A comment on this here blog from Will Errickson of the great Too Much Horror Fiction blog and Stoker Award-winning Paperbacks From Hell inspired me to look at the covers of some mid-Nineties publications from White Wolf, and I chanced upon 1996's Proprietors of Fate, an anthology with a cover and interior illos by Mike Mignola, one of my brother's favorite artists.  Why not read some stories from this book, stories by people in whom I have some interest?  The stories in Proprietors of Fate are apparently set in White Wolf's "Gothic-Punk" gaming milieu The World of Darkness in which the players take on the roles of vampires and werewolves who fight against the unfairness of modern capitalism.  In the 1990s I would have rolled my eyes at this ridiculous and childish concept and called it g** and r*******, but Basil Copper, Charles L. Grant and Poppy Z. Brite are probably up to the task of concocting good stories no matter how pandering and silly might be the angsty teen "I'm an oppressed minority and a superhero" theme in which they have to work, right?

"Death of a Demi-God" by Basil Copper 

isfdb is telling me the version of "Death of a Demi-God" in Proprietors of Fate was altered by White Wolf, so I am reading the story in an e-book edition of the second volume of the Copper collection Darkness, Mist and Shadow in hopes of finding there a Copper-approved text.  I feel it my duty to warn you that this electronic version of the collection is chockfull of missing punctuation and annoying typos; e.g., "we must be folly alert," "feint applause," and "unproved" for "improved."  Oy.

(A version of "Death of a Demi-God" that isfdb specifically states is "definitive" can be found in the 2002 collection Cold Hand on My Shoulder, but I can't find a scan of that book.)

"Death of a Demi-God" is a police detective story set in an unnamed American city, the kind of American city where people suffer "anaemia," drink tea by the fire in the "sitting room" and go to a "late night chemist" to have their prescriptions filled.  These Americans say things like "Should not you see a doctor?" and "fortnight" and "old chap;" the "workmen" among them carry around "gimlets" while the police officers don't do paperwork and have meetings at the "station" but at the "Bureau."  What?

Ryan is our main character, a cop with a wife twenty years younger than he; he and cigar-smoking Grady are working on the case of a woman who was decapitated by her husband with an axe.  At night, Ryan starts having dreams of a hot naked blonde and a dark figure in a hat with glowing eyes--when he wakes up he has little wounds on his neck.  Copper describes three of these quite similar episodes to us in some detail--this story is long, over 50 pages.

The prime minister of France is coming to the city and Ryan and Grady are given the job of watching for trouble from the upper stories of a warehouse as the Frenchman's procession passes below them.  (Wait, aren't they detectives?  Do detectives get assigned this kind of grunt work when a murderer is on the loose?)  Ryan will be on the roof and Grady at a window two floors down, so Ryan gets a slate and and a piece of chalk so he can, if necessary, write a note on the slate and lower it down to Grady's window on a string.  (Wait, don't they have radios?)  So many people are out on the streets hoping to catch a glimpse of the French prime minister that Ryan and Grady can't find any "public conveyance" to the warehouse where they are to keep watch so they walk there from the police "Bureau."  (Wait, this town doesn't have police cars?)  They remark that the "Army" will also be acting to protect the Frenchman's procession.  (Wait, is the United States Army typically used in such a fashion on domestic soil?)  The "militia" is also on the scene.  

The man who murdered his wife shows up and tries to murder the French minister but is caught--not through any action of Ryan or Grady, but that of minor characters.  Our guys are there at the interrogation, though, where the murderer commits suicide by jumping out a window before divulging much of anything to the cops.

Ryan's vampiric dreams stop for a few months, then start up again.  A minor character is killed by a vampire, and we readers wonder if Ryan is now a vampire but doesn't know it.  Ryan begins to feel that he is being watched.  Then comes a big day, a major assignment, one on the scale of the French prime minister episode.  Ryan is given a spot at which to sit, apparently as a guard, but then feels compelled to leave the spot--he finds himself in the clutches of the evil people from his dream, the naked beauty--she turns out to be his wife--and the man with the hat and red eyes--he turns out to be a living corpse!

The twist ending of the story explains all the puzzling oddities about the city in the story and about people's vocabulary and behavior.  "The Death of a Demi-God" does not take place in the 1990s, as I stupidly assumed (the background on World of Darkness, linked above, talks all about skyscrapers and punk rock and film noir and other 20th-century stuff so set me up for a fall); it takes place in 1864-5.  The city in Copper's story is Washington, D.C.!  Ryan was given the job of guarding Abraham Lincoln's box at Ford's Theatre, and vampires used their diabolical powers to draw him away from his post so the President could be murdered!

This story is not enjoyable.  The murders don't feel connected, none of the detective work is interesting, the main character doesn't do much of anything, the supernatural elements are banal.  The characters don't have personalities or compelling relationships and don't win your sympathy, the story lacks tension and is poorly constructed, with a sort of climax when the murderer is found and then a dull segment followed by the real climax that comes from out of nowhere with no buildup.  As for the central gimmick, I found all the clues that this was the 19th century bewildering and distracting, assuming they were errors rather than part of a clever ruse, and the final revelation irritating.

Thumbs down!  

"Gray" by Charles L. Grant

Here we have a story by the famous practitioner of "quiet horror" which it seems may never have been printed in any other venue.  It is not only Mignola collectors who need a copy of Proprietors of Fate, but Grant fanatics!

The themes of "Gray" are more what I expected from a World of Darkness story--a depressed werewolf kills white people in his quest to defend nonwhites from capitalism--but like Copper's "Death of a Demi-God," Grant's story is about a famous 19th-century event and Grant tries to spring that fact on you as a surprise.

Our main character is a scout with the U S Army in the West, the racist white men think he is half-Native American because he is such a good tracker, but the reality is that he is a werewolf!  The werewolf is sympathetic to the Indians, and uses his position as a scout to lead the white imperialists into ambushes.  At the end of the story we learn he has lead Custer (who is never named, but identified by his blonde hair) to Little Big Horn.  There is also some business about the werewolf and the Indians he is helping not really getting along; even though by killing white people the protagonist is doing the right thing, he is also a tragic anti-hero, committing blunders himself and suffering the tragedy of having his favorite horse killed by natives.

This is a competent but slight story that maybe you'll enjoy if you like seeing white people laid low, in particular if you have some kind of resentment of blondes.  We'll call "Gray" barely acceptable.

