Weird Tales Sept 1939: T McClusky, E H Price, A Derleth & M Schorer, and C A Smith

No doubt you have heard that it is time to get weird!  (It's long been the time to get weird here at MPorcius Fiction Log.)  Let's not buck the zeitgeist and check out more Weird Tales from 1939 with the September issue.  In these pages Farnsworth Wright reprints a classic H. P. Lovecraft story I have read multiple times (before I started this blog, I think), "Cool Air," so I won't be talking about it today other than to say I really like it; instead we'll focus on four stories I haven't read before by some other weirdies with whom we have some familiarity.

"While Zombies Walked" by Thorp McClusky

Every day I have a reason to ruefully mutter, "Don't leave New York," be it because there is something wrong with the car or something wrong with the lawn mower or because of the distinct lack of Greek vases, Roman statues, skyscrapers and ocean-going vessels where I now reside.  The protagonists of Thorp McClusky's "While Zombies Walked" have their own reasons to utter my catchphrase, though he doesn't actually record them vocalizing it.

Eileen Perry rushed out of The Big Apple when the uncle who raised her and put her through college, Robert Perry, had a stroke, joining him on his plantation in the remote rural South.  Her boyfriend Tony soon received a letter from her, telling him she never wanted to see him again.  That doesn't sound like the Eileen whom Tony knows!  So he hopped in his car and burned rubber southwards, finally reaching the end of a treacherous unpaved track to find what he assumes is uncle's plantation.  Hmm, what is up with that guy working the cotton fields...with that head injury he looks like a walking corpse!

Tony alerts the apparently feeble-minded Robert Perry and the man who has taken over operations of the farm, a pale-skinned, hugely muscular minister, Reverend Barnes, about the man working the fields even though his head is bashed in, and Barnes, who gives Tony the willies, tries to convince the New Yorker that he was hallucinating.  Things get worse when Eileen appears and tries to signal Tony that something terrible is going on at her uncle's farm and he should book it on out there--Tony ends up a prisoner in a tiny room in Uncle Robert's decrepit old house.  Luckily this little room is above the dining room, and Tony can peer down through a crack in the floorboards and watch how Reverend Barnes treats his black henchmen; somebody better call HR because he addresses his subordinates using the dreaded "n-word."  The "n-word" who was supposed to keep a lookout for unwanted visitors like Tony is executed--method of execution is voodoo doll!

Eileen is conveniently imprisoned in the room next door so our lovebirds can whisper to each other.  As we believers in true love never doubted, Eileen only wrote that dear John letter under coercion, and explains that the Reverend has voodoo dolls of her and of her uncle so they are at the pale-skinned voodoo master's mercy.  The couple is dragged down to the cellar where a bound Tony is forced to watch as Reverend Barnes murders the rest of his black gang and gets to work cooking up the spells that will make Eileen and Tony his slaves.  The Rev obligingly tells Tony the story of how he was corrupted and became a practitioner of voodoo, and also how he has never had a woman and is looking forward to having Eileen as his mindless slave.  Tony manages to get loose from his bonds and he fights the Reverend, but that guy is huge and our hero gets a drubbing.  Then Uncle Robert appears, providentially having overcome the spell that was restraining him, and attacks the Rev from behind with an axe, killing him.  The zombies, freed from their afterlife slavery, hurry back to their graves, and Eileen and Tony live happily ever after.       

"While Zombies Walked" is a merely OK zombie story; the ending could definitely be better.  For one thing, McClusky should have made it more clear how Uncle Robert got free of the spell that had paralyzed his legs and dimmed his mind--a few lines about how in the fight with Tony the voodoo doll of Robert Perry fell out of the Reverend's pocket would have helped.  Another problem is that the Rev doesn't have a very good reason to kill his henchmen down in the basement before he has filled their positions with the white New Yorkers--McClusky obviously feels a need to get rid of them to facilitate the workings of his plot, and the lack of a convincing in-story reason for their deaths undermines the story's believability.    

Sebastian Wolfe included "While Zombies Walked" in his anthology Reel Terror, suggesting that the makers of the 1943 film Revenge of the Zombies based their movie on McClusky's story without giving McClusky credit--it's too bad McClusky didn't have Harlan Ellison or A. E. van Vogt's lawyers.  "While Zombies Walked" also shows up in some zombie-themed anthologies.

