Here comes a new dawn! Here comes a new day! Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are trying to read at least one story from each issue of influential speculative fiction magazine
and today we begin chipping away at issues with a cover date of 1943. We've already got over a dozen years under our belts,
, so prospects we can handle 1943, the year of the Battles of Kursk and Kasserine Pass, of the Zoot Suit riots and the Aqua-Lung, of the births of Christopher Walken and Dennis Etchison, are good!
We're tackling four stories from this ish, the illustration of which is I'm afraid below average. On the docket today are Dr. David H. Keller; Robert "Psycho" Bloch; August Derleth, whom I have heard won a Guggenheim Fellowship and told the Guggenheim people he was going to use the money to travel but instead used it to finance binding his comic book collection; and cat-loving Alabaman Mary Elizabeth Counselman. Note that I am reading the 1943 versions of these stories, not later book versions--as we shall see, later versions are sometimes revised, and not necessarily for the better!
"Bindings Deluxe" by David H. Keller
The first line of this story by the controversial David H. Keller is "I don't like women!" Way to lean in to the controversy, my guy! Two men meet at the Turkish baths, our narrator, a medical doctor (Keller himself was a doctor) who binds books as a hobby, and a fat older guy who talks at length about how terrible women are. The fat guy also binds books, as a pro, and he has a curious mark on his back which Keller doesn't disclose at first, though we know what it is because the illustrator of "Bindings Deluxe," John Giunta (future associate of Frank Frazetta), reveals it in his BDSM-friendly illo for the story.
Some time later the men meet for a second time, at the pro's digs in Boston. The overweight Beantowner is wealthy, and has a Chinese servant, and tells the sawbones that he likes the Chinese--because their culture is misogynistic. I find this kind of humor, about a strange character with an obsessive fixation, more amusing than the puns and absurd hijinks that Robert Bloch passes off as humor. Anyway, the professional bookbinder tells his story of horror to our narrator.
Decades ago the binder was a founding member of an international association of bookbinders who met once a year, London, Paris, Chicago, San Fran, etc. There were dozens of them, and they really enjoyed each others' company. But then one year a woman joined, a woman beautiful and earnest despite the best efforts of the misogynist to prevent this invasion of a male space. She presented a paper at one meeting and revealed she was merely competent, not deeply versed in the profession, and had a lot of goofy ideas about bookbinding. She admitted, proudly, of basing her paper not on specialist texts on the art of bookbinding, but on the Encyclopedia Britannica! The men laughed at her, and then she wreaked a terrible revenge on them!
Over a course of years, one by one, she seduced each of the men who had laughed at her, first the youngest, working her way up to the fat guy, the eldest. She murdered each man and bound a volume of her copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica with his skin! The fat man was to be the last victim, his hide to adorn the final volume, and she got as far as tattooing the title of the volume on his back, but he got lucky and turned the tables on her, killed her and bound the final volume with her skin! The encyclopedia, bound with the skin of his friends and their female nemesis, now resides in his Boston domicile!
If we can look past the wacky coincidence that the encyclopedia has the same number of volumes as the association had members, and the misogyny of the whole thing, this story is pretty good--the frame story is as entertaining as the main story, there is sex and gore, foreshadowing, economical pacing, etc. I like it.
"Bindings Deluxe" has not been anthologized, but has appeared in two Keller anthologies, 1978's The Last Magician and 2010's Keller Memento.
"The Eager Dragon" by Robert Bloch
Brace yourselves, it's another Bloch story I suspect is a joke. Why do I indulge in such suspicions? Because "The Eager Dragon" has only ever been reprinted in the various editions of
Dragons and Nightmares, the 1969 collection which entombs the long version of
"Nursemaid to Nightmares," the Bloch humor piece I have been moaning about ever since I read it a few days ago.
I can grok jokes about how women are terrible because I deal with women in real life. But like Grand Master of Science Fiction Harlan Ellison and President of the United States Donald John Trump, I don't drink, so jokes about the taste of booze and being drunk are abstract and theoretical to me. I bring this up because "The Eager Dragon" starts off with a barrage of just such jokes, calling cheap whiskey "anti-freeze," talking bout how a guy steps into a cuspidor and walks around with it on his foot for a while. Hardy har har har.
Our narrator, who I guess is a former gangster and maybe an immigrant--his narration is in present tense like a cartoon depiction of an ESL speaker--moved to the country some time ago to raise chickens. He is at the local bar, getting drunk, and is accosted by two travelling salesmen. He tells the men the story of how Merlin and various Knights of the Table Round travelled through time here to this hick farm town and enlisted the narrator's help in retrieving from the local museum a valuable artifact. The salesmen don't believe him, so he invites them to his farm so he can show them the warhorse one of the knights left behind.
The warhorse is missing when they get there, but there is a note from Merlin and a gift--a three-foot-long egg. Soon the egg hatches and the baby dragon, like eight feet long, emerges. The jokes about alcohol keep on coming because all the narrator has on hand to feed the baby monster is beer.
More interesting than the tired jokes are the topical references that tie the story to the WW2 era in which it was written. Among these are mentions of Betty Grable, Dorothy Lamour, Hitler, Boy's Town, and La Guardia (whom we are told looks like a gorilla.) The dragon's crying is said to sound like a dive-bomber, its hiccups like anti-aircraft fire or Louis Armstrong on the trumpet. There is what I think is a reference to derogatory propaganda about the Japanese, who during the war were often depicted in cartoons as having huge toothy smiles:
And the dragon lets go with another smile, this time showing enough teeth to supply the entire Japanese army.
I looked quickly at a book version of "The Eager Dragon," and many of these references are missing--gee whiz, Bob, your reminders of how sexy men thought Betty Grable was and how ugly Fiorello La Guardia was and how bitter Americans were over Pearl Harbor were the most valuable components of this lame story!
Anyway, the narrator and the dragon interact with a runaway kid (the son of a circus owner), and with the local gangster (a fat guy), and the dragon grows to tremendous size by eating the wooden floor of the barn as well as metal farm tools, and when the gangster kidnaps the kid a fight erupts between dragon and gangster and both are destroyed in an explosion. The dragon has already laid an egg (just like this story! Ha ha!) so the circus owner and the narrator may still be able to achieve their dream of getting rich by selling tickets to the only show on Earth with a real fire-breathing dragon.
"The Eager Dragon" is bad and I am giving it a thumbs down but it is better than the egregious "Nursemaid to Nightmares" because it has a little more going for it in the plot department and the jokes are marginally less terrible and thanks to the fact that all the timely references--and the fact they were excised for book publication in the late '60s--gives the story historical interest. You should probably read "The Eager Dragon" if you are working on a dissertation entitled "World War Weird: The influence of the Second World War on American fantasy fiction from Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki."
"McElwin's Glass" by August Derleth
I'm always learning, I am. The title character of "McElwin's Glass" was born with a "caul," and his mother regarded this as some kind of omen that foretold great success for her child. I had no idea what they were talking about, but wikipedia soon enlightened me.
Anyway, McElwin, a short and fat and ugly man (I feel like fat men have really been getting it in the neck lately here at MPorcius Fiction Log) becomes a stage magician of moderate success. Then he finds a telescope at an antique store and discovers it can look into the future and the past. He starts a new, more lucrative, career as a fortune teller, even though the performance of the telescope is very unreliable and McElwin ends up winging it much of the time, just lying to his customers.
An old geezer shows up, claiming the telescope was stolen from him; his name is also McElwin--they are distant cousins. Old timer explains that the device only reveals to the viewer events somehow related to himself, stuff that has happened or will happen to him or to ancestors or descendants or colleagues or the like.
Fat McElwin refuses to sell the telescope to old McElwin. Fatso describes things he has seen in the device to the old geezer, and it is implied that the old geezer figures out these visions predict fat McElwin will die an early death. So the old man asks his young cousin to leave him the telescope in his will.
Fat McElwin marries a rich woman, one of the few people whose futures his telescope has offered insights into. This woman seemed sweet when they were dating, but once they are married she is intolerably tyrannical, always nagging and complaining, One thing leads to another, and fat McElwin, in an impulsive moment, shoots her dead. He flees Chicago, pursued by one of the other people whose life he has been afforded glimpses of in his telescope--a police detective!
I want to like "McElwin's Glass" because I like the theme of the disastrous marriage, and I think Derleth does a good job of describing the phenomenon of a man being viciously berated by his "significant other" for something innocuous and trivial he did long ago and doesn't even remember doing. I also like the way the vague suggestive visions in the telescope foreshadow events, but in a way that can be misinterpreted. But the story has problems--like so many Derleth stories, it would benefit from revision and editing. For example, the caul business and the fact McElwin is a magician don't seem to have any impact on the actual plot of the story.
I guess we're going to grade this one acceptable.
"Seventh Sister" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman
Here we have a pretty well-thought-of story; "Seventh Sister" was reprinted by August Derleth, Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg in anthologies, as well as in two different Counselman collections.
Counselman's tale takes place at a semi-abandoned plantation on the Alabama-Georgia state line. It is the 1930s, and an African-American family lives in semi-decrepit slave quarters on the estate, growing yams and growing in population as the matriarch has a new "pickaninny" each year. The seventh child is born two months premature on a night of omens and portents (lightning, dogs barking, owls hooting, etc.) and Mom dies in childbirth. Named "Seven Sisters," the new baby is albino--paper-white skin and hair, and pink eyes--and the father fears the baby is a "woods colt" while an aunt suggests such a baby, the seventh of seven girls, must have "de Power."
The father is inclined to neglect the baby, but the owner of the estate, a doctor whose family uses the planation house as a vacation home and allows the blacks to live on the grounds rent-free, comes by and explains that the baby really is his offspring and threatens to evict him if he doesn't properly tend to the child. Seven Sisters exhibits strange abilities as she grows older, and the local African-American community comes to believe she is a powerful "conjure 'oman;" people pay her father and aunt so Seven Sisters will prepare charms for them and cast spells for them.
Counselman puts a lot of effort into developing atmosphere and drawing characters in "Seven Sisters," though the way she does it may cause the head of anybody born after September 11 to explode.
Light from the sooty lamp threw stunted shadows. The reek of its kerosene and the smell of negro bodies blended with the pungent odor of peaches hung in a string to dry beside the window.
She hummed tuneless little chants, in the eerie rhythm of all darkies.
Or maybe anybody born after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Anyway, as Seven Sisters gets older she has a tough time as all her fellow blacks are scared of her or exploit her--they don't even go to the trouble of baptizing her. The doctor who lets all of these black people live on his land and is always helping them out is the only person who treats her decently. Then comes a crisis. The doctor's mother-in-law moves in and starts pushing the doctor around. She insists he sell the old wrecked plantation--this will leave Seven Sisters' family with no place to live (her father of course is too lazy and irascible to get a job and buy or rent any kind of home for his family.) Seven Sisters tries to use her black magic powers to resolve the crisis, but commits a blunder and a terrible tragedy results and everyone in the story suffers terribly.
A pretty good story, even if we can't publicly endorse its message that dealing with black people is inherently dangerous and even doing them a favor is putting yourself into terrible jeopardy. A close contender for today's best story.
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