‘The Rim of Morning’ review: Two supernatural novels by William Sloane

Halloween comes early this year for lucky readers with the reappearance of two short supernatural novels by the forgotten writer William Sloane: “To Walk the Night” and “The Edge of Running Water.” Conjoined as “The Rim of Morning,” a handsome omnibus volume released by the publishing arm of the New York Review of Books, these undeservedly neglected works may at last find a permanent home alongside the cross-genre novels they anticipated: books that, in style and theme, move with ease between science fiction, noir, dark fantasy, supernatural horror and mainstream fiction.

William Sloane (1906-1974) graduated from Princeton, worked in publishing for a number of years, headed the wartime Council on Books and was the longtime managing director of Rutgers University Press. Belying his Ivy League background and slightly fusty C.V., Sloane had an interest in the occult. In the early 1930s, he wrote three plays dealing with ghosts, and in 1937 published “To Walk the Night.” Kirkus gave it a thumbs-up: “A supernatural story that is neither sensational nor lurid. . . . A good bet for those who like Poe’s work. A first novel — this man bears watching.”

He still does. Robert Bloch (of “Psycho” fame) named “To Walk the Night” one of his 10 favorite horror novels, up there with “Dracula” and “Frankenstein.” Sloane’s tale blends elements of noir, gothic and science fiction in a story that resists easy classification. It opens as the narrator, Berkeley M. Jones (called Bark), navigates the winding drive to a mansion overlooking Long Island Sound. He is there to deliver terrible news to the estate’s owner, whose son Jerry, Bark’s best friend, has killed himself. Bark wants to spare Jerry’s father the details surrounding his son’s suicide, the import of which Bark himself doesn’t completely grasp.

“I must tell my story matter-of-factly, as if that shadow in the corner of my mind did not exist. That was all. I must not make him feel, as I did, that something horrible lay behind what I said.”

Much of the strength of Sloane’s narrative derives from this matter-of-fact tone. One of the novel’s most unsettling scenes takes place during a flashback to an Ivy League football game in which nothing overtly supernatural seems to occur. After the game, Bark and Jerry, drunk and exhilarated over their team’s win, pay a surprise visit to Jerry’s old astronomy professor. The author of a controversial mathematical treatise, “A Fundamental Critique of the Einstein Space-Time Continuum,” Dr. LeNormand is something of a crank. “If he hadn’t been such a famous man to begin with, Jerry thought, they’d have asked him to resign from the faculty.”

What they find when they enter his observatory is something horrible indeed: The famous astronomer is dead and “burning like a torch.”

In the aftermath, the two young men are shocked to learn that the astronomer, a confirmed bachelor, had married just three months earlier. His widow, Selena, is a classic femme fatale: beautiful, icily intelligent, yet oddly detached. Bark finds her impossible to read; Jerry finds her impossible to resist. Within months, the two marry. Shortly after, they decamp to a remote cabin in the New Mexico wilderness, which is where Bark eventually tracks them down in an effort to learn the truth about who Selena really is.

With its witty dialogue, burnished glimpses of affluence and art, and eerily poignant ending, “To Walk the Night” reads remarkably like a contemporary thriller that pays homage to great noir films such as “Kiss Me Deadly” and “Laura.” But Sloane’s book appeared years before either of those movies or the books they were based on. Surely it deserves a film adaptation of its own?

“The Edge of Running Water,” published two years later, did get its own movie: “The Devil Commands,” starring Boris Karloff. Sloane’s second novel is a bit creakier than his first, slower-moving and more conventional in its setup and marred by an ending that feels rushed.

But the book’s polished style and atmospheric setting — a creepy old house overlooking the Kennebec River in coastal Maine — make up for the languid pacing. As in “To Walk the Night,” there’s a scientist at the heart of the tale: Julian Blair, an electrophysicist shattered by the untimely death of his beloved, much younger wife, Helen. Blair has retreated to the remote town of Barsham Harbor, where he summons his former student Dick Sayles, who was also in love with Helen.

Blair isn’t much in evidence — he’s holed up in a mysterious upstairs room, unavailable to all except his housekeeper, who dusts once a week. The house is also occupied by Helen’s younger sister, who bears a startling resemblance to her dead sibling. What Blair is trying to do is construct a machine that will allow him to communicate with the dead. When he shares the nature of his eldritch research with his onetime pupil, Dick’s reaction is predictable: “This is a mad project. It’s blasphemous. It’s impossible. . . . Have you stopped to think what such a thing as you are trying to do would mean, Julian?”

As one might guess, this doesn’t end well.

