furious ape! read book

the big eye by max erlich

2010-02-27T10:58:00.000-08:00

coming soon

retrotrash: konga by dean owen

2010-02-27T09:30:00.001-08:00

things go wrong by the second sentence: "In his lap he held a small chimpanzee, a strange little creature with a furred face and a long tail." The chimp is repeatedly called a "monkey," and when injected with a growth serum it "grows" into a gorilla! well, you can't fault the author for that last bit, that's from the movie. this is the novelization of that awful movie. at least the movie had the cartoony face of the gorilla mask and the hideous horse-visage of michael gough to make it interesting. the book has sex.

"He looked at the oval face, the soft moist inner walls of her open mouth, the tongue like pink silk. You've got to quit, he told himself. He was shaking. It was like a narcotic, turning off the cold logical mind of the scientist and opening a door to a coal furnace where phrenetic dwarfs screamed and stuck hot pins in his nerve ends."

time trap by rog phillips

2009-11-23T10:56:00.000-08:00

“In a kitchen designed for modern living he fell in love with Nelva instantly, in her red checkered house dress.”

a year before “world’s within” rog phillips published the equally alliterative “time trap,” but with a far superior cover! that cover smokes!

inventor ray bradley has accidentally created a device which sends telephone signals through time. to calibrate it he dials the same random number several times in the future and asks for the correct time and date. to the lady who answers years pass between these calls, so that by the last call she is 75. ray makes the mistake of dialing that number just one more time. the lady is now dead. a man answers. ray asks for the correct time and date. the man jokingly asks, “what is the correct time and date on your end?” ray tells him, not suspecting that he has just opened up a whole jumbo can of super-temporal three-eyed alien invasion whoop ass.

in the year 1999 three-eyed aliens called vargians have taken over the earth. ray has just revealed to a vargian that he is onto the secret of time travel, which they intend to keep for themselves. ray receives a telepathic warning (so he thinks) from a future woman calling herself nelva. she tells him he must use the principles he has discovered to create a real time machine and find her in 1999.

phillips wisely avoids making a bunch of silly predictions about the future. he does mention that there was a big zoot suit craze in the 1970’s. well, even that would have been better than disco. he solves a great mystery about the past, too. it turns out humans have not evolved and all those so-called cro-magnon fossils are merely the bones of ordinary men no different from modern day wrestlers.

ray falls in with a group of rebels plotting against the vargian invaders, lead by the erstwhile president of the united states. nelva is the president’s daughter and she’s been abducted by vargians. ray must rescue her. all this sounds pretty trite, but wait. the rebels aren’t really rebels, they are working for the vargians, who they feel are a boon to mankind because they have prevented wars. nelva isn’t the president’s daughter she’s the younger sister of the vargian queen. she hasn’t been kidnapped she is hiding—hiding in time not space. and the vargians aren’t really aliens they are mutant humans from the future. except they aren’t mutants and they are from the past. nothing is what it seems, including the book itself. it appears to be a science fiction adventure, what with time travel and aliens and ray guns, but nothing ever happens. it’s basically 160 pages of people chatting.

worlds within by rog phillips

2009-11-16T13:52:00.000-08:00

this puppy was published in 1950. that chick on the cover is edona, one of the most beautiful women in the world, which gives you some idea how sad life was in the 1950’s.

multiple planes occupy the same three-dimensional space but are separated by fractions of an inch in the fourth. an undiscovered element opens holes between these planes. this makes not only interdimensional travel possible, but space travel as well. the thrifty astronaut can simply shift his spaceship into another dimension with no pesky gravitational bodies, fly to the corresponding location in that dimension without using a lot of fuel, and zap back to his destination in this one. at one point hero lin carter (!) and edona opt to avoid traveling across the perilous dinosaur-plagued landscape of earth 5 by zapping to earth 3 and taking a bus.

the “white incans” mastered all this hooey eons ago. they ruled the whole world using interdimensional devices to broadcast thoughts from underground. genghis khan, adolph hitler and abraham merritt were just a few of their puppets.

yes, the mighty a. merritt, who would have been dead just 7 years when this was published, did not dream up “the face in the abyss,” it was an historical novel dictated to him without his knowledge by ancient incans using futuristic technology hiding in caverns two miles below the earth’s surface. plane six is occupied by winged serpents made of electricity who are the primordial enemies of the incans of earth 5. the gun that can kill them is hidden somewhere in an pyramid in earth 3. and the less you know about earth 2 the better.

all this dimension jumping and alternate history gets hard to follow. lin carter even moves whole earths from one dimension to another to avoid collision with a runaway planetoid. at the same time, the basic 1950’s love triangle is as easy as pie. will lin end up marrying good, sweet and faithful edona, or the sexy incan spitfire mara?

oh, take a wild guess.

retrotrash: psycho circus by andrew shaw (lawrence block)

2009-10-01T13:51:00.001-07:00

hot damn!

these 60’s sleaze novels tend to be amateurish and forgettable, but psycho circus rocks! the pace is quick, and the freaky nastiness just keeps on coming. there even seems to be an underlying theme here: sex and violence are two faces of the same primal being, and each invariably leads to the other. at times the prose is actually rather pretty:

“The next time she danced across the cone of moonlight, he whipped the leather around her left ankle and tripped her. She sprawled on her back. gasping for breath, arms and legs widespread. With a roar like Simba the lion, Miner pounced on her. With cannibalistic lust, they devoured each other. Their muted animal cries of lust floated over the empty arena and out into the still night where they blended indistinguishably with the restless cries of the animals caged in the menagerie.”

circus performers, we are told, are not as other folks. they are highly trained, highly strung athletes, showmen and perfectionists who stare down death everyday with the fierce hearts of tigers. (except for the clowns, who are pathetic losers.) because they live on the knife edge and because their little community is so incestuous, their passions erupt in perverse ways that would be horrifying to the drab, workaday townies. it is the lonely job of circus manager sam walton to keep these passions in check, and a secret.

for example:

the leader of the aerialists catches his little sister about to give up her virginity. he beats both parties to bloody messes. the sight of his own sister naked and covered in bruises gets him so turned on he rushes back to his trailer to screw his wife. the head lion tamer hates his pretty female assistant, so he whips her. she whips him back. the two are such experts that they whip one another’s clothes off, and screw in a field, covered with fresh wounds and blood. a circus employee attempts to rape the little woman from the freak show. townies mistake her for a child and beat the man almost to death. the townies get so turned on by this that they rush home to have sex immediately, some of them not even being able to wait that long and doing it in the grass.

women are getting beaten and molested right and left, but they get their own back too. when the trapeze artist discovers the joys of lesbian sex she poisons her husband with mushrooms. when the frigid and abused equestrienne finally fights back she beats her husband unconscious and gets turned on for the first time in her life, and goes after the stable boy, whip in hand. when the strongman tries to rape the slinky snake charmer her trained python squeezes him to death. she mounts him and rubs his blood over her breasts and comes at the moment he dies.

