Bizarre! stories by A C Clarke, R Bloch, C Woolrich, A Derleth and J H Schmitz

Flipping through a guide to old pulp magazines at Antique Crossroads in Hagerstown, MD, I came upon reproductions of the exciting covers of the second and third issues of Bizarre! Mystery Magazine, a periodical that endured through only three issues during 1965 and '66.  With big names like Robert Bloch, August Derleth and Arthur C. Clarke on its covers, this seemed like a magazine worth checking out.  So, today let's read five stories that appeared in this magazine edited by a John Poe, a man who doesn't seem to have any other credits on isfdb.  

"The Last Command" by Arthur C. Clarke (1965)

The second issue of Bizarre! has stories by Philip Jose Farmer, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Bloch that pique my interest.  The Farmer appears under a pen name and I'm not having any luck finding a copy of it online, so we'll start with the Clarke, which debuted here behind Bizarre!'s fascinating female-nude-with-cobwebs cover and has been reprinted many times.  I'm reading "The Last Command" in a scan of one of many editions of the collection The Wind from the Sun.

"The Last Command" is a gimmicky story, like two pages long.  (We just read another brief gimmicky story by Clarke in late February.)  A guy in space has learned that nuclear war has destroyed his country back on Earth.  This guy is in a space craft loaded with missiles, charged with serving as a deterrent to his nation's enemies.  But deterrence has failed, and he expects to be ordered to nuke into oblivion the survivors of his people's enemies in an act of revenge.  But the message he receives, a prerecorded order from the now-dead President, is a surprise to him!

We've got two twist endings here.  The first is that the Prez doesn't order the spaceman to wipe out the enemy that has exterminated his countrymen.  Au contraire!  The presidential recording orders the astronaut to jettison his weapons and go to Earth to help the destroyers of his people build a better world!  The second twist ending is that the space man isn't an American, but the last living citizen of the Soviet Union!  

It was a relief to know that the United States was still extant, but at the same time it was annoying to see Arthur C. Clarke portraying the United States as a rampaging monster and the USSR as some kind of paragon of selflessness.  But what are you going to do?; the SF world is full of pinkos.

"The Last Command" sparks an emotional reaction and the twists are legitimately surprising, so I have to admit this story is a success, even if its political content is ridiculous and disgusting.

"Enoch" by Robert Bloch (1946)

"Enoch" is the story most energetically promoted on the cover of second ish of Bizarre!, but it is a reprint of a 1946 Weird Tales piece that has been reprinted in a million places.  I am reading it in a scan of the issue of D. McIlwraith's magazine in which it debuted, the cover story of which is Edmond Hamilton's "Day of Judgement," which we read almost nine years ago.

"Enoch" is a better than average performance from our old buddy Bob "Psycho" Bloch, a very good witchcraft story with gore, perversion, and tragedy.  We meet our narrator, who lives in a shack in the swamp, and gradually learn his crazy life story--his mother was a witch, and she summoned a familiar to protect her son should she die, she knowing her son was a dimwit who couldn't look after herself.  The familiar, Enoch, a sort of invisible semi-material gremlin or something, sort of lives in the narrator's skull.  Enoch has psychic or magical powers and uses them to guide the narrator.  Of course, Enoch is a satanic monster, absolutely evil and selfish, and requires from the narrator payment of a high order in return for its support.  At Enoch's direction, the narrator murders and mutilates innocent people and Enoch feeds on their souls and/or brains--it is a little unclear, but Enoch enjoins the narrator to preserve and then remove the heads of his victims.  The story really shifts into high gear when the law and an angry lynch mob catches up to our serial killer narrator.  Will the narrator end in prison? In an asylum?  Or at the end of noose?  Will Enoch aid or betray the narrator?  And what about the government officials and medical men who interview the narrator--how will Enoch handle them?

I've read a lot of mediocre and some actually bad Bloch stories, but every so often Bloch lays a brilliant bit of work on me and I realize anew that he deserves his high reputation.  Thumbs up for "Enoch."

We've already read several stories from Horror-7:
"The Opener of the Way," "The Secret of Sebek,"
"Return to the Sabbath," "The Mandarin's Canaries"
and "The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton"

"Too Nice a Day to Die" by Cornell Woolrich (1965)

The most heavily promoted story of the third and final issue of Bizarre! is a reprint of a Mickey Spillane tale, "The Lady Says Die!", which we read back in 2022.  Next on the list is a Cornell Woolrich story reprinted from the 1965 collection The Dark Side of Love: Tales of Love and Death; I am reading this caper, "Too Nice a Day to Die,"  in a scan of that collection.

"Too Nice a Day to Die" is a competent mainstream story without any of the witchcraft, space aliens or even, really, mentally ill folks that inhabit so much of the fiction we read here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  I'm going to call Woolrich's story merely acceptable, though it is well written on a sentence by sentence basis, as it is not very satisfying--the characters lack personality and the plot is essentially random, its course determined not by the characters' decisions or personalities but extraneous uncontrollable factors.  Sure, maybe Woolrich means that to be the point of his story, that our lives are not under our control but subject to the winds and tides of fate, but such an attitude makes for a weak story, in my opinion.  

A woman is estranged from her family and living alone in New York City, in beautiful Manhattan, working a boring office job, and decides to commit suicide.  At the last minute a random happenstance saves her life.  So she goes for a walk around town, thinking she'll kill herself tonight or tomorrow.  Sitting in Rockefeller Center near the skating rink, a thief seizes her handbag but then a Midwestern transplant, an architect I think, retrieves and returns the bag.  Suicide lady and Indianapolis boy walk around town together all afternoon and fall in love.  In the evening she invites him up to her place but then she gets hit by a car and killed.

The descriptions of New York and the processes of committing suicide, falling in love, and getting hit by an automobile are all good, but "Too Nice a Day to Die" doesn't add up to much for me--maybe, in the same way people who have had BDSM sex or smoked crack long enough can't get no satisfaction from vanilla sex or marijuana, after hundreds (thousands?) of stories about witches, aliens and psychos, I can't derive much from stories about office girls and the architects who love them.  But I'm going to keep saying that his ois not an MPorcius problem but a Cornell Woolrich problem, that "Too Nice a Day to Die" doesn't work for me because a story's course and resolution should be the product of its character' easily comprehensible personalities and decision-making.     

"Walpurgisnacht" by August Derleth (1961)

Listed third on the cover of the final ish of Bizarre! is August Derleth's "Walpurgisnacht," a reprint from the 1961 collection Wisconsin in Their Bones.  I am reading the story in a scan of that collection.

Like Woolrich's story, Derleth's "Walpurgisnacht" is a mainstream story about love and death but it has much more human feeling and feels like real life rather than a twist-ending gimmick story.  We also might call it a feminist story.

An old woman's husband is in the hospital, on his deathbed.  Her neighbor, an old maid who lives with her brother, comes over to commiserate.  Soon we readers learn all about how the husband was a violent drunk who never worked a steady job but fished and scavenged in the dump all day and played the accordion at night at bars; his wife had to bring in cash doing various menial jobs as well as tend the garden.  When the women process that this abusive slacker is dying they throw all his scavenged wooden scrap, his fishing rod, his accordion and his favorite chair into a pile and set them on fire and dance around the blaze in ecstatic celebration.

Pretty good.     

"Faddist" by James H. Schmitz (1966)   

"Faddist" debuted in the third and final issue of Bizarre! and was not reprinted until 2002 when it reappeared in the collection Eternal Frontier, which is where I am reading it.

This is a competent filler piece, an obvious twist-ending gimmick story.  Acceptable.

Herman loves pastries and whipped cream.  But for years such delights were denied him because he married health-food nut Elaine, a woman whose will dwarfed that of the sweet toothed Herman.  after almost two decades of marriage, Elaine vanished on her way to an organic farmer convention, and since then Herman has been eating delicious baked goods to his heart's content.  He does keep his promise to Elaine to carefully maintain her organic garden, though.

The twists are that Herman harvests but throws into the trash the produce from the garden, and that he murdered Elaine.  You see, when Elaine left for the convention, she immediately circled back to spy on Herman, and caught him rushing to the bakery and returning with a (un)healthy supply of pastries.  Elaine confronted hubby before he even had a chance to eat this glorious bounty, and Herman finally decided he loved sweets more than his nagging wife and slew her and buried her in the garden, where her body nourishes her beloved fruits and veggies.

**********

Five tragic stories of death, none of them bad, a few of them good.  Clarke's appeals to the prejudices of anti-anti-communist liberals who think fears of the Soviet Union overblown.  Bloch's is a quite fine black magic story about people exploited by satanic forces to which their own inadequacies make them vulnerable.  Woolrich, Derleth and Schmitz offer mainstream stories, Woolrich's kind of gimmicky and nihilistic with flat, bland characters; Derleth's sadly realistic and genuinely depressing, while Schmitz's, though jokey, at least has characters with personality whose actions and fates are dictated by their personalities.  The crown has to go to Bloch, with Derleth a close second and Clarke at third; Woolrich and Schmitz get passing grades.

Today's complement included only one "real" science fiction story, the remainder being about the supernatural or just crime and bad luck, but next time we meet science fiction is back on the menu, under the "Entrees" heading, or so I hope, as we look at stories from a 1950s magazine that has spacecraft on its cover.