The Hrönir Manufactory

The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 17

Sun, 07 Mar 2021 00:00:00 -0800

Previous post: The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 16.

Let’s close this whole review situation out, folks.

“The Sentence” by Wu Ch’eng En

This is a short excerpt from Journey to the West about an advisor to the Emperor who kills a dragon in a dream, which then causes a real-life severed dragon’s head to fall from the sky. So a story about the blurring of dreams and reality. As we have seen, this is a very common theme throughout the stories in The Book of Fantasy. Which is fine and all, although to an extent I kinda feel like we’re all just ripping off Zhuangzi.[1] But alas, that’s the way it goes with writing and thinking and living, there’s nothing new under the sun, etc. etc. etc.

“The Sorcerers” by William Butler Yeats

In this piece Yeats describes attending an occult summoning held in an undisclosed location in Ireland. The first sentence is interesting:

In Ireland we hear but little of the darker powers, and come across any who have seen them even more rarely, for the imagination of the people dwells rather upon the fantastic and capricious, and fantasy and caprice would lose the freedom which is their breath of life, were they to unite them either with evil or with good.

Yeats describes being nearly possessed by some kind of spirit during the ritual, and successfully resisting it. Which is kinda like, OK, cool story bro, you’re super great at not getting possessed … but also I didn’t ask?

I mean, the story’s like a page and a half long, so I’m not particularly annoyed.

“Fragment” by José Zorrilla

This is from Zorrilla’s play Don Juan Tenorio, which according to Wikipedia is the longest-running play in Spain:

it has become a tradition of both Spanish and Mexican theater to perform el Tenorio on All Saints Day or its Mexican equivalent the Day of the Dead, so the play has been performed at least once every year for over a century. It is also one of the most lucrative plays in Spanish history. Unfortunately, the author did not benefit from his play’s success: not long after he finished writing it, Zorrilla sold the rights to the play, since he did not expect it to be much more successful than any of his other works. Aside from the price paid for the rights, Zorrilla never made any money from any of the productions. Later, he wrote biting criticisms of the work in an apparent attempt to get it discontinued long enough for him to revise it and market the second version himself. However, the ploy never succeeded.

None of that excerpt has a citation to go with it, so it might all be total baloney. Hooray for Wikipedia! Hooray for the Internet!

Since it’s an a itty-bitty-teeny-weeny fragment, I’ll provide the entire text for you here:

D. JUAN: Tolling for me … ?

STATUE: For you.

D. JUAN: And these funereal dirges that I hear?

STATUE: The penitential psalms they chant for you. (At the back, left, between the tombs, lighted candles are seen passing, and the sounds of the service for the dead.)

D. JUAN: But how for me? They bear a wreathed hearse.

STATUE: Your hearse, that bears your body.

D. JUAN: I, dead … ?

STATUE: The captain killed you at your door.

Footnotes

[1] Cf. “The Dream of the Butterfly”, discussed at length in part 4 of this review series.

The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 16

Sat, 06 Mar 2021 00:00:00 -0800

Previous post: The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 15.

We’re getting close! I think this may be the penultimate collection of reviews. Most of the remaining stories are shorties, except for the Oscar Wilde one.

“Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” by Oscar Wilde

I mentioned this story back in my review of “The Desire to Be a Man” by some guy with a very long name. This story has a vaguely similar theme, in that the main character is a well-to-do person who decided he needs to commit a crime, but kind of sucks at it. I like Wilde’s treatment of it because it’s funny and witty, whereas the other guy’s was … not that.

The protagonist, Lord Arthur Savile, is told by a palm-reader that he is fated to commit murder. Lord Arthur finds this whole business very distressing, and decides to get the murder out of the way immediately, before it can cause too much disruption in his life. He first tries to poison his cousin, and fails. Then:

He accordingly looked again over the list of his friends and relatives, and, after careful consideration, determined to blow up his uncle, the Dean of Chichester.

Lord Arthur gets a bomb from an eccentric Russian, but this ploy fails, too. He eventually does get the job done, and everything works out quite nicely for him in the end. It wraps up in a very neat and pleasing way.

It’s a very easy story to like: witty and dryly funny in just the way you would expect from an Oscar Wilde piece. It’s not so easy to excerpt, and I don’t have, like, a sophisticated technical analysis of it to provide here, but the story’s a winner.

“The Sorcerer of the White Lotus Lodge” by Richard Wilhelm[1]

This is a short tale about a sorcerer of the black arts who has a bunch of kinda crappy pupils who keep messing up his magic.

It’s actually a pretty funny piece when you think about it in those terms. But it’s not really written in a comic style, so I’m not 100% clear on the intended reading here.

“The Celestial Stag” by G. Willoughby-Meade

This is a very short tale, so I will provide it here in full:

An unaccountable tale is told in the Tzŭ Puh Yü of the Celestial stag, which lives in underground mines, and guides the workmen to the veins of gold and silver. If these creatures are hauled up into the daylight, they change into an offensively-smelling liquid, which deals pestilence and death around. If the miners refuse to haul them up (apparently they can speak, and are anxious to get out), the “stags” molest the miners, and have to be overpowered, immured in the mine, and firmly embedded in clay. Where the “stags” outnumber the miners, they sometimes torment the men and cause their death.

