Weird Tales, Jan '38: Quick, Hamilton and Keller

In our last episode, we read a story from the 1937 December issue of Weird Tales by a woman we'd never read before, Mary Elizabeth Counselman, and it was pretty good.  So let's read another story by a female weirdie with whom we are unfamiliar, Dorothy Quick's "The Witch's Mark" from the 1938 January issue.  This January issue is something all you Virgil Finlay fans should definitely check out, as it features a hearty helping of handsome men, curvaceous ladies, and ferocious quadrupeds rendered in Finlay's classic style.  This issue also offers stories by Edmond Hamilton and David H. Keller which we'll read today as part of our tireless exploration of the magazine of the bizarre and unusual.

"The Witch's Mark" by Dorothy Quick

"The Witch's Mark" is the story of a love triangle.  We've got Shamus O'Brien, who has a nice Manhattan apartment and a healthy inheritance.  And we've got slender Trudy Rose of the piquant rounded face.  Shamus was planning to propose to Trudy at a house party up at the Rose family's Connecticut estate, but among the guests is Cecily Maltby, she of the red-gold hair, pale white skin and disturbingly red lips, and Cecily's melodious voice and beguiling perfume threaten to blast all thought of marrying Trudy right out of Shamus' mind!

Most of the text of "The Witch's Mark" follows Cecily's efforts to seduce Shamus, and he spends a lot of time in her arms, resisting her requests that he kiss her.  Cecily relates a story from ancient Ireland, the tale of a princess and a "farmer's lad" who fell in love; Cecily implies that Shamus is the reincarnation of that farm boy, and she is the princess, cursed by the Little People to search the Earth for Shamus for many centuries.  Suspecting Cecily is really a witch or vampire from Eastern Europe, Shamus wracks his big Irish noggin, struggling to access the ancestral memories that will tell him if Cecily's tale is the real deal or just a load of malarkey.  In the end, it is Trudy's love that saves Shamus from Cecily; we also learn everyone's true identity and the truth of the story of the princess, the farmer's lad, and the witch.

Acceptable.  It looks like "The Witch's Mark" has never been reprinted.  

"The House of Living Music" by Edmond Hamilton 

Hamilton is known for reusing plots, producing a somewhat repetitive series of stories about space battles early in his career and later many tales following a sort of Edgar Rice Burroughs template.  Hamilton also published many mad scientist stories, and "The House of Living Music" is in that vein.  It has a good gimmick, though, and feels fresh and I quite like it.

The narrator is a New York music critic.  He makes friends with a leading modern composer who is always experimenting, always striving to produce new music that describes real life, that captures the essence of reality and the world.  This genius, Harriman, has a sweet and beautiful daughter, Lina, and the narrator falls in love with her, and thinks she might return his feelings.  

As a youth, Harriman was a student of physics, and a promising one, and he starts haunting the university again, spending time in the physics lab.  Then he and Lina vanish.  The narrator's efforts to find them are fruitless, but a year later he receives a message from the radical composer, a summons to a remote house in rural Massachusetts.

Up in Mass, the narrator is introduced to Harriman's triumph--the composer has constructed a huge apparatus into which he can place an object, where powerful energies dissolve the object and transmute it into wonderful evocative music, music of clarity and beauty no man has ever before heard!  Harriman has recorded music that reflects the characteristic beauty of many flowers, trees, and small animals, works of unparalleled beauty and power!  This is the greatest artistic achievement of all time!  Hey, wait, where is Lina?

Hamilton ends the story effectively with a ferocious fight between two men driven to insanity, and a sad denouement as the narrator cherishes all that remains of Harriman's work of mad genius and of the beautiful Lina.

Thumbs up!  I like it, but it seems "The House of Living Music" has only ever been reprinted in Italian in a theme anthology of weird stories about music.  Thank Yog-Sothoth the internet archive is here to make this story accessible to us Hamilton fans for whom English is a first and only language.         

"Valley of Bones" by David H. Keller

This is a trifling little story, but not bad.

The narrator, a sensitive American who believes that animals have souls and deserve rights, is travelling in southern Africa.  He meets a Zulu who recognizes him--when both were students at Oxford, the narrator, of all the white men at Oxford, treated the black man most kindly.  Strangely, though they met decades ago and the narrator is in his late 50s, the Zulu appears quite young.

The Zulu tells the narrator the story of his youth.  He was a prince of a small remote tribe wealthy in gold.  A white hunter murdered the entire tribe to acquire their gold--the narrator's Oxford colleague was the sole survivor.

Today the white hunter has returned to the location of his genocidal crime to look for more treasure, he having spent all he stole so many years ago.  As the narrator and his Zulu friend watch, the bones of the tribe come to life to kill the hunter.

We have to wonder why two observers of the drama occupy almost all of the text of the story, why Keller developed their relationship and personalities instead of making the evil hunter the main character and developing his personality and depicting his horror.  Maybe Keller wanted a white character to serve as a foil for the hunter, as an example of a good white person who gets along with black people?

Acceptable.  "Valley of Bones" has reappeared in two small press Keller collections, 1978's pamphlet The Last Magician and 2010's Keller Memento from Ramble House.

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These three stories are not as good as the last batch we read, but they are entertaining.  We've got another slate of 1930s stories from Weird Tales coming up in our next blog post, so cross your fingers in hopes they will be the best yet!