The Weird and the Wonderful Youtube Series

I've started a youtube series to further detail my excursions in the Weird, though I still intend to write articles on here as well.

The first three videos

The Snail on the Slope by Arkady and Boris Strugatky (1980)

This novel has been very hard to find in the US due, apparently, to most of the original edition being destroyed by the Publisher due to the blurb about the authors garnering the displeasure of the Soviet Authorities.

This novel is, in effect, two novels.

The first is a kafkaesque story about a young man named Pepper being inable to escape the bureacratic organisation that keeps him in place, nor be able to go into the mysterious forest, which was the reason he had signed up with the Directorate to begin with.

The other deals with the strange, mysterious forest, among confused natives who love to speak in long, run on sentences and change their mind at least three or four times in the same sentence, focusing on Kandid, who crashlanded in the forest several years ago and had been trying to get to the Directorate ever since.

And this is sadly the novel's biggest problem. Both stories work on their own, and each switch is jarring and forcing one to re-acquaint themselves with the setting. The plots go on and on, bringing up things like sentient machines that no one is allowed to see and thus must look for blindfolded, an invisible Director whom Pepper can never manage to be able to talk to, entire forest villages absorbed by mushrooms, we never get a solution to any of it. Perhaps in Pepper's story, leaving us without an explanation would be thematically fitting, but Kandid's story was constantly building up new inexplicable occurrences happening in the forest, only for them to never be explained. Worst, despite Pepper wanting to desperately get into the forest and Kandid being in the forest and trying to get back to the biostation, the same one Pepper goes to get paid at at one point, the two plotlines never converge and the two never meet.

These two faults make me a bit unsatisfied with the conclusion to this otherwise very fascinating book.

This Creeping Evil (1950/1963) by Geoffrey Bennett

Now, it doesn't matter how I start now, there's no better introduction to this review than that cover.

Geoffrey Bennett was a British seaman and author, chiefly remembered for his naval histories, such as his The Battle of Jutland or Charlie B: a Biography of Admiral Lord Beresford of Metemmeh and Curraghmore, G.C.B., G.C.V.O., Ll.D., D.C.L the latter of which I give in full specifically because of that being it's actual full title. He wrote some fiction on the side, under the pen name of 'Sea Lion', almost all seemingly drawing on his own experiences at sea and thus having something to do with ships (even two of his three Desmond Drake novels about a British Intelligence agent deal with ships in some capacity, be it blowing them up or finding them when they get lost) and This Creeping Evil is the only one of his books I can find with a supernatural/superscientific element.

The story details how a giant big blob comes out of nowhere and starts demolishing various British cities via steamrolling through them, all the while the author, one Thomas Delaney of (at the time of publication still) His Majesty's Navy, seems to have the terrible habbit of running into it quite a lot by accident.

The first time Delaney comes across it is when it shows up at the Port in Portsmouth where Delaney is to land his ship, but a huge gelatinous blob coming out of Dartmoor to flatten everything will probably get in the way of shore leave, as so often is the case. Now, Delaney loses his whole ship while attacking the Thing and is the only survivor, thanks to a rather far reaching coincidence. Then, never caring to really mourn any of the men he captained for two years and just acting like said disaster was a nuissance or an embarassment at best, he carries on talking about the Thing a whole lot. He finds people who are oddly thrilled by having seen it kill thousands of people due to it being so 'exciting', and then he's nearly crushed to death when the Thing crashes a football game between the Angles and the Welsh at Wembley, the final result of said unfinished game surely being the focus of much pub-side speculation and the occasional dust up. Of course Delaney is seemingly the only person to survive, and he is rescued by his wife and a chance acquaitance of his whom she randomly meets in the street.

Now, considering how much of an Odyssey the acquisition of this book was for me (this consisting of a crooked used book seller at a certain website trippling the price on me or getting overbid by 50 cents a second before the end of an Ebay auction at 4 AM) I find it painful to state that it doesn't get any better than that. If anything, well.....

