Weird Tales, November 1937: Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore and H. P. Lovecraft

Back in May of 2021, we sampled the contents of the November 1937 issue of Farnsworth Wright's magazine of the bizarre and unusual, Weird Tales, when we read Psycho-scribe Robert Bloch's story "The Secret of Sebek."  Today let's investigate some of the other attractions that lie behind Margaret Brundage's enticing Yellow Peril/BDSM cover, stories to the count of three by Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, and H. P. Lovecraft.

"Quest of the Starstone" by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner (1937)

Many times we have seen Jirel of Joiry, medieval robber baroness, and Northwest Smith, interplanetary criminal, travel between dimensions to get involved in a psychic battle of wills.  Here we go again!

The first section of "Quest of the Starstone," in verse and in prose, tells us how Jirel and her little army besieges and eventually busts into the castle of the evil wizard Franga to steal the Starstone, a fiery jewel said to bring its owner luck.  Franga vows revenge and escapes through a magical portal.

Then the scene shifts several million miles and several centuries to a boozehall on Mars where Northwest Smith and his Venusian buddy Yural are hitting the sauce.  Smith is getting homesick for Earth, and sings "The Green Hills of Earth" to himself.  Then Franga appears through a magical portal and hires Smith to steal the Starstone back for him!  (Yural tags along.)

On Earth in the year 1500 Franga teaches Smith how to activate his portal sorcery, and Smith enters Castle Joiry to meet Jirel.  We hear many times how Smith has steel-colored eyes and Jirel has yellow eyes.  Passing through one of Franga's portals, Smith, Jirel and Yural end up in a gray featureless wasteland where the wizard awaits them.  Smith decides to betray Franga and not seize the Starstone from Jirel, so Franga teleports away, thinking to wait for the three to get hungry and thirsty in this dimension where there is no food or drink.

With their heat ray pistols the men repel an attack by the animated corpses of alien dog people.  Then Fraga attacks, I guess having forgotten his whole idea of waiting for the three to get weak from hunger and thirst.  (Of all people, you'd think a wizard would have some patience.)  Franga binds Smith and Yural with his sorcery and tortures them in a way that doesn't physically harm them in an effort to break their will.  But Smith's will is unbreakable, and the space criminal actually manages to shatter the Starstone, freeing the magical being that has been trapped within it.  This being grants the wish of Jirel, Smith and Yural to be back "home," which sends Jirel to Joiry and the spacefaring outlaws back to that bar on Mars, where they wonder if it was all a dream.

This story, perhaps because of Kuttner's input, is unlike many Jirel and Smith stories in that it moves at a brisk pace and has some action, which is good.  Unfortunately, the ending is a little hard to take--Franga and Jirel are standing close enough to the bound Smith that Smith can kick the Starstone out of Jirel's hand as she is handing it to the wizard.  Couldn't Moore and Kuttner have come up with something better than this?  I guess the real plot of the story, the real narrative, is how Jirel, who tortures people all the time, comes to feel for Smith when he gets tortured, so much so that she is willing to give up the Starstone, and how Smith, a dangerous criminal who robs people all the time, comes to feel for Jirel and turns his back on an employer rather than rob Jirel, but, come on, the action and adventure portion of the story could be a little better thought out. 

The rules governing the Starstone are also kind of contrived and silly; the Starstone will lose its good luck properties if you just steal it; you have to win it in battle or receive it from its current owner who gives it to you freely.  So, it seems, Franga can't just murder Jirel with his magic and take the stone, that won't count as "in battle," but he can torture Smith until Jirel feels so bad for Smith she gives the stone to Franga, because somehow that counts as "freely" handing it over.  But couldn't Franga have just tortured Jirel or threatened to set fire to her castle or something until she gave the Starstone to him "freely?"  Also, nobody in the story seems to derive much luck from owning the Starstone--Franga's castle is taken by Jirel's army while he owns the stone, and while Jirel owns the stone she is lured into another dimension where she is "convinced" to give up the stone.

OK, I guess.

