The Big Time (1958)

Fritz Leiber has a big reputation in horror and science fiction circles, but I haven’t read enough yet perhaps to be impressed myself. This very short mess of a novel (about 100 pages, a length sometimes considered a novella) won a Hugo (for “Best Novel or Novelette”). Wikipedia says it a nice way: “The Big Time is a story involving only a few characters, but with a vast, cosmic backstory.” That backstory is basically time travel, which can change history and erase people (who can then be “resurrected” somehow). It’s an interesting concept but explanatory exposition is scant here. These characters are similarly in a place, called “a Place,” which requires explanation. But, again, in medias res, baby. Catch the clues and keep up. It started to feel make-believe in childish ways. The Place, by the way, has affinities with Samuel Beckett’s let’s call it universe. It’s possible that reading The Big Time again, knowing what I learned the first time, might open it up more impressively for me. People see something in it. It won a Hugo and is included in a Library of America anthology of science fiction novels. There are some gems among the nine novels gathered there—notably Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination and Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man—but more often they felt slight to me and poorly done. The Big Time could maybe have been bigger and more descriptive, which I hate to say in this era of bloat—big novels part of big series. It was kind of refreshing to see a novel coming in at 100 pages. But it is dense and work to fathom. For about the first 20 pages I could barely make out what was even happening. There’s something that stinks a little of the MENSA mentality going on here, the arrogance and contempt. I’ve seen it in science fiction before. Maybe it’s a tradition. I’m thinking here of Philip Jose Farmer, to name names. And maybe Fritz Leiber too. All I can say about what I’ve read of Leiber is that it usually leaves me cold, but I’m thinking I should give it or him another try. All that love. There has to be something to it. But tastes in genre can often be stubbornly individual, I guess. Ramsey Campbell is another even more extreme example of my lack of understanding.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

“I Do Not Hear You, Sir” (1958)

Avram Davidson was a prolific oddball midcentury genre writer and satirist who specialized in science fiction and fantasy and perhaps most notably the spaces between. He worked in the early ‘60s as editor of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This story from an Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthology is a good example of the way science fiction often intruded on horror in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Like Cornell Woolrich’s “Someone on the Phone” from 1949 or Robert Aickman’s “Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen” from 1953, it’s also dependent on a certain uncanniness associated with communicating intimately by voice across great distances. Telephones and radio still had the potential to be unsettling—and do to this day, in some cases, as the mysterious ham radio numbers / letters broadcasts attest. But this story is more along the lines of gimmicky and preposterous, like a Twilight Zone episode that can’t quite find its groove. First there’s a convoluted frame story that has the main character in desperate straits for money. He’s defrauded the wrong person and needs to make it good. Even if he can he’s still likely to be murdered. Then there’s something about an inheritance that isn’t worth enough. But there is this mysterious box he hasn’t really figured out yet. It turns out to be a telephone into the 18th century and he’s able to call people like George Washington (who doesn’t sound like any George Washington I’ve ever heard of). But he can call each person only once. How in the world this is supposed to help him I have no idea, but he gets busy calling Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, and others. Really what’s needed here—and I’m not sure there’s anything that can save this story—is some of that H.P. Lovecraft tempo and detail. What is this machine? Why do American Revolution elites have it? Is this something about masons? Unknown, unknown, unknown. In the end they can’t help our hero and all’s not well that doesn’t end well. This story is a weird mix of brash ‘50s cynicism with schoolbookish American history. I do not understand. It does not compute. It may be more the type of story I claim to like—with little explanation—but in this case I must reserve the right to change my mind.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories My Mother Never Told Me, ed. Robert Arthur
Story not available online.

Who? (1958)

I’m tempted to make fun of Algis Budrys for the title of his short novel. If it were up to me I would have called it The Man With the Metal Head. I would have insisted on it. But all right. What we have is a somewhat dubious Cold War story, ripped from the pages of Mad magazine’s Spy vs. Spy feature. For reasons that seems likely to be unreasonable, a top-secret weapons development program is doing its work near a border between the Allies and the Soviets. Something goes amiss in the calculations and there is an explosion. Soviet forces rush into the chaos and kidnap the top Allies scientist, Lucas Martino. He’s been seriously injured but they patch him up with evidently superior reconstructive technology, even as the Allies press for his return. Several months later the Soviets finally return him. His left arm and much of his head have been replaced in the fixups. The problem becomes confirming that he is actually Lucas Martino and not some Soviet replacement agent there to gather intel. The story is thus playing with ideas about the veracity of identity (as indicated in the title, to be fair). Everything the Soviets might have needed to know could have been pumped out of Martino. They had the time. The novel and its Lithuanian-American author refreshingly understand that torture works. The metal head obscures Martino’s most identifying feature, his face. Everything else, including fingerprints and maybe dental work (unmentioned), can evidently be fudged. DNA ID was of course unknown in 1958. I appreciated the brevity of this one, maybe 150 pages, because some characters were interesting but the big ideas about identity kind of fizzled and the ending was not very satisfying. But Martino, or his facsimile, was an interesting person, an outcast just from his Tin Man appearance. His long detention upon his return and the constant surveillance that followed make him sympathetic. The Cold War is deeply baked into all of it, a pervading reality imagined into the near future of the 1960s and beyond as never-ending. Which is much how it felt, even up to the time when it finally did end. This novel relies to a great extent on military spycraft, which makes it kind of ho-hum for me. But again, it’s over quickly and mostly enjoyable most of the way.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

