1976 Frights by Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison and Robert Aickman

The frights continue, with three more tales from Kirby McCauley's 1976 anthology of all new stories of "what goes bump in the contemporary night," Frights.  Today's terror scribes are Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, and Robert Aickman; Campbell and Etchison we have read before, but I think Aickman is new to MPorcius Fiction Log.  Let's hope he will wow us and become a new favorite!

"The Companion" by Ramsey Campbell

"The Companion" has appeared in many anthologies since its first appearance here in Frights, including an anthology of scary stories about trains and an anthology of horror stories selected by "celebrities," The Arbor House Celebrity Book of Horror Stories.  The celebrity who chose "The Companion" was none other than Stephen King.  King says "The Companion" was the first Campbell story he ever read, and that he doesn't quite understand what is going on in the story.  The other two stories which King nominates as the scariest he has ever read are "Sweets for the Sweet" by Robert Bloch and "The Colour Out of Space" by H. P. Lovecraft.  Many critics agree with King that "The Colour Out of Space" is one of Lovecraft's best stories, but I find it to be one of his least interesting, slow and boring and mundane.  (Celebrity Robert Silverberg chose Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time" for this book, in my opinion a much better choice.)

Well, hopefully my taste will be closer to King's when it comes to "The Companion."

Stone is a middle-aged man, some kind of accountant or something, who loves amusement parks and always goes to a bunch of them--by himself--on his yearly vacation.  (Of course, he's British, so he says "fairgrounds" and "holiday.")  He goes to a particularly old and decrepit sort of fairground, where he has hallucinations of his dead parents, and unhappy memories of his childhood and early adulthood come unbidden to his mind.  He rides a carousel ("roundabout") and sees rambunctious kids trying to steal plays at a pinball machine by using a coin with a string attached to it.

The guy running the roundabout tells him that "the old fairground" is a few blocks away, so Stone walks to it, on the way getting scared by a bunch of kids.  He enters the "old fairground" via a hole in a fence; the place seems to be deserted, but when he sits down in the sole car of the Ghost Train ride it moves, carrying him through the darkened building full of scary props, among them a stuffed animal faintly lit and a mirror that dimly shows his own face.  The story abruptly ends when a sort of stuffed doll of a child appears in the car next to Stone and takes his hand.

With lots of descriptions of garbage on the streets and Stone's out-of-control thoughts, this story feels long and slow, and because Stone's character and what is happening to him are so vague and inexplicable, they don't arouse any feeling in the reader.  Maybe I am supposed to piece together something about how Stone, who has a heart like a stone, is lonely and has no friends or women because his parents blah blah blah and he obsessively goes to fairgrounds to recreate for himself the childhood he never had and in the abandoned ride he finds the companion he has always needed but it is stuffed and fake just like he is stuffed and fake zzzzzzzzzzzzz... but what is my prize for doing all this work?  Campbell's story is not fun or scary or interesting and there is little incentive to turn over all those stones in hopes something noteworthy will wriggle out.

Again I have to disagree with Stephen King and give "The Companion" a thumbs down.  Mr. King and I are obviously not on the same wavelength.

Hans-Ake Lilja is like the world's biggest Stephen King fan, or something

"It Only Comes Out At Night" by Dennis Etchison

On the jacket of Frights we find the passage "No more vampires, werewolves, and cobwebbed castles.  Instead, here is an abundance of tingling, terrifying tales that transpire in our times...."  And yet I see on isfdb that "It Only Comes Out At Night" was included in Stephen Jones' The Mammoth Book of Vampires.  Well, let's see what Etchison's story is all about.

McClay is driving across the desert of the SouthWest, his exhausted wife asleep in the back seat, driving at night because it is cooler.  While Campbell in "The Companion" shovels a lot of details at you that you chop through in search of some kind of feeling or meaning like an explorer, machete in hand, scouring a jungle for signs of a lost civilization, Etchison's details of what it is like for a tired man to drive for hour after hour across the desert at night all paint sharp images or convey some emotional import.

Plotwise, the story is simple: McClay, after all that driving, comes to a rest stop that he slowly realizes is a place where some kind of murderer ambushes weary travelers as they sit in their cars.  He realizes this too late to save his wife.  If I hadn't known the story appeared in The Mammoth Book of Vampires I would not have interpreted the clues as pointing to a vampire, but just to some bloodthirsty insaniac, or maybe a Native American shaman.

Quite good.  I think I have read six stories by Etchison now, and three of them ("Wet Season," "The Dead Line," and here "It Only Come Out at Night") have really impressed me, so one of these days I should probably get my hands on an Etchison collection.

"It Only Comes Out at Night" has actually appeared in several anthologies beyond The Mammoth Book of Vampires, including some purporting to present the "best" or "top" fiction in the horror field, and I suspect it belongs in them.

"Compulsory Games" by Robert Aickman

"Compulsory Games" is the title story of a recent collection of Aickman's work--hopefully that is a sign that it is a good one!

This is a literary story, written in a style that feels a little old-fashioned, like something Victorian or Edwardian, perhaps.  The style is smooth and pleasant; the plot is alright; the ending is a little bewildering, I guess symbolic or surreal or whatever.

Colin Trenwith lives with his wife Grace in Kensington, which wikipedia is telling me is an affluent part of London.  Colin likes books and is sort of a homebody, withdrawn from others.  (This doesn't sound like anybody I know, really.)

The story is about the Trenwiths' relationship with a neighbor, middle-aged widow Eileen McGrath, a woman who works long hours in the civil service and lives in a huge house the rooms of which she tries, with limited success, to rent out.  Eileen tries to be friends with Grace and Colin, but they find her boring.

Grace's mother is in India, studying or joining cults or something (I guess the way the Beatles got involved with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Pete Townshend became fascinated with Meher Baba) and she gets sick, so Grace travels to India to be with her mother in her last days.  Eileen invites Colin to her house, perhaps to seduce him.  Instead of trying to have sex with her, Colin, seeing how unhappy she is, suggests she take up a hobby.

After her return from India, Grace goes to see Eileen without Colin, and returns to tell Colin that Eileen has taken up a hobby--not books, as he suggested, but flying!  And Grace is going to learn to fly with her!  Even though, earlier, Grace didn't even like Eileen, the two women quickly become the best of friends, and Colin almost never sees his wife--she no longer makes his meals or goes on his annual holiday with him.  When he does see her she talks about Eileen.  Eventually Eileen and Grace buy a Moth together, and move out of Kensington without leaving Colin their address!

On his own, Colin goes (it appears) somewhat insane, and/or maybe dies and goes to hell.  He often sees, and almost always hears, a Moth flying overhead--it seems to buzz him, and he has a terrible fear of its shadow falling upon him, leading him to run and dodge down the street, to the laughter of the local children.  The story ends with Colin on holiday by himself, touring the unkempt garden of a decrepit country house--he sees three figures in the distance, and as he approaches them he realizes one is he himself, and then the Moth comes down and, I guess, kills some or all of them.

"Compulsory Games" is well-written enough and interesting enough that I am giving it a positive vote, but the ending feels limp--there is no climax or satisfying resolution, the story just seems to wither and expire.  We readers are also moved to ask: What is the point of this story, what are its themes?  Is it a feminist thing, about how women are better off without men stifling them, about how, liberated from men, women can soar if they work together?  Are we to sympathize with the women or with Colin?  Or none of them (the story is quite cool, emotionally detached)?  There are some hints that the story is somehow about how machines are taking over human life ("Only machines are entirely real for children today....The machines cost enormous sums to maintain; and every day there are more of them, and huger, more intricate, more bossy") and how life is changing for the worse in general, what with the many references to old houses in poor repair and untended gardens and all that.  Children seem to be mixed up in all this dissatisfaction with modern life business; on the first page of the story we read that "Children have come to symbolize such an unprecedented demand upon their parents (conflictual also), while being increasingly unpredictable almost from their first toddlings, as to be best eschewed...."

Its mysteries leave it a little unsatisfying, perhaps, but a worthwhile read, over all.

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I'll definitely be exploring more of Dennis Etchison's and Robert Aickman's work in the future; Ramsey Campbell's?  Maybe not.

I think we'll put Frights aside now, but we'll have more speculative fiction short stories in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.

Night Chills from Fritz Leiber, Dennis Etchison and August Derleth (with H. P. Lovecraft)

Recently I read and praised "People of the Black Coast," Robert E. Howard's tale of a dude whose reckless fiance crashes her plane in the Pacific and gets dismembered by giant arthropod scientists.  I ended up reading a scan of that gruesome story's first printing in a 1969 issue of Spaceway, but, while digging through the internet archive looking for the piece, I noticed that the second place "People of the Black Coast" was published was Kirby McCauley's 1975 anthology Night Chills.  Night Chills reprints 18 stories McCauley felt deserved a wide audience but which had not yet been printed in a widely available book, Karl Edward Wagner's great story "Sticks" among them.  Our mutual admiration for "People of the Black Coast" and "Sticks" leading me to suspect that McCauley and I might have similar tastes, I decided to try out some of his other choices.  Today we'll read the stories in Night Chills by Fritz Leiber of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser fame and important horror writer Dennis Etchison, as well as something that August Derleth came up with based on some notes left by speculative fiction icon H. P. Lovecraft.

(I read the versions of these stories in the scan of Night Chills at the internet archive; all three have been republished in other books since 1975.)

"Alice and the Allergy" by Fritz Leiber (1946)

"Alice and the Allergy" first saw light of day in the same issue of Weird Tales as Edmond Hamilton's "Day of Judgment," which we read back in 2017.

About three years ago Alice was raped by a serial killer who was terrorizing the upper Midwest, a man the  newspapers called "the mystery strangler."  Alice married the doctor who came to treat her after she suffered this crime, and six months after their wedding she began suffering severe allergies and bouts of depression and anxiety.  As our story begins, Alioce can't stop thinking the strangler is coming to get her, to kill her as he killed most of his other victims, even though he was found dead two years ago.

There is a lot of medical and psychological jibber jabber in this story.  Alice's husband, Howard, is working with pharmacists trying to figure out what Alice is allergic to so they can make up shots for her.  Howard also thinks some of her psychological problems are because of the prudish misandrist aunt who raised her and filled her head with fear of men.  Howard says jazz like "Maybe, in a sense, your libido is still tied to the past.  Unconsciously, you may still have that distorted conception of sex your aunt drilled into you, something sadistic and murderous."  When the latest of many tests provides evidence that Alice is allergic to "household dust," Howard suspects her allergies are psychosomatic--maybe Alice's system reacts to dust because Alice was raped on a dusty couch!

By some unbelievable coincidence the household dust for the allergy test came from the same room where the strangler was found dead, and when Alice is given the first shot to relieve her allergy symptoms she dies of a bronchospasm.     

Maybe all that psychoanalytic stuff felt fresh in 1946, but to 48-year-old MPorcius, in 2019, who has seen many movies and TV shows with psychoanalaytic elements, it feels tired and boring.  Even if Leiber here is introducing it as a red herring and using it to portray Howard as a callous dope, it takes up too much space.  The business of the dust sample used for the allergy test coming from the strangler's room is kind of ridiculous--are we supposed to think the strangler's ghost contrived via some uncanny influence to have dust from his body selected for use by the lab that Howard works with so it would be introduced into Alice's bloodstream and, because it is imbued with the strangler's consciousness or evil, it somehow killed her?  Or just that it was a crazy coincidence, and Alice really did die because her subconscious recognized the dust of her rapist entering her body again and just couldn't take it?  Either explanation is too complicated and unlikely for the reader to accept, crippling the story.   

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

"Wet Season" by Dennis Etchison (1965)

Etchison died earlier this year--check out Will Errickson's post from May commemorating Etchison's life and career at his terrific blog Too Much Horror Fiction.  I thought Etchison's 1979 story "The Dead Line" quite good; and am happy to report that I found this one, which first appeared in the short-lived SF magazine Gamma, equally admirable.

"Wet Season" is an effective horror story that plays on our sadness over the deaths of our loved ones, anxieties regarding unpredictable natural forces like the weather, and dismay over the changes to our environs and our own lives wrought by the arrival of new people.  Madden recently married Lorelei, a slim beauty with cool skin who moves with a dancer's grace; she brought with her to their marriage a pair of giggling twin boys.  Madden finds himself unable to bond with the strange little boys, and doesn't enjoy much emotional intimacy with beautiful Lorelei, either.  Not long after their marriage Madden's daughter from a previous marriage dies, drowned in the bathtub.  This tragedy precipitates a mind-blowing talk with Madden's brother, who lays out the clues, both quantitative--weather patterns and old photographs--and qualitative--unnerving feelings about changes in the town and in Madden's home--that suggest that, over the last two or three years, Madden, as well as other men in town, have married aquatic monsters who are transforming the county into some kind of swamp and killing anyone who stumbles on the horrible truth!

Much of "Wet Season" reads like a mature mainstream story about loss and relationships--Madden's relationship with his brother, his heartbreak over the death of his daughter, and his failure to relate with the giggling twins and his slinky beauty of a wife ring true and gave me chills.  The weird monster stuff that comes at the end is also good, and is effectively foreshadowed throughout the earlier parts of the story, so the realistic human drama elements and the Lovecraftian infiltration-by-and-miscegenation-with-evil-fish-people climax make a seamless whole.  Bravo.

An enthusiastic thumbs up for this one!

"Innsmouth Clay" by August Derleth and H. P. Lovecraft (1971)

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth," from 1936, is one of Lovecraft's masterpieces (I gushed about it in early 2018); let's see what connections to that story, if any, Derleth contrives in this story, which first appeared in his 1971 anthology Dark Things and has since been reprinted in the various collections of Derleth/Lovecraft "collaborations" going under variations of the title The Watchers Out of Time.  (It is my understanding that the stories in The Watchers Out of Time were essentially written by Derleth but that Lovecraft's meager posthumous contributions have often been exaggerated for marketing reasons.)

"Innsmouth Clay" is a sort of memoir about vanished sculptor Jeffrey Corey, penned by his closest friend and the administrator of his estate.  Around the time of the events described in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," Corey returned to America from Paris and moved into a seaside cottage five miles south of Innsmouth, home to some relatives of Corey's with whom he had never had much interaction.  After the Federal raid on Innsmouth and the Navy attack on the submarine colony of fish people mentioned in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," Corey found some blue clay washed up on the beach and decided to make a sculpture of a sea goddess out of it.  Like the guy in "The Call of Cthulhu," Corey does some sculpting while asleep, and wakes up to find he has given his sea goddess gills!

The narrator provides text from Corey's journal describing his dreams, dreams it is obvious to us are in fact memories of his real nocturnal activities, which include having sex with a mysterious woman and bringing his sea goddess sculpture to the ocean, where Corey swims with fish people.

The narrator accompanies Corey on one of his visits to the half-ruined town of Innsmouth, where they see the destruction wreaked by the Federal raid and talk to an old local who rehashes all the stuff we learned in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."

Eventually Corey and the sculpture disappear, and the final scene of the story describes the narrator's outing in a row boat, during which he is exposed to evidence that Corey has joined the fish people (like the guy in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," Corey is descended from the fish people, something Derleth makes clear on the story's first page) and that his blue clay sculpture of a beautiful woman has, like Pygmalion's, come to life and become his lover.

"Innsmouth Clay" is a pointless exercise that paint-by-numbers-style rehearses Lovecraftian themes and directly appropriates Lovecraft's characters and settings but denudes them of the mystery, horror and disgust that gave them power in their original form.  Derleth's only original elements, the Pygmalion business of sculpting a hot chick who comes to life to be your girlfriend, doesn't mesh at all with Lovecraft's philosophical ideas or emotional themes.  "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" is a tragedy about degeneration, miscegenation, murder and parasitism, about learning truths (including about yourself) that are almost too horrible to face and lead to cataclysmic destruction, but the story of Pygmalion (and apparently Corey's own story) is a love story about the generosity of a deity, the joy of creation and the achievement of your heart's desire.  Derleth fails--he doesn't even seem to try--to integrate these two disparate components of the story, so "Innsmouth Clay" is not only totally derivative, but emotionally incoherent in a way that undermines the virtues and attractions of the source material he is stealing from.

A frustrating waste of time.

1992 and 2008 editions of The Watchers Out of Time

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Etchison's "Wet Season" is really good, but the Leiber and Derleth stories are misfires and I wonder why McCauley chose them.  Well, we'll read more from Night Chills and get a further sense of McCauley's taste in the near future.

