Back in 2017 I read H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald's
"The Horror in the Burying-Ground," which I panned as a "clunker" overburdened by a surfeit of characters. This disappointment debuted in the May 1937 issue of
Weird Tales, alongside stories by science fiction Grandmaster Jack Williamson, Barry Malzberg's hero Henry Kuttner, and founder of Arkham House August Derleth. Let's read those three tales today in hopes of temporarily slaking our unquenchable thirst for thrills, mystery and excitement.
"The Mark of the Monster" by Jack Williamson
This is a somewhat exploitative piece full of extravagant prose, Williamson describing at length but with verve everything from people's scary eyes and hideous skin to the aura of fear that hangs over every building and every tree in the little town of Creston. Our narrator, Claiborne Coe, has spent seven years in the Far East making enough money to marry the violet-eyed girl he's had his heart set on for ages, Valyne Kirk, and today he returns to Creston, where they grew up and where she awaits him. Clay finds Creston and its inhabitants very sinister and forbidding, and perhaps he shouldn't be surprised, because the letter in his pocket from his adoptive father discourages him from returning, even hinting there is something wrong with the narrator and he should keep away from Valyne for her own good!
"Heed this warning--you must sense its truth, like a cold serpent coiled around your heart!"
Our narrator, orphaned at an early age and then raised by a doctor and his wife, had an odd and unnerving childhood. Take the local bully, Jud Geer, the butcher's son--this low-IQ creep would pull gags like tying up smaller kids with pig entrails. And then there was that time six-year-old Clay felt an irresistible urge to go to a certain place in the woods--his compulsion lead him to a ring of megaliths, at the center of which was a blood-stained altar! Clay's personality is a little strange, at least in one particular: he has a ferocious, uncontrollable temper, and if provoked he will throw horrible fits which he can't remember after they have passed; during his long sojourn in the Orient he was once attacked by knife-wielding "Mecanese," and in a red frenzy, out of his mind, he slew them--when he came out of this violent fit, Clay was astonished to see what he had done to his assailants.
When Clay lays eyes on Valyne for the first time in seven yeas she is being sexually harassed by that bully, the butcher's son, and our guy Clay goes into his frenzy and knocks Jud's teeth out. Then the two lovebirds head to the Doc's house, where Valyne has been staying since her mother died. There the Doc expounds upon his dark hints about Clay's heritage and emphatic pleas that his adoptive son never marry--Doc tells Clay that the Coes for generations were Satan-worshipping wizards, and Clay's grandfather tied Clay's mother--naked!--to that altar where she was raped by a demon Gramps summoned! Clay is a product of that hellish union, a half-demon! What's more, Clay has a noseless twin brother, a monster who subsists on blood; this monster is locked up in the basement and is brought a bucket of blood on the regular by Jud Geer!
Williamson's story approaches a climax when Clay's demonic twin busts out of his prison, grabs Valyne, and carries her off to the altar to rape her. Clay outfights the would-be rapist, and then we get our precipitous let-down of a twist ending--it is all a hoax! Clay has no twin brother--the demon is Jud in disguise! This elaborate masquerade is a component of a plot to drive Clay to commit suicide masterminded by his adoptive father who is angling to inherit the money Clay made in Asia.
The Lovecraftian business about Clay being the descendent of a demon said to have been "summoned out of space," as well as the heavy horror atmospherics about Creston and all the edgy references to rape, were so sincere and so effective that I was surprised and disappointed by the mundane and deflating ending. Many old pulp stories end in this lame Scooby-Doo fashion, but often I don't see it coming and find myself bitterly let down, even though I suppose I am sympathetic to the "lesson" of such narratives (that the supernatural is not real and people who claim it is are fools or shysters.) One of the particular problems with the "it was all a hoax!" ending here in "The Mark of the Monster" is that it renders Clay's violent frenzies and his youthful discovery of the altar somewhat incongruous. I'm also not a fan of the "let's drive this person crazy" plot device which we see so often.
So, what kind of grade can I give a nineteen-page story I was enjoying for seventeen pages until it totally let me down? I guess we're going with "acceptable."
"The Mark of the Monster" was not reprinted in English until the 21st century, when it appeared in Haffner Press's 2002 Spider Island, the fourth volume of their series The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson. Three years later, Richard M. Price included it in his anthology Tales Out of Dunwich.
"The Salem Horror" by Henry Kuttner
Having reread it, I can tell you that "The Salem Horror" is a prime slice of Yog-Sothery and recommend it to fans of horror and the weird with some enthusiasm. Kuttner does a good job with the images of the monsters, the secret rooms and sorcerous paraphernalia, and with the construction of an atmosphere. The plot is sort of typical, but Kuttner builds an entertaining story around it.
