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The Campfire Collection: Thrilling, Chilling Tales of Alien Encounters
You can run, but you can't hide...The thinking outdoorsman's handbook to the heebie-jeebies, this third volume of our Campfire Collection gathers thirteen terrifying tales of alien abductions, encounters, and freakish forays into the unknown. Perfect to read aloud around a fire or in the comfort and "relative safety" of a cozy armchair, Thrilling, Chilling Tales of Alien Encounters offers stories from such masters of fright as Stephen King, Philip K. Dick, Damon Knight, and more. Designed with rounded corners, a durable cover, and large type for easy reading by campfire or flashlight, this rugged companion is more than trail-ready for any excursion. With an unnerving introduction by Michael Berry, science fiction and fantasy book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, this creepy collection confirms that sinking feeling that something is just...not...quite...right....
CONTENTS
I Am the Doorway by Stephen King
Project: Earth by Philip K. Dick
Radiance by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
The Venus Hunters by J. G. Ballard
The One That Got Away by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
To Serve Man by Damon Knight
Pictures Don't Lie by Katherine MacLean
Betelgeuse Bridge by William Tenn
Eight O'Clock in the Morning by Ray Nelson
Night of the Cooters by Howard Waldrop
The Women Men Don't See by James Tiptree, Jr.
Saul by Peter Schweighofer
A Rustle of Owls' Wings by Thomas Smith
CONTENTS
I Am the Doorway by Stephen King
Project: Earth by Philip K. Dick
Radiance by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
The Venus Hunters by J. G. Ballard
The One That Got Away by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
To Serve Man by Damon Knight
Pictures Don't Lie by Katherine MacLean
Betelgeuse Bridge by William Tenn
Eight O'Clock in the Morning by Ray Nelson
Night of the Cooters by Howard Waldrop
The Women Men Don't See by James Tiptree, Jr.
Saul by Peter Schweighofer
A Rustle of Owls' Wings by Thomas Smith
256 pages, Paperback
First published May 5, 2005
38 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
October 9, 2021
This one came up a bit randomly as - I've said before - I'm not really a science-fiction fan. But I had to process a story from this at work and so I asked my boss if I could take it home for a quick perusal because the tight theme was kind-of in line with my general interests. Also, I have to say, I've always loved the design sense on Chronicle Books Campfire series - the squarish shape, the slightly textured cover that feels like it could sit outside for a while and not dampen...
Anyway, as might be expected from the title, all the pieces here involve aliens of some kind (or at least the "idea" of aliens) - broken up into "encounters", "invasions" and "abductions". It's a kind of a hit or miss anthology but certainly has enough strong material on the theme to keep a reader entertained.
For me, the weakest stories here came near the end. "Saul" by Peter Schweighofer gives us a drunk driver involved in a car accident who experiences a seeming alien abduction, although details manifest in some truly bizarre ways. The story works to blur the line between classic "alien abduction" tropes and "angelic vision" stories, so the guy comes out of it a changed man. Seemed lacking in conflict and kind of s straight-line idea. "A Rustle Of Owls' Wings" by Thomas Smith has the same problem - it's not a bad *idea* (here, recounting life-long abductions as creepy, childhood memories of interacting with sinister owl creatures, "the owls are not what they seem", and all that, if you remember your TWIN PEAKS - but it fails to present this idea in the form of a story and more as a monologue.
