The May 1939 issue of Weird Tales includes the first installment of the serialized version of Robert E. Howard's Almuric, a fun novel I read while living in Iowa, shortly before I started this blog. There is also a story by Henry Kuttner, "The Watcher at the Door," which I thought was just OK when I read it back in 2021. There's a poem by H. P. Lovecraft, "Harbor Whistles," which isn't bad, invoking the feeling we might have when we hear the characteristic sound of a ship and reflect that people from the other side of the world whom we will never meet and could likely never understand have heard the same sound and so we have a sort of phantom connection to foreign peoples and strange cultures from all over the globe--when we look upon the stars, who can imagine what unfathomably alien beings have also beheld light from those very same stars? In the letters columns we see correspondence from E. Hoffman Price and Clark Ashton Smith praising the March '39 ish of WT; Hoffman Price in particular seems to like August Derleth's "The Return of Hastur," to which I gave a mixed review back in 2022. Virgil Finlay offers some illustrations with strong design elements and shirtless musclemen, and both Harry Ferman and Harold S. De Lay contribute effectively creepy drawings of hideous old witches. De Lay also has a very good picture of a swarm of monsters in some hellish subterranean landscape. So, a fun issue overall, and we haven't even read the stories by Robert Bloch, Merle Prout and Lester del Rey yet!
"The Dark Isle" by Robert Bloch
In Chapter 4 Vincius awakens and meets a fellow Roman, a man whose skin is painted blue like that of so many of the Druids. This guy, Lupus, has been a captive of the Druids for months. He tells Vincius about a secret passage under an altar in a clearing--the passage leads to the shore, and maybe they can use the passage to get to the Roman ships. Lupus warns that that while the Druids have no boats, they will tonight use their magic to sink the Roman vessels. The men sneak over to the clearing of the altar, where they witness a major Druid ceremony. The Druids have constructed giant representatives of men out of tree branches, and in the wicker torsos of the giant figures are crammed Roman captives. The wicker men are set alight and the captives are burned alive while the natives dance about the clearing.
In Chapter 5 the druids have retired and Lupus guides Vincius into the secret passage under the altar. Down there the two Romans have to fight a swarm of Druid-summoned serpents. They finally come to a seaside chamber where a bunch of Druids are conducting a ceremony. On their altar is the severed tongue of a giant beast--Vincius realizes this is the tongue of a sea dragon, and it is the source of the venom the Druids have been putting on their arrows. Vincius and Lupus fight the Druids; Lupus is killed, but so are all the Druids. The sea dragon, summoned to sink the Roman flotilla, shows up, and Vincius kills it by piercing the inside of its tongueless mouth with his sword, which he has envenomed on the monster's own disembodied tongue. (I guess the monster is vulnerable to its own venom.) Vincius then swims to the ships, confident that now that he has slain the Druids' leadership and their top monster, the Romans will be able to conquer the island.
Bloch describes the slimy revolting passage and its monstrous denizens, the murder of the prisoners, and the living dead Druid assassin, with an infectious enthusiasm. The action scenes are kind of questionable, but not too bad. Perhaps most importantly, the story moves at a fast pace from horror to horror, and there aren't any distracting dumb jokes. I can moderately recommend "The Dark Isle," which would be reprinted in some anthologies and in the Bloch collection Flowers From the Moon and Other Lunacies.
"Witch's Hair" by Merle Prout
It looks like "Witch's Hair" has never been reprinted. Do we have a hidden gem here?
"Witch's Hair" is the story of old man Benedict, the rich guy who owns a factory and a big house on a hill and lots of property, the guy who everybody in town hates because they think he charges his tenants too much and doesn't pay his employees enough. (Everybody's a critic!) "Witch's Hair" is also a story of "gipsies." I know you call them "the Roma" or "the Romani," but Prout in 1939 is calling them "gipsies;" what can I say?
Our narrator is middle-class guy John Wainright. He starts the story by telling us that his wife is in the loony bin, and this story, he hopes, will facilitate her release. She has been incarcerated for quite a while, and it has taken him a long time to piece together the story he is about to tell, but to the relief of us dimwits who prefer being given a straight narrative to a bunch of puzzle pieces we have to assemble, Wainright is just going to tell the story in chronological order and not relate how he figured it all out.
A few years ago there was a blizzard and a band of gipsies broke into Benedict's house to keep warm. When Benedict comes home to find these trespassers having a party in his crib, he tells them they have 15 minutes to leave before he calls "the Law." The leader of the home invaders protests that his pregnant daughter is sick, but Benedict will not relent. That night, out in the snow, the pregnant young woman dies, and her mother, an old crone, curses Benedict, saying he should suffer a night of torment for each hair on her daughter's head!
In the spring, the narrator, who loves visiting pawn shops, finds in such a shop what I would call a wig but which Prout calls "an artificial hair-dress" of great beauty. Wearing such "hair-dresses" is currently in fashion, and Mrs. Wainright is always looking for attire and accessories for her amateur theatricals, so Wainright buys it for her. Buyer's remorse follows immediately, as the beautiful black hair gives him an uneasy feeling. The first time Mrs. Wainright wears it the narrator is amazed at how if makes his wife seem so much more beautiful and so much more determined; soon he is disturbed by how his wife starts uncharacteristically complaining about Benedict, and about having a headache. He gets her to agree to stop wearing it, but over the course of some days, days during which his wife is listless, as if she has some unfinished but forgotten business she knows she must attend to, and becomes sort of ill, Wainright comes to realize that his wife is wearing the wig behind his back and hiding it when he is home so he can't find it and destroy it.
We all know where this is going, but the story still is pretty effective. Benedict's house burns down, and Mrs. Wainright is found at the scene of the crime--she tells her husband she no longer feels anxious about any unfinished business--killing Benedict was that business! Found around the neck of the charred body of Benedict is an inexplicably unburned mass of woman's hair--the authorities figure it is a memento of Benedict's long dead wife, but Wainright recognizes it for what it is, and eventually tracks down its history so he can relate it in this document.
This is a solid black magic story that exploits not only the suspicions of foreigners and their creepy customs of readers but also their resentment and envy of rich people; Prout also offers an engaging depiction of addiction. There are lots of stories in which magic items exercise power over innocent people, rings and swords and amulets and cloaks and on and on, but I find the casting of human hair in this role particularly effective. For one thing, wearing some stranger's hair is kind of disgusting (I am aware of rumors that women in 21st-century America are buying hair from China and Brazil and having it by some uncanny esoteric process integrated into their own hair, but this has gotta be that disinformation I am always hearing about, right?) For another, the idea that a cast off portion of a person's body carries a portion of his or her consciousness is more believable on a visceral level than that an inanimate object like a ring or cloak might do so.
Thumbs up for "Witch's Hair"! Prout only has four stories listed at isfdb, and "Witch's Hair" is the last one. In January I read his 1938 story "Guarded" and found it "acceptable filler." Maybe I should go back and read his 1933 and 1937 stories.
"Cross of Fire" by Lester del Rey
"Cross of Fire" is a first-person stream-of-consciousness thing. The narrator wakes up with little memory of how he came to be laying outside on the ground with an injury, and when he returns to his house he finds it boarded up and decrepit--it seems he has lost his memory of the last several years! The narrator spends the brief story in his house and in the village, collecting clues as to what is going on. It turns out that some years ago a sinister woman turned him into a vampire and he has been committing various outrages ever since, but a lightning bolt, perhaps the work of God, liberated his body from the evil entity that was possessing it. Among his crimes was turning into vampires his closest friends, and he sets out to free them from this tyranny and usher them, and himself, to a final rest.
Del Rey's style is good, and he makes effective use of Christian symbolism and lays out his own theory of vampirism, producing an idiosyncratic and compelling vampire story here. Thumbs up for "Cross of Fire."
"Cross of Fire" has been reprinted quite a few times in del Rey collections and anthologies of horror stories. Its appearance in Early Del Rey is accompanied by an autobiographical account of how del Rey came to submit it to Weird Tales, Farnsworth Wright's response to the story, and why del Rey didn't submit more often to Wright. Early Del Rey looks to be an entertaining source for info about the 1930s and 1940s SF world; maybe I should read more from it.
Early Del Rey is pretty good; it seems there was a short lived attempt to mine this old gold with The Early Asimov, Early Del Rey, etc, but I don't think it went much further. As a kid in the 60s I loved del Rey's juveniles like Rocket Jockey and Moon of Mutiny which were stocked by my school library.
ReplyDeleteI thought del Rey's famous SF Hall of Fame story "Nerves" was a bore when I read it early in this blog's history and that has prejudiced me against him, but I like the format of The Early Del Rey with the autobiographical stuff and the gossip about Campbell, Moskowitz, Wellman and Wright and so I am planning to read The Early Del Rey Vol 1 this month. Del Rey may become a new favorite!
Deletehttps://mporcius.blogspot.com/2014/03/science-fiction-hall-of-fame-2a-strikes.html