Weird Tales, April 1927: M Moravsky, A Rud, & R L Stevenson

In our last thrilling episode we read a science fiction serial by Ray Cummings about travel through space and time whose first installment was printed in the April 1927 issue of Weird Tales.  I wasn't cray about "Explorers into Infinity," but maybe this April issue has some stories that are more to my taste?  Let's read three of them and see what happens.  There's nothing stopping you from clicking this link and reading along with us.

"The Castle of Tamara" by Maria Moravsky (1927)

Last year we read Moravsky's "Beyond the Frame" and "The Soul of a Cello" and I can't say it was a love connection but everybody deserves a third chance.

Wilton was a quiet well-behaved child because everybody told him his mother had a weak heart and if he made noise or misbehaved the excitement could kill Mom stone dead.  As a young adult, when Mom died, Wilton used his inheritance to travel around the world, looking for some of the excitement and adventure he'd missed out on.  As the story begins, he is hiking in the Caucasus mountains, and his guide points out a castle high above a river, telling Wilton it is the home of Tamara, a witch who seduces men and then throws them off a tower into the river below.  Wilton becomes consumed with the idea  of visiting this castle--surely the woman from this old story must be too elderly or too dead to cause any trouble.

A storm comes up, and a fog obscures the path, and the guide wants to halt.  Wilton goes forward on his own with his flashlight and compass, thinking he knows where the village is, and ends up at the castle, where he has a madcap comedy adventure.  The plot of "The Castle of Tamara" is like that of a screwball comedy film, like Jerry Lewis should be playing Wilton.  An old woman, apparently the lady of the castle, eats dinner with Wilton and then the servants show him his room.  In his room he hears feminine singing and looks out his window--below a window opens and he sees what he takes to be a man hanging from the ledge, about to fall.  Thinking this one of the witch's victims, he makes a rope out of the bedsheet and descends to save this poor fellow, only to find it is only a cloak hung out to dry.  He climbs in the window and meets the occupant of the room below, a gorgeous girl whose name is in fact Tamara.  At first Tamara is scared of him, thinking him an invader, then they fall in love, then Wilton is scared of her, thinking she is trying to kill him when she tells him to jump out the window when her angry aunt tries to get in the room.  But the fall from the window is only a few feet, down into a garden, which she demonstrates by jumping herself.  In the garden Wilton and Tamara pledge their love to each other.

I guess this story is supposed to be funny, but there are multiple dark notes that do not exactly contribute to an atmosphere of levity.  Tamara really did push a man to his death from the castle a few years ago when he was drunk and "insulted" her (I guess he was getting fresh with her.)  When Wilton kisses Tamara we are told he kissed "her so long and so hard that her lips bled."  That is not funny or sexy, that's just gross!  And when they jump down to the garden, Wilton hits his head so hard he is knocked unconscious.

I'm not interested in jocular horror stories in any case, and this one's jokes are weak and all the blood and death means any light tone is spoiled, so I'm giving "The Castle of Tamara" a thumbs down.  I don't think this exercise in uneven tone has ever been reprinted.

"The Endocrine Monster" by Anthony M. Rud (as by R. Anthony) (1927)

I chose to read this story because the title is funny, but when I looked it up on isfdb it became apparent that "The Endocrine Monster" is a well-regarded tale that has been reprinted multiple times.  In 1968, Robert A. W. Lowndes brought it back before the eyes of horror fans in his magazine Startling Mystery Stories; in 2015, Ramble House included it in their Anthony M. Rud collection The Place of Hairy Death and Other Stories; and it also appears in Stephen Jones' 2026 Weird Tales Volume One: The Early Years.

Our narrator comes to visit his friend, a 40-year-old scientist, and sees the man has a guinea pig which is preternaturally strong and aggressive.  Then the scientist takes over the narration of the story, relating a tale of adventure down in the Amazon set twenty years ago, when he was one of a party of various white men searching for some unspecified treasure or something.

The adventurers were diverted from their initial goal by mechanical trouble with their ship and stories from the locals about a demon that crushes men's bodies and leaves them laying dead in the jungle, uneaten.  They decide to investigate this demon.  In a village they see a startlingly beautiful woman perform a magnificent dance--this woman is amazingly strong.  She is also forward, aggressive, summons one of the party to her, presumably to have sex.  When the man can't be found the next day, his comrades go looking for him--it turns out the woman lives on the far fringe of the community, out near where the demon's victim's show up all crushed.  Sure enough, in detective-type scenes and action scenes, we learn that the woman has been using her super strength to crush men to death after luring them to her home.  There is a terrible fight and many casualties.  In the end, the scientist explains to our initial narrator that the beautiful woman had cortical disease, which, in this wacky story at least, makes you super strong, super horny and super aggressive before it kills you.

This is a well-written and well-structured story, the images are vivid, and the characters behave in a more or less realistic way and have personality and emotion, and the whole caper moves along at a sprightly pace.  So thumbs up.  I do have a gripe, though.  I don't like deus ex machina resolutions, and the woman's campaign of murder isn't ended by the men gunning her down or by her coming to her senses or any individual's conscious deliberate act, instead, during the fight, she throws a man into a tree, breaking his back, and also disturbing a venomous snake on a limb above her head which then bites her so she expires, thrashing in agony.  It would have been better if one of the men had had to shoot her full of holes and then live with the memory of having slain an unarmed woman.

A smooth and entertaining piece; I'll read more Rud in the future.  The cover story of the very first issue of Weird Tales, "Ooze," is by Rud, so maybe I'll back track a little and read that soon along with some other well-known Rud tales.

The cover of 2015's The Place of Hairy Death is doing a number on my
55-year-old eyes...or maybe it's my 55-year-old brain 

"Markheim" by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

Oy, it is time to class up the joint with a story by the author of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Treasure Island, the April 1927 "Weird Story Reprint."

"Markheim" feels long and slow, with Stevenson piling on sentence after sentence to build atmosphere and make his points.  There is plenty of symbolism, with mirrors a recurring motif, the mirror representing the pain of truly looking at yourself, warts and all, and clocks another motif, their chiming and ticking a painful reminder that as time passes death approaches, and perhaps justice.  Stevenson also fills "Markheim" with philosophy and theology.  All in all, a story easier to admire than enjoy.  I can recommend it, but it is more interesting than fun. 

It is Christmas Day, and Markheim arrives at an antiques shop, ostensibly to purchase a gift for a woman he is courting, and has a pretty contentious conversation with the shop keeper.  It is implied that Markheim is a thief and this shopkeeper is his fence, and Markheim's odd philosophical asides suggest he has a pessimistic and fatalistic attitude about life, and his odd probing questions about the dealer's own life suggest he is trying to find out if the shopkeeper is a conventionally good person, or just a sharp businessman--later events suggest Markheim is judging whether this man deserves to live, or how guilty he should feel for slaying him by surprise, in cold blood.

Because, sure enough, when the shop keeper is in a vulnerable position, reaching for a bit of merchandise, Markheim stabs him in the back, killing him.  Stevenson spends a lot of time describing Markheim's distress and fear after committing this foul deed, the way sounds and memories and thoughts oppress him so he is in a daze, in a frenzy, as he hunts through the shop and then the victim's residence for money.  Upstairs he encounters a figure, apparently the Devil.  The Devil offers to help Markheim find the money before the antiques dealer's assistant returns, and they spend some time dickering and having a philosophical discussion around whether Markheim is truly bad or only driven to bad deeds by circumstances, whether a deathbed conversion can get a lifelong sinner into Heaven, etc.  Markheim maintains that, though a thief and a murderer, he is not evil, and he refuses the Devil's aid.  When the assistant returns, the Devil gives Markheim advice on how to kill her and escape.  But instead the murderer confesses to her and tells her to alert the police.  Though he has lived a life of evil, of theft and murder, during which time he told himself that he himself was good even if his acts were bad, those acts being a reflection not of his soul but of society, though Markheim has lived that evil life, when face to face with the Devil, Markheim rejected him.  Was the figure the Devil after all, or an angel in disguise, giving Markheim one last chance for salvation?

After first appearing in a Victorian magazine, "Markheim" has been reprinted a multitude of times in periodicals, anthologies and Stevenson collections.

**********

We've been good boys today.  We read a story by a woman, we read a story by a writer new to us, and we read a story by a "classic" writer, broadening our minds, spreading our wings, stretching our horizons, expanding the envelope, celebrating diversity, all the cliches.  We'll likely see Moravsky again, as she has a story in a 1948 ish of WT, and we'll definitely see Rud again, and as for Robert Louis Stevenson, he'll probably pop up again, I think he has a bunch of supernatural tales that show up in anthologies.  

More weirdness next time, folks.  Until then, don't do anything that will make you reluctant to see yourself in a mirror.

"Explorers into Infinity" by Ray Cummings

The April 1927 issue of Weird Tales has a cover which depicts an ogre about to grind an attractive young woman into paste with a tree.  Total evil!  This bit of devilry illustrates a serialized novella by Ray Cummings, and that work is the topic of our discussion today. 

We've read things by Mr. Cummings before, as well as Fred Pohl's choice words about the fellow.  An actual man of science who worked with Thomas Edison, Cummings penned space adventures and Edgar Rice Burroughs-type planetary romances but also some pretty terrible exploitation stories.  "Explorers into Infinity" and with its sequel "The Giant World" (also serialized in Weird Tales) were combined to form a hardcover science fiction novel in 1956 under the title Explorers into Infinity, so, despite the woman-in-peril cover of the magazine, I expect this novella won't be too exploitative.  I'm reading this caper at the internet archive, in the April, May and June issues of Weird Tales--you can join me by clicking the links in this sentence.

Cummings begins his tale with a preface, in which he suggests "Explorers into Infinity" is a companion to his "Girl in the Golden Atom;" that story was about "infinite smallness," this tale is about the opposite. 

It is the future of aircars, correspondence with Mars and a pneumatic tube system that serves as an international railway system, each passenger in his own individual little sleeper car.  Our narrator is Frank, a man of 25.  His friends the Gryces call him up and he goes to visit them in their mansion.  His closest pal is 28-year-old Brett Gryce, whose 80-year-old father is a wealthy inventor.  Dr. Gryce also has 17-year-old twins, beautiful blonde Francine and her brother Martynn.

Dr. Gryce gives a lecture on how size is relative, not absolute, how within the tiny atomic particles of our universe there are no doubt an infinite number of itty bitty universes, and how our universe is doubtlessly a teeny tiny component of astoundingly larger universes.  Everybody eats breakfast, Frank ogles Frannie, and then comes a lecture on the relationships of Space, Time, Motion and Matter.  Finally we get down to practical matters.  Dr. Gryce a few years ago developed a device, the myrdoscope, that can generate images from myrdal rays, rays that come from the other, larger, universes, rays that move much faster than light, so you can see what is going on a million light years away right now.  Working with the myrdoscope one day, Brett tuned in to a forested world in which an impossibly beautiful brunette is menaced by a huge man with an uprooted tree--like on the cover of the magazine!  It was, apparently, a still image, not one in motion.  A year later, when the Earth is in a similar position vis a vis the sun, he discovered a similar image--the giant's tree is a little closer to the gorgeous woman!  These are motion pictures he is seeing, but each year here on Earth is a fraction of a second up in the larger universe, so to him everything looks static.  So, the Gryces have done the obvious thing and invented a vehicle that, besides flying through space faster than light, can change its size and its time vibration and enter other larger universes, so they can rescue this brunette, with whom Brett has fallen in love.  TheGryces have four models left after constructing six and conducting tests on two of them that sent them to smaller universes (I think.)

We get some incomprehensible lectures that explain how the vehicle works ("...there is no real substance existing. It is all vibration. Motion, in other words. Of what? That we do not know....") and a scene in which the comic relief twins accidentally start making one of the cubic vehicles too big while here on Earth, big enough to knock over trees and almost demolish the Gryce mansion, and then finally Brett and Martynn take off in one of the cubes (it doesn't have rockets, but moves by selectively intensifying or neutralizing or reversing the gravity of nearby heavenly bodies.)  So ends the first serialized portion of "Explorers into Infinity."

The May installment of the serial has Frank, Dr. Gryce, and Frannie anxiously waiting for Brett and Martynn to return.  I have to admit I wondered why Cummings didn't have our narrator go on the trip, why we were going to get this adventure second hand, and I even assumed for a while that Frank and Frannie were going to jump in one of the spare vehicles and go after them.  Anyway, Brett and his little brother eventually return and Cummings spends some time talking about the wacky clothes they now wear and the air of seriousness, of maturity, they have acquired.  I have to say, Cummings puts more time and energy into the least interesting aspects of his story than he does into the potentially compelling aspects.

Brett and Martynn narrate their voyage to the edge of the solar system, including lots of numbers--velocities, distance from this planet or asteroid at this specific time, etc.  Beyond the orbits of the planets, they began to increase their size, and Brett describes at length this novel experience, and then Dr. Gryce gives a lecture on the effect on time and velocity of increasing your size.  It all seemed like nonsense to me.  As the cube grew larger, eventually as large as a star, its velocity increased, and soon it had left the galaxy, then left all stars behind.  As the May installment ends, the boys are describing how they feared they were lost in space and time.  

As the June installment, the final episode, begins, Brett and Martynn make a declaration that will elicit groans from all the hardcore science kids reading.  B & M tried to tune the myrdoscope to the world of the woman under attack by the ogre, but couldn't receive an image, and realized it was because, considering their position in space and time and the rate time was passing for them and for the woman, that they could not see her because they must be with her at the time they were trying to view, and God has forbidden that we see our own individual futures.

