The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck by Alexander Laing (1934)

Alexander Laing, writer, seaman and poet, is today remembered at all for having edited The Haunted Omnibus in 1937 and for his few books which, while having some fantastical elements, seem to have these as window dressing more than anything. His most famous novel is probably today's piece.

When one comes into this book with the idea of reading about demons and unnecessary amputations and deformed children born out of horrenouds scientific experiments, one would not think these plot points should serve such a minor role in the story as they do. Instead, the originator of all this, the titular Gideon Wyck, MD, is soon murdered and it falls to the plucky medical student and writing assistant David Sanders to go about and do some amateur sleuthing because all the sherif can think of is following people around so he can take everyone's fingerprints by hook or by crook.

Sanders gets the help of his love interest and phone operator Daisy and together they try to sleuthe something out. They find the bunker where the experiments took place and trail Wyck's bastard epileptic son all the way to Nantucket and New York where he murders a former nurse and accomplice, but soon everyone forgets that Wyck was disfiguring developing fetuses to transform them into inhuman mangled merepeople/seal humanoids and instead Sanders just goes on about the possibility of being framed while we go through court processions and questionings and coroner's inquests and jury deliberation etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. The inhuman experiments stop being a focus entirely maybe two thirds in, and they never come up again and we have to wade through page after page of talk about embalming and examinations of clothing and weird mushy prints on a lightbulb.

That Karl Edward Wagner would put this on his legendary list of best horror novels under the Thirteen Best Science Fiction Horror Novels category utterly baffles me. Perhaps he read the second edition trimmed down of about 100 pages courtesy of Laing going in with a pair of scissors, but even if the sleuthing is severly cut down, it wouldn't make the fantastical material present in the book any better due to it's scarcity and sheer neglect towards the end.

Lore of Proserpine (1913) by Maurice Hewlett

Maurice Hewlett, Author, poet and potential son-in-law to Posseidon

Maurice Hewlett was a British novelist who, when not publishing historical novels, took to seriously claiming that not only do Fairies exist, but that he met them personally numerous times, and even had somewhat of a long winded affair with a daughter of Posseidon.

Lore of Proserpine is a very odd book. The title character, the Roman Springtime Goddess Proserpina, though claimed to be somewhat of a Goddess ruling over all the fairies, only features in the final chapter of the book in passing. The beginning of the book itself talks about a tennant no one ever sees, who had his windows replaced with a mysterious glass that alters perception, but that's rather spoiled by being nothing more than an allegory.

The next two "stories" if they may be called that, are steeped deep with personal anecdotes of Hewlett's history, and the actual "encounters" as he describes them make one think that at the very least Hewlett himself may have believed them to be genuine if by nothing else than from the way they just end abruptly without any sort of payoff. A writer trying to weave a story would, and should have, used the image of a pale elven boy with gleaming, dark, pupil-less eyes torturing a rabbit or a story of seeing two lesbian fairies on Parliament Hill as a preface to further, fantastic adventurings. But Hewlett doesn't, all the while repeating to us how everything he says happened and how he saw it.

Later he does slip into the mode of a conventional storyteller, giving "other people's" accounts of fairy child-nappings or of wooing the spirit of a tree during a storm, and these as full stories with a beginning, middle and end. Sometimes he puts himself into the story too, and indeed what can one say to the supposed authenticity of a crowd of Londoners gathering, by some supernatural foresight, in a park at night to accost a messenger boy because he's probably the God Hermes and can fulfill fortunes, good or bad, via the telegram he delivers, with Hewlett himself seeing a lady he knows help a friend make her petition ? Or his claim, coming suddenly at the tail end of a different narrative, that he was present in a house where a woman gave birth to a fairy child fathered by the spirit of a rose and then said child disappeared ?

The parts of this book which aspire towards the analytical while preaching the existence of fairies are the dullest part of the whole affair, apart from those parts where Hewlett unironically asserts that the Greek Gods do exist in some tangible fashion, and after all, if he had fooled around with one of them it would probably be bad form to tell her her daddy's just a figment of her imagination and then again so is she.

Upon completion one has to pause and wonder about Hewlett. On one hand the inclusion of "borrowed" stories he had no part in, beyond claiming to have seen or met the personage in question, or someone known to them years later, and the rather shocking claim that there were in 1913 a quarter million fairy wives in England, plucked out of Sea or Meadow (and thus, without documentation, one should add) leads one to lean on the side of a bet or an intentional bid of ribaldry. On the other, the earlier parts of the book have that shakey quality, lacking in propper setup and delivery, seen so often in the works of Theosophists and other spiritualists who claim the non corporeal is real, which makes things rather uncertain.

