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Category: Vintage Treasures

Burger Creatures and Halloween Stories: DAW’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series III (1975), edited by Richard Davis

Burger Creatures and Halloween Stories: DAW’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series III (1975), edited by Richard Davis

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The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series III (DAW, 1975). Cover by Michael Whelan

The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series III was the third volume in DAW’s Year’s Best Horror Stories, copyright 1975, printed in that same year. Like the first two, British author and anthologist Richard Davis was the editor, though he would not continue with DAW after this volume. The cover was by Michael Whelan (1950–), his first for the series. Whelan was becoming more and more ubiquitous on sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks at the time. I think Whelan’s cover is horror-based but it does seem to lean toward the surreal, psychedelic vibe that was common in the 70s. Unlike Volume Two, this one contains no inner art.

Of the thirteen stories in The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series III, three were originally published in books, three in magazines, and two in fanzines; five appeared here for the first time, which I’ll come back to in a moment. At least five of the authors were British, five were American, one was Canadian (Allan Weiss) and Eddy C. Bertin is the lone Belgian, for the third volume in a row. Like the last installment, this anthology contains only male authors. All three of Davis’ DAW volumes have had a bit of a British slant, but this is unsurprising given that Davis was British as well. We’ll see if that changes when we switch to an American editor, Gerald W. Page, for the fourth book.

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Vintage Treasures: Through the Reality Warp by Donald J. Pfeil

Vintage Treasures: Through the Reality Warp by Donald J. Pfeil

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Through the Reality Warp (Ballantine Books, 1976). Cover by Boris Vallejo

Donald J. Pfeil had a brief and mostly undistinguished literary career. He’s chiefly remembered today as the editor of the well-regarded SF magazine Vertex, which ran for three years in the early 70s. He wrote some short fiction (all published in Vertex), and four novels, including a Planet of the Apes tie-in with the undisputed greatest title of the 1970s, Escape From Terror Lagoon. (If I could dream up titles like that, the entirety of Western Civilization would be helpless before me.)

His best-remembered book is Through the Reality Warp, a dopey science fiction adventure featuring a ballsy soldier named ‘Billiard’ (get it?) who’s shot into an alternate dimension to smash stuff and seduce space babes. It has a dismal 2.67 rating at Goodreads (and some heartily entertaining 1-star reviews), but that’s beside the point.

The point — and the only reason this book is remembered at all after 45 long years — is that eye-popping Boris Vellejo cover, featuring a gorgeous alien landscape, a virile space hero. a slavering alien fiend, and…. oh, wow. A cringeworthy amount of exposed space butt, courtesy of an all-male art department.

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Always Then and Never Now: The 13 Clocks by James Thurber

Always Then and Never Now: The 13 Clocks by James Thurber

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ONCE upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn’t go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold. His hands were as cold as his smile and almost as cold as his heart. He wore gloves when he was asleep, and he wore gloves when he was awake, which made it difficult for him to pick up pins or coins or the kernels of nuts, or to tear the wings from nightingales. He was six feet four, and forty-six, and even colder than he thought he was. One eye wore a velvet patch; the other glittered through a monocle, which made half his body seem closer to you than the other half. He had lost one eye when he was twelve, for he was fond of peering into nests and lairs in search of birds and animals to maul. One afternoon, a mother shrike had mauled him first. His nights were spent in evil dreams, and his days were given to wicked schemes.

Wickedly scheming, he would limp and cackle through the cold corridors of the castle, planning new impossible feats for the suitors of Saralinda to perform. He did not wish to give her hand in marriage, since her hand was the only warm hand in the castle. Even the hands of his watch and the hands of all the thirteen clocks were frozen. They had all frozen at the same time, on a snowy night, seven years before, and after that it was always ten minutes to five in the castle. Travelers and mariners would look up at the gloomy castle on the lonely hill and say, “Time lies frozen there. It’s always Then. It’s never Now.”

So begins James Thurber’s wonderful fairytale The 13 Clocks. Best known as a cartoonist, humorist, and one of the stalwarts of the New Yorker during the Harold Ross and William Shawn years, he also wrote several fairytales for children. I haven’t read the others — Many Moon and The White Deer — but I have come back to this one several times. An effervescent read, it never fails to delight.