By manipulating their own size and the rate of time they are experiencing, the boys land the cube in the forest near the woman being assaulted by the ogre.  They adjust their size so they are even bigger than the ogre.  The ogre flees by shrinking to the size of an insect, using drugs.  This encounter, which I expected to be climactic, is a big letdown.  Brett and Martynn made friends with the beautiful young woman, Leela, and her father, a musician.  These people live in what amounts to paradise, a decadent civilization in which little happens and life is easy, full of music and pageants.  B & M spent almost a year there (that felt like just two weeks to Frank and Frannie on Earth) and learned about the trouble that was afflicting paradise.  People from another, larger, universe are coming to attack them--that giant B & M drove off was their leader.

Having returned Martynn to Earth, Brett the next day heads back to Leela's universe to try to help her people.  He promises to return within a month, but as the story ends, Frank tells us that it has been over two years since he left.  Cummings plays up the pathos of Frank missing his friend and Dr. Gryce missing his son, but the reader just wonders why none of them just get in another vehicle and go after Brett if they are so worried about him.

This story is not good.  It lacks a climax and resolution,  Cummings exciting expectations that he does not satisfy--there is no awesome battle with the giant, and there is no romance between Frank and Frannie after one was foreshadowed.  Cummings misallocates his resources--Frannie gets a personality, so we expect her to play a role in the plot, presumably becoming Brett's fiancé or wife or something, but the woman who actually has an affair of the heart, Leela, has no personality.  Way too much ink is expended on the science lectures when these lectures are neither credible nor interesting.  Edgar Rice Burroughs' means of getting John Carter to Mars is similarly incredible, but Burroughs doesn't spend a lot of time talking about it, he spends his time on what he is good at, the adventure on Mars.  Half the text or more of "Explorers into Infinity" is about how Brett gets to Leela's world, and, once Brett is there, the adventure is totally lame.  We learn more about the clothes on her planet than anything else, and Cummings puts that material at the start of the story instead of while Brett is describing the place.

Maybe the book version of this material, which includes the sequel, "The Giant World," which appeared in serial form in the January, February and March issues of WT in 1928, and presumably includes the resolution of the war with the giants and of the Frank-Frannie love story, is a better read.  But on its own, I have to give this serialized version of "Explorers into Infinity" a thumbs down.  We will still be reading "The Giant World" when we get to the 1928 leg of our journey through the history of Weird Tales, however.                     

A Derleth: "The Sleepers," and, w/ M Schorer, "The River," "The Black Castle," and "The Turret Room"

I haven't been keeping it a secret--I'm trying to read a story from each issue of Weird Tales, the famed magazine that was the vehicle for some of the most famous work of such giants as H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard and the early work of breakout successes Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury, as well as the showcase for the writing of many less famous but well-loved members of the speculative fiction community like Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, and Manly Wade Wellman.  And the list goes on.  One name that belongs on the list is that of August Derleth.  Today we read four stories that appeared under Derleth's name in 1927 issues of Farnsworth Wright's unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual.  The pages of Weird Tales credit one of these four as a collaboration with Marc R. Schorer AKA Mark Schorer, and isfdb suggests that the 2009 Derleth collection The Sleepers and Other Wakeful Things labels two additional stories as Derleth/Schorer collabs, though Schorer is not credited in the 1927 printings.  All four of today's tales would be included in The Sleepers and Other Wakeful Things, but I'll be reading them in scans of the original magazines--here are links to the scans I'll be reading:

Feb     May     Sept     Dec  

Speaking of lists and links, here are links to webpages with lists of Weird Tales stories I have already blogged about, organized by year.

1923   1924    1925   1926

1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938    1939  

1940    1941   1942

"The River"

From the February '27 issue we've already grappled with Edmond Hamilton's "The Atomic Conquerors," and now we take a dip in Derleth's contribution.  (It looks like The Sleepers credits Schorer  as a collaborator on this one.)    

"The River" is not very good.  It is a little silly and obvious, and, besides, is too long, even though it is only three pages here in WT.  The first half of the story is a letter.  A British firm is building a dam on the Volga, and the foreman of the project is writing to England to tender his resignation, and he explains why.  The local peasants and a college professor and a hunchback all keep telling the British team that spirits protect the Volga from molestation and somebody will get killed if they build the dam.  Sure enough, somebody disappeared and an inexplicable wave destroyed half of the progress made on the dam, so the writer, and all the workers, quit.  The head engineer is staying on, however.

We then switch to third-person narration, witnessing that stubborn engineer have another interaction with the hunchback, who yells "Death!  Death!  Death!" at the top of his lungs.  Then the engineer watches the ghosts of the boatmen of the Volga rise up to wreck the rest of the dam; these ghosts then wash the engineer downriver, killing him.

Why is there a college professor and a hunchback?  Why is the narration half a letter and half third-person omniscient?  It doesn't seem like much thought went into this thing.  Weak filler, thumbs down.

"The Black Castle"

In the May 1927 issue of Weird Tales, "The Black Castle" is attributed to "Marc R. Schorer and August W. Derleth."

A European count in his high castle above the village feels a strange, irresistible compulsion!  He sits down to write--someone else is controlling his hand, sending him a message!  The message is from some guy he destroyed, a dead man, a man whose widow and child are suffering in poverty because the count coveted the man's wealth!  The count's victim announces that, with his astral body, he is seeking revenge!  The count has a dim-witted son, and the dead man says he will be using his superior intelligence and willpower to try to push the son's low-IQ soul out of his body and take it over and use it to murder the count!

For weeks the count is worried about this, watches his son, judges his behaviors.  The son falls ill, and, when he recovers, the count thinks he is acting like a different person!  When he catches the son taking a stiletto off the wall and taking it to his room, the decides desperate action is called for--the count takes up the other blade of the pair, creeps into his son's room, and murders his son in his sleep.

Then the ghost controls the counts hand again, writes another message!  The ghost tricked the count!  He didn't take over his son's body, the count murdered his son unnecessarily!  But the count is still going to die tonight!  Sure enough, a lightning bolt hits the castle and kills the count, and the villagers below hear a laugh!  

I like the idea of a dead person's restless soul taking over a body to use for vengeance, and the revelation that it was all a bluff was a disappointment.  "The Black Castle" also has way too many loose ends.  The ghost can control the count's hand, even though the count is clever, so why are we expected to believe taking over the son is facilitated by the son's dim wits?  Why did the son act differently after his illness--why did he carry the stiletto to his room?  Is it just a coincidence?  And then the dead man is shown to be able to control the weather?  Why build a story around one creepy supernatural phenomenon, and then have the resolution of the story come through the use of a totally different, less interesting and less creepy, phenomenon?  

Not only are the plot and themes all messed up, Derleth and Schorer pad out the story with a lot of unneeded romantic goop about melting snowbanks and shadows and moonlight and all that.  Another thumbs down, I'm afraid.  

"The Turret Room" 

We've already read Edmond Hamilton's story in this September issue, "The Moon Menace."  "The Turret Room" here in WT is credited solely to Derleth, and to Derleth and Schorer in The Sleepers.    