The Little People by John Christopher (1966)

Okay so. Imagine youself browsing and then randomly seeing this.

Now, who wouldn't immediately try to find out/get their hands on it ? Because I would, always.

The idea is that an Englishwoman inherits an Irish Castle in the middle of bugger all and she tries to turn it into a hotel, but then they find out that theres actual Little People living in the old tower. We learn they were created via some evil Nazi experiments, and then they suddenly start using their psychics powers to psychologically torture the people at the Hotel before just suddenly getting kicked a few times and crawling away.

Sadly, Christopher spends a third of the book focusing on the Hotel guests before he finally springs the Little people at us, and they only are focused on, beyond everyone's partially self centered disputations about their future and welfare and whether or not to make them a brand, for a handful of pages. Despite Christopher setting up them being savage, sociopathic bastards who use whips and can screw with people's minds, and even has one of them, apparently their leader (since that never becomes a real thing in the book) be built up as this dazzlingly beautiful, Ayesha type figure, but nothing ever comes of it and she disappears from any focus after the time when she almost jerks one of the humans off without him intending her to.

If anything, this would have been so much better had Christopher, if he did not intend to make the book any longer, to cut down his focus on the guests and increase the time spent on exploring and showcasing the Little people, maybe even have them actually kill some of the guests like it seemed they were going to do.

The Image of a Drawn Sword (1950) by Jocelyn Brooke

It seems King Penguin had decided to adorn their reprints of Brooke's works by illustrations depicting him in some fashion, though for what reason I do not know, beyond perhaps them striking onto the autobiographical nature of his works and running with it as a theme

When one starts off a description of something by calling it Kafkaesque, one is bound to shoot oneself in the foot if not carefull. Jocelyn Brooke's The Image of a Drawn Sword has been described thus by the press, and even the publishing company King Penguin couldn't restrain from cojuring up images of the old but un ageing Prague Jew. And yet I find this description not quite fitting.

Kafka certainly did not invent the fantastic creeping into one's life unawares and without explanation, nor the sense of disassociation and general 'wrongness' that can apply to a situation, and by extension to one's whole life. Brooke contradicted himself on whether or not he had read Kafka by the time when he wrote Sword, but I should  come to the man's defence, after having read his book, and say that the situations presented do not warrant the accusation, as it were.

The story, if anything, feels a bit anemic on that front, at any case. The title character, Reynard, finds himself experiencing odd moments where his lethargy seeps over into the slow unravelling of his personality and consciousness. Perhaps this is the clue for later events, but whatever may occur, it seems Reynard finds himself suddenly in situations which, contrary to all his personal experiences, seem very much distanced in time from occasions which, to him, seem a couple of weeks distant at first.

Yet there is never a jolt where Reynard finds himself unsure where he is or how he had gotten there. Indeed, he passes along through the novel quite smoothly, it is only the time of the place he arrives at that seems at odds with his own internal clock.

One regrets then that Brooke did not make the novel any longer or expand at all upon this theme. While the idea is interesting, and the events in the latter section of the novel are gripping enough, the concept as a whole could be utilised a bit better, and the alterations and sudden, unaccountable leaps in his consciousness could furnish a bit more meat to the story. A quick read, and an enjoyable one at that, yes, though if one wishes to experience this idea done in a more fantastic sort of way, I'd say Ruthven Tod's The Lost Traveller might satisfy due to it's superior length. If anyone wants a story of this type with answers well, it seems I don't know what to tell them.

Most interestingly, the novel is not without connection to other work written by Brooke. Anthony Powell, King Penguin's court Biographer on Brooke, completely fails to mention the fictional Dog Inn, located in the untraceable, fictional region of Clambercrown, is the title subject of Brooke's semi autobiographical novel, The Dog at Clambercrown (1955).

Having nothing more to say, I will end my review as suddenly as Brooke ended his book.

The Magic of Malaya by Cuthbert Woodville Harrison (1910)

Of the personage of Cuthbert Woodville Harrison I could find no concrete information, beyond his having authored books relating to Malaya (before a series of political and colonial reorganisations eventually lead to it becoming modern Malaysia), being the author of an oft-cited refference work, An illustrated guide to the Federated Malay States, and this, together with his name appearing on such works as Some notes on the government services in British Malaya and Council minutes, Perak, 1877-1879 leads one to believe Harrison was a colonial official within the Federation/Protectorate.

