September Collection Post

It looks like we are doing this again--welcome to September's blog post about stuff I recently bought, stuff I would have tweeted about if I hadn't lost my X account to diabolical hackers, crackers, and fraud and deceit backers.  Click the pictures below to get an eyeful of all the filthy details.  

In Mt. Airy, MD, in a shopping center with a Weis grocery store where you can buy Ovaltine and a Home Goods where you can buy the mass produced plastic Chinese Christmas decorations you need to fill up your basement, your attic, and that hole in your soul, also sits the Toy Exchange, a store which is choked full of old toy robots and monsters.  There I acquired this beige (Ajax? Archer?) spacewoman and this blue and silver Rascal Robot for five bucks each, even though I already had a blue-green spacewoman and four other Rascal Robots--it felt like a real bargain.

As a kid I was dinosaur crazy, and I collect the dinosaur books I owned, borrowed from the library, and saw at other kids' houses in my childhood, as well as dinosaur books of a similar aesthetic and appeal.  I found this one, which I had never seen before, at Beaver Creek Antiques in Hagerstown, MD.

Another Beaver Creek Antiques find--a book of poetry by Emil Petaja with illustrations by Hannes Bok.  Regular readers of MPorcius Fiction Log will be aware of how big a fan I am of Bok.  As for Petaja...well, I read his novel about space crabs eating people back in 2014, as well as his novel about the best pilot in the Terran Space Navy who is also Earth's best psyker who also goes back in time to deal with a witch and a giant.  Click the links to get a sense of what io thought of Petaja's fiction. 

As for Petaja's poetry in this book, As Dream and Shadow, a lot of it has Lovecraftian themes--there's a direct reference to Cthulhu, and lots of stuff about dreams and the idea that knowledge will not help you, but drive you insane.  Worth looking at for the weird completist.

At Wonder Book in Hagerstown, MD, I picked up some paperbacks because I liked their covers and because I could get them free because my wife had bought something and had filled up my points card or whatever they call it.  Every store nowadays has a card you have to carry around or an app you have to download or a club you have to join or something, even the used bookstore.

Richard Matheson's Third From the Sun has a mesmerizing Gene Szafran cover and reprints 13 stories from the earlier collection Born From Man and Woman.  Of these 13 tales I believe I have blogged about four: "Mad House," "Lover, When You're Near Me," "The Wedding," and "Disappearing Act."  I would have thought I'd read more, as I feel like I have read many Matheson stories--maybe I read some of them before I started the blog.  I'm actually curious to read this thing, maybe soon.

Then we have The 27th Day by John Mantley, which has a cool Richard Powers cover painting, a painting obscured by line drawings of the five people whom the aliens have given the power to destroy the world.  It looks like the world is in trouble--the aliens gave a college professor and what look like a Maoist spy and a Soviet commissar the power to destroy the world.  Thanks, E. T., this is really the help we needed--what's next, airdropping pallets of cash to Tehran?  And, you know, I can't tell if Eve is suffering from postpartum depression, so our odds may be even worse than they appear.  This book looks a little silly, its plot like that of a mainstream melodrama, its point likely that the commies are no worse than us decadent capitalists.  A few moments on wikipedia suggests John Mantley's career was focused largely on the dramatic arts; he apparently is to blame for the second season of Gil Gerard's Buck Rogers.  Don't bet any money on my reading The 27th Day any time soon. 

Finally, another book I brought home (from a flea market, maybe) for its Powers cover, Charles Eric Maine's High Vacuum.  I read Maine's He Owned the World back in 2018, and it is good I blogged about it, because I don't remember a thing about it.  High Vacuum sounds like it is about being trapped in space or on Luna or something, which sounds fun, so maybe I'll read this one, enjoy it, blog abut it, and then forget about it.

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There they are, some recent bargains, some of which we may be hearing more about in the future.  If I buy enough stuff, maybe we'll do this again in November.

   

Robert E. Howard: "Wolfshead," "The Dream Snake," and "The Hyena"

Let's explore a Robert E. Howard bestiary by reading three late 1920s stories from Weird Tales penned by the creator of Conan, Kull and Solomon Kane, all of which, coincidentally, have animal titles.  These stories have all been reprinted in books, including books I own or have access to via the magic of internet piracy, but I will be reading the versions that appeared in Farnsworth Wright's unique magazine through the medium of scans at the internet archive.  Click the links below for quick access to these scans your own self.

"Howoooooo!"               "Hissssssss....."            "Hehehheheheheheeh!"  

"Wolfshead" (1926)

"Wolfshead" is the cover story of the April 1926 issue of Weird Tales and it gets a blood-dripping woman-in-peril cover that is just bursting with energy and emotion.  Weird Tales covers often look static, but this one really conveys motion and feeling to the viewer, so kudos to E. M. Stevenson.

The narrator of "Wolfshead" is an old man hanging out with some soldiers in the 16th or 17th century or whenever, and tells them a story of his youth, prefacing his tale with the suggestion that his story will relate the scariest event any man will witness until the arrival of the end of the world.

Dom Vincente da Lusto was an adventurer and he built a castle on the coast of West Africa to trade with the natives, acquiring slaves and ivory and other valuables and shipping them up to Europe.  Negotiating with African chiefs and driving local labor with the lash is hard work, so every year Dom Vincente invited a bunch of European friends down to his castle for a few weeks of revelry.  Our narrator was one such invitee, and he describes the castle and the surrounding landscape and the assembled Europeans, among thtem men who love to drink and women who love to flirt (and maybe more!)  One European who drinks heavily but never gets drunk, and is otherwise quite stern and taciturn, is a de Montour.  "Wolfshead" is a sequel to "In the Forest of Villefere," a story in which, you will remember, de Montour fought a werewolf.  Well, it is quickly quite clear that de Montour himself is now a werewolf, what with his comments on the moon and warning to everybody to bolt their doors securely at night.

A beautiful woman is assaulted and left bleeding, her clothes torn to reveal her body; a white man in the castle is torn to pieces, as are local blacks out in the jungle--who is committing these atrocities?  Native worshippers of the leopard?  Some of the rowdier European guests, who are having a feud over a woman who has been flirting with both of them?  De Montour, whom Howard has been hinting is a werewolf but not necessarily so bad a guy?  Or Dom Vincente's rat-faced nephew Carlos, whom the narrator, when he isn't describing how he beat the hell out of his slave, Gola--Gola volunteered to be the narrator's slave because he was fascinated by the narrator's hair(!?)--has been foreshadowing is the true villain of the story.

Things escalate radically when Carlos tries to seize the castle himself by murdering Dom Vincente and leading an army of Africans to storm the place and the werewolf enters the fight, performing unimaginable deeds to decide the battle's outcome and resolve its own eerie fate!

"Wolfshead" is a good werewolf story and a good white-people-up-to-their-necks-in-danger-in-Africa story.  The terror and violence and exploitative eroticism are all there, and Howard also comes up with his own theory of lycanthropy and how it operates that is pretty cool, more epic and weird than the general werewolf "rules" which are regularly presented to us.  The story is also full of disturbing ethnic and sexual stereotypes and sexist and racist behavior--just about everybody in the story is morally compromised--but don't we read horror stories to be disturbed?  Thumbs up for "Wolfshead," another Howard story worth seeking out.

"Wolfshead" is justly popular and is the title story of a Howard collection which has been graced by cover illustrations by such savants as Frank Frazetta and Paul Lehr.  After reading such a cool story, and seeing these awesome and evocative cover paintings, you have every reason to say to yourself "The speculative fiction world really is full of talented people!"

