by John Grant
The Golem itself is quite a fun creation, seemingly designed so the special effects crew will have a whale of a good time when the movie's made. It's capable of whipping up whatever happens to be lying around and putting all these bits of debris together into a man-like shape, in which form it can pulverize people. Further, with each such "incarnation," it gets BIGGER, so that by the time it gets its inevitable comeuppance in the face of a solid hail of American grit, pluck, determination, resourcefulness, raw testosterone and probably apple pie, it's stomping across the icy wastes like Godzilla with a hangover, its limbs being made up of assemblages of stuff like tanks and artillery.
As for that prose ... well, let a quartet of examples suffice:
• She was comely; a slight skew of the cheekbones only lent her face a stronger punch.
• The air grew so thick with tension that even the wind outside backed off to a safe distance.
• He whispered under his nose.
• May furrowed her brow. Her pupils jittered side to side, as if her frontal lobes were doing heavy lifting. Her gaze was so intense, it looked like her skull could blow up in a puff of hot steam at any moment. Then her face lit up with a divine epiphany.
—Crescent Blues
The Reunion
by Sue Walker
Morrow, 320 pages, hardback, 2004
Reading Sue Walker's The Reunion I couldn't help but be reminded of the enormous influence Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine has exerted on the modern British psychological thriller, just as she has profoundly influenced British detections (although Ian Rankin has rapidly come to be a more important figure in this latter context). This is not to say that other writers set out imitate her (although some obviously do), more that the pattern Rendell developed has come to be seen as a standard style. Nor is it to say that the influence does not extend well beyond the shores of Britain: one can very easily read books like Donna Tartt's The Secret History as psychological novels in the Rendell mould. The influence has in general been an extremely beneficial one: there were British psychological thrillers of depth, literacy and interest before Rendell came along to transform the scene, but they now almost approach the norm in this subgenre.
The Reunion is smack in the Rendell/Vine mainstream. In general beautifully written (despite some odd Americanization), it has a story that occupies three timelines: now, the recent past, and the distant past – twenty-seven years ago, to be precise – when a bunch of dangerously maladjusted teenagers were brought together for group therapy in an Edinburgh (Scotland) clinic, the Unit, under the aegis of an R.D. Laing figure, Dr. Adrian Laurie. The group members have made a conscious effort to avoid each other since their "cure," although three of their number exchange brief notes once a year, every November 8.
Innes is not one of those three. She's alarmed to receive an answerphone message one day from another group member, Abby – her best friend back in the days of the Unit – who sounds desperate. Innes cannot bring herself to respond, and the next she learns is that Abby has committed suicide by drowning. Delving deeper, she discovers that Danny, another group member, a few months ago likewise suicided by drowning. Two similar deaths recorded as suicides might instead mean a pattern of murder. As much concerned for her own safety as anything else – is someone purposefully setting out to drown Unit "alumni"? – she makes an amateurish effort to uncover the truth.
Meanwhile Simon, now a successful psychologist, suffers the agonies of his young daughter being abducted and sexually molested. He is convulsed by guilt, regarding this as a punishment for what he and three of the others once did when they were in the Unit.
But what was that "something"? The Reunion is primarily a slow revelation of the dreadful secret.
Although the novel is certainly gripping, and the handling of the characters is splendid, the overall effect is not as satisfying as it should be. Its problem is that the only thing standing between the reader and the exposure of the secret is an artificial one: the author's deliberate refusal to tell us what went on. Most of the novel's central characters know the secret; but, any time they start to reveal it, the action shifts or they go all coy. This becomes eventually just plain annoying, rather than tantalizing. The only central character who's in the same state of ignorance as we are is Innes, and it would be reasonable if we were following in her footsteps as she unravels the truth. However, Innes's little burst of detection takes her almost nowhere, and, although eventually she does discover the secret, that is only because other characters choose to tell her.
The Reunion is undeniably worth your time, and I'm certain you'll enjoy reading it. At novel's end, however, you may feel that you've tasted a lot of delicious foodstuffs but your stomach's complaining that it's never been allowed to eat any of them.
—Crescent Blues
Journeys into Limbo
by Chananya Weissman
Infinity, 118 pages, paperback, 2001
Time was, a few decades ago, that a prominent element of the paperback racks consisted of single-author (almost always American) collections of short stories that happily occupied a territory overlapping sf, fantasy and horror; these collections were epitomized by authors like Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch and Fredric Brown. Every now and then one of the stories would be a real knock-your-socks-off blockbuster, but that wasn't what you expected when you bought the collection; what you were expecting was good, solid light entertainment.
This first collection by a new young author harks back to that era, and quite consciously – in one of his sporadic auctorial glosses Weissman states:
I generally don't get too involved in characters, since my primary goal is simply to tell a good story. I think this can be achieved without creating complex characters that the reader feels he knows intimately; besides, real people are far more complex than can ever be portrayed in a work of fiction ...
