Three early stories by Frank Belknap Long: "The Ocean Leech," "The Flame Midget" and "The Peeper"

Let's read three stories by Frank Belknap Long, a celebrated member of the Weird Tales gang who also managed to get some stories into John W. Campbell's Astounding, as we saw in our last episode.  One can borrow a copy of the 1975 collection The Early Long from the internet archive, and from this volume I chose three stories whose titles I thought were amusing.  But before reading the stories, I read the long introduction by Long himself, a pleasant autobiographical sketch.  This collection also includes introductions to each story by Long as well, making it a fun book for fans of SF and weird fiction of the 1920s, '30s and '40s, full of references to and reflections on the many SF writers and editors Long read, knew, and did business with.  Long seems like such a nice guy in these non-fiction writings that I feel a little guilty for using his fiction as a punching bag here at MPorcius Fiction Log the last few years.  Let's hope these three stories are good enough that I won't have to resort to fisticuffs!

(I will note here that I have already read and blogged about four stories that appear in The Early Long:  "Death-Waters," "The Space-Eaters," "The Hounds of Tindalos," and "The Elemental.") 

"The Ocean Leech" (1925)

"The Ocean Leech" appears to have been a hit; after its Weird Tales debut in '25, it appeared again in the unique magazine in 1937 as a reprint, and since then has been included in numerous Long collections and horror anthologies like The Third Pan Book of Horror Stories and Thirteen Tales of Terror.  

"The Ocean Leech," like eight pages here, tells the story of the repeated attacks of a huge gelatinous cephalopod on an ocean-going sailing vessel--the thing has long tentacles with suckers, and snatches sailors and pulls them overboard, feeding on them by dissolving them as it drags them across the deck.  The story is narrated by the ship's captain.  Long describes in gruesome detail the process of men being pulled to their doom, their heads banging on stairs and getting stuck in the scuppers, and of the process of being dissolved.  Gross!  More intellectually compelling is the fact that the monster's victims do little to resist--something about the monster's chemical secretions seems to hypnotize the sailors so they actually take pleasure in being devoured!  Only one man, a man described as a "stoic," fights the monster, saving the narrator and driving off the creature for good.  When the captain admits he "enjoyed" being dragged from his cabin by the creature, the stoic seaman says "I saved you from yourself!"  Long appears to have written here an allegory about how men are often destroyed by their own base sensual desires, but can overcome such temptations with strength of mind and save themselves and their fellows.

(Is there any chance this gooey monster that sucks in men and devours them is a symbol for the vagina?)

Well-structured and paced, with effective images and a surprising philosophical/psychological level, "The Ocean Leech" is much better than I have come to expect from Long.  Thumbs up!  

"The Flame Midget" (1936)

"The Flame Midget" first appeared in Astounding while that  famous magazine was edited by F. Orlin Tremaine.  (In his intro to the story here in The Early Long, Long says John W. Campbell bought the story, but according to isfdb and wikipedia, Campbell was not hired to edit Astounding until 1937, so maybe Long's memory is in error.)  Groff Conklin saw fit in 1946 to include "The Flame Midget" in his bulky anthology The Best of Science Fiction and Ernestine Donaldy and Andre Norton selected it for their 1973 anthology Gates To Tomorrow: An Introduction to Science Fiction.  

Richard Ashley is a reclusive and misanthropic bacteriologist who spends all his time looking at tiny living things in his many microscopes.  Our narrator, John, is the closest thing this antisocial egghead has to a friend, and when Ashley contacts him, John rides a bus 300 miles to see what is up with the hermit.  Ashley looks worn out, and is shaking like a leaf, and soon John finds out why--Ashley has been contacted by a superior being from outer space!

This arrogant extraterrestrial is a scout from a civilization far more advanced and sophisticated than ours--in fact, these jerks see us as little better than bugs!  Speaking of bugs, these aliens (for pseudo-scientific reasons Long expatiates on at some length) are microscopic--even their space ships are microscopic!  The alien scout caught Ashley's attention by climbing onto the slide of one of Ashley's microscopes.  Conveniently, like in so much SF, the aliens are telepaths and this little bastard communicates by directly projecting images and concepts into Ashley's mind.  

The alien scout has admitted to Ashley that when he returns to his home world he is going to advise his people to just exterminate the human race and take over Earth, which you will be proud to learn is a prime piece of real estate on the galactic market.  Maybe you are wondering how a space navy whose ships are the size of an amoeba could defeat the human race; well, Ashley's little friend has demonstrated to him that he can shoot from his body a flame ray that can kill a human at a range of 3000 miles!  Long explains this amazing power with another hearty dose of eye-roll-inducing pseudo-scientific balderdash: 

...every cell of an animal body contains tiny centers of radiation called radiogens, which have a temperature of six thousand degrees centigrade....their excess heat is dissipated by the water in our tissues....the product of a hotter and more concentrated sun, its [the microscopic alien's] radiant energies are not damped.... 

Because of the distance between Earth and the home world of these wee little imperialists it will take decades for their scout to get home and for their microscopic genocide fleet to get here.  Ashley wants to kill the mighty mite, and thus delay the inevitable alien invasion still further--maybe with an extra century to work on our defenses we'll be able to defend ourselves form the microscopic menace!  The ending of the story describes in some gruesome detail the failure of Ashley's effort to slay the teeny tiny terror, and the anxiety our narrator, now the only man who knows the terrible doom the human race now faces, inherits from Ashley.

In his intro, Long stresses that this is a science fiction rather than a fantasy story (which is why he invokes the name of Campbell, a sort of icon of sciency SF.)  But I feel that a "real" science fiction story involves the writer coming up with some speculative science or technology idea (what if we could all teleport?  what if we set up a colony on the Moon?  what if we could extend our lifespans one hundred times?) and then building up some kind of drama around how this new science development might change the lives of individuals or society as a whole.  It seems to me that what Long did in "The Flame Midget" is come up with a compelling horror story idea (what if I looked in a microscope and there was a person in there hanging out with the parameciums--and this person was pure evil!) and then building up wild and unconvincing science mumbo jumbo to buttress his cool horror idea.  I'm not knocking Long for this--I like a good horror story as much as a good hard SF story--just questioning the taxonomy of the story (admittedly a sterile parlor game.)

Anyway, this story is OK; the central idea of seeing the reconnaissance operative of an invincible alien invasion force in your microscope, and the climax in which Ashley and the narrator suffer horrendous fates, are not bad.  

    

"The Peeper" (1944)

In his intro to "The Peeper," the final story in The Early Long, Long tells us that it contains some of his best writing, but has never been anthologized.  (Over ten years after Long wrote this, "The Peeper" would be included in the 1988 anthology Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors.)  Unfortunately, I have to report that this story is sappy and sentimental, full of tired cliched goop we've heard too many times before: not only must readers suffer romantic gush about how poetic Irish people are, but we have inflicted upon us one of the most boring of stock characters, the cynical gossip columnist who writes things like "What after-Pearl Harbor deb gave what buck private playboy the runaround, oh so recently, at the Pelican club?"  Lame!

Michael O'Hara is an Irish immigrant to New York, a graduate of Dublin University.  As a youth he was a sensitive poetic type who wrote perfect horror stories, stories only sensitive sophisticated people could truly appreciate!  But today he's a gray-haired 34-year old gossip columnist, in fact New York's most successful gossip columnist!  As we might expect of an Irishman, O'Hara staggers home drunk one night.  He finds in his bed the dead body of a beautiful young man in ancient Greek attire--it is his beautiful sensitive younger self!  A mysterious and bitter voice tells O'Hara that he killed this sensitive young man because O'Hara "could no longer abide his dreams!"  In the morning O'Hara tells himself it was all the product of booze or just a nightmare, but at his office where he's banging out another gossip column he discovers evidence that the dead body of his younger self really was in his own bed last night!  Then he has hallucinations of monsters and dies.  On the sheet in the typewriter before which O'Hara's corpse sits his editor sees the last lines O'Hara would write, some bilge about "the silver lark" that "takes wing" below the "cliffs of Inishowen;" the editor looks away, and when he looks back the page is now blank!   

Just a bunch of boring and obvious junk poorly riveted together to produce a tedious and irritating clunker--quite bad.  It is understandable that this story meant a lot to Long, who as a youth (as H. P. Lovecraft tells it in his correspondence) was an aesthete who wanted to devote his life to poetry and only churned out hack genre fiction to make a living, but "The Peeper" is just no good at all, absolutely failing to provoke any human emotion or provide any psychological insight or present any effective horror images.

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"The Ocean Leech" is a good story, and much of the non-fiction material in the book will be entertaining to the classic SF fan, so if you can look at The Early Long for free, as I have, it is worth your time.  But it is hard to recommend "The Flame Midget," and impossible to recommend "The Peeper," to anybody who doesn't already have some deep abiding interest in Long or the history of Weird Tales and Astounding.

More crazy stories from magazines printed before you were born in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!