Murmur reviews short stories

[Murmur]

The Maze of the Enchanter: The Collected Fantasies, Vol. 4 (Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith)

I greatly enjoyed this book. This book was just as fun to read as the other Clark Ashton Smith books I've read. The stories were similar to the stories in the other books of his collected short stories, meaning, they're fantasy, science fiction, and horror. It just dawned on me that in none of the CAS stories I've read is there a single joke. Nothing humorous whatsoever.

The editors wrote, in one of the introductions, that some of the stories herein aren't the exact stories that were published in the pulp magazines. For example, the pulp magazine Weird Tales. The editor of Weird Tales frequently returned CAS's manuscripts to him, asking for changes. Therefore, a lot of the published CAS stories weren't what he originally wrote. The stories within this collection are, what the editor believes, CAS's original versions of his stories. In other words, the versions in this collection are from CAS's original manuscripts, not the published versions of his stories. Where the original text doesn't exist or it doesn't exist as a single work, the editors of this collection have put together CAS's stories based on other sources. That means that some of the stories in this collection (and in all of the books of CAS stories from Night Shade Books) aren't genuine exact versions of CAS's stories. I don't know how many of CAS's stories in the Night Shade Books books are these conglomeration versions. I suppose not very many.

Some notes on individual stories.

• The Beast of Averoigne. A comet precedes the appearance of a horrible creature that murders people in the countryside.
• The Disinterment of Venus. Another Averoigne story. A statue of a gorgeous woman is unearthed near a monestary. The same monestary was used in other Averoigne stories, including The Beast of Averoigne.
• The White Sybil. Kind of an uninteresting story of a guy who sees a hot woman and wants to find her again.
• The Ice-Demon. Some guys want to retrieve some treasure from a cursed ice cave. Things don't go the way they wanted.
• The Isle of the Torturers. Reviewed by me elsewhere in this thread.
• The Dimension of Chance. This is an unusual story. Americans are chasing Japanese saboteurs or spies. Both groups were in airplanes. Both groups find themselves in another dimension.
• The Charnel God. A guy is passing through a city where the people worship an evil god. He wishes that he didn't go that way, as you can imagine.
• Vulthoom. An evil god-like creature on Mars conscripts two humans to help it.
• The Voyage of King Euvoran. A magical bird steals a king's crown and he goes on an expedition to retrieve it.
• The Flower-Women. An evil wizard mentioned in another story travels to a planet where he anticipates a rival to his power to arise. He encounters the titular women who are actually predatory flowers and they try to kill him.

Recommendation: If you like old horror stories, you'd like this book.

[Murmur]

Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird

Overall, I didn't like the book. When I was pondering buying this, I guessed that this book was a collection of "best of" stories, or a bunch of 80 year old stories. Both of those guesses were wrong. I'm not sure what to call this collection. Maybe a retrospective. It has a few essays regarding the authors and the stories published by Weird Tales. Fifty tons of name dropping were in the essays and introduction. I'm not sure if the essays were educational to me.

A large number of the stories were modern. The plurality (the majority maybe?) were published for the first time in this book, and this book was published in 2023.

The story Legal Rites has a lot of messed up punctuation. It has some random placement of letters. It looks like an OCR job that wasn’t proofread. The mistakes in the story injure the text and they potentially can confuse the reader.

Other stories and essays in the book have a variety of errors which aren't the same from text to text. Some stories are perfect. Others have a lot of mistakes. The book is a bit of an inconsistent jumble regarding the errors.

Notes regarding the stories herein.

• Robert E Howard's story, Worms of The Earth, had a lot of stuff that I don't like; specifically, characters that have pride in their ethnicity and even their genetics. I greatly dislike that. It's ugly. I think that 10% of the story was sentences that were about this pride.
  
  Here's an example. The protagonist is Bran Mak Morn and he's the king of the Picts.

  These barren wastes seemed the dreary accomplishment of desolation, yet human life was not utterly lacking. Bran met the silent men of the fen, reticent, dark of eye and hair, speaking a strange mixed tongue whose long-blended elements had forgotten their pristine separate sources. Bran recognized a certain kinship in these people to himself, but he looked on them with the scorn of a pure-blooded patrician for men of mixed strains.
  