A Case of Conscience (1958)

This short novel by James Blish confirms a couple of things for me. First, I don’t really like religion getting mixed up with science fiction. “Few science fiction stories of the time attempted religious themes,” according to Wikipedia, “and still fewer did this with Catholicism.” That may be so, but The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell (1996, so perhaps not “of the time”) and the 1959 A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. (which maybe I need to try again) both fit that bill too well. Second, my misgivings about fix-up novels—also called “mosaic” novels in an attempt to dignify them—proved out again. I did not notice this as a fix-up novel while reading it, but I did note a severe drop in quality after the first part, which was the original 1953 novella that won a Retrospective Hugo Award in 2004. The basic idea here is not bad. There’s a planet, Lithia, with an intelligent dominant reptile species. Four human scientists, including a Jesuit priest who is also a biologist, are visiting to determine whether it should be opened to human diplomacy. One of the four says no because it has a huge amount of materials that can be used to create weapons. The Lithian society appears to be harmonious and peaceful. But the priest keeps looking at it through his frame of religious ideas. He sees it as pre-Edenic, still innocent, with no fall from grace, and thus feels it should be respected as such and not interfered with. But then he decides it could be the work of “the Adversary” (i.e., Satan), offering a temptation to believe, or something. I thought it was muddled but I was already souring on it by then. The middle has a logic that is hard to follow. The ending is admittedly powerful, but I’m not sure I agree that the priest is a hero. So I had a hard time with this, my first time reading Blish. I’m open to reading more by him, just not necessarily the After Such Knowledge series, for which this is the first novel. A Case of Conscience won a Hugo for Blish but he is more famous (per Wikipedia) for a Cities in Flight series and for Star Trek novelizations he worked on with his wife, J.A. Lawrence. The biology in Conscience is often thoughtful and intriguing, but the physics is more lacking. Faster-than-light travel, for example, is just a thing that needs no explanation. I think that’s fairly common for a lot of 20th-century SF, but Blish absurdly ignores time dilation too. In a key scene near the end, in fact, our heroes are witnessing real-time developments on Lithia, which is 50 light-years away. It was distractingly hard to believe.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Link Wray, “Rumble” (1958)

[listen up!]

Link Wray’s “Rumble” was a few years late to be the first rock ‘n’ roll record, but it was the first something. Shoegaze, possibly, or dream-pop? Sonic Youth might have studied it closely. It’s an obvious influence on David Lynch’s musical projects. Jimmy Page cites it as a primary influence. So does Jack White, even U2’s The Edge. “Rumble” hits like a steamroller, dense with mass. In its own way it is very ur, even (or perhaps especially) as it stalled out at #16 in 1958. It should have been #1 for weeks and rivaled “Rock Around the Clock.” But the world may not have been entirely ready for it, though its influence now runs to the horizons. Others (notably Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Les Paul) had been exploring the tonal dynamics of the electric guitar, but no one previously treated it like a hot tub where you go take a soak. The best way to listen to “Rumble” is loud, of course, with eyes closed for maximal impact. Wray is in love with his ginormous chords and so am I. Reverb all over the place. His plectrum brushes the chords so slowly and methodically you can almost hear each string. The song plays slow and logy, hypnotic and seductive. Having established a mood so immersive it has your full attention (in a song that lasts only 2:26), Wray proceeds to begin abusing his instrument, whaling away on single strings and incidentally pointing the way to thrash, potentially yet one more innovation of this tune. We have heard it everywhere since 1958, all over oldies radio and in movies like Pulp Fiction, Independence Day, Blow, the original pilot for The Sopranos, the Japanese cult classic Wild Zero, and many more. It never gets old. I’m a little amazed it didn’t turn up in one of David Lynch’s pictures.

Bell Notes, “I’ve Had It” (1958)

[listen up!]