Like Shirley Jackson, Sloane masterfully describes the paranoia and close-mindedness of an isolated rural community when outsiders take up residence. The most striking and frightening scenes involve the sounds emitted by Blair’s creation, a sonic nightmare reminiscent of the effects in Algernon Blackwood’s classic story “The Willows.” And there’s a brilliant set piece when Blair finally reveals his machine to the horror-struck Dick, a small masterpiece of the cosmic horror invoked by the volume’s subtitle. After reading both of these elegant, disquieting novels, one can marvel that they escaped mainstream attention for so long and rejoice that they’re back in print.

THE RIM OF MORNING
By William Sloane
New York Review Books. 464 pp. Paperback, $18.95

Originally published on WashingtonPost.com.

Close encounters with feminist science fiction in 'Sisters of the Revolution'

Mary Shelley usually gets mad props as the progenitor of feminist science fiction for her 1818 "Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus." But pride of place arguably goes to Mary Cavendish, who in 1668 penned a feminist utopian novel, "The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World," in response to Robert Hooke's "Micrographia," which in 1665 put microscopes on the map and coined the biological term "cell." Cavendish delved into speculation as to what might exist beneath and within the world we know, or think we know (alien life forms played a role). She was given the sobriquet "Mad Madge" for her pains.

FOR THE RECORD: Margaret Cavendish: An Aug. 9 review of "Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology" incorrectly said 17th century author Margaret Cavendish's first name was Mary.

Nearly 300 years later, things had improved … barely. "Women are writing SCIENCE FICTION!" trumpeted the flap copy for Margaret St. Clair's 1963 novel "Sign of the Labrys." Women, it went on to say, "are conscious of the moon-pulls, the earth-tides. They possess a buried memory of humankind's obscure and ancient past which can emerge to uniquely color and flavor a novel."

Those who don't possess a buried memory of humankind's obscure and ancient past are condemned to repeat it. So thank the Goddess for "Sisters of the Revolution," a superlative new anthology of previously published feminist science fiction by female writers, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Noted editors of numerous anthologies of speculative fiction, the VanderMeers have compiled one of the best volumes of feminist — or any other — science fiction in years. "Sisters of the Revolution" reaches back to the late 1960s and extends to 2012, with the lioness' share of tales originally published between 1980 and 2000.

There are classic, much-anthologized stories by well-known writers here. "The Screwfly Solution," a brilliant, terrifying tale of global femicide by James M. Tiptree Jr. [pseudonym for Alice Sheldon], carries even more impact in our own age of rampant violence against women than when it first appeared in 1977. An off-world feminist utopia confronts its own destruction in "When It Changed" by Joanna Russ, whose "How to Suppress Women's Writing" was a touchstone for second-wave feminists. Ursula Le Guin is represented by "Sur," in which a group of bluestockings mount an early 20th century expedition to Antarctica. "The Evening and the Morning and the Night" by Octavia Butler explores the global effect of a fictional neurovirus, and "how much of what we do is encouraged, discouraged, or otherwise guarded by what we are genetically," as she states in her short afterword to this poignant tale. Angela Carter's "The Fall River Axe Murders" follows Lizzie Borden on the sultry August morning of the day that her "Sargasso calm" notoriously erupts, suggesting motives that were ignored at the time.

But much of the pleasure in "Sisters of the Revolution" derives from encountering work by writers who aren't household names. The stories are arranged as to how they "speak to one another rather than chronological order". So Anne Richter's "The Sleep of Plants," deftly translated from the Belgian by Edward Gauvin, segues into Kelly Barnhill's dreamy and dark magical realist tale, "The Men Who Live in Trees," which slides into Hiromi Goto's "Tales From the Breast" ("You want to yell down the hall that you have a name and it isn't Breast Milk").

Readers can also compare depictions of maternal love in Kit Reed's viciously funny "The Mothers of Shark Island" and Nnedi Okorafor's "The Palm Tree Bandit," whose narrator tells her young daughter of her namesake great-grandmother's daring nocturnal exploits, and delight in riffs on such oft-told tales as Kelley Eskridge's gender-bending "And Salome Danced" and Nalo Hopkinson's creepy Bluebeard story, "The Glass Bottle Trick." And these are just a handful of the stories contained in this distaff treasure chest: Every single one is a gem.

Forty years ago, in her essay "American SF and the Other," Le Guin wryly observed: "The women's movement has made most of us conscious of the fact that SF has either totally ignored women, or presented them as squeaking dolls subject to instant rape by monsters — or old-maid scientists desexed by hypertrophy of the intellectual organs — or, at best, loyal little wives or mistresses of accomplished heroes."

