Book #8 for 2024. Oof, we’re not doing terribly well, are we? Another time-consuming project on top of the classical music collection organising has kind of got in the way, but ANYWAY here we are again… Back to 1915 this time round; I’ve seen two film versions (Hitchcock’s famous one and Ralph Thomas’ less famous one) but it’s been so long that my memories of both are dim… on reading the book for the first time, though, I do notice certain differences between it and the films, most notably the lack of female love interest for Hannay which you could evidently get away with in a 1915 magazine serial but not in a 1935 film. Anyway, our hero Richard Hannay is newly returned home from the dark continent, and London life is boring him; yearning for excitement, a chance meeting provides just that, dropping him in among international intrigue, but he soon finds the true story is a lot bigger than he originally thought. The book is basically kind of a rewrite of the outbreak of a certain war that was going on when it was written, and I don’t think it’s too big of a spoiler to say that Hannay’s efforts don’t stop it from breaking out in the end; the story relies on a few too many coincidences in place of plot development, characterisation is somewhat negligible, and the literary style is kind of blunt. But that does work in the book’s favour; it compresses a surprising amount into a fairly small span and it keeps your attention all the way through, and you want to see how Hannay gets out of the various scrapes he gets into (and where he finds time to breathe in the course of one damn thing after another happening). Can’t exactly call it a literary masterpiece, and that’s fine; solid proto-pulp adventure has its own valid place too, and a bit of B-film vigour never hurts…
Category: [Books, magazines, etc]
Of One Blood
Finally, book #7 for 2024. Struggling a bit with the reading this month, mostly thanks to a time-consuming other project with my classical music collection and re-organising that, but never mind that, here’s this month’s “classic”. Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood was serialised in a magazine she edited from 1902 to 1903, and it evidently leans somewhat heavily on H. Rider Haggard; it’s kind of a domestic society drama at first, albeit one with a peculiar mesmerism undercurrent, but then it turns into an African exploration adventure as our hero signs on with an expedition to find the lost treasures of ancient Ethiopia… and the romance of the first part of the book is revealed as being rather more gothically fucked up than we might have expected (I was actually genuinely stunned by it and had to reread the scene to make sure I hadn’t just imagined it; I’m still not sure it even makes sense) and our hero is not who he thinks he is on multiple levels. This is fucking preposterous, and not in a particularly entertaining way either; Hopkins may have the first of her particular kind (though the book is more fantasy than horror) but that doesn’t mean she was any good at it… if this is indicative, she was a shabby stylist with a propensity for hitting you over the head with Christianity in a manner that became increasingly aggravating as the book dragged on (which it does mercilessly despite being under 200 pages). I did rather enjoy the thought that the book’s thesis that THEM DARKIES really invented civilisation 6000 years ago would’ve made a bunch of racists’ heads explode back in 1903 (much as it still would now), but those racists wouldn’t be reading this in the first place… Anyway, not a fan.
RIP Brian Stableford
Just reading about the passing of Brian Stableford. Never read any of his own actual works, but I knew of him as a translator of French literature, especially for Black Coat Press, in which capacity he’s Englished a whole lot of books in the French fantastic tradition… there being a whole lot of SF, fantasy, horror and pulp in French that’s kind of gone unknown by us Anglophones for literal centuries (apart from Jules Verne, whose first English critics woefully misunderstood as a children’s author). And so it is that Stableford introduced me to two of the most singular books I’ve ever read, Petrus Borel’s Champavert and Edgar Quinet’s Ahasuerus; both published in the early/mid-1830s, the former is a sort of late gothic collection of tales possessed of a very peculiar black humour, and the latter is… just something else. I really don’t know what to call it, basically it’s a vision of the history of the world from the creation to the last judgement, with the latter event going very much not according to plan, but what form is it? A novel told entirely in dialogue without descriptions? A play which features the entire universe as a character at one point? I remember while I was reading it that I could actually imagine the text being sung, as if it were an oratorio or something (and an extremely atonal one at that). So, respect to Brian Stableford for making these two books available to me that I would otherwise never have read…
Occult Features of Anarchism
Book #6 for 2024. (Bit of a turnaround from Tarzan?) I’ve always been intrigued by the ways in which occult thought and politics have intertwined over the centuries, and this give a reasonably good if brief overview of how medieval millenarian and heretic movements developed through the Renaissance, eventually blossoming into Freemasonry, and the book looks at how Weishaupt’s Illuminati took that into a political and revolutionary direction and inspired umpteen other groups in the nineteenth century to follow the Masonic pattern and use Masonry to further themselves. Theosophy was apparently big among anarchists in the later 1800s. I was kind of amused to see the famous A in a circle logo actually first appeared as a compass and level in the shape of a letter A, and to see that such figure as Proudhon and Bakunin were actual Masons (the latter espousing a Spinoza-esque sort of pantheism).
