The Steampunk MEGAPACK: 26 Modern and Classic Steampunk Stories

The Steampunk MEGAPACK: 26 Modern and Classic Steampunk Stories has an impressive amount of reading matter for the low low price of just 99 cents. I am currently reading story 7 of 26. Already I have forgotten some of them. So, I thought I'd build out my blog post from here with what I remember of what I've already read. What's in The Steampunk MEGAPACK: 26 Modern and Classic Steampunk Stories? It is a mixture of classic and modern. At least thus far, the longer pieces are classic and in the public domain (for instance, the novella "The Whisperer in the Darkness" by H. P. Lovecraft) while the modern pieces, thus far, are short stories.

I will skip "Midnight at Valdosta's" and "The Case of the Peculiar Safe." I do remember a few things about "Midnight at Valdosta's." But I didn't really get the sense of a story out of it. It was more of an impression of something. Like it's a piece of a story or just the beginning of one.

The Acquisition of Mandrakes and Assistants, Jillian Venters

"The Acquisition of Mandrakes and Assistants" by Jillian Venters was the first remarkable story that I ran into.

The assistant is tired of the tiresome professor, and decides to try on a different occupation: taking care of a child. That child happens to belong to a twisted many who enjoys tormenting children. She rescues the boy, burns down the house with everyone locked inside, and goes back to work as an assistant. I really enjoyed this story.

The Whisperer in Darkness, H. P. Lovecraft

"The Whisperer in Darkness" is, as already mentioned, a novella by H. P. Lovecraft. H. P. Lovecraft is a writer whom I've always wanted to like ever since I heard his name mentioned by one of my favorite pulp fiction writers, Robert E. Howard, famous for his Conan stories. Even when I was younger, I found my eyes very nearly bleeding with effort to maintain attention to his books. I am no different now. I am perhaps more disciplined. But I really had to prop open my eyes to keep going. I have since discovered he was a horrible person as a racist. So, I'm not as motivated as before to like his work. What I like about his work is the mythology that he creates. The ideas about extra terrestrials and old dark magic and science from the cold planet, Pluto, are pretty great. There have been many who have brought to life his ideas through their artwork. But the writing itself is onerous.

Most of the story centers around a character, Albert N. Wilmarth, an assistant professor of English at a university. He's made a penpal of Henry Akeley, who lives in a house on the edge of an area haunted by creatures from this planet of advanced and sinister aliens. He has recordings, photographs, and anecdotes about the creatures sent to him. The sinister aliens repress knowledge of their presence through terror and alliances with humans who assist them. At last, Henry Akeley is compromised. He invites Wilmarth to his abode, but also to bring all of the material he had sent including the audio recording, the photos, and even the letters that had been sent. Clearly, at this point, there is a problem. But Wilmarth follows the instructions and all the materials are lost when he flees the house the first night of his visit. I guess it's not a bad story. But I just cannot get into H. P. Lovecraft's method of telling his tale. It is boring. He is entirely too much 'tell' and not enough 'show' when it comes to storytelling.

Wikipedia writes, "In addition to being a textbook example of Lovecraft's characteristically non-occult brand of horror, in an age when the genre consisted almost entirely of ghosts, vampires, goblins, and similar traditional tales, "Whisperer" is one of the earliest literary appearances of the now-cliché concept of an isolated brain (although the alien brain case is not transparent as with later cinematic examples of this trope).

"The story retains some seemingly supernatural elements, such as its claim that the alien fungi, although visible to the naked eye and physically tangible, do not register on photographic plates and instead produce an image of the background absent the creature (an impossibility by any known laws of optics, though a trait commonly attributed to vampires), although the story does mention that this is possibly due to the creatures' fungoid and alien structure which works differently from any known physical organism. It is stated that the electrons of these fungoid aliens possess a different vibrational frequency that would require the development of a novel technique by a chemist in order to record their image."

So, that's the issue with Lovecraft. His work is of a pioneering nature. So, it is important. The ideas are in fact very good. But as a storyteller, I just have a horrible time with the style of the stories. I ought to point out that the style does seem cliche with his period. But who sets the cliche? Was it really his fault? That story construction of, "Here's an unbelievable story. I'm very smart and educated. I didn't believe it at first. But then..." is so tired and uninteresting. And constantly, "on the verge of terror from ..." isn't much better.

The Brass Goggle Factory Worker, John Leavitt

"The Brass Goggle Factory Worker" by John Leavitt was quite interesting. It is flawed due to some poor editing and proofreading. There are many grammar, spelling, and wrong word errors to this tale throughout. At times it is distracting and outright annoying. But inside the story itself is quite interesting.

This story could have taken place somewhere inside the universe of George Orwell's legendary dystopian masterpiece, 1984. It doesn't have that depth. There isn't quite the cold chill horror or brilliance of Orwell's masterpiece. But it's just a short story.

The Tailed Men, Arthur O Friel

"The Tailed Men" is set in the Amazon Forest. A white man is tortured before being returned to his friends. His friends decide to go back into the forest to get revenge against the race. Quite beyond belief, they are able to find the very tribe responsible for his death and the enact their revenge by dressing up as a monster and slaughtering the men and women and setting the village to fire. In their murderous frenzy, they discover that the tribe possibly mates with the local monkeys, resulting in these crossbreeds of half men half monkeys from which the men with tails are concocted.

I have a hard time understanding the connection between steampunk and this particular story.

The Impossible Mister Lapin, Peter Wordworth

I have no idea who Peter Wordworth is. And, for at least the first few page results from Google, nor does Google. I enjoyed this story.

A man pursues mad science in an effort to learn how to turn himself into a rabbit. By doing his research, he is able to discover the secret. In so doing, learning the secret language of the magical universe, he becomes half rabbit and half man. Why not?

With his newfound expertise in the occult, he becomes a kind of investigator into weird happenings. For awhile, this means uncovering silly attempts or deceptions, until another less successful than himself accidentally transforms himself into a gold statue and brings to life a gold statue into a boar which terrorizes locals. He is able to solve the mystery and stop the boar using symbols.

It was a fun short story. I don't know anything else about Wordworth.

The War Effort, Austin H. Williams

Austin H. Williams gets results on Google. He has a number of stories in these types of anthologies and some kind of fiction magazine called Steampunk Tales. So, he's gotten his work around a bit.

A great warrior, Timo Malthusset, falls in love with a woman in a religious order. He dedicates himself to her and follows her, completely ignorant about the religious order, called the Messengers, to which he is devoting himself.

She leads him to an underground world where he is promptly knocked unconscious and turned into a half man half machine under the control of some kind of crystal embedded in his skull. He discovers that his beloved lady is a cannibal and that the religion is some kind of super advanced super sadistic culture which eats the bodies of the dead and has a small army of half men half machine slaves. He is able to wiggle himself into falling to the ground, smashing the crystals on his head on impact(I guess that no helmet or some kind of protective casing design never occurred to the designer). Now he is a super powerful half man half machine who goes about killing the engineer, Garum, and the woman whom he had dedicated himself before running away.

Ok, it wasn't so bad. But Williams could have done more with the story. Perhaps he is.

Herbert West: Reanimator, H. P. Lovecraft

For the first time, I have found a story by Lovecraft that I enjoyed. It was fairly well written. It's the story of a mad scientist and his sidekick who are on a mission to reanimate a corpse. It isn't terribly unlike Shelley's Frankenstein. Though, instead of reanimating the dead with electricity, a freshly made corpse without too much decay is chemically reanimated.

The mad scientist sub genre is one of endless amusement. Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, and Dr. Jekyll, are all very interesting characters. Dr. West is nowhere near as famous as those others, but he is definitely within their ranks, albeit less infamous.

