The Apocalypse Reader Edited by Justin Taylor

The Apocalypse Reader
Edited by Justin Taylor

Nyarlathotep by H.P. Lovecraft
The tall, swarthy god Nyarlathotep emerges from Egypt and cities fall into decay. A group of scientists from one such city decide to confront the god. Despite his protests that he is not afraid, the main character flees into the night with his companions to find their city destroyed.

Lovecraft fiction is usually not plot driven, character driven, or dialogue driven. It is atmospheric. This tale had atmosphere in spades and is a good, short example of why Lovecraft is one of the masters.

The Apocalypse Commentary of Bob Paisner by Rick Moody
A college student writes a term paper that compares the events in his sad, tragic life to the life of St. John writing Revelations.

This was an excellent story. The commentary on the Bible and Revelations mixed in with the plot of unrequited love for a misfit was wonderfully paced and well written.

Sweethearts by Stacey Levine
An unearthly female creature describes the ecstasy of being mutilated by her lover while she mutilates him, again and again.

I guess this story could be termed “experimental.” There was no plot. Just page after page of descriptions of violent acts. It did not work for me.

Friase, Menthe, Et Poivre: 1978 by Jared Hohl
The sun has gone green and chaos ensues on the Earth. A Frenchman recounts how he and a band of people try to survive the riots and roving gangs of Paris in a hunt for food and supplies. To entertain themselves when someone dies, they stage plays in an abandoned theater.

The sparse prose makes this story really atmospheric. There’s no new real twist or take on the sun burning out motif, but Hohl writes his unoriginal story well enough to make it entertaining.

What is it When God Speaks? By Diane Wiliams
A short story about a group of people staying at a fine bed and breakfast.

I read this story twice and did not get the point. No plot. No atmosphere. No nothing. Just a random series of events.

Kraftmark by Matthew Derby
The owner of the KraftMark Corporation pursues his own sun through a remote swamp with the help of a trained guide. His purpose is to kill his son before his corporate operatives do it inhumanely. The son has betrayed his father and the corporation by broadcasting the recipe of the world’s best selling snack cake.

Derby injects some corporate absurdity into his story, but does not overplay it. The tale moves along nicely and the absurdity of what the man wants to do and why makes it a compelling story.

The Hook by Shelley Jackson
In a collapsed society riddled with disease, a crane known to all as “The Hook” lifts dead bodies and lowers them onto an ever burning pyre. A woman becomes obsessed with the operator of this semi-holy piece of machinery and decides to get to know him better – biblically.

The overt sexuality in this story was not enough to save it. The plot meandered and the characters had no development at all. It was not atmospheric with little description of the decimated world this woman inhabited.

Sixteen Small Apocalypses by Lucy Corin
This is a story about different sort of apocalypse, told from the point of view of several characters.

This story was incredibly disjointed and impossible to follow. Not enough character or plot development in the stories to make them interesting. It was difficult and painful reading.

The Last Man by Adam Nemett
The apocalypse is a flood. A group of college students have rebelled and taken over the campus. Their leader is an amphetamine addicted genius. One man’s job is to make sure he keeps getting those pills to fuel his genius.

This read like a college writing assignment. The writing was okay, but there was no real plot to speak of and absolutely no character development. I want to read something much more substantive than this.

Earth’s Holocaust by Nathaniel Hawthorne
A group of reformers decides to purify the earth of everything that causes strife and evil. They start a bonfire in the remote west. Upon it they cast the titles of nobility of the world, the instruments of war, liquor, tobacco, all the literature of the world and finally, all religious symbols. They believed they have purified the world. But one man, the last murderer, assures the author that evil lies not in the objects of man’s creation, but within man himself and the old world will rise again.

A have to admit I’ve not read a lot of Hawthorne. But what I’ve read, I’ve liked and this story was a gem. Obviously a commentary on the reform movement of the time in America where certain people were striving to perfect society, Hawthorne’s final notion about the wellspring of evil rings true.

I Always go to Particular Places by Gary Lutz and Deb Olin Unferth
Two people search the wreckage of a devastated city for a missing woman. In the end, they find a clue, but not the woman.

A good story with an unsatisfying ending. But better than most in this anthology.

An Accounting by Brian Evenson
In a post apocalyptic world, a man crosses the wastelands to find food for his people. He encounters a society whose entire social system is based on Christianity. He quickly becomes Christ to these people.

This story, steeped in great post acpocalyptic imagery and Christian theology was perhaps the best in this lackluster anthology.

Square of the Sun by Robert Bradley
A man's mistress does mathematical calculations in her head during sex to determine the coming of the apocalypse.

Another exercise in college freshman level creative writing. Plot that was barely there and characters not developed at all.

The End by Josip Novakovich
Upon his arrival, a Croation immigrant to the United States becomes a Baptist minister in Cleveland. He moves to Cincinnati and becomes a house painter, still strong in his faith. A series of events challenges his faith while he believes he sees signs of Armageddon.

There was no supernatural or science fiction elements in this story. I was a character study that was complex and well developed.



Some Approaches to the Problem of the Shortage of Time by Ursula K. LeGuin
Scientists discover that time is actually a natural resource that man is depleting through his activities. Scientists and social groups try to find ways to save time and a time shortage grows desperate.

This story read like a government report and had little entertainment value. It was, however, an original concept.

Think Warm Thoughts by Allison Whittenberg
A person describes the coming of another ice age and the lack of food and water.

This short, one page story reads like the introduction to something larger. It was almost as if Whittenber submitted an incomplete manuscript.

The Ash Gray Proclamation by Dennis Cooper
A gay teenage prostitute and heroin addict falls in with a gay Afghanistan psychic and a gay, cannabilistic pedophile to concoct a plan to kill Osama Bin Laden.

This story was nothing but gay erotica. It was quite raunchy and the plot was thin and disjointed. It was not well written, using the structure of a script. It might be meaningful to someone who is gay because it does explore emotional issues that come with being gay, but as a story for a straight person, it was horrible.