This one is an acceptable trifle.  A bunch of British aristocrats are hanging out, and, when the Duke of Kent says that talk of ghosts is just balderdash and poppycock, Lord Alving tells a story about his own sight of a ghost.  He was at the Duke of Gloucester's castle with a bunch of people, including the poet Harry Longworth.  When the Duke of Gloucester mentions that the turret room in his central tower is haunted, Lord Alving says he wants to spend the night there, hoping to see a ghost.  Harry jokes that if Alving doesn't see one, he'll have one sent up.  Alving sits in the room hour after hour--no ghost.  He dozes, awakes, sees Harry in the room with him.  Harry is not very communicative, just sort of smiles.  The Lord looks out the window, looks back, and Harry is gone.  He doesn't return.  In the morning, Alving reports to the party that he has seen no ghosts, only Harry.  As we readers expect, Alving is informed that, sadly, Harry passed away in his sleep last night--before Alving saw him.

Not good, but competently and smoothly put together with no unnecessary frills or confusion.

"The Sleepers"

This story from the December issue serves as the title piece of that 2009 collection we've been referring to--hopefully a clue that it is an above average production--and is the only of today's stories that nobody claims is a collab with Schorer.

Well, I can mildly recommend "The Sleepers," which is almost as economically written as "The Turret Room" and feels more original and creepy (to me at least.)

An important writer, a man whose books get made into movies, tells a story to a bunch of people as they sit before a fireplace.  He was in Hollywood, and was suddenly called back to Chicago.  He gets a bed on a midnight train, but it turns out that the Pullman cars are all full up.  Another traveler is in the same predicament, and they make enough of a fuss that the train adds an additional Pullman for the two unhappy customers.

Once in the Pullman, the men find people sound asleep in their beds!  They call the porter, a sort of comic relief "negro," who gets the conductor.  When the conductor touches the man sleeping in the bed the writer paid for, his hand passes through the man like he is an illusion!  

It turns out that this Pullman is a recently repaired car that was wrecked in a disaster that killed all onboard.  These forms are the images of the dead!  Another ghost, the conductor who died on the train that was wrecked, walks through car and the ghosts of the sleepers vanish.

Not bad.  There is an additional plot thread--the ghost conductor comes to the fireplace to hear the story and comment on it--that is superfluous but doesn't sink the story.

**********

These are all quite minor stories, and two of them are pretty bad.  But on a long journey, you gotta take the rough with the smooth.  This little kink in the road is not going to dissuade us from achieving our weird destiny.   

Robert E. Howard: "Men of the Shadows," "Kings of the Night," and "The Little People"

In our last episode we read three stories from the January 1927 issue of Weird Tales, including a story by Robert E. Howard of Conan fame that is associated with the Bran Mak Morn character, "The Lost Race."  Today I'm taking my 2005 paperback edition of Bran Mak Morn: The Last King off the shelf to read three stories about the Picts, the little people who conquered Britain and then in turn were overthrown by the Celts and driven underground, where they nurtured a desire for revenge and became the basis for our legends of elves and dwarves.

"Men of the Shadows" (1969)

"Men of the Shadows" was first printed in 1969 in the edition of Bran Mak Morn with the unforgettable Frazetta cover.  According to Rusty Burke in the 2001 intro to my copy of Bran Mak Morn: The Last King, in 1926 Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright rejected "Men of the Shadows" as lacking "story," saying it was more of a "chronicle."  Of course, since then, it has reappeared in a multitude of Bran Mak Morn-themed Howard collections.

"Men of the Shadows" begins with a poem of nine quatrains about how the Picts are the "first great nation" and "the last of the Stone Age Men."

The story proper begins with a hand-to-hand battle between a detachment of Roman soldiers--a fragment of a force of 500 men who marched north from Hadrian's Wall but were scattered by a storm and by attacks from Picts--and a much larger group of the short, hairy, ape-like Picts.  Our narrator is among the five Roman survivors of the fight, as for the Picts, they are wiped out.  Our memoirist is a six-foot-five Norseman serving in the multi-cultural Roman Army, and it isn't long before, as these five head south and run into one Pict ambush after another, that he finds himself the sole survivor of the doomed expedition.  Like Tarzan shedding the veneer of civilization and becoming again a jungle beast, as Lord Greystoke does so many times in Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels, our narrator, in his perilous position, surrounded by enemies in a strange mystical wilderness far from any city, shrugs off all his Roman culture and sophistication to become his true self, a viking barbarian!

..a slow, deep rage began to rise in me, coupled with a vast Nordic contempt for my foes.  I was in good mood to go berserk.

When he encounters a party of Picts one hundred strong, he attacks them and is captured after killing many of them.  Then he meets a man who doesn't look like a Pict, being straight and of ordinary height, but is apparently their leader--Bran Mak Morn!  Bran looks like a Mediterranean because "The line of chiefs has kept its blood pure through the ages, scouring the world for women of the Old Race."  Wow, world's best dating service!  (This again reminds us of the world of Tarzan, in which La, Queen of Opar, is a beautiful woman and her underlings are hideous ape-men.)  The arrival of the Norse legionary triggers a showdown between Bran, the political authority of the Picts, and the Picts' religious authority, bringing a long-simmering conflict to a boil.  Bran thinks the old monster-gods are broken and useless, and he no longer permits human sacrifices to them, something the high priest, a wizard more than a century old, resents.  The high priest insists the Norse captive be destroyed, but Bran orders him released, granting his sister's request that he free the big blonde hunk.  (When you are good-looking, the world is full of open doors and escape hatches.)

The wizard challenges Bran's rule, seeking to revive proper worship of the old gods--

"If I conquer, the Serpent coils again, the Wild-cat screeches again, and thou art my slave forever.  If thou dost conquer, my arts are thine and I will serve thee."

--and then the two engage in a test of wills, staring at each other, marshalling invisible forces until the wizard surrenders, beaten.  Howard suggests this battle is symbolic of the triumph of civilization over the Stone Age.

Up until now, "Men of the Shadows" has been a great sword and sorcery story, many fights with plenty of getting people getting decapitated and dismembered, a guy bragging about his height and ethnicity, lots of talk of weapons and armor, a guy escaping death with his sex appeal and then witnessing the mystical struggle over leadership of a dying race.  But then the wizard recites a poem and then tells the story of the Picts.  Our lecture starts with geography and then evolution and proceeds to the sinking of Lemuria, mass migrations, volcanoes, glaciers, conflict with Neanderthals and with the Cro-Magnons, and then we have the people of Atlantis.  The Picts travel all over the globe and conquer or drive before them man races, but in the end are defeated by the Celts.  The wizard then projects moving images from the camp fire, images of the future, of the coming fall of Rome.

In structure and themes, "Men of Shadows" feels a lot like a mere variation on "The Lost Race," and you can see why Wright rejected it (even though he accepted "The Lost Race.")  You've got good sword and sorcery adventure stuff, but that gives way to a history lesson (first the spoonful of sugar, then the medicine), and both stories lack a conventional climax in which the hero overcomes an obstacle in cathartic fashion.

The history lesson is a little tedious, but I'm still giving "Men of the Shadows" a thumbs up as most of the story is pretty exciting. 