His The Magic of Malaya seems to be his only time turning to writing fiction, or at least partly fiction, and on the whole it is a more successfull attempt than those of many writers acquainted with the dull world of nonfiction stepping out uncertainly into the wilds of the romantic market.

The collection contains stories of life in Malaya, usually with a Colonial official holding at least three different posts fumbling about the grass somewhere. There are vignetes that, as they are written in the first person, seem likely to have been at least partly been inspired by real events, or at least had been made from the fabric of real events re-arranged differently. There is nothing that suggests anything out of the ordinary or unreal in tales such as Ah Heng, where a chinese settler takes a woman from a pleasure house to be his wife and very incrimentally increases the size of his land without having to pay extra for it. There is a tale of the inspection of the innards of a dead crocodile after it is suspected of having killed someone, a description (rather than a story, as it lacks any actual plot) of the transport of patients suffering from beri-beri to a remote hospital, and even a lengthy description of the journey undertaken by a Colonial official holding the customary three different offices of Chairman of the Sanitary Board, Collector of Land Revenue and District Officer on his route and the complaints, petitions and explanations given him along the way. None of these, excluding the last one, is very long, and there isn't much incident to relate. The Sinking of the Schooner has a former pirate recount his ambush on a well laden schooner, but that too is brief and cuts away just as the ship is shot for the first time.

Beyond these there are also several diversions which disperse with any trappings of fiction, such as a monologue on the ideal Malay servant, on the psychology of bullock cart drivers, or a summary of the various sieges and conquests within Malacca.

But then you have a short list of tales that actually not only count as fiction, but which are to be classed as supernatural. Pawang Helai, the first of these and the first tale of the collection is the best, dealing with the murder of a chinese peddlar at the hand of a native Sakai wizard who seemingly can change shape and call upon the help of other animals.

The Hallucinations of Mat Palembang follows the title character as he himself follows his dead father up a tree to eat with all his dead relatives, and is also rather impressive in it's description.

Finally, the oddest of the bunch is The Room of the Captain. It doesn't concern Malayans or Malaya, is the only story taking place onboard a ship, and has a MacKenzie, an old, presumabely British sailor as the protagonist. Now he gets promoted to the position of captain after many years of anticipation in a most unusual way: the old Captain simply vanishes without a trace. This sets the crew a-talking and there is some uneasiness about the ship. But MacKenzie keeps getting startled by an inexplicable puddle forming next to the former captain's bed and every night he feels more and more of a tight hold on his shoulder and can more and more clearly hear someone talking to him at night. But no one is ever there and his nerves are always unsettled, until he is forced to clean up the wet stains himself so the crew won't notice, anticipating that each night the situation will get worse after he hears the old Captain ordering him to do something, until.....

And that's where the whole build-up of the story is jettisoned, as Harrison has MacKenzie retire to his old quarters, refuse the Captainship and has the new Captain never run into any perril. The reason for the dead Captain's disdain for MacKenzie's leadership is never explained, nor what actually happened to the former Captain.

If anything, that is probably the biggest disappointment of the book, one can feel that in more capable hands the story would continue onwards and perhaps leave off with a more unpleasant end for the stand-in Captain and his shipmates, but alas.

Now Harrison's writing does include some arrogant gibes at Chinese and Malays alike, written from a colonial perspective and that may irritate the modern reader, though there are a few interesting bits and pieces scattered about the book that may be worth the time.

Na prost!: phantastischer Königsroman by Paul Scheerbart (1898)

Paul Scheerbart is a forgotten German writter who promoted glass architecture, apparently drank excessively and, according to some, may have starved himself to death in protest against World War I.

This isn't his first novel, however it seems to not be one of his more "famous" ones, at least as far as his works go when translated into English for a devoted cult audience.