“Saved by the Book” by G. Willoughby-Meade

This story is slightly longer than the previous one, so I’ll not going to transcribe it. The main bullets are:

Wu insults a magician.
Three figures come in the night to attack Wu.
Wu wallops the figures with his copy of the I Ching, which causes the figures to transform into little paper dolls.
A woman comes and tells Wu that the souls of her husband, the magician, and her two sons are trapped in the three paper dolls, and will he please set them free?
Wu tells her to get bent, but because he’s a nice guy he’ll give her one of her sons back.
The next day it turns out that, yup, the magician and his elder son had died in the night.

“The Reanimated Englishman” by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The “story” (so far as it goes) describe the notion of a person being frozen in suspended animation in ice for hundreds of years. This piece reads like a fragment—and indeed it is: from a story titled “Roger Dodsworth”, apparently based upon a real hoax,[2] so that’s interesting I guess.

Speaking of Mary Shelley, she’s at the center of a very cool bit of trivia I learned in the past year or so. Wikipedia sums it up nicely in their article on the Villa Diodati:

The Villa Diodati is a mansion in the village of Cologny near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, notable because Lord Byron rented it and stayed there with John Polidori in the summer of 1816. Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had rented a house nearby, were frequent visitors. Because of poor weather, in June 1816 the group famously spent three days together inside the house creating stories to tell each other, two of which were developed into landmark works of the Gothic horror genre: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The Vampyre, the first modern vampire story, by Polidori.

This trivia is especially satisfying because it involves a fun follow-on bit of trivia:

The storms and unseasonably cold weather resulted in 1816 being referred to as the Year Without a Summer. It is now known that the exceptional global weather conditions that year were caused by the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia.

Hooray for trivia!

Continued at The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 17.

Footnotes

[1] The story is listed as “by” Richard Wilhelm, although as with several other pieces in The Book of Fantasy (including the G. Willoughby-Meade stories discussed in this post) it seems to be an existing folk tale that Rilhelm captured in writing, so the authorship credit is a bit misleading.

[2] (Not one of those fake hoaxes.)

The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 15

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 00:00:00 -0800

Previous post: The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 14.

You might have guessed from the two-week gap between this and the previous post that I am running out of steam on this whole multi-part review thing. But the end is in sight, so let’s bang out the remainder of these, why don’t we?

“Pomegranate Seed” by Edith Wharton

Hey, Edith Wharton! She’s famous and stuff. To be honest, this is the first time I’ve read her work. I didn’t realize she was into ghost stories! That’s pretty cool, Edith.

This one’s about a lady who marries a widower and gradually comes to realize that he is corresponding with his deceased wife via the post. Spooooooooky!

It’s one of the longer stories in The Book of Fantasy and the twist isn’t terribly difficult to see coming, but the strength of Wharton’s writing carries it over the finish line.

The title, “Pomegranate Seed”, is a metaphorical one that is never explained in the text of the story: it refers to the Greek myth of Persephone, who lives for half the year in the underworld with Hades, God of the dead.

I’m not desperately in love with this story, but it’s a solid entry in the collection and I’m happy to have read it. Maybe I will read it again one day and have more to say about it, but rather than wait for that day to come let us instead continue with our journey.

“Lukundoo” by Edward Lucas White

I’ll mention up front that this story has lots of colonialism in it, with its talk of pygmies and shrunken heads and witch-doctors and fetish-men, etc. So maybe that earns a big auto-“nope” from some folks—which, I get it, that’s fine. But the story also does something really interesting in how it subverts genre expectations. Let me explain.

The story centers on a group of Westerner in Africa who come across a man named Etcham. He entreats them to come aid his leader, a man of some renown named Ralph Stone. They go to help him, and they find that he is suffering from a horrific curse that is causing small screeching heads to grown all over his body like carbuncles. The horror! The horror!

So it sounds like your standard “Foolhardy Westerner recklessly explores the heart of the dark continent and falls victim to an ooky spooky curse” story. But the interesting bit comes in the final few paragraphs:

Then we three sat about Stone and watched that hideous, gibbering prodigy grow up out of Stone’s flesh, till two horrid, spindling little black arms disengaged themselves. The infinitesimal nails were perfect to the barely perceptible moon at the quick, the pink spot on the pal was horridly natural. These arms gesticulated and the right plucked towards Stone’s blond beard.

“I can’t stand this,” Van Rieten exclaimed and took up the razor again.

Instantly Stone’s eyes opened, hard and glittering.

“Van Rieten break his word?” he enunciated slowly. “Never!”

“But we must help you,” Van Rieten gasped.

“I am past all help and all hurting,” said Stone. “This is my hour. This curse is not put on me; it grew out of me, like this horror here. Even now I go.”

His eyes closed and we stood helpless, the adherent figure spouting shrill sentences.

In a moment Stone spoke again.

“You speak all tongues?” he asked quickly.

And the mergent minikin replied in sudden English:

“Yea, verily, all that you speak,” putting out its microscopic tongue, writhing its lips and wagging its head from side to side. We could see the thready ribs on its exiguous flanks heave as if the things breathed.

“Has she forgiven me?” Stone asked in a muffled strangle.

“Not while the moss hangs from the cypresses,” the head squeaked. “Not while the stars shine on Lake Pontchartrain will she forgive.”

And then Stone, all with one motion, wrenched himself over on his side. The next instant he was dead.

And so we find that the curse has nothing at all to do with the jungle! Or witchcraft, or exotic thing that the fearful, unthinking mind might latch onto in a moment of mounting tension. The African setting, with all its genre trappings, was a red herring; the real darkness came from within Stone’s own soul.