"Kings of the Night" (1930)

Here's a story I read in my New York days, when I got my copy of Del Rey's 2006 Kull: Exile of Atlantis not long after it was published.  I remember being reminded by "Kings of the Night" of the first story in my silver paperback copy of Michael Moorcock's Sailor on the Seas of Fate, "Sailing to the Future," in which various Moorcock characters cross the dimensions to join forces.  "Kings of the Night" first appeared in a 1930 issue of Weird Tales alongside stories by Edmond Hamilton and Clark Ashton Smith that I blogged about years ago.

Roman and British armies sit encamped, resting in preparation for tomorrow's big battle!  As two Pictish chiefs and Cormac of Connacht watch, Bran Mak Morn, who is in the process of uniting the squabbling Picts, directs his wizard to tear the living heart out of a Roman soldier and read the future in its last beats!  Victory is foreseen, but is all this magic just a hoax perpetrated to enhearten the Picts, most of whom have a Stone Age Mindset?  The determining factor in tomorrow's battle, for reals, is the behavior of an army of Norsemen camped nearby.  Cormac's Gaels and a bunch of Briton charioteers from south of Hadrian's Wall are committed to fighting beside Bran's Picts tomorrow, but the Norse may join the Romans!  You see, the Viking's king has died and they are trying to squirm out of the deal he made with Bran.  They say they will only fight under a king, and no Pictish or Gaelic king, either!

Howard was a committed history buff and we have to hear all about the weapons and equipment and spirit and relationships of the Picts, Britons, Gaels and Norse before we get to the weird material some of us are here for.  "The ancestors of the Gaels had learned the arts of war on the vast plains of Scythia and at the courts of the Pharaohs where they had fought as mercenaries of Egypt, and much of what they learned they brought into Ireland with them."  Howard loves this "sweep of history" stuff, but I'm more interested in the experiences of individuals and it can get a little tedious.  I guess this business is a little like the catalog of ships at the start of the Iliad and like the descriptions of the armies at the start of a book about Waterloo or El Alamein or Normandy or whatever.

The earlier scene gave us the idea that maybe magic was a load of crap, a bunch of hogwash used by the cognitive elite to bamboozle the ignorant masses, but then the wizard solves Bran's problem with a spectacular bit of sorcery.  Bran has in his crown a gem given his ancestor a hundred thousand years ago by Kull, King of Valusia, a black-maned barbarian who seized the throne of a city the wizard says makes Rome look like a village!  So the wizard summons Kull from across the gulfs of time!  Kull thinks this is all a dream, and mistakes Bran for his Pictish crony--I guess after 4,000 or whatever generations, Bran still looks like the guy Kull awarded the gem to.  Cormac thinks Kull is some ringer the wizard has disguised as Kull, but he has to revise his opinion by the end of the story.

Kull is convinced to take command of the Norse army, but first he has to prove himself to the Northmen.  Their leader challenges Kull to a duel and Kull defeats him in a pretty exciting fight scene.  The Vikings are thrilled to fight under Kull, who has strength, skill, and steel superior to any they have ever seen.  

The duel was a lot of fun, but then comes page after page of fictional military history, with the generals making plans and deploying the cavalry here and the archers there and considering the need for scouts and all that, and then the actual fight, in which Howard gets to use one of his favorite phrases, "red ruin," again and again.  The Romans are surrounded and defeated, and the Vikings are also wiped out, Bran deliberately sacrificing these foreign pirates.  Kull is the only survivor of the Norse detachment, because when he is surrounded by vengeful legionaries he is whisked back to his own time period.

Even if I am not as interested in blow by blow descriptions of fictional battles as I am in more personal conflicts and more supernatural events, the climactic battle scene doesn't undermine "Kings of the Night" by any means.  This story is also better structured than "Men of the Shadows," with proper climax and plot twists near the end.  And I have to admit this story has made me curious to reread the rest of the Kull stories, which I have not read in over a decade.  The last Kull tale I read was "Swords of the Purple Kingdom" and that was in 2013.  So, thumbs up for "Kings of the Night."  

"The Little People" (1970)

"The Little People" was first printed in 1970, long after Howard's death, in a magazine, Coven 13.  A page was missing from Howard's manuscript and so somebody at the magazine came up with something to fill in the gap.  The version in Bran Mak Morn: The Last King lacks any such interpolations.

"The Little People" is a minor trifle, competent but, in this form at least, slight.  A wealthy young American proud of his Celtic heritage, our narrator, is on holiday in western England with his headstrong flapper sister.  From their hotel they can see Celtic megalithic ruins on the moors, the kind of thing that stirs the narrator's heart.  His sister is reading Arthur Machen and this inspires a lecture from the narrator on the Picts and how they came from the Mediterranean and conquered Europe and then were driven by the Celts into caves and became degenerate, the kind of lecture we've been hearing from Howard lately.  The flapper pooh poohs all this as fairy tale nonsense, and gets the idea of spending the night at the ruin to prove absurd local suspicions they are haunted or the Picts are still out there ready to kidnap Celts in revenge.  The narrator discourages her but she sneaks off when he is asleep.  

The ghost of a Celtic Druid wakes up our narrator and he runs outside to save his sister.  Suddenly there are Picts, little misshapen dwarves with flint weapons, chasing the flapper and trying to keep between the narrator and his sister.  The narrator, empowered by his natural Celtic hatred of the Pict, kills many with his fists (back home in the land of the free and the home of the brave he is an amateur boxer.)  The flapper, driven by racial memory, instinctively flees to the Celtic ruins, where the ghost of the Druid appears and drives off the Picts.

Not great--for example, the narrator's killing the Picts with his fists didn't help his sister, who was saved by the Druid.  We can't really hold this one against Howard, as I don't think he tried to sell it to anybody, so it's like an unfinished draft.  Just acceptable.   

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The four Bran stories we've just read feel a little repetitive when read all in one gulp, but none of them had been bad.  As for Kull, two Kull stories appeared in Weird Tales in 1929, so we'll get to the the King of Valusia when our Weird Tales project, currently in 1927, has advanced to that point.

Weird Tales, Jan 1927: A Derleth, R E Howard and W Collins

Those fireworks you heard two weeks ago were part of the fiery but peaceful celebration triggered by the announcement that MPorcius Fiction Log had read and blogged about at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales printed in 1926.   We've rested on our laurels enough and now the machete starts swinging again as we begin working our way through 1927.  Today, the January 1927 number, which has a pretty good monster cover with a fully clothed damsel in distress (somewhat amateurish but charming covers like this one remind me of the beloved covers of the 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual and Dungeon Master's Guide by David C. Sutherland.)  Among other things, inside this issue lurks H. P. Lovecraft's "The Horror at Red Hook," which we read back in August, and an editorial in which Farnsworth Wright admits that it is the science fiction stories ("the Jules Verne type of stories, about trips to other planets, weird surgical experiments, stories that forecast the tremendous possibilities of imaginative science, such as 'The Metal Monsters' in last month’s issue") that get the most enthusiastic responses from readers.  Our main interest today is three stories from this issue that I don't think will be in the Jules Verne category, August Derleth's "The Night Rider," Robert E. Howard's "The Lost Race," and a version of Wilkie Collins' "The Dream Woman."  To read the 1927 printings of these stories that I will be reading, click this link to the internet archive scan of the issue.  

