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Vintage Scares: The Most Terrifying Short Stories Ever?

Vintage Scares: The Most Terrifying Short Stories Ever?

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In my fourth grade year, my teacher, for reasons still unknown to me, decided to read F. Marion 3852814493_5637bb50a9_o Crawford’s “The Upper Berth” aloud to our class.

The story is not so well known these days, but back in the late seventies, it had gained a certain notoriety by virtue of its inclusion in Alfred Hitchcock’s Ghostly Gallery, an omnibus to which I have (with trepidation) returned to many times since. If Hitch was the source from which my teacher made her choice, perhaps she was gulled by the book’s subtitle, which read, “Eleven spooky stories for young people.”

Let me reiterate the salient feature of that rash, dangerous subtitle: FOR YOUNG PEOPLE.

Ha!

To be sure, “Miss Emmeline Takes Off” (Walter Brooks) and “The Haunted Trailer” (Robert Arthur) are easy on the soul, but how to explain the inclusion of “The Waxwork” (A.M. Burrage) or “In a Dim Room” (Lord Dunsany)?

As for “The Upper Berth,” suffice it to say that just as my teacher reached the climactic moment, our rapt, wide-eyed class erupted into chaos. One child whimpered; another screamed. Poor Alicia literally leaped to her feet and fled the room, running for dear life for the imagined safety of any spot on earth where she could no longer hear the teacher’s voice.

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Vintage Treasures: Fair Peril by Nancy Springer

Vintage Treasures: Fair Peril by Nancy Springer

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Fair PerilFantasy writer Nancy Springer has had an enviable career. In 1979, her first published novel, The White Hart, kicked off a successful five-volume series, The Book of the Isle. She followed it with more than 40 additional novels, including The Hex Witch of Seldom (1988), Not on a White Horse (1988), Apocalypse (1989), and the Tiptree Award-winning Larque on the Wing (1994).

She’s been nominated for all of the top awards in the field — including the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo, and the Nebula, all for her short story “The Boy Who Plaited Manes” (from the October 1986 issue of F&SF). Her last novel, The Case of the Gypsy Goodbye, the sixth of The Enola Holmes Mysteries, was published in 2010.

In 1996, Springer took a chance with a very different novel, a modern fairy tale featuring a talking frog, a rebellious teen girl, and a professional storyteller named Buffy. Fair Peril was the first Nancy Springer novel I ever purchased and it eventually led me to track down most of her other books.

The talking frog professional storyteller Buffy Murphy finds in a Pennsylvania pond is begging for a kiss. But the last thing newly divorced Buffy needs is yet another needy male passing himself off as an enchanted prince. Her rebellious teenage princess daughter, Emily, however, is too young to know where a kiss can lead – and soon it’s leading mother, daughter, and a hunky blond former amphibian named Prince Adamus to the mall. For there lies the realm of Fair Peril – where wishes become punishments, where everything is itself yet something other… and where it will take a dutiful mom’s considerable power of storytelling to salvage her child’s future, her daughter’s love.

The gorgeous cover by Mary GrandPré was the first thing that caught my eye — and I still love it today, nearly 20 years later.

Fair Peril was published by Avon Books in November 1996, and reprinted in paperback by AvoNova in July 1997. It is 246 pages in paperback, with an original cover price of $5.99. It has never been reprinted and is currently out of print. There is no digital edition.

See all of our recent Vintage Treasures here.

Vintage Treasures: Adventure on the Final Frontier with Star Explorer

Vintage Treasures: Adventure on the Final Frontier with Star Explorer

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Star Explorer FGU-smallHow do you create a Star Trek game without a Star Trek license?

Turns out it’s not actually that hard — at least not if you follow the example of Star Explorer, the science fiction game of “Adventure on the Final Frontier” published in 1982 by Fantasy Games Unlimited.

Star Explorer was released three years after Star Fleet Battles, Steven V. Cole’s groundbreaking wargame from Task Force Games in 1979, and the same year as the first true Star Trek RPG, Star Trek: The Role Playing Game, published by FASA. Both competing titles were hits, with multiple editions over the next few decades.

In contrast, Star Explorer vanished pretty quickly, with virtually no supporting material at all. Which is a shame, because it had a lot of potential.