in the midst of all this gore and perversion block finds time to tell an elaborate, chapter-long joke. the middle-aged clown has never been with a woman, he gets his only kicks from wearing their clothes. a lengthy flashback explains how he got messed up this way. he spies a pair of panties he desperately wants, the only problem is a girl sitting on a park bench is wearing them. the girl has no idea he’s a transvestite, and he has no idea she’s a prostitute. another flashback reveals how she became what she is. seeing the clown looking up her skirt, she tells him she’ll give him what he wants but it’ll cost him. he gives her ten dollars, which is twice her usual rate. they sneak into the bushes. she removes her panties and spreads her legs and says come and get it. the clown says thank you very much and walks away with the panties.

ha ha ha!

when the roustabouts rape a local girl the town’s juvies come for revenge. they’re pissed and theye’ve got bike chains. but the truth is they are only aching to rape some of those circus girls themselves. the final chapter describes the carnage. by the time the sheriff arrives 10 people are dead and many others have been beaten and raped. but as sam walton realizes the following day lying in his hospital bed the circus is in his blood, and the show must go on!

i should have stayed home by horace mccoy

2009-07-19T12:23:00.000-07:00

i was never a huge fan of horace mccoy and this book didn't change my mind, but what a beautiful cover.

day of the triffids by john wyndham

2009-07-16T11:53:00.000-07:00

this 1952 reprint of john wyndham's masterpiece has one of the greatest covers ever painted. behold the glory.

i have to assume anyone viewing this has already devoured the book at least once so i will say no more about it. except this: i've had three dreams about triffids. i can't think of any other book that has given me even one.

retrotrash: let out the beast by leonard fischer

2009-07-05T22:12:00.001-07:00

if i keep buying obscure and neglected books like this eventually i'm bound to come across a forgotten masterpiece. this wasn't it. this atom bomb novel published in 1950 takes place in the distant future of 1965. americanada and europasia are engaged in a cold war. greg robinson sits on his lime green sofa smoking a vitagrette waiting for news of the conflict to come over his telefacsimile machine. you have to give the author credit for his prescience--he correctly fortold the popularity of lime green sofas.

the bombs fall and civilization is destroyed. greg and his wife hillary, along with other ragged, starving survivors, revert to their primeval instincts to survive. it's hard to tell what the point is. in one strange passage the author tells us an occurance took place which speaks volumes as to the high character of greg robinson. he is spying on some survivors he plans to attack and rob of their food and women. he watches as they slaughter a little girl and make a soup out of her. he is so disgusted and furious that he kills them all, including the women. although he drags the pot of soup home for his own brood to feast upon he does not have any himself, even though he has not eaten for three days.

that's what heroes are made of.

even the civilized survivors who have banded together in the cities to rebuild are chopping off the heads of people they kill for trophies.

near the novel's end greg spells it all out: "better to be a beast and not be cursed with the mind of a man. a beast didn't think . . . it knew no sorrow . . . better to be a beast and know the satisfaction of a full stomach." greg roars "let out the beast" in all caps and "screamed a mad defiance at the heavens." thus the title. eight pages later he's dead.

there's an ironic little twist at the end but you don't really need to know about it.

2009-06-17T14:00:00.001-07:00

retrotrash: eat them alive by pierce nace

2009-06-12T11:30:00.000-07:00

earthquake! tidal wave! fire! "halves of dogs and people" tossing on the waves like kindling! suddenly hordes of giant prehistoric praying mantises are crawling up through the fissures in the earth, released from their million-year subterranean sleep! and now the lucky souls who survived the earthquake the tidal wave and the fires are devoured alive by the ravenous insects!

that brings us to page seven.

dyke mellis watches as his neighbor, kello, is eaten alive:

"how can i be so tied to the sight that i can't look away, that i want to see every bite the mantis takes of old kello? why do i want to watch the creature as he eats the flesh and sucks the blood? . . . i only know the feeling is in me, is taking me over . . . now i've got something to live for, because i love watching a man being eaten by a monster!"

so does the author, apparently, because the lovingly detailed description lasts two pages.

the mellifluously-named dyke mellis is a two bit criminal and sadist who tortures and kills innocent people for kicks. he's five-foot-two, covered in scars, never stops talking to himself and has no penis. clearly one of the most appealing characters in fiction. he captures a giant mantis which he plans to train to do his killing for him.

"he muttered aloud, 'a name. the thing's got to have a name. animals learn their names right off. when i was a kid my dogs always came when i called them. i'll teach this mantis to know who he is and to come when i call. but what will it be? how do you name a beast whose sole purpose is acting as your instrument of boiling revenge, of mind-racking torture, of slow and horrrendous death? well, how about slayer? this man-sized bug is going to slay for me . . . i can already see that both he and i will like the killing so well that we'll spend the rest of our lives doing it. slayer will be the torturer, but i'll be the watcher, the enjoyer, the cheerer-on. i'll love watching my great green mantis as he rips into bodies and eats them part by part. i'll feel excited, obsessed . . . i'll help slayer gouge out thier eyes a rip off their ears and every semblance of their maleness.'"

yeah, i sometimes talk to myself too, but it's usually just things like "where did i put my keys?"

around page 76 we get a second two-page-long description of the mantis eating a man alive, this time more of a catalog of which parts he eats in which order. he likes to save the brain for last.

dyke needs to keep slayer caged, but he needs to travel for supplies too. slayer will only eat live prey. how can he keep slayer fed while he's away? well, he mixes up blood and sugar and leaves a trail through the jungle, right into slayers cage. every jungle animal likes one or the other, so a steady stream of them will just keep walking right into the cage to be devoured the whole time he's gone.

dyke goes to an indian village and just 10 pages after watching the mantis eat a man, watches a man eat . . . a racoon. he shares the raw bloody heart with his girlfriend. "they were a handsome couple." six pages later dyke is back home watching slayer eat a baby puma lured into his cage by the sugar, apparetnly.

"'chew him up, slayer! . . . learn to love flesh and blood more everytime you kill! . . . eat, slayer, eat your fill! get all the blood you can out of that pup! i like to watch you chew, you marvelous killer!'"

10 pages later there's a lenghty description of how slayer eats a snake, first rippping it open to eat the eggs that the snake ate still in its belly. the author is really stuck for ideas at this point, and less than halfway through the novel. things eat other things. 250 pages.

if dyke mellis seemed too good to be true before, get this. to protect himself from being eaten by his own pet mantis, he smears his body all over with a mixture of all the foul-smelling things he can find, including "polecat spray he had once caught in a can when a skunk let go at him."

caught in a can! how could he even do that? why would he even do that? why would he have saved it? just in case he one day caught a giant praying mantis he wanted to train to kill people? and just how many skunks and raccoons are wandering around the tropical jungles of south american islands? i didn't even mention the aardvarks. three times the author writes that aardvarks are native to columbia.

now dyke, the tiny white man who stinks to high heaven, goes to a little indian village and convinces the people to get on his boat and sail to monster island with him. by this time they all know about the giant mantises and are terrified of them, but dyke assures them it's safe and they believe him and grab their babies and climb on board.

