Month: January 2023

Silver Door Diner by Bishop Garrison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Silver Door Diner by Bishop Garrison (FIYAH #16, Autumn 2020) opens with an unaccompanied young boy going into a diner. Tammy the waitress offers him some apple pie if she’ll tell him who he is and who looks after him. He replies that he is on his own, and then she gets ever more enigmatic answers to further questions, including the fact he is studying “how this world ended”. Then, when Tammy asks the boy what game he is playing, he tells her this:

“Susan Culpepper. Eighth grade. In the lunchroom. You made fun of her clothes in front of a group of girls. You said she looked poor and homeless. All of you laughed. At the end of lunch before class, you were in a restroom stall and saw her come in crying. She sobbed for a solid two minutes. Then she left. You wanted to apologize and didn’t. The next week she transferred schools. You never hung around that group of girls again, and to this day you regret never telling her you were sorry. You looked her up on social media more than a dozen times.”
Tammy’s eyes are the size of the saucers sitting behind her on the counter. “I—I never told anymore that story.”
“You told it to me. Susan is married now with two children in a lovely brownstone in Flatbush, Brooklyn. She’s a wealthy author married to an anesthesiologist. Funny how life works. Writing about the abject poverty she survived as a child made her a millionaire. This world loves its irony nearly as much as it does its war.”

The rest of the story details Tammy’s reaction to the above, further personal information about her (apparently the man who comes into the diner every day is secretly in love), and (spoiler) that the boy is an alien being from far, far away.
We finally learn that Earth will be destroyed the next day by two mad dictators, one of whom will fire a burrowing thermonuclear device which will fall into the ocean and tunnel into the Earth’s crust, destroying the planet. This will cause a rift in space-time that creates a thirty-six hour time loop, which the alien/boy will then repeatedly use to visit Earth before its destruction so that it can study humanity. The story closes with the alien saying that this will be its last trip, and Tammy responds (uniquely) by going to track down the man who is in love with her.
This has an intriguing first half, but the more that is revealed the less engaging it becomes. Not bad overall, though.
*** (Good). 4,700 words. Story link.

Egoli by T. L. Huchu

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Egoli by T. L. Huchu (African-futurism, 2020) is an autobiographical piece about an old Shona1 woman which is told in an almost stream-of-consciousness second person:

You remember [Grandfather Panganayi] was proud of that house, the only one in the compound with a real bed and fancy furniture, whose red floor smelled of Cobra and whose whitewashed walls looked stunning in the sunlight compared to the muddy colours of the surrounding huts, just as he was proud of the wireless he’d purchased in Fort Victoria when he was sent there for his training. Through his wireless radio with shiny knobs that no one but he was allowed to touch, the marvels of the world beyond your village reached you via shortwave from the BBC World Service, and because you didn’t speak English, few of you did, the boys that went to school, not you girls, Grandfather Panganayi had to translate the words into Shona for you to hear. In one of those news reports, it was only one of many but this one you still remember because it struck you, they said an American—you do not remember his name—had been fired into the sky in his chitundumuseremusere and landed on the moon.

This is the first of many cultural and technological changes that we see her live through, and in the rest of the piece we see her get married, have children (who later go to work in the egoli, gold mines, of South Africa), and eventually get a mobile phone—something that opens up the world to her (she learns English through online comics, and receives weather reports and farming advice that help her make the most out of her crops).
The story (spoiler) finally morphs from a contemporary piece to an SFnal one when she looks up at the southern night sky and sees a steadily moving dot of light—a spaceship taking her grandson to mine the asteroid belt.
An absorbing story of generational social and technological change, told from an African viewpoint.
*** (Good). 3,450 words. Story link.

