Night Screams by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg

What now?  What did the forces want her to do next?  Leave the house, try to get away in the darkness?  No.  The murderer was out there, watching, waiting; he would see her if she tried to leave, and she couldn't outrun a man through the snow.  Hide?  No.  There wasn't anywhere to hide that she wouldn't be found.

1981 paperback edition

A year or so ago, I guess, I spent four dollars on a 1979 Playboy Press hardcover copy of the novel Night Screams by critically acclaimed mystery writer Bill Pronzini and our hero Barry N. Malzberg.  The time has come to read it!  I'll be reading my physical copy, the jacket of which is severely damaged, though the actual book itself seems to be in good shape; an image of a noose is inscribed on the blue front cover, which is kind of fun.  You can find your own copy of the novel on e-bay for less than ten bucks if you aren't picky, or read a scan available as I write this at the internet archive.

Before we dig into this 260 or so page thriller, here are links to my blogposts about other Pronzini/Malzberg collabs.

The Running of the Beasts

"Fascination"

"Inaugural"

"The Last One Left"

"Night Rider"

"Matter of Survival"

"Another Burnt-Out Case"

"On Account of Darkness"    

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Sad to say, I am pretty down on Night Screams.  We look into a book like this for sex and violence and fear, first and foremost, and very few of the pages actually feature murders, fights, or titillating sex, or actually generate any emotion in the reader.  There are a lot of characters, and none are particularly interesting or likable, I guess so that we don't feel bad when they are killed or revealed to be the killer.  The characters also don't act in a fashion that feels very believable; they are cartoonish, but unfortunately not funny.

The writing of Night Screams is bland and lacks personality, with lots of what I would consider filler passages about scenery that, I admit, are meant to create an atmosphere of isolation and unease (it's a cold snowy winter in the country and many of the characters have an aversion to cold and/or the country.)  Pronzini and Malzberg seem to be trying to appeal to the reader by exploiting in a childish fashion various cultural divides, perhaps catering to who they think will buy a book from Playboy Press, or maybe simply appealing to the prejudices of the editors at Playboy Press.  Basically, on one side we've got hip with-it young urban types who accept the validity of psychic powers with the casualness that you and I accept the validity of electricity, and on the other bigoted rural oldsters who think the paranormal is either bunk or the work of the devil.  Many of the main characters of Night Screams have psychic powers, but their powers rarely actually help them accomplish anything, though the inclusion of premonitions and precognition gives Pronzini and Malzberg a chance to introduce the theme of free will vs determinism; unfortunately the repeated invocations of this theme only serve to strip agency from the characters, who, upon seeing some future, are compelled to make that future come true.  Again and again we are told the psychic characters' choices are circumscribed by these vaguely defined "forces."

As for the plot, it is normal slasher/giallo/Ten Little You Know Whats stuff--we have a bunch of characters who are getting killed one by one and the detective has to figure out which character is the killer while he enjoys a romance with the most attractive and most normal of the cast of suspects/potential victims.  Many scenes feel like dead ends as the characters try one method or another to gather info and come up empty.  I find these ultimately sterile scenes annoying, but I guess such scenes are the norm for detective fiction.

So, thumbs down for Night Screams, even if Robert Bloch [claims to have] liked it.  Despite my serious misgivings, the novel was reprinted in paperback in 1981, by our French friends in 1989, and here in America in 2011--hilariously, the woman on the almost indecipherable cover of the 2011 edition (is that a hand or a snowdrift in the lower half of the cover?) seems to have facial piercings.  

Obviously I am going to blame Pronzini for the weakness of this novel, not my spirit animal Barry N. Malzberg, even though my academic experience has taught me to expect that the second, third or fourth author of a publication probably did more actual work on the text than the top name on the list.  After all, Night Screams is structured and presented as a mainstream detective story with a bunch of suspects and victims and a detective who bangs the top suspect slash potential victim, plus a lot of mainstream pseudo literary gunk in which people look out at the snow; Night Screams does not feel like a science fiction novel or like the typical Malzberg novel which is a series of surreal events that may or may not be the delusions of a madman who is either an astronaut or has some mundane life, spiced up with crazy jokes that reflect the narrator's or the protagonist's insanity.  But we can see Malzbergian elements in Night Screams.  Malzberg protagonists are often self-deluded and/or monomaniacal to the point of insanity, and one of the story's characters, Neal, kind of fits that bill.  Malzbergian protagonists also generally suffer sexual dysfunction, and while our main characters, Brad the FBI man and Leslie the psychic landscape painter, are sexual athletes who are marvelously sexually compatible (on their first date, Brad has two orgasms and is able to maintain his erection between orgasms without having to take any time to recover, while Leslie has three orgasms and tells Brad he can pound her as hard as he likes), the second rank characters and the minor characters all seem to have problems in the bedroom.  

So, there is my sad verdict on, and my Malzberg-centric analysis of, Night Screams.  If you want a plot summary and some additional evidence that back up the various claims I make above about why Night Screams is not very good, read on below.  And remember, I am going to totally spoil the "absolutely stunning surprise ending."

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Part One, nine pages, introduces us to a serial killer as he sneaks into the house of a female flutist, Sandra, and strangles her with a blue velvet cord as she is practicing on the flute.  Once she is dead, he gets another, different piece of rope and hangs up the dead woman with a noose.  It is implied that the murderer is periodically taken over by some supernatural force, that this being or whatever it is drives the killer to commit these foul deeds by giving him premonitory visions of the murder he has to commit--should he not make these visions come true, he will himself die!  In the kill scene, Pronzini and Malzberg focus on the sound of the victim's screams and on the smell of her feces as her bowels relax upon death.  Yuck!

Part One also introduces Leslie Abbot, a woman landscape painter.  She has a vision of the murder of the flutist that includes the sound of the screams and the stink of the feces.  And another vision--of the murderer approaching her own house!

Part Two is the meat of Night Screams, like 240 pages. 

Leslie the painter is a member of a little group of people with psychic powers.  Recently they numbered seven, but today only five remain, as Sandra the flutist was one of their group, as well as a man killed a month earlier, Tony.  Pronzini and Malzberg almost immediately reintroduce the theme of people being compelled to do things against their will, telling us Leslie often has the experience of doing things because "some random events or series of events seemed to be preordained by whatever forces controlled the universe."  I don't like this theme--to me a good story is about people making decisions and succeeding or falling due to the nature and extent of their own personalities and abilities, not because of some decree of fate.  I also don't like invocations of "the universe" and its decrees in modern writing--such ideas feel like a vague, toothless and bloodless substitute religion for people too educated and too hip to believe in Judaism or Christianity.  

The founder and leader of the group of psykers, Oscar, an elderly widower who edits a trade journal for pet dealers (circulation: 10,000), calls a meeting of the five survivors in Vermont, where Leslie has been living for a few months in an old church converted into an artist's studio.  Also among the psykers are skinny Jo from New York City, a chain-smoking theatrical agent who calls people "darling" and "dear;" overweight failed actress Gloria of upstate New York, where she manages a community playhouse; and Neal of Long Island, a married accountant who hopes to use his psychic powers to become an entertainer like his hero The Amazing Kreskin.    

