Dark Love: K Koja, B Copper, R Campbell and K E Wagner

We just read three stories by the great Tanith Lee about disastrous sexual relationships.  This is a theme close to my heart, so let's see what other material of the same bent we can find.  At an antique store recently, I spotted a hardcover copy of 1995's Dark Love, edited by Nancy A. Collins, Edward E. Kramer and the ubiquitous Martin H. Greenberg-- tag line: "twenty two all-original tales of lust and obsession"-- and took a gander at the table of contents.  No Lee, no Malzberg or Wolfe, but still some authors we read.  In the MPorcius tradition of absolute cheapness I decided to save four bucks and read my four selections from Dark Love via the internet archive.  

Dark Love seems to have been a success, winning the 1996 Deathrealm award, which I had never head of until today, and seeing print in Britain and France as well as in America.  Our European friends seem to have gotten the short end of the stick, however, as the US editions of the book have a quite fine Mel Odom cover illustration (check out the even more beautiful original Odom work from which this cover was adapted here) while the French cover is pedestrian and the British cover is embarrassingly lame.  U-S-A!

I guess Stuart Kaminsky is a big deal, but I don't know that I have ever heard of him before

"Pas de Deux" by Kathe Koja

This is a pretty sophisticated piece of work.  The pace of "Pas de Deux" is quick and there is a lot of titillating sex stuff and some violence but Koja also weaves together plenty of compelling scenes that explore multiple engaging themes about life and human relationships, including the relationship of a person to his or her own body--does your body determine your fate?  Does your body, even more than your mind, represent the real you?  

Our main character is a woman who is living in poverty in a crappy apartment in a big city, trying to make it as a ballet dancer.  But she has a troubled relationship with dance--as a kid she wanted to play soccer, but her fat mother forced her to take up ballet, and the woman at the strip mall ballet studio told her "No sports for you, you've got a dancer's body."  Our protagonist left the world of dance for a while and now that she is back in it she is probably too old to really make it.  Many an evening she goes to night clubs where people dance to thrash metal and "steelcore," which I have to admit I've never heard of.  (I'm always learning!)  Her dancing of course is better than anybody else's, and many men hit on her and she brings them back to her apartment for one-night stands; she explains her philosophy to them after having sex with them.  

The dancer's relationship with men is a major component of the story and Koja includes flashback scenes of her with her chain-smoking father in her teenaged years and with her former long term boyfriend, Edward, who himself had a strange relationship with his first wife and his mother-in-law, Adele, a successful dancer who knew Balanchine well, or at least wrote a book purporting such.  Our main character reads Adele's memoir of her relationship with Balanchine, and it has a powerful effect on the dancer's mind, as do her memories of Edward's critiques of her face and fashion choices.  Perhaps the main theme of "Pas de Deux" is to what extent we make decisions and to what extent other people and other external factors (along with the body we got stuck with) determine our choices.  The main character again and again does things she tells herself she doesn't want to do, but asks herself, "what else is there to do?" 

In need of money, she contacts Edward but he wants sex in return for a "loan" she probably will never be able to repay.  She refuses to grant him any sexual favors, in fact strikes him.  So she gets a job at a used bookstore; she steals from the place and gets herself fired.  She then gets a job as a stripper.

At the same time she pursues her doomed quest to become a professional ballet dancer, our heroine is on a quest to find a man, a partner in life--Adele in her book advises women to "find your prince."  This quest is also doomed--the men the dancer meets at thrash clubs won't do (her body, she feels, will tell her which of the men is her prince, but her body rejects man after man, night after night) and she never even considers the repulsive men for whom she strips.

The dancer's sanity slips, and she stops eating, becoming skeletally thin, which does not endear her to her clients or her boss.  The story ends somewhat inconclusively, like a literary story--there is a climax, in which the dancer encounters Edward again and she beats him up and wrecks his house, but we have to assume this is not going to improve her life and career prospects and that if she doesn't take Edward's unwanted advice ("You're very sick, you ought to see a doctor") she is going to die soon.

Maybe like the Lee stories we read in our last episode, "Pas de Deux" is about women who seek love and when men aren't willing to give it to them they lash out at the man who let them down and/or society at large.  But this is no wish fulfillment fantasy that celebrates a woman empowered--it is all about how women are at the mercy of others, men and women both, and factors over which they have no control.

A good mainstream story about a creative person crushed by the world that has enough sex, violence and creepiness that it also provides the thrills we look for in genre fiction--thumbs up!  "Pas de Deux" has been reprinted in Koja collections in English and in French, the language of (noir?) love.

(An odd little note: the artist Patrick Nagel is mentioned twice in "Pas de Deux," but both times here in Dark Love his name is misspelled "Nagle."  I found an electronic version of Velo/cities, and in there the name is spelled correctly.)

"Bright Blades Gleaming" by Basil Copper

We've reads three stories by Copper during this blog's chevauchee across the interwebs.  I liked "The Knocker at the Portico," and "Voices in the Water" but gave "Beyond the Reef" the old black ball.  making sure to keep in mind the law of small numbers, we must acknowledge that "Bright Blades Gleaming" will determine if Mr. Copper has a 75% or 50% hit rating here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Fingers crossed!

"Bright Blades Gleaming" is well-written on a page by page and sentence by sentence basis, with Copper constructing an interesting character and offering strong images.  Of course I am a sucker for stories in which a sensitive young man lives in a big city in a tiny apartment and spends a lot of time on the crowded streets wistfully looking at young women--there was a time when I was such a young man!  But the plot of "Bright Blades Gleaming" amounts to little and the twist ending is pretty disappointing.  It is frustrating when a guy like A. E. van Vogt comes up with a plot full of crazy ideas and astounding events but his poor writing style limits how much you can really enjoy the wild ride, and it is also frustrating when a guy has a good style but only applies it to a plot that lacks any sort of emotional or conceptual punch or any thrills.  We'll call "Bright Blades Gleaming" acceptable.

The text of "Bright Blades Gleaming" is the diary of a late 19th-century young man who has just moved to Berlin.  He describes in detail his new room and his fellow tenants and hints that he is some kind of weirdo with "inflammatory views" who is often in trouble with the police.   As the story proceeds we learn he is an atheist who loves animals and refuses to step on beetles he finds under his seat at the restaurant but hates human beings, a failed medical student who finances his slacker's lifestyle of sitting in restaurants and parks staring at the girls who go by through clever thievery. 

The diarist studies the slaughter of cattle at an abattoir, buys surgical instruments and practices the art of dissection on some dolls.  He starts having horrible bloody dreams and wakes up one morning to discover indications that last night, presumably while out of his mind, he killed somebody.  He flees Germany for England, where Copper provides the in-your-face clues that confirm readers' suspicions that the diarist is Jack the Ripper.