"clouds raced above the island . . . they looked heavy with rain and hail. perhaps they were even brewing a fresh quake."

clouds cause earthquakes.

the author really has his rhythm going now. ten pages after the snake-eating, the sea-goers watch as a giant mantis eats another giant mantis on the beach. now two more giant mantises eat that one, ripping open his belly and eating the undigested pieces of the mantis he just ate "now rendered twice-eaten."

what happens next is beyond ludicrous. the indians file off the boat onto the beach right into the claws of the waiting insects, then act shocked when they are eaten alive. one man even starts up a conversation with dyke as he's being devoured, asking if it was all a ruse or just an honest mistake. the mantises rip babies in half. they snatch the heads off men and crack them open on rocks to get the brains. they snatch the breasts off women:

"the breast stood upright in his claws, the brown nipple pointed toward the clouded sky, the round flesh quivering in the creature's hold. the mantis raised the breast high, sucking it for the blood that ran from it, drinking every drop he could pull from the soft flesh . . . before the mantis rent the organs from the chest and stomach cavities, he bent low over the girl and filled his maw with all that stamped the body as female. watching, dyke thought, god, i could eat that part myself."

dyke's reaction to all the carnage: "he stood on the rock, raised his hands high, placed his feet wide apart, and shouted, 'this is beauty, this is happiness . . . i'm rich, i'm magnificent, i'm a human being with human joy all over me!'"

an uniterrupted series of slaughters follows. dyke packs 10 mantises into a truck and goes on a road trip to get revenge on the four men who castrated him 11 years ago. in texas. by a happy and totally plausible coincidence they all live in columbia now. along the way he stops at villages to let the mantises feed. they rip the breasts off the women and the women run around in circles screaming. when he tracks down his enemies it's always the same. they beg him please do whatever you want to me but spare the women and children. no, dyke says, it has to be this way, you must watch your wife and children being eaten alive first, then it's your turn. not only that but all the servants, dinner guests and even pets must be eaten alive. then dyke loots the place.

he returns to his island paradise with his vengeance satisfied, tremendous wealth, and an army of killer insects. the last line of the chapter reads "could anything unhappy occur after all this happiness?"

there's 15 more pages so i'm guessing yes.

one morning dyke awakes to find the island in a state of war. enemy mantises are killing his own. it turns out one of the men he killed had a brother who has now come for revenge the only way he knew how: by training his own army of killer mantises! he confronts dyke and slayer inside the house and explains it all.

"i made myself a suit of armor that they couldn't bite through--it's outside your door now--and i took them a lot to eat."

no explanation is given as to why, in the middle of a battle of thousands of giant flesh-eating praying mantises, he took off the suit of armor and left it outside. you know what happens. they both get eaten. but it's a happy death for dyke mellis. as he lies dying he thinks "oh, well, no matter. i have lived my life. i have met my most important goals."

that's the end of the book, so i guess the moral is reach for the stars.

he closest thing i can compare this to is a guy n. smith book, but as i recall (it's been 20 years since i've read one) they were actually better than this. or maybe j.g. ballard's crash. it's a safe bet pierce nace is a pseudonym (not to mention an anagram--you can figure it out) and no one seems to know who really wrote this, or rather the fellow who did doesn't want anyone to know.

retrotrash: blood jungle by cort martin

2009-06-07T14:24:00.000-07:00

"the memory of theresa was still fresh and fresher still was her bullet-torn body a few minutes after they had killed her, pulsing out its life in spurts of sobbbing blood."

i was mesmerized by the hideousness of the cover--the orange and yellow color scheme, the cartoon typography, the topless filipina grandmother with the spider egg-sac on her head and enough mascara to doll-up a blimp. i thought, this is the kind of classy literature i need to read to improve myself as a human being.

"a ball of dissatisfaction was forming in his mind, rolled there by the events of his life."

rape, racism and flashbacks, and flashbacks within flashbacks. that pretty much sums up the book. all three come together in this fine example. mari, the guerrilla girl, recalls losing her virginity under the occupation:

"through slitted eyes, major nakamura saw mari shake her head . . . 'you wirr be obedient to japanese sordier,' he snarled . . . seeing the beautiful girl struggling, his lust was aroused and mari cringed momentarily when she saw the strange glitter in his eyes . . . 'now we wirr see how firpina girr rikes japanese rove.'"

yep.

let's just skip to the final sex scene between the two major characters. see if you can spot any clumsy prose:

"for a woman her age, she's still pretty good. the thought cracked in his mind . . . mari was no young virgin . . . he looked at the way her trousers met in a vee, where the honey of her twenty-odd years was most important. his eyes burned through the uniform to the softness of her, the flat hard tummy, the firm torso, the nipples on her breasts."

thank goodness! those nipples are right where they're supposed to be. but we will be reminded once more just to calm any lingering doubts:

". . . his lips were busy, bringing her excitement flowing from the nipples of her breasts. he groaned with impatience to enter her flesh. she guided him deftly to the place where the honey buttled and sang, and they coupled against the green, their bodies humping to a rhythm unwatched by animals."

first, this dude really seems to like honey. second, what does that even mean? where the honey buttled and sang? is he comparing her vagina to a singing butler? a rhythm unwatched by animals? i never assumed any animals were watching to begin with. maybe to be clear he should tell us everything that isn't happening. are they on fire? i can no longer be sure. i suggest a rewrite that goes like this:

" . . . their bodies humping to a rhythm unwatched by animals, uncovered by cake frosting, unspinning like a disco ball, also they were not in outer space at this time."

"'come!' he yelled as they began to turn inside out on the hillock of their passion. he burned inside her and mari gasped as blood came to her lips, the salt stinging the small fresh wounds. and they both screamed together at the final slap of themselves and agonized sweet hurt thrill crash smash of that one moment of eternity when thigh against thigh the universe spills into a thimble of time."

for a minute the author seems to be going all kerouac on our ass, but then he whips out the old tried and true "thimble of time" metaphor and we can rest easy again.

you'll be happy know that 10 pages later they're both dead.

retrotrash: lost city of the damned by alec rivere (charles nuetzel)

2009-06-03T22:05:00.000-07:00

charles nuetzel wrote this book in a week. sex on page one. murder on page two. sex on page three. the average paragraph is two sentences long.

"he was brutal and cruel--the way she liked a man."