So here we have our core list of potential victims and likely suspects.  Having established this crew of middle-class creatives with whom writers like Pronzini and Malzberg can identify, we get our intro to the agents of the state, beneficiaries of the people's taxes, who are going to end up dealing with the case of the murdered psychics, FBI men Brad Saxon and Stan Walker.  Connecticut-based Walker is a passive by-the-book kind of guy, whom DC-based field agent Brad, the younger but senior agent, a hip urbanite who complains about Hoover, fears the Bureau is fascistic, and wears his hair long, finds annoying.  Brad believes in the ability of psychic powers to help solve crimes, and is eager to meet the assembled psykers.  As all my readers who are attorneys know, the FBI doesn't get involved in the murders of psychic flutists unless the penumbra of their psychic emanations affects interstate commerce; Brad and Stan's real mission is investigating the disappearance from DC of Morris Evers, Atomic Energy Commission administrator--Sandra was his cousin, bringing her murder into the bailiwick of the FBI men.

Having set their tale in New England in January, Pronzini and Malzberg inflict on us plenty of descriptions of snow and ice and slush, many scenes of people looking out the window at the snow and scenes of people putting on and taking off their mufflers and coats and bitching about the weather.  I guess this is supposed to add atmosphere, make things feel more oppressive, more dangerous, but these scenes sort of make the eyes glaze over.  Somewhat more successful at making the reader uneasy and generating suspense is how P & M portray New Englanders as superstitious types who think that psychic powers are witchcraft.  "The old Puritan beliefs died hard up here, if they ever died at all."  The local people all fear and hate the psykers, so we can add them to the list of suspects, I suppose.  Somebody, presumably one of the villagers, regularly makes threatening calls to Leslie, saying stuff like "We don't want your kind here."  I guess P & M are trying to win for the psychics some of the sympathy readers would feel for Jews or blacks under threat from bigots, as well as stoke the contempt for rural people felt by the city folk whom P & M assume make up their audience (Brad considers the little village where Leslie lives to have "an aura of emptiness and provincial and cultural isolation...[to be] a place on the edge of nowhere.")

Brad and Walker come to the meeting Oscar has organized and ask questions of the assembled psykers.  (The word the characters use is "clairvoyants.")  All of the clairvoyants act like weirdos or jerks with the exception of Leslie the painter.  Leslie is also the prettiest of the women and Brad immediately develops a crush on her.  So, it is Leslie whom Brad enlists to use her psychic powers to help the investigation.  The next day Brad and Leslie go to Sandra the flutist's place to see if Leslie can get any psychic insight into what happened to Sandra.  Leslie has such powerful visions that she almost collapses, but these visions don't add much to the visions she had when the murders took place.  This book is full of people with psychic powers, but these powers don't actually accomplish much until the last 20% or so of the novel.  That evening the painter and FBI agent have a date at Leslie's house, and share their love of jazz (holy crap, P & M really are aiming to please the Playboy audience with this book) and then go to bed together, where they have the best sex of their lives--after another of the menacing calls from the anti-psychic harasser comes through, of course.

In the first hundred pages of the book we get a bunch of scenes with goofball Neal and cynical jerk Jo, helping us to get to know them, but little exposure to Gloria, even though it is Gloria who is the victim in the book's second murder scene.  Leslie, asleep in bed with Brad, has a vision of the murder.  P & M arrange things so that we have reason to suspect Oscar.  Walker arrives on the scene in time to chase the killer, but the killer gets away--after all, as one of the novel's skeptics of psychic powers and a by-the-book guy with a crew cut instead of a cool hip jazz aficionado with long hair, we have to expect Walker to fail.  This chase is actually pretty exciting, probably the high point of the novel.

Brad brings Leslie to the site of Gloria's murder, but, as usual, her powers don't turn up any useful info.  The next actual bit of excitement is Leslie finding her house vandalized, all her paintings destroyed--except the painting inspired by her vision of the killer approaching her home!  Dun--dun--Dunnnn.  

Brad and Walker get the news that Evers has been found--he was killed by his homosexual lover.  Now there is no reason for the FBI to be involved in the murders of the three clairvoyants.  (Why did P & M make their protagonist an FBI man, anyway?  So he would be a city slicker that Playboy staff and readers could identify with in the way they would not identify with a county sheriff or state trooper?)  Of course Brad wants to stay on the case, and luckily a blizzard rolls in and the FBI men are stuck in Leslie's psyker-hating burg.  At the novel's halfway point, Brad assembles all 20-odd citizens of the village at the inn to interrogate them, hoping to figure out who has been telephoning and now breaking, entering and vandalizing Leslie's home.  This allows P & M to present to us for comic relief some starry eyed ex-hippies turned Jesus freaks who say stuff like "Praise Jesus" and suggest the psychics are possessed by the devil.  Of course, no clues emerge from the interrogations.  Leslie does not attend this event, even though she wants to, because "The controlling forces again, the sense of inevitability: She was here because she was supposed to be here."  Night Screams is the kind of book in which people who believe in Christ are portrayed as idiots but people who believe in psychic powers and do things because abstract ill-defined "forces" make them are considered eminently sensible.

Neal sneaks away from the big village get-together organized by the FBI because he had a vision of himself in the basement of the local antique store--the alcoholic antiques dealer is one of the most vociferous anti-psychics, a prime suspect in the harassment campaign against Leslie and, according to Neal, a prime suspect in the slayings of the clairvoyants.  Neal has been portrayed as a comic relief nerd loser, but he doesn't just break into the antique store because he is foolish--he has to do what he saw in the vision.  "You couldn't deny a precognition; you could get into trouble that way, trying to change what you were destined to do."  What is the point of psychic powers if they don't help you make decisions, to avoid trouble?  Why are the psychic powers even in this story?--I swear the plot would work just the same if they were left out, just have the villagers fear "city folk" instead of "clairvoyants."

The trip to the antiques store leads to a scene, maybe supposed to be funny, of Neal and the alcoholic antiques dealer almost coming to blows and Brad stumbling upon their confrontation and calming them down by "rocking" his revolver, which I guess is a typo for "cocking."  I hope it's not a typo for "racking."  Neal's psychic vision and the whole antique store sequence, which is pretty lengthy and includes Brad doing a top to bottom search of the antique store, contribute nothing to the plot.

Oscar has a vision of his own and runs out into the snow.  Jo follows him, only to be ambushed and murdered.  Leslie also has a vision that leads her and Brad to where Jo hangs from a noose, dead, under a covered bridge (like on the book jacket)--Oscar is still there, in a daze, too out of his wits to offer any clues.  Again we get the idea that Oscar may be to blame.  Is this just P & M trying to fool us?  Or is Oscar under the control of some other psyker, the real villain who is using Oscar merely as a tool?

As the final 50 pages of this caper begin, Brad and Leslie go to Leslie's house to have sex; Brad leaves Walker at the inn to look after Oscar and Neal.  Oscar is still out of his mind, and is so for the remainder of Part Two, but Neal has psychic visions that actually offer some value.  Neal has seen images from the past that prove the antique dealer is a fraud who sells fake antiques he makes himself and that he was the one who has been calling Leslie and who destroyed her paintings while drunk.  He wanted to get rid of the clairvoyants because he feared they would uncover his fraud.  (It is never explained why he destroyed many canvases but left one alone, the one influenced by Leslie's vision of the attack on herself--I guess we have to credit the forces of the universe for this, like so much else.)  The antiques dealer runs off and Walker chases him; left alone, Neal has a vision that sends him to Leslie's house.

After banging Leslie, Brad goes downstairs to get a sandwich and sees a figure outside.  Is it Neal?  Oscar?  Who knows?  Brad goes out into the snow to chase this mysterious character and we hear a lot about how cold it is--I thought the line "The wind-chill factor had already begun to suck body heat from him" was pretty funny, though maybe because I am the kind of person who is skeptical of "wind chill factor" and "heat index" and "real feel temp."  The mystery man ambushes Brad and knocks our hero out with some firewood.