"The Night Rider" by August Derleth (1927)

This is a two-page trifle, set in Italy during some war centuries ago, maybe Charles VIII of France's invasion of Italy in 1494.  Messer Morini and Madonna Lucrezia live in a house by the highway.  At midnight, Morini hears a horseman, riding hard and fast, and goes outside to watch him ride by; Lucrezia joins him.  In attire and figure the rider looks much like Morini's son, who is in the army now resisting invasion, but his face is obscured.  The next day a cavalryman comes to the gate to inform Morini that his son was killed in the fighting.  Lucrezia reveals she did not see any rider last night, it must have been the ghost of Morini's son, a ghost only he could see.

Acceptable filler.  In 2009 "The Night Rider" galloped back into the view of weird fans in the Derleth collection The Sleepers and Other Wakeful Things.  

"The Lost Race" by Robert E. Howard (1927)

"The Lost Race" is categorized as belonging to Howard's Bran Mak Morn series, and has been reprinted a million times all over the world.  We've already read some Bran Mak Morn pieces, "Worms of the Earth," which is great, and "The Children of the Night" and "The Dark Man," two stories in which Bran is not so much a character as a theme of the story.  There are three additional stories associated with Bran, "Men of the Shadows," "Kings of the Night," and "The Little People," and I will read them soon in my copy of Del Rey's 2005 Bran Mak Morn: The Last King.  Today's story, "The Lost Race," I will be reading in Weird Tales out of convenience because it seems the text in the magazine is the same as the text in my book.

Cororuc, a "fine figure of a man" whose features are "of the highest type of Briton, clear, straightforward, the shrewd, practical determination of the Nordic mingling with the reckless courage and dreamy artistry of the Celt," is returning home from a diplomatic mission to the "savage court of the Cornish King."  Howard tells us all about his looks and his attire and his equipment; I was reminded that until recently there were bison ("buffaloes") in Europe--the hide of such a beast covers Cororuc's shield.  In the creepy woods he is marching through, he encounters a panther fighting a wolf.  (Did great cats and human beings ever live in Britain at the same time?)  Howard is really into attributing character traits to a person's ethnicity, and so Cororuc interferes in the fight, scaring off the panther out of "the reckless chivalry of the Celt," and then follows the departing wolf's trail thanks to his "Celtic curiosity."  This is no ordinary wolf--its tracks suggest it walks on two legs!  Cororuc loses the trail and returns to his earlier path.

Soon after, Cororuc runs into the famous bandit Buruc the Cruel, "the scourge of Cornwall," with two of his thugs.   Our guy kills Buruc and one thug, but the third bandit escapes and raises the bandit horde, which pursues Cororuc through the forest.  In a narrow defile that the bandits seem afraid to enter, Coruruc is ambushed and knocked out; when he awakens he is the captive of dark-skinned men four feet tall!  They carry him into a cave, then through a series of caverns, to present Cororuc to their leader, who regales the Briton with the history of his people, the Picts, who once ruled all of Britain after driving to the margins the native redheads, only to, in turn, be driven underground by invading Celts.  Then this chief declares that, like 100 Celts before him, Cororuc will be executed with a special dagger as part of the Picts' enturies-old campaign of revenge on those who defeated them.  When Cororuc objects that he personally never hurt a Pict (he never even saw a Pict until today) he is told

“You pay, not for what you did, but for what your race has done”

Then comes Cororuc's salvation.  That wolf he rescued was not a wolf at all, but a Pict in a wolf skin.  He arrives and tells the Pict leader of Cororuc's good deed, and, because the race of Picts never shows ingratitude and always pays its debts, Cororuc is freed.    

"The Lost Race" is a pretty good sword and sorcery adventure story.  (Even though the werewolf isn't real, but a guy in a suit, the Pict leader is hundreds of years old, because of a curse laid on him by a witch, or maybe because he never leaves the cavern so has no sense of time--which comes from the sun and stars, of course--or maybe because he has a magic potion, and to my mind at least two of those explanations count as sorcery.)  You might quibble that the story is anticlimactic, what with the fights early on, then a history lesson, and then a resolution that relies on oratory rather than violence--I had certainly expected the wolf to reappear and save Cororuc, but to be a werewolf who killed a bunch of Picts, not a Pict himself cosplaying a wolf.  Still, Howard does a good job building up atmosphere with his descriptions of the forest and subterranean settings and of the various people, and his fantasy version of European history and the cultural traits of Europe's diverse people are fun.  So, thumbs up for "The Lost Race," even if I don't think Bran Mak Morn is even mentioned in the text.  Could the old leader be Bran Mak Morn?

     

"The Dream Woman" by Wilkie Collins (1855?)

Wilkie Collins is a famous name that I recognize but I don't think I have ever read anything by him.  According to Wikipedia, "Collins often revised—sometimes drastically—and retitled his periodical short stories for book publication" and spending a few minutes online I found various versions of this story appearing under various names.  I think the version of "The Dream Woman" reprinted in this January 1927 issue of Weird Tales is the very first version of the story, that which appeared in the periodical Household Words under the title "The Ostler" in 1855.  The story was reprinted in 1859 in The Queen of Hearts, which seems like what in SF we would call a "fix-up" novel, and then in a radically revised form  reappeared in the 1874 collection The Frozen Deep.  Since then the story has reappeared again and again in Collins collections and anthologies of ghost and general horror stories. 

Isaac Scatchard makes a precarious living as an "ostler" or "stable-helper," unable to get steady work from reliable employers because of bad luck; though perhaps of limited intelligence, he is sober, honest and industrious, but somehow always misses opportunities for good jobs and ends up working only intermittently for people who have a tendency to pay him irregularly.  Everybody knows him as "Unlucky Isaac."  Isaac has never had a girlfriend ("sweetheart") and when out of work he lives with his widowed mother.

Isaac takes a long walk--over a day--to apply for a job, and doesn't get it because another man applied while he was still walking there.  He takes a new road on the way home and stops at night at an inn during inclement weather to sleep.  He wakes up in the middle of the night to see an attractive woman in his room!  She bears a clasp knife, and twice, no expression on her face, tries to stab him--both times he dodges and the blade sinks into the mattress.  She disappears and Isaac calls for help, incurring the wrath of the landlord--there is no damage to the bed, and no way for anybody to have gotten through all the locked doors and windows, so Isaac must have been dreaming and awoken the house over nothing.

Back home, Isaac describes the dream to his mother, who finds the timing of the dream significant--it afflicted him precisely on the 40th anniversary of his birth.  Mom writes down Isaac's description of the woman and seals it in her desk.  Soon after Isaac's fortunes look up--he gets a good job and keeps it for seven years, until his employer dies, and leaves it with an annuity, a reward for saving the life of his employer's wife.  Isaac has forgotten his horrible dream, but not Mom--she looks at her paper record every time Isaac's birthday rolls around.

On his 47th birthday Isaac meets a woman, Rebecca, apparently a gentlelady down on her luck after being taken advantage of by a callous man or something of that nature.  She is contemplating suicide and Isaac talks her out of this desperate measure.  Or so it appears.  We readers of course recognize the woman from the dream, but Isaac is a little slow on the uptake.  Isaac and Rebecca meet several times and decide to get married.  Of course Mom recognizes her as the woman from the dream when they are introduced, but Isaac is in love with the blonde with the light grey eyes and fair skin and graceful accent and manners, and refuses to act on Mom's advice to never see Rebecca again.  It is not long after their wedding that Rebecca becomes sullen and starts drinking heavily and palling around with questionable characters.  Then a clasp knife just like the one in the dream shows up--Rebecca bought it at a good price and is especially proud of it and refuses to hand it over when Isaac demands it.  

Things come to a head when Isaac's mother dies and Rebecca acts disrespectfully before and during the funeral.  Isaac, provoked beyond limits, strikes her, and Rebecca leaves him, only to return a week later to try to murder him in his sleep with the clasp knife!  The attack occurs precisely 48 years since he was born and eight years since he had his terrible dream in the inn!  Isaac overpowers his wife, seizes the knife and leaves.  When he returns to the house, she is gone, and, despite hiring people to search for her, he never sees her again.

This is a smoothly written and well-paced story, and the plot isn't bad, so thumbs up.  Would it have been more shocking if somebody got killed?  Maybe, but Collins is perhaps more interested in leaving the reader with a feeling of mystery and uneasiness, of lifelong worry about what might happen next, anxiety over what might have been, and wonder about the inexplicable nature of the universe than he is in shocking the reader but also relieving him with a decisive and cathartic conclusion in which Isaac is killed with a knife in his chest or sends a woman to the morgue.

One item that will be of interest to historians of literature and society, especially you sex and gender types, is how Collins describes how the apparently well-brought up Rebecca ended up in so much trouble.

Little by little, in answer to his question, the sad story of the woman came out. There is no need to relate it here; it is told over and over again in police reports and paragraphs about attempted suicides.

Collins implies that Victorian England was full of fallen women, or, at least, that the newspapers were full of stories of fallen women, the topic apparently fascinating the literate public, so that he need only hint to the reader what happened to Rebecca, as if the degraded or fallen woman is a stock character familiar to all his readers.

Of course, "The Dream Woman" in its entirety is about the relationships of a working-class man to women to whom he is in some way subordinate or inferior.  Mom has the legitimate authority of a parent, and is much smarter than Isaac, while the dream woman (also presumably more clever than Isaac) is from the middle or upper classes.  When Isaac asserts independence from his mother by marrying against her will, and tries to assert authority over Rebecca by taking her as a wife and ultimately, when she is rebellious and malicious, striking her, disaster results.  Trying to bust out of the box that society and biology have placed you in is a risky endeavor.  We might also wonder if, by ignoring the warning that is his dream, Isaac is acting insubordinately towards God or the universe.

Collins anthologies, one from the 1990s and one from the 21st century

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A good start to our weird journey through 1927.  More weirdness next time!

Hugh B. Cave: "Betrayal," "The Hunter and the Hunted," and "Little Girl in Black Stockings"

I think of Hugh B. Cave as a guy who writes about people being mutilated, but his career has multiple facets, and he had quite a few stories published in mainstream magazine The Saturday Evening Post.  We just read one of them, "The Mission," which was billed as "A Little Classic of the Spirit" when it was reprinted in book form.  "The Mission" included no mutilations.  Several of Cave's Saturday Evening Post stories were among those collected in the 1963 collection The Witching Lands, which reprints 14 stories about the West Indies.  Let's check out three of them, "Betrayal," "The Hunter and the Hunted," and "Little Girl in Black Stockings."  Is there any chance somebody will be mutilated in any of these stories?  Cross your fingers, sickos!   

I am reading these stories in a scan of a British edition of The Witching Lands I downloaded while spelunking around the interwebs.  You can try to access a scan of that same edition here, and an American edition here, both at the internet archive. 

"Betrayal" (1952)

The texts on the jackets of both editions of The Witching Lands to which I have access give you the idea that the stories in the book are all narrated by a guy who owns a hotel on St. Joseph, which I guess is a fictional Caribbean island that represents multiple Caribbean islands the way Springfield of The Simpsons or Metropolis of Superman represent archetypal American towns.  Here in "Betrayal" the narrator is pretty superfluous--almost the entire story reads like a standard third-person omniscient kind of thing.   

James Lanning is an American who has lived in the West Indies for three years.  Betrayed by his business partner six months ago, left with only a boat, he has money troubles and so has gotten involved with a dangerous character who wants to be transported to St. Joseph as part of some scheme to affect the upcoming election.  This troublemaker will pay Lanning a thousand bucks, a lot of money in 1952--hell, even today it could pay for a two or three years' supply of Ovaltine!  While waiting to meet this guy in a bar in Santiago, Lanning runs into Patricia Marcy, an American singer who has left an unsuccessful band because the band leader was getting fresh.  Patricia has no money, so wants a job to finance her return to New York.  Lanning tells her he'll let her stay in his place while he's on his secret mission transporting a terrorist or revolutionary or whatever he is and lend her money when he gets back. 

When Lanning gets to his boat that night his passenger is waiting for him.  He asks for the first installment of the thousand, and the guy says his crony delivered it to Lanning's house--a woman took it.  Lanning figures Patricia Marcy must have stolen the cash and left town.  He goes through with the mission--after all, he'll get the other $500 when it is over.

During Lanning's adventure helping the political exile sneak home, conning a boat to a secluded, little-visited cove, riding horses on rough terrain, etc., the exile spouts wisdom about the need to trust people and look on the bright side and so forth, trying to cure Lanning of his cynicism.  This activist is betrayed by a colleague and a fight erupts--Lansing fights at the side of his client.  Then they head back to Santiago.  The exile's experience of betrayal at the hands of a friend has not shaken his faith and confidence, in contrast to Lanning, who doesn't trust Patricia because his business partner betrayed him.  Lanning finds that Patricia has not taken the money and run back to New York, but instead gotten a job as a typist and done Lanning's laundry and other neglected housework.  They decide to get married in St. Joseph, where Lanning tells the narrator his story.

This story is OK, maybe worthy of a mild recommendation.  Like "The Mission," it is about how a good person's influence makes other people better, but it is a little more exciting because this exemplar is on a secret mission and shoots people.  

"The Hunter and the Hunted" (1956)

Behind a cover engineered to appeal to all you foot fetishists out there, "The Hunter and the Hunted" debuted alongside stories by important mainstream writer William Saroyan as well as Kurt Vonnegut and Philip Wylie, men with one foot in the SF camp and one in the mainstream.  "The Hunter and the Hunted" was reprinted in the British magazine John Bull.

