Book Review: The Scarlet Plague by Jack London

Jack London may be known as an adventure writer (and an adventurer himself), but in 1912, he wrote a work of speculative fiction—more precisely, post-apocalyptic fiction.

The Scarlet Plague (first published in The London Magazine) was not the first American post-apocalyptic work. John Ames Mitchell’s The Last American (1889), Herbert Ward’s Republic Without a President (1891), and a few other works came first, not to mention the many early British post-apocalyptic novels, beginning with Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826). 

The Scarlet Plague by Jack London, first edition.

It may be the first American story, though (and I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong), to deal seriously and philosophically with society’s decline, and to have a protagonist with a desire to rebuild civilization. That’s important, as the theme of rebuilding features in some of the great post-apocalyptic works to come later, most notably George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides. Stewart’s book, like London’s, is set in San Francisco after a virus has decimated the population, and both have main characters who are the last to remember the world as it once was. While Stewart was obviously influenced by London’s story, Stephen King used Stewart’s novel as a template for The Stand. Almost every serious post-apocalyptic work since owes an indirect debt to Jack London.

The Scarlet Plague begins in the year 2073, sixty years after the outbreak of a virus known as the Red Death. Most of the story is told as a series of remembrances by an old man, James Howard Smith, who, as his life grows short, wishes to pass on his knowledge to his grandson and the other children his age, who know nothing except the primitive life they currently lead.

He fears that it’s probably too late, as the boys seem like savages to him, and the description of their appearance seems part Lost Boys of Neverland and part Lord of the Flies. Dressed in goatskins, they wear necklaces of teeth, and Smith’s grandson disgusts him by wearing a severed pig’s tail over one ear. Language, too, has degenerated, to something “more guttural and explosive and economical of qualifying phrases.” In fact, the boys have difficulty understanding the old man:

“What I want to know,” Edwin continued, “is why you call crab ‘toothsome delicacy?’ Crab is crab, ain’t it? No one I ever heard calls it such funny things.”

The kids barely believe his stories, living in a San Francisco that has wild horses on the beaches and more bears than people, with the whole city having a population of only 40. Smith had been a university professor, but the concept is impossible for children to grasp, as it has no relevance whatsoever to the world they live in.

"Was that all you did?--just talk, talk, talk?" Hoo-Hoo demanded. "Who hunted your meat for you? and milked the goats? and caught the fish?"

"A sensible question, Hoo-Hoo, a sensible question. As I have told you, in those days food-getting was easy. We were very wise. A few men got the food for many men. The other men did other things. As you say, I talked. I talked all the time, and for this food was given me-much food, fine food, beautiful food, food that I have not tasted in sixty years and shall never taste again. I sometimes think the most wonderful achievement of our tremendous civilization was food--its inconceivable abundance, its infinite variety, its marvellous delicacy. O my grandsons, life was life in those days, when we had such wonderful things to eat."

This was beyond the boys, and they let it slip by, words and thoughts, as a mere senile wandering in the narrative.

Smith’s description of the virus and its immediate aftermath is horrific and sometimes gruesome. He describes dead bodies that seem to fly to pieces, melting away with disease, and airplanes falling out of the sky in flames. He describes people fleeing with infants in their arms, riots, looting and general chaos that “was like the last days of the end of the world.” One passage is an obvious pre-cursor to both Earth Abides and The Stand:

“There were numerous stalled motor-cars, showing that the gasoline and the engine supplies had given out. I remember one such car. A man and a woman lay back dead in the seats, and on the pavement near it were two more women and a child.”

Perhaps the bleakest aspect of The Scarlet Plague isn’t just what has already happened, but the idea that, even if mankind aspires to more and rebuilds itself to its former glory, that it is doomed to fall again in an endless repeating cycle of rebirth and destruction—a destruction of man’s own making. It’s a cycle that, as individuals, we are powerless to shape. Just as George R. Stewart would do later, Jack London uses a speculative scenario in a world far removed from our own to teach us a lot of things about ourselves and our own lives.

Get The Scarlet Plague free for your Kindle at Amazon.

Read or download free at Project Gutenberg.

Written for Friday’s Forgotten Books, organized by author Patti Abbott. It’s always a fine collection of reviews. Give them a look.