The novel, sadly, is unpopular for a good reason. It starts out quite good.....but then becomes very bad. One seldom sees such a plunge from the heights of quality to the depths of irrelevance. The story starts out with three learned professors being hurled into space in a giant bottle after the Earth is vaporised when colliding with a meteor. This part is the strongest, and one is reminded of Leonid Andreyev, or Walter Owen. But then the book turns into a long and tiresome tirade of the professors reading out and then commenting on short essays and philosophical allegories and trying to discover the meaning of the universe in a grain of sand, and identify every character and event in the story with some deep and obscure allegorical meaning. Sometimes the stories begin somewhat promisingly, like the story of the gigantic seven headed dragon that flies through space devouring everything.....but like all the rest, the story ends almost immediately, with the dragon turning into a woman.

All the stories are like that, but some are a lot less interesting even in concept, like the fantastic adventure of a fly that sits on a lump of sugar in grandma's tea.

Very, very occasionally the recital of these trivial philosophising inanities is interrupted by a resurgence of the gloomy, post apocalyptical atmosphere, but these moments are sadly rare. Also a few times the professors show a comic misunderstanding of the social and political establishment in 20th century Europe, being from some far distant future that is never propperly expanded upon, such as the belief subway tunnels were used primarily to allow armed Police units to perform military maneuvers when suppressing the masses.

Having read Scheerbart's various short pieces taking place in the ancient Near East, in Assyria, Babylon or Palmyra (the last one having the mischeviously amusing title of "Of People who Lost their Heads, or a Palmyrian Torch-dance novela" that can only be thought up by a rogueish German), I know he can write well, even when dealing with vignettes that only really showcase a moment in the lives of people and places, but this one was rather a dissapointment.

The Fatal Move and Other Stories by F.W.O'Connell (1924)

Frederick William O'Connell (1876–1929) was an Irish clergyman and scholar specialising in the popularisation and preservation of Irish, writing such works as A Grammar of Old Irish, Irish Self-taught or translating Jekyll and Hyde into Irish, as well as having been a voice of 2RN, the first Irish radio station.

Not to try and under sell his accomplishments, however writing fiction does not appear to be one of them.

The title story reeks of a gothic atmosphere. A crazed chess player encases his romantic rival in a metal chair and has him play on an electrified chess board, where two random pieces and a series of squares on the board were arranged so that these touching would result in the unlucky player's being roasted in his chair.

A very intriguing idea, but O'Connell barely devotes any time to the actual game, perhaps due to not being a great Chess player himself. It's all sadly over before it propperly begins. W. C. Morrow would have handled this better, though he'd probably have both fried to a crisp due to a freak accident.

The Vengeance of the Dead is a brainless affair where a Hindu man argues with his Muslim neighbour, hypnotises him and causes his death and then is killed shortly after a seance where the dead man raps out his name.

The Fiend that Walks Behind is another short affair that, in more competent hands, could have been handled well. A physician who stole the work of his deceased colleague and claimed it as his own contracts the same paranoia that his friend wrote about, namely the utter dread of someone or something always following behind his back. The whole thing is presented in a bit of a heavy handed way and the main character committs suicide before much really happens.

The Homing Bone has a physician purloin a femur from a pile of bones in a demolished cemetary.....only to dream that a pair of skeletons barge into his room at night with their femur-less comrade inside of a coffin, and then again with a coffin bearing the physician's name. Then when that silliness is past the doctor lies down but he hears rapping and then someone opens the door of his room and leaves. Oh what M. R. James could have done with the basic idea !

In Professor Danvers' Disappearance, Professor Danvers apparently disappears by pretending to be his own guest, leaving behind his clothes as if he disappeared from them supernaturally. Presented in the dry tone of an ex-detective.

The Rejuvenation of Ivan Smithovitch is the weirdest (and not in the way we like round these parts) part of the whole collection. In some unexplained possible future England was taken over by Russians who supressed the English language so that only 6 people, one of them the title character, can speak it. In order to stop it from dying out he has monkey glands grafted onto his frame and becomes mentally regressed to the state of an ape. Written from the perspective of a somewhat bitter Irishman dealing with the preservation of his own native language, but too brief, lacking in any details and culminating in a most undignified and silly finale.

I can see why O'Connell stuck to translating other people's fiction rather than writing his own very much.

Forty Years with the Damned, Or, Life Inside the Earth: A Novel (1895) by Charles Aikin

This is one of those instances where the chronicler of the obscure is left having to confess that no amount of digging has been able to produce anything at all about the author of the work in question. The publisher himself seems very obscure, and online sources can't even agree on his name, though the book quite clearly mentions Regan Printing House.

The novel in question, from a cursory glance, would seem to come from a somewhat amateur publication. There are instances of repeated words, missing characters. The writing itself would also suggest someone dabbling rather than an experienced hand.