Pole Shift by Justin Taylor
As the sun begins to destroy the world in a pole shift, a young man notices a young woman wearing a thin white dress with no underwear, displaying her body in the last minutes of existence, apparently unaware that the world is about to end.

This reads like a undergraduate college student creative writing submission and hardly fit to be in the same anthology as the likes of Lovecraft and Hawthorne.

Miss Kansas on Judgment Day by Kelly Link

A honeymooning couple watches a Miss America pageant from hell. They watch the human abominations demonstrate horrific talents on stage. They cling to each other in bed, afraid to let go, afraid for their future.

Again, it reads like an undergrad’s creative writing paper. It’s meant to be atmospheric, but comes across as preposterous and generates no emotion of horror or dread as it was clearly intended to do.

The Star by H.G. Wells
An object collides with the planet Neptune and becomes a small star. Neptune, driven from it orbit, starts racing across the solar system toward earth. Astronomers try to predict is course and its effects. Nightly, the star grows brighter and eventually, passes by the earth, wreaking havoc on it.

It’s a joy to read the early masters of genre horror fiction and Wells is one of its founding fathers. This story, like much of Lovecraft, is bereft of dialogue and even of real characters. It describes events as they unfold in vivid detail.

When We Went to See the World End by Dawnie M

So We are Very Concerned by Elliott David
A brief description of riots in various cities after some form of apocalypse. Each city’s riot’s description connotes something of that city’s culture.

Another college writing assignment story. No plot. No characters. No purpose.

Gigantic by Steve Aylett
An astrophysicist concentrates intensely on Scrappy Doo, the cartoon character and is able to see the future. A catastrophe is coming, stemming from the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He becomes a worldwide joke until the spaceships arrive to dump their cargo on the world’s capitals.

This was supposed to be humorous with a political climax. Instead, it was a poorly written, poorly conceived story that bored.

The End of the Future by Colette Phair
A group of survivalists waits out the end of the world in an old, dilapidated building while the rest of the world goes on. Then, it happens.

This story started out with some promise, but fizzled dreadfully at the end. The result was a dreary, desultory first person narrative that ended in a stupid way.

Crossing into Cambodia by Michael Moorcock
In a fictional war, a Russian cavalry unit crosses from Vietnam into Cambodia, pursuing guerilla fighters from the Khmer Rouge. They are supposed to rendezvous with an American unit in a nearby city. When they see a mushroom cloud erupt over that city, the commander makes a fateful decision to obey his orders no matter what.

This story was outstanding compared to most of what is in this book. The narrator was well developed and the story line flowed without lag.

80s Lillies by Terese Svaboda
A couple flees the coming nuclear apocalypse. They arrive in a remote mining town where they plan to ride out the explosions in an abandoned gold mine.

This was, by far, the poorest written story in the book so far. It had a bit more plot than the others, but I can’t believe this story ever lay before a professional editor. Absolutely horrible!

These Zombies are Not a Metaphor by Jeff Goldberg
When the zombie apocalypse comes, one man is prepared with a fortress and supplies. Unfortunately, his housemates are not mentally prepared for what’s coming.

I’ve compared some of the stories here to college writing assignments. This one I would compare to a high school writing assignment. It has a plot, sort of, but no character development. It is written as a series of events that happened with no rising action or climax.

The Rapid Advance of Sorrow by Theodora Goss
A college student in Budapest becomes involved with a plain, demur country woman from a town called Sorrow, located in Siberia. The woman overcomes her shyness to lead a cultural rebellion that soon has Budapest all dressed in white and gray. The movement becomes more militant.

This was an intriguing little story and a metaphor for how the emotion of sorrow spreads. Well written with brief interludes describing the fictional town of Sorrow and the strange powers of its people and lands really added to the enjoyment.

The Conversation of Eiros and Charmiion by Edgar Allan Poe
Two beings who have passed on to the afterlife discuss the destruction of the earth when it is struck by a gaseous comet.

Not one of Poe’s darker tales. It is a descriptive chronology, delivered in cold prose rather than the sinister prose one normally expects from Poe. Poe apparently made the effort to get his science right and that helps with the enjoyment of the story. Over 150 years old, the story remains a plausible, post-apocalyptic scenario.

Apocalypse: A Diptych by Joyce Carol Oates
This “story” is actually two stories, neither of which are apocalyptic. In story one, a person who has been completely dismembered provides a forensic analysis of dismemberment and decapitation while describing their plight of being dead and dismembered. In the second story, a family’s dinner is interrupted by grass growing in the street.

The first story was quite creepy and was easily enjoyed. The second was as pointless as it sounds.

After All by Carol Emshwiller
A retired author decides it’s time for a change in her life and starts out to walk into town. She recalls people and events from her life and evaluates their significance. She spends the night in a cave and the next day is her birthday. A very special transformation happens for her.

I generally despise stream of consciousness writing and dismiss it as an excuse for bad writing. However, Emshwiller is able to keep the stream from meandering too badly and actually develops a meaningful character in just a few pages of text.

Save Me from the Pious and the Vengeful by Lynne Tillman
This “story” is a rambling, disconnected series of random thoughts with no discernable connection to each other.

I’ll let my plot summary stand as a review.

The Apocalypse Reader was an abysmal anthology of “experimental” (read amateur) mixed in with some public domain material by legendary writers and a couple accomplished writers who ought to be embarrassed to have their material published here. Seldom have I ever been so disappointed in a collection of short stories. Avoid this book at all costs. It’s not worth the struggle.

Mammoth Book of Monsters edited by Stephen Jones

Mammoth Book of Monsters
Edited by Stephen Jones
Copyright 2007

Introduction by Stephen Jones
Jones introduces his anthology of monster stories by describing the ground rules for inclusion in the book and tells us we’ll see some of the old archetypes like the vampire, the werewolf, and the zombie. Godzilla gets a new look and we’ll meet some new creatures like Clive Barker’s Rawhead Rex.

