Frank Belknap Long: "Men Who Walk Upon the Air," "The Devil-God," and "The Sea Thing"

Having just fulfilled our vow to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales with a 1924 cover date, let's get cracking on 1925, with three 1925 stories from Frank Belknap Long, a fancy dresser with exciting hair.  We were just talking about Long, about how H. P. Lovecraft lamented the change in the formerly artistic Long's work wrought, according to HPL at least, by the influence of business-like Otis Adelbert Kline.  Today's stories, I believe, must all be from before that influence can be felt.  You can find all three of these tales of uncanny bloodshed and death in France and the Pacific in the 2022 volume of Centipede Press' Library of Weird Fiction (808 pages) dedicated to Long, but I'll be reading them in scans of the original issues of Farnsworth Wright's magazine available to the masses for free at the internet archive.  Experience the mind-bending mayhem yourself in its Roaring Twenties form, along with accompanying illustrations and work by other weird authors, by clicking the links below:

"Men Who Walk Upon the Air"

"The Devil-God"

"The Sea Thing"

"Men Who Walk Upon the Air"

Early in his career, Long was a poet and here in "Men Who Walk Upon the Air" he shows skill in conjuring yellow skies and decaying flesh and other images of horror as well as enticing images of a blue-eyed blonde woman and the feast she lays out for a man from whom she desires a favor.  And as we expect of serious literature, "Men Who Walk Upon the Air" is full of ambiguity and human psychology that is both bewildering and all too comprehensible, disturbingly alike the actions of those around us in real life and our own secret thoughts.  What is really happening?  Are the characters good or evil?  Are they animated by love and generosity or by lust and selfishness?

It is medieval France, and a poet, Long's image of Francois Villon exiled from Paris, is sadly wandering the countryside, which is presented by Long as desolate and disgusting.  The versifier comes upon a hanged man.  (I am not familiar with Villon's work, having spent the time I might have allotted to reading him and learning about medieval Europe to watching Speed Racer and learning about Chim-Chim and Racer X, but wikipedia suggests death by hanging was a preoccupation of Villon's, he always being in trouble with the law.)  The hanged man's wife begs Villon to cut down her husband's corpse.  He more or less agrees, and then with gusto devours the food she prepares him in her little house--Villon has not eaten decent food or drunk wine in days and stuffs himself and gets drunk.  He asks the woman if he can kiss her--just once!--and she relents.  Immediately Villon releases her, having done a little more than kiss her just once, the widow is overcome by fits of terror, thinking her husband, a half-decayed corpse, has climbed down from the gibbet to bust down the door and attack her.  Is Villon's fight with the animated corpse real or just the product of a disordered, depressed, inebriated mind?  Whatever the case, the ghastly assault and pathetic struggle Long depicts is shocking and, as Villon walks away, he sees two corpses, one gripping the other, hanging from the gibbet. 

Very good!  I am probably missing allusions to Villon's work that my more educated readers will recognize, and I recommend this story to all you students of French literature as well as my fellow weirdies.  Besides the aforementioned 2022 Centipede Press collection, "Men Who Walk Upon the Air" would rise from obscurity to terrorize the guilt-stricken living in anthologies of stories from Weird Tales edited by Marvin Kaye (USA, 1988) and Frank Festa and Hardy Kettlitz (Germany, 2023.)    

"The Devil-God"

Mpatanasi is a sort of wizard-priest, a skinny old man with a yellow beard, "malachite" eyes and "monstrous" lips that "seemed to overlap his face," who intercedes between his people, black-skinned jungle-dwelling savages, and their forest devil-god, reputed to be a big furry monster with a single eye in the center of its forehead.  I guess "The Devil-God" takes place in Melanesia--parakeets are in evidence--and not Madagascar, even though Long refers to a lemur--the lemur just appears in a simile.    

Mpatanasi has a daughter who resents him; she would like to color her thin lips and play music, and it seems lay in the arms of the man Mu-senyui, but as a priest's daughter she is forbidden these pleasures.  Mu-senyui is in love with Mpatanasi's daughter, and we hear how he admires her lips, talks about kissing her, how the lovers each touch the other's lips when sneaking around to insist upon silence.  Lips are a theme of Long's story--we also hear about the lips of the gods and monsters in the story, monsters the daughter, and maybe even Mpatanasi the priest, don't really believe in.  

