F&SF May '59: J T McIntosh, C Oliver, M A deFord & A Davidson

In our last exciting excursion into the world of mid-century speculative fiction, we read two stories that appeared in the May 1959 issue of Robert P. Mills' F&SF (as we people who hate to type call it), A. Bertram Chandler's quite good "The Man Who Could Not Stop" and Rosel George Brown's pretty lame "Lost in Translation."  Let's read four more stories from this publication, a long story by J. T. McIntosh and short stories by Chad Oliver, Miriam Allen deFord, and Avram Davidson.  That is the order in which they are printed in the magazine, and by coincidence (?) this correlates with how much I am expecting to like each story.

"Tenth Time Round" by J. T. McIntosh

Many have been the times I have told you that J. T. McIntosh sucks.  But last year I found McIntosh's novel The Rule of the Pagbeasts AKA The Fittest an involving and enjoyable read.  So there is a chance that I will find worthwhile "Tenth Time Round," a story that takes up 19 pages of this ish of F&SF and was reprinted in Japan's premier SF magazine in 1960 and, in 2019, in the British Library's Beyond Time: Classic Tales of Time Unwound.

"Tenth Time Round" is one of those stories about timelines and branching points in history that create new universes and all that.  You see, in 1986 an amazing new service opens for business.  For over $100,000, this firm can send your consciousness back to an earlier iteration of yourself, though no further back than 1975.  You will take over your old body, but retain your current memories, all the knowledge you have accumulated.  Your greater experience and maturity, and your knowledge of the future, will offer you a lot of advantages, so maybe you can succeed in this new universe where you failed in your original universe.  There are limits, though.  For one thing, if you behave differently than you did the first time around, which is inevitable, you will cause changes in this timeline, and so your memories of the first 1978 you went through won't match one-for-one this new 1978.  Second, some historical events, labelled "immutables," cannot be changed, no matter what you do.

The protagonist of "Tenth Time Round" is Gene Player, a writer.  He is in love with a woman, Belinda, and keeps going back in time to restart his life in 1975, a few weeks before he meets Belinda, in hopes of getting her to fall for him.  As our story begins, he is going back in time from 1986 for the tenth time--he has failed to win Belinda nine times, spent 99 years trying to win her, and each time losing to a guy named Henry.  Player is beginning to wonder if Belinda's love for Henry isn't one of those "immutables."

Most of the text of "Tenth Time Round" is romance movie stuff.  There's the "meet cute" that Player experiences for the tenth time.  There's Player plotting to win Belinda over Henry.  There's the surprise appearance of a fourth character, Doreen, who falls in love with Player.  This universe is far different than the last nine--this is the first time Doreen has entered the equation, and it looks like Henry's position with Belinda is not as secure as it has been in the earlier versions of 1978.  Will Player end up with Belinda or with Doreen?

This story is OK.  It is pretty well written, though maybe a lot of it is not very substantive.  The various elements of the story--Belinda, Doreen, the legal and the cosmic rules of time travel, the effect of this story's version of time travel on stuff like Gene Player's literary career (Player writes the same novel in every universe, but having written it nine times already, this tenth version is the most streamlined)--are each handled competently, but do they really all mesh together well, buttress and complement each other to further a single theme?  Maybe not.

A little better than acceptable, maybe a mild recommendation for "Tenth Time Round."    

"The One That Got Away" by Chad Oliver

Anthropologist Oliver often tells us that life as a stone age barbarian is better than life among skyscrapers and books and factories and motor cars*; let's see if he's banging the same drum this time or has something else going on. 

*(See "Let Me Live in a House," "Rite of Passage," and "The Marginal Man.")

"The One That Got Away" is set out in the great outdoors, a valley where there are lots of ranches for "dudes" and cabins for tourists to rent so they can go fishing and engage in other rural-type activities.  The last two years there have been many fires in the valley; multiple people have perished in the conflagrations, and everybody suspects an arsonist is at work.

[C]ome to think of it, just about every modem building in the town had burned down.

The protagonist, who rents "rustic cabins," is glad he didn't build any such "modern buildings" on his own property, but our hero is not immune to the other problem plaguing the valley--the fishing is getting worse for some unknown reason.

The protagonist takes a nap behind a rock at a river, and when he wakes up observes a space alien (E.T. doesn't notice our protagonist).  We realize this is a joke story, even though we've been hearing about innocent people getting killed.  The alien stuns the human anglers by the river side and uses advanced technology to catch a huge haul of fish with ease.  Our protagonist approaches the visitor from the stars and fast talks his way onto the alien's space boat and up into the orbiting star ship.  Our hero knows how to deal with tourists from the city who want to enjoy nature for a few days, which is just what the aliens on the star ship are--they have been burning down the "modern buildings" in the valley so as to preserve its rustic charm, the charm they travel light years to experience, their own worlds being totally urbanized.

"We come a long way every year to find what we want, and we simply cannot permit this commercialization. That’s what we’re trying to get away from, don’t you see?”

“So if we build something you don’t like you bum it down?”

“Naturally." 

I guess the point of this joke story is that businessmen are evil.  The alien businessmen casually slay native Earthers, and threaten to kill our hero.  But our guy figures out how to persuade them to stop monopolizing the fishing in his neck of the woods and move to a different valley, where, he convinces them, there are even better fishing spots.  The fishing in his valley recovers and local buildings stop burning down, though now other Earthpeople are getting mysteriously burned up--not that our protagonist cares.

"I don't care a used salmon egg about men from another world, and I never worried any about Earth either. I care about my business...."

"The One That Got Away" is a sort of traditional light science fiction story in which an intelligent human outsmarts aliens, resolving the plot conflict with quick thinking, but it has the anti-modern bias we see in so much of Oliver's work as well as the hatred of businesspeople we expect to see from college professor types.  Oliver's reprehensible politics and his many references to fishing (Oliver himself was an avid angler) give "The One That Got Away" more character and substance than a filler story, so I can't dismiss it as such, but I still don't care for it.  It doesn't commit any literary blunders, so we'll call it merely acceptable--pinkos and fly fishermen will likely enjoy it more than I did.

"The One That Got Away" was reprinted in the Japanese magazine I mentioned earlier, the British Venture, and right here in the USA, where the businessman has achieved his ultimate expression, in the  2003 Oliver collection A Star Above It.

"First Dig" by Miriam Allen deFord

This will be the second deFord story we have addressed here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Two years ago we read "The Margenes," which I deemed, as I do so many stories, "merely acceptable."  Hopefully "First Dig" will be more entertaining or enlightening.  The editor's intro to the story makes us expect it is some kind of ironic gag story, but we're going to "keep hope alive!" and read this thing (five pages) anyway.

