Week 133 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Ross, Campbell, Cameron, and Thomas

Welcome to Week 133 of my horror short fiction review project! Today we’re starting with a new collection in one of the four slots: Joe Pulver’s edited collection “The Madness of Dr. Caligari.” I had the pleasure of watching the original film and a modern remake just a couple months ago and thoroughly enjoyed both. It’s going to be terrific to read some stories inspired by the film. My favorite story of the week comes from this new collection, in fact: “The Words Between” by Ramsey Campbell. As a former college professor, this one really spoke to me.

Made in Goatswood: New Tales of Horror in the Severn Valley, edited by Scott David Aniolowski (Chaosium, 1995)

“The Music of the Spheres” by Kevin A. Ross

A team of astronomers have detected evidence of Nemesis, the purported death star that periodically ravages Earth with its passing, and have even managed to record the sounds it seems to emit (how, since sound is not conducted in a vacuum?). Two members of the team die tragically, then other astronomers around the world start dying as well. There are intimations that Cthulhu, and perhaps other Great Old Ones temporarily slumbering within the Earth, are beginning to awaken. A good story as far as it went, though I would have liked much more at the end.

The Madness of Dr. Caligari, edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. (Fedogan & Bremer, 2016)

“The Words Between” by Ramsey Campbell

An older student named Ross, perhaps a retired teacher, is taking a university film class. Probably like a lot of non-traditional students, Ross takes this class very seriously, and really wants to do a good job on his first essay, which will be on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Obviously a bit of an odd duck, Ross watches the film over and over again, but struggles to write his paper. After he eventually turns in the paper though, it becomes clear that his essay is nothing more than individual lines and phrases from the film strung together incoherently. He later murders his professor; it seems he has taken on the persona of Cesare from the film. A little long but a solid start to the collection.

A Mythos Grimmly, edited  by Jeremy Hochhalter (Wanderer’s Haven Publications, 2015)

“L2RH” by B.A.H. Cameron

There’s a kernel of an interesting story buried in here. Julia is awakened from cryogenic sleep in a space ship about to dock with a space station out beyond Pluto on the fringes of our solar system. A fungoid colony entity calling itself mi-go has taken over the station, and Julia, the station’s AI (“Granny”), and Julia’s ship’s AI (“Huntsman”) must save the day. The story’s premise is terrific. The prose is laden down with far too much SF jargon (my personal tolerance for that has decreased dramatically over the years) and the Red Riding Hood-ish elements and names come across as way too forced. While I liked the concept, I wish Cameron had used the fairy tale as a general theme or inspiration for the story rather than the heavy-handed way it informed the story here.

The Red Brain: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by S.T. Joshi (Dark Regions Press, 2017)

[previously reviewed] “The Peddler’s Tale; or, Isobel’s Revenge” by Caitlín R. Kiernan

“Integrity” by Jonathan Thomas

A very long story to no good end—easily a third (or more) too long, given the story’s payoff. Here we have an amateur private investigator in Providence, Rhode Island, seduced and hired as a researcher and investigator by an obvious femme fatale. As it turns out, the firm he is hired to work for is in league with demons and uses them to dispose of people it wants to get rid of. Eventually, he runs afoul of his employers, murders his girlfriend/boss, and then gets interminably pursued by demons. At no point do we ever learn what the company is up to or why they would have wanted to hire this guy. Even a brief hint or two would have helped make sense of the story. It all seems a bit pointless unfortunately.

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Week 120 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Burleson, Barron, Curran, and Thomas

Welcome to Week 120 of my horror short fiction review project! There’s a wildly diverse array of stories on offer this week. I would recommend two of particular note: “Charnel House” by Tim Curran, which follows on very nicely from Lovecraft’s “Herbert West,” and “Ghost Lake” by Donald R. Burleson, who does a great job of revisiting Ramsey Campbell’s horrific Great Old One Glaaki.

Made in Goatswood: New Tales of Horror in the Severn Valley, edited by Scott David Aniolowski (Chaosium, 1995)

“Ghost Lake” by Donald R. Burleson

Roger is a young man who has become obsessed with the folklore surrounding the Severn Valley and decides to camp on the edge of the lake where the elder god Glaaki is said to live. He finds that the lake has been drained—no bodies or anything terrible found there—though the houses where his cult was said to inhabit are still there, though they are in bad shape. Roger discovers that a ghostly/spectral version of the lake reappears at night in its original spot (I like the idea of an entire lake as a ghost). Roger sees the monstrous image of Glaaki in the lake and flees, but then comes to realize that Glaaki has been manipulating his whole life—for many years—to engineer this encounter. Some very nice outdoor atmosphere here; it’s not quite as good as “The Willows,” but it’s good stuff nevertheless.

