Anthony Boucher (1911–1968)

A solid folk horror offering from 1943 by the prolific and wide-ranging pulp fiction writer Anthony Boucher that manages to bring elements of Machen's 'White People' into alignment with a genre of Wild West occult horror of which a master exponent was Robert Howard.

There is a bit of a mystery about the 'hero' of the story. He is definitely not one of the good guys but it is unclear exactly what he is - perhaps engaged in espionage and certainly prepared to murder to cover his tracks. The off show more beat militarised desert location sets the scene well.

The critters are also imaginatively drawn being presumed to be the dessicated remnants of cannibal low life humans who have learned occult survival from the desert Indians. These cannibals have their ancestry traced back (in spirit at least) to old European, certainly Scottish, legend.

Desert Indians as a threat (now, of course, a trope seen as irredeemably racist and imperialist) that can visit an indirect revenge on the settlers who ousted them and who are linked to dark blood rites of some sort are a common and morally evasive element in much Western folk horror.

The debt to Machen is there again (and obviously so for Howard) since his 'white people' (there is an irony in the terminology) are also an evil remnant population pushed to the margins by 'civilising' settlers in ancient Britain. Moral degeneracy (not 'Christian') is taken as read.

In the same period (the 1940s), science fiction stories would repeat a variant of this anxious story line, applying them to Martians whose civilisations had degenerated but who perhaps were still present in the landscape and able to do harm to the space settlers.

Obviously the process of settlement was creating something uncomfortable in the American psyche at this time - old fears and greed in a dialectic with nostalgia and sometimes (though not in this story) of regret,

A form of neurotic blood guilt surged through American pulp fiction until more thoughtful writers like Ray Bradbury started to ask some appropriate questions of the moral and psychological costs of the settler process while still not quite getting around to condemning it.

We have had a tendency to sentimentalise the indigenous Indians as eco-warriors and victims but the history of the settlement was not one sided in terms of brutality. A fair history of the Cherokee (whatever their defensive 'rights') will disabuse you of that. Scalping and rape are not spiritual.

Westerners like Howard were writing well within the parameters of a very live folk memory, far closer in time to the Indian Wars than anything Machen might write in relation to the arrival of the neolithic peoples of Britain. Machen and others were just providing a tool for expression of anxiety.

And this was an era that would last until the arrival of the cynical Westerns of the Italians and the 'correcting the story' films of the liberal 1970s when the cowboy film, cowboy music, cowboy culture in general, gave the West a lustre for young males that reached its peak a decade later.

Although we may ahistorically condemn this story as a creature of an unthinking imperialist mind-set, within its framework it is a fine example of the genre. Such stories should be understood on their contemporary merits rather than treated as exemplars of later morality or ideology.

That may be uncomfortable to people under 40 whose education has been guided by liberal bien-pensants but you cannot understand the past by imposing on it the values of the present and sticking your fingers in your ears and going 'lalalalala' when it gets uncomfortable.

This was their world. It had to be displaced eventually (just as the current liberal mythologies will one day be displaced) but it had its authenticity and its historical just cause if only we have the imagination to go back and sit where they sat as well as sit where the indigenous peoples sat. show less

Boucher (rhymes with "voucher") is another of those pulp-era authors who was equally proficient in SF and in mystery; he was also an important critic in both genres. When writing and reviewing mystery, he used the pseudonym "H. H. Holmes," though his mystery novels these days are usually published under the Boucher name.

He was also an important editor in SF. He co-founded and was the first editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year show more and is still one of the genre's major magazines.

This collection was published in 1969, shortly after his death, and gathers the best of his SF stories from the early 1940s. I had picked up the book mostly to read the two award-nominated stories, but I enjoyed them so much that I wound up reading the whole book.

Boucher's writing is recognizably 40s SF (it's hard not to notice the almost complete absence of female characters in these stories), but it's a notch higher in literary style than most of his contemporaries -- more graceful prose, a bit more character development, fewer overwrought adjectives and exclamation points.

The stories for which I picked up the book both hold up well after roughly 80 years. "Q.U.R." is a tale of an inventor who has to fight entrenched business interests after finding a solution to a crisis in the robot industry; "We Print the Truth" centers on a newspaper editor who finds himself with unusual power and responsibility after being granted a wish.

But I liked some of the other stories even more. Several of the stories lean slightly into horror, and Boucher finds just my level of eerie and creepy without getting too gross. "Mr. Lepescu" starts with a familiar theme -- a child convinced that his imaginary playmate is real -- and gives it a sharp final twist; "The Ghost of Me" is a witty piece that combines ghost story with a touch of time travel gone wrong.

Solid, well-crafted stuff, and still thoroughly readable and enjoyable today. show less

This was one of the free books I acquired when I first joined the SFBC back in 1960 (or so). And, after all these years, it's still one of the best compilations I've ever read. While only one of the stories is mediocre the rest are well in the range of exceptional sociological studies on the human condition. ‘Re-Birth’ by John Wyndham has been published in other collects since then, but is still a concise answer to how/why mankind can hope to survive Armageddon. ‘The Shape of Things show more That Came’—by Richard Derming--shames us in our failure to appreciate what humanity has accomplished in just a few years. And only ‘The Weapon Shops of Isher’ by van Vogt could end the book by providing a reasonable solution to the Creation Story.

For all of the woe in the world today—and especially taking into account Ray Bradbury’s elegy to the loss of all our fears : ‘Pillar of fire’—this is one “feel-good” collection. show less

Science fiction is in its infancy, and one of its earliest legends is Fowler Foulkes, who created the immortal Dr. Derringer. Fowler’s son, Hilary, administers the Foulkes estate with a view to wringing every penny out of reprints, not even extending favours to the nuns who would make a Braille version for blind readers. With such a talent for making enemies, it’s not surprising that someone would try to kill Hilary. What is surprising is the locked-room nature of the attempt—and it show more will take all the ingenuity of Detective Marshall and his occasional confidante, Sister Ursula, to figure out who attempted-to-do-it.

This book is not only a mystery novel; it’s a portrait of the sci-fi community in the United States in the late 1930s. Boucher himself makes a cameo appearance, while several of his friends appear as caricatures or as composite characters. It’s a light, wry sort of mystery, both in terms of writing style and in terms of plot. I’m not really one for the locked-room mystery, because I don’t have the faintest hope of guessing whodunnit, but this story was agreeable enough. I’d recommend it if you like light Golden Age mysteries, mysteries about writers, or perhaps the Anthony Horowitz books where he is a character in his own story. (Or if you thought Horowitz’s idea a bit over the top, you might like this better, because Boucher appears only sparingly in his own book.) show less