COLD PRINT: Poppy Z. Brite's "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves" and "The Ash of Memory, the Dust of Desire"

by Jose Cruz

I found it in my aunt and uncle's office. It was early afternoon, the combined light of the day outside and the eggshell glow from the bulbs of the rotating fan above giving the setting an innocuous, decidedly mundane atmosphere. But I knew that the book I held in my hands was anything but innocuous or mundane.

The cover looked fairly generic at first glance, emphasis placed on the author’s name rather than the artistic rendition to sell the book. Still, there was something patently forbidden in the pallid, scarred face that stared out off-center, its lips either submerged in the gummy waters of the bayou or covered by cross-hatchings of Spanish moss. Or sewn shut with black voodoo thread. And the title of the book itself: Wormwood. Biblical, ancient, full of whispery pestilence. And just below that an even more telling reveal, a line that explains this short story collection was previously released under the title Swamp Foetus. I was still in middle school when I picked up the book that sunny afternoon, but I still had enough knowledge of these matters to realize that this was horror as I had never conceived before.

It was then that I realized that this Poppy Z. Brite meant business and was, very likely, highly dangerous.

It was only early this year that I finally confronted the work within that forsaken text. My initial apprehensions of Brite being a tawdry peddler in the erotic horror paperback market had been stamped out in the intervening time between that initial encounter and now, appraisals and tributes to her wonderful and unique craft ever-intriguing me to reevaluate that hasty and paranoid assertion I had made as a foolish boy. Diving into Brite’s prose was a full realization of all the praise I had heard.

The renamed collection from Dell (1996)

In her short stories, Brite is audacious and merciless, the viciousness of her narratives honed to a keener edge by the refinement she brings to her work. To read Poppy Z. Brite is to immerse yourself in a cesspool of sensations both thrilling and horrendous: one comes to admire her delectable descriptions of cuisine and landscape with the same fervor as her portrayals of bodily mutilation and raw sexuality. Brite knows that horror is a genre of feelings both physical and emotional, her uniquely trained eye for unconventional imagery and metaphor perfectly suited to elicit frissons in the reader during the course of any one of her poetical tales. Two of them from later in the collection, “Calcutta, Lord of Nerves” and “The Ash of Memory, the Dust of Desire,” are the subject of today’s post.

Reading each story in Wormwood in its presented order allows the reader to pick up on many of Brite’s fascinations and recurrent themes. The underground Goth scene figures heavily in many, as does the rambling, shadowy streets of New Orleans, both of which Brite has called herself a resident. “Calcutta, Lord of Nerves,” therefore, surprises one in its departure from the familiar settings and preoccupations with art and love that came before it. Originally published for Craig Spector’s and John Skipp’s anthology Still Dead (1992), their follow-up to their successful Book of the Dead (1989), the story is another in a gathering of fictions taking place in a universe wherein George Romero's zombies have overtaken the world.

Mark V. Ziesing, 1992

The story is related to us by a nameless narrator (my favorite kind), the son of an American man and Indian woman who was rescued when the hospital he was birthed in burned to the ground, his mother’s bloody body left in the basement morgue after she died in labor. Early on Brite readily establishes her strengths in painting the most vivid pictures with her prose:

[My father] pressed his thin chapped lips to the satin of my hair. I remember opening my eyes—they felt tight and shiny, parched by the flames—and looking up at the column of smoke that roiled in the sky, a night sky blasted cloudy pink like a sky full of blood and milk.

After his despairing father drinks himself to death, the narrator returns to his homeland of Calcutta as a young man.

Calcutta, you will say. What a place to have been when the dead began to walk.

As he sees it, his home has changed very little with the proliferation of the living dead. The city was already a crawling mass of bodies wishing for death, so the sights of zombies eating the entrails of catatonic mothers through their vaginas and munching on the skulls of their children have only become a part of the greater squalor rather than upsetting the social norm.

Not having any responsibilities in a world gone mad (and living in a city that already was), the narrator spends most of his time wandering through the streets overcrowded with ramshackle buildings and watching the degeneracy unfolding around him to preoccupy his time. From the incinerated zombies tossed into the Hooghly River by the police to the rotting beggars who have scarcer meals than the zombies, the narrator witnesses it all with an impassive eye, loving his home all the more with every horrible revelation.

One of his mandatory stops during his trips is the Kalighat, the temple of worship for the goddess Kali. The narrator is entranced by the power and mystifying sex the goddess represents in her monstrous physicality and deathly adornments. As the narrator continues his walks and muses on the practical and metaphysical problems presented by the living dead (a perfunctory explanation linking their reanimation to a biologically-engineered microbe meant to eat plastic waste is the only one given, and briefly), he eventually finds that the labyrinthine streets of the city have led him back to the Kalighat come nightfall. But when he returns to the altar of his beloved mistress, he finds a different kind of congregation gathered in the temple.

I saw human heads balanced on raw stumps of necks, eyes turned up to crescents of silver-white. I saw gobbets of meat that might have been torn from a belly or a thigh. I saw severed hands like pale lotus flowers, the fingers like petals opening silently in the night.

Most of all, piled on every side of the altar, I saw bones. Bones picked so clean that they gleamed in the candlelight. Bones with smears of meat and long snotty runners of fat still attached. Skinny arm-bones, clubby leg-bones, the pretzel of a pelvis, the beadwork of a spine. The delicate bones of children. The crumbling ivory bones of the old. The bones of those that could not run.

These things the dead brought to their goddess. She had been their goddess all along, and they her acolytes.

This macabre diorama, combined with the animation of the sinuous statue itself, compel the narrator to run from the scene back to the ruins of the hospital. He lowers himself into a cradle of ashes, returned to the dust from whence he was born as the dawn of a new day arrives.

Brite’s writing demonstrates such a potent musicality that when paired with these gruesome sights it creates a symphony of terror. “Calcutta, Lord of Nerves” is a narrative of tensions and contradictions. The city is redolent both with beauty and misery; the living dead both of equal standing with the human citizens and perversions of humanity; Kali acting as both a guard of the old faith and the vicious herald of the New World Order. The best writers have the power to take your breath away, to make you envious of their gifts, to keep you thinking long after you’ve finished that last sentence. Poppy Z. Brite does all of this with “Calcutta, Lord of Nerves” and had it been her only story the world could only be so thankful to have at least gotten this little masterpiece from her.

“Calcutta…” presents a vivid depiction of a social horror eating away like a cancer, and in this way it is similar to “The Ash of Memory, the Dust of Desire,” but the latter tale is more secretive where the former was illustrative, dwelling more in the pockets of darkness in between the “candyscapes of nighttime lights” than in the glaring light of the unflinching sun.