Star Explorer is an adventure game of exploration and encounter in deep space. It places you in the role of a starship captain who must command her ship on a variety of dangerous missions. Success depends on your ability to select the right crew for away missions and to tweak your ship design as required.

While it had some role playing aspects, it was really a board game, with a board and everything. Not a board that displayed tantalizing planets and star systems for you to explore, sadly. No, just a green, featureless tactical map used to resolve star combat. But you did get 240 colorful counters you could push around the map and imagine were exploring stuff.

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When Aliens are Delicious: Murray Leinster’s “Proxima Centauri” and the Creepy Side of Pulp SF

When Aliens are Delicious: Murray Leinster’s “Proxima Centauri” and the Creepy Side of Pulp SF

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Astounding Stories March 1935What if the first aliens we encounter were made of chocolate? Crunchy, delicious, bite-sized chocolate. Imagine that during that all-important First Contact, you decided to take an experimental bite — because, one, chocolate aliens, and two, who would blame you? — and discovered they were so delicious they brought on raptures of ecstasy.

This is more or less the premise of Murray Leinster’s rip snortin’, force-ray filled space adventure “Proxima Centauri,” from the March 1935 issue of Astounding Stories. Except that the aliens are actually highly advanced carnivorous plants who have systematically hunted every form of animal life on their home planet to extinction, and the delicious, bite-sized aliens are us.

“Proxima Centauri” has been reprinted a few times, but I’d never read it. It came up in the comments on my June 20th article on The Best of Murray Leinster, the first of the Classics of Science Fiction series I’ve been exploring recently. A reader named Doug said:

The one story of Leinster’s that impressed me the most was “Proxima Centauri.” Even if the main drive of the plot is pure pulp, the way he describes human behavior during the long trip adds a realism that counter balances the more fantastic elements (i.e. Plant Men). It’s aged incredibly well when you consider that it was written “Before the Golden Age” (I read this first in the same-named Asimov edited anthology).

Fletcher Vredenburgh concurred:

I was eleven when my dad bought and read the Leinster collection. When I asked him about it he said he didn’t think I’d like it. Fortunately, that only encouraged me to give it a try. Glad I did. The gloriously pulpy “Proxima Centauri” still creeps me out.

Well, that was enough for me. I dug out my treasured copy of Before the Golden Age and settled in to enjoy a classic tale of space travel and creepy aliens from a pulp master.

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Vintage Treasures: The Best of Edmond Hamilton

Vintage Treasures: The Best of Edmond Hamilton

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The Best Of Edmond Hamilton-smallEdmond Hamilton is my favorite pulp writer and he has been since I read the chilling short story “The Man Who Evolved” in Before the Golden Age. (Read the complete story online at The Nostalgia League.)

That’s a long time, especially considering how many pulp tales I’ve read in the intervening years. But Hamilton had a lengthy and productive career — he was one of the few writers to survive both the coming of Campbell, who ushered in the Golden Age of Science Fiction, and the death of pulps more than a decade later.

Hamilton’s first published story, “The Monster-God of Mamurth,” appeared in the August 1926 issue of Weird Tales. It was a fully realized tale of eldritch horror, following the exploits of a group of explorers who discover a legendary lost city in the desert and the sinister spider-things who inhabit it still.

When we began including reprints in the print version of Black Gate, “The Monster-God of Mamurth” was the second one we chose, and it appeared in BG 2, with all-original art by Allen Koszowski (see one of the magnificently creepy illos he did for us here).

Hamilton quickly became one of Weird Tales‘ most popular and prolific writers, appearing alongside H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. All told he sold 79 stories to Farnsworth Wright and the magazine’s later editors between 1926 and 1948; only Seabury Quinn and August Derleth appeared more often in the magazine’s pages.

According to his ISFDB page, Hamilton wrote exactly 200 short stories for the magazines between 1926 and his death in 1977. He appeared in virtually all the science fiction and fantasy pulps, including Air Wonder Stories, Wonder Stories, Thrilling Wonder, Super Science Stories, Amazing Stories, Fantastic Science Fiction, and many others.

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Revisit Pavis: Gateway to Adventure

Revisit Pavis: Gateway to Adventure

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Pavis Gateway to Adventure-smallLast April, Sarah Newton wrote a marvelous two-part review of Moon Design’s Pavis: Gateway to Adventure, the third (and easily the most massive) edition of a fantasy setting I first enjoyed 30 years ago.

