James Nicoll Reviews

Edgar Pangborn’s 1972 Good Neighbors and Other Strangers is a collection of speculative fiction stories¹.

Recently SF fans were thrilled to learn that, after a delay of more than half a century, Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions was finally being published. This news was of particular interest to Edgar Pangborn aficionados. Would Pangborn’s heretofore unpublished ​“The Life and the Clay,” one of many stories that Harlan Ellison had sat on for decades, finally see print?

No.

Patience was not rewarded. Pangborn and his heirs would have been better served to yank the stories for publication elsewhere. Pangborn-curious readers must turn to books collated by more reliable editors, of which Good Neighbors is one example.

Good Neighbors predates Still I Persist in Wondering, the other Pangborn collection that I reviewed here. Unsurprisingly, all of stories in Good Neighbors predate every story in Persist. Whereas all of Persist​’s stories take place in Pangborn’s Darkening World setting, none of Good Neighbors’ do.

Pangborn’s faith in humanity had been irredeemably crushed by the time he wrote the stories in Persist. That was not true (or at least not as true) when he wrote the stories contained in Good Neighbors. The title story is wryly pessimistic, as is ​“A Better Mousehole.” Longtooth is outright horror on a number of levels. But a few stories offer glimpses of a Pangborn who, however hesitantly, could imagine a better future even if he could not see a path towards it. Nevertheless, compared to Persist, Good Neighbors is a beacon of hope and wonder.

There is room, I think, for some ambitious publisher to publish the Complete Short Stories of Edgar Pangborn, drawing on the contents of this collection, Persist, and all the as yet uncollected Pangborn short works². Maybe that way readers will finally be able to read ​“The Life and the Clay.”

Until that happy day, Good Neighbors and Other Strangers³ is available as part of an omnibus here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), and here (Amazon UK), and on its own here (Amazon UK).

I did not find Good Neighbors and Other Strangers at Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Chapters-Indigo, Kobo, or at Words Worth Books.

“Good Neighbors” • (1960) • short story by Edgar Pangborn

Confronted by a vast visitor from space, America unleashes its mighty arsenal on the bewildered animal, in the process creating the very havoc it sought to prevent.

This would be whimsical but not notably optimistic. Gallows humor, really.

“A Better Mousehole” • (1965) • short story by Edgar Pangborn

A dull-witted man tries to improve his long-suffering wife, with the help of invading aliens and a complete disregard for consent.

See previous story.

Longtooth • (1970) • novelette by Edgar Pangborn

A taciturn farmer and a friend, neither young men, pursue a strange beast after the beast escalates killing and eating farm stock to carrying off the farmer’s much younger wife.

This comes with big scoops of values dissonance, from miserable Leda being trapped in rural poverty thanks to an ill-considered marriage to the much older Harp, to Harp’s immediate decision on finding traumatized Leda in the beast’s lair to shoot her in the head. The narrator feels the official account treats Harp unfairly, but the events as told by the narrator do not support the narrator.

The narrator’s final lament is that ​“They will do anything for me, except think about it” — (they being the medical staff and it being the true nature of the beast). This could as easily apply to the narrator and Harp’s treatment of Leda.

“Maxwell’s Monkey” • (1964) • short story by Edgar Pangborn

What motivates the anxiety of a romantically incompetent couple’s spectral companions?

“The Ponsonby Case” • (1959) • short story by Edgar Pangborn

A rambling shaggy-dog story. An upstanding citizen finds themself stark naked in a zoo enclosure.

“Pickup for Olympus” • (1953) • short story by Edgar Pangborn 

A mechanic is too taken with a customer’s vintage car to take special note of his client’s unusual physical features.

The customer is probably not Satan! Probably.

“Darius” • (1953) • short story by Edgar Pangborn

The peculiar events leading up to Mr. Follansbee’s mysterious disappearance.

“Wogglebeast” • (1965) • short story by Edgar Pangborn

One of the Fair Folk befriends a middle-aged woman who, failing to understand her ​“pet’s” nature, delights in the illusions it creates for her. Her grieving husband is not so happy.

This was upbeat… right up to the moment Pangborn reveals what’s really going on.

Angel’s Egg • (1951) • novelette by Edgar Pangborn

A cynical recluse is astonished when one of his hens lays a most peculiar egg. A small, fairy-like being emerges from the egg. It is no fairy, but a tiny alien from a highly advanced civilization. The alien brings hope for a pessimistic world.

This isn’t the only story Pangborn wrote about aliens trying to nudge humans away from self-destructiveness (A Mirror for Observers would be another). I do not offhand recall any Pangborn story in which we manage it on our own. 

The Wrens in Grampa’s Whiskers • (1960) • novelette by Edgar Pangborn

An aged man dotes on the wonderous beings nesting in his impressive beard.

1: I own the Collier’s mass market paperback edition of this collection. The fifty-one-year-old paperback barely shows its age. Kudos to publishing house Collier.

This edition contains an ad for SF works available from Collier. The list has an error! Collier has inexplicably truncated the title of Poul Anderson’s Tales of the Flying Mountains to Tales of the Flying. Perhaps Collier could release a new edition correcting this typo?

2: One of the stumbling blocks preventing the issuance of a complete collection may have been that the executor of Pangborn’s literary estate, Peter Beagle, was distracted by pressing legal disputes. Gist of the disputes: ​“Beagle would like to be paid what is owed him” and ​“Beagle would like his ownership rights legally recognized.” These issues appear to have been resolved.

3: While assembling the previous links to Pangborn works I noticed that there are a number of recent Pangborn collections whose common theme seemed to be ​“stories in the public domain.” Dream Books’ The Complete Works of Edgar Pangborn is especially boldly titled, as it only contains three novels and three short stories, none of which anyone with access to Project Gutenberg needs to pay for, at least in ebook. The Edgar Pangborn Megapack has the same six public domain stories but makes no false claim of completeness.

Also worthy of note, Alpha Edition’s $16.00, forty-one-page edition of Pangborn’s The Music Master of Babylon. The blurb claims that ​“The Music Master of Babylon, a classical book, has been considered important throughout the human history.” Hmmm. I didn’t know Pangborn was publishing before writing was invented.