2015 weird madness from A D Foster, W F Nolan, N Kilpatrick and S R Tem

Let's crack open my copy of 2015's The Madness of Cthulhu: Volume Two and read four more 21st-century stories inspired by H. P. Lovecraft that bear the S. T. Joshi seal of approval.

"The Door Beneath" by Alan Dean Foster

Foster's name feels very familiar even though I have read very little of his work during the period of this blog's life; Foster penned the first two Star Wars novels and the Black Hole novelization and I think a lot of his books were at the public library when I was a kid (I was born in 1971 so books like For Love of Mother-Not and Spellsinger would have been in hardcover at the library when I was in my early teens.)  A few years ago I read his story "With Friends Like These..." and thought it OK.  And I think "The Door Beneath" is similarly OK, maybe a little worse than OK, a standard issue science fiction action story with a little Yog-Sothery sprinkled on it.

Our protagonist is the head of safety at an important Soviet installation, the nature of which is kept from us readers.  A big wig accompanied by KGB brutes gives our guy a tour of a secret installation under the main installation.  Down there we find a huge subterranean chamber where toil an army of scientists and technicians on two unusual objects of tremendous size, a towering hunk of what looks like organic matter bigger than a whale and a bizarre contraption like an abstract sculpture above which shimmers a sort of black sphere.  These things were discovered in Antarctica, we learn.  As our main characters watch, the white lab coat crew pumps a bazillion gigajoules of electricity into the organic mass and it quivers to life, scores of eyes and pseudopods ending in toothy mouths emerging.  And then they see something scary in the black sphere--the sphere, they realize, is a portal to some other world and genocidal monsters are going to come out of it.  Our hero hurries upstairs as the monster (eventually Foster just tells us it is a shoggoth) devours his comrades behind him.  Upstairs he somehow convinces his colleagues to blow up the public installation they are standing in, which we learn is the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, killing the shoggoth and closing the portal, and thus saving the world.

A simplistic and plodding story in which the characters don't act in ways that are very convincing and which lacks anything like a Lovecraftian tone or spirit and also fails to supply anything engaging on its own terms, "The Door Beneath" is a barely acceptable filler story, with its focus on nuclear power more like a mediocre story from Astounding than something from Weird Tales.  (Compare "The Door Beneath" to two stories we read last time from Volume 1 of Madness of Cthulhu--Robert Silverberg's "Diana of the Hundred Breasts," which added good human drama to stereotypical Lovecraftian commonplaces and Darrel Schweitzer's "Warm" which embraced Lovecraftianism wholeheartedly and achieved a real Lovecraftian tone and atmosphere.)  Either go all the way with the weird horror goop or give us something new--and good--which integrates some Lovecraftian themes or images; don't give us lowest common denominator science fiction with the most obvious and banal and superficial Lovecraft dressing spritzed on it.

"The Door Beneath" would be reprinted in 2019 in the Foster collection The Taste of Different Dimensions.

"Dead Man Walking" by William F. Nolan

Oy.  I compared Foster's story to a below-average specimen from Astounding, but Nolan's is even less Lovecraftian and even less entertaining--"Dead Man Walking" is like a 1970s TV movie written by somebody influenced by somebody who was influenced by what he heard about Dashiell Hammett.  I think "Dead Man Walking" may be an unfunny spoof of such TV fare, or perhaps was even based on some script Nolan sketched out that he was unable to sell.  Thumbs down!

A writer guy lives in L.A.  (I couldn't care less about L.A. and I am sick of always seeing it on screen or reading about it or hearing people talk about it.  Who the hell still cares about In and Out Burger and Rodeo Drive and Sepulvedra or whatever the hell it is?  Enough already.)  Writer guy is working on a nonfiction book about how the supernatural is a load of crap.  But then a hot chick whose husband, a sculptor, died, calls him up to ask for his help--she thinks her husband is alive and trying to kill her!

We spend like seventeen pages with the writer, the widow, and a gallery owner who is also some kind of medium or witch or something, Madame Jechiel.  Jechiel gave the sculptor a magic ring that allowed him to live forever if he cut a deal with monsters from another dimension--he had to make statues of the monsters and anoint them with human blood and then the aliens would inhabit and animate the statues and take over the Earth.  The writer and the woman outfight the sculptor and the aliens in a way that is not scary or exciting and is not convincing in the least.

This story is bad.  The characters lack personality and act in ways that are not believable, and Nolan writes in a lifeless barebones style that fails to make anything that happens compelling logically or emotionally--plot developments don't follow each other in a way that makes sense, but seem to exist to set up scenes that have the potential to be visually arresting while not requiring much trouble or expense to film.  "Dead Man Walking" is also stuffed with poorly delivered bargain basement jokes, like the writer not liking the nickname his editor has given him and trying to quit smoking and that sort of thing.  I kept flipping through pages to see how many were left, the way I used to look at the clock every thirty seconds at school, at my job in a machine shop, at my job in a department store, at my job at a book store, at my job in a government office, at my job in a warehouse....

So bad I am angry.  Joshi should have deep-sixed this rough draft. 

Looking at the records, it seems I have now read 10 stories by Nolan.  That's right, it is links time.

Title                                                    TLDR quote from my blog post on the story  

"And Miles to Go Before I Sleep"     "OK...a little sappy"
"He Kilt It With a Stick"                    "competent, but pedestrian" 

"Gorf! Gorf! Gorf!"                            "Fourteen pages of feeble jokes."

"Starblood"                                         "lacks any sort of character, feeling or plot"

"Papa's Planet"                                    "Acceptable, I guess."

"Lap of the Primitive"                         "Weak....Lame!"

"Toe to Tip, Tip to Toe,                       "A total waste of time."

         Pip-Pop As You Go"

"Dead Call"                                         "Acceptable."

"One of Those Days"                          "Total junk."

"Dead Man Walking"                          "So bad I am angry."

Never again, Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award and International Horror Guild Living Legend Award winner William F. Nolan, never again.

(UPDATE SEPTEMBER 29, 2024:  I didn't do a good job looking through the records because today I find I've also read a story by Nolan called "Jenny Among the Zeebs" and declared it "unfunny and nonsensical" and "Bad.")

"A Crazy Mistake" by Nancy Kilpatrick

I've never read anything by Kilpatrick before, though I've read stories in anthologies she has edited.  Kilpatrick has written a lot of fiction we might describe as niche, like novels about Jason Vorhees of Friday the 13th fame and pornographic novels about having sex with Dracula, Dorian Gray, Dr. Jekyll, or the Frankenstein monster.  I'm not going to judge; I'm as horny as the next guy and I have done things I might not brag about for money--I've worked in a government office, after all.