Getting my hands on one proved to be more challenging than I expected, however. Apparently, the first printing sold out quickly and I had to wait until it was reprinted. Finally, more than a year after Sarah’s enticing review appeared here at Black Gate, I was able to sit down with my own copy.

Why was I so intrigued? Partly it was memories of that marvelous first edition, a gorgeous boxed set from Chaosium. Pavis was one of the most ambitious RPG adventure supplements ever made when it appeared in 1983: a completely realized bronze age city, packed with historical detail, strange cultures and cults, maps, thieves, profiteers, and adventurers.

Most important of all, however, Pavis was a launching point for adventure in Big Rubble, its sister publication, a ruined city overrun by trolls, snakes — and much worse things. The subtitle of the new edition is “Gateway to Adventure,” and that’s a wholly accurate description.

The new edition combines both Pavis and Big Rubble under a single cover, adding a host of new material on top of an already well-realized setting.

The result is a terrific product, with more tightly-woven encounters and plot threads and everything you need to kick off a grand adventure.

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Unleash your inner Conan with Barbarian Kings

Unleash your inner Conan with Barbarian Kings

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Barbarian Kings SPI-smallMagic Spells and Enchantments! Elves and Orcs and Dwarves! Airships and Pirate Fleets! Heroes and Wizards and… Barbarian Kings.

That’s the cover copy on the boxed version of Barbarian Kings, one of the most fascinating games from my childhood, a game clearly inspired in equal measure by Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkien. Except for the airships, which I think maybe was an attempt to throw in a little Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Carter of Mars.

My fascination didn’t stem from any virtue of the game design. In fact, I never even had the chance to play it when it was first released in 1980. But it loomed large in my imagination.

Barbarian Kings was originally published in Ares #3. I’ve mentioned Ares before — it was the short-lived (and today, highly collectible) magazine published by SPI that included a science fiction or fantasy board game in every issue.

And what games they were. Star Trader, simulating high-stakes interstellar trade, commerce, and piracy; The High Crusade, inspired by Poul Anderson’s classic novel of a medieval conquest of the galaxy; Nightmare House, which featured intrepid explorers venturing into a haunted house; Voyage of the B.S.M. Pandora, a solitaire game of interstellar exploration on savage worlds; The Omega War, simulating a post-apocalyptic battle on a war-scarred North America in 2419. And nearly a dozen others.

And in issue #3, it was Barbarian Kings, a simple but compelling game of fantasy empires in conflict for 2-5 players. The Jack Kirby-inspired art on the cover communicated just about everything you needed to know (click on the image at right for a bigger version). This was a game of empire building in a world of dwarves, orcs, and magic, just like any of a hundred fantasy novels crowding the shelves in the 70s. It was a compact theatre of the imagination that could drop you smack dab into your favorite fantasy setting and let you run rampant with an army at your back. And airships. Let’s not forget the airships.

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Vintage Treasures: The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum

Vintage Treasures: The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum

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The Best of Stanley G WeinbaumThis is the fifth volume in Lester Del Rey’s Classics of Science Fiction line I’ve discussed here (starting with The Best of Murray Leinster, The Best of Robert Bloch, The Best of Henry Kuttner, and The Best of C M Kornbluth.) I believe it may also have been the first, since it has the earliest publication date of the titles we’ve examined so far — April 1974 — and also because the cover design for the first printing (see below) was slightly different and a little rougher.

And also because, if you’re going to launch a series dedicated to the very best science fiction and fantasy writers of the century, it makes sense to start with Stanley G. Weinbaum.

This isn’t the first time we’ve covered Weinbaum’s career. The distinguished Ryan Harvey wrote a terrific retrospective three years ago, where he said, in part:

In a way, Weinbaum was science fiction’s equivalent of Robert E. Howard: a hugely talented author who died too young. But Weinbaum’s run was even shorter than Howard’s — a mere year and a half, with twelve stories published during that time. Posthumous work followed, but considering the immense talent that Weinbaum shows in his fiction — starting with his first story! — it is frustrating how little of this gold strike ever got to the surface for readers to mine.

