THETREASURY OFTHE FANTASTIC
The Treasury of the Fantastic
Copyright © 2013 by Jacob Weisman and David Sandner
This is a collected work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the publisher.
Introduction copyright © 2001 by Peter S. Beagle
Cover art and design by Thomas Canty
Interior design by Elizabeth Story
Tachyon Publications
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San Francisco, CA 94107
www.tachyonpublications.com
tachyon@tachyonpublications.com
Series Editor: Jacob Weisman
Project Editor: Jill Roberts
Book ISBN 13: 978-1-61696-096-4
ISBN 10: 1-61696-096-5
Printed in the United Statese by Worzalla.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION • David Sandner and Jacob Weisman
FOREWORD • Peter S. Beagle
KUBLA KHAN • Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1816)
DARKNESS • Lord Byron (1816)
LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI • John Keats (1819)
THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW • >Washington Irving (1820)
PETER RUGG, THE MISSING MAN • William Austin (1824)
THE MORTAL IMMORTAL • Mary Shelley (1833)
YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN • Nathaniel Hawthorne (1835)
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER • Edgar Allan Poe (1839)
MORTE D' ARTHUR • Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1842)
GOBLIN MARKET • Christina Rossetti (1862)
THE GOLDEN KEY • George MacDonald (1867)
JABBERWOCKY • Lewis Carroll (1871)
THE OGRE COURTING • Juliana Horatia Ewing (1871)
CARMILLA • J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1872)
THE GHOSTLY RENTAL • Henry James (1876)
THE DONG WITH A LUMINOUS NOSE • Edward Lear (1877)
THE NEW MOTHER • Lucy Clifford (1882)
THE STOLEN CHILD • W. B. Yeats (1886)
THE GRIFFIN AND THE MINOR CANON • Frank R. Stockton (1887)
THE HAPPY PRINCE • Oscar Wilde (1889)
BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH • Emily Dickinson (1890)
AN OCCURENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE • Ambrose Bierce (1890)
THE BOTTLE IMP • Robert Louis Stevenson (1891)
THE YELLOW WALL-PAPER • Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)
A MOTH: GENUS UNKNOWN • H. G. Wells (1895)
CASSILDA'S SONG • Robert W. Chambers (1895)
THE LIBRARY WINDOW • Margaret Oliphant (1896)
THE TRUE LOVER • A. E. Housman (1896)
THE RELUCTANT DRAGON • Kenneth Grahame (1898)
THE BOOK OF BEASTS • Edith Nesbit (1899)
THE MONKEY'S PAW • W. W. Jacobs (1902)
THEY • Rudyard Kipling (1904)
THE SWORD OF WELLERAN • Lord Dunsany (1908)
THE CELESTIAL OMNIBUS • E. M. Forster (1908)
THE EYES • Edith Wharton (1910)
CASTING THE RUNES • M. R. James (1911)
THE GHOST SHIP • Richard Middleton (1912)
THE LISTENERS • Walter de la Mare (1912)
RED-PEACH-BLOSSOM INLET • Kenneth Morris (1916)
THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER • Mark Twain (1916)
ENOCH SOAMES • Max Beerbohm (1916)
CLIMAX FOR A GHOST STORY • I. A. Ireland (1919)
THE BLIND GOD • Laurence Housman (1920)
A HAUNTED HOUSE • Virginia Woolf (1921)
DAVID SANDNER & JACOB WEISMAN
Introduction
The editors of this edition have assembled what we believe to be the widest variety of fantastic literature to ever appear in one volume, bringing together poetry and prose, children’s literature and literature intended for adults, mainstream and genre writers, the Gothic and the fairy and the ghost story, the supernatural and the wonder tale, dragons, devils, revenants, vampires, and just plain oddities of origins unknown.
We have, by necessity, had to limit many of our choices along the way. And this volume’s ample girth evidences just how much we fought to keep as much material as we could. Nevertheless, a few ground rules made our task easier. All stories in this collection were originally written in English and published before 1923, the publication of the first issue of the pulp magazine Weird Tales (a point in time when a great many writers took up the call of fantastic literature). Furthermore, we have limited each author to only one appearance: the work that we feel best exemplifies their writing. Many of the writers we were forced to leave out did their best writing after the 1923 cutoff date (H. P. Lovecraft, in particular, wrote several stories good enough to have been included, but not in any way better than the work that was yet to come). We have saved these authors in the hope that this book will prove successful enough to warrant further volumes.
Now it is your turn to peruse these wonderful stories.
PETER S. BEAGLE
Foreword
Then I was a boy—I can’t give you the exact geological period, but I do recall my mother complaining about the pterodactyls messing right in front of the cave—fantasy fiction was not considered a separate and unequal species, distinct from real writing. Stephen Vincent Benét’s celebrated tales “The Devil and Daniel Webster” and “Johnny Pye and the Fool-Killer” were published in the Saturday Evening Post, not in Galaxy or Astounding; nor were Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Rudyard Kipling’s “They,” Virginia Woolf ’s “A Haunted House,” Edith Wharton’s “The Eyes,” or Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger treated as anything but proper literature. Henry James wrote enough ghost stories to fill a book; E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” literally grows more prophetic by the day; and James Branch Cabell was regarded seriously enough to be tried for obscenity. J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy was reviewed on the front page of the Times Book Review—and by W. H. Auden—when it was first published in the United States in 1954. The many novels of Robert Nathan, my own artistic role model, were regularly reviewed in the New York Times, as were my first two books. Science fiction still had a pulp magazine reputation to live down, and the late, lovely Anthony Boucher was the Times’ single mystery critic, granted; but fantasy was generally considered as merely another way of looking at reality. Funny to think about that, in these officially more enlightened days.
Noel Coward once wrote, “I was born into a world that still took light music seriously.” My own experience with what is now heaped and mashed together under the label of genre fantasy was quite similar. As a cave boy, I read a good half of the stories in this collection, and not under the covers with a flashlight, either. It was my father, a New York public school teacher and union activist, who introduced me to the work of such uncanonic writers as Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, Lord Dunsany, George MacDonald, James Hogg, Sheridan Le Fanu, and William Austin. I’ve never come across another of W. W. Jacobs’s stories, but “The Monkey’s Paw” evokes my father immediately: it was his favorite tale to tell to me and my neighborhood friends, sitting on the curb and scaring the daylights out of us, even though we’d heard it any number of times before. He may well have preferred Chekhov and Joseph Conrad for his own reading, but he never once suggested to me that it wasn’t all literature.
I don’t hold the least nostalgia for the elementary schools of my extinct Bronx (always excepting blessed Mrs. Margaret Butterweck, who sent me The Wind in the Willows to read when I was sick i
n bed), but we were given “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” “The Happy Prince,” and “The Last of the Dragons” to read before the sixth grade. In the local junior high school, which lives on in memory as hell with training wheels, our textbooks included Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,”Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners,” Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Bottle Imp.” When a movie based on M. R. James’s “Casting the Runes” appeared (a minor classic unfortunately retitled Curse of the Demon), we discussed both the film and the original story in class. Junior High 80 was not an unusual school. In any way.
The Bronx High School of Science was, which is why I came to Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper” long before Gilman and her work were rediscovered by the emerging feminist movement. We were also presented (by Mrs. Mollie Epstein, as long gone as Mrs. Butterweck) with Forster’s “The Celestial Omnibus,” Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” Max Beerbohm’s “Enoch Soames,” Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur,” Yeats’s poem “The Stolen Child,” Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” and A. E. Housman’s eerie “The True Love,” which began my own adolescent love affair with his stylistically stoic, stylistically limited, heart-haunting poetry. I’ve never really gotten over it.
I blame a person I loved very much, the editor and publisher Judy-Lynn del Rey, for the gentrification of fantastic literature. In a way, I also blame Tolkien, which is ironic, because the paperback explosion of his Lord of the Rings trilogy in the mid-1960s set off a tidal wave of imitative “epic fantasy” that certainly swept my books along with them. Del Rey Books prompted and promoted the great majority of those “Tol-clones,” as they came to be called: trilogies, almost all, and all infested with mimic elves, dwarves, wizards, dragons, enchanted rings and swords, endless Dark Lords, secretive strangers revealed to be outlaw princes...the shameless list goes ever on, long after the death of Judy-Lynn, who never confused garbage with class, and who told me in so many words that she had considerably better luck publishing the former. I read far less fantasy today than I did back when the pterodactyls were peeking over my shoulder.
The stories and poems in this book date from a time before compartmentalization took over quite as completely as it has done in our literary culture: before sequels, prequels, merchandising, movie tie-ins, and video games. (And before magical realism, which is fantasy in fancier bottles.) The majority of them are by English writers—they’ve been at it longer—and in most cases the really spooky stuff happens in the shadows of the reader’s imagination. There is also a surprising amount of humor and satire, almost entirely absent from the current crop of clunky epics; and there is sensuality too,and the lure of the juicy deadly, as witness “Carmilla” and “Goblin Market.” There’s a good deal to be said—on certain occasions—for a Victorian sense of sin.
Finally, what these stories have in common is style. In our time the word has become as much of a millstone to a writer of popular fiction as liberal is to a politician. Editors constantly urge the self-fulfilling necessity of lower and lower common denominators, and one becomes wearily accustomed to going without that other sensuality of language used with grace and music—with attention—not to show off, but to invite the audience into the author’s pleasure in telling a tale exactly as its nature demands it to be told; in deliberating joyously over choosing the right word and not its second cousin. To quote a modern stylist named Joni Mitchell, “You don’t know what you got till it’s gone.”
Or until you read a book like The Treasury of the Fantastic. I really only wrote this foreword so I could get a free copy.
Peter S. Beagle
Davis, California
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Kubla Khan
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was an English poet, critic, and philosopher. He and William Wordsworth together published The Lyrical Ballads (1798), a foundational poetry collection of the romantic movement.
“Kubla Khan” was written in 1797. Coleridge claimed to have dreamed the poem in an opium-induced reverie. He also claimed the poem was unfinished, because he was interrupted by a man from Porlock knocking at his door, but it is unclear what more the poem might need. What is clear is that Coleridge was nervous about his ground-breaking work of what he called “pure imagination.” He showed the poem to friends but didn’t publish until 1816 when Lord Byron, among others, talked him into it.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And ’mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
LORD BYRON
Darkness
Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron, 1788–1824) was born in London. He was probably the best known of the Romantic Poets and lived a dramatic and wildly controversial life. Byron’s celebrity began after writing Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and he was dubbed “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” “I awoke one morning,” he said, “and found myself famous.”
“Darkness” was written in 1816, the same year as the famous “ghost story” contest that led to the creation of Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818) by Mary Shelley and The Vampyre (1819) by John William Polidori. “Darkness” is an apocalyptic, science-fictional vision of the end of the world and a startling example of the romantic interest in “the last man” theme, in which lonely survivors contemplate isolation and dea
th.
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless; and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum’d,
And men were gather’d round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other’s face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain’d;
Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour
They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks
Extinguish’d with a crash—and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil’d;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look’d up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash’d their teeth and howl’d: the wild birds shriek’d
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl’d