Weird Tales, Aug 1938: H T Rich, M W Wellman and A Derleth

Our exploration of 1930s Weird Tales slithers onwards.  Today, the August 1938 issue.  This number includes a reprint of a 1921 H. P. Lovecraft story we've already read, "The Tree," and installments of serials by Edmond Hamilton and Manly Wade Wellman we will probably read some day.  Today we look into an included short story by Wellman that, unlike the serial, appears under his real name (the serial is credited to a pseudonym) and one by Lovecraft correspondent and co-founder of Arkham House August Derleth,  But first, a story by H. Thompson Rich, a writer with whom we are not familiar who has 17 short story credits at isfdb; today's story, "Green Horror," seems to have come late in his writing career, being the second to last story listed.  Rich, like Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, and your humble blogger, was born in New Jersey, but let's not hold that against him.

"Green Horror" by H. Thompson Rich 

New York lawyer Herbert Ames is in love with slim brunette Joan Kendall, so when he gets an urgent letter from her he rushes down to southern Georgia, to the edge of the "Okifenokee" swamp, where she and her father, a biologist experimenting with mutations, have been staying.  He finds Joan and the "negro" servant Peter on edge, and the once robust Dr. Kendall frail and gray.  Joan thinks the ghost of the previous resident of the house, Miles Denniston, a man with a bad reputation, is to blame, that this ghost has a malign influence on pops.  Of course, Ames doesn't believe in ghosts.  At dinner Kendall describes his work; he is trying to discover "the common denominator between life and death" and believes he has succeeded!  First, he studied the protoplasm of slime molds, plentiful in this swamp, and then he studied the ectoplasm of "spirit emanation," plentiful in this house!  Having isolated the "single basic principle" that protoplasm and ectoplasm share, Kendall then combined them to create "a mutation that is a being neither alive nor dead!"  Of course, Ames just thinks the father of the woman he loves is insane.

In the evening, Ames spies on the scientist in his greenhouse and actually sees the ghost of Denniston!  At night everyone hears a scream and in the morning Peter has vanished.  The police are summoned, and remark that servants are always disappearing from this house.  

Ames spies some more the next evening, and gets a real eyeful this time as the ghost hypnotizes Joan and tries to feed her to the giant blob monster living in the chamber under the greenhouse.  By sheer force of will, Ames snaps Joan and her dad out of the ghost's spell and drags them back to the house; for some reason neither the ghost nor the blob monster chases them, and behind them they hear the greenhouse collapse.  

The next day they learn that the ghost has somehow been laid to rest and the blob monster has died in the swamp.  I think we are expected to think the souls of the people whose bodies went into the creation of the blob monster directed the monster to drag the ghost down to hell with them.  (This plot, thus, has similarities to Clark Ashton Smith's "The Garden of Adompha," which appeared in the April 1938 issue of Weird Tales.) 

This story is terrible.  The writing is bad on the level of the individual sentence and the individual paragraph, the plot structure and pacing stink, the heroes do little to resolve the plot, there are loose ends and plot holes, and the story's foundational gimmicks--the search for a common denominator between life and death and a ghost who wants to create a blob monster--are weak on their own and even weaker when paired together.  

Very bad!  New Jersey has another crime to answer for!

You won't be surprised to hear that isfdb has no record of "Green Horror" being reprinted.

"Dead Dog" by Manly Wade Wellman 

We recently read a story by E. Hoffman Price that appealed to Westerners' fascination with the Islamic world; well here we have a story that exploits white people's interest in and fear of black Africa.  "Dead Dog" is set in Portuguese West Africa, where Wellman was born and spent his early childhood, and has an epigraph that purports to be an Umbundu proverb.

Father Lassiter is a Belgian missionary.  An African chief whose tribe has rebelled against the Portuguese comes to Lassiter to report that he will surrender to Captain Rodriguez, a famously ruthless rules-bending guy who is in charge of crushing the rebellion.  The chief leaves with Lassiter his huge black dog, whose name is the Umbundu word for revenge.   Lassiter tries to get Rodriguez to go easy on the chief, but as the rebel leader predicted, Rodriguez's idea of justice is a harsh one--he chops off the chief's head and has it delivered to Lassiter!  The outwardly healthy dog dies a few hours later.

A few months later Lassiter gets a desperate summons from Rodriguez, and rushes through the night to the fort.  The distressed captain tells of how for three nights running he has been haunted by a huge black dog, woken to find it at the window the first night, then on the second in his locked room, and finally on the third right beside him!  Is it a dream, or black magic?  What will happen tonight, the fourth night?  Lassiter stays in the fort that night, and is thus on the scene when Captain Rodriguez meets his horrible fate.

A sort of obvious story, but well-told.  I like it.  Like Price's "Saladin's Throne Rug," "Dead Dog" characterizes the culture of the non-white alien "other" as steeped in esoteric knowledge and reprehensible practices, but their foulest deeds are a reaction to mistreatment at the hands of whites.  "Dead Dog" can be found in Wellman collections and the various editions of Michel Parry's The Hounds of Hell.

"Three Gentlemen in Black" by August Derleth

August Derleth's body of work is quite uneven, and here at MPorcius Fiction Log we have read quite a few mediocrities and annoying failures birthed from his pen.  Fortunately, "Three Gentlemen in Black" is actually a pretty good crime/ghost story with an interesting character at its center.  

Orto Harper has just moved into a house in the English countryside; the place is oddly familiar, as if he has been there before, but he can't quite place it.  Orto had a special reason to move to the country--to have a good alibi for when his uncle, Alexander, takes the poison pill Orto has hidden among Unc's supply of heart pills to be taken daily!  Orto expects to thusly inherit Alexander's great wealth as well as exact revenge for the abuse he suffered from Alexander, the man who raised him after his father committed suicide.  As we get to know Orto better, we learn why Alexander treated him so roughly: Orto is an evil man, and the son of an evil man, one who savors his own evil, takes pleasure in contemplating and committing foul deeds.  

Through dreams, the appearance of ghosts, and Orto's inquiries in the nearby village, we readers learn more about Orto's past and Orto recalls his connection to this country estate--it is the scene of a murder his father committed, a murder with some resemblance to the murder Orto himself is committing.  Dad didn't enjoy the fruits of his crime, and the same supernatural agency that wrought a rough justice on his father will do the same to Orto before the story is over.

Derleth does a creditable job with his depiction of the evil Orto and with all the story's supernatural elements.  Thumbs up for "Three Gentlemen in Black."

"Three Gentlemen in Black" would be reprinted in several Derleth collections, starting with the 1941 Arkham House collection Someone in the Dark, and some anthologies, including Vic Ghidalia's 1974 Gooseflesh! and 1993's 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg.

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Mad scientists, blob monsters, scary black people getting revenge on villainous white people, ferocious canines, murderers, and more ghosts than you can shake a copy of the Necronomicon at--this is what Weird Tales is all about.  And there is more where that came from; just stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log.