Category Archives: Forgotten Book

Forgotten Book: The Will to Kill by Robert Bloch (1954)

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Robert Bloch's The Will to Kill is full of twists and turns.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 172nd in my series of Forgotten Books.

After enjoying a Fredric Brown book last week, I thought it might be nice to try a novel from another classic writer. So I pulled my copy of Screams by Robert Bloch off the shelf. That volume contains three early suspense novels by the Psycho master, so I decided to go with the earliest novel, The Will to Kill.

I had read a lot of Bloch over the years, mostly his short fiction. His horror for Weird Tales was spectacular and he was an early acolyte/friend of H. P. Lovecraft. In fact, the two writers each did a story where they killed the other off by horrific means. Such a fun group.

The Will to Kill was, for many years, a legendary Bloch novel, available only as an Ace paperback original that was very hard to come by. Over the years, I searched for copies of this novel in many states. I did eventually find one in the late 90’s in Springfield, Missouri, at a small paperback house. I locates a lot of great titles that day, including the first five 84th Precinct novels by Ed McBain. I was about to check out when I saw this one behind the counter. The clerk said they were holding it for some customer but he had never come in. I asked when he was going to pick it up and the clerk said if it was still available on Friday, I could have it for $2. Come Friday I picked it up.

Screams collects three early Robert Bloch novels, including The Will to Kill.

I never got around to reading it before my Big Book Sale of 2007, when it went away to land on someone else’s shelves. So this last week, I decided to remedy that situation.

Tom Keller is a Korean War veteran suffering from PTSD, even though that phrase did not exist at the time. He has come home from the war to a loving wife. Sometimes Keller suffers from blackouts, fugue states where he wanders and does things that he does not remember. Following one of those episodes, he wakes up with scissors in his hand and a dead wife at his feet. Her throat had been cut … by scissors. He is jailed but eventually released when forensics prove he could not have performed the murder.

Now in another town, he runs a stamp, coin and book store where he works with his new girlfriend. He wants to be with her, but he still has his own doubts about the murder of his first wife. As the novel opens, Keller is recovering from a blackout and has no idea what he has done. He soon finds that he has told his girlfriend Kit about his fears and this drives her away.

While Kit is gone, Keller deals with a fat man with an obviously stolen stamp collection. He chooses the high road and does not buy the material, even though he could turn it into a quick profit. The seller is upset and leaves.

Soon, Keller encounters the fat man again at a bar, where he is abusing a woman and making threats. When Keller steps in, a knife comes out. But Keller is a veteran and disarms the man, ejecting him from the bar.

The girl he has saved, Trixie, invites him over and frantic sex happens at her place. Keller falls asleep, and when he wakes up, Trixie is dead. In circumstances similar to the previous murder he was involved with.

Keller is, of course, arrested and the earlier case is brought up. A blind man identifies Keller by his walk and the taps on his shoes as the killer. The murder weapon is identified as a poniard, a French style stiletto. And, of course, Tom has one in a case at his store. Or, had one, since the store has been broken into and the knife taken. The only possible lead is Trixie’s roommate. When the police go to ask her questions, she is found dead also. But, Tom was in police custody when the roommate was killed. And, of course, the same knife was used.

Kit shows up with a lawyer, Anthony Mingo, for whom she used to work and had been romantically involved. Tom, already unsure of himself, takes this new twist poorly and begins to doubt Kit’s affection for him.

The story takes several good turns and eventually resolves itself, but not before several unusual items from Tom’s and Kit’s past are revealed.

I really enjoyed this novel and read it in one sitting. And, with Screams, I still have two more early Bloch novels waiting for my attention, specifically Firebug and The Star Stalker. Bloch was really crafting his style at this point, leading up to his 1959 novel Psycho.

So, if you can find the Ace paperback, buy it. If not, get Screams and have three fun books. And, as with all such titles, your mileage may vary, but I doubt it. Bloch is fabulous.

Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs. This week Todd Mason is hosting the listing.

 

Forgotten Book: Night of the Jabberwock by Fredric Brown (1950)

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Nick of the Jabberwok is fast, fun and full of surprises.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 171st in my series of Forgotten Books.

As I mentioned in the last Forgotten Book column, I recently discovered a cache of old Unicorn Mystery Book Club books at the local Half Price. I bought six volumes while I was there. The Memoirs of Solar Pons was in one of the volumes. But the one that really pushed me over the edge was Night of the Jabberwock by Fredric Brown — not that it took much of a push.

There was a time when I had a very nice collection of Fredric Brown’s work. I had hardback firsts of all his science fiction, including a nice, signed Space on My Hands and much of his mystery work. I believe I had all the mystery novels and most of the short stories. I did not have The Case of the Dancing Sandwiches, but I did have the original pulp that the story had appeared in. And I had read most of his work. Somewhere along the way, I did an article about Ed and Am Hunter that appeared in a non-fiction work about 100 great detectives, and I had read all those novels.

At his worst, Brown was always worth reading. And at his best, he was fantastic. Here, in Night of the Jabberwock, he was at the top of his form.

It’s a novel with a lot of stuff going on. The hero is Doc Stoeger, the editor and publisher of a small town weekly newspaper. He has a PhD and his dissertation was on Lewis Carroll. He is nuts for Lewis Carroll. But no one in the town really cares. He has one or two friends he can play chess with, but no one to really discuss the things he loves most. And after 23 years running the paper, he is down. Just once, he would love something to happen on Thursday night so that when the paper came out on Friday morning it would have real news.

Well, Doc soon discovers you should be careful what you wish for. In the course of one night, he has many adventures. There’s a messy divorce case, the bank is broken into, several men are murdered, Doc and his friend Smiley are kidnapped by gangsters, there’s an explosion in the Roman candle department of the local fireworks factory, there’s an escapee from the local loony bin. Oh, and Doc is the prime suspect in two of the murders and is involved in a manhunt in his small town. Doc sees and witnesses all of these and yet, he cannot write about them.

The series of events begins with a man named Yehudi Smith who asks about the Vorpal Blades, a Lewis Carroll appreciation society. That society wants Doc to meet them at a nearby haunted house to discuss the possibility that Lewis Carroll was writing about real worlds in the Alice books.

This is fast paced like a Cornell Woolrich novel and, at times, just as unbelievable. But the prose is lean and clean, and the reader has the adventure of a lifetime.

I read this book many years ago and had forgotten most of it, so it was wonderful to sit back in my reading chair and renew my friendship. I ran across a passage that I loved on the original reading and again last night:

“Two walls of my living room are lined with them (books) and they overflow the bookcases in my bedroom and I even have a shelf of them in the bathroom. What do I mean, even? I think a bathroom without a bookshelf is as incomplete as would be one without a toilet.”

Can I get an “Amen”?

It’s a quick and wonderful read and, while it used to be impossible to find when I first started looking, there are plenty of editions and copies around online or in eBooks now. You have no excuse. Go forth and slay the jubjub bird and have some fun.

Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Forgotten Book: The Memoirs of Solar Pons by August Derleth (1951)

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Mystery fans shouldn't ignore Derleth's Solar Pons books just because they're pastiches.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 170th in my series of Forgotten Books.

Not long ago I was in Half Price Books looking to see what might be malingering for me to find, when I ran across a stack of old Unicorn Mystery Book Club titles. If you are not familiar with the Unicorn Mystery Book Club, it was a club similar to the Mystery Book Club that published omnibus volumes with four titles in each volume. The Unicorn Mystery Book Club was generally edited by Hans Stefan Santesson (according to an article I read) and frequently they contained unusual entries. The volumes I picked up had Fredric Brown and Anthony Boucher in them, so I know I got some solid stuff.

This week’s book had The Beautiful Stranger by Bernice Carey, Fish Lane by Louis Corkill, Hangman’s Hat by Paul Ernst and The Memoirs of Solar Pons by August Derleth. I have had the Derleth Solar Pons books at various times in my collection, but they’d slipped from my fingers by the time I ran across this book. I picked it up and decided to read.

August Derleth is a puzzle to me. I love him as an editor and publisher of Arkham House and for preserving (with Donald Wandrei) the legacies of Lovecraft, Smith and Howard. As a horror writer, I find him pretty close to unreadable, particularly when he takes on the Lovecraft Mythos.