1. According to Wikipedia most Shona people live in Zimbabwe.

Bloody Man by Avram Davidson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Bloody Man by Avram Davidson (Fantastic, August 1976) begins with Jack Limekiller, a Canadian ex-pat living in British Hidalgo (British Honduras), asking Archbishop Le Beau, who is scaling fish, for work:

“They tell me . . . ” Limekiller hesitated, briefly. Was it My Lord? Your Lordship? Or was it . . . it was, wasn’t it . . . Your Grace?
Some saints levitate. Some are telepathic. It was widely said and widely believed that William Constance Christian Le Beau was a saint.
“Just ‘Archbishop’ will do, Mr. Limekiller,” the old man said, without looking up. Scrip . . . scrop . . . scrip. . . Jack found himself looking covertly around. Perhaps for loaves.
“Ah . . . thank you, sir . . . Archbishop. . . . they tell me that I might be able to pick up a charter for my boat. Moving building supplies, I understand. Down to Curasow Cove? For a bungalow you want built?”
Flop went the fish into the basket.  p. 6

After receiving the Archbishop’s agreement and a letter of introduction, Limekiller sets about obtaining the materials he requires. He soon finds out, however, that there aren’t any supplies in sleepy Point Pleasaunce, so his travels take around the town and beyond, which provides the reader with a number of delightful picture-postcard descriptions of the places he visits and the people he meets:

Well, there was the Royal Telegraphy. Her Majesty’s Government did not exactly go to much effort to advertise the fact that there was, but Limekiller had somehow found the fact out. The service was located in two bare rooms upstairs off an alley near the old Rice Mill Wharf, where an elderly gentleman wrote down incoming messages in a truly beautiful Spencerian hand. . . . or maybe it was Copperplate. . . . or Chancery. . . . or Volapiik. What the Hell. It was beautiful. It was, in fact, so beautiful that it seemed cavalier to complain that the elderly gentleman was exceedingly deaf, and that, perhaps in consequence, his messages did not always make the most perfect sense.
Gambling that the same conditions did not obtain at the Royal Telegraphy Office in Port Caroline, Limekiller sent off several wires, advising the Carolinian entrepreneurs what he wanted to buy, and that he was coming in person to buy it.
“How soon will these go off?” he asked the aged telegrapher.
“Yes, that is what I heard myself, sir. They say the estate is settle, sir. After ahl these years.” And he shook his head and he smiled a gentle smile of wonder.  p. 11

Stepping out into the pre-dawn was like stepping into a clean, cool pool. Already, at that hour, people were about . . . grave, silent, polite. . . . the baker setting the fires, the fisherman already returning with their small catch. The sun climbed, very tentatively, to the edge of the horizon. For a moment, it hesitated. Then, all at once, two things happened. The national radio system, which had gone off the air at ten the night before, suddenly awoke into Sound. Radios were either dead silent or at full-shout. In one instant, every radio in Port Caroline, and in the greater Port Caroline Area, roared into life. And at the same moment, the sun, suddenly aware that there was nothing to oppose it, shot up from the sea and smote the land with a blast of heat.  p. 17

Most of the first part of the story is travelogue like the above, but Limekiller eventually begins to hear mentions and rumours of a ghostly mystery, the “Bloody Man” of the tale:

“An’ one day, me see some-teeng, mon, me see some-teeng hawreed. Me di see eet, mon. Me di see di bloody mon—”
“Hush up you mout’,” said Piggott. But the other, a much older fellow, did not hear, perhaps, or did not care, perhaps. “Me di see di blooddee mon. Me di see he, ah White-MON, ahl cot een pieces ahn ahl blood-dee. Wahn, two, t’ree, de pieces ahv heem dey ahl come togeddah. De mon stahn op befah me, mon. He stahn ahp befah me. Ahl bot wahn piece, mon. He no hahv wahn piece een he side, mon. He side gape, mon, gape open. Eet bleed, mon. Eet BLEED!”
And now other faces than the proprietor’s were turned to the narrator.
“Hush up you mout’, mon!” other voices said, gruff.
Brown man, glass of brown rum in his brown hand. Sweat on his face. Voice rising. “Ahn so me di know, mon. Me di know who eet ees, mon. Eet ees de blood-dee Cop-tain. Eet ees Cop-tain Blood!”  p. 15