Dr. West succeeds in his quest. For the most part, he is able to destroy what he creates. But in the end, those whom he failed to destroy end up forming a small troop who literally tear him to pieces. There really isn't much to this story. But it is enjoyable. As I read the story late at night, I felt entertained from the first to the last page. Finally, a Lovecraft story I enjoyed.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain

Mark Twain is definitely among my favorite American writers of that century. I have read at least four of his novels as well as a collection of short stories.

I don't think I would have ever read this novel if not for the fact that it was in this compilation of so called 'steampunk' books. I keep having to go back to the definition of steampunk to see how it fits in. Well, it's a book about late 19th century technology and philosophy going back to around 6th century England. Fortunately, everyone speaks modern English in this story.

Mark Twain's description of the time is a bit of a mix between the impossible and reality. Magic does not exist, though people believe in it. Superstition is ever more powerful in his rendition of the 6th century. People believe in absurd stories quite easily.

The main character, Hank, mysteriously gets whisked to King Arthur's period and is quickly captured by a knight. His knowledge of an imminent total eclipse is enough so that he makes people believe that he has caused the eclipse, and that it is not just a natural phenomenon.

He is also fairly rational, which gives him advantages over the local population. When he has to face off with the magical Merlin, it becomes apparent that Merlin is a fraud. He has no power at all. He only pretends about magic. So, it is easy for Hank, a man of some science and engineering, to make people believe that he is powerful in a magical sense. What is magic but an appearance of the impossible?

Eventually, he manages to manufacture a number of technologies. Everything from gunpowder to laying down some telecommunications. He is able to set up quite a bit. Much of his criticism of Arthur's day I find is relevant today. He talks about how classes are treated differently. While the punitive punishments are certainly not the same today as they were in his America, let alone 6th Century 'England'. For instance, he talks about how a rich or titled lord can basically kill a man or woman without any issue, a poor person so much as scratching a rich man is risking a quick death or a slow lingering death in a horrible prison. These extremes don't exist today, but there are similarities. For instance, scratch a Ferrari on the road, and the cost of the repair will be greater than a  poor person's car. If the man in the Ferrari kills someone and it's their fault, the insurance will pay for it and life will go on for the most part.

There is an interesting tug of war between reason and superstition. Eventually, superstition wins. While Hank is away in France, the whole of England falls apart due to war, and the Dark Ages church takes over. There is a war where many knights die, but it is a war between tens of thousands of knights vs a small band of boys. The battle is largely won, but when Hank goes out to see if he can help some of the dead, he is injured. Further, the sickness which comes with war, of all the decomposing bodies, eventually overwhelms his resistance. The Dark Ages take over the Age of Enlightenment which he tries to ushur in. Surely, there is some similarity between my contemporary society. In these days, there is a huge growth in strength among those who don't believe in science and those who do. Hank believes that once people are educated, it will overwhelm those who cling to ignorance. At some point in our current, recent history, surely we have felt the same way. But the tide is shifting to that of ignorance once again: people don't believe in 5+/- earth, or the round earth, or climate change, or any of these things which are well established by experts. They would rather believe an old book.Will we ever change? Or will this tug of war between reason and superstition always exist?

The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaal, by Edgar Allan Poe

"The Raven" and a few other of Poe's poems are some of my favorite pieces of writing. While I like some of his short stories, there's nothing to equal "The Raven" in my opinion. Of the stories of his that I've read, this was among my least favorite. I am not even sure if he wrote it. In fact, it seems like someone else wrote it and he's commenting on it. However, it's possible that he wrote it to be a hoax and then treated it as a hoax itself. It's something of an ironic approach.

This isn't the first story of its kind that I've read, nor is it the best. I much preferred Cyrano de Bergerac's story, "Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon," which is similar in many ways.

The Lost World, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

It's funny, to look at the cover of this book because in the story, the only white woman is the girlfriend of the narrator, Edward Malone, before he goes off on his adventure to the lost world. Also, there is no T-Rex. The worst creatures they run into are giant toads which hop on their victims with their larger than elephant sized asses, squishing them to death. Way to go book cover illustrator with your horribly inaccurate portrayal!

Edward Malone is in love with a woman who wants a hero for a husband. So, he goes off on this adventure with some professors and an adventurer to see if Professor Challenger's description of this lost world was true and accurate.

The geography is a bit of a puzzle to me. There seems to be a rather significant land barrier between this lost world and the rest of the world. First, they manage to get across due to a tree being close to a rift. Once that tree is gone, they don't know how to build a tree to get back across. Of course, that's quite amazing considering that there are supposed to be two very intelligent academics, one adventurer, and the reporter/narrator. I suppose that they have no engineering ideas among them to help them escape.

Over a period of time, they discover the pterodactyls, a stegosaurus, a gigantic toad, Iguanodon, Allosaurus, and Megalosaurus, and some other prehistoric animals. They get attacked by a tribe of missing link human-like apes, but manage to escape with some red skinned Indians (Native Americans).

Racism: as is often the case, this book has a few moments. The one black character is a 'black Hercules, as willing as any horse, and about as intelligent.' I do believe that he's paying the character compliments in his mind. But it's certainly not at all a compliment.

There are two 'half breeds' which are described. One of whom is said to have 'the vice of curiosity.' However, later on, that same vice is described as 'the bravery of the scientific mind... It is decreed by a merciful Nature that the human brain cannot think of two things simultaneously, so that if it be steeped in curiosity as to science it has no room for merely personal considerations.' That is to say, the curiosity of the 'half breed' is a vice, but in the white men, it's celebrated and makes them brave. Oddly enough, there are not many pages to separate the seemingly obvious contradiction. Later on, the 'red Indians' are also poorly described. Fortunately, the racism in these  descriptions is limited to a few pages only.

I did enjoy the book, despite the silliness and racism.

The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton

I had wanted to enjoy this story. Surely it is meant to be a comedy. It is about a bunch of policemen who are recruited to infiltrate an anarchists' group. Ironically, the man who recruits all of them is the leader of the group, and all of the members of the anarchists' group are policemen.

I think that the story is meant to be a comedy. Perhaps I did laugh. But I'm not really sure. I was disappointed with the story. 

Dark Carnival, Ray Bradbury

   I can't recall where I picked up a copy of Ray Bradbury's collection of short weird fiction, Dark Carnival. In any case, I must say that I don't recall ever having read any of his fiction. This, despite his name being legendary in the golden age of science fiction. Despite my associating him with science fiction, here are a few lines from Wikipedia that describe his fiction:

Bradbury was once described as a "Midwest surrealist" and is often labeled a science-fiction writer, which he described as "the art of the possible." Bradbury resisted that categorization, however:

First of all, I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see? That's the reason it's going to be around a long time -- because it's a Greek myth, and myths have staying power.^[35]

Certainly, there is nothing of science fiction in this collection of short stories. I would classify it as weird fiction. I am not an authority on anything except my opinion, of course.

   I'm not going to go over each of the short stories. I'm only going to mention the few that stood out for me.
   Death and the undead often come up as subjects or characters throughout many of the stories. There is a vampire who doesn't like to be a monster like the rest of his relatives. There is a story, "Uncle Einar", about psychic possession where a girl, to prove how awful she is, possesses a relative hated by the family until he kills himself. All the time he is looking for her to help him, completely unaware that it is she who has haunted him, leading him to his own extinction. There's another story, "There Was an Old Woman", of a woman who refuses to die. When death comes to her and separates her from her body, she manages to retake it from the funeral home which has already gutted and embalmed her. She has her blood replaced in her veins. She then goes home and from then on refuses to answer the door (perhaps to make sure that Death does not trick her again).
   The final story which stood out for me is "The Next in Line", which is about a couple who go to Mexico for a holiday. The woman is haunted by the tour of the unburied: the poor rent plots for a year but cannot afford a second year. So, the bodies are exhumed and left in a kind of cavern, standing. There is a series of macabre descriptions of the dead: one woman who is buried alive. Another who dies giving birth along with the baby. All of them held together and stiff with wire. She begs her husband to not leave her there. But, he refuses. On his way back to Texas, he seems quite happy that she is no longer beside her.
   If you're looking for a series of good horror tales, this is not a bad choice at all.