The narrator of "A Crazy Mistake" is a self-sacrificing woman who left her boyfriend, a student at Miskatonic U, so she wouldn't distract him from his studies and moved to L.A. (ugh) to work as a researcher for B-movies.  She helps schlock filmmakers by doing research on mythology and the supernatural, looking for ideas about mummies or vampires or whatever they can integrate into their bad movies.  She is hired to do research on Amazons and talks on the phone with her ex-boyfriend about them and that gets her interested in purported prehistoric matriarchal societies and those famous Paleolithic sculptures of obese women with beehive hair.  The narrator takes a trip back East to use the Miskatonic U. library to do deeper research, including reading a handwritten first-hand account of the expedition described in At The Mountains of Madness, and she comes to believe that space aliens, the Great Old Ones, created human life on Earth, starting with fat women with beehive heads and then breeding them with Neanderthals, more or less as a joke.  She compares this frivolous entertainment to the B-movies she has had a small part in creating--life is meaningless so intelligent beings, be they the Great Old Ones or their creations--us!--try to fill their empty lives with pointless entertainment.  She ends up insane, believing her body is changing, getting fat, like one of those prehistoric sculptures, because she stole and ate a piece of that manuscript upon which was a sketch of just such a sculpture seen by the explorer in the Antarctic.

"A Crazy Mistake" feels kind of long even though quite little happens; Kilpatrick devotes long passages to describing theories of prehistoric matriarchy and to summarizing At The Mountains of Madness.  But it is not terrible, and maybe will appeal to feminists (the characters use the word "patriarchal" totally unironically like a dozen times) and to goth kids who recognize that life is meaningless and everybody is psychologically damaged but don't keep this knowledge to themselves like the rest of us do.  (Kilpatrick is also author of 2004's The Goth Bible.)  We'll call "A Crazy Mistake" acceptable if forgettable.

I'm never going to read William F. Nolan again, but if I ever feel like reading about women having sex with animated corpses or demons, Kilpatrick is going to be my go-to, so you can look forward to that.

"Deep Fracture" by Steve Rasnic Tem

This is a pretty literary story, with descriptions of the sky, themes of the sadness of working class life and conventional sexual relationships (ignoring phone calls from your nagging wife while you are out running errands, getting the supplies you need to do the cosmetic home repairs she expects you to do after spending a tiring week at work), themes of decay and a recurring motif of lines--cracks, hair, wires, worms.  I think I can mildly recommend this one--it is certainly the best one we are reading today, Tem taking the task seriously (unlike Foster and Nolan who are phoning it in or making a joke of it) and pacing and structuring the story ably (unlike Kilpatrick.)  There are lots of Lovecraftian things going on, and the literary stuff doesn't get in the way of the weird horror elements--Tem's metaphors and descriptions are not too long or too opaque and they all work.

Tom and Walt live in an Appalachian coal town that recently has been afflicted with earthquakes, such that the roads and buildings--ugly stores, houses and strip malls--are crumbling.  Walt is the older man, a geologist, and he is tagging along as Tom drives all over town buying stuff so he can refurbish his and his wife's house--his wife keeps calling him on his cell phone.  Snow is threatening, and Tom is sort of looking forward to snow covering up the ugliness of his decaying town.

All through the story we get hints that suggest a Lovecraftian cataclysm is about to strike, an alien city and its monstrous inhabitants about to rise up under the town and, I guess, kill everybody.  The cold feels strange; Walt admits that his father retired from coal mining because he kept having dreams of an alien city beneath the mines, then Walt shows Tom a spire or some such architectural fragment his father found in the mines which has indecipherable writing inscribed on it; wife calls up to say the contractors hired to clear their sewer line have found it is clogged with "lines" like hair and worms.

Nolan, Kilpatrick and Tem completists are going to have to buy a copy of The Madness of Cthulhu: Volume Two because "Dead Man Walking," "A Crazy Mistake," and "Deep Fracture" have not been reprinted elsewhere, though Tem's story deserves to be.

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One good story, two acceptable, and one bad?  A big step down from our last episode.  Well, sometimes you get the shoggoth, and sometimes the shoggoth gets you.

It's back to the World War II era next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log; see you there, fellow investigators of the astounding and the unknown.

Yog-Sothery madness from R Silverberg, M Tem and D Schweitzer

If you are interested in vintage SF and by some black twist of fate find yourself in the region of Hagerstown, MD, you should take the time to visit the antique stores on Route 40, because at Memory Lane Antiques, Antiques Crossroads and Beaver Creek Antique Market a wealth of old genre paperbacks, magazines and comic books as well as all manner of related material is on offer, much of it at bargain prices.  Recently at Antiques Crossroads I purchased for five dollars each paperback copies of The Madness of Cthulhu Volumes I (2014) and II (2015), anthologies of new stories edited by S. T. Joshi that (according to the back cover, at least) were inspired by At the Mountains of Madness, one of H. P. Lovecraft's most famous productions.  These books, once in the library of a John Johnson of Darrington, Washington, are in quite good shape--they look unread, though tick marks next to the titles of the stories on the contents page of the first volume suggest he did read them--so thanks to Mr. Johnson for taking good care of them.  Produced by Titan Books, the books look great, with nice fonts and cool cover images by John Jude Palencar, details from his Terror in A.D. 1000.

In a departure from normal MPorcius practice, let's take a look at Volume I and read some stories written in the last ten or twelve years.

"Diana of the Hundred Breasts" by Robert Silverberg (1996)

Contrary to what I just said, here is a reprinted story from 1996.  Consider this a plot twist.  (Madness of Cthulhu reprints two stories by Grand Masters of Science Fiction, this one and Arthur C. Clarke's "At the Mountains of Murkiness," which I am skipping because I assume it is a joke story.)  "Diana of the Hundred Breasts" debuted in Realms of Fantasy alongside a story by Tanith Lee and articles about Czech fantastic art and literature and about the illustrations on game cards.  The back cover of The Madness of Cthulhu suggests "Diana of the Hundred Breasts" is "rare" and "lost," but it was in fact reprinted in a Silverberg collection and two anthologies before Madness of Cthulhu was released: Volume Nine of The Collected Robert Silverberg, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's tenth Year's Best Fantasy and Horror and Nancy Kilpatrick and Thomas S. Roche's 2000 anthology Graven Images.  

"Diana of the Hundred Breasts" is a good story, with effective fantastic elements and engaging human elements.  Our narrator is a wealthy slacker who just travels around for fun, spending a lot of time on the Mediterranean visiting ancient sites.  He has a somewhat difficult relationship with his brother, a leading archaeologist; big bro is a genius with exceptional good looks who can also be a cruel and arrogant jerk.  For the first time in a few years these brothers hook up at an archeological site in Turkey.  They meet a fellow American, a Protestant minister from the Midwest who is a widower, and the archaeologist, an atheist who has contempt for religion and, as we expect of a college professor, is confident religion is just a scam used by elites to control the masses, sort of needles this guy, poking fun at Christianity, suggesting it is no better or different than paganism.  But the narrator suspects the cleric may have his brother's number--the minister believes the archaeologist, though gifted and privileged in so many ways, is unhappy because he is empty inside due to a lack of belief in anything.

