Incredible, In More Ways than One: Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man

Incredible, In More Ways than One: Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man

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The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson
First Edition: Fawcett Gold Medal, May 1956. Cover art MH.

The Shrinking Man
by Richard Matheson
Fawcett Gold Medal (192 pages, $0.35, Paperback, May 1956)
Cover art MH

I think it safe to say that Richard Matheson is best remembered today for his novels and stories that were adapted into films and TV scripts, including the dozen plus scripts he himself wrote for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone TV series in the late 1950 to early ‘60s. (An ironic exception is Matheson’s first-published short story, “Born of Man and Woman” (1950), which remains in print in the first volume of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame.)

Matheson’s first six novels, at least, from I Am Legend (1954) to What Dreams May Come (1978), were all adapted into films. (Among short stories adapted into film was 1971’s “Duel,” which became a TV movie under Steven Spielberg’s direction). The earliest film adaptation came from his second novel, The Shrinking Man (1956), becoming the striking if dubiously plausible 1957 film dubbed, Hollywood-style, The Incredible Shrinking Man. I suspect more people have seen the film than have read Matheson’s novel. Yet while I’m reviewing the book here and not the film (which I last saw decades ago), I will compare the two on a few points, mainly because Matheson himself wrote the screenplay for the film. So the differences between novel and film may be instructive.
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Goth Chick News: Fill Up the Gas Tank and Break Out the Fireball, or Hitting the 2021 Show Circuit Hard…

Goth Chick News: Fill Up the Gas Tank and Break Out the Fireball, or Hitting the 2021 Show Circuit Hard…

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GC, masked up and ready to go…

Now that the dumpster fire that was 2020 is in the rearview mirror, and tiny pin lights of normality are beginning to appear, it is only natural that we here at GCN begin the annual countdown to “the season.”

Now, before I start getting messages reminding me it is only March, allow me to remind you that the event around which the entire GCN year revolves was a sad specter of itself last year. Haunted attractions were closed, parties were cancelled, and even Hollywood closed up shop, leaving us bereft of new fall screen screams.

Though the Halloween pop up stores were picked vulture-clean by mid-September by the masses trying to capture the seasonal spirit at home, those same stores were simply emptying out their 2019 warehouses of old props. Why? Because the trade shows that Black Gate photog Chris Z and I normally haunt in the early part of the year, where retail buyers find all the latest and greatest merchandise, were also cancelled.

So, it’s not without significant giddiness that Chris Z has sent his kilt to the dry cleaners and taken the canned air to his camera collection, while I stock the company Hummer with the usual inventory of road trip goodies. You see, in the last month, many of the events we normally cover each year have cautiously begun announcing 2021 dates.

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The Shadow Knows A Good Pulp Painting When He Sees It!

The Shadow Knows A Good Pulp Painting When He Sees It!

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Detective Story Magazine, December 2, 1919. Art by John Coughlin

I thought that today I’d tell the tale of a painting by the talented and prolific John Coughlin, which was used as a pulp cover not once but twice.

Its first appearance was over a century ago, as it graced the cover of the December 2, 1919 issue of Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine. At that time, it illustrated “Eyes of Blue” by Arthur P. Hankins. But its more famous appearance came a dozen years later.

Street & Smith created the character of The Shadow to narrate “The Detective Story Magazine Hour” on radio. That weekly program was launched on July 31, 1930 to promote Detective Story Magazine, and dramatized a story from the current issue. The character of The Shadow was a huge hit, and listeners began asking their news dealers for copies of that Shadow magazine. Sadly for Street & Smith and their prospective customers, there was no such magazine.

Not surprisingly, they soon decided to rectify this and publish a Shadow pulp to cash in on this interest, but uncertain of its prospects, they made it a quarterly. They also didn’t want to incur the expense of buying new cover art for the first issue, dated April 1931. So they decided to recycle a painting in their inventory that featured a Chinese man – Modest Stein’s cover for the October 1, 1919 issue of Street & Smith’s The Thrill Book. Author Walter Gibson was then told to set part of the first Shadow story (“The Living Shadow”) in Chinatown, and they used Stein’s old cover, adding a shadow to the cover in production.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Not-So-Wholesome Buccaneers

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Not-So-Wholesome Buccaneers

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Blackbeard the Pirate (1952)

The role of Long John Silver in Disney’s 1950 Treasure Island finally launched the talented English actor Robert Newton into international stardom. As Silver, Newton popularized the broad West-Country accent that’s become the default talk-like-a-pirate voice of buccaneering rogues ever since. (You can blame—or acclaim— Newton for the ubiquitous piratical “Ahr!”) But fame ruined the actor, enabling endless rounds of drink, gambling, and the kind of wild behavior that made him a role model for Oliver Reed and Keith Moon. And Newton was never able to escape the shadow of the one-legged pirate with the parrot on his shoulder—but typecast though he was, you can still see that he enjoyed the role even while repeating it. Newton died from alcohol-related heart failure in 1956, and his ashes were buried at sea in the English Channel off Cornwall: “Ahr-men.”

