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A man deals with his pregnant wife being possessed and threatening to give birth to something monstrous. Some good ideas and imagery, but the delivery was a little too up front for me, undercutting any atmosphere of menace.
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Mercenary with a heart Dillon is hired to locate the Golden Bell, and ancient artifact, to unify the people of a pirate nation. I've read a couple of Ferguson's stories, including the first Dillon, but this one is on another level.
Dillon faces jetpack assassins, a feline shape shifting femme fatale, a bungee jumping lost race, and an entire army. Longer than most new pulps, Ferguson keeps up the pace throughout without getting tiresome or episodic as is the tendency for the genre.
Dillon is described by others in the story as cocky and arrogant, but he's less Ashley Williams, more Fred Williamson as far as confidence levels. The story is populated with other colorful characters and references to past adventures which give the feeling the series has gone on much longer than it has.
I think there was a reference to the 70s being 60 years ago, setting this in the near future, but all the cultural elements are contemporary, or earlier. There's some advanced technology and a little bit of the supernatural.
Dillon and the Legend of the Golden Bell has some of my favorite action sequences put to print. It has just enough detail to paint the picture, but gives room for your imagination to fill in the spaces. Probably the character I would most want to see on the screen.
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As with his first novel The Forgotten Island, the third person narration has it's own unique voice, which for me could be distracting, ymmv. Excellent gore and monster work, and the characterizations remain grounded, which allows him to go over the top without getting cartoonish.
Basically a novelization of these ads for 70s GI Joe..
As Etchison and Lansdale match each other blow for blow, Roald Dahl distracts the referee with his satirical look at the publishing industry. While the ref’s back is turned, a masked figure slides into the ring and chokes out Etchison with a pink angora sweater.
Lansdale chases off the attacker and comes to Etchison’s
aid. The ref turns to find Lansdale with the offending pink angora sweater in
his hand and calls for the bell. The match ends with a disqualification and the
Cruiserweight Title remains unclaimed!
“She was bruised, cut and her box felt as if a steamroller
had entered it and left it flat and raw”
After being raped in an alley by a maggot smelling hobo, a street
walker goes Ms. 45 emasculating rapists with a straight razor.
Collected in Collected in Angora Fever available from Amazon
An engineer creates a computer which automatically writes
short stories and novels, and eventually buys out all the real authors. [insert
James Patterson joke here]
A junkyard worker and his hobo friend encounter a trash
monster.
Collected in A Little Green Book of Monster Stories,
available from Amazon
Atmospheric sketch about a rest area on Route 66 in the
Mojave desert.
Collected in Talking in the Dark, available from Amazon https://amzn.to/3zDqcHI
While properly unnerving, Deathtracks read like a premise without a story, but more meat on the bone than Shambleau. Dennis Etchison faces the final challenge as the Gauntlet concludes!
Space rogue Northwest Smith rescues a medusa catgirl. The setting
is kind of an Eternal Recurrence thing, with humans traveling into space in the
distant past but still having places like France and Chicago. Falls flat as
horror unless you’ve got a moving hair phobia.
Collected in Northwest Smith, available from Amazon
A Nielson family survey taker visits a couple who look for
hidden messages in TV laugh tracks to explain why their son died in Vietnam.
Collected in Talking in the Dark, available from Amazon https://amzn.to/3zDqcHI
Not a fan of 50s whimsical fantasy or 70s conceptual stuff, it would appear. Henry Slesar and Adrian Cole are both counted out, and two new authors will run The Gauntlet!
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Elfloq is some kind of familiar creature searching for a master. He ends up at Cloudway, which is some kind of interdimensional tavern, and talks to other travelers to learn how to have the Voidal become his master.
This is part of a larger series about the Voidal, but taken alone I have no idea who, what, where, when, or why. Cloudway feels like some of the House of Mystery comics, or the Nightmare Cafe, but almost nothing is described. Feels like a one act play where the actors wear black leotards and stand on an undressed set with maybe a chair and a box on the stage.
Some concepts and shreds of character sketches, but all talking.
Collected in Heroic Fantasy, available at Amazon.
Also in The Year's Best Fantasy Stories 5, currently cheaper at Amazon
I'm beginning to think there was a genre fiction Sahara between the mid 40s and late 60s, and these performances by Bowen and Garrett haven't changed my mind. This match ends with a double knockout, and two new authors face the Gauntlet.
A man who poisoned his wife to marry into wealth is haunted. A ghost story in the classic dull and unfrightening style.
Collected in The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories, available from Amazon
Insubstantial tale of psychic twins, one embedded in Russia spying on a scientist, the other a gambling layabout in DC receiving the messages. Approaches interest with some thoughts on the artistic mind processing information differently from the scientific mind.
Available from Project Gutenberg
"And when he blew into her it was the power and the heat of eternities which smashed into her guts… and with each dripping value the heat remained."
The devil bangs a woman in hell, comes cruising on Earth, bangs another woman, and takes some hustlers who try to mug him to hell.
Dated 1972 in Blood Splatters Quickly, don't know if this was from Wood's papers, if it got published, or where.
Collected in Blood Splatters Quickly, available from Amazon.
Two upper class louts get drunk and bully an old marsh woman into giving them shelter. They find that an old rival for the love of the wife of one of them has died and is lying in state, and decide to play a trick with the body.
The old timey prose was a pain to get through, and felt like an affectation to me, but this one goes real dark.
Robert E. Howard is one of the all time greats when he's not going on pseudoscientific ramblings, talking about history and genealogy drier than the Old Testament, or being a giant racist. We get a little of each with Kings of the Night, and not much else. Ed Wood gives us a sexual confused killer in rubber panties. Wood is nothing if not consistent, and that consistency has let him survive another round.
A serial killer meets his match. Gay panic is quickly becoming a theme for Wood - the character will kill a man if he can't find a female victim, but he prefers women, he says to himself quite a bit.
"It was an excellent plan and his rubber panties would not be denied after all. They would be filled with his own satisfaction and another one of those bitch-tramps would be sent to hell where she belonged."
I can't find anything about the magazine "One Plus One", likely some porn rag lost to time.