Not gonna lie, I also totally love the phrase “mergent minikin”.

“The Donguys” by Juan Rodolfo Wilcock

I haven’t quite decided if this was one of my favorite stories in the entire Book of Fantasy, or if it ultimately falls short of its potential. It’s a strange little half-tale that features a race of all-devouring worm-like creatures—the titular donguys—that have been discovered to live underground and are slowly encroaching upon human civilization. The way they are described reminds me a lot of the graboids from Tremors, with maybe a twist of Stephen King’s langoliers thrown in there for good measure.

The donguy’s mouth is a cylinder lined with horn-like teeth, and shredding in a helical motion.

The story ends in a decidedly strange place, with the narrator obliquely confessing to murdering a series of women and feeding their corpses to the titular creatures. This leads the reader to suspect that, hey, there may not be any donguys at all, that our storyteller may be one of those unreliable narrators we hear so much about, and that in fact this whole “donguys” thing might just be the deranged fabrication of a psychopath.

From a formal and technical standpoint the story is a bit odd, as well. I described it as a half-tale earlier because it doesn’t follow a traditional story structure. It spends a lot of time up front establishing a setting, before launching us into a section of script-formatted dialogue that only serves to provide exposition on the donguys. And then in the last two pages everything shifts away from the setting and characters that have been established. The story ends on an image apparently unrelated to anything we have just been told, and the general sense is that humanity is doomed to be devoured by this race of gross worm thingies.

So while I don’t know how much I really enjoyed this story, it certainly left an impression. It’s very much the sort of thing I never would have read if it hadn’t been for this collection. So whether or not I think it’s a great story qua story, I think it serves as a really good example of what I like so much about The Book of Fantasy.

Continued at The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 16.

The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 14

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0800

Previous post: The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 13.

“The Infinite Dream of Pao-Yu” and “The Mirror of Wind-to-Moon” by Ts’ao Chan

Both of these tales are selections from The Dream of the Red Chamber, so I’m lumping them together.

“Infinite Dream” is fine; as you might guess from the title it’s playing around with dream and reality. To be honest, it’s a theme that’s more compellingly explored elsewhere in The Book of Fantasy.

I like “Mirror” more. It features a Taoist mendicant, which is usually a good sign. There’s a mirror made by “the Goddess of Disillusionment of the Ethereal and Spiritual Palace in the Sphere of the Primordial Void”, which is definitely a good sign. And … well, it’s a very short piece, so that’s about all it needs to do to get me on board.

You heard it here first, folks! Put a mendicant and a cool goddess in your story, keep it short, and you’ve got a 5-star rave review from (*points at self*) this guy!

The story concludes with the protagonist being chained up by mysterious mirror-folk and disappearing forever.

Slightly relatedly: I really would like to tackle The Dream of the Red Chamber, but I somewhat despair that no translation into English will be able to do it proper justice.

“The Desire to be a Man” by Comte P.H. Villiers de L’isle Adam

An actor of a certain age realizes he isn’t passionate about anything, and decides that remorse will be a worthy passion for his temperament. So he does some crimes so that he might be tormented by regret.

On a technical level, this piece was kind of … hamfisted? I mean, you have the main character literally narrating his thoughts out loud to an empty street. It’s a bit silly.

More annoying is that fact that the author seems to think we are … kind of dumb? The guy who does heinous crimes to be haunted by remorse ends up not being haunted by remorse. Get it? It’s ironic! I mean, this is pretty straightforward stuff. Yet Comte P. H. Villiers blah blah blah isn’t confident that we can figure this shit out, so he bashes us over the head with it in final sentence of the story, in literal italics.

But the God he was invoking did not grant him this favour—and the old actor died, still expressing, in his vain rhetoric, his ardent longing to see some ghosts … without realizing that he himself was what he was looking for.

Look, Comtey, you’re not being that clever. Cool it with the typographical flourishes.

Anyway, there’s an Oscar Wilde story later in this collection that has a sorta similar theme, but it’s done with rather more charm and wit.

“Memnon, or Human Wisdom” by Voltaire

It’s an OK story and all, but it’s kind of a rehash[1] of Candide:

“I am afraid,” said Memnon, “that our little terraqueous globe here is the madhouse of those hundred thousand millions of worlds of which Your Lordship does me the honor to speak.” “Not quite,” said the spirit, “but very mearly: everything must be in its proper place.” “But are those poets and philosophers wrong, then, who tell us that everything is for the best?” “No, they are right, when we consider things in relation to the gradation to the whole universe.” “Oh! I shall never believe it till I recover my eye again,” said poor Memnon.

“The Man Who Liked Dickens” by Evelyn Waugh

This story apparently formed the basis for Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust. A shallow Brit goes on an Amazonian expedition; it goes poorly, and he ends up being held prisoner by a madman, the end.

And just in case you felt like holding out hope the narrator might be rescued, Waugh takes extra pains to grind that hope into dust by having a search party come and go without finding him.

Look, it’s fine, stories don’t need to have happy endings. This particular conclusion felt rather mean-spirited; but then again, maybe it just suffered from where it was positioned in larger collection, coming as it does on the heels of a trio of tales that all end poorly for their respective protagonists.

In short: while this short story is perfectly worth reading, I don’t think I’ll be picking up A Handful of Dust any time soon.

Continued at The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 15.

Footnotes

[1] Or maybe a pre-hash? I don’t know if this story was written before or after Candide.

The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 13

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0800

Previous post: The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 12.