Mike Mignola illustrations for "Gray" and  "Mussolini and the Axeman's Jazz"

"Mussolini and the Axeman's Jazz" by Poppy Z. Brite

This story was a success, getting reprinted in Stephen Jones' The Best New Horror: Volume 8 and a stack of Brite collections.  Maybe this will be the one actually good story we read today?

Brite starts out by just telling you the following scenes are set in Sarajevo in 1914, which is a nice change of pace.  People my age will remember that in 1995, when Proprietors of Fate was published, Sarajevo was a focus of world attention because of fighting in the region which continued throughout much of the 1990s.

Anyway, Brite describes the murder of Arch Duke Francis Ferdinand and his wife Sophie capably over four pages.  While not bad, I have to wonder how useful this material is--if I wanted to read about this heinous crime, couldn't I just read about it in any one of scores of history books?  

The scene shifts to 1918 and New Orleans, a town Brite portrays as dirty and crime-ridden.  The ghost of the Duke accosts an Italian-American resident of NOLA, a former cop who has lived a tragic life.  Behind his murder, the Duke informs the ex-cop, was a centuries-old Sicilian wizard, Cagliostro.  Currently, Cagliostro is manipulating Mussolini!  Ferdinand the ghost wants the American to slay Cagliostro, who is currently in the Big Easy disguised as a grocer.  When the man refuses, the ghost takes over his body and starts killing grocers with an axe--the Duke knows the wizard Cagliostro is living as an Italian grocer, but he doesn't know which one.  This campaign of murder Brite, it turns out, based on a real life killing spree I never heard of before. 

Cagliostro Brite portrays as a bleeding heart liberal who can see the future and only kills people to achieve a better future.  The wizard aims to manipulate Mussolini into undermining Hitler.  When the ghost-inhabited body of the ex-cop finally arrives at Cagliostro's place the wizard easily neutralizes it.  Then he pens a letter to a newspaper in the voice of the serial killer urging people to play jazz music on a particular night--the letter is a real artifact that Brite is just reproducing here.

The final scene of the story suggests the Axis powers lost World War II because of Mussolini's bungling, a product of Cagliostro's murders and manipulations.

Besides being, like Copper and Grant's stories, a fantasy explanation of various gory historical events, it is possible Brite means her story to be a satire of people who hope to improve the world by murdering people, or, maybe, a vindication of such people--Brite only has nice things to say about Cagliostro, though some of these nice things may be ironic or sarcastic.

We'll call this one mildly good.  The plot is OK and the style is pretty good, but the tone is a little too variable, with somewhat goofy joke scenes as well as very serious scenes and scenes in which horrible wounds are dwelt upon splatterpunk style.  

**********

If I had known these stories were going to be alternate history tales in which bargain basement Draculas, Wolfmans and Merlins were the secret manipulators behind famous battles and the world-shaking murders of statesmen I would not have read them because I don't find such stories entertaining.  But here we are, sadder but wiser.  

(Whatever I think of these stories, though, I am probably going to be reading Copper, Grant and Brite again.)

Proprietors of Fate is the second volume of a trilogy of anthologies edited by Edward E. Kramer, whom I just now am realizing is some kind of predatory homosexual who has been arrested time and again for violations involving minors.  (Again, I am sadder but wiser.)  The first Dark Destiny volume, Dark Destiny, includes a solid Robert Bloch story, "The Scent of Vinegar."  Kramer also had a hand in editing Forbidden Acts, which contains stories by Kathe Koja and Barry Malzberg, Steve Rasnic Tem and Karl Edward Wagner full of perverse sex, and Dark Love, from which we just recently read stories with uncomfortable sex themes by Koja, Wagner, Ramsey Campbell and Copper.

Next time on MPorcius Fiction Log: short SF from the Eisenhower era which (probably) will lack uncomfortable sex themes and gore in the splatterpunk style. 

Vampires!  You love vampires.  I love vampires.  Everybody loves vampires.  So let's read about vampires!  Whatever it is you are doing--sheltering in place, living under quarantine, living under lockdown, working from home, searching for toilet paper, embroidering a snappy motto on your homemade face mask, attending a wedding via Zoom, breaking up with your not-as-significant-as-you-initially-thought-other via Skype--can probably be improved by simultaneously reading about vampires.

No doubt you recall our foray into The Mammoth Book of Erotica.  There is a Mammoth Book of most everything at this point; we can probably look forward to The Mammoth Book of Coronavirus Tales someday.  So let's seek our vampires in The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women, edited by the indefatigable Stephen Jones and first published in 2001, picking out tales by three people we have talked about before here at MPorcius Fiction Log, Poppy Z. Brite, Tanith Lee, and Melanie Tem.   You won't be surprised to hear I am reading from a scan of the book available at the internet archive.  If that check for $1,200 that just mysteriously appeared in your bank account is burning a hole in your pocket you can pick up a trade paperback copy on ebay for less than $6.00.

"Homewrecker" by Poppy Z. Brite (1998) 

This one first appeared at the website Gettingiton.com, which I believe is currently defunct.  Enjoy your favorite website while you can, oh my brothers, it could be gone in an instant.  "Homewrecker" would first appear in a physical book in 2000 in Paula Guran's Embraces: Dark Erotica.  In the intro to "Homewrecker" here in The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women, Brite suggests that to write a decent vampire story "requires the ability to plumb one's own darkness."

This story is like two and a half pages long, but it is chock full of stuff that is gross, like hints of incest, explicit nonconsensual sex, vomit, and animal blood.  Brite also  skillfully packs an entire traditional horror story plot into this tiny space while piling on the memorable (albeit gross) images.

Our narrator is a young boy who lives with his "Uncle Edna" (birth name Ed Slopes,) a crossdressing homosexual who works at a slaughterhouse killing pigs by day and wears lipstick and women's dresses at night.  The narrator has to make sure Uncle Edna's perfumed bath is ready when he gets home or he gets beat--when Uncle Edna beats the narrator he (Edna) gets an erection.

