Cold print Book

[Nov 2019: revisiting selected pieces...]

The intro is quite interesting; Campbell is candid and not very forgiving of his early stories. (I do remember "The Stone on the Island" from somewhere, though I don't recall the casual sadism that Campbell is embarrassed about.)

"The Moon Lens": we've seen this "bloke is trapped in a threatening small town, shit happens" trope a lot. The lens are kind of fun. But there's so much B-movie mechanics (he blocks the room door with the bed! Oops, now he can't unblock it! etc). And that voiceover explaining Shub-Niggurath! Blah blah.

"The Render of the Veils": the opening scene, with the protagonist caught in the rain, looks forward to Campbell's later work. But then we end up in a pretty standard hallucinations-with-odd-alien-device scenario, straight out of Frank Belknap Long's "Hound of Tindalos", or was it "Space Eaters"? In any case, Stuart Gordon's From Beyond is a fine over-the-top reworking of this.

"Before the Storm" holds up reasonably well. I'd forgotten about the abrupt shifts in POV, and only remembered the elegant (?) ending. The length helps (a mere 10 pages), though these days I'd prefer a tighter treatment.

"The Insects from Shaggai": I just can't get into all the different alien races, who did what to whom, what planets they hopped, etc. But I'm sure other fans cared.

"Inhabitant of the Lake" is probably my favorite of Campbell's early Lovecraft stories. The lake setup is nicely constructed, the buildup is effective (though too long), and the climactic "battle" is fun. (I remember an article mentioning the penetration/castration imagery in this; was it Campbell's? No, I'm not making this up.) I know it's the period style, but we do get mercilessly telegraphing passages like:"Nothing I could put my finger on but I certainly wouldn't like to live down there alone. There's something about those trees growing so close and that black water --- as if there were things watching and waiting... but you must think me crazy. There is one point, though --- why were those houses built so far from everywhere? By that lake, too --- I mean, it's hardly the first place you'd think of if you were going to build a row of houses. Who'd be likely to live there?"Maybe a bunch of crazy cultists worshipping the predictable Lovecraftian monster god, that's who! Zzzzz.

"Blacked Out" is "Moon Lens" in Bavaria, with the sexual frustration that pervades quite a few of Campbell's post-Lovecraft stories.

A lot of trampling through the mud and undergrowth in "The Faces at Pine Dunes". The main story is nicely told through uncomfortable family interactions, with Lovecraftian cliches mostly slipping through in small fragments. There's after all so much flesh in the way.

Funny, my memories of "The Voice of the Beach" include a number of desperate and cryptic messages written on the sand, none of which is in the story. (Maybe there's another beach story?) I appreciate what Campbell is trying to do here, but two not very interesting middle-aged guys grumbling at each other gets a bit thin after 15 pages or so. I like the device early on with the narrator omitting words referring to the beach. But not much is done with it, and the foreshadowing seems unnecessary (and old-fashioned). Aickman or Evenson would probably have just dropped you into the murky (grainy?) situation and left you to figure out how it's going to work out.

The title story still packs a punch though. The way things just rev up in the last scene is pretty memorable.

The setup of "The Tugging" is too long for my taste, though it's probably consistent with the period style. Nice effective ending, with its genuinely cosmic implications.