"Black Canaan," "Black Hound of Death," and "The Grisly Horror" by Robert E. Howard

Tarbandu's recent blog post about Spanish artist Sanjulian reminded me about my acquisition back in February of 1979's The Howard Collector, edited by Glenn Lord, for which Sanjulian provided the cover painting of an axe-wielding muscleman freeing a scantily clad woman from captivity in some dimly lit temple or other place of unspeakable deviltry.  The Howard Collector is a collection of documents that first appeared in the periodical The Howard Collector, including fiction, poetry, essays and correspondence by Robert E. Howard and writing about Howard by Howard's friends and fans like E. Hoffman Price and Emil Petaja.

I saw The Howard Collector at 2nd Act Books in Charlottesville, Virginia, on a street where they have lots of fun bookstores, antique stores and restaurants.  (Charlottesville is a fun place to spend a day or two; my wife and I had great pizza at Lampo and saw beautiful Burne-Jones prints at Blue Whale Books.)  It looked like an interesting read, but I couldn't find any price marked on it, so I asked the guy working in there what it would cost.  Even though the door to the store had been unlocked and this guy had enthusiastically welcomed me in, he told me he couldn't sell any books today because the store was not open and the computers were not in operation.  I offered to pay cash, but he refused to accept it; eventually he just told me to take the book for free.  So I did.

As I had expected, The Howard Collector is a cool book, with plenty of interesting documents; Howard's father's letter to H. P. Lovecraft describing Howard's suicide is particularly memorable, as is Howard's own letter to Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright asking for some of the money Wright owed him for stories Wright had purchased long ago and already published, a sum totaling over $800!  In E. Hoffman Price's June 25, 1936 letter to Lovecraft mourning the loss of Howard and describing the personality of Conan's creator, Price says that "his Conan series were really the dregs of his talent, not the tops."  So let's read three Howard stories set not in the Hyborian Age or Valusia or the limits of the Roman Empire, but in the swamps and pine forests of the American South!     

"Black Canaan" (1936)

Included in The Howard Collector is a 1931 essay by Howard called "Kelly the Conjure-Man," a brief description of what is  purported to be Arkansas folklore about a mysterious African-American hermit who arrived in the area 75 miles north east of Smackover shortly after the Civil War.  Six-foot tall Kelly lived alone in a pine forest by a creek for about a decade before vanishing; reputed to be a wizard, black people would venture to Kelly's cabin to receive protection from spells and cures made of powdered snake bone.  As time went by Kelly began to acquire a bad reputation, his sorcery being blamed for the mental disorders of insane blacks living in the area; Howard speculates that perhaps his disappearance in the late 1870s was a case of one of his victims achieving revenge on Kelly and hiding his body in the creek.

Regardless of how much this is "real" folklore and how much just Howard making stuff up, "Kelly the Conjure-Man" is a fun and evocative bit of writing, and Kelly would serve as the basis for the character at the center of the 1936 story "Black Canaan."  In a letter to August Derleth (also in The Howard Collector) Howard complains that editorial interference ruined the version of  "Black Canaan" that appears in Weird Tales.  It seems that Howard's preferred version is available in some recent publications, but these are not necessarily easy for your impecunious blogger to acquire publications, so I am going to give the 1936 Weird Tales version, available for free at the internet archive, a go.

Canaan is a triangular stretch of back-country in the American South, somewhat isolated by the three rivers that form its borders, "Black River," "Nigger Head Creek" and "Tularoosa Creek."  Canaanites are independent-minded and have little intercourse with outsiders, and Howard's tale is about some dangerous interlopers who try to revolutionize the place and make themselves its rulers!

Our narrator is Kirby Buckner.  Born and bred in Canaan; a major landowner there, Buckner is something of a community leader.  While in New Orleans, he learns by mysterious means of unspecified trouble back home, and hurries back to that swampy and pine forested country.  It is after midnight when he arrives in Canaan on horseback, and is accosted by a beautiful "quadroon" woman who emerges from the woods.  Buckner has never been attracted to a black woman before, but this girl has an animal magnetism that can "make a man blind and dizzy" as well as good English and facial features as "regular as a white woman's."  Buckner only barely resists her voluptuous charms.  Rejected, the woman sics three "gaunt black giants" on him; Buckner dispatches them with his percussion cap pistols and his Bowie knife.

When Buckner hooks up with the other white men of Canaan he learns that Saul Stark, a huge muscular black man with perfect English, has moved into Canaan and has quickly become a leader among the local blacks.  The black farm hands have not showed up for work, and are congregating in the black village of Goshen, while the blacks who live in the white town, Grimesville, have not been seen for days.  The leaders of the white community fear a black uprising is imminent.  A black spy, Tope Sorely, is captured, and he reveals that Saul Stark is a voodoo conjurer and has the local African-American population in fear of his sorcerous power--those who resisted him have suffered an unspecified but nightmarish fate!  Stark plans to lead the blacks in a campaign of murder that will exterminate the local white population and then be crowned king of Canaan!

While Buckner is off on his own investigating Stark's abandoned cabin the quadroon girl reappears, and gloats that she has used some blood Buckner shed during his rumble with those "giants" to cast a spell on him.  Sure enough, after she has again vanished, he finds he is powerless to resist the urge to make his way through miles of swamp and through all kinds of scary creeks to where Stark is leading the Canaan blacks in a major voodoo ceremony.  The seductive girl plans to make the torture and murder of Buckner the climax of the ceremony, but the loyalty of one of Buckner's friends, Jim Braxton, who sacrifices himself (he gets killed by a monster who rises from a creek) foils the ceremony and saves Buckner's life.  The girl dies, and the failure of the ceremony shatters the local blacks' fear of and allegiance to Stark.  The horrible spell Stark worked on any black who resisted him is revealed--Stark turned these recalcitrant into aquatic monsters like the one who killed Braxton.  Stark's power broken, the monsters turn against him and Stark kills them with a revolver.  Out of bullets, Stark is attacked by Buckner, who kills him in a fierce hand-to-hand struggle; when the fight is over Buckner finds Tope Sorely, the spy who spilled the beans, halfway through the process of being transformed into one of those monster amphibians--Buckner puts him out of his misery.

The most striking thing about this story to a person reading it in 2019, of course, is how racist it is, in its surface details--the "n-word" is used with reckless abandon--and in its basic themes--blacks are inexplicable aliens, both childish and demonic, reminding us of the line from Kipling's "The White Man's Burden."  Blacks are repeatedly compared to animals, and the American blacks act irrationally while the smarter black invaders are wholly selfish and malevolent.  Blacks in "Black Canaan" show no camaraderie or fellow-feeling for each other, the manipulative interlopers cavalierly abusing and contemptuously exploiting the ignorant American blacks while the black masses, when trouble appears, betray their fellows or stampede right over them.  This is a marked contrast to the white society of Canaan, which Howard depicts as a united and organized democratic polity based on mutual respect and characterized by a willingness to look out for each other and take risks to ensure each other's safety.

A major theme of "Black Canaan" is the vast gulf that lies between the whites and blacks of Canaan--the whites have no idea what goes on in the black community, and there is no point in them even trying to understand what the blacks are up to.  Blacks have knowledge, and means of acquiring knowledge, which whites lack and cannot even comprehend.  This idea is nailed down on the story's first page.  Kirby Buckner first learns that something is up back home when an old black woman emerges from a crowd, utters to him a brief phrase, and then disappears among the teeming throngs of people on the streets of New Orleans.  How does she know what is going on back in Canaan, how did she know who Buckner was or where he was?  It is impossible for a white person to tell, and pointless to guess!

No need to seek confirmation; no need to inquire by what mysterious, black-folk way the word had come to her.  No need to inquire what obscure forces worked to unseal those wrinkled lips to a Black River man.  

When Buckner goes to investigate Saul Stark's cabin he senses that, in Stark's absence, it is inhabited by some inexplicable and invulnerable creature that will destroy Buckner should he open its door, a creature with which blacks are familiar but whites are wholly ignorant.

Man and the natural animals are not the only sentient beings that haunt this planet.  There are invisible Things--black spirits of the deep swamp and the slimes of the river beds--the negroes know of them....   

Opening the door to Stark's cabin, like trying to understand black people, would be fruitless and/or dangerous, and Buckner declines to do so.

"Black Canaan" is all about boundaries and divisions (the three rivers that separate Canaan from the rest of the world are mentioned repeatedly, for example.)  Some characters in the story live in the fuzzy border zones (the "liminal space" you might say if you were in grad school) between black and white (Saul Stark and the quadroon girl with their perfect English) or between land and water (the blacks Stark turned into amphibious monsters) and between the living and the dead.  The second time she meets Buckner, the quadroon girl tells him that she will perform the Dance of the Skull at the voodoo ceremony that evening, and that nothing, not even death, can stop her from doing so.  During their trip through the swamp, just before he gets pulled into a creek and strangled to death by one of the amphibian monsters, Buckner's friend Braxton shoots at the girl when she briefly appears amid some bushes.  She escapes, the shot apparently only a graze, but in the climax of the story, when she dances before Stark, the assembled blacks and a hidden Buckner at the voodoo ceremony, we realize she was hit right in the chest and is in fact dead, her corpse animated by magic and her powerful will to complete the Dance.

It goes without saying that these people who live in the border zone, who are neither fully black nor white, fully neither of the land or the water, or neither truly living nor fully dead, are a terrible danger to the natural order and must be destroyed to maintain peace, and the very fact of their existence hidden from the rest of humanity.  The last lines of "Black Canaan" reinforce the theme of white ignorance of black knowledge, and remind us of all those Lovecraft stories in which knowledge of the true nature of the universe drives people mad:

They [white people] will never know the shapes the black water of Tularoosa hides.  That is a secret I share with the cowed and terror-haunted black people of Goshen, and of it nether they nor I have ever spoken.     

This is a quite good Weird Tales-style adventure horror story if you are not totally repelled by its in-your-face racism; the story achieves its goals.  The magic scenes and monster scenes and fight scenes are all good, and Howard succeeds in setting a mood and in integrating peculiar elements of the culture of the American South (fear of black revolts, for example) with supernatural and monster story themes.  A little more might have been done with the characters; Saul Stark and the quadroon girl (this woman doesn't even get a name!) are interesting villains and the story may have benefited from them being fleshed out further, and I think the story certainly would have been improved if we knew more about Buckner's relationship with Jim Braxton, the man who sticks by Buckner in the face of terrible danger and in fact loses his life saving Buckner's.

"Black Canaan" has been reprinted many times, first in Skull-Face and Others in 1946 and later in a bunch of illustrated paperbacks that I vaguely recognize...maybe my brother has them.  I'd certainly be curious to see all those Jeff Jones and Ken Kelly illustrations.

"Black Hound of Death" (1936)

A black criminal, Tope Braxton (Howard insouciantly reuses names) has murdered Constable Joe Sorely and is loose in the "densely-timbered river country" the local blacks call "Egypt."  Our narrator, Kirby Garfield, ventures into Egypt on this dark night to warn East-coast transplant Richard Brent, who lives in a lonely cabin in the pine forest, of the danger.  Before he reaches Brent's place Garfield comes upon a dying black man who says he was assaulted by a white man, and then a mysterious figure grapples with Garfield and flees.  What is going on in this pitch dark forest?

We learn the backstory to this nightmarish adventure when Garfield hooks up with Brent, Brent's servant Ashley, and Brent's sexy niece Gloria, who has come to the woods from fabulous New York City in response to a telegram she had believed, erroneously, was sent by her uncle!  You see, five years ago Brent was on an expedition to Mongolia when his party was attacked by worshipers of Erlik!  (Wow, two Erlik appearances in a row on MPoricus Fiction Log!  This blog is full of surprises!)  Only two members of the expedition survived the initial attack, and Brent and  the other American, Adam Grimm, were surrounded by the death-worshipers.  They had only one camel left to them, and so when night fell Brent knocked out Adam Grimm and rode the camel through enemy lines to safety.  Brent figured Grimm had been murdered by the Erlik cult, but, instead, they used their esoteric science to transform him into a werewolf!  Seven months ago Grimm came to New York, his transformation obscured by a crude disguise, intent on exacting revenge on Brent; Brent fled to a place where he thought he'd never be found, this secluded Southern pine wilderness.

Paranoid Brent thinks Garfield must be working for Grimm, and refuses him entry into his cabin.  While hanging around outside our narrator is slugged and tied up by "squat, apish" Tobe Braxton.  Howard gives us a whole long description of Braxton, who has "thick lips" and "wide, flat nostrils" and so forth--"He was like a shape from the abyss whence mankind crawled ages ago."  Braxton is working with the werewolf, who promised to help Braxton escape the authorities if he helps him kill the Brents.  (Who trusts a werewolf?)

Life in these pine forests is tough, with the men getting involved in feuds and fights all the time, so Garfield is up to the task of wrestling Braxton to the death.  Howard gives us a long gory fight scene here, one in which he belittles the value of finesse and intelligence and tells us that it is sheer strength and animal ferocity you need in a real fight.

I fought Tobe Braxton as the rivermen fight, as savages fight, as bull apes fight.  Breast to breast, muscle straining against muscle, iron fist crushing against hard skull, knee driven to groin, teeth slashing sinewy flesh, gouging, tearing, slashing.  

Having dispatched Braxton, Garfield returns to the cabin to find Ashley is dead, Brent is tied up with his clothes on, and Gloria is tied up with her clothes off.  Grimm the wolfman gives a speech in which he contrasts wimpy backstabbing citified Brent with stolid country boy Garfield, putting forward Howard's typical thesis that the barbaric life is better than the civilized life and the barbarian more noble than the decadent city boy.  The wolfman is about to flay Gloria alive with a skinning knife when Garfield shoots him to pieces through a window; the monster staggers to Brent and murders him (by biting his throat) as his final act.

"The Black Hound of Death," which I have to warn you is as racist as "Black Canaan," is a good horror thriller that voices Howard's usual theme of the superiority of primitivism to intellectualism in more than one way.  After first appearing in Weird Tales (I read the scan at the internet archive) it has been reprinted in a number of Howard collections; it inspired the title of the ninth volume of The Weird Works of Robert E. Howard.

"The Grisly Horror" (1935)

In some reprintings this one is titled "The Moon of Zambebwei," which is a somewhat more appropriate and less vague title.  Among other places, this one was printed in a 1971 issue of the Magazine of Horror.  I read the original Weird Tales version which is available at the internet archive.

In response to a telegram, Bristol McGrath rushes back from the West Coast to the pine woods where he grew up, to the mansion of his worst enemy, Richard Ballville!  On the nearly impassable road to the Ballville mansion he comes upon a prostrate form--it is Ahmed ibn Suleyman, Ballville's Arab servant, and he is dying from the torturing he recently received!

McGrath sneaks up to the mansion, looks in the window, sees that Ballville is being tortured by a "bestial black" (Howard compares the torturer to a frog.)  Among other atrocities, Ballville has suffered the burning onto his chest a strange sign--a sign that world traveler McGrath recognizes from his time in Africa!  The sign of Zambebwei!

McGrath leaps in and kills the torturer with the dagger he acquired and became expert with while in Afghanistan.  Dying Ballville tells McGrath a crazy story.  Three years ago he faked the death of Constance Brand, a woman they both loved, and kidnapped her and has held her in this house ever since.  Brand refused to marry him, so he called on the services of an African wizard, John de Albor.  (I guess wizardry is another job Americans won't do.)  Instead of using his powers to make the woman marry Ballville, de Albor, desiring her for himself, became leader of the blacks who work Ballville's land and made himself master of the estate!  Luckily, Ballville hid Brand from de Albor right before the takeover--she is in a secret cave on the other side of a swamp, a cave sealed by an iron door with a combination lock.  With his dying breaths Ballville tells McGrath the combination.

Ahmed's brother Ali arrives, seeking vengeance, and joins forces with McGrath.  McGrath and this second ibn Suleyman go to the secret cave, enter it, find blondetastic beauty Constance.  That is when the bogus Ali ibn Suleyman throws off his disguise and is revealed as the diabolical "octaroon" John de Albor!  He paralyzes McGrath and carries off our hero's dream girl.  De Albor wants her for himself, but the local blacks seize her and imprison the wizard--they want to sacrifice Brand to their new god, the god de Albor recently introduced to them.

McGrath recovers from the paralysis, liberates de Albor from his single guard, and the two of them agree to work together to rescue Constance Brand from the god of Zambebwei, which is a carnivorous gorilla with talons and fangs like a tiger's, a monster de Albor somehow brought to America from the jungles of Africa.

This thing was an affront to sanity; it belonged in the dust of oblivion with the dinosaur, the mastodon, and the saber-toothed tiger.         

De Albor of course betrays McGrath at the first opportunity.  Pushing Howard's themes of the triumph of the primitive over the intellectual, clever and unscrupulous de Albor keeps tricking the gullible McGrath, but McGrath's iron constitution allows him to shake off the effects of de Albor's drugs and blows to the noggin.

Like in a lot of fantasy fiction, even fantasy fiction by an immortal genius like Gene Wolfe (see The Wizard Knight), the hero of "The Grisly Horror" interrupts the sacrifice of a beautiful woman.  McGrath saves the day by shooting the man-eating ape in the head as it is about to devour his lady love--the god of Zambebwei goes berserk, killing de Albor and running riot among the blacks before expiring.  Now McGrath can make Constance Brand his wife!

Of these three stories "The Grisly Horror" is the weakest.  Howard fails to make the characters' motivations and actions believable and includes various elements that just feel silly.  The plot machinery that gets an African wizard and a man-eating gorilla to a secluded American mansion is way too clunky and contrived.  (If I had been Howard's editor, I'd have told him "Since you don't bother to take advantage of the peculiarities of the American South to lend an atmosphere to this story, why don't you set it in a British or French colony in Africa, which would make the presence of Arabs, witch doctors, carnivorous gorillas and pagan blacks a little more believable?  Such a setting would also allow you to exploit the fear of white people isolated in a nonwhite environment.")  A clumsy plot can be forgiven if a story offers some powerful, compelling scenes that thrill or chill you, but there are no scenes in "The Grisly Horror" that even come close to the quadroon scenes and the monster scenes in "Black Canaan" or Kirby Garfield's to-the-death wrestling match with Tope Braxton in "Black Beast of Death."  "The Grisly Horror" feels like a kind of half-assed job, especially since so many of its basic components would be used more successfully in "Black Canaan," published the following year. 

Barely acceptable.

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I might have my social media accounts suspended for recommending such unabashedly racist stories, but "Black Canaan" is a superior tale of horror and violence, and "Black Beast of Death" also has some good points.  I suggest that you won't miss anything if you skip "The Grisly Horror."

Whew!  That's enough Weird Tales for now.  We'll be tackling a science fiction novel in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

Strange 1939 stories by Henry Kuttner (including a collaboration w/ Robert Bloch)

In his 1986 collection of essays, Out of My Head, Robert Bloch sings the praises of, and provides personal reminisces of, many greats of the speculative fiction field, from John W. Campbell, Jr. and August Derleth to Fritz Lang and H. P. Lovecraft.  Among this catalog of giants is Henry Kuttner.  In his article on Kuttner, "The Closest Approach," Bloch briefly discusses Kuttner's relationship with the magazine Strange Stories, which endured for 13 issues from 1939 to 1941.  I decided to check out three Kuttner stories from 1939 issues of this gruesome magazine, the two Prince Raynor stories, and a collaboration with Bloch, "The Grip of Death."

"Cursed Be The City"

It is the forgotten past, a time of kings and prophets, swords and sorcery, heroism and demonic evil!  King Cyaxares, a massive fighting man brimming over with testosterone, has as his closest adviser an effeminate little clotheshorse, Necho, whom we quickly learn is some kind of demon who manipulates Cyaxares at the same time he paves the way for Cyaxares's many conquests.  (Like a blues musician, Cy has sold his soul to the devil for success!)  Cyaxares's latest conquest is the city of Sardopolis. After the metropolis is taken and sacked, Necho's manipulation leads to the murder of Sardopolis's noble king, Chalem at Cyaxares's own hand, when Cyaxares was inclined to spare his fellow monarch.  Chalem's son, Prince Raynor, is sent to the dungeons to be tortured after cursing out his father's killer.

Raynor's black servant, Eblik, a hugely-muscled warrior himself, rescues Raynor and the two sneak out of the city through a secret passage pointed out to them by a dying priest of the Sun God.  The priest directs them to the forest, where is imprisoned the monstrous god who ruled Sardopolis before he was ousted by the faithful of the Sun God long ago.  There is a prophecy that, when Sardopolis falls, this aboriginal god will return and destroy the city's conqueror.  Raynor and Eblik hurry to the forest, pursued by Cyaxares's soldiers--Necho also knows of the prophecy.

In a castle in the forest our heroes meet the guardian of the bound god, a king with a beautiful warrior princess for a daughter, Delphia.  The princess guides Raynor and Eblik through a secret passage to the site of a lichen-covered temple ruin, where they free the imprisoned deity, Pan, "the first god."  Pan and his army of satyrs and other faerie types destroy the castle, wipe out Cyaxares's soldiers (but not before Delphia's father and all his men have been killed in a fight with them--bummer), and reduce Sardopolis to rubble.  Yes, three (3) kings are killed in this story.  The last scene of this epic of regicide depicts Necho torturing Cyaxares as he slowly expires.  Raynor, Delphia and Eblik, apparently the only human survivors for miles around, head off to some other part of the world. 

"Cursed Be The City" is an acceptable sword and sorcery and exploitation story.  There is quite a bit of bondage and torture, gory murder and bloody combat, as well as a hearty helping of histrionic speeches ("Fallen is Jewel of Gobi, fallen and lost forever, and all its glory gone!") and wordy melodramatic passages ("He sensed a mighty and very terrible power stirring latent in the soil beneath him, a thing bound inextricably to the brain of man by the cords of the flesh which came up, by slow degrees, from the seething oceans which once rolled unchecked over a young planet.")  "Cursed Be the City" actually reminded me a little of one of those Michael Moorcock Eternal Champion stories in which some hero travels around, making friends and collecting pieces of equipment needed to trigger or survive some final cataclysm.  Moorcock fans may thus find this old story interesting.

"Cursed Be The City" has been reprinted quite a few times in Kuttner collections and in anthologies of the weird and of heroic fantasy.

There are actually two Kuttner stories in this issue of Strange Stories--besides "Cursed Be The City" it includes (under a pseudonym) "Bells of Horror," a memorable Lovecraftian piece I read in an anthology of Yog-Sothery years before starting this blog.  I recommend "Bells of Horror" to all you Lovecraft kids out there--at the very least check out the illustration to the 1939 printing in which some poor bastard with a goatee gets decapitated! 

"The Citadel of Darkness"

Prince Raynor, heir to the throne of the destroyed city of Sardopolis, is back!  And his muscular black servant Eblik is right there at his side!  But where is warrior princess Delphia, heir to the destroyed castle of the guardians of the bound god Pan?  Kidnapped by Baron Malric's men!  Luckily, Raynor and Eblik meet an astrologer--Ghiar, self-styled Lord of the Zodiac--and this joker gives Raynor a talisman that, he says, will give the prince power over Malric.

Sure enough, once in Malric's castle, the talisman's rays neutralize the Baron and his warriors, but it also somehow summons Ghiar, who uses sorcery to temporarily blind everybody and steal away with Delphia to his own enigmatic black citadel, which lies on an island in the middle of a lake.  Raynor and Eblik swim across the lake and then overcome the sleep-inducing properties of the island's black flowers.  Inside the featureless tower an eldritch ophidian tries to hypnotize Raynor ("nothing existed but the dark, alien gaze of the serpent, brooding and old--old beyond earthlife!") but it too is overcome.

This alien serpent, a servant of that conniving troublemaker Ghiar, has for hundreds of years sat upon the brow of a human wizard, a savant who can cast his soul forth to explore the universe.  Now that he is free, the savant tells Raynor that Ghiar is going to kill Delphia and use her blood to rejuvenate himself--thuswise has Ghiar lived many centuries.  Prolonged proximity to that malignant serpent has deformed the wizard's body into that of a misshapen monstrosity, and he begs Raynor for the release of death.  (This reminded me of Howard's famous 1933 "Tower of the Elephant.")

Deep under the citadel, at the bottom of a tall shaft open to the night sky, comes the final showdown.  Raynor is confronted not only by Ghiar and a hypnotized Delphia, but Malric and his posse, who have followed Raynor and Eblik here--the Baron is animated by a powerful desire for Delphia!  Ghiar proves invulnerable to Malric and Raynor's blades, and his magic wipes out the Baron and his soldiers.  But the spirit of that sorcerer whom Raynor liberated from the alien snake reappears to strip Ghiar of his powers; Raynor then kills Ghiar in a bloody wrestling match.

"The Citadel of Darkness" is a smaller, lesser story than "Cursed Be the City."  There is less torture, less bondage, less murder, less gore, and the stakes and scale are smaller.  On the other hand, Kuttner makes an effort to develop Raynor and Eblik into living personalities.  The story is in large part about their friendship, and Kuttner makes clear that it is only their dedication to each other that allows either to survive this perilous wizard-haunted adventure.  Kuttner also tries to mine their relationship for comedy, with Eblik advising caution and Raynor always impulsively plunging onward into danger.

Merely acceptable.  "The Citadel of Darkness" has appeared in a few places alongside its predecessor "Cursed Be the City," including a 1987 pamphlet that looks to be a sort of amateur labor of love and features an introduction by L. Sprague de Camp and numerous illustrations by Steve Siryk.  Frankly, the cover looks more like medieval Europe than the exotic locale Kuttner describes: "Imperial Gobi, Cradle of Mankind...mistress of the Asian seas" in the era "ere Nineveh and Tyre were born."  Oh, well.

"The Grip of Death" (with Robert Bloch)

"The Grip of Death" has only ever appeared in two publications, first in 1939 in Strange Stories and then in the 1986 anthology Tales of Dungeons and Dragons, which sports an intro by Ray Bradbury.  In both places Bloch is the only credited author; it is in the essay "The Closest Approach," which first appeared in Henry Kuttner--A Memorial Symposium and was later reprinted in Out of My Head, where I read it, that we learn the story was a collaboration between Bloch and Kuttner.  I read the 1986 version of the story, "borrowing" a scan of Tales of Dungeons and Dragons at the internet archive.

Luke Holland has a "warped brain," he being the product of "generations of Puritan stock."  This reminds us of Lovecraft's New England settings and recurring theme of degenerate families and races, but when in the next paragraph we learn Luke is plotting to murder his uncle, "an occultist," because the Bible tells him sorcerers must be killed, we wonder if this is also Bloch expressing hostility to Christianity or some of its adherents.  SF is a hotbed of religious skepticism!  Of course, the main reason Luke wants to off the old weirdo he has been living with in a scary house for a year is to get his mitts on Unk's money; that religious stuff is just a rationalization, a pious fig leaf.

"The Grip of Death" is a pretty good story, more economical, psychological and economical than the Raynor stories, with good descriptions of places and people and a well-constructed atmosphere and an ending that feels original.  We accompany Luke as he puts into action his plan to murder his uncle.  Uncle Lionel Holland has been shut up for a year in his upstairs rooms with all his weird books--collected while pursuing his career as a merchant in the China trade--while Luke has been limited to the downstairs, his job being to send food and other supplies (like live chickens for you-know-what!) up in the dumbwaiter and to keep the curious away from the creepy old house.  Luke is sick of waiting for Unk to keel over, and has been smelling and hearing progressively stranger and more eerie things from upstairs lately, and so has decided the time has come to speed along the natural process by which death follows life and inheritance follows death.  So he sabotages the dumbwaiter and brings Uncle Lionel a meal himself, a meal he has poisoned.

The wizard turns the tables on Luke, and gets Luke to drink drugged wine.  Luke is told the drug will paralyze his body but keep his mind alive, so that he will be thought dead and suffer the hellish fate of being buried alive!  (A Martian metes out just such a fate to a guy in Poul Anderson's 1951 "Duel on Syrtis.")  Luke attacks the old man, wrapping his fingers around the sorcerer's throat with intent to strangle him, and we get a bizarre and horrible climax and denouement.     

A good story in the Weird Tales tradition, with wizards summoning alien beings and greedy fools (like the guy in Kuttner's "The Graveyard Rats" or the guy in Lovecraft's "In the Vault") suffering a mind-shattering punishment for their avarice.

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Fun stories that remind us of the work of Howard and Lovecraft, the icons who invented those immortal characters Conan and Cthulhu.  More weird productions from Kuttner and Bloch from the same time period in our next episode.

The Comet Kings by Edmond Hamilton

"You can help us willingly with all your knowledge of this universe, and be rewarded by electric immortality.  Or you can refuse.  In that case, we will strip your mind of all knowledge and then destroy you immediately."

In his essentially mainstream novel about a science fiction writer who goes insane, Herovit's World, Barry Malzberg, who has read more SF and thought about SF more than just about anybody, includes a parody of SF of the Lensman/Captain Future type that features heroic scientists and fighting men who explore the universe and battle hostile aliens.  Let's check out an example of the very kind of story Malzberg was satirizing, Edmond Hamilton's The Comet Kings, first published in Captain Future magazine in 1942.  The Comet Kings is the 11th Captain Future Adventure; I am reading the 1969 paperback edition from Popular Library.

(We've read two Captain Future novels by Hamilton already, Quest Beyond the Stars and Outlaw World, and over the course of this blog's life I have read many other novels and stories by Hamilton, who, like his wife Leigh Brackett, is something of a MPorcius fave.)

The government of the Solar System, based in beautiful New York City on Earth, has a big big problem!  Dozens of space ships, both private commercial ships and government war ships, have vanished without a trace in a sector beyond Jupiter.  The Planet Patrol has sent out two of its best agents, old man Ezra Gurney and Joan Randall, a "dark, pretty girl" and "the smartest agent of our secret investigation division" who "knows the spaceways better than most men," to investigate.  These two geniuses also disappear, so the government turns to the Moon for help!  Only four people make their homes on the Moon, scientist Curtis Newton, known as Captain Future, and his three comrades, the Futuremen!  Newton has a crush on Randall, so everybody knows he will take this job seriously!

Who are the Futuremen?  Oldest of the three is Doctor Simon Wright, a genius scientist who was a close colleague of Curtis's father, biologist Roger Newton.  When his body approached death, Newton removed Wright's brain and implanted it alive in a box equipped with cameras, microphones, and projectors that emit "beams of force" that allow him to hover and fly.  Newton and Wright created in their lunar lab the other two Futuremen, Otho, the synthetic man, and Grag, the intelligent robot.  When his parents died, young Curtis was raised by Wright (AKA "The Brain") and Otho and Grag, and became a brilliant scientist himself, as well as "the most renowned fighting planeteer in the System."

I took these images of Curt Newton's comrades from the scan of the Winter 1943 issue of
Captain Future available at the Internet Archive

Apprised of the disappearance of Randall and hundreds of other people, Newton and the Futuremen fly off to the orbit of Jupiter to investigate.  It is not long before they suspect that Halley's comet is somehow connected to the disappearances, and, when they approach the comet to have a look-see,  their ship is seized by a magnetic force and pulled towards the mysterious body.  They discover, within the glowing energy field that is the outer shell of the comet, a small forested planet with an alabaster city on its surface.  Here lie all the lost space ships, and here our heroes are taken prisoner by the pirates who live on the comet, men and women whose very bodies pulse and glow with electricity!  These electric people do not need to eat or drink, and are practically immortal!

There are no three-eyed aliens in this story

The world inside Halley's Comet is full of surprises.  Our heroes learn that the people of the Comet (the Cometae) only recently became electrified and immortal, when their tyrannical rulers, King Thoryx, Queen Lulain, and the weird old adviser, Querdel, exposed them to the power of the Allus, creatures from another cosmos summoned to our universe by Querdel's science.  The majority of Cometae don't even want to be electrified, as they feel it has stripped them of their humanity--they are sterile and thus denied the joys of parenthood as well as the age-old natural cycle of birth, maturity, and death.  Another surprise: when he is brought to the royal court, Newton finds that his crush Joan Randall has been electrified herself!

Randall of course is only pretending to have joined the Cometae in order to learn more about them and the Allus--she is an intelligence agent, after all.  When Newton and the Brain promise the leaders of the anti-Allus majority population of the comet world that they will try to reverse the electrification of their bodies, the commoners launch an uprising against the royals, and Newton and the Futuremen are right in the thick of the fighting!  Unfortunately, when the rebels are on the cusp of victory, Querdel contacts the extradimensional Allus via his ten-foot-wide ebon orb and a wave of energy from another universe hypnotizes all the rebels into immobility, save the not-quite human Grag and Otho, who escape to the forest outside the alabaster city.

Querdel, in his six-wheeled car, drives the unconscious Newton from the white city to the black citadel of the Allus.  Luckily, Grag and Otho, hiding in the woods, see the car go by and march to the 1000-foot tool black tower.  Within the tower Curt learns the true nature of the Allus and their mission in our universe.  (The scenes in which Newton sees the true forms of the Allus for the first time, and when he looks through the Allus' portal into their universe of four dimensions, seemed to me to owe some inspiration to H. P. Lovecraft, Hamilton's fellow Weird Tales scribe.)  Newton, the Futuremen and Joan Randall work together to shut the portal from the other universe, dending the Allus menace, and then Newton, The Brain, and a Martian scientist figure out how to turn all the immortal electric people back into short-lived normal people who can have children and die.  (Hooray, I guess?)

There are no giant bats in this story

This is a fun, fast-paced, and brief (128 pages here) story, a good example of old-fashioned adventure SF.  The Comet Kings is full of speculative science about things like a comet's make up and why living things age and die, though I'm guessing these theories are today totally exploded, and our heroes overcome obstacles again and again by using their knowledge and via trickery--while there is some hand-to-hand combat and bloodshed, the story fetishizes not strength or martial prowess, but science and quick-thinking.

As part of my project of defending Golden Age SF from misharacterizing attacks, I will point out that while Malzberg's parody in Herovit's World suggests that SF scientist/soldiers are xenophobic, shooting first and asking questions later, and making servants or slaves of alien races, this Captain Future novel is practically a paean to diversity.  It is true that nobody gives a boring or self-righteous speech about the evils of racism and sexism--Hamilton instead depicts the people of the future matter-of-factly taking diversity and equality as a given, portraying Earthlings, Martians and Venusians working side by side, both men and women exhibiting intelligence and bravery, and all of them accepting such strange characters as Grag, The Brain and Otho as comrades.  The masses of the people of the comet are good and quick to aid the strangers from outside--it is only their aristocratic leaders who are evil, and they courageously oppose when given a chance (Hamilton perhaps exhibiting a very American attitude about hereditary rule.)

An entertaining, optimistic and wholesome space opera, perhaps an interesting contrast to the somewhat gritty, pessimistic and noirish Hamilton space opera we read a little while ago, "The Starcombers."

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The last page of my 1969 paperback is an ad, but not for SF books.  Rather, it promotes the history of the Plantagenets by Canadian-born writer Thomas B. Costain.  It looks like people still read these--the first volume, The Conquering Family, published in 1949, has 25 reviews on Amazon.  I like to think that there are thriving classic SF and pulp fiction communities online, but The Comet Kings only has two Amazon reviews and the third volume of The Collected Captain Future put out by Stephen Haffner (which contains The Comet Kings and three other Captain Future novels) has only 11 reviews--I guess this Costain guy is a big wheel!

Weird Tales by Frank Belknap Long from the 1920s

For decades I have been wondering, "What is up with that Frank Belknap Long?"  He has a good reputation and some nice awards, but when I read his work I am usually astounded by how poor it is.  Maybe what I need to do is go back, back, back to the very beginning, and read some of Long's earliest work, stories that appeared in 1920s issues of Weird Tales, including two stories the isfdb specifically places in the "Cthulhu mythos;" maybe this is the Frank Belknap Long everybody is in love with. 

"Death-Waters" (1924)

"Death-Waters" first appeared in Weird Tales in '24, and was reprinted by that unique magazine in 1933.  Both issues have covers guaranteed to start difficult conversations with your "woke" friends should they see them in your collection.  Maybe keep these babies out of sight, bro!  I read the 1933 reprint version in a PDF file available at the very useful SFFaudio Public Domain PDF page.

(Whether you find Margaret Brundage's sadistic sex-oozing cover entrancing or enraging, the September 1933 issue of Weird Tales looks like an exciting one, with a Robert E. Howard Conan story*, stories by MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton and critical darling Clark Ashton Smith, and letters from Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch.  Nice!)

A guy is travelling in a passenger ship along the coast of Latin America, accompanied by his friend, who lies dead in a coffin.  He tells the other passengers on the ship the story of how his friend got killed, and how he himself got all those nasty snake bites on his arm.

The guy (Long doesn't provide him a name) was in a canoe in the center of a lake fed by a jungle spring with his now dead buddy, Byrne, and "a huge black savage," the "oily skin" of whose "animal-like body" was "hideously tattooed."  Byrne wanted to bottle the water from the spring as a health tonic to sell to gullible people back in New York, but a taste test was required, and both he and the narrator were afraid to imbibe any of it, it being full of "animalcules" and smelling foul.  So Byrne forced the black guy to taste it.  After drinking it down the black dude screamed manically, his shrieks more like the sounds of "a gorilla under torture" than any utterance one might expect to come from a human throat.  Apparently in response to the scream, thousands of snakes rose out of the lake! These serpents, apparently a nonvenomous species, swarmed into the boat to bite Byrne, but not our narrator or the black man.

The black guy rowed them to the shore, then left them.  From over a hill crawled and slunk an army of poisonous toads, venomous snakes, and even horned lizards--a carpet of scaly death!  The white men beat at the swarm of herps, killing hundreds of them, but eventually the cold-blooded creepy-crawlies overwhelmed Byrne, poisoning him to death.  The beasties only bit the narrator when he tried to pull them off Byrne, and once Byrne has expired they squirmed away.

This story is entertaining because it is so crazy in so many ways.  There are the nightmarish and gruesome images of swarming reptiles being smashed by the score.  And there are the racial elements--students of depictions of non-whites in genre literature may find the story a valuable window into 1920s thinking about race; the narrator has a whole theory of the psychology of blacks and how whites should interact with them, and one might say that the point of the story is that Byrne suffered for not treating the black guy in a just and prudent manner.  And then there is Long's strange style which features odd phrases and makes strange little jokes; I'll just give you this one example: "I became as flabby as an arachnid on stilts."  What? 

I'm judging "Death-Waters" acceptable, largely as a curious, strange, artifact.

*It looks like nowadays, even though "The Slithering Shadow" is a fun title and looks great in the typescript chosen for use on the cover of the magazine, we are calling this story "Xuthal of the Dusk."

"The Were-Snake" (1925)

"The Were-Snake" appears in a book I own, the 1979 collection Night Fear.  (You'll remember I read the short story "Night Fear" back in mid 2014 when it was masquerading as a novelet.)  Night Fear has mind-bogglingly effusive praise for Long from Gordon R. Dickson and Richard A. Lupoff printed on its back cover (reproduced above) and on its front cover a painting by Clyde Caldwell of Chaugnar Faugn, star of "The Horror from the Hills," a long story I read back in late 2014.  Caldwell did lots of illustration work for TSR during the years my brother and I played endless hours of AD&D and Star Frontiers and devoured every month's Dragon magazine, and we became very familiar with Caldwell's style.  We called him "the Gemster" because every one of his paintings seemed to include a glittering jewel or gem, no matter how inappropriate its inclusion might be.

Our narrator for "The Were-Snake" is an American adventurer; this guy is visiting some remote ancient ruin, a temple dedicated to Ishtar, a goddess, we learn, whose worship goes back thousands of years before Homer, Stonehenge, and the Egyptian pyramids.  He tells his girlfriend, a Miss Beardsley, that Ishtar's "terrestrial manifestations" were femmes fatale who seduced and destroyed countless men.  He wants to spend the night alone at the temple, investigating, and dismisses Miss Beardsley's fears a native girl will seduce him while she is away.  Our narrator's native guide, in a sort of digression, tells him that the East is superior to the West because Easterners educate the soul and care not for technology--the West, he opines, went down the tubes when Europe chose Sir Isaac Newton over John Dee.

At night two green eyes appear in the darkness and try to mesmerize the narrator.  He shoots at the eyes, with no effect.  Miss Beardsley appears, wanting to help, but she is snatched by the creature and dragged down into the ruin.  When the hero catches up he can see that Ishtar is a thing like a giant snake that oozes slime and has a dog-like head.  Overcoming his fear, he chops off the monster's head with a sharp rock, rescuing Miss Beardsley.  In the morning his guide reports that a woman without a head and a disembodied cobra's head were found in the ruin.

The "Were-Snake" is a turgid mess that moves slowly and tries, with no success, to generate excitement by describing at length, but with little clarity or power, psychological states.  Much of the story is dissonant; the opening hints that Ishtar is sexy, but Ishtar turns out to be a thing like a slug; when bullets had no effect on the creature I thought it must be an illusion or a non-corporeal ghost, but then it grabs Miss Beardsley; the narrator goes from paralyzed by fear one second to galvanized into action in another for reasons that are not made clear; we are expected to believe that bullets don't harm the monster but a sharp stone can decapitate it in one blow; the monster is slimy like a slug at one point, scaly like a snake at another, and goes from having a canine head to a serpentine head.  The story is confusing in a way that is frustrating and irritating, that takes you out of the story, rather than in a way that sucks you in by exciting a desire to see a mystery solved.

Weak.  If I may be allowed to play editor to a World Fantasy Award winner, I would suggest that this simple plot could be made to work if the narrator and/or Miss Beardsley were interesting characters with psychological attributes which gave them the ability to overcome Ishtar.  Maybe their love for each other gave them strength, or their belief in Christianity, or a belief in reason andf familiarity with science that immunizes them to superstition and allows them to see through ancient myths to the reality behind them.  Maybe the hero could kill the monster with a knife his girlfriend gave him or a sword blessed by a priest, a symbol of what makes him and Miss Beardsley special as people.  Anything to make sense of the story and give readers some emotional or intellectual handle to grasp.

"The Space-Eaters" (1928)

isfdb tells us this story is part of "The Cthulhu Mythos;" it seems to be one of the first (maybe the very first) Mythos stories published by someone other than Lovecraft himself.  I read it in a scan of its original appearance made available by the good people at SFFaudio.

Frank, our narrator, and Howard, his friend, a writer of horror stories, are sitting around talking.  Howard engages in some interesting literary criticism, discussing the reason various horror writers' stories are effective and lamenting that he is not able to achieve in his own writing his goal of depicting horrors from outer space that have no earthly analog.  Then one of Frank's friends, Wells, bursts in to tell a story of horror that matches Howard's aspirations--as he was travelling through a foggy wood full of trees shaped like "evil old men," Wells experienced the most horrifying and most bizarre sights and feelings imaginable.  And he has the head wound to prove the truth of his story--a perfectly smooth and bloodless hole has been bored through his skull to his brain!

As the story progresses Frank and Howard must confront, and try to puzzle out the mysterious nature of, a creature which has come to Earth to suck out human brains.  One of the surprising things about this story is its solution to the problem of the aliens.  I think of Lovecraft's stories as being, in part, a refutation of traditional beliefs about the universe held by the faithful of the monotheistic religions--Jews, Christians and Muslims think that God manages the universe and that God loves and protects mankind, while in Lovecraft stories the universe and powerful "gods" are indifferent or even inimical to mankind.  But Long's "The Space-Eaters" suggests that some power, represented by the sign of the cross, has defended Earth from alien invasion in the past, and in this story that power does so again.  (An epigraph to the story, ostensibly from the John Dee translation of The Necronomicon, foreshadows this by attesting to the power of the sign of the cross.)   

This is a story I can recommend.  It is of course fun to see Long writing a story about himself and his buddy H. P. Lovecraft facing alien monsters, and I enjoyed the literary criticism "Howard" delivers in the beginning of the story.  "The Space-Eaters" also has some good images and genuinely disturbing horror elements, like when Frank is asked to hold up a lamp to help a doctor conduct brain surgery on Wells--our narrator is too scared to look at his friend's exposed brain and may not even have the guts to hold the lamp steady!  Long thus exploits not only our visceral disgust at physical gore and our cerebral fears about our place in the universe, but our fears of being too weak to aid our friends should they find themselves in desperate need.

"The Space-Eaters" has been reprinted numerous times, including in a 1988 edition of August Derleth's 1969 anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, which has a striking cover illustration by Tim White.

Hannes Bok appropriately depicts the Hounds as being composed of straight lines and angles
in his cover illo for the 1946 collection of Long stories published by Arkham House

"The Hounds of Tindalos" (1929)

OK, here it is, the (I believe) most famous Frank Belknap Long story, and one of the most famous Cthulhu Mythos stories by somebody other than H. P. Lovecraft, "The Hounds of Tindalos."  "The Hounds of Tindalos" is the title story of a 1946 Arkham House collection of Long stories, and the Tindalos "brand" is so recognizable that a 2008 anthology of stories written by Long and by a number of other writers inspired by his work was entitled The Tindalos Cycle.  Well, let's see what the fuss is all about!  I read "The Hounds of Tindalos" in a scan of the nearly 90-year-old issue of Weird Tales in which it made its debut that is available at the internet archive. 

Halpin Chalmers is a genius who breaks all the rules!  "I have always been a rebel, a champion of originality and lost causes...."  He has disdain for Bertrand Russell and the positivism and materialism of 19th- and 20th-century scientists, admires the alchemists and mystics of the more distant past, and reveres Einstein as "A priest of transcendental mathematics."  Chalmers wants to know the truth about man's origin and man's destiny, and condemns modern biologists for their slow progress in uncovering the secrets of human development.  He believes that, armed with his knowledge of modern mathematics, he can travel through time by using a drug little known in the West but used in the East by such savants as Lao Tze and see man's beginning and man's end!  "Time and motion," he declares, "are both illusions," and through the use of the Far Eastern drug he is going to "strip" from his eyes "the veils of illusion time has thrown over them."

(This story is full of name dropping: Darwin, Haeckel, Plotinus, Aquinas, and John Dee, a guy I never hear about whom Long brings up in three of today's four stories, are among those mentioned.  The story also reflects the fascination of Western intellectuals with Eastern mysticism and philosophy--Chalmers bases much of his thinking on the concept of the Tao.)

Like that of so many Lovecraftian-type stories, the bulk of "The Hounds of Tindalos" is a first-person narrative.  Our narrator is a friend of Chalmers's whose aid he requests in his drug-induced journey back in time.  "...if I go back too far you must recall me to reality.  You can recall me by shaking me violently."  Our narrator thinks the Tao and all this time travel jazz is "rubbish" and tries to dissuade Chalmers from this risky experiment with foreign intoxicants, but he is willing to help his buddy if he can't convince him to just say "no."

Chalmers takes one of his Oriental pills and our narrator sits and with his "pale green Waterman" fountain pen writes down everything his adventurous crony says during his "trip."  Chalmers reports that he can see all of time simultaneously, and reels off a list of incidents from Atlantis and Lemuria, medieval Italy and Elizabethan England, ancient Greece and ancient Rome, the migration of the Neanderthals and the age of the dinosaurs.  He can perceive time as "curves" and "angles," and far back, before the time of multi-cellular life on Earth, the angles become strange and horrifying.  Chalmers throws a fit and crawls around the room like a crazed canine untoil our hero shakes him and the mystic collapses, stunned.

After recovering with the help of some whiskey, Chalmers tells the narrator that, at the beginning of time, he saw the Hounds of Tindalos, creatures of angles who became the repository of all foulness after a terrible "deed" that is symbolized in our culture by the myth of the Fall.  (Like "The Space-Eaters," "The Hounds of Tindalos" makes use of Christian symbolism, Chalmers saying "The tree, the snake and the apple--these are the vague symbols of a most awful mystery."  As did Eve, Chalmers has taken a tremendous risk in the reckless pursuit of knowledge.)  Evil is represented by angles, and goodness by curves, and the angular Hounds lust to devour human beings, the good part of whom is descended from a curve.  Upon smelling Chalmers, the Hounds pursued him, or so he says--the narrator thinks this all nonsense.

The brief second part of the story tells how Chalmers, with the narrator's aid, used plaster of Paris to fill in all the corners and angles of his room, so that, as far as possible, Chalmer's room resembled the interior of a sphere.  Chalmers thinks this may keep the Hounds from reaching him.  The final part of the story is a series of excerpts from newspapers, a chemist's report, and Chalmer's own published work, providing us clues as to Chalmer's ultimate fate.

This is a good horror story, with strange ideas and memorable images, and it is more economically structured than "The Space-Eaters."  I can see why this would be Long's most renowned and influential story, reprinted not only in Lovecraftian volumes, but in anthologies of stories about drug use and stories representing an overview of 20th-century SF.

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"The Space-Eaters" and "The Hounds of Tindalos" are good enough that it makes sense that people still admire Long, even though he also produced a vast quantity of mediocre and poor work later in his career.  These stories have provided a useful addition to my weird education.

More Weird Tales in our next episode!