I recently mentioned how French novelist Michel Houllebecq found H. P. Lovecraft's work compelling in part because Lovecraft gave little attention to the topics of sex and money, topics central to so much of our lives and our literature. This comment of Houllebecq's always makes me think of Lovecraft's story "The Thing on the Doorstep" (published in 1937, but apparently written in 1933) because that story actually is about a sexual relationship. Similarly, a comment of Clark Ashton Smith's recently brought to mind Robert E. Howard's Conan story, "The Scarlet Citadel" (published in 1933, but apparently written in 1931.) So I decided to reread these stories by the two towering giants of the Weird Tales crowd.
I have already talked on this blog about how Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright kept track of what stories came in for praise in readers' letters to the magazine, and thus--scientifically!--determined which stories and authors were the readership's favorites. SF historian Sam Moskowitz obtained the note cards on which Wright kept these tallies, and in 1983 published an article including a chart showing the most popular story in each issue of Weird Tales from November 1924 to January 1940. "The Thing on the Doorstep" and "The Scarlet Citadel" were both the most popular stories in the issues in which they appeared. I decided to round out this blog post with a third Weird Tales winner, and settled on Henry Kuttner's "Towers of Death," from 1939, which I have never read.
"The Thing on the Doorstep" by H. P. Lovecraft (published 1937)
"The Thing on the Doorstep" is the story of the relationship of architect Daniel Upton, our narrator, and poet Edward Pickman Derby; these men shared an interest in the weird and fantastic. In the first paragraph of the story (which comes to about 27 total pages in my book here) Upton admits that he shot Derby in the head six times when he last met him in Arkham Sanitarium, but our narrator insists he did not murder Derby thereby, but rather avenged him! How to explain this bizarre claim? Well, Derby's soul was already dead when Upton shot up his body, and that body was inhabited by an evil wizard who sought to achieve immortality by shifting from body to body over the centuries as each body grew old and wore out!
Upton and Derby had been friends for like thirty years when Derby, a shy and retiring sort of gent, the son of overprotective parents, finally, at age thirty-eight, developed some kind of a relationship with a woman. Derby would come over to Upton's place all the time; Upton could even recognize Derby's distinctive knock on his door--three brisk strokes followed, after a pause, by two more. The woman in question was twenty-three-year-old Asenath Waite, a pretty thing, but odd, with protuberant eyes and strange manners--Asentah was one of the Innsmouth Waites, and we all know what that means--Asenath's mother wasn't entirely human, but part fishperson! Upton gives us a description of rumors and stories about Asenath and her father Ephraim that make it clear to us readers that Ephraim Waite of Innsmouth knew how to transfer his consciousness into other bodies, and that Asenath's young body is inhabited by Ephraim's wicked soul. (Presumably the merciless Ephraim murdered his daughter's soul after trapping it in his own senescent body.) Some of "Asenath"'s many unaccountable comments suggest that Ephraim hates being in a female body because the female brain is inferior to the male brain and being stuck in a woman's physical form is limiting his arcane powers. "Asenath" is, no doubt, cultivating a relationship with Derby because Ephraim covets the poet's body--Derby is a child prodigy, after all, with a superior brain, and his lack of willpower (a result of coddling by his smothering parents!) makes him relatively easy prey.
To his father's dismay, Derby marries the strange girl, and Upton and the elder Derby see less and less of the poet as time passes. The local people love to gossip about the oddball Derby menage, though, and from clues Upton provides us we know that Ephraim is regularly switching bodies with Derby, trapping the poet in Asenath's inferior girlish body and using Derby's own male body to go on expeditions to Innsmouth and elsewhere (e. g., "Cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases lead down to abysses of nighted secrets....") in pursuit of otherworldy information and artifacts, knowledge and apparatus from other dimensions and other planets. Sometimes these expeditions go awry, and Derby wakes up in his own body, far from his Arkham, Massachusetts home, in some remote forest or desolate ruin. Over three years after Derby's fateful wedding, Upton has to drive up to Maine to collect the poet when he staggers out of the woods, apparently insane, babbling about alien monsters and diabolical rites. The drive back is shocking for Upton, as Derby, at first depressed and then raving about his incredible and sinister experiences, suddenly gets a hold of himself and becomes smooth, confident, charismatic, a master of the situation who even succeeds in convincing Upton to let him drive the motor car himself, even though Upton knows Derby never learned to drive--Ephraim has regained control of Derby's body before Upton's unbelieving eyes!
The climax of the story comes after a desperate Derby finally asserts himself, bludgeoning "Asenath" and apparently killing her. One can only imagine the catharsis the inoffensive versifier must have felt seeing that fish-eyed freak fall to the floor with a nice big dent in her pate after three and a half years of "her" tyranny. Derby buries his not-quite-human wife's cadaver in the basement of their large house and tells everybody she is on a long research trip and that they are soon going to be divorced. But Derby isn't out of the woods yet! The body in which it is housed may be inert, but the wizard Ephraim's malign soul endures! Ephraim keeps trying to take over Derby's body, sending Derby into seizures that land him in Arkham Sanitarium. Finally, three months after Derby murdered Asenath's body, Ephraim succeeds, and Derby wakes up under the dirt of his basement, in his wife's rotting corpse! Determined to put the kibosh on Ephraim's plans to live forever--and use his foully acquired extra centuries to collaborate with the monstrous aliens who want to take over the Earth--the poet digs himself out of the grave in which he himself interred Asenath. Unable to talk because wifey's face and throat have decayed (the best he can come up with is a "sort of half-liquid bubbling noise--"glub...glub...glub"), Derby writes a note to Upton and staggers to Upton's house, giving his distinctive knock so Upton knows it must be his friend. When he sees the rotting corpse on his doorstep Upton faints, but not before he has taken the note in hand. When he revives, Derby's soul has expired and Asenath's putrid corpse has collapsed, but after reading the note Upton takes up a firearm and goes to the sanitarium to blast Derby's head, which houses Ephraim's satanic consciousness, to pieces.
But there is a hitch. If Derby's body isn't quickly cremated, Ephraim's powerful malevolent soul may be able to invade another body and continue its campaign of evil! Upton insists on a rapid cremation, but of course who is going to listen to a murderer's advice on how to dispose of his victim's body? The doctors at the sanitarium are eager to preserve the cadaver of this patient and conduct a careful autopsy...as the story ends we have no idea if Ephraim Waite has been truly exorcised or if his soul will soon be abroad, menacing an unsuspecting world. Will Derby's superhuman efforts and Upton's sacrifice be in vain?
I love this story. It not only foregrounds some of my favorite SF themes--immortality and the switching of brains or souls between bodies--but some of my favorite literary themes--unhappy relationships between parents and children and unhappy sexual relationships. "The Thing on the Doorstep" also exploits heterosexual men's horror and disgust at women's bodies (Ephraim and Derby both find being trapped in a woman's body to be a nightmare) and at homosexual relationships. And of course the brilliantly horrible final image of a shrouded half-rotten corpse thrusting forward a sheet of paper to his only real friend, a doomed man's final act, an effort to redeem his wasted and miserable life!
A weird classic that pushes a multitude of buttons!
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| Here are two anthologies that feature "The Thing on the Doorstep" which I thought had interesting covers. |
"The Scarlet Citadel" takes place during the period of Conan's life in which he is King of Aquilonia, and through Conan's dialogue Howard gives us a brief sort of treatise on his theory of what constitutes legitimate government and what constitutes good government. Conan became ruler of Aquilonia by taking the place over by force from a tyrannical king whose family had ruled for a thousand years--Conan's rule stems from ability, legitimizing it; Howard and Conan do not consider inheritance to confer legitimacy on a ruler. Once in charge, Conan lowered tax rates so that Aquilonians enjoyed the lowest taxes in the civilized world, and in turn Aquilonians thrived and were loyal to Conan.
Conan may be a good king whose rule is, in Howard's opinion at least, legitimate, but as the story begins Conan and Aquilonia are in serious trouble. Tricked by two treacherous neighboring monarchs, our hero has marched five thousand Aquilonain knights into a trap and they all have been massacred by enemy archers and pikemen, and Conan himself has been taken captive by the wizard who is the power behind the two tricksy kings--Howard underscores the impotence and illegitimacy of these hereditary kings by showing how the wizard, Tsotha, pushes them around and humiliates them. Compared to the self-made man of brawn (Conan) and self-made man of brain (Tsotha), these two hereditary kings are contemptible.
Tsotha and his pet kings offer Conan a pile of money to repudiate his throne, and when Conan refuses he is tossed in the dungeons under Tsotha's tower. These subterranean corridors are thousands of years old, and full of alien monsters as well as the products of Tsotha's experiments in necromancy and other sorceries. Conan, by luck, escapes his cell and the eighty-foot long snake that sought to devour him there, and stumbles upon the cell of the wizard Pelias, a rival of Tsotha's. Conan liberates Pelias from the noxious monster flora that has been holding him in a sort of coma for ten years, and then Pelias uses his magic to spring the two of them from the dungeon.
The monsters in the dungeon and Pelias's magic are fun and creepy--this is the best part of the story. In this printing, "The Scarlet Citadel" is like 33 pages, and about half of them consist of this fun dungeon stuff.
Pelias summons a flying monster from outer space (I guess) that carries Conan to the capital of Aquilonia, which is in chaos after news of his death; the commoners are rioting, the aristocrats are overtaxing the merchants and fighting each other, etc. Meanwhile, Tsotha's pet kings' armies are trying to take a fortified border town on a river. We get page after page of fictional military history stuff: orders of battle, Conan arriving at the head of his hastily-assembled relief force, archers and siege engines shooting, a bridge of boats across the river, cavalry charges, etc. I am a military history buff--this month I read a lot about RAF Wellington bomber operations in the Mediterranean in Martin Bowman's Wellington: The Geodetic Giant and about the RAF's bombing campaign directed against Berlin in Martin Middlebrook's The Berlin Raids--but I often find blow by blow descriptions of fictional battles tiresome, and the battle at the end of "The Scarlet Citadel" is pretty boring. Fortunately it ends on a good note, the confrontation of Tsotha and Pelias.
"The Scarlet Citadel" has appeared in a profusion of Howard collections, of course, but not many anthologies. Jacques Sadoul did see fit to include it in a French anthology of selections from Weird Tales, however.
"Towers of Death" by Henry Kuttner (1939)
Besides Kuttner's story, which got the cover, the November 1939 issue of Weird Tales includes a fun letter from Ray Bradbury in which he praises H. P. Lovecraft's "Cool Air," a 1928 story reprinted in the September 1939 issue of Weird Tales, and Clark Ashton Smith's 1933 "A Night in Malneat," a reprint of which also was included in that September issue.
Kuttner is a good writer, and I have enjoyed many of his stories and many of his collaborations with his wife C. L. Moore, but "Towers of Death" is not a good story. The plot and pacing and style are pedestrian and clunky. The plot actually has much in common with Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep," but while that story is evocative, rich with dimly glimpsed background and written in a distinctive style, Kuttner's piece here is leaden and flat, written like a bland detective story. And while the plot of "The Thing on the Doorstep" flows naturally from the characters' personalities and is driven by their decisions, a lot of "Towers of Death"'s narrative is driven by coincidences and dumb luck. Kuttner maybe just threw this one together to get some much-needed cash.
Simeon Gerard is a rich old dude who got involved with the occult and has spent a lot of time in the Orient, especially Tehran, learning about magic and the worship of "the dark god Ahriman" and so forth. When his American physician, Stone, tells him he only has a month to live he puts into action his plan to move his soul into the body of his big healthy young nephew Steven. All this is written in the third person, and we get boring scenes of conversations between Gerard and Stone the sawbones, Gerard and his Persian accomplice Dagh Ziaret, Gerard and his lawyer Morton (Gerard has to make sure all his property is legally handed over to Steven before he dies so he can have his hands on it after he switches bodies) and of course Gerard and Steven and Steven's hot girlfriend Jean Sloane.
It pains me to do it, but I have to give a thumbs down to this story. No wonder nobody wanted to reprint "Towers of Death"--this is a weak piece of work that only Kuttner completists and weird specialists will want to read for scholarly purposes.
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It was great to revisit a classic like "The Thing on the Doorstep" and find it as good as I had remembered--Lovecraft deserves his high reputation. And it was interesting to reread "The Scarlet Citadel," which I know I must have read in the "oughts" but which I had totally forgotten. And it was worth my time reading a little-known Kuttner story, even if it was a real disappointment, as I am very interested in Kuttner's career.
More short horror tales from authors that interest me in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.
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