Strange Stories Feb' 1939: H Kuttner, M W Wellman, and A Derleth & M Schorer

The very first issue of Strange Stories, the February 1939 issue, includes many stories by people we know from Weird Tales.  Back in 2017 we read one of Henry Kuttner's included stories, "The Frog," and just days ago we read both of Robert Bloch's two contributions.  Today let's examine Kuttner's other story in the issue, as well as Manly Wade Wellman's piece and the "Complete Novelet" by August Derleth and Mark Schorer.

"The Invaders" by Henry Kuttner

"The Invaders" appears under the pen name Keith Hammond, who is touted as the author of "The Seventh Coffin" and "The Hand of Ahrimam," two stories I can't find records of at isfdb or philsp.com.  Did the editors of Strange Stories just make up names for non-existent stories in order to give the impression that the fictitious Mr. Hammond had a long successful career behind him?  Tsk, tsk.

"The Invaders" is an OK horror story that Kuttner seeks to firmly embed in the Lovecraftian mythos, integrating lots of common weird themes and including direct references to Cthulhu and to The Mysteries of the Worm, the forbidden book conceived by Robert Bloch (Bloch and Kuttner were buddies who collaborated on stories and whom you can see together in a photo taken at the Weird Tales offices with editor Farnsworth Wright, Kuttner looking like a movie star and comedian Bloch striking a self-consciously ludicrous pose.) 

The narrator, newspaperman Gene, and his buddy Bill Mason have received an urgent telegram from their pal Michael Hayward, one of the world's most innovative and exciting horror writers.  When they arrive at Hayward's cottage on the California coast they realize that their buddy--and now they--are under siege by flying tentacled monsters from another world!

Hayward reveals to them the astonishing secret behind both his stellar career as an author and his devilish current predicament.  You see, Hayward got himself some photostatic copies of a few choice pages from The Mysteries of the Worm, including a recipe for a special drug, a drug that when ingested allows you to access memories from your past lives!  The libertarians will tell you that the past before the Industrial Revolution was a nightmare of poverty and drudgery, and maybe that is true, but what they won't tell you is what Hayward discovered: that in the ancient past the Earth was a battleground between different factions of alien monster gods!  It is this sort of esoteric knowledge, gleaned from his ancestors' memories, that has been the raw material of Hayward's acclaimed stories!

That recipe page in Mysteries of the Worm included warnings about the drug and also prescribed various protective measures to ensure the user of the drug didn't summon to his own time any dangerous beings.  Hayward didn't take those warnings much more seriously than nicotine addicts take those warnings from the Surgeon General on their packs of cancer sticks, and that is why those monsters from another dimension are floating around his cottage on the Pacific.

The monsters capture Mason and sacrifice him to their alien god.  Kuttner tries to shock us with some physical horror, describing how the dying Mason crawls on the sand, leaving a trail of blood, looking as if he has been "flayed alive," his eyes torn out and the white of his skull showing through his wounds.  Then, as our narrator Gene watches, Mason's body passes backwards through evolutionary history until his friend is just a blob of black goo.

The sacrifice of Mason is the essential component of the ritual that will open a bridge to another universe through which an invincible horde of malevolent beings can travel to Earth and reduce the entire human race their play thing.  Luckily, one of Hayward's other ancestral memories surfaces, one from a predecessor of his who was a high priest in forgotten Mu; Hayward chants a spell that summons the aid of one of the friendly gods who in the ancient past protected mankind, and it drives off the invaders. 

This story isn't terrible, but it isn't great; it sort of feels like the various conventional weird elements--knowledge of past lives,* evolution in reverse, human sacrifice, invasion from another dimension--are just sort cobbled together instead of being smoothly integrated into a coherent whole.  For instance, Kuttner doesn't do a great job of explaining how using a drug that allows you to access ancestral or racial or past life memories might open a portal to another hostile universe unless you paint a pentagram on the floor or something.  The way Mason's body suffers radical devolution as he dies is even less explicable.

Below average for the justly admired Kuttner.  "The Invaders" has been reprinted a number of times in fanzines like Fantasy Crossroads and Kuttner collections, as well as Robert M. Price's anthology Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos. 

*See Robert E. Howard's 1931 "The Children of the Night" and 1932 "People of the Dark,"  Clark Ashton Smith's 1931 "A Necromantic Tale," and Donald Wandrei's 1932 "The Lives of Alfred Kramer"

"Changeling" by Manly Wade Wellman

This is a trifling little thing, its plot simple, its style somewhat clumsy and overblown.  Wellman writes the story in the third person omniscient, but all the information in the story seems to come from one of the characters, as if the narrator interviewed him; the narrative is burdened with unnecessary phrases such as "today he remembers with clarity only..." and "He does not today pretend to know...."  Wellman also, in my opinion, uses too many metaphors and fancy descriptions that fail to add to the atmosphere or furnish powerful images.

David, thirty-six today, is the only surviving individual who was any sort of witness to a strange series of deaths in a little midwestern town twenty-eight years ago, when he was eight years old.  David accompanied his father, a college professor, to the stricken town to meet the couple suspected by the locals of poisoning their neighbors.  It is a dry and hot summer, and all the yards in the town are brown, save the yard of the suspects, whose grass is green and whose garden boasts a rich variety of brilliantly-colored exotic flowers.  

The couple turns out to be a fat Englishman and his skinny American wife.  This dude hails from Devonshire, and Wellman seems to imply that stories of changelings are associated with Devon.  Wellman also writes the Englishman's dialogue phonetically in an effort to represent his accent, a literary technique I generally find annoying, and it is annoying here.  The couple has a skinny eight or nine-year old daughter, Sarah; all of the numerous people who have died unexpectedly in the town of late expired after receiving a bouquet from Sarah, whom her parents proudly report tends their garden assiduously every day.

While the adults talk, Sarah takes David to her little play house and tries to get him to accept a gift of flowers.  Wellman's story briefly flickers into life in these scenes of temptation, which of course have disturbing erotic overtones.  David wisely rejects Sarah's offerings; he also witnesses Sarah conducting a conversation with a voice that emanates from a hole in the ground; Wellman leaves no doubt to what is going on, the monster voice actually explaining for the benefit of the audience stuff that Sarah must already know, that she is a monster sent out into the world to kill people so the unseen monsters can absorb their life force.  

The climax of the story takes place at tea time; the professor pours boiling water on Sarah, and the evil skinny little girl vanishes and an innocent fat little girl, who resembles the Englishman, appears in her place.  The prof explains that back in England when Sarah was a baby an evil changeling must have been substituted for her--luckily the prof knew that boiling water would banish the monster and summon the couple's true child.  

I'm calling this one barely acceptable, but it has reappeared in Wellman collections like Worse Things Waiting and Sin's Doorway.

Left: 1982 edition by Carcosa; Right: 2018 edition by Shadowridge Press

"Eyes of the Serpent" by August Derleth and Mark Schorer

At like 14 pages, "Eyes of the Serpent" is about twice the length of Wellman's "Changeling" and like 50% longer than Kuttner's "The Invaders."  Sadly, I can't say it is any better than those two tales; this is a filler story that could have used some additional work.

Our narrator is a resident of the Windy City.  His girlfriend is Monica Crittendon, secretary to the police commissioner.  One night she bursts into the narrator's house via the (unlocked?!) French doors to gasp that she is being pursued, and that the commish has been found dead, only hours after a sort of death token ("ouanga") was found on his desk!  The government has been keeping it secret from the people, but Monica knows all too well a truth she reveals to the narrator--the Chi-town PD is locked in a struggle with a voodoo cult that worships Damballah, the voodoo serpent god!  

Monica has brought with her a file on the cult which provides evidence supporting her belief that the Damballah-worshipers are led by a woman who was shot down by a Haitian cop 25 years ago but survived because she is an adept at astral projection and her soul was outside her body when she was hit and the establishment refused to follow the instructions of those in-the-know that they should burn her body!  Monica is sure that it is this voodoo priestess ("mamloi"), Ulrika Bayne, who is responsible for the death of the commish--only someone in astral form could have gotten into the commish's seventh floor office, after all.

