Mysterious, Menacing and Macabre tales from R Bradbury, R Bloch, and A Derleth & H P Lovecraft

Last month we read Murray Leinster's story about a rat, "Side Bet," from Helen Hoke's 1981 anthology Mysterious, Menacing and Macabre.  Triple M has other stories by people we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are interested in, so let's read them.  

"The Tombling Day" by Ray Bradbury (1952)

According to isfdb, "The Tombling Day" first saw print in Shenandoah, a literary journal put out by staff at Washington and Lee University, where it appeared alongside a poem by e. e. cummings and an essay on James Joyce by Ezra Pound.  (I can't find a decent photo of the cover of M,M,M, and I can't find a decent photo of the cover of the Autumn 1952 issue of Shenandoah either, though the text of both is readable at the internet archive.)  A year later "The Tombling Day" was included in Groff and Lucy Conklin's anthology The Supernatural Reader, which has a terrific purple and green cover, and would go on to appear in the oft-reprinted Bradbury collection I Sing the Body Electric!

The government is building a highway through a little Missouri town, right through the cemetery!  So the people are digging up the graves and moving the coffins to the new cemetery.  But an old woman insists on having the coffin of her fiancé, who died before they could be married, like sixty years ago, brought to her house and opened so she could look upon her love, stolen by death so long ago.  Amazingly, his body has been preserved--he looks like he did when he died, like an attractive man in his twenties!  At first, the old woman is depressed, wishing she had died with him so she too would have defied aging and be as handsome as he.  But then the corpse quickly decays, its deterioration mimicking the aging process, and she watches as her beau appears to grow old and then finally suffer reduction to mere bones.  Relieved, the woman does a little dance, thrilled that she now looks younger than her fiancé and happy to be alive.

This story is OK.  Is it a reminder that women are vain and erratic, and/or a reminder that we should cherish life?

"Head Man" by Robert Bloch (1950)

Berlin, 1937.  Our main character is the executioner, who chops convicted criminals' heads off with a giant axe.  He becomes fascinated by the heads of the people he executes, wishes he could keep them!  It won't be easy to steal the heads, and of course he won't be able to steal all of them, he will have to select the choicest.  

One day in his superior's office he meets two convicts, people he will soon be decapitating.  One is a handsome older man; the other is a beautiful young woman, his daughter.  Immediately the executioner becomes determined to retain the heads of these two spectacular specimens!  Hm, what did these two people do to get convicted of a capital crime, anyway?  They were sticking pins in dolls of Adolf Hitler--they are witches!--and when the local "block leader" came over to investigate the rumors that these two were performing black magic, they killed him!  

The executioner plots to steal the heads of these murderous magicians, but a snag in his plans arises--after seeing them and before the date of their execution, the court determines they should be executed by firing squad instead of by decapitation.  The executioner acts quickly, seizing the witches ahead of schedule and chopping off their heads.  Nobody has claimed their bodies, so the executioner figures he can have the bodies destroyed before his superiors know what is up and report that claim the sorcerers were executed by firing squad as ordered, just ahead of schedule.

Our protagonist keeps the heads at his home for a little while, talking to them, and goes a little crazy, thinking they are talking back, and then hallucinating, seeing them outside after he has left them at home.  Then comes another snag--some cousin of the wizards has shown up wanting the bodies, and the executioner's colleagues haven't destroyed them yet, so the corpses have to be handed over.  This cousin will presumably notice the bodies are missing their heads, and if he complains it will become obvious the executioner disobeyed order and broke the rules and will be in deep doo doo.  Grabbing the heads from home, the executioner rushes to the dark storage area where the bodies lie and sews the heads on.  But the next day he is hauled before his superiors.  In the dark he accidentally attached the man's head to the woman's body and vice versa, and the cousin complained, and now the executioner is going to have his own head chopped off by the new executioner.

This story is just OK; the basic ideas and themes are not bad, but there are distracting problems.  Why is the tale set in Nazi Germany?  There isn't any specific 1937 Germany content; in fact, wikipedia is telling me that in 1936 it was ordered that the guillotine be the method of execution of civil criminals in Germany, and that the firing squad was reserved for military offenders.  Oops.  It would have made more sense to set the story in some earlier period--apparently before 1918 people were executed by axe in Germany.  I guess Bloch set the tale in Nazi Germany just to make it more sensational, and maybe because it makes the witches more sympathetic if they are using a voodoo doll to murder or torture Hitler and not somebody less reprehensible.

