still looking for the cockatrice

"...And he said, ‘Nobody’s heard of him, because all he wrote were short stories, and nobody reads short fantastic fiction.’

"He said they were better than Bradbury. Then a copy of the book happened to come through the store, and sure enough, they were the best short twisty-ended fiction I’ve ever read. It was called... maybe Tales of the Cockatrice? Maybe not, but there was a cockatrice on the cover. I’ve only seen one copy come through here, apart from the one that I have."

If you like X, said the sage to the bookseller, You’ll like his mentor, John Collier, and I’ve forgotten who X was, but I though a dose of twisty-ended short stories might be a nice addition to the general stew of my novel.

Because he said the books were hard to come by, I looked up John Collier on the web. It was a bit confusing because there are several fairly well-known John Colliers about, but after some interesting false starts I found the right one. Then, just for kicks, I tried the Vancouver Library Website.

And there in the catalogue, prosaically enough, was a copy of – not Tales of the Cockatrice – but the also-prosaic John Collier Reader. (Which, after all, contains prose, so.) It wasn't even in Special Collections.

I thought, well, not all good things are hard to get, so I ordered it delivered to my local branch. (I am delirious with the novelty of having books delivered to me. I still have eighteen free holds of my original twenty-five, but I fear they will not last long.)

Today I picked it up. (No cockatrice on the cover, but some interesting masks.) I read probably half the stories in my usual pattern, shortest ones first, with a bias towards the order of presentation.

This further reinforced for me that what I think of as a Really Amazing Story, and what many other people think of as a Really Amazing Story, are not the same thing. These were okay stories, but shopworn and showing their age. The opening tale contains a paragraph which starts out with racism and manages to transform into anti-semitism by the end, which I suppose counts as a twist. Some of the stories made me laugh, but none of them settled into my head the way a really good story does, becoming part of your own narrative.

Interestingly, though, the stories are very queer, in that Did you really mean to tell me all this? kind of way, where the author thinks he's making a funny, urbane joke about, say, Those Awful Pansies, and you can't help noticing he's standing in a flowerbed.

Take the breezy little piece in which the hero decides to marry an Ugly Girl for her money – is usurped by his own mistress, who disguises herself as a man and marries the Ugly Girl instead – who then turns out to be a Man after all. Good job he didn’t marry her! Ha ha! Ha. Hum...

His hero is always being ushered into strange worlds by oddly effeminate men. Of course, he manages to find a woman (or usually ‘a girl’) to fall for once he’s there; but always there’s that moment of being urged across the threshold. And he always manages to misplace the girl somehow by the end of it.

Or, rather more than urged, there's the hero of "Bottle Party," who is rescued from his prison inside a genie-bottle only to be "used with the utmost barbarity" by a group of sailors.

It's not that all this is done unknowingly; there's plenty of I know what goes on when the lights go down. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Say no more. Maybe I am unfair; maybe these stories stand in perfect balance between prurience and clear-sightedness, between satire and sly confession. But I am not convinced, Mr. Collier.

Add to this the overall style -- the stories aren't badly written, but they're all in that artificially light, well, let me just say the mid-century New Yorker style, sometimes amusing, often teeth-grindingly arch, like watching The Thin Man a hundred and fifty times, and I’m not at all sure I want to plow through the novel included about a man who marries a chimpanzee. Ha ha! Er...

rf