"a shudder ran through her voluptuous form."

those are two typical paragraphs. there's good guys and bad guys, there's a virgin and a whore. things happen so fast you'll have a hard time keeping them straight. everybody has guns. everybody has sex. there's a lost city full of treasure and a statue that shoots a disintegrating beam from its eye. it might have something to do with atlantis or maybe aliens, but we never find out. nuetzel isn't trying to steal work from abraham merritt. half the characters are killed when the city collapses and the rest are decapitated by headhunters. the two survivors do it in the jungle and get away with the treasure.

retrotrash: delta mistress by t.r. young

2009-05-28T23:08:00.000-07:00

another pec book with another kick-ass cover. it seemed obvious the same artist was at work on all the pec books i have and i wondered who they were and why they were never credited. someone smarter than myself already solved this mystery and you can read their story here:

http://efanzines.com/EK/eI19/index.htm#weaver

the book can be summed up in three words you probably say 10 times in the average day: cornpone lesbian nothingness. because this dirty dirty sex book is from 1966 it doesn't have any sex in it. you might imagine the author would succumb to temptation and fill the void with some sort of plot. usually these "adult" books revolved around some criminal activity. if i wrote one i'd have to introduce an element of the fantastic--ghosts or robots or . . . leprechauns. something!

but t.r. young, the samuel beckett of sleaze, is made of stronger stuff. nothing happens. nothing happens. nothing happens. two hot southern chicks do it on the kitchen table while the biscuits are cooking. the end. for 160 pages. it didn't take me 160 words.

my favorite part was the part about the biscuits.

retrotrash: father of the amazons by pete lewis

2009-05-27T14:07:00.000-07:00

you won't beleive it, but this book is about an astronaut who crashes on a planet of amazon women and is forced to have sex with them! i know, right?! but rev oliver is such a manly man that he also finds time to kill pterodactyls, fight knife-wielding drug addicts, and fall in love. i've done two of those things myself but i won't tell you which ones.

now the amazon women came from earth 150 years ago in a bioprobe. but there was another bioprobe--a russian bioprobe! rev gets kidnapped by dirty sneaky communist amazons. the cold war rages in space.

"dido . . . approached him naked, except for sandals and a spear. her breasts jutted out and pointed accusingly at him."

they'll do that.

escaping the communists, rev gets mixed up with cave people and attacked by tyrannosaurus rex and something weirder, a reptile slash lion with fish scales and vestigial wings. why the cover artist didn't toss one of those in we may never know. when rev gets back his girlfriend, sarah, who thought he was dead, strips.

"why the black panties? were you mourning for me?" he quipped.
"yes, you dope!"

rev solves all dilemmas. he ends the cold war by restoring communication between the communists, who are moslty decent folks duped by their leaders, and the amazons. using the "quantgun" from his rocket he blasts his way through dinosaur territory to test the source of the water for radioactivity. this is why the amazon men can't satisfy the women. using parts from his destroyed rocket he repairs the century-and-a-half old bioprobe so he and sarah can return to earth and procure the technology to decontaminate the water and restore normal sex relations to the amazon planet.

"you've got it wrong, baby. men are still boss back on earth."

retrotrash: sex madness by dave king

2009-05-22T19:25:00.000-07:00

another pec book with an amazing cover. i'll spare you what's inside. i read it so you don't have to.

retrotrash: another man's hell by william e. kemper, jr.

2009-05-21T23:30:00.000-07:00

this forlorn little book looked so neglected and obscure i had to read it. also because the cover appears to have been painted by a 10-year-old, and suggests that a pretty redhead lounging on a tropical beach is somehow "hell." the hopeful editor writes:

"this is a science-fiction story for science-fiction fans. this is a 'i found a million dollars' story for the dreamer-readers. this is a romancer story for the romancers . . . other publishers may have looked at it--but we published it because we felt it was what you were looking for. because we fell you will enjoy reading it--will enjoy the hour or two of escape--escape into someone elses' world..."

not so much.

dude gets drugged in 1963, wakes up in 2093. everyone wears unitards and i.d. tags. computers make all the decisions. poverty and war are extinct, and crime nearly so. so what makes this utopia one man's hell? well, nobody smokes or listens to calypso music anymore, and he just finds unitards unappealing. this free-thinking rebel falls in with a band of dissidents who rage mildly against the benevolent machine. they flee to the countryside and start their own little hooterville. the final chapter finds our hero stocking up on supplies at the general store. he buys ten pounds of tobacco. he was serious about that smoking business.

retrotrash: wanton web by dave king

2009-05-14T13:29:00.000-07:00

oh what a glorious freakin' cover! that's not just a metaphor either it's an actual scene from the book. bored hollywood couples get into s&m and get blackmailed and somebody gets murdered and somebody gets framed. very tedious stuff but the ending was cool. the innocent man can only stop the evil nympho from shooting him by screwing her until she's so exhausted she loses her grip on the revolver.

"valerie considine had only two things in mind--sex and death--and she did not mean to release her hold on either."

now if you're confused about orgy etiquette, what i gleaned from this book is that the first thing you should do is hit the buffett and make yourself a big old pastrami sandwich. see, i'm a vegetarian, that's why i don't get invited to orgies.

the torture garden by octave mirbeau

2009-05-09T19:47:00.000-07:00

of course you know the work, but check out the amazing cover on this 1955 paperback. it combines the three things you love most in the world: surrealism, sadomasochism and healthy snacks!

i'm guessing.

retrotrash: the ant men by eric north

2009-05-04T17:00:00.000-07:00

i'll read any book with giant bugs on the cover. it's a sickness.

unfortunately this paperback reprint goes to some lengths (including a totally fallacious synopsis on the back cover) to conceal the novel's origin as hardcover "juvenile fiction." the ant men turn out to be pretty decent chaps who communicate using telepathy and fight giant mantises. now the red ant men worship a giant frog but the black ant men worship fire, so it is immediately obvious to the scientist that the black ant men are evolving forward into men whereas the red ant men are evolving backward into, um, ants.

that's why he's a scientist and you're not.

retrotrash: into plutonian depths by stanton a. coblentz

2009-05-04T13:54:00.000-07:00

what amazing cover art. that is just freakin' gorgeous. that cover is so magnificent there doesn't even need to be a book in there. sadly, there is.

things go south on page one. the narrator refers to jules verne and h.g. wells as "romancers" and says that although they "encouraged" him, it was "prolonged and serious scientific study" that convinced him interplanetary travel was really possible.

but jules verne was very scientific in his description of space travel, as he was in everything he wrote. h.g. wells not so much. for example, in "first men in the moon" the adventurers create a substance impervious to gravity and build a spherical spaceship with shutters which open and close all around so that they can use the gravitational pull of distant planets to navigate through space. they land on the moon, wander away from the ship and and get lost, and are taken captive by the natives who live in vast underground caverns. but i digress . . .

so the adventurers create a substance which is impervious to gravity and build a spherical spaceship with shutters which open and close all around so that they can use the gravitational pull of distant planets to navigate through space. they land on pluto, wander away from the ship and get lost, and are captured by the natives who live in vast underground caverns.

it gets worse.

