we completed a step in our journey to dark enlightenment when we achieved our goal of reading at least one story that appeared in each issue of D. McIlwraith's
in the year 1941. Today we begin our eldritch slither through the year 1942 with the January issue of
. This issue includes one of H. P. Lovecraft's best stories, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," and in the letters column we find August Derleth discussing the place of this story in the Cthulhu Mythos. I've read "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," multiple times, and
, so we won't be dealing with that masterpiece today. Instead, we'll read stories by Dorothy Quick, Mary Elizabeth Counselman and Fritz Leiber.
An interesting note. In Canada, a version of this issue of
Weird Tales appeared with an Innsmouth-inspired cover and a May cover date.
"The White Lady" by Dorothy Quick
Like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," "The White Lady" is afforded an illustration by the great Hannes Bok. I have to admit I am not crazy about the way Bok depicts the ghost, however.
Our story begins with a long description of the looks and attire of two people, the handsome but cruel Abbot Telva and beautiful and elegant Mary Vetrell. The Abbot, resident in England but of Spanish blood, wants the English Mary to marry his nephew, Clement, but she is not interested; sure, the Abbot's family is prestigious, but so is Mary's, and Mary is not in love with Clement, but with heroic soldier Sir John de Winton. The Abbot is insistent, because he himself is in love with Mary, whom he has tutored since she was a little child, and if she marries into his family she'll always be nearby. Besides, a union of the Telva and Vetrell families will allow him to add some valuable real estate to the Abbey's. (Of course, we readers won't be placing any bets on the future prosperity of this Abbey, as we realize this story is taking place during the reign of Henry VIII.) Mary and her father refuse to agree to the marriage, so the Abbot storms off, promising to use his high position in the Catholic church to make life tough for Mary; for example, making it impossible for her to marry John de Winton.
John de Winton arrives and we get a long description of him. Quick's style is not very good.
He had a great chest and arms, with a figure to match, and was the type of man that women love.
Then arrives Mary's father, whom we are told looks like Santa Claus. Sir Charles Vetrell is on good turns with Cardinal Wolsey, the king's closest advisor, so Sir Charles writes a letter to Wolsely requesting relief from Telva's prohibition on any cleric marrying Mary and John. After John rides off with the letter, Sir Charles, a widower, and John's mother, a widow, reveal that they are in love and they plan to get married. Quick seems to be more interested in writing about jejune vanilla sexual relationships than about anything weird.
Halfway through the story it looks like the Abbot and Clement have gotten to the King before John got to Wolsey, so the King is on Team Telva and will make sure Clement and Mary wed. Mary says she'll commit suicide before marrying a Spaniard and then faints.
John, Wolsey, and Anne Boleyn concoct a scheme to get Mary out of marrying Clement. They convince King Henry that Sir Charles' manor house is haunted by a Lady in White. When the King and his court come by to attend the wedding of Clement and Mary the ghost--somebody in disguise--will appear and warn that the marriage should not take place, that Mary must marry for love.
There is a mix-up--Mary thinks she is to play the ghost and Anne Boleyn thinks she is to play the ghost, so there are two ghosts at the appointed hour and the whole thing is a shambles, both girls being seized by Henry's soldiers. But then a real ghost, Mary's mother, appears, and lays down the law. The king will compel the Church to marry Mary and John.
We have here a poorly-written and totally boring story. Quick makes a hash of the personality of the Abbot and we readers have no idea how we are supposed to feel about him--he is in the villain slot, but we keep hearing that Mary had a good relationship with him for years. Quick clumsily tries to exploit the reader's supposed interest in the court politics of Henry VIII and the English Reformation and supposed hostility to Spaniards and the Catholic Church, which feels like a cheap short cut, like she can't generate emotion in the reader on her own and so resorts to latching on to feelings she thinks you already have. Th descriptions are tedious and numb the mind instead of building atmosphere or painting images. As for the plot, "The White Lady" reads like a caricature of what men suspect fiction by women is like, a bunch of women using their social connections to get married.
Thumbs down!
"The White Lady" was reprinted in 2001 in an anthology by Forrest J. Ackerman and in the 2024 Quick collection The Witch's Mark and Others. I believe this is the fifth Quick story I have read--click the links to see how I rated "The Witch's Mark," "Turn Over," "Edge of the Cliff," and "The Lost Gods" and rest assured that I didn't dislike all of them.
"Parasite Mansion" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman
"Parasite Mansion" is also adorned with a Hannes Bok illustration, but I am finding the composition of this one, and the faces and poses of the figures, below par for Bok. Too bad.
More bad news. "Parasite Mansion" is another long and tedious and poorly-written story. What is the world coming to?
Blue-eyed redhead Marcia Trent is a grad student in Psychology and a teacher at a girl's school in Carolina. When she hears that her fiancé is marrying her sister back home in Birmingham, Alabama, she hops in her car and sets out on a 400-mile trek, full of rage. She somehow ends up on a lonely road where she crashes the car because a sniper puts two rounds through her windshield. She hits her head and sprains her ankle and is carried into a decaying mansion by some weirdos, the Mason family. Counselman provides us, with sleep-inducing detail, descriptions of the Mason mansion and its occupants that stress how contradictory or paradoxical the milieu and its occupants are--the mansion is full of beautiful antiques, for example, but is also in a terrible state of repair. Our heroine is stuck in bed and a succession of mentally ill people shuttles in and out of Marcia's room for page after page after page.
We've got the sniper, Renny Mason, a murderous little boy who, having failed to slay Marcia with his rifle, tries to strangle her. Little Renny is trying to kill our redheaded academic because he fears she has come to take away his older sister. Renny's campaign of destruction is arrested by his adult brother, Victor Mason, a filthy drunk who is also a trained physician who wraps up Marcia's ankle and puts stiches in her noggin. (Victor is one of Counselman's paradoxes, a man of science who has become a slave to superstition, a handsome chap under a thick coat of booze and dirt.) We've also got a hideous old woman who married into this insane family long ago, Gran, whom we are told multiple times looks like a mummy. Gran thinks she is better than the others and is acquisitive, steals Marcia's money and jewelry. Finally we have teenaged girl Lollie Mason, Renny and Victor's sister, blonde and skinny and innocent; she thinks Marcia is a princess. Poltergeist-type phenomena attend Lollie, and she spontaneously suffers bloody wounds, as if an invisible demon has scratched her. Marcia, a scientist (you know, we all pretend psychology is a science, our of politeness), thinks Lollie's gruesome injuries are psychosomatic.
"Parasite Mansion" is like 17 pages long. Halfway through, Victor tells the history of the cursed Mason family. His great aunt and then his aunt were terrorized by an invisible monster, tormented until their deaths; Lollie is the third such victim. The first two victims of the monster were admitted to asylums but the doctors could do nothing for them, so Lollie and her family are determined to keep victim #3 from being similarly taken away, uselessly, to a depressing institution and so the Masons have shut themselves off from the world, leaving the family in poverty and Renny and Lollie with no education or social skills. Victor declares he cannot let Marcia leave, as she would attract the authorities and lookie-loos to the dilapidated estate and Lollie would end up in an asylum.
In the last third or quarter of the story, Marcia figures out what is going on and saves the day. Gran has the power of telekinesis and has been using it to terrorize the pretty Mason women whom she envies and resents because the Masons were not as wealthy a family she thought they were when she married into their family. As for the injuries, they really are psychosomatic, like stigmata. After she has been discovered, Gran tries to murder Marcia, fails, and has a heart attack and dies. We are led to expect that Victor, Lollie, and Renny will rejoin society and have normal lives--Victor will quit the booze and marry Marcia, he being a hunk once he is shaved and washed up.
Long, slow and repetitive, and irritating to read because of the clumsy style. I can't blame Counselman for the typos, but I can blame McIlwraith, and I can blame both of them for some of the lines that are so wacky as to take you right out of the story:
"It sounds like the supernatural, I know. But so did television, to people of Shakespeare’s time."
Thumbs down for "Parasite Mansion." Arkham House put out a Counselman collection, Half in Shadow, in 1978, and you can find "Parasite Mansion" in there. In 1987 Peter Haining included this clunker in his anthology Poltergeist: Tales of Deadly Ghosts.
"The Phantom Slayer" by Fritz Leiber
After those two long boring pieces it is a relief to read a well-written story with some human feeling and some strong images. "The Phantom Slayer"'s content is just OK, but thanks to superior technique the story is miles ahead of Quick's and Counselman's.
Our narrator is sort of a loser who is going through some tough times. An uncle he never met dies, and he inherits unc's meagre estate; unc was a retired police lieutenant and paid his rent in advance, so our narrator gets to live in unc's apartment in the big city and eat unc's stockpiled canned food. Leiber does a good job describing the narrator's loneliness and what it is like to move into a little apartment in the big city. This material is right up my alley; I am fascinated by city life and small apartments, the sounds and the smells, the light and shadows and all that.
The plot concerns the narrator going through his uncle's things, in particular newspaper clippings about a series of murders by what we today would call a serial killer, and horrible dreams the narrator has after moving in to unc's flat. Or are they dreams? Is the narrator's uncle trying to communicate with his nephew from the grave? Trying to take over the narrator's body? Is the uncle trying to solve the case of the Phantom Slayer, or is he himself the Phantom Slayer? Is the narrator going to become a murderer himself or save the day and solve the crime?
It is not rare for a character in weird fiction to learn something dreadful about his own ancestry and/or identity, to have dreams that may in fact be memories of things he is doing while he thinks he is asleep, and to fear someone else is taking over his body. But Leiber handles this conventional material pretty skillfully. I can moderately recommend "The Phantom Slayer."
Sometimes under the title "The Inheritance," "The Phantom Slayer" has been reprinted many times, in various Leiber collections and in several anthologies.
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Not a great start of the 1942 leg of our long march through the history of
Weird Tales, but when walking the weird road, you gotta take the rough with the smooth. And Fritz's contribution is good. As for this issue of the magazine, of course "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," Bok's illo for that story and Derleth's commentary on it make it worthwhile for the student of the weird.
We'll continue our explorations of 1942 weird stories soon, but first a novel from the late 1920s.
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