The '68 printing (left) has as an intro an excerpt from a letter to H. P. Lovecraft written by Howard;
the '79 edition (right) has an intro by Robert Bloch of Psycho fame;
both intros are well worth the time of the weird aficionado

"The Dream Snake"  (1928)

"The Dream Snake" debuted in the same issue of Weird Tales as one of the most famous and influential of all weird or speculative fiction stories, H. P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu," an issue the cover of which seems to illustrate a story about an evil piece of furniture.  Even though our pal from Texas won the cover illo just two years ago with the great "Wolfshead," this cover doesn't even mention Howard's name!  

A bunch of people are hanging out outside at night.  The moon rises, and one of the party, Faming, responds to the appearance of this heavenly body by going pale and rigid, by biting his lip so it bleeds.  His friends notice, so Faming explains the uncanny reason the moon affects him so.

Like plenty of people in the kinds of stories we read here at MPorcius Fiction Log, Faming has been having a dream all his life in which he inhabits the life of a similar man in radically different circumstances.  This dream feels so real that at times Faming wonders if that life might be the real one and this life the dream!  

In that other life, Faming is a fugitive living in a hilltop bungalow in Africa, surrounded by grassland.  He lives with a servant, a Hindu ("Hindoo"), also a fugitive.  The dream is almost the same every time he has it, and covers a few days time.  In the dream, he comes home from an unsuccessful hunting expedition, his rifle broken beyond repair.  He finds his Hindu companion absent, and clues suggest the man was carried off or swallowed whole by a mind-bogglingly colossal serpent!  With no rifle, Faming is horrified the snake will come for him and he will be powerless to defend himself.  All night he listens in horror to the snake move through the tall grass, to its pushing at the bolted door!  The bungalow has a window, and Faming knows if he sees the snake through the window he will go insane!  The huge reptile does not reveal itself, and during the day Faming hurries towards the coast.  When night falls he is still making his desperate way through the grasslands, and he looks back and in the light of the moon to see the tall grass waving in the still air--the giant snake must be behind him!  And closing in!

Faming wakes up before the snake catches him--but lately the snake has been getting closer and closer before he awakes!  

That night Faming's friends here a scream and rush to Faming's room to find him dead, his body crushed, as if by an impossibly huge constrictor snake.

This is filler material but Howard handles it very well--thumbs up!  "The Dream Snake" is very smooth and economical, with the odd notes--why is Faming a fugitive in the dream?  Why is his servant a Hindu?-- adding to the air of menace and mystery.  (Gola's bizarre fascination with the hair of the narrator of "Wolfshead" serves a similar purpose--it doesn't add to the plot but it adds to the atmosphere of alienness and disorder.)    

"The Dream Snake" has reappeared in a bunch of books with terrific covers, including one I own, the edition of Pigeons from Hell with cover illo by Jeff Jones that features two of your favorite warm-blooded reptiles, Tyrannosaurus Rex and Pteranodon.  Let's also today celebrate the edition of Pigeons from Hell with an Esteban Maroto cover, where we find some of your favorite cold-blooded reptiles, among them the cobra.

"The Hyena" (1928)

Here's another story that was reprinted in Pigeons from Hell.  You can also find it in the various editions of The Dark Man and Shadow Kingdoms.  "The Hyena" debuted in an issue of Weird Tales that carries a story by August Derleth and serials by Murray Leinster and Ray Cummings, all of which we may very well find ourselves reading as we continue our Weird Tales journey.  

One reason I like stories in which people are in space or on the moon, in spacesuits, that kind of thing, is that in the vacuum of space or on the surface of an alien world death is just moments and millimeters away--one mistake, one bit of carelessness, a little bad luck or betrayal or negligence on the part of a comrade and you are done for.  The setting of such a story generates a tension which is exciting.

I feel the same way about these stories of white people in Africa or some such place.  As in outer space, in Africa it is like the whole universe around you is out to destroy you, so you'd better keep on your toes!  And just as the science of what is going on in the void between the worlds or on the surface of the moon is mysterious and alien, the culture of Africans and the plants and animals of Africa are alien, inscrutable, will kill you you know not why, kill you you know not how.

(Of course I refer to the outer space and the Africa of fiction--I know next to nothing about space or Africa in real life and am sure Africa is a great place.)

I say all this as a preamble to telling you I really enjoyed "The Hyena."  Thumbs up!  

Our narrator, Steve, is a young man newly arrived in East Africa, with a job on a cattle ranch.  Steve is a fish out of water.  He doesn't speak the language of the locals, the Masai, and he doesn't have much in common with his boss, a Boer.  He doesn't really like to hunt, to kill animals, or to boss the blacks around, and when the blacks start sniggering that he is womanish he has to beat one to maintain his dignity and reputation.  We get the impression Steve even felt uneasy and out of place back home in Virginia when he tells us he didn't know how to act around women back there and would avoid them.

Living in the area is a singular black man, very tall, very lean and muscular, his skin a different shade than that of the Masai, his facial features--the thin nose, the thin lips--suggesting he has some Berber blood.  Confident and well-spoken, Senecoza the fetish-man gives Steve an inferiority complex, and Steve comes to hate the fetish-man, based more on instinct than any evidence.  The Masai fear Senecoza and avoid him, while the white ranchers like him and trade with him.

Howard admires barbarians and the primitive and so we shouldn't be surprised that Steve's intuition, even if it seems to be based on simple racism and childish envy and fear, turns out to be correct and Senecoza turns out to be a monster who can turn into a hyena at will and who is plotting to lead a crew of cannibals with filed teeth in a campaign of murder against all the white ranchers.  The hints of magic early on and the fight scenes that ensue once Senecoza's powers and plans are made plain to Steve and us readers are pretty good, quite exciting--Howard excels at this sort of thing.  Also effective are Steve's and Senecoza's relationships with a woman who comes to the ranch from New York, a beauty who exerts a powerful attraction on both the sexually naive Virginian and the masterful dominating fetish-man.  The woman from the Big Apple is open-minded and finds everything in Africa just fascinating and she and Steve don't see eye to eye about Senecoza at first, but she gets an education when the fetish-man rips her clothes off and ties her up and she has to be rescued by Steve.

Like "Wolfshead," "The Hyena" is a well-crafted adventure and horror story and it covers some of the same themes and has many of the same disturbing attributes as the tale of de Montour the werewolf.  Quite entertaining.

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Three good stories.  It is always gratifying to read the work of a writer and find that he deserves his high reputation.  These stories buttress Robert Bloch's contention that the Conan stories are far from Howard's best work.  I should look into the collections Wolfshead, Pigeons from Hell and The Dark Man and Others and read the included stories I have not yet blogged about.  Stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log and see what comes of that idea.

Frank Belknap Long: "The Dog-Eared God," "The Man Who Died Twice," and "The Black Druid"

Let's continue our readings of 1920s weird fiction with three stories by Frank Belknap Long, one of H. P. Lovecraft's more intimate associates.  We'll be venturing beyond Weird Tales today, and even into 1930, as we hunt for stories by Long we haven't already read--we've already read a lot of them!

Today's stories have all been reprinted in books, but I'm reading the original magazine versions in scans at the internet archive, and you can too by just clicking these handy dandy links:

"The Dog-Eared God"  "The Man Who Died Twice"  "The Black Druid"

 "The Dog-Eared God" (1926)

We get the ethnic stereotypes right out of the gate today as the narrator of "The Dog-Eared God" tells us about his friend, a short and hideous neurotic New York Jew with a hook nose.  Our protagonist's pal is a college professor and he has an elaborate hobby--an amateur Egyptologist, he has smuggled 83 mummies into Gotham and destroyed them one by one in his mansion on Riverside Drive in the course of performing experiments on them.