In short, this is formally a story about a paradisical after-life existence inside the Earth, in a place called Surey. However, seeing as this is a Utopia of the most sickening sense, the author decides, after subjecting us to a full chapter of extremely tedious and long winded descriptions of theatres and opera houses, to not focus on this Utopia overmuch, instead letting people either speak of their past lives or to follow the main character on a spirit journey to Mars.

These are a mixed bag. For example, the only story taking place inside the Earth, dealing with the attack on Hell, is over-brief, lacking in detail, and is over before it's pretty much started and in contrast, the story of a Southerner pursuing his eloping daughter and then shooting her husband while drunk ends up having more substance and holds a stronger interest.

The Martian story is the most interesting, and one would almost hope that Aikin focused only that, as the spirit-intervention of the main character is extremely brief, circumstantial and could be easily supplanted.

On the other hand the story focusing on the Toltecs and Aztecs is the most confusing, as Aikin seems to just treat them as Medieval Europeans, being knights-errant, houlding tourneys on horseback with lances and the like, and it's one of the more odd goofs of the writing, which also includes such statements as "black people are by natural law motivated to serve white people even in the after life", "no one will ever reach the North Pole", or a completely meaningless incident where the main character runs into a conclave of Sirens talking about all the bones of the victims displayed in their palaces, which information the main character learns only to leave and for it to never come up again.

And then the hunter who had all this narrated to him wakes up from a dream.

I will not gratify this last development with a reply.

Decimon Huydas: A Romance of Mars (1906) by Sara Weiss

And so again I have to repeat myself, re-affirming that age-old wisdom: mediums and spiritualists write terrible fiction. It was the same with Charles W. Leadbeater and Margaret Bloodgood Peeke. An interesting idea barely developed.

The book in question, whose labourious full title runs as "Decimon Hûŷdas : a romance of Mars : a story of actual experiences in Ento (Mars) many centuries ago / given to the psychic Sara Weiss and by her transcribed automatically under the editorial direction of spirit Carl De L'Ester ; illustrated with six original drawings." concerns a vile priest named Zeydon forcing Frona, a young woman and her cousin Invalou into priestly service via abuse of his near absolute power due to his lust for the women, interwoven with stories of the all but recently practiced human sacrifice and mentions of the seeming abuse of power and throttling of the nation at the hands of the priests.

This seems like a good enough basis for a story, unfortunately Mrs. Weiss may have refused to actually give it it's propper shape due to the fact that, in her fixed belief as a medium, if this she really was and this wasn't just a fictitious vehicle for explaining the story, she may have come to regard these ideas as coming to her through external inspiration and thus jotted them down without caring that this made her story limp about piteously without ever really getting anywhere. Also in the book she presents the cessation of the previous mandatory human sacrifice as a boon, with the institution itself having been, according to her words, holy and good and the only reason it was ceased was because the Chief God felt pitty for all the families chosing mass suicide to avoid their children being publically sacrificed in the flames. Mrs. Weiss doesn't treat the practice with any contempt, and acts as if it was completely propper that it was instituted and maintained, and that it could even be re-instated.

Furthermore, in connection to this, she presents the idea that people see the actions of the Priests to be tyrannical, only to drop the idea and never brings it up again. Even the guilty Priest repents halfway through the book, thus having us go without an actual antagonist for the rest of the book.

The main characters, if they can so be called, as well as all the other characters in the book aside from those having short cameos or the villainous but not so villainous Priest Zeydon, all suffer from the consequences of being written by a person with seemingly a religious regard for their material, who makes good only entirely and absolutely good to an utterly sickening degree. Barely any screen time is given to the main characters, apart from one or two scenes of them to make statements as concerning their mutual love and their hate for Zeydon, and despite them remaining at the cloister for years, almost none of the incidents therein are related to us. We only learn that Frona had a friend and confidante in a fellow would be novice in one paragraph in passing after the latter dies. We see nothing of their youth, know none of their friends or associates and even the role of their grieving parents is entirely restricted to making pilgrimages back and forth to try and get the Priests to release their children and repeating the same assertations of their own pious nature ad nauseam. We know nothing about them either, nor about their relative and friend who wishes to aid them in this process apart from the fact he is a widower.