This supernatural thread slowly develops through Limekiller’s subsequent trip down to Curasow Cove with his shipment—he witnesses a fishing grounds dispute between the locals and Arawak tribesmen from the south, displaced because of sightings of the apparition—and then Limekiller himself sees the Bloody Man when his boat enters a supernatural mist. Then (spoiler) after talking to Harlow, one of the locals who provides information about who the apparition might be (there is talk of Blackbeard and the Flying Dutchman, etc.), Limekiller asks the Archbishop for help in laying the ghost to rest.
In the climactic scene, and after fighting off the Fallen (who summon waterspouts and sharks), the Archbishop administers the sacrament to the Bloody Man and he disappears.
There is an interesting historical postscript where the ghost is revealed as Captain Cook (who met his death in Hawaii, thousand of miles away), and whose ghost has supposedly returned to the area because of a light-hearted oath made by Cook before his death.
I really enjoyed the wonderful description and colourful detail of this story (it is probably my favourite of the ‘Limekiller’ series1) but I suspect the average genre reader’s enjoyment will depend on whether they take to the sprawling travelogue that occurs before the fantasy elements come to the fore.
**** (Very Good). 19,250 words. Story link. Book purchase link UK/USA.

1. The ‘Jack Limekiller’ series of stories (which were later collected into a book) at ISFDB.

Ocean by Steven Utley

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Ocean by Steven Utley (Fantastic, August 1976) opens with the female narrator, who has “flippers and gills now”, poisoned by the spines of a sea urchin—but she escapes its effects by surfacing and becoming a flying creature.
The next section describes an ongoing struggle she is having with a man who is either (a) interfering with her (possibly prosthetic) body, or (b) operating her controls (she may be a spaceship), or (c) she is a personality living in a ship’s computer. Later we learn (spoiler) that it is the latter, and that she is on a generation ship where everyone died apart from her. When she got old she uploaded into the ship’s circuits/memory, and at that point sensed a malevolent entity.
The story ends with some sort of reckoning.
Trying to work out what was going on while reading this story was like wading through mud.
– (Awful). 2,700 words. Story link.

Spirit Level by John Kessel

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Spirit Level by John Kessel (F&SF, July-August 2020) opens with Michael, the story’s middle-aged and maritally separated narrator, waking in his parents’ house in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. On his way he sees the ghost of his wife Lauren—who asks why he left her after twenty-eight years, and demands the truth. She then walks into the living room and disappears:

He touched his hand to his head. He took a deep breath.
Yes, he was awake. He went to the bathroom, relieved himself, then returned to the bedroom.
He told himself it was some vivid fantasy, but lying on the air mattress, hearing the furnace turn on and then off, he felt a bone-deep uneasiness. Lauren was not dead. She was alive and living in the house they had lived in for the last twenty years.  p. 53

The rest of the story sees Michael haunted by the ghosts of other failed or troubled relationships: the first is his (dead) father, who ends up striking Michael with a spirit level; then his (live) teenage son Trevor, whose ghost visits just after Michael has sex with his current girlfriend, says, “I smell her on you . . . You stink of her” before fleeing.
Alongside these encounters we get more backstory about the failure of Michael’s marriage and his unhappy relationship with his father, and we also come to see that most of Michael’s relationships are unsuccessful (we see this at his work, with his current girlfriend, and with the care staff where his senile mother lives—and whom he hardly ever sees). We begin to realise that Michael is part of the problem, something put in sharp focus when he dumps on his girlfriend Donna about a troubling visit to his mother:

Donna sighed. “I think you need to ask yourself a few questions, Michael. Is this about your mother or is it about you? If you can’t stop beating yourself about the head and shoulders, you shouldn’t expect someone else to stop you. You certainly shouldn’t expect them to give you sympathy for something you’re doing to yourself. Your mother’s situation is tragic, but it’s what happens. If you wanted to visit her more, you would, though I doubt it would make much difference.”
“That’s cold.”
“I don’t mean to be cold. You know I like you. You’re not a bad guy. But I can’t solve your problems for you. I’m sorry about your mother. At least you can be with her at the end, if you want to be.”
He looked her in the eyes; she took a sip of coffee.
“I don’t think we ought to keep seeing each other,” Donna said.  p. 72

Eventually, Michael’s late-life crisis worsens (as well as the previous events, he starts taking drugs he has found in his parent’s home), and (spoiler) the climactic scene sees him entering his parents’ house to find himself in his childhood home, his mother still in her mid-thirties, and his father’s spirit-level lying beside an unfinished doorway (the spirit level is obviously some sort of symbol, as it appears on a number of occasions throughout the story).
This is fundamentally a literary short story about late life problems and angst (the spirit level, the references to Moby Dick, etc.) with a few fantasy tropes thrown in. For the most part this works pretty well—there is a lot of good observational writing—but the problem the story has is that the genre features are not used consistently, i.e. we go from ghostly apparitions to an ending where the protagonist is apparently transported back in time to his childhood home. This (perhaps dying fantasy) makes for a dissonant and inconsistent ending (I can see why he may want to return to when he was younger and start over, but why to his parents? And how does this ending flow from ghostly apparitions?)
I think this piece will mostly appeal to males in later life, who may recognise some of the situations and appreciate the story’s insights1—but, even if the ending doesn’t throw them, they may tire of a disgruntled protagonist who seems to be unable to get out of his own way.
**+ (Average to Good). 9,700 words.

