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orty-one stories spanning the years 1951 to 2001 selectively represent the entire short fiction career to date of William F. Nolan, most famous today for his first novel, Logan's Run (1967), and its many adaptations in other media. And although the majority of the entries here fall into the gothic vein, a fair number of them are SF or fantasy of the kind that catholic readers are used to seeing in such an omnibus collection. Overall, readers of genre material, whatever their hardcore preferences, will embrace Nolan's worldview across all his many modes. And a fine introduction by Christopher Conlon makes a strong case for the unity of Nolan's vision.
"The Underdweller" charts the cloistered existence of the last man on an Earth overrun by aliens of a strange sort. The ironic fate of a spaceman doomed to premature death just hours from a reunion with his parents is detailed in "And Miles To Go Before I Sleep." Does an endless party sound like fun? You'll discover otherwise in "The Party." "He Kilt It with a Stick" illustrates the justice meted out by the feline kingdom on a tormenter.
No speeding ticket today could match the penalties handed out to future transgressors in "Violation." Aliens wishing to savor human experience are frustrated in "Starblood." In "Coincidence," time travel proves to have nasty consequences for poor Harry Dobson. Shades of Swamp Thing: a voracious elemental lives beneath the innocent surface of "The Pool." What explained the presence of an ancient steam train on modern railroad lines in the wilds of Montana? Only reading "Lonely Train A'Comin'" will reveal the answer.
"Something Nasty" proves the supernatural power of sheer belief, as evidenced by a young girl. A Lovecraftian "Ceremony" captures a professional assassin in its tentacles. Queer aliens live among humanity, and have for ages, as we learn in "Gobble, Gobble!". A woman is plagued by appearances from "The Giant Man" before she learns his true reason for materializing. Time travel holds more quirks in "On Harper's Road," as the past seeks to remake the present. Lonely young women settle for sharing an alien lover in "Boyfren." And finally, from the theme anthology The Touch comes "Freak," about a mutant with a power that corrupts and saves.
A universe well worth inhabiting
William Nolan, though less well known than his longtime peers and friends Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, arose from the same milieu that fostered these writers: the fannish California climate of the 1940s (a milieu memorialized in the recent anthology California Sorcery). And like the latter two of his companions (Bradbury being sui generis), Nolan shares a certain style and angle of approach.
His stories are generally shorter than the norm today, streamlined in scope, wordage and sentence length. Nolan is not a writer of indirection or sleight-of-hand. His tales mostly travel a neat linear path, and are hewn from slabs of good solid prose. Occasionally Nolan will experiment with form, as in the documentary-like "The Francis File" or in the dialogue-only "The Visit" or the typescript-transcription of "Boyfren." But generally he moves along traditional rails of old-fashioned narrative. Along with a tendency in the earlier works for twist endings of the Twilight Zone type, this makes rapid consumption of his stories an experience that's a trifle repetitive. But generally the conceits at the heart of each are strong enough to sustain interest even across mass readings.
In his generous story-notes, Nolan comes across as an open-hearted, sometimes naively childlike fellow (his anecdote about trying to contact Joyce Carol Oates and being rebuffed would have been withheld by a more worldly soul), yet also a man with a consuming interest in extending his writerly reach. One gets the sense, especially through the chronological arrangement of this volume, of a talent pushing ahead into new territory even after five decades. And he does reveal that he can neatly handle even surrealism when he tries, as in "One of Those Days" and "My Name is Dolly." Not bad for the onetime hyper little kid who made himself a writer by gorging on comics, movies and Big Little books!
And as with all their books to date, Stealth Press (www.stealthpress.com) earns high marks for beauty and craftsmanship. Their books are investments in both the past and the future.
If you enjoy the work of Frederic Brown, Robert Sheckley or Robert Bloch, you'll find elements of all three blended into Nolan's particular universe, where darkness is relieved by the human spirit. — Paul
Also in this issue: Psychohistorical Crisis, by Donald Kingsbury
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