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Vintage Treasures: Creatures From Beyond, edited by Terry Carr

Vintage Treasures: Creatures From Beyond, edited by Terry Carr

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Creatures from Beyond-smallIt shouldn’t be a surprise that I didn’t discover science fiction and fantasy through novels — not really. I discovered it by reading short stories in Junior High, and especially the enticing anthologies on display every week in the library at St. Francis School in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I didn’t really know what science fiction was; but if it had monsters on the cover, I was all over it.

The first anthology I can recall reading was Creatures From Beyond, a marvelous monster-fest if ever there was one. When I tracked it down again decades later, I was delighted to discover the editor was none other than Terry Carr, the legendary editor whose Best Science Fiction of the Year and Fantasy Annual paperbacks I read avidly all through high school — and who pulled William Gibson’s Neuromancer out of the slush pile at Ace Books.

I think the reason I still remember it so well after all these years is that, unlike most of the collections I checked out of the library, it wasn’t a kid’s book. It’s a genuine SF anthology, with short stories from Henry Kuttner, Clifford D. Simak & Carl Jacobi, Theodore Sturgeon, Donald A. Wollheim, Brian W. Aldiss, Robert Silverberg, and other top-flight authors.

Carr reasoned — correctly — that there was no better source for action-filled monster tales than pulp science fiction magazines and he mined them heavily to generate Creatures From Beyond. The fiction is drawn from Amazing Stories, Astonishing, Unknown, Other Worlds, Comet, Thrilling Wonder, Future, and a smattering of anthologies.

Of course, the other reason I remember it is Eric Frank Russell’s brilliant novelette “Dear Devil,” the tale of a handful of children who survive a nuclear apocalypse on Earth… and the curious (and hideous) explorer from Mars who helps put them back on track towards a new and better civilization. Rejected by all the major SF magazines of the time, it landed at Ray Palmer’s fledgling Other Worlds, where it almost single-handedly put the magazine on the map — and instantly made a name for the young editor who pulled it from the slush, 26-year-old Bea Mahaffey, who’d been thrust the reins of the magazine when Palmer was incapacitated in an accident.

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Vintage Treasures: The Fox Woman & Other Stories by A. Merritt

Vintage Treasures: The Fox Woman & Other Stories by A. Merritt

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The Fox Woman-smallI’m a pulp fan, and I have been for decades. The next time I’m marooned on a desert island, I’m taking as many magazines from the 1930s and ’40s as I can cram in the life raft.

Pulp novels though… you know, that’s another story. Ask me to name the great fantasy novels of the pulp era, and I run out of air pretty quickly. The fast action and colorful settings of great pulp fiction seem to work best at short length, which maybe explains why the era’s biggest names — H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith — wrote almost exclusively at that length.

Perhaps that also explains why the years have not been kind to the most popular fantasy novelists of the pulp era — Otis Adelbert Kline, Ray Cummings, John Taine, L. Ron Hubbard, Ralph Milne Farley. All were prolific novelists before the end of World War II and virtually all are long out of print.

That’s especially true of the man who was perhaps the biggest name in pulp fantasy: A. Merritt. For decades, his name on the cover of a pulp magazine guaranteed sales in the hundreds of thousands and his novels remained in print late into the ’70s.

I first tried Merritt at the age of fourteen — already a pulp fan, I’d read more than a few breathless reviews of his work from several sources. I found a copy of his 1931 novel, The Face in the Abyss, in the spinning racks of a used book store in Ottawa and snatched it up with considerable excitement… which quickly turned to disappointment.

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Vintage Treasures: Andre Norton’s Velvet Shadows

Vintage Treasures: Andre Norton’s Velvet Shadows

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Andre Norton Velvet Shadows-smallMy home is pretty cool. There are teetering piles of unread books everywhere, ready to topple like late August sunflowers. And if I only had time to review a few, it might be even cooler.

Fortunately, I’m not the only one who lives here. Occasionally, the other inhabitants find something that catches their eye, and when I see that happen I grab a notepad and try and coerce some comments out of them. It’s not the perfect family dynamic, but at least it’s something we do together.

I don’t get to choose what my family reads, obviously, so these reviews-by-proxy tend to be an odd lot (the last one was The House of Dead Maids, which I discovered my daughter enjoying a while back). Last weekend, I noticed my wife had casually picked up a copy of Andre Norton’s Velvet Shadows. I debated for a second before grabbing my notepad. Andre Norton, vintage paperback, gothic romance… Well, close enough to Black Gate territory for our purposes.

What follows is a raw transcript of our conversation, which she agreed to have published here only after I promised not to use her real name on the Internet. Not everyone has a taste for fame, I guess.

John O’Neill: Well, how was it?

Unidentified Reviewer #1: It was terrible.

JO: Okay that’s a little more, uh… concise than our usual reviews. What else you can tell us?

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The Nightmare Men: “The Blind Man”

The Nightmare Men: “The Blind Man”

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weird-tales-march-1944-small‘…an elderly man who wore his hair long and white…a firm, almost prognathus chin, half-pursed lips and a strong Roman nose. His eyes were not visible at all, for he wore dark glasses with shields which prevented one from seeing his eyes even from the side.’

