Let's surf on over to the internet archive and take a look at the September 1948 issue of Weird Tales, edited by Dorothy McIlwraith. In the list of new members of the Weird Tales Club we see the name of Jack Gaughan, who was then just beginning his successful career as a SF illustrator, and on the table of contents page we see the names of five writers we have already opined about here at MPorcius Fiction Log: August Derleth, Ray Bradbury, Stanton A. Coblentz, Edmond Hamilton, and Eric Frank Russell. Let's read those five stories and get a taste of what Jack Gaughan and other readers of Weird Tales in 1948 were getting for their 20 cents.
"The Whippoorwills in the Hills" by August Derleth
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| 1958 hardcover |
At night, a huge flock of whippoorwills settles in the valley where lies the Harrop house, and make so much noise with their cries that the narrator cannot sleep. The next day when he eavesdrops on the neighbors' phone convos, Dan finds that they are all talking about the whippoorwills--they could hear their racket, even though their homes are quite distant, and fear the bird's activity foreshadows an imminent death.
Sure enough, cattle and even people in the area start getting killed in the dark of night. During the day Dan conducts his investigations, looking into Abel's strange old books and talking to the locals, who refuse to help him, some quite angrily. Whenever he is near Abel's queer library Dan has visions, like unbidden memories, of weird landscapes and creatures. During the night Dan does his best to sleep while the whippoorwills alight on and around the house and make their interminable racket, and when he does sleep he dreams of monolithic towers and fungoid trees and the amoeba-like beings that live among them. As the story progresses we are given clear clues that Abel was casting spells from the books in order to "open a Gate" through which to contact or summon monsters from that other dimension, ansd that he himself was sucked bodily into that alien plane. Dan himself, by reading aloud a passage of one of Abel's books, got the attention of alien creatures and the murders of animals and people are being conducted by him in a state of stupefaction or alien possession, their blood a sacrifice to the extradimensional monsters that perhaps appeases them and saves him from being taken away as was his cousin.
We learn at the story's end that Dan is writing this memoir in captivity, having been captured by the local police in the vicinity of the dead body of a murdered woman--Dan refuses to admit he is the culprit, instead blaming the whippoorwills.
Derleth fills this story with direct references to people, places and things in Mythos stories by H. P. Lovecraft and in at least once instance Robert E. Howard. The towns of Dunwich and Arkham are mentioned, minor characters have names like Whateley, Abel's books bear titles like Unaussprechlichen Kulten, and the creatures in Dan's dreams have names like Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.
"The Whippoorwills in the Hills" starts out alright; the pacing and tone and style are good. But Derleth fails to tie everything up together in the end; at least I didn't quite understand the role of the whippoorwills in the story. All the stuff with the books and monsters from another dimension and the murders works as a discrete unit, it all makes internal sense, so the whippoorwills feel like a superfluous element just added on top of the story instead of integrated with the rest of it. I guess the birds are a manifestation of the aliens (whom we are told can take any shape) and it is they that drink the blood that Dan spills, or somehow direct him to spill the blood. It is possible that the whippoorwills seemed out of place to me because I was not very familiar with the folklore about them, and had forgotten that these birds played a role in Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror."
Another problem with the story is that it doesn't build up to a striking climax, it just sort of sails along and then ends, the tone and pace, which were perfectly adequate at the start, never changing, so it feels like the story just abruptly ends.
Merely acceptable. "The Whippoorwills in the Hills" would be included in the oft-reprinted Derleth collection, The Mask of Cthulhu.
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| British paperback editions, 1951 and 1976 |
Bradbury's dialogue is chilling, his metaphors powerful and illuminating (as metaphors, which so often are showy cliches that waste your time, should be), and the story is a perfect length, short and to the point. Quite good.
"Fever Dream" was first reprinted in 1959, in the collection A Medicine for Melancholy, and has since been widely anthologized.
"The Daughter of Urzun" by Stanton A. Coblentz
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| Most of the stories in this 1964 magazine were written by Coblentz, though many appear under pseudonyms |
Out of the starting gate, Stanton gets me on his side by reminding me of my New York days and relating a horror-story version of a typical New York experience--being mesmerized by an attractive woman on the subway! Our narrator and his blue-eyed wife Marjorie are riding the world's most famous mass-transit system when a "swarthy" "Oriental" woman with big hypnotic black eyes and a "cynical" mouth sits down across from them, and the narrator is disturbingly captivated by her--he can't stop looking at her, and her presence fills him with a weird dread. Later in the day, he and Marjorie get on a different train and the "Oriental" sits across from them again! After the sinister figure gets off, Marjorie tells the narrator that she was also fascinated and horrified by the woman, the sight of whom conjured up unaccountably bad feelings, like those associated with a terrible experience in the past.
That night our hero has a vivid dream, like a vision, in which he and Marjorie are dark-skinned people themselves, living in an ancient exotic city where animal-headed gods are worshiped. (At the end of the story we learn it is a city in "ancient Babylonia.") He and Marjorie are workers, he a brick mason and she a tender of the fires in a bakery, but a seductive noblewoman has taken notice of him--she has been summoning him to her palace to engage in a torrid affair that is ruining the narrator's marriage! As you have already guessed, this aristocratic lady, this homewrecker who "throbs" in the narrator's embrace, who is "lithe, sinuous, panther-like, a thing of curves and fire" is the woman from the subway, and this dream is a recovered memory of one of the narrator's past lives which was intimately associated with the past lives of Marjorie and the subway woman!
The main plot of the story is how the ancient incarnation of the narrator was forced to choose between his work-worn wife--the mother of his child--and the rich sexy lady who offered him a life of luxury, and the crimes and tragedies that are the product of this love triangle.
I am a sucker for stories about femmes fatale and stories about dangerous sexual relationships, about men being carried away by desire and doing things that are stupid or immoral, and so I found "The Daughter of Urzun" entertaining. Judged with cold objectivity, it is probably just average.
I sometimes wonder what value my blog provides when I praise universally acknowledged geniuses like Ray Bradbury--everybody and his brother can tell you Ray Bradbury's early stories are good, so I'm not adding much to the discourse by agreeing. I feel more confident that I am doing something worthwhile when I talk about stories and writers who have been forgotten or who are controversial, and "The Daughter of Urzun" falls into that forgotten category--isfdb indicates that it has never appeared in book form, and was only ever reprinted in an odd magazine in 1964--it is practically a lost relic from our literary past!
"The Watcher of the Ages" by Edmond Hamilton
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| Dutch edition of What's It Like Out There? |
(I recently bought Volumes 7, 9 and 10 of Hippocampus Press's Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and highly recommend them to those interested in speculative fiction of the 1930s--among the letters in these three volumes are those to Robert Bloch, Donald A. Wollheim, Henry Kuttner, Fritz Leiber, and C. L. Moore, as well as letters written by Moore to Lovecraft. Each of these three books is over 400 pages long and full of personality, insight, gossip, and helpful notes by editors David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi--I paid $25.00 for each and they are totally worth it.)
As regular readers of MPorcius Fiction Log know, I consider Edmond Hamilton a favorite--though I have panned some of his productions and Lovecraft certainly has a point about his reusing plots--and am curious to read this tale, one which Lovecraft, who died eleven years before it was published, never had a chance to pass judgement on.
The narrator of "The Watcher of the Ages" is Lane Adams, a geologist, a member of a team of eggheads accompanied by a mining executive exploring an ancient city in the "Matto Grosso" region of Brazil--rumor has it this city, lost in the jungle for centuries, is the site of valuable radioactive elements and other minerals. Adams is familiar with this part of Brazil and can communicate to the Indian porters and read the inscriptions on the ruined walls of the thousands-years-old metropolis. Both the native porters and the ancient inscriptions say the city is hellishly dangerous because it is guarded by an inhuman being and you should get out while you still can, but you don't think a bunch of American scientists and businessmen are going to believe that mumbo jumbo, do you?
At night, somebody sabotages the expedition's Geiger counters, but luckily the mining executive has kept one Geiger counter separate from the others and it is still serviceable. Using it, the expedition discovers a source of radiation deep in a mountain. Clad in protective suits, the men descend an ancient stairway to find a pit full of radioactive material--on the edge of this pit is a sort of laboratory where the scientists of six thousand years ago created an artificial man, the inhuman guardian the inscriptions and Indians warned them of! The mining exec comes up with the scheme of selling the golem-making apparatus to the highest bidder--Hamilton doesn't name names but I'm betting Joe Stalin and Chairman Mao would be in the market for a process that could build an invincible army with which to put those paper tigers and running dogs in their place! Of course, the businessman will first have to murder the do-gooder scientists who came on this expedition not to get rich but to expand the frontier of knowledge.
This is when Lane Adams reveals the astounding truth--he is the inhuman guardian, in disguise as an American geologist! For six thousand years he has guarded the city and the ancient lab, sabotaging and diverting expeditions hunting for it because he feared the human race was not yet ready to shoulder the responsibility that comes with the ability to create life. The mining exec and his henchmen try to kill him but the guardian has super strength and is practically invulnerable to bullets and blows, and the fight ends with the unscrupulous business people being thrown down into the radioactive pit to die a horrible death.
"Adams" lets the scientists go after they promise to keep the ancient lab and radioactive pit a secret. Then, weary of life, in despair of mankind ever developing to the point that he can safely hand over to them the secret of creating synthetic people, the immortal guardian sets a bomb to collapse the mountain, thus burying the lab and pit for the foreseeable future, and commits suicide by jumping into the radioactive pit from which he sprang sixty centuries ago.
This story feels underdeveloped; its numerous fertile ideas--exploring a jungle and ancient city, how would people react to learning that they could create synthetic people, the psychology of a superior inhuman being living in disguise among humans for thousands of years--could form the basis for all kinds of adventures and thought-provoking discussions and dramatic scenes, but in this short story they amount to little. A lost opportunity. I'm judging "The Watcher of the Ages" barely acceptable.
"The Watcher of the Ages" would go on to be reprinted in the 1974 collection What's It Like Out There?
"Displaced Person" by Eric Frank Russell
Ohhh, another New York story, this one set in Central Park! I know I don't have to tell you how much I miss Central Park...Bethesda Fountain, the Ramble, Turtle Pond...those were the days....
Anyway, this is a silly gimmicky story, as these short shorts tend to be. The narrator is sitting on a park bench when a well-dressed man sits next to him. The narrator gets the impression that this is some refugee from Europe, a political dissident driven out of his country, and in conversation the man relates that he led a failed revolt against a "leader" who had "delusions of grandeur" and "posed as the final arbiter on everything from birth to death." The man expresses his frustration over the fact that his enemy controls all the propaganda and has suppressed all his attempts for to make his case before the public. When the narrator assures him that in America we have free speech and the dissident can say what he likes, the defeated rebel murmurs, "My name is Lucifer."
Oh, brother!
Is this story just a goofy joke? Or an attack on Christianity and Christian institutions? Does it make sense to equate God and/or Christian churches with Hitler and Lenin and Stalin, and Satan (and Satanists?) with people who opposed or fled totalitarian regimes? The story is so brief, Russell can't make a case for his strange argument (if it is an argument), so it just comes across as a sort of cheap thumbing of the nose at religious people.
Or maybe I am so used to SF writers goofing on religion that I am missing Russell's point--maybe the story is supposed to be an example of the Devil's audacity and trickery, maybe we are expected to bristle at the rank presumption of Lucifer playing the victim and the effrontery of his assumption of the mantle of real victims of real tyranny and oppression.
Whatever Russell is trying to do here I don't get it and I don't enjoy it--have to give this thing a thumbs down.
I have now read sixteen stories by Eric Frank Russell over the course of this blog's unlikely life, and here are handy links to my blog posts that address the other fifteen (I liked some of them):
"Mana," "Jay Score," and "Homo Saps"
"Metamorphosite," "Hobbyist," "Late Night Final," and "Dear Devil"
"Fast Falls the Eventide," "I Am Nothing," and "Weak Spot"
"Allamagoosa," "Into Your Tent I'll Creep," and "Study in Still Life"
"Exposure"
"Love Story"
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I guess we shouldn't be surprised that Ray Bradbury's story is, by a wide margin, the best of this lot. The conventional wisdom wins again!
In our next episode a 1970s novel about travel in outer space.
Confirming the excellence of a writer like Ray Bradbury is no crime. Like you, I'd rather find a lost classic or an underrated story than to agree with critical consensus about great writers.
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