Harlan Ellison: "Nothing for My Noon Meal," "O Ye of Little Faith" & "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" (redux!)

Let's take a break from Weird Tales and read three stories from my autographed paperback copy of Harlan Ellison's 1971 collection Alone Against Tomorrow.  (According to the copyright page, mine is a Fifth Printing from 1979.)  I won't wear gloves, but I will hit the soap and water before handling this holy relic touched by the very hands of science fiction's bad boy.  We've already read a bunch of stories that appear in this book--see these links:

LINK THE FIRST
LINK THE SECOND 

If you don't want to risk soiling your own copy of Alone Against Tomorrow by taking it out of the locked and climate-controlled glass case in which you keep your Harlan Ellison collection, you should be able to find these stories somewhere or other online.  Here are some links to give you a head start:

Hardcover 

Paperback

"Nothing for My Noon Meal" (1958)

Nebula Science Fiction was a British (the wikipedia article stresses that it was specifically Scottish) magazine that was published between 1952 and 1959.  There was a US edition offered in '58 and '59.  The wikipedia article includes quotes from Ken Bulmer, E. C. Tubb, and Brian Aldiss praising the magazine, and editor Peter Hamilton, to the skies.  "Nothing For My Noon Meal" debuted in Nebula, and appeared in both the British and American editions.

"Nothing for My Noon Meal" is a decent traditional science fiction story with space suits and space ships and all that, with the kind of high emotion and tragedy and alienation we expect from Ellison, but Ellison doesn't overdo it as he sometimes does--this story doesn't feel like Ellison is yelling and it doesn't feel like he's belaboring his points.  I can mildly recommend "Nothing for My Noon Meal."

Our narrator is a "poor space bum" who, I suppose, lives by exploring and mining new planets and that sort of thing.  He gets married and he and his wife approach a small planet with a strange day and night cycle, the result of the planet orbiting far from its star and having two moons that often eclipse the star, so that this planet experiences months and months of darkness at a time.

Approaching the planet there is a disaster and the ship falls apart.  The narrator is in the forward portion of the ship, which can serve as an escape pod or lifeboat (Ellison uses the word "hutch") but his wife is back in the galley getting coffee and so when the ship is wrecked she dies but he survives to land on the planet.  On the planet he discovers, accidentally, that the only living thing on the planet, a sort of flower, subsists on nitrogen and expels oxygen.  So there will be enough oxygen for him to survive, at least as long as the flowers are in bloom.  One of the story's plot elements is that the flowers seem to die off, but we eventually learn that they are just retracting into the surface and will be back.  Ellison's botany is a little all over the place; early in the story the flowers are described as "strange plants that sucked nitrogen from the thin atmosphere, circulated it and cast it back out as oxygen," but then at the end we are told that the flowers, feared dead, "had merely gone down to replenish their own oxygen supply from the planet itself...."  Well, whatever; Ellison doesn't have some kind of science or engineering training like Asimov or Anderson or Heinlein or one of those guys, and we don't expect the focus of his work to be actual science.

Exposure to the planet has a strange effect on the narrator--he grows a thing like a goiter on his face, a sac, that can store oxygen and which distorts his face so he looks like some kind of monster.  This is the first instance in real life of a mutation taking immediate effect instead of having to be passed on via heredity to an organism's offspring.

Our guy survives on this little planet for some months, and then an Earth ship arrives.  While the narrator is an old space bum with an old ship who has endured a tragedy that has often made him question whether or not he should continue living, the three people arriving on the ship, a brand new fancy shiny one, are young scientists full of energy and hope--Ellison really pushes the alienation theme here.  The three scientists want to bring the narrator back to Earth to study--Earth is in trouble because of overpopulation, thanks to antiaging drugs and a Christian lobby that is preventing the adoption of "really effective birth control laws," and maybe learning how to mutate people in their own lifetimes will help somehow.  But our guy, with his hideous face, doesn't want to live among normal people, and, besides, he can hear his dead wife's voice--she is floating in space, orbiting this planet, and doesn't want him to leave.  So he convinces the three scientists that they should send people to study him while he is here on this little world.  Maybe we should compare this story to the H. G. Wells story we just read, "A Dream of Armageddon," in which a guy has a one-of-a-kind contribution to the troubled world that only he can make and he refuses to make it because he would rather spend time with a woman he loves. 

I don't think "Nothing for My Noon Meal" has ever been anthologized, but of course it has been reprinted in the multiple editions of multiple Ellison collections, including Ellison Wonderland, which in 2015 appeared behind an embarrassingly lame and instantly dated try-hard I'm-a-phony-rebel cover with sickening colors that I can barely believe was actually sold to people instead of thrown in the garbage.  Disgusting.  In comparison, Bob Pepper's 1974 cover looks like a towering achievement from an era of awe-inspiring creativity, beauty, sophistication and elegance.

"Harl"?  More like "hurl," amirite?

"O Ye of Little Faith" (1968)

I have in the past noted how closely intertwined are the worlds of SF and that of men's adult magazines, and today we note that "O Ye of Little Faith" saw print in the magazine Knight the same year it appeared in the Ellison collection Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled.  Our pal Harlan is proud of this one--it appears in Harry Harrison's 1971 SF: Author's Choice 3, in which "Thirteen Science Fiction Masters" like Sonya Dorman and David I. Masson "Present, With Commentary, Their Own Favorite Stories."  Let's read the version of the story in my copy of Alone Against Tomorrow and then Ellison's commentary in the Harrison anthology, which will be easy for you cybersleuths to find online.

"O Ye of Little Faith" starts off with a dream-like action sequence that makes me wonder how Ellison got a reputation as a good writer.  Here's a sample sentence that seems to have all kinds of grammar issues (I'm not going to put all those "[sic]"s in there): 

The tips of his fingers skinned away from friction, and the pain was excruciating, for a long moment, but was lost in an instant as the shriek tore from his throat and he plunged, hitting painfully with his shoulders and the back of his neck that threatened to snap his spine, down into a depth of water black and viscuous and bottomless that closed over him, filled his mouth with foulness, blind, dragged into the grave-chill body of a moist lover terrible in her possessiveness, jealousy and need.

Maybe this sentence is full of printer's errors and typos?  Anyway, the action sequence stinks; not only is it poorly written but it feels like a dream sequence so you don't care if our protagonist, Niven, outfights or escapes the centaur or gets out of the arena or out of the tunnel or wherever the hell he is because you expect every painful and confusing paragraph to be followed by "Niven woke up in a cold sweat."

After two pages of this aggravation we learn that Niven was in Mexico on vacation and his centaur-fighting, into-a-pit-falling hallucination began in a soothsayer's shop.  We get one of the lists we so often find in Ellison's work, this one meant to convey to us how crazy Tijuana is, a list of the stuff money can buy in that town, like a ten-year-old boy virgin or the chance to see a sex show involving a dog.  The word "pudenum," in italics, makes an appearance, which I don't run into often in my reading.  Anyway, Niven and his 35-year-old girlfriend were in Tijuana to get her an abortion, and after the procedure she asked him where their relationship was going.  She didn't like his goofy evasive answer so stormed off and he chased her into the soothsayer's shop, where the Mexican oracle told Niven that he was a man without faith and so was damned and so Niven punched out this stooped old man and suddenly found himself in a "bowl" fighting a centaur.

After this flashback we are back to the hallucination.  Niven escapes the foul water and encounters Jesus, Bast, Apollo, and other deities, and realizes that like a god who has lost his worshippers, he failed to give his girlfriend a reason to have faith in him, to believe in him, and so he is lost like those forgotten gods.  Or maybe his girlfriend is like a god and he is like a worshipper who failed to have faith in her and so is lost.  It is a mess.  

This story is a pretentious but weak bit of self-indulgence, Ellison apparently trying to come to grips with his own issues with women and with the psychological pressures of being an atheist, or maybe just trying to mine his relationship problems and hostility to religion for material.  Poorly written and offering no entertainment value and only sham profundity, MPorcius Fiction Log has to give "O Ye of Little Faith" a bitter thumbs down.      

But let's look at Ellison's own commentary on the story in SF: Author's Choice 3, a five-page intro that precedes the nine-page story.  Oh, first I'll note that the text of "O Ye of Little Faith" in SF: Author's Choice 3 seems to have been cleaned up--the sentence I quoted above has somewhat better punctuation and grammar, and the italicized "pudenum" was changed to unitalicized "pudenda."

Ellison tells us that "O Ye of Little Faith" isn't really his favorite of his own stories--that would be either "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes" or "At the Mouse Circus."  Then he relates the story of how, when he was a little boy, a little girl who was a Seventh Day Adventist tried to convert him because she thought Jews committed such crimes as grinding up gentiles to make matzoh and were doomed to hell.  Harlan then tells us he has become very interested in religion, bragging that he is reading Chesterton and Aquinas, and that in his writing he has been trying to come up with a modern pantheon of gods and figure out what happens to gods who are no longer worshipped--"O Ye of Little Faith" is one of those efforts.  Harlan also makes a sex joke that comes off as a dated and kind of creepy non-sequitur:

She may have been correct; I may be doomed, but not because I didn't read The Watchtower. And frankly, I can think of infinitely groovier things to do with little Gentile girls than grinding them up for matzohs.*

*[UPDATE 8/27/2026:  See the comments for an interesting observation on this passage from one of my eagle-eyed readers.]

Then we get the real reason the version of "O Ye of Little Faith" that I read is such a piece of junk--as a stunt, Ellison wrote it in one hour at the 1966 West Coast Science Fantasy Conference after Larry Niven won an hour of his time in a charity auction; one condition of the auction was that Ellison would include the name of the winner of the auction in the story as well as three words chosen by the winner (Niven chose "minotaur," "polyp" and "prognosticator," but in the heat of writing Ellison mixed up "minotaur" and "centaur.")       

    

Finally, Ellison babbles on about how important writers are in our violent world; "writing is a holy chore....a heavy responsibility....none of us who write take it lightly..."  Good grief, Harlan, you just told us you published--in a porn mag--as a completed story a rough draft you made up as you went along that is full of mistakes.

"The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" (1958)

Another porn mag story, "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" appeared in Rogue ten years before "O Ye of Little Faith" was printed in Knight.  This one also appeared in Ellison Wonderland, but I'll illustrate this part of the blog post with covers of The Essential Ellison, in which "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" was also offered to the public.

I felt like I was recognizing this story as I read it, and after I had drafted the below blog post I realized I had in fact read it in 2024 and blogged about it.  Oops.  I think the version I read today in Alone Against Tomorrow is different, however, and that justifies my just posting about "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" again, doesn't it?    

Arthur Fulbright is a "partial clairvoyant," which, in this story at least, means he can see some future events but not others.  He is also a 39-year-old virgin--you know what that means.  Art lived with his mother for like 33 years, and now, six years after her death, he has one of his visions of the future--that the world will end in two weeks.  He decides he'd better lose his virginity while he has the chance.

The story follows his clumsy attempts to date women and then his abortive plan to rape a woman.  Finally, guided by his ability to see the future, he meets a whore in a bar and seals the deal.  She asks for 15 bucks, and after he finishes having sex with her in his house he pays her four thousand dollars.  You might say that his last act on this Earth is to become the world's best tipper.  A moment later Arthur, the prostitute, and the entire world are incinerated.

This is today's most competent story; there are not any goofy blunders and all the characters act in ways that makes sense.  I'm not sure if "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" is today's best story, though, as "Nothing for My Noon Meal" is more creative and has a lot more stuff going on--"The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" is kind of obvious.  Is it better to be ambitious, take risks, and make mistakes, or set modest goals and achieve them?  I can't decide, so I'll just say I can mildly recommend "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" and leave it at that.    

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Two of our stories today are alright, but one of them is so bad it is kind of insulting that Ellison and his editors and publishers saw fit to shovel it at us, like we'd eat anything and enjoy it if it bore the Ellison label.  It shakes your faith in the whole enterprise of publishing, the whole culture of fiction.  

If my memory is to be trusted, and today we have seen it isn't, there are three stories remaining in Alone Against Tomorrow that I have yet to read.  I think I'll wrap up this project in our next post by blogging about "Night Vigil," "Lonelyache," and "Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes."

H. G. Wells: "The Stolen Body," "The Valley of Spiders," and "A Dream of Armageddon"

The October 1925 issue of Weird Tales includes a full page ad heralding the coming appearance in the unique magazine of three stories by the "great English novelist" H. G. Wells.  These are reprints, not new stories, but perhaps "The Stolen Body," "The Valley of Spiders" and "A Dream of Armageddon" were hard to find in 1925 and '26, so maybe their appearance in this American magazine was a big deal.  Nowadays it is easy to find these stories, but I am going to read them in their Weird Tales versions, and you can join me by clicking the links in the previous sentence. 

"The Stolen Body" (1898)

"The Stolen Body," which first appeared in the British magazine The Strand* in 1898, is the cover story of the November 1925 issue of Weird Tales, an issue with a more professional than average looking cover illo for Farnsworth Wright's magazine.  With no sexy woman and no monster and not even some kind of armed foreigner, Andrew Brosnatch's cover looks like it would fit just fine on a mainstream magazine, though I guess there are ghosts or lost souls dimly recognizable in the illustration.

*Having typed this, I am going to have Bryan Ferry's voice in my head all day.

This is a very good story, so thumbs up.  We have a sort of journalistic narrator, a nameless person who has spoken to the two main participants in the drama the story relates and more or less gives the story from their point of view, first one, then the other.

A successful London lawyer, unmarried, spends his free time investigating psychic phenomena.  Before TV, middle-class people had crazy hobbies--if it wasn't for TV, the Cold War world would have witnessed untold numbers of astounding discoveries and horrendous crimes.  Anyway, the particular interest of this lawyer, Bessel, is in transferring thoughts and images from one mind to another.  So Bessel recruits a pal, Vincey, who lives two miles away, to conduct experiments with him.  At specific times, both will sit still in their London apartments and focus with all their mental energies on the other, trying to make psychic contact.  Four or five times nothing happens, but on the fifth or sixth try Vincey actually sees an image of Bessel, but Bessel looks haggard and anxious, like he's in trouble!