One of my pet peeves about fiction is the shortcuts writers take in their task of manipulating the reader's emotions.  For example, writers know that putting a child in danger will get a rise out of readers because people have a natural sympathy for defenseless children.  The writer doesn't have to convince the reader about anything, the reader will naturally worry about the child.  Similarly, if a writer wants to serve the bloodlust of readers with depictions of a sympathetic protagonist who kills lots of people, he can make the people getting killed Nazis--all our lives we've been told killing Nazis is good, so the writer doesn't have to put any time or effort into explaining why the hero is justified in killing all these people.  The use of these kinds of shortcuts can diminish the tension of the story by absolving the reader of any responsibility, freeing him from doing any kind of intellectual work--nobody sympathizes with or identifies with somebody who harms a child or a Nazi, so the reader doesn't have to figure out if the violence in the story is justified and doesn't have to work through his emotional response to the violence.  Much more challenging, for reader and writer, would be to put not children or Nazis in danger, but government bureaucrats, wealthy businessmen, nagging spouses, African-American burglars, communist spies, or Christian clergy.  Such types of characters inspire a range of attitudes in readers; plenty of readers will sympathize or identify with such characters while at the same time plenty of other readers will hope to see such figures punished; this generates tension because readers won't know where the story is going and are forced to think through intellectually what the story is trying to say and whether they agree with it.  And to achieve the desired result from a maximum number of readers, the writer will have to make a convincing case, and he or she can play games with us readers, getting us to change our minds about the characters over the course of the story.

(A story can use these shortcuts and still be a good story, of course, if other elements of the story generate tension or if the story has other virtues--the most cliched and obvious plot and characters can be the foundation of a great story if it is well-written by some savant like Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance, or Tanith Lee, with sentences that are beautiful and/or paragraphs that are economical.)

Anyway, in "First Dig" I think deFord is taking a shortcut by appealing to people's admiration for William Shakespeare.  In the same way we all are disturbed when we hear a child is in danger or feel justice has been served when we see a Bf-109 go down in flames or a U-boat sink with all hands, we all know Shakespeare is awesome, so by putting the Swan of Avon at the center of her tale, deFord has liberated herself from the need to convince us to go along with one of her main themes.

"First Dig" has a science fiction setting but is actually a weird or fantasy/horror story.  The intellectual and emotional tension of the story is generated by raising the question of whether our lives have any meaning, whether human excellence matters.

DeFord's story begins with a little prologue in which we observe the attendees of a funeral; the event is described in a vague way, no really famous names of people or places, though deFord offers clues that will indicate to those familiar with the Bard's biography what is going on.  Then the main text, set 50,000 years in the future.  Earth has long been nothing more than a barren waste, and the billions and billions of humans who live all across the galaxy know almost nothing about the history of the planet upon which their ancestors evolved.  They don't even know if Earth humans had a religion, they can't read a single word of any language written before mankind conquered the stars.  All they know about the "Old Planet" is its location.

A college professor brings some archaeology students to Earth for a dig; this is a training exercise, and the students are not expected to find anything of value, and the prof, who comes across as cynical, cold, arrogant and dismissive, pooh-poohs the bones and things the students find.  The most energetic and romantic student, a kid emotionally committed to the past and the profession of archaeology, finds a gravestone.  He senses, without any rational reason, that this headstone is a big big deal, even when the prof dismisses the stone as valueless.  Driven by some compulsion, the student laboriously copies by hand the inscription on the headstone, even though he can't read a word of it, the letters mere squiggles to him.  Then he drops dead.

The story ends with the revelation that this kid found the gravestone of Shakespeare, upon which was engraved a curse on any who would disturb the Bard's bones.  While the realistic portions of the story suggest our lives are meaningless, that even the greatest of the world's artists and their cultures will be forgotten by those who follow them, the fantasy portion of the story suggests that great artists are like wizards, their art--in Shakespeare's case, the written word--like magic, able to shake and shatter human hearts and minds.

Competently written, and thought-provoking (nowadays you could use this story in a college class to interrogate "whiteness"--the elevation of the white male, white worship of the written word, white obsession with time, you know what I'm talking about), I can mildly recommend this one.  

"First Dig" was included in the 1971 deFord collection Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Elsehow and Helen Hoke dug it up and exposed it to the world in her 1977 anthology Eerie, Weird and Wicked.

Hey, comics fans!  Two points:
1) The cover of Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Elsehow is by Richard Corben
2) Hoke also included in Eerie, Weird and Wicked Robert Bloch's joke story about
comic books "The Strange Island of Dr. Nork," which last year I told you was terrible

"The Montavarde Camera" by Avram Davidson

Here comes the story I had the highest hopes for.  I gave Oliver a low "C," and McIntosh and deFord low "B"s, so it shouldn't be hard for Davidson to go to the head of the class!  Let's hope he's on his game today!

Davidson's style here in "The Montavarde Camera"--the vivid, emotionally evocative, images of people and places, the little subtle jokes--is quite good, so right away the story gets a thumbs up.  As for the plot, we are in weird territory again.  (I take a break from reading Weird Tales, but they keep pulling me back in!)  A guy in turn of the century England is mysteriously drawn to a shop owned by a remarkable figure who is probably the Devil or one of Satan's servants.  The protagonist is interested in photography, and the smooth and charismatic shopkeeper sells him a very special camera, one constructed by a pioneer of photography, a somewhat mysterious individual with a chequered history, a man rumored to have produced pornography and to have links to satanic cults.

Clues mount that the camera has a diabolical influence, that it drains the strength, the life force, from objects and people whose image it captures.  Will the protagonist do the right thing and try to destroy the infernal device?  Or will he be corrupted by it, seek to use it to liberate himself from his nagging penny-pinching wife?  

An entertaining weird tale.  "The Montavarde Camera" has been a hit with editors and reappeared in multiple anthologies and Davidson collections.

********** 
 

The Davidson piece is the best of today's stories, the most fun to read, but also the hardest to write about, because it seems to be designed solely to be an entertainment that transports you to an earlier age with its references to the technology, events and aspects of daily life of a past era; in contrast, the Oliver story seems to be trying to make a banal argument about our market society while deFord's story seems to be trying to make profound points about the meaning of life and the roles of the artist and of the scientist, favoring the former over the later in a provocative way.  McIntosh's contribution is mostly trying to entertain you with a story about human relationships, but has the speculative element we expect to find in "real" science fiction, asking the question, if you could travel back in time under certain parameters, how might it affect your relationship life and career life?

A diverse bunch of stories, none of which is actually bad.  So, a good issue of F&SF.  Kudos to Mr. Mills and all concerned.

Merril-approved '59 stories: R G Brown, A Budrys and A B Chandler

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading selected stories printed in 1959 (more or less) that critically-lauded anthologist Judith Merril saw fit to include in the list of honorable mentions in the back of the 1960 edition of her annual Year's Best S-F series.  Today we'll finish up the "B"s and start the "C"s.  One of Merril's missions in life was to dissolve or at least point out the fatuity of distinctions between genre and mainstream fiction, and so she liked to include in her anthologies and honorable mentions lists stories that appeared in mainstream outlets that shared aspects with the material appearing in category SF magazines, and among her 1960 honorables we find a story by a William Chamberlain entitled "The Flying Jeep" that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post.  Chamberlain, a distinguished U. S. Army officer, was apparently also a prolific writer of fiction.  (It is amazing to the lazy among us how productive some people are.)  I can't find the text of "The Flying Jeep" anywhere online, so we'll have to skip Chamberlain and go right to A. Bertram Chandler after digesting Rosel George Brown and Algis Budrys.