Carson is a successful writer of light popular novels, but he needs quiet to write, and so rents a house in Salem--a house he learns was once the home of a witch who was seized by the local people and buried with a stake in her heart because her body resisted burning. In this creepy house he follows a rat to the basement--the rodent leads him to a secret door that opens into a room with elaborate markings on the floor and queer writing on the walls. This subterranean chamber is very quiet, so Carson furnishes it with a desk and starts writing down there. Strange, horrible, things start happening in Salem, and when occultist Michael Leigh appears he explains that the secret room is one of those few spots on the Earth that acts as a sort of bridge to other universes, and via this otherworldly channel the witch is manipulating Carson, working him like a puppet without his knowledge--at night he is fulfilling the requirements to raise the undead sorcerous from her grave so she can pursue a campaign of revenge against Salem and summon to Earth a horrible monster god that takes the form of a huge black amoeba that can move at astonishing speed. Should Carson believe this goop? If Leigh's claims are true, will Carson survive, and can Leigh neutralize this diabolical threat to the people of Salem?
Kuttner sent an early version of "The Salem Horror" to H. P. Lovecraft, who responded with a long letter to Kuttner describing Salem, which the young Californian Kuttner had never seen. This March 12, 1936 letter, complete with Lovecraft's drawings of three typical examples of Salem architecture and six representative types of Salem gravestones, can be found in Volume 10 of Hippocampus Press's Letters of H. P. Lovecraft, Letters to C. L. Moore and Others, edited by David E. Schulz and S. T. Joshi. Kuttner seems to have integrated lots of Lovecraft's info into the version of the story that was printed in Weird Tales, including his reference to the "slum inhabited by Polish immigrants--mill workers." Weird stories set in the mysterious East or the Third World or some such locale often feature natives whom the Northern European protagonist considers to be superstitious goofballs, but who it turns out actually have insight into supernatural phenomena at which the explorers from Western civilization scoff at their peril. Weird stories set in the First World often feature some minority demographic community in this same role, and in "The Salem Horror" it is working-class Polish immigrants who occupy this slot.
"The Salem Horror" is quite good, and was a big success, seeing print in quite a number of anthologies.
"The Wind from the River" by August Derleth
My scattershot reading about Derleth and of Derleth's correspondence with Lovecraft has left me with a good impression of him as a person who worked hard and had a lot of energy and was helpful to people and so forth, but lots of his writing is just plain shoddy, and "The Wind from the River" is one example of this lamentable fact. This story feels like a draft that needs to be tightened up, that would benefit greatly from some editing and polishing to make sure all the sentences actually add value--and not just length--to the story. Williamson and Kuttner in their stories discussed above use lots of adjectives and offer long descriptions, but these flights always serve the purpose of the story, creating a mood of fear or painting a disturbing image. But Derleth in "The Wind from the River" just throws all kinds of metaphorical phrases and boring descriptions at you that don't seem to further the story's goals:
The district attorney was shown into the long hall just as Leocadie came down the stairs, her presence engulfing him.
It is never made clear what this "engulfing" means--it is not like the DA is psychologically dominated by Leocadie or is consumed with a fascination with her--just the opposite, for the sentence that ends the paragraph that starts with the sentence above is:
And there he immediately began, speaking rapidly, for he was obviously in a hurry, as Leocadie saw by his frequent glances at his wrist watch.
In fact, this entire scene with the district attorney--who never reappears--is a waste of time and should have been excised entirely.
The plot. Three rich people--sisters Leocadie and Lavinia and their nephew Walter, the son of their dearly departed sister--live in a big house by a river; until recently Walter's stepbrother Arthur resided with them, but he was found drowned in the river, apparently a suicide. The main thread of the story concerns Leocadie discovering evidence that Arthur was murdered, why, and by whom; at the same time both of the sisters--and their servant--independently sight Arthur's ghost. We also get a lot of talk about the weather--wind off the river, fog rising from the river, a lightning storm--and the ghost's appearances are correlated with these meteorological phenomena. In the end the ghost of Arthur draws the killer--Lavinia, who had terminated short their love affair against Arthur's wishes--to the river where she is destroyed.
The basic plot outline and its main elements--a young man has an affair with his dead stepmother's sister and when she tires of him he gets aggressive so she drowns him and then his ghost gets revenge on her--are good. But Derleth's technique in relating this plot is quite poor. Also, Derleth employs two reasonably good gimmicks when he should have just stuck with one instead of trying to cram them together into one story, as they work at cross purposes with each other. I have already hinted at the first gimmick--the ghost of Arthur has taken on aspects of the water in which he was slain, and rides the fog up to the house, leaves a trail of dampness wherever he goes, and brings his murderer to the river to kill her. Derleth's other gimmick is that Arthur is proud of his long yellow hair and his ghost strangles his step-aunt with strands of this hair. Arthur's pride in his hair is underdeveloped so the use of the hair to kill Lavinia comes as sort of a surprise at the end, not having been foreshadowed sufficiently, and the hair theme serves to undermine the water theme--shouldn't the ghost drown Lavinia the way Lavinia drowned Arthur?, and if he can strangle people with his hair, couldn't he do have done that up at the house?
(Yet another problem is that Leocadie somehow sees some of the ghost's activities in her dreams--this third gimmick is also totally unnecessary and diminishes the power of the main gimmick.)
Gotta give this one a thumbs down, though I can easily imagine giving it a thumbs up if Derleth and Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright had put in some hours revising it, cutting superfluous passages and concepts.
"The Wind from the River" can be found in such Derleth collections as Someone in the Dark (first edition 1941) and L'amulette tibetaine (1985).
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It feels good to get back to the weird, so, more weird material in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!
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