The professor shows the narrator his latest acquisition, a mummy of strange proportions.  The prof shares with our narrator one of his theories--that the animal-headed gods of the Egyptians were based on real beings, members of a nonhuman intelligent race who lived upon the Earth long ago.

Somewhat ridiculously, the professor proposes that he and the narrator sleep in the room with the strange mummy.  I guess this is an experiment?  Long could have come up with a more plausible reason for the men to be asleep in the room with the mummy, like having them fall asleep while translating boring documents late into the night or after drinking to celebrate the acquisition of this bizarre over-sized and queerly-shaped mummy. 

Anyway, the narrator wakes up in the middle of the night and has a vision that indicates that, indeed, in ancient Egypt, lived people with the heads of lizards and other beasts.  The mummy here in the professor's mansion was their king and god, a cruel ruler from outer space who drank people's blood and devoured virgins.  The narrator observes, in his vision, the ceremony at which the space monster-god was buried, and at which the king's resurrection was predicted.

Our guy then observes that resurrection as the mummified alien, who has an elephant nose in the center of its bat-face and big dog ears to either side of it, busts out of its wrappings and attacks the prof.  The prof is briefly thrilled to see his theory proven correct, but has little time to celebrate as the monster god breathes fire on him, killing him and setting the whole place aflame.  The narrator runs out of the house screaming, at a subway station jumping the turnstile and boarding a train without paying.  The next day he reads about the fire in the paper--it seems that the firemen had a hard time putting out the blaze because dozens of people who concealed their heads under hoods kept trying to get into the burning building!  The animal-headed people theorized by the professor are still alive, living in concealment in New York City!  

Though ridiculous, this story is a lot of fun--thumbs up!  Professional scholars of the weird also like it--you can find it in the 2022 volume Weird Tales: Best of the Early Years: 1926-27 (edited by Kaye Lynne Booth and Jonathan Maberry) and 2026's Weird Tales Volume One: The Early Years (edited by Stephen Jones.)  "The Dog-Eare God" also appeared in 2000's Arkham's Masters of Horror: A 60th Anniversary Anthology Retrospective of the First 30 Years of Arkham House.

"The Man Who Died Twice" (1927)

Here's today's non-WT story.  "The Man Who Died Twice" first haunted the material world in Ghost Stories, a magazine that endured from 1926 to 1931.  I don't know if I have ever read a story from this magazine before; some of the covers are pretty good, with attractive women being menaced by skeletons, the devil, a clown, a cobra, and--of course--figures that look like freshly laundered white sheets, but I can't recognize hardly any of the names on the table of contents pages.  One day we may dig through a (virtual) stack of these magazines to read stories by people we know, like Ray Cummings, who has "They Hanged a Phantom for Murder" in the same issue that presents Long's" "The Man Who Died Twice," Robert E. Howard, who has a boxing story, "The Apparition in the Prize Ring," in a 1929 issue under a pen name, and Hugh B. Cave, who appears in a 1931 ish with "The Strange Case of No. 7."

Hazlitt walks into the office of the insurance company where he has worked for twenty years, and, in his own mind, at least, been essential to the building of the firm to its current state.  He sees another man at his desk, dictating to a secretary!  Has he been let go?  Enraged, Hazlitt busts into the boss's office, where the boss and three other bigwigs are smoking and talking over some business.  He yells at the boss, insults him, but the boss and the other executives just ignore Hazlitt.  Hazlitt goes so far as to strike the boss in the face, but the boss just touches his chin and remarks that he has felt a sudden pain.  The business talk resumes, and, humiliated, Hazlitt sobs and then returns home, despondent, to face the wife.  Similarly, the wife--and a man in the apartment with her!-- ignores Hazlitt.  Hazlitt realizes, remembers, he is a ghost, that he died six months ago!  How did Hazlitt die?  His wife poisoned him!  He seeks revenge, but when he tries to strangle the bitch, she feels a pain in her neck and throat, but can still breathe.  Hazlitt exerts all his strength, and his diabolical widow senses that somehow the man she promised to have and to hold in sickness and in health, is punishing her, but Hazlitt exhausts his ectoplasmic strength and doesn't even come close to slaying his killer.

Hazlitt gives up and walks the streets.  He sees a child stupidly standing in the middle of the street, about to get hit by a car.  Hazlitt runs at the child, pushes him to safety, and is himself struck by the car and killed, his soul sent to its final rest.  The woman driving the car saw Hazlitt briefly as she ran him over, and jumps out of the car to look for the dead or wounded man, by passersby tell her she has hit no one and conclude she is "batty."

This is a good story up until the end; Long describes Hazlitt's wild emotions in a way that is compelling and amusing.  And then there is the wife:

...standing above him with a spoon, and a bottle in her hand, on which was a skull and crossbones....She bent and forced the spoon between his teeth. “I don't love you,” she laughed shrilly. 

I also like the colloquialisms Long's characters utter, like "I hope he chokes" and "She'll think I'm a jellyfish."  

Stories in which people express and act upon passion are entertaining, even if, as here, people's dialogue and behavior reminds you of Looney Tunes.

It feels like Long didn't know how to end the story, however.  Hazlitt walks down the street, people again and again passing through him, but then he can touch a little boy to save him and get hit hard enough by a car to be slain?  And after being invisible the whole story, even to people he is physically assaulting, he can be seen by the female motorist?  These inconsistencies are a little hard to take.       

 I still like "The Man Who Died Twice", even if the ending doesn't quite work.  Endings are hard.

"The Man Who Died Twice" had to wait until the year 2000 to rematerialize in an anthology of stories from Ghost Stories, and it was also included in 2010's huge (1100 pages!) volume of Long stories from Centipede Press.

"The Black Druid" (1930)

Long ago, I read Edmond Hamilton's "The Death Lord" from the July 1930 issue of Weird Tales, but I skipped the Long and Donald Wandrei contributions to the issue.  Well, today we fill in one of those gaps by reading Long's "The Black Druid," which has been reprinted in multiple Long collections and anthologies with cool covers.

Benefield is a New Yorker and an archaeologist who has been around the world, explored the Egyptian pyramids and read forbidden books in China and all that sort of thing.  His colleagues consider him something of a crank because he seems to believe in vampires and voodoo.  He also dresses sloppily and unfashionably, and has an unhappy marriage and money troubles.  

He consults a book at the library, reads a passage that suggests the Druids invested magical power into all they touched, so that it was dangerous for people to come into contact with any item or article touched by a Druid.

When Benefield makes to leave the library he finds his overcoat is on a different hook--someone must have moved it.  On the subway ride home his face feels odd, and people are looking at him curiously.  He touches his face and it is wet, slimy--some goop must have dripped down onto him from a drain or a roof or something.  He hurries homewards and in a reflection in the glass of the door to his building he sees that his face has changed, become bestial!  His hands likewise are like those of an animal, all claws and hair!  Even his mind has unbidden thoughts, as if another being's consciousness is invading his mind!  He suddenly realizes his overcoat is causing this transformation.  He throws the coat off and enters the building and proceeds to his apartment, his appearance being back to normal.   

The next morning his wife tells him a story a neighbor told her.  Last night a mysterious figure climbed into the neighbor's apartment via the window, went out the door and, down by the entrance, picked up and donned an overcoat and walked off with it.  This burglar or whatever he was had odd pointy ears.

