Weird Tales October 1939: R M Farley, M W Wellman and H P Lovecraft & K Sterling

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are fulfilling a pledge to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales that has a 1930s cover date.  We've already sampled something from every issue published from 1930 through 1938, as the lists at the following links will attest, and we are currently in the closing stages of the 1939 leg of our journey, today reading three stories from the October issue of that year.  

1930  1931 1932 1933  1934  1935  1936  1937  1938  

This October 1939 issue of Weird Tales includes a reprint of a good Robert E. Howard story, "Worms of the Earth," which I blogged about back in ancient times--late 2013--as well as an interesting letters column, in which people, including Robert Bloch, Henry Kuttner, and E. Hoffman Price, opine about P. Schuyler Miller's memorably crazy story "Spawn," about which we recently penned a pretty hostile mixed review.  But our focus today will be three stories altogether new to me.

"Mystery of the Missing Magnate" by Ralph Milne Farley

This will be the sixth story we've read by Farley--earlier this year we read "The House of Ecstasy," "Time for Sale," "Liquid Life," "Horror's Head" and "The Stratosphere Menace."  I thought those five not bad (though Isaac Asimov would beg to differ) so have reason to hope "Mystery of the Missing Magnate" will be a winner, even though it looks like this story has never been reprinted.

As it turns out, "Mystery of the Missing Magnate" is a mediocre Twilight Zone-style story in which something impossible happens to a guy but it doesn't affect his life long term.  Farley's story might, however, offer some limited interest (or limitless offence) with its depictions of various demographics of Americans and South Asians.

A "dignified Milwaukee financier" is in Mobile and has just inked a deal with some Southerners to buy a large quantity of cotton; this deal is very important to the Northerner's firm.  To relax after a long morning of negotiations he goes to the cinema, where a travel film presents feats of magic performed by a "Hindoo swami;" one such feat consists of making a young man disappear and then reappear.  The financier declares this "hooey" but when he steps out of the theatre he finds he is not in Mobile, but back home in Wisconsin!  He spends a few pages running around Milwaukee, wondering it he is insane.  Did he hallucinate his trip to Mobile?  Will his firm lose a chance at all that cotton because he missed the meeting with the Alabamans (even though he recalls meeting them?)  He doesn't run into anybody he knows, his colleagues being out to lunch and his wife being off visiting relatives.  Our rattled financier gets a ticket for the next train down to Alabama and then goes into a movie theatre to kill time waiting for it.  He sees the reel about the Indian magician again, and when the businessman emerges from the cinema he doesn't recognize the street.  He asks a "Negro policeman" to direct him ti the train station is, and the man's response (Farley writes the black cop's dialogue phonetically--"The o'ny two stations hiah ah de L. an' Ain, and de So'thun") realizes he is now in Mobile!  The cotton deal, and with it the man's career and company, are secure and safe, but he'll have a different view of Hindu swamis for the rest of his life.

An acceptable filler piece.

"The Witch's Cat" by Manly Wade Wellman (as by Gans T. Field)

Here we have a much more entertaining and better-written story than Farley's, one with vivid descriptions and characters with strong motivations.  Thumbs up for "The Witch's Cat," an impressive piece of work by Manly Wade Wellman.

Jael Bettiss is an incredibly ugly old woman who hates everybody and lives in hollow among cypresses in a house that is falling apart.  She endeavors to give the local villagers the impression she is a witch, even rubbing soot onto her cat so it will be the appropriate black, and supports herself by selling charms and philtres and by demanding protection money of farmers whose cows, she hints, just might go dry.

One Jael Bettiss acquires a book of spells and gains the ability to work real black magic!  One of her first works as a real witch is to give her much-put-upon cat the ability to speak!  Then she masters a spell that  gives her the appearance of a mesmerizingly beautiful young woman!  Changing her looks was just the first step in Jael Bettiss's campaign to steal away from the prettiest girl in the village the heart of the village's most handsome young man in the village, a campaign that involves a voodoo doll, among other sorceries--the witch even coerces her cat into acting as her thief.  But the cat feels more kindly to Jael Bettiss's rival for that young man's affection, who pets him when she has the chance, than he does to the cruel witch.  Will the feline foil Jael Bettiss's schemes to murder the pretty girl and win the love of the young man?

A great black magic story, with well-described sorcery and well-wrought characters whose behavior is wholly believable and compelling and whose personalities drive the plot.  Recommended to all fans of witchcraft stories as well as cat lovers.

Besides Wellman collections, "The Witch's Cat," which first appeared under the pseudonym "Gans T. Field," has been reprinted in cat-themed SF anthologies, of which there are quite a few--SF people love cats.