Another problem is that the executioner's machinations don't really make sense.  The execution of two witches--one a beautiful woman!--who murdered a Nazi Party official is obviously big news in the Berlin law enforcement community and among members of the National Socialist Party--it is suggested Goebbels could use the incident as the topic of a propaganda story.  So surely somebody would have noticed that the gorgeous sorceress didn't show up to be executed as scheduled, if only the members of the firing squad, and why would they keep mum?  It is also a little hard to believe that if there was enough light to sew on the heads that there wasn't enough light for the guy who executed them to tell the old man from the young woman.

"Head Man," after its debut in 15 Mystery Stories, would appear in a number of Bloch collections and horror anthologies, including Hauntings and Horrors: Ten Grisly Tales, which is credited to Alden H. Norton but which was in fact edited by Sam Moskowitz (according to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Moskowitz ghost-edited three anthologies for Norton, two for Roger Elwood and four for Leo Margulies.)   

"The Shuttered Room" by August Derleth and H. P. Lovecraft (1959)

Hoke here in 1981's M to the Third Power credits the story to Lovecraft, but isfdb lists August Derleth and H. P. Lovecraft as authors, while the January 1965 issue of The Magazine of Horror lists both men but puts HPL's name first.  Wikipedia says Derleth wrote the story based on "lines of story ideas left by Lovecraft after his death."  "The Shuttered Room" first saw light of day in the Arkham House volume The Shattered Room & Other Pieces, which has a really fine cover illo.  

"The Shunned Room" is very derivative, full of references direct and indirect to "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and "The Dunwich Horror," but the plotting, pacing, and many of the images are pretty good, so I liked it.

Abner Whatley has been travelling around the world--Paris, London, the Far East--studying the ancient civilizations of the South Pacific.  Abner has to return to Dunwich, to his grandfather's decrepit house attached to a mill on the Miskatonic, where Abner spent some time as a boy, because his grandfather has died and Abner has to deal with his inheritance.  Grandpa left him a written message in the dusty old house, telling him to make sure to destroy the room over the mill wheel where Abner's Aunt Sarah lived--Aunt Sarah, before Abner was born, took a little trip to Innsmouth, and when she got back Grandpa locked her in that room over the wheel, nailing the shutters closed and never letting her out, though decades passed.  In the message, Grandpa insists that if Abner should find anything alive--no matter how small--in that locked room whose shutters are nailed shut, he must kill it.

Abner unlocks Sarah's room, breaks open the shutters, glimpses a frog or toad or something in there but lets it be, and things proceed from there as we might expect.  As is common in these Lovecraftian stories, a lot of time is spent reading old documents and piecing together the clues they contain.  Among the clues in the many documents Abner finds in the old mill house is an indication that the monster that was locked in Aunt Sarah's room was a sort of elastic or plastic thing that could survive on little food at a tiny size, but grow to behemoth size if well fed.  Soon after Abner's arrival and his opening the windows of the shuttered room, something starts killing and eating the local livestock, and then the local people!  

While the least original of today's three horror stories, I found this one the most fun, because I am totally into this whole Lovecraft theme of alien monsters hiding in and preying upon decrepit New England towns and the way it leverages our fears about our identities and our families and about icky sex.  I think I can also offer you an academic hot take on "The Shuttered Room" that you can use in one of your papers at grad school.  You see, Abner's grandpa is a conservative and a disciplinarian, and when his daughter Sarah goes off to Innsmouth to hang out on the beach and have premarital sex--with her cousin!--he locks her up as punishment and to keep it from happening again.  (Bourgeois fear of women's sexuality!)  But too late!  She's already preggers!  Grandpa keeps Sarah locked up to limit the scandal, but the bastard child still manages to cause a lot of trouble for everybody.

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These stories are alright, but no big deal.  Maybe we'll find some stories that can get us a little more excited in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, when we again look at a magazine edited by Sam Merwin, Jr.