The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, by Laird Barron (Night Shade Books, 2014)

“The Siphon”

I honestly don’t quite know what to make of this one: it’s just so odd and it leaves so many questions unanswered. Lancaster is a senior sales executive for a multinational corporation who was also recruited by the NSA years ago. He is asked by his NSA handler to get to know an academic and a wealthy foreign businessman, and manages to arrange for both men and their various companions to tour one of his company’s sites. He entertains them and strikes up relationships, but the whole group—except for Lancaster—is massacred and sacrificed the one or more elder gods by a couple shapeshifters who have infiltrated the group. Lancaster is temporarily left alive, at least temporarily, to bear witness to the events and let the NSA know what had happened (why would the elder gods care if the NSA knows?). Oh and Lancaster turns out to be a (former?) serial killer who has never been caught. Some interesting imagery and ideas idea, and I did find it to be an intriguing story, but gosh this one was strange.

Legacy of the Reanimator, edited by Peter Rawlik and Brian M. Sammons (Chaosium, 2015)

“Charnel House” by Tim Curran

A really excellent piece of body horror. The story is set after the events depicted in HPL’s original “Herbert West” story. The community of Bolton, Massachusetts is still cleaning up the aftermath of Herbert West’s experiments with reanimating the dead and what West left behind. The narrator of the story is a reporter whose pregnant sister’s corpse has been stolen from the family crypt (I think we all know what happened to her). There is a very nice final bit to this one with Herbert West’s monstrous experiments on the sister and her unborn child. Gruesome and absolutely lovely. Recommended.

A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by S.T. Joshi (Dark Regions Press, 2015)

“Mobymart After Midnight” by Jonathan Thomas

Not a good story. A Walmart IT guy who hates his job comes to work late one night to find the place overrun by vampires with all workers and customer slaughtered by the undead. He escapes and the whole thing gets hushed up. As it turns out, the store was built on the site of an ancient graveyard where the protagonist’s ancestor (Warren, from HPL’s “The Statement of Randolph Carter”) died and turned into one of the undead. While I appreciated the HPL tie-in, the whole story was sadly underdeveloped. I’m really not sure what the point of it all was, except to make a tired comparison between corporate consumer culture and bloodsuckers. I get it, I really do: I’m sure that working at Walmart sucks. But that doesn’t mean we need a quasi-Mythos story about it.

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Week 66 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Campbell, Thomas, Chambers, and Jacobs

Welcome to Week 66 of my horror short fiction review project! Several really god stories this week, but my favorite was “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” by John Hornor Jacobs. It’s a brief tale, but Jacobs’ writing was truly superior–hope to him more from him in the future.

Alone with the Horrors, by Ramsey Campbell (Tor, 2004)

“In the Bag”

I liked this one. The narrator is Clarke, hot-tempered headmaster of a boy’s school in which his own son Peter is also enrolled. The story opens with Peter having had a plastic bag placed over his head by an unknown assailant(s), though Peter managed to escape before he could be suffocated. No culprits come forward and Clarke begins punishing the student body en masse until the bully reveals himself. It eventually becomes clear that when Clarke was a boy he was involved in the accidental death of a classmate, who suffocated after he was playing with a plastic bag as a mock astronaut’s helmet; Clarke has some culpability here, as he tied the bag’s knot, failed to help the boy as he suffocated, and never told anyone he had been involved. Clarke seems to have been troubled by guilt his whole life, hearing the phantom sounds of a plastic bag crinkling nearby for many years. The ending of the story is a nice little shocker; I don’t want to spoil it, but it really caps off the tale very nicely. There were some definitely story parallels with Campbell’s “The Guy.”

Black Wings of Cthulhu 4, edited by S.T. Joshi (Titan Books, 2016)

“We Are Made of Stars” by Jonathan Thomas

I ended up disliking this one. It turned out to be both boring and expressed in a weird staccato prose style that just didn’t work for me. It’s set in modern-day Providence, Rhode Island—a wonderful city I’d like to spend more time in—but even that wasn’t enough to grab me. There are a couple things going on here. First is the immediate plot involving a man named Ira, some unusual graffiti appearing in the city, and an exploration of urban decay and gentrification. The second is a more interesting revelation of humans as stars who become “right,” a potentially interesting take on the Lovecraftian idea that the Great Old Ones will return when the stars are right. I wanted to like this one a great deal more than I did, but the humans as stars angle came across to me as an incoherent mess.