Visitation by David J. Schow
Supernatural debunker extraordinaire, Agnus Bond, has determined a means through which he can predict supernatural occurrences and their location. Only he believes them to be natural phenomena – not spiritual. The grandfather of his deceased partner joins him at a strange Kentucky hotel to observe the latest occurrence. Agnus says he can deflect the attack because he does not believe it to be supernatural. But the old man proves him wrong.

Mix Stephen King’s 1408 and Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House and this is what you get. It’s not a bad story, but been done many times before. There’s no new or compelling twist to the scientific researcher applying science to the supernatural.

Down There by Ramsey Campbell
A woman and a male coworker are working late in a high rise building with only one working elevator. The building has a colorful past and an oddly cavernous sub-basement. She and her coworker try to make the elevator work correctly to leave the building, but end up in that strange sub-basement which was stocked with unholy terrors by its builder.

This is my second reading of this story, having first encountered it in Campbell’s collection, Alone with the Horrors. Three years ago, I said this about it: Campbell has a great concept here, but really misses the mark in character development. I love a plot-driven story, but Campbell doesn’t put any effort into making either of the characters sympathetic or unsympathetic. They’re just “there” for the action to revolve around. I stand by that statement. The reader is left with no idea what motivates these characters. Campbell feints at it. He gives us hints, but never fleshes them out. Better characters would have made this heavily plot driven story better.

The Man He Had Been Before by Scott Edelman
A 14 year old boy lives in a remote cabin with his constantly arguing parents. The world is gone, now dominated by zombies that hunt by night. By day, the family hunts sleeping zombies. This has gone of four eight years and the boy longs for a normal life and a family that isn’t always fighting with each other. One night, he slips out of the cabin and into his old home in the suburbs. He goes to the basement where memories of his youth and his abusive father come back to him.

This an exceptional short story that takes the zombie motif back to its origins in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. While the zombie world is a backdrop, the story is about loneliness and longing for normalcy, much as Richard Morgan wanted it in Matheson’s story. The central character is developed wonderfully and the story is poignant. It’s one of the best zombie stories I’ve ever read.

Calling All Monsters by Dennis Etchison
A comatose and apparently braindead man listens as a doctor argues with his wife. He is all but dead, the doctor tells her. The tests confirm it. He is an organ donor and he has been in a car accident. His wife pleads in vain for the doctor to run additional tests, but the doctor says no, the harvesting must begin now. The man, apparently not feeling anything because of his damaged brain and spinal cord, is left to think his last thoughts as the “monsters” begin harvesting his organs.

This was a short and unsatisfying story. The horrors of surgery and organ harvests being performed on accident victims still able to feel and sense is a medical fact. Etchison was going for the art of being exceptionally “short” with this short story, but I didn’t feel the horror that was supposed to be there. Stephen King does a much better job building character and tension in his story about premature carving of bodies in Autopsy Room Four.

The Shadmock by R. Chetwynd Hayes
Over the years, the ancient monsters of Europe – the vampire, the werewolf, the ghoul, etc, have been breeding to create new breeds of monsters. The newest, and most fierce is the Shadmock. An English millionaire and his wife learn this when they purchase a remote cabin in the woods and decide to spend a week there in the summer. They are greeted by the house’s staff which is a gruesome looking, but polite couple and their son. A local minister visits for dinner and tells them that their house staff are monsters. The man disbelieves at first. But when the monsters relieve him of his soul to make them one of their own, he becomes a believer. Meanwhile, the wife has made an ally of the fiercest of the bunch, the handsome Shadmock who is the son of the caretakers and the gardener. She promises to help tend the garden in exchange for his protection. When his parents want to drain her blood to fertilize the garden, the young Shadmock shows them who is in charge.

This story is told in traditional European style with a voice reminiscent of Bram Stoker – lots of words! Despite its wordiness, it is a new twist on the traditional European haunt that is engaging reading. The story was made into a segment of an anthology film in 1980 entitled, The Monster Club, starring Vincent Price.

The Spider Kiss by Christopher Fowler
Good, upstanding citizens of Miami are going crazy. They are attacking, hacking, biting, and slicing their fellow Floridians for no conceivable reasons. Then, they are killing themselves in even more bizarre manners. Two Miami detectives investigate. One is older and set in his ways. The other is younger and more open to new ideas. The younger one finds the answer with a new age guru who tells him that the cosmos are leveling man’s karma by stripping him of his soul and replacing it with the souls of lesser creatures.

To say this story was horrible would be an understatement. New Age, politically correct tripe wrapped up in splatterpunk prose. Skip it!

Café Endless: Spring Rain by Nancy Holder
A Japanese businessman is entertaining his company’s American agent in downtown Tokyo. They are bar hopping when she sees the Café Spring Rain and is enchanted by its outward appearance. The Japanese businessman reluctantly agrees to accompany her. He is reluctant because there is a certain Kabuki dancer with whom he had a fling – a fling that still haunts and scars him today – who danced in that bar. He soon finds himself drawn back into the dark embrace of that undead dancer.

This story was exceptionally light on plot and heavy on imagery and erotica. It was well written in achieving what the author wanted it to. However, I like my fiction plot driven. Not much of a story here.

The Medusa by Thomas Ligotti
A college professor has a grim obsession with Medusa and collects all sorts of lore on the mythical woman with hair of snakes. A friend tells him to go to an antique book store. Deep in the musty stacks, he meets a strange woman wearing a turbin who drops him a note that directs him to a brownstone in the city. He goes and is lead to a storage room where he sits and ponders Medusa. Upon leaving, he friend tells him the whole thing was a ruse set up by his friend’s wife. Our college professor then learns the true nature of his friend’s wife.

This story was heavy on doses of dreary philosophy. The prose reminds one of Lovecraft – heavy on passive narration and light on dialogue and action. Not an exciting story. Certainly not a scary story. But some of Ligotti’s ruminations are thought provoking.

In The Poor Girl Taken by Surprise by Gemma Files
An old woman comes to a remote Canadian inn called The Poor Girl Taken by Surprise and tells the legend of the werewolf. She tells of its roots, its nature, and its habits. This old woman knows because she is the oldest of the werewolves of Canada. These men have slain and eaten her two young daughters, also werewolves. The men, she tells them, are now her children.