“The Encounter”, a tale from the Tang Dynasty

No author is given here, nor is any citation provided in the bibliography. Furthermore, since the title of this tale is fairly generic and I have no idea how the character names (Chi’ienniang, Chang Ti, Wang Chu) were transliterated, it’s not trivial to just search the web for more information about the story.

I did find someone who went through the trouble of transcribing the story online. It’s not very long, and I recommend reading it yourself if you’re so inclined.

“The Three Hermits” by Count Leo Tolstoy

We’re getting into some heavy hitters late in the collection: this story is by Tolstoy, and coming up we’ve got pieces from Voltaire, Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde, and W. B. Yeats. I don’t know that that’s worth noting. But I’ve gone and noted it. So deal with it.

This tale centers on an Orthodox bishop whose sententious religiosity is shown up by a trio of weirdos living in the Solovetsky Islands. I’m always happy to see bishops getting shown up by weirdos, so it’s a fine story, though not anything to write home about.

“Macario” by B. Traven

I believe this is the longest story in the collection, though it doesn’t read that way. The tale is about a good dude named Macario who just wants to eat a whole friggin’ turkey. Then death shows up and everything goes off the rails.

B. Traven is a fascinating character. From the intro of his Wikipedia article:[1]

B. Traven was the pen name of a presumably German novelist, whose real name, nationality, date and place of birth and details of biography are all subject to dispute. One of the few certainties about Traven’s life is that he lived for years in Mexico, where the majority of his fiction is also set—including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The film adaptation of the same name won three Academy Awards in 1948.

Virtually every detail of Traven’s life has been disputed and hotly debated. There were many hypotheses on the true identity of B. Traven, some of them wildly fantastic. The person most commonly identified as Traven is Ret Marut, a German stage actor and anarchist who supposedly left Europe for Mexico around 1924 and who had edited an anarchist newspaper in Germany called Der Ziegelbrenner (The Brick Burner). Marut is thought to have operated under the “B. Traven” pseudonym, although no details are known about Marut’s life before 1912, and many hold that “Ret Marut” was in fact also a pseudonym.

Then there’s this story involving John Huston, director of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre:

In 1946, Huston arranged to meet B. Traven at the Bamer Hotel in Mexico City to discuss the details of the filming. However, instead of the writer, an unknown man turned up at the hotel and introduced himself as Hal Croves, a translator from Acapulco and San Antonio. Croves showed an alleged power of attorney from Traven, in which the writer authorized him to decide on everything in connection with the filming of the novel on his behalf. Croves was also present at the next meeting in Acapulco and later, as a technical advisor, on location during the shooting of the film in Mexico in 1947.

Or this tidbit from the concluding list of hypotheses as to B. Traven’s true identity:

B. Traven was an illegitimate son of the German Emperor Wilhelm II. Such a hypothesis was presented by Gerd Heidemann, a reporter from Stern magazine, who claimed that he had obtained this information from Rosa Luján, Hal Croves’ wife. Later, however, the journalist distanced himself from this hypothesis. Heidemann himself compromised himself through his complicity in the falsification of Hitler’s diaries in the 1980s.

B. Traven has been quoted as saying:

An author should have no other biography than his books.

Oooh, them’s fightin’ words in today’s day and age!

Anyway, back to “Macario”. It’s real good. A brief initial search indicated the story was based on a Mexican folk tale, but a little more digging suggests a better candidate: the German folk tale “Godfather Death”. This seems especially likely given B. Traven’s probably German nationality. “Macario” largely follows the synopsis given in that “Godfather Death” article, but I greatly prefer Traven’s telling, which trades up from the fairytale meanness of the folk tale and does much to humanize both the title character and, surprisingly, the figure of Death.

Continued at The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 14.

Footnotes

[1] I particularly enjoy the proliferation of question marks in this article’s infobox.

The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 12

Wed, 17 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0800

Previous post: The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 11.

“The Music on the Hill” by Saki

I think this is the first work by Saki I’ve read, and I’m not particularly compelled to seek out more. The brooding sylvan ambiance is well-rendered, especially given the brevity of the piece, but it doesn’t quite compare to what Arthur Machen accomplished in fewer pages in “The Ceremony”.

And the ending feels a bit clumsy. The brutality of the protagonist’s death isn’t out of place, per se, but maybe it’s rendered too concretely for my taste? I dunno.

It’s certainly not a bad story, but I don’t care to linger on it any longer.

“Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched” by May Sinclair

This is a standout story in the collection, one of my favorites. It is also one of the longer pieces, and absolutely earns its length. The narration has a dreamlike quality to begin with, which perfectly suits its eventual descent into twilit surreality, and horror. The story feels utterly modern, almost like a cross between Virginia Woolf and Charlie Kaufman.

This is a passage near the end:

“In the last hell we shall not run away any longer; we shall find no more roads, no more passages, no more open doors. We shall have no need to look for each other.

“In the last death we shall be shut up in this room, behind that locked door, together. We shall lie here together, for ever and ever, joined so fast that even God can’t put us asunder We shall be one flesh and one spirit, one sin repeated for ever, and ever; spirit loathing flesh, flesh loathing spirit; you and I loathing each other.”

“Why? Why?” she cried.

“Because that’s all that’s left us. That’s what you made of love.”

I won’t spoil the end for you, since that’s where it really gets dark.

The author, May Sinclair, is credited with first using the term “stream of consciousness” in a literary context, which is pretty baller.

“The Cloth which Weaves Itself” by W. W. Skeat

The story, in full:

Among the sacred objects belonging to a sultan of Menangcabow named Gaggar Allum was the cloth sansistah kallah, which weaves itself, and adds one thread yearly of fine pearls, and when that cloth shall be finished the world will be no more.

Pretty much what it says on the tin.

“Universal History” by William Olaf Stapledon

The story, in full:

In one inconceivably complex cosmos, whenever a creature was faced with several possible courses of action, it took them all, thereby creating many distinct temporal dimensions and distinct histories of the cosmos. Since in every evolutionary sequence of the cosmos there were very many creatures, and each was constantly faced with many possible courses, and the combinations of all their courses were innumerable, an infinity of distinct universes exfoliated from every moment of every temporal sequence in this cosmos.

This is a remarkably lucid articulation of the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics, which is especially neat given that this piece was written in 1937 and MWI was first proposed in 1957 by Hugh Everett.

The theme of “Universal History” is taken up by Borges himself in one of his most famous stories, “The Garden of Forking Paths”. And, hey, here’s a quote from that Wikipedia article:

[“The Garden of Forking Paths”]’s theme has been said to foreshadow the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. It may have been inspired by work of the philosopher and science fiction author Olaf Stapledon.

Borges, quantum mechanics, and Olaf Stapledon: Wikipedia concurs with me! Never have I felt so vindicated.

“A Theologian in Death” by Emmanuel Swedenborg

I remembered not caring much for this story upon first reading it, but after a reread I think that determination was a bit unfair. It’s basically the story of a theologian who dies and refuses to admit that he has been owned, while slowly shrinking into a corn cob.

"im not owned! im not owned!!", i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob
— wint (@dril) November 11, 2011

There are some quote-worthy lines in here, for instance:

One evening, Melancthon felt cold. He began examining the house, and soon discovered that the other rooms no longer matched those of his old house in the natural world. One was cluttered with instruments whose use he did not understand; another had shrunk so small that entrance was impossible; a third had not changed, but its doors and windows opened onto vast sandbanks. One of the rooms at the back of the house was full of people who worshipped him and who kept telling him that no theologian was ever as wise as he. These praises pleased him, but since some of the visitors were faceless and others seemed dead he ended up hating and distrusting them.

Continued at The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 13.

The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 11

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0800

Previous post: The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 10.

“The Bust” by Manuel Peyrou

Oh yes, this is the good shit. I am absolutely here for this story.

Obscure Argentinian author? Check.

Gradual descent into obsessive madness? Check.

Supernatural persecution by an inanimate object of mysterious origin? Check.

At five pages, the story is satisfyingly substantial without overstaying its welcome. There’s no stylistic chicanery going on here, which is neither a plus nor a minus, just an observation. Which is to say, while there is certainly something mysterious going on here, I wasn’t left scratching my head wondering what the hell actually happened.

“The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe

This is a classic and I sincerely doubt I have anything interesting to say regarding the story itself that has not already been said. What interests me here is the choice of the editors to include this tale in The Book of Fantasy.

Unless I’m forgetting something significant, nothing properly impossible happens in the “The Cask of Amontillado”. Now, there have been a few selections in this collection that stretch the notion of “fantasy”, or at least look at it slantwise.[1] so it’s not like “Amontillado” is wildly out of place here. But if you had asked me to select a Poe story for a collection titled The Book of Fantasy, “The Cask of Amontillado” wouldn’t even make it onto my shortlist. I’ve only read, like, three other Poe stories in my life – “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “The Masque of the Red Death”, and “The Tell-Tale Heart” – and all of them more fit more obviously into the theme of “fantasy”.

Given that Borges was impossibly well-read,[2] I have no doubt he could’ve whipped out an obscure fragmentary piece from some never-completed collection of Poe’s and really given the literature snobs something to ooh and aah over. I mean this: Borges was quite possibly the most well-read person on the planet during his lifetime. So the choice of “Amontillado” is, in addition to being weirdly inapt, also seems unaccountably … well, basic.

And yet. The atmosphere of the story certainly suits the collection. There is something darkly fantastical lurking within the obscurity of Montressor’s motives and the cruelty of his vengeance. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say the editors chose this piece precisely because it stretches our notion of fantasy, and does so in a way another Poe story wouldn’t. The sheer famousness of “Amontillado” forces the engaged reader to look past the story itself and contemplate the very nature of fantasy. If you’re at all aware of the context, you can’t simply say, “Oh, I know that one!” and move to the next tale. Or, I guess you can, but you’re doing yourself a disservice if you do.

Alternately, they included this story because thought it was ooky-spooky scary. The ending is pretty metal, too.

“The Tiger of Chao-Ch’êng” by P’U Sung Ling[3]

A tiger devours an old woman’s only son, and she insists that the law bring the tiger to account. It works out surprisingly well for her.

“How We Arrived at the Island of Tools” by François Rabelais

This is an extract from Pantegruel, which is a work I once forgot the name of during a one-on-one scholastic bowl match versus my friend Cliff. The match had come down to that question, so Cliff won and went on to compete in the final. Fortunately, I’m not bitter about it! Not at all![4]

The translation of this piece was done by Sir Thomas Urquhart, an eccentric Scottish aristocrat from the 17th century with whom I feel a strong spiritual affinity. In contemporary parlance, I’m pretty sure I stan this guy.