An Uncle Jude used to live with Edna and the narrator, but a few years ago a woman, a Verna, somehow stole him away.  Edna is still bitter about it, often ranting about that "bitch who stole his man" and banging the table and so on.  One day the narrator hears that Verna is back in town (no sign of long lost Jude, though.)  Fearing that Edna might murder Verna, the narrator provides oral sex to another kid in exchange for some Xanax, and uses the drugs to knock out Edna before he finds out the homewrecker is back in town.  When the narrator goes to talk to Verna, in hopes of learning something about the whereabouts of Jude, we readers realize Verna is a vampire who gets her kicks from using her hypnotic powers to get gay men to have sex with her.  She uses these powers on the teen-age narrator, and not only fellates him against his will (which he finds so sickening he vomits) but poisons his mind, filling his head with thoughts of the look, the smell, the feel of a woman's breasts and genitals--as a homosexual, he finds these thoughts disgusting, but, despite his professed inclinations, these obsessive thoughts physically arouse him to the point where he has to masturbate in public to relieve the pressure.

Brite is a good writer, and on a technical level this is a well-written piece, with good sentences and economical pacing and striking images and all the stuff I hope to find in stories.  It is also a sort of switcheroo story; in the past it was common for heterosexual men to express disgust at gay men and their sexual practices, and it was common to express fear that gay men would seduce young boys into joining the gay subculture.  Well, in this story we have gay men expressing their nausea at the thought of a woman's body, and we have a woman who seduces a gay boy into joining the straight culture (which in the story feels like a subculture, because all the male characters are sexually active gay men.)

(I guess I should point out, in case you don't know, that, since The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women was published, Brite has come out as a gay man and taken hormone therapy and prefers to be called Billy Martin.)

I often complain that switcheroo stories are lame, but "Homewrecker" works because it is a well-crafted story and because the switcheroo feels fresh (at least to me) and because Brite doesn't stack the deck by portraying the gay men as angels and their lifestyle as ideal--the narrator is beaten by his father figure and trades sex for drugs as a matter of course, after all.

(For another switcheroo story about a straight minority in a gay milieu, check out Charles Beaumont's 1955 "The Crooked Man.")

Thumbs up, but I can't say this story is for everybody--it is disgusting and potentially offensive (for example, Brite does that thing where you compare the scent of a woman's vagina to a fish market, which I feel might piss some women off.)  But we read horror stories because we want to be shocked and speculative fiction in general because we want to be exposed to different ideas and learn about other points of view, don't we?

"Venus Rising on Water" by Tanith Lee  (1991)

I don't need to tell you I am a big fan of Lee's, as I told you that in our last episode when I read her gruesome story about family relationships that either smother you or let you down, "A Room with a Vie."  That story was set in an English seaside town; "Venus Rising on Water" takes place in a city much like Venice in a future alternate reality Earth.

The old city has been almost entirely abandoned, many of its buildings crumbling, its walls covered in vines and creepers, its streets and squares choked with trees and shrubbery.  Only a few nutcases live in the city, but the once beautiful metropolis, centuries ago home to aristocrats and artists in powdered wigs and elaborate masks, has been left to decay instead of torn down so it can serve as a kind of museum--every month a boat travels between the modern apartment buildings on the other side of the lagoon to the old ruin, and sometimes a scholar or journalist is on the boat.  Our heroine, 25-year-old Jonquil Hare, is one such writer who explores the city alone.  (Jonquil was Fritz Leiber's wife's name, which may or may not be significant.)

Jonquil, equipped with SF devices like an inflatable mattress and a machine that cooks fine meals for her, sets up camp in a glorious old pile called The Palace of the Planet which centuries ago was home to an astrologer named Johanus who claimed to have observed the surface of Venus.  She has an appointment with a caretaker who gives her a sort of remote control called a manual--by manipulating the buttons on the manual she can project holographic films in the palace which purport to show the now decayed edifice as it looked in its heyday, complete with costumed actors who act out masked balls.

Jonquil finds a chest, one that has not been opened in three centuries or more, one which the scholars who compiled the data in the manual believe is no chest at all, but a faux chest (a "jester chest,") an empty decoration.  Impelled by a dream about the chest, Jonquil figures out how to open it, and discovers a full-sized portrait of a boyish woman.  (A blurring of gender roles is one of the minor themes of the story.)  Jonquil, an expert on art and architecture, assesses the find and decides it must be a painting by Johanus the astrologer.  She begins having dreams of Johanus in which she learns that he believed that his long observations of the surface of Venus had opened up a path between the two planets which some Venerian creature used to travel to Earth, to this very palace.  This creature is like a cloth or large piece of paper or piece of skin that travels by inching along the floor or floating through the air.  Jonquil also has dreams, thrilling dreams, of the woman in the painting climbing atop her and bringing her to orgasm.

In the horror/action climax of the story it becomes clear that the canvas Jonquil discovered is the creature, that Johanus painted his idea (or the monster's memories transmitted into his mind!) of a Venerian woman upon this alien skin from Venus.  Dragging the picture frame along the floor like the shell of a clumsy turtle or snail, the monster pursues Jonquil (to eat of her flesh? to take control of her body? to slay her? to rape her?) through the palace, finally bursts free of the heavy frame and flies after her through the ruined streets of the town.  She takes refuge in an ancient mausoleum, but the monster from Venus is hot on her trail!  Among the long-interred coffins and mummies, a horde of the albino rats who infest the underworld of the abandoned city swarm over the alien, tearing it to pieces and devouring it.  Jonquil is saved, but we are left to consider the possibility that the alien still lives, that the rats will become a ravenous half-Terran half-alien plague which will threaten the entire human race! 

"Venus Rising on Water" is only about vampires if you are using the most liberal definition of what a vampire is, but it is a very good horror-SF piece; Lee's descriptions of the palace and city and the chase are quite fine.  It is kind of like one of Clark Ashton Smith's Mars stories, say "Vault of Yoh-Vombis" or "The Dweller in the Gulf" but with a rapey lesbian sex scene thrown in.  Who would gainsay that recipe?

Recommended.

"Venus Rising on Water" was first printed in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and would go on to be included in a 2019 collection of Lee tales published by Immanion Press, which has been printing collections of Lee's late work.

"Lunch at Charon's" by Melanie Tem (2001)

The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women includes several decorations by Randy Broecker, this one among them

I believe "Lunch at Charon's" was original to this anthology.

The narrator of "Lunch at Charon's" is a vain forty-something woman who is always working out and doing yoga and having plastic surgery and so on in order to maintain her looks and keep in shape--she talks a lot about whether or not her breasts are sagging, whether or not her finger nail polish is chipped, and about how her friends' fat bodies or unfashionable nail polish disgusts her.  This woman is a real jerk!  It soon becomes clear that one of her strategies for maintaining her looks is sucking the life force out of her friends!  Worse than a jerk, this woman is a god-damned vampire!

