It Puts The Blog In The Basket

The last few months have been a bit scrambled in my head, and I didn’t always log the right dates when I read a book, but I’m pretty sure that October was the month that I re-read Dennis Etchison’s ‘Cutting Edge’ horror anthology.

Dennis Etchison introduces this book with a fervent essay about the value of horror in the literary world, specifically the world of genre fiction. He takes a swipe at several sub genres including popular fantasy. Bear in mind this was back in 1986.

The anthology is divided into four themed parts.

Part One is ‘Bringing it all back home’ and includes ‘Blue Rose’ by Peter Straub, ‘The Monster’ by Joe Haldeman’ and ‘Lacunae’ by Karl Edward Wagner.
‘Blue Rose’ is the story that ‘Koko’ is built on, and gives us a glimpse of Henry Beevers’ childhood. ‘The Monster’ allows Haldeman to take us back to the horrors of the Vietnam war, and what may have been brought back from there. ‘Lacunae’ tells a story of sexual identity and drugs.

Part Two ‘They’re Coming For You’ has seven stories. The first, ‘Pale Trembling Youth’ is a short story about youth culture, music and alienation, I enjoyed it a lot. ‘Muzak for Torso Murders’ tells the story of a serial killer and his loving mother. ‘Goodbye Dark Love’ is a very dark tale indeed. ‘Out There’ is a beautiful little story about a possessive building and its residents. I loved it. ‘Little Cruelties’ is another dark tale about family and home that really gave me the creeps. ‘The Man with the Hoe’ is not recommended for anyone who loves cats. Not my thing. ‘They’re Coming For You’ is a perfect creepy story that I’d love to have written myself.

Part Three ‘Walking the Headlights’ also has seven stories. The first ‘Vampires’ is a freeform poem by Richard Matheson. ‘Lapses’ by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is one of my favourite stories in the book, with a brilliant sense of terror and loss. William F Nolan’s ‘The Final Stone’ is one of my favourite Jack the Ripper stories, I’ve read it a few times and I always enjoy it. Nicholas Royle’s ‘Irrelativity’ is a weird urban horror story that deserves to be read two or three times. Ramsey Campbell’s ‘The Hands’ is a thoroughly creepy story about a hapless traveller who makes the wrong decision. ‘The Bell’ is a well written monkey’s paw / deal with god story with a predictable ending. I enjoyed Clive Barker’s ‘Lost Souls’, a fun story about a demon hunter.

Part Four, ‘Dying all the Time’ only has three stories. Robert Bloch’s ‘Reaper’ is a long story by the standards of this collection, and features a horror writer making a deal with Death. It’s funny and creepy and I liked it. Ed Bryant’s ‘The Transfer’ is a nicely weird story about a woman with an unusual gift, and a desire for revenge. Whitley Streiber’s ‘Pain’ ends the book with a paean to masochistic delights.

Overall, the stories feel dated now, a collection that’s almost forty years old that has a disconcerting number of male writers and far too few diverse voices. It’s becoming a part of the history of dark fiction, but it’s interesting because Etchison drew together so many of horror’s great writers of the time.

I followed this with another re-read from my shelves, a lovely old sf anthology ‘Out of This World 9’ edited by Amabel Williams-Ellis and Michael Pearson.