The narrator basically just sits around, talks about the Thing a lot, and describes it's seemingly erratic and never explained movements from one city to another. I was hoping there would be some explanation offered for that, but instead the author invokes the "supernatural therefore I don't have to explain anything" clause, making me want to bite something.

The book suddenly shifts to prattling about how England needs a Leader from amongst the Church, how this Thing is clearly the Devil or something of that sort, bringing up a "Prophecy" from the Bible about how this is totally the "Serpent" let loose after a thousand years because, etc. etc. Then when the Thing finally does something different and starts to slowly squeeze London to death with it's tentacles, we get told that England totally deserved this because unlike the "Heathen of China or the Congo" they've been taught the Christian way and ignored it. Apparently not working on Saturday and having a luke warm approach to active worship is apparently just the worst and most evilestest thing ever, and was deserving of God letting loose his wrath upon Britain. Bear in mind this was published in 1950, a mere five years after the War and yet apparently no one thinks it's strange that human experimentation and mass ethnic genocide and slaughter of millions of people is apparently considered not as bad in comparison, since God never thought it'd be a good idea to let his giant goop monster loose on Nazi Germany.

Then someone says how God let loose the Thing because people lack faith in him and my first reaction was "Of course, and here I was thinking that the best way for God to revive Faith in himself was to manifest himself publically in such a way as to deny any possible denial or skepticism but silly me, the answer was clearly to let loose a giant slimey blob to randomly bulldoze through England, killing old people, women and children alike, with no apparent link or direct connection to God or Christianity, in the hope that people just kind of piece that one together. Brilliant !"

This is in keeping with the same logic that basically pretends that only Christians live in the entirety of Britain and there aren't any Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists or any other denominations about in the heartland of the then British Empire.

And so, in keeping with this sudden turn, a new character is introduced twenty pages before the end (the book has a real problem of basically having no one but Delaney stay around long, every character that gets introduced only showing up for a chapter or two before dying or leaving for the rest of the book) who gathers up people inside Saint Paul's Cathedral and gives them a sermon, and tells them how the only way to save themselves from the Thing which not even an Atom Bomb could really put a dent in is to pray. Not, you know, getting airlifted out of there which the authorities tried a whole one time and then since the plane got demolished by a crowed never tried to do again, apparently. Not tunneling beneath the enclosing claw, which they totally have time for because the damn Thing takes literal days if not weeks to close in in any significant fashion.

No no, clearly the real solution is to march out towards the Thing singing hymns and then praying in front of It and hoping God just does a Miracle.

And yeah, the climax of the book is that a bunch of people kneel in front of the Thing, there's a lightning flash and it's just gone.

....Now the question is why Arrow Books decided to dust this one off thirteen years later. The Thing saw publication only a few years before the start of the Giant Monster movie craze in the mid 50's and early 60's, as testified by the appearance in rapid succession of such films as The Giant Claw, The Giant Gila Monster, Gorgo or Reptilicus just to stick to US releases. I believe the people at Arrow saw this book as a quick way to cash in on the trend, and even got some bloke to make this utterly amazing cover for it. Sadly it's probably the best thing about the whole production.

Wulfheim (1950) by Sax Rohmer

Sax Rohmer aka Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward is remembered today primarily for his Fu Manchu novels, and even those are brought up mostly to cringe at the Yellow Peril aspect of the franchise. Yet he also penned outright genre fiction, including the phenomenal masterpiece of the form that was Brood of the Witch-Queen.

Wulfheim was published towards the end of Rohmer's life, under yet another pseudonym, this time as Michael Furey. To my knowledge this is the only time Rohmer used this name and I'm not quite sure why. Perhaps he wanted the work to not be tinged with expectations his name may provide, as it probably is a completely different book from what his readers would expect ?

Either way, this is a work of his that has, quite frankly, garnered very little attention. I do not, however, believe that to be justified, as Wulfheim is a fine work indeed.

Set in an unspecified period of time not quite modern but no longer renaissance or Medieval either, it follows the Monk Hilarius, formerly Otto of Wulfheim, who ran off to a monastery for very personal and very troubling reasons. He returns home to tell his father the Count of Wulfheim why he did so, especially given that this way the Wulfheim name passes and the Domain falls to the Church on Otto's death. When he arrives in the Domain where he is virtually a stranger, he meets not only his father and sister Fragia, but also Fragia's best friend Loe, her parents, Loe's almost-fiancé and the resident no-bullshit-taker, Dr. Oberon. Along the way he finds that people in the Domain shun him, he feels an evil presence about, discovers the ruins of an Abbey that burned to the ground as well as discovering two rogues digging up the heart of Caesar Wulfheim, the last Abbot who had been burned at the stake for devil worship.

The story focuses on the interactions between the people in the oppressive atmosphere of Wulfheim Castle that is, in the truest sense of the word, Gothic, without having any of the usual pretensions that happen when an author tries to do this idea straight in modern-ish times. The people at the Castle are slowly revealed to be suffering various stages of depravity and erotic mania. Loe's father the General can't help but try and make the light-as-a-feather Castle Maid and her mother is purposefully blocking Loe's engagement simply because Loe's chosen husband refused to sleep with said mother. Meanwhile the true nature of Otto's mania is revealed to us, and it is perhaps only slightly less interesting because the novel very bluntly hints that the half-sister he can't but think of isn't actually his sister. I will, however, commend Rohmer on having this revelation only come after it's too late for it to mean anything beyond making Otto feel better about himself.

In the background of all this is the creeping aura of some ancient evil, culminating in the post-mortem possession of Fragia's body by another, long departed soul. And while the few reviewers out there seemed to suggest the story up until this point was gearing up for literal lycanthropy, what we get and how we get there isn't bad at all, especially since the atmosphere is quite strong throughout.

Now, the most sure-fire way to drag a book down and make it tedious is to have a character who likes to wax philosophical. In Visiak's Medusa, whenever Huxtable got into his habbit of speaking in saccharine analogies and long winded spiritual diatribes, it made the already floundering book flounder even more vehemently. This book, however, is the rare exception to the rule. The character of Dr. Oberon is by far the most engaging member of the book's cast. He is snarky, he likes to say seemingly irreverent or intentionally provocative things, likes to be sarcastic to the point where one imagines him rolling his eyes visibly, and does, as a rule, not take anyone's crap and just gets right on to the point that they are either not seeing or trying not to see. This, along with the narrator's own tone, hovering between sarcasm and sardonics, makes for an interesting reading, and generally does not spare anyone.

If I am to lay any criticism against this book, it is that the possession itself is of rather brief duration, cut short by the dramatic and very ironic denoument. Other than that, this is a fine work that I fully believe is worthy of the Rohmer name.

Medusa (1929) by E. H. Visiak

Edward Harold Physick, pacifist, author and life long admirer of Milton is better known under his pseudonym of E. H. Visiak. However, one assumes that most people know Visiak not from any perusal of his work per se, but from reading about other people talking about how they perused his work.

For, despite being an oft cited and oft repeated name in various biographies, essays and studies of the Weird and Fantastic in fiction, Visiak shares the fate of H. R. Wakefield, in that his actual books are no easily accessible to the public, beyond maybe a snippet that gets released in anthologies ad nauseam. Visiak, who apparently only wrote the few occasional scattered tales that never even found an anthology to this day, does not even have that luxury.

Medusa is often cited as a masterpiece of the form. Indeed, Wagner puts it on his list of 33 best Horror novels, though given the man put something as flawed and mishandled as The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck on the same list means that is in and of itself no great honour. Indeed, if one is to compare Medusa to anything, it should be Visiak's own The Haunted Island (1910), his first novel.

That story, while occasionally containing anecdotes that distract from the tale, is also a tale of a youth who escapes England on board a ship following his own entanglement with the law. But where in Island Visiak manages to keep the theme going strong and only bungles the ending (by having the 17th century mad scientist bent on blowing up England just sort of give up on his evil schemes, because), Medusa is sadly an instance where an impressive near-mid end or culmination of the story is bogged down by a dronning middle.