St. Martin's Press, 1991

Originally appearing in Dead End: City Limits (1991) edited by Paul F. Olson and David B. Silva, “The Ash of Memory…” is a tale of the modern city, or what would at first appear to be the modern city. The stink and spice of India is left behind in favor of the steely cool of the American metropolis (its exact name is never given) where our narrator, Jonny, works as head chef for the posh hotel restaurant the Blue Shell with his aspiring artist friend Cleve. Jonny’s girlfriend Leah spent a passionate night with Cleve for which the couple is still feeling the emotional shockwaves from, their intimacy gradually crumbling in the wake of the infidelity. Not only that, but Leah has found out she is pregnant. The baby could belong to either man.

Conflicted by his feelings for both Leah and Cleve, Jonny continues to kick back and listen to jazz records with Cleve and comfort Leah in her times of need even when she makes her resentment of his boyish sweetness known to him. When she gets an appointment with a private doctor in a run-down neighborhood to carry out the abortion, Jonny decides to accompany her despite his fear of the decrepit district.

Other parts of the city were more dangerous, but to me the old factories and mills were the most frightening places. The places where abandoned machinery sat silent and brooding, and twenty-foot swaths of cobweb hung from the disused cogs and levers like dusty gray curtains. The places that everyone mostly stayed away from, mostly left alone with the superstitious reverence given all graveyards. But once in a while something would be found in the basement of a factory or tucked into the backroom of a warehouse. A head, once, so badly decomposed that no one could ever put a face to it. The gnawed bones and dried tendons and other unpalatable parts of a wino, jealously guarded by a pack of feral dogs. This was where the free clinic was; this was where certain doctors set up their offices, and where desperate girls visited them.

There’s a telling reveal in Jonny’s words about the head that “no one could ever put a face to it.” This description not only speaks to his fear of the city’s erosion of identity and how a distinct human body can be reduced to a nameless pile of remains that no one can mourn but also his fear of the random, anonymous incidents themselves. Early in the story Jonny speaks of “the grand melodramatic murders” that the city hosts, but one never gets the impression that Jonny speaks of these things as products of human nature. The atrocities he describes in the quoted passage seem to be attributed to a greater and more arcane horror, victims erased from existence by the very environment rather than some mortal perpetrator. This notion is lent more credence as the tale advances.

*SPOILERS*

When Jonny and Leah begin arguing after having difficulty finding the doctor’s office, Jonny runs off, his impotent rage leveled only by his blind devotion to Leah, leading him to make sure that she remains in earshot as she gives chase to him. But Jonny ends up losing track of her, finding evidence that Leah had taken a spill outside an alley before seemingly disappearing from the spot. This is where Brite demonstrates a touch for queasy suspense, ratcheting up the tension as Jonny sees a worn sign pointing down the alley marked with their destination.

But whereas the couple had been searching for “127 Payne Street,” the sign indicates that he has found “Pain Street,” and the number itself is scratched into the face of a yawning metal door leading into one of the ghostly factories. There he discovers the corpse of a young girl “half buried and half dissolved into the grime and ash of the factory floor,” one of the miserably impregnated who sought the aid of a doctor years ago and only found death. Jonny quickly sees that Leah has come to a similar end herself: she’s been run through with one of the towering machine’s gleaming, organic hooks and lifted into the air, the desiccated fetus ripped from her abdomen. The sight leaves Jonny maddened and haunted in the tradition of the Lovecraftian narrator, but any melodramatics are played down with Brite’s eloquent style.

I no longer thought I knew something about love.

Now I knew what love was all about.

A reprint from Penguin Books (1995)

Like “Calcutta, Lord of Nerves,” “The Ash of Memory, the Dust of Desire” leaves off with all its horrors intact, the narrators left to study their lives—or whatever may be left of them—as the dark forces of the unknown continue their work and propagation in the background. The latter story would make a favorable pairing with Clive Barker’s “The Midnight Meat Train,” another tale concerned with the bloody black magic of the old ways literally existing underneath a veneer of modernity. While Barker gives his terrors a face, Brite leaves her story ambiguous. Who or what is controlling these machines? Are they sentient? How did they come to be? Like many things of this earth, there’s more to it than anything Brite or Jonny could have dreamt up in their philosophies.

Both of Brite’s stories are in the end concerned with the unloved and the unwanted. The narrator from “Calcutta” is the product of a fatal birth, one he believes his mother may have despised him for, and an undesirable child is the whole driving force in "The Ash of Memory...". Though separated by hundreds of geographic miles, Leah and the catatonic mothers of India are in their hearts one in the same, victims of circumstances both within and without of their control, food for monsters. It shows us that in spite of our differences, horror is a tie that binds us.

Brite now identifies as Billy Martin, and you can find his blog here.

COLD PRINT: William Sansom's "A Smell of Fear" and "The Little Room"

by Jose Cruz

The tricky thing about anthologies is that you're never entirely sure what you're going to get with them. Being that individualized reviews for the book's diverse contents are hardly if ever written, this only increases the unpredictability of each story. When I picked up my copy of The Seventh Pan Book of Horror Stories (1966), what I had expected were tales of gangrenous aberrations and loathsome creatures of the night. The collection certainly had given me my share of this with the likes of R. Chetwynd-Hayes' "The Thing" and David Grant's "The Bats" and Martin Waddell's "Cannibals." But when I arrived at the pair of tales written by William Sansom (1912 - 1976), “A Smell of Fear” and "The Little Room," the last thing I imagined I would find was actual horror.

Like many, I'm attracted to the various trappings and aesthetics of the horror genre, even down to the hoariest of settings. Give me a lonely graveyard or a cobweb-strewn hallway and I'll manage to get my buzz. Vampire crawling out of a casket? Even better. Throw in some fog and a waxy full moon and I'll be good until the morning. But I'll be the first to admit that these elements are empty calories. They're fairly useless unless the writer working with them has imbued them with true dread and vibrancy. Of course, one does not need to rely on these conventions to stir up fearful sensations in the reader's mind. Sometimes the most affecting of horror tales have nary a tombstone in sight.

“A Smell of Fear” and “The Little Room” are two such stories. A former firefighter during the London Blitz, Sansom turned to writing everything from romances to supernatural horror after the Second World War, making his biggest impression with collections published in the 40s and 50s. “The Little Room” debuted in his premier anthology, Something Terrible, Something Lovely (1948) while “A Smell of Fear” was an original to Herbert van Thal’s seventh Pan omnibus. Another tale, “The Vertical Ladder,” had been seen in Pan’s second volume of shuddersome stories while what is perhaps his most famous story, “A Woman Seldom Found,” made the paperback anthology rounds, first cropping up in Alfred Hitchcock’s Stories They Wouldn’t Let Me Do on TV (1957) and hopping around Fontana and Hamlyn books before finding its most recent host in the Vandermeer’s doorstopper volume The Weird (2012). A sold-out collection of Sansom's macabre writings from Tartarus Press was released in 2002.