The Underdwelling, Tim Curran

To be perfectly honest, I don't know where I picked up this novella. I probably got it for free from somewhere, but I'm not sure where. In any case, it's a relatively new story (2012) by Tim Curran.

It's a well told story from top to bottom, I would say. The writing style is easy to follow. The story follows a debutante miner on his first day of the job. He dreads going into the mine, but chalks it up to typical nervousness for the first day of the job. But it turns out that his premonitions were nothing to sneeze at.

The miners go into a deep pocket that has been buried for about 250,000,000 years. They discover an entire world that has petrified. Everything from dinosaurs to gigantic trees, all preserved in this underworld. But beyond the memorial of a primeval period of time that goes back to the beginning of the dinosaur age, there is an immortal resident.

The immortal resident is described as a super intelligent spider like creature. It is able to tap-tap communicate. It is powerful enough to rip full grown, powerful men into pieces for devouring. It does not eat like a spider, but rather chooses to eat men more like those around a turkey for Thanksgiving: ripping it to pieces and eating limbs and lapping up the blood of its victims. The protagonist, on the other hand, she preserves. She has been lonely for 250,000,000 years, and chooses him as a companion. She feeds him in the darkness. She helps him overcome a serious illness. Then, she gives birth to creatures. Eventually, the rescue team gets into the chamber, but this is where the story ends.

The story reminded me somewhat of H. P. Lovecraft. I am not alone in this vein. It was entertaining. It was short. It was an easy and pleasant enough read. If you like the short horrors of long ago, you will probably appreciate Curran's effort.

The Moonchild, Aleister Crowley

   Aleister Crowley's name often gets thrown into sentences with HP Lovecraft. I am not so fond of Lovecraft however. Aleister Crowley's name is famous in the occult of the previous century. He seems like a far more interesting person than Lovecraft who created cardboard characters. I hope that one day I will read a Lovecraftian book and say, 'Wow, that was amazing. My opinion on the writer is forever changed.' That would be great. I'm still waiting. In any case, Moonchild is available freely at www.feedbooks.com.
   In any case, Moonchild has far more going for it than anything I've read so far out of Lovecraft. So, I am quite happy that I read it. It was certainly a voyage into a different kind of novel than I've been into of recent months. It is a strange fiction filled with some pretty sinister imagery.
   In one of the scenes where the evil sorcerers, looking to get at the 'white magicians', it's quite an enlivening scene. "The doctor was himself the last to enter the circle. In a basket he had the four black cats; and, when he had lighted the nine small candles about the circle, he pinned the four cats, at the four quarters, with black arrows of iron. He was careful not to kill them; it was important that their agony should frighten away any undesireable spirits." It's a book, right? No actual harm came to any cats in the making up of these words. Harming actual cats would not be entertaining at all. Another particularly brilliantly dark scene involved more imaginary cats being tortured, "The hideous cries of the tortured cats mingled with the triumphant bleating of the goat and the nasal monotone of Arthwait as he mouthed the words of the Grimoire. And it seemed to all of them as though the air grew thick and greasy; that of that slime were bred innumerable creeping things, monsters misshapen..." is such a visually delightful horror. I cannot imagine a more discordant cacophony of sound than the bleating of a goat mingled with the awful cries of four tortured cats.
   Some of the politics were a bit funny. He writes, "A parliament of the wisest and strongest men in the nation is liable to behave like a set of schoolboys, tearing up their desks and throwing their inkpots at each other. The only possibility of cooperation lies in discipline and autocracy..." It would seem that he had a rather sour look on the ideals of democracy.
   There is no real main character throughout this book. Through much of it, I'm under the impression that Lisa la Giuffria is the main character. Through much of the story it is her mind we are exposed to; her thoughts; her experience being brought into magical training. She is seduced by a white magician, Cyril Grey, and persuaded into helping him in a magical battle with a black magician and his black lodge. Ultimately, all the sacrifices that she makes to assist him: joining his cult, going through a kind of willing imprisonment, ultimately gets thrown aside in an act of kindness.
   Then she is whisked away by a Turk who was in love with her. She gives birth to a child named the Moonchild. But she hates the child, as does the Turk. I am unsure if the Turk himself is the father or if she was magically impregnated or some other means of her carrying it. When she gives birth, she isn't even aware that she is pregnant. There does not seem to have been enough time for the Turk to have been the author of the pregnancy. Since this book treats magic seriously, it is well within the realm of such fiction for that to be the case. Crowley makes no effort to clear it up.
   Moonchild seems like it ought to be the first book in a series. But, as far as I can tell in the Wikipedia article, it is not. I can't help but wonder what would have happened to it.
   I recommend reading this book. But if you don't, I don't think you will have missed anything particularly amazing.

The Slayer of Souls, Robert W. Chambers

The Slayer of Souls(1920) is the second book of Robert W. Chambers' that I have read. It is available for free at Gutenberg.org and Feedbooks.com. The edition I am reading is from Feedbooks. The difference between the two is generally that the transcriptions on Gutenberg.org are better than that of Feedbooks.com. On the other hand, the Feedbooks edition has a preface. After having read it all, I highly recommend reading the Gutenberg edition, as the Feedbooks edition has so many errors in it. They don't often obscure much, but it's like listening to a great album with a lot of scratches on it. Sometimes I had to stop and look around to figure out what should have been written in Feedbooks' edition.

First, the preface: Included is a criticism of legendary writer H. P. Lovecraft's, in which is excerpted, "Chambers is like Rupert Hughes and a few other fallen Titans - equipped with the right brains and education but wholly out of the habit of using them." The preface also includes a criticism from Frederic Taber Cooper, which reads, "So much of Chambers's work exasperates, because we feel that he might so easily have made it better." Regarding Lovecraft: I have only read a few things of Lovecraft's stories, "At the Mountain of Madness" and "The Alchemist". So, perhaps I'm missing something. However, I see his work as significantly inferior to that of Chambers'.

Take The Slayer of Souls which I am reading as an example: the descriptions are vivid. There is good dialogue, which is something which feels so lacking in Lovecraft's writing. Further, in the types of literary exposition, there is what is called 'show' and 'tell.' Lovecraft's two stories I have to go by is mostly 'tell' with some 'show,' whereas Chambers' is skillfully described.

The story could occupy several genres: fantasy, speculative fiction (according to Wikipedia), weird fiction, and horror. In this world which is set in the real world is an older one with magic set in the period just after world war one.

The main character, Nan-Yang Maru, aka Tressa Norne, has a great deal of this magical power. She was forged in magical China where demons are worshiped. She is a very powerful female hero, which is considerably rare. In fact, I cannot recollect any books that I have read prior to 1920 or even around that period where women are the heroes and main characters in this kind of fiction. For this reason alone Chambers has invoked a great deal of respect from me.

From the beginning, Chambers gives a taste of her power as she faces her most powerful nemesis: Sanang. Sanang breaks into her room on a boat headed to San Francisco from China, using psychokinetic powers, "(She) saw the double locked door opposite the foot of her bed slowly opening of its own accord." She holds a pistol at him. She uses some of her magical power and throws at him a yellow snake which terrifies him.

The first attempt at her assassination comes from a tough character, Gutchly Kan. He plots her dath, deriding Sanag's love for her and his fear. But Gutchlug instead is killed by one of her snakes, sent psychically from below his own room.

Senang and his surviving assassins are refereed to as Yezidees, and the demon they worship is Erlik.

When Tressa Norne finds herself in the US, she is unable to provide for herself. She tries to become a magician to entertain. But rather than using the typical setups of a magical show, she uses real magic instead. However, this does not amuse the audience, and she cannot make a living. There is no family for her, and she is extremely vulnerable.

Physically, she is described as boyish, her breasts being 'undecided.'

To survive, she is prepared to sell herself as a prostitute. But this is implied and never explicitly said. She is given an alternative: work for the US government for 3x what she was receiving before as a magician. Of course she agrees, despite knowing that by doing so she violates her promise to never reveal the inner workings of the Chinese assassins' guild, the Yezidees.

She was brought to China by her father. But, it would prove fatal to her father when the Yazidees "took Yian in 1910, threw him into a well in his own compound and filled it up with imperial troops" when she was 13. Some years later, her mother is killed, and she is forced to become a temple sorceress.

Her biggest problem is that she believes her soul is already dead. As soon as her body dies, she dies with it. For this reason, she will do anything to survive, as long as she can. The man she meets that recruits her is Victor Cleves, who ends up marrying her to save her reputation. A couple living together unmarried, apparently, would harm her reputation. She consents. As time goes on, however, it becomes clear that they are quickly falling in love with one another. Perhaps it is this love which helps her overcome the sorcerer-assassins.

Tressa is a remarkable character: horribly weak in some ways, and in others, perhaps, the most powerful person in the world. She defeats one after another of those who would kill her and subvert America into communism, but sees herself as completely unworthy of Cleves.

The prose is often poetic. It is well written, even romantic at times. I am very impressed with this novel and highly recommend it. I can't help but wonder if Chambers' harsh critics were jealous of his obvious talent.

The Inn of the Two Witches, Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) is a brilliant author of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. "The Inn of the Two Witches" (1913) is a good short story that can be found at numerous sources such as Gutenberg.org. This copy, however, comes from Manybooks.com. I have downloaded many books from that source, but a detractor, at least for this short story, is that the tabbing function doesn't work at all.


Conrad begins the story by means of an interesting introduction which tells of how he found the tale. It reminds me a bit of how The Twilight Zone often opens:

The Find was made in a box of books bought in London, in a street which no longer exists, from a second-hand bookseller in the last stage of decay... (the story is) A litter of loose pages at the bottom of the box excited my curiosity but faintly.

I don't know if this was written by him or not. Such casting off of credit is a frequent enough occurrence that it puts authorship in doubt. Most recently, Don Quixote was written by a man who said the entire tale was stitched together from a few different sources. Perhaps for Conrad, this was an attempt at deepening the mystery behind the story. Much of the story is condensed and many details left out that he considers trivial. Perhaps it's a true story rewritten by the master. For, he writes, it's written in a fashion as dull as an inventory manifest.


The story is about a journey in Cuba. Two young men, Edgar Byrne  and Tom Crobin (Cuba Tom), go on this journey, one before the other. On the journey, both come onto a hut which houses three witches: one beautiful (but evil looking) and two ugly and very old. Edgar, as he approaches this cabin, hears the voice of his friend and shipmate giving him warnings, close at hand.

He goes into the house and is told that he can stay there. He's fed some food and then lead to his room. He keeps hearing Tom warning him about something, but he cannot see him anywhere until he searches the armoire. There is Tom, stone cold dead. He examines him as best he can, and cannot find a reasonable cause of death. Just a simple bruise on his forehead and the suggestion that Tom was trying to punch someone or something.

He puts Tom in the bed meant for him, and then watches the top of the bed lower down and basically crush him. After this is done, someone comes to his door. But it is not one of the witches, it is someone who has come to help him. They discover that the reason the young witch was killing people was for the buttons on their jackets.

It's a nice little horror story, perfect before going to bed. Sweet dreams!

The Great God Pan, Arthur Machen

The Great God Pan (1894) is a novella by Arthur Machen (1863-1947). There are several sources for the text: Gutenberg.org and Manybooks.com, to name but two. There is also a Youtube.com movie available, presumably because the movie is in the public domain.

I think I found this novella when searching for famous older horror stories or weird fiction a few months back. This was one of the novellas mentioned. The reception for this novella is a bit inexplicable for me. I found the text to be dull. Yet, Stephen King is on record for saying, "Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language." I would love to inquire from him why he thinks so. What have I missed?

The article on Wikipedia.org states, "On publication it was widely denounced by the press as degenerate and horrific because of its decadent style and sexual content, although it has since garnered a reputation as a classic of horror." I didn't find it degenerate, but nor did I find it particularly decadent in style or particularly sexual. I feel like everyone has read a different story than I have. John Lane wrote, "Why should he be allowed, for the sake of a few miserable pounds, to cast into our midst these monstrous creations of his diseased brain?" Yet, how monstrous can these evil characters be? H. P. Lovecraft writes, "No one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds." Perhaps I'm not sensitive?

It all begins with a ruthless scientist who cuts a portion of the brain that blinds people to the horrors of some underworld, so that they might see Pan. The girl upon whom this surgery is conducted becomes essentially brain dead. To take care of her, she's sent to a farmer. Though it isn't explicitly pointed out that the farmer raped her, at the end of the story it becomes evident that the accused for instigating suicides is her daughter, and there was no one else to have gotten her pregnant I imagine. Pan himself is hinted to be the impregnator, however. Both Pan and the farmer were in her life at roughly a close enough interval that either could have been the father. Further, if she had been pregnant, why was this not discovered at an earlier point? Surely it must have been intentionally hidden.

The style is clumsy, as is noted by Stephen King who wrote, "surmounts its rather clumsy prose and works its way relentlessly into the reader's terror-zone. How many sleepless nights has it caused? God knows, but a few of them were mine. I think 'Pan' is as close as the horror genre comes to a great white whale." I promise I shall not lose a night's sleep over it. I will just shake my head in wonderment over the sensation that it caused in its day and the reception it continues to receive from a writer of King's caliber.

The Monk; a Romance, Matthew Gregory Lewis

The Monk; a Romance, written by Matthew Gregory Lewis, is available freely on Gutenberg.org and Amazon.com. The Amazon version is slightly better, as the pages are numbered making it easier to reference.

My notes following are taken as I read. I find doing so sometimes helps me get the story straight. This story takes place in an unfamiliar setting, both time and space. It's taking a bit of an effort to clarify some events and twists as they evolve.

The setting is that of Spain. Spain had been for awhile a Muslim nation. The temporal setting is after Christianity had begun to retake the country. Thus, Antonia, one of the principal characters in this temptation of a monk, wears a veil that covers her face. She seeks to remain veiled, but is nearly stripped of it by a man only just introduced:

"... as yet (you) are unacquainted with our customs, that you continue to wear your veil..." 

At the same time He advanced his hand towards the Gauze: The Lady raised hers to prevent him. (p. 11)

She would have resisted his aggressive behavior, if not for her aunt who seemed to quite dislike her niece.

He is successful in petitioning Antonia's aunt to allow him to disrobe her of her veil. The description of her face begins her role as a seductress. "(her face) was rather bewitching than beautiful." (p. 12) She is disconnected from the Catholic religion, as she counts the rosary beads, but that she doesn't really know what to do with them.

When her aunt, Leonella, starts to describe the other principal character, the Monk, Ambrosio, Abbot of the Capuchins, she says of him that he treats men and women as if they are the same gender, and that he is chaste. When Antonia asks, since she has these same qualities, if she is then a saint, she is lectured upon and told that men and women are not the same. This is a double standard. I don't know if the author is either making fun of or chastising Antonia, or consciously revealing the double standard and criticizing it.