The beginning of the novel is fine, with the main character going through many unfortunate events and tragedies in his young life that, spaced as they are during a period of many years, allow one to experience their atmosphere in quick succession, giving one false hope that the entire novel would be written in this fashion. Sadly, the middle part, where Will, the main character, joins Huxtables sea expedition to find his son, is the longest and most drawn out. Visiak finds it necessary to encumber his readers with many unnecessary details about the various stops the ship makes along the way and of the mundane sights and sounds one gets to see in the harbour. When the novel starts with Wil killing his grandfather and then beating a bully to death, one can't help but hope for something more exciting than spending several pages talking about a port town and how the shipyard has a crane.

The worst part of this section are the occasional moments where Will's benefactor Mr. Huxtable attempts to imprint some bogus philosophical claptrap onto his protegé. These are dull and tedious and simply stretch out the book until something mildly interesting happens again.

The appearance of a strange merman-like creature on board is not given enough attention and is treated more like a curiosity, and the only way Visiak thought to be able to introduce the lore that is given as explanation behind everything going on is delivered in a droning tone going on about extra sensory drivel that honestly doesn't rise above random, hackneyed digressions on such themes from writers who have no business holding a pen. The climax itself is startling, yes, but it's not quite enough to balance out the tedious journey there, especially given how short it is.

The ending itself is abrupt and feels like a concluding statement is missing, the story simply stopping. It's sad that the novels best parts are so weighed down by the travelogue portion of the story, so tedious the author finds it necessary to excuse himself for his own sluggishness at points. If that were cut down, maybe this novel could be an actual living classic and not only called such by essayists who feel it is their moral obligation to follow the Authorities. Maybe then one could obtain the English language edition of the book for less than 65 Pounds, which, had I paid as much and not simply gotten the dirt cheap German translation, I would definitely not feel a worthwhile price.

The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children (2011) by Brendan Connell

Yikes, a book published this century ? Yes indeed, a title I started on the strength of a promising review online, and probably the most recent thing I have read in years.

Of the 11 stories present in this volume, only about 2 of them I'd say are really good, with one that is almost there but stumbles. That leaves a lot of things that sadly left me in a bit of a sour mood.

To get the bad out of the way first, both The Dancing Billionaire and Maledict Michela are utterly pointless. One has a character almost grow as a person but then deciding not to and the other has a German who likes feet marry a woman and make eyes at the cleaning lady. I find no real lasting appeal in either of these.

The Slug, while fitting the theme of degradation, seems to be largely without any reason behind it's central conceit, and so it feels more like a philosophical excercise than a story.

Peter Payne, while technically a story, doesn't have much to it, and it doesn't seem to fit with the theme the book sometimes tries to convey, and honestly it is the least interesting piece in the collection if one discounts the two damp squibs mentioned above.

Collapsing Claude does go with the overall theme of degradation, but it isn't the most interesting of premises, with a man being forced as a third, degraded wheel in a three way relationship with a horribly ugly woman.

Molten Rage is basically a slow description of the collapse and destitution of a worker and of the hypocrisy of his intellectual friend, the so called champion of worker's rights. It is servicable for what is it but like thw previous two stories fails to really grab you or present something more novel.

The Life of Captain Gareth Caernarvon is something that tries very hard to ape the title story in presentation and in execution and I argue it would have been sucessful and worthy of being included as one of the genuinely good and fitting stories of this collection, provided the ending cut, as it, despite conjuring up a single specific potent image, I definitely can say tries way too hard and thus spoils the whole broth.

The Chymical Wedding of Des Esseintes is another story that could be genuinely good, but isn't. All the pieces are there for it to be genuinely an interesting, metaphysical read, but Connell stumbles over himself and ends things before anything truly happens. Both the setting in 19th-early 20th Century Prague Ghetto and the mystical rituals invoked remind one very strongly of Meyrink and one is to wonder what he could have done with the concept. Not helping Connell any is that his characters walk by a magician who it's apparently not good to associate with, but then that's dropped and most of the story is taken up with people drinking beer.