The Yellow Sign and Other Stories, by Robert W. Chambers (Chaosium, 2004)

In Search of the Unknown

–The Pythagoreans (ch 22-25)

The final linked story (of six) that is collected in the novel In Search of the Unknown. We continue with the young man encountered on the train as our narrator, once again describing some weird experiences he had. It begins with a very promising locked-room style mystery: his aunt died while in possession of a multitude of cats and one of the world’s largest diamonds. She has apparently died of natural causes but the diamond, which she wore in a velvet bag of catnip around her neck, is missing. During the course of the investigation he encounters a secret society, the Pythagoreans, who are interested in Eastern mysticism and who have apparently managed to develop a number of psychic abilities (telepathy, astral projection, etc.) Oh and the narrator’s aunt seems to have come to possess one of her cats. Included some really interesting elements, but was narratively the least coherent of all the stories and it very much broke the mold of the rest of the stories. Would have been a much stronger story as a stand-alone, it just didn’t fit into the rest of the novel coherently.

The Book of Cthulhu, edited by Ross E. Lockhart (Night Shade Books, 2011)

“The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” by John Hornor Jacobs

I can’t comment meaningfully on this story without giving it all away because it’s so brief, so what follows will be spoiler-filled. Short version: great story, very poignant, read it. A waitress at a seaside restaurant, whose husband has apparently “gone down to the sea,” is being courted by a wealthy young male tourist. He eventually wins her over and they become romantic. This is all extremely well-done, and Jacobs is a master wordsmith. As it turns out the husband and his brethren are not drowned sailors, but have become Deep Ones, and they use the young man as a blood sacrifice to summon Cthulhu. Really good story, and it’s all in the telling because the premise itself is a simple one.

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Week 40 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Lovecraft, Wolfe, Barker, and Thomas

Welcome to Week 40 of my horror short fiction review project! Some big names being reviewed this week, and while I really, really wanted to like several of these stories more than I ended up (Gene Wolfe, I’m looking at you), my favorite of the week was Jonathan Thomas’ “Houdini Fish.” Probably because it picks up where Lovecraft’s “From Beyond” leaves off.

The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, by H.P. Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi (Penguin, 2004)

“The Lurking Fear”

Like “Herbert West—Reanimator,” this story was written on spec by Lovecraft to be published in serialized fashion. While there are a few interesting horrific bits, I found the story to be fairly forgettable, and probably too padded, though that’s not surprising given its origin. We have a story in four parts:

1. A reporter travels to the Catskills after reports of attacks by strange creatures and the destruction of a small community. He discovers local legends about the Martense Mansion, foreboding and long-abandoned by the mysterious Martnese family, and takes up temporary residence there with two companions. Despite their best efforts the three men eventually fall asleep and, upon awakening, the narrator discovers his companions missing and spots a grotesque shadow being cast by—perhaps—a monster.
2. The out-of-town reporter befriends a local journalist and continues the investigation. They manage to uncover a Martense family diary and seek shelter in a cabin during a storm. The local reporter gets his face munched off by some…thing while staring out the window at the cabin. I’m beginning to think that accompanying the narrator on this investigation is a really bad idea.
3. Several months have passed but the narrator has returned to the area to continue his ill-fated investigation. He believes that the mystery is connected with the Martense family and has boned up on their family history. The family was, unsurprisingly, unpleasant and isolated by the locals before eventually dying out or disappearing. There are strong indications, however, that the family remained in the area in hiding and continued to propagate themselves via inbreeding. Still poking around the area, the narrator falls into an underground burrow and encounters a misshapen humanoid there. Oh and the cabin burns down, presumably caused by the humanoids.
4. The narrator discovers a vast network of tunnels, nests, and burrows made by the humanoids all around the old mansion. (I’m sure you can guess who/what these things are by now.) He witnesses hundreds of the things, sees them kill and eat a weak member of the pack, and kills one of them himself, confirming that they are indeed (gasp) the remnants of the now-inbred and degenerate Martense clan. He has the area dynamited but is haunted by the fear that one or more of them may have survived.

There are some interesting elements included—I’m always a sucker for tales of degenerate ancient family histories—but the actual horror/horrific elements could have been sharpened considerably. It ends up being a fairly forgettable and skimmable story.