Now I am just about at the half way point of the novel. The events leading up to Agnes' being in a convent she had no taste for are detailed. The unhappy couple who love each other are ill fated at every turn: her aunt falls in love with Lorenzo, who then tries to clear up the confusion (for the aunt thought him in love with her), but instead invites the wrath of a woman scorned. Lorenzo and Agnes plot together to make an escape at night, using a costume in the likeness of a cursed spirit called the Bleeding Nun. However, it is not the nun's likeness that enters the coach, but rather the nun herself. Thinking he is speaking to Agnes, he swears himself to her. But the swearing forces him to take on the burden of breaking the Bleeding Nun's curse. He is fortunate that another famous phantom, the Wandering Jew, cursed for his part in the crucifixion of Jesus to wander forever, looking to help people. Agnes, thinking Lorenzo has forsaken her, agrees to become a nun.

When Lorenzo is finally able to discover Agnes, he essentially rapes her, forcing her to try to flee the convent. However, the Prioress, Mother St. Agatha, refuses to part with Agnes, even after receiving a letter from the pope demanding her release.

The relationship between Matilda and Ambrosio is the most interesting. She is, in essence, the destroyer of Ambrosio as the 'perfect monk.' She seduces him perfectly. After their first consummation of lust, Matthew Lewis first writes,

"... Unnatural were your vows of Celibacy; Man was not created for such a state; And were Love a crime, God never would have made it so sweet, so irresistible!" (p. 191)

And then,

...the fair Wanton put every invention of lust in practice, every refinement in the art of pleasure which might heighten the bliss of her possession... (p. 192)

But whether Matilda is there merely to seduce the Monk or is in fact smitten with him, it is not yet 100% clear. This passage suggests that she believes in the moment without a care about the moments after death:

"I will think my sacrifice scarcely worthy to purchase your possession, and remember that a moment past (passed) in your arms in this world o'er-pays an age of punishment in the next." (p. 192)

So, did she seduce him simply for the purpose of torment? Is she some kind of temptress who lives to destroy? Or is she simply a fool in love? However, at last she reveals that her seduction of the monk is merely a ploy to gain entrance into "...the burying-ground at midnight." (p. 192)

Some of the phrases that Matthew Lewis uses are brilliant, and as true today as they were when he wrote them more than three centuries ago. He, alongside Matilda, in their secret entrance to the 'burying-ground,' hide when the prioress makes her conversation with an elder nun about the situation with Agnes. She intends on punishing Agnes to the full extent she can for embarassing her in front of Ambrosio. But now, because of his own transgression,

"...thunder out menaces against the errors of others, the better to conceal your own." (p. 197)

Ambrosio's character, as a child, was quite good. Lewis writes that it was the
education of the monks which perverted him. He is described as being 'pure,' but in the darker, puritanical way which is merciless. He is 30, and already severe. So, it is hard to really know how much Matilda's seduction affected his personality. However, it certainly has changed in its perversity.

He attempts to seduce Antonia, who is painted as a pure character. She is very young, and is unable to see Ambrosio as a threat. However, when alone with her, he attempts to rape her. Elvira, the mother, had caught on to his attempts at seduction, and was able to interrupt his attempt on Antonia's virginity before he had done much damage. She would expose his attempt to the public, but is too pragmatic to think that it would do anything but cause her and her daughter much pain and offer little threat to Ambrosio as a monk of great repute.

Ambrosio stops at nothing to rape Antonia. He kills Elvira as she witnesses his attempt on Antonia's rape. He then poisons Antonia, to rape later at his leisure in the sepulcher under the convent. He ultimately succeeds in raping her. The perspective on Antonia here is interesting. Lewis writes about how she is ruined in several ways:

Her peace of mind was lost, her honour irreparably ruined. She was cut off for ever from society, nor dared He give her back to it... She could never hope to be creditably established; She would be marked with infamy, and condemned to sorrow and solitude for the remainder of her existence... (Permanently imprisoning her) is the only means to prevent Antonia from publishing his guilt and her own infamy. (my Italics added for emphasis.) (p. 327)

She nearly effects an escape, but is murdered by Ambrosio even on the point of her rescue. The next lines are equally shocking.

She told him that had She still been undefiled She might have lamented the loss of life; But that deprived of honour and branded with shame, Death was to her a blessing: She could not have been his Wife, and that hope being denied her, She resigned herself to the Grave without one sigh of regret.

What a terrible double punishment. Not only is the raped a victim of the rapist, but she is also vilified by her culture.

This vilification of the victims of rape are also brought up through the story of Agnes. She suffers horrifically for trying to escape the convent. She's thrown into a dungeon, and then rescued by her brother. But when it comes to her rape, she is the one who must suffer:

He (Raymond) once conquered my virtue... I have been frail and full of error... my conduct has been highly blameable.

The ending of the book is quite a horror. At the last moment of the evil Monk's release from the inquisitors, Satan manages to convince Ambrosio to sign his soul over. Satan frees him from the prison, then drops him onto the mountains to die a long and lingering death (7 days) followed by an eternity of hell. The end for him is horrific.

This book is fantastic. It's probably the best book I've read this year and maybe better than anything in the past few years. If you're looking for a good Gothic horror, then this is the right book for you.

The Vampyre; a Tale, John William Polidori

This book, available freely for download at Gutenberg.org. The authorship is quite confusing: on the one hand, I had thought that the novella was written by Polidori. Then, having read the letters at the front and back of the story, I thought that Lord Byron had written it. Having now read the Wikipedia article about it, I no longer feel confusion and understand why I was confused in the first place. Polidori, in an attempt (I assume) to promote his book, put Byron's name on the cover to help move sales.

The introduction, titled, “Extract of a Letter from Geneva” includes a rather negative comment about women writers. Or, rather, a compliment of one particular female writer, Madame de Stael, followed by comments disparaging other female writers:

...that astonishing woman Madame de Stael: perhaps the first of her sex, who has really proved its often claimed equality with, the nobler man. We have before had women who have written interesting novels and poems... but never since the days of Heloise have those faculties which are peculiar to man, been developed as the possible inheritance of woman.

I almost dropped the book on that paragraph. However, being a short novel, I decided to push through. I don't suppose the author of that letter (I don't know for certain if that is Polidori himself or someone else) thought it possible that writing and education were discouraged of women. Often, women would hide their true gender behind male names in order for their writings to be taken as seriously as their male counterparts.

Aubrey is born to wealth, but not to parents who are deceased. As a result, his head is full of the romanticism of poetry, and entirely neglectful of the harder realities of life.

He makes a friend, Lord Ruthven, who is a character described as gladly giving to charity only when those to receive the alms are wanting to 'wallow in his lust, or to sink him still deeper in his iniquity, he was sent away with rich charity.' He loses in gambling those who ruin the desperate, the very money that he has won from the desperate.

He receives a letter from friends warning him away from Lord Ruthven, but he ignores their advice.

Lord Ruthven's hobby seems to be to ruin the good. As a result, Aubrey becomes a target of Lord Ruthven, who sets up a scenario where he is wounded. He pretends to be on death's door and asks Aubrey to grant him a dying wish. He does so, and Ruthven requests that for one year Aubrey would not speak of him no matter what would happen or be said. He agrees. He does not know that he has made a pact with a devil.

Ruthven targets Aubrey's sister. Aubrey wants to warn her, to stop her from marrying him, but he is chained to his word to Ruthven. I guess he never thought that Ruthven had deceived him by pretending to die, and therefore it would annul his own bond. In any case, the day before he is to be released from his pact, Ruthven marries his sister, presumably lies with her (thereby taking her virginity/innocence), and is then able to do what vampires do.

The story is a good short fiction. It's also a first for the genre. There's something especially sweet about reading books or novellas which are literary firsts.

There is another bit at the end about Lord Byron and how great Lord Byron is for caring little about literary profit (easy to say when one inherits wealth, though I recall reading he managed to waste it all).