2nd printing, 1980

“A Smell of Fear” is a portrait of urban paranoia that would likely gain the sympathies of Ramsey Campbell. Diana Craig is a young woman living by herself in London, going through the motions of a dreamless existence interrupted only by Diana’s sharp bursts of fear and apprehension at the most innocuous of situations. Sansom displays his canny eye for descriptive detail both mundane and extraordinary in the opening scene that finds Diana cutting her nails over her bathtub. A moment as thunderingly ordinary as this is imbued with slightly sinister portent, as Diana fancies her cut cuticles resembling shellfish:

However white such nails looked on her fingers, they gleamed yellowish against the white enamel. They just looked curled, and wet, like shrimps or sandfleas. And the surface tension of the water gave them a greyish blur of legs and feelers.

Now a big dark drop of blood splashed down among the shrimp pairings, it washed out pale pink and brought her abruptly to her proper senses.

Sansom pairs the wandering mind of the dreamer, imagining pieces of his character’s body taking on animalistic characteristics, with a kitchen-sink, everyday realism that strikes a primal chord in the reader no matter how much we may differ from Diana. Haven’t we all caught ourselves with one of these funny ideas in our heads?

Funny isn’t exactly what Diana makes of it. She scolds herself for her imagination, just like she does when she believes she’s being methodically followed by a limping man with an ugly birthmark on his face. Is he really breathing down her neck in the fish monger’s shop? Does he actually follow her in the streets as she tries to elude him?

Sansom is both delicate and blunt in his depiction of Diana, laying all her insecurities bare for the scrutiny of the reader. His heartbreaking description of Diana's opinion of her looks demonstrates a knowledge of the way that loneliness and the sound of one's own voice can have on our minds:

Sometimes in a double mirror she had caught sight of her profile and had noticed a tone of placidity in the face, as though this profiled stranger were a little too heavy or pallid or something, shapely but overdone, like a Roman bust. Lips – not enough color? Pale eyelashes? Cheeks too full and flat? It could not be exactly said – and she avoided saying it. A mixture of vanity and humility told her that she was a good-looking, unattractive girl. 

The veracity of the narrative is appropriately muddied by Diana’s neuroses. Like the female protagonists of Shirley Jackson, Sansom’s character is one not to be entirely trusted but she is nonetheless someone who inspires our sympathies. Unlike her male counterparts, Diana feels no need or desire to investigate her apprehensions and “get to the bottom of things.” Her womanly intuition tells her everything; she knows that she’s being followed for a fact, no matter how much she chides herself in the other direction. She is the archetype of the “hysterical woman,” but if anything this shows her (and all her other literary ancestors right down from the madwoman in “The Yellow Wallpaper”) to be the more emotionally intelligent of the sexes. When faced with darkness, men are compelled to probe it while woman instinctively know it for what it is. Fittingly in the horror genre neither gender comes out the better in the end.

And that is exactly how Sansom ends it. Diana finds herself walking along the lonely streets at night with her strange watcher tagging behind and, with that growing fear stirring inside her, the one that can be smelt by dogs (and wolves), she contemplates seeking shelter in a bustling pub before she heads off again because of old anxieties cropping back up. What follows is a startling altercation wherein we discover that Diana’s suspicions were right—but for the wrong reasons—and that good deeds performed in the face of mortal danger lead to punishment. Sansom doesn’t resort to a Blochian twist to unsettle our nerves (she was a werewolf the whole time!), but the frankness with which he confronts the final events of the story grimly reinforce that old adage of the genre we mentioned before: no one goes free.

Though the ending of “A Smell of Fear” is retained to allow the reader to have their first-time frissons with the story, the nature of the discussion for Sansom’s second tale under review entails a precise detailing of its climax and aftermath. Consider this ye only warning.

Hogarth Press, 1948

The titular location of “The Little Room” is the apartment of Sister Margherita, a nun who has just been punished by her convent’s order for an unknown offense. Whatever this woman's crime is, her sentence is clear: death. But the sister will not be facing a firing squad or the gallows. She is to be sealed inside her cubicle, bricked in and cut off from any supply of oxygen so that she will eventually--very eventually--perish from asphyxiation.

And that's it. Margherita's last moments on this earth are described in poignant and unflinching detail by Samson. The story is completely at odds with the reputation that the paperback Pan Horror series garnered with their depictions of stinking flesh and human depravity. Not one drop of blood is spilled and yet it completely succeeds in chilling ours.

One of Samson's great assets as a writer is his sharp insight into the workings of the human mind, a trait that is used to devastating effect here. We initially see Margherita accepting her fate with all the patience and open-heartedness of the truly devout; she holds no anger or fear for what is to come. She even begins to become bothered by the presence of the female artisans who busy themselves with creating her artificial tomb. It's a purely human tic that finds expression even in the face of permanent isolation. We wish everyone would just go away until they finally do. Then, like a touch of cold, the loneliness begins to seep in.

Not only that, but Margherita's judges have seen it fit to have a barometer installed in the room so that the prosecuted may see the actual decrease in air as time goes by, a most effective means in promoting penance in the criminal's heart. The barometer is surrounded by a mesh of brass, so that the guilty may clearly see its measurements but refrain from, as Sansom puts it, "injur[ing] the instrument in the belief, perhaps, that it was the agent of death rather than its mentor."

Although Margherita initially takes her sentence in stride, it isn't long before the inevitability of her situation begins to crawl into her mind. The monotony of the room itself, the lack of the ceremonial bread and water the order provides as a final courtesy, the ever-teasing and never-wavering needle of the barometer; all of these begin to impress upon her that most incomprehensible of thoughts that she will not be long for this world.

"This person, this 'me,' that I am, this familiarity of hands and memories and close wishes and dry disgusts, this well-shaped shadow lying about my inner thoughts--all this is going to die. It will cease to be. There will be nothing more of it."

How do you comprehend that? How do you deal with the notion that the very thoughts running through your mind will not exist in the next second? Sansom of course doesn't have any answers. And that's what's so damn terrifying about it. And with the doubt and the terror there comes the regret that we have not fulfilled all the potential dreams of our sorry existence:

Whatever it was, she had left it undone. However much she might have done, she could have done more. However much she had seen, she had not felt deeply enough. However much she had felt, she had not stored those feelings deeply enough.

I don't recall just how I was imagining "The Little Room" would pan out upon my initial reading of it, but for whatever reason I hadn't thought that Sansom would deliver on exactly what he had promised. In a way I became like Margherita, a small flame of hope quivering in my heart for some kind of last-minute intervention or redemption. But it never came, for me or for her. Margherita was sentenced to her fate and no other would be supplied. The throat that had been choked with tears now gasped for air while the barometer--cold, dispassionate, mechanical--reached its final destination.

