Weird Tales, May 1938: Robert E. Howard, Edmond Hamilton & J. Wesley Rosenquest

Our exploration of Weird Tales continues, today with the May 1938 number.  This issue of "The No. 1 Magazine of Bizarre and Unusual Stories" prints installments of serials by two authors I like, Henry Kuttner and Jack Williamson, but on this occasion we'll limit ourselves to a famous story by Texan Robert E. Howard which I read decades ago, a piece by our pal Edmond Hamilton of Ohio, where I lived for a couple of years, and a tale by some guy I never heard of who only has two fiction credits at isfdb, J. Wesley Rosenquest.

"Pigeons from Hell" by Robert E. Howard

Steven Tompkins, in his introduction to the 2005 Howard collection The Black Stranger and Other American Tales, calls "Pigeons from Hell" "one of the finest American horror stories," and it has been reprinted in a host of anthologies in numerous languages.  I read the story ages ago, and as I recall was a little underwhelmed by it, considering its high reputation.  But maybe I'll appreciate it more now that I am older and have feels like an uncountable number of weird stories under my belt.

Two New Englanders, buddies since childhood, are driving around the American South on a vacation.  In a remote region they get off the treacherous poorly-maintained road to sleep in an abandoned mansion, and there experience a night of eerie horror and gruesome death!  One of the men survives, just barely, rescued in a nick of time by the local sheriff who just happens to be in the area, a brave and resourceful man who throws around the "n-word" with abandon.  The sheriff connects the clues the New Englander provides with some local legend, and then consults an ancient black man--a voodoo priest who has made a pact with an ophidian African god--and finally resolves the plot by returning to the mansion with the New Englander to destroy the monster and reveal the twist ending.

Despite what I thought when I first read it, "Pigeons from Hell" is a great story--five out of five brain-smeared hatchets!  Howard stuffs every paragraph with compelling and entertaining material and we readers are subjected to zero fluff or filler.  The plot, which under all the sickening gore and black magic fireworks has the structure of a detective story, is solid--scenes follow one another logically and people's actions are believable, so the narrative draws you in and carries you along unflaggingly, unencumbered by any dull spots or rough patches that threaten your suspension of disbelief.  Both the supernatural content and the human dimension are well-handled; Howard's descriptions of the many horror images as well as of the surviving New Englander's wretched emotional state are sharp and powerful.  I found particularly effective Howard's description of the experience of being a victim of hypnotism.

As we all have heard a hundred times, Howard tried to imbue his writing with a sense of history, and "Pigeons from Hell" is chock full of pointed references to American history--Tompkins is quite right to consider this a very American story.  All the numerous characters' personalities and motivations reflect racial and regional stereotypes and grow out of the tragic and violent relationships between the European colonists who conquered the New World and the native Indians they met and the black Africans they dragged to the new civilization they founded there.  Whether we regard Howard's sketches of archetypal New Englanders, white Southerners, and African-Americans to be insightful or merely extravagant racist caricatures, they are engaging and serve to add life and credibility to the story.    

A major theme of "Pigeons from Hell," like Howard's "Black Canaan," which we read in 2019, is that black people have special knowledge and a peculiar connection to the supernatural.  Says the sheriff:  

"We're up against something that takes more than white man's sense.  The black people know more than we do about some things."

But while blacks are certainly "the other" in the story, it is not like "Pigeons from Hell" presents white people in a universally positive light.  The sheriff assumes the killer monster he is hunting is a living-dead "mulatto" woman, but in the end he finds that, in fact, the supernatural menace is a cruel white woman who has been warped by her relationships with black people and assumed some of the very worst characteristics of (Howard's pulp fiction vision of ) African culture.  Howard's story suggests that relationships between the races are inherently destructive and degrading, causing immense suffering and bringing out the worst in participants of both races.  

As the identity of the villains suggests, "Pigeons from Hell" not only offers readers a surfeit of race-based material, but plenty of sex- and gender-related content as well, with numerous female characters who suffer and/or commit all manner of crimes and mayhem.  Also noteworthy, and this is hinted by the story's title, is the role of animals in "Pigeons from Hell": birds, reptiles, and other beasts appear in the story as striking symbols as well as concrete agents of the supernatural.      

An entertaining and well-wrought classic with the ability to disturb 21st-century readers in a variety of ways.  Recommended to all readers, whether you be of the thrill-seeking or academic bent.

"The Isle of the Sleeper" by Edmond Hamilton

"The Isle of the Sleeper" might be considered one of the prolific Hamilton's more popular stories; in 1951 Farnsworth Wright's successor as editor Dorothy McIlwraith reprinted it in Weird Tales, and it would also resurface in Leo Margulies' 1961 anthology The Ghoul Keepers and a 1993 anthology edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Weinberg entitled To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare.  