Vincey rushes to Bessel's apartment to report success and see if his friend is OK.  Bessel is absent, his room in terrible disorder, and a guy on staff at the apartment house reports bizarre behavior on the part of the lawyer.  The story follows Vincey's efforts to find out what is going on and to help his friend, and then we get the story from the point of view of Bessel.  There are various exciting events and compelling descriptions--Wells is a good writer and everything that happens is fun or disturbing or engrossing. 

In brief, Bessel separated his soul from his body and found himself in a sort of parallel realm inhabited by floating spirits and the souls of mortal men who have gone insane or somehow become detached from their bodies.  From this realm you can see everything going on on the real Earth, easily seeing through walls and floating around effortlessly, but you can't touch anything, and this parallel world is totally silent.  The spirits native to this world watch the world of the living with terrible envy and longing--it is torture for them to see the living going about life, talking and touching and building relationships and so forth, when they are stuck in a realm of silence in which no physical contact is possible.

Because Bessel has left his body, one of these desperate spirits is able to fill the vacancy.  Bessel's body, now controlled by the spirit, runs around London, crying out "Life!" and, in an ecstasy of joy, smashing, breaking, and setting afire property and people.  The disembodied Bessel witnesses the atrocities committed and risks run by his body and feverishly tries to get help from Vincey and other people, but contacting them through the barriers between the worlds is difficult.  After injuring many people and damaging much property, the piratical spirit sends Bessel's body falling down a deep hole at a construction site where nobody will think to look for him, shattering multiple bones in the process.  Bessel's body will die down there if nobody finds it soon!  Luckily, Bessel is able to contact his friend via a medium and his body is rescued, and is able to regain possession when the occupying spirit, unable to stand the pain of living in a broken body suffering dehydration and starvation, vacates the premises.

A very good story told in an understated but quite effective style.  Wells is one of those big names that deserves his high reputation and is also accessible to ordinary readers.  A good acquisition by Wright.  "The Stolen Body" has been reprinted in many Wells collections and several anthologies.

"The Valley of Spiders" (1903)

This one debuted in Pearson's Magazine, and I think this link will take you to a scan of "The Valley of Spiders" as it appeared in that periodical 123 year ago.  There are multiple illustrations, so maybe worth your time.  I am reading the December 1925 Weird Tales printing--this issue has a good sex and violence cover, with a nude blonde in the coils of a huge snake and a man with a big heavy rune-inscribed sword facing her--is she the snake's victim or is she in league with the legless abomination?  A delectable slice of classic Weird Tales insanity.

(We just read the Frank Belknap Long story from this ish, "The Sea Thing.")

Three men are in pursuit of someone, and ride into a queer valley.  Wells is cagey about who these men are and who their quarry is, giving us hints in dribs and drabs, not letting us settle into hoping these men catch those they pursue or hoping they are evaded.  We also don't know where they are, even what continent, just that they are in a wilderness where no people and few animals seem to live.  

As we learn that the leader of the party is wealthy and everybody is afraid to defy him, we readers,  aware that Wells is a socialist, begin to suspect this leader is the villain of the piece and the spiders of the title are going to kill him.  One of the rich man's companions, silently, raises doubts as to the justice of a society in which some command and others obey.  Maybe this guy, whom Wells calls "the little man," will kill the leader, who is often described as "the master"?  Eventually this leader guy is called not just "master" but "lord," leaving us to wonder if he is a representative of the aristocracy or of the bourgeoisie.  We also learn that the men are pursuing a "half-caste" woman who resisted the leader of the party, but is she fleeing of her own volition in the company of friends or has she been kidnapped or something?  

The spider attack comes, and it is of an unexpected form, Wells unleashing some real creativity on us.  The unusual nature of the monster attack earns "The Valley of Spiders" a thumbs up right there.

In the confusion of the fight, one of the men, the taller and more loyal of the two subordinates, is killed after saving the master's life.  The lord and the skeptic of hierarchy escape the spiders with their lives.  The little man accuses the lord of cowardice, of not helping his faithful subordinate.  A showdown ensues.  Wells does not show the showdown, but in the last part of the story we see that it is the lord who has survived.  

Wells is not presenting here a left-wing wish fulfillment fantasy in which a rich guy gets killed.  Instead, he is offering us left-wing allegory and metaphor--the rich are like venomous spiders!  On the very last page of the story the "master" AKA "lord" is clearly identified with the killer spiders--the valley of spiders is the world!  Realizing the half-caste girl has escaped him, the master resolves to emulate the spiders--"Next time I must spin a web."  But Wells offers advice to those who would overthrow the upper and middle classes.  The spiders' initial attack is effective because the eight-legged predators ride in tumbleweed-like balls of silk, bouncing and gliding at high speed when the wind is strong.  But, when there is no wind, and the balls of silk are broken or still, the spider's ability to suck the blood of others is very limited.  "From the ground without either a wind to carry them or a winding sheet ready, these things, for all their poison, could do him little evil."  Is Wells telling us that the aristocracy and bourgeoisie can only push around the proletariat and peasantry because of their superior wealth and technology, and those advantages only obtain during periods of specific environmental (economic? political?) conditions?

Wells' science fiction and action content are good, and he weaves the political goop in with it quite well, so "Valley of the Spiders" is a good story, even if, like me, you spend every day with your fingers crossed hoping the bourgeoisie can maintain the liberal order in the face of threats posed by socialists and jihadis foreign and domestic.  "The Valley of Spiders" served as the title story for an oft-reprinted Wells collection--among these reprintings is a movie tie-in edition promoting the Joan Collins film Empire of the Ants; "The Valley of Spiders" can also be found in various anthologies.

"A Dream of Armageddon" (1901)

"A Dream of Armageddon" appeared in the March 1926 issue of Weird Tales, an issue with a dearth of fiction by people whose names I recognize.  Frank Belknap Long has a poem about a body of water in a desolate landscape haunted by a sea serpent, and E. Hoffmann Price has a poem about a dark woman who has contempt for her many male admirers.  And then there is the Walt Whitman poem, "Death Carol," in which Whitman addresses death as "Dark Mother" and "Deliveress" and unabashedly, ecstatically, sings her praises.  This issue is a goldmine if your goth band has music written but is in need of some lyrics.

"A Dream of Armageddon" is sixteen pages, and feels kind of long.  It tries to be powerful, tries to move the reader with its depictions of love and loss and its warning that high technology will make war terrible, or I guess more terrible, I mean, Waterloo and Antietam weren't exactly picnics, but "A Dream of Armageddon" is not very successful in getting across its message or in entertaining the reader, as the main story is choked with a lot of superfluous framing impedimenta, and the main character is more of a spectator to the plot than a participant, and the whole thing is pretty repetitive, the same points hammered at again and again, and they aren't even interesting points. 