There are no squeaking dolls or loyal little wives here, no old maid scientists — and if there were, woe betide anyone who took them at face value.

Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology
Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
PM Press: 341 pp., $15.95 paper

Originally published on LATimes.com.

In Austin Grossman's supernatural novel, 'Crooked,' Richard Nixon meets H.P. Lovecraft

As if American voters didn’t have enough to worry about, in the last few years, the undead and the uncanny have infiltrated the ranks of U.S. politicians in novels like Seth Grahame-Smith’s “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” and “The Last American Vampire” and Christopher Farnsworth’s wonderful Nathaniel Cade books, which star a vampire Secret Service agent bound by blood to protect the president. Fans of those books might raise an eyebrow at the White House’s decision to allow tourists to use cameras for the first time in 40 years. Garlic and silver bullets seem a safer bet than Instagram for your White House tour; stakes too, though the ban on selfie sticks makes it doubtful they’d make it through security.

“Crooked,” Austin Grossman’s clever new supernatural novel, delves into even more arcane territory. His previous works, “Soon I Will Be Invincible” and “You,” deal with superheroes and the world of video game design (Grossman worked as a game developer in the 1990s). In “Crooked,” he riffs on H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos in all its eldritch glory and creates an antihero as tormented as any Marvel or DC villain: Richard Nixon, 37th president of the United States.

Nixon narrates “Crooked.” The most impressive aspect of the novel is how Grossman creates a nuanced, funny and moving characterization of a man reviled during (and after) his term of office; a Republican president whose achievements — desegregation in the South, detente with the Soviet Union, establishing a relationship with Red China — were overshadowed by the Watergate debacle and the Vietnam War (which ended during Nixon’s term in office).

“I had an ignoble knack for meanness,” Nixon admits in “Crooked.” “Reporters would get out their notebooks and scribble, nodding, knowing they had a quote … No matter how pure I seemed, righteous all the way through, there was always another me that couldn’t be put down, a sly one, a clever one, a lying one, a vicious one. I could be elected president of the whole goddamned United States but I’d always be Tricky Dick.”

This gift for moral compromise accelerates Nixon’s plunge into the supernatural maelstrom when, as a first-term Republican congressman on the House Un-American Activities Committee, he accuses Alger Hiss, a State Department employee and former Communist Party member, of being a Soviet spy. In our world, HUAC’s actions are often compared to those of a witch hunt. In “Crooked,” Nixon uncovers something far worse than witches: a cabal of Soviet agents invoking Yog-Sothoth, Elder God of the Cthulhu cycle, in a New York hotel room.

After witnessing this, Nixon is unwillingly co-opted as a Soviet asset, which he remains throughout the Cold War. Worse, he learns that the Soviets aren’t the only ones engaging in eldritch rites: In Pawtuxet, Mass., a secret government facility created and overseen by Dwight D. Eisenhower is developing even more sinister paranormal weapons to combat the Soviet threat.

“Strategic alliances with folkloric, extraplanar, and subterranean entities. Field deployment of weaponized paleofauna. Large-scale saturation of target areas with invasive fungal and floral xeno organisms …This is the Cold War now,” the president is warned by Henry Kissinger.

“My government was a stranger thing than anyone knew,” Nixon observes in one of the many deadpan asides that make “Crooked” a droll riff on 20th century politics. During his decades-long journey through the fetid swamp of American diplomacy, Nixon views human and inhuman rivals with the same jaundiced eye. He becomes increasingly estranged from his wife, Pat, who remains loyal in public even as she demands separate sleeping arrangements and reveals that she’s never voted Republican in her life.

Nixon is despised by his colleagues in Congress and the White House, and his closest and most enduring ties are to a pair of KGB operatives, Arkady and Tatiana. Their Boris and Natasha skulduggery enlivens “Crooked’s” middle section, which gets bogged down in Nixon’s thankless tenure as Eisenhower’s vice president and in Nixon’s failed 1960 presidential bid. The action picks up once Nixon takes over the Oval Office, especially after Kissinger becomes his national security advisor. Those who recall Kissinger’s seemingly superhuman flair for diplomacy will not be surprised that he is a 1,000-year-old sorcerer.

Grossman’s own impressive narrative gifts are occasionally undermined by slack pacing. And the supernatural elements are often underplayed — most paranormal incursions are delivered as secondhand accounts. We seldom see any monsters, and neither does Nixon, though we do get enticing references to “the Great Worm at Tunguska, and what’s at Arkhangel’sk, and the pine men, and that which you tried to put down with the bomb in ’49.”