We follow this dude for page after page as he tidies his room, follows a girl on the street, has tense conversations with his land lady, and denounces aged veterans, slowly learning how truly odd and sinister he is, but instead of some kind of climax in which he achieves some dastardly perverse goal or he is foiled by the authorities or some brave civilian, our supposed pay off is being told he is Jack the Ripper?  Copper's attempt to appeal to the audience's supposed fascination with Jack the Ripper is cheap and unsatisfying, a cop out--it is like he wrote only half a story, just the setting and the character, leaving the reader to supply his own climax and resolution.    

(Defenders of "Bright Blades Gleaming" might call it a mood piece or a character study.  Let's also note that Dark Love is dedicated to Robert Bloch, so maybe this story is an homage to the Jack-obsessed Bloch.)  

Besides in Dark Love, you can catch this rump of a story in the Copper collections Darkness, Mist and Shadow: Volume Two and Cold Hand on My Shoulder.    

"Going Under" by Ramsey Campbell 

This story feels long and glacially slow, with long meandering sentences that fail to engage the reader's interest or inspire any emotion and a tedious pace that leaves the story seeming to move in slow motion.

"Going Under" takes place in a tunnel that goes under a river.  The tunnel is part of the highway system, and to celebrate an anniversary of its opening it has been closed to automobile traffic to serve as the route of a charity walk--a crowd of people has come to buy a ticket, the money going to their favorite cause, AIDS or whatever, and then walk the length of the tunnel.  Blythe is doing this charity walk by himself, having had a fight with his wife.  Blythe is one of the first people to own a cell phone or mobile phone or whatever English people were calling them in 1995 and while doing the walk, crammed cheek by jowl with strangers in the dense crowd, he leaves wifey a voice mail and then takes an incoming call--these calls are critical, as Blythe has to get his alimony check to his first wife (I think it's alimony--the word "maintenance" is used) in the mail or he will be imprisoned, and he wants his current wife to put the check in the mail, which he stupidly didn't do himself.  The tension of the story is meant to come from the fact that he has trouble getting a signal and then the answering machine malfunctions and then he drops his phone and it breaks blah blah blah.  Campbell tries to make his story funny and/or disturbing by describing how fat everybody doing the charity walk is and how their bodies radiate heat and by having people make fun of Blythe for using a phone in public.  Blythe then goes insane and starts harming people in his feverish quest to retrieve his phone or borrow or steal some other person's phone.

Bad.  Maybe this crummy story serves as a historical document of a time when it was fashionable to envy people who had cell phones and used them in public.  Didn't Stephen King write an entire book about how cellphones are bad?  "Going Under"'s defenders might say that it seeks to evoke the claustrophobic stress of being in a dense crowd at a public event.     

People love Ramsey Campbell, and Stephen Jones included "Going Under" in a best-of-the-year anthology.  You can also find it in multiple Campbell collections.

"Locked Away" by Karl Edward Wagner

Wagner brings to our exploration of Dark Love the gross explicit sex we were perhaps sort of expecting, plus little jokes for genre fans, like a mention of David Drake (a romance novelist in this story's world) and to Bambi and Thumper from the James Bond film Diamonds are Forever.  

Pandora is an Englishwoman in her late twenties, a divorcee and owner of an antique store in North Carolina.  She wins a box of jewelry at an auction, and fancies for herself a heart-shaped Victorian locket she finds among the lot.  Pandora puts on the locket, the clasp of which she initially finds difficult to open.  When she does manage to open it, it triggers immersive dreams of rough sex in which she is the subordinate participant; Wagner graphic blow-by-blow descriptions of these episodes are like something out of a porn story.  Soon the locket clasp is opening freely, practically on its own.  Some of the dreams are essentially rape and torture fantasies.  When Pandora wakes up from the dreams she finds underwear or sex toys from the dreams in her possession, ejaculate on her face and blood leaking from her anus--was she having sex in another universe or with ghosts?  

It turns out the locket was owned by a spinster, a very religious woman, and, perhaps, the dreams are that old woman's sex fantasies, which she never expressed or experienced, but kept locked away in the locket.  (SF stories and porn stories often ridicule religious people, suggest religious people are hypocrites; I guess people who put science or sex at the center of their identities see traditional religion as a rival school of thought, a way of organizing the universe which they must supplant or perhaps just resent.)  But Wagner also suggests that Pandora is just a pervert, her sexual desires warped by abuse at the hands of her ex-husband, maybe even the result of brain damage from blows to the head.  As the story ends Pandora tosses away the locket, puts on revealing clothes, and arms herself with a knife--she is going to have rough sex with men she meets at a bar, or maybe her young employees, an attractive woman and a handsome gay man (there is a lot of lesbian sex and lots of gay vibes in this story), and unlike in her magical locket-triggered fantasies, she is going to be the aggressor, is going to leave the other participants bleeding.

A nasty exploitative thing, the supernatural elements an excuse to describe brutal homoerotic scenes of men abusing a woman, abuse the woman ultimately enjoys.  But competent, I suppose.  We'll call it acceptable.

"Locked Away" would go on to be reprinted in three different Wagner collections, all of which sport covers that leverage Wagner's biker image.

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Well, only one of these stories, Koja's, is actually good, though Wagner's seems to accomplish its (modest) goals.  Copper's shows ability but was disappointing, while Campbell's was emphatically not my cup of tea.  Of course, I'll probably read all there people again next time they pop up in some anthology that has caught my eye, maybe soon, maybe years from now.

1991 vampiric stories by B N Malzberg, K E Wagner & T Ligotti

OMG, more vampires!  Are you sick and tired of vampires?  I hope not!  Because today we have vampire stories first printed in 1991 in Ellen Datlow's A Whisper of Blood.  A Whisper of Blood recently came to my attention because it includes a Barry Malzberg story I don't own, but when I saw it also contained stories by Karl Edward Wagner and Thomas Ligotti, I figured I would read those as well.  Put that crucifix around your neck, eat some garlic, and make sure those are silver bullets in your revolver, because here we go.

(I'm reading these stories at the internet archive, in a scan of a 2008 omnibus volume titled A Whisper of Blood: A Collection of Modern Vampire Stories that includes the texts of 1989's Blood is Not Enough as well as 1991's A Whisper of Blood.)

"Folly For Three" by Barry N. Malzberg

I wouldn't say this is really a vampire story in a literal sense, though it is in a metaphorical sense and plays with the forms and themes of a vampire story.  On the surface at least it is a tricky sort of mainstream story.  Malzberg tells the story out of order, breaking it into five parts and starting with the part that is fourth, chronologically.  Then we get the third part, then the second, then the first, and finally the ending.  