The narrator is even more superfluous here than in "Betrayal."  I wonder if the narrator gag was introduced in the book to link the stories together.

Marcel is a cop in St. Joseph City.  He left his home village in the mountains six years ago, and has had no contact with family or friends back home--nobody back home even knows he is a police officer.  The Captain sends him to his place of origin to capture Le Vagabond, who is said to be hiding there.  After a drive of two and a half days, Marcel arrives at home and finds Le Vagabond  with ease.  Marcel's quarry, a thorn in the side of the President and his cronies, but whose actual political activities Cave leaves totally undescribed, has adopted a little girl, the daughter of Marcel's old girlfriend and the boyfriend she took up with after Marcel left, an unpopular jerk from some other village, now gone.

Just like Yolanda in "The Mission" and the political activist in "Betrayal," Le Vagabond is a generous person whose goodness rubs off on all those around him.  A woman who was sick and ugly when Marcel left is keeping house with Le Vagabond and now she is hale and healthy.  The house Le Vagabond lives in is now in terrific shape, but was a terrible ruin last time Marcel saw it six years ago.  The little girl obviously loves him--he is a good father.  It will be hard for Marcel to arrest him and drag him back to the capital.

A ferocious storm hits, giving Le Vagabond another opportunity to show how awesome a guy he is.  The refurbished house is wrecked.  The four people take shelter in a cave.  A landslide seals the cave entrance.  So Le Vagabond jumps into an underground river he knows leads to the surface to get help.  This is a suicide mission--if the underground stream turns too sharply or gets too narrow, Le Vagabond will surely drown in the dark.

Marcel, the woman, and the little girl are dug out by villagers who claim they never saw Le Vagabond.  It is clear Le Vagabond alerted them to the plight of Marcel and company and everybody is in on a scheme to save Le Vagabond from the feds.  Marcel resigns from the police force and stays in the village and becomes father to the little girl and marries a cousin of his old girlfriend.  Sometime later Le Vagabond reappears just to visit--he is currently at some other mountain village, improving it.

"The Hunter and the Hunted" is OK, but the fact that it has the same theme as the last two Cave stories we read is kind of annoying.  "Little Girl in Black Stockings" better do something different.   

"Little Girl in Black Stockings" (1960)

Doctor Jourdan is a woman with greying hair who runs Ecole Pour Les Enfants Handicapes in St. Joseph City.  Today it rains heavily as she rides with Melodie, a nine-year-old girl, back to Melodie's mountain village, the girl's period of recovery at the school being concluded.  Melodie wears black stockings in a country where women all go bare-legged, and it is implied one of her legs was amputated after an accident back home three years ago and she has an artificial leg.  On the ride, through their conversation, we learn more about Melodie and her village.

The car gets stuck in a stream that crosses the road right next to the village so they walk into town.  There is a touching scene in which the driver expresses his love for Melodie.  These Cave Saturday Evening Post stories are for softies--all three of today's stories have scenes in which a parental figure expresses love for a child or vice versa.

The village is largely deserted as the villagers are at their gardens and farms, trying to keep the flood from washing away their soil.  Nobody being at the house of the aunt who is raising Melodie because Mom abandoned Melodie after Dad died in a fall from a mule, the doctor and Melodie head to the school, crossing the narrow bridge across the river from which Melodie fell in the accident that caused her disability.  The loving aunt is playing substitute teacher today.  The aunt tells Doctor Jourdan that the father of the boy who died in the accident which maimed Melodie, the local magistrate, blames Melodie for his son's death, and has been talking about driving the little girl out of the village.  The impressionable school kids have got the message that Melodie is to be shunned. 

Doctor Jourdan has the aunt take her to see the magistrate, a fat guy with the biggest house in town, to try to reason with him, but he is unreasonable, driven by guilt because he was supposed to keep an eye on his four-year-old boy that day and he let the tyke out of his sight so that he followed Melodie to the bridge to look for crayfish and, like her, was swept away by a tree branch that was floating downstream.

It has been raining the whole time and now the dangerous bridge over the river is below water and the kids, Melodie among them, are stranded at the school without adult supervision.  The magistrate's daughter is one of the oldest kids and a kind of leader and wants them all to try to run across the submerged bridge, but Melodie distracts the kids from this risky plan by showing them her artificial leg and telling stories of the city, which of course they have never been to, and teaching them songs taught her by Doctor Jourdan.  Melodie is a hero beloved by all the kids by the time the river has lowered and the adults can get to the school and the magistrate's heart softens.

This story is more affecting than "Betrayal" and "The Hunter and the Hunted" because thinking about a little girl amputee is sort of disturbing and depressing--I can shrug off an adult man having some problem because he has taken a risk but I certainly can't avoid feeling anxious about some innocent little girl losing her limb and then being shunned by her peers.  But, as I feared, "Little Girl in Black Stockings"' central theme is much like that of our earlier Cave Saturday Evening Post contributions--Melodie, in becoming a leader to the kids, is emulating Doctor Jourdan, even taking on the good doctor's mannerisms and methods of speaking; the doctor is a role model for goodness who has elevated those around her.

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Science fiction and weird stories tend to be challenging and surprising, always trying to convince you of some perhaps counterintuitive thing or going out on a limb to predict the future or extrapolate how some new element in society might change our lives.  Or, they are just adventure stories or horror storis set in a strange milieu that appeal to our fascination with sex and violence.  Either way, you kind of grapple with a SF story, have to try to figure it out, if only figure out if it has merit or is just nonsense or exploitative trash.  At least I do.  Literary fiction is also challenging or surprising, literary authors often springing wacky ideas or difficult techniques on you, so that, again, you've got to come to terms with them--Moby Dick or The Magic Mountain or In Search of Lost Time take you on a challenging journey, while more recent literary authors like Celine or Henry Miller or Charles Bukowski get in your face, challenging you to figure out how you feel about the outrageous behavior and opinions of their autobiographical characters.   

Mainstream popular entertainment stories like today's stories by Hugh B. Cave, on the other hand, are kind of like most TV shows--predictable, anodyne, meant to comfort you, many approaching the status of white noise or static.  Such fiction puts the reader in the position of passive observer of the mundane rather than of participant in a relationship with the author and interpreter of something strange.  Of course I am painting with a broad brush and there is a lot of overlap between literary and mainstream popular fiction--I love P. G. Wodehouse and W. Somerset Maugham, and think of them as literary or quasi-literary, and their work appeared in mainstream popular outlets.  But reading four stories from the Saturday Evening Post in a row, shortly after reading a fifth by Shirley Jackson, has validated in my own mind my decision to focus my reading in the SF realm instead of the mainstream.  Cave's stories today are competent, more competent than many of his weird stories, but they lack personality and excitement, they feel safe, reading them is like watching a man walk down the street, whereas reading a weird or science fiction story is like watching a man walk along a tightrope--is this daredevil going to make it?

So, I can mildly recommend two of today's stories, and the other is unobjectionable, but I won't be reading any more stories from The Witching Lands.