By GERALD KERSH (Gold Medal Books; 1968)
The front cover of this collection promises “11 stories of the weird, the unspeakable, the bizarre.” In truth all these tales, weird, unspeakable and bizarre though they definitely are, reside firmly in the jaunty-whimsical category that comprised the majority of the fiction of the inimitable British and (as of 1959) American writer Gerald Kersh (1912-1968). His other books included the novels NIGHT AND THE CITY (1938), PRELUDE TO A CERTAIN MIDNIGHT (1947) and THE GREAT WASH (1953), and quite a few groupings of short stories, of which NIGHTSHADE & DAMNATIONS, published in the year of Kersh’s death, functions as a “Best Of” volume.
The contents include “Men Without Bones,” about gruesome creatures encountered in the jungles of the Amazon that hold the key to mankind’s genetic history; “The Brighton Monster,” about an aquatic “monster” whose features are remarkably similar to those of a man who suffered severe radiation poisoning in an atomic blast; “The Queen of Pig Island,” in which a circus boat sinks near a deserted island, stranding a woman without arms or legs together with a giant and two dwarfs; “The Ape and the Mystery,” which purports to explain the secret of the Mona Lisa’s smile (she apparently had bad teeth she was trying to cover up); “The King who Collected Clocks,” involving a robotic monarch everyone mistakes for the real thing; and “Whatever Happened to Colonel Cuckoo?,” whose title character undergoes a fate similar to that of Melmoth the Wanderer.
All these tales are lively, imaginative and fun to read. One can’t help but admire Kersh’s way with words, which produces astonishing descriptions like “This man might have been one hundred-thousandth part of the featureless whiteness…and his oddment of limp brownish mustache resembled a cigarette-butt, disintegrating shred by shred in a tea-saucer” and “The cold hand that had got hold of my heart relaxed, and my heart fell back into my stomach, where it had already sunk.”
The editor of NIGHTSHADE & DAMNATIONS was lifelong Kersh fanatic Harlan Ellison, who personally selected the stories and provided a laudatory introduction entitled “Kersh, the Demon Prince.” Ellison admits in said intro that he never met Gerald Kersh, but “I’m editing Kersh, because it takes one to know one.”