"Lost in Translation" by Rosel George Brown

Editor of F&SF, where we are reading Brown's "Lost in Translation," Robert P. Mills, tells us that Brown is good-looking and that she majored in Ancient Greek.  Sounds awesome.  Then he hints that "Lost in Translation" is a joke story.  Not awesome.  Well, the story takes up only nine pages, so we can probably hack it.  

Brown immediately clues us in to the fact that her main character, Mercedes, is a contemptible poseur.  She is a virgin of the sex-positive future who reads ancient Greek texts in translation but doesn't understand them as well as a devotee of the current neo-Victorian fad.  Why does Brown think we will want to spend nine pages with someone whom she keeps telling us is contemptible?  So we can enjoy looking down on her?  As I keep telling you, SF is full of elitism.

Mercedes, who keeps affecting Victorian mannerisms, is visited by a man she has never met before.  Mercedes' father is a college professor and this is one of Dad's grad students.  Dad and this joker have invented a time machine and they want to test it out on Mercedes.

You may remember that Brown's novels Sibyl Sue Blue and The Waters of Centaurus were about a hip happening chick who was sexually promiscuous--how could you forget Sibyl Sue Blue having casual sex with lizard people from another planet?  Well, Mercedes here in "Lost in Translation" is the opposite of Sibyl Sue Blue, a square and a prude.  Our gal gets sent back to ancient Greece equipped with a translation device and finds the Greek literature and lifestyle she has been pretending to understand and revere is, in fact, to her neo-Victorian mind, vulgar and offensive, full of talk about sex, populated by  women who wear revealing attire and extravagant make up.  Mercedes falls in with some prostitutes who teach her how to apply cosmetics; now all dolled up, men are attracted to her.  (Brown here in this story illustrates the fact that women are positive that men prefer women with lots of cosmetics slathered on, no matter how often men tell them different.)  Never before have men desired her, and Mercedes finds she likes the feeling.  At a party she gets drunk and loses her virginity to a rich guy, though she barely remembers the actual intercourse.  Transported back to her time of origin, it is clear Mercedes has become a normal woman who will abandon prudery and start troweling her visage with artificial goop and have lots of sex.

A weak filler story that goofs on prudery and advocates sexual promiscuity and cosmetics.  Maybe "Lost in Translation," while failing to entertain us, serves to enlighten us denizens of the 21st century, is valuable as a primary document of 1959 feminism and progressive thought, offering insight into how the feminist line on stuff like sexual activity and the use of cosmetics has evolved over time.  I am going to judge "Lost in Translation" barely acceptable--it is not fun or funny and its attitude is banal and off-putting, but it isn't terrible.

Our mates over on Airstrip One reprinted "Lost in Translation" in a 1965 issue of Venture, and the story also reappeared in the 1963 Brown collection A Handful of Time.  

"The Stoker and the Stars" by Algis Budrys

Merril uses her honorable mentions list to promote two stories by Algis Budrys, but we've already read "The Man Who Tasted Ashes" so we're just addressing "The Stoker and the Stars" today, a tale that debuted in Astounding under a penname and would not be reprinted until 2011 in Leigh Ronald Grossman's Sense of Wonder. 

The cliched analysis of Budrys' work is that it is about what it means to be a man, and in "The Stoker and the Stars" Budrys almost comes right out and says this, in a passage that reminded me of Seneca's 86th letter to Lucilius (like Mercedes I read the classics in translation, and the trans. of Seneca's letters I read is Robin Campbell's.)

I couldn’t really describe him to you. He had a duffelbag in his hand and a packed airsuit on his back. The skin of his face had been dried out by ship’s air, burned by ultraviolet and broiled by infra red. The pupils of his eyes had little cloudy specks in them where the cosmic rays had shot through them. But his eyes were steady and his body was hard. What did he look like? He looked like a man.

"The Stoker and the Stars" suggests that being a man means taking risks to help others, and being a leader who supports his society.  The story comes to us as the memoir of a space man, a crew member on a Terran space ship who rose in rank to become captain of such a ship.  His career began in a difficult, humiliating time for the human race.  You see, after developing an interstellar drive, the human race tried to conquer other planets and races, and the alien races defeated us, chasing us back to Terra and then sort of quarantining our solar system, allowing only a small number of trading vessels to leave our system every year.  Our narrator is on the crew of one of those few trading ships.

A guy joins the crew to be a "stoker"--this man is the actual protagonist of the story, not our narrator.  The interstellar drives on ships during and just after the wars are temperamental and dangerous; a person--the stoker--has to stay in the engine room and constantly tend to the drive, clad in uncomfortable armor because the drive can arc and kill unprotected individuals.  The new stoker is obviously a veteran of the wars, but doesn't talk about his service.  By chance, the narrator learns that he was a Marine, one of that hardy crew of men who fought the most heroically during the wars, took the most risks, participated in the most savage fighting, etc.  Our narrator and others fear that, when the ship arrives at the trading post, that this Marine will launch some kind of kamikaze revenge terrorist attack on the aliens and ruin Earth's trade relations with the aliens, maybe even lead the aliens to wipe out humanity once and for all.

On the trip to the trading post, the stoker becomes a hero, suffering injury while saving the ship when the drive goes haywire.  Even though he is an enlisted man, his behavior while aboard, singing songs and so forth, raises morale and makes the ship operate more efficiently--he is obviously a talented leader of men.  This makes it hard for the narrator and his fellows to do anything about the man whom they fear is going to cause a diplomatic disaster once they arrive at the trading post; they just leave him be and hope for the best. 

When the day comes, the former Marine puts on his wartime uniform and walks right over to the aliens he fought with earlier in his career.  Instead of a disaster erupting, the Marine signs on to be a stoker on the aliens' ship.  In the denouement, we learn that this Marine, no mere grunt but a ship commander during the war, becomes a good will ambassador to multiple alien races, working as stoker on one ship after another, and is so charismatic and makes Earth look so good that the aliens allow more and more trade ships to leave our system and Earth eventually becomes integrated peacefully into the multi-racial galactic civilization.

A smoothly written and entertaining story with suspense, characters you can identify with who act in a believable manner, and a nuanced view of humanity and of what it means to be a man and a leader.  Thumbs up for "The Stoker and the Stars"!             

 

"The Man Who Could Not Stop" by A. Bertram Chandler 

Merril included two stories by Australian sailor A. Bertram Chandler on her list.  "The Man Who Could Not Stop" is classified at isfdb as a component of Chandler's famous series of stories and novels about space navy officer John Grimes, and it is set in the same universe as the Grimes stories, but Grimes himself does not appear.  Which is perhaps for the best as the Grimes stories I read in the dark age before I started the blog were kind of underwhelming. 

"The Man Who Could Not Stop" is an entertaining sort of slice-of-life story, set in the furthest reaches of the Milky Way, among the Rim Worlds.  Chandler sketches out effectively what life is like on these unattractive worlds, so far from Earth and the well-populated planets, and then introduces us to a pretty despicable fellow, a highly intelligent master thief who has pulled some major heists and killed at least one person in a fight.  He has fled from planet to planet through the galaxy, and ended up at one of the Rim Worlds because they are under a different jurisdiction and will not punish immigrants for crimes committed back among the Inner Worlds.  Chandler then chronicles this master criminal's life on the Rim in sort of jocular style, but the jokes are not absurd or based on puns or otherwise annoying or offensive.

