WILLIAM SLOANE (1906–1974) was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts. After graduating from Princeton University in 1929 he enjoyed modest success writing supernatural and fantasy dramas. By the end of the 1930s he had published his only two novels, To Walk the Night (1937) and The Edge of Running Water (1939). During the 1950s he edited two science-fiction anthologies, Space, Space, Space: Stories About the Time When Men Will Be Adventuring to the Stars (1953) and Stories for Tomorrow (1954). Sloane taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for more than twenty-five years and was responsible for inviting many notable writers, including John Williams and John Ciardi, to join the faculty. In 1983 a collection of his Bread Loaf lectures was published as The Craft of Writing. For much of his career Sloane held numerous editorial positions, including a stint at his own publishing house, and from 1955 until his death he was the managing director of Rutgers University Press.
STEPHEN KING is the author of more than fifty novels, hundreds of stories, and several works of nonfiction, including On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Among his most recent books are The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, a collection of stories and novellas, and Finders Keepers, the second book in a trilogy of novels featuring retired homicide detective Bill Hodges. Much of his fiction has been adapted for film and television, including Carrie, based on his first published novel, Misery, Under the Dome, and The Shawshank Redemption.
THE RIM OF MORNING
WILLIAM SLOANE
Introduction by
STEPHEN KING
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
To Walk the Night copyright © 1937, 1965 by William M. Sloane III
The Edge of Running Water copyright © 1939, 1955, 1966 by William M. Sloane III
Introduction copyright © 2015 by Stephen King
All rights reserved.
To Walk the Night and The Edge of Running Water were first published together as The Rim of Morning in 1964.
Cover photograph: Unknown, Solar Eclipse, 1923, Courtesy Galerie Johannes Faber, Vienna
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sloane, William, 1906–1974.
[Novels. Selections]
The rim of morning : two tales of cosmic horror / William Sloane ; introduction by Stephen King.
1 online resource. – (New York Review Books classic)
ISBN 978-1-59017-9079 — ISBN 978-1-59017-906-2 (paperback)
I. King, Stephen, 1947– II. Sloane, William, 1906–1974. To walk the night. III. Sloane, William, 1906–1974. Edge of running water. IV. Title.
PS3537.L59
813'.54—dc23
2015016471
ISBN 978-1-59017-907-9
v1.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
TO WALK THE NIGHT
Dedication
Foreword
1. End of Evening
2. Autumn Weekend
3. The Stars Are Fire
4. Interregnum
5. Beauty for Ashes
6. What Seems So Is Transition
7. Trifles Make the Sum
8. Questions, No Answers
9. Interrogation
10. Cras Amet Qui Numquam Amavit
11. Events Leading up to a Telegram
12. Conversation Piece
13. Cloud Mesa
14. Sometime Is Now
15. Early Light
THE EDGE OF RUNNING WATER
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
INTRODUCTION
[Author’s note: Like most introductions, this one necessarily refers to events in the novels, these days commonly called “spoilers.” Consequently, you may want to save these few words for last. I want to thank William Sloane’s daughter, Julie Sloane, who provided valuable insight into her father’s work.]
THE AUTHOR photograph of William Sloane on the back of the 1964 edition of The Rim of Morning shows a hawk-eyed gentleman with a pipe clamped in the corner of his mouth and an open book in his hands. He’s in a library (perhaps his own); many more books line the shelves behind him. This seems fitting, because books were Sloane’s life. He graduated from Princeton (class of 1929), worked for a number of publishing houses, directed the Council on Books during World War II (where books were pronounced “weapons in the war of ideas,” which sounds suspiciously like propaganda to me), and went on to serve as managing director of the Rutgers University Press. He also formed his own well-respected publishing company, William Sloane Associates, and served on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. A busy and productive life of books and reading, you would say.
Yet there was more to William Sloane’s love of books than editing and publishing. In the 1930s, he also wrote two remarkable novels, To Walk the Night (1937) and The Edge of Running Water (1939), composing mostly on weekends and during the evenings.[1] It’s interesting to note that in 1937 he met Carl Jung at a luncheon and was amazed to discover that the great psychotherapist had read To Walk the Night (in its earlier form, as a play), and felt that the book’s central conceit, of a “traveling mind,” fit perfectly with his, Jung’s, idea of the anima as a free-floating and quasi-supernatural archetype of the unconscious mind. On that same memorable occasion, Sloane met another idol whose ideas are reflected in his novels: J. B. Rhine, inventor of the famous Rhine ESP Cards and pioneer (at Duke University) in the study of extrasensory perception.
Although Sloane was clearly a science fiction fan and conversant with the field—he edited the anthologies Stories for Tomorrow and Space, Space, Space—neither of his novels are, strictly speaking, science fiction. They are good stories and can be read simply for pleasure, but what makes them fascinating and takes them to a higher level is their complete (and rather blithe) disregard of genre boundaries.
