The PorPor Books Blog: SF and Fantasy Books 1968

Book Review: 'The Genesis Machine' by James P. Hogan

3 / 5 Stars

'The Genesis Machine' (299 pp.) first was published by Del Rey / Ballantine in February, 1978. The cover art is by Darrell K. Sweet.

When Judy Lynn Del Rey founded her own imprint in 1977, she immediately began issuing novels and short story collections that promoted traditional sci-fi, signalling a turning away from the New Wave movement. One of the authors she enjoyed showcasing was the UK engineer James P. Hogan (1941 - 2010), whose first novel, 'Inherit the Stars,' was a major success and a declaration that 'hard' sci-fi was very much back in style.

Hogan went on to produce a sizeable number of novels and story collections, as well as nonfiction books. His fiction had a didactic quality, and his protagonists often were scientists whose innate humanism and idealism bluntly was contrasted with the mendacity of the political establishments for which they were obliged to work.

'Genesis' is set in 2005, at which time the Cold War has evolved into a dangerous confrontation between the Third and First Worlds. The US government is funding research and development with defense / military applications, and with little monies left over for more pacifistic enterprises, top talent is left with no choice but to enlist in government projects. So it is that Brad Clifford, a brilliant mathematician, is employed at the 'Advanced Communications Research Establishment' in New Mexico.

Brad is disinterested in doing what the government wants him to do, instead spending the bulk of his time working on a Grand Unified Theory that reconciles classical physics with quantum theory. As the novel opens Clifford has come up with the concept of hyperspace - referred to as k-space - that indeed seems to provide a Unified Theory.

Unfortunately for Brad, his supervisors aren't all that impressed with supporting theoretical research, however profound its implications for gravity, space, and time may be, and he is disciplined for failing to stick to applied research. Disillusioned, Clifford releases his draft paper on k-space to the wider community via the internet (a neat bit of prescience here from Hogan), quits his job, and wonders what else to do with his life.

It turns out that Brad's paper has gotten the attention of some very bright people, including the ebullient Aubrey 'Aub' Philipsz from Berkley. Excited by testing the real-world implications of the k-space theory, Aub introduces Clifford into a consortium of researchers whose work has yet to be co-opted by the military-industrial complex.

There's just one problem: the government has learned about the k-space R & D, and they intend to coerce Brad and Aub into developing military applications. With global tensions approaching a breaking point, it seems inevitable that the genesis machine and its promise of a brighter, more peaceful future may be subverted for the purpose of mass destruction.......

'The Genesis Machine' is a competent, but not overly memorable, hard sci-fi novel. The first two-thirds of the novel are the best, as Hogan describes the intellectual adventure of a tech start-up, wherein a group of geniuses decide to abandon the government / corporate track and instead try to fulfill their dreams by doing things their way.

However, the final third of the novel veers into political territory, and here it's all about virtuous scientists struggling against the military-industrial complex, with the narrative adopting a sententious tone. It doesn't help matters that the denouement relies on all sorts of contrivances in order generate a happy ending.

'The Genesis Machine' stands as an example of hard sci-fi at a time when the genre badly needed rejuvenation, and in that regard it retains value. But I would argue that Hogan's other novels from the period (such as the so-called 'Minervan' novels) are superior when it comes to engaging, as opposed to lecturing, the reader.

Kung Fu Christmas

from the National Lampoon LP Good-bye Pop (1975)

Not many people know this, but one of the greatest soul songs of the 1970s was a humor track, titled 'Kung Fu Christmas,' from the 1975 LP Good-bye Pop. The song also is included in the 1978 LP Greatest Hits of the National Lampoon.
You can listen to the track here. Also available is a track with a 70s ghetto / blacksploitation vibe pictorial.
'Kung Fu Christmas' was written by Brian Doyle Murray, with help from Lampoon alums, and Saturday Night Live cast members, Bill Murray and Gilda Radner. Paul Shaffer, David Letterman's band leader, composed the music. The song has a masterful soul groove with lyrics that might have sounded transgressive in '75, but are rather tame nowadays. Still, they perfectly evoke the vibes of the New York City ghetto at Christmastime in the mid-seventies.
Verse:
Midnight in a ghetto street
A desperate boy wants something to eat
('Cause he's dead on his feet)
To the man in the squad car, it's just his beat
He don't care, he don't live there
He lives in Queens
Not Manhattan or the Bronx or Brooklyn
A thief on the roof, and a mugger in the hall
(Stick 'em up, Stick 'em up)
A baby on the floor eating paint off the wall
(How's he gonna grow tall?)
But there's one time of year that brings joy to one and all
When every race has a smile on its face

Chorus:
Junkie on the corner, the pusher uptown
Digging the Yuletide, Santa's getting down
Holiday colors of red and green
Turkey's big and fat and the gangsta lean
Numbers runner stops for a chat
The Apollo doorman tips his hat and he says:
Have a Kung Fu Christmas

Verse:
Living in the ghetto, you always lose
They'll shoot you for your socks, and they'll stick you for your shoes
When you're a super bad dude, you pay super bad dues
Where fear and strife is a way of life
But there's a man coming today with lots of loot
He's got a pimp-mo sleigh and a red fur suit
He's a Super Fly guy, and he's awful cute
He's about to arrive, bringing Jingle Bell jive

Chorus:
Santa Claus making the Soul Train scene
Slicking down his beard with Afro Sheen
Eeny meeny and miney mo
Frost in your hair and snow up your nose
Diamond in the back, trimmed with holly
My girls on the street and I'm feeling jolly
Christmas Eve's coming with the last-minute bustle
Santa tells the elves, "You'd better do the 'Hustle'"

Penthouse

December 1972

December, 1972, and atop the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart is Billy Paul with 'Me and Mrs. Jones.'

The latest issue of Penthouse magazine is out on the newsstands ! And this December issue is a good one.

In his 'Housecall' column, publisher Bob Guccione triumphantly notes that this is the longest and largest issue yet, with '....our heaviest bookings by advertisers.' And big money advertisers, too: liquor, cigarettes, cars, stereo equipment, and cologne. All the items that a magazine, aimed at a male readership, needs to promote in order to be successful.

In the letters / forum page, 'monopede mania' continues. Reading so many early Seventies issues of Penthouse has made me inured to this rather disturbing fetish; I react to 'maniacs' with pity, rather than abhorrence. Or something like that.

We've got some cartoons......

A portfolio titled 'Dutch Treat' features a stunning young Netherlands girl named Diana van Derenter who is, in the modern parlance, 'THICC' !

Raquel Welch (1940 - 2023) was a superstar in '72, and the fact that Penthouse was able to score an interview with her signaled to the world that Guccione and his magazine were up-and-comers. She comes across as sensible and level-headed.

Also a major coup for Penthouse is an interview / profile of Carlos Castaneda, by John Wallace. By '72 Castaneda was a major pop cultural phenomenon, but also, wary of interviews; he would become a recluse as the decade went on. Wallace's article is fanboy stuff; despite his fawning tone towards his subject, Carlos comes across as a bullshitter, who at times is cruelly amused that people actually believe his 'Don Juan Matus' crap.

William Kloman, who was a music critic for the New York Times, and contributed articles to a variety of print media in the 60s and 70s, authors the fiction piece 'The Return of One Soldier.' The soldier of the title is a Vietnam war vet named Michael, who was wearing a straightjacket when he was discharged (!). Aimlessly wandering the California coast, Michael meets a hippy chick who changes his life. For the better ? Maybe......

The fashion section features actor Richard Roundtree, riding high on the 1971 film Shaft, modeling some early Seventies 'lougewear.'Of course, Roundtree has some foxy ladies grooving along with him.......

Isaac Asimov makes another of his many appearances in the magazine, here with an overview of the phenomenon of 'corpsicles.' Asimov's piece is centered on the science, and concludes that freezing corpses is, all things considered, a bad idea.

And thus we close our issue of Penthouse, from that long-ago December of 1972..........

Old Editions Bookshop

North Tonawanda, New York

Early in November I took a trip to the Old Editions Bookshop and Gallery at 954 Oliver St, in North Tonawanda, New York (near Buffalo). This is one of those stores that looks small outside, but once you are inside, it seems to be quite a bit larger.

The front portion of the store has a sizeable collection of paperbacks and hardcovers in a variety of genres, along with vintage magazines and other print media.

There's a little section devoted to tabletop RPG stuff:

The science fiction and fantasy section of paperbacks and hardcovers has some good representation of modern and older titles. The paperbound titles are usually around $3 to $6 each.

There's a large section of books on military history, with a shelf devoted to those old Ballantine Books trade paperbacks from the 1970s.

Those looking for vintage, postwar crime / detective / mystery paperbacks will find a good selection available. These are comparatively higher priced, from $10 on up.

And if you're into New Age books, they have you covered:

There horror section inevitably oversubscribes to Stephen King and Dean Koontz, but there are some Paperbacks from Hell nestled there on the shelf.

Higher-end antiquarian / vintage paperback books are housed in the back of the store. There is an impressive shelving system for these paperbacks, in fact, the most impressive such shelving system I've yet seen in a bookstore. Needless to say, these vintage paperbacks are in 'very good' to 'like new' condition, and have prices of $10 on up.

Old Editions is the sort of place where you easily can spend several hours poking among the shelves and looking for offbeat treasures. I came away with a nice collection for myself:

If you find yourself in the greater Buffalo area and you have a couple of hours of free time, it's well worth making a detour to Old Editions.

January is Gold Medal Books Month at the PorPor Books Blog

Here at the PorPor Books Blog, we like to take a break from reading and reviewing books on science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and instead profile books, fiction and nonfiction, from other genres and publication lines.

For January 2025, we're going to focus on those paperbacks of yore: Gold Medal Books. According to the Wiki entry, in 1950, "Roscoe Kent Fawcett wanted to establish a line of Fawcett paperbacks....Fawcett announced Gold Medal Books, their line of paperback originals." The Gold Medal line quickly became sales leaders, as they were marketed at the same retail outlets as were Fawcett's magazines.

According to Bookscans, in 1955 Fawcett began issuing its paperbacks under its Crest label. The line continued to publish titles in varied genres, such as romance, spy thrillers, melodramas, Vaguely Sleazy, science fiction, crime / detective, and historical dramas.

Growing up as a paperback collector, I never paid all that much attention to the Gold Medal Books lineup. I considered Gold Medal books to be rather old-fashioned and obsolete. My attitude towards the imprint changed a bit in 1987 when I read 'The Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction,' edited by Ed Gorman.

In his Introduction, Gorman looks fondly back to his youth when he first bought a Gold Medal book:

I still remember buying it. I could hardly forget. It packed the same charge on anxiety as purchasing one's first teenage beer.

The woman behind the counter of the place....peered down at me and said, "Pretty racy stuff, isn't it ?"

Outside, shut of the woman, I got my first good glimpse of it then in the new spring sunshine.

The cover, designed by the masterful Michael Hooks, depicted one of his wild but forlorn red-heads submissive at the feet of a hood with a .45 in his hand....The title was in yellow, as was the medallion in the upper right hand that would virtually change my life.

Gold Medal book number 663 was DEATH TAKES THE BUS by Lionel White.

That was my first Gold Medal book.

I can't say that after reading Gorman's introduction I went out and snapped up every Gold Medal or Fawcett Crest paperback I could find, but when I did see these on the shelves of the used bookstores, and the titles lodged them in the detective / noir / private eye and sci-fi genres, well, I was a little more likely to buy them.

One thing I learned rather quickly was that Gorman, in his nostalgia, was avoiding a rather blunt truth: many of the Gold Medal titles, regardless of the genre, weren't very good........

Having accumulated a small library of Gold Medal books over the years, I thought that I'd start off 2025 by reviewing a bunch of them. Few Gold Medal titles are over 200 pp. in length, so it wasn't that hard of a journey in terms of sitting down and finishing six or seven of them.

It's well worth noting that the ability to compose a novel of short length, however commonplace it may have been 60-70 years ago, is a dying attribute. The 'Cormoran Strike' detective novels by J. K. Rowling (using the pen name 'Robert Galbraith') are over 900 pages (some over 1,000 pages) in length. I can't imagine reading a detective novel that requires 900 pages.

Anyways, with the asking prices for Gold Medal and Fawcett Crest books increasing with each passing year, hopefully these reviews will inform any decisions by my blog audience to invest in these titles.

January is Gold Medal Books Month at the PorPor Books Blog

Book Review: 'Before It's Too Late' by Lou Cameron

image courtesy of Paul Eng, Bookscans

2 / 5 Stars

'Before It's Too Late' (176 pp.) is Gold Medal Book No. R2197, and was published in January 1970.

Lou Cameron (1924 - 2010) wrote a small library of pulp fiction in all genres, particularly westerns (under the house name 'Tabor Evans').

'Too Late' is set in 1969, when twenty-four year-old Steve Warren comes back from the Vietnam war to his Midwestern hometown of Jefferson City. Needing a job, Warren signs on with the Ace Collection Agency and is given a tough, even dangerous, initial assignment: repossess an automobile from one 'Mau Mau' Fenwick, leader of the Jefferson City hippy tribe..... and something of a psychopath.

Warren's repossession goes off without incident. But then things get complicated when Mau Mau turns up dead, his body bruised and battered. As the investigation unfolds it becomes clear that something very odd is going on in Jefferson City, something that its leading citizens would rather not talk about.

Steve Warren teams up with a beautiful Israeli medical student to do some investigating of his own, as the bodies and the alibis begin to pile up..........

'Before It's Too Late' was something of a disappointment. The first half of the book displays Cameron's skills at pulp fiction writing: clean, straightforward prose; dialogue that is a bit dated by contemporary standards, but still believable; some vintage male chauvinism; and a set of nubile, pliant, and utterly groovy chicks.

Unfortunately, the second half of the novel suffers from Cameron's inability to keep the plot simple. So many red herrings, coincidences, and contrivances are thrown into the narrative that the final segment explaining Whodunit is over ten pages long. Even after re-reading it several times I still couldn't figure exactly, what, had happened.

Summing up, I can't call 'Before It's Too Late' a neglected Pulp Fiction Gem. Perhaps it's unfair to reason that Cameron, who made a living from cranking out as many books as he could, was going to take the time to craft a stellar work of fiction. However, this is one Gold Medal Book that likely can stay on the shelf.

National Lampoon

January, 1975

Once again, let us travel back in time, fifty years in this case, to January, 1975, and the latest issue of the National Lampoon. The cover art, by Robert Grossman, depicts Father Time holding up a used condom.........that's Lampoon humor for you !

The Billboard Top 200 LP chart for early January 1975 indicates that Elton John's Greatest Hits album is atop the chart, followed by albums from Jethro Tull, Neil Diamond, the Ohio Players, and Joni Mitchell. So you have rock, pop, soul / R & B, Adult Contemporary, and folk, all represented.

At the Lampoon, P. J. O'Rourke now is executive editor, with Henry Beard and Doug Kenny still manning the editorial offices. The magazine is thriving, with lots and lots of advertisements for high-end stereo equipment and record albums in its pages. At the beginning of '75, the singer-songwriter movement was getting a lot of attention from labels. You can find all the albums advertised below on YouTube.

I've listened to some of them and I find them listenable, with the Ozark Mountain Daredevils'It'll Shine When It Shines a good LP. Poco's ad tells readers that the group is America's 'first and best country rock band,' a dig at the Eagles. Unfortunately, as 1975 unfolded Poco would struggle for commercial success, while the Eagles would only expand their dominance of the charts with the release of One of These Nights later in the year.

The Nostalgia Craze of the 1970s continues unabated; how else to explain Columbia, a major label at that time, flacking a packaging of old W. C. Fields radio programs ?!

There are lots of comics in this January issue, one of the best being 'All New First High Comics,' from Doug Kenny and Joe Orlando. Not only does it satirize the romance comic books of the era, it delivers a great last panel. And, the character 'Dave Wheatjeans' seems to have been the inspiration for Stephen Bishop's character in Animal House: 'I gave my love a cherry / that has no stone.........'

Do you want nudies ? Well, as always, 'Foto Funnies' delivers !

This issue's magazine parody is Negligent Mother, which, in its own snide way, reminds us that fifty years ago things like Child Protective Services were rarer, and less effective, then they are nowadays.

We'll close with 'Salvation Army Comics,' by Henry Beard, with art by Frank Springer. This is one of Beard's better pieces in those early years of the magazine. It avoids his highbrow approach to humor and instead goes for something more blunt and acidic..... I mean, Christian soldiers using flamethrowers on Bowery Bums ?! That's humor for you, from fifty years ago......

January is Gold Medal Books Month at the PorPor Books Blog

Book Review: 'The Death Cycle' by Charles Runyon

3 / 5 Stars

‘The Death Cycle’ (159 pp.) was published by Fawcett’s Gold Medal imprint in January 1963, as number s1268.

Charles W. Runyon (1928-2015) wrote a sizeable number of short stories and novels in the mystery, private eye, and sf genres during the 60s and 70s. Some of these saw publication under the house name 'Ellery Queen'. I consider his 1971 novel ‘Pig World’ to be an interesting, overlooked example of proto-Cyberpunk, while ‘Soulmate’ (1974) is a reasonably effective horror novel.

As ‘The Death Cycle’ opens our protagonists, Brett Phelan and his wife Jeanne, and Carl Newsome and his wife Doris, are on motorcycles, and on the run. It turns out that they have stolen $65,000 and are fleeing Chicago, where a jeweler was shot dead in the course of a robbery, for Southern Mexico.

Brett is not the nicest of men, and there is a rivalry between he and Carl that goes back to the days when they served in the same unit during the Korean War. For his part, Carl dislikes and distrusts Brett, but realizes that until they reach safety in Mexico, the two are obliged to work together.

Doris and Jeanne are complete opposites. Doris is, in the parlance of early 60 pulp fiction, a ‘nympho’ who constantly craves attention, while Jeanne’s life as Brett’s spouse has left her steeped in misery……and bruises.

As the couples travel ever closer to their final destination, where the money is to be split and separate ways taken, the likelihood of a double-cross looms ever larger. And the man to deliver it will be a sadistic Mexican pistolero nicknamed ‘Trinidad’…………

‘The Death Cycle’ is a serviceable, if not particularly imaginative, example of early 60s noir fiction. The novel is suffused with hard-boiled language, and here are some examples:

His blue eyes measured the world from a face that was locked up tight, like a house shuttered from a storm.

****

Sometimes she looked at them with the shocked fascination of a girl caught up in a lynch mob on her way to Sunday school.

****

When Frieda’s husband was away, her mind roiled with sexual fantasies which would make a Ciudad Juarez puta squirm uncomfortably on her pallet.

****

I’ve got a nose for death, thought Brett. I can smell people who are about to die.

***

And I encountered, for the first time in my life, the noun (?) ‘asininity’ within the pages of ‘The Death Cycle.’

I won’t disclose any spoilers, save to say that the conflict between Brett and Carl is resolved in a satisfactory way.

The verdict ? Those who like crime and suspense novels from the Gold Medal catalogue probably will find ‘The Death Cycle’ rewarding. Those accustomed to more sophisticated styles of writing may be disappointed.

K-Tel Collection

I bought a few K-Tel albums back in the day. One of the best was Rock 80, a compilation of New Wave tracks from 1979 - 1980. Good stuff !

If you are under 50, it's going to be a little hard to explain what K-Tel was all about......you see, back in the vinyl / 8-track / cassette era, you couldn't hear a song on the radio and then promptly go to YouTube, or Spotify, or iTunes, and listen to it and download it if you were so inclined.

Back in those Old School days, you could buy the song as a single, if it was in fact out as a single; you could hunt for the album on which the song was featured; or, you could look to see if it had been included on the compilation records K-Tel issued on a regular basis during the 1970s and 1980s.

According to his obituary, K-Tel was the brainchild of Canadian salesman and huckster Philip Kives, who invented (among other things) the 'Veg-O-Matic.' In 1966, Kives released a country music compilation, the very first K-Tel record, which did well enough for Kives to pursue issuing further compilations.

K-Tel assembled 'greatest hits' compilations for all sorts of genres, such as pop, rock, country, disco, soul, and R & B.

K-Tel even released compilations of TV show themes...... !

For some of these albums, along with the top 40 hits you'd occasionally get some more obscure songs, added to fill out the track listing. Some of these well are worth a listen. Take, for example, this Velour Soul, smoove groove song, 'Sad Sweet Dreamer,' by the U.K. band Sweet Sensation. It's off the1975 compilation K-Tel's Superhits of the Superstars, Volume One.

I've already highlighted a forgotten gem, 'Baby Come On,'from the soundtrack to a 1976 documentary, Sex O'Clock USA, made by French director François Reichenbach (?!).

You can find 'Baby Come On'on 1977's Disco Rocket. What a funky groove ! DISCO-DYNA-MITE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Then there's Street Beat, from 1984, that has all the top 40 hits from the early 80s.