The Solar Pons books, however, I enjoy. Partly because they are somewhat formulaic. Solar Pons is Sherlock Holmes. No one even remotely tries to deny it. His assistant, Dr. Lyndon Hardy, is Dr. Watson (the Doyle Watson, not the movie one). Derleth’s pastiches are good, very relaxing and enjoyable. Not near the equivalent of the originals but better than many things which followed Doyle and Derleth.

Derleth wrote more Solar Pons stories than Doyle ever did for Holmes — eight volumes of short stories and one novel. The collection in question this week contains 12 stories and is chronologically the second volume published.

The stories included are all pretty clever, especially “The Adventure of the Broken Chessman,” which features Russian spies in London during the 1920s, and “The Adventure of the Six Silver Spiders,” which references some of the famous occult volumes such as The Necronomicon and Unausprechlican Kulten, which are familiar to Lovecraftian fans. I also really enjoyed “The Adventure of the Proper Comma,” which features Pons’ Praed Street Irregulars and “The Adventure of the Five Royal Coachmen,” which combines politics, spies and trout fishing.

Some stories were easy to figure out, such as “The Adventure of the Circular Room” and “The Adventure of the Paralytic Mendicant,” while others were not as easy. And how could you not love a title like “The Adventure of the Tottenham Werewolf”?

Each story ran about 20 pages for a quick and easy read. This was not my first encounter with Mr. Pons and Dr. Parker nor will it be my last. Paperback copies exist of most of the Derleth titles, since Pinnacle did a reprint series in the 1980s, as well as including the four volumes Basil Copper continued with the character after Derleth’s death. I have not read those, but I may have one or two hanging around. I’m not sure, but perhaps I will check around and see.

Online book marketplace AbeBooks has quite a few of the paperbacks for under $5, plus shipping. EBay has also has a large number for various prices, including some of the original hardcover published by Arkham House’s mystery imprint Mycroft and Moran.

There are never enough great detective short stories. These may be very good. I don’t know if I’d call them great, but I enjoyed the collection all the way through.

As usual, depending on your fanatical devotion to the canon, your mileage may vary. Don’t ignore them just because they are pastiches.

Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Forgotten Book: Harry O. Morris by Harry O. Morris (2015)

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Harry O. Morris

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 169th in my series of Forgotten Books.

Years ago I first encountered the force of nature that is Harry O. Morris in the pages of the long gone and deeply missed fanzine Nyctalops. I received an issue for my birthday and it was filled with more information and visual stimulation than you should legally be allowed to have. The issue I got was devoted to the work of Clark Ashton Smith, though Lovecraft was the fanzine’s primary focus.

Then I saw some of his art at the World Fantasy Convention in Ft. Worth in 1978. It was so wildly different from everything else on exhibit there that, broke person which I was, I ended up buying two photo collages for my personal collection. I know that I still have one of them and maybe the second too.

I later met Harry in person at ArmadilloCon and he was every bit as weird and cool as you could expect. Eventually he married my friend Christine Pasanen and they were a lovely match. I visited them once in Albuquerque and it was great!

Recently, Jerad Walters, the madman behind Centipede Press, published this amazing artbook/biography of Harry. Filled with literally hundreds of photos of artwork from fanzines and book covers. And the introduction from Thomas Ligotti, a writer I first encountered through Harry’s work, is worth the price of admission alone.

One of Morris' book covers

I’m not going to talk much about the book. It is extraordinary and out of print from the publisher, though a few copies are still floating around out there in Webland. It’s a little expensive (not really) because it is filled with lots of heavy paper and color pictures. I’m going to post a photo of Harry and some of his work. This does not really begin to give you an idea of its brilliance. He works with pens, ink, colors, collage, photo emulsions and maybe magic.

If you are looking for the perfect present for that weird friend (who may even be yourself), give them this book. Offer a double or nothing deal if they don’t like it. You won’t have to pay up.

Happy Holidays to everyone out there. And remember, if it ain’t weird, you’re not trying hard enough.

Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs.


 

Forgotten Book: The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs (1969)

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By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 168th in my series of Forgotten Books.