  Not that the common people of Caledonia were altogther pure-blooded; they got their stocky bodies and massive limbs from a primitive Teutonic race which had found its way into the northern tip of the isle even before the Celtic conquest of Britain was completed, and had been absorbed by the Picts. But the chiefs of Bran's folk had kept their blood from foreign taint since the beginnings of time, and he himself was a pure-bred Pict of the Old Race. But these fenmen, overrun repeatedly by British, Gaelic, and Roman conquerors, had assimilated blood of each, and in the process almost forgotten their original language and lineage.

  Overall, the story didn't suck, but I just hate that nonstop ethnic and genetic pride.
• Scratch-off Universe is loaded with dumb similes, analogies, and metaphors all over it. It sucked. It was hard to follow and the story just wasn’t that good anyway. This story annoyed me.
• The story Jagganath was pretty good. I really liked it. It was a page turner. I couldn’t tell if the protagonists were humans. It seemed to be about a post-apocalyptic society of people living their entire lives in a cybernetic creature.
• The author of Lady Cataract Comes to the Mosque, Usman T. Malik, tried to be stylistically fancy in his writing. In my opinion he created garbage and I was very happy that it was a very short story. The story is obfuscated and I couldn't tell exactly what it was about and I stopped caring quickly.
• C.L. Moore was a contemporary and literary comrade of Lovecraft, RH Barlow, Clark Ashton Smith, and friends, and she was a lady. Gasp! I think she's only one of two ladies associated with the Lovecraft group. Her story was Black God's Kiss. It was a sword and sorcery type thing. I don't really like sword and sorcery stories, but she put together a relatively good story.
• The only essay I liked was The Circle, which was about Lovecraft's literary group and his buddies. This essay is where I learned about CL Moore.
• I'm pretty sure I heard The Scythe as a radio play and it was good. The written story is good too.
• How To Make the Animal Perfect? was a short little thing and it was actually quite good.
• Slaughter House was pretty good. It reminded me of Maupassant's The Horla.
• The Damp Man was unusual. There was a hint of an explanation of what was going on, but very little. It was almost like a chase movie, like The Terminator.

There were a bunch of graphics within the book. There were Weird Tales covers, advertisements, and grainy photos of authors. Here are a few. The art with the extremely scantily clad ladies is done by Margaret Brundage. The images below are photos I took of pages in the book.

Spoiler

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Here's the table of contents which I got from https://www.weirdtales.com/100th. I made the essays blue, and the poems green.

Spoiler

• The Eyrie - By Jonathan Maberry
• The Third Guy From the Left, Bottom Row, in the Old-Timey Picture Above the Left-Side Urinal at McTeague's Bar - By Scott Sigler
• A Century of Weird - By Lisa Morton
• The Game - By Marge Simon
• Disappear Donna - By R. L. Stine
• Up From Slavery - By Victor LaValle
• The Call of Cthulhu - By H.P. Lovecraft
• The Circle: Shared Worlds - By Lisa Diane Kastner
• Worms of The Earth - By Robert E. Howard
• Swords and Sorcery: Weird Tales and Beyond - By Charles R. Rutledge
• Cosmic Horror - By James A. Moore
• Arched Bridges: Blackout Poetry - By Jessica McHugh
• Black God's Kiss - By C.L. Moore
• Legal Rites - By Issac Asimov and Frederick Pohl
• The Scythe - By Ray Bradbury
• Who You Gonna Call? The Evolution of Occult Detective Fiction - By Henry Herz
• Blood Moon - By Owl Goingback
• The Vengeance of Nitocris - By Tennessee Williams
• Dead Jack and The Case of the Bloody Fairy - By James Aquilone
• Slaughter House - By Richard Matheson
• The World Breaker - By Blake Northcott
• Scratch-off Universe - By Hailey Piper
• Church at the Bottom of the Sea - By Michael A. Arnzen
• Prezzo - By Keith R. A. DeCandido
• How To Make the Animal Perfect? - by Linda D. Addison
• Jagganath - By Karin Tidbeck (Curated by former Weird Tales editor Ann VanderMeer)
• Bait - By Dana Fredsti
• The Damp Man - By Allison V. Harding
• NecronomiCommedia: Dante, Doré, and the Root of Lovecraftian Horror - By Jacopo della Quercia and Christopher Neumann
• Lady Cataract Comes to the Mosque - By Usman T. Malik
• Cupid is a Knavish Lad - By Laurell K. Hamilton
• Vampire Chaser - by Anne Walsh Miller

Recommendation: I'm not sure who would be the best audience of this book. Perhaps just extreme fanboys of Weird Tales. For all other people, I don't recommend this book.