This restraint may be in accordance with Lovecraft’s famous dictum that horror is best invoked by a “certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces … a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.” But one yearns for more about the kraken that assisted the British during World War II, yanking Messerschmitts from the sky with its tentacles, and the rival magicians associated with the Democratic Party, who “showed their hand at Woodstock.”

Still, those who love deconstructing the supernatural literary references in series like “True Detective” and “Lost” will find much to savor in “Crooked,” which also carries an important message we should all heed as our presidential candidates hit the campaign trail: “If the old gods rise, it will represent a significant realignment of the electoral landscape.”

Crooked
Austin Grossman
Mulholland/Little, Brown: 355 pp., $26

Originally published on LATimes.com.

J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and 'The Fellowship' of fantasy writers

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (Haywood Magee / Getty Images)

In a pub in Oxford there lived some writers. Not nasty, dirty decadent writers, whose books were filled with intimations of sex and an oozy smell, nor yet dry, bare Modernists with a horror of heroics or fantastical things: These Oxford writers were Inklings, and that means heterosexual white male Christians who created some of the most enduring works of 20th century fantasy.

The pub was the Eagle and Child. In the decades since the Inklings first met inside its wood-paneled rooms, their faerie landscapes have become a pop cultural theme park on a global scale, encompassing Westeros, “World of Warcraft,” Dungeons & Dragons, “Star Wars,” Renaissance fairs and goth emporia. The most famous Inklings were J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, but over the years the group included, among others, the anthroposophist poet-philosopher Owen Barfield, fantasist Charles Williams, Lewis’ older brother Warren, known as Warnie, and, eventually, Tolkien’s youngest son, Christopher.

The story of these literary soul mates has been told before, but Philip and Carol Zaleski weave their story into a highly readable group biography called “The Fellowship: Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams.” Authors and editors of books on spirituality and prayer, they keep their focus on the Christian elements in the Inklings’ lives and work. They also make ample room at the high table for Williams and Barfield, minor writers who nonetheless had considerable influence on their friends, especially Lewis, a literary magpie who made liberal use of images and ideas from the other Inklings in his work.

Tolkien, Lewis and Barfield all studied at Oxford. The three also served in World War I, an experience that was especially pivotal to Tolkien in his creation of a Middle-earth ravaged by war and its aftermath. Poor eyesight kept Charles Williams out of the military, and his family’s genteel poverty meant he could afford only two years at University College London. Yet all four ended up closely associated with Oxford, where their weekly gatherings at the Eagle and Child or a member’s university rooms served as a movable feast for this “group of Christians who like to write.”

“In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out,” C.S Lewis remarked in 1960, long after the Inklings had dissolved.

Tolkien was the philologist and Anglo-Saxon scholar, Lewis the Christian apologist who wrote on medieval allegory before earning fame with a science fiction trilogy, wartime BBC broadcasts on Christian faith, and later “The Screwtape Letters” and Narnia books. Owen Barfield loved English folk dance and wrote the influential “Poetic Diction,” developing a theory of language that anticipated later developments in the study of consciousness, as well as what became known as New Age thought. The disarmingly fey Williams had no problems reconciling his Anglicanism with a belief in magic and the tarot, participating in esoteric rites such as the “Ceremony of Consecration on the Threshold of Sacred Mystery.” He invented the supernatural thriller in novels like “The Place of the Lion” and “The Greater Trumps,” books that created a genre we now call urban fantasy.

Williams came to Oxford after joining the Inklings. He soon became a ixture there, drawing crowds to hear him lecture on Milton, Shakespeare, romantic love, the Arthurian mythos. His eccentric views exasperated and sometimes infuriated the far more conservative Tolkien. Williams viewed his own wife as “his Beatrice, muse and model of perfection,” none of which prevented him from developing passionate, if mostly platonic, relationships with younger women. At least one of these involved ritual sadomasochism, of which Williams wrote in a letter to his paramour: “I am sadistic towards you, but … I wouldn’t hurt a fly unless it made it perfectly clear that it liked it. And then only a little. And then only for the conversation.”

The Zaleskis do an impressive job of compressing a huge amount of material into a smooth if occasionally dense narrative. Still, in our own multicultural landscape, it’s difficult to muster much enthusiasm for the Inklings’ countless heated arguments on Catholicism versus Anglicanism or the critical head-butting with F.R. Leavis. Their scholarly machismo made it possible for Lewis to do a very public volte-face from heartfelt atheism back to Christianity but never entertain the thought of a female Inkling.

But during World War II, Lewis generously opened his household to schoolgirl evacuees. He helped them with their homework, told them to buy books on his account at Blackwell’s and paid the Oxford tuition of one young woman, “on the condition that the gift remain a secret.” All this time, Lewis maintained a strange, decades-long relationship with the much older mother of a childhood friend. After her death, he made a blissful late-life marriage to the American writer Joy Davidman, whose death inspired Lewis’ powerful “A Grief Observed.”

