I woke in the middle of the night from a dream that started out science fictional and turned personal. The dream’s ending seemed so tense to me that for a while, as I lay there in the dark, I thought I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. Thankfully, I eventually did.

It started out innocently enough. I was in a store buying some books. They were all anthologies, perhaps because of the string of them I’ve been reading in real life. (I’m in the middle of the Ellen Datlow-edited Poe right now). That morphed into me autographing a copy of one of the DAW anthologies in which my stories have appeared for a customer who’d recognized me. I’m not sure which title it was.

The next thing I know I was instead in a condo with the person whose book I was signing, and the electricity went out. It was so dark that I could barely see. I kept flicking light switches, but nothing would happen. Eventually, the sun came up—I could see it rise over an uninterrupted horizon out the front window—and illuminated the room. I was alone now, and the only sound was distant music. I went in search of the source of that music, which seemed to me to be coming from a radio in a back room.

I wandered the halls, opening closed doors, and eventually found a man tied up in one of the bedrooms. The radio volume was turned high so that no one could hear him calling for help. I stared at him for a moment before realizing that he was my maternal grandfather, Nathan Goldstein, looking younger than I’d ever known him.

I was in the past, which, since this was a dream, I did not question.

“What are you waiting for,” he said, not recognizing me for his future grandchild. “Untie me!”

My grandfather, who in this waking world died twenty years ago in his late 80s, was a bookie and an alcoholic. He hung around with unsavory characters. He could be tremendously charming, the life of the party. But let him take that first drink and things went downhill fast. So when you were with him, you never knew which Nathan Goldstein you were going to get, which meant you were always on edge.

As soon as I untied him, he rushed from the room, telling me to wait there while he dealt with those who had done this to him. Once he was gone, however, all I could think was … there’s no way that becoming part of his life will turn out well, not even if he now considers me his rescuer.

So I left the condo and went out into the street to get way from that entanglement, while wondering, based on his apparent age, what year it was. The ’50s? The ’40s? As I tried to think whether any of my knowledge of the past would help me escape from him and make my way in that time, I woke. I was tense from the encounter, and didn’t think I could get back to sleep … but by forcing myself to think of other things, I was able to clear him from my mind, and eventually did.

This was too, too sad …

I could almost weep.

Over at the Horror Drive-In, reviewer Mark Sieber writes:

“The first thing I want to point out is how well written The Hunger of Empty Vessels is. The language is rich and each sentence is a beautiful construction. Clearly Scott Edelman is a solid professional.”

Though the horror turned out to be a little too vague for him, he still went on to write that “I urge readers to give The Hunger of Empty Vessels a chance.” What more can I ask for?

Meanwhile, Don D’Ammassa calls The Hunger of Empty Vessels “another nice chapbook from Bad Moon” and deems my tale to be “nicely done.”

If you’d like to discover the reason for these kind words, copies are still available over at the Bad Moon Books site.

Yesterday’s Washington Post included the following correction on page 2:

The Second Reading column in the March 6 Style section mistakenly said writer James Salter is dead.

I hope that I will be around to see the same sort of thing written about me someday!

A review by John Seavey over at fraggmented takes a look at the Scarecrow stories I wrote for Marvel Comics more than three decades ago and finds them wanting.

Luckily, Seavey is so hilarious in his description of the plot that I couldn’t help but laugh.

Besides—when I wrote those comics, I was just a tadpole. He’s probably right about everything!

Here’s my favorite part of his review:

And finally we get “The Scarecrow.” No, no, not that Scarecrow. No, not that Scarecrow either. This is an entirely different Scarecrow, who is … um … he lives in a painting, and there’s this cult that hates him, or maybe he hates them, and he’s getting revenge on them for, um … something, but they want the painting, and there’s a demon, and this guy keeps vanishing, and he’s got the power to … do stuff, I guess, and … it’s all actually more than a little confusing.

There’s more, which you can find here.

Whether he loved them or hated them is almost beside the point. The fact that anyone is still bothering to think about these at all so many years later is flattering enough!

I have been deemed “deep, disturbing, and emotionally draining.”

Well … not me personally. Rather, it’s my about-to-be-published novella The Hunger of Empty Vessels which has been judged so, in its first review.

The reviewer also states that “Edelman really knows how to pack a knockout into a literary jab.”

If you’d like to find out why, The Hunger of Empty Vessels is available for sale over at the Bad Moon Books site.

Do you remember where you were over the 1972 Memorial Day weekend? I do!

I spent every hour I could at Manhattan’s McAlpin Hotel attending the 1972 EC Fan Addict convention. I paid my $7.50 entry fee and got to hang out with the madmen (and one crazy lady) behind one of the most amazing comic-book companies ever.

And I have the button to prove it!

Those of you who couldn’t make it to New York back then are able to catch up with a report in the pages of the September 1972 issue of Graphic Story World magazine, one of the high-end fanzines of the day. (And if that cover boy below puts you in mind of Watchmen‘s Nite Owl, well, that’s not him. It’s just … The Owl, a character created by Jerry De Fuccio and Mart Bailey for a potential newspaper strip in the mid-’60s.) (more…)

It’s true! Paul Levitz has left the building. Why, I read it only yesterday.

At least … it seems like yesterday …

Actually, though, he announced his retirement in the 100th issue of his fanzine, The Comic Reader. The Comic Reader started out called On the Drawing Board, which, at the time I started subscribing as soon as I read a mention of it in a DC comic, was being edited by Mark Hanerfeld. But Paul took over in October 1971, and by this issue two years later, dated August-September 1973, he was ready to call it a day.

Here’s the cover of his farewell issue:

(more…)

Over at Fantasy Book Critic, Liviu C. Suciu reviewed the entire contents of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Three, edited by George Mann.

Why do I care?

Because my short story, “Glitch,” earned 4 1/2 stars … which as far as I can tell, was on a scale of 1 through 5. (If I’m misinterpreting things, and it was instead on a scale of 1 through 100, please … keep that to yourself.)

Here’s what Suciu had to say:

Prim S-Tr resists the attempts of her bonded partner X-ta to have “animal-like” human intimacy. Then things go out of control… Interesting, funny and dark at the same time. The style was a bit flat but otherwise very good.

The anthology will officially go on sale tomorrow.

The February 2009 issue of The Believer features an article on the early novels of Thornton Wilder, books written before he wrote the plays for which he is now mostly remembered, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth.

“A Partisan of Eternity,” by Christopher R. Beha, details how the contemporary critics of those first three novels slammed Wilder for ignoring what they considered to be the fundamental issues of his age. The following intriguing quote doesn’t specifically touch on that main thrust, but rather on Wilder’s thoughts when creating a story:

“It seems to me that my books are about: what is the worst thing that the world can do to you, and what are the last resources that one has to oppose it,” he wrote not long before the crash, in a letter included in the new and generous Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder. “In other words: when a human being is made to bear more than [a] human can bear—what then?”

This makes a good companion to the other question I’ve ben advised a writer should ask when deciding whether he or she has chosen the proper protagonist for a story—

Who hurts?