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[Murmur]

I looked up CL Moore on gutenberg.org. She had only four stories on the site. I read each one. Two of them are credited to her, and the other two are credited to being jointly written by her and her husband, Henry Kuttner. Her entry on gutenberg has since been changed to remove two of the stories.

• Juke-box. Written by CLM and HK. This is a pretty good sci fi story. This could have been an episode of Twilight Zone or X Minus One. A jukebox seems to bring good luck to a guy, and his life turns around.
• Tree of Life. Written by CLM. This has one of Moore's repeating characters. A guy named Northwest Smith. He is tricked to go to another dimension where he is put in mortal danger. I really liked this story.
• Song in a Minor Key. Written by CLM. This is a tiny story. By itself it seems pointless. It looks like it’s meant to be part of a larger whole.
• Happy ending. Written by CLM and HK. This is about a guy getting a device that allows him to communicate with a person in another time. This is an unusual story. Kind of surreal.

The stuff written by CLM and HK reminds me of David H Keller's writing. The stuff that's written by CLM only (including Black God's Kiss) reminds me of Robert E Howard's writing and Clark Ashton Smith's writing. It seems like CLM's writing is an average of the other two authors' writing. However, she doesn't mention ethnic pride, and I don't need to consult a dictionary multiple times per page.

If you google "cl moore online", you can find links to some of her stuff that you can read for free.

Recommendation: If you like Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E Howard, or David H Keller, you'd probably like her stuff.

[Murmur]

The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton

Unfortunately, I can't remember much about the stories I read. Overall, I didn't like the book too much. It didn't have enough creepiness for me. Everything was well written but this just wasn't what I was hoping for. Ms Wharton wrote very well, but too many of her stories had unsatisfying endings that don't explain things and don't wrap up the story.

There was one illustration per story. The illustrations were pretty good.

Edith Wharton does a good job creating an atmosphere I must say. The reader really gets a feel of the frustration of the protagonists and their emotional states. It seems like a lack of communication is a major plot device in a lot of her stories.

Notes on individual stories. I wrote most of these notes immediately after reading the stories in question.

• Pomegranate Seed is about a husband receiving strange letters and his wife wondering who they're from and what’s in them. There are pages and pages of her wondering where her husband is and what’s going on. It ended with a lot of implications but nothing definite. The ending was unsatisfying.
• Afterward is her most famous ghost story I think. It’s about a husband with a mining company and some inscrutable secrets. The wife is wondering what’s going on. There are pages and pages of her trying to figure out what's going on. The ending had a lot of implications but the ending was mostly satisfying this time.
• The Looking Glass is about some woman who becomes a fake psychic for a friend of hers. I couldn’t discern where any ghost was. Zero spookiness. It was a well written story regardless.
• All Souls' was pretty good. It’s probably the spookiest story in the bunch. A woman awakens to find that she is completely alone in her house. This story had me making up a bunch of explanations for what was occurring.
• The Lady's Maid's Bell was enjoyable, but it ended with implications and nothing concrete, like so many of her stories.

Here's the table of contents which I have just transcribed.

* Preface
* The Lady's Maid's Bell
* The Eyes
* Afterward
* Kerfol
* The Triumph of Night
* Miss Mary Pask
* Bewitched
* Mr. Jones
* Pomegranate Seed
* The Looking Glass
* All Souls'
* An Autobiographical Postscript

Recommendation: If you're a fan of Ms Wharton, you'd probably like it. Otherwise, I can’t recommend it.

[Murmur]

The Best of Amazing Stories
The 1940 Anthology

Overall, I liked the book. Like so many books published these days, it had plenty of errors. About one easily noticeable error every few pages. Horses is spelled like "h:rses" on page 124 for example.

The stories are science fiction. I liked the other two anthologies that I've read more than this one. Those are the ones from 1927 and 1928.

Some notes on some of the individual stories.

• The Voyage that Lasted 600 Years. It seemed flawed somehow. Like the ship's voyage should have been planned better.
• The Monster Out of Space. You know those ads in old comic books where a 90 pound weakling gets sand kicked in his face by a bully and then the bully takes his girlfriend? That's virtually the premise of the story The Monster Out Of Space. I couldn’t believe it. And the 90 pound weakling wins in the end. The setting is spaceships and a dangerous asteroid, but the story revolves around the bully and the bullied.
• Paul Revere and the Time Machine. Two foolish scientists bring Paul Revere from the past into the present day.
• The Living Mist. A sort of carnivorous mist becomes sentient with the personalities of criminals.
• The Mathematical Kid. A genius boy is an unwelcome crew member on a spaceship.
• Sons of the Deluge. This is a novella. It's about time travel to Atlantis and Atlantis's role in Earth's history.

The table of contents.

* The Voyage that Lasted 600 Years
* The Monster Out of Space
* Truth is a Plague!
* Paul Revere and the Time Machine
* The Living Mist
* The Day Time Stopped Moving
* The Mathematical Kid
* The Strange Voyage of Dr. Penwing
* Three Wise Men of Space
* Sons of the Deluge

Recommendation: Read it only if you like old sci fi short stories.

[Murmur]

The Last Hieroglyph: The Collected Fantasies, Vol. 5 (Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith)

This is the final volume in the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith published by Night Shade Books. The quality of CAS's work declined in each successive volume. In other words, I liked #1 the best, #2 the second best, and so on. The stories in this volume are his weakest.

Too many of the stories herein end in a weird way, like the story wasn't truly complete. Some of CAS's stories would have benefited from a happy ending. CAS's stories had so few happy endings that I guess that I must conclude that he was satisfied with sad / bad endings.

Notes on a few of the stories, based on what I can remember.

• The Great God Awto. This is the only satire story from CAS that I know of. It's about the Hamurriquanes and their sacred vehicles.
• Mother of Toads. This is a weird, slightly prurient story. The story ends with
  Spoiler

  a human man being pushed underwater by the titular Mother where she uses her massive breats to push on his head. Yes, really.
  The movie The Theatre Bizarre (2011) has a segment based on this story.
• Morthylla. A guy falls in love with a lamia (a female vampire) at a cemetery. I really like how CAS handled the end of this guy. The protagonist
  Spoiler

  killed himself, and later, forgot that he had died, and returned to the cemetery.
• The Dart of Rasasfa. This is CAS's last story he wrote in his life. It's not particularly great. It was rejected by publishers. The manuscript and rejection letters were sent to CAS and he died before he received them.
• The Seven Geases. This is a kind of ridiculous story of a guy who is constantly given geases by powerful creatures because they don't want to talk to him. It kind of seems like CAS parodied his own work.
• Xeethra. This is a tragedy of a young man trying to find a city he remembers. It has some similarities to Lovecraft's story The Quest of Iranon.
• The Master of the Crabs. This is one of CAS's very few stories with a happy ending.
• The Chain of Aforgomon. Ages Unwound is a custom campaign for the game Arkham Horror the Card Game. The author of the campaign got some of her story elements from this story.
• The Black Abbot of Puthuum. This is an adventure story with a rare happy ending.
• The Garden of Adompha. An evil king has an evil garden.
• The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles. CAS reused one of his characters in this adventure story: Satampra Zeiros.

Here's a table of contents which I found here.

* The Dark Age
* The Death of Malygris
* The Tomb-Spawn
* The Witchcraft of Ulua
* The Coming of the White Worm
* The Seven Geases
* The Chain of Aforgomon
* The Primal City
* Xeethra
* The Last Hieroglyph
* Necromancy in Naat
* The Treader of the Dust
* The Black Abbot of Puthuum
* The Death of Ilalotha
* Mother of Toads
* The Garden of Adompha
* The Great God Awto
* Strange Shadows
* The Enchantress of Sylaire
* Double Cosmos
* Nemesis of the Unfinished
* The Master of the Crabs
* Morthylla
* Schizoid Creator
* Monsters in the Night
* Phoenix
* The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles
* Symposium of the Gorgon
* The Dart of Rasasfa

Recommendation: For the casual reader, I don't recommend it. If you're a Clark Ashton Smith fan, sure, I recommend it.