Jizzle

by John Wyndham

This collection includes the following stories:

"Jizzle"
"Esmerelda"
"Heaven Scent"
"Look Natural, Please"
"Reservation Deferred"
"Affair of the Heart"

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Collections, Speculative Fiction

191 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1954

About the author

John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris was the son of a barrister. After trying a number of careers, including farming, law, commercial art and advertising, he started writing short stories in 1925. After serving in the civil Service and the Army during the war, he went back to writing. Adopting the name John Wyndham, he started writing a form of science fiction that he called 'logical fantasy'. As well as The Day of the Triffids, he wrote The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos (filmed as Village of the Damned) and The Seeds of Time.

Reviews

[Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable collection of stories, full of ideas, some made me smile, and a few surprise endings. My favourites were ‘Perforce to Dream’ where two women discover they’ve been dreaming the same dream and the final story ‘More Spinned Against’ where a women discovers in her husbands spider collection Arachne herself. Other stories concern the nature of heaven ‘Reservation Deferred’, the existence of hell ‘Confidence Trick’ and a society where wheels are the devils work ‘The Wheel’. The title and first story Jizzle is about a very clever monkey. John Wyndham is always a good thought provoking read.

[Jeff Koeppen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is John Wyndham's first collection of short stories, published in 1954 and containing stories he wrote in the early 1950s. I find it hard to rate short story collections because there are usually hits and misses but I enjoyed this one a great deal, especially the first and last stories, "Jizzle" and "More Spinned Against".

"Jizzle" is the standout story in my opinion. It's the story of a naughty monkey named Jizzle with a unique talent. This would've made a great "Twilight Zone" episode because of its great twist ending.

"More Spinned Against" is about a spider with an interesting history who lives in the spider-room (I want one) of a collector of insects and arachnids.

Other standouts include: "Affair of the Heart", about a mysterious annual meeting between two friends at the same restaurant which has gone on for 38 years; "The Wheel", about a young boy who raises the ire of his village for re-inventing an evil device; and "Heaven Scent", about the strange effects of a newly invented perfume.

Anyone who enjoys Wyndham's writing and story-telling ability will find something worthwhile in this collection. I'm looking forward to reading his two other short story collections: "The Seeds of Time" (1956), and "Consider Her Ways and Others" (1961).

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fifteen short stories, five of which appeared originally in magazines like Argosy and Women's Journal, run the gamut of fantasy, nearly all written in a tongue-in-cheek style not usually associated with the author of The Day of the Triffids or The Midwich Cuckoos.

Though jumping from time-travel to artificial intelligence via surreal fantasy, fairytale, legend and myth, these tales nearly always involve individuals caught up in situations beyond their comprehension or control, often to their discomfiture but mostly to our amusement. Though a couple are told in the first person the majority are fly-on-the-wall observational pieces, thus allowing us the privilege of becoming aware of how matters stand a short while before understanding dawns on the unfortunate victims.

Because victims they generally are: and it's Fate, in the guise of the author, that determines whether they emerge sadder and wiser or don't emerge at all...

Let me start with the piece I think was the weakest even though the premise was interesting, and then work up to the stories I think worked really well. 'Confidence Trick' starts with the protagonist boarding a London Underground train against his better judgement, only to find that it rattles along not to his stop but towards the nether regions. In his carriage are a handful of other passengers whom we may suspect are there as his foils. When, after several hours they arrive at a modern version of the Hell as portrayed in Hieronymus Bosch's triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, there is some doubt as to whether this represents a reality or not, and whether the hapless travellers deserve to be there.

The author is trying, I think, to be over clever here. The title hints that nothing is as it seems; the protagonist, in believing rush hour on the Tube to be a form of hellish torture, hints at a variation of Sartre's dictum in Huis Clos that "Hell is other people"; then a young man, who loudly declares his disbelief in Hades, begin its disintegration, but will he be as successful back in the City standing in front of the Bank of England? And do those who believe that everything in society is comme il faut somehow engineer their own future downfall? I suspect Wyndham is attempting to make some philosophical points under a cloak of heavy humour, but to me is doesn't all quite work.