In brief, Chandler depicts how the protagonist is an inveterate breaker of rules and exploiter of others--he is unreformable and essentially addicted to stealing from others.  Chandler also contrasts the law enforcement systems of the Inner Worlds, where criminals are coddled and prisons are comfortable places it is hoped will reform malefactors, and the law enforcement systems on the Rim, where criminals are punished with hard labor and poor food.  At times "The Man Who Could Not Stop" feels like a law and order conservative's satire of liberal "soft on crime" policies.

Again and again the protagonist robs somebody and is then thrown in prison for some months, only to get out and steal again and be captured and imprisoned again.  Chandler's descriptions of the man's crimes and his time in stir are entertaining.  Then comes the twist ending.  You see, while in prison the protagonist gets training as a mechanic.  After his third infraction he, along with many other irredeemable crooks, are impressed onto the crew of a starship about to embark on a dangerous mission--to leave the galaxy and attempt to reach an alien galaxy.  Few people would volunteer for such an arduous journey, so men who have been given a chance to straighten out and fly right but have proven unable to respect the law and the rights of others will crew the ship and in that way, finally, contribute to society.

Thumbs up for "The Man Who Could Not Stop," which I certainly enjoyed more than the John Grimes stories I read in the period before this blog came into operation.

"The Man Who Could Not Stop" debuted in the same issue of F&SF as Brown's "Lost in Translation" and would go on to be included in the collection Beyond the Galactic Rim.

"Familiar Pattern" by A. Bertram Chandler

"Familiar Pattern" was printed in Astounding under a pen name--Chandler had another story under his own name in this issue of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s magazine.

Chandler makes extensive use of his experience as a seaman here in "Familiar Pattern."  Our protagonist is the Australian captain of a merchant ship.  By chance--or so it seems!--an alien craft lands in the ocean near his ship, and he meets the aliens, who are more or less human-like.  They are pretty friendly, say they came to our planet because they were low on water and Earth, which they had no idea was inhabited, was the closest source of that oh-so-essential H2O.  The aliens and the humans trade small items, mostly booze and cigarettes (the aliens love to smoke, and Earth tobacco is more powerful than theirs, apparently) and then leave.

The aliens return and request to deal again with the protagonist.  Soon Earth is receiving regular trading delegations from alien space ships.  Interstellar trade remains based in Australia, and Chandler spends a lot of time detailing the logistics of moving stuff from the starships to the surface and the Earth goods to the starships and so forth.  Among the aliens who spend a lot of time on Earth are not only a trade commissioner and merchants but also alien missionaries.  Their religion, which preaches frequent use of alcohol and sexual indulgence, starts getting popular.

Throughout the story Chandler and his human characters point out parallels between European contact with Pacific natives and these aliens' new relationship with Earth humans.  In particular, there is a "pure-blooded Polynesian" bosun among the protagonist's crew who plays a sort of Magic negro role in the story, he being a better sailor and more phlegmatic and more wise than all the white people in the story.  This guy predicts, though in vague terms, what happens by the end of the story.

The provision of alcohol by the alien church serves as competition to local breweries.  And the sexual license promoted by the alien church offends the local prudes.  These conservative forces conspire to generate a mob that destroys the alien church.  This gives the aliens a pretext to bomb Earth ("gunboat diplomacy") and eventually take over our planet.  Has their entire series of visits, even the first, been a scam to provide the aliens a chance to conquer our world?

This story is OK.  The satire is a little too obvious and the description of trade negotiations and logistics a little too lengthy.  We're calling this one solidly acceptable, an uninspired but professional piece of work.  It doesn't seem to have been reprinted if you don't count British editions of Astounding or an appearance in Ellen Datlow's internet magazine in 2005. 

**********

In these Merril-approved posts I often try to figure out why Merril chose to include these specific stories on her list.  It is easy to see what Merril liked about today's stories by Rosel George Brown and Algis Budrys--they can readily be seen as attacks on the civilizations of Great Britain and the United States that lefties like Merril thought so reprehensible.  Brown's joke story is an attack on the bourgeois attitudes about sex of the English-speaking world, an attitude that liberals and leftists throughout the 20th century labeled "Puritanism" and blamed for a host of psychological and social problems.  As for Budrys, he may not himself be a liberal or leftist, but his story can be seen as, in part, a condemnation of the violence and imperialism of the British Empire and the Cold War USA (the Earth playing the allegorical role of the English-speaking world in the story) as well as a dramatization of the left-wing aspirational dream of seeing the First World humiliated by the socialistic Second World and/or the non-white Third World.  Of course, Budrys' story (unlike Brown's silly piece) also has literary merit--its characters have personality and behave realistically and face moral dilemmas--as well as entertainment value, and can be seen by us free-market types as arguing that trade is the key to productive international relations, making it a choice by Merril that is easy for me to endorse.

The second of Chandler's stories is even more of an anti-Western text than Brown's or Budrys', so we can see how it must have warmed Merril's heart.  Chandler's first story, however, with what it seems to say about recidivism and the foolishness of leniency towards criminals, would seem to go against what I would have expected Merril to believe, but it is a pretty fun and well put together light-hearted crime story, so maybe Merril promoted it purely based on her recognition of its merit as a piece of entertainment.  Or maybe she thought it a very subtle dig at punitive crime policies because the criminal was portrayed with sympathy and society eventually found a use for him instead of executing him or condemning him to a lifetime of incarceration?

These stories, whether I loved them or merely tolerated them, all provide food for thought.  So, a good batch.  More "C" stories next time we hop on the Merril tour bus and further explore exotic 1959.

O A Kline: "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," "The Corpse on the Third Slab," and "The Cup of Blood"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading stories from the first issues of Weird Tales, those with 1923 cover dates.  Today we'll tackle stories by Otis Adelbert Kline, whose "The Phantom Wolfhound" we read in our last episode.

"The Thing of a Thousand Shapes"

This here is a serial published in two parts across the first issue of Weird Tales, the March 1923 number, and the second, the April 1923 ish.  This early artifact of the weird has not been reprinted so I'm afraid we can't count on it being a blockbuster, but who knows, maybe we will enjoy it anyway--book editors aren't always right, after all.

The narrator's only relative, Uncle Jim, has just died at the young age of forty-five.  Uncle Jim financed the narrator's education so he could get an office job--the narrator's parents died in a fire when he was twelve.  Uncle Jim lived on a big farm but left its operation to others--he was an amateur scientist who devoted all his time to his studies of the occult and psychic abilities.  

The narrator goes to the farm where he has bizarre experiences that suggest Uncle Jim is trying to contact him from the beyond!  He is also surprised to learn that Uncle Jim left explicit instructions not to bury him or do anything to preserve his body until there is incontrovertible evidence that it is decaying.  Strange animals are seen about the house, a big white cat and a big bat, creatures which disappear soon after being spotted.

The next day one neighbor falls ill, and another's wife dies--the community begins to suspect Uncle Jim is a vampire who casts his soul into bats and felines and feeds on the living!  At night, sitting with his uncle's corpse, the narrator beholds an astonishing apparition.  An amoeba bigger than your fist appears on the floor, crawls around, then transforms into a trilobite, then a starfish!  The vision transforms again and again, each time into a more advanced form of life (at least in Kline's view--he has a porpoise evolve into a lizard, which is backwards, or we might say orthogonal--maybe Kline thought a porpoise was a fish?), eventually taking the form of an ape man and then going to cave man with a club to Roman soldier with a javelin to 18th-century soldier with a musket.  The apparitions disappear when the wind of the thunderstorm we expect to find in these kinds of stories hurls a broken branch into a window, breaking it.

Thus ends the first installment of "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes."           

The narrator falls asleep and dreams he is a caveman pursued by a dinosaur through a jungle of giant fungi.  When he wakes up, he sees more strange apparitions, disembodied hands apparently signaling him, then a menacing figure that approaches him.  The narrator flees outside, runs into the road and is hit by a car.  When he comes to in the morning, a beautiful girl is tending to him.  She and her father, a college professor who studies psychic phenomena and was friends with Uncle Jim, were coming by to pay their respects to the deceased when they hit the panicked narrator.

The doctor who sets the narrator's broken ribs looks over Uncle Jim's cadaver and finds that no decomposition has yet taken place.  

The local people are up in arms, many having fallen ill, some fatally, and the mob demands the narrator surrender Uncle Jim's body to them so they can drive a stake through its heart.  This will be a real tragedy, as the professor is sure Uncle Jim is alive, in a state of catalepsy or suspended animation.  The prof helps unravel what is going on, giving a lecture on the subconscious mind and one on "psychoplasm"--oy, Kline used these same phenomena as the basis of "The Phantom Wolfhound."  Anyway, all the apparitions are said to be products of Uncle Joe's subconscious bringing to life ectoplasm.  

(Kline insists on saying "psychoplasm" instead of "ectoplasm" and "objective mind" and "subjective mind" instead of "conscious mind" and "subconscious mind," which I found a little annoying.) 

Uncle Jim's subconscious is sending telepathic messages to the narrator's subconscious, and the prof figures out how to expose these messages to the conscious world.  He directs the narrator to hold hands with his daughter (sounds good), a woman who is not only a looker but adept at automatic writing.  Sure enough, after dad hypnotizes her by making passes with his hands and holding a mirror in front of her face, this beauty facilitates conversations between the subconscious minds of the two men by mindlessly writing down each man's dialogue.  These conversations are not very interesting, merely providing assurance that Uncle Jim is, as we have been told already, alive but cataleptic.    

The mob of superstitious farmers who believe in vampires (unlike logical college professors, who know vampires are a myth and instead believe only in rational facts like that ectoplasm that can be turned into animals by the subconscious minds of people in comas) arrives to put a stake through the cataleptic Uncle Jim.  The prof and his gorgeous daughter trick the mob into putting a stake through an empty lidded coffin.  Then Uncle Jim wakes up, just fine.  We are told that all the illness and deaths among the local community have nothing to do with Uncle Jim, its all a coincidence, the work of a brand new disease that is hitting the area.  As the story ends the narrator is going to leave behind office work in the city and bachelorhood to become business manager of Uncle Jim's farm and husband of the professor's daughter.

"The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" is not good.  The main character does not do much of anything, just spectates.  The real protagonists of the story, the professor and his daughter, the people who have special knowledge and special skills and who make the decisions and perform the actions that save the day, do not appear until the second half of the story.  Most of the weird stuff in the story has no effect on the plot--the dream of being a dinosaur-fleeting caveman, the vision that dramatizes evolution, the use of automatic writing to exploit subconscious telepathy, are all just padding.

Thumbs down!  Book editors were right to pass on this cobbled-together mess.           

"The Corpse on the Third Slab"

"The Corpse on the Third Slab" debuted in the July-August edition of Weird Tales.  In our own 21st century it has been reprinted in the Italian magazine Providence Tales, and in the American anthology Horror Gems: Volume 17.  

This is not a gem but merely an OK filler story.  A corpse was stolen from the morgue recently, so an Irish cop is assigned the duty of watching over the room with the cadavers from dusk til dawn.  His friend, a "wop," has provided him some booze to keep him company.  Our guy keeps thinking he sees or hears one of the corpses shifting around.  After falling asleep on the job, a sound wakes him, and that suspicious corpse walks up to the cop and talks about how he got killed.  The policeman can't move a muscle, can only sit still and listen to this living dead monologue--is this just a dream?  Having said tis piece, the corpse returns to its slab.  The cop, now able to move, goes over to the slab but slips and falls unconscious upon hitting his noggin on the hard floor.  The luck of the Irish is with him--he wakes up just before the chief and the morgue staff arrive.  The conversation between the police chief and the coroner reveals that the murder described by the corpse last night really happened--it wasn't a dream after all!

Pedestrian but not incompetent, silly but memorable in its slapstick and exploitation of ethnic stereotypes.  

"The Cup of Blood"

This one comes from the September 1923 issue of WT, the one with the cover depicting a woman with nice shoes about to be mauled by the king of the beasts  We've already read a story from this one, Farnsworth Wright's tale of people driven to suicide by forbidden knowledge disseminated by a creepy Oriental artifact.  In addition to the aforementioned 2019 Horror Gems: Volume 17, Kline's "The Cup of Blood" was included in the 1975 Kline collection The Bride of Osiris and Other Weird Tales as well as a 2023 German anthology of stories from early issues of Weird Tales, so perhaps we can hope this piece is superior to the disjointed and tiresome "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" and the mediocre "The Corpse on the Third Slab."  Germans are known for their high standards and meticulous judgement, aren't they?

Well, "Cup of Blood" feels better written and more adult, more serious and less exploitative, than the two other stories we read today, and is certainly better constructed than "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," but it also feels old fashioned and a little boring.  I guess a more respectable story than "The Corpse on the Third Slab," but less amusing and less memorable, so approximately as good, meaning merely acceptable.

Our narrator and his friend are American veterans of World War I hiking through Scotland.  After being acquainted with the long convoluted story of how the local castle became haunted, they decide to camp within its walls.  It seems a few hundred years ago an old tyrannical noble married a pretty young woman and at about the same time appointed a young cleric to handle the local parish or chapel or whatever.  The laird eventually learned that his wife and the minister had known each other, been in love, before her marriage, and wrongly suspected they were conducting an adulterous affair behind his noble back.  So he came up with an elaborate means of punishing them involving sealing them up in the wall or something.  To this day, the locals think the ghosts of these three people still haunt the castle and avoid the ruins like the plague.

The two doughboys set up camp inside the castle and Kline spends a lot of time describing the place and the hikers' mundane camping activities.  The men split up and the narrator's friend fails to return in a timely fashion and so, during a thunderstorm, the narrator looks for his comrade.  It takes him a while, but eventually the narrator finds his friend--this guy fell into what amounts to a trap and found himself injured and confined in a secret room where he uncovered clues that explained all that went on with that love triangle long ago.  My eyes were kind of glazing over, so maybe I am making a mistake, but I felt like the clues this guy accidentally found at the cost of a broken leg just confirmed what we already suspected.