This story is apparently meant to be humorous--the narrator's obsession with her and her friends' appearances goes way overboard and Tem's learned references ("Charon's" as the name of a fancy restaurant, "Alighieri" as the name of one of the narrator's friends) are in-your-face obvious.  You know I often complain about joke stories, but this one is actually sort of funny, so good on Tem.

As for plot, the narrator chronicles how all her friends get old and die before their time because she is stealing their life force under the guise of giving them massages and hugging them and so forth.  One of her friends is a lonely lesbian college professor with an adopted Chinese baby--after the narrator sucks the life out of the horny prof through a kiss, she plots to make friends with the woman who is the newly orphaned baby's guardian, in hopes of feasting on the child's young and innocent life!

Not bad.

**********

I really thought these stories were going to be about more or less traditional vampires, but it turns out that the common thread running through them is homosexuality.  Fortunately these stories are all entertaining, so, no harm, no foul, right?

Thomas F. Monteleone's name is one I have seen in anthologies and magazines, and at blogs like tarbandu's and Will Errickson's, for years, but I have never seriously looked into his work.  (I did read a single short short by Monteleone a while ago.)  This week I decided to pull down from my shelves four publications containing stories by Monteleone and check them out in chronological order.

The terrific cover to the Italian edition of Future City.

"Chicago" (1973)

This one appears in Roger Elwood's anthology Future City.  Both Joachim Boaz and tarbandu have read Future City in its entirety and written about it at their great blogs.  I've actually read most of Future City myself (in Joachim's comments section I gush about the Lafferty story and also praise the Malzberg and the Silverberg) but for whatever reason I didn't read Monteleone's "Chicago" until this week.

"Chicago" is a pretty traditional SF story, but it is well done, so I enjoyed it.  (Who am I kidding?  I love traditional SF stories!)  Millions of years in the future the domed city of Chicago, run by computers and robots, continues to function smoothly, lights coming on at night and going off at dawn, mass transit operating, and so forth.  But there are no human beings in the buildings or on the streets!  The only people in the city are those cryogenically preserved back in the 2nd millennium because of their incurable diseases.  When a malfunction results in one of these individuals being accidentally revived, the 70-foot tall maintenance robot who discovers her becomes curious about the history of mankind.  (He is also fascinated by her breasts and genitalia.)  Through research in the library, and then firsthand when he goes AWOL beyond the dome in search of our descendants, the robot learns that the human race is a bunch of violent, racist, environment-wrecking jerk-offs!

"Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep" (1975)

This tale appeared in another Roger Elwood feel-good production, Dystopian Visions, and is in the same Chicago-centered fictional universe as "Chicago."  In 1977 a fix-up of Monteleone's four Chicago stories would be published under the title The Time-Swept City.  I read "Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep" in my copy of Nebula Winners Twelve, edited by Gordon Dickson.  The story takes its title from an A. E. Housman poem, "Reveille."  (Dickson had a poor editor; in my copy of Nebula Winners Twelve Housman's name is misspelled and we are told the poem is titled "Rebellion.")  Like everybody, I love "When I Was One-and-Twenty," and so did not hesitate to read "Reveille" in preparation for experiencing Monteleone's story. Housman's poem seems to be telling me that I should have devoted my life to going on adventures instead of reading books and taking naps.  Too late!

"Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep" takes place millions of years before "Chicago."  In the interests of efficiency, the computer which runs the authoritarian Chicago society has totally alienated the human race from the physical realities of sex.  People don't have sexual intercourse, but satisfy their natural urges via drugs and what we would call virtual sex in the entertainment quarter or cybersex with their spouses.  We see the protagonist, Benjamin, have sex with his wife by laying next to her in bed, not touching her, each of them hooked up via electrodes to a machine which synchronizes their orgasms!

Physical sex has been outlawed to prevent the birth of "randoms."  As in an insect colony or some kind of factory, the central computer only authorizes the birth of genetically engineered people of specific types for which there is specific need.  (As in Brave New World, every person born is a member of a specific caste with specific functions in society.) People are born in the wombs of huge mutant women who live in vats, host mothers that look like amoebas and can carry thirty children at a time.  These host mothers have no eyes or ears, and communicate with the men who maintain the vats via telepathy.

Benjamin is one of the men who monitors the vats, using a helmet to hold telepathic conversations with one of the host mothers, Feraxya.  Something goes wrong--the thirty fetuses to whom Feraxya is playing host are not going to come out as engineered, but as "randoms."  (Just like you and me, reader!)  The government, of course, orders the fetuses aborted, but Feraxya rebels, insisting that her thirty children "have as much right to live as you or me."  Unbeknownst to anyone, Feraxya has developed telekinetic powers that allow her to attack the abortion team with deadly force!  Who will live and who will die?  Will totalitarian Chicago survive or fall to some kind of revolution?  

It is easy to see both conservative and feminist themes in this story; women relegated to being breeding machines for the totalitarian state, skepticism of abortion and genetic engineering, the dangers of divorcing sex from procreation via medical technology and pornographic entertainment.  The story also has good human relationship and horror elements.  I like it!

"Spare the Child" (1982)

This is a good horror story with disturbing erotic and cross-cultural overtones.  It is also one of those stories in which women cause men nothing but trouble.  I know it is hard to believe, but men used to think that way!  Thank heavens we have people nowadays dedicated to making sure such thinking remains a thing of the past!  I read "Spare the Child" in my copy of the January 1982 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Russell lives in Northern New Jersey with his wife Mitzi and works in Manhattan. Mitzi always has some little project she is working on, and, in response to an ad in the New York Times, her current project is to "be a foster parent" to a child in the Third World.  "Be a foster parent" is a euphemism for sending 15 dollars a month overseas.  Russell is the one who writes out the checks, and so it is to Russell that their foster daughter, a prepubescent girl named Tnen-Ku who lives on a Pacific island, addresses brief letters thanking him and calling him "second papa."  The first letter is accompanied by a surprisingly provocative topless photo of the black-haired, black-eyed girl.  After a few months Mitzi grows tired of being a foster mother to a girl (whom she has come to think of as a "tart") who never uses Mitzi's name in her insultingly short letters, and so asks Russell to cease payment; besides, she wants to use the money on new curtains, her next project.

Russell stops sending the money, and Tnen-Ku, with her eyes that seem "like empty holes in her face" and her "deeply tanned flesh" begins haunting Russell, alternately seductively and terrifyingly.  Monteleone's depictions of the many creative ways the girl terrorizes Russell are effective; I particularly liked the appearance of a box of little animated bones which spell out threatening messages.