Once again I have to apologize for those few regular readers, After Thanksgiving I began a new work project and that consumed my time. Normally over the holiday I would have spent some time reading but we had guests and that didn’t happen. I hope it doesn’t happen again anytime soon, but it will, so hopefully we can all bear through it.

This week’s title is a book I have had for many years and somehow never got around to reading, even though I knew it had a great reputation and that I would enjoy it. The Face in the Frost is by the great YA writer John Bellairs, but this is not a real YA book. This was meant for the adult fantasy market and it deserves the reputation it has maintained for the last 46 years.

It is a story of magic and magicians and friendship and how all these things work together. The two main characters are both magicians with familiar names, Prospero and Roger Bacon. Prospero lives in the South Kingdom while Roger lives in the North Kingdom. The two realms have no other names than that. They each have their quirks.

The two magicians are old friends and see each other rarely. So it is with joy that Prospero greeted his old friend who came telling of a book he had been searching for. The book is in an unknown tongue and has last been owned by a wizard named Melichus who had trained with Prospero and, during that training, the two had become not friends, more like adversaries.

Strange things are happening in the kingdoms and the two wizards find themselves on a quest to find the book before evil really happens. They shrink down and travel on a small ship. They get separated. Prospero finds an evil pseudo-village and nearly dies. The wizards are reunited and find themselves traveling in a smaller version of Cinderella’s coach, made form a squash.

All the above makes this sound formulaic and squeaky. It is not that at all. The writing is so wonderful it practically leaps off the page. I found myself not wanting to finish the book because I was enjoying it so much, but this column was not going to write itself if I didn’t finish. But, let me cite an example from the first chapter:

“Several centuries (or so) ago, in a country whose name doesn’t matter, there was a tall skinny, straggly-bearded old wizard named Prospero, and not the one you are thinking of, either. He lived in a huge, ridiculous, doodad-covered, trash-filled two-story horror of a house that stumbled, staggered, and dribbled right up to the edge of a great shadowy forest filled with elms and oaks and maples. It was a house whose gutter spouts were worked into the shape of whistling sphinxes and screaming bearded faces: a house whose white wooden porch was decorated with carved bears, monkeys, toads. And fat women in togas holding sheaves of grain; a house whose steep gray-slate roof was capped with a glass-enclosed twisty-copper-columned observatory…”

Your mileage may vary but I was hooked from those words on. There are not any cutesy elves or orcs or hobbits or warrior-kings. This is the good stuff, not the derivative stuff that passes for fantasy these days.

Take the time. Enjoy the ride. Treasure the words. Live. You won’t regret it.

I know this is a shorter column, but the time is late and I have a 5 a.m. wake-up staring me down.

Buy some great books for your friends and yourself for Christmas. Spread the words.

Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Forgotten Book: Some of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon (1961)

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Theodore Sturgeon is known more for his sf short stories than his novels, but Some of Your Blood is exceptionally good.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 167th in my series of Forgotten Books.

I have read and enjoyed the work of Theodore sturgeon for nearly 50 years. I really loved his short stories, particularly “It,” “Killdozer” (which had a fun made-for-TV movie made), “Slow Sculpture” and perhaps my favorite short story, “The Man Who Lost the Sea.” When North Atlantic Books decided to publish the complete Theodore Sturgeon short stories, I went for the hardcover versions of all 13 volumes. They make a wonderful set and look great on the shelf. I dip in there frequently savoring the texture of his work.

I met Sturgeon only once, at an AggieCon in 1979 (which also had Boris Vallejo as a guest). Like a durn fool idiot I did not take all my books to get them signed. I had a copy of each of his books, maybe not all first editions, but I had the words. I don’t know why but a few years later he was gone. Among the things I did get signed were a copy of the Unknown pulp with “It” in it and a paperback edition of his Ellery Queen novel The Player on the Other Side. Of the many folks who did pseudonymous Ellery Queen novels (and that list included Jack Vance, Avram Davidson, and more) Sturgeon was the only one to get to play in the Ellery queen universe, using both Ellery and his father in the book. The others all did regular mysteries attributed to EQ. Apparently he also may have done a Saint novel The Saint Sees It Through though this is absolutely not substantiated. I like to believe it though so there.