The entire novel is almost exclusively dedicated to this back and forth petitioning and repeated asertations of faithful religious service. None of the particulars of the lives of most of the characters are given us, no details of the life on Mars or the deeper religious lore of the Planet. Sometimes Weiss reffers to some of it's aspects in passing, but after that we are right back to lengthy statements of the sacredness of "Our Holy Religion".

The odd thing in this instance is that the author would seemingly have enough material from her own pen to fall back on. As far back as 1903 she published Journeys to the planet mars; or, Our mission to Ento which seems to be an account of mental communication with Mars and a description of life thereon. Weiss has even gone so far to even provide a glossary of specific Martian terms prior to the text of Decimon Huydas, yet she doesn't use any of this in her story propperly, aside from using made up names for plants and birds.

If this idea was indeed sabotaged by a deep conviction that this idea in it's rough and unpolished state was mentally communicated and thus beyond reproach or alteration, then it is indeed a shame.

Incidentally, the title of the book is a bit odd since it is framed as something Weiss wrote down after getting it dictated by a Martian spirit named Genessano, who recites the story of Invalou and Frona as recorded many centuries later by Decimon Huydas, who thus seems an odd choice for the title character.

Cloud-Pictures (1872) by Francis Henry Underwood

I've decided to ressurect this blog, chiefly for my own personal interest, as I see no reason to confine my ratings solely to goodreads anymore.

Franics Henry Underwood (1825-1894) somewhat dissapointingly does not provide much juicy material to start us off. A magazine editor from the US, abolitionist advocate and later US Consul in Scotland, his literary output seems to also be rather un-appreciated at present, with none of his novels being selected for literary discussions. Though in The Atlantic Monthly he butted shoulders with luminaries of his time like Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell and Holmes, his own output seems far less stellar, though according to John Wilson Townsend in his Kentucky in American Letters, 1784-1912, his Lord of Himself, a novel of life in Kentucky in 1844, was very well received in Kentucky, a state he had quit many years prior due to his distaste for slavery. A further oddity is his having penned in 1890, as a US Consul at Glasgow, Cookery for working-men's wives, a guidebook to frugal cooking.

Cloud-Pictures (1872) seems to be his first work of fiction. It contains four stories, with half of the book taken up by the novella The Exile of von Adelstein's Soul, which deals with a baron who runs over the deformed son of a witch and whose soul is cursed every night into the body of the dead youth in order to serve the witch and suffer horrible abuse. It is a very chilling idea and were it treated in a longer and more detailed fashion, it could well suffice for a whole novel. Unfortunately the author, though he has the props in place, including a philosopher dabbling in sorcery who'se beloved was destroyed by the witch and a helpfull priest set on helping the Baron, he fails to use them for long, and indeed the story concludes all too briefly, never taking full advantage of the potential nastiness provided by the premise. The climax of the witch simply dying on her own is not exactly what one would hope for either.

The next story, Topankalon, is mostly a simplistic story with seemingly didactic leanings, where a harmonious and peace loving people are overwhelmed by a barbaric and bloodthirsty people from the land of Malaccordia. This name makes one suspect satirical leanings to the story, but those aren't there. Instead there is a rather quick reformation of the barbaric prince due to his love for the princess of Topankalon, and it is a bit too brief, again, to really take advantage of the set up. Even the conspiracy to kill the Prince, and later his father, lead by his scheming brother fails to supply much of interest beyond one skirmish where the would-be usurper gets defeated and exiled.

What follows is pure drudgery. Herr Regenbogen's Concert is not a story, though apparently published by Putnam at one point. It is a dready slog, where several pages before the "story" propper begins are taken up with empty, hollow, pretentious babblings about the eatheric propperties and qualities of music, a load of bold faced drivel that could only impress a suitably underdeveloped intellect, and that purely through the sheer awe at all the unfamiliar words and turns of phrase and wide, sweeping comparisons employed, without understanding any. The narrative itself deals with a concert conducted by the legendary conductor, Herr Regenbogen, which is devoid of any real incident. At one point it seems the music brings out to view the true character of the people listening, but despite that being a low tactic worthy of a moralist novel for children, it has no real significance and is over before you know it. And after the concert is over the narrator simply leaves.

A Great-Organ Prelude, the final story of this collection is a little less tedious to sit through, but does not offer a whole lot. A bunch of Grand Organ decorations argue among themselves, and with Bach, about how no one but mathematicians even really like Bach to begin with, and that turns out to be a dream.

Heaven forbid something mildly interesting happens.