Weird Tales, Dec '39: T McClusky, D H Keller and R Bloch

After spending four blog posts in the Harlanverse, let's get back to World War II-era Weird Tales and read from the December 1939 issue of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual edited by Farnsworth Wright.  We've already read two stories from this issue, an inferior Northwest Smith piece by C. L. Moore and Forrest J. Ackerman, "Nymph of Darkness," and a better than average Frank Belknap Long story, "Escape from Tomorrow."  That leaves us with stories by Thorp McClusky, David H. Keller and Robert Bloch to read today.  This issue also has good  illustrations by Hannes Bok and Virgil Finlay and a letter from Willis Conover, Jr. imploring people to order from August Derleth and Donald Wandrei's Arkham House the upcoming book The Outsider and Others, a collection of the late H. P. Lovecraft's stories.  This is a pretty manipulative letter, with Conover insulting in extravagant terms those who have not already ordered the book and offering an incentive--a chance to win a hand written autograph of Lovecraft's--to do the right thing.

"The Considerate Hosts" by Thorp McClusky

Here we have a barely acceptable ghost story.  Our guy is driving home in a once-in-a-lifetime rainstorm and has to take a detour on a rarely used country road because a bridge is out.  His car stalls due to the damp and he has to pull over--luckily he sees a nearby house, one with another car sitting in front of it.  He goes into the house and meets a couple who seem odd.  Soon they are telling him they are ghosts, that this house is actually a dark ruin and only looks lit and furnished and tenanted because of their haunting.  They are haunting the house tonight because they have a scheme of revenge.  Twenty years ago the husband was wrongly convicted of a murder by a young prosecutor and executed; his wife committed suicide soon after.  Tonight, because of the storm, they believed the prosecutor, now a big wig, would have to take this road and that the forces of Fate or Justice or whatever would force him to stop, giving the couple the opportunity to scare him to death.  Sure enough, our protagonist finds the unconscious body of the prosecutor in another room--the couple has scared him into a faint, but not slain him yet.  Our guy convinces them to not kill the man, and carries the unconscious attorney to his car.  Our guy's car now starts and he drives off, finds a phone and calls the cops to tell them about the unconscious guy in a stalled car back on the country road.  The next morning he returns to the house and indeed, it is a ruin with no lights or furniture.  A few days later he reads in the paper that the prosecutor died of heart disease, and he is glad that he died of natural causes and was not murdered by the ghosts.

This story is not very engaging.  The main character is not in any danger and is sort of superfluous--it is the three other characters who have to make decisions with moral weight and are emotionally invested in what happens.  As I've told you in many blog posts, I don't like stories in which the main character is a spectator.  Why not write this story from the point of view of the prosecutor, show how he decides to frame an innocent man in order to advance his career, and then his horror at suffering a supernatural comeuppance?  Also, the tone of the story is uneven; at times I thought it was supposed to be funny, what with the way the main character doesn't believe the two people are really ghosts, but it is not funny, and it isn't scary, either.  "The Considerate Hosts" also shares the problem of so many ghost stories, the incoherence of the "rules" concerning what abilities and powers the ghosts have, for example, under what circumstances the ghosts can touch material objects.  Such rules generally are totally illogical and exist merely to facilitate the progress of the plot or allow for a powerful image.  In this story the protagonist actually picks up a telephone in the haunted house but there is no ringtone*, and the next day finds no furniture whatsoever in the house.  So I guess these ghosts generate furniture that living people can interact with?  But they can't themselves touch the prosecutor?  Ay, carumba.

*[UPDATE 10/3/24: Obviously this is the wrong word, and anachronistic, a blunder on my part as a commentor points out below; the text says "No answer from Central. He tried again, several times, but the line remained dead."]

The first page or two of the story I liked, the description of the night drive in the rain, but the actual plot and tone once the ghosts appear is not to my taste. My opinion may be the minority one, though, as "The Considerate Hosts" has been reprinted in a multitude of books including one called Famous Ghost Stories, edited by Bennet Cerf, co-founder of Random House and a guy you can watch on TV in many episodes of What's My Line?                

"Lords of the Ice" by David H. Keller 

Here's the big cover story of this issue of WT, a story promoted as a depiction of "a war-mad world" (ripped from today's headlines, eh?), a story which has not been reprinted very often; the only reappearance listed by isfdb is in 1978's The Last Magician, a collection of Keller stories from Weird Tales.  

An unnamed European nation (clues suggest Germany) has run out of fossil fuels and raw metals, and lacks the cash to buy these essential commodities from foreigners, which is really putting a kink in the dictator's plans to build a powerful military establishment.  He calls together the nation's top scientist, top industrialist and wealthiest individual and they come up with the idea of exploiting the rich store of natural resources under Antarctica!    

In Chapter 2 we witness a delegation of guys meet with American businessmen and purchase a massive quantity of raw materials with gold.  In Chapter 3 we learn how the dictatorship got all this gold--by using a mole machine of the kind we find in SF rather commonly to discover the world's greatest gold deposit down in Antarctica.  There is so much gold the scientist we met in Chapter 1 worries that gold will lose its value and cause an international economic disruption.  This guy also remarks on the foolishness of the United States and other nations of selling stuff to the dictatorship that the dictator will use to launch a war against them.  

In Chapter 4 the scientist begins to suspect somebody else is tunnelling through the rock near the vein of gold.  In Chapter 5 a digging machine busts into the gold mine and the scientist meets representatives of a secret civilization known as The Lords of Ice, a nation of five hundred descendants of Moors and Jews who fled Spain during the Reconquista.  These people have psychic powers and are thus able to observe and influence the rest of the world from their city two hundred miles from the coast of Antarctica.  It was these jokers, not brilliance or dumb luck, that put into the scientist's brain the idea of coming to Antarctica and guided him to the vein of gold, an experiment to see how the human race beyond Antarctica would respond to a sudden increase in the supply of gold.  Chapter 6 describes the utopia of these emigre Iberian psykers, a city high on a mountain under a dome powered by a nuclear reactor, Chapter 7 their attitude towards religion (they make a big deal of tolerating religion even though they know it is all a scam.)  In Chapter 8 the scientist is told that some traitor to the dictatorship has exposed the location of the gold mine and so soon a war will erupt over the mine as several nations send fleets to Antarctica to secure it.  The scientist is given the job of warning the world that if they don't behave the Antarcticans will use their high technology to set off volcanoes which will cause the ocean to rise 50 or 100 feet, destroying London, New York, etc.

The world does not listen (Chapter 9) and war erupts so the world is flooded (Chapter 10.)  Our final Chapter is 11, in which the Antarcticans ask the scientist to join their space program.

"Lords of the Ice" is a quite weak story.  The style is simple, even childish, but the story is not direct and smooth--there are all kinds of extraneous scenes and characters (e. g., the scientist briefly speculates that the sounds he hears are a huge worm is burrowing through the Earth near the goldmine.)  It is ideas, not character, drama, suspense, or human relationships (there are none) that animate "Lords of Ice," and these ideas are banal misanthropy.  The plot is arrogant elitist wish fulfillment, I guess designed to appeal to kids who think of themselves as bright and who are bullied or shunned--a small cadre of smarty smarts plays a trick on humanity and then punishes humanity for its violent ways by inflicting even greater violence upon them--and the Earth!--from the safety of their secret fortress, then plots how to leave the ruined Earth behind.  

Thumbs down!

"Mannikins of Horror" by Robert Bloch      

Edgar Colin was one of the world's great surgeons and an expert on human anatomy; he suffered psychological trauma on the battlefields of the World War and wound up in a mental hospital.  He feels dissociated from his own body, feels like his organs are distinct entities, feels he is losing his identity, as if he were thousands of different men!

To maintain his sanity he needs serious absorbing work, and he starts sculpting human figures in clay, six or so inches tall.  Colin isn't satisfied to just sculpt the outsides, the surface, of his little figures.  It takes years of study and practice, but eventually he is sculpting skeletons, attaching organs and muscles and nerves and blood vessels and finally skin and hair until he has the world's most realistic representations of human beings' insides and outsides!  When he finds he can control the movements of the mannikins with his mind, he begins to think of himself as a Dr. Frankenstein, even as a God!  

Disaster!  Colin's shrink thinks his patient's obsession with the clay dolls is inhibiting his recovery!  Tomorrow the clay dolls will be taken away!  Colin resorts to desperate and violent measures, imbuing dolls with fragments of his consciousness, sculpting dolls for the specific roles of spy...and assassin!  Gruesome horror is the result!  Who will live?  Who will die?

A good horror story from Bloch which features Bloch's hobbyhorse of mental illness but, thank Azathoth, none of his characteristic puns.  Elements of the tale, including one of the climactic visual gimmicks, are slightly similar to Harlan Ellison's "All the Sounds of Fear," which we just read; I wonder if "Mannikins of Horror" might have influenced our old pal Harlan?  Ellison would have to had seen it in this issue of WT, as while it has been reprinted many times, isfdb suggests "Mannikins of Horror" was not reprinted until 1966, when it was included in Kurt Singer's Weird Tales of the Supernatural, and "All the Sounds of Fear" appeared in 1962.  "Mannikins of Horror" was later included in the many editions of a collection of stories by Bloch and Ray Bradbury, and multiple anthologies on the theme of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster.

**********

Well, Bloch saves the day with a solid tale about a mad scientist who creates life that features dreadful and shocking mental and physical injuries--it would have been sad if we had ended our examination of the 1930s run of Weird Takes with McClusky's mediocre piece and Keller's boring and lame science fiction complaint that people are too greedy and too violent.  If you are going to be the millionth person to bitch about human greed and violence you'd better have something interesting to say or say it in an entertaining way, and Keller fails; thankfully, when Bloch invokes the immortal name of Frankenstein he delivers an engaging piece with some human feeling and some disturbing horror images.

Yes, it is true, the MPorcius Fiction Log Weird Tales Project is complete--my pledge to read at least one story from each issue of WT with a 1930s cover date has been fulfilled!  Below find links to year by year lists of stories read with handy links to my blog post about each story.

And don't be sad, weirdies!  There is every possibility the Weird Tales Project will be extended back to the Roaring Twenties and the editorship of Edwin Baird and forward to the period of American participation in the Second World War and the Cold War and the editorship of Dorothy McIlwraith.  So stay tuned!

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