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Post by dem bones on Nov 20, 2008 21:33:43 GMT
Peter Haining (ed.) - The Fantastic Pulps (Victor Gollancz, 1975) Introduction - Peter Haining
Stephen Crane - Manacled Jack London - A Thousand Deaths Upton Sinclair - Author’s Adventure Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Resurrection of Jimber-Jaw Max Brand - John Ovington Returns A. Merritt - The People of the Pit George Allan England - The Man with the Glass Heart H. Bedford-Jones - The Wolf Woman Victor Rousseau - A Cry from Beyond Ray Cummings - Madman’s Murder Melody
[Illustrated Section: The Pulp Artists]
Sinclair Lewis - The Ghost Patrol Dashiell Hammett - The Sardonic Star of Tom Doody MacKinlay Kantor - The Second Challenge Hugo Gernsback - Baron Munchhausen’s Scientific Adventures David H. Keller, M.D. - A Twentieth Century Homunculus Edmond Hamilton - The Man Who Saw the Future Seabury Quinn - Suicide Chapel H. P. Lovecraft and William Lumley - The Diary of Alonzo Typer C. L. Moore - The Tree of Life Robert Bloch - Iron Mask Ray Bradbury - The Sea Shell
Appendices
Charles Beaumont - The Bloody Pulps The Fans (Readers Letters) 1. Forrest J. Ackerman - Poor Amazing Gets It! 2. Leslie Charteris - The Saint’s Here Again
BibliographyFor me, the 'seventies were unquestionably Haining's best decade and this is yet another highlight from his Gollancz years. Along with the usual weird horror and supernatural, this selection takes in detective, Western, SF and fantasy fiction (Tony Goodstone's similar Pulps: Fifty Years Of American Pop Culture even adds romance to the mix), but for the most part it still reads like a bunch of terror tales. Manacled sees a strongman shackled onstage as a fire fast spreads through the theatre: Quinn's Suicide Chapel is as good as its title and features a jungle torture sequence that is as hideously memorable as the Satanic crucifixion in The Devil's Bride. The only slight disappointment is the below par Ray Cummings story which is used as an example of the 'Sex & Sadism' pulps - it just isn't horrible enough. Includes: Stephen Crane - Manacled: A fire breaks out in the Theatre Nouveau during the second act. Bad news for the audience, worse for the guy playing the hero, Aubrey Pettingill, as it's the big prison scene and the warders have left him ... manacled. Ned Buntine - The Mad Wolf: October 1883. The narrator and his three companions are returning from a hard days trapping when they are attacked by a rabid wolf. The half-breed Alexandre is the first to surrender to the madness and sets fire to their tent. Staked out by his companions, he dies raving in the night. Worthington is next, wandering off to his doom in some demented trance, leaving only our man and Verboncoeur, both of them growing increasingly alarmed at the crazed look in each others' eyes. It is Verboncoeur who snaps first, but our man lands him a heavy blow with the rifle and ties him down - not very well as it transpires for Verboncoeur manages to free his hand, grab the gun and promptly blow his brains out. The narrator staggers on through Crow and Arapaho territory until he reaches a trading post where he is taken for a raving lunatic, until news arrives from a neighboring camp confirming that Worthington has been found and has since died of hydrophobia. He ends by assuring us that, of the four, he alone survived due to his "free use of liquor and salt." Amos Sewell ( Strange Tales, Sept. 1931) Victor Rousseau - A Cry from Beyond: A case for Psychic Detective Dr. Merrick. Milborn, a small fishing village off the Massachusetts coastline. Millicent French has recently endured a series of cataleptic trances while her daughter Elsie grows worryingly anemic to the point where it looks unlikely she'll survive. Merrick connects these worrying developments to M. French's attempts to contact the spirit of his first wife, Georgina, seven years dead, via occult experimentation. Merrick exhumes Georgina's coffin to find only ashes and bone within (like his assistant, Benson, this reader expected to be confronted with an undecayed corpse) which appears to rule out a vampire. They hold a seance - and little Elsie's doll really comes into its own. " ... the doll that the child had clasped all night in her arms had grown somehow swollen - monstrously distended. The face had grown larger, the lips redder, and the eyelids seemed to tremble, while the eyes beneath them seemed to reflect an evil life. Then, even as I looked, a tremor ran through the child's body. It stirred, it turned, and those red lips were implanted full upon little Elsie's!" The evil Georgina has come back after all!
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Post by lobolover on Feb 18, 2009 23:14:07 GMT
I wanna ask about the London story.Can you blame me? Also, you not thinking the Merrit story is notable?