Book Review: Tales of St. Austin’s by P. G. Wodehouse

P. G. Wodehouse himself is decidedly not forgotten. He’s ranked as one of the greatest and most enduringly popular writers of humorous novels of all time. Outside of Jeeves and Wooster, Psmith, and the Blandings Castle stories, ol’ Plum’s books do tend to get overlooked, though. That’s too bad, considering that some of his stand-alone novels are every bit as clever as their more famous counterparts. (Laughing Gas, for example, wherein a Wooster-esque member of the Drones Club swaps bodies with a bratty child movie star, is a hoot.)

First edition of P. G. Wodehouse's Tales of St. Austin's.

Wodehouse’s career was a long one, spanning over 70 years. He produced books from 1901, when he was 20 years old, until his death in 1975, leaving an unfinished Blandings novel. In those seven decades, he wrote more than 90 novels, 20 screenplays, collaborated on 30 stage plays, and wrote lyrics for more than 250 songs for musical theatre, including the lyrics to “Bill,” one of the most famous songs in Kern & Hammerstein’s Show Boat.

It would seem then, that Wodehouse could do no wrong, or at least I didn’t think so, as a pretty die-hard fan of his novels from the ‘20s and ‘30s. His earliest stories, though, are rather hard to love, unless you happened to be a British schoolboy at the turn of the century, or obsessed with amateur cricket. Tales of St. Austins’s is a collection of stories written for a particular audience in a particular time and place, and getting through them can be a bit of a slog.

Tales of St. Austin’s was published in 1901, collecting stories and essays Wodehouse wrote for the school magazines The Captain and Public School Magazine. As the readership was almost exclusively made up of young boys, the plots are driven by student problems: petty gambling, being unprepared for tests, sneaking out of school. The tone is often moralistic, and bad deeds are generally punished.

Copy of the short-lived Public School Magazine.

Wodehouse had yet to develop his signature style when the school stories were published, which makes the subject matter even more of a snooze, especially when entire cricket matches are describe play by play. In later works, Wodehouse hones his humor so well that the subject matter becomes irrelevant. Golf? Hysterical! Hat-making? Even more hilarious! Collecting silver cow creamers? Call an ambulance, I’m dying!

It is fun to find some early glimmers of Wodehousian snark, though you’ll have to mine for it (unlike the Jeeves and Wooster novels, which I’ve always maintained are so funny that you can open a page at random and find something hilariously quotable).

When a student is trapped in a room, Wodehouse writes:

“Now, the immediate effect of telling a person that you are unable to open a door is to make him try his hand at it. Someone observes that there are three things which everyone thinks he can do better than anyone else, namely poking a fire, writing a novel, and opening a door.”

The sarcastic opening to the story “The Prize Poem” is also indicative of the later style the author would develop:

“Some quarter of a century before the date with which this story deals, a certain rich and misanthropic man was seized with a bright idea for perpetuating his memory after death, and at the same time harassing a certain section of mankind. So in his will he set aside a portion of his income to be spent on an annual prize for the best poem submitted by a member of the Sixth Form of St Martin’s College, on a subject to be selected by the Head Master. And, he added,—one seems to hear him chuckling to himself—every member of the form must compete. Then he died.”

Some fun bits in otherwise tepid stories:

“The qualities which in later years rendered Frederick Wackerbath Bradshaw so conspicuous a figure in connection with the now celebrated affair of the European, African, and Asiatic Pork Pie and Ham Sandwich Supply Company frauds, were sufficiently in evidence during his school career to make his masters prophesy gloomily concerning his future.”

And:

“Bradshaw looked up from his book. He was attempting to get a general idea of Thucydides’ style by reading Pickwick.”

Overall, the stories are a mixed bag, mostly mediocre, with a few real snoozers. There is one excellent standout, worth reading by itself: “The Tom Brown Question.” A spoof of theories concerning Homer (though Shakespeare also comes to mind), the humorous essay concludes that the author of the first half of Tom Brown’s School Days could not possibly have written the second half. One point of evidence involves cricket: “Tom may have been young, but would he, could he have been young enough to put his opponents in on a true wicket, when he had won the toss? Would the Tom Brown of part one have done such a thing?”