This is quite the atmospheric tale. The atmosphere is bleak, lonely, and desolate in the Canadian wilderness where darkness and cold hold sway. Not a lot of story to be found here, but a chillingly told lecture on werewolves and their need to kill for the sheer joy of the kill.

Downmarket by Sydney J. Bounds
An orphaned teenager escapes an English orphanage and makes his way south to a small London town where he gets a job as a barrow boy at a local market. The tenants of the market take a liking to him and treat him well – until they decide it’s time to sacrifice him to the spirit of the market.

This is an oft-told tale of human sacrifice by otherwise good people. Bounds’ story is good in that it is short – sparing nary a word to drive his plot. He also develops his main character sufficiently for the reader to know and care about him. One of the shortest – and best – stories in the book thus far.

The Horror from the Mound by Robert E. Howard
A vampire is afoot after an unwitting, down on his luck farmer releases him from his tomb in an errant treasure hunt.

A succinct short story summed up in one sentence. Howard is known for driving his story through fast moving plots. This story never slows. Great stuff from a legend!

Fat Man by Jay Lake
Two down on their luck farmers chance across Bigfoot while hunting game in the Oregon forest. Believing they are going to get rich, they talk a local restaurant owner into letting them store the eight foot tall missing link’s body. However, as children in the area start to come up missing as Bigfoot lie dead in that freezer, the whole town learns the true nature of Bigfoot.

The Sasquatch legend is not one I’ve explored a great deal – in either fiction or non fiction. Jay Lake delivers a fast pace narrative where sometimes, points of view become confusing. Good tale nonetheless.

The Thin People by Brian Lumley
A Londoner walks back to his flat with a half drunk drinking buddy to have a nightcap. As they walk, his buddy is dismayed to find out what neighborhood he lives in. This area, he tells our Londoner, is inhabited by the Thin People. The Thin People are so tall and narrow they are nearly impossible to detect and their abodes exist in little narrow crannies. They have a talent for folding and unfolding themselves – and folding other people and things. They don’t like people very much and don’t mind folding them.

This is an original concept and give Lumley an A for creativity. Unfortunately, the story just wasn’t that interesting. His monsters weren’t that terrifying and his characters not that interesting.

The Hill by Tanith Lee
A professional librarian takes a job at a mansion outside a small village in Kent. The mansion’s grounds are inhabited by exotic species of mammals, reptiles, and insects collected by its owner and housed in woods nearby. With the landlord gone on some adventure somewhere, the librarian settles in to sort books with the butler and maid. When the alarm sounds in the village, they all respond. They find that the dead have dug themselves out of the graves of the village’s lone cemetery and are about the countryside, slithering on their bellies to get about. The mansion staff returns to the mansion to hunker down and see what happens next.

This great story is where Henry James(whose stories of the supernatural always had a rational ending) meets Hammer horror. The first person narrative is atmospheric and its main character well grounded – not given to fits of over the top fear. The resolution as to why the dead are returning is clever.

Godzilla’s Twelve Step Program by Joe Lansdale
Godzilla, once a destroyer of cities and subway cars is in recovery for his addiction to mayhem. He has a job in a steel mill providing fire and a small apartment. He shares time with other former monsters such as King Kong and Gamera who are in varying states of recovery. He tries to stay on the wagon and his sponsor desperately tries to help him. But, his love of destroying man’s creations proves too much.

Silly story without purpose. Enough said.

220 Swift by Karl Edward Wagner
A professor explores an area along the Pigeon River for the ancient mines of the conquistadors. He rooms with a graduate student who is student who is studying regional folklore. One evening, the pair are having dinner with their landlord when the professor discovers they’ve been using a Conquistador helmet as a flower pot. He demands to be taken to the cave where it was found. The professor and the graduate student enter the cavern. We find out the miners of these ancient mines weren’t conquistadors and we find out the graduate student isn’t who he said he was.

This was a fantastic tale that would have made an excellent vintage 1950s B-horror flick. Wagner keeps his reader guessing all through the story. Great stuff that would make great reading material for pre-adolescents.

Our Lady of the Sauropods by Robert Silverberg
A lady research scientist is trapped on an island that is inhabited by artificially created dinosaurs. It will be thirty days before a shuttle will arrive to pick her up. Basic challenges like gathering food and water have to be met. She is able to survive until she falls from a tree and breaks her leg. But she finds an unusual ally and benefactor. She finds she has the power to repay the favor.

This was a creative concept and a well told story by one of the masters of sci-fi/fantasy! The main character is well developed without too much backstory. This story was published about eight years before Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, so credit Silverberg with a brilliant dinosaur story – of which there are few.

The Flabby Men by Basil Copper
At some point in the earth’s future, when the planet is sickened with radiation and pollution, a research scientist is dispatched to an island research station that is studying the native inhabitants of that island. One day while exploring, he meets a woman (in this day and age, women are called “breeders”) who shows him a slimy growth on her chest. In her own language, she pleads for help. A team of researchers is dispatched to a satellite location near the village to research the nature of the problem. They find out that there are other inhabitants of the island – sea creatures who devour souls.

Cooper gets caught up a bit in describing the minute details of logistics, making his story unnecessarily long. But the main theme of malevolent sea creatures is straight out of the Lovecraft canon. Cooper’s writing made the story resemble something of where H.P. Lovecraft met Roger Corman. If one can get past the excessive verbiage, there’s a great story there.

The Silvering by Robert Holdstock
A man living on a remote island has formed an intimate relationship with a sea creature known as a Selkie who shed their sea creature skin when they come ashore and become human. When another selkie who is not his beloved shows up one evening, he is distraught to learn that she has “gone deep.” He wants her skin so he can bring her back to life. The selkie are not eager to comply.

I have mixed views on this story. I liked the twists contained in the otherwise disjointed prose. But the writing is just atrocious! Events unfold that have no bearing on anything and the narrative’s timeline is confusing and hard to follow.