pluto is inhabited by human-like beings with lamps on their heads. the lamp-heads are convinced nothing exists outside their subterranean world, and the astronauts cannnot convince them otherwise. the girl zandaye is plain by plutonian standards, but one hot property to the earthmen. sure, she has a lamp on her head and 14 fingers, but when in rome . . . a council of wise plutonians decide their atavistic visitors might be cured of their moral failings through drastic cerebral surgery (to stimulate the "superlampular gland"). zandaye encourages them to submit to this surgery, but they choose flight instead.

now at the risk of betyraying the horrifying depths of my own tragic geekiness, every word of this is totally ripped off from yet another h.g. wells tale, "the country of the blind."

stanton a. coblentz spends one page dissing h.g. wells and the next 75 stealing from him shamelessly! this brings us to the half way point of the novel and the author has apparently begun to fear for his immortal soul. in a desperate attempt to redeem himself he tries to fly some biting social satire in the mix. we learn that bankers are the poorest people on pluto because all they have is lots of money, and artists are self-obsessed bores. the word "swiftian" does not leap to mind. the greatest and most revered men on pluto are instead the poets. it will shock you to learn coblentz was a poet when he wasn't writing . . . whatever this is.

the astronauts are recaptured and their doom seems inescapable. but lo!, they have unknowingly brought with them from earth the mumps, for which the plutonians have no immunity. nevermind that coblentz has stolen yet another device from wells, the point is the last 30 pages of the novel are nothing but a series of conversations about the mumps! i am not making this up. thirty solid pages of people talking about the mumps!

worst book ever!

retrotrash: sojarr of titan by manly wade wellman

2009-05-02T18:44:00.000-07:00

imagine "tarzan" in space. now toss in some "at the earth's core." in space. finally add a chapter from "a princess of mars." in space.

manly wade wellman, better known for his regional horror stories, also had some science fiction pots to boil. this little pulp from 1941 has an awesome cover but it's just a bunch of edgar rice burroughs cliches lacking the epic sweep. bonus points for carniverous plants, though.

it begins like tarzan but ends like a shirley temple movie. the astronauts' spoiled niece has stowed away on the rocket. now get this bit of mush as she is about to return home:

"'then i'm ready to go,' she said, resigned. 'i stowed away for titan as a bored, thoughtless girl. i thought i'd have fun. instead i ran into danger, sorrow, work, and a whole curriculum of moral lessons, by which i'm going to profit . . . now good-by all.'"

as the rocket zips away they spy from the window sojarr making out with warrior-girl vara. this is the last line of the book:

"'mmmmm,' observed pelton. 'those old atlanteans evidently taught their children how to kiss.'"

oh yeah, the people of titan came from atlantis. did i mention that? well, they did.

retrotrash: corpus earthling by louis charbonneau

2009-04-29T07:46:00.001-07:00

english professor paul cameron is obsessed with two things: the murderous alien voices he hears inside his head and screwing pretty co-eds. is he crazy or the most rational man ever? he seeks the answer from three sources: he consults a swami, a scientist, and he does drugs. yep, that about covers it.

the aliens are real and if you've seen the outer limits episode based on this book you already know the sneaky way they came to earth. cameron exterminates them and finds true love with the girl next door.

seeds of life by john taine

2009-04-18T22:30:00.000-07:00

misanthropic mathematician eric temple bell was taking no prisoners in 1931. the same year he published "the time stream" about a planet called eos nearly destroyed by love, he also published the far darker, more realistic and much superior "seeds of life" about a planet called earth nearly destroyed by greed.

"money dies hard--if it ever dies. . . business, he saw in one transcendent flash of revelation, is immortal. man may have a soul, the race a purposeful mind, but lucre has a belly and it has all-consuming powers of digestion."

bell's far-fetched story relies on the premise that certian financiers are so obsessed with money that they will endanger the very planet they live on and all its inhabitants for a quick buck. well, that's why they call it science fiction.

the ostensible hero of the novel is a physicist called crane. his drunken, resentful lab assistant tries to commit suicide in the way that will most inconveniece his boss--by frying himself with 20 million volts of x-rays. instead he is transformed into an evolutionarily-advanced superman, tall, dark and handsome, and with an intellect vastly superior to that of any human who has ever lived before him. he is truely a new man, with the merest germ of a memory of where he came from. he adopts the name de soto. in a single day at the public library he masters all of theoretical physics and higher mathematic, and finds it lacking. in fact, he finds all of humanity lacking.

the following day he presents himself at the foundation where he was previoulsy employed. although he has no credentials his genius is immediately apparent. he is placed in charge of the lab where he was once a broom-jockey, and his former boss is made his assistant. adding insult to injury, de soto uses his dark charms to seduce away crane's sweetheart, alice. crane warns alice that there's something sinister about de soto, and she will regret marrying him. she does so anyway.

now look at taine's take on some ragged cliches.

one might expect crane to carry his torch for alice, rescue her from the evil de soto and win back her heart. instead, crane realizes that he prefers the bachelor life, staying up all night, that sort of thing. de soto comes to love alice, much to his own surprise. and she dies giving birth to de soto's mutant offspring.

"brown of course told the heartbroken father that alice had died naturally--as, indeed, she had. nature, however, is hell."

there's another great cliche, the old soul bit. yes, mankind has it's failings and wars and what not, but we also have a saving grace that no other species has: a soul! here is de soto's answer to that:

"man, he learned to his astonishment, had a soul. who knows . . . but that the carnivorous reptiles, who had two or more less centered nervous systems, had not a pair of souls? . . . the soul of man, if it exists is, he concluded, an abortion that should be chloroformed at birth."

it's almost epigrammatically nietzschean. or nietzscheanly epigrammatic. anyway it's something.

de soto is so disgusted by the pettiness of his species that he concocts an elaborate plan to . . . well, i can't give away something the author works so hard to conceal until the final chapter, but trust me it's gleefully grotesque. taine can deal in cliches when he chooses. here he takes the whole mad scientist doomsday bit and does something so great with it that the little serial killer in your heart will be dancing a jig.

by the novel's end de soto emerges as the real hero, if a twisted, tragic one, while crane becomes something of a minor character. maybe this was taine's plan all along. maybe it was the result of the book originally being published in installments and the author growing increasingly fond of de soto as he wrote.

there's even dinosaurs and giant black widow spiders! but do not expect any epic battles between man and monster. the monsters are terrifying in other ways. taine seems to have been repusled by the fecundity and degradability of living matter. read "the greatest adventure" to see what i mean.

anyone interested in reading john taine is encouraged to begin here. this book totally rocks!

the time stream by john taine

2009-04-07T13:52:00.000-07:00

eric temple bell was a highly regarded mathematician who led a shamefull double life as a science fiction writer. the only one of his books easily found today is "the greatest adventure" thanks to the ace mass market paperback with its awesome cover. perhaps deservedly less well known is "the time stream," originally published as a serial begining in 1931.

