H P Lovecraft: "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family," "The Festival," "He," and "The Horror at Red Hook"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading stories from 1920s issues of Weird Tales, the widely beloved pioneering speculative fiction magazine.  Today we are going to tackle four WT stories from the era by an author closely associated with WT, H. P. Lovecraft, stories I haven't blogged about yet, though I may have read some of them in the distant past.  I will be reading them from my Arkham House hardcover Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (Corrected Ninth Edition), but I'll include links to the stories' 1920s Weird Tales appearances: just click the magic words below to be whisked off to the hellish landscapes which lie just beneath the surface of our own mundane reality:

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh

Cthulhu R'lyeh
wgah'nagl
fhtagn

"Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" (1921)

This tale debuted in a publication called The Wolverine, and appeared in Weird Tales three years later under the title "The White Ape," a title of which HPL did not approve.

This story, a history of a now extinct noble English family,  contains, in concise concentrated form, many of the standard Lovecraftian themes--lost cities, degenerated races, miscegenation, unwelcome revelations about one's identity, and scholars and explorers who search for the truth and are driven mad by what they find.  The opening paragraph is almost a thesis statement for the whole Lovecraft oeuvre, asserting that life is "hideous" and that the more science discovers, the more hideous we realize life is, and if science ever uncovers the truth about our identity we may well all kill ourselves.  The male members of the Jermyn family dramatize this morbid claim, many of them dying in shocking, melodramatic, fashion, their remains disposed of in ways that are particularly macabre.

In brief, an 18th-century head of the Jermyn clan was an explorer in Africa, and upon his return to Britain claimed to have discovered the ruins of an ancient city apparently once inhabited by a race of white people and/or a race of human-ape hybrids.  His discoveries are scoffed at, and he ends up in a madhouse, where he dies.  This guy's descendants tend to be ugly, even deformed--it is hinted they have simian features--and the men tend to have unusual marriages, to women of the lower classes and/or women they refuse to allow out of the house, lest they be seen in public.  Quite a few Jermyns are murdered by family members or commit suicide, including the last of the line, who dies without issue.  These murders and self-murders are generally a reaction to a realization about the Jermyn ancestry--it seems that several of the Jermyn men have mated with women who are part-ape, surviving members of the ancient race that built or lived in that ruined city.  One female Jermyn was crudely mummified and worshipped as a god or used as a totem or good luck charm by various black tribes.

"Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" generates a mood and has lots of solid horror ideas--all the varied shocking fates individuals and their bodies suffer--but it is not a traditional story with a plot and characters and all that.  I like it.  

As with most of Lovecraft's work, you can find "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" in a multitude of Lovecraft collections.  I will point out that this tale has also been reprinted in a 1973 Roger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia anthology, Androids, Time Machines and Blue Giraffes, and in a 2008 Marvel comic alongside a graphic novel adaptation of the story by Richard Corben.

"The Festival" (1925)

This one debuted in the same issue of Weird Tales as Frank Belknap Long's "The Ocean Leech" and C. M. Eddy, Jr.'s "Ahrl-a of the Caves."   Besides in the inevitable mountain of Lovecraft collections, "The Festival" has been reprinted in a few anthologies, including some on a Christmas or holiday theme and Peter Haining's The Satanists, even though this story isn't really about Satan or his worshippers.  

Our narrator makes clear immediately that he is of a secretive people small in number whose culture, a culture that stretches back long before the rise of Christianity, a culture with an affinity for the stars, has been suppressed, but who have striven to keep that culture alive by holding a festival every 100 years.  At Christmas time he comes to a coastal New England town to participate in this ceremony, makes his way to a seventeenth century house inhabited by an old man and an old woman who through disguises keep the narrator from seeing their flesh and who utter no speech--the man communicates via stylus and wax tablet.  Lovecraft does a good job describing these weirdos and their house.

Late at night the entire town of people, all of them dressed to obscure their forms and visages, assembles at a church and descends through trap door and spiral stair deep into the earth, to hold a bizarre ceremony involving a monstrous flame that generates no heat and causes no shadows, and a herd of queer monsters that are to serve as the assembled throng's steeds and carry them to even stranger ceremonies deeper still beneath the surface.  The old man who welcomed the narrator into his home is apparently the leader of the group, and uses a copy of The Necronomicon in the ritual; it is suggested this creature is an ancestor of the narrator, somehow still alive, though horribly decayed or transformed, centuries after his burial.  The narrator, horrified, escapes, almost dying in the effort, and wakes up in a hospital after being rescued as he floated in the harbor.  The town seems different, more modern--was the narrator cast back in time last night, or drawn into some intersection of our world and another?

Quite good, a sort of embryonic, more concise, less extreme version of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."  In this story the narrator's jump from ignorance to knowledge of his heritage is less radical, as he starts off knowing his people are unlike others and doesn't end the story as an actual monster, as does the narrator of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."     

"He" (1926)

I lived in New York City for over a decade, and so found very compelling the first two or three pages of "He," in which the narrator describes his initial fascination with the Big Apple upon his arrival and then his rapid disillusionment after taking up residence in Gotham.  Particularly interesting was Lovecraft's idea that New Yorkers lack a sense of history, that changes to the city erase earlier achievements and characteristics rather than building upon them as one builds upon a foundation: 

...this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life.

I guess this is the sort of criticism of Americans we can expect from a self-described conservative like Lovecraft, that Americans are deracinated and obsessed with the self and progress and so have no use for the past, see the past as something to be escaped or overcome or just ignored and forgotten.  I'm not sure how seriously we can take Lovecraft on the particulars about New York--while he did spend time in New York, I don't think he ever went to Paris or London, so his comparisons among the three cities must largely be based on stuff he read or heard.  And of course a lot of Lovecraft's criticisms of this sort are animated by the fact that the New York of the 1920s is full of Jews and blacks and Catholics, not just the Dutch and English who founded and then sized New Amsterdam.  Still, a provocative line of thinking, and the idea of New York as a dead thing inhabited by parasites and scavengers a powerful image, making for compelling reading.