Apparently this was the first instance of turning the shallower vampire myth into the romanticized version we know today. I wonder, knowing more about it now, if the first letter was written in an attempt at voicing another opinion rather than his own. There is mention of Mary Shelly. So, I'm not sure about his true opinion on that matter (and opinions change).

The Dark Tower, Stephen King

The Dark Tower was supposed to be the final book in the Dark Tower series. However, their is an eight volume. This seventh volume is a bit of a monster at 745 pages.

The birth of Mordred, son of Roland and Susannah, but more a minion of horror, is born. Whatever question I had about how he might turn out is quickly determined. His evil is not brought about by conditioning from the minions of Hell, but rather he is already a demon already. I recall how Sin gave birth to her child: it clawed its way through her belly. I had thought maybe something like that was in store for the Mia/Detta/Susannah collective that are the personality complex of this character. 

When Mia gives her breast to Modred (perhaps to be renamed later, or not), he shows what he truly is. His belly has a crimson brand like the belly of a black widow spider. Its darkest nature is eloquently portrayed by King in one of his divine (perhaps Satanic) displays of narrative poetry as Mia nurses her baby:

Blood had begun to pour fro her breast (where the baby had fed). The baby drank it like milk, losing not a drop... She (Mia) reached out and stroked the still-changing freak at her breast, the black spider with the tiny human head... Her cheeks and brow and throat, flushed dark with the exertions of childbirth only a moment before, faded to the waxy whiteness of orchid petals.

At this point, now, I am just over half way done this seventh volume. Main characters are dying. One, Eddie the junkie, dies from carelessness. Another, Jake the kid Chambers, dies saving Stephen King's life. While the books are fairly well written, I didn't find any hardness in my throat or tears for the characters. Despite 'knowing' them for such a long time, I guess I never really got into them emotionally. Their deaths, in particular, Jake's, are well played and the death scenes are well done. But, for whatever reason, the emotional connection just isn't there: a touch closer to the boy, but still the distance between characters and reader (at least for me) is too distant to feel the strength of empathy of character required. When's the last time a book made me cry? I can't really recall. So, maybe it's just me being hard hearted ('may it do ya fine,' King might add).

King's involvement in the story is probably one of the more interesting facets of this tale. His involvement has grown considerably, and the involvement in King's life of the characters has grown as well. As mentioned, Jake's sacrifice is what keeps the van from ending Stephen King and The Dark Tower series. Whether he is the creator of this world or not--the book says not, he's just a medium of 'Dan-tet,' a kind of fate or an oracle--however, if his telling of the story was of no importance to the development of this imaginary world, why would his life really matter (to this imaginary world)? The oracle doesn't make fate, does it? It merely provides a riddle which becomes unraveled throughout the telling.

An aspect of King's involvement in the story that is interesting is how candid he is in self description. He avoids writing The Dark Tower series because of fear. But it's also revealed that all of his books are in some way related to it, some more, some less.

At this point, I have finished the end of The Dark Tower. Originally, I think King meant for the tale to end here. Of course there is an eighth book (there should be 19 books in all...) The last book was pretty good. Everyone except Roland and his new buddy die in the end. But, Susannah manages to escape her own fate: she abandons the quest for the dark tower just before they come to it, and, unless book 8 yanks her happy ending away, she's reunited with another world's version of Eddie and Jake (who are now brothers and have been waiting for her).

For Roland, the ending isn't nearly so kind. He refers to ka so much in the book (King's word for fate). There is often talk about worlds that only go forwards whose timelines cannot be repeated. However, Roland is forced back in time to redo his adventure from the point where volume one begins: Roland hunting down Walter to avenge his part in destroying Roland's family and friends.

Maybe this was what drove his antagonist mad: the constant repetition of a hard struggle. Maybe this was why he was working so hard to destroy the dark tower and these beams of existence or creation.

King has been given a fun series to read. Earlier books had a certain poetry (sometimes feeling forced, at others natural and brilliant), middle books trudged through a morass of words, but the last two books were well written with book seven being the highlight at the end of the tunnel. I will get to book eight soon enough, but, since I read somewhere that it really belonged past the middle but before the end, I don't feel that same sense of needing to read it. There are so many books to read, so little time.

I'm thinking The Stand is next, or perhaps it'll be book eight after all.

Song of Susannah, Stephen King

Song of Susannah is the sixth book of Stephen King's series, The Dark Tower. Its length is listed at 432 pages. So, it is significantly shorter than the volumes before, but longer than the first two.

At this point I have read more than 3/4 of this volume. Although it doesn't quite have the beauty of some of the earlier volumes, I nonetheless have enjoyed it quite a bit better than Wolves of the Calla. There are some quite interesting aspects to it which I will get into shortly.

This book is centered around Susannah having Roland's demonic baby. She has been hijacked, yet again, by a new personality. However, it is different in that this is not one of her own personalities, but rather a new individual altogether. She has fled from the Calla in an effort to bring to term the pregnancy in another dimension of earth.

The ka-tet (Stephen King's expression to describe a kind of tightly knit posse, brought together by fate) is split into two: one to rescue or recover Susannah, and the other to obtain the property rights to the land in New York on which the sacred wild rose lives. Jake, Oy, and Callahan go in pursuit of Susannah while Roland and Eddie go after Calvin Tower, the owner of the New York property.

One scene disappointed me: when Susannah first appears in New York for the deliverance of the baby, she robs a lady of her shoes. I find the stereotype disturbing.

Probably one of the most interesting aspects to this book is the involvement of Stephen King as a character and plot twist. King writes himself in as a kind of God or conduit. The question of either being a kind of God or a conduit is never answered. Does Stephen King invent the characters, worlds, and events that take place in the books, or is he merely a conduit for them? When Roland and Eddie meet Stephen King, King knows less about what is going on than they do. King is at the point in his life where The Dark Tower series lies nearly forgotten in a box. He has, he says, essentially run away from the book, and speaks of his fear of it: is it the fear that he cannot complete the series? that he isn't good enough to complete the series? is it the fact of living within the story, as writers do as they are written, frightening to him? These are some of the other questions that I think he, the character and maybe the writer, come up with.

In any case, at this point of the story, I have enjoyed it quite a bit. There is none of the slow paced, pointless rambling that pained me through Wolves of the Calla. In King's phraseology, "Thank ye sai!"

I finished it! Good book. I really enjoyed it from beginning to end.

Sparingly, King indulges the reader in some terrific horrific imagery:

...the smell in the air hadn't been pork. The thing turning on the spit, brown as a squab, was a human baby. The creatures around it dipped delicate china cups into the drippings beneath, toasted each other... and drank.

 Susannah gives birth in the 19th chapter of the novel: quite fitting considering the repeating theme of the number 19. The story, for the most part, ends here. But then there's an interesting twist.

King writes himself into the story once again. How much of it is fiction, how much of it is biography? I don't know. I really love how he describes going over an old manuscript (The Gunslinger):

Usually working on an old story is about as appetizing as eating a sandwich made with moldy bread.

I think I would liken it to putting on dirty clothes after taking a long hot bath.

This last chapter seems to be a series of journal entries that somehow involve the creation and selling of the The Dark Tower series. Again, is this fact or fiction? I'm very, very curious. Curiouser and curiouser! One interesting thing he writes is, "...books were treasures you protected with your life." I can't help but wonder if that sentiment had anything to do with the creation of the book dealer. I can't imagine, having read what King wrote on working on an old manuscript that he could contemplate rereading his own journal and throwing in relevant bits and pieces. Surely they are fictional entries loosely autobiographical.