A re-read. A re-read after a long time, but my feeling of familiarity with the book shows that I’ve read it several times before. It was published in the early 1970s, but the ‘Barnados’ sticker on the front cover means that I bought it after 1988. See, I coulda been a detective.
It’s an ex library book – Bramhall High School Library, to be exact. It still has the index card and date stamp, which suggests it was taken out of circulation in or after 1984. It still has its plastic library cover. I love a book with history. The book consists of nine stories … two of them in translation … curated by the anthologists Amabel Williams-Ellis and Michael Pearson.
A two page preface ponders the nature of sf and the puzzling scarcity of stories that originate outside the USA and Britain.
The first story is ‘The Diamondwood Trees’ by James H Schmitz. It’s a hugely satisfying story about colonisation, what it means to be human, and the importance of respecting the local ecology.
Frank Russell’s ‘Allamagoosa’ is a straight faced study of rules v reality and what happens when they collide. I love this story, it could have been written at almost any point in the last century.
Gerard Klein’s ‘A Message for Zoo Directors’ allows sf to meet horror in this translation from the original French. It’s a tale of messages from an unusual source and the men who went in search of the truth.
‘The Vanishing Man’ by Richard Huges is a very short story describing what has become a trope of modern sf … interdimensional travel and the physical dangers thereof. It reminded me of the premise of Pratchett and Baxter’s ‘Long Earth’ series.
‘At Daybreak’ by Italo Calvino is the other translated story in the book, a gentle tale of physics, creation, and a First Family that deserves the name.
‘Rich and Strange’ is the only original story in the book, and is by the anthologist, Amabel Williams Ellis. It’s a story very much of the earlier part of the twentieth century, and concerns scientists young and old exploring an interesting theory from two very different viewpoints.
John Christopher’s ‘Blemish’ has a Twilight Zone vibe to it. Earth is heavily civilised, developed, and run on very strict principles. It has one blemish, a village that runs on older ideas. An inspection from an alien civilisation arrives to decide if Earth is fit to join the galactic culture. The Expected happens. The really sad thing about this is that what read as a dystopian Earth forty years ago now reads as something I would happily trade for the dystopia we’re living in now.
John Rackham’s ‘Catharsis’ was originally published in ‘New Writings in SF 11’. It’s a simple story of a man who is so focussed on his work that he is dying because of it. The solution, as envisaged by another highly focussed man, is drastic and very troubling.
‘Mantrap’ by Kathleen James is my favourite story in the book. Following the capture of a colonist from a rogue planet, the authorities send back a spy who has been surgically altered and trained to impersonate the colonist and to send back regular reports. Blending in becomes far too easy a task.
‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow’ brings in the big guns. Kurt Vonnegut’s story is an amusing and fun take on extended life and youth, and the implications for later generations. Going back to Pratchett (I wonder if he ever read this story) I’m reminded of Nanny Ogg and her constant rearranging of the family portraits in the living room.
I loved revisiting this book. At only nine stories long, it’s a nicely curated study of sf in the early seventies, reaching back in style as far as the forties but also reaching forward to the feminist sf that was beginning to make its mark.

And from a lovely anthology to a deeper dive into a thick novel. Adrian Tchaikovsky’s ‘City of Last Chances’ I have two copies of this book. The first is a hardback, signed by the author at an event in Lancaster. It was the second time I’d met him, but the first time that I’d met him after reading … ahem … a couple of dozen of his books. I also have a paperback copy that was a gift from my husband, who hadn’t noticed that I had the hardback on my shelves. Ah well, he knows what I like.

 I love Tchaikovsky’s books, I seem to read a lot of them, but I also seem to have four or five of them lying unread on my tbr pile. Does this man ever stop to eat?

So, I read this within a year or so of enjoying China Mieville’s ‘The Iron Council’ and the parallels are fairly clear in terms of world building, although Tchaikovsky’s prose is definitely more accessible to the average reader. I enjoyed both books immensely.

I’m looking forward to reading the sequels and finding out who the Tyrant Philosophers actually are. What we have in this book is an industrialised city with a large population of downtrodden denizens including several distinct immigrant groups who have fled from difficult situations. There’s also, quite brilliantly, a haunted sector of the city that is the last resort of the desperate. Finally, for fun, there’s a copse of trees that occasionally becomes a portal to somewhere far away and strange, a portal that is guarded by monstrous creatures and a band of guardians. Next to this copse is an inn, and inside the inn, there’s a card game where the stakes are always high and the players are always looking for their next mark.

The characters are richly drawn and interesting, and I cared about them, even the silly ones who made some very bad decisions.

By the end of the month, I needed some comfort food, so I headed for the Pratchett side of town. I was a generous and community minded reader of Terry Pratchett. I gave away most of my copies after reading them because I genuinely want everybody to read them. I did keep four or five though, and for a couple of weeks I took a deep dive into three of them. My last read of October was Carpe Jugulum, which is still one of my favourite book titles of all time, as well as being my favourite Pratchett and one of my favourite books.

You know, I didn’t even write a proper review, probably because I’ve read it so often I kind of assume that I don’t need a reminder. Anyway, this is what I said.

“My favourite Pratchett, it’s got vampires and witches. It’s got Greebo too.

What would happen if a vampire bit Granny Weatherwax? Well, pretty much what you’d expect.”