Speculative Fiction Junkie

I've had remarkable success this year with books recommended by readers of this site. The latest such success is Feesters in the Lake, from Midnight House, which collects the entire published output of Bob Leman, whose name I had never heard prior to having his work recommended to me.

All but two of the fifteen stories in this collection were originally published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Of these two, one was previously unpublished, intended as it was for Harlan Ellison's The Last Dangerous Visions anthology, which was never completed.

Another thing that makes Mr. Leman's fiction stand out is his use of the fictional Goster County and the town of Sturkeyville. Places and people make appearances in multiple stories and together flesh out what is one of the more interesting settings I've encountered in weird fiction recently. Other writers have employed this tactic before but I never tire of it.

While there is not a single dud in this collection, a few of the stories really stand out. The first of these is "Window," in which a military experiment creates what appears to be a window into the past. In this bubble is a Victorian house complete with what looks like a happy family. The inhabitants appear to be completely oblivious to the existence of the modern world around them and indeed the military can only penetrate the "bubble" for a few seconds every day. When one of the men is lured by the idyllic vision to try to breach the barrier, the nature of the window becomes strikingly apparent.

"The Pilgrimage of Clifford M." is perhaps the book's best story. It is a vampire tale of sorts, but one that brings a different angle and tenor than is usually encountered in this sort of story. I found it to be the most moving and haunting tale in the collection.

"Olida" was also outstanding. In it, a man returns to the town he grew up in only to have his elderly aunt request his assistance in figuring out what has gotten into her son. The son has decided to marry one of the Selkirks, a despised tribe of a family that resides in the mountainous region outside of town known as Grill's Fork. This story is a satisfyingly weird variation on the outsider-visits-insular-mountain-enclave tale.

Other favorites in this collection include "Industrial Complex," "Loob," "Feesters in the Lake," and "Instructions." To be truthful, all of these are almost as good as the three I singled out above. This is just a truly solid collection.

Mr. Leman's writing seems to me to be sort of a bridge. On the one hand, his writing is firmly rooted in the intelligent, but often somewhat sanitized, genre writing of an earlier age, but on the other hand the effectiveness of most of his tales derives from his ability to deftly introduce the weird and horrible into this seemingly sanitized world just when the reader was getting comfortable.

Bob Leman is an American classic, and Feesters in the Lake is the definitive (and only) complete collection of his work. I have no doubt that it will eventually be republished in one form or another but until that happens, if you have the opportunity to snap up this rare gem for a reasonable price, don't hesitate.