For a story featured in a series infamous for its gruesomeness, "The Little Room" is the cruelest of the entire lot. It gets to the heart of fear and never blinks an eye the entire time. Death will not sneak in and destroy us in gaudy violence. We'll see it, advancing slowly and assuredly, its course definite and unchanging. It will come and claim us and we won't be able to do a thing about it and, like Margherita, we will eventually stop moving.

Read "A Woman Seldom Found" here.

Read "Various Temptations" here.

NEXT CHAPTER: Poppy Z. Brite

Memoirs of a Pulp Fiend!

Continuing our massive interview with pulp historian Stefan Dziemianowicz (Part 1 is available over at A Thriller a Day).

PE: Why the fascination with Weird Tales? I mean, sure they’re pretty to look at but you don’t actually read these old moldy things, do you?

SD: There's this joke they tell in pulp-collecting circles (which I'm sure can be adapted to comics collecting, book collecting, "fill-in-the-blank" collecting) about the novice pulp collector who's going table to table at a pulp convention, buying titles for "investment" purposes, when he comes to one table where a bunch of veterans are shooting the breeze, discussing their favorite pulp stories. "You actually READ the magazines?" gasps the horrified novice. "Don't you know how much that devalues them?!?!?" Actually, other people tell this joke better than I do, but it's not as much a joke as you might think. There are people who collect pulps and, for whatever reason, don't read them. Me, I came to pulp magazines as a reader, and although I've not read every magazine in my collection, I've read a lot of them.

As to "why Weird Tales"--hey, that's the title of the editorial that ran in the famous May-June-July 1924 issue, and just being able to spout that kind of trivia makes me sound like more of a nerd than I really am, doesn't it?--that's simple. I started reading fantasy horror and science fiction in my adolescence, which is to say the late '60s and early '70s. That was a half-decade or more before the advent of Stephen King and a good decade before there was anything remotely resembling a modern horror genre with bookstore presence. What you could find, in scanty form, were the classics: Poe, Blackwood, Machen, Le Fanu, Bierce, and other writers from the Victorian and Edwardian era. The most "modern" writers of horror fiction you were likely to find at your local neighborhood bookstore (dare I date myself and mention that this was back at a time when the concept of chain bookstores such as B. Dalton, Waldenbooks, Barnes & Noble, and Borders had yet to gain traction?) were H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Ray Bradbury, and Richard Matheson. If, like me, you chowed down on every title of theirs as soon as you could get your hands on it, you couldn't help but look at the publication credits on the copyright page (sort of like gnawing the bones of the book to suck every last juicy morsel from it) and--guess what!--you discovered that ALL of them published stories in Weird Tales.

You've got to remember that Weird Tales stopped publication in 1954, which means by 1969 it was only 15 years dead. To put that into perspective, that's the same interval that separates Stephen King's "Carrie" from "The Dark Half." Put in perspective another way, only 20 years separate the death of Weird Tales and the publication of Carrie where as 36 years--nearly twice as long--separate Carrie from the books King published in 2010. What I'm getting at is that, in the late 1960s and '70s, the classic Weird Tales was not yet the embalmed memory we think of it as today. It was still possible to stumble on copies in used bookstores, or run across cheap reading copies in specialty science fiction and fantasy book catalogs, like the ones you saw listed in the ads at the back of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Those catalogs sometimes put you in touch with offerings from the then current specialty press, much of which was full of memoirs, and even current fiction, by the likes of Joseph Payne Brennan, Hugh Cave, H. Warner Munn, Carl Jacobi, and other Weird Tales alums. The early '70s were the period when fan fascination with Lovecraft was starting to take off in a way that even the readership of Weird Tales in its heyday couldn't have imagined, and given that Lovecraft's name was virtually synonymous with the magazine, if you read anything about Lovecraft, odds were you picked up a lot about Weird Tales. Those same years, Sam Moskowitz launched the reissue of Weird Tales. The magazine was underfinanced, which meant that Sam had to fill it with a lot of fiction out of copyright that Weird Tales itself might never have published, and it was almost impossible to find at the newsstands. But, hey, it was Weird Tales--!!!!!--and the very fact that it was resurrected from the dead only fed the mystique that drove fans like me to seek it out. (I should also point out that about the same time, Sam Moskowitz opened his collection to a guy named Tony Goodstone who was compiling a magnificent retrospective book on pulp magazines entitled, simply, The Pulps. The book included a generous sampling of fiction from most of the major pulp genres, including a few Weird Tales stories. Most important--it included a bunch of glossy insert pages reproducing cover art from the magazines. As you put it in your question, the magazines are "pretty to look at," and it's the cover art that hooks you. This was the pre-internet days--hell, this was the pre-computer days--when you couldn't find repro like this with a mouse click on Google search. Goodstone's book was the equivalent of pulp porn.)

Jeez, look at how wet I'm getting over this. I'm starting to sound like a teenager in the backseat of a car, only with a magazine rather than Betty Lou the cheerleader--ain't I? (They've got a word for that, don't they? Can we say it in this blog?)

They say you never forget your first love, and I haven't. I bought my first copy of Weird Tales in 1971. It was the November 1950 issue, with a cool Frank Kelly Freas cover. I paid $3.00 for it. It featured a Fritz Leiber story I coveted because I'd become acquainted with its existence the year previous. (More on that later.) The rest, as they say, is history. I was a collector just waiting to be bit by the pulp bug. One buy led to another, and another, and with each issue of the magazine you bought, I became more and more aware of its legacy and history. Weird Tales published 297 issues in its first incarnation. Do the math, and you can figure that it probably published upwards of 4,000 stories. And not just throwaways. Virtually every writer of short horror and fantasy fiction who amounted to anything between 1923 and 1954 published in its pages. Some of the stories that appeared in Weird Tales literally altered the course of the modern fantastic tale and became the foundation that decades of horror writers afterward built on their work. There was no other repository like this for weird fiction, and there likely never will be again. Getting access to it 16 years after it closed shop made me feel a little like how graverobbers must have felt when they broke into King Tut's tomb.

PE: Off topic a bit but you once edited a string of reprint volumes with Greenberg and Weinberg called 100… Run us through the process of a monster undertaking like that. Did you sit in your living room surrounded by pulps, close your eyes and point?

SD: Not off-topic at all. Remember how all of those mad scientists in shudder pulp stories had armies of drool-slavering cretins whom they pressed into service to carry out their evil designs? Well, I had my own gang of mutant editorial associates. Basically, I would wave a pulp story under their noses, and when they got the scent, I would order "Go fetch permission for World English Language rights!" Those boys never let me down--

Say, I get the idea you're not falling for this bunk...