Three of the stories here (in the "Invasion" section) are old school sf-mag "twist-ending" stories. "To Serve Man" by Damon Knight was famously adapted on THE TWILIGHT ZONE and parodied on THE SIMPSONS. "Pictures Don't Lie" by Katherine MacLean was adapted (or ripped off) in an an old EC comic - WEIRD SCIENCE, probably - as well as variant-ed in some DC comic anthology of my youth in the 1970s - UNEXPECTED, probably. "Betelgeuse Bridge" by William Tenn was new to me, so I read it and "Pictures" but skipped re-reading "Serve". It's a funny thing about these kinds of stories - one can obviously state that the flaw in such stories are that once one knows the twist, why re-read them? - and so they tend to be looked down upon. Of course, that also points out that they are perfect example of the market-driven/entertainment short fiction story, the kind of thing those that scorn "art" and "posterity writing" supposedly are striving to write. Yet, stories like these (and shows that adapt them), also seem to trigger feelings of anger and resentment in a certain class of reader - as if, having been "tricked" by Rod Serling in their youth, they'll be DAMNED if they're gonna let another smarty-pants writer put one over on them... thus, the overall intended effect of pleasing entertainments (and, in the case of Serling's classic show, some solid humanistic lessons) are lost on some who can't see the forest for their superior knowledge of trees. I can admire the tales presented here as well-crafted trifles - "Pictures" tells of contact with an approaching alien ship (all the video footage looks a little...odd) that, upon arrival, doesn't seem to arrive at all (it's a lesson in scale, you see). "Bridge" has two overly obsequious slug-like visitors (think Kang and Kodos, I couldn't help picturing them the entire time) "sold" to the world by Madison Avenue ad-men, but it's all in service of a long con. "Serve" - well, you know that one already... ("Memo to Mr. Chambers: no luck yet on cracking the translation except for single words and isolated phrases. Today's deciphering were "simmer" and "falling off the bone". No idea what that could mean...")
A few pieces here are entertaining without being particularly compelling or anything. "The One That Got Away" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch is sharply written and has a full-time, small-money professional gambler relate the one big tournament jackpot that got away because of alien intervention. The kind of thing that easily could have appeared in ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE back in the day (that is to say, the sf/alien aspects are bolted on to a crime-type story), a moment's diversion - but still, very well-drawn characters. Howard Waldrop's "Night Of The Cooters" (dedicated to Slim Pickens, no less!) is a fun bit of southern-fried hokum as Texas locals in the late 19th century defend their town from ornery, invading martian cooters (see also, The War of the Worlds by one Wells, H.G.). Again, a fine moment's diversion. Nina Kiriki Hoffman's "Radiance" uses it's "energy aliens occupying dead human bodies" as a means for the main character to reconcile family conflicts. Human and heartfelt, but the ending felt too rushed and expositional.
And that just leaves five more stories, all of which are solid and vary in approach.
Ray Nelson's "Eight O'clock In The Morning" is probably most famous as the source material for John Carpenter's well-known (if under-performing at the time - I remember sitting in an empty theater on opening weekend), Reagan-era critique movie THEY LIVE. I've always found it an uneven film (what with the abrupt ending, and that subjectively eternal wrestling match in the alley) but the central concept, here presented in its original form, is great - a man gets un-hypnotized at a stage show and suddenly realizes the world has been infiltrated and enslaved by mesmeric aliens who exploit our resources while keeping us docile slaves with subliminal propaganda that reenforce our herd tendencies. The style is very focused and clipped (no time is spent on worrying about whether he's crazy, for example) and delivers the idea to its logical conclusion in a heady rush of pulp storytelling (a small aside implies that the aliens are eating humans, which I don't remember from the film, and at least the story has a justification for the abrupt ending). Good, pre-Philip K. Dick mind-fuck sci-f.
And speaking of which, we also have Philip K. Dick's "Project:Earth" in which a young boy, discovering that the elderly lodger upstairs (who continually works on his endless report) is actually an agent of vast cosmic powers - so vast, in fact, that said powers have already tried, and failed, at breeding intelligent life on Earth (the first run had wings and fought each other a a lot. We're the second attempt. The third is being planned...) - and contrives to steal the "special experiments" the lodger is working on. And so the fate of man is decided by a game of marbles and some doll clothes... Much like the Nelson story, this is amiable "gee-whiz" sf pulp and you can sense Dick's perception just starting to stretch in the concept...