"Folly for Three" is told in the third person, but there is one lead character whose thoughts to which we are privy, who is in every scene.  She is a married woman, and she enjoys sex, but her sex life with her husband has gotten stale--he is gaining weight, is stressed from overwork, she doesn't love him any more, and she has trouble getting wet.  Because of the unchronological order in which the story is told in, readers may think she, and perhaps her husband, are cheating, but we learn late in the piece that they are scared of catching AIDS if they are unfaithful, so what appears to be an extramarital affair is in fact the married couple playacting at cheating; they meet in a bar, pretending to be strangers, and then go to a hotel to have sex--this pantomime of adultery excites her.  At the bar a guy described as "priestly" sees them going off together, calls them "fornicators," and then follows them to the hotel, getting into their room (he has a key, somehow), where they are just about to have sex, toting a gun, apparently intent on killing them.

The literary flourishes Malzberg adds to the story include making the husband a salesman--he "sells" his wife on the idea of playacting to make their marriage more sexually arousing, and Malzberg implies that being a salesman consists of putting on an act, and the husband is going to use the same skills he uses to make money--putting on masks and playing roles--to save his marriage.  

All the marriage stuff works, but the guy who is going to murder them for being fornicators sort of comes out of left field.  His presence makes sense if we see Malzberg's story as a parody or "riff" on vampire stories, because priests typically appear in vampire fiction and try to kill the vampires when they are helpless (and the married couple are vampire-like in that they are pursuing satisfaction from people they don't love by pretending to be what they are not) but while Malzberg lays all the ground work for the married couple's relationship and it makes sense in the context of real life, the murderer comes out of nowhere and his actions don't seem to make much sense.  Of course he is crazy, but when you have a story in which two of the characters' motives and actions are carefully and realistically explained, it is incongruous to throw into the mix a third character whose motives and actions feel arbitrary--and how does he get the key to their room?

As I copy edit this blog post I recall that the last line of the story is the wife making a silly joke, and now suspect she may have hired the priestly man to murder her husband.     

This story is alright.  Maybe it is interesting as an historical document, depicting the fear of AIDS in the early 1990s among heterosexuals.    

In an afterword (the stories in A Whisper of Blood all have afterwords), Malzberg praises Datlow highly, crediting her for helping him with the story and even implying she turned it into a vampire story.  He also talks about Cornell Woolrich (an earlier draft of this story was a tribute to Woolrich) and George V. Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle.  With his trademark pessimism, our boy Barry suggests that marriage is psychic vampirism, like all our relationships, which are fundamentally asymmetrical, one partner always taking more from the other than he gives.

"Folly for Three" has only ever appeared in the many printings of A Whisper of Blood, but that includes a translation into Finnish!  It is nice to see that the people of Finland have had an opportunity to experience Barry Malzberg in their native tongue.  

"The Slug" by Karl Edward Wagner

Martine is a sculptor who works in stone.  Wagner feels the need to tells us all about every aspect of her appearance and identity; we learn her height, her ethnicity on her father's side, her ethnicity on her mother's side, her eye color, her hair color, what rock music she listens to while she works, what gin she drinks, the brand of sneakers she wears, etc.  And Martine isn't even really the main character!

A writer, Keenan, comes to Martine for a visit while she is trying to work.  Most of "The Slug" is a first-person narrative related by Keenan as he describes at great length how a mutual acquaintance, Casper Crowley, who claimed to be related to Alistair Crowley, kept coming to visit him, interrupting him day after day while he was trying to work.  Crowley was fat and a messy eater, and would devour all of Keenan's food and drink all his beer.  These distractions made Keenan miss deadlines and wrecked his relationships with his publishers and his editors.  At the same time, Crowley kept saying his own writing--books about the occult on such goofy subjects as the connections between druids and Nazis or between witches and UFOs--was going gangbusters, editors snapping up his work.  Keenan, low on funds, has to sell some of his books and Crowley actually buys them at a used bookstore to aid his research for his own next book.

Keenan thinks of the obese Crowley as a slug, and tells Martine he killed Crowley by burying him in rock salt.  Keenan is drunk on Martine's gin, and she doesn't believe him.  But after he leaves, Martine has trouble chiseling away at the bust that is her current project, and we readers know that Keenan is now going to try to suck out her creative energy the way Crowley stole his.

This story is OK, a little too long and wordy.  And a slug isn't really parasitic; Wagner sort of admits that calling Crowley a leech would make more sense.  One aspect of the story that I haven't mentioned but which might be noteworthy is that Crowley tells lots of obscene jokes about women's privates and animals having sex, and Wagner includes many of these.

In his afterword to "The Slug," Wagner complains with some fervor and some sarcasm that people sometimes come to visit him while he is writing and make his work more difficult.  Maybe Martine is a female version of Wagner, which is why Wagner spent all that time describing her tastes--maybe they are his own.

"The Slug" was selected by Ramsey Campbell and Stephen Jones for Best New Horror 3 (1992) and can also be found in several Karl Edward Wagner collections.

The rock music Martine is listening to when Keenan comes by to confess
the murder of Crowley is performed by Lou Reed 

"Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel" by Thomas Ligotti

This is a superior story with a very fine central idea, an idea that is fresh and exciting, and is also written with style and economy, presenting vivid, powerful images.

The central idea of "Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel" is that dreams are parasites, "maggots of the mind and soul," creatures or beings who lived in the black chaos before life arose, monsters that have no world and so, as we sleep, suck at and steal the essence of our world!  Dreams are the reason we grow old and die--if not for their nightly depredations we would be immortal!

The narrator tells us how, as a kid, he had horrible dreams and often awoke screaming and was left exhausted during the day.  His mother had an interest in the occult, and took her boy to see a strange old woman reputed by others to be a witch, a Mrs. Rinaldi.  Ligotti does a good job describing how she takes the narrator to dark room of her house that is full of cabinets and chests and there works a weird ritual or spell.  As part of the procedure the old woman opens a box, and the narrator sees that within it lives a sort of glowing vapor.

After this mysterious treatment the narrator's bad dreams ease up.  But he misses the dreams!  Dreams not only draw away our life forces, but give us experiences and knowledge we cannot acquire awake by day, and the narrator realizes that he has "an appetite" for "the absurd and horrible, even the perfectly evil."  The bad dreams return, but when his mother brings the narrator back to Mrs. Rinaldi they find the old woman is sick.  She tells her visitors that she made a mistake trying to treat the narrator, that his voluntarily "consorting" with the dreams not only caused her treatment of him to lapse but exposed her "angel" and herself to the dreams, and she and the angel are now grievously poisoned.  Not long after this meeting Mrs. Rinaldi dies, and neighborhood kids who spy through its windows tell the narrator that in the vacant house they have seen a thing creeping along the floor, a thing like a pile of dirty rags.

Thumbs up for this jewel of a creepy story!   

In his afterword Ligotti talks about how the vampire (like the werewolf, incidentally) has lost his power because too many writers have leeched the mystery out of him, carefully cataloging his powers and weaknesses and so forth, and using him not to represent some kind of fantastic evil and a menace to the soul but as an allegory for boring psychological, sociological or political phenomena or simply as a physical threat.