A similar awkwardness exists in the two first person accounts, "Esmeralda" and "Una". The first involves someone who runs a flea circus and who, for all his confidence in managing miniature performers, is no match for human females; the second is about a creature, a kind of cyborg which is part organic and part robot, whose creator accidentally endows her with a massive libido. Both have humour and a sting in the tail but I think having the narrator as one of the main players means a limit on the comic effects that Wyndham is able to wield. That said, these worked rather better than "Confidence Trick".

I appreciated what seemed to be the starting points of each story. "More Spinned Against" combined the Greek myth of Arachne, who was turned into a spider by a jealous Athena, with the biological propensities of female spiders the world over. "The Wheel" is a future parable about superstition and voluntary sacrifice, while "Heaven Scent" concerns the aphrodisiacal uses to which a perfume additive can be put by an infatuated female. A couple of pieces run variations on the theme of time travel: "Technical Slip" is a lesson on the possible consequences of trying to change history, another discourses on the paradox of how one could be warned by one's future self:

'I mean, as the cells that make you are always gradually being replaced, you can't really be all the same person at any two times, can you?'

Frances tried to follow that, without success, but;

'Well---well, I suppose not quite,' she conceded, doubtfully.

'Well, then, when all the cells have been replaced by new ones, over seven years or so, then you can't any of you be the same person any longer, although you still think you are.'

John Wyndham, 'How Do I Do?'

These tales, originally published between 1949 and 1954, have been described as whimsical fantasy and I think that's the best way to think of them, for all that one or two appear to use Science Fiction tropes; for example, the trigger for "Perforce to Dream" is a psychiatric paper called The Inducement of Collective Hallucination. Others however are the kind of supernatural tales that Edith Nesbit could have written a quarter of a century before: "Affair of the Heart" involves a final twist in a long-term romance that ends fatally; "Reservation Deferred" is a ghost story that revolves around whether there's an afterlife; and "Look Natural, Please!" involves an innovative portrait photographer who falls into the same traps that he thought he was avoiding when he set out on his career decades before.

I shall end with two tales where Wyndham attempted to use regional voices, though whether he was successful is not for me to judge. "A Present from Brunswick" (which turns out to be an antique instrument, probably from Hamelin in Saxony) is set in a prosperous if self-satisfied North American town, Pleasantgrove, population 3,226. Wyndham had used Americanisms in his unpublished Plan for Chaos written around this same period, but those who knew didn't find them authentic or convincing, and that may be the case here for all I know. Perhaps more controversially, "Chinese Puzzle" adopts jokey Welsh English for its characters, placed in a setting on the borders between Breconshire and the Valleys. The speech forms of Welsh had truly been adapted for English in the not so far distant past, but it's to be doubted that any self-respecting Welsh men or women would have spoken thus in the fifties:

'So foolish, you are, Idris Bowen, with your head full of propaganda and fighting. Other things than to fight, there is, even for dragons. Such a brave show your red dragon was making, such a fine show, oh yes---and very like a peacock, I am thinking. Very like the boys in their Sunday suits in Llangolwgcoch High Street, too---all dressed up to kill, but not to fight.'

John Wyndham, 'Chinese Puzzle'

Personally I don't find much that's offensive here, even if I'm only Welsh by residence. Nobody speaks like that now, seven decades later, and apart from the unlikelihood of Welsh speakers speaking this archaic Wenglish to each other even in the postwar years, to focus on this feature is to miss Wyndham's gentle mickey-taking of everything, whether comic Welshness, leftwing propaganda clichés or parochial small-mindedness. In fact, what comes through strongest in most of the stories -- as much as whimsy -- is the ascendancy of female commonsense over male foolishness.

This comes through in the last story I want to mention, actually the first in the collection to which it gives the overall title. Jizzle is actually Giselle, a performing simian in a fairground sideshow who in fact makes a monkey out of his owner Ted. An indication of its malign nature comes in the final and very short paragraph: "George was lifting the rifle. On his shoulder Jizzle snickered." How it all comes to this point is for readers to discover for themselves, but it sets the tone for the remaining tales.