"Spanish Vampire" by E. Hoffmann Price

"Spanish Vampire" is a cynical joke story, full of quips about the shallowness and faithlessness of women, the greed and corruption of business people and professionals, the propensity of people for thievery, and so forth.  Our narrator is a law student who works at a gas station.  He recently participated in a student riot, helping to destroy a theatre because the establishment refused to offer a student discount.  An important lawyer in town, for whose firm our narrator had hoped to some day work, saw him overturning the ticket booth, and drives into the gas station specifically to upbraid our hero and tell him he'll never get a job in his office.  Our guy then gets to work on polishing a rich professor's Packard; when he grows bored of the wax-on-wax-off routine he opens up the briefcase the prof left in the car and peruses the papers therein about the synthetic blood the prof is developing.

Late at night, this antinomian law student decides to hang around in a secluded wood, and comes upon a grave dating from the Spanish Occupation.  From it emerges a beautiful woman who openly admits she is a vampire.  The law student considers destroying her, it being sort of his duty as a citizen, especially after learning the vampire is drinking the blood of local children, but he falls in love with her because she is so beautiful and she falls in love with him because he's the first person in over a century not to scream and flee from her.

So instead of putting a stake through her he tries to reform her.  He permits her to drink his blood and maintains his health by supplementing his own blood with synthetic blood he steals from that professor, the law student figures he can eventually wean the vampire off human blood and get her to subsist on animal blood.  He steals some nice clothes for the vampire (who has been walking around in a burial shroud) and they go to a charity ball where our hero impresses that legal eagle with his beautiful date and finds himself back in this guy's good books.  Everybody is impressed by the gorgeous young lady; in fact, when the law student isn't looking she gets into a car with a hunk and starts making out with him!  After a brief break up the law student and vampire make up again, but then she dies after drinking his blood--thinking they were quits, he ate some chili with garlic.  He gets a job at the big law firm, though, so, happy ending, I guess.

Thumbs down for "Spanish Vampire."  I rarely like joke stories--everybody in the world thinks he's a comedian (and I am as bad an offender as any), so there is no shortage of jokes out there, so I look to these old genre magazines for wild and crazy images and ideas, for suspense, for human feeling, and obviously Price's jokes and cynicism keep you from being scared by the horror parts or sad over the rocky romance between two blood sucking creeps, one living and one undead.  

"Spanish Vampire" was first reprinted in 1945 in one of those British pamphlets of "American Fiction" whose main selling point seems to have been their artistic nude covers; this one's title story is "Lady in Danger" by Jack Williamson, a Yellow Peril/mad scientist story which we read in a 1934 issue of Weird Tales under its original title, "Wizard's Isle."  In 1973 "Spanish Vampire" would resurface in Kurt Singer's Satanic Omnibus and if you savvy the lingo you can also read it in a 1978 German anthology.

"Spawn of the Maelstrom" by August Derleth and Mark Schorer

This is one of those stories about English guys who have a club where they hang out when they aren't at their country estates.  We’ve got three such guys: 1) the narrator, Bassett, 2) Warwick, one if these people we are always encountering in fiction whose hobby is investigating the supernatural, and 3) Sir John.  "Spawn of the Maelstrom" is also one of those stories, like so many Lovecraftian tales, in which in the first paragraph we are told the upshot of the caper (in this case, Warwick has vanished without trace) and then the main narrative relates the events that led to this bizarre circumstance.

Warwick has heard rumors that some abandoned island off of Norway, one of the Lofotens, near the Maelstrom, is haunted by a "deathless" and "soulless" monster and so he goes there.  While there he writes letters to Sir John.  When Bassett runs into Warwick again back in London, Warwick seems pretty strange: his gait is different, he doesn’t even recognize Bassett at first, and his whole personality has changed; once eager and outgoing, Warwick is now cold and subdued.  Sir John goes on a little trip to the Continent, tracing Warwick’s path from the Norwegian island back to England, and learns that along that route many people have turned up dead, their corpses oddly unmarred by wounds.  Then somebody breaks into Sir John’s country house, kills one of the servants in a fashion that leaves no visible injury, and steals the letters Warwick wrote to Sir John from that mysterious island.  The narrator and Sir John glimpse the killer as he runs off into the night—it looked like Warwick!

