Back in 1970 our friends over in the land of Rembrandt took their fingers out of the dike long enough to translate 17 stories by Robert Bloch and publish them in a book they called Troost me, mijn robot and decorated with a naked woman. Hubba hubba. Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading those stories (in English, of course--when I dropped out of grad school I swore to never again try to learn anything.) We've already tackled eleven of them, leaving six, that's three for today, three for next time. Today's stories all appeared in our beloved Weird Tales in the 1940s.
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| Back cover of Troost me, mijn robot |
Oh yeah, links to the blog posts with my totally subjective and absolutely spoily assessments of those eleven stories will be appended to the bottom of this blog post by order of the marketing department here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
"The Beasts of Barsac" (1944)
Here we have a well-written mad scientist story. I'm going to give it a thumbs up but admit the ending is a little disappointing.
While studying at the Sorbonne, British scientist Jerome made friends with ugly little French scientist Barsac, a man of wealth and ancient family with some wacky ideas. That was like a decade ago, and Jerome hadn't heard from Barsac for three years when he got a note from the obese yellow-toothed continental a few days ago, asking him to come to Castle Barsac, Barsac's ancestral home, to spend a month with him. This note came at an opportune time, for Jerome had lost his job and was in dire straits, unable to pay the rent.
At the castle, Barsac asserts that he has proven through experimentation all his theories the other scientists--Jerome among them--dismissed as ridiculous: via mechanical hypnosis, he has imbued lab animals with a portion of his own soul, and these beasts have taken on some of his physical characteristics! And his next experiment will instill in animals some of his own consciousness, his personality!
Jerome is torn between believing Barsac is insane and his evidence is bogus, and fearing Barsac's experiments really have been a success and Barsac is doing something dangerous. Barsac wants Jerome to become his assistant, and to carry on his work after he dies--you see, the little fatty is on his last leg, dividing his soul and donating some of it to animals having weakened him (so he says), and he has willed the castle and all his elaborate lab equipment to Jerome in the hopes Jerome continue his work! Jerome, penniless, is not only tempted to accept the offer, but to murder Barsac to short circuit the Frenchman's crazy experiments and get his hands on the moolah all the quicker. Of course, living in this crazy castle, hearing the wild sounds of Barsac's experiments, which he refuses to participate in, may be affecting Jerome's psychology, not only giving him horrible dreams but actually warping his judgement.
Who will live? Who will die? Are either of these scientists truly sane? Has Barsac really given a bunch of animals portions of his soul, or is he just lying? Or deluded? Might Barsac try to steal part or all of Jerome's soul to preserve his own life? And how might those animals allegedly carrying some of Barsac's soul react if Jerome were to resist or assault Barsac?
Bloch does a good job with the atmosphere in the castle and the personalities of the two morally and/or psychologically compromised scientists, as well as with the various descriptions of monsters, even though the monsters mostly appear in dreams or speculation, not exactly "on screen." So, thumbs up for "The Beasts of Barsac."
"One Way to Mars" (1945)
"One Way to Mars" is a competent but forgettable filler piece about a jazz musician who goes insane. It includes one of those passages that always makes my eyes roll, a writer trying to convey through the printed word the beauty and joy of hearing or producing good music. "He was out of this world. Riding for the stars on a trumpet, sweeping up with a boogie beat....It was hot, solid, something to hang on to. He twisted each note, reluctant to let it go. He wanted a solo ride...." As these things go, Bloch's isn't that egregious.
(For more jazz-related genre fiction content, check out Bloch's "Dig That Crazy Grave!," Harlan Ellison's "Have Coolth" and "May We Also Speak?," Charles Beaumont's "Night Ride" and Fritz Leiber's "Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee.")
Joe is a talented horn player. He was spotted by agent Max while "playing non-union dates at stags" and Max got him plum assignments with real bands and at recording studios. But Joe kept screwing up these jobs because he prioritized banging chicks and getting drunk over furthering his career and showing any sort of gratitude to Max.