I was listening to Vol. 2 of the Ace label’s excellent Golden Age of American Rock ‘n’ Roll: Hot 100 Hits From 1954-1963 when the Bell Notes’ one and only hit, which reached #6 in February 1959, leapt out and reminded me vividly of the early-‘80s cowpunk act Rank and File and specifically their theme song “Rank and File.” It seems likely this could be settled in a court of law because “Rank and File” sounds more like “I’ve Had It” than “My Sweet Lord” sounds like “He’s So Fine.” Just sayin’. The greater and more obvious influence on the Long Island act Bell Notes is the Everly Brothers, in both their close harmonies and in the sense in their songs of ineffective peevishness, miffed by the way things are going. In “Bird Dog,” “Problems,” “Walk Right Back,” “Bye Bye Love,” “Wake Up Little Susie,” they have reason to feel short-changed and that there’s nothing they can do about it. Just so, the singer of this song has “had it,” an expression, “I’ve had it,” usually spoken by people who are likely to keep having it and know it. Exasperation as real as it gets, in a way. As for the cowpunk lift, I would not call it exactly theft on the part of Rank and File, just a pronounced family resemblance between songs, or maybe a kind of homage or salute (though it’s unlikely many in 1982 remembered the Bell Notes, who I have to keep fighting myself not to think of as the Bell Tones). Rank and File’s version, if you want to call it that, is twice as long and all rocked up heavy on a big drumkit and twangy electric guitar, with all-new lyrics. You can imagine what the “la-la-la-la” singing Bell Notes might have to say about it. It’s right there in the title of their only hit.

Jody Reynolds, “Endless Sleep” (1958)

[listen up!]

[content warnings] One more out here on the morbid tip. Jody Reynolds was a one-hit wonder rockabilly artist, born in Denver and reared in Oklahoma. “Endless Sleep” reached #5 in 1958, his only appearance in the top 40. But the follow-up, “Fire of Love,” which peaked at #66, was later covered by both MC-5 and the Gun Club. The label Demon liked “Endless Sleep” enough to record it, but insisted on adding the happy-ending last verse as well as tacking on the name Dolores Nance to the songwriting credit; apparently they thought the tune would do better as the product of a songwriting team. OK, maybe. The story here is literally dark from the start, opening: “The night was black, rain fallin’ down.” In profoundly mournful tones, the singer tells us he’s quarreled with his girlfriend and doesn’t know where she went. He follows her footsteps to the shore of the sea (Reynolds wrote the song in San Diego and performed it that night). She’s gone, “forevermore.” Gasp! Suicide! Then the singer thinks he hears the sea speaking to him, albeit in a kind of awkward way to make the lines rhyme, saying, “I took your baby from you away.” But we’re not done yet. Comes the voice of his beloved: “Come join me baby in my endless sleep.” Suicide-murder! Lord! “Come join me baby in my endless sleep.” It’s high, keening, remorseless tragedy, but thanks to the honchos at the perhaps ironically named Demon label all’s well that ends well. The singer rescues his babe. The “angry” sea gives it up. “You took your baby from me away.” But I don’t believe it. One or both are moldering at the bottom of the sea even as we speak. I’m sure of it.

Pets, “Cha Hua Hua” (1958)

[listen up!]

The Pets were a group of studio hands—drummer Earl Palmer is the only name I recognize in the quartet—who had a #34 hit with this exotic and deeply silly instrumental, which became a staple among Latino acts. I see that my streaming service offers versions by the Crownstars, Tito Gomes & Orquestra Riverside, Orquestra Riverside with sole credit, and Joe Lubin & Orquestra Riverside again (I believe Lubin was cowriter of the song, with someone named Irving Roth, who is also apparently the arranger ... note that information about this song is scant on the internet). There are more, some sounding like the same recording with different artist credits. But it does not have this version by the Pets, unfortunately, which is the first I heard and still my favorite. For my fix I have to go to youtube or the Volume 3 CD of the Ace label’s invaluable series The Golden Age of American Rock ‘n’ Roll. “Cha-Hua-Hua” (pronounce it “chihuahua”) attacks with something that sounds like a bubbly game show interlude and then quickly pivots to churning, soaring proto-Star Trek vocals, women putting it over in the high registers. The falling-forward momentum behind it is irresistible—beautiful, driving, single-minded, full of the drama of science fiction. After about 30 or 40 seconds of that (on a 2:15 track) and a quick cha-cha-cha it lapses into more conventional rock ‘n’ roll, eventually with a chattering alto sax solo (Plas Johnson). Have no fear, it’s good classic rock ‘n’ roll and outer space is never far again. I seem to find myself playing it a lot on repeat until I’ve had enough.