Okay, the truth is I did get to cull a lot of pulps for stories for the 100 short-short story books, but there was a natural process of triage. The anthology theme limited us to certain magazines. 100 Crooked Little Crime Stories pretty much made it possible for us to print any crime/mystery/suspense story that satisfied editorial demands. 100 Crooked Little Crime Stories and 100 Dastardly Little Detective Stories mandated that the crime story chosen feature a detective or crime-solver of some sort. 100 Wild Little Weird Tales limited us to a single magazine: Weird Tales. Word count for these books dictated that stories run no longer than 2,500 to 3,000 words so that was yet another winnowing tool. Then, the deal clincher: the story had either to be in the public domain (a surprising number of pulp stories are, notably those published under house names in fly-by-night magazines); by an author with whom--or with whose agents and reps--we have a good working relationship (for example, Hugh Cave, a true gentleman who always seemed so delighted to be remembered for a book that we never had any problem working out terms with him); or published by an author whose work had been copyrighted by Popular Publications. Popular Publications was, at one time, the biggest publisher of pulp fiction magazines, and we were lucky that Bob Weinberg served as business manager for the concern to whom copyright for all Popular Publications magazines had been assigned.

You might think that this would create extremely stringent conditions under which to assemble an anthology, but the fact is it gave us access to an astonishing number of magazines and their contents. The pulps were intended to provide quick, forgettable escapist entertainment, and you would be surprised at how many stories in a particular issue of a particular magazine--say, Detective Fiction Weekly or 15 Mystery Stories--clocked in at just the right word count. Most of the stories that filled "the back of the book in pulp magazines" were tailor-made filler pieces, written to order in some cases to be fit around the advertisements and longer stories that ended part way down the jump page. It was a delight to discover that, even though written to format, a number of the stories were quite good, or at least as good as any that appeared in the front of the book. Mind you, this turned reading that I would normally do for fun into "work," but I still got a kick out of sitting down with obscure magazines that only fellow pulp collectors were familiar with and pulling stories from them for a second life.

The book that damned near killed the three of us wasn't an anthology top-heavy with pulp stories, but Horrors: 365 Scary Stories. It featured all new stories, especially written for the book, none longer than 750 words. This was back in the pre-electronic submission days, and I was getting and reading upwards of 30-40 manuscripts per day. Granted, at 750 words per story, that's not a lot of wordage to have to read, but a story is a story, and I was doing this all on top of my daytime job. Every day I would come home from the office and find a neatly stacked and rubber-banded pile of manila envelopes plopped on the floor in front my apartment building mailbox. I knew what my leisure hours were going to be spent doing that evening. Years later, I realized that I was doing the latter-day equivalent of pulp editing for that book. Pulp magazine editors read a lot of stories on a daily basis, a lot by people who never managed more than a sale or two in their lifetime, and a lot more by people who wrote so badly that they never made a sale. The experience raised my admiration for a guy like Doc Lowndes who, at one point in his career, was reading stories for science fiction, fantasy, western, sports, and probably love pulps on a daily basis for notoriously lower-tier publications.

PE: You’ve made quite a career mining those pulps for great stories. Do you have any idea what percentage of the total stories published you’ve read?

SD: The short answer to that question is, not as many as I would like to have read. When I first started collecting pulps as a teenager, you could count in nanoseconds the amount of time it took me to get the wrapper off the magazine I'd bought from a used book dealer and plunge into the pulp. But that was back in my high school days. Suffice to say, my literary horizons have broadened since then--young pulp collectors, please take note: there ARE other types of fiction to read out there--and since I do a lot of reviewing of contemporary genre fiction that, and the obligations of "the day job," have cut severely into my free time. 

Despite the fact that there were not that many horror/weird fiction pulps, there's only one that I've read the complete run of, cover to cover. That was Unknown/Unknown Worlds (39 issues) and I did that, in part, because I wrote a book (my first, in fact) on that magazine. I blush to admit I've read maybe only half of the stories in Weird Tales, and not all of the good ones. I got a lot of Weird Tales stories under my belt when I and Bob Weinberg and Marty Greenberg compiled 100 Wild Little Weird Tales. That book was made up of one hundred stories in the 2,500 to 3,000 word range from Weird Tales, and that required me to read all the short filler stories at the back of the magazine and pick the cream of the crop.

I would say that, for most of the the other weird fiction pulps--Strange Tales (7 issues), Strange Stories (13 issues), Ghost Stories (60+ issues, and this one counts only partly since they fobbed off most of the contents as "true" ghost stories) I've read about half to 3/4 of the contents. Then you get hybrid magazines like Fantastic Adventures (some horror, but mostly fantasy of a juvenile stripe), Famous Fantastic Mysteries and Fantastic Novels (largely reprints of old lost world fantasies and early scientific romances from the pre-1930s)--I've read about the same percentage of those. I've got about 1/3 to 1/2 of the runs of the shudder pulps Horror Stories and Terror Tales, and about the same percentage of the shudder pulp incarnations of Thrilling Mystery and Dime Mystery. I'm less well read in those, only because they're formulaic and reading too many in succession will put you to sleep. Sort of the same experience I had when I tried reading Doc Savage novels as a teen. Speaking of Doc Savage, there's a lot of horror and science fiction in hero pulps like Doc, The Spider, G-8, Operator 5, et al. But those magazines, like the shudder pulps, are dearly priced on the collector's market today and I know I'll never own all of the ones with weird fiction.

My goal before I die is to have read all of the stories in the genuine weird fiction pulps.

PE: What is SD’s WT collection like? Have you got a WT room? Perhaps Cthulhu shot glasses for SD?

SD: What's my Weird Tales collection like? Okay: I've got a complete run, sort of. Of the original 279 issues, I'm missing all but four issues: the first 3, and the first Lovecraft issue (October 1923). I've got photocopies of those issues. I could break down and buy the Girasol reprints, and probably will at some point, but I'm a nostalgic kind of guy, and my photocopies were made off of August Derleth's set before it was dispersed. I've got copies of all the issues from subsequent incarnations of the magazine.