If you haven’t read any Wodehouse, Tales of St. Austin’s won’t make you a fan. If you enjoy his work, I’m fairly certain these stories will fall short for you. They are of some interest, but mainly as an insight into how his writing style developed over time.

Download free at Project Gutenberg

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Written for Friday’s Forgotten Books, usually hosted by Patricia Abbott, taking place this week at George Kelley’s blog. Check out some of the other reviews of forgotten novels.

Book Review: My First Book by Jerome K. Jerome and Others

In a forgotten collection, Arthur Conan Doyle, R. L. Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and other late 19th century authors talk about being published for the first time.

One of the book-nerdiest things I do is that I occasionally click the “random” button at the Project Gutenberg site and choose one of the 25 books displayed there to read. (Click here to try it. Refresh the screen to get more random selections.) I’ve found several forgotten public domain books that way -- things I wouldn’t ordinarily have thought of (or known of) to try and seek.

Recently I came across My First Book, a collection of essays by notable writers on the subject of, naturally, their first books. 

First edition of My First Book, 1894.

Today’s review for Friday’s Forgotten Books decidedly counts as forgotten, considering that at present the book has zero reviews on either Amazon or Goodreads. That’s surprising, considering that writers on writing is a perennially popular subject among those who read, and especially those who also write. I highly recommend the collection to both readers and writers as an insight into the craft, and particularly the business of writing, that’s still refreshingly relevant.

My First Book was published in 1894, with an introduction (and also a first-book essay) by Jerome K. Jerome. Most know Jerome as the author of the wildly hilarious Three Men In a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), but he was also the co-editor, with Robert Barr, of a popular magazine called The Idler. “My First Book” was originally a running series in the monthly magazine, and Jerome ultimately collected the 22 contributing writers in one volume.

The Idler, where the "My First Book" essays first appeared.

Though some names will be more familiar than others, all of the writers were hugely popular in their day, and the list of names reads like a Who’s Who of Victorian fiction. The complete list includes, in addition to Jerome: Walter Besant, James Payn, W. Clark Russell, Grant Allen, Hall Caine, George R. Sims, Rudyard Kipling, A. Conan Doyle, M. E. Braddon, F. W. Robinson, H. Rider Haggard, R. M. Ballantyne, Israel Zangwill, Morley Roberts, David Christie Murray, Marie Corelli, John Strange Winter, Bret Harte, Q. (pen name of Arthur Quiller-Couch), Robert Buchanan, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Each writer has his or her own approach to talking about their early work, but many talk freely about the struggles in becoming a published author. It’s nice to feel some camaraderie with someone as eminent as Conan Doyle as he talks about his string of rejections:

“Fifty little cylinders of manuscript did I send out during eight years, which described irregular orbits among publishers and usually came back like paper boomerangs to the place that they had started from.”

Conan Doyle’s essay here is the source of the oft-repeated story of his first full book manuscript, which to his horror, never arrived at the publishers, and was never seen again.

“Of course it was the best thing I ever wrote. Who ever lost a manuscript that wasn’t? But I must in all honesty confess that my shock at its disappearance would be as nothing to my horror if it were suddenly to appear again --in print.”

Robert Louis Stevenson was likewise horrified when the manuscript for Treasure Island arrived just fine, but the map he (and his father) had worked on so assiduously was lost and never recovered. He did it over again, but admitted that “it was never Treasure Island to me.”

“It is one thing to draw a map at random, set a scale in one corner of it at a venture, and write up a story to the measurements. It is quite another to have to examine the whole book, make an inventory of all the allusions contained in it, and with  a pair of compasses, painfully design a map to suit the data.”

Walter Besant almost sounds like a modern-day freelancer, telling of “years of rejection,” and spending all of his extra money on books, paper, and postage, while doing all of his writing during dinner breaks at an office job. He also talks of writing like mad and sending his work off to “every kind of periodical that I could find in the Post Office Directory.” (Now we know what young freelancers did before the Writer’s Market.) Besant and others like him had a difficulty we don’t have today, with the easy availability of photocopying. After his hand-written manuscripts had been rejected a few times, they looked worn, and not wanting them to look like they’d been shopped around, he rewrote them again by hand before sending them out anew.