We’re hardly the first fans to champion Weinbaum’s pulp science fiction. H.P. Lovecraft praised him highly, calling him ingenious, and stating that he stood miles above the other pulp SF writers in his ability to create genuinely alien worlds, especially in comparison to Edgar Rice Burroughs and his “inane” stories of “egg-laying Princesses.” And series editor Lester del Rey, in the June 1974 issue of IF magazine, said:

Weinbaum, more than any other writer, helped to take our field out of the doldrums of the early thirties and into the beginnings of modern science fiction.

Pretty heavy claims. So exactly who was this writer who won such adoration and devotion, even decades after his death?

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Roger Zelazny, August Derleth and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

Roger Zelazny, August Derleth and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

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The Great Book of Amber-smallI’ve been spending a lot of time with Gary Gygax’s Dungeon Masters Guide recently, as I guide my young players through a wilderness campaign using Outdoor Survival. The DMG is a treasure trove of handy tables, excellent advice, and fascinating tangents — atrociously organized, of course, but that’s part of its charm. Like the most useful book in all fantasy, the Junior Woodchucks Guidebook (seriously — I’d kill for a copy of that book), you can flip pages at random and never know what indispensable tidbit you’ll find.

Appendix N, which lists the great fantasy writers whose collective contributions laid the groundwork for Dungeons and Dragons, is just one of those finds; but it’s one which has received a great deal of attention. Mordicai Knode and Tim Callahan at Tor.com are sampling the work of every author in Appendix N; so far they’ve covered Robert E. Howard, Poul Anderson, Sterling E. Lanier, Fritz Leiber, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Jack Vance.

Last week, Tim turned his attention to Roger Zelazny and The Chronicles of Amber. He wasn’t impressed:

I merely sampled the first book in the series, Nine Princes in Amber, originally published in 1970, and that was more than enough… if the first book in Roger Zelazny’s Amber series is considered any kind of classic, then it must be because the novel is graded on a curve. A curve called “pretty good for an opening novel in a series that gets a whole lot better,” or maybe a curve called, “better than a lot of other, trashier fantasy novels released in 1970, when there was nothing on television but episodes of Marcus Welby and the Flip Wilson Show…”

It’s not that I found Nine Princes in Amber uninteresting; it’s just that I found the novel shockingly discordant and unsatisfying to actually read all the way through. It’s a novel that slams together jokey Hamlet references in the narration with pop psychoanalysis and superhuman beings and shadow realms and dungeons and swords and pistols and Mercedes-Benzes.

Actually, that last sentence is almost exactly how I remember Nine Princes in Amber. Shadow realms and dungeons and swords and pistols and Mercedes-Benzes. Yeah, that pretty much covers it.

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Experience the Best Science Fiction of 1926 with The Gernsback Awards, Volume One

Experience the Best Science Fiction of 1926 with The Gernsback Awards, Volume One

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The Gernsback Awards-smallThe Hugo Award, science fiction’s most famous prize, was first dreamed up in 1953 for the 11th World Science Fiction Convention, and they’ve been given out every year since 1955. The prestigious Nebula, awarded by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), was first given out in 1966.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “But wait! What about all the marvelous science fiction and fantasy published between 1926, the year that marks the birth of Amazing Stories and hence science fiction as a genre, and 1953? With no prestigious award to draw the attention of future generations, is all that pulp fiction doomed to obscurity? Can nothing be done?!?”

Admit it — that’s exactly what you thought, over-punctuation and all. You should think about switching to decaffeinated.

Well, calm down. As usual, there’s no thought that we have that Forrest J. Ackerman hasn’t thunk before. In fact, Forry sprang into action to rectify this serious crime against science fiction way back in 1982.

His ingenious idea was The Gernsback Awards, a series of awards given retroactively to early science fiction. Each year, the ten nominees for the award would be collected in a handsome volume that would allow modern audiences to read and judge for themselves the best of the year.

At least, it was meant to be a series of awards. For unknown reasons, only one volume ever appeared: The Gernsback Awards, Volume One: 1926. Still, that one volume is packed full of terrific fiction from Edmond Hamilton, Curt Siodmak, Murray Leinster, A. Hyatt Verrill, H. G. Wells, and others — not to mention great art by Frank R. Paul.

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