Alright, it is time to take a look at the second of the six issues of
Weird Tales published in 1942. This issue has a lot of good interior illustrations, including several by Hannes Bok, so check it out, art lovers. The March 1942 issue of D. McIlwraith's magazine also includes the first episode of a reprint of H. P. Lovecraft's twenty-year-old serial "Herbert West: Reanimator," which I won't be reading today, having read it many years ago and not feeling like reading it again yet. There is a Malcolm Jameson story that looks like a joke story, so I am skipping it, and I am in no mood to deal with Stanton Coblentz and his
joke stories and
satires, either, so there's another story we can say we are putting off to another day and then absolutely forget about.
Let's get right to the three stories we
are going to read; but first note that I am reading them in a scan of this original magazine, not in any later anthologies or collections.
"Hell on Earth" by Robert Bloch
The narrator of "Hell on Earth" is a horror writer who is hired by two college professors--a fat man and a slender blonde woman with blue eyes--to act as a witness to their experiments into the occult. Fatso and blondie have collected in an upper story of a Manhattan skyscraper a vast library of ancient and medieval manuscripts from around the world and acquired a storehouse of creepy sundries like eye of newt and candles made from the rendered fat of corpses in hopes of performing black magic. The profs are sure that there is some truth to the tales of sorcery of the past, to the claims of wizards to be able to raise the dead, turn lead to gold, and summon demons, and they hope to master these esoteric skills and employ them for the good of modern man.
Bloch does a good job describing all the occult paraphernalia and making black magic sound sort of rational and believable, and he is similarly successful depicting the ritual by which the blonde summons from hell Satan himself! You'd think that the eggheads would start small, summon a minor demon, and they meant to, but one of the profs screwed up, it seems, and blondie read the spell that summons the demon at the top of Hell's org chart. Luckily the college profs have set up a special cage of unbreakable glass reinforced by holy water and crosses and Satan is trapped within it.
The rest of the story, which is kind of long, chronicles how Satan tries to escape the glass cage by possessing or hypnotizing each of the three main characters in turn while they try to kill Satan with poison and similar means or send him back to Hell with other spells. During the excitement, the narrator and the blonde fall in love, and the narrator has to drive Satan from her body by punching her and burning her possessed flesh with a crucifix. This sex and violence material holds the reader's attention, but Bloch then resorts to providing us a long alphabetical list of different methods of divination that the narrator tries to employ and then a list of the various types of elementals the narrator considers summoning and that stuff is a little tedious. I guess Bloch did a lot of research for this story and, not wanting any of it go to waste, just dumps his notes in front of us. I already find it a little annoying when a story has the same thing happen three times in a row (in this story the three principal characters all getting possessed, as if after the first possession they wouldn't be more careful) and the monotonous lists coming after that was hard to take.
The resolution of the plot is also disappointing. The natural ending of "Hell on Earth" would be for the narrator to become Satan and conquer the Earth with an army of monsters, or, commit suicide to free himself from Satan's power, but I guess a happy ending was called for, and Bloch unfortunately doesn't provide a very convincing one. Bloch put a lot of effort into, and achieved considerable success at, portraying how summoning the demons works and I think also succeeded in making the narrator's seduction by Satan convincing, but the way the narrator escapes and sends the devils back to Hell is half-baked, quite vague, and not very believable. I think part of the problem is the requirement that the narrator be the hero--it is the writer who triggers the trap that confines Satan, and then frees the fat academic from bondage, and then the slim love interest, and then himself; it might have been better if fatso and/or blondie had returned the favor and saved the narrator instead of the narrator improbably saving himself.
We'll call "Hell on Earth" mildly recommendable.
If you can read Spanish, you can read "Hell on Earth" in an issue of the Argentine magazine Narraciones Terrorificas printed in 1944. In 1966, the story was included by Peter Haining in his anthology Summoned from the Tomb and by Cylvia Kleinman Margulies in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine. In 1985, the story was adapted into an artistically ambitious but unappealing graphic novel. In 2000, "Hell on Earth" reappeared in book form as the title story of the second volume of the collection The Lost Bloch, which sports a Bernie Wrightson cover.
"Death of the Kraken" by David H. Keller
Back in August, tarbandu at Por Por Books Blog
directed us to a 2024 interview of Betsy Wollheim in which interviewer Darrell Schweitzer says it is just as well that David H. Keller is forgotten. Well, hold on to your hat, Darrell, because here at MPorcius Fiction Log we haven't forgotten Keller! "Death of the Kraken" will be the fourteenth Keller story we've blogged about here at MPFL, and here are the links to prove it:
I'd like to support a fellow son of the Garden State, and I've
liked the
fiction of Schweitzer's that I have read, but "Death of the Kraken" is a good adventure story and so I have to say that Schweitzer is off base on the topic of Keller. Well, maybe Schweitzer felt the need to suck up to the feminists or something; those face-to-face meetings can be tough, and if you are the kind of person who wants to have a career or friends you can find yourself saying any crazy thing to keep your job and keep the peace.
