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jayrothermel's review
1.0
Tales of the marvellous and the ridiculous: Review of Don't Dream - The Collected Horror and Fantasy of Donald Wandrei
http://jayrothermel.blogspot.com/2017/08/tales-of-marvellous-and-ridiculous-dont.html?m=1
http://jayrothermel.blogspot.com/2017/08/tales-of-marvellous-and-ridiculous-dont.html?m=1
otterno11's review
2.0
Don’t Dream is a collection of weird tales and prose poems written between the 1920s and the 1960s by fantasy and horror author Donald Wandrei, interesting mainly in his role as a correspondent of H.P. Lovecraft and, with August Derleth, founder of the publishing house that preserved much of Lovecraft’s work. Of course, with Wandrei a long time citizen of St. Paul, living in a home not far from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Summit Hill neighborhood, a few blocks from where I currently live, there is the local interest for me as well. The Twin Cities and greater Minnesota are even featured in a few stories, specifically the 1935 horror tale “The Destroying Hoard,” in which a giant amoeba is accidentally freed from the University of Minnesota’s biology building to wreak havoc on campus, and the droll “Strange Harvest,” in which plant life mysteriously gains sentience to menace the agricultural workers of a rural farming community. Both of these were a bit more of interest to me with their use of local color.
But Wandrei is most remembered as being a cofounder of the publisher Arkham House. After corresponding with and meeting H.P. Lovecraft, he partnered with the Wisconsinite August Derleth to publish and promote Lovecraft’s work after his death in 1937. However, unlike Derleth’s repetitive and boring “Cthulhu Mythos” pastiches, Wandrei’s work is rather more original and idiosyncratic. His stories actually share little with Lovecraft’s writing stylistically and he definitely does not, in contrast to Derleth, attempt to imitate his style. On the other hand, for the modern reader anyway, that is not say that any of the stories are very interesting.
The collection does get stronger as is goes on, arranged by date written, but the stories generally have a very vintage, familiar old school pulp sci-fi feeling, leaving the reader the feeling they’ve seen it before somewhere, like maybe on the Twilight Zone. A few, particularly his prose poems and dream stories, dwell on rather interminable surreal impressions, and don’t really go anywhere. There are some definite motifs that Wandrei has a liking for and returns to often, including alien beings composed of pure energy, people regressing into past times, self-dividing blob monsters, and exotic locations bringing about strange body horrors. The latter, of course, are no better in terms of its depiction of non-American cultures than one can expect from early twentieth century pulp, so not great, although not as bad as Lovecraft. In fact, there is a definite strain of misanthropy that runs through many of the tales, but one that feels less cosmic or impactful. All in all, few of the stories are really all that inspiring, if you are not as automatically drawn in by Minnesota settings as I am. In the end, I wouldn’t really recommend going out of your way to track down any of these old pieces.
Finally, the most interesting part of the collection is the introduction by Wandrei’s neighbor, and the later biographical sketches of Wandrei, discussing his connections to various Twin Cities institutions, his contentious relationship with Arkham House, and his eccentric and prickly personality. These are much more intriguing to me, in getting a better picture of an interesting local character who helped to shape today’s science fiction, fantasy, and horror literary landscape.
But Wandrei is most remembered as being a cofounder of the publisher Arkham House. After corresponding with and meeting H.P. Lovecraft, he partnered with the Wisconsinite August Derleth to publish and promote Lovecraft’s work after his death in 1937. However, unlike Derleth’s repetitive and boring “Cthulhu Mythos” pastiches, Wandrei’s work is rather more original and idiosyncratic. His stories actually share little with Lovecraft’s writing stylistically and he definitely does not, in contrast to Derleth, attempt to imitate his style. On the other hand, for the modern reader anyway, that is not say that any of the stories are very interesting.
The collection does get stronger as is goes on, arranged by date written, but the stories generally have a very vintage, familiar old school pulp sci-fi feeling, leaving the reader the feeling they’ve seen it before somewhere, like maybe on the Twilight Zone. A few, particularly his prose poems and dream stories, dwell on rather interminable surreal impressions, and don’t really go anywhere. There are some definite motifs that Wandrei has a liking for and returns to often, including alien beings composed of pure energy, people regressing into past times, self-dividing blob monsters, and exotic locations bringing about strange body horrors. The latter, of course, are no better in terms of its depiction of non-American cultures than one can expect from early twentieth century pulp, so not great, although not as bad as Lovecraft. In fact, there is a definite strain of misanthropy that runs through many of the tales, but one that feels less cosmic or impactful. All in all, few of the stories are really all that inspiring, if you are not as automatically drawn in by Minnesota settings as I am. In the end, I wouldn’t really recommend going out of your way to track down any of these old pieces.
Finally, the most interesting part of the collection is the introduction by Wandrei’s neighbor, and the later biographical sketches of Wandrei, discussing his connections to various Twin Cities institutions, his contentious relationship with Arkham House, and his eccentric and prickly personality. These are much more intriguing to me, in getting a better picture of an interesting local character who helped to shape today’s science fiction, fantasy, and horror literary landscape.
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