a group of friends living in san francisco are capable of entering "the time stream" and travelling to another world in another eon. this world is called eos. it is a perfect society based on pure reason. all citizens of eos have absolute freedom to do whatever they wish, but because they are so rational they always choose to do the right thing. this adherence to rationality extends to love and marriage. eosians only take as lovers people they are exactly suited for. at this point the modern reader, so used to dystopian science fiction, might expect that eos conceals some dark secret that is crushing to the human soul. but no. these are the good guys. eos is so perfect that the men who travel there consider this world a mere "shadow life" compared to it.

when a headstrong young woman falls in love with a man who is not her perfect mate, it threatens to destroy the entire civilization. so say the prophecies of the ancients, and so say the terrifying future battlefield visions seen by the travellers in the time stream. try as they might they cannot dissuade her, and as it goes against everything the people of eos believe in to deny anyone their free will, these brave preservers of all that is good must find a way to destroy the entire planet rather than let it fall into the chaos and ruin and war that unreasoning love will bring about.

in the end they show mercy, defy the ancients, and only exterminate most of the people on eos, leaving a handfull to rebuild the perfect society once again.

back on earth, san francisco is devestated by the great quake. the travellers are so impressed by the fortitude and unflappable good cheer of the san franciscians that they decide this world is not so bad after all, and they will devote their lives to making it better. one will pursue the nobel calling of physics, and learn to tame nature to man's will. another will sound the call for prison reform. another will be a war correspondent, and broadcast the nasty truth about all the bloodshed. and the last will devote his life to the study of eugenics!

the whole thing ends with a poem by shelly. because you know what a rational guy he was.

a very strange book that rails against the horrors of war, then posits love as the cause of war, then suggests that war can be avoided by simply killing everyone. to be fair, eugenics was a popular idea in 1931, in fact a "liberal" idea. nevertheless readers today will come away from all this with rather mixed feelings.

retrotrash: the marrow eaters by harris moore

2009-04-02T06:48:00.000-07:00

this book seemed to have it all: a topless chick, a monster, crazy-ass lab equipment! and what a great title. it turned out to be the most tedious nonsense imaginable. structured more like a bad movie than a bad book, each chapter finds the monster killing a fresh new non-character while on the trail of the main characters. problem is these doomed nobodies are more memorable than the survivors. there's a wise old indian and a magic amulet. yawn.

retrotrash: superdoll by leo august

2009-04-02T06:26:00.000-07:00

oh, the wacky sixties, when there were only three channels on tv and all they showed were westerns. paperback books were popular entertainment. like this one, about a sexy robot spy who shoots bullets from one nipple, napalm from another, and lasers from her navel. her mission: to infiltrate a gang of pet-napping bikers by screwing them. exactly as good as it sounds.

your world tomorrow

2009-01-09T06:17:00.000-08:00

part of the fun of reading old science fiction is the technological predictions that were silly and wrong. but imagine a book about future technology written by actual science writers. imagine that "over 3,000 manufacturers, engineers and scientists were polled in preparation of the material of this book." and imagine it is not a book about the distant future but the very near future. surely that book would be dead-on. welcome to your world tomorrow, published in 1944 by mechanix illustrated. this book assures americans that as soon as the war in europe is over everything is going to be a-ok!

"a great day is dawning. it is the day in which you and i and our children will live out the rest of our lives. it is not a visionary day in the dim remoteness of the future. it is, in fact, tomorrow."

so let's take a look at what life in the 1950's was like.

chapter 1: your next automobile

your next automobile will be shaped like "an elongated egg." the body will be made of plastic manufactured from soy beans which will self-repair minor dents and scratches. if you don't want a plastic car you may have a plywood or magnesium one.

the interior will be so roomy you can arrange the seats just like furniture in your living room. don't worry, the seats will have frames "so light a woman can handle them." there will be room for two beds in your car.

the windshield will be a bubble wrapping around and over your head which admits "the health-giving ultra-violet rays of the sun," but if the sun is too bright you can turn the top of the bubble opaque by pressing the polarizing button. windows will not go down because the car is equipped with something called "air conditioning" which renders the notion archaic. the lights on your instrument panel will be ultraviolet.

the engine will be the size of a motorcycle engine, but "it will out-perform your present motor as a greyhound bus pulls away from a st. bernard." the exact greyhound bus to st. bernard ratio is not given. i'm guessing it must be something like 3 to 1. and you'll get between 45 and 60 miles to the gallon.

your car may have seats equipped with safety belts.

the price of this miracle automobile will be between 300 and 700 dollars.

and the road itself? dividing lines will be painted with with glow-in-the dark paint. there will be no traffic signals, but radio transmitters which activate red, yellow and green lights on your dashboard. how this helps pedestrians trying to cross the road is unclear.

chapter 2: your peacetime house

carpenters will be happy to learn that although "house-building has been one of the stubborn holdouts against mass-production, assembly-line techniques that have made american industry great," this situation is rapidly changing. your next home will be completely modular. it will consist of only 27 pieces with all the plumbing and wiring already built in. even the light bulbs will already be screwed in. it will be assembled in an afternoon. or you may opt for the "accordion house" which comes fully assembled on a truck. you just have to stretch it out.

even the chairs, sofa and beds may already be built in, which means if you feel like rearranging furniture you'll have to go out and do it in the car. in fact, with drawers, shoes racks, and shelves built right into the walls, you can simply get rid of most of your furniture.

needless to say these new houses will be made of plastic, plywood, magnesium and aluminum. do not imagine they will be ugly however. plastics and aluminum can be colored to "contribute immeasurably to the cheerful brightness of a room." these houses will be better than your old wooden ones. they will be perfectly insulated, invulnerable to entry by mice or insects, fireproof, and they will never need painting inside or out. they will cost about $2,000.

chapter 3: coming household equipment

you will never sleep under a blanket again because you will spend the night bathed in the warm glow of ultraviolet radiation! after your morning shower there will be no need for towels, you'll be dried off completely by . . . ultraviolet radiation! there's a photograph of two little girls playing with dolls under the protective glow of an ultraviolet light.

your kitchen door will open automatically when you approach it. you'll drink coffee from "a gadget that turns itself on automatically." they hadn't come up with a name for that automatic coffee making gadget yet. you'll read the morning paper printed by a radio-facsimile machine. you may have guessed all the usual kitchen things are built into the walls so that "the business of serving food becomes as orderly as the assembly of an automobile."

you may have a refrigerator made of polarizing glass which becomes transparent at the touch so you can see what's in there without opening the door. or you may have a refrigerator made of, um, plywood, to match the rest of the decor. your refrigerator will make ice. your refrigerator will quick-freeze fresh foods for when you want to serve your guests "several pike you caught last may, or a side of venison or a brace of pheasants shot during the hunting season several months ago." why people in this futuristic space-age kitchen are eating like hillbillies is not explained.

food will not spoil in the refrigerator or bread box thanks to built-in ultraviolet lights! a special lamp over the sink "sprays ultra-violet rays like machine gun bullets" to keep dishes sanitary.

radioactive plates and glasses will always be sanitary because they will kill bacteria.

the walls in your house are grey but the light bulbs all colors of the rainbow. in this way you can "repaint" your house any time you wish simply by changing bulbs.

"here's another lamp which, when you turn it on, gives forth no light at all. that's what you think! the light is there, all right, but you can't see it because it is in the invisible ultra-violet range of the spectrum." why? because fluorescent patterns are impregnated into the wall itself! these patterns only become visible when the goddamn ultraviolet lamp is on.

we are simply going to be bombarded by "health-giving" ultraviolet radiation all day, every day! we will become supermen! brown, leathery, cancerous supermen!

virtually everything in your house will glow in the dark so you'll never stub your toe at night.

"furniture will be mass produced as efficiently as the motor car, in standardized, inexpensive patterns." the book admits that some people will cling to their antiques, but offers hope that this foolish habit will eventually die out.

chapter 4: new radios and television

the book predicts the development of the entertainment center ("electronic cabinet") and projection tv, although they believed projection tvs would be the norm and only a small handful of folks would opt for the tiny screen. the electronic cabinet will also contain a radio-facsimile machine. phonographs will be a dimly remembered error once all music is stored on optical film. all television broadcasts will be in color! and stereo! and three dimensions!

fm radio will become more popular than am.

chapter 5: the amazing helicopter

most every family will have their own helicopter. they will be somewhat cheaper than automobiles, and considerably less dangerous. housewives especially will feel safer running errands in the helicopter than the car.

chapter 6: transport revolution

if every jackass flying their own helicopter doesn't terrify you, how about commuters flying personal gliders to work, and these gliders are linked together like train cars, and being pulled by a "locomotive plane." when you approach your stop you simply disconnect from the train and sail on down. the visionary behind the locomotive plane concept is an aeronautical engineer named casey jones. any time you hear the name casey jones in a sentence with the word locomotive you know good things are going to happen.

america will adopt the double-decker bus, as this makes more efficient use of space than current models.

chapter 7: your post-war boat

hey, we all get a boat!

chapter 8: food, clothing and health

"strange-looking flakes and powders turn out to be meat, milk, eggs and vegetables from which the water has been ruthlessly removed, seedless tomatoes and watermelons have been produced by treating the plants with hormone solutions, and brand-new foods as yet unknown to man are heralded by the x-ray bombardment of seeds. you can eat a christmas tree."

ham and eggs will come in a can. tea will come in a lozenge. "hams can be preserved indefinitely regardless of temperature by spraying them with an impervious coating." fresh vegetables and fruits will be quick frozen by the simple expedient of loading them onto a plane and flying that plane into the stratosphere. high-frequency radio waves can cook a roast in 6 seconds, and bake a loaf of bread in less than one. radio waves destroy the natural enzymes in foods, which makes them taste better! the packages food comes in may also be edible, eliminating waste. and laboratory-grown "meat" made of brewer's yeast is better than the real thing.

a new product called monosodium glutamate makes everything taste like chicken. in the future every kitchen will have a shaker of this miracle chemical next to the salt and pepper.

synthetic fibers will make natural (in quotes) fibers obsolete. "the silkworm has been all but sentenced to extinction, along with its japanese masters." these synthetic clothes will not be sewn but fused together by radio waves. they will be so inexpensive that most will be disposable. it will be cheaper to replace your dirty wardrobe than do a load of laundry.

the conquest of the common cold and the defeat of influenza by navy doctors are "a few of the health promises destined to come true tomorrow."

chapter 9: the farm of tomorrow

by giving chickens radioactive feed blue eggs can be produced. the book admits that there is no market for blue eggs as yet, but the promise is there. it's really astonishing how much faith these people had in the power of radiation to do good things for mankind just one year before the atom bomb.

most likely every farming community will have its own local dehydrator so that all fruits and vegetables can be dehydrated for lighter shipping. barns will be equipped with ultraviolet lights to keep animals healthy. leftover jeeps from the war will replace tractors for most jobs. "some farms will be indistinguishable from factories." they nailed that one.

the tail-end chapters recount the achievements already made in electronics and chemistry. they predict remote controlled toys and "pianos with sound effects amplified by electronic circuits." they assure us that "much of the world's routine work, including housework, will be accomplished by the secret mechanisms emerging from this war," and that we will have more leisure time than ever before. this has always been the claim of new technology and it has always been a lie. we are told that chemists and engineers are the top earners of the future while construction will all but vanish and doctors will merely be wage slaves after america undoubtedly adopts socialized health care. banking "threatens to become something of a dead-end occupation" as social security rids our nation of the idle rich.

etidorhpa by john uri lloyd

2008-12-31T07:03:00.000-08:00

anyone interested in the history of fantastic fiction really needs to devote some time to etidorhpa. but don't expect it to be easy. the hollow earth novel published in 1895 has nothing in common with the better known subterranean adventures of verne and burroughs which are roughly contemporary. this an adventure of ideas. some of the ideas are pretty hard to swallow, and the overblown prose doesn't help. still, i must root for the home team; john uri lloyd was from cincinnati, ohio.

although a scientist by training and profession, lloyd was also an occultist. not as unusual as it sounds. few people were more obsessed with witchcraft and spookery than issac newton, the very man to whom we owe our mechanistic universe. in etidorhpa we are told first that science is a disease which has robbed man of his faith and later that it is the golden pathway leading us to god. but self-contradiction is only a problem for the scientist, the mystic thrives on it.

one can get some idea what the novel is like just by reading chapter titles. "the fungus forest--enchantment," "the mother of a volcano--you cannot disprove, and you dare not admit," "motion from inherent energy--lead me deeper into this expanding study," "a lesson on volcanoes--primary colors are capable of further subdivision," and "matter is retarded motion."

lloyd's "science" can seem eye-poppingly crazy to the modern reader but we must give him credit for taking his task seriously. if you are going to write a book who's premise is that the earth is hollow you must provide plausible explanations for things like oceans, volcanoes and gravity. lloyd does not shy away from these tricky problems, he wrestles them to the ground and beats them joyfully with a big stick. the book is so insistent on itself. the human character--and by extension the human reader--is told again and again how foolish and ignorant and backward he is for even daring to question the divine revelations about, for example, how artesian wells work, or how a man may look backwards into his skull and see his own brain.

in fact to call this a hollow-earth story is to oversimplify lloyd's premise. the earth is two "energy bubbles" which have stuck together much in the way soap bubbles do (this accounts for the planet's imperfect symmetry) and gathered a thin coating of "space dust." there are accompanying diagrams.