Both books certainly contain elements of science fiction. In The Edge of Running Water, Julian Blair is trying to get in touch with his dead wife via an electricity-powered machine he has created for just that purpose (although he has a spiritualist medium waiting in the wings, just in case). In To Walk the Night, Professor LeNormand and his student, poor damned Jerry Lister, are working on something called “A Fundamental Critique of the Einstein Space-Time Continuum,” a study that leads to their deaths.
Both books contain elements of mystery. Much of Edge is concerned with just how Mrs. Marcy, the unlucky housekeeper, met her death . . . and, of course, whodunit. Much of To Walk is a kind of “locked observatory” mystery: what caused LeNormand to burn to death . . . and, of course, whodunit. We understand that neither mystery will have a strictly rational explanation, which adds a resonance to these stories that no Agatha Christie novel can match. To Walk
the Night owes much more to Charles Fort (The Book of the Damned, Wild Talents, Lo!) than it does to the mystery or horror writers of the time.
Both books also contain elements of horror. Boy, do they. No one can read The Edge of Running Water, the more successful of the two, without a frisson of fear when that awful blankness appears in Blair’s workshop—a blankness that threatens to suck in not just papers and furniture but perhaps the whole world. And no one can read the story of Luella Jamison’s disappearance in To Walk the Night without a similar shiver.
Because they ignore genre conventions, Sloane’s novels are actual works of literature. Perhaps not great literature; no argument will be made here on that score. If one wants great American literature from the 1930s, one must go to Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck. But if one compares these novels to what was then being published in SF magazines like Thrilling Wonder Stories, or so-called “shudder pulps” such as Weird Tales, what a difference in language, diction, theme, and ambition!
Sloane builds his stories in carefully wrought paragraphs, each one clear and direct. Here is a man of the old school, who learned actual grammar in grammar school (complete with the diagramming of sentences, one suspects), and probably Latin at the high school and college levels. It’s been my experience that even bad story tellers with a solid grounding in Latin are unable to write bad prose, and Sloane had serious narrative chops to go along with his basic writing skills. The very first sentence of Edge—“The man for whom this story is told may or may not be alive”—is as good an opener as I’ve ever read in my life.
The curtain-raiser of To Walk the Night is more businesslike and less enticing, but the writing nonetheless sparkles with witty grace notes: “She led the talk around to the question of the winter styles with all the finesse of a children’s photographer arranging a difficult grouping.” That’s a linkage Raymond Chandler might have made, although Chandler’s version would probably have been a bit punchier. Sloane is also allusive in a pleasantly scholarly way that few pulp writers of the day could have matched. In To Walk, he writes, “Maybe the Italians can live happily on the slopes of Vesuvius, but I am not that sort of person.” It’s a nifty insight into the narrator’s character, but one has to know what Vesuvius is (and what happened there) to really appreciate it.
Despite the trappings of science fiction (a mere flick of the authorial hand, really), and some of the conventions of the mystery novel (much interrogation of witnesses, and in Edge, a fair amount of hugger-mugger about footprints in the mud), I would argue that these are essentially horror novels. In The Edge of Running Water, Sloane’s subject is nothing less than what may exist after death, an idea I have approached myself in three novels, and never without a sense of awe at the tremendous implications of the subject. In To Walk the Night, we discover that a disembodied brain—perhaps an alien from space, perhaps a human intelligence from another time-stream or dimension—has inhabited the body of a mentally retarded girl named Luella Jamison, transforming her vacuity into coldly classical beauty.[2]
In the hands of his horror contemporaries—H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth—such frightening concepts would have been rendered in thundering, florid prose, complete with words like cyclopean and phrases like the hoary primordial grove. I’m not knocking Lovecraft—there are plenty of reasons why his contemporaries imitated him—but Sloane is more reasonable in his approach, more rational, and this makes his work both accessible and ultimately more disturbing. Also, Sloane could write snappy dialogue, a talent very few contemporaneous horror writers seemed to possess. “Good God, Julian,” Edge narrator Richard Sayles exclaims to his old friend at one point, “when you duplicate a seance, you duplicate it. This looks like a Black Mass in a futurist play.”
One can’t imagine Lovecraft ever writing such a line, especially during our first entry into Julian’s laboratory, a locked room that drives our curiosity for the first three-quarters of the book. Love-craft never would have considered highlighting horror with humor. For one thing, it didn’t fit his classical concept of the genre; for another, he (like many horror writers then and now) seems to have had no sense of humor. Here, though, it works, and works brilliantly. Sloane’s writing is drum-tight, but his approach is looser; he pulls the reader in and then begins turning up the heat. He understood that before a pot can boil, it must simmer.
The reissue of these two remarkable novels is long overdue. The general reader will find much here to enthrall and entertain; those who have studied the horror genre but don’t know these books will find them a revelation for the way Sloane takes what he needs from multiple genres, an ability only well-read novelists possess, and makes something new and remarkable from them. Put simply, the sum is far greater than the parts. I can think of no other novels exactly like these two, either in style or substance. My only regret is that William Sloane did not continue. Had he done so, he might have become a master of the genre, or created an entirely new one.
Yet we must be grateful for what we have, which is a splendid rediscovery. These two novels are best read after dark, I think, possibly on an autumn night with a strong wind blowing the leaves around outside. They will keep you up, perhaps even until the rim of morning.
—STEPHEN KING
1. Sloane’s only other published work—so far as I can determine—was a short story called “Let Nothing You Dismay,” which can be found in an anthology titled Stories for Tomorrow, which he edited.
2. No, “mentally retarded” is no longer considered politically correct, but Sloane, writing seventy-five years ago, was even more blunt, referring to Luella as an idiot.
TO WALK THE NIGHT
And mind alone is never whole,
But needs the body for a soul.
—STRUTHERS BURT, “Pack-Trip: Suite”
To
J. C. S.
FOREWORD
THE FORM in which this narrative is cast must necessarily be an arbitrary one. In the main it follows the story pieced together by Dr. Lister and myself as we sat on the terrace of his Long Island house one night in the summer of 1936. But in retelling it I have not tried to follow exactly the wording of our conversation. To do so would leave many things obscure to readers who did not know Selena, Jerry, and the rest of us. Therefore I have allowed myself the liberties of adding certain descriptions of people and places, and of attempting to suggest now and again the atmosphere of strangeness, even of terror, which was so much a part of my life while these events were in progress.
My belief is that this story is unlikely to attract much attention. Essentially it is concerned with people whose very names, with one exception, are unknown to the general public. One of them is now dead and another is alive merely in the physical sense of the word. The evidence which I can bring forward in support of its truth is almost wholly indirect, and psychological rather than circumstantial.
With some hesitation I submitted galley proofs of this book to Alan Parsons, who worked on the LeNormand case from its beginning. The letter he sent in reply is confidential, and I am not free to print it here. Thanks, however, to valuable suggestions from him the presentation of the facts has been revised in several places, and where my narrative touches upon the evidence in the official records it is at least accurate. Its interpretation, of course, is entirely Dr. Lister’s and mine. What Parsons may have thought of it I cannot tell for certain. But some weeks ago, in making a final check on the transcripts of parts of the evidence, I went to his office at New Zion. When his secretary brought me the case folders I observed that she took them out of a file drawer labeled “closed.”
I am not sure that it is wise to make this story a matter of public record. Dr. Lister and I have hesitated before doing so. Our ultimate decision is based upon the belief that it is never expedient to suppress the truth. We do not expect it to secure immediate acceptance. There are some experiences which are alien to everyday life; they are “doomed for a certain term to walk the night” before the mind of man either rec
ognizes them for what they are or dismisses their appearance as fantasy.
—BERKELEY M. JONES
Long Island, 1937
1. END OF EVENING
THE DRIVEWAY began to dip to the long pitch of the bluff. The old taxi lumbered around curves and dropped heavily down the slope, its tires making a strong, harsh noise as they rolled over the gravel. The sound told me, without my having to open my eyes, how close we were to the house. Only a minute more to lie back in the refuge of this dilapidated sedan and be carried along without effort and without thought. Then the narcotic of traveling, of surrendering myself to the mere forward motion of train and automobile, would wear off. For twenty-five hundred miles and three days I had tried to imagine what I would do when the wheels under me stopped rolling and I should have to rouse myself to action.
The air coming through the open window was already fresher, with a coolness in it from Long Island Sound. Reluctantly I propped myself upright in a corner of the back seat and looked out. We were within a few hundred yards of the house. There was a glitter of water, darkened to the color of blued steel, shining between the stems of the trees. Fireflies were beginning to show in the laurels on each side of the road, and the birches had taken on a twilight glimmer. Almost there. I wanted to tell the driver to slow down, that I was not ready to have the journey end yet. Instead, I straightened my tie and rubbed some of the dust off my shoes.
We swung round the last bend and left the trees behind us. The familiar outline of the house was black against the sudden sweep of the Sound and there was no light in the windows on the landward side. Even the bulb under the porte-cochere was dark. After all, there was no reason why it should be lighted to receive me. What I had come to tell Jerry’s father did not require light or welcome. Always before, when I had come here, there had been radiance in the windows and eagerness in my own thoughts. The impassive face of the building tonight was actually grateful because it did not remind me so much of those other times.
The Rim of Morning Page 1