 "Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel" would be reprinted in the Ligotti collections Noctuary and The Nightmare Factory.

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Unexpectedly, these stories are only about vampires in a metaphorical sense, which sort of endorses Ligotti's view that the vampire is no longer a powerful literary device.  

We may read stories from Datlow's Blood is Not Enough in the future, but our next stop is the early 1950s, space cadets.  

MPORCIUS FICTION LOG BONUS CONTENT!!!!

A Whisper of Blood contains a story by Kathe Koja called "Teratisms" which I read in the anthology Darkness back in 2015 and blogged about then.  I reread the story today in A Whisper of Blood and had drafted a discussion of it before remembering I had already blogged about it.  So I copyedited my draft and present it to you below as a sort of superfluous bonus track or remix:

"Teratisms" by Kathe Koja

"Teratisms" is about a wild and crazy family; in her little intro to the piece, Datlow compares this family to that in the film Near Dark, a movie I not only have never seen, but never heard of.  

Koja tells her story somewhat obliquely and opaquely, but I think I can grok it.  Mitch and Randle (not their real names) are a brother and sister who have to look after their retarded little brother Alex, having promised their mother on her deathbed that they would do so.  They may all be vampires; at the very least Alex is a cannibal--whatever they are, they are not conventional Dracula-style vampires, as they eat ordinary food sometimes and the sun doesn't kill them.  We do have incontrovertible evidence that Alex kills babies and eats them, however (speaking of Dracula.)

These sinister siblings travel across the USA by car.  They try to settle down, but Alex, whom Randle (whose previous names include Francey and Marie-Claire) lacks the energy to keep an eye on 24/7 (Mitch has to go to work to make money), always ends up murdering and eating a baby, so they have to move to a different town and take different names.  Randle always flirts outrageously with her older brother, showing him her breasts and laying her head on his thigh while he drives and so forth.  The highlight scene of the story is when Mitch drives them to McDonald's.  Mitch wants to get drive through, but the irrepressible Alex leaps out of the car, insisting they eat inside.  While inside the restaurant Alex vomits, and blood and a baby's finger come out!  Gross!

In the final scene of the story, Alex having committed yet another monstrous atrocity, Mitch decides the three of them would be better off dead and makes a snap decision to kill them all in a dramatic fashion.

A totally disgusting horror story that tries to leverage not only our horror at gore and monstrously evil crimes we wouldn't think of committing, but also the quotidian horror of our own lives: crummy jobs, crummy food, fights with your family members, sexual frustration, the weight of responsibilities you do not want, perhaps feel you don't deserve (at one point Randle screams "I'm not his mother!")  Well done, but sickening and twisted and vulnerable to the charge that it is exploitative and soul-crushing.  A possible defense against this charge, I guess, is that it is an allegory of the life of people from broken homes in our increasingly individualistic society in which (as conservatives lament) the church and the family are collapsing and (here's what commies would say) the government isn't spending enough money to help the poor and the mentally and physically ill.

Koja in her brief afterword says she doesn't like to write such ancillary material as forewords and afterwords, arguing a story should stand on its own.  I wonder what Harlan Ellison and Barry Malzberg thought when they read this! 

Ellen Datlow would go on to include "Teratisms" in three other anthologies, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, and Edited By. It also reappeared in Koja's collection Extremities.

Vampire stories by R Bloch, R Zelazny, D Drake, K E Wagner & R Matheson

Looking around everybody's favorite online resource, the internet archive, for stories by Tanith Lee, I came upon prolific anthologist Martin H. Greenberg's 1997 Vampires: The Greatest Stories.  I've actually already read and blogged about the Lee story included by Greenberg, "Red as Blood," but Vampires: The Greatest Stories contains quite a few stories by other writers we are interested in here at MPorcius Fiction Log--Robert Bloch of Psycho fame, Amber scribe Roger Zelazny, creator of Hammer's Slammers David Drake, the man who brought us Kane, Karl Edward Wagner, and the guy who wrote Vincent Price's and Steven Spielberg's best movies, Richard Matheson--and I decided to check them out.  Could they really be among the greatest of all the many vampire stories out there?

"The Bat is My Brother" by Robert Bloch (1944)

A title ripped from today's headlines!  Oh, wait, I thought it said "The Bat in My Broth."  Anyway, "The Bat is My Brother" debuted in Weird Tales, and was mentioned by name on the cover.  When I see that this issue includes stories by August Derleth, Manly Wade Wellman and Hannes Bok which I have never read, and a Ray Bradbury story I should reread, I realize that, unless I achieve immortality (you know, like a vampire!) I will never run out of weird fiction to read.

Graham Keene awakens to discover he has been buried alive!  A poor man, he was interred in a cheap unsealed coffin in a shallow pauper's grave, and manages to tear his way out of the casket and up out of the earth.  Back on the surface, in the cemetery, Keene is greeted by a gray-haired wrinkle-faced man who welcomes him to his new life--as a vampire!--and introduces himself as his guardian--this guy is going to show Keene the ropes!

"The Bat is My Brother" is one of those stories that divorces vampirism from religion and the supernatural and tries to explain it scientifically.  I am skeptical that this is really a good idea.  Keene's new friend tells him vampirism is a disease, and spends quite a number of pages explaining to the new recruit to the ranks of the undead what "rules" of vampirism hold in this story: it is true that vampires cast no shadow or reflection, but the idea that they can change into bats or wolves is just superstition; a vampire really can't be killed by weapons, but he is not truly immortal, eventually, he will decay.  And so forth.  If we accept the existence of God and the Devil (or the deities of polytheistic religions), it is easy to accept that a guy might suffer the curse of having no shadow or reflection or be granted the power to survive getting shot full of holes, but it is hard to accept that a mere disease might thusly exempt you from basic physical laws.

Anyway, the old vampire explains to Keene his plan to create an army of vampires to take over the world, and why no vampire over the centuries has ever done this before.  He wants Keene to be his lieutenant, and Keene must decide if he is willing join to this vampire revolution and embrace a position as a high ranking member of the vampire dictatorship.

This story is sort of pedestrian, though not actually bad.  The best scene is when the old vampire explains in detail how to best kill and feed on a young woman, using your left hand to cover her mouth and your right to pinion her arms, etc., because this scene is chillingly cruel and disturbingly erotic while fulfilling the story's theme of applying science and logic and practicality to the essentially supernatural or allegorical idea of vampirism.  Otherwise, "The Bat is My Brpother" is sort of bland.

Acceptable.  "The Bat is My Brother" has been included in several anthologies, including Michel Parry's The Rivals of Dracula.