The first frame consists of our narrator encountering on the train a tired-looking guy who gets on the same car with him.  After what we might jocularly call foreplay, this second guy tells our narrator about his recent vivid dreams in which he was, apparently, projected into the future to live out the tragic ending of the career and life of a major political figure in the high tech future.  I am always skeptical of these stories in which, instead of the author just telling us the adventures of a character, we have to hear that a narrator meets a guy who then relates the adventures of a character, or, that the adventures of the character are in some other milieu that the narrator or protagonist enters while in a dream.  Why not just tell us the character's adventures in the voice of the character or in that old standby the third person omniscient?  Anyway, we get both of these framing devices here and I guess Wells does this to connect his polemical story to real middle-class English life at the end of Victorian era and the start of the 20th century, so it feels less like a fantasy and more like a warning or prophecy that 1901 readers should take seriously.

The future guy in whose body the train passenger found himself in his dreams was a big wig in politics, one of the good guys who was against "the Gang" that is corrupt.  But he left politics to spend time with a beautiful woman on the island of Capri.  Wells describes how beautiful Capri is and how beautiful this girl is in tedious detail, so that while I was reading about the sunlight on boats and the blue green of the water and the architecture of the dance hall I was thinking, "come on, let's get to Armageddon already."  We can see how much of a utopian and an optimist Wells could be when he tells us that the music and dancing of the future will put the music and dancing of the 19th century to shame.   

Anyway, in this first dream, a member of the protagonist's political party begs the protag to return to politics because war may result from the hash the hero's colleagues are making of things in his absence.  But the hero refuses to leave his girl and reenter the dirty game that is politics, saying war is impossible.  But in the second dream it looks like war is in fact likely.  In succeeding dreams war erupts, war involving fleets of aircraft and long range artillery.  I guess a Wells booster would call "A Dream of Armageddon" prophetic, seeing as World War I was all about long range artillery and World War II was all about fleets of aircraft, but this material takes up like one page of this long story and the few details Wells offers don't really predict how war in the air worked out in real life ("They were great driving things shaped like spearheads without a shaft, with a propeller in the place of the shaft....They fired the guns backwards, out of the base of the leaf, so to speak, and rammed with the beak.")  

The protagonist and his girlfriend flee here and there, in and among throngs of fleeing peasants and marching soldiers (this is where Wells is less optimistic, his idea that the Southern Europe of two or three centuries from 1900 would still be inhabited by hordes of peasants) ending up in a picturesque location, the ancient temple complex at Paestum.  I'm guessing Wells chose Capri and Paestum for the dramatic sections of his story because he figured his readers would be familiar with them, that English people of culture and means, the kind of people who could steer society away from mass high tech war, would have been there or known people who had been there and would talk their ears off about them.  Anyway, the girl is killed by a piece of shrapnel when a shell explodes nearby, and the protagonist carries her melodramatically into one of the Greek temples, and, when enemy soldiers try to take the temple, the protag tries to stop them (not by fighting them, just with a demonstration of moral righteousness) and their officer just runs him through the heart with a sword.

His alter ego of the future now dead, the train passenger says he doesn't have those kinds of immersive and memorable dreams any more, just nightmares of large birds fighting.

I'm calling this story barely acceptable, as it is long and boring and it tries too hard (today's other stories made their points and wrung emotion out of the reader more subtly and effectively) and its message is boring and banal and ill-suited to entertainment.  I did a class analysis of "The Valley of Spiders;" let's see if I can do a class analysis of "A Dream of Armageddon."  The future guy is a member of the educated upper-middle class, a guy with tons of money and influence.  We are told again and again that he has the power to prevent the cataclysmic war that ends up laying waste to the world.  But he does not do this good thing--instead he turns his back on politics because he would have to leave the woman to do so.  (One of the problems of Wells' story here is that he doesn't really specify why this guy can't marry this woman or keep her as a mistress while he is up in London or wherever the seat of power is while he is saving the world.)  I am guessing Wells is suggesting that the world will go to hell if middle-class people refuse to keep society in line and instead become preoccupied with their private pleasures.  Perhaps more interesting than the idea that a guy would shirk his responsibilities to the world at large for a dame, which is a big "no shit, Sherlock," is a hint that this successful guy has another reason for not doing what he, and only he, can do to save civilization:

Why, in spite of all, should I go back, go back for all the rest of my days to toil and stress, insults and perpetual dissatisfaction, simply to save hundreds of millions of common people, whom I did not love, whom too often I could do no other than despise, from the stress and, anguish of war and infinite misrule?

The hero of the future world, a man we are told "had been a master man away there in the north, with influence and property and a great reputation," a man who in politics had made of himself "a big man, the sort of man men come to trust in, to group themselves about....Millions of men who had never seen me were ready to do things and risk things because of their confidence in me" despises the common people and basically says "the hell with them" and lets them get mixed up in a war, but then that war kills his girlfriend and himself.  Wells is telling middle-class people that they are in the same boat as the stupid proles, that if they (the middle classes) don't shoulder the burden of leadership and steer society around disasters that they will suffer as much as the workers and peasants when the ship runs aground.

Not a very good story, but perhaps interesting and important if you are curious about fiction as a means of prophecy and as a tool for influencing public opinion.

"A Dream of Armageddon"'s first appearances was in serialization across four issues of the magazine Black and White Budget; you can see the appropriate issues of that magazine, including eight or so illustrations for the story, at these links:

                                                 ONE     TWO    THREE    FOUR

"A Dream of Armageddon" would reappear many times in Wells collections and in a few anthologies like Peter Haining's The Nightmare Reader.

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Wells is a skilled writer with strong points of view, and "The Stolen Body" and "The Valley of Spiders" are quite successful.  "A Dream of Armageddon," maybe not so successful.  An interesting element in  the history of Weird Tales.

E. Hoffmann Price: "The Rajah's Gift," "The Sultan's Jest," and "The Prophet's Grandchildren"

Today we read three 1925 stories by E. Hoffmann Price as part of our exploration of 1920s Weird Tales.  WT first hit the racks in 1923, and we have read at least one story from each of those 1923 issues--click this link for a list of those stories and links to my blog posts about them--and we have done the same for 1924--click this link for an index of Weird Tales stories I have read from that second year of the magazine's long history.  Price was fascinated by the mysterious East, and if the titles are any indication, you've got trips booked to the lands of the Hindus and the Mohammedans today.  Hopefully you've had all your shots.

"The Rajah's Gift"

"The Rajah's Gift" debuted in the same January issue of WT as a bunch of stories we've already read: Frank Belknap Long's stay-out-of-the-water story "The Ocean Leech," C. M. Eddy, Jr.'s perils-of-dating-among-cavemen-caper "Ahrl-a of the Caves," H. P. Lovecraft's don't-go-to-the-family-reunion story "The Festival," and Henry S. Whitehead's don't-cheat-your-undead-clients tale "The Fireplace."  Those stories were full of good advice--what wisdom does E. Hoffman Price have to impart in this story?