I've been meaning to return to these stories for forty years -- I acquired my ex-library copy in the early 80s and a couple or so of these pieces have stuck in my mind all that time. All this time later "Jizzle" and "Chinese Puzzle" still loom large in my imagination but they've now been joined by a few more, such as "Perforce to Dream" and "How Do I Do?" Perhaps significantly these feature well-depicted women seeking agency, a revelation that perhaps wasn't so evident to my younger self; if ever there was a reason to reread memorable books this could be it -- the promise that good writing always has something more to say, depending on your receptiveness.

[Martin Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, how, how, how I loved this little book.

John Wyndham is best known for :
a) Day of the Triffids - maniacal plants go on the rampage- excellent stuff, and
b) The Kraken Wakes - aliens torment humans - a bit dreary, but readable

I bought Jizzle in a second-hand bookshop mostly because it sounded rude and I have a childish sense of humour.

It's a collection of short stories, all very different in nature. Jizzle (I guess pronounced Giselle) is the subject of the first story only and is an utter delight. The rest of the storeies are completely unrelated to the book's title. There were 15 stories in total ranging from one or two pages to 10-15 pages long. I loved them all. There wasn't a single one that disappointed. I particular enjoyed Affair of the Heart, a dark love story that has a super twist at the end.

The stories often have a melancholy or difficult theme, yet are replete with dark humour and sharp, pacy description. A common theme with most, but not quite all, was a clever, often unforeseen, twist at the end of the story, cleverly constructed and fabulously delivered, that wouldn't be out of place in a Hitchcock Half Hour.

Jizzle was a great find and I'm so glad I've had the chance to read it. It's the kind of book I could read again.

[Marcus Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came across this collection of short stories in a used book shop, immediately taken in by the cover art of the 1979 New English Library reissue, which featured a tube train descending into an apocalyptic landscape, a human skull emerging fron the flames and looming over it like an angel of death. Turns out this is an illustration for the story "Confidence Trick," by far the strongest tale in this bag, which plays out like one of those linking segments in the old Amicus portmanteau horror movies, where a bunch of strangers are gathered together in inexplicable circumstances in order to meet their ominous fate.

Most of the stories here play out like something out of one of those old horror movies, the reader will also be reminded of television shows such as Twilight Zone, and Tales of the Unexpected too. Each one is blended with elements of horror, supernatural, science fiction and fantasy, and some of the stories are better than others, while some fall flat on their faces. I must admit to being rather bored by several in fact.

Overall a decent time waster, but like all short story collections be prepared to take the rough wifh the smooth.

[Barbm1020 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pure delight. Wyndham's unforgettable characters tell their own stories in various dialects, as they encounter lonely dragons, strangely talented simians and Opportunities Too Good To Miss - always with a catch. I loved this book back in my student days and I am very happy to have a vintage copy now, thanks to another reader who also remembers it. It's a blast from the past, and if you ever watched The Twilight Zone, you'll like it.

[Dan Cassidy · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like Neil Gaiman's short stories you should stock up on these out of print John Wyndam collections. This one of the most solid short story collections I have ever read.

[Georgia King · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of fun. Collection of short stories, so different from his other books I’ve read, but the shorter stories lend themselves more to his humour shining through. Amusing touches in the stories, with humour similar to that in the Hitchhiker’s Guide. Enjoyable

[Ape · Rating 4 out of 5]

Naughty monkey! I've just started reading this and only read the first story which I loved. Jizzle, who adorns the title of this book, is the monkey. Really called Giselle but I guess us Brits can't pronouce French. Guy buys her from another guy in a pub - oh, we all know that story. Turns out Jizzle is a portrait artist, and the guys sets her up in a little dress and circus act. But are those monkey sniggers just monkey noises or signs of mischief....

