The Short Story Thread

[GOLLUM]

When i read Saki i got everything i wanted from witty,satirizing his times type author. Everything i assumed people hailed an author like P.G Wodehouse for and then i read he influenced Wodehouse in his bio. I cant remember last time i laughed at subtle,witty humor. Usually i read parody, more crude stand up type humor.

I'm late on all of this having been away from the forums for several weeks but I would second and third any calls for readers here to seek out Saki and John Collier.

I have the collected short fiction of Saki aka Hector Hugh Munro as well as that NYRB edition mentioned here already of Collier's Fancies and Goodnights which of what I've so far had a chance to read is very good!

Also if you enjoy wit, particularly English wit, then you should also check out Max Beerbohm, a brilliant critic, writer and cartoonist (caricatures) and a contemporary of both Wodehouse and Saki. NYRB have a copy of Seven Men, where he 'turns his comic searchlight upon the fantastic fin-de-siecle world of the 1890s—the age of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and the young Yeats'.

Nite.

 

[Randy M.]

[...]
Also if you enjoy wit, particularly English wit, then you should also check out Max Beerbohm, a brilliant critic, writer and cartoonist (caricatures) and a contemporary of both Wodehouse and Saki. NYRB have a copy of Seven Men, where he 'turns his comic searchlight upon the fantastic fin-de-siecle world of the 1890s—the age of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and the young Yeats'.

Nite.

Good call. I've haven't read all of Seven Men but both "A. V. Laider" and especially "Enoch Soames" are terrific, even essential fantasy reads.

Oh, and tangentially, if you have never read his parody of Henry James, "The Mote in the Middle Distance," you're in for a treat. It's in A Christmas Garland which can be found at Project Gutenberg.


Randy M.

 

[Fried Egg]

I just read "Into your Tenement I'll Creep" by Jonathan Thomas.

As well-being an excellent name for a story, it was also a great story. A Lothario comes a cropper when he becomes the victim of a woman who's good nature he was exploiting in a most unexpected and disturbing way.

 

[GOLLUM]

Good call. I've haven't read all of Seven Men but both "A. V. Laider" and especially "Enoch Soames" are terrific, even essential fantasy reads.

Oh, and tangentially, if you have never read his parody of Henry James, "The Mote in the Middle Distance," you're in for a treat. It's in A Christmas Garland which can be found at Project Gutenberg.


Randy M.

Nice to see another Beerbohm fan...

I have never read his parody of Henry James, so thank you for that information.

OH and as you point out out a lot of Beerbohm's writing can be sourced from online sites like Gutenberg.

Also I've passed by second hand copies several times of his only novel Zuleika Dobosn but never purchased a copy to date..I should really address that.

 

[nomadman]

I just read "Into your Tenement I'll Creep" by Jonathan Thomas.

As well-being an excellent name for a story, it was also a great story. A Lothario comes a cropper when he becomes the victim of a woman who's good nature he was exploiting in a most unexpected and disturbing way.

That sounds interesting. I've never heard of the writer before.

 

[Fried Egg]

That sounds interesting. I've never heard of the writer before.

I would recommend picking up "Midnight Call and Other Stories" by him.

 

[Fried Egg]

I just read "Tempting Providence" by Jonathan Thomas, the title story of the collection. It was set in Providence where the protagonist, a Lovecraftian scholar was visited by Lovecraft's ghost. As he experiences more paranormal occurrences, he begins to draw parallels with Lovecraft's story "Haunter of the Dark" (which was also set in Providence).

After finishing it, it having been a while since I last read that story by Lovecraft, I re-read it to freshen my memory of it and then immediately re-read this story, this time better able to understand and appreciate it. Definitely one for the Lovecraft fans...

 

[J-Sun]

Just finished re-reading The Best of Cordwainer Smith and reading The Instrumentality of Mankind which, aside from the four Casher O'Neill stories and the one or two Rod McBan novel/stories, is the complete-as-matters SF of Smith. Credit to J.J. Pierce for doing a really good job on TBo. I always knew what he picked was good but mostly didn't know what he might have missed. While IoM has some good stuff such as "Mark Elf", "No, No, Not Rogov!", and "Drunkboat" (the last two of which I'd already read in anthologies), and "Angerhelm" (the best of his few non-future history stories), it really is "The Rest of". TBo has almost all the best stuff and all the core of the history and the most interconnected works. Probably my favorites out of TBo are "Scanners Live in Vain", "The Game of Rat and Dragon" (extra excellent), "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard" (ditto), "The Ballad of Lost C'mell", and - probably, if only for bizarre epic-ness, "The Dead Lady of Clown Town".