Mu-senyui and the girl scheme to get rid of Mpatanasi so they can be together in the open.  Mu-senyui convinces the priest that the king is not fulfilling his duties, and gets Mpatanasi to pronounce a doom on "the king;" Mpatanasi holds an elaborate ceremony in which he calls upon the forest-devil to make "the king" commit suicide.  As Mu-senyui hoped, Mpatanasi does not speak the king's name in his ritual--the trick is that the man whom the priest believes to be king is already dead, murdered a few days ago by handsome 12-year-old Bamuti, whom the queen and her handmaidens all covet.  The king found the charming boy alone with the queen and his majesty ended up with a knife in the ribs, something the court has kept secret from the priest.  With the death of the king, Mpatanasi is king, and so by cursing "the king" he has pronounced a doom on himself.

Mpatanasi flees the village into the forest.  In a surreal scene involving an earthquake and a forest fire, he is attacked by a monster that Long tells us is such a "caricature of evil" that not even Aubrey Beardsley or Felicien Rops could have conceived it.  (The mention of these European artists is a questionable move by Long, like mentioning the lemur--are these Pacific Islanders familiar with these men's work?  It kind of pulls you out of the setting.)  The monster, which is, apparently, a distinct monster from the forest devil, apparently tears Mpatanasi limb from limb, though maybe this is all a dream or hallucination? 

In the final scene the priest's daughter has painted her lips and adorned herself with other cosmetics and jewelry and she kisses and caresses Mu-senyui while they play with her father's severed head.

I like this story but it is a little opaque.  Is the forest-devil real or just a lie the priests tell people to keep them in line?  Is the "caricature of evil" monster real or just Mpatanasi's delusion as he commits suicide or is murdered by Mu-senyui?  Why does the priest inherit the throne?  Who is king now?  Who is priest now?  Still, "The Devil-God" is well-written on a sentence by sentence basis and I like the theme of vain and horny women more than willing to destroy their own families, their people's government and their people's religious establishment in order to satisfy their base lusts, so thumbs up, but this one isn't as well organized and coherent as "Men Who Walk Upon the Air" or "The Desert Lich."  

Robert M. Price printed "The Devil-God" in the 1986 issue of Crypt of Cthulhu dedicated to Long, and you can also find it in the 2010 Centipede Press Long collection, the one that is 1100 pages long.

"The Sea Thing"

This is a mundane ordinary horror story, but well told, with cool horror images and atmosphere, so thumbs up.  "The Sea Thing" is less original than the crazy "The Devil-God," but has a more straightforward structure, with fewer loose ends, and is far less literary than "Men Who Walk Upon the Air," but still a better than average piece of weird fiction.

Our text is a captain's log, the log of a clipper ship that has suffered one disaster after another!  Damaged, the ship was becalmed and then the crew got cholera and like three quarters of them perished.  Only six crewmen and the captain survive as the narrative begins.  The ship is taking on water and food is running out--they are likely doomed.  But then a guy appears in a boat!  He is the only survivor of a sinking (he says!) and has with him lots of supplies!

Everybody is thrilled and morale recovers and this new guy turns out to be a skilled healer and a real raconteur who has tons of stories with which to entertain everybody.  But after a few days the new guy starts acting strange and people start getting inexplicable injuries and mysteriously losing blood.  Men start dying.  By chance the captain is looking through a century-old book of odd anecdotes, and comes upon the story of a scaly man who was able to live under the ocean--holy crap, the scaly guy's name is the same as that of their new friend!  No wonder this guy has lots of cool old stories--he's some kind of immortal aquatic vampire!

The captain and the most trustworthy of the surviving crew hatch a plot to destroy the monster, which, in the final showdown, exhibits some of the characteristics of a shape-shifting blob!  Who will live?  Who will die?

"The Sea Thing" is pretty fun.  It was reprinted in 1926 in Britain in the second book in Christine Campbell Thomson's Not at Night series of anthologies, and in 1928 in the similarly titled American anthology Not At Night! 

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Nineteen-Twenty-Five was a good year for Long--I can heartily recommend all three of these stories.   A most felicitous step in our long journey through the history of the Unique Magazine--another step next time we meet here at MPorcius Fiction Log.