Legends for the Dark

[koilungfish]

Title - Legends for the Dark
Editor - Peter Haining
ISBN - Not Given
Contents:

• Solomon's Demon - Arthur Porges
  
• The Altar - Robert Sheckley
  
• Here, Daemos! - August Derleth
  
• The Academy of Pain - Basil Copper
  
• Floral Tribute - Robert Bloch
  
• The Secret of the Vault - Wesley Rosenquest
  
• The Ordeal of Doctor Trifulgas - Jules Verne
  
• A Night with Hecate - Edward W. Ludwig
  
• Beyond the Wall of Sleep - H.P. Lovecraft
  
• The Scythe - Ray Bradbury

Legends for the Dark is a thumbnail-thick collocation of horror and supernatural tales, out of print and, in this individual instance, missing ten or twelve pages. The best way to describe this book is mediocre; nothing here rises above the level of the passingly interesting, nothing sinks below the level of the forgettably bland. At least everything is short.

Solomon's Demon is most solid tale in the book, a straight-up cautionary tale of not meddling with things that someone else went to the trouble of burying with warnings on, beaten down by the triumphant powers of science and electric pylons. Like the rest of the book it has a strong feel of the imitation, as if the reader is re-reading the work of, say, Lovecraft, as filtered through the smoky lens of a lesser imagination.

The Altar also has that feel - that sense of the grand and terrible dragged down to the mundane level. There is a sense of shabbiness, of offices, of rulers, about the whole thing. Being a life-long atheist my attitude towards belief in deities is one of bewilderment and non-comprehension, yet it feels very deeply wrong to me to see a believer written as referring to what anthropologists would call "phallic rites" as, well, "phallic rites". The language of the insider is not the language of the outsider, and vice versa.

Here, Daemos! is a re-telling of a very old story-form, the comeuppance of the grave-robber. That the robber is a priest does not help the plausibility of the story; his very vocation is at odds with his actions, and it becomes nagging that he should do something so very stupid and so morally wrong.

The Academy of Pain feels rather older than the rest of the book. There is something eminently late Victorian about it, although the morality of a Victorian tale is reversed in favour of meaningless torture. There is no sympathising with the victor, since he is a sadistic bully. Perhaps the point is for the reader to empathise with the victim, and to imagine themselves into his place? If so, it is difficult to do so, since he comes across as rather a wet weekend.

Floral Tribute is the most human of the stories here, playing thoughtfully on the ability of children to accept the world around them as normal and not really think about what might be strange. The idea of the story is of interest, but leaves me going "Yes, and?". It is rather homely and the final "surprise" isn't if you've read more than three horror books.

The Secret of the Vault is the sound of a man trying very, very hard to be Edgar Allan Poe and not really hitting the mark. There is doom, there is gloom, there are histrionics. Off screen, the Ushers bitch relentlessly about other people stealing their plot.

The Ordeal of Doctor Trifulgas is another morality tale, this time with the morality plugged in the right way around - that is to say, traits which the reader can instinctively perceive as negative are punished - although when the most interesting thing in the story is a dog, who gets all of four sentences of description, something has failed. There is nothing novel about this story, except perhaps the aforementioned mad lantern-carrying dog, and the sense of having read all this before that pervades the book is thickest here.

A Night With Hecate is, conversely, perhaps the most original. Written from the point of view of the pagan goddess Hecate, set in a future 1997 - the book dates from 1968 - where everything is spaceships and science, and the old gods are dying out from lack of believers, Hecate and her last follower set out to find her a new believer before dawn, lest she perish utterly. I am rather piqued that this freshest concept and most original perspective in the book is cut off by my copy missing the last two pages, and right before the puppy got sacrificed too ...

Beyond the Wall of Sleep is entirely missing from this book, the pages having fallen out.

The Scythe plays on the concepts of the Grim Reaper and the field of corn, and decides to blame most of the twentieth century on one man's grief at having to reap the lives of his family. The idea is one to toy with, the execution is passable, yet the whole thing fails to engage for some reason, possibly because the main character lacks the philosophical nous his task requires.

All in all, reading this book feels like reading other, better books through sunglasses. Don't bother.

This book is:
* - mediocre
* - short
* - passable for passing the time

This book is not:
* - worth buying second-hand
* - in one piece
* - in print

Comments

[seiberwing.livejournal.com]

I think I might have read The Scythe in one of my English books in high school. Does it get set on fire at the end or something?


The Academy of Pain feels rather older than the rest of the book. There is something eminently late Victorian about it, although the morality of a Victorian tale is reversed in favour of meaningless torture. There is no sympathising with the victor, since he is a sadistic bully. Perhaps the point is for the reader to empathise with the victim, and to imagine themselves into his place? If so, it is difficult to do so, since he comes across as rather a wet weekend.

Ah. Verbal gorn.