I’ve been reading Barry N. Malzberg’s short stories and novels since the 1960s. Malzberg’s fiction focuses on paranoia, the Kennedy assassination, and the fluidity of Reality. Stark House collects two of Malzberg’s short story collections, The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady (1980) and In the Stone House (2000), which covers some of the best of Malzberg’s hundreds of published short stories.
In The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady, at the end of each story, Malzberg comments on the genesis of the story, the publishing circumstances at the time (sometimes dire), and details surrounding subsequent reprinting of many of the stories.
In addition to excellent stories like “The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady,” Malzberg includes three stories he wrote with Bill Pronzini. Malzberg and Pronzini also teamed up to write three excellent and underrated novels.
Also impressive is Malzberg’s thoughts on Science Fiction: “The Fifties (essay).” As Malzberg points out, dozens of SF magazines that provided a large market for Science Fiction stories at the start of the decade disappeared by the end of the decade. The market for SF morphed to paperbacks, hardcovers, and competition for sales to the remaining SF magazines in the Sixties.
THE MAN WHO LOVED THE MIDNIGHT LADY/IN THE STONE HOUSE displays Barry N. Malzberg’s unique talents and interests while delivering an adrenaline rush equivalent to a literary zipline thrill ride! GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
THE MAN WHO LOVED THE MIDNIGHT LADY — 7
Introduction — 8
On the air — 9
Here, for just a while — 16
In the stocks — 22
The fifties (essay) — 30
The man who married a beagle — 38
Big Ernie, the royal Russian, and the big trapdoor — 48
Ring, the brass ring, the royal Russian and I — 53
Of ladies’ night out and otherwise — 58
The annual once-a-year bash and circumstance party — 63
The appeal — 70
Yahrzeit — 77
Another burnt-out case / with Bill Pronzini — 80
I’m going through the door — 91
Cornell — 96
On account of darkness / with Bill Pronzini — 99
Impasse — 104
Varieties of technological experience — 111
Varieties of religious experience — 116
Inside out — 121
Line of succession — 126
Reaction-formation — 131
Indigestion — 135
A clone at last / with Bill Pronzini — 142
Backing up — 144
September 1958 — 148
Into the breach — 152
On ‘Revelations’ (essay) — 157
Thirty-six views of his dead majesty — 162
The trials of Sigmund — 178
The man who loved the midnight lady –182
IN THE STONE HOUSE –189
Heavy metal — 190
Turpentine — 203
Quartermain — 213
The Prince of the Steppes — 222
Andante lugubre — 230
Standards & practices — 236
Darwinian facts — 242
Allegro marcato — 253
Something from the seventies — 261
The high purpose — 266
All assassins — 282
Understanding entropy — 289
Ship full of Jews — 293
Amos — 302
Improvident excess — 309
Hitler at Nuremberg — 316
Concerto accademico — 321
The intransigents — 326
Hierartic realignment — 332
The only thing you learn — 343
Police actions — 347
Fugato — 356
Major league Triceratops — 374
In the stone house — 396
AFTERWORD: The Sprawl of Intensity, the Intensity of Sprawl — 422
Acknowledgments — 425
Bibliography — 428