Fools’ Gold (1958)

This novel by Dolores Hitchens is one of the best in the Women Crime Writers Library of America collections, second only to Charlotte Armstrong’s Mischief. Sadly, a lot of these short novels seemed way off the standards of the LOA’s American Noir series, which is essential. Fools’ Gold is the source novel for Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 movie Band of Outsiders. It’s a movie worth seeing—Quentin Tarantino’s favorite Godard, I’ve heard—but not a good representation of the novel, a taut thriller that is all business about a heist going very, very wrong. The characters here are stock types but Hitchens somehow makes them lively, interesting, and believable. There is a hilarious sendup of Southern California Alcoholics Anonymous culture, apparently already in place in 1958—a mix of seeing the light of spiritual epiphany, on the one hand, and knocking elbows with the richies and celebs on the other. Skip is a cocky young dude of 21 who has learned via a girl he meets in a typing class, Karen, about a house where a man from Las Vegas is storing cash for some reason. Karen lives in it. She thinks there’s as much as a million dollars there. Skip’s plan is to waltz in and take it. Only Karen and an old woman, Mrs. Havermann, live there. Mrs. Havermann felt to me created with Miss Havisham in mind from Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations because they share many traits. Karen is Mrs. Havermann’s “ward” (whatever that means) and mistreated by her as a servant. Skip’s Uncle Willy—an ex-con who attends an AA meeting to establish an alibi and ultimately see the light—gets word of the job and brings in some serious heavies to help, like “Big Tom.” Hitchens’s bad guys are bad in many different ways. Skip is a manipulative weasel, for example. Big Tom is violent, physically powerful, and scary, like some of the worst in Elmore Leonard novels. Uncle Willy is shrewd but weak. Karen means well but she is naïve and easily manipulated. The story of the owner of the house and the cash, Stolz, basically spells doom for this caper but no one in this story figures it out until too late. That’s another thing I like about it. It’s mostly downbeat, but there is one very nice story of redemption. Fools’ Gold is well balanced in general, ranging from the suspense promised in the series title (and too rarely delivered on in the series) to some very funny scenes, rooted believably in these characters Hitchens has created, this great cast. Very good one at the very end of this series.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Ashes and Diamonds (1958)

Popiól i diament, Poland, 103 minutes

Director: Andrzej Wajda

Writers: Jerzy Andrzejewski, Andrzej Wajda

Photography: Jerzy Wojcik

Music: Filip Nowak

Editor: Halina Nawrocka

Cast: Zbigniew Cybulski, Ewa Krzyzewska, Adam Pawlikowski, Waclaw Zastrzezynski, Bogumil Kobiela

I better admit right away this movie has never worked well for me. I’ve tried it a couple times in the last 10 or 15 years, and if third time’s the charm—and by that I only mean I saw a case for it better, at last—it’s hard for me to rally around it much. Ashes and Diamonds is the third in a trilogy of World War II pictures by Polish director and cowriter Andrej Wajda, after A Generation (1954) and Kanal (1956). Seeing the others might have helped but I didn’t even know about them as a trilogy until more recently and was not motivated much by then for further research. Understanding Polish history and/or WWII history better might have helped too.

Ashes and Diamonds has the style of an art picture, with a swirling approach to telling the story and lots of impressive shots in a silvery black and white grain and fancy camera angles and movement. Wajda and crew are obviously naturals of film but the spy story in this peculiar and specific war setting can be confusing, taking place in Poland on May 8, 1945, the last day of the war in the European theater. It involves an assassination attempt on a Soviet official by the Polish resistance in an isolated countryside sequence that opens the picture. The attempt goes wrong, killing the wrong people. The would-be assassins, Maciel (Zbigniew Cybulski) and Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski), find that out on their return to town. They must finish the job before dawn. The wrinkle: Maciel falls deeply in love at first sight with a barmaid, Krystyna (Ewa Krzyzewska), and can’t decide if he’s still able to go through with “all this killing.”

Things Fall Apart (1958)

Chinua Achebe’s novel has become a classic look at life in Nigeria before and after the coming of colonialists. More than half of it is focused on the time just before missionaries and other conquering Europeans show up. It was not a perfect idyll and it’s easy to see many problems in that society. Our main character, Okonkwo, is a proud self-made man among his people, a championship wrestler and a warrior renowned for his kills. He has three wives and several children. He is abusive and demanding, quick to knock people around when he loses his temper (including his wives). He seems to lose his temper a lot. Yet he is also widely respected by village elders. Okonkwo’s father was weak, passing down a shameful legacy which Okonkwo transcended. One area of particular non-enlightenment in this village is with gender, as usual. Women are not treated well and it is a devastating insult for a weak man to be called “a woman.” Just when you’re starting to wonder about colonialism, the second half comes along. At the end of the first part Okonkwo commits a serious offense, and though it is an accident he is exiled from the village for seven years. During that time missionaries appear and begin to convert tribe members. The missionaries appeal first to tribal outcasts and gather influence and momentum from there. Eventually Okonkwo’s son becomes a convert, which creates rifts and tensions across the larger family. Okonkwo practically disowns him as “a woman” but these colonialists knew what they were doing, dividing to conquer. It’s really hard to watch once it starts. Okonkwo is old school and ignorant of Europeans. His solution is to fight back and make war, but by then it’s too late and only causes him more and more problems. Achebe’s writing style is simple and straightforward, almost serene. Except for the novel’s reputation I wasn’t sure where it was headed in the first half, which is a portrait of that culture’s old ways—the things that will fall apart. Seeing the way colonialism works is moving and vivid in its clarity. But the story is not just about colonialism but also a powerful character study of Okonkwo—complex, imperfect, fascinating. Okonkwo and other village figures believe they have a good deal of power, and they do within their society. But that society is under attack—the missionaries are sent in first to soften the ground—and then we see Okonkwo’s whole world systematically destroyed. Achebe’s voice is placid but what he describes is enraging. He maintains a perfect balance between the two modes until the very end. Powerful novel.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

