Black Gate

The Calling of Bara (Avon, 1981, cover uncredited)

I like to use my Vintage Treasures columns to highlight overlooked classics of SF and fantasy, or books that mean something special to me. But every once in a while I’ll stumble on a complete mystery, a book I’ve never previously come across in over four decades of collecting. Are these titles worth showcasing? Of course they are! You even have to ask?

Which brings us to The Calling of Bara, a 1981 Avon paperback I found in a collection I bought on eBay over the summer. Never seen it before, and never heard of the author, Sheila Sullivan, either. But it’s clearly dressed up as a mainstream fantasy — and it even has an enthusiastic blurb on the cover by the great Peter Beagle (“”A haunting, scary, highly original book.”) Plus, it’s got a post apocalyptic, ruined-Earth vibe, and that’s a plus. That was enough to send me on the hunt for online mentions, and eventually I found this 40-year-old Kirkus Review in the faded memory banks of an old Univac machine at the U. of I:

When Con, the child Bara bears in 2044 — after all 20th century western civilization had crumbled away — is five years old, Bara hears voices within her demanding she bring Con to Ireland. They are pursued by Con’s father, the savage White Michael, travel through wild lands and tribes, until, after being joined by Bara’s man Tam, they are welcomed in Ireland by the ruling class of telepaths which had called them. Con, with his unique powers, will one day head this elite who are debating whether or not to restore 20th century civilization, while the evil principle, White Michael, waits in the wings. Atmospheric and moderately involving if you haven’t been there before.

Atmospheric and involving… evil principle… crumbling ruins. What the hell, my needs are simple. I’ll try it.

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Berkley Books (1987). Cover uncredited

Suzy McKee Charnas has won virtually every major accolade our genre has to offer, including the Nebula, Hugo, and James Tiptree Jr. awards. Perhaps her most famous work is The Vampire Tapestry (1980), a non-supernatural tale of vampires with an SF premise. Her four-volume Holdfast Chronicles, which opened with Walk to the End of the World (1974), is a modern classic of feminist science fiction.

Dorothea Dreams, her fifth novel, is supernatural horror; The Washington Post called it “a ghost story — and a beautifully realised unconventional one at that.” It’s the tale of Dorothea Howard, a New Mexico artist haunted in her dreams by a ghost from the French Revolution. Midlist horror didn’t get a lot of critical notice in the mid-80s, but Dorothea Dreams did. This review from Publisher’s Weekly is fairly typical of the book’s warm reception.

For two years artist Dorothea Howard has been embedding fragments of pottery, wire and glass in the wall of black volcanic rock on her property near Taos. Her solitude is broken when her old friend Ricky, a British travel writer dying of cancer, arrives, saying simply he was drawn to visit. While trying to unravel Dorothea’s complex, frightening dreams which feature a 19th century lawyer who is a survivor of the French Revolution, Ricky urges his reluctant friend to show others the wall… Then a group of Chicano teenagers hunted by the police takes over the house… Charnas (The Vampire Tapestry) is billed as a fantasy writer, but this novel, as beautifully layered as Dorothea’s wall, is also a very human story about love and loss and continuation.

Dorothea Dreams was published by Arbor House in 1986, and reprinted in paperback by Berkley Books in January 1987. The paperback edition is 246 pages, priced at $2.95. The cover is uncredited.

See all our recent Vintage Treasures here.

Strange Seas and Shores by Avram Davidson (Ace Books, 1981). Cover uncredited.

Avram Davidson was one of the most respected fantasy short stories authors in America during my formative years as a reader. He was nominated for the Nebula Award ten times, the World Fantasy Award nine times, and won a Hugo for his classic story “Or All the Seas with Oysters.” That’s some serious street cred right there.

He’s not well remembered today, though. Criminally, we haven’t paid much attention to him at Black Gate either (aside from a Birthday Review by Steven Silver), and that’s a serious oversight. I found his third collection, Strange Seas and Shores buried in a collection I purchased recently, and want to settle in with it this weekend. I also found this compact review at the PorPor Books Blog; here’s a taste.

In his Introduction to Strange, Ray Bradbury notes that Davidson (1923 – 1993) crafted his short stories in the mode of the renowned Saki, O. Henry, and Chesterton. That is to say, Davidson employed surprise or trick endings in his short fiction, preferring to withhold the background detail of his plots at the outset, letting these details unfold along with the narrative, with the revelation / punch line coming in the last paragraph or sentence.

Many of the entries in Strange Seas and Shores are five or fewer pages in length, so providing synopses of these tales is essentially the same thing as disclosing spoilers… Some tales use quirky or satiric humor for their revelations… Others take a grimmer tone… Some of these stories have a ‘New York City’ sensibility to them, Davidson’s home throughout most of his life. In this manner they represent a sort of alternate approach to John Cheever’s examinations of NYC life in the postwar period.

It’s interesting to observe that Davidson steadfastly adhered to the classical, or traditionalist, format for his short fiction, even as the New Wave movement overtook sf publishing. His writing is clear and unambiguous, devoid of stylish affectations, although this being Davidson, readers will need to prepare for an expanded vocabulary: ‘circumambulation’, ‘nostra’, and ‘ratiocination’, among others…. Strange Seas and Shores is dedicated reading for Davidson aficionados; those others, who appreciate short stories in the ‘classical’ mode, may also want to seek it out.

Want to know another thing I discovered about Strange Seas and Shores this weekend? It is not the same book as his 1965 collection, What Strange Stars and Skies. For the last 40 years I’ve gotten these two titles confused. Glad to get that cleared up.

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