I guess we are to think Druids are living secretively in New York and one of them accidentally took Benefield's overcoat because it looked like his, leaving the professor with the Druid's coat.  The Druid than used his magic to find his coat.

It is a little annoying that a guy reads about a vanishingly rare phenomenon that almost nobody in the world knows about and then, amazingly, by coincidence, he experiences it like ten minutes later.  Maybe we are to think the Druid, lurking in the library, heard Benefield request that particular book and so set out to lay a trap for him, and then retrieved the coat when the trap failed?  Long also makes a lot out of the fact that Benefield is a Saxon, the mortal enemy of the Celtic druids, suggesting he is able to resist the conquest of his mind and throw off the overcoat because his blood is that of those who defeated the Celts.  Maybe the Druid sensed Benefield's ethnicity and sought to attack him because of it?

This caper feels a little clunky and confusing; I'm calling this one merely acceptable. 

The Fifteenth Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories reprints
Anthony Boucher's "They Bite," which we read back in 2019.

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These stories really exercise your suspension-of-disbelief muscles, but "The Dog-Eared God" and "The Man Who Died Twice" keep you interested with their driven, emotional characters.  "The Black Druid" has an odd and interesting character, but he doesn't propel the narrative--the story happens to him, rather than he determining the course of the story.  I can recommend the first two stories; as for the last, it isn't actually bad, but merely merits a passing grade.

August Derleth: "Bat's Belfry," "The Devil's Pay," "The Coffin of Lissa"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading stories printed in 1920s issues of Weird Tales.  In fact, we've already blogged about 17 stories that appeared in 1923 issues of Weird Tales, 17 stories that appeared in 1924 issues of the unique magazine, and 26 from issues with 1925 cover dates.  Click the links in the previous sentence to see lists of the stories I read and blogged about, and links to those blog posts.  Today we read three stories from 1926 issues of WT by August Derleth, famous correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft and champion of the legacy of the man from Providence, and a prolific writer and editor working in an array of genres.

Today's three tales from 100 years ago have all been reprinted in anthologies, but I am reading the original magazine versions in scans of 1926 issues of Farnsworth Wright's essential periodical.  To make it as easy as possible for you to read along, I provide links to the scans I will be consuming below:

"Bat's Belfry"

"The Devil's Pay"

"The Coffin of Lissa"

"Bat's Belfry"   

This is a typical but pretty well-written haunted house / vampire story, though Derleth kind of falters at the ending.  The story comes to us primarily in the form of a letter and a diary; one of the problems of the ending of "Bet's Belfry" is that we are to believe that the writer of the diary was still scribbling away while vampires were attacking him.  This is a problem we see in plenty of Lovecraftian stories, people having the presence of mind to write when they are horrified, and making the strange decision to overcome the natural reflexive inclination to flee or fight back so they can write a few last words like "A sharp stinging sensation in my throat...Oh God!"

Some wealthy guy, his valet and his cook, move to an old house in the country.  It is this gentleman who writes the letter (never sent) and keeps the diary.  As we expect of the characters in the stories we read here at MPorcius Fiction Log, this guy is a student of the occult--he aspires to be a wizard.  He hears strange things about the family who previously lived in the house, he finds strange books in the attic, inexplicable drafts blow out lanterns in the basement, his Catholic servant whips out the holy water, the writer of the letter and diary starts dreaming that beautiful women are coming to him and withdrawing his lifeforce via kisses, etc.  Derleth handles the material competently, and I enjoyed reading the story, but the ending is a bit of a letdown.  The narrator, instead of leaving the house of the vampires, who are sucking his blood nightly and who have killed many children in the area, as evidenced by a pile of little skeletons discovered in a secret room, decides to try to summon the vampires and trick or coerce them into revealing their hiding place so he can destroy them.  This is obviously crazy, but we can accept it because this guy is trying to become a sorcerer.  But what is harder to accept is that he forgets to make preparations to protect himself from the monsters' attack, so after he summons them, they just kill him (and apparently turn him into a vampire.)  Maybe we should charitable and assume the vampires sort of hypnotized him into being careless, that his summoning them was not him laying a trap for them, but them entrapping him?  But aren't they already coming to him every night to drink his blood anyway, so why the need to sham being summoned?

Another little kink in Derleth's story is that while most of the text consists of the letter and the diary, there is a brief omniscient third-person narration section that describes the examination of the dead man's body and the destruction of a book of magic, The Book of Thoth.  This content would have been better if it also appeared to us in the form of a written source.  

An interesting thing about "Bat's Belfry," something that makes it a little different from other vampire stories, is that the writer of the letter and diary can't call upon God for aid because, as an aspiring wizard, he has in the past called upon Satan for aid.  This is perhaps a reflection of the fact that Derleth, unlike Lovecraft, took Christianity seriously.  Also noteworthy is how much "Bat's Belfry" owes to Dracula by Bram Stoker.  An early edition of Dracula is among the books the protagonist discovers, and of course the epistolary form echoes the form of Dracula, and then we have the fact that there is a single male vampire with multiple female associates and that they devour children.

"Bat's Belfry" has been pretty popular with editors, seeing reprint almost immediately in the British Not At Night series of anthologies, a Latin American magazine in 1939, cool 1970-1980 books with covers by Jeff Jones and Tom Barber, and in 21st-century anthologies by people like Kaye Lynne Booth and Johnathan Maberry (Weird Tales: The Best of the Early Years: 1926-27) and Stephen Jones (Weird Tales Volume One: The Early Years.)

"The Devil's Pay" 

This is an acceptable filler piece.  A Venetian duke in the Renaissance (I guess) has been trying to kill another duke, sending assassins, poison drinks, etc., but this enemy has always somehow survived the attacks.  So our protagonist resorts to consulting a wizard.  The wizard warns that enlisting the aid of Satan is risky!  But the duke insists.

The wizard makes a wax doll of the target and tosses it in the fire.  The duke pays the sorcerer in gold, and the wizard warns Satan has yet to be paid his fee.  Right after he gets back to his palace, the protagonist receives news his enemy has suddenly died of some sudden and mysterious ailment; he then trips and falls down the stairs and dies of a broken neck--Satan's fee for killing his enemy was the duke's soul.

There's nothing wrong with this three-page anecdote, but there isn't much to it.  "The Devil's Pay" was reprinted in a 1985 fanzine and in a 2009 Derleth collection.

"The Coffin of Lissa"

(MPorcius Fiction Log recommends the song "Lisa's Funeral" by Clay Allsion/Opal.  I don't know much of anything about the taxonomy of popular music, but wikipedia and discogs are telling me Opal's work is considered psychedelic rock and the band was prominent in the Paisley Underground scene.)

This story, according to isfdb, has not appeared in a Derleth collection, but it has been reprinted in multiple anthologies.  "The Coffin of Lissa" is less than three pages long.

Our narrator has been condemned by Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition!  He is put in the Iron Coffin of Lissa.  His torturers thread his arms through holes in the coffin and chain them to the floor, so his hands can serve as food for the local rats!  Slowly, ever so slowly, the metal lid of the coffin descends to eventually crush the narrator's skull.

This whole process is described in the first person, and then we are led to believe the narrator, though he has lost some fingers, has not in fact been tortured to death by the Inquisition, but is a lunatic in a cell in a mad house.  He has  hallucinated the whole Iron Coffin business, perhaps eaten off his own fingers in his insanity.

For what it is, "The Coffin of Lissa" is pretty good.