Jerome K. Jerome, editor of My First Book, author in his own right.

Jerome himself gave me a laugh, discussing his lifelong problem with a critic having labeled him as a "humourist" early on:

“ ... I'd pen a pathetic story, the reviewer calls it ‘depressing humour,’ and if I tell a tragic story, he says it is ‘false humour,’ and, quoting the dying speech of the broken-hearted heroine, indignantly demands to know ‘where he is supposed to laugh.’ I am firmly persuaded that if I committed a murder half the book reviewers would allude to it as a melancholy example of the extreme lengths to which the ‘new humour’ had descended."

Marie Corelli: The Victorian Stephenie Meyer?

While I was unfamiliar with writer Marie Corelli, the reading public of the time knew her well. I found her essay amusing, because she comes off like a Victorian-era Stephenie Meyer. She primarily wrote about supernatural subjects while reconciling them with Christianity, and the people ate it up. Corelli was a huge bestseller (outselling the works of Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Kipling combined), but the critics loathed her. “A woman of deplorable talent,” wrote one. Another said she had “the mentality of a nursemaid.” Corelli’s essay is a tad haughty, but you can’t blame her for being defensive, even as she laughed her way to the bank.

“I count no ‘friend on the Press,’ and I owe no ‘distinguished critic’ any gratitude. I have come, by happy chance, straight into close and sympathetic union with my public, and attained to independence and good fortune while I am still young and able to enjoy both.”

There are many, many more passages worth quoting from My First Book, but you should find them on your own. Even if you pick and choose essays to read or to skip according to your own taste, you’ll find plenty of historical anecdotes you never knew, and loads of writing wisdom from some truly experienced folks.

Download My First Book for free at Project Gutenberg.

Download My First Book for free at Amazon.

Book Review: Someone Is Bleeding by Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson is best known to the general public for his books that were adapted into movies: I Am Legend, Hell House, and Stir of Echoes, for example. Even those who know his writing a little better still often think of him as mainly a horror, science fiction, and fantasy writer. Matheson, though, was fond of genre-hopping, and tried just about everything. In addition to his most popular books, he also wrote five westerns, fiction based on his WWII experiences, and biopics of both L. Frank Baum and the Marquis de Sade. “I only do things once,” Matheson once said, “and then move on.”

1953 edition of Someone Is Bleeding.

At the beginning of his career, Matheson tried mystery writing before moving on. He admitted that it was largely due to the influence of a group of pulp writers he joined: “If they’d all been science fiction and fantasy writers, I probably would have tried that type of novel first,” he said. His debut novel Someone Is Bleeding was released by Lion Books as a paperback original in 1953, with a cover price of twenty-five cents. (That same edition will set you back at least $75 today.) 

For some reason, the book wasn’t reprinted again in the United States until 2005, when Forge Books included it in the Matheson collection Noir: Three Novels of Suspense, along with Fury on Sunday and Ride the Nightmare. It’s a slick collection, and it has a noteworthy introduction by Matthew R. Bradley, who is something of a Matheson expert. He incorporates a lot of interview material and quotes from the author, and mentions that Matheson himself was excited about the new edition. (He said he re-read the books for the first time in decades.)

Someone Is Bleeding is about a writer, David Newton, who meets an intriguing girl on the beach and falls for her. Peggy is, shall we say, complicated. She doesn’t like to be touched, has nothing nice to say about men, and in fact, despite proclaiming six pages into the book that she’s “madly in love” with Dave, has another boyfriend of sorts. Jim, who is married, is also Peggy’s lawyer, and a rival of Dave’s since college. To further complicate matters, Jim’s brother also has a thing for Peggy. She’s crawling in men, including her lecherous landlord,  but doesn’t much want anything to do with them. When the old pervert turns up with an icepick in his brain, Peggy is a suspect. Is she the murderer, or is someone trying to defend her honor?

Forge Books' 2005 collection.