The contents page of the 1944 issue of Weird Tales in which it appears teases
"The Bat is My Brother" with what we might call a social justice joke

"Dayblood" by Roger Zelazny (1985)

"Dayblood" was first published in Twilight Zone magazine.  It was first reprinted in the 1989 Zelazny collection Frost and Fire, which I own, but which I have yet to read anything from.  Unless I live forever (you know, like a vampire!) I'll never read all the SF books I have accumulated.

"Dayblood" fits the Twilight Zone brand, with a twist ending and a snarky, smart alecky, attitude.  A vampire has turned a local beauty into a vampire, and the woman's fiance forms a three-man posse with a priest and a physician and, armed with garlic and stakes, head to the ruined church where the vampire and his new companion are residing.  Our narrator is a smart ass journalist who complains that the vampire was foolish to let these mundanes (you kids say "muggles") detect his work and track him to his lair.  The reporter is waiting by the church when the three vampire hunters arrive.

The twist ending is that the journalist is a monster who feeds on vampires, so he ambushes the innocent Christians and murders them, preserving the two undead monsters so he can later kill them himself and gain sustenance from them.  The narrator talks of an "underworld ecosystem" that needs to be balanced, explaining that vampires haven't multiplied so much that they could take over the world because if there were too many vampires there would be too few living people for them to feed on.  Again we see scientific concepts applied to the fantastical idea of vampirism.

Acceptable.  This story has been widely anthologized in some of the many vampire books out there.

"Something Had to Be Done" by David Drake (1975)

"Something Had to Be Done" had its debut in F&SF and has reappeared in quite a few anthologies and Drake collections, including the 1976 edition of DAW's Year's Best Horror Stories.  It is short and economical, which I appreciate, is told in a clever and slightly oblique manner, and has a good twist ending that packs a punch.

Captain Richmond has the unenviable task of visiting the families of personnel killed in Vietnam.  He is accompanied on these visits by another officer, and on today's visit, to the Lunkowski family, it is a Sergeant Morzek, who served with the dead Private Lunkowski, who comes with him.  Morzek is old and emaciated and covered in weird moles, and seems to be drunk!

Morzek isn't acting like people usually do on these generally sad and solemn visits, and the three surviving Lunkowskis also act in an odd fashion as Morzek talks to them about their son's service and death.  Morzek's brief narrative and the Lunkowskis' reactions indicate that Private Lunkowski was a vampire, and so are the three people in the house here with Morzek and Richmond!  Lunkowski started murdering his comrades to drink their blood, and when Morzek realized this, he killed Lunkowski (who had proven immune to rifle fire during an attack by "the dinks") with a phosphorus grenade.  The Lunkowskis surround Morzek and Richmond and start closing in for the kill, but Morzek came with the specific purpose of cleansing the world of the Lunkowski menace and has brought another phosphorus grenade with him!  He tells Richmond to jump out the window and then detonates the explosive, incinerating himself and the monsters.

Quite good.  All the little details Drake includes as the story goes along that at first seem like window dressing or to hint at one thing in fact add to the tone or plot and end up hinting at something else--for example, because he is so sick-looking I initially thought Morzek might be a vampire, but in fact he has terminal cancer and the fact that he only has a few weeks to live has made easier his decision to die fighting the undead menace.

"Beyond Any Measure" by Karl Edward Wagner (1982)

"Beyond Any Measure" made its debut in Whispers #15-16, the special Ramsey Campbell issue of the magazine.  It has reappeared in many Wagner collections and vampire anthologies.

Lisette is an American art student studying in London; she shares a room with Danielle, another tall, slender young American artist.  Lisette has been having bad dreams, and Danielle arranges for her to meet a Dr. Magnus at a gallery opening--Magnus, she says, is an expert on dreams.  Lisette begins going to Magnus's office regularly to be hypnotized; Magnus believes that past lives have an influence on our thoughts, through racial memory in our DNA or because of reincarnation of the soul, and he provides "treatment" to Lisette free of charge because he thinks her case can finally settle the questions of the reality of racial memory and the immortality of the soul.  Under hypnosis Lisette relates memories of being a lady in the late 19th century, memories that all seem to have to do with coffins and graveyards and blood!

"Beyond Any Measure" is long, almost 50 pages in Vampires: The Greatest Stories, and it feels long because Wagner fills it with long conversations and long descriptions of people's clothes and bodies that do little to move the plot or generate emotion in the reader.  Wagner seems to be trying to make his story sexually arousing, so in every scene we have to hear all about about what clothes Lisette and Danielle are wearing and how their attire shows off their bodies, and Lisette's dreams and recovered memories always mention that her hair or rain water or blood or whatever is running over her breasts.  One of Wagner's themes in the story is the indulgence and license of the cultural elite, so in a scene at a masked ball where everybody snorts cocaine (which they call "toot") we get verbose descriptions of half a dozen people's BDSM outfits.

Lisette and Danielle are lesbian lovers, though their relationship is not very convincing or interesting--they don't act like any couple I have ever met or like any lesbians I have ever met; in most scenes they just act like casual friends, so when they suddenly started having sex in the shower I was taken by surprise.  "Beyond Any Measure" has three lesbian sex scenes, all of which end in blood.  In the first Lisette performs oral sex on Danielle, who hasn't realized she is on her period, so that when Lisette stands up sees herself in the mirror with blood on her face--you know, like a vampire!--and faints.  In the second a character introduced in the second half of the story, Beth Garrington, a wealthy woman who looks just like Lisette, murders Danielle after tricking her into thinking she is Lisette.

Then comes a long plodding explanation of what Dr. Magnus turned up by hypnotizing Lisette and by scouring old newspapers and public records.  In short, in the 19th century an aristocratic woman became a vampire.  When you become a vampire your soul leaves your body, but the soul is immortal, so the lost soul of this vampire lady--who now goes by the name Beth Garrington-- reincarnated in the body of Lisette when she was born.  Driven by the subconscious desire for justice and revenge that lies buried in her soul, without knowing what she was doing, Lisette came to London and sought out her former, now vampiric, body.  (I think.)

Beth Garrington, intrigued by Lisette's physical similarity to her, lures Lisette to her estate, where she starts having sex with the student and then bites her neck to drain her blood.  But, because they are, in some way, one person, this, for some reason, kills both of them.  Dr. Magnus arrives at the estate to find the two nude bodies, one still young and beautiful, one like a dried up mummy, intertwined in death.

Have to give "Beyond Any Measure" a thumbs down.  The plot is complicated and limp; the characters don't demonstrate drive or motivation, none of them seems to have any ambition or love or hate or fear, they act listlessly, like leaves in a gentle breeze.  The story feels very long and slow; there are repetitive and superfluous scenes and repetitive and superfluous sentences within scenes.  The whole time Wagner seems to be trying too hard, piling on the descriptions of clothes and boobs in an effort to be sexy, describing drug use and punk rock attire in an effort to be edgy, trying to get horror fans on his side with his name-checking of Psycho, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Edgar Allen Poe.