Keller gives us a frame story about a writer, our narrator, meeting an impoverished sailor and the sailor regaling the narrator with his twist ending adventure story. The sailor's tale is about being hired to man a machine gun on a ship that a scientist takes to the Sargasso Sea; the scientist thinks there is a huge monster there that eats sailors, and a machine gun is just the thing to solve the monster problem. Sure enough, as the ship drifts among the weed, past various dead hulks, crewmen begin disappearing. These poor bastards don't even have a chance to cry our before vanishing; this huge monster must be a sneaky one! Who among the passengers and crew will get back to America? Will the sailor discover the true nature of the monster and end its reign of terror with a burst of machine gun fire? Will the narrator, and will us readers, believe the sailor's gruesome tale?
"Death of the Kraken" is not a groundbreaking story, but it is written well and so it is entertaining. "Death of the Kraken" was the cover story of an issue of that Argentine publication we just mentioned, and would reappear in Keller collections in 1976 and in 2010.
"Here, Daemos!" by August Derleth
This is an obvious and conventional story, but not badly told. Acceptable filler.
A new vicar takes over the parish of a English country village. The previous vicar didn't handle the finances well, so the parish faces major debts. The new guy has the idea of opening up some three-hundred-year-old tomb to take custody of the treasure said to be within it. The local people are against this course of action--the tomb is of a man reputed to be a demonologist and is known to have a curse on it. The new vicar considers this foolish superstition, and hires workers from outside the parish to help him loot the tomb. The ghost of the demonologist and his big pet dog return to take revenge. Derleth's story is very much a morality play and not an exercise in terror--the ghosts only harm the new vicar after he has made a decision that wiser heads have advised him against again and again, the ghosts don't wreak havoc indiscriminately throughout the countryside, victimizing innocent people or anything like that.
Anthologists seem to like "Here, Daemos!" Peter Haining included it in Legends for the Dark in 1968, Vic Ghidalia and Roger Elwood included it in Beware the Beasts in 1970, and whoever edited Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Master/s Choice included it in that 1979 volume. It also shows up in Derleth collections.
None of these stories is bad, so this step in our journey through the history of
Weird Tales has been a comfortable one. The best material we read today was probably in the first third or so of Bloch's "Hell on Earth," but the final third of that story is not so hot, so David Keller's "Death of the Kraken" is today's top story. Derleth's "Here, Daemos!" brings up the rear, but earns a passing grade.
More short stories in our next episode, kids. Until then, stay weird.
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I don't know what Schweitzer is saying if he is saying that Keller is forgotten. He is by no means forgotten and a good many of his stories have been published in books.
ReplyDeleteIn the first place, in science fiction, no one is forgotten. I have never seen a field that catalogues itself more obsessively than science fiction. The Day index to the science fiction pulps was published before the pulp era had even come to an end. Keller is no more forgotten than any of the other early writers.
Second, you can't pick up a newspaper today without finding a story about mechanical "robots." As far as I can tell, the first person to use the term "robot" for a mechanical being was Keller in his story "The Threat of the Robot" (Science Wonder, June 1929). The story by the way is quite topical: it is about the replacement of human football players by mechanical players. The story also predicts that sports games would be televised to a mass audience. (Capek used the term "robot" in RUR for biological beings, what we would now more likely call an android.)
Third, Keller was one of the great early idea men of science fiction. He was one of the most important layers of the foundations of science fiction ideas that all later authors have employed. Read his stories and see if you don't agree. It ill becomes a son to forget his father.
Fourth, some of his stories dealt with racial matters. Well, that is good. There is no subject that is off limits for science fiction. If you don't like how he handles them, then go write your own stories.
If I have noticed anything about Keller's stories, it is they can be absolutely hard-boiled and will come to the appropriate conclusion no matter how harsh that may be. In other words, he is an honest writer. See his stories "The Golden Key" or "A Piece of Linoleum" and you will see what I mean. I guess the modern generation just cannot deal with that kind of honesty.
DeleteIt was an odd comment from Schweitzer, and really jumped out at me, which is why I remembered it after reading it six or seven months ago and thought it worth bringing up.
DeleteThanks for the well-informed and instructive comment. And for the recommendations--I'll keep "The Golden Key" and "A Piece of Linoleum" in mind!
It would not at all surprise me if he was not referring to a few of the Taine of San Francisco stories, especially the first one, "The Menace" (Amazing Quarterly, Summer 1928) which deals with an attempt by black people to wipe out the white race. It is actually a highly imaginative story in the best Keller style, especially the third component "The Insane Avalanche." (You have to love pulp story titles.) Keller really has an advanced and thorough science fictional imagination. His day job as a psychiatrist gave him all information he needed to write gritty, horrifying and scientifically informed stories. There is a very interesting essay on Keller by Patrick A. Adkins, "David H. Keller as Pulp Writer," to be found in the paperback reprint of Keller's story "The Human Termites," another great story.
DeleteI looked up the Betsy Wollheim/Darrell Schweitzer interview I think you referenced. What Schweitzer said was that it was best for Keller to be forgotten because he was in the Rush Limbaugh/Donald Trump faction. I have read plenty of Keller's stories and I have no clue as to how Schweitzer arrived at that conclusion about an author born in 1880. Keller seems to me, like most of the early masters, to be non-political in his stories. My comment above about racism has no relation to anything ever said by either Limbaugh or Trump. Even worse, what Schweitzer plainly advocates is that if you don't share his obvious wokery opinions that you should be cancelled. I think we can all agree Schweitzer's comment is foolish.
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