As a general rule, I like Sturgeon’s short fiction much more than his novels. His most famous one, More Than Human left me pretty cold. The Dreaming Jewels was OK but not up to his best work.

But Some of Your Blood is different from all of those others. This is a work of pure horror and like much of his shorter work it is subtle and succinct. The novel begins with two psychiatrists exchanging notes about a soldier referred to one of them. The soldier was in a war zone (maybe Korea) where mail home is censored for sensitive data. A censor reads a letter and forwards it to a major who immediately recommends the man be taken into custody and evaluated. The contents of the letter are not shown to the shrink.

The soldier “George Smith” (this may be an alias) seems somewhat slow but not particularly violent or psycho. He begins a long term analysis by two psychiatrists, who are trying to evaluate each other’s opinions off the record. Smith has grown up in a loveless home where his mother died fairly young. The family lives in a shack in the backwoods and the father is the town drunk who can get abusive. George frequently goes into the woods and hunts using his hands, a knife and his backwoods skills. He is not particularly bad, just not really good, an average-or-lower student who does not fit in well.

One night he is arrested for breaking into a store and stealing some food — something he had done for a while. He is sentenced to go away to a juvenile prison where he remained a fairly model student. When his two year sentence was up, he is informed that his father has died. Rather than go home or go live with his mother’s sister, he stays for another year. At the end of that he is taken to a new home with the aunt and her husband. He still doesn’t fit in well but he finds some affection from a local girl eight years his senior whom he meets secretly for sex. When she gets pregnant, he knows her father will kill him so he joins the Army. Here he has an undistinguished record until the letter incident.

The accounts of George either by himself or the interaction with the psychiatrist are fascinating. There is no moral compass and the answers to the Rorschach test are creepy as hell. The big secret is not revealed until the final few pages, including the contents of the letter — and it is wild.

This was a revolutionary book when it came out, as wild as Silence of the Lambs, but since it was a paperback, it went ignored beyond the science fiction and horror circles. Its reputation as a horror classic is well deserved.

For years, copies of this book were hard to find and cherished by those who had them. It appears to be in print at the moment and copies are available on ABE and eBay for varying prices as well as for Kindle.

I think you should check it out if you have not read it. And read it again if you have before. And have a Great Thanksgiving.

Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

Forgotten Book: Magnus, Robot fighter 4000 A.D., by Russ Manning (2015)

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Magnus goes toe-to-toe with a robot oppressor. Because, after all, he's the Robot Fighter.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 166th in my series of Forgotten Books.

Sorry for missing you all last week. I had many things going on and nothing specific to review, so rather than trying to fake it, I decided to pass. This week I had another book, but I have not finished reading it, so I went with something fast and furious.

When I was younger I loved comics and bought them. I bought a lot of comics. They were mainly DC and Marvel but not all. I loved Classics Illustrated books and bought more than a few of them. I was there at the beginning of the Silver Age of comics and had a number of those early key issues. But I was limited by whatever passed through the revolving rack at my local 7-11 or TG&Y. Marvel and DC controlled a lot of those slots. Occasionally, though, another company would land a few. I looked at Harvey comics and the rare Gold Key and Dell. I would see the rare Tarzan, Dr. Solar or Space Family Robinson — and even rarer was Magnus, Robot Fighter.

Magnus is a comic I would have loved. It was science fiction. It was Russ Manning, whom I loved for his work on Sea Devils, a comic I cherish to this day, and his work on Tarzan. But I never saw enough of these to make an impression. If the choice was an odd issue of Magnus or an issue of The Avengers, the superheroes were going to win.

So, let’s talk a little about this title. Magnus is a young man, raised by the robot 1A to be a free-thinker and to fight for the rights of people. Mankind has developed a number of different robot types and taken up a life of leisure. The robots have attained some sentience and have begun to start repressing any thoughts of individuality and rebellion. Mankind has to do whatever the robots tell them or suffer the consequences.

At the time this comic started up in 1962, Russ Manning approached the editors at Gold Key with the idea of a future science fiction Tarzan. A young man raised by a robot rather than an ape. He fights against despotic robots rather than some of the great apes. Manning had been doing the Tarzan newspaper strip for a while and he had the stories and ideas down pat.

Magnus has a transmitter in his head that allows him to receive robot transmissions. In his first issue, he incites a riot and meets up with Leeja Clane, a beautiful woman with ideas of her own and a wardrobe that was amazing to my pre-teen eyes. Magnus has been trained in martial arts and can damage a robot with his bare hands. Pretty heady stuff in the pre-Bruce Lee days.

Issue one introduces the main characters of Magnus, Leeja and 1A. Leeja’s father, Senator Clane, is introduced in Issue 2, and he aids in the war against robot oppression. The stories have some, but not a lot of originality. Issue 2 introduces a robot Magnus that fools some. Issue 3 has alien invaders; Issue 4 has an underwater menace. With Issue 5 there is the “immortal robot” that has tyrannical aspirations. Issue 6, we have a concentration camp/brainwashing issue and Issue 7 features the return of Xyrkol, the alien from Issue 3.

These are comics and the stories are not great, but some of the ideas are. And the art is always fun.

Dark Horse re-issued Magnus in two formats. There was a nice hardback edition at about $50, and later, there were some paperback ones at $20. I had the first hardback collection prior to my big book sale in 2007, so now I have the paperback collections. The art is in color, and there are seven issues here, encompassing 204 pages plus a few pages of extras. I think it’s a great value.

And, of course, depending on your love of the character, Russ Manning, Gold Key comics and other factors, your mileage will definitely vary.

Is this as impactful as the first seven issues of Spider-Man? Oh, absolutely not. Or how about The Defenders? Yeah, I like this better than that one. And, if the idea of a futuristic Tarzan in robotland doesn’t appeal to you, I can only ask that you do a self examination and figure out what is wrong with you. Or, maybe me.

Have a great week, and remember Thanksgiving will be here very soon. Enjoy the season no matter how you celebrate.

Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Forgotten Book: Gestapo Mars by Victor Gischler (2015)

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Gestapo Mars: Lots of fun, but don't expect to find it at your local Barnes & Noble.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 165th in my series of Forgotten Books.

I hope you all had a wonderful Halloween with lots of costumes and candy and fun. We had rain in San Antonio, first early in the day and then again just as the sun went down. Kind of dampened a few spirits and ghouls too.

This week I need to talk about one of my favorite living writers, Victor Gischler. It was Bill Crider who I blame for pointing me in Gischler’s direction. VG was looking for “Gischler virgins” (people who had never read his work) to try a test on. I responded that I was a virgin and he sent me a copy of Shotgun Opera. The only requirement was that I read the book and post a review. If I liked it, great. If not, tell people what I thought and pass the book on.

I posted my review on Amazon and it went along the lines of “What if Quentin Tarrant no had directed the Marx Brothers in Kill Bill and they had done it in drag?” That really didn’t describe the plot of the book, but it certainly captured the flavor. Gischler is not going to be your mother’s thriller writer. Conventional is not a word to enter into these discussions.

I’ve read many of his books, but not all. A couple are waiting for me to get to them. I just cannot binge on this stuff. But I love what I read. When I was Toastmaster at ArmadilloCon a few years back, the committee asked if there was anyone they could invite that I wanted to come. I told them Gischler’s name and he came in from Baton Rouge. He seems like a nice normal person, and I think he had a good time. I know I enjoyed seeing him there.

So this week we are looking at his new science fiction thriller which is not likely to be in a lot of places because … well, it’s not very PC. Gestapo Mars is a title unlikely to send Barnes & Noble ordering 150 copies per store. It’s much more likely to be in the one-or-fewer copy range. Much like Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream, this attempts to make a Nazi sympathetic hero work for the reader.

Carter Sloan is a programmed and highly trained assassin and spy for the Third Reich, which is still in existence several centuries from now. He has been in cryostorage for 258 years, awaiting a mission. When he is awaked, he is told that he will be invading a resistance group looking for the Daughter of the Brass Dragon. Almost immediately, the people reviving him are attacked by the Nazis, who also want him to get to the Daughter of the Brass Dragon. His instructions are a little vague. He will have to improvise and move along. When he finds the Daughter he is to capture her. Or maybe kill her. No, it’s capture. Then it’s kill. Things get a little weird.

