Kent,

Assuming you’re on this list, Wes Britton here-I’d like to invite you to send me a PDF of your new book with contact info so we can set up an interview for my podcast/ radio show, “Flashback with Dr. Wes Britton.”

This month, we’ve had a trilogy of shows exploring the influence of 19th century authors on modern sci-fi, horror, imaginative fiction beginning 3 weeks ago with Mark Dawidziak talking about his new Poe book. This upcoming weekend will be-

Concluding our trilogy of explorations into 19th century creators of proto-science fiction, on Sept. 21, Mark Twain scholar NATHANIEL WILLIAMS comes to “Flashback with Wes Britton” to discuss his book, GEARS AND  GOD; TECHNOCRATIC FICTION, FAITH, AND EMPIRE IN MARK TWAIN’S  AMERICA.  He’ll describe fantastical and imaginative stories by Washington Irving, E. A. Poe, Mark Twain, Frank Reade dime novels featuring boy inventors in the Old West, even Tom Swift. Expect an hour of surprises and revelations as well as new music from Mitch Woods and Kenny Wayne Sheperd you can stream or download beginning Fri. Sept. 20 over:
 
https://www.artistfirst.com/flashback.htm

	Or hear us Sat. Sept. 21 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern over:

https:// www.artistfirst.com/


While the series was intended to be a trilogy, I can happily expand the concept to feature your work and I’d add H.G. Wells if I can find a good expert to talk to.
What cha think?




Dr. Wesley Britton, Host Artist first flashback with Wes Britton
https://www.artistfirst.com/flashback.htm

Wes Britton’s “Remember Again” ArtistFirst page:
https://www.artistfirst.com/rememberagain.htm

Wes Britton’s spywisesecretdossier.com espionage files:
https://www.spywisesecretdossier.com/

The “Flashback with Wes Britton” Facebook page:
https://m.facebook.com/groups/1560816671426189/?multi_permalinks=1601034534071069&paipv=0&eav=AfYC_y_MzreGjClckTS8FNku4PKYN7cvwgnrHhbE9c-UP6Slo3XnP96IqousTfFyEVM&_rdr


-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Twain Forum <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Barbara Schmidt
Sent: Sunday, September 15, 2024 9:59 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: BOOK REVIEW: _Tales of the Macabre & Mysterious_, Rasmussen, ed.