This leaves Leslie to deal with the killer alone.  Both Leslie and the killer select weapons and tactics and strategies based on what their visions and what "the forces" permit them--they are both puppets on strings rather than agents who determine their own goals and how to pursue them, and then succeed or fail based on their decisions and abilities.  Totally lame storytelling, though I guess in keeping with Malzberg's pessimistic view of life.

The fight between Leslie and the killer is not bad, but the revelation of who the killer is is total garbage that made angry.  The person who has been killing all the psychics is a minor character I had been paying no attention to, the innkeeper's overweight wife.  (I guess we are supposed to believe her fat body looks like a man's in the distance, like when Walker chased her and when Brad saw her through the window while making a little postcoital snackerino.)  Why would a fat woman who runs an inn with her husband kill psykers?  Because she is possessed by the ghost of her dead brother, a character never mentioned in the story until page 245 of a novel the last numbered page of which is page 262.  (Maybe we are supposed to think this possession by a man gives the innkeeper's wife a masculine gait and masculine strength, at least when in kill mode, making it more believable that she can pass for a man and so successfully fight people and run away from people and lift dead bodies above her head so she can hang them from nooses.)

When she was thirteen, the innkeeper's future wife and her eight-year-old brother were playing cowboys and Indians (maybe you say "Native Americans") and she tied up her brother with a blue velvet cord and accidentally strangled him.  To make the tragic accident look like suicide, she strung her brother up with a noose.  A few years later, the brother's ghost came to inhabit his sister's body.  (This is all kind of reminding me of the Genesis masterpiece, "The Musical Box.")  Dead brother prefers living, even if he has to share a woman's body, to being dead, so when Leslie came to town, and other psykers followed, he decided to kill them because he feared they would detect his presence and send him back to the afterlife.

This little ghost plot isn't terrible but it is very frustrating that there were no clues that this fat innkeeper's wife was important to the story or had a tragic past or had masculine attributes or anything like that.  I thought a good mystery story was supposed to provide the reader an opportunity to figure out who dun it (well, at least I heard T. S. Eliot say that.)  There is no way the reader could figure out a ghost who was possessing a minor character was to blame because said ghost was never mentioned.  Come on, Pronzini!

Neal's psychic powers guide him to the unconscious Brad, whom he arouses--Neal is the only psyker in this book whose powers ever seem to actually produce.  Leslie is losing the fight and is about to die when Brad rescues her.  Instead of surrendering to Brad the ghost decides to direct his sister's body to jump out a high window--the final fight sequence takes place in the belfry; you remember Leslie's house is an old church, don't you?--to their deaths.

Part Three, three pages of text, lets us know that Brad and Leslie live happily ever after in a city apartment, that Oscar recovers his wits, and offers a joke scene in which Neal is a guest on a TV talk show where he has a vision of the host and a guest having oral sex backstage.  We never learn any more about the "forces," or Brad's or Neal's or the innkeeper's reaction to learning that a ghost was forcing the innkeeper's wife to massacre people or what happens to the alcoholic dealer of bogus antiques.  What a load of crap.

Barry N. Malzberg: "Nordic Blue," "Safety Zone," and "Another Goddamned Showboat"

In 1990, the year I turned 19, a film full of actors I don't like was released based on the famous comic strip Dick Tracy.  Also released in 1990 was a paperback anthology of all new stories about Tracy entitled Dick Tracy: The Secret Files.  I've tried to get into the (original, Chester Gould) Dick Tracy comic strip a few times, but the art and the writing, I found, were just too boring.  (On the other hand, like everybody, I've loved the Daffy Duck spoof of Dick Tracy known as "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery" since I was a kid.)  So, why do I care about Dick Tracy: The Secret Files?  Because I recently discovered that our hero Barry N. Malzberg contributed a story to it!

Today we'll read that story, and two other stories by Malzberg that appeared in 1990 anthologies, "Safety Zone" and "Another Goddamned Showboat."  I considered blogging about a fourth 1990 Malzberg story, "Playback," but when I looked at it I realized I had read it before but not blogged about it.  "Playback" is an annoying gimmick story, a sort of literary stunt in which Malzberg builds a story by augmenting a contemptuous spoof of science fiction penned by Raymond Chandler, quoting every line of Chandler's mocking parody and adding material between Chandler's sentences.  I'm in no mood to deal with this kind of thing; consider this a sub rosa blog post on "Playback," like an Easter Egg or hidden bonus track.

"Nordic Blue"

Back in 2018 I acquired a seriously battered copy of 1970's The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy for two dollars and today, to prepare myself for Barry's take on Tracy, you know, get a sense of the tone and themes of this American classic, I read three of the included 1940s Chester Gould stories, titled in this 1970 volume "88 Keyes," "Flattop" and "Breathless Mahoney and B. O. Plenty."  I still found the art to be pretty poor, even repulsively ugly, but the stories were actually entertaining, real hard-boiled portraits of human evil, monstrous individuals committing atrocities and more or less ordinary people succumbing to temptation or being seduced into the criminal underworld.  Many people--including women--get shot, run over by a train, set on fire, impaled with gardening tools, etc., and the death count is high.  Besides that welcome mayhem there is a lot of business with clues, Tracy finding something the killer dropped and the police lab analyzing it, that isn't exactly thrilling, but isn't too bad.  Perhaps the best parts of the strips are the extreme measures the villains take to hide while on the run, crawling down into chimneys or climbing into a bag of laundry and the like.  Maybe I have changed, become more amenable to this sort of material, or maybe the strips I tried to read years ago were not the best ones, and the ones I chose today represent the cream of the Gould crop.  Anyway, I can recommend at least those three sections of The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy, like 70 pages of a 250-page book.  

OK, let's take a look at Malzberg's take on the Tracy character, penned like 45 years after the Gould material I just read.

Well, it seems to me that Malzberg here uses the surface elements of Dick Tracy to write about his usual themes, like skepticism of technology and disastrous sexual relationships, and maybe to satirize the violence and pro-law-and-order attitude of Gould's strip; he doesn't seem to be trying to reproduce or pay homage to the elements of the '40s Gould strips that I found engaging, though maybe Malzberg is responding to later strips--somewhat to my surprise, the Dick Tracy comic strip is still going to this day, long after Gould's retirement in 1977.  

Malzberg's story starts at police HQ, with Tracy and a female subordinate getting word of a strange death, that of a man who froze to death, even though it is July.  A big theme of "Nordic Blue" is growing old and resentment of the change around you, and this woman colleague furthers this theme--it seems likely she will replace Tracy when he retires.  A male subordinate plays a similar supporting role in Malzberg's tale; this guy loudly complains about how things like the Miranda ruling and soft judges and juries have given criminals more freedom to operate and tied the hands of the cops; Tracy agrees, but is less vocal about it.  

During the investigation, Tracy uses high technology to solve the case, but he and his male colleague are nevertheless very skeptical of technology.  The villain is a manifestation of the dangers of high technology, a woman named Crystal Freezum who produces drugs via some process that generates extreme cold, cold that is killing people. Freezum also serves to represent the customary Malzbergian theme of the disastrous sexual relationship--she has two henchmen who are in love with her, even though she treats them like garbage. 