The narrator spends his time searching New York for streets whose buildings are all old, streets where there are no foreigners.  He is accosted by a man who, apparently, has a similar avocation, and this taciturn guy leads the narrator on a curious maze-like journey through old neighborhoods where they see no people, an odyssey that includes a climb over a brick wall and a long stretch of crawling through some kind of low tunnel.  Finally, the man brings the narrator to an 18th-century house in a walled yard and doffs his cloak to reveal he wears 18th-century costume.  Emaciated and ancient, he claims to be an antiquarian who affects the dress of two centuries ago, and to have at his command the magic learned by an ancestor who lived in this house when it was built, magic his ancestor learned in England and France and from the local Indians.  With this magic he is able to show the narrator, through a window, the New York of the past, and, horrifyingly, the New York of the future, a future of dizzyingly tall towers, flying machines, and "yellow, squint-eyed people...dancing insanely to...ceaseless dirges...."  The narrator cries out in fear at the nightmare fate which awaits NYC, summoning the ghosts of the Indians who once dwelt here and were murdered by the 18th-century wizard.  The strange old antiquarian is surely in fact that very wizard, and the Native ghosts carry him off as he finally decays as he should have decayed way back in colonial times.  The house collapses and the narrator barely escapes being crushed under it, falling unconscious from wounds he suffers on the way out.

(Today's stories are all about decaying bodies and/or collapsing buildings--change in Lovecraft is always for the worse.)  

A solid piece of work that exploits our fears of the future and of foreigners, our all too appropriate expectation that our culture and way of life are going to be swept away and forgotten and we will be replaced by people who are incomprehensible to us and, perhaps, evil and disgusting.

After its debut in Weird Tales alongside a rarely reprinted Edmond Hamilton serial we can look forward to reading soon and reprinted work by Shelly and Poe, "He" has been included in some attractive anthologies, like Donald A. Wollheim's Terror in the Modern Vein and various European volumes.

Wollheim included in Terror in the Modern Vein his own story of New York disillusionment, 
"The Rag Thing," and Robert Heinlein's story of discovering the horrible reality behind
apparent reality, "They"

"The Horror at Red Hook" (1927)

I don't think I had read "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family," "The Festival," or "He" before today, but I am confident I read "The Horror at Red Hook" when I lived in New York, over ten years ago.   I don't remember it very well, so it may hold surprises for me.

In Chapter I, we are introduced to Malone, a New York police detective with "the Celt's far vision of weird and hidden things" who is living in Rhode Island after a terrible experience in Brooklyn left him with deep psychological wounds.  He was in some kind of raid in which a collapsing building killed many of his comrades, and the general public thinks that this disaster is what has led to his mental illness.  In fact, he witnessed "a horror of houses and blocks and cities leprous and cancerous with evil dragged from elder worlds," but is canny enough to know nobody will believe his story so he keeps it to himself.

The narrative shifts backwards in time in Chapter II, and we learn a little more about Malone, a smart guy who has always been interested in the occult, in the evil that lurks beneath the surface, has read books about witches and has his own theories about human behavior and human history.  We also learn about Red Hook, where Malone is stationed, a decayed Brooklyn neighborhood inhabited by blacks, Italians, Syrians and "Spaniards," many of them up to no good or just hanging around, likely, Malone theorizes, even long before he comes face to face with the terrible truth, "heirs of some shocking and primordial tradition; the sharers of debased and broken scraps from cults and ceremonies older than mankind."  

Chapter III introduces us to Suydam, a fat old Dutchman with a nice house and huge library of books on the occult in Flatbush.  This guy has been spending a lot of time in Red Hook, hanging around with groups of "swarthy" people and making strange comments about "unlimited powers" he is striving to acquire.  He was also wasting all his money importing from Europe rare books on strange topics and acquiring buildings in Red Hook where are housed throngs of dark foreigners.  His relatives want him declared insane, but fail in their legal efforts, as before the judge Suydam appears normal; the local and Federal police, however, keep an eye on Suydam as the man's many contacts in Red Hook are among the worst criminals in the area, thieves and importers of illegal immigrants.  Malone is assigned the job of leading the investigation and effort to round up the undocumented Near Eastern weirdos--Kurdish Yezidis said to worship the devil--with which Suydam's swarthy cronies are populating Red Hook.

    

Chapter IV covers Malone's investigation and developments in Suydam's life.  Suydam's appearance, behavior, health and finances improve, his white hair even regaining its original youthful color, and he wins over the relatives who previously thought him mad.  The Dutchman spends more time at home in Flatbush, even has the place renovated and becomes more social than ever before in his life--he even gets engaged!  Meanwhile, Malone and his comrades are able to get into some of the Red Hook houses where Suydam's Kurdish and other non-white cronies have been living, discovering strange, sinister, inscriptions in esoteric tongues on the walls.  

Chapter V tells of the death of Suydam and his new wife on the Europe-bound ocean liner just after their wedding.  Some kind of animal or monster, only glimpsed by a member of the crew before it vanished out a porthole, massacres the newlyweds, and almost immediately afterwards a boarding party of Arabs and other strange characters from a tramp steamer take custody of Suydam's mangled body.

At the same time Suydam is killed and his carcass carried off, in Red Hook there is a big excitement described in Chapter VI.  Some little white boys with blue eyes have disappeared from Gowanus and the local Scandinavians are forming a mob to invade Red Hook to try to rescue them, so the police raid suspicious buildings in Red Hook to forestall civil unrest.  The cops interrupt some kind of elaborate ceremony, and, in one of Suydam's buildings, Malone has an impossible experience he'd like to chalk up to a dream or hallucination.  A wind that seems alive sucks him into a subterranean world of vast chambers and shores upon dark seas where he sees monsters of all shapes and sizes and witnesses a perverted marriage ceremony which culminates in the mutilated corpse of Suydam, again obese and white-haired and impossibly and frantically alive, flees a horde of monsters.

Like the protagonists of "The Festival" and "He," after his glimpse of the horrible reality behind our complacent reality, Malone falls unconscious and is awoken by rescuers.  The buildings the cops raided collapsed on him and his comrades, killing many of the police and most of the captured worshippers.  Chapter VII, the denouement, describes how tunnels were discovered leading from Suydam's Flatbush house to various locales and the authorities chalk it all up to an illegal immigrant smuggling operation.  But Malone knows better, that the Suydam affair is connected to evil from beyond space and time that threatens to overwhelm our universe, and we readers are assured that the evil traditions practiced in Red Hook continue to this day.

"The Horror at Red Hook" is a good horror story that leaves behind all the fun (or boring, to some) architecture and history talk we see in "The Festival" and "He" and serves up a double helping of racial essentialism and race hatred, romanticizing Celts ("sensitive") and Scandinavians ("Vikings"), dismissing Southern Europeans slightingly, and depicting Arabs, Asians and blacks as disgusting and alien ("the leader of the visiting mariners, an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth..."; "Their [the Yezidi Kurds'] squat figures and characteristic squinting physiognomies, grotesquely combined with flashy American clothing, appeared more and more numerously among the loafers and nomad gangsters of the Borough Hall section....")  The horror of "He" I feel is more rational and historically grounded, depicting the white man displacing the natives of the New World while appropriating the native's wisdom, and then being displaced in turn by the Oriental who, presumably, took advantage of Western advances in science and technology to build his super city and armada of aircraft, while the horror in "The Horror at Red Hook" is based simply on disgust at the appearance and alleged behavior of nonwhites.  Still effective, but less thought-provoking, visceral rather than intellectual, the horror of seeing something gross under a rock, not the horror of considering where your society is heading.

"The Horror at Red Hook" received immediate recognition, being included in the 1927 British anthology edited by Christine Campbell Thompson, You'll Need a Night Light and the 1928 American anthology Not At Night! edited by Herbert Asbury.

**********

I like all these stories, and I think they are a good example of what Lovecraft, at least in his early work, is all about, and for personal reasons I think "He" is my favorite.  And stories about a changing New York and about illegal immigrants may resonate with readers today.  So of course I recommend you read these stories, though be careful not to start including words like "squint-eyed" and "negroid" in casual conversation.

I'm putting my copy of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales back on the shelf but pulling down The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, so brace yourself for more Lovecraft material when next we meet here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and, in the meantime, just accept the world as it appears and don't go digging into caves and caverns and sewers trying to unearth the real truth--you'll be better off.

C. M. Eddy, Jr.: "With Weapons of Stone," "Arhl-a of the Caves" and "The Better Choice"

During a period in 1924 and 1925, many stories in Weird Tales bore a heading
that tightly integrated title and illustration in a rectangle as here

Back in 2020 we read four stories H. P. Lovecraft produced in collaboration with C. M. Eddy, Jr.  Today let's read three stories published under Eddy's name in Weird Tales that deal with themes far removed from those we associate with HPL.  Read along with us at these links three:  ONE  TWO  THREE  

"With Weapons of Stone" (1924)

"With Weapons of Stone" debuted in the same December 1924 issue of Weird Tales we were just looking at because we were reading Galen C. Colin's story of a man on a quest to reunite with a love from which he had been parted during the days of the Pharaohs, "The Song Eternal."  (The same issue also prints Frank Belknap Long's story of a guy trying to avoid being overcome by a slithering swarm of cold-blooded creatures, "Death-Waters.") 

"With Weapons of Stone" is a straightforward adventure drama set among a tribe of cave people.  It is time for a young cavewoman, Zo-na, to mate.  This tribe has "progressed from the days when the male, by sheer brute force, took the female of his choice to his cave" and so she can select her own mate, though that choice has to be approved by the tribal elders.  Two men have caught her eye; one is Gra, the son of the chief, and the other is Ra-nor, whom she really does prefer.  Who to choose?  Zo-na comes up with what to me seems a crazy scheme, but the assembled cave men love it--Zo-na announces that she will mate with whichever of these two guys slays the saber-toothed tiger that has been bedeviling the tribe. 

As we might expect of the son of a politician, Gra is pretty corrupt, and, on the day Ra-nor sets out early into the jungle to look for the saber-tooth, Gra, reputedly a great hunter, is just bidin' his time, having breakfast with his dad, the big guy, and carefully looking over his flint and stone equipment.  Then he follows Ra-nor, who has tracked the cat, with the idea of letting Ra-nor fight the monster, said to have the strength of ten men, and then finishing off whichever of the exhausted combatants has survived the struggle.  While Ra-nor lies in ambush for the saber-tooth, nearby Gra himself watches Ra-nor and waits.

Sure enough, when Ra-nor, after suffering some serious wounds, has killed the great cat, Gra sneaks up behind him and reaches back his arm to throw a stone dagger at Ra-nor.  But love wins!  Zo-na, having realized how much she loves Ra-nor, has followed Ra-nor's trail herself, and sees Gra about murder her man, the true victor of the contest!  Zo-na throws her own dagger at Gra, scoring a direct hit on his black heart and killing him instantly!  

"With Weapons of Stone" is an acceptable entertainment, like a chapter out of a Burroughs novel.  It has reappeared a number of times in small press publications, including a 2008 Eddy collection, The Loved Dead and Other Tales, edited by Eddy's grandson Jim Dyer (wow, we encounter filial devotion in real life!) and a 2021 anthology, Prehistoric Adventures, edited by D. M. Ritzlin for his DMR Books.

"Arhl-a of the Caves" (1925)

A footnote at the end of "With Weapons of Stone" promises "another story of prehistoric men by C. M. Eddy, Jr., will appear in the next issue of Weird Tales" and Farnsworth Wright was as good as his word, printing Eddy's "Arhl-a of the Caves" in the January '25 issue.  "Arhl-a of the Caves" reappeared in all the same places "With Weapons of Stone" did, including a 1976 Xeroxed pamphlet that collected Eddy stories, Terror Out of Time.    

Like our previous cave man adventure, "Arhl-a of the Caves" revolves around a love triangle.  It is a tale as old as time, after all.  Arhl-a is a cave woman, and in love with handsome Wagh, but ugly Zurd also desires her, and Zurd has tied her up and carried her off.  Eddy doesn't stint when it comes to describing how Arhl-a's wrists bleed as she tries to escape her bonds or how this prehistoric Lucretia is more than ready to bury her dagger in her own chest before enduring defilement at Zurd's hands--something for all you violence against women fans.  Later, Eddy dwells on Arhl-a taking a bath naked in the ocean and then laying nude on the beach.  All this would be more compelling in a movie than on the page, but I guess in 1925 (and maybe in 2026 if you are 12) it was sort of titillating. 

Arhl-a manages to get out of her bonds when Zurd isn't looking and she kills Zurd with her dagger when he comes for her, animated by lust--somehow Zurd forgot to search Arhl-a at some point between capturing her yesterday and finally deciding to rape her today.  This means that when Wagh follows Zurd's trail to the kidnapper's hideout, he doesn't find Arhl-a, just Zurd's corpse.  So then he has to follow Arhl-a's trail.  Wagh catches up to Arhl-a just as she is attacked by a huge ape; he kills the ape and the lovers are reunited.

"Arhl-a of the Caves" is well-written enough on a line-by-line basis; all the descriptions of tracking and cooking food and all that as well as the fear and anger of the three characters are conveyed in an entertaining manner, but the plot is so very basic that the story is like a fragment of a longer work.  It's like the pre-credit sequence of a James Bond movie.  We're calling this one barely acceptable.    

"The Better Choice" (1925)

"The Better Choice" is a more serious and ambitious story than the previous two cave men stories, but it is not very satisfying as it doesn't really hold together logically and what it is trying to accomplish is elusive.  

Scientist John Castle has invented a means of reviving the dead.  He has tested his technique on scores of animals.  Now comes the ultimate test--on a human being!  Who will be the scientist's guinea pig?  Castle himself!

Castle has all ready a drug of his own devising that will kill him while leaving no evidence he committed suicide--this is so his wife will get his life insurance, should the technique fail on a human.  And he has prepared his life-reviving gas in its machine, the operation of which involves pumping the gas into the dead animal or person's nostrils and mouth.  Castle has left a note for his lifelong friend, businessman Montague White, explaining how to revive Castle when White finds his pal's dead body.  I didn't really understand why Castle didn't brief White in person, why he insisted on keeping his experiments a secret even from the man he expected to put his new technique into operation for the first time on a human being.  As for the note, won't it be solid evidence that Castle committed suicide?  I guess White will be expected to destroy the note if the revival technique fails.

Castle takes the pill and dies.  In his astral body he flies around, through walls and so forth, looking down at his beloved wife and adorable kids asleep in their rooms.  Then an astral being appears, to guide Castle to the afterlife.  (Eddy avoids terms a religious person might use, like "God" or "soul" or "angel" or "Heaven.")  Castle speculates about what he will tell people about his astral experiences when he is alive again soon, but the guiding entity gently scoffs at the scientist's expectations, implying that other scientists before Castle have tried just such a stunt--reviving the dead--and failed and he is just the latest.  The thought of missing out on life with his wife and kids leads Castle to beg the being for another twenty years of life.  It is sort of implied that "the great All-Power that ruled the universe" has decided that Castle is to die on this day, but the guide entity gives Castle a chance to see what the next twenty years will be like if he in fact does return to life.

Castle wakes up, the poison having apparently failed to kill him.  He remembers all that jazz about astral flight and a guide spirit but thinks it was a dream.  He abandons all scientific work, keeping his revival experiments a secret, and goes into business with his best friend, White.  But he and White soon  quarrel and become rivals.  Castle becomes a very successful businessman by being ruthless and crushing all sorts of people.  But then his business goes sour, and, twenty years after he abandoned science, he is financially ruined.  He blames White, who is apparently behind the businesses that are putting Castle out of business.  Eddy leaves all this business stuff absolutely opaque, offering no clue what Castle and White argued over or what business they are in or anything like that, presenting us a view of the business world that is like a caricature of what commies think private enterprise is all about:

...for every dollar he made an enemy.  Merciless, showing no quarter, he crushed his victims with as little compunction as a thoughtless boy smashes a tiny ant....Now the tables were turned.  Now he was the fly, his enemies the spiders.... 

Driven insane by his impending financial defeat, Castle goes to White's office and shoots his old chum dead.  Eddy puts a lot of effort into describing Castle, his wits recovered, in prison, moaning over how he has ruined the lives of his wife and kids by murdering White, wishing he had died twenty years ago, etc., and then being convicted in a court of law and hanged.  

After the hanging, Castle is back in outer space with the guiding spirit.  But only briefly.  He is sucked back into to his dead body, which is surrounded by wife and kids, the family doctor (wait, so this guy and Castle's wife must know about the note), and White, who has put the tubes in Castle's dead nose and dead mouth and is about to pump the life-giving gas into him.  Even though he is dead, now that Castle is back in his body he is able to reach up and pull on the tubes that are in his face hard enough to destroy the machine and prevent his revival, as all these people watch.  So, he's committing suicide in front of everybody?  The story ends there, but I guess we have to assume Castle's astral form leaves his body again and goes to the afterlife.  Eddy does not speculate on the reaction of Castle's family and best friend to these incredible events.

This whole thing is ridiculous.  Among many other incongruities, Eddy fails to provide any reason why Castle and White become monsters who hate each other after being nice guys and best pals for decades.  And what is the point of the story, the ideology of the story?  That death is good?  Castle is discouraged from reviving the dead, and encouraged to choose death over life.  Maybe the theme is that you shouldn't defy the decree of fate, but Castle isn't punished for doing so, so the story has no bite and offers no real reason to not defy fate.

Thumbs down for "The Better Choice."  This mess has been reprinted in the aforementioned small press publications Terror Out of Time and The Loved Dead and Other Tales.

Illustrator Andrew Brosnatch seems to have ignored Eddy's
assertion that the guiding spirit is a voice lacking any visible form

**********

Eddy's cave man stories achieve their modest goals and are passable entertainments that, perhaps interestingly, portray women taking the initiative and fighting for the futures and relationships that they want--again we see the stereotype that women in old speculative fiction stories are mere damsels in distress exploded.  Eddy's afterlife story, on the other hand, is a total failure.

More 1920s Weird Tales in our next episode.  Try to keep body and soul together until then, friends!

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

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

"Snake" 

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

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

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

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

"Eyes" 

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

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

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

"The Song Eternal" 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weird Tales Project: 1943

Robert Bloch.  August Derleth.  Henry Kuttner.  Ray Bradbury.  David H. Keller.  Hannes Bok.  Edmond Hamilton.  These are the names we associate with the McIlwraith era of Weird Tales, and these are names that dominate the 1943 issues of WT I have just finished exploring.  As you perhaps know, I have sworn a vow to unnamable powers to read at least one story from every issue of Weird Tales, and have been putting up a post for each complete year for which I have made good on this inexplicable obligation.  So, before a list of links to each of my blog posts about a 1943 Weird Tales story, please find links to posts cataloging my readings for earlier years.  Thank you, and on to 1944!

1923   1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938    1939    1940   1941  1942

January

David H. Keller:                     "Bindings Deluxe"

Robert Bloch:                         "The Eager Dragon"

August Derleth:                      "McElwin's Glass"

Mary Elizabeth Counselman: "Seventh Sister"    

March

Ray Bradbury:   "The Wind"

August Derleth: "No Light for Uncle Henry"

Henry Kuttner:  "Under Your Spell"

Robert Bloch:    "A Bottle of Gin" 

Robert Arthur:   "The Book and the Beast" 

May

J. Schuyler Miller: "John Cawder's Wife"

August Derleth:     "A Wig for Miss DeVore"

Stanton Coblenz:   "The Labyrinth of Glass"

Ray Bradbury:       "The Crowd"  

July

Ray Bradbury:                                                    "The Scythe"

Robert Bloch:                                                     "Yours, Truly--Jack the Ripper"

Otis Adelbert Kline and Frank Belknap Long:  "Return of the Undead" 

September

Fredric Brown:          "The Geezenstacks"

Robert Bloch:            "The Black Barter"

August Derleth:         "Baynter's Imp"

Ralph Milne Farley:  "Wings of Death" 

November

Edmond Hamilton:        "The Valley of the Assassins"

Manly Wade Wellman:  "The Third Cry of Legba"

Ray Bradbury:               "The Ducker"

August Derleth:             "A Thin Gentleman with Gloves"   

Weird Tales, Nov 1943: E Hamilton, M W Wellman, R Bradbury & A Derleth

After today I will have read at least one story (in fact it looks like I will have read at least three stories) from each of the six issues of Weird Tales with a 1943 cover date.  We are making progress in our grand quest to have read something from each issue of Weird Tales, a periodical the life of which spans from 1923 to 2025.  And today may be a red letter day, with stories by blockbuster writer Ray Bradbury, fan fave Manly Wade Wellman, MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton, and Lovecraft correspondent and Arkham House founder August Derleth.  This might be the best issue of Weird Tales from 1943!  You can read along at the internet archive here and find out how this ish of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual stacks up in real time!

"The Valley of the Assassins" by Edmond Hamilton 

Mark Stanton and Bill Bradley are American engineers working to maintain the railway in mountainous northern Iran over which the Western Allies are shipping vital supplies to the Soviet Union so the diabolical Reds can enslave Eastern Europe I mean so Mother Russia can defeat Nazi Germany.  A landslide has blocked the railway, but Stanton and Bradley's hundred-plus Persian laborers have thrown down their tools because they have gotten a sign from The Sons of Murder!  That sign is a peacock tied to a rock.  No doubt the Order of the Assassins, founded ten thousand years ago by a wizard and still active to this day, don't want this railway to operate.  Or so the locals think.  Stanton figures German agents put the bird there.

Stanton uses his automatic to get the Iranian workers back to clearing the railway and Bradley rides off to follow the trail of whoever left that peacock there.  When Bradley returns he has a glazed look on his face and he tries to murder Stanton and the other white person at the worksite!  The young man goes berserk when captured and bound and there is no sign he recognizes his friends.  Is Bradley delirious from some accident or fatigue, as Stanton hopes?  The victim of the some drug-wielding Nazi psychologist, as Stanton fears?  Or have the Assassins stolen the young engineer's soul with their black magic and turned him into a mindless killer, as all the Persians believe?

Their superstitious dread overwhelming them, all but one of the Iranians flees.  Stanton sends the third white man back to Tehran for help, and he and the lone Persian brave enough to remain at his side go out to find whoever warped poor Bradley's mind.  Bradley feels a compulsion to return to his insidious masters, and serves as a guide to them.  The ensorcelled Bradley leads Stanton and his Persian companion into a trap high in the mountains and they are captured by a party of men--some Iranian, some Arab, Turk or Syrian--who do not speak and who bear the same mindless stare and exhibit the same grim determination as the enslaved Bradley.

The zombie-like Assassins take Stanton and friend to a monumental black castle behind which lies a narrow valley of stupendous beauty, full of flowers, glazed-eyed women and screaming peacocks.  In the castle they are dragged before Hasan Sabah, world's foremost expert in the science of the mind!  He has survived many centuries, battled Crusaders, met Marco Polo, tangled with Genghis Khan and Napoleon!  Hasan Sabah hypnotizes Stanton's Persian comrade, making him the latest of his servants, and then announces his plan to transfer his soul from his current old wrinkled body to Stanton's healthy young form!  This is how Hasan Sabah has survived for some many lifetimes!  In Stanton's body he can make sure the Axis powers win the war, which will throw the Middle East into chaos so that he, Hasan Sabah, can take over the Middle East.

In science fiction fashion, Stanton uses quick thinking, trickery, and his knowledge of science to foil Hasan Sabah and save himself, his friends, and the Anglo-American lifeline to Uncle Joe Stalin.  

The ending of "The Valley of the Assassins" is a little weak--the villain, who is a genius thousands of years old, shouldn't have fallen for the trick Hamilton came up with--but not terrible.  Otherwise, "The Valley of the Assassins" is quite good, a fun melodrama.  Hamilton knows just the right amount of detail and description he needs to paint a picture and elicit emotion in the reader without going overboard and becoming boring or confusing, and the action scenes similarly are just long enough and detailed enough to be exciting and get across what is happening to the reader.  (Just recently I was complaining that some of Ted Sturgeon's action scenes, and at times his writing in general, include too much detail and get tangled up in themselves.)  Thumbs up for "The Valley of the Assassins."

