Stories of Haunted America by Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, Carl Jacobi, and Barry N. Malzberg

Let's dip again into Marvin Kaye's 1991 anthology Haunted America.  As I mentioned in our last installment, for this book Kaye split the USA into five regions, and selected eight to ten stories to represent each region.  Today we'll look at one story set in The West, Fritz Leiber's "The Glove," and three about The MidWest: Robert E. Howard's "The Dead Remember," Carl Jacobi's "The Chadwick Pit," and Barry Malzberg's "Away."

"The Glove" by Fritz Leiber (1975)

"The Glove" is about a rape at a San Francisco apartment building where live a bunch of homosexuals, people who believe in witchcraft, women who get attention by cutting themselves or overdosing on pills, a guy with some strange sexual fetish that drives him to violence, and other weirdos.  Leiber infuses the story with sad nostalgia, using the building and its inhabitants as a sort of model in miniature of a United States in social decline.  The now grim apartment building was once a bustling hotel, the now empty closets and inert dumbwaiters then in constant use by a legion of accommodating servants.  Almost all the current tenants of the building are single, and there are no servants, making the big building feel empty and lonely, and our narrator says that because people nowadays have fewer children that the entire world is perhaps similarly becoming big and lonely.

Our narrator is Jeff Winter.  He tells us he slept through the break-in of the apartment next to his and the rape of its occupant, Evelyn Mayne, a 65-year-old woman who is neglected by her family, is always hitting the bottle and who makes half-hearted attempts to commit suicide several times a year.  Winter knows all the details of the crime through conversations with the victim and another tenant, an attractive woman he is dating, Marcia Everly, who was the first person Mayne went to for help.  After the police have come and left, Mayne finds a clue in her apartment, a glove.  When Mayne is taken away by her family, Marcia Everly gets custody of the glove, but the glove creeps her out so she asks Jeff to keep a hold of it until the cops return.

That night Jeff keeps waking up, thinking the glove has come to life and is touching him, and it does seem to move about the room, though probably this is just because of the wind from an open window.  When the police come to collect the glove, the glove's unusual movements (merely at the whims of the wind and gravity, probably) help to pinpoint the rapist, who turns out to be the most outwardly helpful and neighborly person in the building!  In the story's last line we learn the gloves worn by the rapist were handed down to him by his father, who was a judge.

This is a well-written and enjoyable story, though the business with the moving glove is probably the least interesting part, and I suppose in a lot of ways the piece isn't "woke."  I note that Leiber seems to write a lot about rape--see: "Alice and the Allergy" (1947) and "The Sadness of the Executioner" (1973)--and politically incorrect sex in general--see "The Bait" (1973.)  The rape scene in "The Sadness of the Executioner" is played for laughs, and I thought Leiber was pulling an inside joke on us here in "The Glove" when he has Jeff relate that, after hearing Mayne describe her victimization, "I realized, perhaps for the first time, just what a vicious and sick crime rape is and how cheap are all the easy jokes about it."  On second thought, perhaps this is not a sly joke directed at his fans, but Leiber's subtle mea culpa.

Of the stories in Haunted America I have read, "The Glove" seems most successfully to accomplish what Kaye set out to do with the anthology: it actually paints a recognizable picture of the place it is set in (San Francisco as a place full of people with sexual appetites outside the mainstream) it actually features a haunt focused on a particular location or item, it actually has something to say about American culture, and it is actually good.

"The Glove" was first printed in the June 1975 issue of Stuart David Schiff's Whispers, and selected by Gerald Page for DAW's The Years Best Horror Stories: Series IV.

"The Dead Remember" by Robert E. Howard (1936)

"The Dead Remember" was first printed in Argosy, but Cele Goldsmith included it in a 1961 issue of Fantastic 25 years later, even advertising it on the cover and printing a page-long essay by speculative fiction historian Sam Moskowitz on Howard along with it.

