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4:33 a.m. - 2022-03-06 "House of the Blue Dwarf" is vintage Sala, featuring ESP; telekinesis; a seance; inter dimensional travel; heavily caricatured villains of the Chester Gould/ Bob Kane school; and a conspiracy of plots, counterplots, constantly shifting alliances, and over-the-top graphic violence. In "Monsters Illustrated," Sala resurrects Peculia, a seemingly innocent but surprisingly resourceful young woman from his earlier stories, who wanders into a curious old book store. In a story-within-a-story plot device that recurs several times in the collection, Peculia begins reading an illustrated book of famous monsters, only to discover that the final illustration is of real monsters who inhabit that very store. But Peculia is far more formidable than the cliche alluring female victims who populate the illustrations. "Cave Girls of the Lost World" uses the manuscript in a bottle plot device, allowing the storytelling to proceed with accompanying commentary from a skeptical modern female observer. Drawing on movies like "One Million Years B.C." and "The Lost World," it tells the story of young women stranded in a remote location who encounter dinosaurs, Neanderthals, carnivorous plants, and other monstrous threats while moving toward what seems to be an inevitable apocalypse. No lost world cliche is spared, but the dubious female commentator is more rooted in a modern reality: "I'm not convinced it's a good idea . . . to be fantasizing about naked chicks riding around on dinosaurs. You don't want . . . to have silly, unrealistic fantasies . . . Women are real people." "Fantonella," the final and most ambitious story in the compendium, is a dark parable of politics and human psychology, equal in ambition to Sala's earlier inverted fairy tale "Delphine." The eponymous heroine, in a plot similar to the Bruce Lee movie "Game of Death," slowly ascends a tower populated by hideous villains, violently avenging some undisclosed crime from the past. She makes it clear that she is after vengeance, not justice. The villains have been in control of the local population for several generations, ruling with an iron fist. Near the base of the tower an idealistic boy exhorts a crowd to resist the criminals. Though viewing him as a "useful idiot," the thugs decide to give him a beating. "I don't understand," the bloodied victim says later, "Why didn't anyone help me? Some of them (the crowd) were cheering." While ascending the tower in her bloody reprisal, Fantonella encounters The Writer, who all but breaks the fourth wall with his cynical commentary on her character: "There should be more shading, more depth to your character . . . We need to make you more likable . . . Perhaps you could risk your life to save a child." "You realize, of course," The Writer continues, "that it is not enough for those in power to simply kill the restless and rebellious. More may come along. We must destroy their yearning and desires. We must murder their imagination and originality, crush their creativity. That way they are satisfied with whatever we give them." Later in the story the tyrant declares, "The people love me . . . let's declare martial law!" As Fantonella nears the top of the tower, another character advises her, "Above us, in the highest room in the tower, above all this, is a special room for the person who really runs everything." Fantonella ascends the final stairway . . . "But the room was empty. There was no one there but her. She hesitated for a moment, not sure what to do. Then she walked over to the window and looked out. It was a nice view." The chilling ending leaves us wondering what Fantonella will do with her hard-won power. The prologue to "Fantonella" is equally dark. "When you are young," Sala tells us, "you imagine you are going to be the hero of your own movie." Then as we age, we are willing to accept a supporting player role, commenting on the actions of others. Older still, we realize we are more like the villagers in an old horror movie: "superstitious, unlucky, suspicious and doomed." Finally, "you see . . . that the movie is continuing on without you." The compendium has structure, moving from a typical Sala escapist tribute to horror movie traditions, to a story within a story, then to a story with skeptical commentary by an outside observer, and finally to a dark Orwellian allegory with cynical advice to its principal character, who may become a rescuer or just another tyrant of a superstitious, unlucky, suspicious, and doomed population.
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