Marvin Kaye (1) (1938–2021)

Since reading Stephen King's [Danse Macabre], I've been trying to find the authors and books he mentions in an effort to read more of the foundational horror writing available. Many years back, after my first reading of Uncle Stevie's treatise on horror, I read up on some of the biggies, but not the deeper mentions. This collection featured several of the authors Uncle Stevie mentions - [[Isaac Bashevis Singer]], [[Ray Bradbury]], [[Tanith Lee]], [[Isaac Asimov]], [[Robert Bloch]], and [[Fritz Leiber Jr.]]. And there are many stories within that were a joy to read. My only quibble might be the over inclusion of fantasy stories of the sword and sorcerer ilk, to the exclusion of such supernatural beings in more contemporary settings.

One surprise was Singer's The Witch, which opened the book. Kaye lists some biographical notes about the author or the stories before each entry, and I learned that Singer was a Nobel winner - a rare thing for anyone writing anything approaching horror. This story focuses on a Jewish story of obsessive love brought on by witchery.

[[H. G. Wellls]]' story The Magic Shop was a simple tale of magic, all the more enjoyable for its simplicity. Seems as though the blood and gore of modern horror looses the macabre in favor of carnage.

Bradbury's The Traveler belongs with the collection of stories you'll find in [From the Dust Returned] but, sadly, you won't find it there. It follows Cecil, a being who can inhabit any person or animal. It's easily one of Bradbury's best in that set, but was not included in the more modern collection of stories about the weird family.

[[Jack Snow]]'s Dark Music is a wonderful and engrossing tale of a man seeking for an Eden to rest. When he finds it on his family's unused forested property, there is someone else living there - and the squatter is hiding a dark secret.

Bloch's offering, The Chaney Legacy takes us to old Hollywood, and the secret behind Lon Chaney's eerie inhabitance of all his characters. It's one of only two noir stories in the collection and a highlight.

[[Alvin Vogel]] writes a deeply imagined detective story, The Party Animal, about private magic investigators. The world building in such a small space is first-rate. Harry Dresden owes a lot to this story.

Emma's Daughter by [[Alan Rodgers]] will just make your skin crawl in all its zombie glory - The Walking Dead got nothin' on this one.

Lovecraft is here, too, with an uncompleted manuscript that was finished by August Derleth, who founded Arkham Publishing House - the great classic horror purveyors. Witches' Hollow has what you'd expect from a Lovecraft creation, but the effect isn't diminished by the expectation.

All in all, this was a wonderful, if sometimes uneven, collection. And who wouldn't want to own a book with Edward Gorey cover art.… (mer)

The anthology consisted of five “short novels” by acclaimed voices in fantasy fiction, though to me they felt more novelette-sized. IMO most would have been OK with a shorter treatment. Two of the stories were annoying, one disappointing, one all right but nothing special compared to the author’s other work, and one I enjoyed. So it was a mixed bag. The theme was, of course, a dragon or dragons were the central focus, but each author treated it differently.

The most straightforward of them, and the one I liked the best, was Mercedes Lackey’s “Joust” which was about dragon-riding warriors in a desert kingdom reminiscent of ancient Egypt. Vetch, a downtrodden slave boy, is taken by one of them to be his apprentice dragon-keeper, and the story is about how Vetch adjusts to his new surroundings and what happens when he steals a dragon egg and raises it as his own. The worldbuilding was excellently done for such a short piece, as was Vetch’s helpless anger from his father’s murder that he can’t let go of even when his situation improves. Being a Lackey story, it was schmaltzy and repetitive in places, but enjoyable to read in spite of that. It inspired a later series of novels, but I can take Lackey only in small doses and will probably pass on them. (When I first read this story I swore it was by Andre Norton, and only when I started to write this review did I realize the author was different.)

Michael Swanwick’s “King Dragon” handled the same subject matter, a relationship between a dragon and a boy, but his worldbuilding made absolutely no sense. Somehow the folksy Discworld realm of village fantasy mated with the world of high technology, resulting in sentient metal dragons with jet engines and cockpits, along with elves and spells and curses. One of these dragon jets crash lands in a rural area and forces the villagers to serve it, kidnapping a local teenage boy to be its mouthpiece. This was one of the annoying stories because, as I said, the world made no freakin’ sense, and it actually hurt my opinion of Swanwick whom I understood to be a fine writer.

The other annoying story was Elizabeth Moon’s “Judgment” which, again, had a dragon and a young male protagonist in a rural English village setting, with some witch-hunting thrown in. This story was frustrating because the male protagonist was so stupid and so thick-headed he never saw what was obvious to the reader from Day One. Again, I don’t think I’ll read any of Moon’s other work either.

Orson Scott Card did a much better job with “In the Dragon’s House ” in which he sets up a family mystery in an old house with a model train setup in the attic, decaying electrical wiring, and a matriarch who puts on community theatrical productions in the basement, all of which were way more interesting than the… yes, you called it… young male protagonist and the dragon, who is formed from living electrons. This story ended on an abrupt downbeat note more suited to horror than whimsy, which I had classed the story as; still, up to that point it was a good read, even if it wanted to be start of a longer, more complete tale.

Tanith Lee’s “Love in a Time of Dragons” began as a trope: a dragon slaying knight in some Medieval European never-never land appears at a village inn where he is seduced by one of the wenches, who asks that he take her with him on his journey up the mountain where the dragon lairs. Halfway through, the plot takes an unexpected twist, which is par for the course for a Tanith Lee story (and also, par for the course, one the reader would never see coming) and the rest of the story consists of the heroine’s immersion in the dragons’ world, including some sexual escapades with teeth and tongues, until she loses her sense of humanity. It was interesting, but not among Lee’s best.

(On reflection, it’s odd that the only story with a female protagonist had her having tons of sex with both the knight and the dragon.)… (mer)