If you are getting nostalgic thinking about those long-ago days of K-Tel records, or if you are a younger person curious about the music of 50 years ago, well, the 'K-Tel Collection' blog is a good place to see all the stuff issued by K-Tel from 1973 to 1984. Looking at the albums on display at the blog, there are quite a few songs that send me to YouTube for a listen. Or, you can check out Discogs and see what's available; many K-Tel LPs in Very Good or Like New condition are quite affordable. Go ahead, give it a try !

January is Gold Medal Books Month at the PorPor Books Blog

Book Review: 'Bad Day at Black Rock' by Michael Niall

2 / 5 Stars

'Bad Day at Black Rock' started life as a short story, titled 'Bad Time at Honda,' in The American Magazine in 1948. This Gold Medal Books paperback (No. 45, 143 pp.) was issued in December 1954, and was an expansion of the short story into a novel designed to tie-in with the 1955 film of the same name.

'Michael Niall' was the pseudonym of writer Howard Breslin (1912 - 1964) who published a number of novels during the 1940s and 1950s.

The eponymous hamlet is located in the California desert, and rarely does the Streamliner passenger train make a stop. So, it's a source of considerable stir when one day in the summer of 1945 the train stops, and a passenger gets off: a man named John Macreedy.

Macreedy's evaluation of Black Rock indicates he's here on a work trip, not for tourism:

A town like a thousand others, he thought, in this part of the country. Dust-plagued and shabby, with every flaw harshly revealed by the pitiless sun. Not attractive, but he'd seen worse, been pinned down in worse.

Save for a few exceptions, such as the veterinarian Doc Velie, and the young and attractive Liz Wirth, who operates the town garage, the townspeople of Black Rock are hostile towards Macreedy. Even before Macreedy reveals why he's come to town, Reno Smith, the local land baron who controls Black Rock, gives the command that the stranger is to be harassed and intimidated into leaving. But Macreedy, a veteran of World War Two, is not a man who scares easily. And when it comes to physical violence, he can handle his own......

The literary motif of the stranger who goes poking into the bad side of a bad town, has since become a mainstay of suspense and thriller fiction. Unfortunately, 'Bad Day' has all the strains of a novel constructed from the expansion of a short story: overly sedate pacing, padding in the form of regular conversations and interior monologues, and a denouement that goes on just a little too long. Well before the halfway point of the novel I was getting impatient with the way the narrative was dragging. The novel's ending didn't seem all that rewarding in terms of the effort I had to put in to get there.

The verdict ? 'Bad Day at Black Rock' is a Two-Star title. Those with a high level of patience may find it a rewarding read, but if the sharper, more fast-paced noir novels of the postwar era are your preference, then you'll want to examine other titles in the Gold Medal Book catalogue.

January is Gold Medal Books Month at the PorPor Books Blog

Book Review: 'Lucinda' by Howard Rigsby

2 / 5 Stars

Howard Vechel Rigsby (1909 – 1975) wrote a number of novels and short stories in the gothic romance, suspense, and western genres in the 1950s and 1960s. ‘Lucinda’ was published in 1954 by Fawcett / Gold Medal books.

The novel is set in the late 1940s / early 1950s. Judson Hay is a young artist who travels the back roads of northern California, looking for painterly scenes. When his girlfriend Julia asks him to try and find her employer, a lawyer named Malloy, who was last located in the coastal town of Mussel Point, Hay somewhat reluctantly agrees. But Hay’s efforts to travel to Mussel Point are upended when a chance encounter in the unmapped wilderness of the mountains makes him a witness to the murder of a man in a corduroy hat.

Labeled a possible suspect, Hay winds up hiding out in the remote fastness of Squatter’s Valley, a strange and rustic collection of log cabins and hillbillies straight out of a ‘Lil’ Abner’ comic strip.

However impressive the mountain scenery surrounding Squatter’s Valley, it pales in comparison to the beauty of the eponymous Lucinda Plumb, a stunning 17 year-old girl whose parents are seeking to marry her off in a ‘Dogpatch’ – style convocation of eligible bachelors. The convocation, to be held few days hence by Lucinda’s mercenary father, has drawn the interest of all of the Valley’s bachelors, an unsavory lot of rustics with bad hygiene, missing teeth, and unsatisfied erotic yearnings.

While preoccupied with trying to learn who killed the 'corduroy hat man,' someone who well may be trying to kill Judson, too, our hero finds himself falling for the amazing Lucinda. But identifying himself as a suitor for Lucinda draws the ire of those others seeking her hand: hard men, desperate men, who have no problem with loosing rifle shots at any competitors, especially ones from outside the Valley……..

‘Lucinda’ is a competent Gold Medal novel. There are some plot twists and turns that at times get a little too complicated for their own good, and the ending relies overmuch on sentimentality. I can’t say it’s worth searching out, but those with a fondness for the ‘milder’ Gold Medal titles may find it interesting.

Playboy

January, 1974

Time to travel back in time 51 years, to January, 1974, and take a look at the latest issue of Playboy magazine. It's a thriving publication, with a hefty 294 pages celebrating the magazine's twentieth anniversary. And all for $1.50 ! Compare and contrast to today's magazines.........

There is quite a lineup of premiere contributors for this special issue, all of whom are very much in tune of the magazine's major demographic; men over the age of 40:

The Interview features none other than Hugh Hefner himself. Hef is living large in these mid-1970s years, enjoying the company of his girlfriend Barbi Benton, and hanging out at the Playboy mansion amidst all the cool people who want to see and be seen. Hef is very much the international man of adventure, looked upon with admiration.

In the Interview he does display some rancor towards Bob Guccione and Penthouse (which by '74 had a larger circulation than Playboy), Gallery, Genesis, and other 'imitators,' but Hef seems secure in the knowledge that these 'copycats' fails to offer anything that is 'fresh and original.'

This January issue features a portfolio of all 12 Playmates from 1973. Ironically, these photos all have adopted the soft-focus photography pioneered by Guccione. But, hey: whether soft- focus or not, these are some foxy ladies !

Along with the portfolios, there are some interesting fiction and nonfiction articles in this January issue.

A profile of comedian Jerry Lewis is particularly sharp and acidic. O'Connell Driscoll, the author of the piece, was allowed to 'tail' Lewis for several months in the spring of 1973.

Driscoll apparently was able to record everything Lewis said, verbatim, although the article does not explicitly state this. 'Birthday Boy' starts off with Lewis staying at the Deauville Hotel in Miami in March, 1973, where he is co-performing in a comedy show with Milton Berle. Lewis has just turned 47 and his career is fading. He is frustrated and unhappy with having to do a lame show with Uncle Milty, a signal of has-been status, playing to the elderly Jewish retirees in the Miami area. As the article progresses, it becomes ever clearer that Lewis is flailing, trying to find some outlet that will grant him the fame and appreciation in the USA, that he enjoys in Europe.

At the close of the article, Driscoll is present when Lewis is doing the edits on the footage of the (never-released) movie The Day the Clown Cried. Seemingly indifferent to the fact that he is being recorded, Lewis shows how odious and unpleasant a person he can be:

You can read the entire 'Birthday Boy' article here.

'Haiti, Goodby,' an article by Bruce Jay Friedman is decidedly more appealing. Friedman, having left behind his days as an editor of 'sweat' magazines at Martin Goodman's Magazine Management publishing firm, describes his 1973 stay at the Hotel Oloffson, a resort hotel in Port-Au-Prince. It's bizarre to realize that fifty years ago people would willingly go to Haiti on vacation, although - as Friedman tells it - the Europeans and Americans he encountered at the Oloffson were towards the stranger end of the spectrum.

John Updike was one of the leading authors in the USA in 1974, and he has a short story in this January issue.

'Nevada' features Updike's favorite type of character: a Jewish man, closer to middle-age than he would prefer, who is confronting a personal crisis. Culp is the character's name, and his crisis, a divorce from his wife Sarah. While the ex enjoys a honeymoon with her new hubbie, Culp is tasked with looking after his two daughters. The three of them take an existential journey through the heat and emptiness of Nevada, where, by the story's end, Culp finds a measure of self-renewal. It's a good story.

And that, dear reader, is how it was, back in January of 1974...........

January is Gold Medal Books Month at the PorPor Books Blog

Book Review: 'The Hoods Come Calling' by Nick Quarry

3 / 5 Stars

'The Hoods Come Calling' (160 pp.) was published by Fawcett in 1958, as Gold Medal Books No. 747. It's one of a number of Gold Medal crime novels, featuring private eye Jake Barrow, authored by Marvin H. Albert under his pen name 'Nick Quarry.'

Albert (1924 - 1996) published over 100 nonfiction and fiction works, the latter in a variety of genres.

'Hoods' is set in New York city in the late 1950s. After a two-year absence, Jake Barrow has returned to the place where he grew up. Barrow is hoping to start his own private-eye business. To do this, he needs the $1,600 that his estranged wife Carla presumably has been safekeeing in their joint bank account.

Getting the money won't be easy. Jake and Carla have a troubled history. Carla is quite a looker, but also has a problem with staying faithful, one of the reasons Jake felt compelled to leave the city in the first place.

At a party hosted by Eddie Jerango, a childhood friend and now a mover in the city's underworld, Jake meets a swell dame named Sandy Adams. Jake also learns that Carla now is the squeeze of Buddy Jerango, Eddie's brother. Hot-headed and intemperate, Jake creates a public scene with Carla and Buddy, a scene that ends badly for Jake.

When, soon after, Carla is murdered, Jake finds himself the lead suspect. With just days to find the murderer and clear his name, a desperate Jake prowls the summertime streets and hood haunts of the city, looking for clues to the identity of the perpetrator. Luckily Sandy Adams is willing to help him out; she's got beauty and brains, and seems to show up in the right place at the right time. Maybe Sandy is too good to be true...........?

'Hoods' is one of those rarer Gold Medal titles that, for most of its length, delivers a well-told, and well-plotted, hardboiled crime story. Author Quarry / Albert has the style down pat:

It was a cheap hotel, down near Times Square. A small room and bath with a view of an open airshaft for two-and-a-half a day. The first dirty streaks of dawn were creeping into the night sky as I let myself into the room and locked the door.

I didn't turn on the light. I went straight to the bureau and opened the top drawer. The flat pint of rye was still there, under my shirts. I carried it into the bathroom, got a tumbler and poured the rye into it. The neck of the pint kept clinking against the glass as I poured.

I gulped it all down without taking the glass from my teeth. When I poured again, my hands were no longer shaking. I carried the bottle and the filled glass into the other room and sat on the edge of the bed. I sat there till I'd finished the bottle. My brain was rocking like a rowboat in a squall.

'Hoods' is standard-issue private-eye fiction from the postwar era; when it comes to hand-hand combat, Jake takes on all comers and, while he may suffer some superficial damage, always manages to get the best of his adversaries. Helping to sooth his injuries and tribulations is the fact that Barrow regularly meets comely young women who, for some reason, can't help wanting to sleep with him.

Where the novel falters is in its final chapters, where all sorts of loopholes and contrivances lead to the discovery of Whodunit and their fate. It's a flaw not unusual in many private eye tales but, given the higher quality of the initial chapters in the book, it seemed as more of a letdown to me.

I'm willing to investigate other entries in the Jake Barrow franchise, but I'm hoping their conclusions are more convincing that what I read in 'Hoods.'

January is Gold Medal Books Month at the PorPor Books Blog

Book Review: 'Mad River' by Donald Hamilton

1 / 5 Stars

Donald Hamilton (1916 - 2006) was a very successful writer of paperback fiction from the 1950s on into the 1980s. Twenty-eight of his 42 books were novels about the secret agent Matt Helm, but Hamilton also produced several western novels, one of these being 'Mad River,' first issued in 1956 by Collier, and later reprinted (date unknown) as Gold Medal book No. k1500.

'Mad' is set in the Arizona Territory, in the late 19th century. The protagonist is Boyd Cohoon, who, at twenty-four years of age, has just finished serving a five-year sentence at the territorial prison in Yuma. As the novel opens, Cohoon is returning to his hometown of Sombrero, which, unfortunately is under the thumb of the mining tycoon Paul Westerman.

It transpires that Cohoon's prison term is linked to a robbery that cost the life of Westerman's son Harry, and Westerman has nothing but animosity for Cohoon. And a message: get out of town, and don't come back.

Of course, Boyd Cohoon isn't scared of Westerman, nor of the town Marshall, Willie Black, who takes his marching orders from the mining magnate. Cohoon is less interested in following Westerman's dictates, and more interested in trying to figure out who bushwhacked his father and brother while Cohoon was imprisoned in Yuma.

Cohoon's also in town to settle accounts with the Paradine family. Claire Paradine once was his fiancee, but Cohoon knows that things can change with five years apart. There is her brother Francis, who shares complicity with Cohoon in past misdeeds in the arroyos and canyons outside of Sombrero. And then there is Colonel Paradine, who is accustomed to using guile, as well as wads of cash, to deter potential problems.

Sticking around Sombrero and prying into things left better left alone is a good way for Boyd Cohoon to put his life at risk from any number of parties, including the 'General,' a mysterious bandit who has been robbing the town bank with a disturbing regularity. As Cohoon makes his way around the dry and dusty streets of Sombrero, he'll need to keep an eye out for firearms leveled at him from the shadows.......

'Mad River' is a perfunctory effort from Donald Hamilton. It reads as a crime or mystery novel that was repurposed to a western. Even though the novel is only 143 pages in length, it is a sluggish read. There is no real action until page 85, and Boyd Cohoon doesn't even fire a weapon with deadly intent until page 140. Much of the narrative is taken up with dialogue passages that relate the emotional interactions of the lead characters, and the final chapters rely on contrivances to pull together various complicated intrigues, and Whodunit revelations, that are out of place in a Western novel.

While I certainly wasn't expecting 'Mad River' to have the energetic violence of a George Gilman / Terry Harkness 'Edge' novel, it's a bloodless adventure reminiscent of the Marvel westerns of the Post Comics Code-era, when the Two-Gun Kid, the Rawhide Kid, and Kid Colt all had to shoot the guns from their adversaries' hands because the Code discouraged depictions of people being struck by gunfire.

If you enjoy that sort of western, you might like 'Mad River,' but all others can pass on this vintage Gold Medal title. For the sake of fairness, however, I will point out that a review at the Vintage Pop Fictions blog found the book to be more rewarding.

Lookin' Out for #1

by Bachman Turner Overdrive

1976

An underappreciated, brilliant little gem of a song. 'Lookin' Out for #1' was recorded on the 1975 BTO LP Head On, and released in the USA in 1976 as a single. It reached number 65 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

The song starts off as a downbeat, bluesie number, one with a stark message perfect for the 'Me' decade. But then, in its coda, it suddenly transitions to a progressive rock - jazz fusion melody. Stuff that bands could do, back in the mid-1970s.

You can listen to 'Lookin' Out for #1'here.

February is Gold Medal Books Month at the PorPor Books Blog

Book Review: 'Plunder' by Benjamin Appel

3 / 5 Stars

'Plunder' (180 pp.) is Gold Medal book No. 266 and was published in October, 1952. According to his New York Times obituary, author Appel (1907 - 1977) published more than 25 books between 1934 and 1977, many of these novels in the noir and crime genres. 'Funhouse' (aka 'The Deathmaster,' 1959) is science fiction. 'People Talk: American Voices from the Great Depression,' first issued in 1940 and reprinted by Touchstone in 1982, is an oral history of that era.

Stark House Press has republished some of Appel's crime novels, including 'Plunder.'

Appel also wrote a number of books for juveniles under the 'We Were There' imprint, such as 'We Were There in the Klondike Gold Rush.' I may well have read some of these when I was a kid - !

'Plunder' is set in the Philippines in April, 1945, just a month or so after the end of the brutal Battle for Manila (which killed an estimated 100,000 civilians). Vice and corruption seethe in Manila, as the destitute and impoverished Filipinos try to make as much money as possible from the American military, before it ships out in order to pursue the Japanese elsewhere in the Pacific. Amid the ruins of the city, neighborhoods have been turned into Red Light Districts, where bars, brothels, and souvenir shops compete for the pesos being spent by G.I.s.

In the opening chapter we learn that the novel's protagonist, Joe 'the Lawyer' Trent, is in the stockade for deserting the battle in order to work in a brothel called the Five Sisters. In the stockade, Trent befriends a swarthy G.I. named 'Blacky' MacIntyre, who is willing to buy into Trent's promises of wealth and women. Trent makes a bargain with First Sergeant Murdock, the stockade NCO, to escape confinement. Fifty miles later, Trent and Blacky are back in Manila, and Trent is ready to wheel and deal.

Working with Tommy Cruz, the owner of the Five Sisters, Trent schemes to masquerade as a Military Police (M.P.) officer, and acquire easy pesos by coercing the owners of the other red light brothels and bars into paying protection money. Trent is very good at exploiting the avarice of the officers in charge of various Army logistics units in Manila, into playing along with one clandestine business arrangement after another.

As the novel progresses, Trent's flair for illicit commerce leads to the creation of a syndicate that has its fingers in all manner of commodities, and Joe is a thorough man-about-town, consorting with a rotating cast of beautiful mistresses and influential gangsters. But Joe has a big weakness: his greed has no bounds. Sooner rather than later, Joe Trent is going to discover that once dishonesty exceeds a certain threshold, retribution is all but assured.....

One thing 'Plunder' does very well is remind the reader of the aspects of the American involvement in World War Two that tend not to be mentioned in the history books: the massive scale of corruption and profiteering that mushroomed in the war zones once the shooting stopped, and the hustlers saw their chance to operate. In such an environment morals evaporated and transgressions became commonplace.

Appel was present in the Philippines following World War Two, as an aid to the American High Commissioner (and later Ambassador) Paul McNutt, so Appel's descriptions of wartime Manila, its commerce (open and clandestine), Tagalog phrases, and G.I. slang and idioms, give the novel considerable verisimilitude.

Where the novel falters is in its final third, where the prose gets florid and Blacky's psychological turmoil gets so much attention that it drains momentum from the narrative. As well, readers are unlikely to be surprised by the denouement, which takes its time in arriving.

Summing up, 'Plunder' is a solid Three Star crime novel. If you like a blend of noir and exotic locales, then it's a worthy read.

Deathlock (1991-1994)

Marvel Comics

I've always been a fan of the 'Deathlok' character from Marvel comics, starting with his first appearance in 'Astonishing Tales' No. 25 (cover date August 1974). Deathlok, created by Rich Buckler circa 1972, predated Martin Caidin's 'Cyborg' as an iconic cybernetics - based superhero.

Buckler's Deathlok, which appeared in 'Astonishing Tales' from 1974 to 1976, was a marked departure from the Marvel superhero paradigm. Deathlok was set apart from the Marvel universe, in a dystopian, 1990s USA marked by social anarchy and a military-industrial complex run riot.

The stories had a bleak, existential quality and featured content that pushed the boundaries of the Comics Code as far as violence was concerned; Deathlok would just as soon shoot somebody, as opposed to knocking them out for later incarceration.

In 1990 Marvel published a four-issue miniseries, titled 'Deathlok', and the response was encouraging enough for the company to relaunch the character in his own eponymous series, which ran for 34 issues, from April 1991 to April 1994.

The Great Comics Boom of the 1990s then was underway. It's worth noting that, according to Jason Sacks and Keith Dallas in their book 'American Comic Book Chronicles: The 1990s,' in November of 1993 Marvel produced 128 comic books, compared to 92 comics for November 1992 (page 117). Anything that Marvel thought might sell, got packaged and sent to the stores.

Last summer I picked up the entire 1990s run of Deathlok (including the two Annuals) for a very affordable $15.

Also worth noting is the 2015 trade paperback, 'Deathlok: The Souls of Cyber-Folk,' which compiles the first 15 issues, and one Annual, from the 1991 series.

Unlike the 1974 Deathlok, the 1991 version was part of the Marvel universe, a move which allowed for well-known Marvel heroes and villains to make guest appearances (and boost circulation).

Whereas Luther Manning, the original Deathlok, was somewhat ambiguous in terms of his racial identity, the new Deathlok, Michael Collins, was black. Writers Denys Cowan and Dwayne McDuffie were black as well. Black superheroes and creative teams were starting to gain momentum in the early 1990s, and in 1993, Cowan and Mcduffie would go on to form Milestone, the first black-owned comic book publishing company, which issued its books through DC comics.

Reading the 1991 series, I have a mixed reaction. On the one hand, the series definitely has some energy to it, with plenty of segments of furious action that recall the tenor of the original series. On the other hand, Cowan and McDuffie, and later, writer Gregory Wright, are insistent that Michael Collins exhibits a pacifistic attitude, which deprives the character and setting of the edgy quality of the original series. After a while, the humanistic homilies that drive the Michael Collins Deathlok get tiresome.

However contrived, the appearances of various guest stars from elsewhere in the Marvel pantheon does lend some interesting twists to the storylines. This is particularly true of the final four issues (#31 - #43) when, in the 'Cyberstrike' story arc, the original Deathlok arrives to team up with the Michael Collins incarnation of the character. Lots of big guns, in the style of 1990s action comics:

In the early 1990s cyberpunk was a growing pop culture motif and the Deathlok writers worked it into their story lines. Michael Collins was a computer expert prior to becoming Deathlok, and as the cyborg, he routinely would enter cyberspace for one reason or another. The artists did a reasonably good job of depicting this facet of the series.

One of the better story arcs involves a three-issue adventure in Wakanda, with the Black Panther fighting side-by-side with Deathlok to prevent a usurper from taking over the country

Looking through these 1990s comics, I'm struck by the various gimmicks and come-ons, such as foil-embossed covers, that were part and parcel of the comics boom of that era. It's also interesting to see that, in the 90s, artists and editors with a high-profile status were able to earn money via independent appearances at comics-related events.

One area where these comics have not aged well is in the color schemes. Page after page of these Deathlok issues, like so many Marvel comics of the early 1990s, have remarkably ugly coloration. It's as if Pantone had a 'dogshit shades and hues' category, which Marvel was partial to.

To be fair, the crappy color was due in part to the decision by World Color in Sparta, Illinois, to switch from their old and failing letterpress equipment to 'Flexographic' printing, using rubber plates. Flexographic meant that Marvel and other publishers could continue to produce comics, at the cost of shittier print quality.

The result was panels and pages (like the ones below) where the colors make your eyes hurt......

Interestingly, as I was perusing these 1990s Deathlok issues earlier this Fall, Marvel released a 'Luther Manning.....Deathlok' one-shot comic as part of its commemoration of the character's 50th anniversary:

As the title indicates, this one-shot revives the original character and places him in the dystopian New York City of the 1974 incarnation.

Much as I like Deathlok, this one-shot was a disappointment. The opening sequence of the book, designed to introduce the character to the 21st century readership, was incoherent. Once the narrative moved into present-day (so to speak) and the ruins of the city it steadied a bit, although still it tried to cram too many story beats into too few pages (a common failing of Marvel titles). The ending was contrived and made no sense, other than to try and provoke those few people who still buy 'floppies' (i.e., traditional comic books) into keeping an eye out for some future Deathlok limited edition series.

In keeping with the mercenary marketing philosophies that rule Marvel nowadays, this 50th anniversary issue had four different covers, designed to pry more cash from the fanboys. Needless to say, I resisted and just got the one book.....

When all is said and done, the 1990s incarnation of Deathlok is a readable, if not overly memorable, series. If you can find the comics for a reasonable price, and you like the franchise and science fiction-themed comics, then it's worth getting. I am not aware of any Marvel 'omnibus' in preparation that would collect the 34-issue run but if I do get word of such a production I'll post about it here at the PorPor Blog.

Book Review: 'Alfred Hitchcock's Fear and Trembling'

4 / 5 stars

'Alfred Hitchcock's Fear and Trembling'first was printed in 1948 by Alfred Knopf. This little Dell paperback edition (192 pp.) was issued in 1963, and features cover art by Fred Banbery.

I'm really going back in time with this review, into territory more frequently covered by M. Porcius, whose blog focuses on sci-fi and fantasy literature from the postwar era. In my experience the literature of this era can be rewarding more for the mystery / detective / suspense genres, and considerably less so for sci-fi.

The fourteen stories compiled in this anthology all saw print in the first 50 years of the 20th century, and almost all were written by British authors. Unlike the latter Hitchcock anthologies, which were edited by Robert Arthur, it is unknown who edited this particular volume.

My capsule summaries of the contents:

Cassius, by Henry S. Whitehead: a strange, and dangerous, little animal is loose on the otherwise tranquil grounds of an estate in the U.S. Virgin Islands / St. Thomas. This novelette is overwritten, but imaginative. Its prose is too un-Woke to be viable nowadays.

The Tarn, by Hugh Walpole: amidst the idyllic vistas of the English Lake Country, evil is nurtured in the dark heart of a recluse named Fenwick.

Little Memento, by John Collier: in the drowsy Somerset countryside, a young man named Eric Gaskell makes the acquaintance of the village eccentric, an elderly man who knows "all that goes on."

Although only five pages in length, this is a well-constructed tale, in which dialogue is used to direct the plot towards an understated, but effective, denouement (one with a note of viciousness). Collier (1901 - 1980) is considered one of the most capable short-story writers of the 20th century. I have ordered a couple of his anthologies for further reading.

Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad, by M. R. James: while 'on holiday' in rural England, Professor Parkins, a fussy and unimaginative man, unearths an artifact that was best left alone. This story first was published in 1904, and is too fuddy-duddy for this anthology.

One Summer Night, by Ambrose Bierce: a short-short tale that still is memorable, more than a century after its first publication in 1906 in Cosmopolitan magazine.

Telling, by Elizabeth Bowen: it's an Evelyn Waugh, Downton Abbey- style fine summer morning in the English countryside. Everyone is rousing themselves from a long night of partying. But Terry, it seems, did Something Bad last evening.....

The Jar, by Ray Bradbury: a backwoods simpleton named Charlie decides to buy an artifact from a county fair sideshow. A decent enough tale from Bradbury, although the highly descriptive prose style rapidly tires after a few pages.....

The Badlands, by John Metcalfe: a young man suffering from a 'neurosis' seeks quietude and healing in the coastal Norfolk village of Todd. A road near the hotel leads him to a strange and troubling landscape. Is it a figment of his neurosis ? This story is reminiscent of the stories of Arthur Machen and William Hope Hodgson, and (arguably) a progenitor of the 'weird fiction' genre.

Ghost Hunt, by H. R. Wakefield: you may remember the 'ghost hunters' program that was popular 20 years ago on the Syfy channel. This 1947 tale from Wakefield is the progenitor.

Skule Skerry, by John Buchan: a 'skerry' is a small, windswept island located in the Orkney or Shetland archipelagos. In this story, an ornithologist decides to spend a few days on one of the most remote and isolated of such islands. He finds himself in an unexpected struggle with violent weather and its associated eerie manifestations.

'Skule' is not a ghost story in the traditional sense. The unsettling aspect comes from the protagonist's insistence on intruding into a locale that intrinsically is hostile to man. Despite the lack of overt horror elements, it nonetheless is an effective story.

The Red Room, by H. G. Wells: a 'modern' (as of 1896, when the story was published) take on the haunted house trope.

The Sack of Emeralds, by Lord Dunsany: a fable about a wretched man and his burden. Despite its brevity, the tale's prose is adept at communicating the atmosphere of a foreboding October night in the English countryside, with horror looming from the darkness

The Night Reveals, by William Irish: 'William Irish' was the pseudonym of Cornell Woolrich. In this story, a man discovers his wife has been going on for late-night assignations of a disturbing kind. 'Night Reveals' is a well-told noir tale, but a bit out of place compared to the other contents of this anthology.

The verdict ? For a collection of 'traditional' ghost stories, stories that invariably had the adjective 'macabre' applied to them in the era in which they saw print, this Alfred Hitchcock anthology is quite readable. I favor these stories over the figurative and opaque prose style of the'quiet horror' movement of the latter decades of the 20th century. If you share my attitude, then 'Fear and Trembling' will be a rewarding acquisition.

Celebrating Black History Month 2025

'Blueschild Baby' by George Cain

4 / 5 Stars

Here at the PorPor Books Blog we like to celebrate Black History Month by reading and reviewing a book, fiction or nonfiction, that illuminates the Black Experience. For February 2025, we are reviewing 'Blueschild Baby' by George Cain.

'Blueschild Baby' first was published in hardback by McGraw-Hill in 1970. In January, 1972, Dell books issued a mass market paperback edition, copies of which can be rather pricey. This trade paperback edition (210 pp.) was issued by Ecco / Harper Collins in 2019 and is considerably more affordable.

It features an Introduction by Leslie Jamison, an essayist who has written books about addiction. Jamison is a white liberal, and while her Introduction features insights into Cain garnered from his wife Jo Lynne Pool, Jamison steeps the Introduction in identity politics and grievance politics (it is structural racism fomented by the white power structure that drives People of Color to take up clandestine drug use, etc., etc.).

'Blueschild' is the first and only novel by Cain, and is autobiographical in nature. Born in 1943 with the name George Maurice Hopkins, he later converted to Islam and changed his surname to Cain. During the writing of the novel in the 1960s he would head into the ghetto with notebooks tucked under his arm, taking notes of the landscape from which he was scoring dope. While 'Blueschild' made him a rising star in the literary scene, he struggled with heroin addiction all his life, and despite assistance and encouragement from his editor, he never was able to write another book. Cain died in 2010 at age 66.

'Blueschild' is set in Harlem in the summer of 1967. The first-person narrator (also named George Cain) is only 23 years old, but a stone-cold junkie who must get a fix every day. In the opening chapters we are introduced to the lifestyle of the junkie, the process of scoring dope and shooting up, hustling for the next hit, staying one step ahead of the Man, and evading injury or death at the hands of Harlem's criminal element.

The first half of the novel chronicles Cain's misadventures in the back alleys and tenements of Harlem, and his fraught relationship with his family, who lecture him - to no avail - about the need to get cleaned up, if not for himself, then for his daughter Sabrina.

The crux of the narrative occurs about halfway through the book, when Cain decides to quit, cold-turkey, with the aid of his long-suffering girlfriend. The narrative then goes into flashbacks of his upbringing, and his efforts, often tortuous, to straddle the world of the streets and the world of upper-class society.

'Blueschild' uses a jive-influenced, clipped prose style, mingling stream-of-consciousness with introspection:

Take the bus downtown to Washington Square. Walking across the park see strange signs and omens. Young white beggars fill the streets, pawing and panhandling. Dirty and drugged. Everywhere gross acts and running obscenities. Bold, they exhibit their infirmities for sympathy and inspection, dead souls and lost minds. The cancer has found a fatter host, it began somewhere deep in my bowels and now consumes America. Tourists roam the place. Laughing and giving freely for what they think funny, not knowing it is their own death they're watching.

Coming onto Thompson Street, go into my bag. I swagger and sneer at them. Italian women dressed in dumpy-black, hanging from the windows and stoops, cursing me in their foul tongue while counting beads and blessings.

George Cain is not a likeable character. He is self-centered, consumed with self-pity, often violent and abusive towards women, racist towards whites, and sometimes hateful towards other black people. He will betray anyone, if it gets him another fix and another day lost in euphoria.

Along with its stark portrayal of the self-degradation of addiction, 'Blueschild' also is an observation of the conversion of John Lindsay's New York City into the hellhole it would be in the 1970s. The exploding numbers of addicts in Harlem are a foreshadowing of the spread of social disorder into the other boroughs of the city, and the advent of the pervasive decay to come.

Where 'Blueschild' falters is in its closing chapter, which, without disclosing spoilers, ends on an ambiguous note. It's something of a cop-out on the author's part.

Summing up, 'Blueschild Baby' succeeds as an insightful treatment of black life and times in the sixties, and is deserving of a Four Star Rating.

'The Dreamer' by William Hjortsberg

from Penthouse, February 1979

Here's a tale of proto-cyberpunk that went through some different incarnations in print media in the 1970s.

Hjortsberg (1941 - 2017) is perhaps best known for his 1978 horror novel 'Falling Angel,' which later was made into the 1987 film Angel Heart. His 1971 sci-fi novel 'Gray Matters,' which uses the brains-in-a-jar theme, is reviewed here.

'The Dreamer,' which was published in the February, 1979 Penthouse, is an adaptation of a novelette Hjortsberg published, as a chapbook titled 'Symbiography,' in 1973.

'The Dreamer' benefits from a fine illustration from Don Ivan Punchatz:

As a spoiler-free summary, I'll say that 'The Dreamer' is set in the near future, after a catastrophe (probably nuclear war) has left much of the planet a wasteland, peopled by nomads whose lives are nasty, brutish, and short.

Civilization survives in the form of the City, a high-technology enclave run by a cadre of bureaucrats, who are in turn aided by sophisticated computers. Within the City, the populace take their pleasure in reliving the dreams of others, via the aid of specialized neurolink devices through which they can 'download' the dreams from the network.

Par Sondak is one of the small coterie of professional dreamers, whose dreams are recorded and then distributed - for profit - to the audience in the City. To enhance his dreaming experiences, Sondak resides in isolation in a well-guarded oasis of greenery in the midst of the wasteland.

As the novelette opens, Sondak is facing something of a crisis. Direct Experience Tapes, or DETs, are overtaking dreams as a commodity. DETs, a sort of GoPro technology as it might have been envisioned in the early 1970s, can feature all manner of experiences that are real, not dreams. And the lotus eaters in the City have a preference for DETs that feature explicit sex and violence.

Unless Sondak can come up with a way to compete with the DETs, his career (and its accompanying affluence) as a professional dreamer is in danger.

But a chance encounter with a wasteland nomad, 'Buick' of the Cincinnati clan, plants an idea in Sondak's head......

'The Dreamer' is a good mix of proto-cyberpunk with a 'Mad Max' sensibility. Its prose is clear and unadorned, the characterization of Per Sondak and his nomad acolyte adroidt, and its portrayal of a near-future society in keeping with the tenor of the early 1970s. I find 'The Dreamer' to be superior to 'Gray Matters.'

While both the 1973 chapbook 'Symbiography' and the 1979 Penthouse are not easy to come by nowadays, the novelette is included in the 2004 omnibus, 'Odd Corners: The Slip-Stream World of William Hjortsberg,' which is quite affordable. Those with an interest in proto-cyberpunk may want a copy.

Book Review: The Genesis Machine

Kung Fu Christmas (National Lampoon, 1975)

Article 0

Old Editions Bookshop North Tonawanda

January is Gold Medal Books Month at the PorPor Books Blog

Book Review: Before It's Too Late

National Lampoon January 1975

Book Review: The Death Cycle

K-Tel Collection

Book Review: Bad Day at Black Rock

Book Review: Lucinda

Playboy January 1974

Book Review: The Hoods Come Calling

Book Review: Mad River

Lookin Out for #1 BTO

Book Review: Plunder

Deathlok 1991-1994

Book Review: Alfred Hitchcock's Fear and Trembling

Book Review: Blueschild Baby

The Dreamer by William Hjortsberg