At the site, the two brothers accidentally set free a space monster which is, perhaps, the source material of the famous image of Diana of Epheseus, and the experience has a profound effect on the archaeologist, shaking his cynical rationalist view of the universe--maybe there is more to the universe than the eye can see.

The people feel real and the images of the ruins and of the monster that may well have been a goddess to the ancient Greeks are vivid--thumbs up for "Diana of the Hundred Breasts!"  

"Cantata" by Melanie Tem (2014)

I think I've read four stories by Melanie Tem, "The Country of the Blind," "The Marriage" (with Steve Rasnic Tem), "Iced In," and "Lunch at Charon's," and liked them all, so it makes sense to read this one.  "Cantata" would be reprinted in the Tem collection Singularity and Other Stories.

"Cantata" is OK; I'm not thrilled by it.

A woman who has a mental condition called "amusia" or "amusica" is part of a scientific team on an alien planet or maybe just a remote previously unexplored part of Earth.  This site is home to intelligent but primitive humanoid natives, the survivors of a more advanced civilization that was destroyed by legendary enemies; these survivors may perhaps share an ancestor with us normal humans.  (These elements of course remind us of Lovecraft, whose work is full of degenerate races and old ruins and vague memories of past apocalyptic wars and hints that the human race is the product of genetic engineering by aliens.)  People with amusia cannot understand or enjoy music, and our heroine actually hates music.  The lost tribe she is working among has no music, no knowledge of music, music having been lost in that cataclysmic war thousands of years past.  But while here on the expedition she has begun hearing music, music nobody else hears, and it is driving her insane--the sounds cause her to itch, and she scratches so vigorously that she penetrates her skin, inflicting upon herself bloody wounds.  Eventually the natives rediscover music and begin humming and our heroine scratches herself so ferociously that she cuts her own throat with her nails and even penetrates her own skull and damages her own brain.

"Cantata" is subtle and literary as well as disgusting in its depiction of injuries, so shares a lot with the other stories by Tem I have read, but I somehow am not enjoying it as much as those others.  If I had to guess I'd say it is because the main character doesn't show agency--in the other Tem stories I praised so much, characters demonstrated evil or self-destructiveness through their actions, which excites powerful emotions in the reader and raises issues of morality, while here in this story the protagonist is primarily a victim of unknowable forces who is defined by an unalterable innate characteristic.  Stories about those who act are inherently more engaging than stories about those who are acted upon, and narratives about people defined by what they do more compelling than those about people defined by inherited identities.      

"The Warm" by Darrell Schweitzer (2014)

I liked Schweitzer's novel The Shattered Goddess and his stories "Going to Ground," and "Malevendra's Pool," so let's give this story a try.  In 2015 "The Warm" would reappear in the Schweitzer collection Awaiting Strange Gods.

Once at a book store I saw that someone had written a novel in which the wife of Captain Ahab of Moby Dick fame was the main character, and I recently heard that someone wrote a novel in which Julia of 1984 was the main character.  Part of the excitement of such derivate productions is that they are works by and about women, whom we are told are "marginalized."  Well, who could be more marginalized than a monster who lives in an underground labyrinth that almost no surface dwellers even know exist?  "The Warm" is based on Lovecraft's famous tale "Pickman's Model" and its narrator is the ghoul whom Pickman induced to serve as an inspiration for his macabre art.

Schweitzer does a good job of depicting the alien world beneath our feet and the lives of the monsters down there, and the psychology of a man who joined the ghoul population but is the least of their horrible number, and, through his contact with Pickman, begins to regain his humanity at the same time Pickman is losing his!  The pacing and images of the story are quite good, and I liked the twist ending.  Thumbs up!  

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This was an enjoyable exercise, so let's keep it up--we'll read four stories from the second volume of The Madness of Cthulhu in our next episode.

The Unfrozen by Ernst Dreyfuss

These people were our enemies.  Two of us against thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of superior, mechanically ultrasophisticated human beings.  Judging by their everyday gadgets, their weaponry must have been something awesome.  They distrusted us because we were different from them, primitive to their way of looking at life.  They were desireless, while we looked at life as a God-given gift to enjoy.  We were in a bottomless pit.  Was there really a way to get out of it?

Over a year ago at an antique mall I bought a copy of 1970's The Unfrozen because it had a Jeff Jones cover.  In a recent gesture towards organizing the shelves of the MPorcius Library, I came upon this 158-page paperback and thought I might read it, see what it is all about.  The Science Fiction Encyclopedia suggests there is a mystery as to who the author, who only has this single work listed at isfdb, really is.  Well, I like getting direct first-hand knowledge of these oddities, so let's dig in.

Our narrator, Neal McDavid, is an intern in Houston, in 1969.  His official work is in the development of heart transplantation, but he is also interested in life extension and especially cryogenics.  His girlfriend is a beautiful blonde nurse, Marya Svenson, a Swedish immigrant.  We get some soap opera stuff in the first two chapters of this 29-chapter novel as we witness the start of this couple's relationship and their disputes over birth control and abortion--Marya is Catholic and refuses to use a condom when they have sex and when she gets pregnant she rejects Neal's suggestion she have an abortion.  She wants to get married but he insists they wait a year, until he has finished his internship.  She runs off and gets severely injured in a car wreck that it is hinted is a suicide attempt.  

When Marya shows up at the hospital where Neal is interning and is found to be braindead, the staff plans to carve her up so her organs can be used in transplants, but Neal (who, as an intern, has more authority than I would have thought) has her frozen intact, and then freezes himself--he has realized he can't live without Marya and is willing to risk the freezing process rather than face the possibility his beloved won't be revived until after he has grown old or died.  Somewhat humorously, the freezing process does not involve drugs or machinery--Neal just uses buckets of ice and lays down next to his clinically dead girlfriend.  There are a few scenes like this that make you wonder if The Unfrozen is a goofy satire.

Neal wakes up in the future, in a huge transparent antiseptic space station.  The people here are all thin, never blink, and have a skin color like coffee with milk, apparently the product of centuries of race-mixing.  This future nation consists of a bunch of space stations--this is the hospital station.  The people have numbers instead of names, call each other "comrade," and have no emotion and make no provisions for privacy.  Computers and robots do all the surgery, and in minutes have fixed Marya's head injury with artificial spare parts; most of the people Neal sees have bodies largely consisting of such spare parts, the availability of which has rendered these future people almost immortal.  The space people don't even eat or defecate--on a regular schedule a computer pumps them intravenously full of a perfect mix of nutrients and calories.  The future people have no knowledge of sex or love--new comrades are produced in a test tube when needed and they are castrated.  When a sleeping Neal has a wet dream the future people are disgusted and decide to castrate Neal and Marya.

