Reading Report February/March 2025
Got two anthologies by Ardath Mayhar, who I’d heard about but never read (after a post on Keith West’s blog https://adventuresfantastic.com/ for her birthday; he had met Mayhar!) And I’ve been on a Mayhar jag, I don’t know if I’d read her stories before. Read “Aunt Dolly” and “The Creek, It Done Riz.” Both in “100 Menacing Little Murder Stories.” Very dark fun!
Also read two stories out of her collections: “The Affair Of the Midnight Midget,” a Sherlock Holmes (really Mrs. Hudson!) story from “Crazy Quilt, the Best Short Fiction Of Ardath Mayhar.” Mrs. Hudson is perfectly in character; she doesn’t suddenly show Holmes’ deductive abilities. Also read the title story in “Slewfoot Sally And the Flying Mule.” Both great fun! Also read her story “The Weapon,” in the “Best of…” collection.
Also on my Mayhar jag I read “A Night In Possum Holler” which is in “100 Fiendish Little Frightmares.” Those “100 Little…” anthologies are a treasure trove of new/old stories. (Okay, new in the 90s!)
Speaking of the “100 Little…” anthologies, I read some Edward D. Hoch stories for his birthday: “Twine” and “The Man Who Was Everywhere.” Both from “100 Menacing Little Murder Stories.” Also read Hoch’s “Traynor’s Cipher,” “Violet Crime” and “The Spy Who Did Nothing.” Those three in “100 Sneaky Little Sleuth Stories.”
I tried to read some of the non-Dickens stories in his anthology “The Haunted House,” taken from stories in one of his magazines, but I gave up on one and the other wasn’t worth it; just a waste of time joke story where it is all a dream brought about by the Ague. For the record, the stories were “The Ghost In the Clock Room,” by Hesba Stretton and “”The Ghost In the Double Room” by Gorge Augustus Sala.
I probably have the other stories by Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins somewhere and I know I have the Dickens stories in a book.
Much more worthwhile was “The Switchin’ Tree” by Elwin Cotman. From his horror/fantasy anthology “Weird Black Girls.” Excellent!
Read some stories from the 19th Century writer Richard Garnett, from his only collection “Twilight Of the Gods.” Read “The Potion Of Lao-Tsze,” “The Wisdom Of the Indians” and “Abdallah the Adite.” Pretty good!
Read some of Clark Ashton Smith’s stories in “The Tsathoggua Cycle,” a Chaosium (publisher) book featuring Cthulu-esque fiction new and old. Read Smith’s “The Seven Geases,” where he’s having some fun with a fairy tale trope. Not the Smith of the later Xothique-type stories but fun to read! Also read “The Family Tree Of the Gods” (a Lovecraftian essay) and “The Testament of Athammaus.”
The real fun came with Smith’s “The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Gables,” set in a Howard-esque (I say “esque” a lot, don’t I?) medieval fantasy world. A fun caper story! It’s one of Smith’s later stories and I wish he’d written more about this thief.
Read Mack Reynolds’ “Posted,” in a Greenberg/Asimov/Waugh anthology “Flying Saucers. From same book read Thomas Burnett Swann’s “The Painter.” I hadn’t read Swann before I think. I stumbled across his name researching Richard Garnett. Read Swann’s “Night Of the Unicorn” in the Dann & Dozois anthology “Unicorns.” Excellent! A wonderful writer!
For Jack Kerouac’s March 12th birthday I read his story “Ronnie On the Mound” in the baseball fantasy/supernatural anthology “Field Of Fantasies.” Not much fantasy in the story except it was based on a baseball board game Kerouac invented when he was a kid. Sort of a fantasy league. Story is about pitcher Ronnie who is getting his big chance in a game. Story would probably have grabbed me more if I understood anything about baseball. There is a sweetness to it.
Read Stephen King’s new story “The Extra Hour,” in “Cemetery Dance” Magazine issue . First-person narration of a nightmare that gets bleaker and more surreal. King is still damn good. Maybe even better than when I read “Night Shift” in college.
And I’ve been reading stories in the aforementioned anthology “Flying Saucers.” Read Avram Davidson’s “The Grantha Sighting.” A sweet, funny and very telling story that’s not about flying saucers, it’s about the nature of people. Read Howard Fast’s “The Mouse.” A moving and perfect story from the author of “Spartacus.” (This is one of three sci-fi stories I know about mice and spaceships; I think the other two are by Frederic Brown.)
Of course I’ve been reading the regular flash fictions by Kaje Harper and E. H. Timms, as well as the fine serial by J. Scott Coatsworth “Down the River.” https://www.jscottcoatsworth.com/serial-down-the-river-chapter-thirty-nine/
And I read Volume Two of “The Justice Society,” collecting the stories from the 1970s and ‘80s about the world’s first superhero team. When I was in High School and College I read the original comics (“All-Star Comics” and “Adventure Comics,”) mainly for the fantasy and fun but now I appreciate the stories. They hold up.
And I was floored that one story has a climactic scene taking place atop Gotham City’s Twin Towers. Yes, THOSE towers. A character even falls to their death from one of them. This was about 1980…
And Gay author Felice Picano died this past week, so I’m reading stories in his collection “Tales: From A Distant Planet.”
But I didn’t even read a word of the Henry Kuttner story I started on a month or so ago!
——jeff baker March 20, 2025
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