It's a statement that may come as something of a shock to many more experienced short-story writers, but in fact it concords perfectly with the Mathesons and Blochs and Browns of yesteryear: the tale is the thing. The statement also of course, through its cockiness, reveals that this is a young man's collection – which is probably, on the whole, no bad thing.
A few of the fifteen stories in this slim volume (some are short-shorts, all but one are hitherto unpublished) are fairly humdrum – "Solitary", for example, has a narrator who proves, exactly as one had guessed with a yawn by about the fifth line, to be an unborn fetus – but none fail to meet the basic standard of adequate light entertainment, and some achieve more than that. I liked especially "Dream Slave", the recurring dream of whose central character features a dream creature who has become so established as to be a fully independent entity and in fact to dominate and control the dreamer's dreams. "Cogs" is a nice multiple-universe story. And "Rent-A-Friend" strays into early-Bradbury territory, albeit without the sensitivity of language, in its tale of a company that rents Best Friends to the friendless.
In short, this is a very promising first collection. Once Weissman has perhaps lost a little of that awestruck sense of exploring for the first time virgin domains that have in fact been well trammeled by others before him, we can expect great stuff; in a few years' time the contents pages of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction may well be peppered with his name. In the meantime, Journeys into Limbo serves as an intriguing taster of what may well be to come.
—Infinity Plus
The Psychotronic Video Guide
by Michael J. Weldon
St Martin's Griffin, 672 pages, paperback, 1996
I have to confess to one thing immediately: despite the description on the back of the cover of this huge paperback and despite knowing Weldon's Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, I'm still not 100% certain what the word "psychotronic" actually means. Let me make a stab at it. There are some movies you watch because they're good, improving stuff, and there are some you watch because they're crap. They may be good crap (they're well made and you really enjoy them) or bad crap (th
ey're badly made but still you may enjoy them, if not always for the reason intended by their makers). Both categories of crap seem to fit into Weldon's definition of "psychotronic". Perhaps all would be clearer if I took Psychotronic Video magazine, which Weldon founded and edits. Perhaps not – because among the movies listed here is, to take just a single example, Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books.
But forget all the stuff about definitions. This is a glorious book, and it should be on your shelf if you're remotely interested in movies. Here are synopses and basic data about over 9000 movies, of which getting on for half are horror or horror-related, and of which probably more than half – the two categories overlap – are either the kind of movies which the more orthodox sources (Halliwell, Elliot, etc.*) are too snooty
[* 2011 note: Again, how things have changed in a decade and a half. Thanks largely to the internet and especially sites like Allmovie and the IMDB, those "orthodox sources" have, so far as I'm aware, essentially disappeared.]
to list or are direct-to-videos. Do not buy the book on a day when you've got a lot of work to do: it is addictively browsable.
Weldon's synopses are usually succinct, cutting to the heart of the movie concerned, and very frequently display a sly wit, taking the mickey out of the material yet in such a way that his affection for it shows through. There are minor errors in the synopses – for example, Chris Sarandon in Fright Night moves in next door with just one sidekick, not several, as stated here – and there are some curious omissions. Some of the omissions are only apparent, because videos can often sport a bewildering variety of alternative titles, and Weldon's cross-referring of these is not as complete as it could be: I looked, for example, for the pseudo-feminist Western Wanted Women, and found no mention, but eventually discovered it was a variant title of Jessie's Girls; René Clair's classic Paris Qui Dort is listed only as The Crazy Ray; etc. Other omissions are genuine: I was startled to discover that the Virginia Madsen/Tommy Lee Jones vehicle The Dead Can't Lie wasn't listed. Also, I would have much preferred the book had it given running times.
But these are small carps. This is a vast book (646 approximately A4 pages of three-column setting, including an index that is almost too comprehensive) and, leaving aside its very considerable reference value, it is certain to give hours and days of fascinated enjoyment.
—Samhain
The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction
by Gary Westfahl
Liverpool University Press, 344 pages, hardback, 1998
Towards the end of this long book there is an observation (which Westfahl modestly states is not originally his) that casts light not only on the rest of the text but on a great deal of the accepted history of sf.
We are accustomed to reading of the great flowering of writing talent which occurred around the time that John W. Campbell took over the editorship of Astounding, a flowering generally attributed to his editorial skills – to his ability to draw the very best out of his writers, to stimulate them with his own originality of thought, etc. As an editor myself (albeit not a magazine or even primarily a fiction editor), I have always been troubled by this accepted truth: editors may make good writers better ones but I am unconvinced that, even if they had the time to do so, they could make good writers out of bad ones.
Westfahl clearly shares my doubts about the prevalent hagiographical approach to Campbell's editorship, because he sets out an alternative hypothesis that makes a great deal more sense: those writers who were a part of the great flourishing of talent in the 1940s were of an age to have been reading, during their formative adolescent years, the sf magazines published by Hugo Gernsback – and many of them have indeed written of the boyhood joys of scouring each new issue of Gernsback's Amazing. In so doing they must have read, along with the fiction, Gernsback's frequent editorial pronouncements as to what sf was about. Absorbing such messages, even if the surrounding fiction obeyed Gernsback's rules more in the violation than in the observance, the individuals concerned, on reaching maturity and beginning seriously to write, followed either consciously or unconsciously those dictates.