There's something particularly beautiful about this last chapter. It's the kind of last chapter that I wish all of my favorite authors of my favorite books had written: imagine Tolkien having a chapter like that after his Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit! Imagine Paradise Lost, and regained, by our great poet Milton, having a chapter like this? How about Asimov, or Heinlein, or any of the others? I think if all the books had sucked as bad as Wolves of the Calla and they had ended with this journey into the creation of this series, it would have all been worth reading. King has a fantastic narrative ability which transcends fiction.

This excerpt also gave me a good chuckle:

The worst thing to happen this week, I hope, will be my wife's bed coillapsing under the weight of our son and daughter-in-law--the idiots were wrestling on it.

I'm still laughing!

One of these days I'm going to do my '50 best novels' or 'writers' or something. You know, one of those lists that only means something to me. Kind of like this reading journal that I keep, the stories that I write, the poems that I wrote... I wonder where I'd put King. He definitely belongs on that list.

The Wizard's Son (Volume 3), Margaret Oliphant

This is the third volume of Margaret Oliphant's trilogy, The Wizard's Son. It is available freely on Gutenberg.org.

While the books are not bad, this will be the last book of Oliphant's that I read. It was closer to a romance than it was much of a fiction about the occult.

The Warlock himself never seems so terrible. He has certain powers of being able to appear and disappear within a certain distance of the ruined castle. He does push Walter to marry for money. However, none of this is worse than a father doing the same for his son. He seems to hold no malice. An accident years before befell the previous lord and his love interest, however it would appear that it was an accident and that the warlock had not really meant for that to happen.

The scene during the climax of the story takes place in the tower. The setting itself has a vestige of interest to me:

A great telescope occupied a place in the centre of the room, and various fine instruments, some looking like astronomical models, stood on tables about. The curtained walls were hung with portraits, one of which she recognised as that of the last Lord Erradeen. And in the centre of all supported on a table with a lamp burning in front of it, the light of which (she supposed), blown about by the sudden entrance of the air, so flickered upon the face that the features seemed to change and move, was the portrait of Walter.

 These instruments seem to be that of science. Like how the Catholics of Galileo's day shut him up in a tower to gaze at the stars. This is contrasted with religion later on about how God basically saves them and they live happily ever after with generous hearts to serve the poor and needy.

The warlock himself disappears from the area at the end, and really does very little to fight against the couple. He does resist, but no more so than any other parent might want to when a couple wants to get married that is not of their choosing. What's more, considering that he has a portrait of Walter on the wall, it would seem that he had some care for him and that he never intended him any harm. Indeed, throughout the three books, there was never a sense that the warlock wanted evil for him or wished any harm to him. In volume two, he even said that he appreciated the good that Walter had done for the poor on his estate, and that he wanted Walter to be the face of good for him.

I think if I had been in Walter's shoes, I would have been fascinated with such a warlock. I would have loved to discuss his philosophies, learned his interests, competed (perhaps poorly) in a good game of chess. In any case, the end is that Oona sets fire to the castle tower, and there must have been some kind of explosives to cause such a big explosion. By pure 'luck' or 'grace of God' they both manage to survive the blast.

I am disappointed with this story, even if it was fairly well written. It would be like ordering a spicy meal only to discover that a mere sprinkle of spice was added. It just didn't meet my expectation. I do not recommend it. I say that despite the fact that Oliphant was a skilled narrator.

The Wizard's Son (Volume 2), Margaret Oliphant

This is the second volume of The Wizard's Son trilogy. It can be found and downloaded at Gutenberg.org.

The second volume is almost exclusively that of character development. Walter spends much of his time pursuing his old habits, but at a higher cost. Instead of winning or losing pennies and nickles, he loses pounds.

However, he does meet with some reputable people and becomes a part of the upper social class. He becomes involved with a woman, Katie Williamson, who is from his area of Scotland. Mr. Williamson, her father, likes Walter quite a bit, as does Katie. But, the two never do fall in love. Nevertheless, he is ready for a marriage, but their relationship is interrupted by Julie, a previous friendship. Julie wants him not because of love, either, but because of the wealth and prestige.

Mr. Williamson is vastly wealthy, owning a new and modern castle, a steam yacht (at that time probably the height of private technology). Mr. Williamson does not need wealth from the marriage, but rather aspires to have a title for his daughter. Due to Julie, however, that aspiration is unlikely to take place. She interfered at the only time that Walter might have made a bid for her hand in marriage.

Slowly he is growing stronger, mentally. He voluntarily reengages with the ghostly warlock and refuses to pander to the warlock's demands. However, he is emotionally distraught, as the warlock is able to pick him apart for a do-nothing. He wants to do the right things, but is thus far always negligent and lazy.

This trilogy is not what I had hoped it would be: that of a wizard hero. But, Oliphant is a skilled narrator and character developer. I don't know if, after having finished the trilogy, if I will go on to read more of her works. The 'weird/horror' is there, but it is not very strong or very weird. However, I hold out hope that volume three will be different.

The Wizard's Son (Volume1), Margaret Oliphant

This is a trilogy. There are three parts to the trilogy. The author is Margaret Oliphant. I'm not sure where I heard her name before. I found appeal in the title of the trilogy. Also, most of the writers that I read are male, and I need to read more works by female authors. She was a prolific writer and there is much material to enjoy available freely online. The Wizard's Son (volume 1) can be found freely on Gutenberg.org.

This is a superficial remark: her paragraphs are quite lengthy; sometimes they span pages. However, her style is very easy to read and pleasant. In the early chapters I find that she is a master of the craft belonging to the uppermost tier of fiction writers.

I read her biography on Wikipedia.org. She apparently was the sole provider for her three surviving children after her husband's death. I can't help but wonder if a part of her is in the main character's mother. She works hard to support her son who does not realize what she does for him and he takes her for granted never really knowing the position that she is in. He is considered to be a lazy do-nothing kind of young man. The cause is argued that her nagging of him is one cause, while the other her effort to protect him from knowing the perilous nature of their financial situation.

Things, however, take a drastic turn. I am unsure as to why they take such a turn. One idea is that Captain Underwood may be the cause. He is thought to maybe have a solid network of people that he knows of both high and low class. He asked Walter Methven what he would do if he suddenly came into wealth. Later on that day, a distant relative of extensive wealth and royal blood but no heir, makes his appearance and makes him his heir.

The way people treat Walter between the day before and the day after is classic.

He stumbled over the housemaid's pail, of course, but did not call forth any frown upon that functionary's freckled forehead as he would have done yesterday. On the contrary, she took away the pail, and begged his pardon with awe—being of course entirely blameless. He paused for a moment on the steps as he faced the raw morning air going out, and lo! the early baker, who was having a word with cook at the area over the rolls, turned towards him with a reverential look, and pulled off his cap. These were the first visible signs of Walter's greatness...

This story is not a fast action novel. It's quite slow and deliberate. That said, it's skillfully written and well described. It was written in the Victorian era, I believe, where that is the style. The characters are well defined as are the gorgeously described settings.

The joy of wealth, for Walter Methven, comes with a heavy price. He takes on a new name: Lord Erradeen. With it comes a heavy price. When he is taken to Scotland where his inheritance is, he is confronted by a ruined castle. This does not mean that he is poor. He is in fact quite wealthy, even though the ruined castle only has a few rooms in any condition to live within. This in itself would be enough to make him comfortable as he begins to network within the social web that surrounds him.

Unfortunately, the castle is also haunted with a ghost. Most likely it is the ghost of an ancient ancestor who is referred to as a warlock. The warlock attempts to gain control over Walter. A part of that control involves making him evict a small village of people who had a bad year and are therefore being evicted from their homes.

Walter, having been recently poor, however, cannot stand to let the eviction take place and stops it at the last moment. This is where part 1 of 3 ends.

I really enjoyed this first book and look forward to reading the second.