The following book review was written for the Mark Twain Forum by Alan Gribben.
~~~~~

BOOK REVIEW

_Mark Twain's Tales of the Macabre & Mysterious_. Rasmussen, R. Kent (ed.).
Essex, Connecticut: Lyons Press/Globe Pequot Publishing Group, 2024. Pp.
265. Paper, 6" x 9". $24.95. ISBN 978-1-4930-8613-9.

Many books reviewed on the Forum are available at discounted prices from the TwainWeb Bookstore, and purchases from this site generate commissions that benefit the Mark Twain Project. Please visit: http://www.twainweb.net

Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:
Alan Gribben
Auburn University at Montgomery

Copyright © 2024 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or redistributed in any medium without permission.


R. Kent Rasmussen seems to have made it his mission in life to help every reader become a Mark Twain expert. His _Mark Twain A to Z_ (1995)--eventually expanded as the 2-volume _Critical Companion to Mark Twain_ (2007)--has become as indispensable for the literary scholar specializing in Mark Twain's works as for the casual inquirer looking for background information about a Twain novel, an incident in Twain's life, an explanation of an essay by Twain, or the publishing background of one of Twain's short stories. Rasmussen's _The Quotable Mark Twain_ (1997) likewise saves everyone much effort in locating a favorite quip or searching for what Twain said or wrote regarding a certain topic.

The name "Mark Twain" still sells books. Those who edit his writings, write biographies about him and his circle, or analyze and comment on his novels, stories, essays, newspaper columns, travel books, poems, and plays benefit from the author's enduring fame. Too often, though, a percentage of writers and editors seem drawn to Twain largely because of his popularity and the probability that their book or article will find ready acceptance by a press or journal owing to the celebrity of its subject. By contrast, Rasmussen brings to this collection more than his decades of research; it is clear that he genuinely enjoys and admires the writer about whose works he has written or edited more than a dozen books. A reader unconsciously absorbs this beguiling enthusiasm. Rasmussen's affection for Mark Twain causes pages to turn pleasantly. We are sharing a solid and delicious experience with this knowledgeable scholar.

Mark Twain, however, is not among the authors who first come to mind when the subject of Gothic horror fiction arises in conversation. Horace Walpole, Bram Stoker, and Mary Shelley envisioned the prospects for this genre in British literature, of course. On the United States side of the Atlantic, one thinks of nineteenth-century writers like Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Later on, H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James carried on, and enlarged the boundaries for, forms of literature involving the horrific and macabre.

Yet when, upon reflection, a reader recalls the number of Mark Twain's literary characters who are buried (sometimes alive), resurrected from their burials, burned alive, struck by lightning, drowned, left adrift in floating vessels, or suffer other forms of excruciating torture or premature death, the creator of these fates seems to have earned a right to be included in any list of literary producers of the horrific. It's just that we don't associate Twain with the writers who conjured up these effects exclusively because Twain typically incorporated his accounts of gruesome ordeals into narratives in which they are subsumed into larger story lines.

In fact, Rasmussen is quick to acknowledge that he is often extracting his selections from unlikely places. Possibly to surprise and intrigue readers, he has chosen _not_ to use any material from Twain's two best-known works--_The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_ and _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_, but rather has chosen "underappreciated" short pieces as well as passages from Mark Twain's travel books that possess "a powerful Gothic feel."

Twain experts may find themselves a bit disconcerted upon not recognizing any titles in this collection. That is because the contents bear invented, updated titles. For instance, Twain's hilarious reminiscence about groping about in an unlit German hotel room as related in _A Tramp Abroad_ is here called "Forty-Seven Miles in the Dark."  In many cases the pieces have been renamed to endow them with twenty-first-century relevance. "Cannibalism in the Cars" now becomes "Politically Correct Cannibals." The dilemma in Twain's "A Medieval Romance" appears as "A Mysterious Gender-Bending Impasse." Always meticulous and accurate, Rasmussen thoughtfully adds the actual titles and sources, along with their dates, at the end of each story.

Six categories in _Mark Twain's Tales of the Macabre & Mysterious_--all of them containing between four to six narratives--capture different effects.
Part I offers "Tales Spooky & Grisly," Part II consists of "Unpleasant Places," Part III brings together "Remarkable Characters," Part IV collects "Curious Talk & Strange Obsessions," Part V introduces "Worlds Remote in Time & Space," and Part VI concludes with "Ironic Twists & Clever Deceptions."

An excerpt in "Remarkable Characters" titled "The Mysterious New Boy" turns out to be Chapter 1 from the "Schoolhouse Hill" version of Twain's the _Mysterious Stranger_ manuscripts, in which the youth who calls himself "Forty-four" flabbergasts his classmates by demonstrating his incredible skills at vocabulary memorization, foreign language acquisition, mathematical calculation, mimicry, and various other feats. From Chapter 28 of _The Innocents Abroad_ Rasmussen gives us the elderly friar's animated descriptions of the four thousand monks of the Capuchine order whose skulls and bones lie heaped in different rooms. "See what one can accustom himself to.--The reflection that he must some day be taken apart like an engine or a clock, or like a house whose owner is gone, and worked up into arches and pyramids and hideous frescoes, did not distress this monk in the least,"
Twain observes. Corpses abound in Twain's writings, and several of them are on exhibit in this book, including "The Undertaker's Chat," renamed for this collection "A Corpse Not Particular about Style." Limburger cheese, a coffin, and a box of rifles make their appearance (or stench) known in "The Invalid's Story," retitled as "Out of Focus Imagination."

But relatively few selections are morbid to this degree. More typical is the comic sketch Rasmussen designates as "A Literary Nightmare." There Twain's narrator runs across a simple rhyme ("Punch, brothers! Punch with care! Punch in the presence of the passenjare!") in a newspaper and then realizes that his mind is unable to stop humming its imbecilic lines. The hilarious "photographs" Rasmussen devised to accompany these "odious" words that pulse unceasingly in anyone's brain who comes in contact with them are as empathetic as they are laughable.

A number of subscribers to the Mark Twain Forum may have previously been aware of Kent Rasmussen's consummate skill at adding color to black and white photographs with computer software, making GIFs of Twain-related images, and playfully photoshopping images of himself and friends into a historic Twain photograph. Now, with the new abilities of AI at his disposal, Rasmussen has produced--throughout _Mark Twain' Tales of the Macabre & Mysterious_--representations of Twain and his characters that alter, evoke, vivify, celebrate, and concoct so convincingly that they seem like actual snapshots inserted merely to stimulate the reader's imagination. Not since Walter Blair's hilariously droll sketches of himself standing and sitting with Twain, William Dean Howells, and other literary figures has any Twain scholar had so much imaginative fun with the man in the white suit. (Professor Blair, one of the first scholars to study American humor, sent his whimsical drawings out as Christmas cards in the 1960s and 1970s.) The publisher of this present book clearly gave its editor carte blanche to do pretty much whatever he wished to enliven and supplement the stories by adding what Rasmussen refers to as "photo-realistic details."

The imaginative results are highly entertaining. Readers view (persuasive) photographs of Scotty Briggs shaking hands with the hapless parson who would preside at the funeral of Buck Fanshaw (in _Roughing It_) and the same Briggs addressing earnest-looking young children in a Sunday school class. We see an image of young Sam Clemens innocently furnishing the town drunkard with the matches that will light a fire and engulf the intoxicated man in flames (also depicted), an incident borrowed from Chapter 56 of _Life on the Mississippi_. Another neo "photograph" captures the moment of Captain Stormfield's arrival at the Heavenly gate where, up to his knees in cloud vapor, he encounters space aliens. Perhaps the prize for optical impact should go to the fantastic illustration of a bewhiskered Stormfield, astride a miniature Earth-globe, steering this cosmic vehicle into the bedroom where Mark Twain is writing his story. The hideous caricatures of Mark Twain's shriveled conscience, portrayed twice in "Facing One's Most Pitiless Enemy" ("The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut"), are menacing enough to scare most wavering souls into reforming their lives.

If these examples seem a bit zany, well, they reflect the offbeat tone that Rasmussen cultivates in this collection. The originality of Twain's imagination inspires the illustrations that Rasmussen employs as aids to help us savor Twain's skill with words and syntax. Before textual purists clear their throats to object to decorating these excerpts from Twain's fiction and travel writings with so many invented scenes, they should recall how committed Twain and his publishers were to adorning Twain's volumes with those multitudinous illustrations by True Williams, E. W.
Kemble, and other artists with the motives of padding their page length and delighting the subscription book customers. The uninhibited, innovative Mark Twain himself would likely feel honored by the ingenuity of Rasmussen's authentic-looking pictures--and might even agree with this reviewer that the visual effects in this collection alone are worth its modest price.

Beyond all this--and one can detect it in the range of Kent Rasmussen's Twain publications, which extend from Twain's autobiography to Twain's descriptions of dogs--Rasmussen definitely wants a larger proportion of the public, and even those of us already and especially interested in the Mark Twain's life and writings, to grasp the astounding dimensions of this author's capacities and achievements.
_____

 ABOUT THE REVIEWER: The University of Georgia Press will shortly release a revised reprint of Alan Gribben's two-volume _Mark Twain's Literary
Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading_ containing additions and corrections.