There’s no denying that Peggy’s pretty weird. Dave notes it from the get-go, describing her eyes as pretty and full of curiosity, but against a deadpan expression. “Did you ever have a child watch you from the seat in front of you in a bus or a trolley car?” Dave says. “That’s what it was like.” She makes a confession early in the book, though, that goes a long way toward explaining both her neediness and her fear of being touched. At the age of eight, she was attacked and raped by a young man: “He dragged me in a closet and tore all my clothes off.” Dave asks how far the boy went. “All the way,” she answers. “I was unconscious.” I would imagine being raped to the point of unconsciousness at the age of eight would leave some serious psychological damage.

Dave is pretty weird himself, or maybe he’s just plain dumb. Part of the problem may be that Matheson’s early writing efforts don’t include a lot of fleshing out. We never really know his motivations, so everything he does is perplexing. In a lot of ways, Dave just sort of bumbles around, letting others push him around, but then randomly becoming indignant. He’s at his most interesting when he meets a starlet at a party, and just for kicks pretends he’s a producer, just to watch her act like a fawning fool. (He claims to have worked on a picture called Vanilla Vomit.) Mostly, though, Dave is so much of a goof, that fairly far along in the book, when he goes home to write, I realized that I had forgotten he was a writer. He doesn’t seem smart enough -- certainly not observant enough.

The relationships in the book are all a little confusing, again because the motivations are muddled. It’s hard to understand why so many men are in love with Peggy, who doesn’t do much besides sulk and stare, and may even be a psychotic killer. It seems to be mostly a posturing contest between the men, though this is guesswork: Matheson tells us so little about what anyone really wants. They want her, probably, because the others do, and each man wants to be the one who wins. The fact that she’s unobtainable and won’t allow men’s hands on her makes the prize all the more valuable. They want to have what can’t be had.

Someone Is Bleeding’s best feature, writing-wise, is a nail-biter of a chase scene that’s downright Hitchcockian. Unfortunately, it’s not long after that scene when the book takes an unsettling turn.

Matheson writes, as Dave:

"Was it possible that, unconsciously, Peggy dressed and behaved in a manner calculated to draw desire out of the men she was with? Ostensibly she feared men and their aggression, Why, then, did the very thing she claimed to fear always happen to her? That boy, her husband Albert, and all the men she had driven half-mad with desire for her."

Then:

"They talk about accident-prone men. Well maybe there are rape-prone women."

And at the book’s climax:

"I could almost understand a man wanting to take Peggy by force. She seemed the sort of woman."

Whaaaaat? Rape-prone? The sort of woman?

Peggy’s childhood rapist is included in the list of men she may have calculatedly tried to draw desire out of (“that boy”). Did she unconsciously want to be raped at eight? The fact that she seems to do the exact opposite of eliciting desire is ignored. In the moments leading up to this very speech, she’s tugging at her sweater in an effort to make it looser -- clearly the actions of a woman uncomfortable with her body, trying to deflect attention.

Via Temple of Schlock.

“Men are pigs!” Peggy proclaims more than once in the book. It’s meant to be extreme. Considering the behavior of the men she knows, including the one who is supposed to be protecting her and claims to love her, it’s hard to disagree.

On a wildly different note: Peggy is attacked in a funhouse at a place called Funland. Given Stephen King’s reverence for Matheson, I imagine it may have inspired the spookhouse murder in Joyland, and could possibly have been the impetus for the idea of the whole book.

Someone Is Bleeding was filmed in 1974 in France as Les Seins de Glace, literally Icy Breasts (the English title) starring Alain Delon. It was actually a post at Temple of Schlock that brought my attention to the film, and to the fact that it was based on an early Richard Matheson novel. The French title is a bit of wordplay. Les Seins de Glace is a homophone of Les Saints de Glace, evoking the “ice saints” of folklore which are associated with frosty weather. 

(The trailer below is in French, but you can get a good idea of the film's look.)

The verdict on Someone Is Bleeding: it’s a first novel, and it shows. On the other hand, it’s a first novel by an author with a heck of a lot of talent, and that shows too. If you can put aside the weak characters, the wobbly plot, and the embarrassing victim blaming, you’ve still got some moments of neat (if terse) writing, a great action scene, flashes of wit, and the one thing that’s impossible to resist: ice picks to the brain.

Written for Friday’s Forgotten Books. Links from other bloggers are collected here. Read my previous forgotten book entries here.