One of the letters Warwick sent to Sir John is still in Sir John's custody, because Warwick didn't send it by post, but instead put it in a bottle and threw it into the ocean from the island.  We read this message along with Bassett.  It tells of how Warwick discovered that on the island has lived since before the rise of mankind a monster from another dimension, a monster that can take any shape it desires!  The thing is trapped on the island until it has devoured three souls--oops, it has taken two souls already and Warwick warns that he will soon be soul #3, so the monster will be able to escape the island and terrorize the world.  One thing can stop the monster, a five-pointed star stone that a priest gave to Warwick when Warwick came round asking about the monster.  For some reason Warwick didn't bring the stone to the island with him, but left it at his lodgings, and tells Sir John to acquire it from his landlord, helpfully attaching a note authorizing the landlord to transfer this magic stone to Sir John.

The story ends anti-climactically with the ancient being that is taking Warwick's form falling into a transparent trap laid by Sir John and crumbling to dust.

This is a mediocre story in which traditional fantasy/horror elements are just jammed together.  Again and again the reader has to swallow plot elements that are just not convincing.  Warwick gets a super weapon that can easily kill the immortal monster and he doesn't bring it to the island of the monster?  Where did the priest get the star stone?  How does the priest know what it does?  How does everybody know that three souls will be enough to allow the monster to leave the island?  Why does the monster take Warwick's form and go to England?  Why does the monster just blithely fall into the trap?  Sir John and Bassett can sense an ancient power in the star stone without touching it, but the monster can't sense this, the one power to which he is vulnerable, and just reaches out and touches it and gets destroyed?  

Fiction is commonly full of these kinds of lacunae and plot holes, but if a work has other virtues the reader feels generous about overlooking them.  (The plots of Star Wars movies, Star Trek movies, Indiana Jones movies, giallo movies, etc., are often nonsensical or just stupid, but viewers will forgive because the films deliver good visuals, good music, likable characters, etc.)  But "Spawn of the Maelstrom" doesn't offer human feeling, striking images, or elegant sentences, so its entire value proposition (as business people might say) lies in its plot, and if there are problems there, it has no other virtues to fall back on.

"Spawn of the Maelstrom" is not noxious, just weak, so we'll call it barely acceptable.  After debuting in Weird Tales, this limp production saw print in the 1966 Derleth and Schorer collection Colonel Markesan and Less Pleasant People and then our Italian friends included "Spawn of the Maelstrom" in a 1989 collection of stories from Weird Tales for which I am having trouble finding a decent cover image; it is also in the 1998 Derleth collection In Lovecraft's Shadow.

"A Night in Malneant" by Clark Ashton Smith (1933)

This is a reprint of a story that first appeared in 1933 in Smith's small press collection The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies.  I am reading "A Night in Malneant" in the 2007 collection The End of the Story; we are told this text follows that in the 1933 pamphlet and that the Weird Tales printing is an edited text.   

The narrator is wandering the world, trying to forget the woman who committed suicide over love for him--he was an inconstant lover, and broke her heart.  He comes to an odd city where the sun doesn't shine and funereal bells ring at all hours of the day.  He wanders the sparsely populated, narrow winding streets between the grim, unlived-in looking houses.  He can't find an inn or tavern, so he stops some people, asks for directions.  They say that they are busy preparing for the funeral of the lady Mariel--"Mariel" is the name of the woman who destroyed herself for love of the narrator!

Similar incidents occur, culminating in the narrator coming to a cathedral in which rests a dead body in preparation for burial--of course it is Mariel.  Is this entire city a product of the narrator's grief?  Could the tragic death of Mariel have been instantiated in an entirely new dimension?  The narrator leaves the city of death and never returns.

"A Night in Malneant" is well-written but it is more like a mood piece or idea than an actual story with a plot and a character who changes and/or deals with obstacles in his pursuit of some goal, and it is sort of predictable.  A good example of what it is, though.

"A Night in Malneant" has reappeared in numerous Smith collections, and Robert Hoskins included it in his 1973 anthology of "tales of the supernatural," The Edge of Never. 

**********

Gotta say, this batch of stories is pretty middling.  McClusky's and Derleth and Schorer's pieces are routine in content and weak in execution.  Price's is a lame joke story.  Smith's is good for what it is, but slight.  Not one of the highlights of our long investigation of the history of Weird Tales, I'm afraid.  There are still some more 1930s issues of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual for us to cross off our list, however, so we can hope to come upon a blockbuster before this project has reached its conclusion.