"Shambleau" by C.L.Moore is one of those vivid tales which once read, cannot be unread. It transforms the way you see the world, especially its shadowy parts, for all time. I've read the story several times over the decades.
C.L.Moore (the gender-erasing pen name of Catherine Lucille Moore) created Northwest Smith for the pulp Weird Tales. Smith is the template for Han Solo, a swashbuckling protagonist of suspect morality but ruled by an internal integrity and embued with a fundamental courage. In this most famous 1933 Northwest Smith story, the first story ever published by Moore, he rescues a mysterious woman (he almost always did) who turns out to be more and strangely less than she seems.
The secret of Shambleau is that she's not human, in fact humans are a source of sustenance for her. What kind of sustenance is the core secret of the story. Moore creates a wonderful and terrible synthesis of beguiling beauty and weird horror all in one exotic intoxicating package. If you've never read "Shambleau" you must. I don't want spoil it, but I fear I've said too much already.
Here is a link to the collection in which I most recently read the story. Below are some covers for editions which have included the tale, which has been widely reprinted.
The Sword & Sorcery Anthology puts me in the mind of those wonderful collections of sword and sorcery stories by Lin Carter so many years ago.
It showcases quite a range of authors, including of course Robert E. Howard represented here by his outstanding "The Tower of the Elephant". Also from Weird Tales is a Jirel of Jory story by C.L. Moore ("Black God's Kiss"). There's a Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story by Fritz Leiber ("The Unholy Grail") and a story by Poul Anderson ("The Tale of Hauk"). Michael Moorcock is represented by the Elric story "The Caravan of Forgotten Dreams".
Those stories I have though in other places, but what really got me to give this one a second look were a trio of stories from Whispers, a Kane story by Karl Edward Wagner, a story by David Drake, and mostly a sword and sorcery story by Ramsey Campbell written under the pseudonym of "Montgomery Comfort".
Throw in some newer stuff by the likes of Michael Swanwick and Gene Wolf, and you have a really nice range of talent represented in this book. It's not comprehensive, but nicely expansive. There's a real sense of a range of voices and styles.
The volume is really hurt significantly though by the almost complete lack of an editorial voice. There's a forward by David Drake, but nothing from the editors and no explanatory material between the stories either about the authors or the stories. These kinds of books need that context in my opinion and the lack of it here does hurt.
The cover for this one by Jean-Sebastien Rossbach is a keeper, a really nice image full of blood and thunder. That's a nice change for my tastes when fantasy covers and S&S covers in particular seem sometimes to eschew this kind of thing.
The original solicitations for this book said Jack Vance would be included, but he has no story in this collection. There's no explanation offered.
At fifteen bucks though this one is worth the effort to find.
Having finished up the space opera on the Sci-Fi TV collection, I shifted my attention to the other series and one-shots contained on the disks. I was intrigued by Tales of Frankenstein, a 1958 pilot episode that quick research informed me was not picked up and existed as a single offbeat jewel from the time when I was a mere one year old.
The show starts up pretty dang effectively with a dark stormy night and Frankenstein in the middle of creating his infamous creature. The monster comes to awareness but having the brain of a murderer immediately wants to kill Frankenstein and only a surge of electricity downing the behemoth saves the Baron.
We then cut to the town and a couple who show up. The man, a sculptor is mortally ill and he and his wife have come to seek Frankenstein's help. They knock on his door, but after some polite chatter he rejects their plea, but it seems he might have alternate plans for them. The man dies a few days later, and Frankenstein pays the gravedigger to leave the grave open. Frankenstein wastes little time rummaging around in the grave getting the non-criminal brain he requires.
The wife though discovers the crime and confronts the drunken gravedigger who sends her to Frankenstein. She arrives just in time to meet her husband in his new body, a fact that drives him to a rampage which ultimately takes him to his grave site. She keeps him from killing Frankenstein, but then he casts himself into the grave. Frankenstein begins to cover it over when the cops arrive. But Frankenstein is undeterred and suggests his work is not over.
But it was, as I've said this pilot was not picked up.
The show is only a half-hour, but its brisk and effective for what it was. The acting is pretty good, especially strong is the wife. The only break down in the story was the very end when for reasons that didn't make sense for me, she rejects her husband's new form, apparently realizing that they wished for something they shouldn't have. It should make sense, but I don't buy it somehow given how strong her devotion to him had been and how frank and honest she'd been in the story. She didn't strike me as the kind who would let questions of vanity rule the day so. But I guess the story had to end.
What really blew me away though were the credits. Curt Siodmak was the director of this mini-epic. And the script was by Henry Kuttner and her wife C.L.Moore, all three of these folks science fiction heavyweights. It's to noted also that this was the last year of Kuttner's life and so Tales of Frankenstein must've been among his final projects. With the imprint of Hammer Films on the production, the pedigree of this show is pretty impressive.
The first episode is well worth seeing. And you can do just that by checking out the Youtube embeds below. Enjoy!