Brother of the Holy Ghost, the story that more than any of the previous ones is close to being good, and perhaps can even be said to be so, but not to the fullest degree possible. Showcasing the life and incompetent reign of Pope Celestine V, as well as showcasing some dark secrets from his past, should do well to make it stand alongside the title story, but unfortunately the stream-of-consciousness writing that Connell likes to sometimes engage in does this story some disservice, which is topped off with it's rather short length and lack of any great detail afforded to the events and incidents alluded to.

The Search for Savino is one of the two really good pieces in this collection, and it is slightly annoying that this is the only story not solely authored by Connell, being co-writen by Forrest Aguirre. In essence it is the examination of the life and works of a fictional painter, as well as the rather bizzare art he creates in secret and leaves behind as a monument. The story, more than anything else, reminded me very strongly of Borges.

And finally, The Life of Polycrates, is the story of the life, reign, tyranny and cruelty of Polycrates, Tyrant of Samos, detailing his beneficial and monstrous deeds in equal measure, and using various excerpts and letters as well as snippets of narrative to paint out the life of this most amusing rogue. it is by far the best story in the collection, and even the notes attached to it contain many short and intriquing episodes and anecdotes. One only wishes the whole book was of this nature and quality.

Zorastro, a Romance by "Creswick J. Thomson"/Charles John Samuel Thompson (1899)

Charles J. S. Thompson was a British physician notable for his many books on poisons and being an agent of high class British medical hoarder Henry Wellcome. His book The History and Evolution of Surgical Instruments is nearly the only remnant of the vast collection of medical instruments acquired under his headship of Wellcome's library, the collection being destroyed by those dastardly Germans during World War II.

Though his complete bibliography is not easy to trace, but he wrote books about the history and "romance" of not only subjects that would be related to his profession, like of the lot and trade of the Apothecary or a history of Quackerdom (not to be confused with Quakers) in the old city of London, but also on subjects like Astrology or Perfume. One of his more readily available and yet also easily digestible is the slim little volume Poison romance and poison mysteries (1904), wherein he details , for example, how a Franciscan offered the Venetians a diverse array of poisons and listed exact figures for the poisoning of the crowned and annointed heads of Europe and beyond. And assuredly his Holiness the Bishop of Rome Paul III would surely not find it pleasing to find his life valued as one fifth to that of the Ottoman Sultan.

The book in question today seems, after some digging, the only article of fiction written by Thompson, at least the only one that I know of. Unlike many non fiction authors trying their hand at the weaving of fictions for the first time however, this tale shows not a little competence.

A tale of Karl, a foundling orphan and his foster sister turned love interest, taking place in 16th century Germany, primarily in the city of Nuremberg and it's environs, the chief point of interest lies with the titular Zorastro, a brillinat physician and alchemist who had discovered Karl in a basket on the river and left him to an old apothecary to raise, and who has since travelled in many countries and learned medical secrets from Tatars and other such peoples. Renowned as a wonder worker, he returns to Nuremberg to make Karl his assistant right around the time when Dulcie, his beloved, becomes singled out by the son of the Duke of Bavaria as an unwilling potential mistress. The incidents of the first half of the novel, following quickly after each other, are the best, as they display action without making it too unbelievable.

The second half is a bit less neat, though there be a pleasant enough sprinkling in of seemingly genuine and non-rationalised supernatural and alchemical occurrences, sadly becomes a bit muddled as characters run into each other and onto many startling coincidences and sudden, unexpected revelations of life-long mysteries all in the span of a few days, with little enough to suggest that all this did not fall into place by pure chance.

Still, it be a fine historical piece with enough going on to keep one satisfied and a few mysterious and inexplicable glimpses of the unreal to be basically beyond serious reproach.

One is confused by the author's chosing a pseudonym basically consistent of his initials and surname for this book, when the book at the same time boasts of his nonfiction books, which were published under his real name.

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.

Grey Maiden, the story of a sword through the ages by Arthur D. Howden Smith (1929)

Image courtesy of Pulpflakes

Arthur D. Howden Smith (1887-1945) was a writer and journalist, who spent a year fighting against the Ottoman Empire alongside Macedonian revolutionaries and wrote adventure stories for Pulp Magazines. He even wrote a prequel to Stevenson's Treasure Island, with the approval of his estate.

Grey Maiden is a collection of stories about the sword as it goes from owner to owner down the centuries. These stories were originally published in Adventure magazine, and they all stand indepentantly. The stories include a type of lost race story of the survival of the Sixth Legion in Britain after the end of Roman rule, the story of vengeane for the theft of rightfully inherited property in Iceland or how the sword was acquired by a warlord of Muhammad.

Oddly enough, the very first story, The Forging, was not published in the original 1929 edition which is in the public domain today. It is utterly baffling why they would omit the story, especially as the Egyptian origin of the sword is still refferenced in several of the other stories. Luckil Black Mask Magazine has posted the story online and so it can be accessed below.

http://www.blackmaskmagazine.com/adventure_01.html

There is also a 2014 paperback edition from Atlus Press called Grey Maiden: The Story of a Sword Through the Ages, The Complete Saga.

Either way I highly recommend this book, it is one of a handful of titles I would rank as exceptional.

Osru a Tale of many incarnations, the history of the soul (1910) by Justin Sterns

Once again I am at a loss what to say about the author of a book. Justin Sterns seems to have ever only published one book. There is no biographical information to be found out about him, not even his date of birth.

The book is interesting though and worthy of a mention. It chronicles certain passages of the various lives of a soul. It works more effectively as a conte cruel then a lecture about karma, as there is only one incarnation wherein the soul commits any evil, where it happens to be Nero. The rest are rather unpleasant, from throwing a drugged woman ontop of a funerary pyre against her will, to a man rotting in a dungeon to several decades, being made the brood mare of a slavery plantation, etc. It is well written stuff either way and worthy to look up.

The only piece of trivia I can find out is that there seems to have been a drama based on the book called "Every-Soul" by A.L.Pollock. That person too appears to be an enigma.

A Modern Wizard by Rodrigues Ottolengui (1894)

Rodrigues Ottolengui (1861-1937)  was a somewhat famous pioneer in the art of inflicting suffering on others and still getting paid for it, specifically being a dentist. Apart from spending his time perfecting the root cannal and shinning x-rays inside of people's mouths, and an occupation with entomology, Ottolengui wrote a few work of criminal fiction, which appeared in book form between 1892 and 1896. He published no more fiction afterwards, beyond a story in a magazine here and there, and as Anthony Boucher said he "gave up the sleuth for the tooth".

A Modern Wizard is his third book and it seems to be his most interesting work. It has a main character who likes to hypnotise people and be brutish and commanding without considering other people's feelings, always getting what he wants. The first third of the book deals with Dr. Medjora on trial for the murder of his wife, and Ottolengui grinds the plot to a halt to showcase the proceedings in numbing detail, with nearly the entire cross-examination of all witnesses and the complete closing speech of the defense and Attorney, repeating the same points over and over again.

The second part, years later after Dr. Medjora was acquited, deals with the Doctor adopting Leon, a farm boy who, it turns out, is his son with his first wife. The novel seems to be building up Leon confronting the Doctor, who tries to hypnotise him and make him assimilate information at rapid rate for his own purpose, and also forces him and a girl in the neighbourhood to fall in love through hypnotism, all while talking about how he is a direct descendant of the God Aesculapius, who was a North American native wise-man venerated as a god before the world flood, leading Leon to the pyramid built by Aesculapius which is below Medjora's house. All this seems to build up some kind of conflict but then the novel just sort of ends with Medjora intentionally driving himself insane to prevent a detective from dragging his name through court after the suspicious and largely unexplained coincidental death of his second wife. Leon, despite how much time is devoted to him, really ends up doing nothing and it seems like Ottolengui suddenly ended the novel for reasons beyond his control.

Rather disappointing considering the potential of the Lost-race element on display here, it's a shame it ends up so marginal.