Update: I finished off this book this morning by reading the final story. It was a rather lighthearted macabre tale of a woman married to a man she wasn't overly keen on - he collected spiders (yuck!). One particular specimen he catches turns out to be the spider, old as the greek myths. The wife and the spider swap places for 24 hours with interesting results...

These quirky short stories with varying sci-fi/paranormal/macabre twists remind me of the old black and white television series The Twilight Hour. It's a pretty good collection of short stories in that I don't think I disliked any of them. Although of course there are some I preferred over others. Despite my horror of spiders, I liked the spider tale. And the monkey tale, Jizzle, of course. And another that sticks out was the Chinese Puzzle tale about the dragon egg posted to a little mining village in Wales =) It was so sweet how that little dragon was helping the lady of the house light the fire and so on.

This is a very vintage copy I've been reading. It was only 30p to buy in the UK! It has very thorough pricing on the back, with the prices from Cyprus, Gibraltar (sorry, those guys had to pay 35p!), Malta, NZ, Spain, Trinidad and Australia.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of thirteen short stories and two novelettes. The title story Jizzle is about a monkey, who has the ability to draw portraits of anyone placed in front of her.

[Stuart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great set of short stories. Jizzle is an evil monkey!

[Jenny Burridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sadly, I can see why this collection of short stories has yet to be re-published in more recent times (as far as I can see). The stories in here are an odd jumble, and not up to quite the same calibre as those in Consider Her Ways and The Seeds of Time. Not to mention the odd-sounding title, which refers to the first story, in which the name Giselle is mispronounced as Jizzle. I decided to rate each story separately below:

Jizzle - 2 stars. A circus monkey trained to paint portraits becomes overly possessive of her new owner, leading to her painting some unusual, accusatory things.

Technical Slip - 3 stars. A man bargains with a demon on his deathbed.

A Present from Brunswick - 2 stars. An odd little tale. A woman receives a present of an antique recorder with a peculiar ability to enchant people.

Chinese Puzzle - 3 stars. A Welsh couple receive a present of an egg that hatches into a Chinese dragon, that the locals don't take too kindly to it at first. I'm not sure why the Welsh characters in this are written like they talk like Yoda, but it's an otherwise quite charming tale.

Esmeralda - 1 star. By far the weirdest story in this collection in my opinion. I didn't really understand the ending. Esmeralda is a prized performing flea, in a flea circus.

How Do I Do? - 2 stars. A woman is given a glimpse of her future by a fortune teller.

Una - 2 stars. This one was bizarre and felt like the plot of an old Doctor Who episode or something. A man is suspected of creating human-animal hybrids in the style of The Island of Doctor Moreau, but has actually created something far weirder.

Affair of the Heart - 3 stars. A very short story (6 pages) with an interesting twist.

Confidence Trick - 3 stars. Five train passengers suddenly find themselves alone on a previously very busy train, travelling downwards in the dark. I liked the beginning of this story, with the suspense of not knowing where the train was going more than the end.

The Wheel - 2.5 stars. People believe that the Wheel is an invention of the Devil made to lead humanity to ruin.

Look Natural, Please! - 3 stars.

Perforce to Dream - 3 stars. An interesting concept. Two women write the same book, using a story they both seem to have dreamed.

Reservation Deferred - 2 stars. An odd 5-page story where a young girl on her deathbed is keen to get to heaven until a ghost-woman describes it to her and it isn't quite as she imagines.

Heaven Scent - 2 stars. A man invents an ingredient for perfume that essentially turns it into a love potion, only to have it used against himself.

More Spinned Against - 3 stars. An interesting and somewhat karmic ending to this one. The spider Arachne, of Greek Mythology, inadvertently gets herself caught by a man who studies spiders before preserving them in alcohol for his collection.

[Alex Sarll]

I remember reading my first stories from this on my train to work, wondering if that didn't make the cover an ill omen, and dismissing the notion - shortly before commuting came to an apocalyptic end. Despite which attention-grabbing move, it's taken me until now to finish. When I used to see this on lists of Wyndham's other works, one of the few to elude me in my first teenage burst of enthusiasm for his books, I always wondered if the comedy title might factor in to its rarity; as it turns out, that's a mispronunciation of 'Giselle' in a story about a relationship-wrecking monkey. And that's not the only tale here which, while peculiar, has no outright fantastical elements. Even when we do get into more familiar Wyndham territory, like the misappliance of science, the results tend to end up more like comedies of manners, as in Una, where two men from an RSPCA analogue stumble into Carry On Doctor Moreau. More often, any of what we might call genre elements are a little sideways from the genre as it eventually settled down; there are lots of stories which take mythological concepts at face value, but treat them with a wryness and studied lack of respect that reminded me a little of Richard Garnett, without being on his level. Sometimes the creakiness is simply a case of a collection 70 years old made of stories from even earlier; Look Natural, Please! has been so comprehensively overtaken by trends in photography that it takes real effort to place oneself in the frame of mind where it makes sense – and even then the likes of Yevonde make a bit of a mockery of it. Perforce To Dream, on the other hand, despite giving away its resolution in the title, could almost feel prescient as a riff on at least two subsequent vogues for romantic fantasy, were it not for the way that when the two women who've been having the same racy dreams of Arcady meet, their interactions remain so primly heterosexual as to now seem quite outlandish. Yes, on the most basic level there's a shared fascination with his catastrophe novels, the stories often turning on an intrusion which, despite everyone's best efforts, upends the stifling/cosy certainties of post-War British life. But the specifics often end up feeling more abstracted and dry, macabre comedies of manners with maybe a little John Collier around the edges. So, amusing as the title is, maybe the issue is more that this is not the sort of thing readers usually want from Wyndham, and nor is Wyndham the author you go to if you want to read stories like these.

[D J Rout · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here's the complete list of stories in tis book:
Jizzle
Chinese Puzzle
Esmeralda
How Do I Do?
Una
Affair of the Heart
Confidence Trick
The Wheel
Look Natural, Please!
Perforce to Dream
Reservation Deferred
Heaven Scent
More Spinned Against

These are some of the lesser-known, sadly overlooked stories of John Wyndham, but they're by no means inferior to the more famous stories in Consider Her Ways and Others or The Seeds of Time. The title story is a cute piece of light fantasy similar to Lewis Padgett with an ending that feels right. 'Affair of the Heart' is an excellent example of how to write a quick story with a compelling ending, and 'Confidence Trick' is a well-constructed, logically developed story that shows the concerns of middle-class English people more adroitly than the corpus of kitchen-sink dramas of the 1950's do.

A superb, enjoyable read.

[N. M. D. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not at all the book my edition's cover promised me. Whimsical, playful, and fun short stories I had no strong feelings about. Even the story depicted on the cover, about several people on a train unexpectedly arriving in hell, is completely silly.

There's some minor, old-fashioned sexism, so mild it isn't worth being bothered by. I'd rather there had been less female characters to act silly, but some of the stories' points are made with 'women's feelings' as a primary mover.

My favorite story was probably "Chinese Puzzle", about an middle-aged couple who receive a Chinese dragon egg. Half the story's fun is that the pair are so outrageously Welsh. The dialogue is ridiculous. I could have done without the more overt political overtones though.

The last story, "More Spinned Against," about a woman who trades places with a mythical spider, heads towards one dark ending but pivots towards a different one that caught me totally off-guard.  A couple other stories did have some dark endings, but within the realm of sardonic comedy. Nothing was really heavy. I was hoping for a little more darkness.

Overall, competent stories that do what they intend to do, but just weren't really my flavor.

[Dane Cobain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, let’s just gloss over the name. That story is about a monkey that’s a little smarter than we humans give it credit for and who eventually leads to a divorce and a murder.

This is a collection of John Wyndham’s short stories, and there’s a moveable feast of pieces for us to enjoy. Wyndham covers a whole bunch of different subject matters, and really the only thing that they all have in common is that they have endings that will take you by surprise.

All in all, John Wyndham does a great job as always here, and I think the fact that these are short stories helps to ensure that he doesn’t fall into the trap of labouring the point. That happens from time to time in his full length novels because he’s more of an ideas man than the kind of writer who’s all about fast-paced action scenes.

If you’ve been wanting to give Wyndham a try, this isn’t a bad place to start for a kind of lucky dip. So yeah!

[Gilda Felt · Rating 4 out of 5]

There were some stories I really liked, some I sort of liked, and some I didn’t care for in this collection of short stories. But, I have to admit that, even the stories that I wasn’t so crazy about, I have to admire Wyndham’s imagination. Several of the stories had endings that I didn’t see coming, and were a refreshing change. Especially since they were written so long ago, and the basis of some of the stories have been used innumerable times.

I thought Technical Slip to be the most inventive, though my favorites were How Do I Do?, More Spinned Against, and Perforce to Dream.

I’ve seen the movies based on some of Wyndham’s novels, but have never read them. That’s something I plan on rectifying.

[Darryl Sloan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of 15 stories, most of which are set in domestic life, darkly humourous in tone, containing elements of the absurd. Quite different from Wyndham's popular collection "The Seeds of Time." There are a few duds, but for the most part this was a really enjoyable set, and there were a few unforgettable gems included. It's a shame this isn't still in print.

[Ian Hamilton · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection has some conceptually interesting stories that maybe would’ve been stronger more fully flushed out and longer as novellas, but nothing was really memorable. No regrets though, as it’s JW.

[Jeff Lewis · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found 'Jizzle' disappointing collection of short stories by John Wyndham. 'Technical Slip' was the stand out story which could have developed in to a full novel. 'How Do I See' and 'Confidence Trick' are strong stories let down by a poor conclusion. The rest I failed to hold my interest,

[Joanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Wyndham's stories always contain a twist - some are more amusing than others. For his time he writes quite positive female characters - which I appreciated. Definitely worth a read, but his novels are better, in my opinion. Other reviews her go through the stories in more detail.

[Eleanor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some stories are better than others. I particularly enjoyed "Chinese Puzzle" and "Reservation Deferred". A reread after a great many years, prior to rehoming this and a number of other books with my niece.

[Peter Holz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an eclectic mix of short stories. Some are whimsical. Some are serious. Several of the latter take a hard critical and insightful look at belief and faith.

[Chuck McKenzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great collection of short fiction by John Wyndham, including some of his pure dark fantasy and horror pieces. A great read.

[Julio Gagne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Expected sci-fi but got Twilight Zone lite stories

[Alexander Gent · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this something of a stop-start anthology. Each tale was so self-contained that the satisfaction of finishing one and gleaning the twist at the end meant I was not immediately ready to start the next. It had some real gems and it is a shame it is not as readily available as some of his other better known works. My "well-thumbed" second-hand edition will not be escaping from my clutches for a while.

[Octavia Cade · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of stories that is far superior to the appallingly dreadful pulp cover it was saddled with.

In it is a very short story, "The Wheel", and I can't help but wonder if this was an early dry run for Wyndham's truly excellent novel The Chrysalids. The similarity is not so much in character (though the relationship between a young boy and an older relative prefigures that between David and Uncle Axel) but in the theme of post-apocalypse and religious repression. Given that The Chrysalids is one of my favourite books of all time, I found this a particularly interesting story, if one that's unusually heavy-handed for Wyndham. The remaining stories are all enjoyable, if not outstanding or even particularly memorable.

[Abigail Rieley · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Wyndham on sparkling form, this collection of stories leans more to wry humour than the darker, more cynical sci fi he's known for. If there's a theme to the collection it's one of rather predatory females but the femme fatales in these stories are more likely to be fleas, monkeys or amorous genetic experiments than real battle of the sexes stuff. These stories are told tongue firmly planted in cheek. They might not always be madly politically correct but they're damn good stories.

[Edward Dale Jacknitsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wrong review for story

Wrong review for story

Warning. This is ONLY the short story JIZZLE and not the book with the short story in it. The story was fine but the review says collection. The price was too high for about 8 - 9 pages. 4 stars for story. 1 for the product.