"The Jam" (1958)

[spoilers] Henry Slesar was a native of Brooklyn born in 1927 and a Madison Avenue ad man who started writing copy at 17—legend has it he invented the term "coffee break." But his real love was writing short (usually very short) genre tales with hard twists. "The Jam," with its heavy-handed modern details like heroin addiction and bad freeway traffic, feels pro forma in many ways: setup, misdirection, twist. Over and out. It could be an inflection point itself from one phase of horror into another, from the grandiloquent literary huffing of H.P. Lovecraft and his crowd to the zip and punch of TV consumed between commercial breaks, where Slesar eventually made a career contributing scripts regularly to Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, while writing literally hundreds of stories. This little 5-pager, which appeared originally in Playboy, takes place in a car traveling one of the tunnels from New York to New Jersey. Our driver and his passenger are at the end of a long wild weekend and the passenger is starting to go into withdrawal. He needs a fix. They're in a big hurry. The premise actually surprised me more than the twist ending. I don't entirely believe this premise. It feels based more in drug lore—Allen Ginsberg's "starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix" comes to mind—but it's garish and daring for 1958 and the story is very short. It's not that hard to suspend disbelief. Brevity saves the day again. The premise is there for the shock value, but it's also shocking. The driver is a madman, switching lanes, riding the white lines between cars, scraping paint from the sides of them. These miscreants emerge from the tunnel into a massive traffic jam, the kind where your progress is measured in yards per hour, and engines are overheating all over the place. Perhaps obviously—it certainly seems like an obvious twist now but maybe it was a good one then—they are dead, having died in an accident in the tunnel. There's some nice misdirection here, we see the accident but don't recognize it for what it is in the chaos of the crazy drive. Dead, yes, and in the hell that heroin addicts and bad drivers deserve, as we can all certainly agree, right? The drugs are a little on the nose even for 1958, though it probably seemed pretty hip then with Howl still so relatively recent. But the traffic jam—Slesar was clearly familiar with the look and feel of a hell commute, which sadly for us and our life on this planet we still know too well all these many years later. For the mere paragraphs it goes on, "The Jam" captures all the soul-consuming claustrophobia, frustration, and death wish of bad traffic endured 10 times weekly. Slesar's details are just right, such as the eager gobbling up of a few feet when the car ahead of you finally moves, or the sight of a snaking parking lot that goes as far as you can see: "hopping out of the car to stare at the sight again, at the ribbon of automobiles vanishing into a horizon 10, 15 miles away." If you've ever had a hell commute, this story will bring it all rushing back. It's a good thing the story is so short because I think that might make it just a little bit easier to shake off. On the other hand, I'm still thinking about it.

Masters of Horror and the Supernatural: The Great Tales, ed. Bill Pronzini, Barry N. Malzberg, & Martin H. Greenberg (out of print)
The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural, ed. Ray Russell (out of print)
Read story online.

"The Distributor" (1958)

Tooling around the internet, I see this Richard Matheson story absolutely exalted by some. Heck, I found it originally in the My Favorite Horror Story anthology as the choice of F. Paul Wilson (The Keep), who provides an excitable foreword and afterword. I also found a Goodreads reviewer who puts it among the five best short stories ever written. But I think I'm closer to another Goodreads reviewer who praised it as more like black comedy. It's chilling, of course, but it's also farcical. A man moves into a neighborhood and sets out to engineer discord among his new neighbors. To their faces he is generous and sympathetic, but he's actually busy with lots of specific projects. He mails them poison pen letters, tears up their gardens at night, paints obscenities on their doors. The story is shot through with bolts of ugly racism. Some of these neighbors are not so nice, having affairs or might be. Most have secrets of some kind. Our main guy manipulates them, harasses them with unwanted deliveries, reports them to the police, drugs them, takes pictures, blackmails them. In typical Matheson form these things just happen; he reports them. This guy is amazingly efficient in his work, artifact of Matheson's straightforward and unadorned delivery, not to mention the complexity of the schemes. The story has so many characters it's hard to keep them straight as each plunges into their own downfall. Matheson simply keeps reporting the outrageous events and moving them along. Wilson sees Matheson's flat writing style as the key to what makes the story work so well: "All horror fiction I'd read until then pulsed with vibrant emotion—rage, hate, fear, lust for revenge. 'The Distributor' has none of that," he writes. "And that's what makes it so horrifying." Matheson's story does have a certain amount of power but, contrary to Wilson, I think it's less prescient and more rote about how bad things happen, suggesting it's all a little Pavlovian (and maybe it is!). There's a case for this story chipping in its part to documenting our great American unraveling since approximately 1958. Our "distributor" guy sort of stands in for the great rightwing termite machine, which never sleeps and is always working to sow division and hatred.