This historical stuff is good although perhaps not ideal for people coming to the subject completely new, it probably helps to have some prior knowledge. Also, I’m not sure how it really all ties in with Lagalisse’s real subject, or at least the one I think she cares more about, i.e. that anarchism since the 20th century has basically tried to ignore its theological and occult underpinnings, and this is leading it down something of a dead end where they’re more interested in looking like they have what she calls “good politics” than, you know, doing actual good. Which leads to the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t be so automatically dismissive of conspiracy theorists:
…purveyors of “conspiracy theories” are often from subaltern groups, so the educated activists who generally state a nominal concern to “take lead” from “those most affected” by oppression should nominally allow for the possibility that the “conspiracy theorist” may actually be offering positioned insight. Beyond “tolerating” the theorist of conspiracy for the sake of reeducating him, activists’ own ideology suggests that they might listen for subversive social commentary amid unfamiliar exposition.
They might, but that doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily gain anything useful from it. Lagalisse writes about a Zapatista who put her onto the whole conspiracy thing in the first place, and how she managed to convince him THE JOOOOOOOOOOS aren’t really running the world, but I think she got lucky with that one; I’m not sure how much seriousness she thinks we should approach these people with before we realise the exercise isn’t as edifying for them or us as she seems to think it will be.
So a mixed result, I suppose, interesting but I also don’t know how much I agree with her own arguments or how well they mesh with the historical stuff. Still, short enough that I finished it in one night, so I’ll definitely give it points for not being any longer than it was…
So how is the reading plan going?
Remember I was experimenting with a reading plan I found on Bluesky? I suppose now we’re staring down the barrel of a new month, I should look at how I’m going so far.
So, in the fifth week of the year, I’ve just finished book number five. That’s pretty good. I’m keeping to the “one book a week” rule on average.
Non-fiction for the month: Monster She Wrote. This one’s quite easily done.
Classic of the month: Tarzan. “Classics” is such a vexed issue, and I’m contemplating a post on that subject, that I did consider either Black No More or the Cornell Woolrich collection could technically count as the classic for January, but Tarzan‘s in the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Lose Your Eyes book so I suppose that makes it “more classic”…
Short story per day: THIS, somewhat to my surprise, has been the bit where I’ve fallen down. I haven’t read one story every day, though when I’ve missed a day I’ve made up for it by reading two the next day, so it actually works out, I should have read 366 individual stories by the end of the year… but yeah, I’m finding this hard. Cos I’m not used to reading quite like this; I obviously can’t read most books in a single day so I need to pause at some point and resume it later, but I’m still used to reading multiple chapters in one sitting. I don’t usually approach collections of stories in this one-at-a-time way, I read one and then I want to read the next on straight away. You know, like a “normal” book.
Also, it means that I’m reading more than one book at a time, which is definitely something I don’t think I’ve ever done before. I have, in the past, put one book on hold then read another book before going back to the first one, but I wasn’t reading both of them simultaneously, I was focusing on one at a time. And I can’t really do that the same with this approach, my attention is being divided to some extent. I’ll certainly stick with it, cos the plan is otherwise having results; maybe it’ll get easier…
Tarzan of the Apes
Book #5 for 2024. My only experience of Tarzan thus far is the TV version with Ron Ely (which I haven’t seen since I was quite little so don’t remember much) and Looney Tunes parodies of the Johnny Weissmuller films, so reading the original book (which I was spurred to do by Burroughs enthusiast Michael Vaughan on YT) was a fascinating experience. Tarzan, of course, is raised by anthropoid apes in Africa, rescued after the deaths of his parents who were stranded somewhere in Africa by a crappy mob of mutinous sailors; the young human boy is obviously unlike the other members of his “family”, and as he grows and sights other humans for the first time, he discovers he is in fact much more like these other creatures. It must be said the book’s handling of racial issues is… of its time, perhaps, and makes H. Rider Haggard look relatively progressive, although Tarzan’s first encounters with other white people are about as confusing to him as the black villagers who’ve fled the Congo (and Burroughs is clear about the latter’s hatred of white people being justifiable given the atrocities perpetrated there by the Belgians). And the intro to the Modern Library edition does make it clear that Tarzan’s whiteness is kind of the point, it’s what makes him the near superhero the book paints him as. Unsubtle, but undeniably rip-roaring stuff, I liked this a lot; I did it find the last part a bit unlikely, in that Tarzan adjusts to Western civilisation with almost undue haste, to the point of having learned to drive somehow before the fiery climax, I found this a bit hard to swallow—as opposed, obviously, to the gritty realism of the rest of the book—although certainly not enough to put me off the whole book too much. Must read more Burroughs.
RIP Harry Keogh
News just came through that Brian Lumley left us at the start of the month. Orrin Grey offers what strikes me as an even-handed obit here:
Like most of the rest of the horror community, it would seem, I learned last night that Brian Lumley passed away earlier this month at the age of 86. Lumley’s is a name that never quite attained the same sheen as certain other writers who were his predecessors or contemporaries, but he is nonetheless one who was an important stepping stone for many of us, myself included. […]
I’m not sure how many of the Necroscope books I actually read, but it certainly wasn’t all of them. Reading that first one at a formative age, though, had a big impact on me. Here was pulp horror in a vein I had, at that time, rarely encountered, told with scope and ambition to spare, and crammed with big (and sometimes goofy) ideas. […]
Lumley did have many standout stories, though. He wasn’t one of the best writers we’ve ever had. His stories were pulp throwbacks through and through but, like the best of the pulp writers, they were usually entertaining, quick to read, and full of ideas, even when the execution was sometimes lacking. And even then, it wasn’t always. Lumley could do atmosphere, when he set his mind to it, and he could describe monsters with the best of them.
That seems about right. Not exactly the greatest writer—I’ve mostly read his Cthulhu Mythos stuff, and it’s a bit… oof at times; he clearly took more cues from August Derleth than from Lovecraft—but I must concede he was perfectly readable in a somewhat pulp way, and I recall really liking House of Doors when I read that a long time ago… plus I suppose Necroscope was a sort of stepping stone for me, too, it would’ve been one of the first modern (only a few years old at that point) horror books I read while making my first inroads in that genre back at the start of the 90s… I’ve been giving some thought for quite a while to going back to that series, just the bewildering number of books he wound up writing in that series has daunted me, especially given the length of most of them; we’re not quite talking Wheel of Time proportions, but still pretty big. Still, it might be nice to see how well they hold up, so maybe this year I’ll finally do it…
The Women of Weird Tales
Book #4 for 2024. I said I would read this as a follow-up to Monster She Wrote and so I did. Something of a variable mixed bag, as you might expect; I will confess to struggling a bit through the first few stories, but as the volume progresses things pick up and on the whole I’d call it pretty successful. About two thirds of the stories come from the 1920s, with Mary Elizabeth Counselman’s two coming from the late 30s and Greye La Spina’s last three from the ’40s; interesting that La Spina gets five stories in here despite only being mentioned in passing in MSW, while the evidently enigmatic Eli Colter only makes one appearance, and not with the intriguing-sounding “weird western” described in that book. Everil Worrell completes the quartet, and she gets some of the more interesting stories in the collection cos they have science fiction elements; classically dubious early SF science, of course, but they give a certain additional flavour to proceedings (which can be kind of predictable at times, e.g. the revelation that a character in the last story, La Spina’s “The Antimacassar”, is a vampire is kind of telegraphed on the second page or so). Occasionally only historically interesting, but for the most part enjoyable stuff; another volume of this stuff wouldn’t go astray at all.
Poe boy
I’m not a big fan of Edgar Allan Poe, whose 215th birthday this would’ve been today. I discovered him, pretty much, via H.P. Lovecraft, whose Supernatural Horror in Literature devotes an entire chapter to him, so I thought he had to be something special. So I went in search of a book by him at the library, found one, read it… did not find it to be anything special. I spent years being mystified by Poe, whose historical importance I could appreciate but that was all; I was particularly put off by the fatuous humour of some items. A few years ago I tried a re-read, this time Penguin’s Portable Edgar Allan Poe collection of his stories, verse, and various non-fiction. And I think I understood him at last. Reading the critical work in particular, I think I finally got where Poe was coming from. But I still didn’t like his work as such (and I found much of the poetry actively irritating, particularly that technique he has of repeating lines with slight variations), and I may be doomed to never do so.
But look at him. Look at that picture of him, apparently taken in 1849 not long before he died. He looks EXACTLY like the sort of person who would write his stories. If you were going to be the pioneer of the short macabre tale, you’d want to look like Poe did, the face that illustrates what he said about terror being “not of Germany but of the soul”… perfectly untidy hair, haunted withdrawn eyes, quite rectangular moustache, that necktie and somehow disreputable-looking coat… it adds up to a middle-aged goth icon by itself. Better than his stories as far as I’m concerned.
Nightwebs
Book #3 for 2024 (the first one I actually started, as noted before, but the third actually finished). Here’s the thing, though; I actually started this 20-odd years ago but never actually finished it. Nightwebs was a posthumous collection of Woolrich stories that mostly hadn’t been reprinted or collected since their first appearance, and Gollancz included it in their Crime Masterworks series that they did back then (smaller companion to the contemporaneous) SF and fantasy series, and I have that paperback. Which I started reading, and was rather enjoying, but, as I tend to do with collections like this, I reached a point where I thought “this is good but I want to read something else for a while and come back to this later”, put it aside, and did not in fact come back to it. And then I had a notion to give Woolrich another go at last much more recently, found a slightly bodgy digital copy, and settled down to finish it at last. Except that in doing so, I discovered my old paperback was actually not the full collection, and the original edition (from which my ebook had been made) actually contained sixteen stories, not twelve, plus an extensive bibliography of all of Woolrich’s known work. Why Gollancz’ version left those out I don’t know, but anyway that’s why it took me sixteen days to read the book in full rather than twelve.
Be all that as it may. Like I said, this is a posthumous collection of then-uncollected stuff, so I don’t know if it’s really a proper best-of as such, but Francis Nevins’ endnotes for each story generally hail them as the best example of the sort of thing they are which Woolrich wrote, so. Most of the contents date from the 30s, when he was preposterously prolific after turning to pulp magazine outlets, with a few examples of his later (and lesser) output; it’s a fairly bleak world he depicts, shot through with often grim irony, horrible coincidences, and, in the later tales, outright cruelty (“Too Nice a Day to Die” in particular could also justly be called “Go Fuck Yourselves”), but also one with some frankly bizarre aspects to it (particularly “Graves for the Living”, which borders on the positively gothic). I suppose it’s a fair introduction to Woolrich, all up, although I obviously haven’t read enough to really know for sure; maybe one of the novels (particularly Night Has a Thousand Eyes) is better for that sort of thing? Either way, now that there’s legit ebook editions of his books available, I’m going to be checking the novels out too. As for Nightwebs, I think we can say it was worth the 20-something-year wait to finish…
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