Kurt Singer included "The Valley of the Assassins" in his 1972 anthology Ghouls and Ghosts and Helen Hoke eight years later reprinted it in Fear! Fear! Fear!  Our paisans over in Italy had a chance to read Hamilton's story of the fall of Hasan Sabah in the language of Dante in 1987 when "The Valley of the Assassins" served as the title story of an Italian anthology of stories from Weird Tales.

"The Third Cry to Legba" by Manly Wade Wellman

The cover of this issue of Weird Tales advertises "A new mystery series by Manly Wade Wellman" and "The Third Cry to Legba" is the first installment of that series, which isfdb calls the John Thunstone series and lists over a dozen component stories.

Thunstone is a huge strong man who has studied the occult.  We see many such students here at MPorcius Fiction Log; I guess "the occult" is a crowded field, though I never met any such students myself as an undergrad in New Jersey or as a grad student in New York City.  Thunstone is out at a Manhattan night club with a former flame, the blonde and blue-eyed Countess Monteseco.  (Come to think of it, we meet a lot of these blue-eyed blondes here at MPFL as well, don't we?)  When they first met, some years ago, she was just Sharon.  

The act at the club tonight is a reproduction of a voodoo ceremony, a call to the furry god Legba, a dance that climaxes with the scantily clad dancer breaking the neck of a chicken.  Thunstone, a writer who can get into places by saying he is a journalist, talks to the dancer backstage while another big strong man, Thorne, chats up Sharon--Thorne is also a student of the occult, a man who has spent plenty of time in Haiti, which Conan O'Brien tells me is a real beauty spot, but Mike DeWine tells me is literally hell.  Well, opinions will differ.

Thunstone's and Thorne's opinions certainly differ--our guy Thunstone is a crusader against the forces of darkness, while Thorne is a devotee of black magic who hopes to get his mitts on Sharon, Countess Monteseco's inherited wealth to finance some kind of diabolical large-scale project.  (Today's secret word is..."diabolical.")  Thunstone has some powerful friends, and calls in their aid.  He gets the police to close the night club over a fire safety code violation.  In Harlem he consults a black preacher who gives him more info on Legba, citing, among other volumes, Zora Neal Hurston's Tell My Horse; Thunstone and this man of the cloth conclude that the next performance of the call to Legba at the club, the third, might have catastrophic consequences.  And in Midtown he gets from a jeweler an old brooch that he hopes will provide protection from the forces of darkness--he gifts the brooch to Sharon the Countess.

We get a good detective scene in which Thunstone figures out where Thorne lives and busts into his place to look for clues.  Then a decent climactic action scene in which Thunstone interrupts a private performance of the crucial third chicken-sacrificing dance ceremony.

This is a pretty fun story--thumbs up!  I often find detective stuff, following clues and all that, to be a drag, but enjoyed the detection business in "The Third Cry to Legba."  Hopefully the succeeding tales of Thunstone, which I will be reading as they come up in Weird Tales, are as entertaining.  I wonder if Sharon and Thorne will be back.

"The Third Cry to Legba" has been reprinted in Thunstone-centric Wellman collections. 

"The Ducker" by Ray Bradbury

Here we have a rare Bradbury that was not reprinted in an English-language Bradbury collection until our own bizarre and unusual 21st century.  "The Ducker" did pop its head up in a Japanese 1972 collection, a British 1977 anthology edited by Mike Ashley, and a 1989 Italian anthology of pieces from Weird Tales, however.

"The Ducker" is a somewhat silly story, the gimmicks of which remind me a little of that Roberto Benigni movie Life is Beautiful and of that Stephen Spielberg TV episode in which an artist magically drew the landing gear on a stricken B-17 to save himself, stories that inject a little magic and whimsy and child-like wonder into the serious business of the Second World War in the European theater in a way that some might find moving (women were sobbing in the theatre lobby where I saw Life is Beautiful) and others ridiculous or even offensive.  "The Ducker" is a pretty weak story by Bradbury standards, and the use of the gag gets repetitive, so I'm judging "The Ducker" merely acceptable.

Johnny Choir is an 18-year-old who hasn't really grown up--he still has the interests and mentality of an eleven-year-old.  He used to run around with a bunch of kids, playing at war and at being cowboys, an endless series of arguments of the "Bang, you're dead!"  "No, you missed!  Bang, you're dead!" type and somehow basic training as an infantryman in the United States Army has not stopped him from continuing to think of warfare in this childish way.  Johnny gets shipped off to fight in North Africa and when German aircraft strafe his unit, he is among the bursting shells of an artillery barrage, or German machine gunners are trying to hose him down, he is immune because he treats it all like a game, saying "Missed me!" and "I ducked!" and so forth.  To kill German infantrymen he just has to say "Bang! Bang!" and Hans and Fritz just fall over.  It is kind of ludicrous, and Bradbury doesn't just do this stuff once, as a climax or a punch line, but runs these gags multiple times over multiple pages.  In the end, after Johnny has taken a German position single-handed, one of his comrades, Private Smith, says some goop about how God protects children and Johnny still has that protection because he never grew up, and so Smith will endeavor to make sure Johnny never grows up and thus remains safe.  This is a little hard to take, seeing how criminals abuse and murder children all the time and children regularly get killed by bombs during modern warfare.

Ray of course is good at putting sentences together and slinging the similes and metaphors, so reading "The Ducker" isn't painful, but it is not one of finest moments of Waukegan's gift to literature.

"A Thin Gentleman with Gloves" by August Derleth

Of the four authors we are reading today, I probably like Derleth the least; he certainly seems to be the most likely to deliver a half-assed clunker to the editor and get it published.  But maybe today he will put in a stellar performance.  

     

Bellaman is a London barrister almost all of whose clients are dangerous criminals.  But he has one decent client, Potter, and when this honest man dies, Bellaman handles his estate.  The deceased Potter, a student of the occult (of course), left all his money, a considerable sum, to an old girlfriend who hadn't heard from Potter in ages.  Bellaman thinks he can steal some of the inheritance from this woman--diabolical!--but as he goes about this crime, he keeps seeing a strange figure that gives him the creeps.  The man who seems to be following him whenever he misappropriates some of Potter's estate is a very skinny man in gloves, his face somehow always obscured--Bellaman recalls that a similar man always accompanied Potter on the rare occasions when Potter left his abode, a tall thin man who never spoke, whose face nobody can remember.

Bellaman's investigation indicates to us readers something Bellaman himself refuses to believe--Potter, a wizard, raised a former enemy from the dead and bound the corpse to be his familiar.  The living dead slave will be released form servitude and able to rest when Potter's estate is properly disposed of, and so the monster is endeavoring to make sure Bellaman doesn't abuse his office of executor.  The climactic ending in which the monster slays Bellaman and the denouement in which the police find the unusual state of the two bodies, barrister and skeletal corpse, are pretty effective.

"A Thin Gentleman with Gloves" is an obvious, straightforward, traditional horror story, but Derleth does a good job with it, and there are no annoying mistakes (true, there are typos in this WT printing of it, but I can't blame Derleth for that.)  Derleth wrote quite a few of these stories in which a character you are expected not to like suffers a terrible rough justice at the hands of a supernatural entity or phenomena, and sometimes Derleth just seems to think the person should die because he or she is rich or vain or fat or has low intelligence or something, and to me such stories feel vindictive and exploitative.  The guy who gets killed in this story is actually a thief who is robbing a woman and a fraud who is failing to meet his obligations to a client, so I was able to cheer on his destruction.    

I can mildly recommend "A Thin Gentleman with Gloves."  The adventure of Bellaman the fraudulent attorney was included in the Derleth collection Something Near, an anthology Derleth edited, When Evil Wakes, and an anthology edited by Mary Danby, Realms of Darkness, that has an introduction by beloved thespian Christopher Lee.  Followers of my sadly defunct Twitter feed may recall that I recently purchased at an antiques mall the NECA Christopher Lee as Dracula action figure.

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Let's pretend we are good at math and score the six 1943 issues of Weird Tales based on what I felt about the three or four stories I read from each.  The January ish had two stories I liked (+2), one I thought acceptable (0), and one I didn't like (-1), so January has 1 point.  Grading the rest similarly, we get this list:

Jan:   1

Mar:  1

May: 0

July:  2

Sep:   0

Nov:  3

So, my hopes that this November issue of Weird Tales was the best 1943 issue have been fulfilled!  Good news for once!  We've wrapped up this stage in our weird journey from 1923 to 2025 with a bang.

More Weird Tales next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log--cross your fingers in hopes the next batch of stories we read will be as good as today's collection.

Weird Tales, Sept '43: R Bloch, A Derleth and R M Farley

It's time for another trip to the dark and dangerous world that is Weird Tales, the essential pulp magazine, edited, from 1940 to 1954, by Dorothy McIlwraith.  Today, the September 1943 issue.  We've looked into this issue already to admire "Fredric Brown's story "The Geezenstacks" and a Hannes Bok illustration.  But it is stories by Robert Bloch, August Derleth, and Ralph Milne Farley that bring us to WT's pages today.  Feel free to read along at the scan of the World War II-era magazine that I will be reading, which you can find at this link. 

"Black Barter" by Robert Bloch

"Black Barter" is a sequel to November of 1942's "Nursemaid to Nightmares," a story I called "an absolute waste of time."  I counted, and saw that "Black Barter" filled 20 pages of Ms. McIlwraith's magazine.  Then I gritted my teeth and forged ahead.  "Unto the breach once more, dear friends...."

Our narrator, in the earlier story, was hired by an eccentric hobbyist to look after his collection of mythical and supernatural individuals--a vampire, a werewolf, a mermaid, and the rest.  Then the eccentric collected a Medusa and it turned everybody to stone (except the narrator.)  As "Black Barter" begins, the narrator is missing his charges and his employer and hopes to someday figure out how to get them reanimated.  A witch, an old friend of the collector, comes to visit.  We get lots of lame jokes and silly interplay as the narrator tries to convince the witch to summon a demon to reanimate his friends.  Part of his strategy is to get the witch drunk, but when she performs the black mass to summon the demon she botches it and gets a substandard demon.  The narrator cuts a deal with the demon, and he reanimates the statues, but puts the wrong soul in each body--the mermaid's body is animated by the centaur's soul, etc.  These are the kind of jokes you get on Gilligan's Island and The Flintstones, but we like those shows because we already like the actors and/or characters and so care what happens to them--of course the characters in this story are interchangeable and forgettable.  Somehow the mermaid's soul gets stuck in a wax dummy the witch is using as a 1:1 scale voodoo doll.  Here I provide an example of the wordplay that Bloch engages in on almost every line.

“Nevertheless, the window dummy is mine. It’s my poppet, and I shall pop off with it.”

“Go fly your broomstick,” shrilled Trina the mermaid. “And don’t call me a dummy, you Halloween hag!”

Five or ten pages of this would be a waste of time, and here we have twenty.  And yet, "Black Barter," while bad, is better than "Nursemaid to Nightmares," because whereas its predecessor was an almost plot-free series of gags, "Black Barter" has a conventional narrative structure in which the protagonist pursues a goal.  The narrator takes the witch on a date, including a harrowing broomstick ride, hoping to seduce her into summoning another demon to rearrange his friends' souls; hijinks ensue when the jealous mermaid and all the other monsters try to chaperone the date, and everybody ends up in front of a judge at night court, rehashing the plot to the incredulous magistrate (this kind of thing also happens in The Flintstones) who orders the witch to summon the demon to put everybody back in the correct body--the wily sorceress double crosses our cast, leaving all the weirdos once again inanimate statues and the narrator all alone (as in an episode of Gilligan's Island, at the end of the story the characters are all back at square one.)   

A step up, but still way down in the basement.  Thumbs down.

"Nursemaid to Nightmares" and "Black Barter" were reprinted together in a 1955 issue of the magazine Imaginative Tales and in the Bloch collection Dragons and Nightmares; Dragons and Nightmares also reprints "The Eager Dragon," another Bloch joke story I have denounced here at MPorcius Bitch Blog, and "A Good Knight's Work," a 1941 story that debuted in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown which I expect I will be grousing about here some day.

This is how you sell garbage stories, in America, in Germany, and beyond

"Baynter's Imp" by August Derleth

Cyril Baynter is a fat, vain, lazy rich man whose wealth was inherited from his grandfather, a lumber baron who made a pile  devastating the environment.  Baynter is "a great hand with the ladies," thanks to his wealth, but one woman, the beautiful Belle Fassett, has given him the cold shoulder; she is instead interested in Bert Trayle.  By chance, Baynter acquires an old vessel, a sealed carafe, with warnings in Greek and Latin inscribed upon it; after he opens it, it becomes evident a supernatural entity has been released.  This imp reads Baynter's mind, sees his desires, and has Trayle killed in an accident and then Belle Fasset's father similarly killed, clearing a path for Baynter to marry Miss Fassett.  But Baynter worries about the imp--if he marries Belle and Belle finds out about the imp she will leave him or figure out what happened to her father and previous beau or something like that.  So Baynter tries to seal the imp back up in the bottle, but the imp reads his mind and turns the tables on him--Baynter is entombed in the bottle more or less forever, and the imp takes his form and marries Belle Fassett and lives happily ever after.

This is an acceptable filler piece, written in a somewhat but not quite obnoxiously sarcastic style; no big deal, but better than some of the junk Derleth banged out on the old typewriter (according to David Drake, a huge Olivetti) to help fill up the pages of Weird Tales.  "Baynter's Imp" would go on to be included not only in Derleth collections but the anthologies Alone By Night (1962) and 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories (1994).

"Wings of Death" by Ralph Milne Farley

Remember when I defended Farley from a scurrilous attack by one Isaac Asimov?  I was contending with giants in those days!  I would go on to praise Farley's story about a gangster who integrates cloning into his criminal enterprises.  I even gave a mildly positive review to Farley's story about a guy being sent back in time by a Hindu swami to strangle a young Hitler!  Let's hope I can champion Farley today; at least "Wings of Death" is a good title.  (Remember how much I loved H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald's "Winged Death"?  I was consorting with giants in those days!)  Plus, here in Weird Tales "Wings of Death" is accompanied by a decent illustration by Weird Tales veteran Margaret Brundage.

"Wings of Death" is a little long and a little convoluted, with too many twists and turns that I feel don't really accomplish anything and plot elements that are not quite believable, but not bad.  We're judging it acceptable.

Our narrator is a reporter, who is interviewing Ames, a New England business guy who inherited a fleet of ships, as he lounges poolside with his wife, both of them in skimpy swimwear.  Mrs. Ames suggests her husband tell the journalo the story of the sacred flies of Malea, and most of the text is a third-person account of Ames' wild adventure in the South Pacific.

Ames' father had a lot of business in the Pacific, and when Ames was a kid took him to an uncharted island only he knew about, Malea.  Ames senior was pals with the head of the tribe on the island, but not the priest, a skeletal old guy.  Ames junior made friends with the chief's son, Tamu.  These two kids realized that the tribe's religion was a load of crap.  The island of  Malea is infested with big flies, flies as big or bigger than wasps, which the tribesmen considered gods.  The flies emerge from a slimy pool that writhes with maggots.  According to the local religion, this is the pool of life, and if it were to expire, all life on Earth would die.  So, the tribespeople toss food--including human sacrifices--in the maggot pool all the time, and it is forbidden to kill any of the flies, even though they bite people.

Young Ames is hanging with Tamu one day when a fly bites him and he kills it by reflex.  When Tamu sees his white friend isn't immediately struck dead, he realizes his religion is a sham--no biggie, Tamu didn't like the sinister head priest, anyway.  The boys agree to, one day, maybe when Tamu is chief, to destroy the fake religion.

Ames didn't return to Malea until he was an adult, after his dad died.  He and Tamu have kept up a correspondence over the years, and get along well, and Tamu's sister has grown up to be very attractive.  When Ames talks about how hot this girl is, the reporter is a little surprised to see the businessman saying this stuff around his wife, whom the narrator takes to be a typical Bostonian.  Anyway, there is a whole complicated thing with a member of the ship's crew killing a fly and the priest witnessing it and sentencing the sailor to death and Ames coming up with a crazy plan to save the man and destroy the pool, a plan that miscarries at first.  At the same time, the annual Mating Dance comes up, a ceremony that imitates the mating practices of the flies.  The marriageable women dance around a fire, and pick men out of the crowd to dance with them--if nobody objects, they become man and wife.  But men in the audience are permitted to object, and then the two men fight.  Tamu has to fight some guy to get his girl, and Ames similarly fights to get Tamu's sister.  Tamu's sister is then instrumental in conceiving and accomplishing a back up plan to save the sailor and Ames and to discredit the local religion.  As we see quite often in these old genre stories, a woman takes initiative and puts herself at risk to resolve the plot, making me think "Wings of Death" has feminist elements, but since she performs this heroic deed to save her man and because the story fails the Bosporus test, I doubt academic feminists would appreciate the feminist aspects of the story.         

The twist at the end of the story is that Ames's wife is Tamu's sister.  I found it a little hard to believe that the reporter would have a conversation with a South Sea Islander in a swimsuit who learned English as an adult and mistake her for a "typically Bostonian wife."  This and some other needless complications and hard-to-swallow elements mean I can't really say "Wings of Death" is good, but it certainly falls in the acceptable range.

It looks like "Wings of Death" has never been reprinted, so I am one of the relatively few people to have read it--I guess you are one of the rather small number of people to have ever heard of it.  We dig deep here at MPorcius Fiction Log!

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Probably the high point of this issue of Weird Tales is "The Geezenstacks," but Derleth's and Farley's contributions are not shameful.  As for the Bloch, we'll sweep that one under the magic carpet.  Maybe the next issue, which features Edmond Hamilton, Manly Wade Wellman, and Ray Bradbury, will be a little better.  Fingers crossed!