**********

I've harshly criticized work by Derleth in the past, but today's three stories go down pretty smoothly--I like all three of them.  When next we meet we'll be looking at three more stories by a famous Weird Tales writer and I hope they are at least as good as these three have been.

Henry S. Whitehead: "Across the Gulf," "Jumbee" and "The Projection of Armand Dubois"

Let's read some 1926 Weird Tales.  Today's author: Henry S. Whitehead.  We read three Whitehead stories recommended by anthologist Robert Weinberg back in 2024, "The Shadows," "The Fireplace," and "The Passing of a God" and more recently read Whitehead's "The Door," "Sea Change," "The Thin Match," and "The Wonderful Thing."   And let's not forget Whitehead's collaboration with H. P. Lovecraft, "The Trap."  Today we add three to this pile, "Across the Gulf," "Jumbee" and "The Projection of Armand Dubois;" click the links in this sentence to read the same magazine versions of these three stories that I am reading.  If physical media is your thing, all three of today's stories are included in the big 2012 Whitehead collection Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead.

"Across the Gulf" 

I'm not here to truck in ethnic stereotypes, but today's three stories are, and "Across the Gulf" suggests that Scottish people are superstitious.  And here I thought they were cheap.  Well, I guess they can be both.  Anyway, Carrington the successful business lawyer is in his late thirties when his "Scotch" (I don't know when you are supposed to say "Scottish" and when you are supposed to say "Scotch;" I always say "Scottish," but Whitehead says "Scotch," like when he says "the Scotch are a dour race") mother dies.  Mom often claimed to have been visited by her own dead mother in dreams, right before something bad happened, and Carrington, though not superstitious himself, kind of worries he might see Mom in his dreams.  But for like six years, Mom stays out of Carrington's dreams.

Carrington is a workaholic, and, at age 43, his doctor tells him he'd better take the summer off.  So he goes to the Adirondacks to help a cousin on his mother's side, a minister who quit the clergy to become a fiction writer and run a boy's camp; the camp's business manager has keeled over and cuz could use some help from a man of business like Carrington.

Life in the country greatly improves Carrington's mental and physical health.  Then one night he dreams about his mother.  Then a couple of days later he eats some poisonous mushrooms; fortunately, the African-American cook staff help him vomit up the poison and he is OK.  Carrington realizes that his mother is still looking after him, a heart-warming experience.

This story is not very good.  There are lots of extraneous details; about the minister's career, for example, and then Whitehead describes for many paragraphs the discovery of the mushrooms, the examination of the mushrooms, the cooking of the mushrooms, and then Carrington's illness and recovery thanks to gulping down copious amounts of mustard, which induces vomiting.  People will complain that Herman Melville describes whales and the equipment and techniques of whalers in too much detail in Moby Dick, that it is boring, but as a 20th-century slacker I have no direct experience of whales and whaling, so I found that stuff engaging, the description of an alien world.  But cooking and eating and getting food poisoning are pretty common events, and having all this quotidian kitchen activity described in detail, even competently in Whitehead's able prose, was far from thrilling.  Also, the utility of the dream seems to be nil--Mom in the dream doesn't say "Don't et any wee poison mushrooms, laddie," or anything useful like that, all she does is tuck him into bed.  Whitehead does not establish a link between the dream and the poisoning, and leaves us wondering if this story is supposed to be creepy or heart-warming.

I have to give "Across the Gulf" a thumbs down, though a mild one--it is limp and boring rather than annoyingly bad, a story that is sort of long but confused and adds up to very little.  Maybe people who have or had good relationships with their mothers, or are very interested in mushrooms and mustard, will like it more than I did. 

"Across the Gulf" has reappeared in a few Whitehead anthologies, and in one of those Barnes and Noble instant remainder anthologies edited by Weinberg, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz and Martin H. Greenberg, 100 Wild Little Weird Tales. 

"Jumbee"

It being the title story of a Whitehead collection, I am hoping for great things from "Jumbee."  In particular, I am hoping it is an actual voodoo story, as I have heard that Whitehead learned all about voodoo while living and working down in the Caribbean and put this knowledge to good use in his fiction, but in my readings of Whitehead's work thus far I have seen very little evidence of this!

In old books, people are always going away for a few months for their mental and physical health.  Lee is a Virginian, a veteran of World War I, a victim of a mustard gas attack.  To help recover, he goes to St. Croix for some months.  Curious about local customs, he asks around about something occult he has heard mentioned, "jumbee."  Black laborers and shopkeepers profess to not believe in such superstition--some even claim white people made it all up to scare their black employees into staying home at night.  But Lee gets a different answer from a wealthy man who is one-eighth African, Jaffray Da Silva, whose answer comes in the form of a creepy story.

Da Silva had a friend, a big fat Dane prone to heart attacks.  Da Silva and his pal were interested in the occult and supernatural, and had a pact--the first to die would try to contact the other from the other side!  Sure enough, when the fat guy dies, Da Silva suffers a terrifying visitation, apparently the Dane's soul or spirit contacting him, wordlessly alerting Da Silva that he has passed beyond the veil to the afterlife!

An hour or so after the disturbing visit, a servant comes from the fat guy's wife to Da Silva's house to summon him and alert him of his friend's death.  On the way to his dead friend's house, Da Silva sees an apparition--three ghosts of black people, hanging in the air, turning to continue facing Da Silva as he walks by.  These are the "jumbees" of the title, the ghosts of black people who always appear in a group of three.  They don't do or say anything, just hang there, looking at you.

Da Silva sits up with his friend's wife and sister-in-law a while, and then they go to bed as two black servants prepare the deceased's body.  Da Silva heads home; there is an old black woman sitting on the steps, apparently asleep.  Da Silva looks away a moment, looks back, and the woman is gone, but a white dog is bounding towards him to attack!  The woman was a were-dog!  Da Silva hits the dog a powerful blow on the skull with his walking stick, throwing himself off balance with the effort of his swing.  When he looks up again, the dog has vanished.

And that's it.  There is no explanation what connection there might be among the three crazy supernatural incidents, Da Silva's white friend sending him a message from beyond, the vision of the three African-Caribbean ghosts, and the attack by the were-dog.

Each of the three incidents is well-written and effective, but it is a little odd that Whitehead makes no effort (that I could see) to link them.  Are the jumbees mourning the dead white man?  Warning Da Silva of the impending attack by the lycanthrope?  Why do they always come in threes?  Maybe the idea is that jumbees and were-beasts are always stalking the night, and Da Silva hadn't seen them before because he wisely stays home at night, and the death of his friend serves as the impetus for him to venture forth into the haunted night of St. Croix.

I'll mildly recommend this one.  I suppose I should also warn my 21st-century readers that the characters in "Jumbee" express contempt or pity for black people (Da Silva says "full-blooded Africans"), suggesting that blacks are like children and also have excellent hearing, like that of a dog or cat.  I have to admit, I can't recall ever hearing that Africans have particularly good hearing before--there's so much racism out there, there are racist beliefs I haven't yet heard of!

"The Projection of Armand Dubois"

This is one of the Gerald Canevin stories; we've already read two Canevin tales, "The Trap" and "The Passing of a God" (links to my blog posts above.)  This one is set in St. Croix, before Canevin, the narrator, "became a landed-proprietor, as I did later, and was still making a variable living by the production and sale of my tales."  Canevin is the narrator merely of the brief frame--the actual story is one told to him by a white woman in her seventies, a widow who serves as narrator for like seven of the story's eight pages.