I mean, just look at his bibliography! Here, let me start quoting extensive portions of it for you:

Trissotetras: Trissotetras treats plane and spherical trigonometry using Napier’s logarithms and a new nomenclature designed to facilitate memorization. Urquhart’s nomenclature resembles the names medieval schoolmen gave the various forms of syllogism, in which the construction of the name gives information about the thing being named. (Urquhart would make use of the same idea in his universal language.) The resulting effect is, however, bizarre, and the work is impenetrable without the investment of considerable time to learn Urquhart’s system. Although Urquhart was a formidable mathematician and Trissotetras mathematically sound, his approach has never been adopted and his book is a dead end in the history of mathematics.

“Universal language”??? Wikipedia, you can’t just drop shit like that on me! I NEED MORE.

Pantochronachanon: Subtitled “A peculiar promptuary of time,” this work is a genealogy of the Urquhart family. In it, Urquhart manages to name each of his ancestors in an unbroken hereditary line from Adam and Eve all the way up to himself through 153 generations. This work has been the subject of ridicule since the time of its first publication, though it was likely an elaborate joke.

Does it get better? OF COURSE IT DOES

The Jewel (Ekskybalauron): A miscellaneous work. It contains a prospectus for Urquhart’s universal language, but most of the book is, as the title page says, “a vindication of the honor of Scotland,” including anecdotes about many Scottish soldiers and scholars. It includes Urquhart’s fictionalized life of the Scottish hero James Crichton (1560–82, “The Admirable Crichton”), Urquhart’s most celebrated work outside of his Rabelais; this section has sometimes been reprinted separately.

OK OK, but there you are again with the universal language. What about the UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE?

Logopandecteision: This book contains another prospectus for Urquhart’s universal language. Although Urquhart does not give a vocabulary, he explains that his system would be based on a scheme in which the construction of words would reflect their meanings. Logopandecteision also contains a polemic against Urquhart’s creditors.

YES YES EVERYTHING HERE IS PERFECT

(If you want to read more about the universal language, rest assured: it’s pretty great.)

Oh and then there’s this:

Urquhart’s prose style is unique. His sentences are long and elaborate and his love of the odd and recondite word seems boundless_[citation needed]_. At its worst his style can descend into almost unintelligible pretension and pedantry (“a pedantry which is gigantesque and almost incredible”, in the words of George Saintsbury), but at its best it can be rich, rapid and vivid, with arresting and original imagery. He coined words constantly, although none of Urquhart’s coinages have fared as well as those of his contemporary Browne.

Now, if Urquhart’s writing is anything like Thomas Browne’s, then odds are that I won’t actually, you know, enjoy reading it. This kind of thing appeals to me more in the abstract than the mundanity of implementation; I’m glad to leave that drudgery to the philologists.

Oh right, I’m supposed to be reviewing a story or whatever. Um, it’s fine? It’s kind of random. But it’s only a page long so whatever.

Continued at The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 12.

Footnotes

[1] E.g., “The Monkey’s Paw”, which as we discussed earlier presents us with dots that are very tempting to connect, but the genius of the story is that it never explicitly connects them, leaving it open to interpretation.

[2] (and surely the other editors as well, but Borges is the only one I feel relatively confident in assessing here)

[3] This is how the author’s name is formatted in the bio provided in The Book of Fantasy; I suspect that the capitalized U is a typo. Wikipedia uses the name Pu Songling (蒲松齡 in Chinese).

[4] I’m actually not! There are absolutely some ScoBol-related things from high school I still kick myself over—I’ll even tell you about them, if you care to ask!—but this ain’t one of them.

The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 10

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0800

Previous post: The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 9.

“The Atonement” by Silvina Ocampo

I fell asleep while reading this story the first time. I didn’t reread it at the time, but I thought I’d give it another shot so that my review of The Book of Fantasy would be complete.

Am I glad I reread the story? I guess. It’s not my favorite, but it’s certainly not fall-asleep-while-reading-it bad. I was probably just tired when I read it the first time. Give me a break; I have a baby.

The thing that makes this a tough story to follow is the way Ocampo’s narration flits back and forth through time and space. The story is anchored by a single scene: the narrator’s husband, Antonio, is showing off a trick that he has taught to his flock of pet canaries. Grammatically speaking, the scene is written in the past tense, but it effectively functions as the “present” of the story because blah blah blah retrospective narration blah blah habitual aspect blah blah blah free indirect speech.[1] What I’m not bothering to explain here is how the grammar of this piece is operating to muddle the situation and setting of any given paragraph.

I’m curious to know how the story reads in the original Spanish, because it seems like the sort of story that could be particularly gnarly to translate.

Unrelatedly, there is a footnote in this story that explains what bolas are. And I’m like bitch please, of course I know what bolas are: 1d4 bludgeoning weapons that allow you to make a ranged trip attack against an opponent.

“The Man Who Belonged to Me” by Giovanni Papini

A man named Amico Dite pays the narrator to own him, body and soul, on the condition that the narrator directs him to live an adventurous and illustrious life. Which, as we soon discover, is quite a severe condition indeed.

In short, this is a story about the awesome and thankless responsibility of being a manager.

I don’t have a lot to say about the story other than I enjoyed it, and it shines an absurd little light on a desire we all harbor in a small corner of our soul; namely, the opportunity to lead an exciting life without actually having to orchestrate any of it.

Oh and hey, according to Wikipedia the author was a fascist! I mean, like, a literal Mussolini-approved fascist. So uh that’s not great.

“Rani” by Carlos Peralta

A butcher is married to a beautiful woman who turns into a tiger at night. It’s a nothingburger story. Let’s move on.

