Galen C. Colin: "Snake," "Eyes," and "The Song Eternal"

Galen C. Colin has four fiction credits at isfdb, three of them for stories that appeared in Weird Tales in the year 1924.  At the Tellers of Weird Tales website, you can find a biographical article on Colin by Terence E. Hanley; Colin was a big player in the world of printing and journalism in his home state of Kansas and author of many Western short stories and novels.  As part of our effort to read at least one story from each of the seven issues of WT with 1924 cover dates, let's check out those three stories, "Snake," "Eyes," and "The Song Eternal."  Read along by clicking the links in the previous sentence that will whisk you away, as if through a magic pool (see below), to the very scans of the magazines that I will be reading.

"Snake" 

The January 1924 issue of Weird Tales, edited by Edwin Baird, includes reprints of H. P. Lovecraft's "The Picture in the House;" a poem by Clark Ashton Smith, "Solution," that I guess is about a guy walking through a herp-infested swamp (maybe it is all a metaphor for getting drunk or committing suicide?); and Edgar Allen Poe's "The Black Cat," the ostensible source material of one of my very favorite gialli.   There is also a bunch of grotesque news stories (e.g., "Voodoo Doctor Admits Brutal Murder," "Child Dies From Candy Lodged in Throat" and "Swallowed Diamonds Assessed by Ex-Ray.")  But we today are focusing on Galen Colin's "Snake," which is advertised as "An Unusual Storiette" and takes up like a page and a half.

"Snake" is the nickname of an ugly and cruel man living on the margins of a sort of Wild West community, a man rumored to beat his wife and to make his living as what we today might call a "coyote," a guy who smuggles illegal immigrants into the country.  Everybody hates him, they all having witnessed him kick a puppy and being fond of his pathetic wife, who perennially bears the bruises of Snake's ill treatment.

Snake one day throws a fit and kills his wife, then hurries to his hideout, a cabin with a secret cellar.  He is hiding in the cellar when the posse that is after him searches the cabin, then, it being late, beds down in the cabin above Snake.  In the dim light that filters into the cellar, Snake thinks he sees a snake!  We readers know it is just a coil of rope, but Snake's fear of the reptile leads to a heart attack or some such medical calamity that ends his evil life.

This is actually a fun little melodramatic anecdote, despite or because of its exploitative reveling in cruelty and agony; thumbs up.

"Eyes" 

"Eyes" appeared in the famous anniversary issue of Weird Tales which printed Lovecraft's ghost-written story for Harry Houdini, "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs," and Lovecraft's collaboration with C. M. Eddy, Jr., "The Loved Dead."  Like "Snake," this story is only a little longer than a single page.

The people in "Snake" acted oddly--a wife loved her husband even though he was constantly beating her, a guy was so full of hate he irrationally assaulted animals and his own wife--but somehow it seemed believable; sadly, this is how people act in real life.  The behavior of the people in "Eyes" is somewhat less credible.  Our narrator is a medical student who has rigged up his own elaborate doorbell system--when you push his doorbell, a skull with an electric motor and light bulbs installed within it chatters and its eyes light up.  His best friend, a fellow medical student, comes over, looking haggard.  Best friend tells a crazy story.  This guy hasn't much money, so when he developed an obsession with owning a skeleton with which to decorate his quarters, he had no legitimate way of acquiring one.  So he decided to rob a grave.  But when he dug up a grave he was almost driven insane when he saw that the skeleton, though all the flesh had decayed, still had staring blue eyes.  The punchline is that he chose the grave of a blind man buried with glass eyes intact.

Colin's description of going to the cemetery and digging up the grave is good, but I found the otherwise exemplary student's obsession with owning a skeleton hard to understand and the bit with the skull doorbell silly and disconnected from the plot.  Do people act this way in real life?  I guess we are supposed to chalk it up to the stress of medical school and the commonplace belief that college students are always up to ludicrous stunts, eating goldfish and cramming into telephone booths and putting people's automobiles on rooves and the like.  We'll call this one acceptable.

"The Song Eternal" 

A text that debuted in the December 1924 issue of Weird Tales, the second edited by Farnsworth Wright, has already been subjected to the MPorcius treatment: "Death-Waters" by MPorcius regular Frank Belknap Long, the 1933 printing of which we read back in 2018.  There's also a C. M. Eddy story in this December issue, which we may read soon.

"The Song Eternal" is subtitled "A Mystic Tale."  We get a brief frame story, in which the narrator, "a sea dog," says he met an odd-looking fellow in a port on the west coast of Africa and this stranger related to him the tale that makes up most of "The Song Eternal"'s eight pages, the story of a love affair that spans forty centuries!  

Ever since he was a child this adventurer could, when alone, hear faintly a sort of sad melody, the words of which he could not make out.  This song was a source of endless fascination, and so he avoided the company of others.  Until his father forced him to go to college, where he met Dick, a student of the occult.  A few years after they graduate, Dick has become a powerful enough wizard to transmit the adventurer's soul through a magic pool to other times, other places, in search of the source of the song that has dominated his thoughts all his young life.  He inhabits the body of an ancient raider, a soldier in an army that preyed upon the Egyptians, a citizen of a metropolis that traded with far China.  He falls in love with Eldres, virgin high priestess of the sun god and singer of the song that has haunted the adventurer, and she returns his love.  Such love is forbidden, and the priests burn the lovers to death under a giant magnifying glass.  But the sun god sympathizes with their love!  Their souls shall return to human bodies in four thousand years and he shall hear that song again!

Clues seen through Dick's pool suggest the modern Eldres lives as a priestess among primitive blacks, and so the unnamed adventurer has been searching Africa for her.  As the story ends we don't know if he will succeed in his quest.

The content of "The Song Eternal" feels like filler material we've seen before, but Colin writes it pretty well and I enjoyed the story.  So, thumbs up for "The Song Eternal."

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These stories are actually not bad, not bad at all, but as far as I can tell, they were never reprinted.  Colin apparently left the weird market to write for Western magazines because there were so many more Western magazines printed than weird ones, and I have to suspect his Western stories were good.  We'll definitely read his final weird story, which was published in 1926, when we get to that phase of our own eternal quest, the unholy drive to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales.