When I saw the announcement for the Marvel Age of Comics series, I said to some friends of mine that they seemed like the comics-related version of the 33 1⁄3 series, and apparently, I was more right than I new. They are published the same publisher (Bloomsbury), and I came across a press release that that says they were "inspired in part by Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 books."
Where the 33 1⁄3 books gave an author's idiosyncratic take on an album, the Marvel Age of Comics seem to cover a notable storyline or era in Marvel history. I decided to sample the series with The Mighty Avengers Vs. the 1970s by Paul Cornell. I suspect that, like the series that inspired them, these books will vary in how they are written and the insight provided, but on the basis of this one, I plan to check out more.
Cornell gives a compelling overview of the decade, breaking it up into the runs of the various writers (Thomas, Englehart, Shooter, and the fill-in writers), and examining how their approaches and concerns influenced the title. In centering the narrative on the writers, the artists are perhaps given short shrift, though George Perez is singled out for a good deal of praise. Cornell his talent for scene composition and character expression likely influenced writers both working with him and thereafter on the title.
Cornell's description of the series and its virtues is personal, reminding me at time of Morrison's Supergods, but is more concrete and informative rather than speculative. The complete Marvel neophyte will be confused, probably, but and the Avengers scholar might find it shallow. It appears to be gauged for the familiar, but not the expert, which is probably the right approach.
Recently, I decided to fill a gap in my cyberpunk awareness and check out Walter Jon Williams' Hardwired (1986). I've sampled Williams' short fiction before: his contributions to the Wild Cards shared universe, "Wall, Stone, Craft" from my years subscribing to the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy; and "Red Elvis" and "Prayers in the Wind," stories that left an impression even among other worthies in Dozois' Years Best Science Fiction collections. I figured I was long overdue to read what is perhaps his most famous novel.
In the near future of Hardwired, the Earth has lost the Rock War (a kinetic orbital strike) with the Orbital stations in the control of various corporate blocs. The territory that was formerly the United States has fractured into the rival states, scrambling to hold onto what they can in the face of environmental degradation and exploitation by the Orbital blocs. The novel has two protagonists. One is Cowboy, a cybernetically enhanced ex-pilot, now a panzer (a hovercraft or ground-effect type vehicle; storywise a futuristic truck) driver, running contraband from the relatively more prosperous West to the beleaguered East Coast. The other is Sarah, an enhanced street tough and bodyguard in Florida, trying to keep herself and her prostitute brother alive after she becomes a "loose end" following a job she took for a corporation.
Hardwired seems clearly post-Gibson, but Williams crafts a cyberpunk future all his own. No Blade Runner-inspired Sprawl here really or heavy Japanese overlay. Hardwired sets much of its action in rural areas, even more rural in his future than today, on lonely, roads, or in smaller cities like a partially drowned Tampa that becomes an evocation of the developing world under the colonial boot heel.
William's Cowboy has a much more on-the-nose name than Gibson's console cowboys. The callbacks and parallels to the Old West of reality and of celluloid myth are much stronger. Hack science fiction of the past was often derided for utilizing plots cribbed from horse operas and given a futuristic veneer, but William's work recalls the Western in a way that gives it resonance similarly to how the work of Leigh Brackett so often does. In fact, Cowboy reminds me more than a little of Brackett's outlaw protagonist in "The Citadel of Lost Ships," even down to their "the family lost their land" backstory.
Beyond the Western, the run down and discarded nature of Hardwired's America has a very 70s feel. There are echoes of car movies like Vanishing Point, but also 70s Neo-Noir. It prefigures Cowboy Bebop a bit in some of its worldbuilding and influences.
I enjoyed the novel a lot. It's fairly pulpy, I suppose, though that's never been a downside to me. It is very 80s, too, in how it is written. It's prose in interesting enough and quintessential early cyberpunk: Chandlerian simile and metaphor with a science and technology obsession. The occasional snippets of news or ad copy go for black satire at times similar to Robocop, still a year away. It's themes, though, are just as relevant, today, perhaps even more so.
For the month of October and the Halloween season, I thought it would be fun to revisit some classic Old-Time Radio horrors. My friend and former podcast co-commentator, Jason, was up for it. We started with "The Thing on the Fourble Board."
For this our last episode of the season, I wanted us to return to Lights Out in the Arch Oboler era. "The Dark" aired (possibly, there is some disagreement) on January 19, 1938. In this story, a ambulance crew responds to a routine call and finds something decidedly nonroutine.
The episode as it aired is lost today, though it was remembered well enough to form the basis of a segment in The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror V." This likely came from a truncated vignette that appeared on the Oboler's LP Drop Dead! An Exercise in Horror in 1962. That 7ish minutes version is on YouTube and elsewhere.
How could we listen to a lost episode? Well, a group did a recreation based on the existing script. If you want to see the actors actually doing the recording, that's on YouTube:
Trey: Jason, did this episode make you afraid of the dark? Or at least steer you away from a second career as an EMT?
Jason: I don't know that I am permanently scarred by the experience, but I was again surprised by the intensity of this program's fright factor, and just how outré such a mass media production managed to get in it's short run time.
Events were skewing fairly mundane, if horrific, until the climactic minutes, when all bets were off and no holds were barred in terms both of graphic (or should I say sonic?) violence and a sharp turn into the unexplainable so profoundly weird that it gives Lovecraft a run for his money.
I'm once again avoiding spoilers because the big reveal really must be heard to be believed.
My only criticism lies in the challenge of reviving a piece of media from a bygone era. The performances make an admirable attempt at reproducing period acting styles, which lends an air of goofiness a bit at odds with the tone of the events portrayed, until the bitter end when the viewpoint character is left alone to face existential terror.
But man, that last 5 minutes!
Trey: Yes, no slight to the recreation voice actors who do a great job, but I would like to hear the original crew because there would have been a "naturalism" for them in some of those lines and those performances.
For the month of October and the Halloween season, I thought it would be fun to revisit some classic Old-Time Radio horrors. My friend and former podcast co-commentator, Jason, was up for it. We started with "The Thing on the Fourble Board."
“Evening Primrose” first aired on Escape on November 5, 1947. It proved so popular it was repeated on September 12, 1948 and August 25, 1949. This dark fantasy story of a poet who, fed up with the modern world, goes to live in hiding in a department store, only to find there's already a whole wainscot society living there. I society who employ the shadowy Dark Men to keep their existence hidden.
The teleplay is based on a 1940 short story by John Collier. It was also adapted into a musical by Stephen Sondheim, starring Anthony Perkins, in 1966 as an episode of ABC Stage 67.
Trey: I first encountered the story in Dennis Hartwell's seminal 1987 horror anthology The Dark Descent. It's perhaps less pure horror story than some of the others we've listened, but I think suitably uncanny for the season. What did you think?
Jason: Suitably peculiar! The story's atmosphere of strangeness was enhanced by the now-distant cultural norms of decades long gone, the past being a foreign country, as they say.
The elements of world building presented were, for me, the most interesting aspects of this tale.
This society of nocturnal free-loaders is noted as accumulating in their secret havens following periods of economic upheaval and seem symptomatic of modernity. Their cultural enforcers, the mysterious dark men, could plausibly have been with us since about the same time as the proliferation of department stores in the US, with the funeral industry becoming a widespread phenomenon at approximately the same time in the late19th century.
I particularly enjoyed the revelation that the society of store-dwellers were socially stratified by the perceived status of their home shops.
The next time convenience or necessity drives me into a Walmart, or some similar purveyor of goods, I will have a close look at the nooks and crannies. I have joked in the past about Walmart adding a funerary department to its extensive list, so it can truly provide cradle-to-grave services, but if such a thing should ever come to pass, I'll know what's really going on.
Trey: Keep us updated! Yeah, the worldbuilding was good. I particularly liked the hints that the store-dwellers had become something other than completely human, much in the same way subterranean peoples tend to change or "degenerate" in the works of Machen, Lovecraft, or Howard.
For the month of October and the Halloween season, I thought it would be fun to revisit some classic Old-Time Radio horrors. My friend and former podcast co-commentator, Jason, was up for it. We started with "The Thing on the Fourble Board."
"Poltergeist" was the October 20, 1942, episode of the series Lights Out. The series was created by Wyllis Cooper (who we mentioned previously in regard to his later series Quiet Please) but was eventually taken over by Arch Oboler. Lights Out was one of the earliest radio horror shows and was perhaps the first to gain a large following. It ran from 1934 to 1947 and eventually transitioned to television.
In this episode, three young women discover that the dead expect a certain deference from the living and to transgress these limits can bring their vengeance down on you.
Trey: I think the opening to Lights Out is perhaps my favorite in old time radio: the foreboding drone, then the monotone voice, "It...is...later...than...you...think..." This episode feels more modern than some of the others we've heard. It could be translated into a horror film--but then I think seeing it on film would diminish the horror of the particularly visceral sound effect that accompanies the deaths. What did you think of the episode?
Jason: I very much enjoyed this surprisingly effective tale. I was skeptical at first, again owing to the condensed nature of the short form storytelling. As events began to unfold, one of the character's immediate and extreme reaction challenged my credulity, but everything that followed assuaged my concerns.
I agree with your thought about the possible diminishment of effect if this tale was presented visually. Could a talented director pull it off? It's possible, but as you suggest, and for me, the biggest strength of Poltergeist is the images it provokes in the mind of listener.
I'm thinking of course of the sticky ends met by the characters, but particularly of the horrific moment at the very end, when listeners had every right to expect a denouement that ties things up in a nice bow. What is delivered instead is a description of a final, nightmarish image so effective that it stuck with me long after my morning commute listening time.
