One of my delights as a kid was reading ACE Doubles. I couldn’t wait until new ACE Doubles showed up on spinner racks each month!

But ACE was not the only publisher to offer Doubles. In the late 1960s, Belmont Books published a series of “Belmont Doubles” but with only one cover, not two like ACE Doubles. Sadly, the quality of those Belmont Doubles was inferior to the ACE Doubles…but I bought them anyway.

John Brunner is one of my favorite SF writers. He started out writing mediocre SF novels but with STAND ON ZANZIBAR and THE JAGGED ORBIT in the mid-to-late Sixties, Brunner became a top notch SF writer.

Clearly, “Father of Lies” was a story Brunner salvaged from his desk drawer and Belmont dutifully published it in 1968 with Bruce Duncan’s “Mirror Image.” “Father of Lies” was initially published in the British SF magazine, Science Fantasy #52, 1962.

“Father of Lies” begins with a dragon and then an ogre. The story concerns a different plane of Reality. Today we would refer to this as The Multiverse. “Father of Lies” has more in common with Brunner’s stories from the 1950s than his more mature work of the late 1960s. GRADE: C

I’ve never head off Bruce Duncan and his “Mirror Image” is poorly written and shows why Belmont Books was considered at the “low end” of the paperback publishing spectrum. A dead stripper, an android sailor, and a New York detective investigating the dead bodies of the real stripper and the real sailor basically goes nowhere. GRADE: F