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Post by dem bones on Sept 3, 2010 7:54:15 GMT
Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Resurrection of Jimber-Jaw: When Irish inventor Wild Pat Morgan's prototype airship is forced to land in Siberia, he and colleague Dr. Marvin Stade discover a man from 50, 000 BC encased in a block of ice. Stade being a pioneer cryogenicist, it doesn't take them so long to thaw pleistocene man who Morgan christens Jimber-Jaw after a grizzly bear he once hunted on the Yellowstone. When they return to America, Jimber-Jaw, now 'Jim Stone' and speaking fluent English, earns fame first as a wrestler, then a prize-fighter and finally lands a Hollywood contract. But things fall apart after he's introduced to superstar actress Lorna Downs who bears an uncanny resemblance to Liliami, his lover from way back before the Ice Age hit. Lorna just ain't the type of girl you can club over the head and drag home to the cave by her hair, and their relationship is tempestuous. Disillusioned with rubbish modern life and American womanhood in particular, Jiber-Jaw finds a way to return to his old deep frozen self. Peter Haining writes in his introduction that this is something of an anomaly as ERB wasn't a great one for short fiction (I have no idea if that's true or not). "A central character in the mould of Tarzan and a story with an element of 'scientific romance' which made the John Carter series so popular." Craig, check your PMs! Ray Cummings - Madman’s Murder Melody: Narrated for the most part by the seriously paranoid psychotic George Conners from his cell at the Asylum. Conners shot Peter Jansen in cold blood, wrongly believing him to be after his wife, Gloria. Being a man of wealth and influence, Conners escapes the chair after taking his lawyer's advice to plead "temporary insanity." Now, of course, he realises that all of them - Gloria, his lawyer, that supposedly oh-so-saintly Dr. Peters - are in on the conspiracy to drive him insane with "scientific torture". To cheat them, he knots his bed sheet around his neck and suspends himself from the steam-pipe which, i'm sure, are a standard feature in padded cells. As overwrought as you'd expect but oddly devoid of Horror Stories's trademark mindless sex and sadism, making this the least representative shudder pulp Haining could have chosen. Upton Sinclair - Author’s Adventure: "Adventure should be experienced before it is written." Insufferably full-of-himself horror author Mark Lewis is holding court at his Gentleman's Club. He explains that, although he's never murdered anyone physically, he imagines his friends' in the most dreadful situations before he writes up the gory details as a story. Take for instance Finch. Earlier this evening he'd noticed him standing gloomily by the French windows like so. Perhaps a skeleton from his past has reared its accusing skull? Perhaps Finch imagined his past misdeeds had taken on a hideous form, and that this monstrosity was readying itself to strike? Perhaps he took an involuntary step backward and fell through the wind ---- AAAAaaa aaargh!
Splat.MacKinlay Kantor - The Second Challenge: Big Chuck Noel and his super-intelligent German Shepard Kais on the trail of cop-killer Wayne 'The Omaha Kid' Babcock, believed to be riding the midnight freight through to Chicago. Sure enough, when the train reaches the Kewassee Yard, a figure answering to the murderer's description leaps from the rear carriage and makes for the coal sheds. The fugitive busts Kais's spine with a huge slab of nutty slack - guess the dog wasn't so smart after all - and Chuck is furious: killing a police officer is one thing, but that hound cost him $250! "Dirty runt - I'll shoot your guts outa your ears." Chuck is as good as his word. When he turns over the corpse, however, he realises to his horror that it sure doesn't belong to the Omaha Kid but someone closer to home ....
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Sept 3, 2010 9:46:14 GMT
Burroughs is not a great short story writer and Jimber Jaw is not a great short story. It's a fairly good concept, unfreezing a 50 000 year old cave man and then sneaking him through customs. Mostly Burroughs uses the story to hand out his current philosophy (think Conservative American 1920 to 1950's) In this case the effeteness of modern man and the loose morals of modern woman. The jokesy tone is about the level of the Flintstones and the dialogue without its anachronisms always flows with later Burroughs.
"Of what good is a mate in your country?" he asked. "They are no different from men. The men smoke; the women smoke. The men drink; the women drink. The men swear; the women swear. They gamble—they tell dirty stories—they are out all night and cannot be fit to look after the caves and the children the next day. They are only good for one thing, otherwise they might as well be men. One does not need to take a mate for what they can give—not here. In my country such women are killed. No one would want children from them."
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Post by dem bones on Sept 3, 2010 12:02:35 GMT
It looks as though the story first appeared in Argosy for 20th February 1937, so i'm sure The House Un-American Activities Committee were thrilled to learn how refreshingly supportive Wild Pat found the Russians after dealing with those "bureaucratic boneheads in Washington"!
might as well squeeze another one in before an attempt on Seabury Quinn's epic.