He is sent to the moon in a disguise and is accepted by the resistance and the lovely Meredith Capulet, who agrees to smuggle him out. But nothing goes as planned, and her little flyer is attacked by the aliens of the Coriandon race, gelatinous beings from somewhere not near here.

To save himself, he must reveal his Nazi connections and call for help. This obviously does not set well with Meredith, but he wants to live and love again. Bad things happen to the Nazis, and Carter and Meredith are on a slow ship back to the Nazi stronghold on Mars.

But, wait, things have changed. The resistance has moved against the Nazis, and no one is safe. His mission changes until he no longer cares and just wants to survive. Enter the exploding dog with new missions.

The action is fast, furious and irreverent. Sloan has to question all sides and make love to all available women. It’s kind of like Raiders of the Lost Reich, as situations change every few pages. The Nazis and resistance need to unite, because the gooey aliens are coming and they have big guns.

It’s a fun and fast read full of in jokes and odd stuff. When someone sings “Hey, hey we’re the Nazis. The people say we Nazi around,” you know sanity has left the building.

As usual, your mileage may vary, but if Ernie Kovacs and Monty Python are your type of humor, along with a tiny sprinkle of Benny Hill, you can find a home on Gestapo Mars. And the cover is fun, too.

Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Forgotten Book: Earthbound by Richard Matheson (1982)

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Spooky, erotic stuff lies inside the covers of Richard Matheson's Earthbound.

This is the 164th in my series of Forgotten Books.

All of you should know the work of Richard Matheson, particularly at this time of year. His work for The Twilight Zone alone is enough to make him a demi-god. Then there were his wonderful movies, adapting Edgar Allan Poe and others like Fritz Leiber, which he and Charles Beaumont, another demi-god, adapted in Burn, Witch, Burn. I reviewed that film several years ago. If you have not seen it, you should.

But, beyond those wonderful cinematic things, there is the literary Richard Matheson. First it was the short stories. The collections Born of Man and Woman, Shock!, Shock II, Shock III, Shock Waves, Shock 4 and The Shores of Space are treasures beyond measure. The signed Collected Stories by Richard Matheson is one of the core books of my library. It was expensive but worth every penny I spent.

Then there are the novels. You must have read some of them – I Am Legend, The Shrinking Man, his war novel The Beardless Warriors, the amazing Hell House, Bid Time Return and What Dreams May Come, among many others. If you have not read these books, put down this column and go find them. Get any copy you can. It won’t matter. You will fall in love with the stories, with the printed word and with the mind of the Master.

I met RM only one time, at a World Fantasy Convention in Arizona. We didn’t talk long. It would have been embarrassing because I would have blithered like an idiot. We talked about a mutual friend Chad Oliver and RM spoke fondly of Chad’s days in California. Then he was gone, and I was still alive after being in his presence.

Not many writers affect me like that. But Matheson was a personal hero and I went all fanboy.

To this book now.

Earthbound is an overlooked Matheson title. It was originally published by Playboy Press under the pseudonym Logan Swanson in an uninspired looking paperback edition. Very few people saw it. In 1989, a small press in the UK, Robinson Publishing, presented the work in a hardcover edition bearing Matheson’s name and a creepy cover that was not given an artist credit.

Earthbound's original, far less exciting cover.

I had this book for a long time and decided that since this was Halloween week, I might as well read the master. What a quick, wild read. David and Ellen are a California couple whose marriage is in serious trouble. David has had an affair and been caught. He loves Ellen, in his way, but they have been married more than 20 years. Their kids are grown and gone. They are about to be grandparents and David is feeling mortality.

They decide to go on a second honeymoon back to the small town where they originally honeymooned. But their original cottage is gone to a fire, so they take another one nearby. They visit some of the same places, order the same meals but something is just not right.

Then David meets Marianna, a free spirit who wants nothing more than wild sex and depravity. When David succumbs to her temptations he feels excitement, guilt, lust, enervation and more. David immediately resents the liaison and vows to be faithful to Ellen. But Marianna is persuasive.

The novel moves between erotic thriller into erotic horror with astounding ease and makes twists and turns you don’t see coming (or at least I didn’t), leading to violent confrontation and resolution.

It’s short, vicious and packs a mean punch. Just like a Richard Matheson novel should.

Again, Halloween is a couple of days away. Enjoy your favorite horrors and candy and films. Scare yourself.

Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

 

Forgotten Book: PS Showcase #3: Mad Scientist Meets Cannibal by Robert T. Jeschonek (2008)

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Chances are you've never read anything like Robert T. Jeschonek.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 163rd in my series of Forgotten Books.

Frequently when I review the books for the Forgotten Book column, I use a book I have read before and share my love or hatred of the book right here. Last week’s book Beastly Bones was new to me but not the writer. This week everything is new. I was looking for a book to read and talk about and, for some reason, this one caught my eye.

It fit several parameters I had established. It had to be short. Check. It had to have horror. Well, there are five stories here and several of them have horror elements. So, check. And it had to grab my attention. HUGE CHECK!!!

I loved this book. Robert T. Jeschonek was not a name I was familiar with. I had gotten the book from the publisher, PS Publishing, in a grab bag when they offered some of their back stock at a reduced price. Several small press publishers will do that occasionally as a way to move slow stock, odd items and to raise some quick cash. As a collector, it’s a great way to get some odd things I might not have initially ordered, but at a reduced price, I can take a chance on it.

And PS is one of those publishers I really like. I’ve got a lot of their books — many in the signed limited state. This is one of them. There is a hardback edition of 200 copies signed by Jeschonek and then this one with a dust jacket limited to 100 copies signed by Jeschonek and introducer Mike Resnick.

It was the introduction that sucked me in. I’ve met Mike Resnick many times over the years and I enjoy his work as a writer and an editor. Resnick starts his introduction remembering those guide-to books of the 80’s and 90’s that said stuff like, if you like Poul Anderson, try Gordon R. Dickson. He remembered that it said something like “If you like R. A. Lafferty, buy up all his books and keep reading them because no one else is remotely like him,” or something like that. He says that could apply to Jeschonek too.

So, with that type of fanfare, I had to see what was going on. Before we get to the stories, let me say, Resnick is right. If anything, he understated the case.

These were mind-blowing stories, the likes of which I had not seen in a long while. First up was “Something Borrowed, Something Doomed” which blew me away. This is the story of genebillies living in West Virginia.  Simple mountain folk know for their wicked sense of humor and gene splicing (“wildshinin’”) abilities. One of their traditions is to try to make a couple’s wedding into the most horrible day possible with the idea that, if you survived that, your marriage could survive anything. Our narrator is Vicky Dozen, a master wildshiner who is about to marry Bigfoor Tourniquet, who may be her equal. She is hoping the wedding is up to her mother’s best effort which reproduced the 12 plagues of Egypt in the wedding hall. Boils, locust, frogs and blood rivers were the least of it. Vicky is hoping her five brothers don’t do something stupid and, of course, they do. They end the world and someone forgot to protect the wedding chapel from that.

“Dionysus Dying” deals with a legendary saxophonist meeting his idol right at his death bed. Bobby Ball has enjoyed success in his past and when his idol Omar Wild sends for him as the one man to perform his final work, he sees possible new fame and success.

“Food Chain” deals with a woman having to deal with the idea that her food comes from a living, talking human being called a Ration who can make his flesh taste like anything and regenerate whatever you eat. She has her reasons for hating the Ration, though.

“The Day After They Rounded up Everyone Who Could Love Unconditionally” is very short: 750 words. It didn’t work for me.

The final piece is “Playing Doctor” features Dr. Hildegarde Medici, female mad scientist, bent on world conquest and her assistant Glugor (”Glue”), who has been in love with her since she was six years old. But of course, she does not realize it. As her plans fail and bad news happens, Glue has a surprise for the mad doctor. A touching story of world domination and love.

This is an amazing book and I loved it. I had never heard of Jeschonek but I will be searching out more of his work. And you should too. Kudos for PS Publishing for putting out this little gem. They do this on a semi-regular basis so you should check them out too.

Read something new, bold, and different. You owe it to yourself.

Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs.