Weird Fiction discussion

I am very excited about our group read, a British Library anthology this month edited by Henry Bartholomew titled Dangerous Dimensions: Mind-bending Tales of the Mathematical Weird. Check out this list of the dozen stories it contains!

9 • Introduction (Dangerous Dimensions: Mind-Bending Tales of the Mathematical Weird) • essay by Henry Bartholomew
23 • The Plattner Story • (1896) • short story by H. G. Wells
51 • The Hall Bedroom • short story by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman [as by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman]
75 • Space • (1911) • novelette by John Buchan
99 • A Victim of Higher Space • [John Silence] • (1914) • novelette by Algernon Blackwood
127 • The Pikestaffe Case • (1924) • novelette by Algernon Blackwood
169 • The Hounds of Tindalos • [Cthulhu Mythos (Lovecraft contemporary)] • (1929) • short story by Frank Belknap Long
191 • The Trap • [Gerald Canevin] • (1932) • novelette by H. P. Lovecraft and Henry S. Whitehead
223 • The Living Equation • (1934) • novelette by Nat Schachner
251 • Infinity Zero • (1936) • short story by Donald Wandrei
273 • The Library of Babel • (1970) • short story by Jorge Luis Borges (trans. of La biblioteca de Babel 1941)
287 • "—And He Built a Crooked House—"? • (1941) • novelette by Robert A. Heinlein (variant of "—And He Built a Crooked House"?)
317 • Slips Take Over • (1964) • short story by Miriam Allen deFord

The great selection speaks for itself, but here are a few preliminary thoughts that come to my mind about the stories before we commence.

1. I'm always happy to encounter a new (for me) H.G. Wells story. I read and loved his five big speculative fiction novels as a teenager.

2. I am stunned to see us return to read something by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. We read her "The Yellow Wallpaper" the first year the group operated, and it has always been a regret for me as I consider that work to be standard fiction. She wrote something that was actually weird fiction? How can this be?

3. I have never read anything by John Buchan despite owning a copy of The Best Supernatural Stories of John Buchan. I'll get to that collection one day, I promise. Seeking out a less expensive way to make available a John Buchan story for our membership is how I came to recommend this anthology for our group read in the first place. I hope this story does Buchan proud.

4-5. We have read quite a bit of Algernon Blackwood in this group. Here are two more stories I don't think we ever have read as a group before. I consider reading Blackwood a real hit or miss proposition. There's little middle ground with him. Here's hoping these two stories hit.

6. To the best of my knowledge we have not read a Frank Belknap Long story for group read since we read the very first group read this group began with, The Challenge from Beyond, for which Frank Belknap Long was one of the five chapter contributors. If memory serves correctly, I thought his chapter the strongest. It's great to be returning to this classic weird fiction author for another story after all these years.

7. I don't recall ever having heard of this Lovecraft/Whitehead collaboration. I know of Whitehead as the originator of voodoo zombie stories. I've nominated a collection of Whitehead's voodoo stories for group read here a couple times. It never came close to winning. Weird fiction and trope monsters don't really mix is why, I figured.

8. I've never heard of Nat Schachner. I have no idea what to expect here.

9. The Wandrei brothers have long been two of my favorite authors from the classical weird period. Donald was the more successful brother and wrote more science fiction than weird. His brother Howard's stories are rougher, as were his life circumstances. Howard wrote in more genres, and some of his stories just blow my mind. Reading a Wandrei story, whichever one writes it, has always been a treat for me. I don't know this particular one.

10. Jorge Luis Borges is an author we have not read in this group before. I have read three or four of his stories. Much of his stuff is weird-adjacent. It's always inventive, imaginative, very thought provoking, and original material one finds in a Borges story.

11. Robert Heinlein? One of the "big three" Golden Age science fiction authors! I would not have expected to find him in this collection. I'm curious to read a story he wrote that would fit here.

12. Miriam Allen deFord's photo graces our group home page this month. I have never before heard of her. Looking over her material some, I see she wrote entirely short fiction, maybe forty or fifty speculative fiction stories, mostly for Startling Stories magazine, from the 1950s through the 1970s. She started out in the 1940s writing mystery stories, but then at the same time as Andre Norton did, switched over to writing some SF and fantasy in the early 1950s. She continued to write short stories in other genres too. Unfortunately for deFord, she (unlike Andre Norton) was never able to publish a novel. Thus fame eluded her. I'm really curious to read this story, my first deFord.