Blackbeard, the Pirate

Rating: **
Origin: USA, 1952
Director: Raoul Walsh
Source: Amazon streaming video

On November 22, 1718, Edward Teach, the notorious pirate known as Blackbeard, was killed on his ship the Adventure during a fierce boarding action led by Royal Navy Lieutenant Robert Maynard. By the time he was brought down, Blackbeard had been shot five times and suffered twenty wounds from edged weapons. For the most famous image depicting this event, look no further than the painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris on the cover of your editor’s Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure anthology.

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Video Game to Film – A Reason to Hope

Video Game to Film – A Reason to Hope

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Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Good morning, Readers!

I was recently quite ill, and while under basically house arrest, stuck in my room with neither the ability or the will to go anywhere else, I came across a trailer for the new Mortal Kombat movie that piqued my interest. At the end of the trailer, I literally scream-laughed. Needless to say, I’m going to see this movie for, and only for, Kano, who was so quintessentially Aussie it could not help but make me roar with delight.

Here’s the trailer, for those who are curious.

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Future Treasures: Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley

Future Treasures: Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley

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Skyward Inn (Solaris, March 16, 2021)). Cover by Dominic Forbes

Aliya Whiteley is the author of The Beauty (which I described as “dystopian horror filled with cosmic weirdness, strange fungi, and terrifying tales told around post-apocalyptic campfires” three years ago), The Arrival of Missives, and Skein Island. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably noticed that Whiteley is accumulating a rep for SF on the weird side.

Her newest certainly fits that mold. SFX calls Skyward Inn “A melancholy and compellingly weird tale of identity in crisis,” and Publisher’s Weekly says it’s a “deeply weird story of missed chances, invasion, and assimilation.” I don’t know about you, but those sound like compelling endorsements to me. Here’s the publisher’s description.

Drink down the brew and dream of a better Earth.

Skyward Inn, within the high walls of the Western Protectorate, is a place of safety, where people come together to tell stories of the time before the war with Qita.

But safety from what? Qita surrendered without complaint when Earth invaded; Innkeepers Jem and Isley, veterans from either side, have regrets but few scars.

Their peace is disturbed when a visitor known to Isley comes to the Inn asking for help, bringing reminders of an unnerving past and triggering an uncertain future.

Did humanity really win the war?

Skyward Inn will be published by Solaris on March 16, 2021. It is 336 pages, priced at $24.99 in hardcover, $6.99 in digital format, and $24.99 for the audiobook. Read an excerpt at SciFiNow.

See all our coverage of the best upcoming SF and fantasy here.

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: The Forgotten Black Masker – Norbert Davis

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: The Forgotten Black Masker – Norbert Davis

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You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

And I take a break from the world of Nero Wolfe to bring A (Black) Gat in the Hand back to Black Gate.

The first image graven onto my Hardboiled Mt. Rushmore is Dashiell Hammett’s. The Continental Op and Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key – I think he did the genre better than anyone. Very narrowly going up second is Frederick Nebel’s. I’m a fan of Cardigan, MacBride and Kennedy, Gales and McGill, and much of his other pulp stuff. Steeger Books has made a plethora of his material available, and I’ve got most of it.

My third choice isn’t one of the expected names, like Raymond Chandler (it’s taken me a couple decades to warm up to his stuff), Erle Stanley Gardner (I do LOVE Cool and Lam), or Carroll John Daly (Race Williams has grown on me a bit over the years). Or a worthy name like T.T. Flynn, W.T. Ballard, Paul Cain, Roger Torrey, or Stewart Sterling. Nope – it’s Norbert Davis.

And Davis is right up there with Nebel, but there is much more of the latter’s work available, and I think he produced a greater amount of ‘better’ writings. But the five Max Latin stories rank among my favorites in the genre. And I’m a big Bail Bond Dodd fan. In the longer format, the Doan and Carstairs novels are arguably the best in the comedic-hardboiled school. I believe that Davis is probably the most under-appreciated pulpster of them all. And I think that with the Jo Gar stories, Raoul Whitfield may well be able to press that claim as well.

Davis grew up in rural Illinois. Good ol’ Abe Lincoln, at 6’4”, towered over his contemporaries. Davis was 6’-5”, and that would have been almost a foot taller than the average American male around him back then. That’s a significant difference. He moved to the West Coast and enrolled at Stanford’s Law School: Davis was no dummy. While a student, he began writing pulp stories, and he was selling them. By the time he graduated in 1934, he was an established pulpster – which of course, wasn’t exactly as lucrative as a successful law career. He had appeared in Black Mask for the first time two years earlier, with “Reform Racket.”

Erle Stanley Gardner was a practicing lawyer as he built his writing career; finally giving up law. Davis took a different approach. An AB (the Latin designation for a BA) and LLD in hand, he never took the bar. Lawyering was not to be Davis’ career path. He would be a professional writer – though, sadly, for not nearly long enough.