"The Cup of Blood" feels long and slow and nothing about it is very compelling, but I suppose there aren't any major blunders in it.

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Not great.  We'll probably be reading the rest of Kline's 1920s Weird Tales work as we continue our trek through the unique magazine's early days; hopefully those stories will be better.  

It's been five or six Weird Tales posts in a row, so we'll see if we can get some "real" science fiction with rocket ships, space suits, and speculations about life in the future lined up for next time.  In the mean time, look out for those thunderstorms and all that ectoplasm you know is out there, just lurking in the spaces between the mundane atoms, waiting to be activated by your subconscious.

Weird Tales, June 1923: O A Kline, L B Sugarman, H Leverage, and H R Henze

Let's check out the fourth issue of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual, Weird Tales.  From the June 1923 issue we will be reading four stories, one by a pretty famous guy, three by peeps I've never heard of before. 

"The Phantom Wolfhound" by Otis Adelbert Kline

Kline is a somewhat important member of the weird and science fiction communities; he published various stories and novels that appeared in the pulps and in book form, apparently worked at Weird Tales in some kind of assistant editorial capacity, and was for a time Robert E. Howard's literary agent, as well as Carl Jacobi's.  I read an Ace paperback edition of Kline's Burroughs pastiche Planet of Peril in the period before the inauguration of this blog and thought it OK, and during this blog's life read his collaborations with E. Hoffman Price "The Spotted Satan" and "The Cyclops of Xoatl;" you can click the links to see what I thought of those.  Starting today with "The Phantom Wolfhound," we are going to get better acquainted with Mr. Kline's 1920s work and see if, as the Science Fiction Encyclopedia warns us (promises us?), his fiction is "crudely racist" and "sniggeringly sexist."

Dr. Dorp is an expert on the supernatural.  His friend Detective Hoyne brings over a pathetic character, a worn-out skinny man Dorp immediately dislikes, Ritsky of the cold clammy handshake.  (You kids living in the post-coronavirus world may not know it, but it used to be that careers, business concerns, and entire empires rose and fell due to how well a guy could shake hands.)

Ritsky tells his improbable story.  He killed a dog two years ago and ever since, whatever house or apartment in the Chicago area he moves to, the ghost of a dog haunts him, keeping him from sleeping, allowing him no peace.  His servants could hear the dog and have left his employ, except for a deaf woman.  Ritsky lives with a 12-year-old niece, who has apparently not heard the dog.

In Chapter II, Kline describes in detail how Dr, Dorp sets up cameras in hopes of catching a photo of the phantom dog, should it be real.  In Chapter III Dorp and Hoyne witness the ghost--it comes out of the niece's mouth and floats from her room, down the hall, through the keyhole to Ritsky's door, to take the shape of a dog and terrorize Ritsky.  After having done this for over a year, the ghost finally decides to attack Ritsky; Ritsky dies of a heart attack, and the ghost vanishes, leaving behind what appears to be dog slobber; Dorp collects some of the slime.

Chapter IV includes a sort of lecture on ectoplasm AKA psychoplasm AKA teleplasm, and the people who have studied it, including Arthur Conan Doyle.  Then we get the explanation for what was going on.  Ritsky, editor of a radical newspaper in New York, was given guardianship of the niece when her  parents died.  The niece had a dog, a present from her parents, and the dog hated Ritsky, and bit him.  So Ritsky shot the dog behind the niece's back.  The niece doesn't consciously know who shot her pooch, but her subconscious mind figured it out!  Energized by the stress of all the trouble the girl had been through and its hatred of Ritsky, the niece's subconscious was able to mobilize the ectoplasm that naturally occurs in the air to create a form with which to achieve revenge by terrorizing Ritsky.  In case we didn't already hate Ritsky for being a dog-killing commie, Dorp also reveals that Ritsky was slowly poisoning the niece with small doses of arsenic; he being her closest relative, he'd get her money if she croaked.

Kline finishes the story in an odd way.  After Dorp has explained everything, the photos arrive that show Ritsky's last moments, and Kline puts in italics the revelation that the exposures show a ghost dog  as if this should be a surprise to us, even though the entire story has been telling us that a ghost dog was haunting Ritsky.

Personally, I am not crazy about the trope in fiction of people performing elaborate activities at the direction of their subconscious selves, murdering people or whatever and then being totally unaware they have done it.  In my opinion, it would be more compelling if the niece was somehow deliberately in cahoots with a ghost dog or had become a witch who made a deal with the devil to kill her uncle in self defense or just out of revenge.  Of course, Kline's aim is to portray the niece as totally innocent and sympathetic, and Ritsky as totally evil, not to depict the kind of moral ambiguity and troubling trade offs experienced by people in real life who have to fight for their lives or set out on a campaign of vengeance.

As we so often do here at MPorcius Fiction Log, we are giving this story an "acceptable" grade--it isn't bad, but it is pedestrian and there are what I would call missteps.  As we read more Kline it will be interesting to see if negative depictions of radicals are a recurring theme in his work.  The fact that Ritsky is some kind of left-wing intellectual is just thrown in here in "The Phantom Wolfhound" unnecessarily (perhaps to appeal to readers' supposed hostility to the Bolshevik Revolution and dismay over the recent founding of the Soviet Union--the dog Ritsky murdered is a Russian wolfhound and the niece's name is Olga), but maybe in his other work Kline expands on his political or social ideas? 

After lying dormant for almost a century, "The Phantom Wolfhound" sprang back to life in two 21st-century anthologies, one with Chi-town as its theme, the other a "best of Weird Tales" compilation.

"The Gray Death" by Loual B. Sugarman

Sugarman is another of these people who has only one entry at isfdb.  (Terence E. Hanley of the vast Tellers of Weird Tales blog is on the case and for more info on the author of "The Gray Death" you can check out Hanley's  blog post on Sugarman.)  "The Gray Death" is well-liked by small press editors, it seems, reappearing in Robert Weinberg's The Eight Green Man and Other Strange Folk, Gregory Luce's Horror Gems: Volume 17, and Chad Arment's Hortus Diabolicus: Further Twisting Tales of Menacing Flora and Malignant Fungi.  The most famous editor of Weird Tales, Farnsworth Wright, reprinted "The Gray Death" in WT in 1934.

Our narrator is pissed off at his friend Anthony because his Tony, whom he hadn't seen in quite a while, was repulsed by his new wife.  But Tony then explains his reaction was involuntary, a response to seeing the woman all clad in grey, including grey gloves.  Tony then explains why he can't stand the sight of gray.

Tony was in the Amazon with a German scientist and some superstitious "natives" as guides.  I assume these guides are Indians or maybe Hispanics but the German refers to them with the "n-word;" maybe people in 1923 used that word to refer to any non-whites or maybe this is a reflection of this guy having English as a second language--Sugarman writes the German's dialogue phonetically, so he says stuff like "Ach, dot iss new.  I haf not smelled it before. But—I do not lige it.  It iss not goot.  Smells is goot or bat—und dat is not goot."

This German is smart and brave and fun and willing to risk his life to help others and so forth--Tony is very fond of him, which makes the climactic horror scene of "The Gray Death" all the more powerful.  You see, the two men discover a giant fungus monster, a writhing thing Sugarman does a very good job describing.  The monster devours organic matter lickety split, as well as metal, but it can't digest silicon, and is confined to its current locale by the fact that it is surrounded by a patch of sand.  The German wants a sample of this monster to study, and accidentally gets a tiny spot of the grey stuff on the American's foot, and it starts devouring Tony's foot so quickly that the German has to cut off part of his friend's foot and our guy gets feverish and is bedridden quite a space.  Undeterred, the German tries again to collect a sample, but again blunders and Tony has to watch as the grey fungus, in seconds, eats away his beloved pal's arms as he screams in agony.  The German begs Tony to shoot him in the head to put him out of his misery.

A solid bit of gross horror.  The best or second best of the 1923 Weird Tales stories I have read so far, and the monster makes it legitimately weird, not just a crime story or psychological story like its competition, Mollie Frank Ellis' "Case No. 27."

"The Voice in the Fog" by Henry Leverage

Leverage seems to have been a wacky and nefarious character who spent time in prison and had scores of stories published, but, according to isfdb, only one in Weird Tales, this baby right here, which is promoted by reminding readers that Leverage produced the novel The Whispering Wires.

Paul Richter is the chief engineer on an oil tanker and has travelled aboard the ship all around the world, making some serious cash doing some smuggling and grey market and black market trading on the side.  Richter has been plunging that money into making a lady of his daughter Hylda, so he isn't happy when one day he gets home and 27-year-old Hylda is making time with some guy named Gathright, a mere sailor!  Richter tells this joker he'll get him a job on his ship, but it's a trap--Richter knocks him out and sticks him in a boiler, then operates the boiler, aiming to cook Gathright to death.

The rest of the story follows various episodes on the ship that lead the reader to believe the flesh and bones of Gathright are causing malfunctions in the ship propulsion systems, and lead Richter to fear the ship is now haunted so that he starts drinking heavily and neglecting his duties.  Eventually an amazing coincidence occurs that reveals the truth of Gathright's fate and resolves the plot.  Gathright escaped the boiler out another opening, and signed on to a different ship.  Months later that ship flounders in a storm and the ship Richter is on rescues Gathright, who is unrecognizable due to a bandage on his face.  Gathright of course recognizes the father of the woman he loves--his would-be murderer!--and works some psychological tricks on Richter, then, revealing himself, gets Richter to agree to allow him to marry Hylda.

The happy ending is a little hard to swallow--shouldn't Gathright kill Richter or at least sic the police on him?  "The Voice in the Fog" otherwise is quite convincing and well written.  A professional piece of work, better than acceptable but not as good as "The Gray Death" or "Case No. 27."  I guess it is easier to come up with a good premise and compose the body of a weird story than it is to produce a good ending.

It doesn't look like "The Voice in the Fog" has ever been reprinted.

"The Escape" by Helen Rowe Henze

Another writer with only one isfdb credit about whom you can read at the Tellers of Weird Tales blog.  And another story that has not, it seems, ever been reprinted.  We're all about the nooks and crannies here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

"The Escape" has a compelling premise--a man who is afraid to sleep in a room with another, to get drunk, or to undergo anesthesia because he fears what he might say when he lowers his guard, relaxes his self restraint.  I myself have always worried about what I might say if I started hitting the sauce, or when I had dental surgery or a colonoscopy--I often think things I know will get me in trouble if I voice them.  Of course, the guy in the story has it worse than I do--he murdered his wife, and I have yet to murder anybody!

Henze's story is effective in describing this guy's anxiety as he learns he needs an appendix operation and has to decide if he should agree to the surgery the medicos claim is essential.  He eventually has no choice but to have the operation, and when he wakes up he worries he has revealed his monstrous sin while under the ether and the police are on the way to the hospital.  I thought this guy was going to try to sneak out or fight his way out of the hospital, but instead he comes up with an elaborate means of committing suicide.  I'm all for suicide in stories, but somehow the suicide in this one was a let down, both premature (why not try to get away first?) and overly complicated (he takes a sheet and tries to strangle himself by tying the sheet around the bed posts and sticking his head between the head board bars or something like that.)  Also, he didn't seem suicidal until the end of the story, after he had survived a threat (appendicitis)--having put one obstacle behind him, shouldn't he have gained confidence that he could survive the next obstacle?    

For the most part, the story works, so we're calling "The Escape" acceptable, maybe the high end of acceptable.

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The story by the famous guy is probably the worst of the lot, but it isn't bad, so sampling the fourth issue of Weird Tales has been a good experience.  Stay tuned for more weirdness right here at MPorcius Fiction Log--we'll be done with 1923 before you know it! 

Weird Tales, May 1923: K D Whipple, V Starrett, E T Emmons, and M F Ellis

In our last episode, I read stories from the first, second, and sixth issues of Weird Tales by famous member of the weird community Farnsworth Wright.  Looking at the contents of the third issue of the unique magazine, the May 1923 number, there's a dearth of names I recognize.  So, I'm going to choose four stories to read by people I have never heard of based on their alluring titles and the fact that they are short--let brevity be our watchword.

"The Secret Fear" by Kenneth Duane Whipple

Whipple has only one credit at isfdb, this story, which has never been reprinted.  "The Secret Fear," four pages, is billed as "A 'Creepy' Detective Story," and a detective story it is, with witnesses and clues and suspects and all that jazz.

Our narrator is a newspaper reporter with a good relationship with the cops.  He is on the waterfront when a police officer investigates the dead body of a local character, one of the many hard-drinking and hard-fighting and hard-living men who live and work among the docks and boats and ships.  Various other denizens of this district show up or are summoned and the cops interrogate them on the spot.  Most of these guys are Irish or Scottish or whatever, I guess, but one is a short, swarthy, hairy and bearded "foreigner" with an accent.  This guy admits to robbing the dead man, but denies he killed him.  The dead man's best friend amidst the waterfront had dinner with the deceased earlier and explains what must have happened.  You see, the dead guy had a terrible fear of monkeys and apes, and read in the papers that one of the gorillas had escaped from the local zoo.  So when the foreigner with his hairy arms and beard attacked him from out of the dark, the man suffered fatal heart failure from fear.

Barely acceptable filler.

"Penelope" by Vincent Starrett

I never heard of this guy, but he has a substantial body of work and Arkham House in 1965 actually produced a collection of his short stories entitled The Quick and the Dead.  "Penelope," three and half pages here in WT, appeared in that volume as well as the 1927 anthology The Moon Terror.

Our narrator has a buddy, Haswell, who never stops talking.  Haswell is equipped with an inexhaustible supply of facts, many of which are heterodox, heretical or fallacious, and he s not shy about sharing them.  One night, drunk, Haswell tells the narrator about his relationship to a star, Penelope, a heavenly body almost too dim to be seen with the naked eye, a star discovered by his father, an astronomer who died in an insane asylum.