"The Women Men Don't See" by James Tiptree, Jr. has three vacationers (an intelligence operative on a fishing trip, a government clerk and her daughter) and a pilot crash-land on an isolated sandbar near a mangrove swamp. As they struggle to survive, the narrator (the intelligence guy) find himself reappraising the clerk, until they suddenly intersect with... well, you know because you're reading this in an alien anthology. Tiptree is quite the writer - the opening is gripping, the characters sketched with short observations and subtle dialogue choices. Especially well done is how Tiptree misdirects the reader at first, knowing her market ("James Tiptree" was a nom de plume for Alice Bradley Sheldon) and so leading us to believe, through the eyes of the male narrator, that there is something odd/alien about the mother when in fact she's just triggering against the narrator's gender assumptions. And yes, the story is a strong feminist commentary, although (thanks to the wonders of genre) ultimately a defeatist/escapist one - although thankfully honest about how sad that it (and thanks to the wonders of genre the coincidental aspects of the plot need not also rankle too much). Fine stuff. It could be argued as being a variant of Derrick Bell's "The Space Traders", with a focus on gender instead of race.
I can still remember walking to grade school in the late 1970s, training myself to walk and read at the same time so I could work my way through Stephen King's NIGHT SHIFT collection, the die-cut cover of which (if you're old enough, you know the one) featured a visual from the story here, "I Am The Doorway" (originally printed in Cavalier Magazine, 1971). This is early King, King as solid short-story craftsman, balancing an awareness of what a story needs to *do* with a talent for inserting the little grace notes that make a piece just somehow better than the run of the mill. Here he takes a simple idea (astronaut back from orbit of Venus finds eyes growing in his fingertips), solid pulp writing chops (not a wasted line here, the story just clips along) and adds a smattering of further ideas (the eyes are being "looked" through and the things looking, which seem to not just be plain ol' Venusians but something from "outside" our experience, are malevolent and gaining control of their "doorway") to craft a memorable read (great last line as well).
Finally, there's "The Venus Hunters" by J.G. Ballard. You have to (or at least *I* do) love Ballard's dry-as-a-martini style, all reserved-but-humanistic characters and psychological musings on the space age, here turning his focus on the "contactee" phenomena and really digging in to it instead of using it simply as a tool to mock people. We get touches of science, space-age architecture, Jungian archetypal musings on flying saucers, etc. as a young, professional astronomer at an observatory falls into the charismatic orbit of a local who claims to have talked to "Space Brothers" from Venus out in the desert. Again, what would in lesser hands be an easy target of mockery or a tool for lazy cynicism becomes a fascinating exploration (thanks in part to Ballard's character writing) of the psychological impact and implications of the space age on the human mind and culture of our "rational" age. Less a story about "aliens" (their actual existence is the question, of course) than a story about a new belief system and the resulting apostasy from a conflicting one, you have to give it to Ballard for not taking the easy way out.
And, obviously, neither did I with this review!
Anyway, as might be expected from the title, all the pieces here involve aliens of some kind (or at least the "idea" of aliens) - broken up into "encounters", "invasions" and "abductions". It's a kind of a hit or miss anthology but certainly has enough strong material on the theme to keep a reader entertained.
For me, the weakest stories here came near the end. "Saul" by Peter Schweighofer gives us a drunk driver involved in a car accident who experiences a seeming alien abduction, although details manifest in some truly bizarre ways. The story works to blur the line between classic "alien abduction" tropes and "angelic vision" stories, so the guy comes out of it a changed man. Seemed lacking in conflict and kind of s straight-line idea. "A Rustle Of Owls' Wings" by Thomas Smith has the same problem - it's not a bad *idea* (here, recounting life-long abductions as creepy, childhood memories of interacting with sinister owl creatures, "the owls are not what they seem", and all that, if you remember your TWIN PEAKS - but it fails to present this idea in the form of a story and more as a monologue.