Malzberg shoehorns into his story still more themes.  One is pessimism about city life--the city is said to be "overpopulated" and unlikely to "make it out of the century."  ("Make it out of the century" is an example of a metaphor being used to obscure meaning and evade responsibility rather than clarify meaning and illuminate a point--what the hell does "make it out of the century" mean?  It can mean anything, so nobody can accuse Malzberg of being wrong in his dire prediction.)  To me, this feels like a 1970s attitude than a 1980s one.  More in tune with what I expect to hear from 1980s liberals like our sad sack pal Barry is the idea that the rich are building a two-tier society and walling themselves off from the second-class citizens.  Miranda, which gets mentioned a lot in this piece, means "perps could make believe that they were citizens," luxury hi-rises are said to be where people live to escape interaction with the doomed city, and we are told Crystal Freezum never leaves her apartment, the decor of which is entirely uniformly white.  The extreme extent of Malzberg's pessimism is revealed by the fact that, in this doomed city of haves and have-nots, Tracy is not universally considered a selfless champion of the have-nots!  We learn in no uncertain terms that some beat cops and ordinary civilians have been making snarky comments about how Tracy is now a celebrity who spends a lot of time on TV and only heads out to the field to work flashy cases!  

The plot of "Nordic Blue" is not great, and there are problems with the execution of multiple scenes.  In the '40s Dick Tracy strips I read, the villains kill people with their own hands in order to get their hands on others' cash, and then kill and deceive and corrupt still more people in their efforts to retain the cash and escape justice--everything in these WWII-era strips is very direct and morally clear.  In Malzberg's story, Crystal Freezum is some kind of drug dealer and what she is doing and why, and its moral valence, are far less clearly defined and far less exciting.  I couldn't really understand why she needed to generate deadly cold to manufacture drugs nor what the connection was between some of the injuries and deaths in the story and her drug manufacturing operations.  I can see that Malzberg wanted some grand guignol scenes, like the one with a veteran of the Bataan death march whose hands needed to be amputated because they froze, as a nod to all the terrible bloodshed in the original comic strips, but Crystal Freezum's connection to this atrocity  is sort of tenuous.  (Maybe Malzberg is trying to suggest that the really bad criminals in real life are not people who stab other people or set them on fire with their own hands but businesses who pollute the environment or something.)  Malzberg starts his story off on a bad foot with some pretty feeble jokes in the police station that don't seem to play any role in developing the characters or generating atmosphere.  The concluding action scene is not very well done--you can't visualize where people are or what they are doing, and their movements make no sense.  And the ending, a downer of course, is somewhat cryptic.

"Nordic Blue," which as far as I can tell has never been reprinted, is kind of a mess and I am going to have to give it a thumbs down.   

"Safety Zone" 

"Safety Zone" debuted in an anthology about ghosts in New England.  Like everybody, I like New England, a great road-tripping region.  Consider this a recommendation from MPorcius Travel Guide.  I am reading "Safety Zone" today in a scan of 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories, and you can also find it in Collecting Myself, one of the Malzberg collections recently published by the good people at Stark House.      

"Safety Zone" bears as an epigraph a quote from Joanna Russ that refers to the fact that H. P. Lovecraft had a very limited sex life, and apparently little interest in sex, and dealt very little with sexual relationships in his writing.  Malzberg's story is set in Providence, and is narrated by a young woman, Donna, who has never heard of Lovecraft and lives with a lame roommate who hates to leave the house and spends his time watching TV and writing his autobiography.  As for Donna, it seems like the center of her life is going to the singles bar.  

Tonight Donna meets an odd character at the bar--she doesn't realize it, but it is the ghost of H. P. Lovecraft, come back to Providence in this year, the year he would have turned 100, to try to learn about sex!  He clumsily tries to develop some sort of relationship with Donna, even gets physically aggressive, but Donna rejects him.  The ghost talks about hearing the hounds in the distance, I guess a metaphor for the realization of those no longer young that death is approaching.  Donna goes home, and after finding her roommate passed out in front of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, she goes to bed and for the first time hears the hounds in the distance.  It is implied that she, like Lovecraft, has an unhealthy attitude about sex and time may be running out for her to build a healthy sexual relationship before she dies, as it ran out for HPL. 

Like "Nordic Blue," "Safety Zone" is a "riff" on a major American pop culture phenomenon that Malzberg (it seems) is uneasy with or hostile to, a story about getting old and a story in which figure people who don't want to leave their apartments and otherwise erect barriers between themselves and others.  "Nordic Blue" is much better than "Safety Zone," though; the jokes are actually amusing and the characters' motivations more clear and their fates more poignant.  Here we have a solid Malzberg production.

("Playback" is another derivative piece drawing on the work of an iconic American genre writer--I guess this was what Malzberg was up to in 1990.  Detractors might call this behavior lazy, but fans can comfortably label these works "meta" and "recursive"!) 

     

"Another Goddamned Showboat"

I don't know a lot about Ernest Hemingway, so much of this story must be flying right past me.  In "Another Goddamned Showboat" Hemingway is a frustrated writer and has turned to the pulp market, focusing on science fiction.  He sits in a Paris cafe with his wife as the Germans advance on the city, groaning because "the kids" Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein have broken into Astounding but Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. has rejected all of Hemingway's many submissions.  The tone of Malzberg's story is despairing--Hemingway is broken up over the fates of his peers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce, feeling old, drinking too much, and worried because soon the money will run out and they'll have to leave France and he'll have to take some menial job.  But Hemmingway isn't giving up--he reads the Asimov and Heinlein stories with care, hoping to learn from them.  Malzberg's last line, "The war was on.  The war was coming.  Bit by bit, one by one, the stars were coming out" perhaps is meant to contrast how the world at large was entering a long period of terrible destruction and tremendous risk--global conventional war among all the great powers followed by the Cold War between the nuclear-armed hegemons that come out of the conflagration on top--but the world of science fiction was beginning its golden age with the appearance of Asimov, Heinlein, and others; maybe, among those others, along with A. E. van Vogt and Clifford Simak and Ted Sturgeon, in this alternate universe, will be Ernest Hemmingway.

A moderately good piece that presumably draws on Malzberg's own experience as an aspiring literary writer who had to resort to genre fiction to get published.  "Another Goddamned Showboat" debuted in What Might Have Been: Volume 2: Alternate Heroes, and in the same year appeared in the omnibus edition of both volumes of What Might Have Been.  In 1994 the story was again presented to the SF community in the collection The Passage of the Light: The Recursive Science Fiction of Barry N. Malzberg, and when our Italian friends put out a book of science fiction about science fiction in 2010 they included a translation of "Another Goddamned Showboat."

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We're on a journey here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and that journey is not a straight line to any particular final destination.  Sometimes we get diverted on to little side roads, see what is at the end of what turn out to be cul-de-sacs.  Our little Dick Tracy detour today may have been a disappointment, but time spent learning about major elements of American popular culture and the career of Barry N. Malzberg is not time wasted.  And the Hemingway and Lovecraft stories Malzberg put out there in 1990 are not bad.

More short stories next time, dear readers, stories from further back in time, back before I was born.

Asimov's Masters: A C Clarke, L Niven and B Malzberg

Barry Malzberg's "The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" came to mind while working on my last blog post, so let's read it today.  One of the places "The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" was reprinted is an anthology of stories from Asimov's magazine entitled Isaac Asimov's Masters of Science Fiction.  This is a curious artifact; it looks like they just took the same plates used to print the magazine and used them to print almost all the pages of this book.   I also have to wonder if any of the stories in the book live up in tone or content to the promise of the sex and violence cover. 

We'll read "The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" from a scan of this anthology, and round out this blog post with stories by two other masters, men whom we'd have to guess know a lot more than Barry about the hard sciences and also about bringing in the big bucks for publishers and bringing home those Hugos, Arthur C. Clarke and Larry Niven.

"Quarantine" by Arthur C. Clarke 

As Clarke describes in an intro to this story, "Quarantine" is a stunt.  Some British guy came up with the idea of printing up postcards with an entire SF story on them that SF fans could collect and mail to each other.  Asimov wrote one, and so did Clarke; "Quarantine" is that postcard-sized story.

"Quarantine" is a little cryptic, but I think I get it.  There is a vast interstellar empire of robots.  They keep sending recon units to Earth, but all these recon units get "infected" and so HQ destroys them.  After this has happened many times, the command program of the inorganic space empire directs the destruction of the Earth.  The surprise ending is that the "infection" suffered by the recon robots was getting addicted to chess, and the command program knew that this addiction, if allowed to spread, would so obsess the computers of the empire that the empire would collapse.

Acceptable.  After its debut in Asimov's, "Quarantine" has reappeared in multiple Asimov properties and Clarke collections.

"Cautionary Tales" by Larry Niven 

This is a brief philosophical piece.  We might say it has a twist ending or subverts one's expectations.  It is written in a vivid and easy to digest style.  We'll marginally recommend it.

Gordon is one of the few humans on some kind of space station or something full of intelligent aliens of many different species.  One alien approaches him, a being who has a similar body chemistry to a human.  This alien is obsessed with trying to achieve immortality, and has been spending his life travelling hither and thither throughout the universe, investigating every culture and every technology, trying to find the secret of immortality.  He has not found it yet, but he hasn't given up.  He has developed a sense that tells him when he meets other intelligent beings who share his obsession--Gordon he knows is one.

Gordon hears this alien talk, describe all the places he has been, all the time he has spent on the quest for immortality.  The alien is now too old to have children, something he has left undone; the alien lets slip that he has lived over ten thousand Earth years.  Then he asks Gordon to join him on his quest, which will afford Gordon access to knowledge and technology no human has ever before had access to.

The story thus far resembles the first chapter of a novel about a long quest, but this is a short story, and Niven's twist ending is that Gordon refuses to join this alien on his quest talking to the alien has opened Gordon's eyes to ancient wisdom--it is better to spend your brief life productively, not on a a quixotic quest seek to extend that life indefinitely.  Gordon heads back to Earth, presumably to meet a woman and build a family, the only real way to achieve anything close to immortality.

I like it.  "Cautionary Tales" shows up in a few of the aforementioned Asimov properties as well as a bunch of Niven collections.

"The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" by Barry Malzberg

OK, this is why we are here today.  Let's dig in!

"The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" is an epistolary story consisting of communications between different individuals; each individual gets his own font, at least in the Asimov's printings.  Through the documents we learn that it is the 24th century and a big organization handles what amounts to TV broadcasts across the solar system, maybe across the galaxy.  Our protagonist, the Roger of the title, is an expert on mystery stories, and has applied for a job composing mystery scripts.  He was rejected, largely because the mystery form is no longer popular and thus few mystery writers are needed.  Science fiction, westerns, pornography and "gothics" are much more popular, and the organization's management suggests Roger apply for a job writing military adventure stories set on Venus.

Roger is a very emotional and egotistical guy.  He is insulted by the suggestion he write SF, and argues passionately that the mystery is the form that built popular fiction entertainment and that soon it will again rise to dominance over SF, the western, and the gothics.  When the management still refuses to hire him, Roger hatches a cunning plan of revenge.  He has a friend who is already employed as a mystery writer, and Roger has this accomplice put scripts composed by Roger into the system.  These scripts cause an uproar as they, apparently, kill off famous fictional detectives like Hercule Poirot.

A pretty fun story with meta characteristics that are not cloying or indulgent but actually sort of amusing and interesting.  What genres will continue to be popular in the future?    

"The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" would be reprinted in various publications associated with Asimov, and Malzberg and his oft-times partner Bill Pronzini included it in their anthology of SF crime stories, Dark Sins, Dark Dreams.  The version of the story printed in Dark Sins, Dark Dreams lacks much of the distinctive use of fonts, but it includes an intro by Malzberg in which Barry tells us that, when he (Barry) publicly declared he was quitting the SF field, Philip K. Dick called Barry "a whiner."

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Three stories which accomplish their goals, which are not too long or too convoluted, stories in which people's behavior and motivations make sense, stories which have twist endings that do not strain credulity but sync up with what has come before and thus offer the reader satisfaction.  These stories are not breathtaking masterpieces, but the respectable work of craftspeople who show respect for their field, their audiences, and themselves.  Things don't always go so smoothly here at MPFL, so let's show some gratitude to Messrs. Clarke, Niven and Malzberg, and the editor of Asimov's, George H. Scithers.  

More short stories when next we convene here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Barry N. Malzberg: "Getting In," "Getting Out," and, w/ B Pronzini, "Night Rider" and "A Matter of Survival"

Digging around scans of late 1970s detective magazines I came up with two Barry N. Malzberg stories I haven't read, and to round out a full blog post let's add to them two stories Malzberg collaborated on with his pal Bill Pronzini.  I read these all in scans of the issues of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in which they debuted, haphazardly reading the collabs out of chronological order.

"Getting In" by Barry N. Malzberg (1977)

This is an absurdist, somewhat dreamlike, story depicting the pressures inherent in the life of the middle-class male.  Our narrator, I guess an architect or something like that, is so stressed out by dealing with his office job, with his wife and kids, and with his mistress, that he tries to admit himself to an insane asylum called "the Residence."  The doctors run many tests on him and over his protestations declare him sane.  They explain to him that nobody is happy, that his psychological state is normal for one of his age and socioeconomic status.  

We get jokes about how the narrator always contacts his mistress by calling her from a payphone at the fast food restaurant Wonder Waffles, and scenes in which the narrator drives his assistant insane and jealously watches as the man is hauled off to the Residence.  Plus lots of dark humor that demonstrates how selfish the narrator is and how manipulative and emotional women are.  The story ends with the narrator taking up a Smith and Wesson .38, like the guy in one of the Malzberg stories we just read a few days ago, and using it to torture a doctor, who, even as he bleeds from his gunshot wounds, insists the narrator is sane.  As the story ends it becomes starkly dreamlike, and we are given the impression the narrator is going to commit suicide.

This story is so fantastical, feels so much like a cynical fairy tale set in a hyperbolic caricature of our own world, that it is odd to see it in a crime magazine instead of a science fiction magazine.  I don't know that "Getting In" has ever been reprinted, so all you Malzberg obsessive collectors out there will need a copy of the March 1977 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, but if I know you sensitive and sophisticated guys as well as I think I do, you wanted one as soon as you saw the cool blue of the issue's cover.

"Getting Out" by Barry N. Malzberg (1978)

Nothing makes the cool blue photographic cover of the March '77 AHMM look better than the embarrassingly lame (the kids would call it "cringe") golf cartoon cover of the July 1978 ish.  Ugh.  But it seems "Getting Out" has never been printed anywhere besides behind this cover that is making me ruefully shake my head.  

As we were hoping, "Getting Out" is a sequel to "Getting In," even though the insane asylum, called "The Residence" in "Getting In" is called "The Institute" here in "Getting Out."  (Wonder Waffles is still "Wonder Waffles," thankfully.)  After shooting at least one person with his Smith and Wesson .38 (described here as "antique," giving us science fiction vibes), and not killing himself, the narrator is held in a cell which he considers more comfortable than the middle-class work and family milieu from which it (partially, as the wife and mistress do come to visit and the kids send correspondence requesting an increase in their allowance) separates him.  He expresses the hope he will be able to spend the next thirty years in this cell, but further tests indicate he is sane, and a doctor confides "You are a valuable social resource, a presumptive sane person. We cannot keep you, really, for thirty hours."  

Released, the narrator returns to work and to home and we get the same kinds of jokes about middle-class life as we got in "Getting In."  Then comes the punchline of the two stories--the narrator and his mistress truly fall in love, and the narrator decides to abandon his family.  This destruction of the family unit cannot be accepted by society, and so the insane asylum that rejected him when he was miserable and tried to admit himself now forcibly admits him, now that he has a chance of happiness by ditching wife and kids.     

Malzberg writes about the profession of psychology, big institutions, and disastrous sexual relationships all the time, and "Getting In" and "Getting Out" are pretty good examples of his work on these themes.  The extent to which Malzberg is sincere in his portrayal of the mental health establishment as a cog in the machine of bourgeois capitalism, as devoted to the project of corralling men in the prison that is the child-rearing family in order to bolster GDP, and to what extent he is spoofing such assessments, I don't know, but the text Malzberg produces is fun and provocative both in its general themes and in its many little jokes and details.  Thumbs up!    

"Night Rider" by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg (1977)

Compared to the "Getting" series, "Night Rider" was an international sensation, seeing reprint in the Pronzini and Malzberg collections Problems Solved and On Account of Darkness as well as translated for the Finnish edition of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine as well as the Japanese Hayakawa's Mystery Magazine.  

When I was living in the Hawkeye State, I checked On Account of Darkness out of the Des Moines Public Library, and so I read "Night Rider" in that dimly recalled period of time before I started this blog.  The New Jersey setting and the marital conflict plot stuck with me--I remembered the story immediately as I started reading it today.  Oh yeah, and the fact that I didn't really like the ending.

Our narrator is a failure in life who has always taken the path of least resistance and is married to a nagging boring woman who has the TV on all day.  His only relief is his nightly drive of over 60 miles along the highways and country roads of Northern New Jersey in his worn out Cadillac Fleetwood.  Pronzini and Malzberg take us with the narrator on one of these drives, mentioning real highways like Route 80 (what people in other states, I have learned, call "I-80") and towns like Lodi, though the geography feels fictionalized and there seems to be a typo, "Watching" for "Watchung."

Anyway, we hear how annoying the wife is and how unhappy the narrator is, and how he is stopped by the police so often for speeding he has developed a whole system of trying to bribe them with plausible deniability if the cop refuses the bribe.

Another car starts chasing the narrator, and we get a pretty good--realistic and tense--car chase.  The narrator drives too fast, is distracted by trying to figure out who might be chasing him, and crashes on a lonely country road by a swamp.  He gets out of the wreck, injured, sees the pursuer's car parked on the shoulder--it is his car!  The man emerging from the car must be himself!  The illusion, presumably a manifestation of his guilt, vanishes and the narrator remembers that he murdered his wife by hitting her with her TV and put her corpse (and that of the TV) in the trunk.

I had little tolerance for such silly psychological twist endings when I was younger, but now I take them in stride and don't find "Night Rider" as disappointing as I did when I read it over ten years ago.  So, thumbs up.

"A Matter of Survival" by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg (1976)

Another Pronzini-Malzberg collab that was reprinted in Problems Solved.  This is today's weakest story, more an idea than an actual story, and lacking the little jokes and sharp images and biting phrases that add so much value to our earlier three tales.

Two business executive are on the balcony of an apartment building over twenty stories up in some Midwestern or Western city where a party is being held.  Each man owns an electronics firm that is losing money because of competition from out east and because corporate welfare from the feds has dried up.  Both companies will fold unless they merge and take advantage of the resulting economies of scale by slashing personnel and space costs.  But the two men don't get along, so a merger seems impossible.

The men don't like each other because one is married to a faithless, manipulative, promiscuous slut and her latest affair is with the other.  She has them under her thumb, enjoys torturing them, refuses to allow her husband to divorce her, refuses to allow the other to end their affair.  And she is against the merger the men think is the only means of saving their two companies.  She comes out on to the balcony to torment them, and they join forces to throw her off the balcony and convince the cops it was a freak accident.  The men's business careers and psychological well-being have been saved.  

Merely acceptable, a sort of skeletal outline of a story that lacks personality and emotional impact.   

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So, four stories about the tragedy of the bourgeoisie, how work life and women drive middle-class men insane, drive them to violence!  Maybe we can tie these themes to a specific time and place, perhaps they reflect conditions in the doom and gloom 1970s and the exigencies typical of American capitalism, and maybe Malzberg intends that interpretation.  But I think the themes of these stories are universal--no doubt medieval European merchants and Soviet apparatchiks were under the same sorts of stresses, were themselves pushed to the brink and sometimes beyond by the pressures of juggling the demands of women and bosses and their responsibilities to and for subordinates and children.

Of today's tales, "Night Rider" feels like the most palatable to a broad audience, a conventional suspense piece written in a realistic style that I think would appeal to mainstream thriller readers, though it has a Malzbergian psychological resolution.  Also conventional, but blandly and boringly so, is today's least piece, "A Matter of Survival," a story with a sort of boiler plate plot that is unadorned by stylistic flourishes or compelling characters or images.  The two solo Malzberg stories, "Getting In" and "Getting Out," are pure Malzberg, reminiscent of so much of his body of work in their themes, style and details, and full of fun; these two are definitely worth seeking out for the Malzberg fan.

Barry N. Malzberg: "1984," "Reason Seven" and "Piu Mosso"

I was digging through the old paperbacks and magazines at Antiques Crossroads in Hagerstown, MD, when I came upon an issue of a digest-sized magazine I'd never heard of before, Espionage.  The cover illustration was sort of crude and I would have just ignored the thing and forgotten about it ten seconds later had I not spotted on the cover the name of our hero, Barry N. Malzberg!  Attached to a cryptic title that I didn't recognize, a title doesn't appear at isfdb!  I had to own this magazine!  And luck was with me--the price sticker on the plastic bag read "$1!"

Let's read this story and two other Malzberg stories from magazines printed in 1985, stories we might call rare.  

"1984" 

"1984" is a trifle, taking up a mere half page of Ed Ferman's F&SF.  This issue of F&SF also includes a book column by Algis Budrys, in which Budrys talks about A. E. van Vogt and van Vogt's influence on or relationships with Damon Knight, Philip K. Dick and Charles L. Harness, and a film column by Harlan Ellison, in which Ellison savages Gremlins and questions the effect on society of the way talented filmmakers George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg are using their power.  Both of these columns are clever and compelling, Budrys and Ellison demonstrating a deep knowledge and commitment to genre literature (and in Ellison's case, cinema) and getting pretty emotional, Budrys' column ultimately being heartwarming and sweet and Ellison's of course self-important and over-the-top bitter and angry.  I definitely see where Ellison is coming from with Gremlins and Lucas and Spielberg's work, however--as a kid I loved Gremlins, and of course the film is very competent technically, but when I saw it for the first time as an adult back in 2015 I was put off by how much it feels like a vicious attack by the contemptuous cognitive elite on ordinary average-and-below-average-IQ Americans and their perhaps childish attitude about Christmas.

Anyway, Malzberg's "1984," which Ferman suggests is about the election in which Ronald Reagan thrashed Walter Mondale, relates a scene in a school for scientists or gods or whatever; the narrator is the teacher and he is reviewing students' work.  A student has created a simulation of a society, or an actual miniature society (like in Ted Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God," I suppose), apparently a regular part of the curriculum.  The miniature society's politicians are stupid, its cities are full of riots, its countryside plagued by pollution.  The student is protective of his work and thinks he can jigger with it and get this fallen society back on course, but teach insists he put the people of this society "out of their misery."  The student will fail if he doesn't follow orders, so he pulls "the electoral lever" and destroys the little civilization.  

Presumably the implication is that by voting for Ronald Reagan the American people had destroyed the world, but maybe we should take solace in the fact that the world is in a terrible irreparable mess.  A view into the mind of the center-left intellectual in the Reagan era, which I guess was a tough time for them psychologically, as so many times are.  

Not a good story by any means, but an interesting time capsule that is brief and to the point.  Acceptable.  "1984" can be found in the recent Malzberg collection Collecting Myself.  

"Reason Seven" 

"Reason Seven" debuted in Omni and was reprinted in 1994 in the anthology Omni Visions Two and in 2023 in the anthology Ready When You Are and Other Stories.  Maybe it is not fair to call this one "rare."  Anyway, the issue of Omni in which "Reason Seven" appeared, where I am reading it, has a column by Charles Platt about the use of speculative futuristic languages in SF with references to Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and Russel Hoban's Riddley Walker, and a story by Kate Wilhelm, a person whom we are always hearing is so very important.  Photos of Malzberg and Wilhelm are included on page 10 for those who want to admire these two lookers.

Like "1984," "Reason Seven" has on its surface a difficult and destructive human relationship and is some kind of attack on Ronald Reagan that doesn't actually mention the 40th president's name.  It is the near future, I guess the mid or late '90s, and the United States has been engaging in invasions and raids all over the Third World in the prosecution of its conflict with the Soviet Union.  The assumption of the American intellectual class, of course, is that opposing the Soviet Union is a mistake or actually immoral, so the US government strives to deceive the public into supporting these kinetic actions and one means of doing so is producing what are purported to be enemy documents captured during the attacks, documents that make the enemy look bad.  Our narrator's job is composing this black propaganda. 

Like so many Malzberg stories, "Reason Seven" is a sort of report or testimonial the narrator has been ordered to produce.  In it he describes how he, stupidly, told a woman he was dating, a nurse with a masters degree, about his job.  Government agencies and employees in Malzberg stories are always incompetent, and not only is the narrator shown to be foolish enough to explain his espionage job to a civilian predisposed to oppose American foreign policy; Malzberg also makes clear that the fake documents the narrator concocts are shoddily composed but that the narrator, nevertheless, is very proud of them, and confident that by creating them he is "making a difference."

The nurse is outraged when the narrator explains his job and shows her his elaborately and lovingly organized library of his own half-baked meretricious writings, and she not only denounces him and his work but starts destroying the binders full of them and declaring she will expose him to the press.  So, the narrator murders her.  When he tells his superiors about what he has done, they quickly move to solve the problem presented by the woman's death, and assign the narrator the job of writing a suicide note.  I believe the final twist is that the narrator is going to be extrajudicially executed by the agency for which he works, that the suicide note he is writing is his own--in the same way he has been writing fake documents in the voice of commies the government has murdered as a way of justifying the killing of those reds, he is writing a fake document in his own voice to justify his own murder in pursuit of anti-communist policy.

More interesting than the story's banal and silly idea that the US is no better and perhaps worse than the USSR is Malzberg's depiction of the inner life of the writer and his relationship with his employers and with the public.  The narrator of "Reason Seven," for money, churns out at a high rate of speed a vast quantity of writing at the direction of callous employers, texts that few people end up reading and which most ordinary people would find unconvincing or uninteresting or even incomprehensible, but the narrator is nevertheless proud of his work, the artistic touches he has tried to include within it, and he cherishes the idea that by doing this (in-fact useless or even evil) literary work he is somehow "making a difference."  This is of course a somewhat caricatured depiction of Malzberg's own career.  This sad self-reflection is clever and compelling, and of course I appreciate Malzberg's depiction of a disastrous sexual relationship, one of my favorite themes and one that Malzberg skillfully addresses again and again in his work, in particular how here Malzberg focuses not on physical sexual dysfunction but on the risk we all run when we expose our true selves to others, when we make ourselves vulnerable in pursuit of an intimate physical or emotional connection to others; here in "Reason Seven" the result of a man opening himself up to a woman is catastrophic for all involved.

I like it.

"Piu Mosso" 

Malzberg knows all about music and a quick search on the google machine tells us that "piu mosso" is an instruction you might find on sheet music that directs the musician to play faster and with more energy.  What this has to do with this story is a little vague; maybe we are expected to think this story strives to achieve "the condition of music," i. e., it seeks to affect us directly, without having to describe reality or construct a plot or engage in other such intermediary techniques and devices.  (Music inspires emotion in the listener without having to tell a story or conjure an image the way painting, sculpture and literature generally do.)  Of today's stories, "Piu Mosso" is the least tethered to reality, a dream-like absurdist narrative featuring jokes about how government employees are lazy and corrupt and government operations are incomprehensible.  But just because a story tells a truth doesn't mean it is good; "Piu Mosso" is the weakest of today's stories.

A civil servant working in a building full of shirkers, malingerers, liars, and double and triple agents has decided to murder the President, he is not sure why; perhaps to become famous.  (Political murder is one of Malzberg's hobby horses, one I find far less entertaining than the sexual dysfunction theme.)  By threatening him with a revolver, the narrator acquires from his office mate the itinerary for the President's movements today, a document of loose sheets variously called "plans" and "charts."  This turns out to be unnecessary, as out in the corridor the narrator encounters the President--the chief executive is on his own, in a disguise and exposes himself as a quadruple agent somehow already aware of the narrator's scheme of assassinating him.  The narrator drops his revolver (one of the story's little jokes is how the narrator insists on calling the gun his "point thirty-eight") and the President picks it up and, after consulting the itinerary to make sure he is actually supposed to be here, the President shoots the narrator--in the flash of the shot the narrator sees his office mate and has a ridiculous conversation with the man. 

There is very little plot, emotion or substance of any kind here; "Piu Mosso" is like an unfunny dream sequence taken from a novel that was included in the novel only to pad out the page count.  Thumbs down, I'm afraid.

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I can only really recommend one of today's 1985 Malzberg productions, but that one, "Reason Seven," is pretty solid.  But I have no regrets about exploring some of the less-travelled paths in the sprawling bibliography of our pal Barry.

The Empty People by Barry N. Malzberg

"There is no science in it at all, merely cheap jargon, cheap tricks, old shuffling; a wink here, a dance there, all of it shaped only toward one end and that the most drastic of all because we give it no name.  But enough.  Enough of this."

I've owned my copy of Lancer's 1969 The Empty People, one of Barry Malzberg's earlier novels, published under the transparent pseudonym "K. M. O'Donnell," for over two years, having purchased it in Rockville, MD in early June of 2023, as chronicled on X, the everything app!  Today we crack open this decaying volume to see that it is dedicated to Malzberg's daughter and parents, and to science fiction editors Edward L. Ferman, Harry Harrison, Robert P. Hoskins and Frederik Pohl, and to read its 159 pages.  Should you want to read along, feel free to surf over to ebay and acquire your own 56-year-old paperback by forking over four or five times as many shekels as I put into the palms of the hipsters and nerds of Rockville, but you can just hunt around online--I think you'll find a copy you can read on the same screen you are looking at right now for the same amount you pay me to explore the glories of MPorcius Fiction Log.

Joachim Boaz blogged about The Empty People back in 2014 but I promise I don't remember what he said; after I've drafted my own take here I'll read his and respond to it at the end of this post.

Malzberg, of course, is a failed literary writer who, initially at least, wanted a career more like Saul Bellow's or Vladimir Nabokov's than Robert Heinlein's or Isaac Asimov's, and chapter one of The Empty People is all about typical mainstream mid-century literary concerns--we've got unfaithful childless suburban housewife Della Archer who feels unfulfilled; everybody tells her she is very smart, so she could have had some big career, but didn't, and maybe if she had children they would give her life meaning, but she is sterile.  Malzberg is also a critic of science fiction with a broad and deep knowledge of the field, and chapter one is very "meta," with our housewife being captured by saucer-flying aliens during their invasion (which leaves New York City in flaming ruins) and thrust into a cell stocked with a fulsome supply of sleaze and science fiction paperbacks.  The captive Della has nothing to do but read the books, giving Malzberg a chance to voice the opinion (his own or a parody of critics'?) that science fiction is a bunch of nonsense.

At least one other person has been put in solitary confinement with stacks of books by the invaders, whom one prisoner believes are called "Keepers" because they are keeping all the human race imprisoned, or because they are the most clever and advanced of the many races throughout the galaxy and are dedicated to keeping the peace.  (And don't overlook the possible Biblical reference.)  Others come to believe that the invaders are known as the X'Ching (Malzberg spoofing the I'Ching?), sadistic natives of our solar system who mercilessly crush any other rising civilization in the system.  

The guy who calls the invaders "the Keepers" Malzberg calls "the Poet;" his memory has almost entirely been erased by the aliens.  His cell is chock full of poetry books, so he figures E.T. wants him to write a poem.  The man struggles to come up with some good verses, but the Keepers don't care--what they want is for him to terrorize a human woman, to pursue her and let her escape again and again before finally murdering and perhaps raping her--I suspect this is Malzberg parodying crime and horror fiction.  When the poet refuses, the aliens torture him until he agrees.

We get entertaining flashback chapters about Della's husband William...or is it James?  William/James is found to have an inoperable brain tumor by family doctor Perkins, one of the men Della is having an affair with.  Della contacts a sort of mad scientist figure, an American scientist who fled to Switzerland when the authorities felt his techniques too radical (like our beloved Peter Cushing in a Frankenstein movie, this mad doctor and Perkins bitch and moan that the medical establishment is reactionary and blocks progress) and he arrives to try experimental treatment on Della's comatose husband.    

As we expect in a Malzberg story, there are many suggestions the science fiction elements of the story are not real but the products of the characters' dreaming or suffering mental illness or brain damage.  The different chapters seem like they are from different universes or timelines, or different dreams or delusions--why is Della's spouse sometimes called William and other times James?  In one chapter we are told Della is sterile--in another, that her husband is the sterile one.  Is the mad scientist of chapter six the same guy as the gynecologist in chapter seven?--both these jokers lack an ear and have some kind of robotic leg, after all.  

The story (stories?) of Della and William (James?) Archer's difficult marriage and sexual and medical problems is interesting and entertaining, and Malzberg uses a style that is ambiguous and equivocal, but still smooth and easy to digest.  Less compelling is the story of Rogers, a man who thinks himself some kind of messiah who gets placed (or thinks he has been placed) on a rubble-strewn alien world (for some reason he calls it a sun) where short aliens with stubby limbs mill about, mostly avoiding him.  When the stubby aliens begin talking to him he becomes more sane, stops thinking of himself as a messiah figure.  (Much of The Empty People feels like an allegory of psychotherapy.)  The stubby aliens tell Rogers they are on a tour and waiting for something exciting to happen, something involving him that the entrepreneurs who sold them tour tickets promised.  Nothing happens and after he has come to rely on the aliens' company to maintain his mental health the aliens leave the planet for the next leg of the tour.  They will return in the end of the novel for the big event.  This Rogers business is the weakest part of The Empty People and could be eliminated without loss, in my opinion.         

The tone and themes of The Empty People are hopelessness and disappointment; again and again it is brought home to us that life is inexplicable and without meaning and your plans and desires will be frustrated and any reliance on others is a mistake, that those with authority and influence manipulate you for their own impossible-to-comprehend purposes.  You are alone and nothing will work out for you.  Even the Keepers/X'Ching, who at times seem capable, both technologically and morally, of anything, hint that they are at the mercy of forces beyond their control.

"Despite its ambiguity to you, the energetic way in which we have forced purposes on you has a meaning.  But you would not have the patience.  You want easy answers, easy turns.  There are no easy answers, you see."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"No one ever does.  But what can you do?"

In the second half of The Empty People (besides the resolution of the Rogers bit) we learn the poet's name is James after the Keepers release him into a simulacrum of beautiful New York City with an automatic pistol and instructions to chase down the woman, who of course is Della.  Della, for her part, has been told by the X'Ching that she is to be released into NYC to find and help (or destroy?) one man while avoiding the interference of a second man, an enemy.  Malzberg's descriptions of Coney Island and Manhattan struck a chord with your humble blogger, who every day regrets leaving Manhattan, and Malzberg's portrayal of the thoughts and feelings of James and Della, at odds for no reason they can discern, is also very effective.  Malzberg really is capable of writing crime and horror material, getting into the minds of people obsessed and despairing.  

In what we might call the climax, James the poet throws away the weapon provided him by the Keepers and tries to make a human connection with Della, with only brief and limited success--Della has lost all hope and wants to die.  We get some imagery that reminded me of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway that suggests all human beings are one, but then comes the resolution in the final chapter which is only half a page--all the business we have seen involving aliens is merely dreams suffered by Della's husband as he lays in the hospital dying of his brain tumor--James the poet and Della have the same face because they are just aspects of the cancer victim's own personality, not because we are all one in the eyes of God or share a destiny because of our common humanity or anything nice and uplifting like that.

I think The Empty People is fun and interesting so thumbs up.  I've already suggested it is well-written stylistically and that it entertainingly addresses mainstream literary themes like the banality of modern middle-class life and the challenges of sexual relationships as well as presenting and commenting on traditional science fiction and detective fiction scenarios.  I found Malzberg's little jokes here and there funny, and his little psychological insights, for example, the way captives come to like their captors (sometimes people call this Stockholm syndrome though Malzberg doesn't use the term) and the related way things initially disgusting or frightening can become comfortable, resonated with me.  And of course I have a soft spot for New York, mad scientists, and disastrous sexual relationships, as I have told you a hundred times or more.

Before we check to see what Joachim thought of The Empty People lo eleven years ago, let's play a little devil's advocate and see what gripes people might have about the book.  The superfluous Rogers section is the weak link of the novel--Rogers is essentially alone and so there is little human drama; the Della and James/William Archer sequences are good because they are about Della's relationships with her husband, with her captors, with the mad doctor and with her lover.  I guess we might see the Rogers chapters as an attack on religious people but Malzberg only gestures in that direction, doesn't do much with that theme.  I'm not saying the Rogers material is bad, as it is kind of funny, but while reading it I wanted to get back to Della and the men in her life.

Others might find the "it was all a dream" ending frustrating.

Another possible complaint is that the novel is misogynistic or at least not feminist.  It is hinted that Della is an everywoman--the final line of one chapter is "She was a normal woman"-- and compared to James/William and the mad scientist she is selfish and also weak, crumbling under pressure rather than energetically pursuing a goal.  This doesn't faze me, but you know what it is like out there, my droogs.   

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I think Joachim and I are essentially on the same page when it comes to The Empty People, though I probably enjoyed it more than he did; he also focuses more on the novel as a vehicle for hostile criticism of SF than I have.  It is likely these differences are the result of the fact that I genuinely like pulpy old ideas like alien invasion and mad scientists.  But I can't really disagree with anything Joachim has to say, so no fireworks.

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I think we'll be headed back to the early 1940s and Weird Tales next time we convene, so if that is your bag, see you then!