“Laff, do you remember 'Johnny Crookedhouse,'" Barry Malzberg asked me once. ‘How could you have known, how could anyone have known?’ I gasped. ‘For my sins I was sometimes assigned to the slush piles when I worked for publishers,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember anything about it except the name, and I can never forget it. It was, it was—’ ‘The worst story ever written,’ we both said at once. No, of course there is no copy in existence. I hope not.” Being a big Barry Mazberg fan,

Lafferty finished the original draft of “Once on Aranea” in October 1961 and rewrote it in January 1965. It first appeared in his short story collection Strange Doings  (1972). Originally a story that focused on personal horror, in the rewrite it became a piece of cosmic horror and one of my favorite Lafferty stories. It begins with a survey team exploring the asteroids of the Cercyon Belt. They have an odd and funny procedure of leaving one man behind to test for latent thre

The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve; lovers, to bed; 'tis almost fairy time. I fear we shall outstep the coming morn as much as we this night overwatch'd. — William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream , Act V, Scene I “ . . . the sun really is darkened and the moon really does not give its light. The time has almost all run out. The iron tongue of midnight is already swinging, and when it will clash and sound, the angular velocity of psychic accumulation is seen t