Let's take another step in our eldritch journey--our quest to read at least one story from each issue of
Weird Tales, the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual! Today, we consider the July 1942 issue and we've got three stories lined up, one each by historian of the American South and chronicler of the adventures of John the Balladeer Manly Wade Wellman, founder of Arkham House and creator of Solar Pons August Derleth, and top tier weird artist Hannes Bok. I'm reading all these stories in a scan of the magazine, which was edited by D. McIlwraith and sports a cover by Margaret Brundage that features more clothing on its female figure than do so many of Brundage's
more famous covers.
"Coven" by Manly Wade Wellman
The narrator of "Coven" is Cole Wickett, 14-year-old cavalry private in the Confederate Army. Captured by the Federals, he is pressed into an esoteric service by a Union Chaplain and sergeant when they are certain that Wickett is a virgin. You see, Sarge and the chaplain are hunting a vampire! A virgin on horseback cannot cross the grave in which a vampire rests, and these two enemies of the forces of Satan need Wickett's help finding which grave conceals the monster. The collaboration is a success, though Wickett narrowly escapes statutory rape by the pale green-eyed female vampire. After the vampire has been destroyed, Wickett is allowed to escape back to the rebel lines.
Chapter II takes place over ten years later. Wickett is an impoverished wanderer with no friends or family, close to starvation! Reconstruction has been hard on this guy, and he has tried his hand at gambling, stealing, scavenging, even joining the KKK! Walking one night, desperate, he sees a flying monster approach three men--two of the men are torturing the third! He rescues the man being flogged, and drives off his tormentors; the monster also disappears, and then suddenly appears that Yankee sergeant, now a minister. These two guys are fated to help each other fight the Devil, it seems.
In Chapter III the former sergeant explains to Wickett his current struggle against a coven of devil-worshippers and the bat-winged monster Wickett glimpsed, and enlists his aid. In Chapter IV the coven approaches the house in which our heroes await, and in Chapter V we get the fight with the human enemies. In Chapter VI, Wickett witnesses the flying demon punish its followers for their failure and then confronts the winged monster alone. In Chapter VII, the monster exiled to another sphere along with its followers, things get wrapped up--it is suggested that Wickett will start his own farm and marry a minor character, an attractive young woman. This chapter also puts forward baldly a Lovecraftian assessment that we saw dramatized earlier, that increasing your knowledge may well lead to disaster rather than benefit--the human leaders of the coven learned how to summon a demon, and that demon ended up destroying them all.
This is a good black magic story. The way Wellman handles the magic--the various spells and counterspells and the relationship between the demon and those who summoned it--is compelling, much of it feeling fresh and all of it being exciting. (Here is where I will complain that Brundage on the cover of this issue of WT gives the monster human legs when Wellman specifically describes its legs as being much more alien, much more like an animal's--she missed a real opportunity here.) Wellman's fight scenes are also good, fast and brutal and disturbing, and I also liked the somewhat darkly erotic scenes with the vampire. Thumbs up for "Coven."
"Coven" has been reprinted in Wellman collections, and in Nightmares in Dixie, an anthology of horror stories set in the South. I should also note that "Coven" is a sequel to a three-part serial by Wellman that appeared in Weird Tales in 1939, "Fearful Rock," that also features that sergeant; I should get around to reading that novella someday.
"Lansing's Luxury" by August Derleth
Here we have one of those stories that Derleth, a man famous for his connection to his home state of Wisconsin, sets in England. Why does he do this? "Lansing's Legacy" is also one of those stories that seeks to exploit the reader's supposed envy or hatred of rich people. Plus, it is one of those horror stories which, to my mind, is not a horror story at all, but a morality tale, a tale in which the author does not seek to horrify us by telling us that the world is chaotic and terrible, but rather assures us that the world is orderly and just, a story in which a person behaves immorally and is then punished by supernatural forces.
Lansing is a rich guy in his sixties or maybe late fifties, a successful businessman with lots of connections. Derleth makes it clear he is not some old money guy who inherited his wealth, but a sharp operator who made his money--this story is not an attack on the aristocracy, but on the bourgeoisie. The leitmotif of Derleth's story is that this guy has no imagination; we hear that Lansing has no imagination like ten times over the story's five pages. I guess the people who write for and read Weird Tales think of themselves as people with imagination, and have contempt for guys with no imagination, another way this story tries not to horrify but to comfort its readers. I daresay that a guy who built a fortune must have some kind of imagination, like, he must have come up with business plans or something, but I suppose Derleth and Weird Tales readers think "having imagination" means you believe in the supernatural.
There's our character. Now, our plot. Lansing learns a new railway will be built soon. Before the public knows of the new project, Lansing buys up all the land the track will be laid on--he will be able to sell the land at a big profit because the owners he purchases it from don't know how valuable the land is about to become. It seems Lansing doesn't need money, but just does this for love of the game and to assuage the boredom old men feel. One property owner refuses to sell. Lansing hires a private investigator to figure out what is up with this joker. It seems everybody in his environs thinks he is a wizard or an immortal monster or something.
Lansing pulls strings to have the wizard's property condemned so he can buy it, but the wizard is still able to keep his house; this part of the story I didn't quite get. The wizard sets out to assassinate Lansing, I guess out of a desire for vengeance because killing Lansing won't get his property back and the monster is still in its house anyway--it is not like the wizard has to kill Lansing to retake its territory. Anyway, the monster stays abed all day and projects his astral form out into the world. This astral form can touch people, and keeps trying to push Lansing down the stairs or in front of a truck ("lorry") or onto the train tracks. Lansing manages to catch himself twice, and is preserved during the third attempt when a porter saves him from falling on the tracks.
For some reason, Lansing goes to the former wizard's property to watch the construction of the railroad; why bother when he doesn't own the property anymore and never had any connection to the railroad? The engineer in charge of the project says they probably won't build the railway here after all, as there are caverns under this area (it is implied that the wizard is a subterranean monster who emerged from these caverns long long ago.) Lansing walks over to a path along a cliff or something ("He found himself alone, with the steep slope of rock on one side of him, and a shorter, more dangerous declivity on the other") where the wizard's astral form causes an avalanche that crushes the businessman--Derleth twists the knife by telling us for the first time that Lansing is fat, too fat to run out of the path of the avalanche.
This story is sloppy. The fact that Lansing has no imagination isn't well integrated into why he gets killed--I guess we are expected to think that if he believed in the supernatural he wouldn't have used his connections to buy the wizard's property after learning the guy had magic powers. I totally didn't understand how the government could condemn the wizard's property in such a way that Lansing could then buy it and sell it to the railroad, except for the actual house, which the wizard was still allowed to live in. And twice Lansing saves himself from being pushed to his death, making you think he is spry, but then at the bottom of the last page of the story, Derleth tells us he is fat. At the top of the first page of the story, Derleth gave a physical description of Lansing, and there is no mention of him being fat.
Gotta give this one a thumbs down. It is true I am biased against this story for numerous reasons, some of which are listed in my first para on "Lansing's Luxury." Another reason: I am often turned off by stories in which the writer stacks the deck against a character, egging you on to hate him and enjoy seeing him get killed--when the writer of a story is manipulating you too blatantly into having it in for some character, I start to sympathize with the character. (As a kid I always sympathized with the people Benson and Alan Alda made fun of on their shows, perhaps because the kids at school always made me the butt of their jokes, and I am fully aware of how my parents talk about me behind my back, and so always take people's extravagant depictions of others as villains with a grain of salt.) Even discounting my own prejudices, I think "Lansing's Luxury" deserves a negative vote because of all the sloppiness I have detailed above.
"Lansing's Luxury" has been reprinted in several Derleth collections; maybe it was revised for book publication to solve some of the issues I am complaining about? (Something maybe D. McIlwraith should have done? Tsk, tsk!)
"Poor Little Tampico" by Hannes Bok
I am of course a fan of Bok's paintings and drawings, but, when
I read three of his stories back in 2019, I found them a mixed bag, more curious than enjoyable. But let's give "Poor Little Tampico" a chance.
Our tale is laid in wartorn Spain. Everywhere you look are shell craters and burned or bombed houses. Our protagonist is 11-year-old orphan Tampico, son of a doctor in Madrid who died in the fighting; Tampico wanders the countryside, begging for food--everybody tells him they are too poor to help him. One farm seems to be in better shape than the rest, seems to be thriving! Little Tampico is told to stay away from that house, as it is the home of a witch who makes money telling people's fortunes. Is Bok here betraying a weak grasp of economics--if everybody is impoverished, how do they pay the witch?--or satirizing the tendency of poor people to stupidly waste money on nonsense like fortune telling?
Ignoring the warnings, Tampico sneaks into the house and, finding the witch absent, drinks the hot broth in the cauldron over the fire. Ay caramba, he gets sick soon after. The witch arrives and moans because Tampico has eaten the goop she looks in to predict the future for her customers, a goop composed of such unsavory ingredients as bat wings and desiccated lizards!
A pregnant woman whose husband is away participating in the war wants her fortune told and the witch finds that she can read the future in the ill Tampico's eyes. When word gets out to the rest of the peasants that the witch can read the future in a kid's glazzies, they all want their fortune told this way, like novelty-loving consumers. The opening pages of the story that describe the blasted countryside and Tampico's poverty seem so sincere, these satirical elements come as a surprise.
Tampico and the witch get a profitable business going, and the witch even tidies up the kid's hair and clothes so he is more presentable. But eating a broth made from worms, amphibians, reptiles and bats every day is doing a number on Tampico's health. He tries to leave the witch, but she stops him, and entices him to stay by telling him she has legally adopted him and he will inherit her relatively well-appointed farm when she eventually expires.
General Blasco, a ruthless dictator with an interest in the occult, summons the witch and her adopted son when he hears of their feats of divination. This caudillo has people shot over the slightest offenses, and tells the witch she will be shot if her fortune-telling is proven to be a scam. To her horror, when she tries to read the General's future in Tampico's eyes, she can see nothing! The General has her summarily executed, but allows Tampico to leave; he will now enjoy running the witch's farm, the best in the village. The punchline of the story is the revelation that, after consuming the noxious broth this time around, Tampico took some bicarbonate of soda to settle his stomach, thus inadvertently short circuiting the broth's magical effect.
I guess this story is a little funny, and not poorly written, so we'll judge it acceptable. "Poor Little Tampico" has never been reprinted, unless you count the Canadian edition of Weird Tales, which did bear a different cover.
**********
Wellman is a strong performer, and "Coven" is quite good, easily the best of today's stories. I'm actually not really interested in the Civil War or the South or hillbillies, but Wellman is regularly able to overcome my lack of sympathy for these settings simply with his effective writing.
Derleth's story is some kind of rush job, full of problems that should have been ironed out in revisions. Today's loser. Bok's tale is not bad, though certainly odd, starting out like some tearjerker and transitioning into satire and then ending with a wacky joke that undermines all the energy its depiction of black magic might have had.
Stay tuned as we continue our journey through the long history of Weird Tales here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
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