I'd like to think that, before I die, I'll acquire a complete run of the 'zine, but it's not likely. As I mentioned, when I started collecting, even pulps like Weird Tales didn't cost that much to acquire. They were pretty much the obsession of a small but devoted core of fans. Talk to the guys who attended the first Pulpcon 30-some-odd years ago and they'll tell you how they were buying and selling Spicy pulp, hero pulps, and shudder pulps for a couple of bucks apiece. Yep—the same magazines that you see fetching several hundred dollars a pop on Ebay these days. After back burnering pulp collecting while I was in college, I started collecting in earnest again in the 1980s, when I moved to the NYC area and started working in publishing. The first core part of my Weird Tales collection came when I responded to a listing in the Boston Book Annex (do they still exist?) catalog for a set of 35-40 issues of Weird Tales from the 1930s and 40s. If memory serves, they wanted $500 bucks for them. I don't know whose collection they got them from, but they definitely got them from a collector. These babies were in cherry condition: no cover creases, glossy covers, white paper interiors, tight spines, even pages that were uncut in some issues. They were so incredible I thought at first I'd been duped into buying replicas. And these were issues with stories by Lovecraft, Howard (including some Conans), Clark Ashton Smith, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch—literally the best and brightest writers for the magazine. Included was a pristine copy of the now infamous issue with Margaret Brundage's "bat girl" cover. They try to hawk that on Ebay for $500 to $1,000 bucks a shot. I got it, like all the other issues in that lot, for about $13 to $14 on average.

Sounds like the steal of the century, right? Well, not entirely. Again, we're talking the 1980s, before Ebay came around and started exposing the pulp market to comic book collectors who famously had more money than fans of other collectibles. I attended my first Pulpcon in 1990, when it came around to New Jersey, and quickly discovered I was one of the only guys on the floor with any interest in Weird Tales or weird fiction magazines. The overwhelming majority of collectors were interested in hero pulps and pulps in other interest area. There was one dealer who had a lot of 1920s issues of Weird Tales and he was discounting them for me the more I bought. So I got most of my issues from 1926 to 1930 for about $25 to $30 apiece. Gee I'm starting to sound like a real gloating collector, aren't I? (Don't even ask about science fiction magazines. The common wisdom is that science fiction fans were slavishly devoted collectors who kept everything they could get their hands on, with the result that there are no scarce science fiction magazines. Dealers were almost giving these away for lack of interest in the 1980s and '90s.)

The last key chunk of my collection dropped into my lap the week before I got married in 1996. A dealer friend had just bought a complete run of the magazine and sold me most of the 1923 and 1924 issues I needed. Great prices to be toting up the same week you're trying to figure out how much you're going to be in hock for the next decade. In the last decade, I've bought maybe three issues of Weird Tales to plug gaps in my run. Regardless, I'm glad to have acquired my collection before Ebay came into existence. With the prices fetched these days and the competition, I couldn't afford to buy for my collection.

In addition to the Weird Tales run, I've got the infamous "associational items": Canadian issues of Weird Tales with cover art different from the American editions, original art from the magazine, etc. Sorry, no Cthulhu shot glasses.

PE: Are there times when you sit in your easy chair, smoking jacket on and pipe alit and crack open a WT, or are you on to other pulps now?

SD: I do have a smoking jacket and easy chair in my pulp room, but I should specify that the jacket was made from the flayed skin of the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred and the chair is this neat contraption with straps on the legs and armrests and this little skullcap doohickey for keeping your head warm. It's also wired for illumination like those itty-bitty book lights you used to see them sell at Barnes & Noble. I don't smoke a pipe, but I've discovered that pages from my pulp duplicates make great rolling papers.

Seriously, you would be greatly depressed were you to see my pulp room. It's my attic, which is finished but pretty cluttery with books and magazines. I have 4 floor-to-ceiling bookcases about three and a half feet across with nothing but my weird fiction and science fiction pulps in them. And I've probably got about 40 boxes of pulps boxed up to accompany them. I'm in a household with two working writers, and that means that every square inch of space except for a narrow corridor down the center of the each room is piled with tottering stacks of books and papers. If this place ever caught fire you'd be able to see the flames from Jupiter. For the longest time, I used to know instinctively where every magazine and book was located, the same way I could remember the plot of just about every book and story I read. But I'm pushing 53. It's not that my memory isn't so sharp any more as that a life of constant reading has made it impossible for me to retain everything.

Remind me, again: This is the Larry King show we're on, right?

As I alluded earlier, I do read pretty widely, so yes I don't always spend my pulp time with my nose buried in an issue of Weird Tales. I've got complete runs of all science fiction magazines published in the U.S. (and a bit of the UK) up to the 1960s, and in some cases beyond. There was a lot more science fiction published than weird fiction in the pulp years. And there was a lot more detective fiction published than science fiction. I'm pretty thick with mystery and detective magazines from the 1930s-1950s. I have very few complete runs of anything in this area until you get to the digests of the 1950s and '60s. Those were the last gasp of the pulps before the paperbacks totally took over. I do have complete runs of some oddball adventure type pulps. In fact this year, after almost 20 years of acquiring, I finally completed my run of Jungle Stories (I was shy only one issue for about the last 7 years) I keep kidding myself I'll get around to doing annotated guides to all of these magazines some time in my infinite spare time.

PE: You did a fabulous job on the Robert Bloch books. Is there another project waiting in the wings for your special talents?

SD: Thanks for the nod on the Robert Bloch books. I got to know Robert Bloch very remotely through correspondence and one wonderful meeting with him at the first Necronomi-Con and it was an honor and a privilege to work on collections of his writing. It was similarly an honor to work with a guy as talented as David Schow on those books. David and I have one more collection of Bloch's material coming out, all of his stories related to Jack the Ripper, from Subterranean Press. I've been a bad bottleneck on this owing to an insane work schedule, and Sub Press has been more than patient about it, to my genuine relief. Just recently, me and Bob Morrish—you may have heard of him; he co-edited a primo magazine in the 1990s named The Scream Factory with two guys named Enfantino and Scoleri—handed in a book collecting the best short weird fiction of Henry Kuttner to Centipede Press. I'm not doing as much freelance editing and anthologizing as I used to, in part because I'm doing it at my job as a senior editor at Barnes & Noble in their book publishing arm. I've been able to get a lot of neat stuff into print. I'm supposedly writing a book on Stephen King, but am way overdue on my contract for it. And I've been promising for 20 years now to write a complete annotated guide to Weird Tales, which would be a story by story, issue by issue guide to the original 279 issues. I think part of the reason why I've not sat down to do it is because I'm convinced that once I've read the last story in the magazine, I'll die. I have to time the writing of the book just right so that I finish the last annotation just before I get to the last sentence of the last story. If there's a twist in the final line, I'm screwed.

(In one of my rare serious moments, I'll just add that Stefan is one of the most giving persons I know. He's always ready to help at the drop of a hat. His Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds is the best example of a "guide" I've ever read and is 100% responsible for my Guide to Manhunt -PE)

The Bibliography (unless otherwise noted, all books are co-edited with Robert Weinberg and Martin Greenberg—I've tried to be complete, but I'm sure a title of two slipped though the cracks)

The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (SD only)
Between Time and Terror
Bloody Mary and Other Tales for a Dark Night (SD only)
A Century of Horror 1970-1979 (edited by David Drake, intro by SD)
Crafty Cat Crimes
Famous Fantastic Mysteries
Girls' Night Out: 29 Female Vampire Stories
Hard-Boiled Detectives
Horrors! 365 Scary Stories
The Lost Bloch (3 volumes, edited by David J. Schow. SD as "research assistant")
The Metal Monster (by A. Merritt, intro by SD)
Murder Most Scottish
Nursery Crimes
100 Astounding Little Alien Stories
100 Creepy Little Creature Stories
100 Crooked Little Crime Stories
100 Dastardly Little Detective Stories
100 Fiendish Little Frightmares
100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories
100 Hilarious Little Howlers
100 Menacing Little Murder Stories
100 Sneaky Little Sleuth Stories
100 Tiny Tales of Terror
100 Twisted Little Tales of Torment
100 Vicious Little Vampire Stories
100 Wicked Little Witch Stories
100 Wild Little Weird Tales
The Reader's Bloch (2 volumes, 1 forthcoming)
Rivals of Dracula
Rivals of Weird Tales
Sea Cursed (T. Liam McDonald, SD & MHG)
Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia (3 volumes, co-editor S. T. Joshi)
A Taste for Blood (uncredited, credited to MHG)
To Sleep, Perchance to Dream...Nightmare
Tough Guys and Dangerous Dames
Virtuous Vampires
Weird Tales-32 Unearthed Terrors
Weird Vampire Tales

The Annotated Index to Tales of the Frightened

by Peter Enfantino

Back in 1957, Michael Avallone was writing short-shorts for a syndicated radio program called The Frightened, a show which spotlighted the voice of horror great Boris Karloff. At about the same time, Avallone was approached by book packager extraordinaire Lyle Kenyon Engel to edit a line of digest magazines, one of which was to be based on the Karloff show . Avallone jumped at the chance to put together what, in his words, "a nation of Weird Tales-denied readers had been waiting for." The old venerable warhorse (Weird Tales, not Avallone) had been put out to pasture just three years before and, aside from digests like Fantastic, Beyond (which had bit the dust in 1955), and Fantasy & Science Fiction, there really was a void for anyone seeking horrific yarns. Originally, the zine was to be called Boris Karloff's Tales of the Frightened, but at the last minute, the star got cold feet and the title was released as Tales of the Frightened.

Too bad that TOTF wasn't the zine to catch fire with the public as Avallone did a genuinely good job of selecting fiction for TOTF (especially for the second issue) and I'd love to have seen what would have shown up in a third issue. According to Avallone, poor sales was not what killed TOTF, but rather a strike at the company that distibuted the zine.

#1 sports a nice cover by Rudy Nappi, illustrating "The Curse of Cleopatra", one of two short stories Avallone contributed to the first issue, but for some inexplicable reason (lack of funds?) the second cover is simply a multi-colored list of the stories included. The two-issue run is fairly collectible, but can still be found (when it can be found) in the $8-10 per issue range.

Contents of the two TALES OF THE FRIGHTENED issues. All word counts are approximate based on average word count per column.

Vol. 1 No. 1 Spring 1957

The Curse of Cleopatra-Michael Avallone ** (7550 wds)

William Ramses, president of Firm Fit Foundations bra company, believes that his new seretary is actually Cleopatra. When he goes to a local antiquities dealer to see a ring reputed to have belonged to the queen of the Nile, his suspicions are confirmed.

The Malignant Jewel-Sidney Porcelain * (1750 wds)

Palpo picks up a jewel in an abandoned house in bombed out Nazi Germany. Next thing he knows, it starts growing. Arch Oboler's classic "Chicken Heart" radio story is much better than this.

The Glass Thread-Elsie Milnes *** (4850 wds)

Unusual story about a woman who believes her husband and her sister-in-law are plotting to kill her. Story gets better as the woman's paranoia deepens, eventually leading to madness and Poe quotes.

Incident in a Flying Saucer-James Harvey * (1250 wds)

UFO-movie parody tries to come off funny but ends up dopey.

Cat Woman-Gerald Gordon * (2450 wds)

Russ Gillespie is taken with the girl who comes to his apartment pleading for help. There's a cat down a well and Russ foolishly volunteers to rescue it. Pointless story has no suspense to it (especially considering that the punchline is telecast in the title).

The Stop at Nothing-Mark Danes ** (3500 wds)

Sam Potter receives a strange telegram informing him that his time is up and that he needs to take a midnight train that will stop at nothing. Suspenseful build-up that leads to, well, nothing. An anti-climax with a lame twist and no payoff. This is actually Avallone under the Mark Dane psuedonym.

Alias Napoleon-John Jakes * (3600 wds)

Carnival barker Jack Morris discovers that a Martian is living inside the Napoleon Bonaparte figure in the carnival's wax museum exhibit. Once discovered, the Martian discloses its plan of world conquest to Jack. Real dumb story from an author who would go on to sell millions of books in the 1970s with his bicentennial series.

Faith Killer-Winston Marks *** (2600 wds)

A pompous doctor mocks a faith healer and suffers her wraith. Just as fun and visual as one of Boris Karloff's Thriller TV shows.

Mistaken Identity-Ralph Williams ** (2650 wds)

Connor, on business, just wants to get a good meal but finds that restaurants in a small town close early. Well, except for that "special restaurant" that the hotel bellboy sends him to. The "mistaken identity" of the title closely resembles an old EC horror yarn called "Midnight Mess," wherein a man stumbles onto a restaurant for vampires and is eventually strung up and tapped like a keg.

Old Snagglebuck-William G. Weston ***1/2 (4550 wds)

Little Bobby has a rotten sadistic son-of-a-bitch father whose own father was a necromancer. Now daddy is threatening to unleash a demon on Bobby if he doesn't behave. Well-written thriller works up to a ghoulish finale.

Scorpion-Hal Ellson *1/2 (2750 wds)

Not much suspense is built up in this tale of a Mexican prisoner who's placed in a cell with a scorpion to cure him of his violent habits. Ellson was a mainstay in the crime digests (and usually contributed much better stories than this) back in the 1950s and 60s, and also wrote some best-selling juvenile delinquent novels.

But a Kind of Ghost-John Wyndham * (6650 wds)

Sam Tineways finds a mysterious box embedded in the cliffs of a nearby beach. When he opens the trunk, he discovers the body of the goddess Hiltrude (here again played by Vanna White). One part romance, one part ghost story, all sleep-inducing, "Ghost" is like a 1950s retro-commercial. An intolerable bore from the otherwise respectable author of The Midwich Cuckoos, Day of the Triffids, and Out of the Deeps.

The Gardener-John Christopher ** (2800 wds)

The really weird tale of a wanderer and the strange characters that surround him in his boarding house.

The Unwatched Door-Richie McPherson ** (150 wds)

A suicidal woman dies and her doctor and husband remark that she "escaped through the only door they couldn't watch." Obviously there's not much you can do in 150 words, but the author gives it the old college try anyway.

The Frightened-Michael Avallone * (850 wds)

The sad short story of William Welles and the evil Mr. Sorko. Though credited to Karloff, the "Frightened" stories were actually written by editor Avallone.

The Singular Occurrence at Styles-Alan Henry **** (1800 wds)

Newsome Holder travels to England for the sole purpose of murdering someone, anyone. Holder wants to create a "singular" act, a murder so unique it will shock all who hear of it. After the murder, Holder steps into a bar and brags of his evil deed, only to be rebuffed as an ordinary killer. A very unique read, easily the best presented in Tales of the Frightened, topped off by a funny punch line.

Vol. 1 No. 2 August 1957

The Queen's Bedroom-Ledru Baker, Jr. **1/2 (9400 wds)

Rolly Andrews, a "treasure hunter" in Egypt, buys ancient artifacts for museums. When he meets Dr. David Barkley, an eccentric archaeologist, he knows he's stumbled onto something big. Barkley has discovered the long lost tomb of Queen Hetepheres and wants only to make this one last contribution to science before he dies. Andrews gets a bad case of the greedies and helps the old man to a heart attack, allowing the find to himself. Though the "mummy" story has been reworked a million times, "The Queen's Bedchamber" actually rejects the shambling mummy cliché we keep waiting for. Andrews' metamorphosis from good guy to baddie and then full circle back to "man with a conscience" (he eventually can't cope with his own guilt and decides to "discover" the Queen's tomb and use only the professor's name in the paper) is not usually what we get in stories of this kind. It should also be noted that there are no supernatural devices in the story, only the ominous shadow of the ancients.

The Man Who Thought He Was Poe-Michael Avallone *** (4850 wds)

Good solid follow-up to Robert Bloch's "The Man Who Collected Poe." George LeGrande has become so obsessed with Poe that he has changed his name to Roderick (as in Usher), furnished his home in decaying antiques, reads only dusty tomes, and, to top it all off, has decided to kill his unsympathetic wife, Agnes. Nice twist ending.

The Man Who Stole His Body-Mark Mallory *** (3250 wds)

Bizarre story of a doctor who assists an operation on his own body after he's run over by a truck. Check your brain at the door. Nonsensical title.

Mr. Tiglath-Poul Anderson **1/2 (6550 wds)

Harley buys three genies from the mysterious Mr. Tiglath and plans to rob the safe of his employer.

The Black Spot-William B. Hartley * (4000 wds)

Bizarre mumbo jumbo about a guy who stumbles upon a dead man with a bullet hole in his head (or is it a bullet hole?) and can't get the sight out of his mind. Everywhere around him are people with black spots on their foreheads.

White Legs-Mark Dane (Avallone) * (4200 wds)

Mr. Carter's wife has been prodding him to see a psychiatrist about the strange dreams he's been having. In his dreams, Carter is a voyeur to thousands of beautiful female legs (right, just legs) which turn into giant tree trunks that fall and crush him (no foolin'). Dreadful story that reads like a Reader's Digest article on psychiatry, dream analysis, and boredom.

The Lucky Coffin-C. B. Gilford *** (5100 wds)

Emery Sim can't wait for his kindly rich old Uncle Sim to kick the bucket and leave Emery his vast fortune. But just when it looks like the old timer will finally follow that big exit sign, he buys a coffin (to prepare for his own funeral) that seems to have magical healing powers. Now Emery has to put on his thinking cap and devise a way to murder his suddenly-immortal uncle. Both amusing and chilling, "The Lucky Coffin" has a great twist ending reminiscent of "The Monkey's Paw."

Wise Beyond His Years-Claude Ferrari **** (1400 wds)

Creepy short-short about an old man who kidnaps a baby and uses it in a witchcraft ceremony. Very nasty little gem.

Span Trap-Sidney Porcelain * (3050 wds)

Mona Wilson tires of her worthless life and overdoses on sleeping pills. Once dead, she awakens on another plane or in another dimension (don't ask me which) or something, where she becomes a worker on a factory assembly line. Nonsensical bit of tripe becomes more unreadable with each page turned. This attempt at abstraction very much reminded me of the stories of David Bunch, which appeared in FANTASTIC in the early 1960s. Bunch would write absurd non-stories about nothing at all, and FANTASTIC readers would duke it out in the letters page debating whether Bunch was an artistic genius or a crafty charlatan (take a guess which side I stand on).

Duty-Tristan Roberts *** (1300 wds)

Good post-apocalyptic short-short about the last man and woman on Earth and their search for the power packs that will help them rebuild their city.

Dead End-Mack Reynolds * (400 wds)

Doctor searches for immortality through vampirism. Real short and real dumb, just like one of those vignettes they used to do on Rod Serling's Night Gallery. Mack Reynolds (who also wrote as Mack Mallory and Dallas Ross) was an incredibly prolific writer for the sf digests of the 50s and 60s. Though virtually unknown by sf fandom, Reynolds created several series (including The Cold War, Homer Crawford, Johnny Mauser, and Ronnie Bronston) for F&SF, Analog, and Future. He also collaborated with the great Fredric Brown on a handful of stories.

The Window-A. Bertram Chandler *** (6100 wds)

Lost on the streets of London, a man seeks shelter from the rain and happens to look into the window of a dark lodge. There he sees a human sacrifice performed by a group of robed cultists. When he flees to the police to tell his story, he is informed that the lodge is haunted by the ghosts of the Satanists. Actually it turns out that the window is a two-way porthole to the past. This revelation leads to a neat twist and an apocalyptic outcome.

Miss Bard's Lover-Elizabeth Luna *1/2 (5850 wds)

Mousy Miss Bard has a new tenant at her boarding house. A very strange one, she finds. One who has an unnatural obsession with Miss Bard's long flowing hair. Turns out that the new boarder is a serial killer who strangles women with their own long silky tresses. Miss Bard, by now in love with the nut, gives in to his wicked desires and dies in a fit of lustful agony/ecstasy. Oh brother! I swear I read something along these lines in True Confessions magazine. The psycho sexual finale would make great fodder for David Cronenberg.

A Tale From "The Frightened"-Boris Karloff * (850 wds)

Sylvester Dodge is being followed by a man with a deathly white face and a mysterious umbrella. I vividly remember reading this as an impressionable pre-teen (it was reprinted in Avallone's Tales of the Frightened paperback) and having the crap scared out of me. It's too bad I spoiled my own fond memories of the story by re-reading it thirty years later.

As an aside, someone has very nicely uploaded a batch of Karloff's readings of "The Frightened" on the web.