Three of the stories here (in the "Invasion" section) are old school sf-mag "twist-ending" stories. "To Serve Man" by Damon Knight was famously adapted on THE TWILIGHT ZONE and parodied on THE SIMPSONS. "Pictures Don't Lie" by Katherine MacLean was adapted (or ripped off) in an an old EC comic - WEIRD SCIENCE, probably - as well as variant-ed in some DC comic anthology of my youth in the 1970s - UNEXPECTED, probably. "Betelgeuse Bridge" by William Tenn was new to me, so I read it and "Pictures" but skipped re-reading "Serve". It's a funny thing about these kinds of stories - one can obviously state that the flaw in such stories are that once one knows the twist, why re-read them? - and so they tend to be looked down upon. Of course, that also points out that they are perfect example of the market-driven/entertainment short fiction story, the kind of thing those that scorn "art" and "posterity writing" supposedly are striving to write. Yet, stories like these (and shows that adapt them), also seem to trigger feelings of anger and resentment in a certain class of reader - as if, having been "tricked" by Rod Serling in their youth, they'll be DAMNED if they're gonna let another smarty-pants writer put one over on them... thus, the overall intended effect of pleasing entertainments (and, in the case of Serling's classic show, some solid humanistic lessons) are lost on some who can't see the forest for their superior knowledge of trees. I can admire the tales presented here as well-crafted trifles - "Pictures" tells of contact with an approaching alien ship (all the video footage looks a little...odd) that, upon arrival, doesn't seem to arrive at all (it's a lesson in scale, you see). "Bridge" has two overly obsequious slug-like visitors (think Kang and Kodos, I couldn't help picturing them the entire time) "sold" to the world by Madison Avenue ad-men, but it's all in service of a long con. "Serve" - well, you know that one already... ("Memo to Mr. Chambers: no luck yet on cracking the translation except for single words and isolated phrases. Today's deciphering were "simmer" and "falling off the bone". No idea what that could mean...")
A few pieces here are entertaining without being particularly compelling or anything. "The One That Got Away" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch is sharply written and has a full-time, small-money professional gambler relate the one big tournament jackpot that got away because of alien intervention. The kind of thing that easily could have appeared in ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE back in the day (that is to say, the sf/alien aspects are bolted on to a crime-type story), a moment's diversion - but still, very well-drawn characters. Howard Waldrop's "Night Of The Cooters" (dedicated to Slim Pickens, no less!) is a fun bit of southern-fried hokum as Texas locals in the late 19th century defend their town from ornery, invading martian cooters (see also, The War of the Worlds by one Wells, H.G.). Again, a fine moment's diversion. Nina Kiriki Hoffman's "Radiance" uses it's "energy aliens occupying dead human bodies" as a means for the main character to reconcile family conflicts. Human and heartfelt, but the ending felt too rushed and expositional.
And that just leaves five more stories, all of which are solid and vary in approach.
Ray Nelson's "Eight O'clock In The Morning" is probably most famous as the source material for John Carpenter's well-known (if under-performing at the time - I remember sitting in an empty theater on opening weekend), Reagan-era critique movie THEY LIVE. I've always found it an uneven film (what with the abrupt ending, and that subjectively eternal wrestling match in the alley) but the central concept, here presented in its original form, is great - a man gets un-hypnotized at a stage show and suddenly realizes the world has been infiltrated and enslaved by mesmeric aliens who exploit our resources while keeping us docile slaves with subliminal propaganda that reenforce our herd tendencies. The style is very focused and clipped (no time is spent on worrying about whether he's crazy, for example) and delivers the idea to its logical conclusion in a heady rush of pulp storytelling (a small aside implies that the aliens are eating humans, which I don't remember from the film, and at least the story has a justification for the abrupt ending). Good, pre-Philip K. Dick mind-fuck sci-f.
And speaking of which, we also have Philip K. Dick's "Project:Earth" in which a young boy, discovering that the elderly lodger upstairs (who continually works on his endless report) is actually an agent of vast cosmic powers - so vast, in fact, that said powers have already tried, and failed, at breeding intelligent life on Earth (the first run had wings and fought each other a a lot. We're the second attempt. The third is being planned...) - and contrives to steal the "special experiments" the lodger is working on. And so the fate of man is decided by a game of marbles and some doll clothes... Much like the Nelson story, this is amiable "gee-whiz" sf pulp and you can sense Dick's perception just starting to stretch in the concept...
