Last-minute Halloween suggestions

I don't usually read horror, but I try to find something suitable every Halloween. In past years, I've read the Library of America collection of H.P. Lovecraft's short stories (good), Stephen King's vampire tale "Salem's Lot" (good) and Arthur Machen's "The Hill of Dreams" (a little disappointing.)

This year I am reading classic ghost stories by M.R. James. He's brilliant. I'm reading "Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories," an Oxford University Press book, but you can also simply download his stories from Project Gutenberg. (They are available as an audiobook as well as text.) Gutenberg also has oldies-but-goodies such as Bram Stoker's "Dracula" (also available as audio and text) and stories by Edgar Allen Poe.

For more suggestions on free Halloween content, go here.

Effinger's A THOUSAND DEATHS

I just finished A THOUSAND DEATHS, the George Alec Effinger collection of Sandor Courane stories published by Golden Gryphon. Like the other two posthumous Effinger books edited by Marty Halpern for GG, it's a very strong book. It reprints THE WOLVES OF MEMORY, a novel which Effinger regarded as his best (and which I also think is possibly his best), a dark but fast-moving allegorical novel which turns the protagonist into a Christ figure. There are also seven short stories with Sandor Courane as the protagonist. None of have been included in any of Effinger's books before, except for "The Thing From the Slush," previously reprinted in the poorly-circulated "Author's Choice Monthly" title, "The Old Funny Stuff." Effinger was a Cleveland native, but I haven't seen anything about the new book in the local press. For more on Effinger, see my Effinger pages (includes FAQ).

A new take on the Goths

I just finished reading ROME'S GOTHIC WARS by Michael Kulikowski, an important historian of late antiquity. It's short, but rare for such tomes, it is also really well-written and succeeds in being a book which is written well enough to aim for a general readers but also very scholarly. Kulikowski's most interesting academic heresy is an argument against the Gothic heritage cited by everyone ( that they originated hundreds of years before the fall of Rome, in Scandinavia, as per Jordanes). He argues, convincingly I think, that they arose in the third century on the frontiers of the Roman Empire, similar to the process that gave birth to the Franks and Alamanni. Perhaps, less convincingly, Kulikowski also takes aim at emperor Theodosius the Great, arguing that he is remembered as "great" only because Christian apologists liked his willingness to force Nicene doctrine on everyone. This puts Kulikowski in the position of having to explain away Theodosius' unbroken record of success. (Theodosius was the last Roman emperor to rule an intact Roman Empire.) After a "losing battle" against the Goths in the wake of the Battle of Adrianople, Theodosius somehow negotiates a peace treaty incorporating them into the Roman army (page 153). He defeates Magnus Maximus because of "the superior skill of Theodosius' generals" (page 159). Arbogast is a "much better general" than Theodosius, but the emperor defeats the usurper Eugenius because the wind blows the right way (page 163).

The suggestions for further reading in the back of the book are unusually thoughtful and detailed.

About the libertarians

I just finished an excellent book, Radicals for Capitalism by Brian Doherty, about the history of the modern libertarian movement. Very well, researched, very well written. (Before I plunged in, I took the precaution of looking up Robert Anton Wilson in the text, so that I could verify that he was treated respectfully. He was, so I went ahead and read the book.) This is a book you'll want to read with two bookmarks -- one for the text, and the other for the notes in the back, where Doherty puts much of his interesting facts and gossip.

Good news for readers

Golden Gryphon is about to release (June 1) the third of its posthumous George Alec Effinger collections, A THOUSAND DEATHS. It includes the novel THE WOLVES OF MEMORY and seven short stories; all feature one of Effinger's recurring characters, Sandor Courane. I've read pretty much all of Effinger's novels, and I thought THE WOLVES OF MEMORY was the best, so it's great to see it back in print.

More on Robert Anton Wilson

A memorial service for Robert Anton Wilson has been announced.

Last May, my newspaper, The Sandusky Register, published my column on Wilson. I tried to take advantage of the still-hot "Da Vinci Code" craze to focus attention on Wilson. Here's the text of the column:


If you're sick of hearing about "The Da Vinci Code," Dan Brown's exciting but factually-challenged thriller, this week won't provide any relief.

The new movie, starring Tom Hanks as a college professor who looks like Harrison Ford and dishy French actress Audrey Tautou as a dishy French detective, opens in theaters Friday.

As nearly everyone knows, Brown's book has a cliffhanger at the end of nearly every chapter and is hard to put aside.

But although "The Da Vinci Code" works as fiction, it fails as history. Its controversial claim that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and the two had kids is built upon half-truths and outright falsehoods.

It's an old theory -- I first ran across it on Jefferson Airplane's 1972 LP, "Long John Silver" -- and not a particularly convincing one. Entire books have been published detailing Brown's mistakes. It's not true, for example, nobody believed Jesus was divine until the Emperor Constantine suddenly cooked up the theory at the fourth century Council of Nicaea.

Brown's assertion Jesus must have been married because unmarried Jewish men were unheard of in the ancient world also presents an easy target. Paul of Tarsus, a Jew, converted to Christianity and made a big deal out of the fact he was a confirmed bachelor. You've heard of St. Paul.

Churches use "The Da Vinci Code" to deliver their own message. For pastors, the book is heaven-sent: Americans actually want to listen to lectures and read books detailing the history of early Christianity.

I have my own agenda. I'm hoping a little of the "Da Vinci" hype will rub off on "The Illuminatus! Trilogy," three very odd and very interesting novels by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Originally published in the mid-1970s as three separate novels, the work now is usually sold as an omnibus volume containing all three titles.

The books helped launch the genre of conspiracy fiction popularized by Brown. The main villains in the books were the Illuminati, a purported secret society also featured in Brown's "Angels and Demons."

In many ways, Brown's very commercial book is an inversion of the "Illuminatus" books, which are too long and too strange to be bestsellers.

The novels are (loosely) about the eternal warfare between liberty-loving rebels and a secret society which seeks to use governments to enslave mankind. The rebels' weapons include self-destructing mynah birds, birds taught to say "Here, kitty, kitty" and then turned loose in the big city to undermine the social order by freaking out witnesses.

And while Brown's characters push the "Code's" main theory rather humorlessly, the Illuminatus novels refuse to take anyone or anything at face value. Ayn Rand's novel, "Atlas Shrugged," becomes "Telemachus Sneezed." The books' hero carries out missions in a yellow submarine.

The books began as a joke during a barroom conversation between the two authors, who at the time were editors at Playboy magazine. The original idea was to write a novel in which every conspiracy theory the authors had ever heard of would be true.

It took several years to find a book company willing to publish the work. The trilogy was never a best seller but has remained in print, attracting a loyal audience of libertarians, nut cases and minor newspaper columnists.

Shea died in 1994, but Wilson, 74, remains a prolific author and radical skeptic who attacks all ideologies, even skepticism.

In a recent interview, Wilson suggested the world would become "more sane" if dogmatic statements were qualified with the word maybe, as in "Maybe God hates gay people," or "There is no God except maybe Allah, and maybe Mohammed is his prophet."

Rediscovering Philip Jose Farmer

I've been re-reading Philip Jose Farmer's "World of Tiers" books, one of his best-known series. I was a big Farmer fan in my youth. The re-reading was sparked by the discovery, in a used bookstore, that Farmer has published a sixth book in the series in the 1990s.

The books are THE MAKER OF UNIVERSES, THE GATES OF CREATION, A PRIVATE COSMOS, THE WALLS OF TERRA, THE LAVALITE WORLD and the book I found in the bookstore, MORE THAN FIRE. (For the purposes of this discussion, I'm treating RED ORC'S RAGE as a related book but not a part of the series.)

I've read the first two and I'm mostly done with the third book. The prose is creakier than I remember, and the stories are more improbable. For example, in A PRIVATE COSMOS, the hero, Kickaha, jumps on a stampeding herd of buffaloes, hopping from animal to animal. Anyone who has watched an experienced cowboy struggle to stay on top of a bull for only a few seconds at a rodeo will know how unlikely this is.

Still, the books are very imaginative and fast-moving, so I guess you have to take them as they are. The pocket universes created by Farmer's Lords (immortal humans employing "super science" are very well done. In fact, the settings are a high point of the books and enable Farmer to have fun with Plains Indian tribes, German knights, Viking marauders, Olmecs and other promising material. In some ways, these books seem to presage the Riverworld books, which I'll re-read in a few months.

Farmer is alive and well at age 87 and his Internet minions have created an official page for him that has a great deal of useful information, including a bibliography that quotes many of the reviews of his work.

A PRIVATE COSMOS features an introduction by Roger Zelazny, another of my old favorites, who does a nice appreciate of the first two "Tiers" books.

During the late 1970s, when I was a student at the University of Oklahoma, the campus science fiction club brought Zelazny in as a guest speaker, and I asked him about the introduction. He mentioned that Farmer, who he described as a bit of a hypochondriac, was worried that he would die before completing the "Tiers" series and had made Zelazy promise to finish the series, if necessary. Of course, the sad sequel to the story is that Zelazny has died since then, although it's a blessing we still have Farmer.