I must be some kind of outlier because this mess won a 1983 World Fantasy Award for Best Novella.  What did people like about it?  Maybe all the talk of people snorting cocaine, dropping acid, wearing black leather S&M outfits, and having lesbian sex was considered "with it," "an update of the vampire for the '80s?" 

Two Karl Edward Wagner collections from Centipede Press.  Left: 2011's Karl Edward Wagner:
Master of the Weird Tale Right: 2012's Where the Summer Ends

"No Such Thing as a Vampire" by Richard Matheson (1959)

"No Such Thing as a Vampire" first appeared in Playboy, our most prestigious skin rag (unless you count National Geographic), and has been reprinted in numerable Matheson collections and horror anthologies.

This is a competent though somewhat pedestrian story in the twist-ending-Twilight-Zone mold, though suited for Playboy with its inclusion of nudity and a sexual element.  In a Romanian town full of superstitious peasants lives a doctor and his beautiful wife in a fancy house with a bunch of servants--the doc and the missus have separate bedrooms.  One morning the wife wakes up with her night dress pulled down, her bare breasts covered in blood!  The doctor finds two tiny holes in her neck!  Obviously a vampire has attacked!

The doctor and the brave butler (the other servants flee) do all they can with garlic and crosses to fortify the house, but to no avail--every morning, even when the sawbones stays in his wife's bedroom all night long, she wakes up having been further drained.  The doctor writes to their friend in another town, and he comes to help.  When he joins the doc to sit up all night with the wife we get our twist ending--the doc has been faking the vampire attacks by drawing his wife's blood with a syringe (don't worry, folks, she will recover...physically, at least.)  His wife having cheated on him with this friend when they went to visit him last summer, the doctor has been plotting a terrible revenge!  He drugs the friend, puts him in a coffin in the basement, and arranges it so that the heroic butler finds the "vampire" and kills it with a stake through the heart.

Acceptable.

**********

The Drake is the big winner here--his story is economical, striking, and "brings the vampire into the modern world" in a way that is interesting.  The Wagner is the polar opposite, long and tedious, and, by sticking a vampire in the middle of a bunch of coke-snorting punk rockers and lesbian art students, "updating" the vampire in a way that is lame and boring.

We'll be orbiting Mother Earth in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, reading an early '80s SF novel by a SFWA Grandmaster.

Whispers II: Lafferty, Davidson, R. C. Matheson, Chalker, and Sallis & Lunde

They don't have to be in mint condition
for me to buy them

Followers of my twitter feed know the wife and I like to go to antique stores.  In some of those antique malls that host booths from a large selection of sellers you can find a booth which is practically a mini-used bookstore, and at one such booth in the Westminster Antique Mall in Westminster, Maryland this last weekend I purchased a hardcover copy of Whispers II, the 1979 anthology edited by Stuart Schiff.  Let's check it out!

In his Introduction, Schiff, who I guess was a trained dentist living in the greatest state in the union, says that fantasy and horror are now big business, what with Sissy Spacek as Carrie, Max von Sydow as The Exorcist and Michael J. London as The Snowbeast burning up our screens, but these popular commercial versions of horror and the weird designed to please the masses are diluted, adulterated.  In his work as an editor of Whispers, a semi-pro zine, Schiff (his friends like David Drake call him "Stu") has tried to encourage the creation of and to disseminate more pure, less commercial, horror/fantasy fiction.  He goes on to praise the role of little magazines like Whispers throughout the modern history of horror, citing the early careers of Lovecraft, Bradbury and Stephen King.

Whispers II includes 21 stories and I think I am going to read and opine on 19 of them.  I am skipping Karl Edward Wagner's "Undertow," a Kane story.  I read all the Kane stories in the late New York and early Iowa periods of my life and didn't really find them to my taste, though some were better than others.  My vague memories suggest that "Undertow" was better than the average Kane story.  I have already blogged about Hugh B. Cave's "From the Lower Deep" and Russell Kirk's "Lex Talionis," having read them back in 2015 in DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII, which was edited by Wagner.

Tarbandu of The PorPor Books Blog has already trod this ground--feel free to read his brisk and informative blogpost from 2010 about Whispers II and skip my long-winded babbling about it and get back to your real life; I'm sure you'd be better off doing something productive like chasing girls or making money or something like that.

"Berryhill" by R. A. Lafferty (1976)

"Berryhill" has a straightforward plot.  On the edge of town is a decrepit house where live some really old people who are rarely seen and are kind of weird.  All kinds of rumors about their alleged crimes have sprung up over the decades.  One day a nine-year-old juvenile delinquent who likes to torture animals and vandalize local farms ventures into the old weirdos' house.  What will happen to all these creepy characters?

Lafferty, with understated brilliance, takes this plot and makes it both hilarious and horrifying.  Everything from people's names to the little turns of phrase he uses to the details about small town life and casual descriptions of human evil work to make the reader smile and laugh or wince and shiver.  Engrossing and surprising, and easier to understand than some of Lafferty's work, which can often be difficult, this story alone is worth what I paid for this book.

Very good, highly recommended.  "Berryhill" first appeared in Whispers #9, and would later appear in the collection Iron Tears, which has a good cover by the Dillons.

"The King's Shadow Has No Limits" by Avram Davidson (1975)

I often find Davidson's stories to be erudite but gimmicky and silly, though I gave his novel Enemy of My Enemy a moderately positive review earlier this year.  "The King's Shadow Has No Limits" seems to have appeared approximately simultaneously in Whispers #8 and the book The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy.  I think this will be the first Dr. Eszterhazy story I have ever read.

I guess this story is a mood piece about historical change with a focus on social class and what today we would call income equality.  Dr. Eszterhazy lives in a bustling metropolis in an alternate history 19th century, the capital of a multi-ethnic empire in the Balkans that I guess was inspired by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  This empire has a triple monarchy (one better than the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary) and is known as Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania.  The city is home to both both modern buildings and ancient ruins, to modern devices, like steam shovels, electric lights and telephones, and centuries-old rituals and superstitions, like poor people clamoring for the dust scarped yearly from a long dead saint's grave.  Esterhazy wanders around the town, seeing the poor working on a construction site, accepting alms, waiting in line for the aforementioned dust, etc.  Some impoverished old men remind him of the aged Emperor, and Eszterhazy addresses one and finds that it is the Emperor!  The Emperor tells him that some wise Jews inspired him to spend time among the poor; he also compares himself to Louis XV, quoting "after me, the deluge," suggesting that after he dies the empire will fall apart.

Later we are provided evidence that the Emperor had been in a coma all day, and his soul left his body to travel around the city and experience life from a different perspective.