If I were a child listening back in the day, I would have had to contend with unpleasant and intrusive thoughts once consigned to bed!
For the month of October and the season of Halloween, I thought it would be fun to revisit some classic Old-Time Radio horrors. My friend and former podcast co-commentator, Jason, was up for it. We kicked it off two weeks ago with "The Thing on the Fourble Board."
For our fourth, frightful selection, I chose "The Shadow People," which aired on the program Hall of Fantasy on September 5, 1952. The episode was written and directed by Richard Thorne. Thorne borrows the character Dr. Hesselius (or at least his name) from the short stories of Sheridan le Fanu.
Thorne's version of Hesselius becomes involved when a family becomes the focus of malign forces that strike out of darkness. The story centers on a powerful, perhaps primal, idea, and one that made it into modern folklore either as a result of this story or parallel evolution.
Trey: So Jason, what did you think of "The Shadow People?"
Jason: The central conceit of this story is a powerful one, an ineffable horror intruding into the reality of the hapless characters, who turn out to be as powerless in its face as children afflicted by night terrors. It eludes rational explanation, despite the efforts of Dr. Hesselius.
Unlike Dr. Van Helsing, or other similarly situated occult intervention specialist types in horror media, Hesselius is flummoxed at every turn and ultimately unable to provide the hoped-for assistance.
I think this story suffers a bit from its brevity, in contrast to the pieces we've reviewed previously. We begin in media res and little time is given to establishment of character or setting. I've come to appreciate the economy of the short form radio drama, but in this case I think a bit more rooting in reality before its descent into the unexplainable would have served the storytelling.
That said, the concept of the Shadow People alone is potent enough to deliver appropriately harrowing thrills and chills.
Trey: I agree with all those points. It does feel a bit rushed. In a way, though that does add to the bleakness of the story. There is nothing the protagonists ever do that more than briefly delays the victory of the Shadow People. Not only is there no escape, but the protagonist are completely blameless in their doom. There are none of the even minor transgressions or bad choices that in these stories often bring about the characters' unfortunate fate.
For the month of October and the Halloween season, I thought it would be fun to revisit some classic Old-Time Radio horrors. My friend and former podcast co-commentator, Jason, was up for it. We kicked it off two weeks ago with "The Thing on the Fourble Board."
For our third selection, I chose "The House in Cypress Canyon." This was an episode of the series Suspense. Written by Robert L. Richards, and produced and directed by William Spier, it originally aired on December 5, 1946, on CBS radio. It stars film actor Robert Taylor and radio veteran Cathy Lewis. Despite being a well-regarded episode, it was only performed once on Suspense.
Despite their being a touch of the Gothic in it, the story here is relentlessly contemporary. A couple, moving for the husband's work to California, can't be picky due to the post-War housing shortage. Lucky for them, they happen upon a newly constructed house that has just been listed. Things take a take a bad turn when they begin to hear strange noises, and there's the matter of a mysteriously locked closet door. It appears the house is haunted.
Trey: So, Jason, as you sipped you Roma wine, as Suspense's sponsor would want you to do, and listened to this episode, did you get the sense that this one had more to say than our previous selections?
Jason: suspect some listeners back in its day would be inclined to throw back a bracer a bit more potent than those produced by the master vintners of Grand Estates after wading through this piece of fiction!
Rather than the primordial terrors evoked by our previous entry, this tales has plenty of undercurrents that hint at more modern anxieties. As with many entertainments of the mid-twentieth century, the long shadow of World War II casts its pall here, the reconfigurations of domesticity and gender roles perhaps chief amongst them.
The uncanny elements of the tale remain unexplained, and their ability to disturb benefits from this ambiguity. It's a haunted house story, but it's weird disturbances are triggered by future events, rather than those lingering from the past.
I have to wonder if the story has lost (or gained) any of its ability to invoke horror for modern listeners, or at least those significantly younger than I, who are less steeped in 20th Century media, especially with modernity's open examination and long-term experimentation with non-traditional gender roles. Or am I completely off the rails? Help, Trey!
Trey: I'm afraid I'm in no better position to judge how the kids might take it, but I think it's a remarkable story, in the sense that it is at once, I think, fairly obvious while being utterly uncanny at the same time--even if the point of it might be lost on modern audiences.
What I mean is that it is clearly about anxiety over women's changing roles post-war in society. There's closet, where things must be kept in check. The flow of blood evoking menses. The milkman, frequent foil for jokes about infidelity, as the first victim.
But then there's the framing sequence, making the story not a haunting so much as a dire portend. Likewise, the specific malign spirit inflicted upon the wife is unexplained. Despite its utterly mundane setting, it makes no effort to make its horrors make sense. There's a nightmare logic to it.
Both for its strangeness and for the perhaps outdated nature of the concerns animating it, I don't think you'd get a story like this today.