The woman in question was the young wife of an Anglican minister on St. Martin in the year 1880.  By chance, she discovered that her husband was owed money by two men, one a "white gentleman planter" and the other a "prosperous" "colored man."  Hubby had decided, for years, to not pursue these debts, but wife endeavored to get back the money they were owed.  The white man pays up within six months.

The "colored" individual, one-quarter African, is the Armand Dubois of the title.  We are told that Dubois was not respectable like so many West Indian "quadroons," but instead "his leanings, as sometimes happens, were to the Black side of his heredity" and he pays up, but "with a very bad grace" and only after visiting the rectory where the minister and wife lived, accompanied by a gang of blacks, to demand a chance to speak to her.  On the advice of a devoted black servant, who thinks Dubois very scary, the minster's wife refused to speak to Dubois.  There is reason to believe Dubois was planning to splash "vitriol" on the minister's wife from a vial he carried--I guess this would be sulfuric acid.

(Like "Jumbee," "The Projection of Armand Dubois" portrays black people as childish--impulsive, emotional, selfish, imitative and unoriginal.  Whitehead includes the parallel debt of the white man to suggest that Dubois only asked for a loan because he heard that the white man had got one, was aping the white man.)  

A month after the debt was reluctantly paid through the minister's agent, the minster's wife is awakened in the night by a series of supernatural apparitions.  The first is of Dubois in her room, menacing her, pantomiming the act of splashing a liquid on her.  She is awakened a second time by the appearance in her room of a goat, and a third time by the image of Dubois again, walking around her house, then through a wall.  The next day she learned that Dubois died the night before of some fever.

"The Projection of Armand Dubois" is similar to "Jumbee," what with a guy projecting his presence after death to another person, but this story is better constructed--we know why the supernatural events occur, because Dubois hates the woman who forced him to pay what he owed.  I guess whether Dubois really died of a fever and on his way to the afterlife terrorized the woman, or, died because he was casting a spell with the intention of seeking revenge, a spell that took the hazardous course of separating soul from body, is a mystery.  I personally recommend that you keep body and soul as closely bound together as possible, just to be safe.

I can moderately recommend "The Projection of Armand Dubois;" it is perhaps a little better than "Jumbee;" as I have suggested, the story's components are more coherently linked together, and Whitehead includes little details of life in the 19th-century West Indies that are sort of interesting (a lot more interesting than kitchen tips.)  This story is closer to what I was expecting when I started reading Whitehead, a tale of white people confronted by malignant black sorcery.  "The Projection of Armand Dubois" can be found in Jumbee, which I think our British friends published as two paperbacks, the second (which contains the saga of Monsieur Dubois) titled The Black Beast.

**********

We'll be taking more trips to the creepy West Indies with Henry S. Whitehead, but that will be in 1927.  For now, expect more 1926 weirdness here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Fantastic, Jan '59: R Bloch, J Wyndham, R F Young and L M Janifer

Let's read four stories from the January 1959 issue of Fantastic, sister magazine to Amazing, both of which at this time were edited by Cele Goldsmith.  This issue has a memorable but somewhat mysterious cover by Phil Berry and, inside, two solid interior illustrations by the great Virgil Finlay, one of a woman being murdered in fetishistic fashion, the other of men in spacesuits in serious distress.  The editorial is by editorial director Norman Lobsenz, and in it he laments the death of Weird Tales and Unknown and the apparent lack of respect currently afforded fantasy--all the good authors today, he fears, seem to be focusing on science fiction, so that there is no heir to Lovecraft, Poe or Machen.  Lobsenz thinks there is still a market for good fantasy and suggests Fantastic will include more fantasy in coming issues.

Check out all this exciting content, and today's four stories, in their original magazine form, at the internet archive here, which is where I will be reading them.

"The Screaming People" by Robert Bloch

The title of Bloch's story is promoted on the cover, but not Bob's name, for some reason.  Remember when we read Bloch's cover story from the January 1960 issue of Fantastic and I found it to be "one nihilistic story...[in which] Bloch suggests that the human race is so crummy that its destruction is not a tragedy but a consummation devoutly to be wished"?  And then there was Bloch's cover story to the August 1960 issue of Fantastic, which I considered "twenty-four (24) pointless pages" consisting of a "bunch of bad jokes and then a bunch of superficial alternate history goop" and finally "a long and absolutely unconvincing utopian tract" proposing the theory that "the institution of the family is the cause of all our problems."  Hopefully Bob has a better attitude this time around!  (Or could it be that I am the one who needs an attitude adjustment?)

"The Screaming People" starts with a very good sequence of like half a dozen pages (this thing is like 35 pages long in toto), the depiction of a man committing terrible crimes at the direction of a mysterious voice in his head.  Our narrator, Steve, works in broadcast advertising, in sales, in Los Angeles, and has a lot of psychological trauma after a terrible car accident.  Has this trauma opened him up to control by some demon or alien or something?  Whatever the voice is, it wakes him up at night and directs him to dress, walk to a mansion, sneak in, murder an old man in his bed and steal some item from the mansion before returning home.  Our guy thinks it's all a terrible dream, but after his lovely red-headed wife wakes him in the morning he finds the box that once held the item he stole in the supposed dream right there in his jacket pocket!

Skipping work, he rides the bus to his shrink, neurosurgeon Dr. Wagram--along the way he passes many Los Angeles landmarks and Bloch takes this opportunity to rag on L. A., to compare its denizens to vampires and suggest LA is a world of fakery.  (Bloch attacks the City of Angels and Hollyweird in lots of his stories, something that surprised me when I first started reading him.)  Steve has a kind of breakdown as he arrives at his doctor's house, but recovers in the special room the good doctor has prepared for him--a room that reminds him of the security of the womb!  

We learn more about that traumatic automobile accident.  Our guy was thirty years old when he was in the one-car crash in the desert between L. A. and Las Vegas, suffering injuries that put him into a coma.  The doctor was the first to come upon the accident, and took our guy on as a patient, shepherding him back to health.  The narrator physically recovered under the care of this immigrant from Germany, but Steve has amnesia and can remember nothing that occurred before the accident.  The generous doctor helped him get a job, where he met his wife.  Bloch gives us a flashback to the conversation in which Steve convinced Roxie the aspiring but talent-deficient singer to marry him.        

We learn about Wagram's medical practice.  The good doctor takes on the brain injury and psychiatric cases that other doctors believe are hopeless, and employs innovative and controversial techniques.  These techniques are morally questionable--Wagram is a mad scientist!  For example, if a patient has sadistic or masochistic tendencies, or sexual problems, Wagram provides the sufferer life-like mechanical dummies to act out his or her perverse fantasies with!  Yikes!  As for patients whose insanity is caused by horrible memories, Wagram administers shock treatment that removes those pesky memories to reduce their personalities to that of a baby still in the womb--then he can build their personalities up again, in effect creating new people!

Steve realizes, largely through coincidences but also through the kind of detective work that involves threatening and torturing people to get them to tell their secrets (you know, the detective methods that work in real life, unlike that Sherlock Holmes "the lint on your lapel proves it was you who dun it" nonsense), that Wagram is using his memory erasing and personality crafting skills to build a sort of criminal army, and Steve himself is one of Wagram's top soldiers!  And Wagram isn't working alone--other people, people who represent Hollywood and how corrupt, mercenary, and deceptive Tinsel Town really is, are in league with Wagram, and Steve has to confront each of these backstabbing lying pieces of human garbage one by one--who will live and who will die as the successive gory climaxes hit and then hit again?  And of the survivors, who, if anybody, will be sane at the end of the story?  

Robert Bloch and Cele Goldsmith have foisted some real clunkers on us (have I mentioned Bloch's cover story for the November '58 issue of Fantastic, a story that I called "an unconnected jumble of dumb puns, winking references to science fiction cliches, and gory images"?) but "The Screaming People" is a winner.  The hypnosis scenes are good, the gore is good, and the one gruesome-catastrophe-after-another ending is good.  Bloch's negative portrayals of psychiatry/psychology and Hollywood here ring true, or at least feel appropriate to me, a skeptic of those institutions.  I don't deny that "The Screaming People" suffers from some of the usual shortcomings of detective fiction, like the convoluted conspiracy and the long scene in which the (amateur, in this case) detective explains the criminals' scheme and how he figured it out, but these elements don't sink the story.  So, thumbs up for "The Screaming People."    

"The Screaming People" would be reprinted in the Bloch collection Chamber of Horrors and in a Finnish collection with a particularly gruesome cover.  

We've now read, I think, four stories that appear in Chamber of Horrors, today's entry, plus:
 "Method for Murder," 
a version of "Two of a Kind," 
and "The Unpardonable Crime"

"The Troons of Space: Mars A.D. 2094" by John Wyndham (1958)

The editor's intro to "The Troons of Space: Mars A.D. 2094" reads "In this third part of his novel-length saga written especially for Fantastic, famed British author John Wyndham ('The Day of the Triffids') writes a deeply penetrating story of man in far space."  But isfdb says that this story had already appeared in New Worlds over in Albion in 1958 under the title "The Thin Gnat-Voices."  I'm not going to expend any energy trying to figure out who was trying to trick who here.  Instead, I'll remind you I've already read some Troons stories: "The Asteroids, 2194," and "Idiot's Delight."  I think there are five Troons stories, so we still have a way to go until we are fully Trooned out here at MPorcius Fiction Log; seeing as I didn't give either of those two stories a positive review, we may never fully Troon out.

Our narrator is a Troon on Mars, one of the first people to land on the red planet, a descendent of a long line of Troons who each played a major role in the early stages of the exploration of space.  Wyndham uses the Troon family as a way to tell a fictional history of the future, and we get a long history lesson about the war that destroyed the northern hemisphere and left Brazil and Australia the leaders of civilization.  As is usual in these stories, nobody can be blamed for starting the nuclear war, the implication being that the liberal West is no better than the Soviet Union.  The narrator is British by ethnicity, a citizen of Brazil, one of his ancestors a British officer who was on vacation in Jamaica when the Northern hemisphere was wiped out and who was made head of the Brazilian space agency.

Then the narrator's own biography.  He was chosen to be one of three crewmen on the first ship to Mars, a ship designed and built by his father's team.  The ship lands on its tail as according to plan, but the surface of Mars turns out to be unstable, in many places a thin crust over a vacuity, and one of the ship's three legs breaks through the surfsce into a cavern and the ship falls on its side.  One of the crewmen dies, and another is hit in the head and becomes insane.  The radio is also wrecked.  The insane man at first suspects that the narrator is a Martian, and then that there are Martians outside plotting an attack on the stricken ship, and finally that the narrator is in league with the Martians.  I took this to be a satire of people in the West who feared communist spies or an attack from the USSR--Mars is a totally barren desert, as the narrator saw while the madman was unconscious--there are no Martians.  I don't read the current SF magazines, and I wonder if they are full of stories that imply that people who worry that Muslims will attack Christians and Jews or that Russia will try to conquer Eastern Europe are insane.

Much of the plot of this story consists of the narrator trying to get the maniac to come to his senses about the nonexistent Martians and to help get the radio fixed and the ship back into operation, efforts that come to nothing.  The madman tricks the narrator into leaving the ship, then the madman makes a desperate attempt to get the ship to take off from its horizontal position.  The attempt fails and the madman dies, stranding the narrator on Mars, where he drifts in and out of sanity.  We get a little lecture on how man cannot accomplish anything alone, how important "corporate strength" is, not only to conquering space, but to maintaining sanity:

We need numbers to sustain us; in numbers we can dispel the terrors; alone, we are weak, mutilated. Taken from our pool of corporate strength we gasp, we wriggle defenselessly while the terrors circle round, slowly closing in . . . 

I guess this is a plea that we make friends with the Soviet Union?  Or just temper our individualistic culture with a hearty does of collectivism?

The actual science and technology stuff in "The Troons of Space: Mars A.D. 2094," the space suits and space ship and the little aircraft the narrator constructs and all that, is good, and Wyndham's writing is very smooth and professional.  But the fictional history parts of the story (which is 28 pages total; like 8 or so are the history lesson) drag, and as I have suggested, I am not impressed with the story's ideology.  The story also lacks passion, feels slow.  I'm calling it acceptable; people who think the space program  is a mistake or who blame the West for the world's problems may like it more than I did.

You can find "The Troons of Space: Mars A.D. 2094" AKA "The Thin Gnat-Voices" (the latter title a reference to Rupert Brooke's "The Jolly Company," which is quoted in the story) in the Troon collection The Outward Urge.  I'm a Wyndham skeptic, but he is very popular, and The Outward Urge, sometimes credited as a collaboration between Wyndham and his pen name Lucas Parkes, has been reprinted many times.  One Italian edition has a cover featuring a hot babe smoking a cigarette, which is kind of funny.  Is there a hot babe in a Troon story I haven't read yet?  I wouldn't associate Troons with hot babes based on my experience with Troons thus far, but I guess anything is possible.

"Passage to Gomorrah" by Robert F. Young

I feel like I've been reading lots of stories with prostitutes lately.  There was Harlan Ellison's "Pennies Off a Dead Man's Eyes," Harlan Ellison's "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman," and Harlan Ellison's "The Toad Prince, or Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure Domes."  Well, I guess I have just been reading lots of stories by Harlan Ellison lately.  Anyway, the editor's intro to Robert F. Young's "Passage to Gomorrah" tells us that the story is about "the Galaxy's most beautiful whore."  Wow!

Lady Berenice, the blonde-haired and blue-eyed "lady of the stars" (groan) is being exiled to Polaris 2 aboard a one-crew, one-passenger star ship.  She flirts with the pilot, Cross, and Cross gets sexually frustrated because he doesn't have enough money to afford the services of such an expensive prostitute.  He is so discombobulated that, when he gets a message form HQ that a time storm is up ahead, instead of coming out of hyperspace he pushes the wrong buttons and dives right into the storm!

Hyperspace travel in this story exploits a "separation of pure space and pure time from the thing-in-itself, or from basic reality," contracting a parsec to half a kilometer, allowing interstellar trips to take place in hours or days instead of years.  In a time storm a ship is likely to find itself in pure time, and its passengers and crew to relive past experiences.  Because "in pure time, individuality does not exist," people on a ship that enters a time storm will experience each other's pasts as well as their own.  Could it be that Cross' subconscious caused him to push the wrong buttons out of a desire to experience the sexy sexy past of the Lady Berenice?

We get a bunch of flashbacks to the two characters' childhoods, learn why Cross became a space pilot (he was ashamed as a child because he proved too scared to climb a tree all the way up and the other kids taunted him) and why Berenice became a whore (her father and mother fought all the time and Dad was often away on business and then left for good when she was ten.)  

“I’ll show them! Space is a tree, in a way. Space is a tremendous tree reaching up into infinity, and I’ll climb as high into it as I can get and I’ll laugh back down at them in their silly suburban houses...."

The anti-suburban theme, common in 20th-century literature, in this story manifests itself in odd ways:

“Think about it, Nate,” his father went on, puffing self-righteously on his suburban pipe. “You’re still young. You’re only 19. Why don’t you wait for a while...."

"Suburban pipe"?  Good grief!  Young never presents an urban milieu or sensibility to contrasts with the suburban milieu and beliefs his characters rail against; in "Passage to Gomorrah," "suburban" is just a euphemism for "conservative" or "religious."   

Considering the social geography Young concocts for his story, "provincial" or "Earthbound" might have been a better word for him to use than "suburban" to describe the villains of his story.  Through the flashbacks of our two characters, we learn that, in Young's fictional universe, society on Earth and society beyond its atmosphere are totally separate.  People who opt to go to space surrender their rights as Earthers, including the right to marry and have kids, because the radiation in space means that the children of people who spend time in space are mutants--even "monsters."  Because spacemen can't get married, to relieve their horniness the world's oldest profession, still looked down upon on Earth because of religious prejudice, is in space a noble calling--one minor character calls it "The Galaxy's Noblest Profession."  Whenever a woman does get pregnant with a mutant child she is exiled to Polaris 2, AKA Gomorrah, the world of mutants.  That is why Berenice is headed for Polaris 2--she apparently neglected to use her Farbes and Donniger contraceptor-field and got preggers, though she insists the device malfunctioned.

(One of the interesting things about "Passage to Gomorrah" to a 21st-century audience is how it suggests that abortion is so unspeakably horrible to 1959 people that it isn't even mentioned in the story, even though you have to imagine the kind of adventurous or desperate women who would abandon their families and friends on Earth to become prostitutes would be quite willing to have an abortion to avoid exile to some planet purportedly full of monsters.)     

We follow the careers of these two spacers, the eager male tryhard adventurer who quickly rises in the ranks and the resigned whore who hates her clients.  Young's story at one and the same time seems to be trying to convince the reader that objections to prostitution are silly, the result of the irrationality of religion, and to portray being a prostitute as terrible.  I guess he explains in a half-assed way that prostitution in outer space is gross because it is controlled by corporations--I guess goofy attacks on big business go hand in hand with goofy attacks on religion and on the suburbs.  

Then comes our first twist ending.  Berenice is preggers not because her contraceptive device failed--she is carrying Cross's child because they have sex in the time storm and being in a time storm sometimes causes things to happen out of sequence--she had sex with Cross today, and this lead to a pregnancy that began a few weeks ago.

Because Cross and Berenice in the time storm are reliving their lives, and each other's lives, Young has the audacity to reprint in the second half of the story an entire page of dialogue between them from earlier in the story, so we can relive that conversation along with them--annoying.

Anyway, after going through the time storm together, and having sex that has resulted in pregnancy, Cross and Berenice are like the platonic ideal of a married couple, though legal or religious marriage is denied them--they know each other better than any married couple on Earth could, having lived each other's lives.  Berenice is radiant:

...her face, bereft now of all the hardness and the cynicism civilization had imposed upon it, was like a little girl’s.

Our other twist is that the mutants on Polaris 2 are not hideous monsters but beautiful angels with wings and everything!  Space radiation is not bad for people, but turns them into the incubators of homo superior!  How ironic that the whores the religious establishment denounces are the source of the angels those religious dopes glorify on their stained glass windows!  The corporations have kept this astounding fact secret from the Earth.  Cross and Berenice take up residence on Polaris 2 AKA Gomorrah, where people don't live in suburbs but on farms.

If you read 20th-century fiction you encounter plenty of attacks on religion and big business and the suburbs, and some of them are silly, and "Passage to Gomorrah" is one of the sillier ones.  The story isn't very well-written or exciting, either.  The plot is crazy, audacious, so I guess that makes it kind of interesting, but it is not a good read, the science makes no sense but is merely a contrivance to set up the anti-religion plot, and its arguments are asserted rather than argued.  Gotta give Young's story here a moderate thumbs down; it not terrible like Laurence M. Janifer's "Expatriate," but still bad.

This strange artifact reappeared in a 1966 reprint magazine, The Most Thrilling Science Fiction Ever Told and is also in a 21st-century Young collection from Ramble House.

I think I've read eleven Young stories now.  Zoinks, it is links time.

"The Ogress"
"Thirty Days Had September"
"The Dandelion Girl"
"Ape's Eye View" 
"Starscape with Frieze of Dreams"

"Jungle Doctor"

"When Time Was New"

"Your Ghost Will Walk"

"Time Travel Inc."

"Magic Window" 

Probably I should do an analysis of these almost-dozen stories and see how many of them bitch about the suburbs and religion.  Maybe next time I read a Young story...if there is a next time.

"Replace the Horse" by Laurence M. Janifer

"Replace the Horse" was reprinted in the 1968 Janifer collection Impossible?  In the intro to that collection, besides bragging about how thin he is ("People who diet hate me,") Janifer tries to give the impression that he is a special guy and a special writer, a rebel who wants to do new things, wants to break the rules.  More endearingly, Janifer is also generous to those who helped him, among them Cele Goldsmith (he says "Cele Lalli," using her married name) whom he singles out as perhaps the editor most willing to let him experiment (in contrast to Horace Gold and John W. Campbell, Jr., who each made him rewrite a story eight times.)  I wonder if Lalli gave the writers at Modern Bride, where Lalli worked for three decades, over ten of those years as Editor-in-Chief, as much opportunity to experiment as she gave SF writers during her six or seven years at Amazing and Fantastic.

I've read enough stories that could have used some additional editing from Goldsmith's Amazings and Fantastics that I am skeptical of her laissez-faire editing style,* but I have to congratulate her and Janifer on "Replace the Horse," which is a kind of P. G. Wodehouse style story that is quite fun. 

*See the aforementioned Fantastic cover stories by Bloch and Jim Harmon's "Measure for a Loner,"   

Our narrator is a horse trainer who gets mixed up in the schemes of a scientist.  This egghead has invented anti-grav and wireless energy transmission.  The scientist thinks he can make more money through cheating at horse races than selling his paradigm-shifting technology to the government or private industry, and wants our narrator to act as his trainer to make his scam look more legit, and to be his guide through the world of horse racing.  The scientist buys a pathetic old horse that anybody with any experience at the track can tell is a loser and puts a saddle on it that has, concealed within it, an anti-grav "printed circuit."  Given enough power, the anti-grave device reduces the weight of saddle and jockey to zero, so the horse can race totally unencumbered.  The scientist has built power generators and transmitters into a pair of binoculars--as long as somebody is training the binoculars on the saddle, even this old worn out nag can outrun a good horse.

As we expect, things eventually go down the tubes, but for a while there our protagonists are really making money running this specially equipped horse.

Good jokes, a good style, an entertaining story, thumbs up.  I'm surprised "Replace the Horse" hasn't been printed more often--aren't there a stack of anthologies of allegedly humorous SF stories?  This story of Janifer's deserves to be in those.  Well, just this summer "Replace the Horse" appeared in a webzine called Black Cat Weekly and edited by John Gregory Betancourt, so maybe now it will get the attention it deserves.  (The same e-issue of Black Cat Weekly also includes Young's "Passage to Gomorrah," so I guess Betancourt just read this issue of Fantastic.)

**********

The Bloch and Janifer are winners, the Wyndham is respectable, and while it is not good, the Young at least is crazy.  So, a good, memorable, issue of Fantastic.  Goldsmith edited over 70 issues of Fantastic and I am sure we will be reading from more of them, so stay tuned.