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Columbia College Chicago Alumni Fantasy Writers Look at the Changing Role of Heroes in Terry Pratchett’s Troll Bridge Film

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Columbia College Chicago Alumni Fantasy Writers Look at the Changing Role of Heroes in Terry Pratchett’s Troll Bridge Film

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Troll Bridge, Snowgum Films (2019)

The air blew off the mountains, filling the air with fine ice crystals.

It was too cold to snow. In weather like this wolves came down into villages, trees in the heart of the forest exploded when they froze. In weather like this right-thinking people were indoors, in front of the fire, telling stories about heroes.

This is the epic, atmospheric opening to Sir Terry Pratchett’s marvelous short story, “Troll Bridge,” set in his Discworld series. 

As I write this, it is not too cold to snow, though it’s much too nasty to be outside. The wind is howling and the snow is blowing, and here in Chicago they’ve predicted we’ll get a foot of snow in 48 hours. Texas looks like the Midwest in winter, and there’s damned few snowplows in the Lonestar state. A whopping 80% of the US currently has snow on the ground. 

In past winters, I have seen coyotes slinking around the park a block from our condo building, and one glorious Yuletime night, I saw a 10 point buck, antlers coated in ice, standing in the middle of Michigan Ave, on the Magnificent Mile. It was an icy, wind-whipped night, the type where the snow turns everything it touches into a glowing icicle. Only the buck and I were foolish enough to be out that night. That was 30 years ago, and I remember it clearly to this day.

As the wind howls past my window tonight, it takes little imagination to think packs of wolves might be coming down from the wilds of Wisconsin to stalk through the streets of Chicago.

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Start Your Engines… for Car Wars

Start Your Engines… for Car Wars

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the old TSR minigame Revolt on Antares, and that got me thinking about other microgames which were popular back in ye olden days, and that brought to mind one of my favorites, Car Wars from Steve Jackson Games, published in 1981, a vehicle combat game.

If you ever wanted to take part in the fast-driving, hard-hitting action of the Mad Max universe where guns and cars ruled the roads, and the plains and the deserts and the … etc., then you would do well to buckle in and pick up one of the versions of Car Wars which has been made available over the years.

But my first love was the original Car Wars which came in a small, black plastic box, though there were copies of the game which came in just a plastic bag (but who would want that when you could get your hands on a cool plastic pocket box, as they were called?).

The action came in various scenarios from arena battles to highway combat against marauders and the like, and that original pocket box included everything needed to get you on the road to war. Included were the six-sided dice needed for the game, a rules book, maps, vehicle sheets, and cardboard counter pieces of vehicles, road hazards, and more.

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Lovecraftian Horror, Robot Musicians, and Alien Monsters: March/April 2021 Print SF Magazines

Lovecraftian Horror, Robot Musicians, and Alien Monsters: March/April 2021 Print SF Magazines

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Covers by NASA, Maurizio Manzieri, and Warwick Fraser-Coombe

My regular trips to Barnes & Noble to pick up the latest print magazines are usually a fun affair. But it was bittersweet last month as, due to the ongoing uncertainty surrounding Interzone (and the planned retirement of its editor, Andy Cox), I assumed the Nov-Dec 2020 edition currently on the stands would be the final print issue of Interzone. Fortunately the magazine appears to be continuing, as least for the short term.

First up — the latest Asimov’s SF, with stories by Greg Egan, James Patrick Kelly, Kali Wallace, Michael Swanwick, and Black Gate‘s Saturday night blogger Derek Künsken. Here’s the highlights from Victoria Silverwolf’s review at Tangent Online.

The magazine opens strongly with “Glitch” by Alex Irvine. The setting is a future in which one’s consciousness can be recorded and then downloaded into a new body after death, if one can pay the price. People can also swap minds, using similar technology, or hitch rides inside the bodies of other persons. The story begins with the protagonist in a new body, after being killed in a bombing. The terrorists tried to block the minds of their victims from being resurrected, but a technical problem caused the main character to share his body with the mind of the bomber, who also died during the attack. He struggles to prevent the terrorist from taking over completely, while evading the authorities and fighting to stop another bombing. The author creates a vivid and suspenseful tale…

“Mrs. Piper Between the Sea and the Sky” by Kali Wallace is a tale of alternate history set in the 1940s. Aliens arrive on Earth, ending the Second World War when they destroy both Germany and the Soviet Union for refusing to cooperate with them. The protagonist is a British secret agent, sent to the United States to capture a former war hero who chose to work with the aliens. If necessary, she is ready to kill to accomplish her mission. She witnesses the devastating effect the arrival of the aliens has on plants and animals, and learns something about the relationship between the married couple. The premise is intriguing… The story’s mood ranges from Lovecraftian cosmic horror to spy thriller to domestic drama…

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