"The Dead Remember" is a solid competent horror story about cowboys and race relations.  Over half of the tale consists of a letter written by cowboy Jim Gordon back home to his brother Bill; Jim was working a cattle drive from Texas that has just reached its destination in Kansas.  Jim tells Bill he expects that he will soon be dead, and explains why.  Jim, who seems like something of a swaggering jerk who was always throwing his weight around, four months ago, before the cattle drive, got drunk and outrageously mistreated a black man, Joel.  After abusing Joel's hospitality and accusing Joel of cheating him at dice, Jim instigated a fight with Joel in which Joel's wife, Jezebel, a light-skinned black woman reputed to be a witch, also became involved.  When the fight was over Joel and Jezebel were dead, but as she was expiring Jezebel put a curse on Jim.  While on the way to Kansas with the herd of 3,400 head of cattle, Jim repeatedly escaped death, narrowly, from various accidents--no doubt these accidents were the work of the curse!

After the letter comes a bunch of legal testimonials from a sheriff and various witnesses which relate to us readers how Jim was finally undone by Jezebel's curse in Dodge City, Kansas.

I like it.  In my last blog post I mentioned how one of Lovecraft's early stories, "The Terrible Old Man," perhaps had something to tell us about the author's attitudes about immigrants, and maybe this story, one of Howard's last, similarly can tell us something about Howard's attitudes about African-Americans and their relationship with the white majority.

"The Chadwick Pit" by Carl Jacobi (1980)

This story appeared in the first of four paperback editions of Weird Tales published in the early 1980s and edited by Lin Carter; in that book it was simply titled "The Pit."  In his intro to "The Chadwick Pit" here in Haunted America, Kaye tells us a version of the story with all the supernatural elements removed appeared in a 1976 issue of Mike Shane's Mystery Magazine.

Back in July I read Jacobi's 1936 story "The Face in the Wind" and bitterly denounced it, but maybe this one will be good?

Chadwick is a dude who likes to live alone and has just moved into a house in a relatively remote area.  At the edge of his property is a huge sinkhole full of stones and black water; he has been told this is the site of an Indian burial mound that some enterprising jokers dug up, looking for artifacts.  The pit is an eyesore and a danger, but when Chadwick says he is thinking of filling it in, people warn him to just leave it alone.     

Chadwick builds what he calls "a summer house."  In my experience, in New Jersey and New York, people use the phrase "summer house" to mean an actual second house you own or rent that is far from your main residence, a place you go to on vacations.  My boss when I worked in public academia in Manhattan had a summer house in the Hamptons; she cunningly claimed to the tax collector that it was her main residence, thus allowing her to avoid paying income taxes to New York City, where she lived in an apartment like 300 days of the year.  Anyway, I was amazed when Jacobi wrote that Chadwick built this summer house in "several weeks."  A quick look at wikipedia indicates that some people use the phrase "summer house" to mean a thing like a shed or shack you put in your yard to sit in instead of sitting in your actual house.  I guess you use such a thing the way you'd use a porch or veranda, especially if you don't have an air conditioner in your house. 

Anyway, Chadwick uses stones from the pit to build the foundation of this "summer house."  He starts sleeping in the little summer house, but he always has nightmares when he does so, nightmares in which he chases people and is chased in turn.  When news comes from town that people are being murdered, we readers assume Chadwick, under the influence of the stones from the pit, is spending his nights driving around murdering people, Mr. Hyde-style.  Chadwick suddenly finds a room in his house that he never noticed before. (?)  In it are a bunch of psychology books; they fall open naturally to their chapters about dreams.  There is also a bunch of books about Native Americans, including one that claims a mysterious race inhabited North America before the arrival of the Indians.  (I'm guessing that in the Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine version of the story the Lovecraftian lost race jazz was left out.  Maybe Lin Carter should have convinced Jacobi to leave the psych books out of the Weird Tales version and focus a little more on the ancient monster people.)

Chadwick has a crush on the girl who works at the library, whom he met when checking out books on how to build a summer house.  (If only these books had warned him not to use stones from an Indian burial mound.)  When this girl turns up missing, Chadwick's Dr. Jekyll side briefly overpowers his Mr. Hyde side and he leads the cops to where he has hidden the librarian while in his most recent Mr. Hyde period.  The police rescue the girl and drag Chadwick off to jail.

An unremarkable and pedestrian piece of work that feels clumsy and contrived at times.  One example is that room with the books that comes out of nowhere.  Whose psychology books were those?  Did the people who were there before have bad dreams, even though they didn't build a haunted summer house?  (Jacobi makes clear that Chadwick doesn't have the bad dreams if he sleeps in the actual house he bought.)  Another example is how when Jacobi needs the sheriff to be a passenger in Chadwick's car for his plot to work, all of a sudden Chadwick reveals he was a cop back in Chicago in '55 so the sheriff will deputize him.  Instead of the two of them searching for the missing librarian separately, you know, to cover more ground, the sheriff decides he'll leave his police car behind and ride with Chadwick in his civilian car.  What?  I'll judge "The Chadwick Pit" just barely acceptable.     

"Away" by Barry N. Malzberg (1985)

In "Away," Barry Malzberg, a creature of New York and New Jersey, like myself, tries to say something about Iowa, where I lived for four years.  I don't know if Malzberg ever lived there.  This story is a first-person narrative with stream of consciousness elements, delivered by the ghost of Josiah Bushnell Grinnell, the New Englander who founded Grinnell College in 1846.  Grinnell materializes at a Fourth of July picnic in 1954 where one of Iowa's senators, Bourke B. Hickenlooper, is giving an anti-communist speech.  Grinnell's ghost cries out that the orator is "all wrong....This man is not telling the truth!  We lived to open frontiers, he is closing them!"  Neither Malzberg nor the ghost of Grinnell bothers to make a case that we should be more open to communism--instead ad hominem attacks are employed, Grinnell accusing the politician of hating black people and suggesting he doesn't really believe what he is saying.

The main interesting and sole creative element of "Away" is the idea that the character of the people of Iowa is the product of the influence of the ghosts of white people murdered in an 1857 massacre perpetrated by Sioux Indians at Spirit Lake.  Hickenlooper's hostility to black people, for example, is said to be the result of his being "linked to Spirit Lake by ancestry and blood, [he] still sees the frame of the assassin arched against the moonlight."  Grinnell is also linked to the massacre, having flashbacks to the murders and, in what I guess is a joke, yelling to the crowd that Hickenlooper "speaketh with forked tongue!"

Needless to say, Malzberg's work is much more interesting and valuable when he is writing from his own experience of working as a writer and social worker in New York and New Jersey, or addressing universal problems like sexual dysfunction and the general futility of life.  Here he seems to be writing about Iowa based on stuff he read in an encyclopedia.  Malzberg is famous for arguing that the space program is a pointless waste of time, that humanity is not up to the task of colonizing space, and there is an additional flicker of interest in "Away" when it is hinted that Malzberg feels the same about American expansion to the West; for example, when the ghost of Grinnell moans that he was gullible to take seriously Horace Greeley's suggestion "Go West, young man."  I wish Malzberg had spent more energy on this theme, though, just as it is hard to argue that communism was a big success, it is hard to argue that the settlement of the American West has been a failure.  As it stands, "Away" feels like a dashed off bit of New York parochialism, an expression of the stereotypical New Yorker's view that, beyond the Big Apple, white people are all irrational racists with an irrational skepticism of all the wonderful things their betters in government, academia and the media are doing for them, and not a very entertaining or self-conscious one.

"Away" appears to have been written to fill in the Iowa slot of the 1985 anthology A Treasury of American Horror Stories, a book which presents fifty-one horror tales, one for each state plus an additional one for the District of Columbia.  Of the 51 stories, it looks like 49 were reprints, with only Malzberg's "Away" and Edward D. Hoch's "Bigfish" being original to the anthology.  (Too bad Martin H. Greenberg didn't recruit Iowa-born Thomas Disch to fulfill that commission.)

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

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I feel like I have been pretty bitchy about Kaye and his anthology here, but there's nothing wrong with livening up the blog a little, am I right?  And Haunted America does include numerous good stories--the Lovecraft, Howard, Leiber, Wellman, Matheson and Boucher stories are worth the time of all you Weird Tales kids, and Kaye also includes in the anthology stories by major American authors you are supposed to like, like Poe, Twain, Cather, Irving, Wharton, James and Hawthorne.  So don't let my irascibility keep you from checking it out for free at the internet archive. 

After this year-end rapid fire barrage of posts about short stories, we'll start the new year at MPorcius Fiction Log with a novel.  See you in 2020!