Besides the expected Jirel and Smith collections, you can find "Quest of the Starstone" in anthologies of fantasy stories by Lin Carter and Joachim Korber, even though the story features lots of ray gun action which would have, I would have thought, disqualified it as a characteristic fantasy tale.

"The Case of Herbert Thorp" by Henry Kuttner (1937)

Here we have a tale that would not be reprinted until the 21st century, when in 2011 Centipede Press offered their 300-dollar volume of Kuttner stories and in 2016 Haffner Press published their second volume of Kuttner stories, available for the low low price of  $45.00.  

"The Case of Herbert Thorp" is a silly joke story; I guess you might call it a recursive or meta inside joke, seeing as it is set in the milieu if pulp magazine production and refers obliquely to Clark Ashton Smith and to C. L. Moore.  

Herbert Thorp is the editor of a fantasy magazine, and in the first scene he is rejecting a story from a weird little fat guy who has come by the office.  Fatso's story relates how a man is inducted into a band of hideous ghouls, who magically spirit him away to their world of greyness, then send him back to Earth to capture his own brother and bring said brother back through the magic portal so the ghouls can feast upon his flesh.  The protagonist eats his brother's hand and arm, and steals his brother's ring and slips it on his own finger.

Thorp says the story is unbelievable and so he won't print it.  Then he falls asleep and dreams he is living out the story shorty tried to sell him.  But wait!  Thorp's secretary finds him dead at his desk with a new ring on his finger!  And Thorp's brother came in earlier and is now nowhere to be found!  I guess it wasn't a dream after all!  

Silly filler, barely acceptable, and I am being generous because I like the description of the ghouls.  

"Hypnos" by H. P. Lovecraft (1923)

The Weird Story Reprint for this November '37 issue of Weird Tales is H. P. Lovecraft's "Hypnos," which was first printed in 1923 in The National Amateur and made its first appearance in an oversized anniversary issue of Weird Tales in the summer of 1924.  We've actually already read a story that appears in that anniversary issue, Lovecraft's collaboration with C. M. Eddy, Jr., "The Loved Dead."  I am reading "Hypnos" in my Corrected Ninth Printing of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. 

Our narrator is an English sculptor, a loner who has never had a friend and has always wondered about the alien realms one can only access in dreams--not the ordinary dreams of ordinary people, but the kinds of dreams a creative man of imagination only has once or twice in a lifetime.

One day the narrator meets an odd character, a man of great beauty with big mesmerizing eyes--just by looking at those eyes the sculptor realizes that this man is going to be the only friend he will ever have, and that he will guide him to those mysterious realms accessible only while asleep!  They live together, take drugs together, and explore other dimensions in their drug-induced sleep, universes the narrator can't describe to us because the languages of Earth have no words meet to the task of describing them, because the minds of humans can't really comprehend them!  Always the man with the strange eyes explores a little ahead of the sculptor, crosses barriers between dimensions before him, sees further than can the artist.  

Then disaster strikes!  The narrator's mysterious friend penetrates to a realm where he, apparently, arouses the attention of a malevolent entity!  He tells the sculptor that they must cease their questing--they must stop sleeping altogether insofar as it is possible!  For two years they use drugs and frequent wild night spots in a desperate effort to keep their sleep down to one or two hours a night!  But eventually the mystery man falls into a deep sleep, and the narrator goes into a kind of frenzied fit that attracts the neighbors and the authorities, and then comes our twist ending that suggests that maybe there never was any friend, maybe our narrator is truly insane and the friend was just an hallucination, a personification of the narrator's ideal vision of himself!  

Here is where I tell you the thing you already know, that Lovecraft deserves his high reputation and this is a very good story.  In "Hypnos" we have a work of weird fiction that is actually weird and not just a gory horror tale or a rousing adventure caper, one that is just the right length, is perfectly paced, has a very effective twist ending, and skillfully employs an unreliable narrator who has a very believable psychology.  Recommended.

"Hypnos" appears in translation in a number of European publications,
including anthologies produced in Belgium and in Russia 

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We'll be returning to the November 1937 issue of Weird Tales, as it contains an episode of a serial by Edmond Hamilton, but first we'll be yet again exploring the work of the Sage of Teaneck, Barry N. Malzberg!