The high concept of James Morrow’s novel Shambling Towards Hiroshima is, quite frankly, almost worth the price of admission by itself. Unbeknownst to most Americans, the Navy had a backup plan in case the Army’s A-Bomb didn’t work out in WWII — genetically engineer giant, fire-breathing lizards to devastate Japan. (But we were building the A-Bomb to devastate Germany, I hear you cry. Never you mind about that.) But unlike our secretive A-Bomb policy, we decided to demonstrate our monsters to the Japanese to give them a chance to surrender first. But (and here’s where it gets really good) we couldn’t devastate anywhere real for a mere demonstration, so the Navy hired the world’s greatest monster-actor, Syms Thorley, to get into a rubber monster suit and stomp around on a model of “Shirazuka” for the cameras. The plan was to show the film to the Japanese and horrify them into surrender.

Every so often, you will see Catherine “C.L.” Moore’s hero Northwest Smith referred to as the model for Han Solo. This would only be strictly true in a world in which Josef von Sternberg directed Star Wars.

Yes, Northwest Smith is a wanted criminal and occasional smuggler; yes, Northwest Smith wears space leathers on his lean frame and a ray-gun on his hip; yes, Northwest Smith has a dangerous killing alien as a sidekick. But in the thirteen recorded Northwest Smith stories by C.L. Moore (all collected for the first time in this excellent Planet Stories omnibus), we only see the inside of one spaceship — and Smith is a passenger, not the pilot.

No, Smith may inhabit a solar system of Martian canals and Venusian swamps, but his adventures are less SF than a kind of lush, operatically colored noir.

Chicago’s Wildclaw Theatre company takes, as its mission, the restoration of horror to its rightful place on the stage. Its previous productions include theatrical adaptations of Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” and H.P. Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House,” showing a solid grounding in the classics. Their newest show is the Midwest premiere of Scott T. Barsotti’s The Revenants, a drama of love and zombies.

Without spoilering anything, I can say that the play is a thoroughly successful melding of the relationship drama and the zombie apocalypse; neither component was bolted on after the fact, and each provides vital momentum and plot turns for the other. WildClaw’sWitch House also concerned apocalypse, though interestingly a less personal — and more cataclysmic — one than Lovecraft’s story. It, also, featured a relationship drama, although one cast as a parallel investigation; a despairing Thin Man story wherein Nick and Nora meet only for the catastrophe.