Despite writing a well-regarded children’s book, “The Silver Trumpet,” Barfield never succeeded as a novelist. His interests grew increasingly esoteric: After reading Rudolf Steiner, he became an anthroposophist, then for decades languished as a London solicitor. The Zaleskis poignantly depict his near-total eclipse by the success of his friends, to whom he remained touchingly devoted.

So one delights in Barfield’s late-life success. Invited to teach in the U.S., he becomes an instrumental figure in the counterculture movement, his work on language, consciousness and Samuel Taylor Coleridge admired by Theodore Roszak, David Bohm — and Saul Bellow, who, somewhat bizarrely, became fascinated by anthroposophy.

Christian faith was indisputably one strand of the Inklings’ creative DNA, but what then to make of all those elves and heraldic creatures and otherworldly voyages, the underlying obsessive strangeness of so much of their fiction? More than “mere Christianity,” what stands out today, 83 years after the Inklings first met, is their shared passion and abiding love for the British Isles, a haunted landscape irradiated with meaning, from its ancient languages to its folklore to its trees and pubs and villages and footpaths and prehistoric barrows. One is left with the impression that within each of those hearty, laughing, church-going writers, there beat a pagan heart.

Hand’s short novel “Wylding Hall” will be published this summer.

The Fellowship
The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams

Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 615 pp, $30

Originally posted on LATimes.com.

Book World: ‘Finders Keepers’ by Stephen King

Stephen King’s superb new stay-up-all-night thriller, “Finders Keepers,” is a sly, often poignant tale of literary obsession that recalls the themes of his classic 1987 novel “Misery.”

At the center of this story is John Rothstein, a novelist whom Time magazine once crowned “America’s Reclusive Genius.” His best-selling trilogy — “The Runner,” “The Runner Sees Action” and “The Runner Slows Down,” is considered “the Iliad of postwar America.”

When the teenage Morris Bellamy reads the first two books, he falls in love with their antihero, Jimmy Gold, “an American icon of despair in a land of plenty.” But Morris finds the third novel, in which the protagonist settles down and takes a job in advertising, a sell-out and an unforgivable betrayal. A smart, deeply troubled kid who’s already done time in juvie, Morris hatches a plan to break into Rothstein’s New Hampshire farmhouse. His hope is to find the new Jimmy Gold novel that Rothstein is rumored to have written since retiring from public view. But when Morris’s plan goes disastrously wrong, he ends up, at age 23, sentenced to life in prison.

That’s where the fun begins — for the reader, if not for Morris Bellamy.

More than three decades later, another teenage boy, Pete Saubers, is living with his family in the same house that had once been Morris’s childhood home. Like Morris, Pete is in thrall of the Jimmy Gold novels, though he has other things on his mind. His family is struggling to get by after his father was injured when a madman plowed a Mercedes though a crowd waiting in line for a job fair. King fans will recognize that tragedy as the seminal event in his novel “Mr. Mercedes” (a much less enjoyable book than this one). They’ll also recognize several characters from that novel, including retired police detective Bill Hodges, now a private investigator. After Pete discovers the trunk with Rothstein’s stolen notes, King begins to weave this web of characters, coincidence and connections with dizzying speed and dazzling facility.

“Finders Keepers” — the second in a planned trilogy — may be a twisted love story, but it’s also a love letter to the joys of reading and to American literature. Rothstein’s books evoke Updike’s Rabbit novels, as well as works by J.D. Salinger, John Cheever and Richard Yates . Pete reads D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner” and realizes too late its lesson that “money from nowhere almost always spells trouble.” And Pete’s favorite English teacher mentions Theodore Roethke’s sublime “The Waking.” That poem’s most famous line — “I learn by going where I have to go” — could serve as a mantra for Pete, who at every step must make life-altering decisions about Rothstein’s literary legacy, his family’s financial well-being and his own survival. In one sense, sweet-natured Pete is not so different from vicious Morris: Both, “although at opposite ends of the age-spectrum, are very much alike when it comes to the Rothstein notebooks. They lust for what is inside them.”Near the end, one of Rothstein’s many fans muses, “I was going to say his work changed my life, but that’s not right. . . . I guess what I mean is his work changed my heart.”

Readers of the wonderful, scary, moving “Finders Keepers” will feel the same way.

Hand’s short novel “Wylding Hall” will be published this summer.

For more books coverage, go to washingtonpost.com/books.

Originally posted on WashingtonPost.com.