As described in that magnificently menacing opening, the evil Duke spends his days setting his niece’s suitors impossible tasks such as cutting a slice of the moon or turning the ocean to wine. Sometimes, for no better reason than failing to describe his different-length legs properly (they differed in length because he spent his youth “place-kicking puppies and punting kittens”) or not praising his wine, staring at his niece too long, or having a name that started with X, he would just kill them.

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Exorcists Take Warning: DAW’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories II (1974), edited by Richard Davis

Exorcists Take Warning: DAW’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories II (1974), edited by Richard Davis

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The Year’s Best Horror Stories Series II (DAW, July 1974). Cover by Hans Arnold

The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series II was the second volume in DAW’s Year’s Best Horror Stories. Copyright 1972, 1973, but printed in 1974. Like the first, it was edited by Richard Davis. The cover, by Swiss artist Hans Arnold (1925–2010), was much more in line with a horror themed anthology than the first one. Clearly the cover is an homage to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, though there’s no story with a similar theme found within.

It had been two years since the release of DAW’s first The Year’s Best Horror Stories, which had been adopted — story for story — from Davis’ first British Sphere edition with same name. But for DAW’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series II, Davis did more than simply bring over every tale from the second Sphere volume. Some stories were dropped, and some added. Comparing the tables of contents, both volumes contain the Foreword by actor Christopher Lee, “David’s Worm” by Brian Lumley, “The Price of the Demon” by Gary Brandner, “The Knocker at the Portico” by Basil Copper, “The Animal Fair” by Robert Bloch, “Napier Court” by Ramsey Campbell, and “Haunts of the Very Rich” by T. K. Brown, III.

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Vintage Treasures: Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois

Vintage Treasures: Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois

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Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994). Cover by Kim Poor

When I talked about Gardner Dozois’ 1997 anthology Modern Classics of Fantasy a few years ago, I called it “a book that makes you yearn to be stranded on a desert island” (or anywhere you could read interrupted for a few days, really.) That description applies equally well to his 1994 volume Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction, a book that over the last few decades has become one of my favorite fall reads. It’s packed with a surprising assortment of 13 novellas from some of the greatest SF writers of the 20th Century.

I say surprising because the first time I opened it, I was a bit taken aback at Dozois’ selections. There’s no sign of Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, or any of the usual suspects you might expect — no “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, Jr., nor Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons,” or Kuttner and Moore’s “Vintage Season,” or Theodore Sturgeon’s “Baby Is Three” for that matter. No “Rogue Moon” by Algis Budrys, or “The Witches of Karres” by James H. Schmitz, or “The Big Front Yard” by Clifford D. Simak. Not even H.G. Well’s The Time Machine.

In fact, there’s not a single story overlap between this book and The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume II, which for many of us old timers is the gold standard of classic SF novella anthologies.

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Killer Dolls and Murderous Dimensions: DAW’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories I (1972), edited by Richard Davis

Killer Dolls and Murderous Dimensions: DAW’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories I (1972), edited by Richard Davis

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The Year’s Best Horror Stories (DAW, 1972). Cover by Karel Thole

The first Year’s Best Horror Stories, DAW No. 13, published in 1972, was edited by British author and editor Richard Davis, who would go on to produce many more horror and sci-fi anthologies throughout the 1970s and 1980s. He also edited the next two Year’s Best Horror Stories for DAW, but he primarily published through British outlets.

The Year’s Best Horror Stories, No. 1, was first published by Sphere in the UK in May 1971, and reprinted by DAW in the US fourteen months later, dropping the No. 1 from the title in the process. The cover of the DAW edition was by Dutch painter Karel Thole (1914–2000), a regular on sci-fi covers during the time. I think the cover is more psychedelic than horrific. In 1975 DAW reprinted the book with a new cover by Hans Arnold, one much more fitting to the horror genre.

This first volume has a strong lineup, and I can see why Donald A. Wollheim sought to get Davis’ Sphere release as the debut for his new Year’s Best Horror Stories series. It was also, somewhat surprisingly for the time, quite diverse.

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Knight at the Movies: SIEGE (1983), or SELF DEFENSE or possibly NIGHT WARRIORS

Knight at the Movies: SIEGE (1983), or SELF DEFENSE or possibly NIGHT WARRIORS

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You ever watch one of the long video game cutscenes that passes for movies these days and think “I kinda miss old, raw-looking films, like early Romero and Carpenter. Something that had teeth. Heart. Balls. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.”