Sure enough, a tall "singularly beautiful" woman--Ulrika Bayne herself--appears in the house.  She tosses an ouanga on the narrator's desk and then flees when another figure appears--the cop who shot Bayne 25 years ago, Gabriel Lantora!  Lantora explains that he has made it his life's work to battle Bayne, who murdered his father, a clergyman down in his and Bayne's homeland of Haiti.  We are led to believe that both Bayne and Lantora have appeared in the narrator's home in their astral forms, and both exercise some kind of power over electricity.

I didn't like how astral projection was handled in this story--Lantora and Bayne pass through walls, fly, appear and disappear, but they also can touch people and carry around objects.  People, like the police  commissioner, whom Bayne murders are found with their throats torn out.    

After Lantora leaves, some cops come to arrest Monica, as she is the lead suspect in the murder of the commissioner (even many members of the poli e force don't seem to know about the twilight struggle against the voodoo cult.)  The narrator consults a bishop whom Lantora knows and who is familiar with voodoo.  Monica is released from jail, and then captured by Bayne and two "Negroes."  The narrator and Lantora head to the voodoo temple in a "squalid Negro district" on Chicago's south side.  The temple is in the basement of an abandoned building; our heroes spy a gruesome ceremony through a curtain--Ulrika Bayne, before a horde of chanting blacks, sacrifices a goat and collects the blood so her flock of Damballah worshippers can drink it in an orgiastic frenzy.  I guess this exploitation scene, with the detailed description of the death of the goat and what happens with its blood, are the story's "money shot," its most carefully composed and memorable element. 

But the goat is just an appetizer!  A hypnotized Monica is brought to Bayne to be sacrificed!  Lantora interrupts the ceremony, scaring off the blacks and releasing Monica from the spell of the mamaloi with a word.  Then the narrator and Monica watch as the two astrals engage in a final showdown.  Ulrika Bayne suggests to Lantora that the two of them unite and jointly rule, but he is having none of it.  We also learn that long ago they were lovers.  Employing his superior psychic power, Lantora compels Bayne to reveal the secret location of her body.  Then the cast proceeds to its hiding place, where the body is burned, destroying Bayne.  Lantora, his work on this Earth complete, also vanishes.   

"Eyes of the Serpent," like Kuttner's "The Invaders," feels like a bunch of standard genre fiction tropes just jammed together, whether they actually go together or not.  For example, the way Monica is arrested and jailed has no effect on the plot--she just gets right out of jail.  Other superfluous material includes three unnecessary characters who contribute nothing to the plot and have zero interest or appeal: the bishop, whom I have mentioned, and two people who live in the narrator's house, his sister and his Japanese servant.

If Wellman indulges in one of my pet peeves--phonetic rendering of dialogue--Derleth and Schorer more seriously offend my sensibilities by committing another of my pet peeves: presenting main characters are more spectators to than prime movers of the plot.  "The Eyes of the Serpent" is about the climax of the decades-long feud between sorcerous adepts Gabriel Lantora and Ulrika Bayne, both of whom hail from exotic Haiti, and these two figures make all the big decisions and engage in all the fighting, so the story should have had one or both of them as viewpoint characters.  Instead our protagonists are two boring Chicagoans with little at stake emotionally and very little influence on the course of the conflict.  A story the same length narrated by Lantora, expressing his guilt and ambivalence over using black magic to achieve justice, or narrated by Bayne, full of ranting and raging that reflect her ambition and bloodlust, would have been far more interesting and exciting.

 

I guess I am feeling generous because I am going to call this one barely acceptable.

After reappearing in the Arkham House volume Colonel Markesan and Less Pleasant People in 1966, "Eyes of the Serpent" would be included in the 2009 Derleth collection That is Not Dead.

**********

These stories aren't so hot.  Maybe these are pieces Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright rejected, or ones their authors didn't feel comfortable sending to Wright but sent off to the new magazine on the block, fingers crossed.  Whatever the case, these stories aren't so bad as to invoke my rage, just my disappointment.