Three 1940s horror stories: Anthony Boucher, A. E. van Vogt and Theodore Sturgeon

Flipping through the issue of Unknown with James H. Schmitz's "Greenface," a good monster story, I noticed the beautifully gruesome illustrations by Frank Kramer for Anthony Boucher's "They Bite."  A quick look at isfdb indicated that "They Bite" is a widely admired, extensively reprinted story, so I decided to read it, and, to round out a blog post, read two other 1940s horror tales by prominent SF writers, Theodore Sturgeon, whose name I was just bandying about in a blog post about Ballantine's 1960 SF line, and MPorcius fave A. E. van Vogt.

"They Bite" by Anthony Boucher (1943)

Among the many places "They Bite" has been reprinted are an issue of F&SF when Boucher was editing that magazine and the Boucher collection Far and Away which has a striking Powers cover.  I read "They Biite" online in the F&SF version because the scan was sharper than the scan of the 1943 version and thus easier on my 47-year old eyes.

Hugh Tallant is a kind of freelance spy, a guy who collects info and sells it to the highest bidder.  As our story begins he is in the desert of the American SouthWest, surreptitiously observing the goings on at a U.S. Army glider school and making detailed sketches of the latest aircraft developed by the military machine of the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Is Tallant going to sell these sketches to the henchmen of Hitler or Stalin?  Or does he have even bigger plans, of allying with a foreign totalitarian power and being given the job of dictator of North America?

We don't have to worry about Tallant selling us out to the commies or becoming the Fuhrer of a National Socialist USA.  Tallant is staying in a primitive adobe house that the locals of the tiny desert settlement call "the Carker place," and as he sits in a bar they tell him stories of how the place for centuries has been associated with white cannibals who learned magic from local Indians.  And sure enough, the climax of the story takes place on the dirt floor of the Carker place where Tallant must fight for his life against animated mummies only three or four feet tall, and we are led to believe he does not win the fight.

This is a decent horror story, with a good violent sequence at the end with some serious gore.  Before the gore is a well done build up constructed around rumors and old stories about degenerate whites and mysterious nonwhites, the kind of thing you might find in a Lovecraft story (in the same way that we learn that the government launched a raid to deal with the fishpeople of Innsmouth in "Shadow Over Innsmouth" we are told here in "They Bite" that the Army in the past has launched operations to wipe out the Carker cannibals.)  Tallant, like the protagonist of Henry Kuttner's "The Graveyard Rats" or any one of dozens of EC comics stories, is a totally unsympathetic jerk whose evil plans put him at the mercy of an even greater evil.  A skillfully put together example of time-tested horror conventions; I enjoyed it.

"The Witch" by A. E. van Vogt (1943)

Like Boucher's "They Bite," van Vogt's "The Witch" first appeared in John W. Campbell's Unknown and would be reprinted in the 1960 collection Zacherly's Vulture Stew.  (I'm guessing you know who Zacherly is.  Another story that showed up in Zacherly's Vulture Stew was Donald Wolheim's mummy story "Bones," which I read in 2014.)

"The Witch" is also included in the 1948 collection of van Vogt and E. Mayne Hull stories (Hull was our man Van's wife) entitled Out of the Unknown.  I own a 1969 paperback Powell edition of Out of the Unknown and it is interesting to see how van Vogt updated the story for book publication.  For example, the magazine version of "The Witch" takes place in 1942 and the protagonist goes to the "talkies" and reads a "war editorial" in the newspaper.  In the version in Out of the Unknown it is 1948 and the hero goes to the "movies" and that newspaper article is an "anti-communist editorial."

(There are also embarrassing printer's errors in the version in the paperback I own, like one entire paragraph being printed twice, and another paragraph actually missing.  Sad!)

A year ago, Craig Marson's decrepit old great-grandmother, Mother Quigley, came to live with him and his wife Joanna in their cliff-side home.  Little does Marson know that this wretched old bag is a sorceress who has achieved longevity by periodically shifting her consciousness into the body of a lovely young woman and she has her sights on the "slim, lithe, strong body" of his wife!  As our story begins the "first new moon after the summer solstice," the time when Mother Quigley can take over Joanna's hot young bod, is only nine days away!

Marson receives a letter in the mail from one of Mother Quigley's creditors that suggests that the woman living with him is some kind of impostor.  As the nine days pass, Mother Quigley keeps trying to make preparations for casting her soul-shifting spell while Marson keeps uncovering clues suggesting something fishy is going on and trying to convince Joanna that the weird old crone should be sent to the "Old Folks Home" tout suite--when that ploy fails Marson considers murderously drastic measures!  In the end (and I hope all you people who claim Golden Age SF was irredeemably sexist are listening) it is Joanna who uses logic to figure out how to save herself from the witch's machinations. 

1948 hardcover edition

I like stories in which people fight for immortality by any means necessary and switch brains or souls from body to body (remember how much I loved Edmond Hamilton's "The Avenger from Atlantis"?), and I enjoyed "The Witch."  I cannot deny that van Vogt probably has the worst writing style of any writer I actually like, but it doesn't cripple the story--in fact, I think it adds a layer of strangeness and confusion to a story (like most of van Vogt's work) which is intended to be dream-like and mind-boggling.  Throughout the story, Marson, confronted by the reality of a witch in the 20th century, is, "struck dumb" or suffers having "his thought[s] twisted crazily" or fears he is suffering hallucinations, while the witch herself, driven half mad with desire for Joanna's body and fear that Marson will prevent the soul transfer, at one point has a "flare of hope that...nearly wrecked her brain" and is always burning with rage or shaking with fear or wriggling with ecstatic glee--van Vogt's tortured prose forces the reader to endure an inkling of the disordered mental states suffered by these characters.

Thumbs up for "The Witch!"

"The Professor's Teddy-Bear" by Theodore Sturgeon (1948)

"The Professor's Teddy-Bear" first appeared in the 25th anniversary issue of Weird Tales, which is full of stories by major SF figures like Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and Edmond Hamilton.  There's even a poem by H. P. Lovecraft!  This looks like a great issue!  Sturgeon's contribution would go on to be included in the Sturgeon collection E Pluribus Unicorn and various anthologies of stories about monsters and The Devil.  I read a scan of the original Weird Tales appearance.

"The Professor's Teddy-Bear" is a surreal piece of work, short and a little disturbing.  A child of four years, Jeremy, has a toy teddy bear which is a demon.  The demon talks to him when he is alone in bed, helps Jeremy cast his mind into his own future.  Jeremy will be a college professor who lectures on Greek philosophy, and four-year-old Jeremy recites the lectures to the demon--the demon derives sustenance from hearing these lectures in a bizarre and you might say disgusting fashion.

Jeremy can not only witness his own future, but manipulate it in esoteric ways.  Guided by the demon, Jeremy, with the power of his mind, causes deadly accidents to occur to people his future self sees, e.g., making a girl's roller skates fail so she falls under the wheels of a moving truck, or making a man trip and fall into a deep hole at a construction site.  Little Jeremy and the demon consider these accidents to be very amusing.

Switching back and forth between Jeremy's corrupted childhood and his lonely career as a middle-aged professor, Sturgeon describes the influence each period exercises on the other as well as the evolution of Jeremy's relationship with the demon and his attitude towards his strange powers.

"The Professor's Teddy-Bear" feels original, and is quite effective.

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Three entertaining horror tales--Boucher's is sort of traditional but very well done, Sturgeon's is novel, and van Vogt's is characteristic of its author.  This was so fun I think we'll read more 1940s weird horror stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.