H. P. Lovecraft Collabs: "The Horror at Martin's Beach" (w/ S Greene), "Two Black Bottles" (w/ W B Talman) & "The Trap" (w/ H S Whitehead)

Remember how awesome some of those Lovecraft collabs with Hazel Heald and Zealia Bishop were?  Let's try to recapture that magic with three more H. P. Lovecraft collaborations read from the pages of my Corrected Fifth Printing of The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions.  Today's stories appear in the "Secondary Revisions" section of The Horror in the Museum; editor S. T. Joshi describes secondary revisions as stories "which Lovecraft merely touched up--albeit sometimes extensively."  All three were published in magazines under the names of Lovecraft's collaborator, and you can read those versions by clicking the following links:

"The Horror at Martin's Beach" AKA "The Invisible Monster" by Sonia Greene 
"Two Black Bottles" by Wilfred Branch Talman
"The Trap" by Henry S. Whitehead

"The Horror at Martin's Beach" (w/ Sonia Greene) (1923)

It appears Greene sent Lovecraft a draft of this story and the man from Providence "edited and revised" the tale, which appeared across two pages of Weird Tales under the title "The Invisible Monster."  The story has since been seen in a billion Lovecraft collections, and, in our own bizarre and unusual 21st century, editors seem to be looking kindly upon it, Gregory Luce reprinting it as one of the best weird stories of 1923 and Stephen Jones including it in his 2026 volume Weird Tales, Volume One: The Early Years.

"The Horror at Martin's Beach"/"The Invisible Monster" is a pretty good story, thumbs up!  The crew of a ship catch a monstrously large fish, like 50 feet long, a bizarre specimen never before seen, presumably from the black depths, with a single eye and what look like legs where it ought to have fins.  A sensation among scientists and the public, it is put on display on an anchored ship by a public beach near a fancy resort.  Biologists point out that the colossal corpse has a preternaturally complex and large brain, and indications that suggest this fish is not fully grown, but newly hatched!  

A few days later the ship upon which the dead monster is displayed is lost at sea during a terrific storm and never seen again.  A few days later that very beach is the scene of an uncanny horror that makes the thoughtful wonder if perhaps highly advanced animals might have hypnotic powers.

A scream is heard from the sea and the lifeguards, even though the scream seems not quite human, rush to the water and throw in the life preserver on a long rope.  The floatation device is pulled beneath the surface and the lifeguards grasp the rope from shore.  The pull on the rope is so strong that the lifeguards enlist help from male beachgoers.  No matter how many men pull at the rope, they cannot seem to bring the submerged life saver one foot closer to land.  Then, the men realize they cannot let go of the rope.  At the same time, onlookers are somehow psychologically unable to come to the stuck men's aid.  A storm hits, the tide comes in, and all the men gripping the rope drown and their bodies are never found.

Pretty cool, a story that feels fresh, that has some new or rarely seen gimmicks and no fat.

Greene, as you probably already know, met Lovecraft at an amateur press convention before this story was written and after it was published in 1923 the two married, a collaboration not nearly as successful as "The Horror at Martin's Beach."

"Two Black Bottles" (w/ Wilfred Blanch Talman) (1927)

This one debuted in an issue of Weird Tales that printed a story by Frank Belknap Long we read a few years ago, "The Man with a Thousand Legs."  Joshi can't be sure how much of the text of "Two Black Bottles" is Lovecraft's, as apparently HPL made many additions and changes and Talman got angry and may have ignored them.  I guess we've all had the experience of somebody asking for an honest opinion or advice and them reacting negatively when you actually follow through instead of just validating everything he or she has already done--your friend or colleague didn't really want help, but for you to say "You are awesome, rock star."

Well, I don't know how much to credit Lovecraft and how much to credit Talman, but "Two Black Bottles" is a good story, pretty well-written and with a good plot, so thumbs up!

Our narrator has travelled to a remote and impoverished village in the mountains, having heard that a uncle he never met, a clergyman reputed to be large and strong physically but weak-willed, has died, and any inheritance is due to the narrator.  The church is on the edge of the village, on the other side of a swamp, and is shunned by all the villagers, our guy learns upon arrival.  From a villager he hears a wild story about how the creepy old sexton, the guy who maintains the church grounds and graveyard and gets the supplies at the store every week or so, dominated the narrator's uncle, got him to begin preaching in a way that upset the parishioners so fewer and fewer attended services and eventually on Sunday not a soul was in the the church besides the clergyman and the old sexton.  The villagers believe that the sexton worships the devil and they are all scared of him.  

Thinking this a load of nonsense, the narrator heads to the church even though it is getting dark, to meet the sexton, who lives in the church basement, and get the business of his inheritance sorted out ASAP.  The swamp and the church are pretty creepy at dusk and after sundown and the narrator almost loses his nerve, but eventually finds the sexton up in the belfry of the church with a bunch of ancient books and manuscripts.  The sexton, spine crooked and body skinny, is drunk and scared, and tells the narrator that he has learned black magic and demonology from the books, that he used sorcery to steal the narrator's uncle's soul and put it in a bottle.  The preacher is buried in a grave, unable to rest because his soul is trapped in the bottle, and the sexton is afraid the man is strong enough to bust out of his grave and come get his revenge!  When the narrator comes to believe this, being able through the belfry window to see the makeshift cross on his uncle's grave shifting as unc's soulless body struggles to escape, he desperately resolves to take the bottle to his undead uncle, thinking to appease his wrath in this manner.  But there are two such bottles--the sexton himself is like 250 years old because in the 18th century another wizard put his soul in a bottle--he has "lived" as a soulless man since colonial times!  Which bottle is which?  What will happen if in the confusion either of these bottles shatters and a trapped soul is released?

I like the plot, and I like all the descriptions of physical things and of people's fear--either Talman or Lovecraft did a good job putting them together.  "Two Black Bottles" is a creditable piece of work.  August Derleth included "Two Black Bottles" in his anthology Sleep No More, as did Stephen Jones in his aforementioned 2026 anthology of stories from Weird Tales.  And of course it is in countless Lovecraft collections. 

"The Trap" (w /Henry S. Whitehead) (1931)

Almost two years ago I read three stories by Henry S. Whitehead and enjoyed them, so let's see if Whitehead can maintain his streak of good grades here at MPorcius Fiction Log--he'll have to produce, because this institution has yet to fall to the spreading plague of grade inflation.

The tone of "The Trap" is very different than that of the other Lovecraftian stuff we've been reading--instead of being scared and/or on the brink of insanity, the protagonist is confident, competent, and calm.  When somebody gets stuck in a parallel dimension, instead of finding everything crazy and inexplicable, the protagonist in "The Trap" calmly figures out the "rules" of this alien universe.  And instead of dreams being horrifying, the hero welcomes dreams as a means of communication, as a solution to the plot's obstacles.  

I like the basic plot and the ideas of "The Trap," but the story feels long and the pace is slow, like there are too many sentences and they are too deliberate.  The style of the story does not communicate any urgency to the reader, and much of the text is not concerned with describing the behavior of the characters (who actually do but little) but with describing the setting, and those descriptions are not exciting or disturbing, but merely curious.  There is also the fact that the narrator is not at risk, but a sort of spectator.

That narrator is a Gerald Canevin, a recurring character in Whitehead's body of work, a man who has travelled all over the world and is knowledgeable in the occult.  In this story he is living at a boarding school in New England, working as a tutor.  It is winter and when the heating system in the classrooms breaks down he has his students attend class in his rooms, where he has a fire in the fireplace.

In his rooms Canevin has an elaborate 17th-century Danish mirror he found in an abandoned building in the West Indies.  A favorite student, Robert, notices a weird pattern in the glass of the mirror, visible only from certain angles, and becomes fascinated by it.  Touching a particular spot on the mirror where Robert sees dimly noticeable lines converging, he tells Canevin that it feels like the mirror is trying to suck him in.

Not long after, Robert disappears and all efforts to find him bring up zilch.  At night while asleep, Canevin gets telepathic messages from Robert.  In these visions, Robert's blue coat is yellow, his skin is a queer color, and Robert seems to have trouble talking.  Over a series of nights, Robert explains what happened to him via these psychic conversations.  So interested in the mirror was the teenaged boy that he came to Canevin's rooms when the tutor was absent and got sucked into the mirror when he touched it at that particular point.  This mirror is the work of a 17th-century Danish glazier, Europe's finest maker of mirrors, a guy named Holm.  Holm was also a student of the occult, like half the people in the fiction we read here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Holm feared death, and sought immortality in the fourth dimension.  He acquired a little mirror known as "Loki's glass" and integrated it into a larger mirror of his own fabrication.  By entering this mirror, you enter the fourth dimension, a place where you don't have to eat, use the toilet, or sleep, where you will not grow old or die or get sick, where there are no insects or vermin.  Holm sent two black slaves into the mirror with lots of books and then joined them.

Much of the text of "The Trap" describes in detail bordering on tedium the "rules" of life in the mirror.  Everything in the mirror is reversed or opposite.  The "Negro" slaves have white skin, for example, the midday sky is yellow instead of blue and so forth.  New arrivals to the fourth dimension take a few minutes to learn how to walk and a few days to learn how to talk because nerves and muscles are wired in reverse or something like that.  Most unbelievably, when you walk closer to something it takes up less of your field of view, and if you retreat from something it appears to grow larger.

The environment inside the mirror takes on the appearance of those places which have been reflected in its surface for a sufficient period of time, so, places like Canevin's rooms and some Caribbean locales; for many decades the mirror was leaning with its glass towards a wall so there is a limited number of "scenes."  Transient movable objects like furniture are not in the world of the mirror, and you can't really interact with the "scenes" that are there--they are just like a painted background.  

Over the years, Holm used telepathy to hypnotize people, Robert being the latest, into joining him in the mirror.  There being nothing to do, the inhabitants of the mirror spend a lot of time chatting, talking about differences in life between the 17th, 18th, and now 20th centuries.  There is a long list of such people, but Whitehead doesn't give them personalities or relationships or describe any of these conversations.  We can only hope that Robert had his wits about him and became the world's expert on 17th-century European table manners or the practical aspects of cultivating, storing and selling sugar in the 18th century or something like that.

Eventually, Canevin gets a glass cutting tool and carefully removes "Loki's glass" from the rest of the mirror.  Robert comes through to our world more or less intact, but all the other people, who should have died over 100 years ago, instantly degrade into dust.  Robert finds that he is now left-handed and his heart is now in the right side of his chest instead of the left, you know, like Dr. No.  We also get an overly long denouement in which Canevin comes up with an elaborate story to explain to people where Robert was these two weeks.

I'm grading this one acceptable.  "The Trap" lacks human drama; it is more of an idea story than a horror story or adventure story, lacking thrills or chills, sex and violence.  Other writers might have used the mirror-world as a setting for a battle of wills, a love triangle, a tragically doomed romance, a debate on the social order or religion or political systems, but that is not Whitehead's project.  Whitehead does what he set out to do just fine, but it is not really my cup of meat.

Joshi tells us that there is reason to believe that Lovecraft wrote "the entire central section of the story."  Maybe I have to blame HPL for some of "The Trap"'s long-windedness.    

"The Trap" debuted in Strange Tales and editors have favored it since then; you can find it in a multitude of Whitehead collections, Lovecraft collections, reprint magazines and anthologies. 

We've read several stories from Donald Wollheim's Avon Fantasy Reader No. 6:
Thorp McClusky's "The Crawling Horror,"
David H. Keller's "The Thing in the Cellar,"
and Edmond Hamilton's "The Star Stealers" 

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All of these stories are worth reading for the student of the weird, and the Greene and Talman stories are good economical tales deserving of a wide audience.  Let's hope our next foray into interwar genre magazines meets the standard today's stories met.