Weird Tales, Jan 1937: Thorp McClusky and Duane W. Rimel & H. P. Lovecraft

The January 1937 issue of Weird Tales contains two stories by big names I have already blogged about: one of my favorite H. P. Lovecraft stories, "The Thing on the Doorstep," and a quite short piece by Henry Kuttner, "The Eater of Souls."  Two other pieces in the issue are catching my eye, a tale by Thorp McClusky and a collaboration between Lovecraft and Duane W. Rimel, which appears in the magazine solely under Rimel's name.  

"The Woman in Room 607" by Thorp McClusky

Back in 2020 we read McClusky's "The Crawling Horror," the tale of a shapeshifting monster.   In "The Woman in Room 607" McClusky offers readers another menace characterized by physical instability.

Police Commissioner Charles Ethredge has a steady girlfriend, Mary Roberts, but he must be some special guy, because another woman is after him, one of the sexiest chicks in town, dancer Marilyn Des Lys!  Des Lys spots this top cop on the street and exerts an hypnotic power over him, drawing him into her room in a flea bag hotel where she embraces him.  Ethredge tries to resist, but finds himself unable to break the spell she has over him until he sees in a mirror that he is embracing not the hottest girl he has ever laid eyes on, but something akin to a cloud of smoke or mist!  He flees!

The next day Ethredge begins to get an inkling of the mind-blowing truth--Marilyn Des Lys died over a week ago!  As the story proceeds he and his right hand man, detective Peters, fill in the blanks of this otherworldly case and we get a melodramatic tale of interlocking love triangles, murder, and the occult.  Des Lys was the charismatic leader of a cult that learned how to cheat death; as they surrounded her death bed, cult members cast part of their own life forces out to Des Lys' departing soul, so that, while her body expired and was cremated, her ghost endured in this world, invisible and unable to interact very much with solid matter.  But by drawing further life energy from a man in love with her, Italian-American Nick Gallichio, she became stronger, took on some substance, became capable of presenting the image of her gorgeous body, and thus able to seduce a series of disreputable men and suck away most of their life force, leaving them shriveled wrecks who were casually diagnosed by the indifferent authorities as junkies.  

Now that the diabolical dancer's physical matter meter is at like 90%, she is setting her sights higher, trying to seduce Ethredge, a respectable man for whom she feels true desire and with whom she plans to share the secret of life eternal.  She no longer has any time for poor Gallichio--Des Lys reveals to her biggest fan her absolute contempt, calling him "a wop" and telling him, "Fool, you were just the rent!"  Heartsick Gallichio kills himself after directing the fuzz to Des Lys' new HQ; there, Des Lys almost hypnotizes Ethredge into joining her in a centuries long career of vampire like parasitism, but Peters, with a silver bladed knife, and Mary Roberts, with her love, save Ethredge's soul and destroy the living dead dancer.

I like McClusky's themes (the femme fatale, the quest for immortality, suicide), but he could have explained some things better (e.g., why some people can see Marilyn Des Lys and some can't, what killed this athletic young person and why the police commissioner didn't know such a celebrity had died) and he writes his erotically charged tale about how we poor men are at the mercy of sexy babes in a very simple, almost juvenile, style.  We'll call "The Woman in Room 607" acceptable.  It looks like McClusky wrote several stories starring Ethredge and Peters, most of which debuted in Weird Tales and all of which were collected in a 1975 book, Loot of the Vampire.    

"The Disinterment" by Duane W. Rimel and H. P. Lovecraft

Back in October we read Rimel's "The Metal Chamber," about a guy who developed his telepathic abilities via drugs and ended up going insane after he contacted some aliens.  Rimel was one of H. P. Lovecraft's many correspondents, and it appears the man from Providence read many of Rimel's manuscripts and offered advice and support.  In the introductory matter to my copy of the Corrected Fifth Printing of The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, leading scholar of the weird S. T. Joshi writes "Rimel maintains that Lovecraft's revisions in the story ["The Disinterment"] were very light, and letters by Lovecraft unearthed by Murray and myself appear to confirm that claim."  I am reading "The Disinterment" in The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions.

Our narrator and his best friend are medical men from prominent families--in fact, their stone mansions, which resemble medieval castles, sit within a quarter-mile of each other.  When the narrator returns from the Philippines, best friend diagnoses him with leprosy!  Our narrator fears the authorities will shut him away if anybody finds out.  His pal comes up with a crazy scheme.  Best friend has acquired a drug in Haiti that will put you in a coma which appears precisely like death!  Our narrator can thus fake his death, be buried (his buddy will supervise the proceedings so he doesn't get embalmed or anything) and then, when nobody is looking, best friend will dig up the narrator, who can live out his life in secret in best friend's mansion.

I didn't quite understand the supposed utility of the narrator faking his death and being buried alive--why did he agree to this crazy scheme, how did he think it would help him?  It seems the idea is that dying of leprosy is embarrassing, so by concealing the cause of his death he is preserving the family name from shame.  Personally, I think the plot of "The Disinterment" would have made more sense if the narrator was wanted by the cops or a crime syndicate or something, though I guess the fact that the best friend has fooled the narrator into thinking he has leprosy makes him more diabolical.  And maybe "saving the family name from shame" was more resonant in the 1930s than it is today, when we are all radical individualists and the family is typically seen as an institution that stifles you and should be rebelled against. 

Anyway, the good parts of the story are how the narrator, after waking up after being buried alive, comes to realize his friend is in fact experimenting on him, discovers what the experiment is, achieves his revenge, and then commits suicide.

I like it.  Besides a few Lovecraft collections, "The Disinterment" has reappeared in a 1990 small press Rimel collection entitled To Yith and Beyond.

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Lots of murder, suicide and morally suspect efforts to cheat death today.  Not bad.  We'll probably hear more from Thorp McClusky and Duane W. Rimel as we continue to explore the weird here at MPorcius Fiction Log.