The Dark Descent, edited by David G. Hartwell (Tor, 1987)

“Seven American Nights” by Gene Wolfe

A long story with an unreliable narrator and some complexities that don’t really come through on the written page. The story is formatted as the travel journey of an Iranian visitor to a future, post-apocalyptic United States returned to his family after his mysterious disappearance. The exact nature of the disaster is left unstated, but it has rendered most of the interior of the North American continent uninhabitable and many of its inhabitants mutated. The Iranian stays in the Washington, DC area; falls in love/lust with an actress who is probably more than she seems; is given a strange drug that he may or may not take; is attacked by a weird flying humanoid creature; and has other strange encounters, none especially coherent. This incoherency is enhanced by the diarist’s excisions to his own text (he tears out some entries) and indications that his journal may have been tampered with or even partially forged after his disappearance as part of a cover-up. It never really gels though.

I know that Wolfe has many fans—and I myself enjoyed the first few “Book of the New Sun” books—but some of his fans have perceived far more complexities and nuances in this story that I have not. Wolfe himself has stated that this is one of his favorite stories. Some fans have constructed an elaborate timeline and have discussed their speculation about the story’s ending and other possible ideas (I quite like the explication of the parallels between this story and the final week of Christ’s life noted in that last link). I’m not saying that these readers are seeing things that aren’t there, but I can say that I think they are doing a great deal of reading between the lines and constructing a far more coherent narrative that Wolfe’s text actually allows. I wish that there was stronger textual support for these fan theories. Ultimately, I was intrigued by this story, and may return to it for a re-read at some point in the future, but while there are some interesting possibilities here, there’s not enough substance on the written page.

Books of Blood, Volumes Four to Six, by Clive Barker (Sphere, 2007)

“The Madonna”

There were some great elements in this story that I wish had been played up and put front-and-center, but they mostly remained in the background and only revealed toward the end of the story. Here’s what we’ve got: Jerry is trying to broker a deal for a shady real estate developer to purchase a defunct indoor swimming pool center. They encounter some elusive young women in the complex who intrigue the shady real estate guy a bit too much. He thinks Jerry is trying to pull a scam on him and he and his thugs beat up Jerry and trash his apartment. The violence and threats are well done and set a nice tone. The swimming pool center is actually home to a strange being (“The Madonna,” one presumes) that gives birth to monsters. Really, really cool monsters, though there are a few brief passages about them. Oh how I wish there had been more of the Madonna and her spawn in the story! The ending gets a bit fuzzy, as sometimes happens with Barker’s work. Not a bad story by any means, but I wish it had been crisper.

Black Wings of Cthulhu 3, edited by S.T. Joshi (Titan Books, 2015)

Introduction by S.T. Joshi

Contains nothing terribly interesting or enlightening—just a brief, rough effort to group the stories together thematically.

“Houdini Fish” by Jonathan Thomas

A nice take on/homage to Lovecraft’s “From Beyond.” A sketch of the premise: A professor of archaeology discovers a weird, glowing artifact buried on campus and begins assembling its fragments. This is a bad idea, as weirder and weirder stuff starts happening, subtle at first—things like tiny pink fish swimming in the liquid soap dispensers on campus. (What a horrific discovery!) Then people start disappearing and the police investigation starts to coalesce around the archaeologist. He begins to wonder of the eponymous Houdini fish and other things are newly arrived at the university or if they have always been there, but something has shifted, allowing him to perceive them. If you’ve read “From Beyond,” you probably have a good guess on that. A very good start to the collection.

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Week 25 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Lovecraft, King, Barker, and Thomas

Welcome to Week 25 of my horror short fiction review project! Got some really great stories for you this week. I am hard-pressed to select my favorite between Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” and King’s “The Monkey,” but I guess I’ve got to award the prize for best story this week to Stephen King. If you haven’t read it, you are missing out!

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, by H.P. Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi (Penguin, 2001)

“Pickman’s Model”

This, I believe, was the first Lovecraft story I ever read, so it will always exert a powerful influence over me. (Some enterprising librarian at my local branch of the public library bought a complete set of the Arkham House editions when I was a child and placed them in the young adult section, where I promptly discovered them in close proximity to the Edgar Rice Burroughs books when I was 13.) Great premise that’s a bit understated, but still powerful. It’s written from an odd perspective for Lovecraft: it’s a monologue from the narrator directed at the reader directly, so it’s written in a fairly conversational style; can’t recall Lovecraft using a similar technique in any of his other works. But it’s effective here.

We have a Boston painter, Richard Upton Pickman, who has developed a notorious reputation for painting disturbing scenes and images. The narrator is a friend of Pickman’s, talking to a friend after Pickman has disappeared. He describes a number of the increasingly disturbing paintings that Pickman has done, some involving depictions of hideous, vaguely canine humanoids attacking humans in familiar Boston settings.

I really don’t want to spoil the ending of this one because if I do you won’t see the power of the story or its “twist” ending, but suffice it to say, it’s a good one. I’ve seen other critics dismiss this story, and maybe if you’re coming to it already jaded and cynical, or if you’ve read a million and one horror stories it won’t have much of an effect on you, but I read it at the ripe old age of thirteen without a lot of horror under my belt, and it was effective for me.

Also, see the version of this that they did for the old TV show Night Gallery, it’s entertaining.

The Dark Descent, edited by David G. Hartwell (Tor, 1987)

“The Monkey” by Stephen King

What a great story! This is King’s version of the narrative about a cursed object that brings tragedy and misfortune to all those around it. A common horror trope (now), but I’d like to think that “The Monkey” helped cement this trope in the popular imagination. It’s also a further reminder of just how amazing King’s collection Skeleton Crew is, from which this story derives. In some ways it evokes the same themes as King’s “Bad Little Kid” in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, which I reviewed here. While I liked “Bad Little Kid” a lot, “The Monkey” is obvious the superior story. This is one of King’s best short stories in my view.

The story’s premise is a simple one, though characterization and atmosphere are absolutely spot on. We have a man, now married with two sons, who finds a toy monkey with cymbals in an attic that he had thought he had gotten rid of in childhood. It’s a creepy little toy with a long history: the man believes that every time the monkey’s cymbals bang, someone close to him has died. Not something you want hanging around your house. Very, very good stuff with a great resolution (or at least ending).

Books of Blood, Volumes One to Three, by Clive Barker (Berkley, 1998)

“Dread” (reviewed as part of The Dark Descent in Week 22 as well)

A really nice story that captures a lot of the interactions and intellectual posing of undergraduates. A young kid—a freshman or sophomore named Steve—becomes fascinated with an older student (maybe a grad student who hangs out with undergrads named Quaid). Quaid is one of those fairly incoherent intellectuals common to most campuses who talks a good talk until you eventually realize it’s just psychobabble. Quaid’s obsession is dread, as the title would suggest. He eventually confides to Steve that he imprisoned a young woman he was dating in a room with a big haunch of meat. And that was the only thing she had to eat for about a week. The catch was that she was a staunch vegetarian whose spirit was kind of broken before she eventually gave in and ate the then-rotten meat. Quaid then imprisons Steve in a dark, silent place and subjected him to sensory deprivation because Steve’s big fear was a return to a period of deafness he had experienced as a child. Eventually Steve is let go, and seeks revenge on Quaid, turning the tables on him. The story is well-done, even though my description of it makes it seem a routine, by-the-numbers story. A very nice exploration of what fear does to people; psychological horror, like body horror, is something that Barker does well.

“Hell’s Event”

I didn’t especially care for this story. The premise is fine, but the way it’s told is a bit incoherent and hard-to-follow. Here’s the set-up: Once per century, Satan sends one of his minions to compete against the unsuspecting human runners in a race. If Satan’s representative wins, he gets to rule the Earth. If not, everything’s fine for the next century. This time around, one of the human runners, a chap named Joel, realizes that his fellow runners are getting brutally savaged during the race by some unseen force. There’s also a side bet between a Satan-worshipping politician and his Dark Lord. There’s a bit of tension in this one, but it just wasn’t terribly satisfying. Barker has provided some better stories in the collection than this one.

Black Wings of Cthulhu 2, edited by S.T. Joshi (Titan Books, 2012)

“King of Cat Swamp” by Jonathan Thomas

The story’s premise is simple enough. A couple invites an old man named “Castro”—you will remember the importance of a sailor named Castro from “The Call of Cthulhu”—into their home because the guy has been loitering outside their home and claims that there is something he owns inside their house. He promptly begins regaling them with a convoluted tale of cultists following Portuguese sailors to the New World, persecution by Puritans, the Black Winged Ones, and his arrest in Louisiana. If we are to take old Castro at his word, he is far more ancient than would seem possible. The story ends up going in a creepy direction that I won’t spoil here, but I’d have really liked a better, more enjoyable payoff for what should have been a home run, given the inclusion of ol’ Castro.

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Week 12 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Lovecraft, Shea, King, and Thomas

Welcome to Week 12 of my horror short story reviews! While several of the stories this week were good (Lovecraft and Shea), there is one genuine stand-out here, and that is Stephen King’s “Blockade Billy.” I picked this up as a stand-alone novella a few years ago but never around to reading it until now. I didn’t expect to like it–I am not particularly a big fan of baseball–but that didn’t matter at all. This is just a darn good horror tale.

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, by H.P. Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi (Penguin, 1999)

“He”

Not one of my favorites; it’s too similar stylistically to “Nyarlathotep” for my tastes, so if you like prose poems, you might like this more than I did. This is an intensely autobiographical story that reflects the years that Lovecraft himself spent in New York City, hating every second of it. Like Lovecraft himself, the narrator has moved to the city from New England and regrets it, and like Lovecraft, he takes long walks through the city at night. One night he meets a man in Greenwich Village dressed in archaic clothing who offers to show him around the city. The man tells the narrator of a man who, several hundred years previously, bargained with some Native Americans for their secret rituals to manipulate time and space before poisoning them all. The man then shows the narrator a series of visions of the city’s past and future, which, predictably, sends him into a mental tailspin. The spirits of the dead Native Americans then come for the man, who is revealed (again, predictably) as the man who killed them centuries ago. While I liked some of the horrific visions of the city, there’s just not all that much to this story, and it’s fairly predictable and pedestrian for Lovecraft.

The Dark Descent, edited by David G. Hartwell (Tor, 1987)

“The Autopsy” by Michael Shea

An excellent story marred by two (not fatal) flaws: it is far too long and it contains far too much medical terminology, which for me, not having a medical background, is jarring and takes me out of the story. I’m going to have to spoil this one in order to have anything sensible to say about it. A medical examiner dying of terminal cancer is summoned to a small mining community that has just suffered from a tragedy in which a bunch of miners were killed under enigmatic circumstances. Naturally enough, his job is to perform autopsies on the bodies. During the course of his investigation he discovers that the man who killed the other miners was inhabited by an alien being—a small, grisly lump of protoplasm—that devours its hosts slowly over time and killed to preserve its secrecy. The doctor is then mostly paralyzed by the creature while it makes itself at home in his body, but the physician has the last laugh as he writes a message explaining the situation in his own blood, destroys his eyes and part of his brain, and causes himself to bleed out, all before the thing can take motor control of his body. Pretty gruesome body horror, and an interesting premise.

The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, by Stephen King (Scribner, 2015)

“Blockade Billy”

A nice little noveletter/novella about baseball, a subject I don’t know much about. Sure, I’ve gone to half a dozen baseball games over the years, but I’m not really a sports guy at all and have no particular affinity for baseball; I think I have only begun to develop a patience for the game in middle age. In any case, I normally avoid sports-themed literature like the plague, but this one was actually pretty good. In any case, we’ve got a 1957 baseball team that suffers a run of bad luck and has to hastily recruit a new catcher from a minor league team. When he arrives he seems kind of…off, but he’s an incredibly good player and quickly becomes a team and fan favorite despite his personal oddness. Even when he gets accused of cutting up an opposing player as he tags the guy out, he still retains the confidence of the team and coaching staff, with the sole exception of one coach (the narrator) who can’t quite put his finger on what’s going on with “Blockade Billy.” I won’t spoil you on the ending, but it was suitably horrific. I had been worried that this was a story without any horror elements in it, but I need not have. The resolution of the story is pretty horrific.

Black Wings of Cthulhu, edited by S.T. Joshi (Titan Books, 2010)

“Tempting Providence” by Jonathan Thomas

A really long story that should have been about one-third the length—the story’s payoff is certainly not worth wading through what is essentially a long travelogue set in Providence, Rhode Island. The protagonist is a photographer and alum of Brown, who is brought back to campus for alumni weekend, where his work is shown in an exhibition. Brown inexplicably decides to stiff him on his pay and expenses and he ends up wandering around town for a few days, mostly describing meals at various local restaurants that he consumes ravenously (I thought the protagonist’s constant, unexplained hunger for meat would be explained at some point, but no dice). I enjoyed the travelogue because I’ve been to Providence and spent some time walking around town and eating at one of the restaurants he describes, but it simply went on for pages and pages to no apparent purpose. In the end, something Lovecraftian happens (why?) and the administrator who stiffed him on his money gets cast out into one of those non-Euclidean spaces between dimensions or something. Oh and he also spots Lovecraft’s ghost a couple times around town, trying to communicate with him, but we never discover what that was all about either. Very, very little payoff in this story.

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