My Favorite Horror Story, ed. Mike Baker & Martin B. Greenberg
Story not available online.

"Canavan's Back Yard" (1958)

Joseph Payne Brennan's story is a fairy woods variation that works pretty well, predicated on a scary witch's curse, one Goodie Larkins from the witch-burning days of Salem, Massachusetts. This story is set in Connecticut but it's all New England, yes? First this backyard fascinates you, changing moods and altering perception almost like a psychedelic drug. It's just an ugly tangle of overgrown grass and brambles but both Canavan and the first-person narrator are caught gazing at it missing in action for lengths of time. When you go out to explore it you get lost, of course. Here it reminded me quite a bit of Algernon Blackwood's anti-Euclidean patch of woods in the story "Ancient Lights." "Canavan's Back Yard" is ludicrously tagged on ISFDB as a werewolf story because some sort of semi-visible ravening beast seems to be back there. Also, if you linger back there too long you apparently become a beast. These are nice details but not so necessary. My favorite part is the fascination. Brennan has a nice way of describing the uncanny shifts in perception. It starts with an overwhelming wave of emotional desolation, a really great detail, and then: "After I had stood looking out at it for a few minutes, I experienced the odd sensation that its perspectives were subtly altering.... I became convinced that it continued for an interminable distance and that if I entered it, I might walk for miles and miles before I came to the end." A backyard in a tract home in New Haven, Connecticut! The story is simple and straightforward. Canavan is a secondhand book dealer who emigrated from London and set up shop in a rental home on the outskirts of the city. The first-person narrator is his friend and neighbor who drops by frequently. After a time, he starts finding Canavan standing at a window looking out at the backyard and then it starts getting hard to get his attention. Gradually the focus of the story moves from the window of the house into the backyard and all the things that happen there. It's totally ridiculous but it's in a tradition and it's pulled off with a straight face, with some of the psychic and physical dislocations of The Blair Witch Project. I love that it is set in Connecticut. Careful that you don't ever get crosswise of Goodie Larkins.

When Evil Wakes, ed. August Derleth (out of print)
Story not available online.

Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine (1958)

I read a few books from the Danny Dunn series by Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams when I was the appropriate age, say 9, 10, or 11. They were all right but not that great—not as exciting as Nancy Drew, not as intriguing as Edward Eager, not as thrilling as mystery, science fiction, and horror stories. But a couple of things about this one have stuck with me and finally brought me back. First, the book was an early source of interest for me in computers. They sounded pretty cool. Now it's weird to get the munge of '50s computer technology and pure fantasy. The computer here takes up a significant portion of a room, but Professor Bullfinch has also casually pioneered some kind of voice recognition interface. Remarkable! The second and really the main thing that stuck was the moral object lesson, which is along the lines of, "There's no such thing as a shortcut, so do the work." The precocious Danny Dunn wants to get out of homework by having the computer do it for him, somehow never noticing that he has to learn it all anyway in order to program the computer (most related processes also a bunch of mumbo-jumbo to go along with the voice recognition). This lesson can be generalized in any direction. For example, getting out of having to go to a job every day may be an attractive reason to try becoming a criminal, but most people would pay for that with unusual and severe stress. Danny's basic problem in perception shows up when his friend Joe mentions they have to study two books. "We don't really have to study them," Danny says. "We just have to read them enough to understand what's in them." Joe and Irene, Danny's other friend, don't understand the difference, and of course neither do any of the rest of us. Danny Dunn was intended as a model of the virtues of a questioning and problem-solving mind. It's also interesting to me that Danny's father has died, his mother is a widow and single mother, and they room with the kindly Professor Bullfinch. This midcentury focus on fractured families living together on the margins is curious. See also '60s TV stretching to the horizon: My Three Sons, Andy Griffith, Family Affair, The Courtship of Eddie's Father, etc., etc. There's also the usual weird problems of gender roles in anything this old. I think by today's YA standards I grew up in somewhat of a paltry era, but what do you do? It was kind of a nostalgic kick going through Homework Machine again. The used copy I found came out after my time, recently enough that blurbs on the cover note how remarkable it is that there was even a world at all before personal computers. It's from a school library. I can't imagine what a kid would make of it now.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic. (at these prices, wait for the library to reopen)