"The Women Men Don't See" by James Tiptree, Jr. has three vacationers (an intelligence operative on a fishing trip, a government clerk and her daughter) and a pilot crash-land on an isolated sandbar near a mangrove swamp. As they struggle to survive, the narrator (the intelligence guy) find himself reappraising the clerk, until they suddenly intersect with... well, you know because you're reading this in an alien anthology. Tiptree is quite the writer - the opening is gripping, the characters sketched with short observations and subtle dialogue choices. Especially well done is how Tiptree misdirects the reader at first, knowing her market ("James Tiptree" was a nom de plume for Alice Bradley Sheldon) and so leading us to believe, through the eyes of the male narrator, that there is something odd/alien about the mother when in fact she's just triggering against the narrator's gender assumptions. And yes, the story is a strong feminist commentary, although (thanks to the wonders of genre) ultimately a defeatist/escapist one - although thankfully honest about how sad that it (and thanks to the wonders of genre the coincidental aspects of the plot need not also rankle too much). Fine stuff. It could be argued as being a variant of Derrick Bell's "The Space Traders", with a focus on gender instead of race.
I can still remember walking to grade school in the late 1970s, training myself to walk and read at the same time so I could work my way through Stephen King's NIGHT SHIFT collection, the die-cut cover of which (if you're old enough, you know the one) featured a visual from the story here, "I Am The Doorway" (originally printed in Cavalier Magazine, 1971). This is early King, King as solid short-story craftsman, balancing an awareness of what a story needs to *do* with a talent for inserting the little grace notes that make a piece just somehow better than the run of the mill. Here he takes a simple idea (astronaut back from orbit of Venus finds eyes growing in his fingertips), solid pulp writing chops (not a wasted line here, the story just clips along) and adds a smattering of further ideas (the eyes are being "looked" through and the things looking, which seem to not just be plain ol' Venusians but something from "outside" our experience, are malevolent and gaining control of their "doorway") to craft a memorable read (great last line as well).
Finally, there's "The Venus Hunters" by J.G. Ballard. You have to (or at least *I* do) love Ballard's dry-as-a-martini style, all reserved-but-humanistic characters and psychological musings on the space age, here turning his focus on the "contactee" phenomena and really digging in to it instead of using it simply as a tool to mock people. We get touches of science, space-age architecture, Jungian archetypal musings on flying saucers, etc. as a young, professional astronomer at an observatory falls into the charismatic orbit of a local who claims to have talked to "Space Brothers" from Venus out in the desert. Again, what would in lesser hands be an easy target of mockery or a tool for lazy cynicism becomes a fascinating exploration (thanks in part to Ballard's character writing) of the psychological impact and implications of the space age on the human mind and culture of our "rational" age. Less a story about "aliens" (their actual existence is the question, of course) than a story about a new belief system and the resulting apostasy from a conflicting one, you have to give it to Ballard for not taking the easy way out.
And, obviously, neither did I with this review!
August 7, 2017
Really, really disappointed with this. I know there are much better alien short stories out there, so I don't know why this collection is so dreadful. I had to skim stories because they were so damn boring. This had way too many racist, sexist, and homophobic messages for my taste (also, how the hell can you be racist while writing about literal aliens???? I mean). No thanks. The only stories I think are worth anything are Radiance, The One that Got Away, Betelgeuse Bridge, and Eight O'Clock in the Morning. I wish I hadn't read (or skimmed) the rest of them.
April 27, 2021
While the theme supposedly trying all these stories together is a little arbitrary (to wit: each story has aliens, and each story is at least a little spooky), the stories themselves are uniformly excellent.
March 10, 2019
Some were really well written, some were ... not.
January 14, 2025
Some of the short stories are good-like an episode of the Twilight Zone. Others make you have to re-read three pages back to comprehend.
June 13, 2013
Even though the book was published in 2005, many of the short stories were written between 1950-1970. In fact the older stories were some of the ones I liked the best. Quite a few entertaining short stories in this collection, and a few I found dull and skipped.
February 5, 2011
My favorites out of this collection were Nina Kiriki Hoffman's 'Radiance,' Kristine Kathryn Rusch's 'The One That Got Away,' and William Tenn's 'Betelgeuse Bridge.'
might-read
August 16, 2015contains Betelgeuse bridge
May 31, 2016
'I Am the Doorway' is the only story worth reading in this collection. The rest are really, really bad.
February 23, 2014
A solid collection of tales.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews