Weird Tales, May 1942: D Quick, R Bloch and M Jameson

Back in 2019, we read Henry Kuttner's twist-ending story "Masquerade," a tale I wasn't crazy about but which was admired by anthologists and even the people who produce TV programs.  "Masquerade" debuted in the May 1942 issue of Weird Tales, an issue which has three other stories the MPorcius Fiction Log staff is curious about, so let's take some time to check them out.

But before we get to the fiction, I am going to recommend you look at this issue of Weird Tales even if you couldn't care less about Henry Kuttner, Robert Bloch, Dorothy Quick or Malcolm Jameson, because this issue is chock full of striking illustrations by Hannes Bok and Boris Dolgov.  Skeletons!  Male and female nudes!  A woman being strangled!  Reptilian monsters! Ships in the moonlight!  Evocative architecture!  McIlwraith got some stellar work out these guys for this issue, work that deserves to be widely known among fans of horror and fantasy illustration.   

"The Enchanted River" by Dorothy Quick

This will be the sixth story by Dorothy Quick with which the staff of MPorcius Fiction Log has grappled.  Below find links to our first five bouts with Quick, who, it seems, was famous in her lifetime for her friendship with Mark Twain, a relationship immortalized in a TV movie in 1991.  Maybe this weekend you can watch Mark Twain and Me as the life-affirming half of a Weird Tales double feature with the movie in which Vincent D'Onofrio plays Robert E. Howard, The Whole Wide World, as the downer half.  (Are there Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch and H. P. Lovecraft biopics?  Clark Ashton Smith and E. Hoffmann Price are probably the most suitable Weirdies for cinematic memorialization, as Smith could be shown carving his crazy sculptures and Price actually spent time in foreign countries and participated in thrilling violence.)    

"The White Lady"
"The Witch's Mark"
"Turn Over"
"Edge of the Cliff" 
"The Lost Gods"

"The Enchanted River" is a decent happy-ending fantasy story, though it has some horror elements (a guy gets trampled into paste by an invisible elephant, after all.)  Quick's story also incorporates some elements we see all the time in weird fiction but which are pretty superfluous here, but these unnecessary components don't quite wreck the story.  Moderate recommendation.

You know how Arthur C. Clarke went to Ceylon and found the place and its people so captivating he spent the remainder of his life there enjoying its native beauty?  Well, the guy in this story does the same thing!  A rich business guy from the West, Wells Barrington, comes to Ceylon and falls in love with the place and decides to give up his career to stay forevermore.  Wells gets along just fine with the natives, especially after he shoots down a tiger that was terrorizing everybody.

One day Wells sees a beautiful girl bathing in the river.  Ava is her name.  Ava tells Wells that this is a magic river, that the spirit of the river helps guide lovers together.  She is at the river because she hopes the river will somehow bring the man she loves to her--Ava is in one hell of a pickle, the local priests having set her up with a guy she doesn't want to marry.  Of course, the man she wants to marry is Wells, the white savior who slew the tiger and has a pile of money.  And of course Wells is willing to marry Ava, she being so good-looking.  This story is pretty realistic!

Wells talks to the priests and the local prince and tries to solve Ava's problem the way we solve problems over here in the West, by handing out money.  Nothing doing--these natives care more about their faith than your filthy silver and gold and the gods have decreed that Ava will marry the prince.  As a last resort, Wells takes a nude dip in the river himself, Ava having maintained that the spirit of the river might help bring the lovers together.

At the bottom of the river Wells finds a little bell.  When rung, the little bell summons an invisible elephant.  This phantom pachyderm comes in handy when the prince and the priests lead a mob to Wells' house to kill him and Ava.  The elephant stomps the prince and cows the populace, who now see Wells as a hero blessed by the divine.  Wells and Ava live happily ever after.

Then comes the superfluous denouement that Quick tacked on to the end of her story or no reason I can discern after the satisfying gore climax and the assertion that our heroes will be living long happy lives in paradise.  You see, the prince, Wells, and Ava are the reincarnated members of a love triangle that rocked Ceylon thousands of years ago!  Tragedy befell the sympathetic couple that made up the base of the triangle even though an elephant tried to save them from the evil prince who was the disruptive third angle of the love triangle.  Today the ghost of that elephant finally finished the job it started so long ago by mashing the prince into a stain on the ground and making sure the two lovers could be reunited.  To my mind this reincarnation business is quite unnecessary, and if Quick felt the need to include it, maybe she should have hinted at it before the resolution of the plot instead of after.

"The Enchanted River" would not be reprinted until 2024 when S. T. Joshi retrieved it from the depths and included it in the Quick collection entitled The Witch's Mark and Others.

"Black Bargain" by Robert Bloch

Here's a Bloch story that both the aforementioned Joshi and editor Marvin Kaye included in anthologies, and which was included in a bunch of Bloch anthologies in English and in other tongues.  Everyone here at MPorcius HQ so enjoyed making the list of links above for Quick that we're putting together a list of Bloch links for this segment of the broadcast--links to my blog posts about stories that we have already read from the 1998 Arkham House Bloch collection Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies, one of those books in which "Black Bargain" reappeared.