Such is our first glimpse of Dr. Laban Shrewsbury, late of Arkham, late of the distant star Celaeno, and the Hyades in the 1944 story, “The House on Curwen Street”.  Blind, and yet all-seeing, Shrewsbury stands between humanity and Lovecraft’s nightmarish god-things, employing weapons both material and supernatural in the world’s defense.

Created in 1944 by August Derleth for a series of interlinked stories set firmly in the dark universe of HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos — a term coined by Derleth himself — Shrewsbury was far from the standard Lovecraftian protagonist. With his incantations and machinations, he is at first glance the antithesis of the hapless antiquarians and artists who populate both the original stories and many of the pastiches that came after.

“They are at the mouth of the Miskatonic now. But I am ready.”

-Dr. Laban Shrewsbury, “The House on Curwen Street”

Shrewsbury is far more active than his predecessors, who are, in most cases, passive victims of the horrors they encounter. Unlike John Kirowan, who has seen the audient void and been frightened by it into a haunted and semi-reclusive retirement, Shrewsbury is more akin to Titus Crow—he is an active combatant in a war in which humanity is, at best, a pawn, and at worst, food for the titanic forces at play.

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Vintage Treasures: The Little Book of Vintage Sci-Fi

Vintage Treasures: The Little Book of Vintage Sci-Fi

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the-little-book-of-vintage-sci-fiIt’s a great time to be a Golden Age comics fan. If you’re interested in high-priced, archival-quality reproductions of 1950s science fiction and horror comics, there are plenty on the market.

This isn’t one of them.

The Little Book of Vintage Sci-Fi, in fact, is a tiny marvel of affordable comics nostalgia in a sea of overpriced hardcovers. It makes no pretense of offering complete issues, or highly collectible authors and artists, or re-colored anything. But for less than the price of a crummy SF paperback, it offers 112 full-color pages of gonzo Golden Age greatness from an assortment of impossible-to-find comics.

Opening with an 8-page introduction by Tim Pilcher, covering the history of 50s sci-fi comics in surprising detail, The Little Book of Vintage Sci-Fi contains five complete tales, including Explanation, Please! No. 1 Falling Frogs, and Out of the Unknown No. 1: Creature From the Crater. In between are glorious covers from Outer Space, Forbidden Worlds, Adventures Into the Unknown and others, depicting crashing alien spacecraft, stolen moons, and skyscraper-destroying dinosaurs.

There are even full-color reproductions of the classic advertisements that mesmerized me as a kid, including the “Jet” Rocket Space Ship — over six feet long, with levers that work, for only $2.98! — and the 98-cent Sensational Televiewer.

The Little Book of Vintage Sci-Fi was published on April 1, 2012 by Ilex Gift. It is $5.95 for 112 pages, and is one of a set of Little Books from the same publisher, all edited by Tom Pilcher. The others cover Vintage Horror, Sauciness, Crime , Combat, Terror, Romance, and Space. Collect them all!

New Treasures: David C. Smith’s The Fall of the First World

New Treasures: David C. Smith’s The Fall of the First World

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the-fall-of-the-first-world-smallThursday I had the pleasure of attending a reading by the distinguished David C. Smith here in Chicago.

Dave’s accomplishments in the field of modern sword & sorcery are legendary. With Richard L. Tierney, he published the Bran Mak Morn novel, For the Witch of the Mists (1978), and six volumes in the Red Sonja series from 1981 to 1983. He wrote one other novel based on the works of Robert E. Howard: The Witch of the Indies (1977), featuring the pirate Black Terence Vulmea.

On his own, Dave produced the highly-regarded story cycle set on the imaginary island-continent Attluma, beginning with Oron (1978) and The Sorcerer’s Shadow (1978). All told, the Tales of Attluma include five novels and eighteen short stories and novelettes written between 1971–1984. In total, Dave has written twenty-one novels in a career spanning over three decades and still going strong — including the occult thriller Call of Shadows, released by Airship 27 in March of this year.

Dave entertained the audience with tales of the heady days of his early career, when young writers named Karl Edward Wagner, David Drake, Richard L. Tierney, and Charles R. Saunders were breathing new life into sword & sorcery — and when he shared an agent with Wagner, Frank Herbert, and an up-and-coming young horror writer named Stephen King.

But the highlight of the reading was the excerpt from The West is Dying, the first volume in The Fall of the First World, a fantasy trilogy originally published in paperback by Pinnacle Books in 1983. Unavailable for nearly thirty years, these exciting volumes are finally being returned to print by Borgo Press. A fantasy version of War and Peace, the saga follows the conflict between two great empires, bringing together legendary historical characters and Western myths including the tale of Helen of Troy. As a king offers his beautiful daughter as a prize, another pursues only endless war… and so the First World begins to collapse.

The West is Dying was published by Borgo Press on November 29, 2012. It is 422 pages in trade paperback priced at $19.99. The cover art is by Dusan Kostic. It is available directly from Borgo Press or through Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and other fine retailers.

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.

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.

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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