Acceptance of this hypothesis requires, of course, a radical promotion of Gernsback as an important figure in the history of sf, and a corresponding radical demotion of Campbell. And, in case this might seem heretical (although Westfahl is throughout this book unafraid of heresy), there are several cited remarks from authors of the time who significantly did not feel that Campbell was the saintly editor described by later generations: for example (page 266), Robert Heinlein remarked, while complaining of difficulties he was having with F&SF, "Still, it is pleasanter than offering copy to John Campbell, having it bounced [...] and then have to wade through ten pages of his arrogant insults, explaining to me why the story is no good." Westfahl himself has no high opinion of Campbell (pages 271–2):
Allow me to state those flaws plainly: to an extent that cannot be attributed solely to his upbringing and environment, Campbell was a racist, a bigot, a sexist, and an anti-Semite. He was incredibly gullible in believing what he wanted to believe, incredibly stubborn in refusing to believe what he did not want to believe. He played favourites and held grudges.
And so on. Such personal qualities do not of course necessarily make someone a bad sf editor, and elsewhere Westfahl is at pains to make it clear that Campbell's professional skills were not negligible: in short, it should not be thought that this book is a demolition job; it is merely an attempt to restore a more accurate perspective to studies of sf history.
Such insights of Westfahl's are invaluable to at least this reviewer. However, they come towards the end of what is a very long book, and before them, while there are many riches, there are also many extended stretches wherein Westfahl ponderously labors to prove every single step of the case he is building. He is an exhilarating writer, and one would be hard pressed to find a single boring sentence in this book; but the truth is that those sentences are quite often put together to create boring sections. The primary problem is that every assertion is rigorously supported by material that would better have been banished to endnotes;* this is of course good practice in a
[* The endnotes themselves are another matter. They are placed in the most inconvenient matter possible, at the conclusion of each chapter. Thus one must constantly have two bookmarks on the go, one of which inevitably falls out of the book and into the bathwater.]
doctoral thesis, but it is considerably less desirable in a book intended for real people.
The book essentially falls into two parts: there are four chapters examining Gernsback as (a) an sf theoretician (his views on what sf should be and should not be), (b) an historian of sf (his views on magazine sf's precursors), (c) a writer of sf (to see how he put his theories into practice), and (d) an editor of sf magazines (again to see how he put his theories into practice); the second part subjects Campbell to exactly the same scrutiny except that, because Campbell was not much of a writer, (c) uses as its exemplars Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon and "If This Goes On ...", which are taken as accurate reflections of what Campbell might have written had he had the ability. Preceding this main block of the book is an Introduction offering reasons why sf's history should be reconsidered and (deservedly) lambasting previously published historians and critics for their bêtes noires (notably Aldiss) and for their pretentious obscurities (notably Suvin); this is racy and enjoyable stuff, and Westfahl revels in it. In his Conclusion – again racy and enjoyable except when he spends pages on the necessarily abortive attempt to produce an accurate definition of sf – he rightly points out, by way of continuation of this argument, that what sf's scholarly historians and literary critics have to say on the subject has little effect on and is almost entirely ignored by sf's actual practitioners.
Here, of course, one is drawn to ask a pertinent question: if sf's practitioners ignore academic lit crit, why has this book been written? The simple answer – that it is aimed at other scholars in the hope of persuading t
hem to review their approaches to the subject – is itself subverted by Westfahl's own (good and well argued) case that sf criticism should be considered as a part of sf rather than as merely an adjunct to it ... which means that sf critics are sf practitioners, and thus by definition largely ignore what they themselves (Westfahl included) write.
This is not the only logical tangle into which Westfahl is led by his own enthusiasm. The most overt, although far from the most important, occurs on pages 170–71:
Two years later, when Ray Palmer took over Amazing Stories, his first editorial column promised "tales based on true scientific facts. Insofar as the basic subject matter is founded upon scientific research, it will be essentially a true story magazine [...]"
In Bates, Weisinger and Palmer, one observes a [...] truncation of Gernsback's theory of science fiction [...] But these editors never claimed that scientific principles were actually being explained in these stories or that one could obtain scientific education by reading them.
To be true, Palmer did not state his intentions exactly in Westfahl's prescribed wording, and to be equally true Palmer was an unsatisfactory reifier of those intentions, but Westfahl's conclusion, however many times one reads the passage concerned, appears to fly directly in the teeth of what Palmer actually wrote here.
Elsewhere there are assumptions and conclusions that seem governed more by Westfahl's zeal than anything else. To choose a single example, a statement by David Hartwell (pages 294–5) that, in marketing and practical terms, fantasy can be considered as a subset of sf, is taken as support for the distinctly dodgy premise that "fantasy has effectively been absorbed into science fiction". Not only is this conclusion nonsense in terms of theory (a good case can be made that sf is a subset of fantasy, but not the other way round), it is palpably untrue in practice – even for generic fantasy – as a foray to the bookstore will reveal.
