I’ve always loved single author short story collection, but I realize I’m in a minority — the sort of people who devour forewords, afterwords, and author’s notes, always hunt for biographical notes in books and magazines, and read non-fiction books about their favorite authors. Knowing that short story collections of any kind, both multi-author anthologies and single-author collections, don’t sell very well in comparison to novels and, having written and published some shorts with the ambition to keep doing more of the same, I’ve often wondered just how the single-author collection fits in with the modern genre fiction writer’s career path.

Over at The Fix prolific short fictioneer James Van Pelt sheds some light on the questions that many writers have about collecting their fiction in his ‘The Day Job’ column on Publishing a Short Story Collection. Van Pelt addresses the following concerns of burgeoning writers:

• When should a writer do a collection? Do they have to be at “critical mass” or have won an award?
• Small press or major press?
• How well do short story collections do?
• Do you need an agent?
• How do you choose the stories and how much input does the writer have?

If these are things you’ve thought about (I have), Van Pelt lays it all out nicely in his article. Small Press is certainly the arena for collections from writers who have yet to achieve significant book sales to tempt a major publisher, but Van Pelt also addresses self-publishing in his article. He closes with a list of some recommended science fiction and fantasy short story collections.

“We are the October People, the autumn folk. That is the truth in an almond husk, a nightweed shell.”

• Title: From the Dust Returned
• Author: Ray Bradbury
• Genre: Horror/Fantasy
• Year: 2001

From the Dust Returned is another trip with Ray Bradbury into October Country, this time located roughly in upper Illinois. It is a fix-up novel in the vein of The Martian Chronicles, collecting short stories from several previous Bradbury anthologies — most prominently The October Country — and weaving them together with new material into an episodic but thematically coherent novel that tells the story of one very unusual family.

It is a story that Bradbury says he has been revisiting for decades (from 1945 to 2000), without ever really realizing it. Fans will recognize many of the stories and characters here — from Cecy the irrepressible rider of souls to the winged Uncle Einar. From the Dust Returned takes these old friends and finally meshes all their stories together into one narrative history of the Elliott family — a many-generationed clan with their origins in ancient Egypt. The Elliotts are, for lack of a better term, creatures of the night.

From the Dust Returned is essentially an extended riff on ‘Homecoming’ and the shorts related to it such as ‘Uncle Einar’ (both in The October Country) and ‘West of October’ (in The Toynbee Convector). If you liked those stories, and ‘Homecoming’ in particular, you will like this book, which magnifies the idea of the reunion of this otherworldly family and gives us a brief look at their last days — for the Elliotts are coming into conflict with the modern world, a world that no longer believes in the things that go bump in the night.

What is new in From the Dust Returned is both rewritten and expanded sections for each story (for example this version of ‘Uncle Einar’ has him purposefully seeking a wife, rather than accidentally happening upon one) as well as additional vignettes and shorts that round out the whole family and tell of their ultimate fate. Timothy, the normal lad who is the central character of ‘Homecoming’ and has had trouble adjusting to life with a family of immortal — and possibly vampiric — eccentrics, occupies the role of family historian, and is our anchor amidst this strange family of shape changers, Egyptian mummies, ghosts, and coffin-sleepers.

Bradbury’s light touch is still there, and this strange family is ever more human than it is monstrous, and the qualities that ensured ‘Homecoming’ was rejected from Weird Tales in the forties are the guiding principles of this novel of 2001– namely, this is a story about human relationships, family, and the passage of time, not ghouls and goblins. Thus we have a tale in which four randy and adventurous young men have their souls trapped in the body of their ancient grandfather, only to find his lifetime’s memories are adventure enough to satisfy their every craving; a story in which a sick passenger on the Orient Express is discovered to be suffering from an ailment of the modern world, for his kind is not longer believed in; and another of a man who feels trapped by his family only to find in them the source of his own redemption. As always, Bradbury’s stories are human stories, and From the Dust Returned features some of his most lyrical invocations and elegiac imagery to create the sort of dark fantastic fiction that prizes the somber and the beautiful over the shrill and shocking.

• From the Dust Returned at Amazon
• Ray Bradbury’s website

As in a daze Cormac turned his steed and rode back across the trampled field. His horse’s hoofs splashed in lakes of blood and clanged against the helmets of dead men. Across the valley the shout of victory was thundering. Yet all seemed shadowy and strange. A shape was striding across the torn corpses and Cormac was dully aware that is was Bran. The Gael swung from his horse and fronted the king. Bran was weaponless and gory; blood trickled from gashes on brow, breast and limb; what armor he had worn was clean hacked away and a cut had shorn half-way through his iron crown. But the red jewel still gleamed unblemished like a star of slaughter.

• Title: Bran Mak Morn: The Last King
• Author: Robert E. Howard
• Genre: Dark Fantasy/Historical Adventure
• Year: 2005 (1928-32)

Conan is more famous than his creator, Robert E. Howard. Most readers approach Howard through the lens of Conan, as is only natural, and tend to look at his other heroes in terms of Conan — digging for those elements that later make their way into the stories of the Hyborian age. Kull is perhaps the most famous ancestor of Conan for, after all, it was a Kull story that was later modified to become the first Conan tale, ‘The Phoenix on the Sword.’ But all of Howard’s creations are different, as he was too good a writer to spin the same yarn twice, and all of them are informed by the age in which they find themselves. Bran Mak Morn, last King of a dying race, is a hero that Howard spent less words on than Solomon Kane, or Kull, or certainly Conan, but he was also perhaps Howard’s most personal creation.

This review is of Bran Mak Morn: The Last King from Del Rey, part of a new series that collects Howard’s tales and publishes them in their original form and chronology, with a wealth of accompanying notes, essays, and unfinished ephemera. Perhaps not all of this information is of value to the casual fan, but having Howard’s creations available in their proper form is a tremendous improvement from the situation of twenty or thirty years ago, when Howard was only available in diluted, rewritten, or rearranged form alongside a group of modern pastiche writers as part of massive, artificially-conceived series. I always distrusted those books as a kid and so unfortunately never grew up reading Howard, but now his unaltered writings are available in faithful collections from several publishers.

Bran Mak Morn grows from Howard’s fascination with the Picts — but not the Picts of modern, sober archaeology — rather the Picts of turn-of-the-century pseudo-scientific conjectural history, the sort of thing that was available in 1908 for a young Howard to read. But that, believe it or not, is a good thing; for these Picts are a mysterious people with a strange past rooted in lost continents and trans-world migrations and civilizations long vanished. Some of Howard’s magic, whether in the Bran stories or those of Solomon Kane’s skewed 17th Century or Conan’s Hyboria, grows out of the freedom of his time to fill in the gaps of the historical record with imagination — wild speculation on Atlantean colonies and strange transpositions of race were not yet the sole province of semi-educated cranks. If it was the case that less reliable history and questionable science was what Howard had to draw upon, that just had the effect of allowing him to dream bigger dreams.

And Bran Mak Morn is something like a dream of Late Antiquity. Bran, the last King of a people that are the degenerate and near-savage remnants of a race that once ruled a mighty civilization lost to the shadows of time, must fight the Roman Empire as it encroaches on Pictland north of Hadrian’s Wall. These stories are bleak and Bran is heroic precisely because he fights a battle he knows he cannot win, one that, in effect, has already been lost centuries ago. And his heroism underscores too his aloneness as the only ‘civilized’ man amongst a people who have succumbed to barbarity. Unlike Howard’s other heroic outsiders, Bran is an exemplar of his people, his fate bound entirely to their own, his significance to them resonating down through the ages long after he fought and lost his last battle.

What may be disappointing to many readers is just how few Bran stories there are; the Bran cycle consisting of essentially four stories — only two of which feature Bran Mak Morn in the sort of heroic mold of a Conan or Kull. That’s two stories in a 300 plus page hardback book. Readers expecting to discover another Conan will be disappointed, but this collection goes beyond just being about Bran Mak Morn to illuminating Howard’s keen interest in the idea of lost races of men lurking at the fringes of human history.