Wolves of the Calla, Stephen King

Image from Corey Morgan

This is the fifth book of The Dark Tower series, by Stephen King. It's of equal length to book four, and thus the exponential growth of page numbers seems to have comAmazon, the book ranges in price from $.69 for a second hand copy to $20.85 for the library binding. The ebook is a reasonable $7.29.

The introduction is new for this novel, which is good. The rampant growth in the books' girth from book one to book four was quite impressive. However, the growth at this point seems to have subsided. It is roughly the same length as book four.

The story begins away from the main characters. A village gets raided for 1/2 of each twin set of sons and daughters every 24 or so years. This time, they want to fight back, and look to hire the young gunslingers, Roland and his two partners, to protect the village. It has a more than passing semblance to the western movie, The Magnificent Seven (itself an appropriated from the movie, Seven Samurai). King acknowledges that this, among many other novels, contributed to the creation of this book.

For the most part, this book has been the most difficult to get through. The side story about Callahan is entertaining. But for the most part, the book feels tired and uninspired. I'm more than half way through it. Books like this are like a tar pit: you struggle to get through it and you can't really do anything about it. You've already stepped in it (this is book five, right?). Gotta slog through it...

OK, finished slogging now... the book is done. This one was not fun. It had some enjoyable moments, but for the most part I didn't like it. Had it been book one and not book five, I likely would have walked away from it. However, one must sometimes read through or miss important parts that need be known in book six. And, even if books six to eight are as sluggish as book five, I will probably still read every word just to see how the Dark Tower series ends.

There were no really brilliant parts to this book. It was uninspired and dull. I will have to write later if it was worth it after I have finished the series.

Suspension of disbelief is an important component of a book. You have to accept things like robots with antennae which, when shot or cleavered off with a titanium plate, disconnects them from the controller and they 'die.' I can accept that. What is harder to accept is the role of the android (not really a robot, Stephen), Andy (short for android perhaps?) warns the town that these wolves are coming. They decide to seek out the help of Roland and his posse. Then, later on, it's revealed that Andy is in fact a spy and agent for those who seek to harvest some kind of telepathic essence that twins are born with. Why would Andy betray both those who control him and those whom he has fooled into believing he was a kind of simpletonish friend?

But, this wasn't a huge drag on the book. Again, one must suspend disbelief or else miss out on a reading science fiction, horror, and fantasy.

I kind of like the cameo Stephen King does at the end. He becomes a part of the narrative as do some of his books. I find that interesting and wonder where he will go with that.

Wizard and Glass, Stephen King

The fourth book, like the others, continues the pattern of growth that the second and third set. The Gunslinger, according to Google, has 224 pages. The Drawing of the Three has 400 pages. The Wastelands 512, and I'm now into Wizard and Glass at 787. Regardless, a second hand paperback copy is available for as little as one penny on Amazon, while the Kindle version is $10.75. So, it is only a modest increase in price despite there being a full novel's worth of extra material.

The book has an introduction and an afterword that are original. So, unlike the first three novels, there is some little interest here. In the afterword, it's quite interesting to note how many years passed between King's writing of the third and fourth installation of The Dark Tower series.

Due to the sluggishness of The Wastelands, I had a good deal of fear that Wizard and Glass would feel equally dull through an even greater number of pages. However, I couldn't have been further from the truth. The Drawing of the Three was OK, with some sections that were good. But it just didn't have the literary flare or beauty that The Gunslinger had. And, for quite a number of pages, Wastelands was sheer drudgery that almost caused me to drop the book and move onto something else. Wizard and Glass, however, is another animal. Stephen King really mastered his craft when he forged this volume. I might even be so bold as to say that this volume is superior to the first. Where in the first volume was a mixed bag of genius and tired-and-forced expressions, there is none of that forced or tired feel to this volume. It reads brilliantly. I don't know what King was doing as he was writing this, but he was a bloody poet through parts of this. Since I have only read about 20% of the novel at this time, I can only hope he maintains his style and craft at this level.

The group of unlikely knights or gunslingers do very little in this novel. It is mainly a novel about Roland's background story. It's quite a good read. I'm glad I went through the boggy spots.

In the opening scene of Roland's story as a youth, we meet a witch that is to become involved with Roland as a young boy. Almost certainly not to Roland's benefit. In any case, it's just a marvelous scene:

... curled atop the box was a slim green snake. When she touched its back, its head came up. Its mouth yawned ina  silent hiss, displaying four pairs of fangs--two on top, two on the bottom.

 She took the snake up, crooning to it. As she brought its flat face close to her own, its mouth yawned wider and its hissing became audible. She opened her own mouth; from between her wrinkled gray lips she poked the yellowish, bad-smelling mat of her tongue. Two drops of poison--enough to kill an entire dinner-party, if mixed in the punch--fell on it. She swallowed, feeling her mouth and throat and chest burn, as if with strong liquor. For a moment the room swam out of focus, and she could hear voices murmuring in the stenchy air of the hut--the voices of those she called  "the unseen friends."

I would have preferred King to use a young woman, or younger, or of some average age. I've never been a big fan of coupling ugliness and wickedness together. Charlize Theron, for example, made a great wicked witch in Snow White and the Huntsman. For her alone was that movie worth watching. The wicked witches as haughty, powerful women, are a favorite of mine.

Another example of how King makes these brilliant flourishes that add a wonderful spice or flavor to his narrative:

(she) looked into the glass once more. The horse and its interesting young rider were gone. The rose light was gone as well. It was now just a dead glass ball she held, its only light a reflection borrowed from the moon.

Now that I'm further along, almost half way through the novel, it has become ponderous again. Some tired cliches about purity and virginity and golden yellow hair. The sick (perverted) old man is hot for the 16 year old girl, Susan, and has a hall pass from his wife on her since he's wanting a child and his wife can't (or he can't, but the narration suggests the problem is with her). Since the sick perverted man is also a powerful mayor, this is going to cause a major problem between Roland and the people.

I guess it's still in vogue today: writers who paint in moral black-and-white and rarely shades of gray.

Also, despite King being the sort of writer who doesn't mind saying fuck, when it comes to romance scenes, he's about as graphic as a cheap Harlequin novel. I guess the difference might be that in the Harlequin novel the scenes are not rape. Or are they? I have actually never read more than a few pages of a romance novel.

 His eyes were bulging, there were big drops of sweat on his forehead in spite of the room's coolness, and his tongue was actually hanging out, like a dog's on a  hot day. Revulsion rose in her throat like the taste of rotten food. She tried to pull away and his hands tightened their hold, pulling her against him. His knuckles cracked obscenely, and now she could feel the hard lump at the center of him.

He paints a singularly lecherous man who can barely contain himself for his desire of this young flesh. King can't even say cock this time. It's the hard lump at the center of him. What happened to you when you wrote this part, King?

Fortunately, the drudgery of this bland, two dimensional romance, is short enough to endure, and the narrative gets much better and easier to stomach.

Another few negative criticisms I have of King's narrative: First, his treatment of the veritable descendants of Mexicans. He refers to their language as 'crunk.' I guess it's the old cliché, right? Lots of movies were nasty towards Mexicans and (sic) Indians. Fortunately, I suppose, King left the Native Americans alone.

The next criticism I have comes from my feminist side: he refers to the virginity of Susan, Roland's love interest as something that makes her honest:

... calling her as she had all those months ago, on the night Susan had come to her hut to be proved honest.

I wonder if King would say that this is the language of the setting, or the perspective. Or if he just thinks a woman who is not a virgin is not honest? Or is King just trying to reflect the general sexist racist stereotypes for this one book? Or is King himself not racist and sexist, only his writing? Fortunately I'm white, so it's easier for me to swallow. If I was a minority maybe I'd walk away from King and his novel. Or maybe I'm too PC. Most of the time it's OK, and only mildly detracts from the story.