Someone Else’s Problem by Michael Marshall Smith
A man boards a commuter train to take him home after a hectic day at his London office. As he sits pondering the problems at the office, he sees a monkey standing in the aisle of the car, looking at him with blue eyes. He is stunned. At first, he believes it must be somebody’s pet. Later, when he goes to the bar car for a drink, he finds the monkey and his friends. Nobody else is present. He returns to his seat. When his seat mate heads for the bar car for a snack, he doesn’t discourage her. He just wants to get home.

This story had so much potential, but fell flat. It took forever to get going. The first third of the story is the main character pondering his office problems. I don’t care to read them anymore than I care to hear them from someone. The man’s dismissal of what he sees and his lack of concern for his seat mate who is going as a lamb into a slaughter when she heads to the bar car is chilling, but it took too long to get there.

Rawhead Rex by Clive Barker
An ancient evil is awakened when a farmer removes a sunken stone from his field. A gigantic humanoid creature with large claws, large teeth, and a taste for human flesh is unleased on a British village to kill and pillage at will. The police can’t help. The church can’t help. But perhaps a new immigrant can.

Written with Barker’s usual lack of restraint, Rawhead Rex is a lot of fun and perhaps the best story in this book. The monster, Rawhead, is as menacing as they come. Parts of the story are written from his point of view and he is truly evil and depraved. Barker knows no sacred cows and adheres not to conventional mores, making the first reading of any of his stories and adventure.

The Chill Clutch of the Unseen by Kim Newman
The retired police chief of a small Connecticut town considers his responsibility to be at the train station daily to watch the train arrivals for his town is where old ghosts come to die and new monsters are born. He’s battled them like his father before him. One day an ancient ghost arrives and Chief Stockton is there to greet him. They go to Stockton’s house to discuss the pains of old age and the nature of their rivalry.

This story was too ponderous to be fun and too long for its subject matter. I like the idea of a New England town where ghosts and monsters go to die and new ones are born. I didn’t want a lesson on geriatrics.

Stephen Jones has edited some fine anthologies and has usually been able to garner submissions from great authors like Stephen King, Robert McCammon, and Neil Gaiman. This book contains many stories by authors who are strictly second and third tier writers. The biggest name in the book is Clive Barker. While Rawhead Rex is a fun, sometimes disturbing story, it’s far from his best. Robert Silverberg, Ramsey Campbell, and Brian Lumley are represented and are definite first tier writers. But like Barker, they are not represented with their best work.

I get that it’s a “Mammoth” book of monsters, but some of the stories were too mammoth. They came close to departing the definition or short story and approached the land of novella. That’s not necessarily bad except the time invested in one of these long short stories should be worth the reader’s while. Too often in this anthology, it was not worth the while.

A Treasury of Great Science Fiction Volume II

Boucher, Anthony
A Treasury of Great Science Fiction
Volume II
Copyright 1959
Doubleday

Contains the following stories:

Brain Wave
by Poul Anderson

The Earth passes through a mysterious energy field that dramatically increases the entire human race’s IQ. Shortly thereafter, labor is hard to find when a super-intelligent race finds themselves unable to do menial chores. There is great social and psychological upheaval across the globe. A group of scientists work together to quickly solve the problems while dealing with their own issues and those of their family members.

This is intelligent Golden Age science fiction. The events and characters are entirely believable and the story is well paced and engaging. The only drawback is the shortness of the novella prohibited more development of the story’s characters and their interpersonal relationships. Anderson gives us just barely enough to make the characters interesting.

Bullard Reflection
by Malcolm Jameson

A star ship’s crew’s athletic ability saves them when they are double-crossed on one of the moon’s of Jupiter.

Dull, uninteresting story by an author of whom I’ve never heard.

The Lost Years
by Oscar Lewis

What would have happened had Abraham Lincoln been saved by a surgeon instead of dying the morning after being shot? Lewis explores the possibilities in this alternative history short story.

Not really sci-fi, but engaging nonetheless.

Dead Center
by Judith Merril

A woman designed it and a man is piloting it to the moon. The newest rocket, the KIM III malfunctions as it lands on the moon. Its lone astronaut must be rescued. His wife, who designed the rocket, works frantically to put together the team that will save her husband before he runs out of food and oxygen. Meanwhile, their young son is left to wonder about all the frantic activity about him.

This was a tightly told story . A lot of action and character development crammed into 20 pages of text. Merril makes it work. Merril was envisioning woman engineers leading design teams back in 1953.

Lost Art
by George O. Smith

Two brothers discover a device in the Martian desert and use trial and error learning how to make it work . In a parallel story, a Martian father and son assemble and deploy the device.

Perhaps the most useless story I’ve ever read. I kept thinking “something bad is going to happen when these guys figure out what this thing does.” Nothing bad ever happened. Nothing ever happened. What a pointless waste of twenty pages.

The Other Side of the Sky
by Arthur C. Clarke

The narrator is an engineer aboard a space station that he is confident will be a stepping stone into deep space. Set in the 1990s, the narrator relates anecdotes from his space adventures that show how prescient Clarke was in judging the success of satellite-based communications. It was written in 1957. The space stations he describes would be the same ones that Stanley Kubrick would bring to celluloid in the Clarke story 2001: A Space Oddysey.


The Man Who Sold the Moon
by Robert Heinlein

Man, how I hated this story. I could not finish it. I’ve read two Heinlein stories and hated them both. I’ve always thought about reading Stranger in a Strange Land but now I will not.

This is a story about a corporate pig-dog who wants to acquire the moon and take title to it so he can subdivide it and sell the parcels. In a real story, he would have taken it by force through war or something exciting like that. Instead, in Heinlein’s painfully boring story, he takes it through the drawing up of contracts and the structuring of corporations --- all described in painstaking detail in Heinlein’s narrative and the dialogue.

Imagine reading a low-level corporate attorney’s journal entries. It’s not that exciting.

Heinlein may be the most overrated writer in the history!

Magic City
by Nelson S. Bond

Set more than 1500 years in the future, after the fall of civilization, women lead society. Most societies shun men and need them for little more than breeding stock. Advanced civilizations are slowly integrating men into their society as equals.

In this setting a couple journeys from their home in Jinnia to Newyalk to slay the demon Death, who constantly claims their weak, infirm, and old. Swords and daggers are their weapons of choice as they enter the dangerous city and the temple of Slukes.

The names of the various cities and territories are very clever phonetics and plays on words. They live in a country called Tizzathee (as in my country ‘tis of thee). I usually hate such cute word play, but Bond’s are clever enough to be engaging. The battle scenes are well written and his descriptions of the post-apocalyptic east coast are riveting. This was a great story.


The Morning of the Day They Did It
by E.B. White

A television executive now located on a remote planet relates the story of Earth’s final day and how its destruction came about from the placement of the ultimate weapon in space.

I read this on the heels of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and, as in Bradbury’s classic, this story describes how television destroyed society. This story is not nearly as brilliant as Bradbury’s. The narrator uses mundane (very mundane) events from his day along with dialogue from mundane newscasts and shows to set the stage for the Earth’s discussion. This was a creative idea not well executed.

Piggy Bank
by Henry Kuttner

A greedy man has figured out how to manufacture synthetic diamonds, but keeps losing his fortune to burglars. He asks his chief scientist to develop the ultimate safe that can flee when someone attempts to rob it. But when it flees when the man wants to access his fortune contained therein, he tries every conceivable method to get access.

Letters from Laura
by Mildred Clingerman

A woman’s time travel is documented in a series of letters – first to her mother, then to the company that helped her time travel on vacation.

Dull, dull, dull!

The Stars My Destination
by Alfred Bester

A roughneck spaceman pursues vengeance against the crew of a ship that left him in space to die, marooned on a wrecked ship. Meanwhile, the government and various businessmen want to exploit his knowledge of his doomed ship to retrieve its priceless cargo for use in an interstellar war.

I am somewhat familiar with Bester, who ended his career writing radio sci-fi for the CBS Radio Mystery Theater in the 1970s. Stephen King references this work as Bester’s best in his tome On Writing. It is obvious that King used one of Bester’s ideas for one of his better short stories, The Jaunt because jaunting plays a key role in Bester’s novella. For Bester, jaunting is but part of the story. In King’s story, the science of jaunting is explored.

I think this story must have been serialized because every two or three chapters seems to be a story unto itself.

A Treasury of Great Science Fiction Volume I

A Treasury of Great Science Fiction
Volume 1
edited by Anthony Boucher
Copyright 1959
Doubleday

Contains the following stories:

Rebirth
by John Wyndham
This is a powerful novella about post-apocalyptic Newfoundland and a young boy’s coming of age in a profoundly religious society

David, the son of THE local minister in a society where any physical deviation from the normal makeup of the human body, encounters a little girl with six toes. They try in vain to hide the secret, but are unsuccessful and the girl and her family are forced to flee. David, meanwhile, shares a small mental abnormality -- telepathic ability -- with several other local youths who all work hard to conceal it. When David’s new sister is born, they soon find their own abilities pale in comparison to hers. They fear their secret will get out.

This book is dripping with social commentary on religion versus intellectual progress and the role of religion in our society. The characters lack the alienation of a Kafka hero, but it is not hard to sympathize with them as their culture tells them they are abominations before God. While the bit about collectivism at the end smacks a little of socialistic superiority, the story blends just the right amount of social analysis with action to make a truly engaging story.

The Shape of Things That Came
by Richard Deming
A scientist’s nephew finds his time traveling T-shirt and uses it to travel from the year 1900 to 1950. Upon his return, he writes a short story about the experience that his editor simply finds implausible. The man explains what he saw.

Pillar of Fire
by Ray Bradbury
This was the antithesis of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. In this story, the vampire struggles against the humans who dominate society. The last existing corpse comes to life in the 25th century to fight for its existence and to exterminate humans. In a perfectly ordered society, nobody suspects any abnormalities despite the chaos around them

Bradbury gives hints at what would come in Fahrenheit 451, which he wrote later. Our vampire compares himself favorably to the anti-heroes of the works of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft in a society that has burned such disorderly books.

Waldo
by Robert Heinlein
The world’s greatest scientist is presented with an engineering problem that could threaten civilization. He is forced to appeal to a much older and arcane form of problem solving to develop the solution.

This was science fiction for engineers. WAY too much technology and not nearly enough story. I struggled to finish it.

The Father Thing
by Phillip K. Dick
Aliens have eaten Charles Watsons’ father. He must flee from the awful thing that has taken its place and take revenge on its evil master.

This story contains that theme of impostors and conspirators that was so common in the Golden Age Science Fiction of the 1950s. This is comparable to Invasion of the Body Snatchers which was also published in 1954.

The Children’s Hour
by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore
A man goes to a psychologist to be hypnotized so he can recall what happened to missing hours and days in his life. He recalls a young, beautiful girl to whom he was engaged. But fate -- or the intervention of some higher power -- always seems to get in the way.

This was a somewhat intriguing story that built the tension nicely, then veers off in a really odd direction that can't really be called a twist. Melds contemporary psycho-drama with mythology, and in the end, plain old fashioned sci-fi.

Gomez
by C.M. Kornbluth
A prominent scientist receives a letter from an immigrant dishwasher asking him to verify his theory regarding nuclear physics. When the government finds out about it, the young immigrant dishwasher finds his life dramatically altered.

An ok, if non-descript story

The Widget, the Wadget, and Boff
by Theodore Sturgeon
Aliens conduct sociological and scientific experiments on a group of boarding house residents to ascertain whether or not the human race has the necessary mental capacity and ability to survive. As they engage their science from a higher plane of existence, they behave like a typical human married couple.

I don’t normally like character studies like this, but Sturgeon’s characters were meaningful and engaging. The story’s sci-fi tie-in is really tertiary to how human beings of various backgrounds dwell in the same habitat and how they see each other and themselves within that habitat.

Sandra
by George P. Elliot
A first person narrative about a man who purchases a female slave who is obedient and dutiful (and willing to sleep with him). He falls in love with her and she becomes lazy, disobedient, and independent. So he puts her back into slavery and she reverts to her normal form.

I guess this story qualifies as some alternative reality story since the guy purchased his slave at an Oakland department store, but nothing else in the text indicates any hint of sci-fi or alternative reality. It was racy for its time, I’m sure, but today would be dismissed as highly misogynistic.

Beyond Space and Time
by Joel Townsley Rogers
A brilliant scientist teams with a brilliant engineer to design and build the first rocket-ship designed to leave the galaxy. When the engineer is launched, he learns more about what is going on on Earth and his personal life from billions of miles away than he ever did while on Earth.

Ok, if somewhat light, story.


The Martian Crown Jewels
by Poul Anderson

A locked room whodunit in space. The Martian Crown Jewels are being transferred from Earth --- where they were being studied --- to the Mars moon Phobe where they will be unloaded and returned to Mars. They are stowed in a locked cabinet aboard an unmanned freighter. When that freighter arrives, the jewels are gone. Terrified diplomats turned to a skilled Martian detective to help them solve the unsolvable case.

The Weapon Shops of Isher
by A.E. Van Vogt

A group of dissidents operate transient weapons shops that move from town to town and village to village to sell specialized self-defense weapons to help repress the tyranny of an imperial government. A young man defies his father who finds the weapon shops offensive and strikes out on his own with the help of a young woman associated with the weapon shops.

This story was superb and embodied everything that is good about Golden Age science fiction. The characters are strong and the story plot driven. The pro-2nd amendment advocacy is not even thinly veiled, but allows the reader to identify with characters confronting the same issues 5000 years in the future that we confront today.

A website I found describes Van Vogt as the third pillar of Golden Age sci-fi along with Bradbury and Asimov. It also claims that this novella was actually a series of short stories published separately.

My Favorite Horror Story edited by Mike Baker and Martin H. Greenburg

My Favorite Horror Story
Edited by Mike Baker and Martin H. Greenberg

The concept of this anthology is simple. The editors asked several prominent horror and science fiction writers to submit their favorite horror stories. The sum is a collection of stories that inspired today’s best writers to write.

I enjoy short horror fiction. Stephen King, in describing the satisfaction of reading a good short story, made an apt comparison between the short story and a novel. He likened a novel to a long love affair while comparing the short story to a quick kiss from a stranger. While I’ve ever experienced the latter, I’ve got to believe the experience would be enjoyable.

Sweets to the Sweet
By Robert Bloch
Submitted by Stephen King

A nanny has quit the employ of a wealthy aristocrat because she can no longer care for the man’s daughter whom she describes as evil – so evil even her own father hates her. When the man’s brother goes to his house to see the girl and investigate, he finds the girl playing with her toys, which are really just “candy”.

Movie fans know of Bloch’s most prolific work, Psycho, a novella that Alfred Hitchcock made into one of the greatest horror movies of all time. Connoisseurs of horror fiction know Bloch as one of the masters and great contributors to contemporary genre fiction. Like most Bloch work, the prose is short and the story well paced.

The Father Thing
By Phillip K. Dick
Submitted by Ed Gorman

Aliens have eaten Charles Watsons’ father. He must flee from the awful thing that has taken its place and take revenge on its evil master.

This is the only Dick story I’ve ever read and, while I enjoyed it, I enjoyed the movie, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” more which this story resembles closely. That novel was written by Jack Finney and they were written about the same time. Finney’s allegory about the Red Scare of the 1950s is deliberately thinly veiled. Dick’s story is not an allegory, but an attempt to convey the horror of a child. As we all know from being children, the imagined horrors of our youth are the most intense. Dick does an adequate, but not superb job in capturing that.

The Distributor
By Richard Matheson
Submitted by Ed Gorman

A new man moves into Joseph Alston’s neighborhood and promptly introduces himself to Alston as Theodore Gordon. At first, Gordon seems amicable enough. But soon, he starts to “redistribute” the belongings of his neighbors. When they complain, Gordon seizes control of the neighborhood through nefarious and prurient means.

I have a passion for Matheson’s work. I have read about half of it and am looking forward to taking more soon. He is rivaled only by Bradbury in his ability to tell great genre short stories. Matheson’s prose is a forerunner to that of writers such as Stephen King who tells great tales in a straightforward manner (usually). The Distributor is just another of Matheson’s wonderful stories. Certainly not his best, but I’ve never read or seen anything by Matheson I would call bad.

The thing about Matheson is, almost everybody is familiar with his work, but they don’t know it. He wrote 13 scripts for Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone” including several of its most famous episodes like “Terror at 20,000 Feet”. He wrote I Am Legend that has been made into three different movies. He also is known for blending romance and fantasy in such books made into movies as Somewhere in Time and What Dreams May Come.

A Warning to the Curious
By M.R. James
Submitted by Ramsey Campbell

A young man spins a tale in an English country inn about great and powerful artifacts of a forgotten age buried in the countryside. He convinces two older gentlemen to help him unearth these artifacts. Someone lives to tell the tale. . .

This is the one story in the book I really did not enjoy. Campbell tells us he appreciates the “lightness” of James’ writing. I found it dull. I liked the story concept a great deal. The two older gentlemen remind me of members of “The Chowder Society” of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story. However, sometimes the failing of a story is in the poor telling of a good tale.

Opening the Door
By Arthur Machen
Submitted by Peter Atkins

A cynical journalist recounts his encounter with a man known as “The Canonbury Clergyman”. His interviews with the clergyman leave him with large gaps in his memory and disorients him in a way that is hard to reconcile with his journalist’s hardened sensibilities. When the clergyman vanishes, he recounts it as perhaps the only true case of a human being truly disappearing from existence.

I like the journalist character who, as a Fleet Street tabloid writer, is a bit of an anti-hero. Machen tells the tale as any journalist would – events chronologically told with insights from the author. It reads like a feature article from a newspaper. Machen was a journalist by trade, so he was in his element when he wrote it. This was my first experience with Machen and he’s an author more of whose works I hope to read.



The Colour Out of Space
By H.P. Lovecraft
Submitted by Richard Laymon

A meteor crashes into a New England farm. Soon, the family living on that farm devolve from human beings into subhuman beings. His neighbors and the local constabulary investigate to find the greatest horror man has ever known.

Lovecraft never tells a tale from the point of view of the victims of horror. Lovecraft’s narrative always comes from a third party observer. That is how Lovecraft terrifies the reader without ever quite showing the source of that terror. This story is a rare instance when the narrator is directly engaged in the action and sees the nature of the horror – a meteor whose description is of no color, yet of all colors. Stephen King retold this tale in a campy fashion for his anthology movie, “Creepshow”.

The Inner Room
By Robert Aickman
Submitted by Peter Straub

A young girl acquires a large dollhouse from a country antique store. The dollhouse is large enough that an entire room is required to accommodate it. Parts of it are strangely inaccessible, although its features can be observed through windows – except for room in the center of the house. The secrets of that room and that house will go on to dominate the girl and her brother into their adult years.

I read this story in a series of short installments and that may have made the experience less rewarding. I found the description of the house confusing and impossible to picture in my own mind. However, as the kids grow and the memories of the house instead of the house itself , come to the fore, the story really picks up and finishes nicely.

Young Goodman Brown
By Nathaniel Hawthorne
Submitted by Rick Hautula

A young man ventures into the woods on a quest to discover his own nature and test his own morals. While there, the true nature of his wife, friends, and associates is revealed in its most debased form. Brown’s own morality is tested and he is tempted with his basest desires by the devil himself.

I read this in college and enjoyed it a great deal. I did not enjoy it so much when rereading. Some stories can only by enjoyed once, I think. I’m not a fan of classical literature – preferring modern prose. However, it is impossible to not acknowledge the contributions of early writers like Hawthorne to the development of genre fiction.

The Rats in the Walls
By H.P. Lovecraft
Submitted by Michael Slade

A young man, traveling by bicycle through New England, tries to find shelter in what appears to be an empty house. But the house is not empty. It is inhabited by a absurdly weird man who has a number of guests “living” upstairs.

I’ve read almost all of Lovecraft’s fiction and this story still ranks as my favorite. The key component of Lovecraft’s fiction is dread. Seldom do we witness the horror – whether it precedes the story or is the climax. In this story, as in most others, our imagination finishes the tale for us much better than any written word. Lovecraft knew, perhaps better than any other writer, how to let the reader’s imagination finish the tale.

The Dog Park
By Dennis Etchison
Submitted by Richard Matheson

In the wealthiest of suburbs in Los Angeles, there is a dog park utilized by the rich and the famous – and their dogs. The hero of the story lost his dog in that park and isn’t quite sure why. He goes back to explore the park and meets a woman. As they talk, the woman’s dog meets its fate and the man learns the park’s secrets.

While this was an enjoyable tale, the social commentary was entirely too thinly veiled as to detract from the story. I have to believe Matheson has read better fiction than ths.

The Animal Fair
By Robert Bloch
Submitted by Joe R. Lansdale

A drifter comes across a traveling “jungle show” and is horrified with inhuman cruelty which the show’s host submits the show’s prime exhibit – a trained gorilla. After leaving the show, the drifter is hitchhiking when he is picked up by the show’s master. As they travel across the country – with the poor ape in tow – the circus master relates his own tale of inhuman cruelty done to him.

While the nature of the tale is much different than that of Psycho, the telling is the same. There’s no supernatural or fantastic element to the story. It’s just a horrific tale of the sometimes inhumane nature of man.

The Pattern
By Ramsey Campbell
Submitted by Poppy Z. Brite

A young couple – the man an artist and the woman a writer – rent a secluded cabin in the English country. Their first night there, the hear a horrific scream which could only be human. They search for its source and can find no evidence of anything amiss. When they make inquiries of the locals, they are told some secrets are better left undiscovered.

The story was decent, but what struck me was how vividly Campbell can describe a setting or scene. While good settings are an element of a story, they usually can’t carry a story. Here, Campbell’s brilliant descriptions elevate an average story to brilliant.

The Tell-Tale Heart
By Edgar Allan Poe
Submitted by Joyce Carol Oates

A young man slays a rival and conceals his body beneath the floor boards of his home. He tries to convince himself of both the infallibility of his concealment and the righteousness of his deed. When the inspectors arrive to search for the missing man, he smugly invites them in to examine his abode, quite confident they will not find the missing body. But the beating of the heart. . .if he can hear it, can the inspectors?

It is impossible to take a high school literature class and not be assigned this story. It is one of the most famous stories in history, spoofed, imitated and retold countless times. Poe’s legacy is the most enduring of any American horror writer.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
By Ambrose Bierce
Submitted by Dennis Etchison

A confederate spy is about to hang for attempting to sabotage the Owl Creek Bridge. The hanging goes awry and he escapes into the river below. He eludes the Union troops pursuing him until he gets home when. . . .

I first read this story when I was in grade school and it was my first experience with a plot twist. It made an indelible impression on me. I forgot the author, but never the story, until I was in high school when it assigned in a literature class. Now, the name Ambrose Bierce, for me, will be forever linked to everything that is great in short fiction.

Bierce wrote more than one hundred short stories – mostly real life or supernatural horror from the Civil War. This particular story was adapted into a 22 minute film, without dialogue, for Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone” with exceptional quality. It was also adapted for radio for the CBS Radio Mystery Theater in the 1970s.

The Human Chair
By Edogawa Rampo
Submitted by Harlan Ellison

A Japanese writer receives a strange letter from a furniture maker, telling her of how he designed a chair that allows him to hide inside it, undetected. He recounts how he used the chair to take up residence in an expensive hotel and make a living as a thief. Soon, his use of the chair becomes more prurient and horrifying.

This story had a delightful twist. It was originally written in Japanese and the translation is sometimes a bit stilted – lapsing into passive voice when active voice would have b been better. Nonetheless, Ellison promises a horror story to rival anything written by American or British authors and he does not disappoint.