Whether they do or don’t make them like that anymore is another blog post, but a good way to go back and get that early Romero vibe is to seek out overlooked titles from the era. One of those is the Canuxploitation shocker Siege (1983) (released in the USA as Self Defense and sometimes Night Warriors). Thanks to Severin Films, this lost thriller is now available to today’s Blu-ray audience and streaming through sites like Amazon.

Now I’ve seen this movie labeled online as pastiche/homage/ripoff of John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13. YMMV, but to me this is the work of a couple of filmmakers (Paul Donovan and Maura O’Connell of DEFCON-4 fame, most memorable for its excellent poster) who love Assault and want to make something like it, but improve on its weaknesses. They gave the attackers faces, names, and characters, cutting down the numbers to a handful, and made the defenders more vulnerable by putting them in two-story apartment quad, rather than a fortress-like police station. But I get ahead of myself.

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Galloway Gallegher — Kuttner’s Sauced Scientist

Galloway Gallegher — Kuttner’s Sauced Scientist

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Robots Have No Tails (Lancer, 1973). Cover by Ron Walotsky

Try this one on for size…you go to sleep one night and have a lively dream. You see yourself doing wonderful things, creating new devices based on principles so advanced you can’t even image how they could be. You don’t question the fact that it is a dream because you know that, normally, you could never build such fabulous, world-changing technologies. It’s all kind of fuzzy though — what you’re building, the people you’re interacting with, everything.

When you wake in the morning you discover any number of strange devices in your house. You have no idea what they are, how they work, or where they came from. The phone rings. Apparently, there are several people to whom you now owe a lot money. You’ve never met any of them before but they seem to know you. Is it a scam? You hope so because one of them is suing you for breach of contract. Another is taking you to court for assault and battery. What happened? Could your dreams have been real somehow? Regardless, it seems that you’re now morally responsible for a whole lot of trouble.

This is essentially the premise of Henry Kuttner’s five Galloway/Gallegher stories: “Time Locker” (1943), “The World Is Mine” (1943), “The Proud Robot” (1943), “Gallegher Plus” (1943), and “Ex Machina” (1948).

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Arthur C. Clarke: Omnibuses, Collections, and Remixes

Arthur C. Clarke: Omnibuses, Collections, and Remixes

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Omnibuses:
Across the Sea of Stars (Harcourt Brace World, 1959)
From the Ocean, From the Stars (Harcourt Brace World, 1961)
Prelude to Mars (Harcourt Brace World, 1965; book club edition shown)
The Lion of Comarre and Against the Fall of Night (Harcourt Brace World, 1968; book club edition shown)

Arthur C. Clarke was one of the major science fiction writers of the 1950s through the 1970s; his biggest claim to fame was as coauthor, along with filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, of the film and novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. He was a British scientist who lived most of his life in Ceylon, later known as Sri Lanka, and wrote numerous books about his skin diving adventures in that area. He began publishing short stories as early as 1937, and his novels beginning in the 1950s included Childhood’s End, The City and the Stars, and Rendezvous with Rama.

This is the first of two posts about Arthur C. Clarke’s short fiction, which comprise nearly 100 titles and include such famous works as “The Star” and “The Nine Billion Names of God,” not to mention “The Sentinel,” one of the  (several) inspirations for 2001. This post will trace the overlaps between Clarke’s early collections and the later “omnibuses” and “remixes.” The next post will review the stories, both in general terms and to highlight the 8 or 10 or 12 best, or most significant, Clarke stories, in my judgment.

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Introduction to DAW Books’ The Year’s Best Horror Stories (1972–1994), edited by Richard Davis, Gerald W. Page, and Karl Edward Wagner

Introduction to DAW Books’ The Year’s Best Horror Stories (1972–1994), edited by Richard Davis, Gerald W. Page, and Karl Edward Wagner

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20 of the 22 volumes of The Year’s Best Horror Stories (DAW Books)

Today I’m beginning a new series of posts investigating DAW Books’ Year’s Best Horror Stories series, which ran from 1971 to 1994. As a fan of literary horror, I’m excited to sequentially read through these volumes and share my thoughts with you. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to discover some great stories and authors, perhaps some we’ve never read before, and I’m also hoping that we will be able to see how trends in horror have changed over the years. Each post will investigate one volume at a time.

Except this first one, in which I want to explore the impetus and beginnings of the series as a whole.

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