Platypus of Truth

I needed a break from A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (too many authors and too many styles coming in too fast) so I decided to turn back to an author whose work I've enjoyed exploring: Robert E. Howard.  This time, however, I decided to skip over Howard's famous Conan yarns and instead take a look at one of his earlier creations, Solomon Kane.  The idea of a puritan occult detective was too intriguing to pass up.  I have the whole collection of Kane's tales and I do intend to blog them all.  Right now, my little literary detour has only encompassed the first two short stories so I'm going to record my thoughts on them right away and get back to the rest as I have time. Skulls in the Stars Solomon Kane makes his debut with this classic bit of English Gothic including a haunted moor, a vengeful ghost, and a solitary miser.   Howard's Kane fits the portrait of the archetypal puritan: grim, principled, metaphysical, with an iron sense of right and wrong.  I h...

Wow, it's hard to read anthologies at anything other than a slow crawl.  The change from author to author and style to style is exhausting.  Slowing down is a good thing, though, if it makes time for reflection.  That seems like one good reason to create an anthology: to force readers to slow down and reflect. With that as a preamble, let's move on to today's selections. The Black Ferris by Ray Badbury I didn't expect to see this Sci-Fi heavy hitter in a Fantasy collection, but there you go.  I've tried to get into Bradbury once or twice and failed.  His Martian Chronicles , in particular, resisted all my best efforts.  This short story, however, worked like a charm.  The sense of atmosphere in particular is masterfully done (a sort of Tom Sawyer strays into Edgar Allan Poe).  My only complaint is that there isn't more of it, but apparently Bradbury already fixed that by expanding the story into Something Wicked This Way Comes. This raise...

These fragments I have shored against my ruins. -T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland There was once a Tiffany Glass factory in the town where I grew up.  I didn't know that.  It's in ruins now, but apparently you can still pick up handfuls of brightly colored glass if you know where to look. Brightly colored glass. From pieces of brightly colored glass came all the amazing works of the Tiffany studio.  I've seen them in Boston, Ohio, and even Redlands California.  Wherever I have seen them, Tiffany windows are remarkable for their beauty -and my home town played a part in the making of that beauty.  Much of the downtown is in ruins now and those ruins are slowly being cleared away in a decades-long process of urban renewal.  Whatever once flanked the downtown has been covered by the woods and is now a state park.  I don't know what will happen to the old glass works.  Maybe they've already been cleared away.  What is certain is that those piece...

I'll drink up all the mead that you got on your shelf But first let me introduce myself My name is Sin-Fee-Oat-Lee I like my poisons topical most-lee But if any a you want to go rounds with me I'll bust out my sword and make you Dee-Ee-Dee.

Our next two authors are husband and wife team Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore.  This serves as a reminder that the American Fantasy Market did not stay a boys club for long.  Exactly how hard women had to work to bust up "the smoke filled room," I don't know, but the fact is that they did and its been a co-ed party ever since. Call Him Demon by Henry Kuttner We continue our trek through the history of American fantasy with yet another piece in the horror genre laced with Sci-Fi and Fantasy elements.  Kuttner, unlike Boucher, takes up Henry James' cue in A Turn of the Screw that horror is always worse when encountered by children.  James gave us two children in his classic as a way of "uping the ante."  Kuttner gives us four.  While I don't know that that increases the horror, it does allow him to play with the line between children's games and their experience of reality.  Throughout the work, we are always free to doubt the nature of the children...

Yesterday Was Monday by Theodore Sturgeon I've already reviewed Theodore Sturgeon's Yesterday Was Monday , so I'll post the link to those thoughts here. They Bite by Anthony Boucher Every now and then I come across a story that really scares me .  This was one of those stories.   What starts out as a spy thriller takes a turn towards folk lore, then urban legend, and finally into outright horror.  The pace is slow and leisurely, allowing the horror to grow without alerting the reader to its presence at any given point.  Then the end comes and wallops you in a literary master-stroke that leaves no room for mercy.  The authorial restraint such a move takes must be phenomenal.  If you have an interest in literary horror, this is one to pick up.  If you have any interest in writing horror, pay close attention to how Boucher manages the ending.  If you scare easily, take a pass.

We continue our journey through A Treasury of Modern Fantasy  edited by Terry Carr and Martin Harry Greenberg with tales by C.M. Kornbluth and Clark Ashton Smith. Thirteen O'Clock by C.M. Kornbluth The rise of modern Fantasy has been closely linked with that of Science Fiction.  In some pieces, it's hard to tell them apart.   Thirteen O'Clock  by C.M. Kornbluth is one of those pieces.  I'm not sure whether we're in a bad parody of Phantastes  or an episode of Buck Rogers ; possibly, we're just in a seeder part of Oz.  I think this confusion may be intentional.   Thirteen O'Clock  has all the hallmarks of a story meant to sell: genre mixing, thin characters, fast-pacing, a little sex, and lots of surprises.  This isn't a work of carefully crafted epic fantasy, but a quick yarn meant to bring home the bacon in a crunched publishing market.  In that respect, Thirteen O'Clock  reminds us that American Fantasy grew up in a v...

The next short story up for review is Abraham Merritt's The Woman in the Wood .  I read Merritt's The Moon Pearl  several years ago and highly enjoyed it.   The Woman in the Wood  was a welcome return to Merritt's weird world of pagan peril.  The central image, a shell-shocked World War I vet who finds healing in a chivalric grove of sentient trees is worthy of Tolkien (indeed, I wonder if he read it -the time period would be right).  The eerie tone, however, is all Merritt's own as is the unnerving moral ambiguity of the ending.  Tolkien wouldn't have put much stock in such trees, even if the men who opposed them were as orc-like as those of  The Woman in the Wood .  I won't say too much more in case you want to go out and read this one.  Sufficient to say that Abraham Merritt now has my attention and I will look forward to my next encounter with any work that comes from his pen. After the creepiness of the first two selections, a lit...