several chapters are devoted to the evils of drink, or indeed "narcoto-intoxicants" of any kind. the traveller, i-am-the-man, is drawn into "the drunkard's den" where he undergoes a nightmarish test of his resolve to stay clean and sober. the moral lesson could not be more strongly stated. when it's all over, however, the author adds a little note: "if, in the course of experimentation, a chemist should strike upon a compound that in traces only would subject his mind and drive his pen to record such seemingly extravagant ideas as are found in the hallucinations herein pictured, or to frame word-sentences foreign to normal conditions . . . would it not be his duty to bury the discovery from others?" lloyd was a chemist. he seems to be giving the reader a sly wink and saying don't do what i did: trip out and write a 300-page novel about it.

etidorhpa is a difficult and dated book and not for casual readers, but hardcore science fiction geeks and mystical types will feel like better people for having finished it. i've done it three times. to those waybacks who still beleive in the hollow earth it may well be the bible.

the blazing world by margaret cavendish

2008-12-31T07:02:00.000-08:00

published in 1666, the blazing world earns a place in the histories of feminist literature, fantastic literature and even metaliterature. a travelling merchant falls in love with a lady who's name is not revealed, abducts her and spirits her away on a ship. a storm drives the vessel to the north pole where all aboard are frozen to death save the lady who is spared "by the light of her beauty, the heat of her youth, and protection of the gods." the north pole of this world touches the north pole of the next, called the blazing world, and the ship hops right across. the lady is immediately made empress of the blazing world.

the blazing world is populated by bear-men, fox-men, fly-men, and the like as well as by immaterial spirits. the empress assigns these races various studies according to their temperaments, then calls them one by one to question them about the state of knowledge. what follows is a tedious cataloging of the scientific and philosophical notions held by, one assumes, margaret cavendish. in one curious passage concerning spontaneous generation the fish-men and worm-men tell the empress that maggots are generated out of cheese, although they bear no resemblance to cheese. the empress corrects them, pointing out that both maggots and cheese have no blood, and besides maggots taste like cheese.

we are told that the blazing world is without discord of any kind. a modern reader flinches, then, when the empress decides to introduce christianity into this peaceable kingdom; but all goes well.

through the use of "burning stones" which ignite upon contact with water the empress simulates the fires of hell and converts all the world.

now something very strange happens. the empress (who the reader is perfectly justified in imagining a cipher for margaret cavendish herself) asks the immaterial spirits to find her a spirit scribe to write her caballah. after rejecting plato, aristotle, descartes, hobbes and a few others, they recommend the "plain and rational writer" . . . margaret cavendish! the author becomes a character in her own book. the two ladies meet as spirits and become "platonic lovers." they travel to cavendish's world where they enter the body of her husband, and the three souls enjoy many pleasant diversions together.

cavendish desires to the the empress of a world just like her new friend. the spirits admit that there are an infinite number of worlds and perhaps she might conquer one, but it is more rewarding to create your own imaginary world. cavendish does just that. now the empress (a character in a fictional world created by cavendish) is so taken with the fictional world created by cavendish that she wants to become a character in it. very trippy for 1666.

finally the empress learns that her native country on her native world is under attack. she calls on margaret cavendish who's many skills now include military strategy. the shipbuilders, who are giants, are ordered to build "ships which travel underwater." these are towed by the fish-men. the empress appears all decked out in diamonds and carbuncles and seemingly walking on the surface of the ocean (the unseen fish-men are supporting her) and promises grave consequences for any nation which does not obey and pay tribute to her own. under cover of night the bird-men and worm-men plant burning stones in the high and low places of these nations so that when the rains and dews and tides comes they all erupt into flames.

in addition to the historical interest this book has for freaks like me it is also possesses a blatantly self-serving charm.

the maimed by hermann ungar

2008-12-23T06:56:00.000-08:00

hermann ungar was a czech and an exact contemporary of kafka. the protagonist of this novel reminds one very much of a kafka character. what happens to him, however, is more gruesome and more literal than anything kafka would have written. there is nothing metaphysical here. the matter-of-fact style and blunt, short sentences have more in common with american realism; the sense of inexorable doom more in common with the noir novels of david goodis. the book reads like a laundry list of events of ever-increasing nightmarishness.

franz polzer is a petty bank clerk, an asocial, asexual man who loves nothing but order, annonymity and safety. once a week he counts all his meagre possessions to ensure that none have been stolen by the criminals he is sure are lurking everywhere. he knows that people are laughing at him and plotting against him. the mere knowledge that he must go to a shop keeps him awake for several nights fretting. the threat of promotion at work terrifies him. women repulse him. in a nightmare franz has we are told "there was a horrible smell, like fresh rolls. "

but polzer's landlady manipulates him, through threats and tears and violence, first into accompanying her on social outings and then into having sex with her. and franz was right! these seemingly innocent, even pleasurable, events turn out to be the first halting movements of an unstoppable slide into hell, not just for franz but for several other characters.

the novel is exceedingly grim, dwelling on themes of child abuse and sexual molestation, religious fanaticism, flesh-eating disease, whoring, crime, poverty, the slaughtering of animals and finally serial murder; and poor franz polzer is plunged into despair simply by the unfashionableness of his hat! i've read the book twice now and am still not sure if the author intended an edge of black comedy here. the only other thing i've found by him was a short story about cannnibalism where the humor was more overt.

the ship by hans henny jahhn

2008-12-16T16:12:00.000-08:00

this odd green lonely book stood smothered in dust in the dimly lit back room of my city's last remaining used bookstore on the shelf reserved for science fiction, where it did not belong. i had never heard of it or its author. it was only this unrightful placement that drew my attention to it. i bought it partly out of pity. but the novel itself is without pity. it is beautifully written (or at least beautifully translated) but brutally imagined.

hans henny jahnn was the son and grandson of ship builders, a restorer of baroque organs, part of the german expressionist movement, and something of a mystic.

read almost any page of "the ship" and you will find a passage so strangely but wonderfully turned and polished that you will have to wait until the delight of reading it has faded to realize you haven't quite understood it.

"You could find all sorts of suicidal tendencies down to desperate resistance, finally the sudden deathblow of chance. And the whole gamut of pain that went with it. Then the slow passing over into the unmarked storehouse of space and the rapid fall thereafter. The cruel and the gentle in irreconcilable opposition."

there are a good 200 pages of passages better than this, but i stuck on this one because of the cruel and the gentle in irreconcilable opposition. here jahnn has provided a description of his own book.

the entire novel takes place on a ship carrying mysterious cargo and possibly a concealed stowaway to an unknown destination. jahnn's knowledge of nautical engineering proves crucial as the very structure of the ship becomes increasingly important to the plot. the dark sexual imaginings of the crew nearly lead to a mutiny. characters are wandering the ship sniffing the walls looking for a concealed corpse . . .

not all mysteries are solved. the reader is challenged to fill in some blanks for themselves. this is not to say the ending is unsatisfying. the ending is so jarring and so perfect that i dare not say another word.

jahnn's work is difficult to find in english. my research suggest this is the only american edition of the ship, and there was but a single english edition as well. a volume of stories was also translated into english and is even more difficult to obtain.