That's it for my preliminary thoughts. Who's down for this month's group read? I've already purchased the book via Kindle. I will probably start it on my airplane ride tomorrow. Cheers!

I just updated Miriam Allen deFord's photo for our group homepage in order to show her as she would have looked about the time the story we are to read by her was published. I was guilty of ageism for preferring the previous photo of her.

This selection of stories looks promising. I just finished Wells' "The Plattner Story" and was really taken in by his descriptions of an inverted sort of place and its "green sun." At first I couldn't really tell where the story was taking us, but then things veered off into a twilight zone and I was hooked on the pure strangeness of it all.

This story reminds me of some of the chapters in The Time Machine, at least in tone and the way that Wells presents all the details. He's great at building dread, and here he's very effective at describing a haunting, spiritual place without it coming across as trite.

My favorite bit: (view spoiler)["At the second stroke everything grew dim, and a breath of wind, icy cold, blew through the host of watchers. They swirled about him like an eddy of dead leaves in the spring, and at the third stroke something was extended through them to the bed. You have heard of a beam of light. This was like a beam of darkness, and looking again at it, Plattner saw that it was a shadowy arm and hand." (hide spoiler)]

Definitely a four-star read. Glad I got to check this out.

The Plattner Story (1896) by H.G. Wells ★★★1/2

Mr. Plattner, substitute teacher of practical chemistry at Sussexville Proprietary School experiments with a green powder brought in by one of his students and finds himself transported to another dimension where very strange things happen from that dimension's perspective in our dimension.

This was a really fun ride through another dimension described first from the perspective of that dimension, then ours. It's odd how Wells writes using the same-length descriptive paragraphs Langan used in last month's group read. Yet Wells is interesting to read and Langan is not. It's hard for me to pin down why this would be. Could it really be that one author's better command of the English language simply makes him a more fun read no matter what the subject?

The Hall Bedroom (1903) by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman ★★★★

I confused this author with Charlotte Perkins Gilman in my comment number two of my first message above. They are both New England regional writers in the realist tradition with overly long names writing at the same time and appearing in my undergraduate Norton literature anthology. Please forgive me.

In Wilkins' story here, an elderly woman is compelled to take renters in a house she owns and lives in after her husband's death for the sake of making ends meet. She accepts a boarder named George H. Wheatcroft and places him in her hall bedroom. Wheatcroft has limited financial means himself; hall bedrooms are cheaper than end bedrooms.

We get the rest of the story from Wheatcroft's perspective through journal entries. He soon learns upon going to sleep in his room that there are strange things occurring. He finds himself able, willing or not, to cross through dimensions from it. Wheatcroft in his travels meets a man and they start comparing some of their incredible experiences and realize what is happening to them as they both occupy the same room in different dimensions.

This is a really well-told, thoroughly weird story, not at all anchored in our reality. The really fascinating part for me was the author's description of how Beachcroft transversed dimensions. I've never read an explanation for it quite like that one. The story was a very pleasant surprise coming from an author whom I always considered previously to have written only literary fiction.

Apparently, our author of the second story above wrote so many weird tales before our genre was a genre that S.T. Joshi made a collection of them: Lost Ghosts: The Complete Weird Stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. If you see a future nomination on the horizon, you're not wrong.

Space (1911) by John Buchan ★★★1/2

This very Scottish story was excellent as far as it went, which wasn't quite enough. The theme in all three stories so far is remarkably consistent. It's amazing that all three authors can be writing about a phenomenon in such a similar manner without colluding.

Buchan here, oddly enough, leans the hardest into the science and mathematics aspect of other-dimensionality affecting events here on Earth. For Buchan's character who is able to perceive or enter the other dimension (there's always one, but only one, who can) he gets there through a higher understanding than normal people.

This is all well and good, but then unlike in the first two stories, nothing exciting happens as a result of this ability. It's as if the ability itself were sufficient basis for the entire story.

I like that Buchan tries to make mathematics horrifying, but does he have to? I hear many people proclaim their horror of the subject. Their horror, I suppose, is derived from a lack of being able to understand it. This is the first I've read of horror coming from the opposite side, the ability to actually understand the mathematics.

"The Hall Bedroom" - ★★★★

I enjoyed this one quite a bit. The descriptions of warping space, how matter feels, and the dimension's impact on the characters made things exceptionally eerie. The epistolary style works in Freeman's favor, and the ending is a nice touch.


"Space" - ★★★

"A Victim of Higher Space" - ★★★1/2

These next two stories are very similar, both in concept and how it's mostly a conversation between two people. I agree that the concept for Space is good but that it's a dull story otherwise. The same goes for Blackwood's story, although his writing is somewhat better and more suspenseful than Buchan's. Neither of these stories managed to spook me, and I even found myself chuckling at the silliness of certain moments.

I thought of a certain Calvin and Hobbes strip while reading these: i.redd . it/4lfd90jbr9k21.png

Good one for a laugh or two :)

A Victim of Higher Space (1914) by Algernon Blackwood ★★★★

This is probably the best Algernon Blackwood story I have read so far. It is one of those in the series containing his hero, John Silence, Physician Extraordinary. Blackwood's character is a lot like an early version of Doctor Strange. Doctor Silence, too, is a doctor, as well as a master of the mystic arts.

Doctor Silence in this well told story is called upon to save a man who is in danger of slipping out of our dimension altogether and becoming trapped in the fourth dimension. I found the description of what being in the fourth dimension would feel like fascinating, and Silence's solution unexpected. The story had a good bit of suspense too. The only thing more I could have asked for was a better description of the nature of the menace.

The Pikestaffe Case (1924) by Algernon Blackwood ★★★1/2

This was another story like Freeman's about a woman down on her luck who had to let a room in order to make ends meet, and rented to a boarder who crossed into the fourth dimension by use of mathematics. But there the similarity ended. This boarder was intentional about crossing over. He met with a series of strange accidents as a result. I really enjoyed Blackwood's description of what being in the fourth dimension would be like, how the boarder tried to make it back, and what the landlady attempted in order to assist him. Good suspense even it it was extended out a bit longer than I thought really necessary.

The Hounds of Tindalos (1929) by Frank Belknap Long ★★★★1/2

I think this the best story in the anthology so far. Long's protagonist, named Chalmers, is determined to visit the fourth dimension against the narrator's advice. He needs the narrator to bring him back in case he runs into trouble. Of course, he runs into trouble and the narrator has unexpected difficulties.

This sounds like we're rehashing the same story as previous ones, but we're not actually. This fourth dimension includes time. The bad guys are time and space at angles, the good guys view this as curved. A lot of historical names and concepts are brought in to substantiate the basis for the interdimensional travel, all of it well considered and even better written. It's a very solid and exciting tale of rescue from mysterious hounds Chalmers encounters beyond the end of time.

On the second Blackwood story right now. Enjoying everything quite a bit. I woulld recommend this to my Dad the Mathematician, but I think he despises this type of fiction (at least he once remarked when I was gushing over the Pacific Rim movie how he can't stand monster movies; worse than that are onlly robot movies; and here I am telling him about a combo)

The Pikestaffe Case - ★★★★1/2

Great story, great characters. It's interesting how Miss Speke's obsession with the room turns into a kind of outlet where she can feel elation and be free from her worries for a while. And it's clever how Blackwood weaves in a couple other themes into the story, such as with religion being tied to safety. The unnamed clergyman--a contrast to the experimentative Mr. Thorley--tells Miss Speke that prayer and trust in God is all she needs when she feels troubled, but this hardly quells Miss Speke's inner excitement or turmoil over the unknown room and its boarder. The room is like a final frontier, challenging the orderly things around it.

Overall, an engrossing story with good pacing. It's neat that a character references Alice in Wonderland at the end, as one of the earlier stories in this collection reminded me of Alice.

The Hounds of Tindalos - ★★★★

A bit of a rough start, as I found the whole lucid drug trip a bit difficult to believe, but the descriptions of curved and angular time and the impossible shapes/beings make for an effective horror story. I like the references to old civilizations that were knowledgeable of what lies beyond, it opens up a lot for speculation. And Chalmers' "madness" really sells the story as things progress.

Infinity Zero - ★★★★

A post-apocalyptic look at an unending world war. Probably the most bleak story so far. Donald Wandrei does a good job of exploring the question, "What's beyond space?" by showing something "natural" that really puts our world into perspective. The characters are pretty flat, but this is a good story nonetheless.

Zina wrote: "I woulld recommend this to my Dad the Mathematician, but I think he despises this type of fiction..."

Ah, that's too bad. But I understand not liking monster movies, some can be kinda cheesy or hard to believe. My mom tends to avoid horror, but I think she'd really like some of the stories from this collection. As far as books go, Shelley's Frankenstein is still my favorite monster story, I'm always getting more out of it whenever I reread it.

The Trap (1932) by H. P. Lovecraft and Henry S. Whitehead ★★★1/2

Robert enters the fourth dimension through a mirror--original idea Alice through the looking glass--and can't get back. This story only gets good, as well as original, with the introduction of Axel Holm, the sorcerer responsible for the mirror. How the protagonist manages the situation is the story. I found it a bit overly heavy on description and thought more drama was badly needed here. I'm also surprised to see Lovecraft's name attached to this story at all. I barely see a Lovecraftian theme and none of his prose at all in the story. I'm betting Whitehead did more than 90 percent of the work here.

The Living Equation (1934) by Nat Schachner ★★★★1/2

This is the first story to break the mold the other stories were written in to breathe a welcome breeze of change into this anthology. It concerns a burglar, a mathematician, and a lawyer. Each character is concerned with a different aspect of reality; the burglar with the material; the mathematician represents theoretical interests, the abstract if you will; and the lawyer is all about justice. The lawyer also acts as a foil to the mathematician by providing the excuse for the mathematician to explain the situation via his theoretical dialog.

The author, Nat Schachner was a lawyer, and it's easy to see which character he identifies with most.

The burglar when caught in the act accidentally hits the mathematician's machine and engages buttons and levers in a random manner that cannot be reproduced. This changes the nature of reality in our world. The repercussions of these changes make for an interesting story. It's the first story we have that changes the world rather than various individuals' relationships to the world, as in the previous stories.

The theoretical basis for the story, differential equations and tensor analysis in non-Euclidian spaces, and how to get it all fixed back to normal were the story's strengths. (How does a lawyer author know so much about advanced math?) It's a very clever concept that math represents reality and the world is merely math's reflection, or manifestation of that reality. The weakness of the story is that it became too ambitious in my opinion, too far-reaching in scope. We lose the three main characters to get an airplane and then a large ship and its passengers two thirds of the way through the story. Nevertheless, Schachner reels it all in in time and ties everything together to bring the novelette to a fulfilling conclusion.

I really liked this strange story. It's unlike most anything else I've ever read. And it makes me curious about its author. He didn't live very long, just sixty years. He died in 1955, just when authors were beginning to see print in books rather than periodicals. His entire body of speculative fiction work was written between 1930 and 1941 and consisted of about sixty stories, five per year on average. Maybe a fifth of these stories were written with other authors as collaborators. A third were written in the form of series, which if gathered and presented together could form a basis for a short novel. These may be worth pursuing. Based on the originality and strong ideas I saw in this story, if his others were like this, he was surpassing many of his peers in quality, especially in science fiction. I might start with "Wedding Night of the Damned," which appeared in the November-December 1936 issue of Terror Tales, a Harry Steeger edited magazine--those were usually of better than average quality.

Infinity Zero (1936) by Donald Wandrei ★★★
The fourth dimension as a tool of war is accidentally released in the U.S. That's the story. Now you can skip the 20 pages or so of Wandrei slowly relating this fact. Yes, I'm saying the story takes a lot of reading for not that much to happen. I really wanted to like it more.

The Library of Babel (1941) by Jorge Luis Borges ★★1/2
A library of hexagonal rooms contains all the possible books written in a language of 25 letters. I really didn't get the point of this story or feel like it belonged in this anthology.

"—And He Built a Crooked House—"? (1941) by Robert A. Heinlein ★★★★
This is a clever story about architect Quintus Teal's construction of a house in the shape of a tesseract. The house transforms from one form into a more stable form due to an earthquake in order to set up concepts of higher dimensions and mathematical fiction. The narrative explores themes of architecture, physics, and the limitations of human perception in understanding complex structures in a whimsical manner.

Slips Take Over (1964) by Miriam Allen deFord ★★★1/2
A man traverses parallel timelines sort of by accident, but it doesn't seem to phase him or make much impression on him at all. It's a neat idea that sees a lot of use in the 1960s and 1970s. Zelazny uses dimension crossing extensively in his Amber series. Even DC comics uses the idea to set up various Earths with different sets of superheroes, some of whom repeat in certain ways. deFord's concept is in the same tradition, but not quite so fully developed or conceived. Still, it's fun to read as an early try at the concept.

I gave this anthology four stars although my ratings might average closer to three. I really liked the stories on an individual basis, but they became repetitive as the anthology went on. I have come to realize I prefer author story collections and anthologies arranged by broader themes such as best of a year, best of a genre, or a magazine issue. These offer a greater range of subject. Reading this anthology, I started to feel like I was reading a repeat of what I had read previously. I don't watch repeats of favorite TV show episodes, see the same movie again, or read the same book again. Maybe my memory is too good for me to be able to enjoy doing that. This degree of repetition just doesn't quite work for me, I discovered, however much I may enjoy the starting premise the series is based on.

The reason I had to give it four stars is because I believe if I had encountered these stories one by one, every other year say, and after having read forty or more stories in between each of these, my ratings of each would have been at least a half star higher in most cases, maybe even a full star in some of the latter ones. I had to compensate for having read too many excellent but similar stories back-to-back.

The Library of Babel - ★★★

A highly conceptual one from Borges. I agree that this story feels out of place within the anthology, as it's more about the existential dread and the madness that the Library causes than anything else. The librarians in the story attempt to find the Creator of the Library only to find themselves lost in a labyrinth of words and scant clues about the Library's origin. Maybe it's a parallel to scientists' attempts to discover the origin of our universe? There's talk of hexagons being "the necessary shape of absolute space," but it's an idea that doesn't really get explored in a satisfactory way. This story is more like an overview of an interesting idea, and it's very short. I would've liked to see a more coherent, character-driven story instead (like an extended version of that 2nd footnote).

"—And He Built a Crooked House—" - ★★★1/2

This one's pretty funny. The characters are entertaining and distinct. I kept expecting the story to go in a dark direction (and it almost seems like it will), but things turn out OK in the end (except for the house). I think the story is all the better for it; the lighthearted tone mixed with an "active" tesserect make for a memorable combination.

Slips Take Over - ★★★1/2

Less humorous than the previous one, but still made me laugh a good deal. The things that the man in tweed bring up remind me of how I became interested in sci-fi. It all began with things like the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs and dubious "time travelers" like John Titor. deFord's story is properly suspenseful, always playing with expectations. It's a lot like that Mandela Effect idea. The ending left me feeling dissatisfied—the story has good momentum at that point, but then it just ends. Aside from that, it makes for a good read.


I'd rate this collection a four, too. Like you said, Dan, it got somewhat taxing to read a bunch of similar stories in succession, but most of them are good on their own. It would've been nice to see more diversity, but I suppose it's tough to find quality stories that fit a niche theme like "mathematical weird." Still, it was fun to go through these this month. Plenty of talented writers featured here. Makes me want to check out more of their work in the future.

So, let's sum up now that we have reached the end of the month. What was your favorite story? My top three in order:

1) The Hounds of Tindalos by Frank Belknap Long
2) The Living Equation by Nat Schachner
3) A Victim of Higher Space by Algernon Blackwood

This is my second reading of a Frank Belknap Long story that won top billing for me. The first was our first group read The Challenge from Beyond when Belnap beat out four tough competitors for top billing. I really must give this author a more extended try.

My favorite story is definitely The Pikestaffe Case. It's similar to some of the preceding stories, but the mystery, the pacing, the psychological aspect and the central mirror really made the story stand out. The end scene where Miss Speke nearly goes through the mirror and into the fourth dimension is a great bit of suspense. This was actually my first time reading a couple of Blackwood's stories; they left a good impression.

My top three stories are:

1) The Pikestaffe Case by Algernon Blackwood
2) The Hounds of Tindalos by Frank Belknap Long
3) The Hall Bedroom by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (tied with Wells' The Plattner story)

An honorable mention goes to Heinlein's "—And He Built a Crooked House—". Very fun and goofy story, it's one of the more memorable ones from the collection. Borges's story is also unique, but very dense and somewhat confusing.

Some of these stories remind me of the theory of mirror life: en.wikipedia . org/wiki/Mirror_life (I just noticed that "The Plattner Story" is listed in the "In fiction" section of the article, that's a pretty cool coincidence.) Weird fiction—ahead of the curve.

Dan wrote: "The Trap (1932) by H. P. Lovecraft and Henry S. Whitehead ★★★1/2

Robert enters the fourth dimension through a mirror--original idea Alice through the looking glass--and can't get back. This story ..."
A MOST unusual story indeed! I loved the idea of equation being the real seed of the world so to say. Is that - Platonic? The whole world is but a reflection of the True [equation]?

That specific Borges story is sometimes mentioned as one that foresaw modern information-related problems. I am not sure it fits here but it is one of my favorite stories of his otherwise.

Zina wrote: "That specific Borges story is sometimes mentioned as one that foresaw modern information-related problems. I am not sure it fits here but it is one of my favorite stories of his otherwise."

Ah, that makes sense. I actually found a website just now that's set up to mimic the Library of Babel, found at libraryofbabel(dot)info. Looks like there was also an essay Borges wrote about the story. Very cool :)