Good solid horror.  Social sciences and humanities students could write reams about the way women and foreigners are depicted in the story--they nag you, waste your money, use their bodies to manipulate you, and then when you resist them they threaten you with prison and/or death!

"Triptych di Amore" (1994)

This one I read in my copy of Poppy Z. Brite's anthology Love in Vein, which I acquired recently.  The cover of the book really pushes Brite as an exciting new personality, from text declaring her "America's new bestselling dark fantasy author" on the front to a gushing blurb about her from Dan Simmons, and a photo, on the back. (I have to admit she looks pretty adorable in that photo.)  A little disappointingly, none of Brite's own stories appear in the anthology.  However, I am looking forward to the included Koja/Malzberg story, and the story by the Tems, as I have liked horror stories in the past by Kathe Koja, Malzberg, and Melanie Tem. (There is a Wolfe story in Love in Vein, "Queen of the Night," which I read multiple times before the birth of this blog and definitely recommend.)


But first the Monteleone story, "Triptych di Amore."  I'm afraid this story was a little too goofy for me, goofy and obvious.  I thought Monteleone did things that were creative and thought-provoking in "Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep" and "Spare the Child," but "Triptych di Amore" feels like pornographic fanfic.  If you ever wanted an excuse to visualize Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Vincent Van Gogh performing cunnilingus on a blonde with pubic hair as "fine and wispy and soft as the down on a newborn chick," well, here it is!  

As the title suggests, "Triptych di Amore" consists of three related episodes.  Each episode relates an adventure of a beautiful green-eyed blonde named Lyrica who is virtually immortal and seeks out great artists to seduce.  The first episode is a third-person narrative about Lyrica's torrid affair with Mozart.  Sample goofy oral sex line: "He had never imagined a woman could be so clean."   The second episode consists of Van Gogh's secret journal--while sharing a country studio with Paul Gauguin, Van Gogh has an affair with Lyrica.  Sample goofy oral sex line: "A month has passed and I am truly mad for her touch and the lingering smell of her cunt in my beard."

Both Mozart and Van Gogh find that Lyrica is the most beautiful woman they have ever met, and the best lover they have ever had.  Sex with Lyrica energizes them initially and inspires them to produce their greatest work, but after a few months of feverish coupling with Lyrica she tires of them and the artists fall physically and/or mentally ill and die.

In the third section of the story Lyrica falls into the clutches of an Italian exorcist.  She transforms into a giant snake (the exorcist calls her a "lamia") but the priest stuns her with a glowing communion wafer.  Lyrica is entombed under an altar, the priest and his friends hope for eternity, but in a coda Monteleone suggests that an errant bomb dropped from a B-17 in 1944 may liberate the seductress.

The first two sections seem like a sincere but clumsy attempt at writing erotic material, while the last two sections come across as jokes.  However serious or silly Monteleone is being here, I felt like this story was a waste of my time, so I will have to give it the thumbs down.

*********

Looking back on these four stories, I think I can detect some common themes, even though they span a period of over twenty years.  In all of them, woman, in particular woman's sexuality, is a destabilizing force, putting individuals, and sometimes entire societies, in danger.  More generally, these stories strike me as having themes of interest to Christians.  I'm no Biblical scholar, but doesn't a desire for knowledge lead to Adam being cast out of Eden?  And isn't that what happens to the robot in "Chicago?"  "Triptych di Amore" has a juvenile horror movie Christianity, what with the crusading priest who uses the Eucharist to defeat the satanic monster, and "Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep" addresses issues that have been important to post-war Christians in America, like abortion, pornography and recreational sex.  "Spare the Child" is about charity; Russell even gives Mitzi a little virtue-is-its-own-reward speech about how they shouldn't expect any kind of benefit for helping Tnen-Ku.  

While I was disappointed with "Triptych di Amore," I thought "Chicago" pretty good and "Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep" and "Spare the Child" quite good.  I'll keep my eyes open for more Monteleone in the future.

Even though I buy used paperbacks at a rate that exceeds my ability to read them, I still check in at various university and public libraries to see what is going on.  On a recent trip to the Franklin Avenue branch of the Des Moines Public Library I spotted the 2005 softcover anthology Outsiders, edited by Nancy Holder and Nancy Kilpatrick, which is said to contain "All-New Stories from the Edge."  The book seems to be targeted at the "teenage-girls-who-cut-themselves" demographic, but when I saw it contained a story by MPorcius fave Tanith Lee, as well as contributions from Kathe Koja and Poppy Z. Brite, in whom I have recently taken an interest, I decided to borrow it.  This weekend I read these three pieces.

In the tradition of my blog posts about stories from Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction, in which I judged to what extent the stories truly were"extreme," I won't simply assess whether Lee's, Koja's and Brite's tales are good, but will also assess how edgy they are.  Whose story will be the edgiest of the batch?  Place your bets!

Back cover text

"Scarabesque: The Girl Who Broke Dracula" by Tanith Lee

This story is apparently a chapter of an unfinished novel, the fourth Blood Opera novel, which isfdb suggests was never published.  I have not read any of the Blood Opera books, but I assume in the world they depict vampires are real.  If "Scarabesque: The Girl Who Broke Dracula" is considered alone, however, I think everything that happens in it is explicable without recourse to the supernatural.

Sue Wyatt is a plain and skinny 24-year-old woman who works in retail and has middle-class parents.  Every Friday night she puts on lots of cosmetics, black clothes and a long black wig and rides the train to London, where she calls herself "Ruby Sin" and hangs around in goth bars and clubs.  We follow the course of one of these Friday nights during which she is rescued from lesbian bullies who want to jab her with a syringe by a mysterious foreign man who then takes her to his elaborately decorated rooms in an abandoned part of town.

Interspersed with this tale are flashbacks to when Sue was fourteen, lonely and friendless, and became obsessed with the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker and the film version by Francis Ford Coppola.  (She watched the videotape of the movie so much she broke it.)  The same week she rented the movie she was raped for the first time by her father, when he found her dressed up in her mother's cosmetics and lingerie.

The mysterious foreign man makes Sue's dreams come true--he bites her neck, shedding blood, while caressing "her center," bringing her to her first orgasm.  The next day she can't find the man or even his decrepit neighborhood; she searches for him for years, to no avail.

This story is not bad.  I think the history of Sue's Friday night is supposed to remind you of Jonathan Harker's visit to Dracula--the dangerous lesbians are like Dracula's brides, for example.  Like Harker, Sue rides in a cab driven by a mysterious taciturn figure.  Lee describes London's neon lights, which are perhaps meant to evoke our memories of the eldritch lights Harker sees as he travels through Transylvania.

Sue is definitely an outsider, with no friends or lovers, and no real family to speak of. She alienates herself from mainstream society with her goth outfit, but without joining the goth subculture--she goes to the bars and clubs but never talks to anybody there, ignoring women who address her and rejecting men who try to pick her up (Sue's experience with her father has soured her on the idea of sexual intercourse; her dream is to be bitten by a vampire like Lucy and Mina are in Dracula.)  I'd say this story is pretty edgy, despite its pun title.  

I should note that this story reminded me of Richard Matheson's famous and brilliant 1951 story "Drink My Red Blood" (AKA "Blood Son,") in which a young boy becomes obsessed with Dracula and, in the story's closing lines, meets the Count, who embraces him.

"Ruby Tuesday" by Kathe Koja

Good song, crummy restaurant.

This is a decent tear-jerking mainstream story.  I didn't detect any speculative fiction elements.

Our narrator is Rikki, a high school student.  I think Koja deliberately leaves Rikki's sex unspecified.  Rikki's mother is in the hospital dying of cancer, and the stress of this tragedy has severed Rikki's ties with his or her friends, ruined Rikki's grades at school, and strained Rikki's relationship with his or her father.

Rikki wants to be a filmmaker, and every week goes to see a film called Ruby Tuesday.  This is a goofy musical, clearly based by Koja on Rocky Horror Picture Show--the same people are in the audience every week, wearing costumes and singing along, throwing confetti during a wedding scene, etc.  Rikki studies the film, taking notes, hoping to someday create a film which, like Ruby Tuesday, will serve as an alternate world to which people can escape their problems.

Rikki is an outsider--like Sue in the Lee story he/she leaves mainstream society by taking up the rituals of a fringe community (the people who see and interact with the crazy movie every week) but without actually joining that fringe group--Rikki doesn't dress up or make friends with the other Ruby Tuesday fans.  Compared to the Lee story, with its gross sex, violence and crime, however, "Ruby Tuesday" is not particularly edgy.


"The Working Slob's Prayer" by Poppy Z. Brite

This isn't a real story with a plot and all that, more like a bunch of character sketches of people who work at a New Orleans restaurant.  According to the intro to this story, the characters described in "The Working Slob's Prayer" appear in a series of Brite's novels.  The story has no speculative fiction elements.

Leslie, a waitress, is from Brooklyn, and has to yell at the cooks to get them to put out the food as fast as she would like: "Fuck you in the ass, you pig motherfuckers!...If I want any more shit from you, I'll scrape it off the end of my dick, OK?"  Paco is the head chef, a culinary genius and misogynist who has contempt for his customers and employers, most of whom can't appreciate his abilities.  Rickey (another Rick in this anthology?) and G-man are a gay couple, Rickey somewhat violent and low-class, G-man more sensitive and conventional.  The tensions in their relationship are the most interesting part of this story: G-man is offended and worried by how much Rickey idolizes the thuggish Paco (Paco, for example, uses the term "fag" derisively to describe men who are ineffectual or whiny.)  Shake is a Croatian-American whose parents wish he would get out of the restaurant business.

This is a somewhat forgettable mainstream story.  Maybe people fascinated by the seamy side of the culinary world (people who love Anthony Bourdain, perhaps) would get excited by it.  Is it edgy?  Are the characters outsiders? Well, everybody uses cocaine and gets drunk all the time and swears all the time.  I guess that is kind of edgy.  But in 2015 aren't the drug culture and homosexuality practically mainstream? And since they are all working together on a team, making money in a pretty prestigious industry, can we really consider them outsiders?

This is the least interesting and least edgy of the three stories I read in Outsiders this weekend.

***********

I have to admit I was a little disappointed in these stories, even though none is actually bad.  For one thing, I expected them to have more SF elements.  For another, I expected them to represent efforts to really push the envelope, full of shocking behavior or ideas.  The Lee is the only one that seems to be really dedicated to presenting edgy behavior, and the only one I would really recommend to the typical SF fan.

Maybe I'll read three more stories from Outsiders later this month, in search of serious edginess.  

The Halloween celebration at MPorcius Fiction Log continues with three more late-Twentieth Century horror stories selected by Ellen Datlow for her 2010 anthology Darkness, these by Edward Bryant, Poppy Z. Brite, and Gene Wolfe.

Click to read a census of Ellen Datlow's pets and library.

"Dancing Chickens" by Edward Bryant (1984)

I've devoted two posts to Edward Bryant in the past, liking some stories and disliking others.  Let's see what Bryant has in store for us this time.  I have to admit that "Dancing Chickens" is not an inspiring title--I don't want to read any dumb jokes! "Dancing Chickens" first appeared in the anthology Light Years and Dark.

Like Koja's "Teratisms," which I talked about in my last blog post and also appears in Darkness, this story realistically describes a lifestyle which is disturbing and disgusting.  Our narrator, Rick or "Ricky," is the product of a broken home, a street kid who loves dancing.  He was lifted out of the gutter by a man he calls "Hawk." Hawk and Rick have a pederastic relationship:

He had taken me home, cleaned, fed, and warmed me.  He used me, sometimes well.  Sometimes he only used me.

We are even informed that Rick has suffered anal damage which he tries to pass off to doctors as hemorrhoids.  Yuck!

Alien spaceships have been hovering over the Earth for months; they have yet to communicate with the human race, and everybody is constantly wondering why the aliens are here and what they will do.

At a party where cocaine is available and all of the attendees appear to be gay men, one partier uses a raw chicken, dressed in doll clothes, as a puppet, making it dance to a recording of  "Tea For Two" and "If You Knew Susie."  (Not "Sledgehammer," however, which would not be released until early 1986.)   This performance sickens Rick, who flees the apartment and runs in front of a bus.  As he lays dying, the space aliens use a tractor beam to make him dance around, their first interaction with the human race.  The point of the story is, no doubt, that the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.

This story is well-written, and certainly horrible, but it is hard not to see the resolution of the plot as sort of ridiculous.  It is like those EC comics in which a guy who enjoys pulling off flies' wings is captured by giant alien flies who delight in tearing people's arms off--a little too obvious.  "Dancing Chickens" is a borderline case that I hesitate to say is bad, but don't feel I can endorse.