"The Druidic Doom"
"Fangs of Vengeance"
"Death is an Elephant" 
"Power of the Druid" 
"He Waits Beneath the Sea"
"The Dark Isle"
"Wine of the Sabbat"
"A Sorcerer Runs for Sheriff"

"Black Bargain" is a pretty good horror story, and it qualifies as a tale of the Cthulhu Mythos because it mentions the forbidden book invented by Bloch, Mysteries of the Worm.  (Several of H. P. Lovecraft's friends created their own books of mind-blowing lore in imitation of and homage to HPL's famous Necronomicon.)  

Our narrator is a pharmacist who is operating a drug store.  Almost all his customers come in for ice cream, Coca-Cola, cigarettes, etc., and so his work more resembles that of a waiter or candy store clerk than that of a man who has a degree in pharmacy.  Probably the best part of the story is the narrator describing his customers and bitching about them like a butter guy in a mainstream story.

One evening, a nerdy-looking guy (he is skinny and has glasses and the narrator compares him to "Caspar Milquetoast") comes in and asks for specific chemicals.  He has with him a very old book, and drops clues we Weird Tales readers, and the narrator, recognize as signs that this joker is going to sacrifice a cat to a supernatural entity!

Our narrator crosses paths with this guy multiple times, and he learns that ol' "Caspar" in a matter of days has risen in status from an impoverished goofball with no women to a wealthy guy with a high status job and dates with the hotties!  His new position is at a chemical company--he already has his own office and authority over an entire division!  The mysterious chemist invites our guy to join the chemical firm as his assistant--after all, the narrator knows about chemistry from getting his pharmacy degree, and is sick to death of dishing out the ice cream and the cokes to the local brats.  But our guy notices something strange about the newly minted success' shadow--it seems to move independently of "Caspar," and it seems to become more solid and more independent the more successful "Caspar" is in his career and with the ladies!  Will this alien monster, the devil the chemist has made a deal with to secure success, become fully independent?  Will it take over the chemist's body?  Who will live and who will die?

It is no masterpiece, but "Black Bargain" is a competent bit of weird fiction that Bloch successfully integrates into a little early-20th century career drama.  

"Vengeance in Her Bones" by Malcolm Jameson

Naval officer Jameson's contribution to this issue of Weird Tales, the cover story, is a sentimental and somewhat silly thing, a real product of its time.  Captain Tolliver is retired--he lost a hand and a leg in the Great War.  But the United States government calls upon him to again serve his country!  In World War I, Tolliver commanded a cargo ship that had many wild adventures, including sinking multiple German naval vessels.  The ship was to be broken up after the war, but when workers went aboard to tear her apart, they died in mysterious accidents!  So it was decided to just let the ship sit and rust.  But come World War II, the government had her refurbished  and returned to service.  However, the ship keeps running aground, her rudder and engines inexplicably refusing to accept orders.  The government realizes only Tolliver can command this temperamental vessel.

Tolliver takes command, and just lets the ship run itself.  This ship is a genius, not only detecting torpedoes, submarines, and German raiders disguised as Allied merchantmen, but also figuring out which crewmembers aboard are German saboteurs!  Jameson's story is repetitive, the ship pulling off one improbable feat after another, such as pointing out to friendly warships the locations of enemy boats and ships so they can be destroyed or just ramming them herself.  Eventually the ship is totally wrecked and everyone aboard killed, and we get a sappy ending as Tolliver and his ship sink beneath the waves.

Barely acceptable.

I hope it goes without saying that I am a fan of the United States Navy and think that the Navy has been a force for good in the world since its founding and up to this day and so forth.  And I have no reason to doubt that as an officer in the Navy that Jameson did good work and contributed to the success of that great institution and our great country.  I baldly state all this because, as you may remember, a reader once took me to task for criticizing Alistair MacLean's writing, apparently thinking MacLean's exemplary war service rendered the man immune from criticism, and I have to report that Jameson's work, four specimens of which I have read as of today, have not exactly knocked my socks off.  If you are interested, check out my three earlier blog posts touching upon Jameson's career at the following links:

"Bullard Reflects" 

"Slacker's Paradise"

"Train for Flushing"

A lot of people seem to be more impressed with Jameson than I am.  Donald Wollheim included "Vengeance in Her Bones" in his Avon Fantasy Reader in 1949 and Frank McSherry, Jr. reprinted it in 1990's Fantastic World War II.

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Another step in our eerie march lies behind us--before you know it, we will have read a story from every issue of Weird Tales published in 1942.  We've already dealt with every year from 1930 to 1941, as the links below will attest.

1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938    1939    1940   1941

More such material when next we meet here at MPorcius Fiction Log.