Frank Belknap Long: "You Can't Kill a Ghost," "Escape from Tomorrow," and "He Came at Dusk"

Looking over the bibliography of Frank Belknap Long, one of the more unusual characters whom we have talked about here at MPorcius Fiction Log, I noticed that, in 1995, Necronomicon Press put out a 23-page pamphlet of three "previously unreprinted" Long stories from Weird Tales under the title Escape from Tomorrow.  Let's check out these stories in their original WT printings via the magic of the internet archive.

"You Can't Kill a Ghost" (1928)

"You Can't Kill a Ghost" debuted in an issue of Weird Tales that includes an installment of Edmond Hamilton's space opera "Crashing Sun," Tennessee Williams' "The Vengeance of Nitocris," and Robert E. Howard's story of Solomon Kane, "Red Shadows."  Wow, an important issue!  (We blogged about "Crashing Suns" and "The Vengeance of Nitocris" years ago; I read the Kane stories years before this blog appeared as if out of some nightmare realm and I don't think I have blogged about any of them--rereading Solomon Kane is another reading project I should add to the list that I may never get to.)

So much of Long's work is shoddy and poorly written that the quite competent writing of "You Can't Kill a Ghost" surprised me a little.  The plot is something of a trifle, though.  Like so many short stories, our first-person narrator is not the main character of the actual story--he is just telling us a story told to him by the real main character, who essentially becomes the first-person narrator.

The adventurer in question is a young American writer, a journalist, who got drunk while in Haiti and put on military clothes and acted in such a way that the government thought him a rebel or revolutionary and threw him in prison.  The joke that is the foundation and leitmotif of this story is that revolutions are always breaking out in Haiti, and the hero shares his cell with two Haitian "generals" who are also in prison for leading revolutions, men who are filthy and indistinguishable from each other.

The generals suggest a way that the American can cut through the window bars of their cell so he can escape--the fatalistic generals feel no urge to escape themselves.  Our hero succeeds in cutting through the bars and getting halfway out of the window, but then is stuck.  But then a guy, apparently a drunk, helps him out, even carrying him on his back to an American ship in the harbor when he is too weak and tired to go on.  When Haitian soldiers accost the pair, this good Samaritan gets them out of the mess, taking a bullet in the process.  The punchline of the story is that the American journalists' savior is the ghost of the president who had him thrown in prison in the first place, he having been assassinated soon after our guy was arrested.  It is suggested that the ghost helps the journalist because he felt like the presidency was a prison, and so identifies with our guy's struggle for freedom, and it is hinted that before he was president he too was a journalist and maybe even a revolutionary.  

By today's standards, this story is monstrously racist in that it suggests that Haiti is constantly wracked by political violence and its people are dirty and lazy and you can't tell one from another.  Putting that aside, the plot and style are OK--the jokes aren't laugh out loud funny, but they aren't annoying, either, and the depiction of the hero's means of escaping the prison are sort of entertaining.  We'll call "You Can't Kill a Ghost" acceptable.       

I'll note here that on the same page as the last few paragraphs of "You Can't Kill a Ghost," under an ad for acne medication, is a little notice advertising the services to writers of poetry and fiction of Long and H. P. Lovecraft as critics, advisors and revisers.    

In our own 21st century, "You Can't Kill a Ghost" has been reprinted in two expensive but very extensive and very cool collections of Long stories published by Centipede Press, one in their Masters of the Weird Tale series and one in their Library of Weird Fiction series.

"Escape from Tomorrow" (1939)

For some reason "Escape from Tomorrow" does not seem to appear in either of those Centipede Press volumes, even though with its unity of purpose and tone, its stark images of high technology and body horror, and its human themes, I am finding it better than most of Long's uneven body of work.  Maybe "Escape from Tomorrow" formed the basis of some longer Long work I haven't read yet?  Or maybe the Centipede people thought it more "science fictiony" than "weird"?

It is the authoritarian future of the Twenty-Ninth Century!  The government ("the Controllers") of the "Scientific World State" conditions you from birth for the job which has been assigned to you, and people are regularly administered drugs to keep them from acting anti-socially!  Our main character is one of the government flunkies who diagnoses you and pumps you full of the right drugs to make sure you behave ("glandular correctionist"), and his current top patient is himself!  Because he's on the verge of going rogue!

Maal hops in his "stratoplane" (one of the perks of being a high official) and flies from the East Coast to Spain to the research facility where the top scientist, Allelan, with whom he is in love is working on the first artificial man!  Such love between individuals is forbidden--the relieving of sexual urges is to be done within parameters set and monitored by the State!  Maal embraces Allelan in her laboratory, where she has been toiling night and day over the glass case in which pulses the blob of living plasm that is the product of her labors, an artificial brain.  The plasm contacts the lovers telepathically, revealing its vast intellectual superiority to natural humans!  And its contempt!  Why are they slaves to an oppressive government?  Why is science the master instead of the servant?  Why are "dull, stupid, beauty-hating people" in charge instead of "poets, artists, dancers [and] lovers"?  

The Controllers would execute any man who held such thoughts, and Maal recoils the artificial brain's arrogant advice that he and Allelan flee to a rebel colony.  In the same complex is a population of experimental freaks ("cretins"), child idiots whose bodies Maal has altered with surgery and drugs.  The artificial brain gives the horde of freaks intelligence and they rebel, enraged that Science, in its amoral quest for knowledge, has stolen from them the ordinary lives they might have enjoyed.  Finally, realizing it is dying, the artificial brain invades Maal and Allelan's minds, erasing their conditioning so they embrace the opportunity to escape to the rebel colony.

"Escape from Tomorrow" is a decent story, and, with its unsubtly declaimed themes, its romantic descriptions of the sea, and its quotations of poetry by Keats and some other poet I can't identify (perhaps Long himself), illustrates facets of Long's character which Lovecraft hints at in his letters*--Long's passionate love of art and poetry and his (perhaps merely performative) rebellious nature.  We're giving this rarely seen story a thumbs up! 

*For examples, see HPL to August Derleth, October 11, 1926, and HPL to C. L. Moore, June 19, 1936.

"He Came at Dusk" (1944)

This one has the Centipede Press stamp of approval, appearing in the 1100-page volume they printed in 2010.

Jim Reston is perhaps the finest builder of robots in the world, and he is broken hearted--as part of an experiment, he just dismantled Tom George, perhaps the greatest robot in the world--Tom George was the first robot with personality, the first robot with a sense of aesthetics, a robot that loved flowers and showed concern for Jim's welfare, a person whom Jim could talk to more intimately than to his own wife, Louise.  If Jim puts TG's parts back together, will it be the same TG he knew and loved?  

Things only get worse when Louise gets home with a gift for Tom George and finds the robot she adores is now just a bunch of spare parts.  Louise calls Jim a murderer, slashes his face with her nails, and stomps out, never to be seen again!

Jim rebuilds Tom George, turns TG on, but it isn't quite the gentle old TG he remembers.  The new robot silently takes a book off the shelf, opens it to a passage from Nietzsche about how man is not a goal in himself but a bridge that will be surpassed--a concept foreshadowed by Tom George's last words before the fatal experiment ("You're using me as a stepping stone, aren't you Jim?")--and then strangles Jim to death!

"He Came at Dusk" is OK; it is competently written, but I wish it was more clear why the original Tom George was a lover of mankind and the rebuilt TG was a destroyer, the purpose of the experiment that saw TG dismantled, and so forth.  Still, not bad.

**********

Well, these stories are better than I expected them to be, and "Escape from Tomorrow" and "He Came at Dusk," with their literary references and theme of the danger that science and technology misused may pose to mankind, feel more heartfelt and ambitious than much of Long's work.  I'm inspired to read some more Long, so you can look forward (or dread) hearing more about Long in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!