The main character of this story is named Annixter, which is a great name. So Barry Perowne starts things off on the right foot here.

I feel that sentence I just wrote is a setup for a hatchet job, like, “This story gets a point for [trivial thing X] but loses several million for [much more substantial thing y].” That’s not really where I’m going with this, though. I just like the name Annixter.

The story was pleasant. I suppose there’s nothing particularly interesting going on. Like, no stylistic chicanery or achingly beautiful prose. But heck, sometimes you just want a pleasant murder mystery with a fun gimmick and a dash of fantasy. Bish bash bosh and bob’s your uncle.

“The Wolf” by Caius Petronius Arbitrus[2]

A kinda boring page-and-a-half-long story about a werewolf. It’s a passage from The Satyricon, which is a fun[3] bit of trivia I guess.

Continued at The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 11.

Footnotes

[1] I genuinely tried to write a cogent analysis of this, but it kept getting super long and boring and technical. And I probably would have gotten the details wrong in any case, because I don’t actually know anything about linguistics.

[2] I transcribed the name as it appears in my copy of The Book of Fantasy, but this is a typo for Gaius Petronius Arbiter. I’m willing to buy that “Arbitrus” and “Arbiter” are interchangeable forms of the same Roman name, but the Caius/Gaius mix-up is pretty clearly an error.

There are actually a lot of rather glaring copyediting flubs in my edition of The Book of Fantasy; I’m not really sure what that’s about.

[3] (Fun not guaranteed.)

The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 9

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0800

Previous post: The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 8.

“The Shadow of the Players” by Edwin Morgan

One of these paragraph-long stories that has a mystical aura about it. Two kings play a game of chess, which is mirrored on the real-life battlefield below them.

Of note is that the story is said to be from the Mabinogion, which are

the earliest prose stories of the literature of Britain. The stories were compiled in Middle Welsh in the 12th–13th centuries from earlier oral traditions.

Digging ever so slightly deeper, it would seem that the story being retold here is a segment of “The Dream of Rhonabwy” where the kings playing chess[1] are none other than King Arthur himself and his follower Owain mab Urien.

None of this is particularly important, but it’s the sort of fun thing you learn when you scratch the surface of these stories.

“The Cat” by H. A. Murena

A man kills the other man with whom his significant other has been having an affair.[2] The murderer takes the murdered man’s cat and flees to a boarding house.

I had forgotten about this little two-page story, but upon a reread I think it’s a great entry. The opening, in particular, is a striking and confident deployment of subtextual storytelling:

The May morning on which it took place, veiled by the mist, seemed as unreal to him as the day he was born, an event perhaps truer than any other, but which we only manage to think of as an incredible idea. When he suddenly discovered the secret and impressive control the other one had over her, he decided to do it. He told himself that perhaps he would operate for her sake, to free her from a useless, degrading seduction. However, he was thinking of himself, he was following a road first taken long ago. And that morning, leaving the house, after it had all happened, he saw that the wind had driven away the mist, and on raising his eyes before the blinding clarity, he saw in the sky a black cloud which looked like a huge spider fleeing across a field of snow. But what he would never forget was that from that moment on the other man’s cat, the cat whose owner had boasted that he would never abandon him, began to follow him, with a certain indifference, almost with patience at his initial attempts to scare him off, until he became his shadow.

I’m also impressed at how the author (translator?) was able to juggle all those pronouns yet still maintain referential clarity throughout.

Incidentally, none of the above is particularly fantastical. Maybe a bit odd – but I feel like your everyday cat does weirder things than this on the reg.

Really the only fantastical part is the final sentence:

The he opened his mouth, not knowing for a moment why he did so, and finally he miaowed; shrilly, with infinite despair, he miaowed.

I like it when people spell “meow” as “miaow”. I personally don’t spell it that way, for no other reason than that’s not how I was brought up. But it’s fun to see all those vowels stuck in there together.

“The Story of the Foxes” by Niu Chiao

A man steals a page of indecipherable writing from some foxes, and the foxes go to great lengths to recover it.

Friggin’ foxes! Always causing trouble!

I’m not convinced that the author is real: a cursory googling only brings up references to The Book of Fantasy, and the compilation’s own “Sources and Acknowledgements” section completely omits a citation for this piece.

Continued at The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 10.

Footnotes

[1] Not actually chess, but the unpronounceable Ancient Welsh chess analogue known as gwyddbwyll.

[2] I originally tried writing this sentence as: “A man kills the man with whom his S.O. has been having an affair on him with.” Which is so weirdly ungrammatical that it hurts my brain to think about.

The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 8

Thu, 04 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0800

Previous post: The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 7.

“The Return of Imray” by Rudyard Kipling

I didn’t really like this story! It’s … kind of racist? It strikes me as kind of racist.

I mean, it’s Kipling, so I guess what was I expecting?

I don’t know, I was trying to articulate something intelligent about this story, but the more I try to the more I’m like, “Why bother?” There are other stories I like more, and this one is not particularly worth remembering. Indeed, it is probably the worst story in this collection relative to its length!

That’s right! You and your Nobel Prize and suck it, Rudyard!

“The Horses of Abdera” by Leopoldo Lugones

A race of super-intelligent horses rises up against their masters, only to be stopped in the final few paragraphs by an enormous lion who turns out to be Hercules.