"Calcutta, Lord of Nerves" by Poppy Z. Brite (1992)

Poppy Z. Brite is one of those names that I see in anthologies all the time, but I had never read any of her work.  I decided to give her a shot this week.  When I read editor Datlow's intro and learned "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves," which first appeared in the anthology Still Dead, was a zombie apocalypse story I was discouraged, as I am sick of that kind of thing, but having committed myself I went through with reading it. Luckily its main focus is not the kind of zombie stuff we've read and seen a billion times already.  (Maybe I shouldn't read these introductions until after I've read the stories they are affixed to.)

You might call this story transgressive.  How often do you read a story in which the smell of the vagina(!) takes a starring role in a metaphor:

The world squats and spreads its legs, and Calcutta is the dank sex you see revealed there, wet and fragrant with a thousand odors both delicious and foul.  A source of lushest pleasure, a breeding ground for every conceivable disease. 

This story is also a real gorefest--among other things, we hear how zombies will claw the breasts of a new mother so the milk spurts out of the wounds!  Yuck again!

The plot: Our narrator was born in Calcutta to a local woman and an American man. Mom died in childbirth, and Dad took him back to the US.  Dad was a drunk, and died when our hero was 18; soon after the narrator moved to Calcutta.  While he was living there the zombie apocalypse broke out.

Because the zombies move slowly, they can only catch cripples and children, so life in Calcutta goes on more or less as usual: the buses run, shops open and do business, etc. The story consists primarily of our narrator, who apparently has no need to work, spending a day strolling around the town. The picture he paints of Calcutta would not be appreciated by the Department of Tourism of the West Bengal government (whose official English website is full of adorable typos.)  We are told that the people smell bad, and shit and piss wherever they feel like.  Five million of the inhabitants "look as if they are already dead--might as well be dead--and another five million wish they were...."  I'm not feeling encouraged to book a flight to this center of art and culture!    
In the morning our Indian-born, American-educated hero visits the temple of Kali, the four-armed and three-eyed Mother and eater of souls, where he offers her statue a handful of flowers and spices.  In the evening he returns to the temple, and finds a gaggle of zombies there, also making an offering.  The living dead offer Kali severed heads, hunks of human flesh, and piles of bones!  Our hero hallucinates that the statue of Kali begins to move, exposing her gaping sex and gesturing him to come inside. Our narrator flees.

This is a pretty crazy story.  Like the Koja and Bryant stories in Darkness it relies for much of its power on realistic descriptions of the desperate lives of poor people.  I'm even considering the possibility that the "point" of "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves" is that life is a horror story already for many people, that a zombie holocaust would be superfluous.

I would recommend the story as an experience: Brite's writing style is good, I learned a little about Calcutta (Brite does a good job of creating a sense of place), and the bizarre sexual elements (as in "Dancing Chickens") are striking and memorable.  Plot and character are lackluster, however.  In a conventional story a character faces a challenge or pursues a goal, and/or changes in some way.  I didn't get that from "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves;" the story is more like a "slice of life" or "tour of the city" kind of thing, meant to say something about Calcutta, that happens to be set during a zombie apocalypse.  There was also no real tension or emotional attachment, just the simple shock moments caused by the gore and cringe-and-laughter inducing sexual references; I didn't care what happened to the narrator, who in turn seemed detached and aloof himself (maybe that is part of Brite's point, that people from First World countries don't care about Third Worlders, or that the middle and upper classes don't care about the lower orders.)

I'll read more Brite in the future.

"The Tree is My Hat" by Gene Wolfe (1999)

I read this years ago, and didn't remember the details all that well, so decided to give it another read.  "The Tree is My Hat" first appeared in 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense, and is also in the 2009 collection The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction.

Like Brite's "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves," "The Tree is My Hat" is a first-person narrative by an American in the Third World, and has at its center an ancient non-Western religion and the narrator's relationship with one of its dangerous deities.  Wolfe's story is more complicated, though, told in the form of a diary and not quite in chronological order, and our main character is not at all aloof--the story is about his intimate human (and inhuman!) relationships.  It also has a conventional man versus nature, man versus society, and man versus himself plot.

It is sad to see a cover that is so lazy

Our narrator's name is Baden, and, appropriately enough, because like numerous other Wolfe first-person narrators, he is an immoral person and an unreliable narrator, everybody calls him "Bad" for short.  Bad, for example, admits to being a vicious liar.

Bad works for a US government agency whose (ostensible?) mission is to provide assistance to other countries. After a trip to Africa, where he caught a chronic disease (like malaria, I suppose) he has been sent to some little Polynesian island.  Bad wants to get back with his estranged wife Mary, and even while he is in the process of doing so via e-mail he has a sexual relationship with a local woman.

Besides the native woman, Bad becomes friendly with the native king of the island, a Christian missionary named Rob, and an ancient shark god named Hanga.  (And exchanges e-mails with a psychic, who gives him warnings of danger--Wolfe crams lots of characters into this 24-page story!)  The missionary, who has been on the island for years, gives us the lowdown on the shark god and the island's history.  In ancient times, Rob claims, a great civilization in an unspecified location was ruled by a tyrannical and bloodthirsty aristocracy, who waged war and sacrificed peasants in order to appease a bloodthirsty god.  Finally, the commoners rose up and threw the aristocrats out--the aristocrats resettled on the island in which this story takes place, bringing their god with them.

Hanga appears in human form to Bad, and sees in Bad a kindred spirit--in an unsettling ritual they become blood brothers!  In a line that will thrill libertarian and conservative readers, Bad equates the U.S. government with the murderous Polynesian aristocrats:

...I had to wonder about people like me, who work for the federal government.  Would we be driven out someday, like the people Rob talked about?  A lot of us do not care any more about ordinary people than they did.

When Mary gets to the island all hell breaks loose, and in some effectively creepy and then horrifying scenes, Bad, Mary, and their children are tormented and then attacked by the shark god--there are numerous horrendous casualties!

Perhaps my favorite scene comes a little before the catastrophic ending sections, and I think it exemplifies the feel of the story.  Late at night Bad sees what he calls in his diary a UFO, but we readers can tell from Bad's description that it must be his buddy Hanga, in flying shark form!

