Reviews for From the Other World: Disembodied Voices

The average rating for From the Other World: Disembodied Voices based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-10-28 00:00:00 Jason Madrak This book is a collection of five stories hunting for strange animals and the supernatural. They are vaguely linked by a frame narrative (our protagonist is sent to help secure an odd creature) and similar structure (our protagonist falls in love and fails to win the heart of the source of his infatuation). It's clear that Chambers mainly wrote romances, as that crept in quite distinctly. However, the character of the protagonist is not entirely consistent, leading us to determine that not all these were written at the same time. Like swimming squirrels, IN SEARCH OF THE UNKNOWN navigates with the help of Heaven and a stiff breeze, but it never lands where it hopes to. The first segment, also known as THE HARBOUR MASTER, sends our protagonist off to retrieve some great auks, believed to be extinct. While there, he is also to investigate reports of a strange amphibious humanoid. The book soars when the characters are wild and unpredictable. A true delight is the rivalry between our protagonist and the grumpy old man he is sent to negotiate with over the purchase of the auks. The quests for thimbles are a delicious metaphor with many folds available for interpretation. The atmosphere was good and I can see how this was an inspirational document for The Creature from the Black Lagoon. I thoroughly enjoy that Chambers hangs a lantern on the central conceit and then whimsically blusters about the seriousness of the tales. "As I say, I had only just returned from Java with a valuable collection of undescribed isopods'an order of edriophthalmous crustaceans with seven free thoracic somites furnished with fourteen legs'and I beg my reader's pardon, but my reader will see the necessity for the author's absolute accuracy in insisting on detail, because the story that follows is a dangerous story for a scientist to tell, in view of the vast amount of nonsense and fiction in circulation masquerading as stories of scientific adventure." The second story was less compelling and less creepy. It is very similar to the frame of the first, with our protagonist being sent off to find a dingue and a wooly mammoth. The third story about the large flightless ux wandered in new and entertaining directions. The frame here is a scientific symposium that will prove the existence of the strange ux that had been spotted at a distance by Mr. Darwin on his expedition. They will be shown to the world through a live hatching on the presentation stage. There are several eggs in incubators, whose pipework was being assembled and fitted by a large group of workers. "They informed us that they were union men and that they hoped we were too. And I replied that union was certainly my ultimate purpose, at which the young Countess smiled dreamily at vacancy." Quite frequently, I believe these objects of affection are politely ignoring some really awful pick-up lines. These union men walk off the job at the end of their shift in solidarity with labor disputes outside the symposium. This leads to a failure of the incubator system, so it requires that the eggs be sat upon by the members of the ornithological committee including the crown prince of Finland and a titled lord of England. The eggs hatch and the committee rides crazily on giant flightless birds throughout the symposium. Hilarity ensues. The search for the Sphyx in the fourth movement was clearly influential on Predator. "I am most unwillingly led to believe that there are'creatures'of some sort in the Everglades'living creatures quite as large as you or I'and that they are perfectly transparent'as transparent as a colorless jellyfish." You know, if the Predator was hunting baked apple pies like those comic book villains in the one-page Hostess advertisements. Imagine if the Alien vs. Predator comic books were made in the 70's or early 80's and the killers took a snack break to munch on delicious hostess pies. This fourth story is just as awesome as that headcanon advertisement. Any influence from Bierce's The Damned Thing is purely coincidental. "I have always, in common with other mentally balanced savants, despised writers of fiction. All scientists harbor a natural antipathy to romance in any form, and that antipathy becomes a deep horror if fiction dares to deal flippantly with the exact sciences, or if some degraded intellect assumes the warrantless liberty of using natural history as the vehicle for silly tales." This fourth story maintains its frame through the fifth, where our protagonist is heading back to the city with the lady of infatuation on a mission to acquire help to save the kidnapped professor from the colony of the sphyx. On the train, they meet a gentleman who tells strange tales of astral projection and reincarnation. The characters are wild and flamboyant, much like in the Harbour Master section, and really allows this final sequence to soar. At the end of things, we have a number of dangling threads that are unresolved. Our protagonist is unchanged from his state of buffoonery, except for things that feel more like inconsistency in editing rather than development (or devolution). This is whimsical and entertaining for the right sort of antiquarian, but ultimately difficult to recommend. This book is available for free on Gutenberg:

Review # 2 was written on 2020-02-01 00:00:00 Bernie Marlow Funny stories about unknown and supernatural creatures. Light entertainment and all the more surprising because this is the author of The King in Yellow which has some of the creepiest stories I've ever read.