From the Feb '33 issue of Weird Tales: H B Cave, C A Smith, H P Lovecraft & A Derleth

Let's take a gander at the February 1933 issue of Farnsworth Wright's Weird Tales.  Now, we've already read one story from its pages, Donald Wandrei's "The Fire Vampires," but the issue also includes stories from two men we venerate, H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, and two men whose work we (sometimes) tolerate, Hugh B. Cave and August Derleth, so let's check them out.

(I read the Cave and Derleth pieces from the scan of the February 1933 issue of WT, where they debuted, at the internet archive.  Seeking the best possible texts, I read the Lovecraft from my copy of the corrected Ninth printing of Arkham House's Dagon and Other Macabre Tales and the Smith from an electronic library copy of The Maze of the Enchanter: Volume Four of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, edited by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger.)

"The Cult of the White Ape" by Hugh B. Cave (1933)

"The Cult of the White Ape" has been reprinted in numerous places, like Keep on the Light (less than a year after it appeared in Weird Tales) and Michel Parry's The Rivals of King Kong (in 1978) so I'm thinking this might be a good one.  Anyway, I love the idea of a killer ape--the 1933 King Kong is my favorite movie, beating out even such classics as The Driller Killer, Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key and Gamera vs Guiron in the MPorcius film pantheon--so I am starting this blog post with high hopes!  

This novelette (14 pages here in Weird Tales) is a memoir by an administrator in the Belgian Congo, Varicks, the only white man in a remote village deep in a jungle where it is always raining.  He tells us what happened when a white couple, oafish fat drunk Betts and his pretty young wife Lucilia, moved into the area to start a rubber tree plantation.  The drunken Betts immediately trips over the local witch doctor, a deformed man with filed teeth who is reclining on the veranda of Varicks's dwelling, and then brutally kicks him.  Betts is also physically abusive to his native employees and to his wife, and even plants some of his rubber trees in a clearing said to be sacred to a secretive cult of lycanthropes.

The rubber planter goes increasingly crazy as the story progresses.  When he beats two workers to death the narrator goes to arrest him, but Betts, absolutely mad, overpowers Varicks and carries the administrator and Lucilia to that sacred clearing, binding them in front of the tower at the clearing's center.  Naked, the maniac, moving like an ape, dances around and around the tower.  When moonlight falls on the tower (Cave I think makes a mistake, having the moonlight touch the bottom of the tower before the apex) the insane planter moves to kill his captives!  Amazingly, they are rescued by a pack of white apes bigger than gorillas!  These apes are joined by snakes and great cats and reptiles, apparently local inhabitants in their lycanthropic forms; the white ape who carries Varicks and Lucilia to safety is the witch doctor in his animal form, doing Varicks a solid because he has always tried to be a fair administrator--he tended to the witch doctor's injuries after Beets kicked him, for example.  Beets is killed and apparently eaten, and the narrator and Lucilia lose consciousness, waking up back in the village.  Varicks quits his job and leaves the jungle and he and Lucilia get married.

"The Cult of the White Ape" kind of reminds me of those Somerset Maugham stories about two white guys in a colony, one of whom knows how to correctly deal with the natives while the other doesn't; lots of Maugham stories of this type also feature love triangles, as Cave's story here does.  "The Cult of the White Ape" isn't very well-written, but I guess reaches the level of "acceptable," and the plot is not bad.  The story is never boring, being full of violence and blood, and the author's treatment of the black Africans is interesting--they are obviously very alien, but are portrayed as essentially sympathetic, as victims and as meters out of justice; in the last line of the story Varicks tells us that the witch doctor is "wiser by far than any of us."

A passing grade for this one.     

"The Mandrakes" by Clark Ashton Smith (1933) 

This is one of Smith's stories of the French province of Averoigne.  In the fifteenth century, there live a wizard and a witch, a married couple who, in their hut on the edge of a village, make and sell love potions.  Ironically, their marriage is not too good--the witch is violent and impossible to get along with.  One day she attacks the wizard with a knife and in the resulting fight he kills her.  The wizard buries her body under a bed of mandrake plants.  When he harvests the mandrake roots for his potions some months later he finds the roots, which often somewhat resemble a human form, to be shockingly accurate representations of his dead wife's body!  When he cuts them they writhe and bleed!  He uses them to make potions anyway, and these love potions have a calamitous effect on all who imbibe them!  The villagers who tolerated the wizard's illegal trade when he provided them wares that facilitated their love affairs now turn on him and the authorities exact the ultimate penalty!

