The main character in “Snake in His Bosom” is Emil Fuerst, who owns a world-renowned security firm (“Safety Fuerst”). Lafferty’s story has three characters. It can be enjoyed literally as a story about a life-or-death game with betrayal: so, first, the plot, told straight. On the day of the story, Fuerst is playing what he calls a Hunter-and-the-Hunted game with a master burglar known as Gatto. It is a duel meant to test his security system and Gatto’s cunning. The setting is

"Panic Flight" is an early, unpublished Lafferty story that satirizes science fiction before Lafferty cast his lot in with it. The only comments on the story speculate that it failed to sell because the market was unwilling to be twitted by an unknown upstart. More likely, the story did not sell because it is oddly unbalanced and not very good. It wants to do too much with too little. On the one hand, there is the lampooning of science fiction language. This sits at the front

“In any case the Apollonius story is not just a series of ‘and thens’: it drives us on toward a conclusion which restates the theme of the opening. At the beginning Apollonius encounters a king who is living in incest with his daughter, so that his daughter is also his wife: at the end Apollonius himself is a prince united with his lost wife and daughter. The story proceeds toward an end which echoes the beginning, but echoes it in a different world. The beginning is the demo

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. — Genesis 1:6 Then came the clear instant . . . when it was shattered completely and the blue sky was seen supreme. The unpatterned primordial water in "Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs"  has me thinking about Lafferty’s short story "Encased in Ancient Rind,” a pretty gloomy piece in the felix culpa  tradition. Both the Fall and the Flood have already happened

“Do you understand what had to be done? The world had to be unvoided; the chaos had to be unchaosed; the spoil had to be unspoiled; and it must be continued. Everything has to be patterned and structured, continuously. That is the real beginning: the patterning." — Rich Horton, Strange at Ecbatan (blog), November 2020. "Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs" is an important Lafferty story, though you might not know it. It has been mostly overlooked in favor of other works. P

Simon Frakes stood there with his grin that was a caricature as a cartoonist might have drawn it. He was there. Then only his grin was there, mocking them in the empty air. "I’m sure that I know that grin from somewhere," Professor Dodgson mumbled. Ah, but memory is a cat-like thing. It creeps away soft-footed, and is gone. "If you do not believe this, then you will not believe anything," said the grin of Simon Frakes. Then the grin itself vanished, and that was the last that

“I become a transparent Eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance.”— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature The attempt to see into the world of Karl Kleber was almost a total failure. The story is told of the behaviorist who would study the chimpan

Following my request for a review of the materials, the University of Tulsa’s McFarlin Special Collections has updated its archival record: https://utulsa.as.atlas-sys.com/subjects/3870 https://utulsa.as.atlas-sys.com/subjects/4411 A word about this. The photograph of the Holocaust denial letter in the Antisemitism section was not reproduced from the University of Tulsa Special Collections, but comes from another source. Lafferty’s carbon of the letter is archived at Tulsa. S

A short post on a curiosity. Lafferty wrote a sequel to “Quiz Ship Loose” that has never been published. The work survives in an intermediate stage. His handwritten notes and a complete typed version exist, though he never polished it. The story is typed on lined notebook paper, a sure sign of a first-typed draft. Had Lafferty wanted to save the story, he would have next typed it out on carbons. For whatever reason, he abandoned it. In “Hooligs,” we again meet the crew of Qu

“But if I want to murder somebody, will it really be the best plan to make sure I'm alone with him?” Lord Pooley's eyes recovered their frosty twinkle as he looked at the little clergyman. He only said: “If you want to murder somebody, I should advise it.” — G. K. Chesterton, “The God of the Gongs”  "Seven Story Dream" (1961) centers on a delusional, self-exculpatory fantasy that recasts a murder victim as art. Two years before Lafferty wrote it, he had already written a sto

The professor looked at his watch, looked at his schedule, saw that he still had a little time before his final class, glanced at the final entry in the book, "I love you, Emily," smiled, closed the small notebook, and put it in his pocket. "Women have a satirical turn of mind," he said to his companion. "What? Are you sure?" the companion asked. "Blenheim denies it, and the evidence in Creager is doubtful. And Pfirschbaum in his monumental monogram Satire und Geschlecht  has

“But we haven’t any wings, father,” Job Salto protested. “You have feathers, and feathers are certainly an intimation of wings. Some of you even have a few elbow-feathers. I will call them pinion-feathers, and perhaps your elbows will have turned into wing-pinions by tomorrow.” But Darwinism and all the denials that make it up does give silly and evil answers; and it is guilty of Mistakes of Interpretation against dozens of sciences as well as against the Word of God. — unpub

Lafferty’s ontological distinction between characters and persons is underappreciated in part because modern ideas of personhood have been shaped by mass-mediated character and by the categories of modern psychology. The modern person thinks nothing of bumping into the Narcissist or the Borderline, but would be taken aback by bumping into Vice . Daniel Otto Jack Petersen has pointed out that an interesting parallel to Lafferty’s work is the medieval dream vision. This strikes

And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come. — Revelation 4:8 “And I’m on the verge of doing away with all eyes except one pair to a person,” said Mary Fat-Land. “All of them except one pair are an illusion anyhow. Let me touch my mind to that Illusion of an Exuberance of Eyes as I might touch my cigar to a child

Voltaire They had been having a hard time waking Voltaire up and keeping him awake. But, once he understood that it was one of his highest desires really being presented for him, he was able to stay awake pretty well; and he cackled and carried on like a person a hundred and fifty years younger than himself. But it takes a long time to strangle a man with entrails as slick as those were. Fourteen choruses of Grave-Stone Rock  were done while it was going on, and one of those

What was it, then, that I, miserable one, so doted on in you, you theft of mine, you deed of darkness, in that sixteenth year of my age? Beautiful you were not, since you were theft. But are you anything, that so I may argue the case with you? Those pears that we stole were fair to the sight, because they were Your creation, You fairest of all, Creator of all, You good God — God, the highest good, and my true good. Those pears truly were pleasant to the sight; but it was not

“Everybody liked him except those animals, the coons, badgers, and wolverines, those animals that traditionally hate and fear dogs. Then there appeared a wolverine of genius in the neighborhood. In every species, whether wolverine or human or other, about one individual in five million will be an individual of genius. The gifted wolverine got about a hundred other wolverines to assemble. He had to be a genius because the slashing solitary wolverines are lone hunters who hate

On August 8, 1971, a book by Lafferty received a rare notice in The New York Times Book Review . The review drew attention to the heady blend of “politics, poetry, [and] magic” in The Flame Is Green  and noted the bright splashes of humor threaded through its moral symbolism. Unfortunately, the final two volumes of the Cosucin tetralogy remain unpublished. Taken as a whole, the Cosucin novels constitute a major work, worthy of being set alongside Argo  and Green Tree . Until

Pre-War Apartments, Tulsa, OK Q:  Do you believe in the perfectibility of man, or is he a constant fool at odds with the gods of the universe, to be forever rebuffed at his attempt to rise above the madness which surrounds him? RAL:  The perfectibility of “man”? I believe in the perfectibility of people—some people, possibly most people. I do not believe in the perfectibility of society, or of the world, or of “man” in the abstract. Maybe it is a madness that surrounds and r