"In the Walls of Eryx" by H. P. Lovecraft and Kenneth Sterling

"In the Walls of Eryx" debuted here in Weird Tales, where it shares honors as cover story with Wellman's "The Witch's Cat."  Like all Lovecraft productions, "In the Walls of Eryx" has been reprinted a million times, reappearing not only in a stack of Lovecraft collections but in Donald Wollheim's Avon Science Fiction Reader in 1952 and in Spanish translation in a 1972 issue of Nueva Dimension.  I'm not at home so I don't have access to my own copy of Arkham House's Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, so I am reading the story in the Corrected Seventh Printing of that collection available at the internet archive.

Somewhat to my surprise, here we have a classic-style science fiction story with ray guns and forcefields starring an Earthman who tries to solve a mystery on Venus using logic, set against a background of racism and imperialism.

It is the spacefaring future.  Decades ago humans arrived on Venus and discovered some remarkable crystals, crystals smaller than your hand but which store tremendous energy, enough energy to power a city for months!  The Crystal Company makes its profits by bringing these crystals back to Earth, but there are obstacles, like the natives of Venus, tentacled reptile men who wield swords and fling poison darts, and were more or less innocuous until humans started taking away the crystals, which the Venusians hold to be sacred and like to install in their temples.

The bulk of "On the Walls of Eryx" consists of a long journal or diary penned by an employee of the Crystal Company while on a one-man expedition.  In his account of the first day of his expedition, our narrator opines that even though these Venusians have cities and some think they communicate with each other via their tentacles they don't count as people and should be exterminated so as to facilitate the collection of the crystals.

Somehow the big interplanetary corporation which employs him hasn't provided this guy with a helicopter or something, so on day one he trudges through jungles and swamps, hacking down carnivorous plants with a knife and gunning down reptile men he encounters with his "flame pistol."  There is a lot of talk about his equipment--his leather clothes, his oxygen mask, etc.  He spots a remarkably brilliant crystal off in the distance, and tries to get to it, but finds it is on the other side of an invisible wall, in the dead hand of a fellow employee of the Crystal Company, killed in some mysterious way.  Our guy finds an opening in the wall, retrieves the crystal--the biggest he has ever seen--and then proceeds to explore the maze-like building of unscalable, unbreakable, invisible walls.

The narrator gets hopelessly lost, as if the walls are silently shifting or the doorways noiselessly closing behind him, and spends days trying to chart a way out, noting his progress (or lack thereof) in his journal.  While he wracks his brain and employs all his equipment trying to find a way out, the narrator witnesses the corpse of his predecessor being devoured by native scavengers, and then an army of lizard men arrives to watch his increasingly desperate struggles and, apparently, mock him.  When he realizes he is doomed, that his food and water and oxygen are going to run out, he becomes woke and decides that the human race should stop collecting the crystals and theorizes that the Venusian lizard people are perhaps a race superior to mankind, more in touch with the cosmic order and its rules.  If the human race keeps bothering the natives maybe the forces that control the universe will punish us!

At the end of the story is printed a Crystal Company report describing how the body of the narrator was discovered and the maze destroyed.  The report suggests that the Crystal Company is going to try to wipe out the native Venusians and maybe bring down upon the Earth the wrath of higher powers.  

Like a lot of Lovecraft's stories, "In the Walls of Eryx" feels long because of all the detailed description of the setting and of every little step the narrator takes and every little stratagem he experiments with in his efforts to figure out the puzzle which faces him.  Still, it is pretty entertaining.  "In the Walls of Eryx" is also notable for its anti-racist and anti-imperialist message.  There is a commonly-held stereotype that old SF is all sexist and racist and always depicts women as the weaker sex and aliens as evil and so forth.  My reading of 1930s SF over the course of this blog's life has uncovered many examples of SF that prove this to be hogwash, and here is another one.  SF was written by a diverse group of personalities with a wide array of interests and a broad spectrum of attitudes and opinions, and even individual writers' bodies of work can offer a variety of viewpoints--Lovecraft is famously (and justifiably) considered a racist, and yet here we see a story with his name on it that is all about how primitive natives should be respected.

A few years ago we read Frank Belknap Long's "The Robot Empire" under its
original title, "The Vapor Death"

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I'm happier with this October issue of Weird Tales than I was with the September one.  Wellman delivers a very fun black magic witch story, and the Lovecraft and Sterling piece is a solid traditional SF tale with strong weird horror elements.  And Farley's story is not bad, just trifling.  

More Weird Tales await us in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.  Stick around!