Hamilton wrote tons of stories about guys who end up in another world and get involved with a princess and her wars, and we have read a lot of them here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  "The Isle of the Sleeper" bears some similarity to those Princess of Mars-style stories, but has a twist and a note of sadness to it that is likely what caught the eye of editors.  The gimmick Hamilton uses here is not unlike that employed by Ambrose Bierce in "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and William Golding in Pincher Martin, but adapted for a speculative fiction audience.  

Garrison is the sole survivor of the sinking of a ship on the Pacific, and he is near death when his life raft runs aground on a forested island teeming with animals.  He finds not only life-preserving food and water but a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl!  They fall in love and enjoy several happy days together.

The girl insists that the island, the flora and fauna of which Garrison finds are unusual for these climes, is the product of a man's dream--she even leads Garrison to the couch of the sleeping man.  She implores our hero to refrain from waking The Sleeper--if the man awakes, she is sure, the island, including Garrison and herself, will vanish.  Garrison thinks this is nonsense, of course, but, as the days pass, odd events render her theory more and more plausible.  New geographical features and new island inhabitants appear, including monstrous beast-men whom the girl declares must be the product of the Sleeper's bad dreams.  Garrison and his beloved are taken captive by the beast-men, and our desperate heroes decide that annihilation would be preferable to whatever torture the savages have in store for them, so they wake the Sleeper.  Garrison witnesses the island and everything else around him disappear, and then wakes up to find that he is the Sleeper, that he is shipwrecked on a barren rock.  He is rescued, but sadly doubts that he will ever find a woman he can love as much as the girl birthed from his own subconscious; the last lines of the story also suggest that some unique property of the rock actually did give material form to Garrison's dream girl and the lush ever-changing island of his dreams.

A mildly good filler story, competently executed.

"The Secret of the Vault" by J. Wesley Rosenquest

isfdb indicates that "The Secret of the Vault" was adapted for a segment of Rod Serling's TV show Night Gallery; a look at imdb reveals that the segment aired in 1972 and was entitled "You Can Come Up Now, Mrs. Millikan."  Presumably Serling read the story in Peter Haining's 1968 anthology Legends for the Dark, which has a fun human sacrifice cover, though I suppose he might have owned or had access to a collection of old issues of Weird Tales.  I have to say that it is hard to believe that the memorable components of the story could be profitably reproduced on the small screen.

Our narrator is the youngest member of a large and wealthy family whose deceased predecessors are interred in a vault beneath the family mansion.  The first part of the story is given over to effective descriptions of the narrator's childhood fears of the vault, into which his elders regularly descend to pray for their dead loved ones.  Then the narrator indulges in odd speculations about the life force or soul, and about the character of death.  Is a human's soul like a fire that radiates energy, a force that colors and influences the world around him or her?  Is the division between life and death as sharp and clear as we generally believe, or does the life force in fact only gradually leak out of those bodies we consider dead, a proportion of it lingering long after the physical form we are sure is inert has been buried?

Then comes the plot.  The narrator's Aunt Helena was remarkably healthy and energetic, and it was a surprise to the narrator when she suddenly expired, leaving behind only two survivors of the once populous family, our protagonist and Helena's husband, Henry.  Whereas in his childhood the narrator felt the vault emanate a black gloom, now, presumably illuminated by Helena's powerful life force, the underground crypt radiates a warm vitality.  Uncle Henry goes down into the vault every day, the narrator assumes to pray beside his wife's tomb--that is until, drawn by some whim or force, the narrator intrudes for the first time into his uncle's forbidden library!  Therein he discovers dozens of books he would not have expected a Christian to be familiar with, books on the necromancy of remote tribes, books of spells for raising the dead!  The narrator's fears are confirmed when he finds Henry's diary, which Unc has been keeping up to date with descriptions of his activities since his wife's death--even more shockingly, the diary indicates that Henry convinced Helena to commit suicide so she could serve as the subject of his necromantic experiments!

The ending of the story is a little mysterious.  The narrator goes down into the family burial vault for the first (and last) time of his life, and sees the pentagram and candles and necromantic apparatus, and witnesses Helena's body return to animate life, upon which sight he flees the family house forever.  Whether Helena and Henry are satisfied with the experiment and Helena is a healthy immortal, or Helena is instead some kind of monster, perhaps a vengeful one, is not made clear.       

Not bad, but I would have liked a more transparent conclusion; the reader (at least this reader) receives mixed messages from "The Secret of the Vault."  Has Henry performed a miracle to be celebrated or committed a sin for which he will be punished?  Is Helena a victim or beneficiary?  Will this amazing event change the world or remain a secret forever?        

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The Hamilton and Rosenquest stories are entertaining, but it is Howard's "Pigeons from Hell" that stands out as a classic of the genre.  A good issue of Weird Tales, and one I expect to return to for the Kuttner and Williamson serials.

More Weird Tales in our future--stay tuned!