This is a book I’ve long wanted, but for one reason or another, never seemed to find the right opportunity. Published in 1999 by J.Neil Schulman’s Pulpless.com, Inc. ( a strange name for a publishing company), I might have held back from buying it as I once considered trying to publish my own collection of Brad Linaweaver stories. Despite having zero book publishing experience, I always wanted to try to publish the complete store stories of either Linweaver or Michael Shea.
I’d read many of Linaweaver’s stories in their original settings, either magazines of anthologies. I considered him a friend, and we spoke often via phone, email, or the occasional old-fashioned letter. I own or owned almost all his other books – novels like Moon of Ice and The Land Beyond Summer, and the libertarian anthology, Free Space. At one point I owned all the Doom novelizations, but I think they went out during one of my infrequent book purges, which happens when I run out space and need to move some of the books. When I learned of his death in August of 2019, I felt I needed this book. The fact that publisher Schulman died earlier that same month is a strange coincidence.
Clocking in at nearly 600 pages, with 43 stories and an introduction from writer Victor Koman, the first thing that strikes you is the cover. Garish, over the top, it’s probably fitting at some level, since Linaweaver was a huge fan of the B-movie genre. There are just over forty stories in the book. As I don’t have a complete bibliography, I don’t know if these are all his stories. Given that it appeared 20 years ago, perhaps he wrote more stories since then, although I think his focus shifted to movies and his Mondo Cult publications.
I won’t attempt to review each of the 40 plus stories. I’ve done this with shorter collections in various other publications, where editors have complained about a lack of themes in how I group the stories covered in those short reviews. I’ve always found it difficult to review anthologies or collections. Often one writes a sentence or fragment of a sentence about or story, a paragraph about another, and forget to mention one or two more. Those collections generally average a dozen or so entries. A book with nearly four times that number would make for a long essay, and a worn-out reviewer (and reader).
The great thing about Linaweaver was his enthusiasm for everything. He advocated ceaseless for everything he liked, from writers to movies, and yes, even himself. It’s a situation all writers find themselves forced into: selling themselves to the paying audience, the reader. He did garner some great reviews in his time, even a Nebula nomination and mention in some of the year’s best anthologies. This collection, while it’s still available, is one I think many SF (and horror/fantasy) fans would like, although perhaps tastes have changed enough since 1999 to prove me wrong. Maybe Linaweaver stories are now more of the guilty pleasure kind, forays into politically incorrect tales that likely as not would end up getting people cancelled.
Each story comes with an introduction by the author, which I’ve tended to enjoy as much as the stories themselves. These small notes give us insights into the author’s mind as he wrote them, or tried to get them published. My one regret is that I didn’t get a chance to tell Linaweaver in person how much I enjoyed the book.
Michael Shea (1946-2014) remains one of my top five fantasy writers, along with Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, and James P. Blaylock. I’d include Tim Powers there, and maybe shift Blaylock out of the mix in favor or a more traditional fantasy writer like Lord Dunsany or possibly Charles de Lint, but Powers, Blaylock, and de Lint stand slightly off to the side in terms of traditional fantasy. Powers is more science-fantasy, and de Lint’s urban fantasy doesn’t venture as much into the realm of the weird as the others listed. Blaylock lately has written a fair amount of Steampunk, but his other tales are infused with a subtle fantasy similar to Powers.