Like a lot of Wolfe stories, this one is kind of like a jigsaw puzzle, in that you get all the pieces, but you don't pull them out of the box in the order in which they fit together.  It can take a second read to slot them all together and see the big picture. Also, as usual with Wolfe, it makes sense to pay close attention to every sentence; there is no fat or filler in this story.  Besides airing some of his political views, Wolfe also talks about God and His relationship with man, and about World War II, which, as with a lot of history buffs, apparently fascinates Wolfe.  There is also a surprising little joke which I didn't notice until looking through the story the fourth or fifth time--Mary's maiden name seems to be have been "Mary Christmas!"

Another gem from the master which gets better and yields more pleasure to the reader the harder he or she works at it.  Bravo!

**********

Worthwhile horror stories.  In our next episode it's back to the pre-war era for some horror stories by M. R. James, whom Otto Penzler suggests was "arguably the greatest writer of supernatural stories who ever lived!"

Click to zoom in and see if any of your faves are available for the low low price of 48 cents!

I'm back on the titans of British literature beat!

I recently spent a day walking around Manhattan--according to the little "Health" feature on my iPhone I walked over 13 miles. One of the places I visited was The Strand, the famous bookstore. Outside on the sidewalk I picked up two books from the "Special 48 cents" box, a biography of Oliver Goldsmith and a tiny paperback of two Kipling stories, a "Penguin 60" published in 1995.

The Penguin 60s, I glean from the back cover, were issued in celebration of the publisher's 60th anniversary, and cost 60 pence. There is a list of titles in this celebratory series in the back of the book (see below); for the most part they are by writers you would expect, like Melville and Camus and Updike, but I was surprised to see one dedicated to Poppy Z. Brite. (I've never actually read anything by Brite, though I know her name from horror anthologies.  Maybe I would like her--Will Errickson and Harlan Ellison do.)

The two Kipling stories included in my Penguin 60 (reduced to a mere Penguin 48, you might say) are linked by the fact that they "reflect Kipling's own experiences in life."  "Baa Baa, Black Sheep," the people at Penguin tell me, is a recounting of Kipling's youth, spent with a foster family in England, while "The Gardener" is an allegory of his suffering after his son was killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915.

"Baa Baa Black Sheep" (1888)

Five-year-old Punch and three-year-old Judy (curious pseudonyms for a brother and sister, perhaps reflecting the boy's somewhat anarchic and potentially violent life and character) are English children living in India, beloved by their parents and servants, given carte blanche to do whatever they want.  So being sent to live with a foster family back in England that consists of a tyrannical and petty religious bigot, "Aunty Rosa," and her cruel teen-aged son, Harry, is hard on poor Punch.  Every move he makes results in psychological and physical punishments from these two creeps, who take to calling him "Black Sheep" and fill his mind with visions of Hell and the idea that he is a sinful liar.

When he attends school, Punch's class snobbery ("'If I was with my father,' said Black Sheep, stung to the quick, 'I shouldn't speak to those boys.  He wouldn't let me.  They live in shops.  I saw them go into shops--where their fathers live and sell things"), and Harry's poisoning the minds of the other students against him, lead to fights and beatings.  Punch is under so much stress that he contemplates murder, arson, even suicide, and engages in brazen deceptions and makes terroristic threats in an effort to achieve some peace.  Aunty Rosa and Harry's harsh tutelage, which ostensibly has the object of making Punch behave virtuously, has in fact driven him to dreadful misbehavior.

One of Punch's few refuges is reading, and his father sends him gifts of books like the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson, though Aunty Rosa discourages him from spending time with his books and asking adults for help defining odd words--she thinks he is just "showing off."  "Uncle Harry," a veteran who talks incessantly of the Battle of Navarino and treats Punch decently, is another comfort, but he dies shortly after Punch and Judy's arrival.

After five years of this nightmare, Punch and Judy's parents come to England to collect them, and happy days are here again.  Mom's generous parenting is more conducive to making Punch behave than Aunty Rosa's tyranny ("...when one can do anything without question, where is the use of deception?")  However, Kipling reminds us that "when young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion and Despair, all the Love in the world will not take away that knowledge...." Perhaps we are expected to see these horrible years as formative ones, that it was in such miserable circumstances that Kipling's passion for literature and interest in some of his characteristic subject matter was aroused.

This is a solid story.  Like much of Kipling's work, besides being entertaining, at times moving, it provides the 21st century reader with insight into Victorian attitudes about religion, race and ethnicity (among the students are Jews and a black boy), and social class.

"The Gardener" (1925)

I have to admit this one brought a tear to even my cynical eye!

Helen Turrell raises her "nephew" Michael, whom she tells everyone is the product of a scandalous relationship of her dead brother's.  Michael wants to call Helen "Mummy," but she refuses to let him, because, she says, "it's always best to tell the truth."  (The propriety of telling untruths is a theme of both stories in this little collection.)

Michael is commissioned as an officer during the First World War, and like Kipling's own son, is killed and listed as "missing." Like Kipling, Helen becomes involved in the administration of war memorials.

Over a year after the end of the war Michael's body is found and interred in Belgium. Helen travels to the Continent to visit his grave; on her journey she meets other women on similar pilgrimages, witnesses their grief.  One such woman has to deceive others as to whose grave she is visiting, because the fallen soldier was her illicit lover.

At the cemetery Helen has trouble finding Michael's final resting place among the thousands of graves, and is directed by a gardener, who says, "Come with me...and I will show you where your son lies."  This gardener is, in fact, Jesus Christ; this is an allusion to John 20:15, a footnote tells me.

On a first reading I misinterpreted the story; I thought that Christ was telling Helen that, because she raised Michael and she and Michael loved each other, that in every way that matters, she was his mother.  What I was missing (and what I learned while googling around to see if the cemetery in the story was a real one) was that Michael was Helen's biological son, and all that business about him being her brother's son was an elaborate lie to cover up her own illicit affair.  There are plenty of clues that this is the case in the first few pages of the story, but I missed them, naively taking what Helen had to say at face value.

A moving, and (for dunderheads like me, at least) tricky, story.

***************

List of Penguin 60s

I've been impressed with the Kipling I've read in the past (I think The Light that Failed, which I read shortly before starting this blog, is great) and I think these two stories also have quite a lot to offer.  Presumably they are available for free online, but I don't regret purchasing this little Penguin 60, which is a curious artifact and a souvenir of my pleasant day in Manhattan--only the gods know when (or if) I will spend another such day.