Time Out of Joint (1958)

This Philip K. Dick novel follows a familiar Dickian pattern, opening on scenes of hyper-normal California suburban life in the '50s. Small things, very small things, go wrong and characters may seem to overreact but it turns out they are on to something before we are. Things are not what they seem. Except we are on to it pretty quickly, because we know we are reading a novel by Philip K. Dick. And zooming in on our pastoral suburban setting—think The Truman Show now, an obvious heir—there is Ragle Gumm, who makes his living by winning a newspaper puzzle contest most days of the week. He lives with his sister and brother-in-law, Margo and Vic. Vic works in the produce department at the grocery story. The neighbors, Bill and Junie Black, drop in a lot. I'm sure you noticed the strange source of income for Gumm, which is one of the ways Dick does his thing. We know it's weird but no one in the story seems to. Almost right away, we find out the newspaper is collaborating with Gumm to help him keep winning the puzzle contest, which is called "Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next?" Meanwhile, also early on, Vic goes to the bathroom to get something for his stomach and feels around for a light cord before he remembers they have a wall switch. This disturbs him deeply—much more than the fact that his brother-in-law makes his money winning a daily public newspaper contest (though at least he grumbles about whether that's actually work). So it goes—in typical Dick fashion, and continuing with the movie lingo, it starts on a tight close-up of one reality, and then dollies slowly slowly back to reveal greater realities nesting inside even greater realities. Dick is always good at communicating how miserable it is to be this paranoid. Time Out of Joint teeters on the edge of schizophrenic experience, with TVs and such presumed to be monitoring devices. Indeed, it all kind of blows up in the last chapter, with fragmented reveals that might also be further delusions. Think of that onion, man. Always more layers. This also reminds me of Twilight Zone episodes where people turn out to be living in dollhouses, have become household pets of a giant alien kid, or are in zoos. Two or three fleeting moments hit that chill of paranoia hard enough to make me a little nervous about reality from the comfort of my bed. No one else is quite like Dick. Add to the stack.

In case it's not at the library.

"The Conversion of the Jews" (1958)

Story by Philip Roth not available online.

Philip Roth's comic anecdote came early in his career, published when he was 25, with themes and elements that have appeared in most of his work, notably the spectacle of Jews and Christians attempting to live together in New Jersey. It's skillfully done and a pleasure to read—he would get even better at language that is seductively easy to read, but he's already good here. The main charge of the story, however, strikes me as its most dated element now, which is the humiliation of forcing Jews to pray like Christians. Oscar "Ozzie" Freedman, who is 13 or 14, accomplishes this by threatening to jump to his death. It's all tied up with a poem by Andrew Marvell and biblical prophecy. In fact, if I understand things correctly, the parties most likely to be offended are the Catholics (using the term "in its broadest sense—to include the Protestants"), who might be inclined to see the actions of the Jews as mockery, if not indeed profanity. All of this is occasioned by Ozzie feeling the rabbi won't engage with him intellectually when he starts asking the kinds of questions people are always asking about religions. In this case, after the rabbi scoffs at the notion of a virgin birth, Ozzie wants to know why, if God is all-powerful, He couldn't impregnate a woman if He wanted to. The charge of the story is the profanity of the central event, or maybe I mean blasphemy. Threatening to jump from the synagogue roof, Ozzie forces the Jews witnessing the event, including especially the rabbi who won't take his questions seriously, to get on their knees and pray for the love of Jesus the Son of God. Ironically, the story has probably been losing power ever since it was published. It might have some charge to today's evangelicals, who might take it as some sign of formal End Times. I like to think that's an intellectual minority, but I probably have it exactly wrong. Anyway, I'm pretty sure none of them reads Philip Roth, let alone one of his early short stories. Roth is much more a novelist and I'm not even sure he's written that many short stories. So at best I'm going to have to file this under interesting (and entertaining) curiosity.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

Seven-Day Magic (1958)