According to motormouth Haswell, Penelope "has an orbit so vast that fifty years would be required to complete it" and Haswell, Sr. warned Haswell ,Jr. of the dangerous influence Penelope would have over him when it reached "its perihelion with our sun."  (I'm afraid Haswell and/or Starrett don't have a handle on what astronomical terms mean.)  Perihelion occurred last year, in October.  On that fateful day, Haswell awoke to find himself on the ceiling of his apartment--Penelope was at its zenith, directly above, and was pulling him towards itself, away from the Earth!  Haswell walked around the ceiling, upside down, coins and things falling out of his pockets to land on the floor below.

For some reason, Haswell decided to make his way outside, a treacherous enterprise, because the star's gravity was trying to pull him out into space and a quick death.  Haswell is clinging to a fence railing, his feet pointing at the sky and his head near the ground, when a pretty girl comes by.  Haswell learned her name, Penelope, before she scampered away, thinking him insane or drunk.  Haswell fell in love with her, and after the effect of the star waned and he was again subject to Earth's gravity, he spent months searching for this woman,  The big reveal at the end of the story is that Haswell is engaged to this Penelope.

This story doesn't really add up; nothing about it makes sense and the tone is not consistent--at times the story seems "whimsical," but your father dying in a madhouse is not whimsical, and is the star Penelope trying to seize or destroy Haswell or is it trying to help him by introducing him to a hot girl?  "Penelope" is not offensively bad, so I guess I'll judge it acceptable.  At least it is actually weird, and not just a crime story, and I do like the idea of a star having some kind of malign influence on you.

   

"Two Hours of Death" by E. Thayles Emmons

Emmons, a newspaper editor, has only this one story listed at isfdb.  Check out Terence E. Hanley's comprehensive blog about Weird Tales for more info on Emmons.

"Two Hours of Death" is subtitled "A Ghost Story."  The text, except for a little framing paragraph about where the main text came from and a brief newspaper clipping about a guy's death, is a memoir penned by an elderly man.  The narrator, in his twenties and early thirties, was close friends with a scientist of great promise, a genius of wide interests.  This genius went insane at age 34, and has just died in an insane asylum at age 69.  His friend dead, the narrator, in this memoir, reveals what drove the scientist batty over thirty years ago!

The scientist believed in a Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul, and sought to discover the nature of the soul via experimentation.  Eventually he came up with a drug that allowed the soul to leave the body without causing bodily death--he tested the drug on himself, and has out of body experiences.  He then tricked his friend, the narrator, into drinking the drug (some friend!) and the narrator describes the experience of being separated from your own body and sort of floating around, able to see in the dark and read minds and so forth.  

So far this story is pretty good, but then comes the twist ending.  We are told that the narrator was engaged to the woman the scientist loved, and so the genius contrived to detach the narrator's soul from his body so he could more easily murder him.  The scientist got out his fanciest dissection knife and was about to carve up the narrator's body when the narrator became so agitated that he was able to make himself visible and scare off the scientist.  The sight of his rival's immaterial form scared the scientist so severely he went insane and never recovered.  The narrator kept all this business--proof of the soul, the experience of being a ghost, the attempt on his life--a secret until writing this memoir.

"Two Hours of Death" doesn't really hold together.  We didn't know the scientist and the narrator were after the same woman until the last possible second, so the twist ending feels cheap.  Would a guy who has secured proof of the soul and who believes in God actually murder his friend--wouldn't such a believer fear punishment from God for this horrible crime?  Would a scientist as committed to knowledge as we are initially told this guy is use the greatest discovery in history to just murder somebody out of revenge--wouldn't he want to use his discovery to learn about the afterlife and all that?  And why is he scared of the ghost--he was a ghost himself and knows as a ghost he couldn't touch anything in the material world, that the narrator while detached from his body can do nothing to stop him from cutting the narrator's throat?

I liked the style and substance of "Two Hours of Death" up to the clumsy ending, so we're judging this one barely acceptable and shaking our heads ruefully.

"Case No. 27" by Mollie Frank Ellis

On the American liturgical calendar we've got black month (shortest month of the year) and homosexual month (the month school lets out) and we've also got women's month.  I don't think it is women's month as I write this, but maybe you are reading this during women's month?  Anyway, this story is by somebody named "Mollie" and I'm hoping it is better than the other three stories we've read today so I can celebrate women's contributions to the weird with some sincerity.

We are in luck!  "Case No. 27" is actually sort of affecting, and it foregrounds women's lives and concerns, those of wives and mothers, as well as hinting at the callousness of men towards women, the callousness of both working class men and of the educated bourgeois elite, even those who claim to have the good of others as their raison d'etre.  

Our narrator is visiting a friend he hasn't seen in twenty years.  Friend is a leading researcher into mental illness, and takes the narrator to meet his most fascinating patient, the woman whose case number is 27.  Mrs. Howard tells her tragic story herself.  She and her husband, a farm couple, had two young kids.  The kids were both killed in an accident, which of course broke the Howards' hearts.  They have trouble sleeping, but eventually Mr. Howard makes peace with the tragedy and could sleep, if only Mrs. Howard could--her sleeplessness, her agitation, keeps him awake.  Mrs. Howard cannot get over the loss of her children, and comes to blame herself for the disaster.

The Howards find that if Mrs. Howard massages his temples, her husband can fall asleep.  Mrs. Howard herself cannot get any sleep, and she has nobody to provide her comfort.  Mr. Howard does not take his wife's need for sleep seriously--he argues that he needs his sleep because his work brings in the money they need to survive, while her work, women's work, about the house can be safely neglected--and far from comforting her, when she can't show him affection, Mr. Howard starts going into town in the evenings.  Mrs. Howard goes insane, and begins fantasizing about crushing her husband's head during her nightly sessions of massaging his temples.

The first twist ending is that Mrs. Howard thinks she has done just that, murdered her husband, when in fact, she has not--the murder is just a sort of wish fulfillment fantasy slash guilt-induced delusion.  The second twist ending is that the shrink has no sympathy for Mrs. Howard, but has full sympathy for callous Mr. Howard; the narrator finds his friend's attitude revolting and hurries away.  We can see this story as a condemnation of our society's treatment of women, and, to me at least more interestingly, a condemnation of the science/profession of psychology/psychiatry.

The most successful of today's stories.  "Case No. 27" has real human feeling, and it all "adds up"--makes sense and has internal consistency--in a way "Penelope" and "Two Hours of Death" do not.

Like Wipple and Emmons, Ellis has only one credit at isfdb, and like "The Secret Fear" and "Two Hours of Death," it looks like "Case No. 27" has never been reprinted.  We explore some rarely travelled territory here at MPorcius Fiction Log!

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So today we have a quite weak crime story, two weird stories with supernatural ideas that are good but which are botched in the execution, and a good psychological horror story that unleashes some social commentary on us (commentary that doesn't, thank heavens, undermine or overwhelm the actual human drama of the tale.)  Not a great helping of the weird, but not bad, either--we've certainly seen much worse, and by big names, on our long weird journey.  

Stay tuned for more exploration into the earliest of Weird Tales right here at MPorcius Fiction Log.