As the story begins, Joe is in a bar, totally smashed, and a weird-looking character in a brown coat wearing his hat low so his eyes are obscured addresses the trumpet player. He says he is from a travel agency and tries to sell Joe a one-way ticket to Mars--he thinks Joe looks like he could use a vacation. Joe eventually tries to beat up this guy and falls unconscious during the fracas--when he wakes up he is told there was no man in a brown coat, that he knocked himself out flailing at the air and falling over.
These sorts of episodes happen a few times, ruining Joe's on-stage performances and getting him in trouble. Max calls in a psychiatrist, which does not help. Eventually Joe escapes being dragged to the sanitarium by murdering Max and then jumps on a train headed across the river to New Jersey. But he looks out the window and realizes this train is not going to the greatest state in the union, but to goddamned Mars! The man in a brown coat appears to punch Joe's ticket.
Merely acceptable. Some of the slang in this one is a little interesting--Joe calls the psychiatrist a "croaker" and the man in the brown coat a "whack."
"The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (1949)
Here we have a solid tragic crime story about how beautiful women use their sex appeal to manipulate dimwitted men...as well as men who maybe aren't so dimwitted! None of us are safe! Thumbs up!
Our narrator is a wretched hunchbacked dwarf, Hugo, an orphan with a low IQ who runs away from the Catholic orphanage where he has grown up when he hears a rumor that he is going to be sent to a sanitarium and one of the other orphans, as the capstone of years of cruel jokes, tells Hugo that the sanitarium doctors will kill him to experiment on his brain. For some time Hugo lives on the streets, but one fateful day he is found, almost frozen to death in an alley behind a theatre, by a famous magician who makes a thousand bucks a week.
The magician is kind and does everything he can to help Hugo, including taking him on as his backstage assistant, charged with packing and unpacking props as the show tours the country, setting the mirrors up at the venues, that sort of thing. But Hugo is a little scared of the magician at first, because he looks like the devil with his black hair and little mustache and so forth and because he seems to have special powers. The kind magician manages to allay his fears, explaining how all that is just a bunch of tricks for the audience.
The magician has a beautiful blonde wife--Hugo thinks she must be an angel, she is so radiant. But we readers can tell she is a selfish and callous bitch from things she says that Hugo can't quite comprehend, that she is with the magician for his money and has utter contempt for Hugo the hunchback.
Hugo spots the magician's wife cheating with another performer, and unwittingly exposes to the magician the sad fact that his marriage to the blonde beauty is a sham. The three members of the love triangle all try to manipulate or influence Hugo behind each other's backs, the faithless and ruthless wife even convincing Hugo that the magician really is a devotee of the Devil and she is his slave and Hugo can liberate her by slaying her husband! Hugo's gullibility and general lack of intelligence combine with this woman's evil to instigate a gruesome massacre!
Bloch's painting of the various characters and descriptions of the gore scenes are quite effective; everything is totally believable so these people and their black fates actually succeed in making you squirm or in pulling the old heart strings. Also, the ending is very good--no disappointments here. An above average performance from Bloch, whom I can often be so hard on. Bravo, Bob.
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Well, I feel like today I got a jump start on any future project in which I try to read something from every issue of Weird Tales published in the 1940s. I enjoyed this batch of stories quite a bit more than the last; perhaps this is no surprise, as in the past I have demonstrated a preference for Bloch's earlier weird work to his later more psychology-based, crime-focused productions. Of course, we might note that none of today's stories have any true supernatural or science fiction elements, that in each the mayhem is the result of insanity or low intelligence--maybe we should see these three stories as transitional Bloch tales that are based on psychology but still have plenty of weird trappings. I do want to stress, however, that what makes today's stories better than "Comfort Me, My Robot," "The Proper Spirit" and "You've Got to Have Brains" is not the proportion of fantasy vs realism, but that the characters have believable personalities and motivations that drive their stories' conflicts, and that the stories contain uncertainties and surprises that make sense and don't just come out of nowhere.
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