I like all the ways Edward Eager works bookish qualities into this light fantasy for kids and adolescents. The magic book at the center of it is found on the weekly jaunt to the library taken by a gang of five kids from two families on their summer vacation. It's a "seven-day" book, meaning it's in high demand and can only be borrowed for a week. The magical adventures it bestows are rife with obvious references to the Oz books by L. Frank Baum, E. Nesbit stories (Eager's favorite), Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, C.S. Lewis's Narnia series, and even an earlier book by Eager, Half Magic. The magic in Eager's books is always a little tricky. Barnaby, the oldest boy and leader of the gang, outlines his theory of the practical applications: "learn its rules and tame it and make the most of it." At 8, I was envious of kids like this in books like this and went out riding my bike around but never found any mysteries or magic the way Nancy Drew or these kids do. As a grown-up, I can better appreciate what a careful and precise writer Eager is, which helps ground all the weird stuff. But it's pretty good weird stuff—almost meta, you might say. Or recycling, if you were in a less charitable mood. On one of their adventures, for example, they encounter the girl who finds the coin at the end of Half Magic, and we get a revisit with that difficult magic, in which you only get half of what you wish for, so you have to think carefully about what to multiply by two. The girl is minding her baby brother and wanted to go into future times and meet children there, but she forgot to include her brother in the wish. When she tries to correct the mistake, what appears is a full-grown man of 37 who is dressed and can speak. And this is what he says: "I know you now. You're that big one that keeps picking me up and carrying me away just when it's getting interesting and putting me to bed. But never again any more of that from now on!" So, yes, apparently some kind of hideous man / baby hybrid that dresses and talks like a man but behaves like a selfish baby. Insert endless obvious jokes here. Eager reminds me a little of Philip K. Dick, and even more of Fredric Brown, with characters and settings and events that occupy their own universe, ahead of us a step and a half and throwing back bewildering developments to distract, or for some reason. Except Eager intended his work strictly for kids, and made a point, as here, of calling out the writers he considered better than himself, such as his beloved E. Nesbit. The result is actually very charming.

In case it's not at the library.

The Big Country (1958)

USA, 165 minutes
Director: William Wyler
Writers: James R. Webb, Sy Bartlett, Robert Wilder, Jessamyn West, Robert Wyler, Donald Hamilton
Photography: Franz Planer
Music: Jerome Moross
Editors: Robert Belcher, John Faure
Cast: Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons, Charlton Heston, Carroll Baker, Burl Ives, Charles Bickford, Alfonso Bedoya, Chuck Connors

The Big Country seems expressly designed to live up to the "big" in its title—a tale of pioneering ranchers in the West, the movie is nearly three hours long, shot on California locations that convincingly enough look like the Great Plains and "Big Sky" country, with a handful of stars and even an Academy Award for one of them (Burl Ives, who is very good). The theme music by Jerome Moross is epic, memorably sounding like Marlboro cigarettes and those "beef, it's what's for dinner" TV commercials. The story revolves around a long-standing dispute between two families that is turning into a depraved blood feud. Into this mess comes a man of strength and peace.

That's Gregory Peck, as James McKay, come West to marry his college sweetheart, Pat Terrill (Carroll Baker). McKay is actually much more than he appears to be, representing a certain ideal of unpretentious masculinity also seen in John Wayne's performance in The Quiet Man, or later from Peck again in To Kill a Mockingbird. These men abhor displays of dominance as exhibitionistic and unseemly. They have the strength of their self-awareness and don't need to prove things unnecessarily. This confuses people with bullying temperaments, which is approximately where we arrive at what I like best about The Big Country. Pat's family, the Terrills, and the clan they war with, the Hannasseys, tend to see McKay as an Eastern dude, a coward and embarrassment, a troublesome annoyance they have to mind and keep out of scrapes. They don't think he understands "reality." But it's Gregory Peck, folks. You know who's going to end up schooling who here.

Killer's Payoff (1958)

Another early title in the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain—the 6th, to put a number on it—and another with an introduction written in the early '90s. Was it a matter of renewing copyrights, or perhaps a good old-fashioned PR push of some kind? I'm not sure, but they shed an interesting light as McBain used the opportunity to settle some old scores, and here he is pointed. Cotton Hawes, known by his red hair with a white streak, was forced on him by the publisher. But guess who the readers turned out to love most? That's right, Mr. Bigshot Publisher, Steve Carella. Et cetera. Fair enough. McBain has a point. His heart was never in Hawes (whose name derives from Cotton Mather, by the way) and he always loved Carella. In this one, Hawes formally gets the lead in a humdrum whodunit about the murder of a blackmailer. Along the way he beds a chick or two. Steve Carella and Meyer Meyer are well to the side. The love story of Steve Carella and his wife Teddy, who is deaf, is stretched out and distorted by the odd time disconnections of the series (they are forever in their late 30s or early 40s, even as the decades pass us by), but it is the heart of the series, its main narrative arc. That makes Killer's Payoff more notable as an outlier in the series, as McBain attempted to force-fit a character for whom he had little affection. Armed with the information from the later introduction, Hawes's sexual encounters almost feel sarcastic, they are so farcically empty. Cotton Hawes "falls in love," fucks a woman, and then she is gone. That's his style. Later he thinks he might be "falling in love" with another woman. It's so mechanical as to be robotic. Another series semi-regular, Bob O'Brien, also shows up here, but he is much more knuckly and tough than the woebegone character I think he becomes. In short, Killer's Payoff is somewhat unfocused and oddly toned, with a mystery that is suited more to the cozy style than police procedural. McBain, in some conflict with his publisher, is very much still feeling his way along here. One of the lesser efforts in the series.

In case it's not at the library.