It is the 19th century.  Zaid the Persian, as a little boy, twenty years ago, found himself in India, in a principality where the reign of a new rajah was being inaugurated.  Seeing the new rajah astride his elephant, the focal point of a grand procession, Zaid became obsessed with a desire, a fervent dream, to himself some day ride just such an elephant in state in just such a royal parade.

Ten years later, Zaid managed to get himself employed by the rajah he witnessed being honored during his inauguration, and in the ten years since, Zaid has been a loyal, even essential, servant to the rajah, even saving the prince from one of the many assassins that plague court life in this principality.  Today, the Rajah asks Zaid to name a boon so that he might reward his most trusted servant.  Zaid says he wants to ride in state as he saw his master ride that long ago day.  The rajah would rather give Zaid his sexiest slave girl or a pile of money or something like that, because if the people get the idea Zaid is the royal favorite or something, a jealous courtier might assassinate Zaid.  The rajah even locks Zaid in a room with the hottest girl he can find for three days, but afterwards Zaid obsession with riding an elephant in state in a grand procession is as feverish as ever.

Zaid's dream comes true.  As he rides through the streets atop a huge elephant, amid a grand procession, Zaid recalls a bit of ancient wisdom, the idea that the gods will strike down a man who fulfills his dreams, because such a man will become arrogant enough to challenge the gods.  Meanwhile, the rajah is instructing his sharpshooter to snipe Zaid the moment the procession reaches its final destination--the rajah knows that Zaid will never be happy again if he climbs off that elephant, that reverting to mere mortal status after experiencing life as something like a god will be intolerable agony.  

At the end of the parade Zaid topples from the elephant, but who put an end to Zaid, his merciful friend the rajah or the jealous gods?

This is a decent filler story that feels like a fairy tale and is short on events and long on description and verbiage.  Acceptable.  Farnsworth Wright reprinted "The Rajah's Gift" in WT in 1936, and the story of Zaid the Persian has also reappeared in the Price collection Strange Gateways and various anthologies of stories from Weird Tales.

"The Sultan's Jest" 

"The Sultan's Jest" debuted in the September 1925 ish of Weird Tales.  WT would become famed for sporting sexually provocative covers featuring scantily-clad young ladies in imminent danger of death, and this issue I believe bears one of the very first of such covers, and a relatively tame one it is--the victim is fully dressed and the would-be killer is wearing the kind of outfit we see all the time adorning absolutely harmless women at the supermarket in 2026 America.  Behind this prophetic cover are two stories we've already read by leading weirdies, H. P. Lovecraft's "The Temple" and Frank Belknap Long's "The Were-Snake."  Let's check out Price's contribution.

The Sultan is a sadist who loves coming up with fancy tortures and means of execution for criminals.  His favorite among the girls in his harem has been found to be cheating, so he and his wazir sit up all night coming up with some elaborate way to punish the illicit lovers.  (The eunuch who facilitated their meetings is just sewn up in a bag and tossed in the river.)  The court poet, who is buddies with the male half of the pair of doomed lovers, is privy to his masters' sinister brainstorming session and plots to protect the lovers.

This story isn't very good because the punishment inflicted on the lovers, the effort of the poet to help the lovers, and the eventual fate of the sultan, are all convoluted and sort of illogical.  The sultan has his gigantic African executioner pour two goblets for the lovers.  The sultan tells the lovers that one goblet's contents is poison, and the other is not.  The lovers have to choose which of them will drink from which goblet, and each will be put in a separate cell to drink from his or her goblet alone.  The sultan says the punishment of the survivor is living out life feeling guilty for being responsible for killing the other.  

The male lover, in his cell, drinks from his goblet.  The wine is bitter, so he figures it is poison, so he stabs himself to death with a dagger he concealed from his guards--in this way, the woman he loves need not feel guilty that she killed him by giving him the poisoned goblet, as instead he killed himself.  The sultan, standing over the bleeding man who cuckolded him, finds this amusing, and explains why.  The sultan put poison in neither goblet--they were simply filled with a bitter vintage of wine; the sultan's intention was that both man and woman would live out their lives feeling the guilt of having killed the other.  The dying male lover calls the sultan a liar, and the sultan, to prove he is not lying, takes up the goblet and drinks from it.

The twist is that the poet put deadly poison in both the goblets when the African executioner wasn't looking, the poet thinking to spare the lovers the torture that would be life feeling responsible for the other's supposed demise.  So now the lovers and the sultan are all three dead, whereas if the poet had done nothing all three would be alive.

Nobody in this story acts like a person would act in real life, and everybody in this story makes predictions about other individuals' psychology that make no sense.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  The real interesting thing about "The Sultan's Jest" is that it is the second story today in which Price has a character try to help another character of whom he is fond--a young physically healthy person,  by the way--by murdering him.  This is a pretty twisted theme to base multiple stories around.  My young and healthy days are behind me, and I still wouldn't think somebody was doing me a favor by murdering me.

"The Sultan's Jest" has not been reprinted widely, though Stefan Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg, and Robert Weinberg saw fit to include it in 1996's 100 Tiny Tales of Terror.  Recent changes in federal policies mean MPorcius Fiction Log no longer has any interns on staff, but if I still had such interns at my disposal I would set one of the Anglophonic ones to work listing all the stories I have blogged about that appear in any of these Barnes and Noble instant remainder anthologies like 100 Tiny Tales of Terror, 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories, and 100 Creepy Little Creatures--I must have read scores of them at this point, this insane blog being over ten years old and having to live with the guilt of having fathered over 1,500 posts.

"The Prophet's Grandchildren"  

The October 1925 issue of Weird Tales, in which "The Prophet's Grandchildren" first saw print (the only time "The Prophet's Grandchildren" saw print in the language of William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson and James Patterson's ghost writers), has what must be one of the most sophisticated covers of a 1920s issue of the unique magazine, maybe of any issue of WT.  Weird Tales covers often look flat and static, and cover the same basic themes again and again and again, but this one conveys depth and movement and its bizarre and unsettling theme really takes the viewer by surprise.  So, kudos to Andrew Brosnatch for excelling himself and his colleagues on this one.

"The Prophet's Grandchildren" is less than two pages long.  Price presents it as a wacky folk tale that makes little sense that is current among the Muslims of the island of Jolo; Price suggests the people of Jolo are a real fun group,

fierce Moros who with kris and kampilan carve their way to eternal glory through the ranks of the unbeliever. The road to Paradise, they say, is paved with the heads of the infidel; and whoever dies slaying Christians is assured of a seat at the Prophet’s right hand.

This folk tale is an explanation for why Muslims do not eat pork.  In the same way so much fiction we love portrays human beings and dinosaurs living at the same time and battling it out for our amusement, in this folk tale Jesus and Muhammad live at the same time and have divided the world between them and are constantly at odds, each trying to outdo the other.  The episode of their rivalry related in this tale concerns a banquet held by Muhammad; Muhammad invites Jesus to the banquet with the idea of humiliating the Lord of Lords and King of Kings before the assembled Muslims.  Jesus comes, confident he can outwit Muhammad.  Muhammad urges Jesus to perform a miracle to prove he really is who he says he is, but Jesus refuses, saying he doesn't perform miracles just to please crowds.  Then Muhammad tells Jesus that he can prove his power by performing an act of prophecy, which Muhammad figures is a less serious feat that isn't subject to so many use restrictions.  At first Jesus refuses on the same grounds, but eventually Muhammad gets our lord and savior's goat and Jesus agrees to prophesize something. 

Muhammad points to a locked door, and asks Jesus to divine what is in the room behind the door.  Muhammad has put his two grandchildren in the little room, and assumes Jesus will not be able to figure this out.  But Jesus inflicts a blow on the Muslims.  The Nazarene says "When you open that door, you will release two beasts the like of which there are none in the entire world," and when the doors are open two pigs come out--these are the first two pigs to ever trot upon the earth, Jesus having just created a new (delicious) species.

"The Prophet's Grandchildren" is a weak filler piece, and, like "The Sultan's Jest," is pretty convoluted, Price coming up with difficult to credit justifications for portraying Jesus Christ acting totally out of character in a silly fantasy setting.  (Maybe Muhammad is also acting out of character in this story--I mean, he doesn't rape any children or massacre anybody in the story.)  "The Prophet's Grandchildren" is slightly more clever than "The Sultan's Jest," but lacks the melodrama of that story in which many different types of torture and execution are discussed and in which plenty of people get killed.  I think I have to give "The Prophet's Grandchildren" a thumbs down as well.

Our Italian friends in 2019 included a translation of "The Prophet's Grandchildren" in the magazine Zothique, which took as its cover the Kelly Freas painting found on the E. C. Tubb novel Mayenne, which we read like eleven years ago. 

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Not good, I'm afraid, not good.  We won't give up on Price, though--we'll be reading three or four more stories by him from the 1920s, and probably later stories as well.

August 2026 Collection Post

There was a time when I chronicled my purchases at book stores, antique stores, flea markets, etc., on Twitter, but since the pirates of cyberspace seized my X account I have been unable to post on the everything app.  So today I experiment with listing recent additions to my haphazard collections here at the blog.  Click the images to get a closer look, dear reader, and skip ahead to a post on Weird Tales if this is a drag!

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For two bucks I got this Berni Wrightson anthology from 1983, featuring a story about a woman being turned into a cat and an ad for books by Jeff Jones, Chris Foss, J. G. Ballard, Roger Dean, H. Rider Haggard, and other luminaries.  You can read about this comic and learn where the stories included therein first appeared at this link to the Grand Comics Database. 

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I got The Mighty Barbarains for its Steranko cover for only a dollar, and Stanley G. Weinbaum's The New Adam for its Jeff Jones cover; I can't recall for how much, maybe 5 or 6 bucks.  I might read The New Adam some day; as for the sword and sorcery anthology, I've already blogged about three of the included stories, Robert E. Howard's "A Witch Shall Be Born," Henry Kuttner's "Dragon Moon," and Fritz Leiber's "When the Sea King's Away."

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Raise your hand--or beak--if you participated in McDonald's Hello Kitty/Godzilla crossover event.

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I got this reproduction Greek vase for five bucks at a junk shop that mostly had old tools for sale.   

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Finally, we have this severely distressed copy of the Fall 1949 issue of Jungle Stories, edited by Jerome "It's A Good Life" Bixby, for which I parted with three bucks.  It is full of illustrations that remind you how safe and cozy big city life is and hey, maybe I'll read some novelets of Congo terror and dark dramas of jungle menace some day.   

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Maybe I'll do this again next month, or in October, depending on how much stuff I buy in September, and whether I have the energy to do all this resizing and cutting and pasting again, which is kind of tiring.

Weird Tales, July 1925: H P Lovecraft, E H Price & R E Howard

As any sanctioned psyker can tell you, time in the warp can move in unexpected ways, so you shouldn't be surprised that we are looking at the July 1925 issue of Weird Tales after we looked at the August 1925 ish in our last episode.  Anyway, before talking about that August ish, we'd already sampled this July one, reading Henry S. Whitehead's heartwarming tale of a guy's dream girl just landing in his lap without him having to do anything to court her, "The Wonderful Thing."  Maybe today's stories will be more in the thrilling blood-and-guts, politically incorrect foreigners-are-scary, and/or cosmic horror life-is-meaningless-suffering vein that we are used to from Weird Tales.  If you share my skepticism of secondary sources and want to find out for yourself what "The Unnamable" by cosmic horror icon H. P. Lovecraft, "The Stranger from Kurdistan" by real-life adventurer E. Hoffmann Price, and "Spear and Fang" by titan of sword-and-sorcery Robert E. Howard are like, click this link to be whisked away to the internet archive and a scan of the very issue of WT under discussion today.

"The Unnamable" by H. P. Lovecraft 

This seems like one of those Lovecraft stories, like "He," that is semi-autobiographical.  The narrator, whose name is apparently Randolph Carter, is hanging around in a cemetery next to an abandoned house with a friend, shooting the shit.  Carter's pal believes the universe is rational, that science and religion can accurately describe the universe, that nothing is "unnamable," a word that comes up again and again in the story and I guess means to the two men something like "unclassifiable" and "inexplicable" and "incapable of comprehension by the scientific method or within a Christian theological framework."  The narrator is a writer of weird stories who gets published in a magazine called Whispers and argues against the rational man, suggesting, for example, that maybe intangible life forces endure after one has died and these forces can affect places and people.

Carter recently got a story published about a monster child who lived for centuries hidden in a New England town and terrorized the residents by looking in windows and that sort of thing.  In an effort to convince his friend that there are more things in the universe than our philosophy can encompass, Carter describes the sources for his story-- some 18th century diaries that offer hints of the existence of just such a monster, locked in the attic of an abandoned 17th-century house or even escaping confinement to assault people and leave strange wounds upon them, and some bones Carter found, those of a malformed child that he deposited into a tomb.  Carter's punchline is that the house and tomb in question are right here, in view of the two of them.  

Suddenly there are scary sounds and smells and both men are battered unconscious by some sort of attack.  Carter didn't get a good look at their assailant, but when they wake up in the hospital the rational friend admits that he saw the blob monster of no defined shape that attacked them and left upon them wounds like those in the 18th-century accounts Carter read.  The rational friend must admit that this monster was unnamable.

This is a decent horror story with good concepts and images, and is perhaps noteworthy as one of the more jokey Lovecraft stories, the subtle jokes expressing HPL's criticisms and commentaries on regions of this great country of ours, especially New England (though HPL's commentary is not limited to that area) as well as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Cotton Mather.  The rational friend offers literary criticism that Lovecraft presumably disagrees with and is presenting ironically, but which feels like a sincere description of a literary theory, not a spoof or lampoon.  

"The Unnamable" feels like a good story to read to understand what Lovecraft is all about, and unlike some of the man's more famous works, it is pretty brief and to the point.  Thumbs up!

I read "The Unnamable" in my copy of the Corrected Ninth Edition of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales.  "The Unnamable" is one of five Randolph Carter stories by Lovecraft; I've blogged about three now, this one, "The Statement of Randolph Carter," and "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" (co-authored with E. Hoffman Price), leaving "The Silver Key" and "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," which I'll probably get to some day.  "The Unnamable" has been reprinted uncountable times--I'll include in this blog post images from anthologies that include it.

"The Stranger from Kurdistan" by E. Hoffmann Price 

Soldier, orientalist, fencer and boxer Price sets his tale in a ruined city with a tremendous tower at its center.  Tonight, 77 worshippers of the devil are holding a black mass at the base of this tower, and a man in black infiltrates the ceremony.  The ceremony Price describes in detail; the focus of it is a denigration of Christ, a long speech from the Satanic priest listing how Jesus has disappointed his followers, failed to fulfill the promises he made.

The black-clad interloper reveals himself to be the very Satan the 77 and the priest have come to this creepy locale to praise.  The Devil is disappointed in his followers, who are merely mocking Satan's foe, and ludicrously so, as that foe has stymied the Devil for many centuries.  The Satanic priest accuses this figure of being an imposter and the 77 unhappy people who have turned to Satanism because they have been disappointed in their conventional pursuits converge on the stranger to tear him limb from limb, but he really is Satan and (apparently) summons a fire that massacres all of them.

This is more like a little vignette more than a real story, though I suppose it is interesting in that it takes Christianity seriously and that it makes the point that Satanists are not really serious rebels against Christianity and our society; if they are legitimately worshipping Satan they are admitting the reality of Jesus' power and divinity, and if they are just atheists then their whole practice of worshipping the Devil is just childish playacting.  

I guess it is also interesting that the theme of the story is disappointment.  Of the 77, we are told

In the main, the seventy-seven were persons of wealth and distinction, who, having tried and found wanting every field of human endeavor and achievement, had sought thrills in the foulness and degradation of the medieval rites of devil-worship; rakes whose jaded appetites sought satiation in the orgies that followed the celebration of the Black Mass; atheists who, deeming passive atheism an inadequate form of rebellion, found expression in a ritual whose sacrilege satisfied their iconoclastic desires.

The Satanic priest's black sermon, addressed to Christ, is full of stuff like

From the day that the virgin gave thee birth thou hast failed in thy promises; the ages have wept in awaiting thee, mute and fugitive god! Thou wert to redeem mankind, and thou hast failed.... 

And then we have Satan himself, who disavows his followers because they are so lame.

If you have a bad attitude, reject your rightful station, and embrace rebellion for rebellion's sake, you are going to be disappointed and your life is going to be rough and you are going to make some dumb decisions that will kill you before your time or lead to a life of regret.  Traditional wisdom straight from the pages of Weird Tales.  

I'll call "The Stranger from Kurdistan" acceptable.

Just four years later, "The Stranger from Kurdistan" would be reprinted in Weird Tales; apparently it was a big hit with readers.  Does this suggest that 1920s Weird Tales readers had more or less conventional religious and philosophical beliefs?  You can find "The Stranger from Kurdistan" in Price collections and in various anthologies, including Satan-themed anthologies and Darrell Schweitzer's 2025 volume Weird Tales: The Best of the 1920s.  One of these days I will look at the table of contents of Schweitzer's book and see how many of his selections I have read and maybe read some things he recommends that I have skipped. 

"Spear and Fang" by Robert E. Howard 

We recently read some caveman stories by C. M. Eddy, Jr., "With Weapons of Stone" and "Ahrl-a of the Caves," and here is one by the creator of Conan!  Sam Moskowitz, who briefly edited Weird Tales during a 1973-4 revival period, reprinted "Spear and Fang" in the 50th anniversary issue, and you can also find it in a bunch of Howard collections.

Ga-nor is a big tall handsome he-man of a Cro-Magnon, but he's more than a pretty face!  He's also the tribe's best cave painter!  A-aea of the rippling black wave of hair has a crush on him!  A-aea is no demure maiden who follows the conservative social conventions of her time, but a modern woman who knows what she wants and is willing to take risk to get it!

...little A-«ea was herself a mark of progress. Covert glances had failed to attract the attention of the young man who seemed engrossed with his artistry, so she had taken to the unconventional way of spying upon him, in hopes of finding some way to win him.

Despite their reputation, which is based on the covers more than the stories behind those covers, these old pulp magazines are full of ambitious, brave, competent women who take initiative and pursue their goals whatever obstacles may be in their way.  

A mere girl might not intrude upon the councils of men, but such was A-sa’s curiosity, that she dared a scolding by slipping nearer.

The councilors have reason to think some of those savage cannibals, the Neanderthals, whom Howard tells us are the source of our legends and myths of ogres, werewolves and goblins, are nearby.  And, sure enough, when the son of one of the tribe's councilors, the arrogant Ka-nanu, carries A-aea off to rape her (Howard unleashes some social criticism on us by sarcastically suggesting Ka-nanu himself is "another mark of progress") he is interrupted in the commission of this crime by an attacking Neanderthal and torn to pieces.  Yikes!  The monster carries off A-aea to his lair, where he offers her the arm of a Cro-Magnon child for a meal!  He doesn't even cook the arm!  Yikes again!  The Neanderthal then tortures the girl by tearing out her hair.  Triple yikes!  He strips A-aea naked, but, before he can rape her, Ga-nor arrives, having followed the trail.  It is a close fight, but in the end Ga-nor defeats the Neanderthal and he and A-aea become man and mate.

"Spear and Fang" has exploitation elements, what with all the gore and threat of rape, but Howard also advances a lot of historical and anthropological theories about the nature of progress and how modern man overthrew the Neanderthal and how both Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal people lived and thought.  The action elements, all the fighting and chasing and so forth, are good.  So, thumbs up.

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All three of today's stories present a philosophy and/or try to make arguments about groups of people instead of just offering simple entertainment, and the philosophies and arguments are striking (if not necessarily convincing) and so contribute to the value of the stories, to their ability to maintain the reader's interest.  Lovecraft in "The Unnamable" also delivers the horror elements, and Howard in "Spear and Fang" the eroticized action-adventure elements, that make their stories work on a simpler, more direct, level so that they also succeed as entertainment.  Price's story is the weakest of the three, with the least surprising intellectual content and the least thrilling horror/violence content, but still is not bad.  We have here a solid issue of Farnsworth Wright's unique magazine.

Weird Tales, August 1925: R E Howard and N Hawthorne

Let's take a look at the August 1925 issue of Weird Tales, one of the most important of the pulps, one of the greatest of the speculative fiction magazines, the place where so many people first encountered H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Edmond Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, and the list goes on.  Check it out with me by clicking this link, the click that will take you to a scan of the issue under discussion at the indispensable internet archive.

This August issue has a quota of high brow content, including a reprint of an 1820 poem by John Keats, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," a poem about a guy who is heartbroken because some faerie or elf maiden has won his love and abandoned him--he has become a wretched hermit, hanging around the lake where he last saw her.  At least I think that is what is going on; I think it is safe to assume that "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," like all great literature, is a reminder to not let women drive you crazy.

There's also a poem by our pal Frank Belknap Long, "Stallions of the Moon," that is less plot-focused, and more hopeful--Long describes some flying horses in brief quatrains, three or four words per line, and then tells us they are "Mounts for you and me!"  How often do we get this kind of optimism in Weird Tales?  (I know, we got some optimism from WT last time we read from the magazine, and I bitched about it, but Long here delivers the optimism in like 80 words, while Henry S. Whitehead with his "dream story" "The Wonderful Thing" took seven pages!)  We also find Long in the letters section, where he praises the cover of the June issue, in which a man armed with an axe faces a spider the size of a buffalo ("bison" to you pedants), though Long's praise does come across as kind of a gross-out joke ("I cannot imagine a more gigantic, reddish, loathsome or delicious—but I sputter and go out!")

Near the end of the magazine is a hilarious ad for back copies of the extra-large May-June-July 1924 issue of WT, the one with the story Lovecraft wrote for Houdini and the one the man from Providence co-wrote with C. M. Eddy, Jr.  As if the cartoon four-eyes and his diminutive dog, desperately running to the mailbox to send for the "mammoth" issue of his fave magazine, wasn't risible enough, the text actually says "Your life is not complete until you have read this issue," which is even funnier than Long saying a kaiju spider looks delicious.  I have blogged about five stories from this "3 in 1" issue, and please allow me to say that your life will not be complete until you have clicked on the links below:

H. P. Lovecraft and Harry Houdini:  "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs"

H. P. Lovecraft and C. M. Eddy, Jr.:  "The Loved Dead"

Galen C. Colin:                                  "Eyes"

H. P. Lovecraft:                                  "Hypnos"

Otis Adelbert Kline:                           "The Malignant Entity"

Enough with the comedy!  Let's get to why we are here, the fiction, and today that means stories by the creator of Conan, Kull and Solomon Kane, Robert E. Howard, and that guy they tried to make you read in school, Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Oh yeah, there's a story in here by science fiction pioneer Murray Leinster that we read back in 2024, "The Oldest Story in the World."  If you expect all my short story blog posts to cover at least three stories, click the link in the previous sentence and count that one!

"In The Forest of Villefere" by Robert E. Howard (1925)

As we expect of a piece of work by a giant of American popular culture like Howard, "In The Forest of Villefere" has been reprinted in many collections and anthologies, the first of which was the collection The Dark Man.  (We read that collection's title story, "The Dark Man," back in 2021, and I judged it "a pretty good sword and sorcery story.")  I'm just going to read "In the Forest of Villefere" here in Weird Tales, though, where it takes up like two and a half pages.

In Early Modern or Renaissance France or whenever it is everybody carries a rapier around, our narrator is hurrying on foot through the night, carrying an important message.  He has been told this woods is inhabited by a werewolf, but his mission is urgent.  He meets an odd character with a mask and asks this mystery man for directions.  Of course it is the werewolf and of course it leads the narrator into a trap and he has to fight for his life.

This has the plot and themes of a filler story but somehow Howard makes it pretty scary and exciting, really elevating the material.  I'm inclined to think Howard is a master who knows exactly how many words to devote to each element of the story so that each component--atmosphere, image, the period of mounting suspense when everybody knows the action scene is coming up but it hasn't come up yet, and then the actual bloody action scene in which somebody gets horribly mutilated--has maximum effect, and that is why the story feels fresh and fun and I really enjoyed it, but it seems possible I am projecting that ability on him, that I am meeting Howard halfway because I knew it was him and like him already and was primed to enjoy the story as long as it met minimum criteria.  Would I have liked the story so much if I had read it not knowing it was him, like a blind taste test?  I'm going to say I would have, because, among other things, Howard gives the werewolf a strange and unnerving personality through its attire, behavior and dialogue, and that is one reason why the story feels fresh and pushes my buttons, even though I've seen so many werewolves.   

Whether this really is a very good werewolf story, or just a decent werewolf story that the magic of Howard's name is making me overrate, thumbs up for "In the Forest of Villefere."  According to isfdb, this is the first of two stories about de Montour of Normandy; the second debuted in Weird Tales in 1926 and we can expect to read it as we continue our advance through the history of the unique magazine.

 

"Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1837) 

This piece (a portion of the "high brow material" I mentioned earlier) appears under the simple text heading "Weird Story Reprints"--the beautiful hand drawn mermaid heading by Hugh Rankin (I reproduced it at the bottom of my August 14 post) is still in the future, first appearing in 1928.  This story by the man who brought you Hester Prynne was, according to wikipedia, first printed anonymously under the title "The Fountain of Youth" in 1837 in the magazine The Knickerbocker, and that same year in the Hawthorne collection Twice-Told Tales.  "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" was one of the three stories adapted in the Vincent Price film Twice-Told Tales, and genre fiction anthologists like Peter Haining have presented the story to readers many times.

Elderly Dr. Heidegger is a physician, an amateur scientist, and, reputedly, some kind of wizard, or at least possessor of a book of spells and magic devices like a bust of Apollo that some say can talk and a painting of a lost love that some have said can move.  The doctor invites over four friends, fellow oldsters who are kind of losers--Hawthorne flat out says they would be better off dead.  ("They were all melancholy old creatures, who had been unfortunate in life, and whose greatest misfortune it was that they were not long ago in their graves.")  Among them is a woman, once attractive, now ugly, whom the other three friends, men, all courted at one time; a merchant who lost all his money on a desperate gamble and is now almost a beggar; a politician whose career collapsed after a scandal and who is now forgotten; and an army officer who in his youth wrecked his health pursuing pleasures.

Heidegger has acquired water from the Fountain of Youth, and suggests the four drink it, warning them not to waste their second youths misbehaving, like they did the first time they were young.  Of course, within seconds of becoming young they act like total jerks, insulting Heidegger, fighting amongst themselves, and so forth.  It then becomes apparent that the water only works for a few minutes--they are old again.  The four head to Florida so they can drink from the Fountain all day.

The descriptions of Heidegger's home and magic items are good, and the writing over all is pretty good, but the plot and characters are kind of obvious.  If I am biased for Howard because of my admiration for many of his works, it is possible I am biased against Hawthorne because I associate him with school and a sort of established canon of writers you are supposed to like, but I think this story is merely acceptable, no big deal.

Peter Haining included in Beyond the Curtain of Dark several stories
we've already read, among them Robert Bloch's 
"Lizzie Borden Took an Axe..." and "Return to the Sabbath,"
Fredric Brown's "Come and Go Mad," and
Theodore Sturgeon's "The Other Celia"

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I feel like these are competently constructed stories with unexceptional plots and themes that you have to judge on style--is each just adequate, or particularly effective and enjoyable?  Howard and Hawthorne being famous names whose work is important in American culture, it can be hard to judge these stories without letting preconceived notions influence that judgement, but the importance of their authors also makes it all the more easy for me to say that all students of horror and fantasy should read "In The Forest of Villefere" and all students of American literature should read "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment." 

The weird train rolls on to another station next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log; don't lose your ticket.