1. Re the story’s observations, a couple of passages that struck me:

Nobody had a soul, Michael knew. All you had was the face you prepared to show to other people. Your character was a performance, a persona you put on; by the time you were a teenager, under the pressure of other people’s expectations, you worked out who you were supposed to be. You lived your invented self to the point where you imagined that was who you were. Everybody thought they knew you—you thought you knew yourself. Until something happened, like Michael walking out on Lauren, to reveal that there was nothing inside you but a few desires and an echo chamber.  p. 71

He couldn’t blame anybody, and he realized that the sadness overwhelming him was not a result of things he had done or failed to do. It was the result of the simple passage of time. Things changed. When you were young, you thought the past could be recovered, or if not, corrected by the future. When you were old, the silent, inexorable slide of now into then, and its associated accumulation of losses, small and large, crushed any future.  p. 76

The Stairs in the Crypt by Clark Ashton Smith & Lin Carter

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Stairs in the Crypt by Clark Ashton Smith & Lin Carter (Fantastic, August 1976) opens with the death (“the inexorable termination of his earthly existence”) of the necromancer Avalzaunt, and his subsequent entombment:

If the pupils of Avalzaunt assumed that they had taken their last farewells of their master, however, it eventuated that in this assumption they were seriously mistaken. For, after some years of repose within the sepulchre, vigor seeped back again into the brittle limbs of the mummified enchanter and sentience gleamed anew in his jellied and sunken eyes. At first the partially-revived lich lay somnolent and unmoving in a numb and mindless stupor, with no conception of its present charnel abode. It knew, in fine, neither what nor where it was, nor aught of the peculiar circumstances of its untimely and unprecedented resurrection.
On this question the philosophers remain divided. One school holds to the theorem that it was the unseemly brevity of the burial rites which prevented the release of the spirit of Avalzaunt from its clay, thus initiating the unnatural revitalization of the cadaver. Others postulate that it was the necromantic powers inherent in Avalzaunt himself which were the sole causative agent in his return to life.
After all, they argue, and with some cogence, one who is steeped in the power to effect the resurrection of another should certainly retain, even in death, a residue of that power sufficient to perform a comparable revivification upon oneself. These, however, are queries for a philosophical debate for which the present chronicler lacks both the leisure and the learning to pursue to an unequivocal conclusion.  p. 83

I guess you’ll either like this mannered, discursive, and droll stuff (as I did) or you won’t. If you are in the former group then the rest of the story will treat you of an account of how Avalzaunt waits for a ghoul pack to break into his tomb to release him, swears them into thraldom, and then seeks out the sustenance his post-life body now requires—human blood and gore. During these depredations Avalzaunt becomes more and more swollen as the undead can neither digest nor excrete “the foul and loathly sustenance whereon they feed”.
Eventually, after working his way through several of his former apprentices, and preying on the fat monks of Cambora, he is (spoiler) finally stopped by the silver knife-wielding abbot in an Grand Guignol ending that sees everything Avalzaunt has consumed spew out of his body (think of a bloodier and messier version of Monty Python’s Mr Cresote sketch).
I suspect many will find this an overwritten and ridiculous story, but I thought it was an entertaining pastiche of Smith’s work.1
*** Good. 3,600 words. Story link.

1. Ted White’s introduction states:

Lin Carter, working from Clark Ashton Smith’s extensive legacy of notes, outlines, lists of titles and story-fragments, has collaborated posthumously with Smith (who died in 1961), creating new stories—two of which appeared in the briefly-revived Weird Tales, and the third, “The Scroll of Morloc”, here (October, 1975). Here is the fourth.

I suspect the whole (or most of the) story is probably Carter’s apart from the plot idea.