Most stories which deal with historical change have the protagonist acting as a change agent, a rebel or reformer or innovator, but Esterhazy seems to be a sincere supporter of the Emperor and I think we are supposed to get a sense of foreboding from this story, to suspect that the death of the elderly Emperor is going to usher in a cataclysm like the French Revolution or World War I that will kill untold numbers of people and sweep away cultures which, while they have faults, perhaps have admirable elements whose destruction is to be lamented.  I detected similar ideas and themes in Enemy of My Enemy; I'm getting the feeling that Davidson is a sort of sad, romantic conservative, or maybe I am just projecting my own tragic view of life onto his work.

(Being the last story in the collection The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy, it is perhaps appropriate that "The King's Shadow Has No Limits" foreshadow and expound upon the passing of the book's setting.)

This is a well-wrought literary story, dense with description and allusion.  It is a success, but it is not exactly fun or thrilling--it is sad, but not cathartic the way a more extravagant tragedy might be; "The King's Shadow Has No Limits" is haunting rather than melodramatic.  I have to admit it is leaving me feeling kind of depressed; maybe I should have eaten more chocolate today.

"Conversation Piece" by Richard Christian Matheson (1979)

Here's a story from the son of the guy who wrote Steven Spielberg's best film and Vincent Price's best film.  "Conversation Piece" appeared first here in Whispers II, and Schiff liked it so much he also included it in his anthology Mad Scientists.  "Conversation Piece" also shows up in the Richard Christian Matheson collection Scars.

This is a gimmicky silly story; maybe it is supposed to be funny.  Most of it is taken up with the transcript of an interview, "A"s following "Q"s, bookended by the brief recollections and reflections of the journalist who posed the "Q"s.  Basically, the journalo interviews a guy who is just a head, a guy who was born in a normal healthy body and made money by selling body fluids and then body parts to medical scientists until he had sold almost everything.  We don't realize he is just a head until late in the story.  The interviewee's attitude is not that of a victim; he acts like his chosen career of selling off his body piece by piece is just a normal profession, saying it suits him and talking about how he sold this part to pay for his wedding and that part to pay for his daughter's school clothes, etc.  The journalist, at the end of the story, lays on the heavy symbolism, suggesting that we all surrender or sacrifice parts of ourselves, our honesty or convictions, for example, in our pursuit of a career and a satisfying sex and family life.

Acceptable.

"The Stormsong Runner" by Jack L. Chalker (1979)

I think I read a few Jack L. Chalker SF novels in my high school days in the 1980s, but all I can remember is that a party of people was on a space ship, searching for something and being chased by enemy space ships and all that usual stuff, and at one point they had to design a new life form, and they divvied up the design duty, with one person designing the head and another designing the body and whatever.  One guy got the job of designing the life form's penis, and there was a whole paragraph in which the guy described the penis's fascinating attributes (the word "telescoping" was used.)  Did I really read this or is this just a crazy dream I had that I have unfairly associated with Chalker?

Anyway, here we have a short story which first appeared here in Whispers II but would later be included in a Chalker collection and some anthologies of American ghost stories.  Boo!

Our narrator is a guy who got a degree in "elementary education" but had a hard time finding a position and devoted much of his time to booze, drugs, and women with the same dubious hobbies.  Some money falls into his lap after a car accident caused by the other driver, so he leaves the city and moves to the hillbilly country of West Virginia.  Chalker gives us some descriptions of how poor and illiterate and ignorant the people in the hills are, and also how proud they are, how close they are to nature and how they value people and their word more than materialistic and overly sophisticated city folk.

The narrator convinces the state to pay him to be a sort of peripatetic teacher of these country folk who refuse to have anything to do with conventional schooling.  Our ghost story involves a little girl (approximately 12) whom others consider a witch.  Little Cindy Lou Whittler (I suspect this name is a joke because Chalker also directly refers to Dr. Seuss in this story) believes she can control the weather and that her dead father speaks to her, telling her when to make it rain.  And sure enough, one day our narrator hears two voices from the Whittler shack, arguing--a man wants Cindy Lou to trigger a powerful storm, but the little girl says it will cause the dam to burst and kill the local people!

The ending of this story is anti-climactic.  The dam bursts, but nobody gets killed.  Cindy Lou doesn't have to suffer the guilt of wrecking the dam, because (she tells the narrator) her father the ghost, who has responsibility for the weather of the region, enlisted some other witch to make fall the rain, which was mandated by a still higher authority.  The narrator reflects that maybe everybody in this world has a purpose, even drug addicted losers like him (his purpose is to educate these illiterate poor people) and the impoverished people of Appalachia (who control the weather at the behest of Mother Nature or God?)

Lame.

"They Will Not Hush" by James Sallis and David Lunde (1974)

Lunde is new to me, but we've encountered James Sallis before.  I didn't like his experimental story from Quark 3, thought his experimental stories in Again, Dangerous Visions were alright, but could not recommend his experimental stories in Alternities.  The story here has an epigraph from Yeats, four lines from "The Madness of King Goll" about woodland creatures, cluing us in to the source of the story's title.

This is a sleep-inducing prose poem full of sentences like, "A doe, invisible in a dapple of sun and shadow, suddenly bounds down the slope before him," and "A door slapping shit, firmly, like the closing of a fist; a car gearing up, then fading quickly away."  I think it is about a guy who just graduated from college with a physics degree coming home to the forest to his family of witches; the witches are about to face some war or other trial, and the college kid burns his college books and prepares for "the Strengthening" of "the Agreed," who must face "Them"--the college kid is now the leader of the witches and their animal friends.

A total waste of your time.

"They Will Not Hush" first appeared in Whispers #4 and has not been reprinted since Whispers II came out.   

**********

The Lafferty is very good, but it has been downhill from there, from the successful Davidson to the OK R. C. Matheson to the weak Chalker and finally the pointless Sallis and Lunde production.  Hopefully this trend will be reversed when we read five more stories from Whispers II in our next episode.

The inside jacket flap text of my hardcover copy of Whispers II

Tales of Forbidden Acts from 1995 by Koja & Malzberg, Tem and Wagner

I'm still working the 1990s perversion desk!  In our last episode we confronted three tales of rape and death from Poppy Z. Brite's Love in Vein.  Today we subject ourselves to three visions from the 1995 anthology Forbidden Acts, edited by Nancy A. Collins and Edward E. Kramer.  I got my copy of Forbidden Acts on the clearance shelf at Half Price Books.  The cover is very lame, with lots of negative space, a boring picture, no blurbs and no famous names.  Was this a rush job or something?

Forbidden Acts has an introduction by Joe Bob Briggs, the B-movie review guy!  When I was still living with my parents in New Jersey my brother and I would watch all those B-movie TV shows with hosts like Gilbert Gottfried, Morgus the Magnificent, Commander U.S.A, Grandpa Al Lewis, and Briggs.  Those were the good old days!  Anyway, Briggs warns us that we will not "enjoy" the stories in Forbidden Acts, that they are "rude"and "brutal" and will "shock" and even "hurt" us.  Well, let's see if this anthology's offerings by four writers we've already talked about here at MPorcius Fiction Log will rudely brutalize us.

"Mysterious Elisions, Riotous Thrusts" by Kathe Koja and Barry Malzberg

A professional woman is in the middle of a bitter divorce from her second husband, Gerald.  She left her first husband for Gerald because Gerald was a good lay and was as sexually ravenous as she is, but Gerald started cheating on her before the first anniversary of their wedding.  Currently our main character lives alone, sexually frustrated and spending her free time getting drunk on scotch Gerald left behind.

While drunk she hears a sound at the door, and opens it to find an odd little monster has come to visit.  This thing, which I guess is like a volley-ball-sized blob or slug (it has "stalks" and "ganglia" and green blood) but with human-like hands and face, climbs up her legs and has sex with her, using its "claws" and "smile" to give her some of the best sex of her life!  Then it crawls away.

The second time the monster visits her, after it has exhausted her with its attentions, she realizes it has the face of Gerald!  The last sentences of the story invoke the names of Paolo and Francesca, the famous adulterous lovers from Dante, and hint that, like Paolo and Francesca, Gerald and our protagonist are in Hell, being punished because they let their passionate lust carry them away from their duty.  O lasso!

Rossetti's classic 1855 watercolor illustrating Canto V from Inferno

This one is pretty good, a crazy pornographic monster story grounded in believable human emotion; Koja and Malzberg handle both the insane monster stuff and the realistic relationship material well.  Koja and Malzberg completists may be forced to get a copy of Forbidden Acts; I don't think this story has been published in any other place.

"Blood Knot" by Steve Rasnic Tem

This is a story about how claustrophobic families can be, narrated by a guy with psychological problems who isn't good at detecting relationship boundaries; he was sexually attracted to his step-mother, for example, and to his own daughters.  Tem doesn't come out and say much about where these people live or their jobs or anything (besides that our narrator spent time in the Army), but I got a "redneck" or "hillbilly" vibe from the story, I guess because of the contractions and nonstandard grammar used in the dialogue.  "Rednecks" are a demographic that everybody feels comfortable looking down on, an "other" for people who champion diversity and are always criticizing other people for "othering" people.

The narrator's father had four wives, and may have killed one of them (she just disappeared after a loud night of drinking); he serves as a role model for the narrator. An example of his wisdom:  "It don't matter if you like your family or not.  You're tied to 'em; might as well accept that.  It's in the blood."  Tem takes advantage of the multiple meanings of "blood" in English, and there is a lot of talk about family ties ("blood knots") as well as about menstrual blood.

The narrator longed to have a family of his own, but had trouble attracting women. When he did marry it was to a woman much younger than he is (just as his father's fourth wife, the one our narrator lusted after, was much younger than his father.)  The narrator doesn't know how to be a good husband or father, and found living with his wife and three daughters difficult.  The smell of them during their periods was particularly upsetting.  When the daughters started dating he went off the deep end, and, as far as I can tell, murdered them with a sharp implement ("cutting" those blood knots the way Alexander cut the Gordian knot.)  It is possible he cannibalized them, or just drank their blood (he compares his daughters' breasts to apples, onions and tomatoes, and has drinking blood on his mind, comparing his wife and daughters at one point to vampires.)  This is one of those stories in which everything is hinted at rather than baldly stated, so maybe I am misinterpreting something.

I'm going to have to give "Blood Knot" a thumbs down; I didn't feel like the energy spent trying to figure it out was a worthwhile investment, because the plot and characters didn't interest me or inspire any feeling in me.  Some guy I can't identify with in some place I don't know about murdered his family because he was insane and/or came from a broken home--"Blood Knot" is like the news stories I ignore every day when they pop up on the computer screen or the radio.  Maybe people who are into serial killer stories and child abuse stories will like "Blood Knot."  I know Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling included it in the ninth Year's Best Fantasy and Horror so I have to assume I'm voicing the minority opinion here.   

Back cover of Forbidden Acts

"The Picture of Johnathan Collins" by Karl Edward Wagner

Wagner of course is famous for those grim sword and sorcery tales of Kane and for writing and editing horror stories.  I've mentioned before how much I like his story "Sticks."  I also like "The Picture of Jonathan Collins," though not as much. This story appears in two later anthologies of Wagner's horror stories, so you don't have to track down a copy of Forbidden Acts to read it.

Collins is a Londoner.  During the Second World War his house suffered a direct hit from a German bomb.  He was in a coma for a week and awoke with no memory of his past--he even had to learn to walk and talk again!  Any records that may have been in the house were destroyed by the bombing. Forty years later he still looks thirty years old, and still lacks any memory of his pre-war life.

Collins is a bit of a lady's man, and also a collector of turn of the century pornogrpahy.  At an auction he purchases some late Victorian photos, and finds among them pictures of two men dressed in women's clothes having anal sex.  Close examination suggests the active member of the pair is Oscar Wilde, while the passive participant is none other than himself!  Collins starts having flashbacks to homosexual experiences with Wilde, and begins to suspect he is the model for the title character of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Collins seeks help from fringe elements of English society in figuring out the truth and finding the painting or photograph or whatever it is that has kept him young and alive all these decades, so that he can safeguard it and ensure his immortality.  There's a fraudulent psychic cat lady, a transvestite dominatrix, and a gay collector of old pornography.  Even though he has been straight since the war Collins has gay sex with the transvestite (at eighty pounds a session!) as a means of jogging his memory. After being "buggered," as our cousins across the pond say, Collins faints and has vivid memories of the photo sessions that produced the pictures he purchased at auction, at which Wilde "used him like a girl" and then abandoned him.

Collins' quest is ultimately disastrous; he unwittingly puts the image that renders him immortal at risk and suffers a horrible, and long overdue, death.

This story has a strong central idea and is well plotted and structured.  It is also explicit (in every sense of the word) and easy to understand, unlike some of the oblique and obscure stories I have been reading in these 1990s porno anthologies.  I do think "The Picture of Jonathan Collins" is a little too long.  In an apparent effort to shock or offend "square" readers and amuse or even arouse "hip" and gay readers, the story is full of explicit scenes of homosexual sex and detailed descriptions of S&M clothing. Maybe other people will enjoy these scenes, but I thought they were too long and repetitive and dragged the story down a bit.

*********

I wouldn't say these stories "hurt" or "shocked" me, though the Koja & Malzberg story and the Wagner tale are both outside the norm with their explicit depictions of sex with a monster and exhibitionistic gay sex.  Both of those stories are worthwhile reads with engaging plots and characters and references to canonical literary works.  The Tem story about broken families and murder feels like an episode of one of those TV shows "ripped from today's headlines" about cops chasing perverts, but without the cops.  Well, two out of three ain't bad.