Salt Water Tears by Brian A. Hopkins. Dark Regions Press, 2001. Trade paperback, 176 pp. $12.95. You will remember Hopkins’s “Five Days in April” from Weird Tales® #322, a story which won the Stoker Award on the basis of an electronic publication before we put it on paper. Hopkins is a powerful and capable writer just now being discovered. Most of his work has appeared in the small press, on line, or as CD ROMs. This is the first actual book of his we’ve seen. Ten stories. Worth checking out. (Order from Dark Regions Press, P.O. Box 1558, Brentwood CA 94513.)
Three booklets from the Sidecar Preservation Society: A Donald Wandrei Miscellany ed. D.H. Olson, 47 pp. $11.00. Chips & Shavings and Other Writing by Lee Brown Coye. 31 pp. $7.00 Swedish Lutheran Vampires of Brainerd by Anne Waltz. 14 pp. $7.00. These are three well-made, very limited pamphlets from a publisher not-so-seriously devoted to the preservation of a certain alcoholic concoction (recipe provided in each booklet). Donald Wandrei was a very promising Weird Tales® writer of the early ’30s whose career fizzled after World War II. He is well remembered for his rôle in founding Arkham House and for such stories as “The Eye and the Finger” and “The Red Brain.” Fedogan & Bremer have reprinted most of his work of late. Here’s some they missed: prose poems, verse, a couple essays, all interesting in their own right and useful to complete the body of Wandrei’s work. Chips and Shavings collects a little-known newspaper column by one of the great weird artists (who illustrated extensively for Weird Tales® in the ’40s.) The pieces are sketches from life, some pretty bizarre. And as for the last item mentioned, if the title doesn’t tell all, what does? Very amusing. (Inquire of Fedogan & Bremer, 3721 Minnehaha Ave. South, Minneapolis MN 55406.)
The Treasury of the Fantastic edited by David Sandner and Jacob Weisman. Frog, Ltd., 2001. Hardcover, 747 pp. $27.50. This is a major effort, which deserves more than a brief listing. It is a well-researched, well-thought-out historical anthology of fantasy fiction in English prior to the institution of Weird Tales® in 1923, when the fantastic began to become a genre. The material ranges back into the early 19th century. Many of the stories are acknowledged masterpieces (“Carmilla” by J. Sheridan LeFanu, “The Mysterious Stranger” by Mark Twain, “Casting the Runes” by M.R. James) but there are also a few rare ones even we’ve never heard of. Worth a look. Would-be fantasy writers should read such anthologies to get a good grounding in what has been done and what is possible in the fantasy field. (Frog Ltd. P.O. Box 12327, Berkeley CA 94712.)
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The Most Popular Story in issue #326 was Charles L. Harness’s “The Dome,” with Ashok Banker’s “Devi Darshan” coming in second. A couple of readers asked us who Mr. Harness is. “The Dome” was actually his first sale to Weird Tales® but Mr. Harness is by no means a “new” writer. He sold his first story to Astounding in 1946. His classic novel The Paradox Men first appeared in Startling Stories in 1949. Over the years he has produced such classics of science fiction as The Ring of Ritornel and The Rose. NESFA Press has published two omnibus volumes of his work, Rings (containing four novels, one of them published for the first time) and An Ornament to His Profession (short stories), both of which we recommend. (NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 01701)
Someone also asked us who Ashok Banker is. He is a leading Indian writer, a resident of Bombay, who has published hundreds of stories in various genres in India. We have read his fantasy before in the British magazine Interzone.
Voting was extremely light. We continue to want to hear from you.
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We didn’t get a lot of letters, but some are reassuring: Author Fred Chappell remarked:
I’ve been enjoying WT right along, although I’ve been too lazy, alas, and maybe a little too harried to write letters. I don’t think writers should “rate” other writers’ work, unless it’s in the way of duty — as when one serves as critic or as blurbist or panelist, etc.
(Still, I can’t help remarking that Charles Harness’ take on Bruneleschi is really nifty. I like this one a lot!)
Elaine Weaver writes:
Kudos for your editorial titled “We Will Not Stop Dreaming.” Amen! And your approach to the situation makes perfect sense as well. There’s no doubt that the events of September 11th will affect all the arts for some time to come. Responsible members of the creative community will find healthy ways of dealing with the shock and anger we feel without succumbing to bigotry. It will be interesting to see how our culture changes — hopefully in a positive manner.
All we can say in response — since this is not a political magazine — is that we hope that artists will take the same attitude that we have, and try to go on dreaming, producing art during wartime, rather than choosing either silence or cheap propaganda. But at the same time remember that if the totalitarians or theocrats win, then art stops, so there is something to fight for. Our hope is that as a result of all these events, one day Weird Tales® will be able to publish a writer from Afghanistan.
Another bit of editorial reality we might mention is that if these editorials run on too long, they don’t fit. And we wanted to talk about the Lord of the Rings movie.… Well, maybe next time.
SHADOWINGS, by Douglas E. Winter
Black House, by Stephen King and Peter Straub
Random House. 640 pp., $28.95.
“Sometimes little boys get lost.”
Once upon a time, when we all lived in California and no one lived any place else — before Ronald Reagan was President, video killed the radio star, and George Bush’s CIA trained Usama Bin Laden — two friends talked about writing a novel. After storming the bestseller lists with several books of their own, Stephen King and Peter Straub finally collaborated on The Talisman (1984), but some readers and critics were bemused. Defying expectation, King and Straub had created a seamless epic of the imagination that was not comfortably defined — not horror, not fantasy, but a surreal unraveling of the riddle of how J.R.R. Tolkien might have written The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
The Talisman was a post-modern picaresque, free-wheeling from sea to shining sea and into another world, with a new American Sawyer, twelve-year-old Jack, lighting out for the Territories to save his dying mother. The “innately good” Territories were a mirrorland — a parallel reality in which progress was not our most important product, where the grass was greener, the sky clear blue, and hope, like the land, ever fertile. It was an American Shire, that time-honored realm of fantasy novels where things linger as they’d been in a presumably better time, and offer the chance to start over, to do it right for a change. Even lives were paralleled — in the Territories, each human had a “Twinner” — and Jack’s mother, a B-movie queen ravaged with cancer, was true royalty, the Once and Future Queen, preyed upon by a sleeping sickness and dire evil. But Jack Sawyer had no alternate self — his Twinner was murdered at birth — and his singularity defined and directed him on his ever-westward journey to redemption.
The novel embraced the adolescent, escapist impulses of fantasy and grew them through naturalistic storytelling into adulthood, championing innocence (and mourning its loss); memorializing the love of friends, the bond of mother and child; and challenging the new world order of a hurried, secular, technophiliac culture. Travellin’ Jack re-enacted the American experience — a pilgrimage into uncharted wilderness, the crossing of a great frontier, the confrontation of our westward limits — reminding readers of what Robinson Jeffers called the dignity of room, the value of rareness. In Jack’s shoes we walked to the great good place we left behind, the Eden of childhood from which we were cast out — by age, perhaps, but also by the corruptive forces of the social, the industrial, the political.
In the novel’s finale, Jack Sawyer found, if only for a moment, the possibility of meaning in a world of wasted time and wasting flesh. It was the Talisman — “the axis of all possible worlds” — a symbol of redemption and creativity, that fragile and delicate thing we call good. With its power he confronted the darkness and the despair within himself, and within all of us: the will toward