The first Bran story is an example of this, ‘Men of the Shadows,’ which is essentially a history of Howard’s Picts in which Bran is seen through the eyes of a captured Norse mercenary in Rome’s employ. The Picts, which are akin to H.G. Well’s Morlocks with their twisted limbs and hunched backs, are given a detailed — and highly speculative — history based on then-current theories of population migration in the ancient world. Howard’s Picts are descended from Mediterranean stock, and are slighter and darker than their Celtic and Germanic neighbors, and also debased by millennia of barbarous living. ‘Men of Shadows’ is not much of an adventure, but as a weird history illuminating one of Robert E. Howard’s driving passions, it serves as a fine introduction.

Three excellent stories follow, forming the heart of this book. In ‘Kings of the Night’ we see Bran in action for the first time, leading a coalition army against Roman onslaught, dealing with issues of his command and deployment. It’s a great battle piece, and it also features an appearance by another Howard hero — summoned from his own time to lead an unruly Norse contingent. Again we see Bran through another’s eyes, this time a Celtic chieftain, and Howard’s characterization of Bran as a shrewd leader whose paramount concern is the well-being of his own people is well-drawn.

In ‘Worms of the Earth,’ another classic tale, Bran is the viewpoint character for the first and only time. Very little of the Picts are featured here, instead Bran treats with loathsome magics to get revenge on a cruel Roman governor who has executed one of Bran’s countrymen. Bran is consumed by his hatred, and employs the aid of an even older, more degenerated people than his own. Again Howard plays with the theme that dominates all of the stories in Del Rey’s collection, but this time Bran is alone amongst forces older and darker than even his Picts.

And that’s it for Bran . . . or almost. In ‘The Dark Man’ we jump ahead some 600 years to the eleventh century, for the story of an Irish warrior fighting to rescue the woman he loves from Viking raiders. Bran Mak Morn appears in the story as a statue — the mysterious and potent Dark Man of the title — and his presence looms over the action in one great, moody piece of storytelling. The setting and concerns of ‘The Dark Man’ are completely different than those of the other Bran tales, but thematically it fits perfectly alongside the others, even giving those earlier pieces a weight they may not have had as we look back from the bloody vantage of ‘The Dark Man’ to the half-remembered past of the age of Bran Mak Morn.

More stories of Picts and lost races follow, some set in the past and some in the present, but there are no more completed Bran Mak Morn tales to be had. These later stories are worth reading, but are frankly anti-climactic after ‘Kings of the Night,’ ‘Worms of the Earth,’ and ‘The Dark Man.’ But that’s to be expected, and the book is worth it for those three pieces alone — any of them as good a Howard story as the best of those featuring his brooding Cimmerian. Everything else in Bran Mak Morn: The Last King is a bonus: some poetry, story fragments and drafts including a piece of Howard juvenilia featuring Bran written in Howard’s own hand, and an excellent appendix featuring an examination of Howard’s interest in the Picts and notes on the stories.

Ultimately, one cannot read Bran Mak Morn without wanting more, say a good dozen stories of the nature — if not the stature — of ‘Worms of the Earth,’ to really do the character justice. Unfortunately, outside of pastiches, that’s not possible, and one is left with the lingering feeling that Howard’s most mysterious hero was perhaps never meant for our knowing, and that we should be grateful for whatever glimpses of his lost world that have survived intact into our own.

• Bran Mak Morn: The Last King at Amazon
• Conan.com
• Howardworks.com

Martin knew it was autumn again, for Dog ran into the house bringing wind and frost and a smell of apples turned to cider under trees. In dark clock-springs of hair, Dog fetched goldenrod, dust of farewell-summer, acorn-husk, hair of squirrel, feather of departed robin, sawdust from fresh-cut cordwood, and leaves like charcoals shaken from a blaze of maple trees. Dog jumped. Showers of brittle fern, blackberry vine, marsh-grass sprang over the bed where Martin shouted. No doubt, no doubt of it at all, this incredible beast was October!

• Title: The October Country
• Author: Ray Bradbury
• Genre: Horror/Fantasy
• Year: 1955

Ray Bradbury’s importance to the literature of the 20th century extends beyond the limits of genre to embrace all of fiction, and to our broader culture itself. Justly renowned for titles like Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and The Illustrated Man, Bradbury has been a distinct, and distinctly American, voice in speculative fiction for over half a century. It’s a shame he isn’t as widely read as he is admired, or that so many people forget just how sophisticated, how varied, and how spectacular a writer he really is having, perhaps, read a book or story or two of his in junior high English and assumed he was just one of those boring old writers that were a perennial favorite of school teachers and fusty librarians.

Well, Bradbury is anything but boring — unless you think an infant murderer, a man at war with his own skeleton, or a dog that brings the dead to visit a bed-ridden boy sound like the ideas behind  boring stories. Those are just a few of the strange imaginings at work in The October Country, a classic collection of fantastical horror that collects much of Bradbury’s early work from magazines such as Weird Tales, and from a prior anthology Dark Carnival. It is a horror collection but, above all, it is a Bradbury collection, and his distinct voice permeates all and ensures that these tales are more about evoking a certain mood than dwelling on the horrific or sensational.  As to what that mood is, Bradbury says it best in his opening statement: The October Country is “that country where it is always turning late in the year, that country whose people are always autumn people, thinking autumn thoughts.”

The stories in this collection are palpably autumnal, and take place at the juncture of summer’s sweet recall and winter’s approach. Death is near, even in the midst of wonder, even in the celebration of life. ‘The Emissary,’ quoted at the opening of this review, is the perfect example of this. Rich in autumnal imagery, poetically October, it tells of the small pleasures of a sick and housebound boy, whose experience  of the world outside comes from the vicarious romping of his dog. An empathetic tale of a lonely child, one who still manages to find the joys in his childhood. But death is there, uncaring of the boy’s need, and intrudes on the boy’s life through his loyal and well-meaning emissary.

The stories in The October Country are both creepy and poignant, and highlight Bradbury’s strength of juxtaposing the mundane of everyday humanity with the weird and unexpected. Thus we have ‘The Crowd,’ a spooky tale based on the observation of how rapidly a crowd forms at the site of an accident, ‘The Small Assassin’ in which a new mother dislikes the baby she believes wants to kill her, and ‘The Jar,’ which gives us a man willing to kill to protect the only thing that gives him any significance — the mystery of the contents of a jar purchased from a carnival. There are horror tales here, like ‘The Wind’ and ‘Skeleton,’ but also tales of loss and fear and weird transformation.

‘Uncle Einar,’ the story of a winged man who can no longer soar on the night wind as he once did, and feels tethered to his earthly family, is a wonderful example of a tale that isn’t horrific in any way, yet fits as snugly alongside the stories in this collection as any other. Einar, brooding over his loss of vitality and the abandonment of his independence, comes to find salvation in the very family that he felt had tied him to the earth. In ‘The Dwarf,’ a small and misshapen man frequents a carnival in the slow hours of the night to see his reflection made tall and straight in the funhouse mirrors there. Two sets of very human reactions collide in his wake — his private fantasies inevitably the fodder for others because of his conspicuous vulnerability.

Bradbury handles language with his own distinctive rhythm, equal parts colloquial Americana and high poetry. His words pop off the page, crisp and unexpected and perfectly placed. This textual pyrotechnics is best seen in his short fiction — for which he is primarily known — and The October Country is perhaps one of his strongest collections in terms of linguistic and thematic richness. Bradbury’s language frolics, it frissons, it fulminates — it can make you bark laughter, blear eye, or drop jaw amazed and not a little bit awe-struck. Like all the best writing, it is akin to nothing else, the inhabiter of its own universe. It is a universe where readers of fantasy, horror, and science fiction can find a home — perhaps even in that part of it called The October Country.

• The October Country at Amazon
• Ray Bradbury’s website

Are you familiar with the scent of extinguished birthday candles? For me, their aroma is superseded by a sound like the drawing of a bow across the bass string of a violin. This note carries all of the melancholic joy I have been told the scent engenders — the loss of another year, the promise of accrued wisdom. Likewise, the notes of an acoustic guitar appear before my eyes like golden rain, falling from a height just above my head only to vanish at the level of my solar plexus. There is a certain imported Swiss cheese I am fond of that is all triangles, whereas the feel of silk against my fingers rests on my tongue with the flavor and consistency of lemon meringue. These perceptions are not merely thoughts, but concrete physical experiences. Depending upon how you see it, I, like approximately nine out of every million individuals, am either cursed or blessed with a condition known as synesthesia.

• Title: The Empire of Ice Cream
• Author: Jeffrey Ford
• Genre: Slipstream/Surreal/Fantasy
• Year: 2006

It only takes one story to turn someone into a fan of Jeffrey Ford. For me it was ‘Exo-Skeleton Town,’ in the first issue of Black Gate, that had me looking for more by him, and every story of his I’ve read since has only confirmed my initial appraisal — Jeffrey Ford is one of the finest short story writers working today. Tremendously imaginative but never vague or overblown, at once surreal and concrete, darkly poignant without ever resorting to sentimentality or cynicism, and always managing to achieve a real surprise without the use of cheap tricks, Ford grounds his sweeping fantastic visions in precise prose and real humanity.

The quotation at the top of this review is the first paragraph of this collection’s title story, ‘The Empire of Ice Cream’ (still available at Scifiction by following that link), which concerns a young man with synesthesia — a neurological condition in which sensory phenomena are abnormal to the point that sounds may evoke color, colors conjure scents, tastes create sounds, etc. The protagonist’s world of experience is immediately fascinating. His talent with music is apparent at a young age, and when William plays the piano he sees the composition explode before his eyes in colors and shapes. As a young man he studies to be a composer, and his method of composition is to create first a kind of abstract illustration in crayon. His life, and the strange phenomenon of synesthesia, is an immediate hook for the reader, but there is something even stranger going on. When William first tastes coffee ice cream — illicitly, for his parents didn’t allow him rich foods — he experiences a vision unlike anything else.

A girl, about his age, completely real and engaged in the humdrum everyday of her life. For a lonely young man such a vision is irresistible, and William does his best to obtain coffee ice cream whenever he can, eating the marvelous substance even as it makes him sick, until his doctor advises him that such fancies are best forgotten. And forget he does — until, years later, a weekend retreat to create his most important school project prompts him, for the first time, to drink coffee to stay awake. With the first taste the girl appears before him, real as anything, sipping coffee herself. They speak, two synesthetes who have watched each other over the years, both convinced the other is merely a product of their condition.

And the story becomes even more unexpected from that point on, but I think I’ve conveyed enough of the magic of this story to pique the interest. And the danger of overusing words like ‘unexpected’ and ‘magic’ when covering the other stories in this collection is all too real, for every one is a polished gem of the storyteller’s art. There’s the fairy-tale-like ‘The Annals of Eelin-Ok,’ the melancholy story of a being that inhabits sand castles, and lives only so long as the castle stands. ‘The Beautiful Gelreesh’ gives us a monster that uses its role as a kind of therapist to lure humans to their doom, and the surreal ‘Jupiter’s Skull’ has a man and woman reliving an experience of their dead acquaintance in a place just a little outside our own world.

One of the most striking ideas in the collection is central to ‘The Weight of Words,’ in which a man who describes himself as a Chemist of Printed Language has discovered a mathematical equation that governs the shape of a sentence. Merely by obscuring a single word in a certain sentence comprised of a certain font and point size, he can render words unseen by the conscious mind. The protagonist soon falls in with the ‘chemist,’ working as his proofreader in exchange for the inclusion of subliminal messages of reconciliation in the letters he writes to his estranged wife. But it isn’t long before the power of such subliminal messaging soon comes to the notice of those who would abuse it.

Several stories include rich autobiographical elements as well, achieving vivid portraits of nostalgia and loss. In ‘Botch Town,’ a long novella, Ford recreates the experience of growing up in small town New Jersey in the early sixties, at the time of life when the innocence of childhood is in its final bloom. This small town world is richly drawn, which makes the mysteries that plague it all the more perilous, and the synchronicity of events in the real world with a replica of the town in the protagonist’s basement all the stranger. And Ford’s experiences as a clamdigger come to life in ‘The Trentino Kid,’ where the death of one young man might just give meaning to the life of another.

Each piece is enhanced by Ford’s author notes, that give a great added insight into stories that are masterpieces of craftsmanship. Highly literate and boldly imaginative, Ford creates visionary speculative stories that never lose sight of the fundamentals of storytelling, or the humanity at the heart of fiction. For anyone seeking the best the field has to offer in the short form, The Empire of Ice Cream should be at the top of their list.

• Jeffrey Ford’s website
• The Empire of Ice Cream at Amazon

There are philosophers who argue that there is no such thing as evil qua evil; that, discounting spells (which of course relieve an individual of responsibility), when a man commits an evil deed he is a victim himself, the slave of his progeniture and nurturing. Such philosophers might profit by studying Sanctuary.
– from Joe Haldeman’s Blood Brothers

• Title: Thieves’ World
• Author: Robert Asprin, ed.
• Genre: Fantasy/Sword & Sorcery
• Year: 1979

The late Robert Asprin’s Thieves’ World is the granddaddy of the shared-world anthology, and it’s success can be seen in its numerous sequels (the original series ran to twelve anthologies in ten years, plus a few spin-off novels) as well as related matter such as rpg products, in addition to, of course, the many similarly themed anthologies that came out in homage or imitation to the original. In his afterward, ‘The Making of Thieves’ World,’ Asprin describes the shared world idea as a way for many authors to write fantasy without first having to each come up with their own worlds. Imagine, Asprin says, if Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser inhabited the same world as Conan, or if Elric and Kane opposed one another at the head of rival armies. It’s a great, fun idea, and it works well, and it certainly attracted a wide panoply of science fiction and fantasy writers over the decade it ran.

Thieves’ World is the first book in the series, from which the whole derives its name. It centers on the town of Sanctuary, a rats’ nest of rogues and hotbed of skulduggery, a conquered city on the edge of empire rife with competing factions and conflicting religions. It’s a fairly standard fantasy backdrop, at least in this first installment, but it’s also a consistent and well-realized one replete with just enough world-building style details to make the place come alive without the danger of the setting taking over from the plot. Or the characters — and this last is where Thieves’ World really shines.

Each author in the anthology has created his own character, and the book contains a larger-than-life cast of scoundrels, magicians, street folk, and thieves. The ne’er-do-well minstrel Cappen Varra, the cursed magician Enas Yorl, ruthless crimelord and ex-gladiator Jubal, ageless madame Myrtis, and mysterious Lythande, his forehead marked with a glowing blue star that burns with his anger or agitation — just a few of the most prominent personalities of Sanctuary. And while a story might focus on only a few of these characters, they turn up repeatedly again and again in the background of different tales. Indeed, this is part of the fun of the shared world, as different authors handle each other’s characters a bit differently, and even whole scenes from one story may be repeated in another with a twist in perspective. A nice touch, and one that lends the stories the feeling that many lives are brushing up against one another and interconnecting in the world of Sanctuary.

As for the stories themselves, ranging from short story to novella length, some stand out more than others. John Brunner opens the anthology with Sentences of Death, a clever piece centering around apprentice translator Jarveena and her employer, an opportunistic book merchant and scribe. When a magical scroll falls into their hands they decide to profit from it as best they can, and set off a chain of events that involves a strange magician, a foiled assassination attempt, and the fulfillment of Jarveena’s lifelong thirst for revenge. In Poul Anderson’s The Gate of Flying Knives, we have a more traditional sword & sorcery tale, in which the rogue Cappen Verra must venture into another world to rescue his love — and where he discovers that a certain slight-of-hand can be worth more than any sword or spell. In Joe Haldeman’s Blood Brothers the odious One-Thumb, a man confident in his continued existence because of a magician’s curse of damnation on anyone that should ever dare to slay him, meets his comeuppance in a most unusual and ingenious way. In my favorite story of the collection, Asprin’s own The Price of Doing Business, shrewd operator Jubal discovers just how differently those who don’t share his ruthlessly practical outlook see the world, and finds himself confounded first by a child, and then by one of the Emperor’s own elite guardsmen.

Other names that the reader will recognize, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley and Andrew Offutt, also have strong offerings; and overall the anthology is a solid mix of stories from writers of varied sensibilities at different points of their career. But the book is cohesive, the styles complimentary, and the fun firmly at center stage. I can understand how it started something big, especially as it was released before the modern fantasy explosion, and I only wish there was a comparable series today showcasing a similar broad array of talent against a shared world backdrop. One can hope — and in the meantime there is plenty in the Thieves’ World series to satisfy the cravings of sword & sorcery fans.

• Thieves’ World at Amazon
• A Notable Guide to Thieves’ World