A brief and well crafted story with lots of fun horror and supernatural elements.  Thumbs up!  "The Mandrakes" would be reprinted in numerous Smith collections and in one of those Stefan Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Weinberg anthologies put out by Barnes & Noble.

"The Cats of Ulthar" by H. P. Lovecraft (1920)

This quite brief piece, according to isfdb part of Lovecraft's "Dream Cycle," first appeared in the amateur press publication Tryout and was reprinted in Weird Tales in 1926 and again in this 1933 issue.

In a town in some fantasy land live a couple who hate cats and capture and murder any who come into their yard.  The cat-loving townspeople are too scared of this couple to do anything about it, but one day a caravan of what we might call gypsies if we forgot we weren't supposed to say that anymore comes to town.  When a cat who is the comfort of an orphan among the travelers' ranks is (apparently) killed by the sinister couple the child calls upon the travelers' gods and after the caravan has left the cats of the town unite to eat the cat-killing couple.

"The Cats of Ulthar" has a tone sort of like a fairy tale, and I have to admit I prefer those Lovecraft stories that are presented in the form of first-person narratives and/or news clippings and scientific reports.  This story is just OK; presumably a lot of people connect to the story because they love cats, the way I connect to a story like Smith's "The Mandrakes" because it is about a topic close to my heart, the disastrous sexual relationship. 

As you might expect, besides appearing in three billion Lovecraft collections, "The Cats of Ulthar" has been included in several cat anthologies.

I almost didn't include these covers in the blog post because they are so bad, but 
decided that they are bad in a way that excites laughter and so may add entertainment value
to MPorcius Fiction Log.

"The Vanishing of Simmons" by August Derleth (1933)

If isfdb is to be believed, this story has never been reprinted, so I am readying myself for a total disaster.

Efficiency expert and amateur investigator into the occult John Simmons has vanished, and the narrator, a medical man and friend of Simmons named Sexton, tells us how it happened.  

Simmons's father, the Major, had a big estate near Richmond.  Jennie, a young "mulatto" woman worked there, as did Jennie's mother.  Simmons found Jennie attractive, but Jennie and Mom left the Major's employ when the Major heard rumors that Jennie was in a voodoo cult and his efforts to get her to abandon the practice of black magic lead to violence between himself and the two women.  The Major, a healthy man, died of a heart attack soon after this fracas--could he have been the victim of voodoo?

Simmons sold the estate and moved into town.  Jennie's mother showed up one day, selling photographs.  Simmons purchased one, a photo of a slender mixed race woman clad in the costume of a voodoo priestess; the figure was facing away from the camera, but Simmons presumed it was Jennie.  Simmons hung it up in his home where he could see it all the time and became sort of obsessed with it.

One day Simmons comes to Sexton to say the picture has changed--the woman has turned to face the camera and her face is a grotesque mask of hate!  Sexton confirms Simmons's story--the picture has changed, and looking at it is very disturbing.  Sexton takes away the picture, but he is too late--Simmons develops a mysterious injury on his chest, which first looks like a bruise and then later like a stab wound.  Then he disappears, never to be seen again.  When Sexton looks at the photo it has changed again--the woman holds a knife and laying before her on the ground, dead, is Simmons!  Sexton throws the horrifying photo into the fire, and some time later learns that Jennie and her mother have been found dead, mysteriously burned to death!

This story feels like something Derleth threw together quickly without carefully thinking it over and  without troubling to revise it.  There are passages that feel extraneous, like a preamble about "loopholes in natural laws," and others that are needlessly confusing, while some plot points feel disconnected and elements that should have been elaborated on, like Simmons's feelings for Jennie, are given short shrift.   The basic idea of voodoo practitioners using a photograph to exact revenge on white people who mistreated them is good, but the fact that Jennie and her mother leave themselves vulnerable to an obvious counter attack--or just an ordinary accident which causes damage to the photo--feels like a plot hole.  Also, why does Derleth have the voodoo priestess both kill Simmons through the picture and suck him into the picture?  Just one or the other would make more sense and be scarier--for example, if Jennie had imprisoned Simmons in the picture alive, maybe torturing or tormenting him or something, Sexton would face a terrible dilemma: burning the picture might liberate Simmons but also kill him; maybe instead of destroying the photo Sexton would feel impelled to obsessively protect it from Jennie and her cult.  

The bones of a good story are here, but not enough work was done to erect those bones and give them life, and as the tale stands I've gotta give "The Disappearance of Simmons" a thumbs down.   

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Our exploration of 1930s Weird Tales creeps forward on little cat feet, or maybe stomps forward on the paws of righteous apes.  Either way, progress on this weird odyssey continues.