Weird Tales, Jan 1943: Keller, Bloch, Derleth, Counselman

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 Weird Tales 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, 1923, 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941, and 1942, 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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With the possible exception of the Derleth, today's four stories from Weird Tales serve as a kind of time machine that exposes us to the mental milieu of the early 1940s in America.  The past is a foreign country, the cliche goes, and Keller, Bloch and Counselman demonstrate to us what was on the minds of 1940s people who produced and consumed popular fiction, and a lot of that stuff is stuff people in 2026 wouldn't write or say, or maybe even think, if they wanted to function in middle-class society.  Beyond that, Keller's is a pretty good edgy crime story, Counselman's a quite good black magic tale whose bleak ending took me by surprise (I naively thought the doctor's family might adopt the albino), and Derleth's has entertaining elements.  As for the Bloch, it stinks, but every production by such a major figure in popular culture is worth reading, right?   

Weird Tales, January 1942: D Quick, M E Counselman and F Leiber

In December we completed a step in our journey to dark enlightenment when we achieved our goal of reading at least one story that appeared in each issue of D. McIlwraith's Weird Tales in the year 1941.  Today we begin our eldritch slither through the year 1942 with the January issue of WT.  This issue includes one of H. P. Lovecraft's best stories, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," and in the letters column we find August Derleth discussing the place of this story in the Cthulhu Mythos.  I've read "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," multiple times, and blogged about it in 2018, so we won't be dealing with that masterpiece today.  Instead, we'll read stories by Dorothy Quick, Mary Elizabeth Counselman and Fritz Leiber.

An interesting note.  In Canada, a version of this issue of Weird Tales appeared with an Innsmouth-inspired cover and a May cover date.

"The White Lady" by Dorothy Quick

Like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," "The White Lady" is afforded an illustration by the great Hannes Bok.  I have to admit I am not crazy about the way Bok depicts the ghost, however.  

Our story begins with a long description of the looks and attire of two people, the handsome but cruel Abbot Telva and beautiful and elegant Mary Vetrell.  The Abbot, resident in England but of Spanish blood, wants the English Mary to marry his nephew, Clement, but she is not interested; sure, the Abbot's family is prestigious, but so is Mary's, and Mary is not in love with Clement, but with heroic soldier Sir John de Winton.  The Abbot is insistent, because he himself is in love with Mary, whom he has tutored since she was a little child, and if she marries into his family she'll always be nearby.  Besides, a union of the Telva and Vetrell families will allow him to add some valuable real estate to the Abbey's.  (Of course, we readers won't be placing any bets on the future prosperity of this Abbey, as we realize this story is taking place during the reign of Henry VIII.)  Mary and her father refuse to agree to the marriage, so the Abbot storms off, promising to use his high position in the Catholic church to make life tough for Mary; for example, making it impossible for her to marry John de Winton.

John de Winton arrives and we get a long description of him.  Quick's style is not very good.

He had a great chest and arms, with a figure to match, and was the type of man that women love.

Then arrives Mary's father, whom we are told looks like Santa Claus.  Sir Charles Vetrell is on good turns with Cardinal Wolsey, the king's closest advisor, so Sir Charles writes a letter to Wolsely requesting relief from Telva's prohibition on any cleric marrying Mary and John.  After John rides off with the letter, Sir Charles, a widower, and John's mother, a widow, reveal that they are in love and they plan to get married.  Quick seems to be more interested in writing about jejune vanilla sexual relationships than about anything weird.

Halfway through the story it looks like the Abbot and Clement have gotten to the King before John got to Wolsey, so the King is on Team Telva and will make sure Clement and Mary wed.  Mary says she'll commit suicide before marrying a Spaniard and then faints.

John, Wolsey, and Anne Boleyn concoct a scheme to get Mary out of marrying Clement.  They convince King Henry that Sir Charles' manor house is haunted by a Lady in White.  When the King and his court come by to attend the wedding of Clement and Mary the ghost--somebody in disguise--will appear and warn that the marriage should not take place, that Mary must marry for love.

There is a mix-up--Mary thinks she is to play the ghost and Anne Boleyn thinks she is to play the ghost, so there are two ghosts at the appointed hour and the whole thing is a shambles, both girls being seized by Henry's soldiers.  But then a real ghost, Mary's mother, appears, and lays down the law.  The king will compel the Church to marry Mary and John.

We have here a poorly-written and totally boring story.  Quick makes a hash of the personality of the Abbot and we readers have no idea how we are supposed to feel about him--he is in the villain slot, but we keep hearing that Mary had a good relationship with him for years.  Quick clumsily tries to exploit the reader's supposed interest in the court politics of Henry VIII and the English Reformation and supposed hostility to Spaniards and the Catholic Church, which feels like a cheap short cut, like she can't generate emotion in the reader on her own and so resorts to latching on to feelings she thinks you already have.  Th descriptions are tedious and numb the mind instead of building atmosphere or painting images.  As for the plot, "The White Lady" reads like a caricature of what men suspect fiction by women is like, a bunch of women using their social connections to get married.

Thumbs down!

"The White Lady" was reprinted in 2001 in an anthology by Forrest J. Ackerman and in the 2024 Quick collection The Witch's Mark and Others.  I believe this is the fifth Quick story I have read--click the links to see how I rated "The Witch's Mark," "Turn Over," "Edge of the Cliff," and "The Lost Gods" and rest assured that I didn't dislike all of them.

"Parasite Mansion" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman

"Parasite Mansion" is also adorned with a Hannes Bok illustration, but I am finding the composition of this one, and the faces and poses of the figures, below par for Bok.  Too bad. 

More bad news.  "Parasite Mansion" is another long and tedious and poorly-written story.  What is the world coming to?

Blue-eyed redhead Marcia Trent is a grad student in Psychology and a teacher at a girl's school in Carolina.  When she hears that her fiancé is marrying her sister back home in Birmingham, Alabama, she hops in her car and sets out on a 400-mile trek, full of rage.  She somehow ends up on a lonely road where she crashes the car because a sniper puts two rounds through her windshield.  She hits her head and sprains her ankle and is carried into a decaying mansion by some weirdos, the Mason family.  Counselman provides us, with sleep-inducing detail, descriptions of the Mason mansion and its occupants that stress how contradictory or paradoxical the milieu and its occupants are--the mansion is full of beautiful antiques, for example, but is also in a terrible state of repair.  Our heroine is stuck in bed and a succession of mentally ill people shuttles in and out of Marcia's room for page after page after page.

We've got the sniper, Renny Mason, a murderous little boy who, having failed to slay Marcia with his rifle, tries to strangle her.  Little Renny is trying to kill our redheaded academic because he fears she has come to take away his older sister.  Renny's campaign of destruction is arrested by his adult brother, Victor Mason, a filthy drunk who is also a trained physician who wraps up Marcia's ankle and puts stiches in her noggin.  (Victor is one of Counselman's paradoxes, a man of science who has become a slave to superstition, a handsome chap under a thick coat of booze and dirt.)  We've also got a hideous old woman who married into this insane family long ago, Gran, whom we are told multiple times looks like a mummy.  Gran thinks she is better than the others and is acquisitive, steals Marcia's money and jewelry.  Finally we have teenaged girl Lollie Mason, Renny and Victor's sister, blonde and skinny and innocent; she thinks Marcia is a princess.  Poltergeist-type phenomena attend Lollie, and she spontaneously suffers bloody wounds, as if an invisible demon has scratched her.  Marcia, a scientist (you know, we all pretend psychology is a science, our of politeness), thinks Lollie's gruesome injuries are psychosomatic.

"Parasite Mansion" is like 17 pages long.  Halfway through, Victor tells the history of the cursed Mason family.  His great aunt and then his aunt were terrorized by an invisible monster, tormented until their deaths; Lollie is the third such victim.  The first two victims of the monster were admitted to asylums but the doctors could do nothing for them, so Lollie and her family are determined to keep victim #3 from being similarly taken away, uselessly, to a depressing institution and so the Masons have shut themselves off from the world, leaving the family in poverty and Renny and Lollie with no education or social skills.  Victor declares he cannot let Marcia leave, as she would attract the authorities and lookie-loos to the dilapidated estate and Lollie would end up in an asylum.

In the last third or quarter of the story, Marcia figures out what is going on and saves the day.  Gran has the power of telekinesis and has been using it to terrorize the pretty Mason women whom she envies and resents because the Masons were not as wealthy a family she thought they were when she married into their family.  As for the injuries, they really are psychosomatic, like stigmata.  After she has been discovered, Gran tries to murder Marcia, fails, and has a heart attack and dies.  We are led to expect that Victor, Lollie, and Renny will rejoin society and have normal lives--Victor will quit the booze and marry Marcia, he being a hunk once he is shaved and washed up.

Long, slow and repetitive, and irritating to read because of the clumsy style.  I can't blame Counselman for the typos, but I can blame McIlwraith, and I can blame both of them for some of the lines that are so wacky as to take you right out of the story:

"It sounds like the supernatural, I know. But so did television, to people of Shakespeare’s time."

Thumbs down for "Parasite Mansion."  Arkham House put out a Counselman collection, Half in Shadow, in 1978, and you can find "Parasite Mansion" in there.  In 1987 Peter Haining included this clunker in his anthology Poltergeist: Tales of Deadly Ghosts.

For some reason I have read a stack of Counselman stories--behold the links: "The Unwanted," "The Black Stone Statue," "Twister," "The Girl with the Green Eyes," "The Cat-Woman," "Mommy," "The Web of Silence" and "Drifting Atoms."  As with the list of Quick, stories, I actually didn't condemn all of these.

"The Phantom Slayer" by Fritz Leiber

After those two long boring pieces it is a relief to read a well-written story with some human feeling and some strong images.  "The Phantom Slayer"'s content is just OK, but thanks to superior technique the story is miles ahead of Quick's and Counselman's.

Our narrator is sort of a loser who is going through some tough times.  An uncle he never met dies, and he inherits unc's meagre estate; unc was a retired police lieutenant and paid his rent in advance, so our narrator gets to live in unc's apartment in the big city and eat unc's stockpiled canned food.  Leiber does a good job describing the narrator's loneliness and what it is like to move into a little apartment in the big city.  This material is right up my alley; I am fascinated by city life and small apartments, the sounds and the smells, the light and shadows and all that.

The plot concerns the narrator going through his uncle's things, in particular newspaper clippings about a series of murders by what we today would call a serial killer, and horrible dreams the narrator has after moving in to unc's flat.  Or are they dreams?  Is the narrator's uncle trying to communicate with his nephew from the grave?  Trying to take over the narrator's body?  Is the uncle trying to solve the case of the Phantom Slayer, or is he himself the Phantom Slayer?  Is the narrator going to become a murderer himself or save the day and solve the crime?

It is not rare for a character in weird fiction to learn something dreadful about his own ancestry and/or identity, to have dreams that may in fact be memories of things he is doing while he thinks he is asleep, and to fear someone else is taking over his body.  But Leiber handles this conventional material pretty skillfully.  I can moderately recommend "The Phantom Slayer."

Sometimes under the title "The Inheritance," "The Phantom Slayer" has been reprinted many times, in various Leiber collections and in several anthologies. 

      

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Not a great start of the 1942 leg of our long march through the history of Weird Tales, but when walking the weird road, you gotta take the rough with the smooth.  And Fritz's contribution is good.  As for this issue of the magazine, of course "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," Bok's illo for that story and Derleth's commentary on it make it worthwhile for the student of the weird.

We'll continue our explorations of 1942 weird stories soon, but first a novel from the late 1920s.

Weird Tales, May 1941: Counselman, Jacobi, Bloch & Derleth

The May 1941 issue of Weird Tales is like a monument to the genius of Hannes Bok, with a Bok cover and an interior chockablock with Bok illustrations of horrible monsters and alluring ladies.  So this issue of D. McIlwraith's magazine is already getting the MPorcius Seal of Approval even before I read any of the fiction.  This issue is important historically because it marks the first appearance of H. P. Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, a good piece of work I have read multiple times but don't feel like reading again.  In the letters column, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei provide an essay about Lovecraft's working methods and the story of how Charles Dexter Ward came to see print here in WT--this essay is pretty interesting.  In the Weird Tales Club column we find a missive from a pseudonymous Forrest J. Ackerman promoting the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society; advertising in WT works!--the LASFS is, we are told at wikipedia, "the oldest continuously operating science fiction club in the world."  Plus--a poem by Robert Heinlein's second wife!  An exciting issue of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual!

Now our focus, four pieces of fiction by people we have been reading here at MPorcius Fiction Log for some time.

"Drifting Atoms" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman

This will be our eighth Counselman story.  Of the seven we have already read (links below), I think I only liked one-- again we are witnesses to the triumph of hope over experience.

"The Unwanted"
"The Black Stone Statue"
"Twister"
"The Girl with the Green Eyes"
"The Cat-Woman"
"Mommy" 
"The Web of Silence"

"Drifting Atoms" is an acceptable cosmic horror story; to be specific, by "cosmic horror" I mean the characters learn the true nature of the universe and it drives them insane.  There is also some ancillary racism in the story, which adds some kind of historical value, I guess.

Five childhood friends, now middle-class professionals, regularly meet to play poker and shoot the shit.  They are all kind of interested in the supernatural and esoteric.  Tonight, one of them talks about how all the universe is nothing but atoms, that different materials are just the same atoms arranged differently.  He suggests that the power of the mind is what keeps a chair a chair, a stone a stone, a man a man, implying that he means the mind of God or some similar creator figure, but also suggesting that we mere mortals ourselves have a tiny spark of that divine mind and thus a modest ability to arrange atoms.

Counselman's story is long and the action takes place over a succession of meetings with lots of dialogue full of speculations and lots of descriptions of how the men are sweating or jittery and so forth as they investigate the nature of the universe.  One of the guy's uncles, who ended up in an asylum, had a collection of occult books and guy produces one such volume one night and reading it inspires the men to hold something like a seance in which they sit at a table and concentrate in an effort to make a gold watch materialize on the table.  Their first effort succeeds in making a spot on the table warm.  Then they decide to have a witness for their second attempt and summon a black delivery boy to the apartment.  Behind his back they call this young man a "darky" and a "nig" and say that black people are "very sensitive, like dogs."  Sure enough, the "Negro" sees a gold watch on the table after the men concentrate on trying to conjure one up, though it vanishes soon after they cease concentrating.

The idea that we are mere atoms that, should God's mind wander, could fly apart into nothing at any moment, has a negative effect on the men's psychology and one ends up in the loony bin and another commits suicide by jumping into traffic.  The survivors continue the experiments, and the fear that they might succeed, that soon people the world over will be creating out of thin air ersatz objects and even people (of course men will use this power to conjure their dream girls) with their minds, drives one of them to murder the others to save the world from a nightmare paradigm shift. 

Long and slow, but not actually bad.  "Drifting Atoms" would be reprinted in 1990 in the anthology When the Black Lotus Blooms.  For that edition, like it was a John Lennon boxed set, "Drifting Atoms" was edited to remove slurs used to describe black people, as well as the word "Negro," and the men suggest that "some kids are very sensitive, like dogs."  This is your reminder to consult primary sources if you truly want to learn about the past.  Armchair Press reprinted the story in 2022 in their collection of Counselman stories, Hostess of Horror and Fantasy, which I do not have access to, so I don't know if in this 21st-century appearance "Drifting Atoms" has been sanitized for your protection.    

"The Phantom Pistol" by Carl Jacobi

I think I've read fourteen Jacobi stories; oh, that's a lot of links.    

"The Face in the Wind" 
"The Elcar Special"
"The Chadwick Pit"
"The White Pinnacle" 
"The Street That Wasn't There" (with Clifford Simak) 
"Revelations in Black" 
"A Pair of Swords"  
"The Cane" 
"The Satanic Piano" 
"The Gentleman is an Epwa" 
"Spawn of Blackness"

"The Devil Deals"

"Death Rides the Plateau"

"Made in Tanganyika"

"The Phantom Pistol" is an OK werewolf story, straightforward and more or less competent.  It would be reprinted in the 20th century in the Jacobi collection Revelations in Black as well as a few European anthologies; in our own 21st century it has reappeared in Jacobi collections put out by Weird House Press and Centipede Press.

Our narrator is a British guy who collects old books.  He makes a new friend, a guy who collects old pistols.  I'm afraid Jacobi's writing suggests he doesn't know much about firearms, using the words "revolver" and "pistol" interchangeably and offering a description of a guy loading a 1712 pistol that feels all mixed up.  Anyway, pistol guy buys a decrepit old house in a decayed part of the country and book guy goes to visit him.  The narrator finds the villagers all agitated because a wolf or dog has been killing their kids.

The pistol collector is excited to show his bookish friend that he has recently purchased a fancy early 18th-century pistol.  Amazingly, this very pistol is described in the gift that book guy has brought his pal, an old book on firearms.  The pistol in question, according to the old book, was crafted specifically to destroy werewolves for a continental who had been the victim of a werewolf attack.  The firearms expert should have figured this out himself, seeing as the pistol has silver bullets in its case and "Death to the werewolf" inscribed on its barrel, but I guess the print is small and in German besides--give pistol guy a break, he's a Latinist, not a Germanist!  The realization that this gun was built to exterminate lycanthropes seems to upset the firearms collector.

Soon after, book guy finds a bunch of books in the house, all of them about the occult.  One volume is about how to become a werewolf, and includes notes in English and Latin indicating the firearms collector has indulged in Satanic rituals and become a werewolf.  People in these stories always commit some monstrous deed and then explicitly make a record of their crimes right where some other guy can find it.

In my opinion, a strong way of ending the story would be for the book collector to realize he has a duty to God and society to destroy his friend and pursue that weighty task, overcoming or failing to overcome his attachment to his buddy; maybe he does the right thing, maybe he joins his friend in becoming a monster, maybe he gets killed by his friend.  Instead, Jacobi has unseen forces, presumably God or maybe the spirit of the man who had the pistol made, compel the narrator against his will to load the special gun and blast his friend as he comes home, mouth dripping with the blood of children.  The narrator even succeeds in convincing the authorities that the firearms collector accidentally shot himself while cleaning the pistol, so the book collector doesn't have to pay any price for killing his friend.  Taking away a character's agency and liberating him from responsibility for his actions is not good drama, Carl!         

The more I think about "The Phantom Pistol" the less I like it.  Still, it remains within the broad range of "acceptable."

"Beauty's Beast" by Robert Bloch 

I've read over one hundred stories by Robert Bloch.  One day I should do a post on Bloch with a list of links to all my now many posts about his work and maybe a list of my top ten favorite Bloch stories, but today is not that day.

"Beauty's Beast" starts off with a reference to the Smith Brothers, which might not land today, and a series of jokes that work because they are about human relationships and not the lame puns I associate with Bloch's sense of humor.  Our narrator is going steady with Peg, a vapid woman who dominates him.  Walking down the street with our narrator, Peg is enticed into a pet shop by the sight of a puppy; once inside, the "Hindu" proprietor, who tells them that all the animals he sells are sacred in one Eastern religion or other, convinces Peg, perhaps by hypnotism, to buy a monkey (with the narrator's money, of course.)  At a party it comes out that numerous women in their circle have recently purchased pets suggested by this Hindu.

The story progresses and we and Peg and the narrator realize that the Hindu is an evil wizard whose pets steal the souls of the women he sells them to--the women fall dead and the comes around to collect the snake or dog or monkey or bird, which is now inhabited by the woman's consciousness.  Is Peg doomed to be trapped in the body of a monkey?  Can the wizard be defeated?  Will Peg's friend, a woman whose soul has apparently been imprisoned in the body of a cobra, achieve revenge on the diabolical subcontinental?  We get a somewhat apocalyptic climax, the final confrontation taking place during a torrential downpour and flood that destroys the pet shop and all evidence of these incredible goings-on.

I can mildly recommend this one--you know I like stories about difficult sexual relationships and about black magic, and "Beauty's Beast" is pretty well put together stylistically and structurally.  "Beauty's Beast" would be reprinted in the several editions of The Living Demons and in a 1970s French collection of Bloch stories, Parlez-moi d'horreur....

"Altimer's Amulet" by August Derleth 

"Altimer's Amulet" appeared in the Derleth collection Someone in the Dark in the same year it was printed here in Weirds Tales, and would go on to be the title story of a 1985 French collection of Derleth stories.

We had a dangerous Hindu in Bloch's tale and here Derleth delivers more weird menace from the mysterious East.  But while Counselman portrays a nonwhite as an inferior to be dismissed and Bloch offers a devilish nonwhite figure, and in both stories whites are essentially innocent, Derleth's depiction of nonwhites and whites in "Altimer's Amulet" is more of the exploitative-white-imperialist-gets-an-eerie-comeuppance-at-the-hands-of-the-inexplicable-other variety.

Altimer, the well-known explorer, a man of curiosity and ambition, returns to London with an amulet he stole from a Tibetan temple.  To get the artifact, he bribed some priests and sneaked in clad in a disguise and armed with some kind of dagger or sword, I suppose.  When the Tibetan charged with protecting the amulet tried to stop Altimer, the Englishman outfought this guardian, cutting off both of the man's hands at the wrist before escaping with the treasure.

Altimer hopes to be knighted for his exploit and for gifting the amulet to the British Museum.  But he hasn't gotten out of his Oriental adventure scot-free, it turns out.  A package comes in the mail--the head of one of the priests he bribed!  The protectors of the amulet are on to him!  Another Englishman, an expert on the mysterious East, warns Altimer repeatedly to return the amulet.  Altimer refuses, and, sure enough, the severed hands of the man Altimer outfought come after him, retrieving the amulet and strangling the explorer.  The punchline of the story is the suggestion that the king had never even noticed Altimer nor heard about the amulet until after Altimer's mysterious death and the amulet's disappearance--Altimer ran the risks that ultimately led him to an early grave pointlessly.

A competent piece of work, maybe we can call it a mildly good filler piece?

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None of today's four stories is a failure, but none is spectacular, either.  Bloch's is probably the best, with Derleth's in second place; Bloch and Derleth commit no blunders and Bloch's humor, relationships and images are pretty good, actually generating some feeling in the reader.  Jacobi makes what I would consider a bunch of mistakes as well as poor choices in his story, and Counselman's tale is too long and slow.  I think I enjoyed Jacobi's more than Counselman's while I was reading it, as it moves at a good pace, but, looking back, Counselman's plot holds together better--the characters behave logically and people's fates are determined by their personalities and decisions, so the ending is satisfying, and Counselman is ambitious, putting forth a whole philosophy of how the universe works and speculating on how learning how the universe operates might affect human society and individual people.  So we've got Counselman in third place.

An above average issue of Weird Tales.  How will the July 1941 issue compare?  Stay tuned to find out!

Weird Tales, Jan 1940: O A Kline & E H Price, M E Counselman and F Garfield

Last year, we here at MPorcius Fiction Log completed our project of reading at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales with a 1930s cover date.  Here find links that testify to the success of our sacred quest:

1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938   1939

The classic run of Weird Tales was from 1923 to 1954 and there is no reason to refrain from extending our project backwards and forwards.  So today let's check out some stories from the penultimate issue of Weird Tales edited by Farnsworth Wright, the January 1940 ish.

This issue has work by two of our favorite WT artists, Hannes Bok and Virgil Finlay, but when it comes to fiction the really big names are in the letters column.  There's a letter from Robert Bloch defending his treatment of druids in his story "The Dark Isle," citing his sources.  (We read "The Dark Isle" in June of last year.)  Clark Ashton Smith is among the many who write in to praise Henry Kuttner's "Towers of Death."  (I wrote about "Towers of Death" in 2019, but, alas, it was not to praise it.)  Edmond Hamilton has nice things to say about H. Warner Munn and Thomas Kelly, two writers I haven't read anything by yet.

The most important writer (to us here at MPFL, at least) whose fiction appears in the issue is probably E. Hoffman Price, who has the cover story, something he co-wrote with Otis Adelbert Kline.  I read one or two of Kline's planetary romances in the days before I started the blog and found then unremarkable, and during the period of this blog's imperium over the interwebs we've explored I guess a dozen stories by Price.  So we'll tackle their collaboration.  I've been reading Mary Elizabeth Counselman, so we may as well give her contribution a shot.  To round out the blog post, we'll check out a story by Frances Garfield.        

"Spotted Satan" by Otis Adelbert Kline and E. Hoffman Price

"Spotted Satan" presents standard, traditional adventure story characters walking through a similarly routine adventure plot; this kind of material can be compelling and very fun if well-written, but I found Kline and Price's style to be poor, with many clunky sentences I was rewriting in my head as I read them.  For like half the time I was reading "Spotted Satan" I was expecting to give it a thumbs down, but in the second half I found myself wondering what the answer to the mystery was and what would happen to the various characters, who would live and who would die, who was innocent and who was responsible for the crimes, so I guess I have to admit this story gets a passing grade of barely acceptable.  (A real writer, a talented stylist, like Jack Vance or Tanith Lee, could have really done this plot and its various themes up good.)

Our tale is laid in Burma.  The native employees of a British logging company are being killed by a leopard, jeopardizing the operation.  Local hunters have signally failed to destroy the beast, which many have come to believe is no mundane cat but a shape-shifting demon.  So the head of the logging company has hired American hunter Steele and his sidekick, towering Afghan Achmet, to bring down the monster.

We get the expected episodes.  Steele has crazy dreams.  A wiry man in a breechclout tries to murder the sleeping Steele with a kukri knife, only to be foiled by loyal Achmet.  Steele and Achmet witness "the grandfather of leopards" eating some poor native, and the oversized feline somehow eludes a round from crack shot Steele's express rifle.

For the 21st-century reader, one of the interesting things about "Spotted Satan" is its portrayal of many cultures and ethnicities, most of whom enjoy ample description as to physical appearance and behavior.  We've got an American, an Afghan, Britons, Burmese, a Gurkha, and nautch dancers.  The exotic Achmet has more personality, more interesting dialogue (e.g., regularly invoking "Allah," "the One True God," and muttering or even inscribing upon bullets prayers against "shaitan") and behaves in a more exciting manner (e.g., chasing women and waving around a tulwar) than sober white man Steele or any of the other, more submissive, nonwhites.  Behold this description of the only white man permanently attached to the logging camp where Steele and Achmet first see the monster leopard.

There was no doubt that he was a white man: his skin, tanned as only that of a Nordic can be, and the high bridge of his nose, and the unprominent cheek-bones, testified to his race. Yet his hazel-flecked eyes were slanted like those of a Tartar or Mongol. His mustaches, sandy-colored and bristling, jutted straight out on both sides instead of being upturned at the ends, or decently drooping, or close cropped.

Achmet immediately concludes this guy, Kirby, is in league with the leopard or actually is the leopard.  For his part, Kirby admits he believes in local superstitions, thinks the oversized leopard has been sent to attack his logging camp by some supernatural entity because he ordered a new road constructed through sacred ground.

Steele fires upon and misses the leopard again, and is told by a local priest that he needs special weapons to harm the demon.  A third time Steele's fire fails to fell the beast.  Clues pile up that hint that Kirby really is transforming into a leopard at night to terrorize the camp; other clues suggest he may simply by an agent for a rival logging company, sent over to sabotage this camp's production--could he be some kind of leopard tamer?  Visiting nautch dancers are attacked by the monster, and Steele the generous man of responsibility and Achmet the horndog make the safety of these fetching young ladies their number one priority.  In the end Achmet kills the leopard and we get a half-scientific and half-mystical explanation for what is going on and it looks like Achmet is not only going to get a pile of reward money but a hot girlfriend besides.  

Not a great story, unfortunately, but perhaps useful to those interested in Orientalism in speculative fiction, seeing as it is full of descriptions of nonwhites and mixed race people from Afghanistan through the subcontinent to Burma and we are expected to be sympathetic to at least some of them, while we also get skeptical portrayals of Western Europeans.  (Price was fascinated by China, Arab culture and Buddhism, and was a military veteran, so probably had more real life knowledge of other countries and of actual dangerous adventure than most or all the other Weird Tales authors.)    

"Spotted Satan" would not spring into print again until our own 21st century, when it appeared in the anthology Cats of Shadow, Claws of Darkness: Stories of Were-cats, Ghost Cats and Other Supernatural Felines.

"Twister" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman

Here we have an obvious and banal filler story.

A newlywed couple from the North is driving through the South on their honeymoon.  It is a rainy night and they have been driving all day and want to stop, and do so when they come to a town that, curiously, is not on their map.  But the people there tell the travelers that they cannot stay, bidding them to hurry away because a twister is coming.  Obvious clues indicate to us readers that the townspeople are ghosts, that this town was destroyed by a tornado years ago, but Counselman makes us read through multiple pages in which the newlyweds leave the ghost town, get to another town, talk to a guy, spend the night, and for contrived reasons go back to the ghost town the next morning, before she tells us what we have already figured out.

Gotta give "Twister" a thumbs down--Counselman takes a tired plot and makes it unnecessarily long and even more unbelievable than it need be.  That is not an improvement!

"Twister" was reprinted in the Counselman collection Half in Shadow. 

"Forbidden Cupboard" by Frances Garfield

Garfield is a pen name for Manly Wade Wellman's wife, Frances Obrist, who has 11 fiction credits at isfdb.  She wrote a little about herself for the "Meet the Authors" column in the December 1939 issue of Amazing, reporting that she was a tall blonde Kansan who tried to get into acting but found she couldn't deal with the kind of people who run the world of the theatre.  (This seems like a veiled reference to the ubiquity of sexual harassment in show biz, but I could be reading too much into things.)  A revised version of "Forbidden Cupboard," retitled "Don't Open that Door," appeared in a 1970 issue of the British magazine Fantasy Tales.

Like Counselman's "Twister," "Forbidden Cupboard" consists of routine material and the style is just OK, but Garfield doesn't screw up the pacing and length, so we're calling this one acceptable.

Our narrator is a young woman who moves to Greenwich Village to pursue her dream of becoming a writer.  Pushing the writing theme, Garfield includes explicit references to Edgar Allen Poe, Washington Irving, William Blake, Walter Scott, etc.  The narrator already has a project she is working on, having been hired by a widow to pen the hagiographic (and largely fictional) biography of her businessman husband.  This section is, I guess. a joke.

The young wordsmith arrives at the apartment she is renting a day early.  The old building is owned by the church, and the priest who is acting as landlord hasn't had the room quite finished yet--he wants to plaster over a closet, and the plasterers are coming today.  He forbids our narrator from opening the closet.  Our narrator and this clergyman also have a conversation about a previous resident of the house, a locally famous wizard or mad scientist who disappeared after arousing the wrath of the populace.

Once the man of the cloth is out of sight, the narrator goes to open the closet door.  Unexpected distractions delay her--the most interesting element of the story is the speculation that these distractions are the work of God trying to stop the narrator from making a stupid mistake.  But she does eventually manage to open the closet.  The wraith or ghost or whatever of the wizard emerges and the narrator is at risk of being taken over by the monster but then the priest returns, scaring off the undead sorcerer.  

I don't like deus ex machina endings--I prefer the protagonist to be defeated or to triumph based on his or her own abilities or decisions.  So a better ending of "Forbidden Cupboard," to my mind, would have the writer taken over by the mad scientist because she was too curious and ignored God's warnings, or somehow using her knowledge of writers or history or something to outwit the monster.  It is easy to imagine an entire novel in which the woman becomes a famous writer of horror stories because she is inhabited by an evil genius, who uses her wealth to conduct still more diabolical experiments only to eventually be discovered and fought by the priest and the woman's boyfriend or whoever who must try to destroy the wizard without destroying the woman.

Could have been better, but I wouldn't go so far as to call "Forbidden Cupboard" bad.   

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I'm afraid this looks like one of the weaker issues of Weird Tales.  Well, they can't all be winners, can they?  Hopefully the last issue edited by Farnsworth Wright, the March 1940 issue, will be better.

The Unexpected: M St. Clair, M E Counselman & F Leiber

The Unexpected is an anthology edited by Leo Margulies and published by Pyramid in 1961 and then again in 1962 with an inferior cover and a higher price.  The book's eleven stories are advertised as "hair-raising" and "uncanny," which sounds like what we are looking for, life being so boring and easy nowadays.  We've already read some of the contents of The Unexpected in other publications: it feels like just 24 hours ago I endured Robert Bloch's joke story/feeble satire of comic books "The Strange Island of Dr. Nork;" in July of last year we read Manly Wade Wellman's Civil War fantasy "The Valley Was Still;" and in 2019 we read Ray Bradbury's cynical and gruesome "The Handler" and Theodore Sturgeon's very effective "The Professor's Teddy Bear."  Let's sample more of what The Unexpected has to offer today, three pieces that include stories by women contributors to Weird Tales, Margaret St. Clair and Mary Elizabeth Counselman, and a famous story by the creator of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Fritz Leiber.

"Mrs. Hawk" by Margaret St. Clair (1950)

We just read St. Clair's science fiction story about how terrible men are, "Squee," and that was pretty well put together, so we can hope this one will be good.  "Mrs. Hawk," like all of today's stories, debuted in Weird Tales during the editorship of Dorothy Stevens McIlwraith.  (I'll note here that I do not own a copy of The Unexpected so today we are reading from scans of the original issues of Weird Tales in which these stories debuted.)  "Mrs. Hawk" does not appear to have soared--if isfdb is to be believed, Margulies was the only person to have reprinted it.  

"Mrs. Hawk" seems to be largely based on the exploits of a real female serial killer, Belle Gunness, whom St. Clair mentions by name in the first paragraph of this story and apparently assumes you already know all about.  I've lived a sheltered life and had a mediocre education at government schools so Belle Gunness is one of many prominent figures of whom I know nothing.  Luckily my education was not so poor that I don't know about The Odyssey, the other source material for St. Clair's story.

In brief, a beautiful woman named Hawk owns a farm.  She advertises in the personals, hoping to find a husband thereby.  The men who answer the ad tend to vanish, and the local sheriff goes to investigate.  There is a dearth of clues to be found at the very well-run, very organized Hawk farm; the only unusual thing about the farm is the character of the pigs, which seem to have more personality than typical pigs.  By a lucky coincidence, the sheriff's kid is writing a paper on Greek mythology and that night the sheriff learns how Circe the witch turned Odysseus' men into pigs.  So he returns to the Hawk farm the next day and we readers have no idea who will triumph and who will suffer a black fate when sheriff and ancient witch meet for round 2.

An acceptable filler piece.  

"The Unwanted" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman (1951)

Last year I read four stories by Counselman and deemed them "hacky," but here we are, giving her another chance.  Marvel at my generosity!  "The Unwanted" has been reprinted in two different gynocentric anthologies, Seon Manley and Gogo Lewis' Ladies of Fantasy and Mike Ashley's Queens of the Abyss.  The story can also be found in the Counselman collection Half in Shadow.

"The Unwanted" is a long and slow story about mother's love.  Our narrator is a mother of one six-year-old child who has taken a job as a census taker and is climbing the hills of Alabama to interview impoverished hillbillies, most of whom are on the dole.  She meets one proud man in his sixties who lost his arm in the war but refuses to accept any government aid.  He has a wife in her forties whom he believes is mentally ill because she thinks she has eleven children when in fact she has none.  Eventually we readers realize that the wife so desired children, was so full of love, that God or some other supernatural force directed to magically appear to her the children of mothers who didn't want kids, including a Jewish boy and an African-American girl.  The husband can't see these kids, but they are indubitably real--they interact with material objects, wearing hand me downs and chopping wood and gathering berries and completing other farm chores, contributing to the success of the farm.  Because she too is a mother, the census taker can see this multi-ethnic crew of happy kids, see how happy they are to be loved.

"The Unwanted" drags on and on, Counselman taking forever to get to the point.  The style is bland and boring, and if nobody can see them how will these kids grow up and live normal lives with relationships beyond those with Mom?  This one could have stood undergoing another draft to tighten it up, at the very least.  A just barely acceptable filler piece the tone of which is sappy and sentimental rather than scary or thrilling, as we sort of expect from Weird Tales.  Maybe I can say that "The Unwanted" is valuable as a rare SF story that romanticizes the love of a mother for children outside the context of some kind of satire (feminist critics might argue Counselman here is trafficking in traditional gender stereotypes), and as an example of anti-racist/anti-bigotry fantasy fiction.  

"The Automatic Pistol" by Fritz Leiber (1940)

This is a quite famous story which for whatever reason I have never gotten around to reading.

"The Automatic Pistol" is set in my old stomping grounds, Northern New Jersey and New York City, the center of the universe!  It is Prohibition, and our narrator, No Nose, is a bootlegger, smuggling booze in the company of people with names like Glasses and Inky, all of them hirelings of a relatively small-time operator.  Inky has a .45, and he is always touching it, fiddling with it, caressing it, like he is in love with it, which draws sarcastic comments from some of the other crooks.

When Prohibition ends and the criminal enterprise is wrapping up, Inky, an immigrant from Eastern or Southern Europe or some such place, plans to return to the old country with his ill-gotten money, which he has saved rather than squandered like the other bootleggers have.  Inky gives his beloved .45 to the boss, but before he can leave this land of liberty he gets murdered by vengeful members of a rival gang--or at least that is what the boss tells No Nose and Glasses!  The boss claims he is afraid that rival gang is also after him, so he has No Nose and Glasses hole up with him in a dockside hideout.

In the hideout odd things happen with the .45, and Glasses, the most educated of the crooks, theorizes that Inky was some kind of witch or wizard, and the pistol his familiar, a living thing granted to Inky by the Devil to guide and protect him.  It comes to light that the boss himself murdered Inky and gathered Glasses and Non Nose to help him find Inky's stash of hoarded cash, and explosive events bear out Glasses' supernatural theory of the .45, which exacts vengeance on the boss.

A pretty good crime/black magic story.  "The Automatic Pistol" has been reprinted in many Leiber collections and a few anthologies, including one of those Asimov/Greenberg year by year things.    

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As longtime readers of MPorcius Fiction Log are all too aware, Weird Tales is close to my two-sizes-too-small heart, and so it feels good to get some more WT  content under my belt, even if the St. Clair and Counselman material is mediocre or weak filler.  The Leiber is superior, at least.

More McIlwraith-era Weird Tales stories next time we meet, oh my brothers!