Book Review: The Book of Skulls

Book Review: 'The Book of Skulls' by Robert Silverberg

1 / 5 Stars

'The Book of Skulls' first was issued in hardcover by Charles Scribner's Sons in December, 1971. Numerous paperback editions have been published since then, including this Bantam Books edition (196 pp.) from January, 1983, which features a striking cover illustration by Jim Burns.

‘The Book of Skulls’ represents an effort by Silverberg to access the mainstream novel readership as it stood in the early 1970s, namely, the people who belonged to the Book of the Month Club and the Literary Guild, rather than the people who belonged to the Science Fiction Book Club. With ‘Skulls’, Silverberg plainly hoped to emulate the tales of youthful misadventures that proved so successful for Larry McMurtry with ‘The Last Picture Show’ from 1966; Jules Feiffer’s play ‘Carnal Knowledge’, made into a 1971 film; and the novels of Philip Roth (Eli Steinfeld, a character in ‘Skulls’, is essentially a younger version of Roth’s frustrated, self-conflicted Jewish males).

‘Skulls’ is set in the early 1970s. In the opening chapters we are introduced to the four characters: Eli, Oliver, Timothy, and Ned. All are students and roommates at an unnamed Ivy League university in New England. We learn that while poking around the dustier shelves in the basement of the university library, Eli came across a medieval manuscript titled Liber Calvarium, i.e., The Book of Skulls. According to the manuscript, by completing the Trial of the Skulls it is possible to achieve immortality. There is a catch, however: four people must apply for the ritual, and one of them must die at the hands of the others, and one must die by his or her own hand.

Signet edition, 1972

Would you be willing to wager your life for a 50:50 chance at immortality ? The four boys think that, yes, they would, so as the novel opens, they are on a Spring Break road trip from their university to a remote location in the Arizona desert, where they hope to find the House of Skulls. Once there, Eli, Ned, Timothy, and Oliver will proceed with the Trial, each hoping it’s someone else who winds up with the shorter end of the stick…………. 

‘The Book of Skulls’ has an intriguing premise but sadly, Silverberg doesn’t do much with it. 

The narrative is rather awkwardly constructed around revolving first-person discourses by each of the four protagonists. Silverberg adopts this procedure in order to expend considerable text on internal monologues, which inform the reader that the boys only are partially convinced that the House of Skulls, and the Trial of Skulls, even exist, but intend to satisfy their curiosity on the matter. When, on page 94, the boys finally do reach the House of Skulls, the remainder of the novel soon exhausts itself in chronicling the boy’s innermost fears and desires over the cost-benefit ratio of their eschatological enterprise. This temporizing simply pads the narrative, and doesn't do much to advance the storyline.

The novel’s prose style is dense and overwritten, couched in a kind of breathless hipster argot marked by run-on sentences that are compacted into paragraphs that can approach two and one-half pages in length. Readers will have to negotiate phrases in Latin, allusions and expositions on all manner of highbrow topics, and words like: 

muniment: an archived document or record

uncial: medieval script

geniza: the area of a synagogue or cemetery where manuscripts or documents are stored

incipit: the opening words of a medieval text

circumvolutely:  referring to rolling around or encircling something. While 'circumvoluted' is listed by Merriam-Webster online, 'circumvolutely' isn't listed....?!

By the time the denouement of ‘The Book of Skulls’ finally appeared I was so fatigued from plodding through all the verbiage that I observed the fate of Oliver, Timothy, Ned, and Eli with indifference. 

The verdict ? 'The Book of Skulls' fails to engage, neither as a mainstream novel, nor as one of Silverberg's more adventurous excursions outside the sci-fi genre. 

National Lampoon March 1974

National Lampoon

March 1974

March, 1974, and according to the Billboard Hot 100, the single atop the charts is 'Seasons in the Sun' by Canadian folkie Terry Jacks.

Looking through the pages of the March issue of the National Lampoon, we see advertisements for various LPs: 

Puzzle was a progressive rock / fusion band from Chicago who signed to Motown in 1972, and released two albums: Puzzle in 1973, and The Second Album in 1974. Their second album is available for listening here. 

Their single, 'Mary Mary', is a nice little pop song.

Carly Simon strikes a pose in a maternity dress for her album Hotcakes, from which the single 'Haven't Got Time for the Pain' was a major hit.

Panasonic provides an ad for a proto-boombox called the 'RQ-448S Cassette Tape Recorder with FM/AM radio'.

The March issue of the Lampoon is not very good. It's theme is the 'Stupid Issue', but the humor is too Henry Beard, and too highbrow, to really connect with the reader.

The comic book parody takes aim at an easy target, Classics Illustrated, and Plato's 'The Republic'. The parody is one long, rather dull wink-wink joke about Plato's followers......dainty dudes, all.

At least we have.....boobies !

The black-and-white comics lodging in the back of the magazine are competent, if not overly inspiring, here in the March issue.

All in all, the March, 1974 issue of the Lampoon was not all that special. 

And that's how it was, fifty years ago.............

Byron Preiss appreciation

Byron Preiss Appreciation

Byron Preiss (1953 - 2005) was a major influence in the effort to persuade publishers to pair science fiction and fantasy content with graphic art, back in the 1970s and 1980s.

photo by Travis T. Shuler, from https://www.facebook.com/groups/byronpreiss/

Here's an article by Edo Bosnar about the impact Preiss's books had on genre publishing, back in the days when the sci-fi enterprise just was starting to become the commercial juggernaut it is today. 

Not all of Preiss's efforts were overly memorable; much of the 'Weird Heroes' franchise turned out to be too cheesy to appeal to me neither back in the 1970s, nor when read nowadays. 

But there were more than a few Preiss productions, such as 'The Complete Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination', 'The Illustrated Harlan Ellison' and 'Empire', that were real assets to the field of fantastic literature. They ensure Preiss's place as an innovator in genre publishing.

Book Review: The Encyclopedia of Horror

Book Review: 'The Encyclopedia of Horror' edited by Richard Davis

2 / 5 Stars

'The Encyclopedia of Horror' first was published in 1981 by Octopus Books. This large trade paperback edition (192 pp.) was issued by Hamlyn in the UK 1987.

Richard Davis (1945-2005) was a major editor and advocate for horror fiction in the UK, editing the seminal 'Year Best Horror Stories' series in both Britain and the U.S. 

I had high hopes for this book, as usually these UK volumes on pop culture feature high quality illustrations, and tiny-type, informative text written by acknowledged experts in the field. Unfortunately, 'The Encyclopedia of Horror' falls short of its aims.

While some of the illustrations indeed are of high quality, many of the black and white movie stills used in the book have been tinted with pink or red colors. Others have selected features retouched (below). All of this is distracting and gimmicky.

The book is made up of chapters devoted to prominent aspects of horror media, as it stood in 1981. Thus we get Frankenstein; vampires and werewolves; the Devil and Satan; ghosts ('The Supernatural'); and zombies ('The Undead'). A final chapter, 'Travelling Beyond', covers sci-fi.

Inevitably, the contributions to the Encyclopedia suffer from the overly wide scope of the book. There is only so much space that can be devoted to each topic, and thus the contributors are pretty much left to shape their chapters according to their own attitudes about what is noteworthy. Thus, the book is something of a hodgepodge in terms of depth of coverage.

As a result, Tom Hutchinson in his chapter on 'Evil Monsters', which is intended as an overview of the phenomenon of horror, winds up expatiating on the trope of the monster from the era of Western mythology, up to the movie Alien. His overview focuses too much on philosophical and psychological analyses to be effective.

The chapters on Frankenstein, and vampires and werewolves, are a bit more engaging, but their authors (Michel Perry and Basil Copper, respectively) can really do no more than provide a superficial recitation of the vast body of books and films dealing with these subjects.

'The Supernatural', by Michael Ashley, is perhaps the best chapter in the book. Ashley wisely decides to concentrate on something manageable, and that is supernatural fiction from Geoffrey Chaucer all the way up to the late 1970s, and the works of Robert Aickman and Ramsey Campbell. While there probably isn't much here that will be new to aficionados of the genre, newcomers will find this chapter to be informative. 

Douglas Hills' chapter on horror in science fiction, 'The Beyond', is competent, but like much of the other contributions to the Encyclopedia can't do much more than provide a skimming of the large amount of relevant media.

'The Encyclopedia of Horror' concludes with two appendices. One provides an essay on horror comic books, most of these published in the USA. There is a comic book cover gallery and a listing of titles. The second appendix lists the more prominent horror films issued up to 1980.

Summing up, 'The Encyclopedia of Horror' is one of those volumes that by its very nature arguably was predestined to fail. I can't see it offering enough novelty and insight to be of value to the serious fan of horror in films and print media. I do think it could be of value to those new to the horror genre, albeit with an acknowledgement that its 1981 publication date makes it necessarily dated. Accordingly, I'm fine with assigning the book a Two Star Rating.

Glug by Harlan Ellison

'Glug' by Harlan Ellison
from Adam, July 1967

courtesy of vintage girlie scans

Adam magazine was one of a number of publications that came in the wake of Playboy and, as compared to that magazine, featured somewhat more risque exhibitions of female beauty.

The girls posing in Adam were more down-to-earth, and the advertising a little more louche.....

Adam always had quite a bit of fiction pieces interspersed with its portfolios. Either under a pseudonym, or using their actual name, quite a few high-profile authors were contributors of these pieces.

So it was, that in the July 1967 issue, were have 'Glug', short story from Harlan Ellison. Accompanied by a photograph of a well-endowed young woman !

But....just wait a minute.........

It seems 'Glug' actually is a reprint of a story that Ellison first published in the science fiction digest Imagination in August, 1958 - !

So a story that Adam readers might well consider to be a contemporary tale from one of the hottest writers at work in the US in 1967, was in fact a reprint of a nine year-old story. What a ripoff ! 

But then, no one bought Adam for the stories..........

Sadly, according to the ISFDB, the only way you can access 'Glug' either is from Adam or Imagination. The story didn't make its way into any of the 5 billion Ellison anthologies that have been issued over the decades.

Interestingly, Imagination was published by William Hamling, who during the late 1950s founded an empire of sleaze paperbacks, among the editors / authors of which was none other than Harlan Ellison. Inevitably, Ellison had a confrontation with Hamling, and was expelled from Hamling's enterprise (the whole sordid story is available here; warning, Harlan comes across as a self-centered, nasty little shit). 

Adam went on to be retitled Adam Film World in 1969, and experienced success well into the 1990s.

Book Review: Beyond the Occult

Book Review: 'Beyond the Occult' by Colin Wilson

1 / 5 Stars

'Beyond the Occult' (381 pp.) was published in hardback in 1989 by Carrol and Graf.

In his Introduction, Wilson states that his interest in the occult began in the late 1960s when he was contacted by a publisher eager to capitalize on the success of the book 'The Morning of the Magicians', by Pauwels and Bergier. 'Morning' was a bestseller upon its release in France in 1960 and it went on to do equally well with its English-language translations. Wilson was sufficiently intrigued by the topic of the occult to agree to write a book about it. 

That book was 'The Occult', and upon its publication in 1971, it was very well received, coinciding as it did with the rise in the early 1970s of interest in supernatural phenomena.

advertisement from a 1974 issue of National Lampoon

For Wilson, 'The Occult' was not a catalogue of spells and instructions in magical practices, but a recounting of the 'scientific actualities' that constitute supernatural activities. These 'actualities' confirmed his belief that man possesses 'hidden powers', lumped under the rubric of 'Faculty X', which are otherwise unavailable to the great, unwitting mass of Homo sapiens.  

Wilson saw 'Faculty X' as a component of his philosophy of 'New Existentialism', which he introduced in 1966 in a book titled 'Introduction to the New Existentialism.'

'Beyond the Occult' is simply a recapitulation of the ideology of Faculty X, as it was outlined in 'The Occult', using examples from what is known as the 'paranormal'.

In the first two-thirds of 'Beyond the Occult' Wilson chronicles - primarily using examples from the 19th and 20th centuries - paranormal phenomena such as (among other things) psychometry, clairvoyance, precognition, astral bodies, 'second sight', multiple personalities, possession, and synchronicity. 

The book's closing chapters are a rather labored manifesto for the world to acknowledge the existence of Faculty X, which will, in turn, expedite the movement of the world's peoples into a sort of humanistic Singularity.  

From the opening chapters it will be very apparent to the reader that in his zeal to collect anecdotes about the paranormal to support his thesis of Faculty X, Wilson exaggerates and misleads about all manner of alleged psychic phenomena and practitioners. To give two examples from the many presented in 'Beyond the Occult':

• On page 165, Wilson alludes to the novel 'The Wreck of the Titan, or, Futility', published in 1898 by the American author Morgan Robertson, as an example of 'precognition', in that Robertson's novel deals with the lethal collision of an 'unsinkable' ocean liner, christened the Titan, with an iceberg. Wilson remarks that Robertson claimed to be an 'automatic' writer who composed his novels while in something of a trance-like state. This state, Wilson claims, allowed Robertson to subconsciously open his mind to the 'information universe', which in turn imparted to him knowledge of the sinking of the liner Titanic in 1912. 

However, Wilson does not disclose that throughout his life Robertson strenuously denied that his novel was an example of precognition, insisting that his familiarity with nautical matters gave him insight into the circumstances of a hypothetical disastrous accident at sea.

• On pages 231 and 232, Wilson alludes to the Fox sisters of Hydesville New York, who in March 1848 claimed to a neighbor that a spirit had invaded their house, and was communicating via knocks and raps. The sister claimed the spirit was the ghost of a peddler who had been murdered by the home's previous occupant, and buried in the basement. By late 1849 the sisters and their encounters with the supernatural had triggered a national frenzy of interest in 'mediums' and 'spiritualism'. Wilson references the discovery, made in 1904, of human bones in a secret room in the basement; this discovery was deemed proof of the murder, and interment, of the peddler. 

Wilson fails to mention that in 1888, Margaretta Fox publicly declared that the rappings were fraudulent, the product of the sisters cracking their ankle and foot joints. And a physician who examined the bones in the secret basement room concluded that the bones (which included chicken bones) were nothing more than a prank.

Well before the halfway point of 'Beyond the Occult', Wilson's habit of assigning credulity to these and all manner of paranormal phenomena began to pall. No anecdote or experience was too preposterous for Wilson to endorse in the name of 'Faculty X'. Indeed, in the chapter titled 'Visions', Wilson breathlessly relates the antics of one Stylianos Atteshlis, aka 'Daskalos', a Cypriot 'magus' who, in July 1979, claimed to have telepathically persuaded 'flying saucer entities' to alter the orbit of the Skylab space station so that it crashed into the southern hemisphere rather than the (more populated) northern hemisphere !

I finished the book more out of a sense of duty, than enthusiasm. In my opinion, only the most fervent of Wilson aficionados will enjoy 'Beyond the Occult'. For everyone else, it has some slight value as a compendium of observations of some of the most 'woo-woo' entries in the global catalogue of paranormal phenomena.