The story is actually not so weird as it sounds. Upon reflection, it’s essentially just the old “robot uprising” trope, but with the robots replaced by horses. Which is great. Like, The Matrix was a great movie—and now imagine The Matrix but where the robots are replaced with horses. Cinematic gold, my friends!

“The Ceremony” by Arthur Machen

This is a remarkable piece. It reminds me a bit of Borges’s “The Sect of the Phoenix”, though that story is more of a literary riddle with a definitive answer,[1] whereas this one is more definitively ambiguous.[2]

Arthur Machen is a foundational figure in the genres of fantasy and horror fiction.[3] His novella The Great God Pan influenced a bevy of writers from H. P. Lovecraft to Stephen King, and was apparently also an inspiration for the book Bird Box, which you might remember as having been adapted into a Netflix movie that everyone talked about for about three days in 2018 and then promptly forgot ever existed.

Incidentally, I think it’s pretty funny that The Book of Fantasy includes approximately a billion selections by authors that inspired H. P. Lovecraft, but no works by Lovecraft himself. Could it be because Lovecraft is not much more than a competent pastiche artist and stylist who could never quite pin down the trick to making the inexplicable actually horrifying? Like, if Lovecraft wrote “The Ceremony”, the ceremony probably would have metastasized into some kind of horrific ritual, and half the verbiage would be spent describing the indescribableness of it all, and he’d have probably worked some noneuclidean geometry in there; whereas Machen just … doesn’t describe the ritual. It’s a lot less work, to far greater effect.

“The Riddle” by Walter de la Mare

Oh yes, I love this story. Seven children go to stay with their grandmother in a large old house. Grandma tells them to please play and romp and just generally enjoy life, except remember this one thing: don’t play in the ancient oak chest in the spare bedroom!

And so, one by one, the children disappear into the chest.

I’m reaching for a comparison here, and the first one that comes to mind is House of Leaves. It’s a spooky house, but not like a Turn of the Screw haunted house or even a Haunting of Hill House everything-is-fucked-up house. The supernaturalness feels somehow more ancient and more profound than that. The grandmother describes the chest as old, indescribably old, older than her own grandmother. The chest can apparently effect some degree of psychological manipulation on the residents of the house, though the extent of this power is left ambiguous.

And then there’s the title. What precisely is the riddle here? There is certainly a mystery, a puzzle; but “riddle” is a very particular word, and it implies a specific solution that can be worked out by the reader. I don’t see that being the case here.

Someone else please read this story and let me know what you think.

“Who Knows?” by Guy de Maupassant

A dude’s furniture comes to life. The story is a little too cute for my tastes.

Continued at The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 9.

Footnotes

[1] It’s sex, the answer is sex.

[2] “Definitive ambiguity, the best type of ambiguity!”™

[3] And, apparently, fake news:

“It seemed that my light fiction had been accepted by the congregation of this particular church as the solidest of facts; and it was then that it began to dawn on me that if I had failed in the art of letters, I had succeeded, unwittingly, in the art of deceit. This happened, I should think, some time in April, and the snowball of rumour that was then set rolling has been rolling ever since, growing bigger and bigger, till it is now swollen to a monstrous size.”

The Hrönir Manufactory

The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 17

“The Sentence” by Wu Ch’eng En

“The Sorcerers” by William Butler Yeats

“Fragment” by José Zorrilla

Footnotes

The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 16

“Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” by Oscar Wilde

“The Sorcerer of the White Lotus Lodge” by Richard Wilhelm[1]

“The Celestial Stag” by G. Willoughby-Meade

“Saved by the Book” by G. Willoughby-Meade

“The Reanimated Englishman” by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Footnotes

The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 15

“Pomegranate Seed” by Edith Wharton

“Lukundoo” by Edward Lucas White

“The Donguys” by Juan Rodolfo Wilcock

The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 14

“The Infinite Dream of Pao-Yu” and “The Mirror of Wind-to-Moon” by Ts’ao Chan

“The Desire to be a Man” by Comte P.H. Villiers de L’isle Adam

“Memnon, or Human Wisdom” by Voltaire

“The Man Who Liked Dickens” by Evelyn Waugh

Footnotes

The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 13

“The Encounter”, a tale from the Tang Dynasty

“The Three Hermits” by Count Leo Tolstoy

“Macario” by B. Traven

Footnotes

The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 12

“The Music on the Hill” by Saki

“Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched” by May Sinclair

“The Cloth which Weaves Itself” by W. W. Skeat

“Universal History” by William Olaf Stapledon

“A Theologian in Death” by Emmanuel Swedenborg

The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 11

“The Bust” by Manuel Peyrou

“The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe

“The Tiger of Chao-Ch’êng” by P’U Sung Ling[3]

“How We Arrived at the Island of Tools” by François Rabelais

Footnotes

The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 10

“The Atonement” by Silvina Ocampo

“The Man Who Belonged to Me” by Giovanni Papini

“Rani” by Carlos Peralta

“The Blind Spot” by Barry Perowne

“The Wolf” by Caius Petronius Arbitrus[2]

Footnotes

The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 9

“The Shadow of the Players” by Edwin Morgan

“The Cat” by H. A. Murena

“The Story of the Foxes” by Niu Chiao

Footnotes

The Book of Fantasy: A Review: Part 8

“The Return of Imray” by Rudyard Kipling

“The Horses of Abdera” by Leopoldo Lugones

“The Ceremony” by Arthur Machen

“The Riddle” by Walter de la Mare

“Who Knows?” by Guy de Maupassant

Footnotes