I can't say I always know what the heck he's talking about or that we're on the same page when I do but, for sheer visionary weirdness, he's pretty impressive. I only really note two quirks in his actual language - he'll happily double "lee" sounds in words like "oilily" and he often inverts the word order of "said he" vs. "he said" but, otherwise, he uses a pretty gimmick-free style where the magic works on more macroscopic levels of implied myth, matter of factness about the extremely bizarre, and a sense of a larger lived-in-ness where the stories really do accrete and deepen the "history" but never exhaust it or make it plain. IIRC, I wasn't deeply in love with Norstrilia though it was fine (and I intend to re-read it in the not-too-distant future when I read the O'Neill book) and he's got a couple of excellent really short stories (and some not-so-excellent) but, really, he excels at the novella and especially novelette length and builds a future history out of these bite-sized pieces which is just really the way to do it, IMO. It's not 100% consistent but is mostly so and does succeed in creating something larger than the sum of the parts (and some of the parts are pretty excellent anyway).

This was ironically a slog for me to read through for some reason (I think I just wasn't in a very Cordwainerish mood) - I've been chipping away at it for a couple of months - but the best of his stuff is really something people shouldn't miss.

 

[Fried Egg]

I haven't read any Cordwainer Smith yet but I am looking forward to reading the S.F. Masterworks edition that I have on my to-read shelf shortly. Perhaps it will make good holiday reading this summer?

 

[nomadman]

I would recommend picking up "Midnight Call and Other Stories" by him.

I've just read an interview with the author, and a few reviews of Midnight Call on amazon, and he definitely looks like someone I should check out.

On the subject of Cordwainer Smith, count me in as a fan. One of the most unusual, deep minded and poetic SF writers I've ever read. His stuff reads like future myths echoing back to us in fragments, not all of which fit together (as real myths tend not to do). Rediscovery of Man contains most of his best stuff, with Drunkboat being the only notable exception.

 

[Fried Egg]

I just read my eight year old daughter, for a bedtime story, "The hoard of the Gibblens" by Lord Dunsany. I was worried before hand that the linguistic style might be too flowery for her and I was worried that the sudden abrupt ending might be too unpleasant but I need not have worried. She seemed to follow it with ease and enjoyed it. I'm well pleased.

Now to consider whether any of the other stories of his might be suitable...

 

[j d worthington]

I just read my eight year old daughter, for a bedtime story, "The hoard of the Gibblens" by Lord Dunsany. I was worried before hand that the linguistic style might be too flowery for her and I was worried that the sudden abrupt ending might be too unpleasant but I need not have worried. She seemed to follow it with ease and enjoyed it. I'm well pleased.

Now to consider whether any of the other stories of his might be suitable...

Perhaps "The Kith of the Elf-Folk" or "The Highwayman"...?

 

[J-Sun]

She seemed to follow it with ease and enjoyed it. I'm well pleased.

Good deal.

I haven't read any Cordwainer Smith yet but I am looking forward to reading the S.F. Masterworks edition that I have on my to-read shelf shortly. Perhaps it will make good holiday reading this summer?

I don't know - it may well, but it's not light reading. Very dense, allusive, symbolic, etc. So it depends on what you look for in summer holiday reading.

I should also note (had a thread - maybe this one - where I had some confusion over this) that the SF Masterworks volume, Rediscovery of Man, is a Gollancz retitle of the Ballantine/Del Rey The Best of. Whereas the NESFA edition, The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith is basically a resorted omnibus of TBo, IoM, and Quest of the Three Worlds (the O'Neill stories), and includes everything but Norstrilia (and the story versions of it).

 

[nomadman]

I don't know - it may well, but it's not light reading. Very dense, allusive, symbolic, etc. So it depends on what you look for in summer holiday reading.

I wouldn't say it's particularly heavy reading either, at least not in the way that much of, say, Gene Wolfe's fiction can be. Smith's works are extremely multilayered, and rewarding on many levels, but they're not the type of stories that require you to have extensive background knowledge of the symbols, allusions and metaphors he uses in order to get the main thrust of things.

 

[J-Sun]

I wouldn't say it's particularly heavy reading either, at least not in the way that much of, say, Gene Wolfe's fiction can be. Smith's works are extremely multilayered, and rewarding on many levels, but they're not the type of stories that require you to have extensive background knowledge of the symbols, allusions and metaphors he uses in order to get the main thrust of things.

Yep, agreed - that's a good counterbalance. I didn't mean to imply it was exceptionally difficult - just not typical "beach reading".

 

[J-Sun]

Just finished the collection "half" of the Ace "double" of The Green Millennium/Night Monsters. Night Monsters is four whole stories of eighty pages. It starts with "The Black Gondolier" which has a lot of great touches and details but the "big gasp ending" doesn't entirely come off and the central supernatural conspiracy teeters between brilliance and silliness but, due to Leiber's skill, mostly worked for me as far as it went. But, most importantly, it's a single "sympathetic listener" relating the second-hand tale of the "traumatized friend with a weird upon him" and has really the single image/concept/thematic nexus of black oil, blackoil, blackoil! So it should obviously be a short story, right? But it's a too-long novelette of 31 pages. So, worth a read if you're into Leiber or weird stuff but not entirely successful.

That's followed by "Midnight in the Mirror World" which I love but read recently in The Mind Spider, so didn't re-read.

After that, there's one nearly as good - "I'm Looking for Jeff" is a really good macabre tale - it may not be all that spoil-able because it's a fairly standard type but I'll still avoid saying anything about it, just in case. But I really enjoyed it (if "enjoyed" is the right word).

It ends with "The Casket-Demon" which is readable but not particularly good, dealing with an ancient family curse, an actress who must stay famous or fade away (so what'd she do as a child?) and makes fun of the Hollywood entourage and so on.

Strange arrangement as you normally open and close with your stronger pieces and put the filler in the middle and this was backwards to me. Anyway, IMO, "Midnight" and "Jeff" shouldn't be missed.

 

[Extollager]

Unfortunately, Ellison's books are frequently stolen from libraries, as are those of Lovecraft.

Huh! How do you know, if you don't mind my asking?

I just returned an interlibrary loan copy of Ellison's Strange Wine which had a scribbly signature by Ellison's name on the title page. I don't know what his autograph looks like on books. I was curious if it was printed there or was written, so I just moistened a finger tip and touched it, and it smudged. I don't hold with stealing, including stealing library books, but it is funny in a way to think of people stealing Ellison's books, and here's one that may have been signed by the man himself on the public library open shelves. (Grand Forks, ND, public library, but don't anybody go and steal it now.)

[Later] ....Yes, it looked like these samples:

So I guess I have smudged Harlan Ellison's autograph.

When I was a youngster in southern Oregon, I used to come across Arkham House books and Gnome Press books etc. occasionally in public libraries. I suppose they are likely to have been stolen from the public, who bought them, by now. It seems the Grants Pass, Oregon, public library had ? Beyond the Wall of Sleep ? and I'm quite sure they had The Coming of Conan.

 

[Fishbowl Helmet]

I haven't read the massive thread, but I thought I'd mention a few.

James Thurber, The Thurber Carnival collection of shorts is a great read.
Wodehouses, Just Enough Jeeves has a lot to recommend it.
50 Funniest American Writers is a great anthology.
Deliriously Happy, Larry Doyle a former writer for the Simpsons, mostly humorous articles rather than short fiction.

 

[nomadman]

Have been reading a few of Leiber's and Tim Powers's short stories this month. Leiber's Four Ghosts in Hamlet is a wonderful piece, which draws on Leiber's time in the theatre to add a depth and richness to what is already a smart and eerily effective ghost story. It's full of well drawn characters and intriguing little details about the life of traveling stage actors, and the supernatural element, when it appears, is so naturally and subtly introduced as to seem entirely plausible given the confines of the piece.

A Deskful of Girls is less successful. It's another ghost story, though this time the ghosts are alive and out for revenge. The basic premise of the tale is an interesting one, about the possibility that fears and neuroses can be made manifest if sufficiently aroused, but it's also tied in to the whole Change War series, which I'm unfamiliar with, and whose elements I found frankly confusing.

The Inner Circles is an odd little piece about an alcoholic who has visions of grotesque black figures that all seem to represent elements of his psyche but which his wife and child are somehow able to sense. I must confess I ended up skim-reading this one so I didn't get everything that Leiber was trying to say here. Will probably re-read at a later date.

Tim Powers is a first-rate novellist, but he's considerably weaker in the short form. Many of the stories here are rather too offbeat to work as anything other than curious series of incidents, and Powers's often despair-ridden and tortured characters aren't really given enough space to breath in the twenty or thirty pages he gives them. The best of the stories thus far (I'm reading them in order) is A Soul in a Bottle, an engimatic ghost story about a dead poet and her sister that achieves a level of menacing strangeness that begins to approach his longer, better works. The Hour of Babel is another decent piece, about the incursion of an otherworldly entity in a pizza parlour thirty years ago, and a secretive organization's attempts to recreate the experience in the present, with devastating results. The Bible Repairman, the title piece of the collection, is a great idea, and pretty effective in spots, but it's just a little too short and undeveloped to really do the whole thing justice. The final piece I read, Parallel Lines, is a fun though rather forgettable tale of two elderly sisters, one of whom is dead, and their attempts to better understand their relationship.

 

[J-Sun]

A Deskful of Girls is ... tied in to the whole Change War series, which I'm unfamiliar with, and whose elements I found frankly confusing.

Yeah, it's considered "a Changewar tale" but, frankly, I don't see how or why. I think it just got included in the Gregg Press The Change War (1978) but shouldn't have been - perhaps the Silbersack intro to that explains why, but I can't find the intro online and have the fiction contents, so will never buy it. "Deskful" follows a Changewar story in The Best of Fritz Leiber (1974) but, in Leiber's own afterword, he describes "Try and Change the Past" as a Changewar story but does not describe "A Deskful of Girls" as one. As loose and non-cumulative as the Changewar stories are, I don't think it helps the story or the series to try to consider "Deskful" as connected to them.

-- Wow. I just noticed in my last post in the thread that I never directly said The Green Millennium/Night Monsters was by Leiber, only mentioning "Leiber's skill" in passing in the middle of the paragraph. Geez. So, yeah, that one's by Leiber.