Neal figures out a way for he and Marya to escape sterilization.  The space station civilization is in trouble.  The food they all receive intravenously is made from coal, and in a century or so their supply will run out.  Neal offers to go down to Earth to collect more coal--the unblinking future people are unable to accomplish any work down there because the artificial parts that compose most of their bodies aren't suited to the current Earth climate, which is extremely cold, nor to operation at 1 gee--there is no gravity on the space stations and the space comrades spend centuries under weightless conditions.

As the middle third of The Unfrozen begins Neal and Marya meet the president of this post-Earth civilization, the oldest man alive, the only living person (besides Neal and Marya) who was born on Earth--this guy has dark skin--Neal compares his complexion to that of a "mulatto"--and he even blinks.  The Prez gives our heroes a history lesson about the end of life on Earth in 2204, over 500 years ago--he and a few Americans were in orbit at the time of the nuclear war started by the United States of Africa and their ally China against the United States of America and the USSR, and the frozen Neal and Marya were with them.  Over the last five centuries the survivors have built the current space-based society, a society with no desire, no privacy, no racism, no theft or war.  Also, as they begin to run out of coal, laws against wasting energy by speaking unnecessarily.

It takes a while, but Neal finally convinces the government to send our heroes to Earth along with the regular monthly relief team of scientists that man the research station there--the space station people can only stand being on the surface for thirty days, and they never leave the building, just sit in chairs and study the surface with telescopes.  The research center turns out to have been built into Hitler's Berlin bunker, one of the few buildings to survive the atomic war, and Neal and Marya sleep in a bed with "Eva Braun" inscribed on the headboard.  I guess this is part of the satire, the suggestion that Hitler is representative of the Earthbound human race.   

The scientists in the bunker expand on the history lesson the Prez gave our heroes.  In the 21st century the major nations dug up such a volume of natural resources to fuel the space race that the Earth became a hollow shell and earthquakes resulted that killed millions.  The various blocs competed ruthlessly for what little resources were left.  The Chinese-led bloc was developing a superweapon that threatened to give them control of the Earth, so the Western and Westernized states allied with the Soviet Union to launch a preemptive strike that obliterated the Chinese-led bloc.  This left only the US-USSR alliance and a united Africa to contend for the rulership of the world.  The global north was on the brink of achieving the ability to colonize Mars when the Africans, stung by white racism, decided to launch all their nuclear weapons at the white and white-adjacent countries, causing so much destruction that the Earth's orbit was altered, leading to the decrease in temperature and death of every human on the planet.  Sure enough, when Neal and Marya put on their therma suits and oxygen tanks and explore the ruins of Berlin they find frozen corpses among the wreckage.  (These peeps are too irradiated to be revived the way our 20th-century heroes were.)

As the final third of the novel begins Neal and Marya commit suicide--this future world is no place to live in, no place to bring up a child!  They walk out into the freezing cold, oxygen-deficient air of post-holocaust Earth and die, only to be revived by the space people, good as new.  After this caper, the tone of the novel changes; maybe we are supposed to be reminded of how the death and rebirth of Jesus led to a new hopeful era of human life or something.  Whereas earlier, the Earthers considered the space people a bunch of cold mechanical drones living under a tyranny, and the space people considered our heroes dangerous because they were driven by emotion and constituted the sort of people who caused the Earth-ruining nuclear war, after the suicide episode Neal and Marya eagerly pledge allegiance to the space society and become full comrades (they now love Big Brother!) and the space people spare no expense in training and equipping the Earthers so they can survive on Mars, the world they will colonize and from which extract the essential coal.  It is not uncommon in SF novels for the protagonist to switch sides as he realizes the superiority of the alien or rebel society, but here in The Unfrozen Neal's change of attitude seems to come out of nowhere.

Mars in this book has a rich native ecosystem, including extensive deposits of coal and a race of intelligent, though culturally and technologically primitive, natives.  When Earth's orbit was altered, so was that of Mars, and the red planet is now as close to the sun as was Terra and considerably warmer than previously.  The space people train Neal and Marya in the approved technique of dealing with the native life--by projecting thought waves that transmit love!  If the Martian birds and cows know Neal and Marya love them, they will eagerly give up their eggs and milk.  (The space people refuse N & M permission to hunt animals for food.)  And if the intelligent Martians know Neal and Marya love them, they will not attack them.  This whole idea made me groan, because, at the start of the novel, space people were portrayed as emotionless and were even asking Neal to explain what love is to them, and now we are supposed to believe their whole society is based on love and they have advanced psychic techniques to express emotion?  This is a blunder; did Dreyfuss start this novel planning to make the space society a dystopia, and then past the halfway point decide to make it a utopia, and forget to revise the beginning?

Mars is just like Earth, with green grass and forests of pine trees and moss-covered rock, but better--the animals are larger and the cows and chickens produce a prodigious supply of milk and eggs.  Neal and Marya begin a happy fulfilling life on their little Martian farm, which they contrast with their horrible 20th-century lives of the "dog-eat-dog" "rat race," when they had to fight traffic and pay bills.  The novel's climax comes when Marya gives birth to the child conceived back in the 20th century--while she is in labor the Martians arrive, hostile, but Neal and Marya project friendship waves at them and prevent a massacre.

The last dozen or so pages of the novel take place five years on, when our heroes have produced five children who will give birth to the new human race (Neal says "Never mind the incest angle") that will live in harmony, unlike the humanity of Earth which was constantly killing for food and (Neal suggests here at the end of the novel) over sexual frustration.  Neal has also, somehow, built freezers, refrigerators, and a laboratory.  The Martians are the humans' friends and dozens of them work the fields in exchange for food.  Neal figures out why the native Martians are a dying race--they don't get sexually aroused when it is warm, so Neal, who has already revitalized the human race, is going to revitalize the Martian race by setting up air-conditioned buildings in which the Martians can have sex.  (Dreyfuss--and his editors at Tower--commit another blunder here: we are told Neal locks up the fridge so the natives can't see he has been dissecting a dead Martian, and three pages later that he left the fridge door open and it is that cool air which facilitated amorousness among some Martians cleaning the lab.)  

The novel ends with Neal and Marya expressing the belief that everything has happened according to God's plan, and with the implication that the novel's main point is to vindicate authority--the authority of God over the universe has led to a happy life for humans and Martians on Mars, the authority of the space state ended racism and war, and the authority of Neal (who is explicitly likened to God) over the Martians is going to save the native people of the fourth (now third) planet from extinction.

The Unfrozen has a lot of problems but I am feeling generous; since I didn't find it to be terribly laborious or annoying, and there are some glimmers of interest and originality here and there, we'll say it is barely acceptable.  The novel is perhaps an unusual specimen in that it rags on and on about how people are jerks--racist and bellicose--like so much SF does but has a sympathetic view of religion and argues that God is real when most SF stories consider religion a plague.  Potentially interesting issues like religion, racism, sexual dysfunction and the social and psychological drawbacks of immortality are treated in a superficial way, but at least they are there--this isn't a mediocre novel that tries to entertain you with sex and violence, like one of the many Conan pastiches, but a novel in which the author is ambitious and is trying to lay his philosophy on you and tell you what society should be like but he doesn't do a good job of it.  Dreyfuss' style is not great but I suppose it gets the job done, despite some odd tics, like how some words particular to the space society always appear in all caps.  The plot has numerous holes and incongruities (e. g., this super high tech society can't construct remote-controlled robots to mine coal on Mars or Earth?--they already have autonomous robots who can do brain surgery and heart, lung and liver transplants!; every plant and animal on Mars is just like one native to Earth, except the people, who are monsters covered in quills or spines) and the transitions from bitter suspicion between Earthers and spacers to committed solidarity, and from "this is a sterile and emotionless totalitarian state" to "this is a utopia of brotherhood" are poorly handled.  On the plus side, Neal's relationship with Marya and his evolution from abortion-advocating skeptic to devoted husband and father sort of work, and some elements of life in zero gee in the space station society are interesting and feel original.

This unlovely mess has actually been reprinted--in translation into Norwegian with a good cover that doesn't suit the contents depicting an old guy and a young beauty facing some kind of trouble, maybe an aircraft, maybe a really tall person.

Henry S. Whitehead: "The Shadows," "The Fireplace," and "The Passing of a God"

We recently read a story by Frank Belknap Long recommended by New Jersey native Robert Weinberg, author of The Weird Tales Story (1977) and Horror of the 20th Century: An Illustrated History (1999).  Weinberg, in those books, praises Henry S. Whitehead, another man who hails from the greatest state in the Union, but one who spent much of his life in the Caribbean.  Whitehead published quite a volume of stories in Weird Tales, and Weinberg picks out three for particular praise: "The Shadows," "The Fireplace," and "The Passing of a God."  Today, through the magic of the internet archive, we'll read them and assess whether Whitehead, whom Weinberg deemed in 1999 to be a "neglected writer," deserves to be better known today.

I may be reading these stories in Weird Tales, but all three can be found in the 1944 Arkham House hardcover collection Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales and its British 1974 edition, put out by Neville Spearman.  For paperback publication our tea-guzzling pals over in the green and pleasant land split Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales into two volumes; "The Passing of a God" and "The Shadows" appear in the first volume, Jumbee and Other Voodoo Tales, while "The Fireplace" is printed in the second, The Black Beast and Other Voodoo Tales. 

"The Shadows" (1927)

This is a pretty effective story with a smooth understated style with quite a bit of local color about life in the West Indies for American and European residents.  Our wealthy narrator, Stewart, an American, lives on a West Indian island in the house formerly occupied by an elderly Irish colonist, Morris, who died under mysterious circumstances.  Stewart begins to experience a bizarre phenomena--when he turns off the light in his bedroom he can dimly see shadowy or ghostly images of different furniture than his own--presumably this is what the room looked like when Morris lived there.  Each night, the images are sharper, clearer, and eventually Stewart can see Morris's furniture--in the dark--as clearly as he can see his own furniture in the light.  Eventually he can see the image of Morris himself in the process of retiring for the night.

The second part of the story describes the narrator's detective work as he travels around the island talking to people and learning about his predecessor's strange life and mysterious death.  It seems that, before moving to this island, Morris had truck with non-whites on another island and with one or more "jumbees;" "jumbee," a word I haven't encountered before, is apparently a term used in the West Indies to refer to a broad class of evil entities--spirits or ghosts or demons or whatever.  People are reluctant to give our hero much information on Morris, and after, on a significant date, the narrator witnesses Morris's horrible death in the very room in which Stewart now sleeps, Stewart shocks his fellow expatriates with a dramatic revelation of his knowledge.

One might say this story moves slowly, but the style and images are good enough that it never becomes tiresome or boring.  I enjoyed "The Shadows," and I think other Lovecraft fans might enjoy it as well, even though it is more light-hearted and the stakes feel much lower than in a Lovecraft story (Stewart is never in any kind of danger and is never really scared, being buoyed by his Christian faith), if only because it includes a pretty cool monster.

"The Shadows" after its debut in Weird Tales has been reprinted by such editors as August Derleth and Donald Wollheim as well as in Whitehead collections; in 2006 "The Shadows," as well as "The Passing of a God" and two additional Whitehead stories, was included in an anthology of supernatural stories written "in the Christian tradition"--Whitehead was an Episcopal minister.

"The Fireplace" (1925)

This is an OK ghost and murder story; while well-written, I am afraid there are too many nagging issues with the plot and structure of "The Fireplace" for me to call it good.  Also, its locale is the American South, and the local color elements are not as interesting or effective as the West Indies stuff in "The Shadows."

The first little section of the story tells us that in 1922 a hotel in Mississippi burned down, killing four men prominent in politics and the law in MS, Georgia and Tennessee.  Then we flash back a decade to the hotel and a young lawyer who is staying in the same room in which the four victims of the future fire will perish.  The lawyer is surprised when a man inexplicably appears in the room--this man turns out to be a ghost.  The ghost explains that sixteen years earlier he was murdered in this very room during a poker game, and the four men with whom he was playing--one of them his murderer--cut up his body and burned it in the fireplace and then hid his unburnable effects--cufflinks and such--under the floorboards.  The ghost directs the lawyer to where these unburnables are concealed, proving his story true, and gets the lawyer to promise to pursue justice on the killer and his three accomplices.  

The lawyer gets so busy with his career that he doesn't do anything to right the wrong supernaturally revealed to him and some time later he ends up in that hotel room again and he is found dead, strangled, his head in the fireplace.

On a sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph basis this story is well-written and it is never boring.  However, there are problems with the plot and with some of Whitehead's narrative choices.  I don't think you could really obliterate an adult human's bones in a 19th-century open fireplace, for one thing.  Another problem is that we are to believe that the ghost strangled the lawyer who failed to help him, but earlier in the story the ghost said that he could only interact with the material world with great effort--"Managing to knock at the door took it out of me, rather...."  Wouldn't strangling a healthy man and moving his body dramatically into the fireplace be far more strenuous an activity than knocking at a door?  Another issue is that we don't get a scene of the ghost destroying the four men--how did he do it?  I think we also have to wonder if four murderers would meet on the anniversary of their crime in the very spot in which they committed their crime (as in "The Shadows," dates and places are very significant in "The Fireplace," ghosts being very much connected to particular rooms and dates.)  

Acceptable.  "The Fireplace" was reprinted in Weird Tales in 1935 and since then in numerous anthologies of ghost stories, Perturbed Spirits (1954 hardcover, 1958 paperback) edited by R. C. Bull and Helen Hoke's Ghosts and Ghastlies (1976) among them.

"The Passing of a God" (1931)

Farnsworth Wright reprinted "The Passing of a God" in Weird Tales in 1938 after its debut in the Unique Magazine seven years earlier, and Dorothy McIlwraith reprinted it in one of the last issues of the first run of WT in 1954.  In addition, the story has reappeared in several anthologies, including a Peter Haining volume of stories from WT and the aforementioned book of ghost stories "in the Christian tradition," Shadows from a Veiled Creation.  

Our narrator in "The Passing of a God" is an American living in the Virgin Islands and the story consists of his conversation with a Dr. Pelletier about a patient Pelletier treated while he was in Haiti, an American named Carswell.  We learn the crazy life story of Carswell, presented somewhat out of chronological order so as to offer surprises to the reader.  I'll just summarize the Carswell saga chronologically here. 

Carswell, a man in his thirties, left New York when he learned he had a sort of tumor, about the size of a man's head, in his abdomen and was told he had only a year or so to live.  He went to Haiti and made a sizable living shooting and drying ducks for export to the Chinatowns of New York and San Francisco.  His tumor grew only slowly, and he survived year after year, putting together a nice house and becoming an integral part of the local black community; Carswell became very familiar with voodoo, and when Pelletier met him Carswell probably knew more about voodoo than any other white man.

Seven years after his arrival in Haiti, Carswell collapsed while walking home and woke up to find himself seated on a chair, surrounded by hundreds of blacks who were kneeling before him; Carswell's hands were weighed down with over one hundred rings and his neck strained under the weight of innumerable necklaces.  Carswell recognized the phenomena of which he was the center.  In Haiti, when a person, usually an elderly individual or someone mentally ill or developmentally disabled, as we now put it, throws a fit or goes visibly insane, the natives think he is possessed by a god and worship him; when he recovers his senses they feel the god has left and cease their worship.  Carswell assured the "negroes" he was fine now, and they had no objection to him going about his business, but they continued to worship him.  

Carswell left his remote home for Port au Prince soon after this event because his tumor, for the first time, was giving him pain.  It was there that Dr. Pelletier met him.  Seven years earlier the New York medicos had judged the tumor inoperable, but surgical techniques had advanced and Pelletier was willing to take a scalpel to Carswell, telling him he has a 40% or so chance of surviving the operation.  The procedure was a success, and Pelletier removed the tumor.  The tumor turned out to be an embryonic monster that emanated a chilling aura of ancient evil!  Before the monster recovered from the anesthesia used on Carswell, the doctor drowned it in a specimen jar full of alcohol.  Carswell returned to his work, and his black friends no longer worshipped him, recognizing that the god was gone.

Pelletier shows the monster to the narrator.  The final twist is that Pelletier never told Carswell that his tumor was anything out of the ordinary--the white man who probably knows more about voodoo than anybody is ironically ignorant of the most salient fact of the most shocking of all voodoo incidents, even though he is the central figure of the incident.

Whitehead's style is smooth and his images are striking, and the plot proceeds without any hitches or hiccups--thumbs up for "The Passing of a God."  

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Whitehead has a good mainstream literary style (like stories about white men out in the colonies among the natives so often do, the West Indian stories here remind me of Somerset Maugham) and all three of these stories work, the West Indian ones better than the American South one, which as far as I could tell could be set in any place in the world.  While solid, these stories lack any special idiosyncratic personality or ideology, and come off as well-done but standard issue horror stories.  I like today's three stories, but I don't know that I'll go out of my way to read more things by Whitehead when I have so many other authors I am more interested in, authors who have distinctive styles and/or peculiar concerns.  We'll see.  

Unknown, Mar '39: F B Long, H L Gold & R M Williams

In our last episode we looked at three stories that appeared in the very first issue of Robert A. W. Lowndes' The Magazine of Horror, and today we investigate three stories printed in the very first issue of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown.  Frank Belknap Longapalooza continues with a story from the man H. P. Lovecraft called "Sonny," "Dark Vision," and we also have a widely admired story from the future editor of Galaxy H. L. Gold, "Trouble with Water," and from Robert Moore Williams "Death Sentence," a story that seems never to have been reprinted.  This inaugural issue of Unknown also includes a story by Weird Tales stalwart Many Wade Wellman, "'Where Angels Fear....", but while I was reading it for this blog post I realized I had already read and blogged about it back in 2022.  

"Dark Vision" by Frank Belknap Long

In 1975's The Early Long, Long describes how he sent this story to Campbell for Astounding, and Campbell called him on the phone and told him "Dark Vision" didn't fit Astounding but that he was starting a new magazine and "Dark Vision" would be perfect for it.  Long also tells us that Campbell changed a line in the middle of the story, and that he is pleased to thus be a collaborator of Campbell's.  A lot of writers seem to have loved working with Campbell. 

(N.B.: I'm reading "Dark Vision" in the aforementioned The Early Long.)

This is a pretty good story that, for most of it, seems to be taking a very dim, cynical, even misanthropic view of human nature, though things turn out quite all right in the end.

Ronald Horn is a journalist looking for copy at the power plant his friend manages.  While poking around he manages to fall off a height and into a hazardous area where he suffers a serious electric shock.  By some freak chance, he isn't harmed by the electricity that courses through his body, but gains a superpower!  He can read minds!  But this is no blessing--it is a curse!  He can't help but hear people's thoughts, and everybody is an absolute monster of lust, greed, murderousness and/or suicidality!  Horn can't relax, can't rest, because everywhere he goes in New York City he can sense people's animalistic sex desires, their envy and jealousy, their plans to steal and to kill--even the thoughts of Horn's fiancé push his sanity to the edge, for she has contempt for him, finds him exasperating, wishes he had as much money as some other guy she knows!  Long does a good job coming up with evil thoughts for ordinary people in various walks of life; it is a little strange to read text by Long which is competent and even good after reading so much work by him that is terrible--I guess "Francis, Lord Belknap" put some real work into this one.  One wonder if the prestige of Astounding and/or Campbell, or the amount of money Astounding could pay compared to other magazines, had anything to do with this.

The ending of the story is disappointing for those of us who might savor a story about how terrible people are.  His fiancé offering no comfort, Horn visits another female he knows.  This woman's thoughts are not as beastly as everybody else's, and Horn's telepathic powers reveal that she is in love with him.  She suggests they go visit their other friend, America's greatest psychologist.  This guy puts Horn's mind at ease, theorizing that Horn is not reading people's conscious thoughts, but their subconscious ones.  Citing Freud, the shrink tells Horn that everybody has wild and crazy subconscious thoughts of rape, murder and suicide, but almost every person has a censor that keeps these subconscious desires from surfacing--the people whose minds Horn read with horror are all in fact normal healthy individuals extremely unlikely to commit the foul deeds their subconscious seems to be plotting out.  Of course, hearing these horrific thoughts all day will drive Horn insane, so the doctor whips up a treatment for Horn based on curare that will deaden his telepathic ability and permit him to live an ordinary life, presumably married to this sweet girl and not his fiancé whom he irritates.

Personally, I would have preferred a cynical ending in which Horn killed himself or something like that, but this happy ending that vindicates humankind and tries to teach you Freudianism does not sink the story.  I think it is noteworthy that Campbell refused to put this story in Astounding but was happy to print it in Unknown because it is not really a fantasy story with magical elves like the Gold story we are about to discuss or inexplicable ghosts like the Wellman tale we read two years ago or whatever but a science fiction story.  Maybe Campbell just thought the science shoddy, either the Freudianism, the pharmacological speculation or the comic-book-style fashion in which Horn got his superpowers.

"Dark Vision" was included in the Long collection Hounds of Tindalos, which was reprinted in Britain as a two volume set of paperbacks; "Dark Vision" appeared in the second volume, titled The Black Druid.  Readers of French can experience "Dark Vision" in a Belgian collection with a similar name and even similar cover but somewhat different contents.

"Trouble with Water" by H. L. Gold 

Editors love "Trouble with Water," and it has appeared in a mountainous pile of anthologies edited by almost every editor of SF you can think of: Campbell, Knight, Asimov, Silverberg, Carr, Dann, Dozois, and others.  (Wollheim and Merril seem to be chief among the few abstainers.)  I was afraid that this was going to be a joke story, but I forged ahead anyway and read, in its original magazine form, this story which has been almost universally hailed as a classic masterpiece.

Greenberg works beach concessions--selling hotdogs, soda pop, ice cream, etc.--in New York in the summer and Florida in the winter.  He has a nagging and violent wife and an ugly daughter whom his wife is obsessed with marrying off, to the point that wifey insists any spare money be devoted to a dowry.  Tomorrow Greenberg's busy season begins so today he is on a little boat fishing with the rod he had to tape together because his wife broke it in a fit of rage.  He reels in a hat and the hat turns out to belong to a water gnome.  The water gnome casually informs Greenberg that he controls the rain on the East Coast and his preference is to schedule rain on the weekend--this two-foot-tall freak is responsible for the weather that for years has kept customers away from Greenberg's business!  Wifey isn't the only Greenberg with a temper and our hero rips up the gnome's hat and the gnome takes disciplinary action, putting a curse on the long-suffering small businessman.

The meat of Long's "Dark Vision" is scene after scene of Horn seeing into people's thoughts and finding them horrible, and similarly the meat of Gold's "Trouble with Water" is a series of scenes in which Gold tries to take a bath, shave, eat soup, etc., only to find water refuses to touch him or any tool he wields--his boat actually hovers over the water.  Greenberg makes a terrible mess in the apartment and a family catastrophe ensues when a suitor--Sammie Katz, a young doctor, yet!--calls on ugly daughter Rosie.

The wikipedia article on Gold says "Gold was born Jewish" and quotes Anthony Boucher as saying that Gold was perhaps the only SF writer who could write a convincing lower-middle-class milieu, and the dialogue and interactions of the Greenbergs certainly have a lower middle-class Jewish feel to them.  This ethnic angle might today be considered racist (the Greenbergs are all constantly talking about money) but it feels authentic and adds a layer of plausibility and interest to the story.  (I could say the same for the stereotypical behavior of the women in the story--violently angry one second, oozing with comfort and affection the next.) 

Unable to drink, Greenberg fears death, and goes to a doctor, who thinks Greenberg is insane and tries to have him committed.  Luckily a friendly cop comes by, and being an Irishman he believes Greenberg's story about a Little Person and arrives at the solution to Greenberg's thirst--Greenberg can drink beer and he and the cop get drunk together.  (The stereotypes in this story are not confined to the fair sex or the chosen people but strike the sons and daughters of Erin as well.)

The cop and his mother, who knows all about the Little Folk, help Greenberg get the gnome to lift the curse, even though Greenberg's wife sort of wishes her husband would allow the curse to persist for the season, as the fact that rain does not fall around it has made their concession stand very attractive to customers and substantially boosted profits. 

I generally don't like these kinds of trifling joke stories about funny supernatural beings (it feels like just last week I was savaging Robert Silverberg's 1963 joke story about a demon trying to collect a soul for Satan) but this one is actually well-written and I liked the ethnic and class angles so we'll call it acceptable.

"Death Sentence" by Robert Moore Williams

OMG, it's links time.  We've read five short stories and three novels by Robert Moore Williams, and you can find my blog posts about them by clickety-clicking below; for you TLDR folks, I have provided a brief precis of the verdict meted out to each work by the merciless court that is MPorcius Fiction Log:

"Robot's Return"                     "Not bad."

"The Counterfeiter"                 "Smooth and economical...solid plot and philosophical core"

"The Red Death of Mars"        "...not actually bad...pedestrian in plot and style" 

"Sudden Lake"                         "isn't bad"

"I Want to Go Home"               "acceptable; I liked it until the muddled ending."

Zanthar at Trip's End               "bad in almost every way."

Jongor of Lost Land                 "an acceptable Tarzan pastiche...some half-baked science fiction ideas"

The Return of Jongor               "I have to call this one bad."

     

The Robert Moore Williams story that squirms before the steely eyes of The Honorable Judge MPorcius today is "Death Sentence," a story that it seems was never reprinted--not a good sign.  However, justice is blind, and I think this is actually a well-written story with interesting ideas, even if the ideas are not new to me, being standard sort of SF ideas--at least since I was born--and even if I am skeptical of some of the reforms the story may be recommending (though maybe it is not recommending them, just illustrating them.)

(Like Long's "Dark Vision" this is a science fiction story rather than a fantasy, and also features psychological speculation.)

It is the early 21st century and a gangster, Blackie Riordan, age 27, is dragged into court.  This guy has been trouble since he was a kid and has recently murdered a fellow creep, Pinkie Schwartz.  Riordan finds no jury in the courtroom, and over the course of the story we learn not only about Riordan's youth and his career as a criminal but how the justice system has been radically reformed so that, among other things, a jury trial is no longer guaranteed.  The judge seems to know all about Blackie's crimes, even minor ones like shoplifting committed when Blackie was just a kid, and we readers soon figure out and Blackie eventually is told that law enforcement has scanned Blackie's brain and read his memories so they know all about his crimes.

Blackie is sentenced to "obliteration."  This is what in other SF stories might be called a "brain-wipe" or something.  Blackie's memories are erased, to the point that he doesn't even know how to walk!  He's a baby in an adult body!  He is given a new name, Edward Finnegan, and is to be educated.  He learns to walk in just a few minutes, so it won't be too long before he can talk and read again.  By reading his memories the government knows that as a kid he was fascinated by automobiles and other machines and hung around a garage while skipping school, and so the authorities plan out an education and career for new citizen Finnegan as a car mechanic.  The story seems to suggest that some character traits--like Riordan's interest in machines--are genetic, but others--like Riordan's willingness to break the rules and trespass against other people's property and lives--are the result of a bad environment.  (Mere wishful thinking, I'm afraid.)  The authorities plan to make sure Finnegan has no knowledge of his past as Riordan, and will tell him he lost his memories due to a blow to the head and I guess invent a fake past for him.

"Death Sentence" deserves a mild recommendation.  Looking through my old blog posts about Williams, he seems to have been a capable writer who could produce good short stories with good ideas but that he sometimes churned out shoddy novels, presumably due to a need for money.  I will continue to read short stories by Williams and avoid the novels.

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I think we'll call an end to Frank Belknap Longapalooza today, seeing as with "Dark Vision" we can conclude on a positive note.  But don't worry, Long fanatics, there is a lot more work by Long for us to examine, and we'll get back to him at some point.  And we can all look forward to the next thrilling episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, which will feature another weird author recommended to us by Robert Weinberg, author of The Weird Tales Story and Horror of the 20th Century: An Illustrated History.

Magazine of Horror Aug '63: F B Long, E D Hoch and R Silverberg

A fun book to flip through is Art of the Imagination:20th Century Visions of Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy, an oversized omnibus edition of Frank M. Robinson's Science Fiction of the 20th Century, Robert Weinberg's Horror of the 20th Century and Randy Broekner's Fantasy of the 20th Century.  Weinberg, in Horror of the 20th Century, opines that Frank Belknap Long's best story is "The Man With a Thousand Legs," and I figured I should read it during our current Long kick.  "The Man With a Thousand Legs" first appeared in Weird Tales in 1927 and would be reprinted numerous times, including in the first issue of The Magazine of Horror in 1963.  Volume 1, Number 1 of Robert A. W.  Lowndes' magazine includes alongside the Long reprint a new story by super-editor Donald A. Wollheim and one by prolific genre author and SF Grand Master Robert Silverberg that I figured I'd read as well as Long's tale.  But then I realized I've actually read and blogged about Wollheim's "Babylon: 70 M." already, so to round out this blog post we'll be talking not only about Silverberg's offering to those men and women of 1963 who sought horror at the newsstands but also that of Edward D. Hoch, a guy whose name I regularly see as I glance through old books and magazines but whose work I have only sampled once, with negative results; I called Hoch's story "Versus" "bewilderingly lame," "sterile" and "gimmicky," but let's give the guy a second chance, why don't we?  (I keep giving Long second, third, fourth, etc., chances, don't I?)  

"The Man With a Thousand Legs" (1927/1963) by Frank Belknap Long

Lowndes, in his intro to "The Man With a Thousand Legs" in The Magazine f Horror tells us the version of the story he is printing has been revised by Long, and so I'll be reading it there instead of any of the other places in which the tale has reappeared, among them Donald Wollheim 's Avon Fantasy Reader (1948) and Kurt Singer's Horror Omnibus (1965), which has a cool woman-in-distress cover that I can't find a decent image of.

"The Man With a Thousand Legs" is a pretty good mad scientist/monster story told through the medium of nine first-person accounts--diaries, the testimonials of various people, even a message found in a bottle.  The whole thing is actually pretty well-written, certainly better than Long's average.

In brief, a young scientist some years ago became celebrated when he discovered some kind of "etheric vibrations," but some other scientist debunked his work and the youngster fell into disrepute.  But he continued his work and developed a device that emitted a ray that could transform animal matter into a different form, a form more pliable, something like that of a jellyfish or a squid.  He tested the ray on himself and the affected portion of his body became monstrous--yellow and tentacled, and even worse, independent-minded and voraciously hungry!  At first, by exerting his will, our risk-taking scientist could return the monster parts of himself back to normal, but eventually the yellow beast predominates.  From the point of view of victims, witnesses and the mad scientist himself we experience a series of gruesome episodes that highlight shocking images of injury and death, culminating in a scene like something out of a kaiju film in which the yellow monster has grown giant and attacks a naval vessel, killing scores of men.  In the denouement a homeless man discovers the scientist's apparatus.

Thumbs up for "The Man With a Thousand Legs."  Robert Weinberg didn't steer me wrong!    

"The Maze and the Monster" by Edward D. Hoch (1963)

This is a filler story, competently written but gimmicky and totally obvious.  Merely acceptable.

An Englishman is shipwrecked alone on an island.  Captured, he is taken to the island's mad dictator.  This goof, inspired by the famous story "The Lady or the Tiger," has had a subterranean maze constructed.  Our hero is thrown into the maze naked, told that there are two exits, one leading to a paradise, the other to a monster.  Our guy proceeds through the maze and finds himself in a well-appointed chamber in which awaits the hottest chick he has ever seen!  Hubba hubba!  Oh no, the beauty paralyzes him with a touch and, starting with his eyes, begins flaying him with her fingernails!  He hasn't found the paradise but the monster, a sadistic madwoman with an expert knowledge of human anatomy!

This mediocrity was inexplicably reprinted in Marvin Kaye's Devils & Demons.

"The Unbeliever" by Robert Silverberg (1963)

This appears to be a rare Silverberg; at least isfdb doesn't list any reprints.  And I can see why, as this story is quite lame.  Thumbs down!

"The Unbeliever" is a joke story about the Devil.  Steiner is an unethical businessman who seduces women and commits blackmail as well as other sins, so Satan figures he will soon gain custody of Steiner's soul.  But I guess in the world of this story Satan can only get your soul if you believe in him, and Steiner is the kind of guy who is so confident that there is no such thing as the supernatural that he has started a club of people who defy superstitions; these skeptics meet on Friday the 13th to intentionally walk under ladders and break mirrors and so forth.  Satan sends one of his top lackeys, our narrator, up to Earth to convince Steiner that Hell and the Devil are real, and we witness one of the skeptics' club meetings.  The narrator does everything in his power to convince Steiner of the reality of Satan and Hell, without success--or so it appears.  The surprise revelation at the end of the story is that Steiner is immune to Satan's power now matter how far he has gone astray because he is a space alien and/or the Devil of another planet.  In the world of Silverberg's story only Earth people are subject to the rule of God and Satan, I guess.

The twist ending of this story feels stupid and cheap, coming out of left field as it does--the theology of "Unbeliever" makes no sense in relation to traditional views of Satan, Hell and damnation and worse it feels internally inconsistent.  Steiner is not an unbeliever--he obviously believes in Hell and Satan.  The narrator can read people's minds and he looks into Steiner's but doesn't detect that the guy isn't human and isn't really an atheist and a materialist--what he sees in Steiner's mind confirms his own belief and that of readers that Steiner simply doesn't believe in the supernatural.  Maybe we are supposed to think Steiner is so powerful a demon that he can spoof the narrator's mind reading powers with a sort of psychic cloak or facade, but it still feels like a low trick, that Silverberg has used us poorly by selling us a theory that undergirds the entire story and then pulling the rug out from under us at the very end.  Even worse, the meat of the story is a bunch of lame jokes that are not funny.  Bad.

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Long comes through for us, but the Hoch and Silverberg stories are forgettable filler.  The Magazine of Horror would continue publication up and into the year of my birth, 1971, so I guess those filler pieces didn't cripple it.

Look forward to more magazine stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, fantasy fans!