Ray Bradbury - The Sea Shell: Johnny Bishop, eleven, bed-ridden with a cough while all his friends are out enjoying the summer holiday. To cheer him up, Doctor Hull gives him a sea shell he picked off the Pacific shore. Put it to your ear and, if you concentrate, you'll hear the roar of the ocean! Listen harder still and you'll hear jolly (dead?) sailors enticing you to join them out on the high seas ...
Beautifully written as you'd expect, but would anyone be offended if i say i found it a bit .... mawkish? Still, i guess it's left open enough for the reader to imagine that those kindly sea salts are really cut-throat pirates looking for a small boy to roast on a spit ....
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Sept 3, 2010 19:51:49 GMT
would anyone be offended if i say i found it a bit .... mawkish? Would anyone be offended if I said I find practically everything Bradbury ever wrote a bit mawkish?
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Post by Johnlprobert on Sept 3, 2010 21:11:29 GMT
would anyone be offended if i say i found it a bit .... mawkish? Would anyone be offended if I said I find practically everything Bradbury ever wrote a bit mawkish? I wouldn't be!
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Post by dem bones on Sept 3, 2010 21:22:25 GMT
I'd love a single collection of his more uncompromising horror stories, no light and shade, no whimsy, sentimentality or cloying nostalgia that can't help but ring false, just the ugly, humourless stuff and the super-grisly E.C. shockers. Off the top of my head, The October Country, The Next In Line, Wake For The Living, The Handler, Mars Is Heaven, "Bang! You're Dead!", The Playground, The Small Assassin, Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms In Your Cellar!, The Dwarf, The Crowd, Usher II, Pillar Of Fire, Emissary, Skeleton ....
i'm sure the proper Bradbury fans could improve on that!
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Post by marksamuels on Sept 3, 2010 23:16:11 GMT
Would anyone be offended if I said I find practically everything Bradbury ever wrote a bit mawkish? I wouldn't be! To quote someone: Such work derives primarily from the folksy Americana tradition of horror. It’s a cosy tradition as ubiquitous as the Lovecraft pastiches and vampire erotica. Wistful nostalgia about childhood, the big old moon over the cornfields, hitting a home run, the smell of candy-floss, hot-dogs and popcorn, white-collar fear of rednecks and truckers, carnivals rolling into small town USA, dog-eared EC comic-books, Huckleberry Finn archetypes; you know the kind of thing—and about all the shadows underneath that stuff. If that’s what gets you going, then that's your bag. Nothing I’ve written here, or could write, will convince you otherwise.Mark S.
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Post by jamesdoig on Sept 3, 2010 23:57:19 GMT
I've always had a soft spot fot The Jar - the pale thing with peeled dead eyes drifting in alcohol plasma...
The other thing about Bradbury is that he really gets his hooks into you if you discover him when you're 12 or 13 years old.
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Post by marksamuels on Sept 4, 2010 0:14:22 GMT
I never "got" Bradbury, really, and I can't figure out whether I should have done so naturally or not, since I'm not American. I do suspect it may be a failing on my part, as is so much else.
The odd thing is that I think the closest cultural equivalent we have here in England is actually Chetwynd-Hayes, and it took me until I was well into my late 30s before I appeciated his (early, at least, and imo best) work.
Lovecraft's fiction hit me harder than anyone else's in my teens. But I tend to think his stuff transcends national sensibilities.
Mark S.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Sept 4, 2010 7:20:21 GMT
I'd love a single collection of his more uncompromising horror stories, no light and shade, no whimsy, sentimentality or cloying nostalgia that can't help but ring false, just the ugly, humourless stuff and the super-grisly E.C. shockers. Off the top of my head, The October Country, The Next In Line, Wake For The Living, The Handler, Mars Is Heaven, "Bang! You're Dead!", The Playground, The Small Assassin, Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms In Your Cellar!, The Dwarf, The Crowd, Usher II, Pillar Of Fire, Emissary, Skeleton .... i'm sure the proper Bradbury fans could improve on that! Sorry, I forgot about "The Next in Line." That one is excellent, of course.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Sept 4, 2010 9:30:11 GMT
The other thing about Bradbury is that he really gets his hooks into you if you discover him when you're 12 or 13 years old. This did happen to me, but I later discovered the hooks could easily be removed. I still read Bradbury on occasion, though. He has grown increasingly peculiar with old age. The title story of his recent collection WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS, for instance, concerns an anonymous homosexual encounter, as presented by Walt Disney.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Sept 4, 2010 21:27:09 GMT
I was inspired to look at some Bradbury stuff again, and it occurred to me that if you were somehow to pad out a story like "The Playground" to 800 pages, you would have . . . a Stephen King novel!
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Post by dem bones on Sept 4, 2010 21:43:25 GMT
Funny you should say that because i re-read The Emissary earlier. Run it through a blender with The Monkey's Paw and you'd get something very like Pet Sematary. But no complaints from me - i love all three.
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