Merril-approved '59 stories: Collins, Cores, Correy, & Cottrell

Judith Merril, favorite of the critics, cheerleader of the New Wave, recognized a lot of authors whose names begin with the letter "C" on her honorable members list at the back of her 1960 "Best of" anthology.  Today we'll read four stories by such writers, none of whom I think I have read stories by before.  We don't just read the same old authors here at MPorcius Fiction Log--we also read authors I have never heard of before!  

Today's never-heard-of authors are Les Collins, Lucy Cores, Lee Correy, and C. L. Cottrell.  Their names here in this para are links to internet archive scans of the 1959 science fiction magazine or book in which each of today's stories appears so it will be easy for you to read along and then lament that I have totally misunderstood the stories and exhibited my bad taste and thus contributed to the spread of the disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, and indigestion that characterizes these interwebs in the year of our Lord 2026.

"Question of Comfort" by Les Cole (as by Les Collins)

Crimes of misinformation have already occurred!  "Question of Comfort" debuted in Cele Goldsmith's Amazing under the pen name Les Collins, a pseudonym used by Lester Hines Cole.  We've already read a story by Cole recommended to us by Merril, 1958's "Cargo: Death," which appeared under a different pen name and which I groused "is like 40 pages long and feels like it is 140 pages long."  Uh, oh.  Still, I am glad I cracked open this issue of Amazing, because it has two elaborate illustrations by Virgil Finlay, one featuring a guy in a space suit trying to repair his space craft and another featuring a couple in their undies witnessing two hideous monsters chew on each other.  Any publication with a Finlay illustration is worth looking into.

OK, back to Collins AKA Cole.  "Question of Comfort" is the story of a project manager, our narrator, working at Disneyland, battling the executives that represent "the Hollywood Mind" in his quest to create an attraction that consists of a series of rooms that immerse tourists in realistic simulations of the surfaces of several of the other planets and moons of our solar system.  It was kind of obvious from the start that the narrator was a space alien hoping to get Disney to pay for a means to cure his homesickness, and the office politics scenes (Will the suits OK the project?  Will they micromanage it to death?  Will the design team resign, or become a well-oiled machine, an extension of the narrator's wishes?) and the spy/detective stuff (Was that accident at the work site an attempt by a fellow alien to kill the narrator?) and the technical details around building an amusement park ride are all kind of boring.  Do I open up a SF magazine to experience the thrill of working in an office or on a construction site?  No, I do not.

The plot culminates in a fight between our narrator, who is some kind of cop or other authority figure among his people, and the other alien, some kind of miscreant of the same race, in the Venus room.  We are led to believe the aliens are from Venus, and the conditions in the Venus room are needed by these two undocumented immigrants to maintain their health. The bad alien is killed, and then there is a limp twist ending--the narrator is not from Venus after all, but from a Venus-like planet in another solar system.  So what?  There is also a tepid romance between the narrator and an intelligent Earth woman.

In theory, a story about a homesick person who has a love affair with someone of another race/culture/species could tug the heart strings of the reader by conveying the human emotions of loneliness, regret, desire, lust, etc.  Similarly, a cop and a criminal from another world chasing each other and fighting each other in an iconic American location could be the source of action and adventure excitement.  But Cole doesn't even try to do any of that emotion or excitement stuff--he is more concerned with the mechanics of being a project manager who is building a high tech tunnel of love.  Zzzzzzz...  

Thumbs down for "Question of Comfort."  I am puzzled by Merril's support of this yawner.  "Question of Comfort" would however rise to bore again in a 1974 reprint magazine entitled Thrilling Science Fiction.

"Deborah and the Djinn" by Lucy Cores

Cores, who as a child escaped the Russian Revolution with her family, has two fiction credits at isfdb, but apparently was quite prolific in the detective and historical fiction fields, publishing numerous novels in those genres.  "Deborah and the Djinn" debuted in Hans Stefan Santesson's Fantastic Universe, in the same issue as another story Merril recommended to us that has never been reprinted, Sasha Miller's "The Dancing that We Did."

"Deborah and the Djinn" is kind of a light-hearted joke story, though the actual jokes are sort of few and far between and quite thin; maybe if you liked the jokes, you'd call them understated or subtle.  Deborah was born on and lives on Martha's Vineyard, and there are a lot of comments that gently, even affectionately, suggest people on "the Vineyard" are full of themselves.  Deborah buys an old oil lamp (she has a collection of them) and when she starts cleaning it the genie comes out.  The genie is a bored smart ass, apparently sick of being a genie and giving out the requisite wishes to the contemptible people who find his lamp and summon him.  Deborah, who is apparently a nicer person than any other person who has ever activated the lamp, quickly charms the genie and gets him to take her to a square dance.  Cores spends a lot of time describing the clothes Deborah and the genie wear to the dance.  And how much Deborah enjoys having a tall man touch her (she herself is taller than most men) and hearing other women comment on her tall strong date.  Much of "Deborah and the Djinn" resembles is what I suppose women's romance novels are like.

The genie has more fun at the dance than he has ever had before over the course of his centuries' long career.  So he warns Deborah that the wishes he fulfills for people, and has for thousands of years, always turn out bad for the wisher.  Doing this gets him thrown out of the Genie Guild, turning him into a mere human.  Luckily this happens after he buys the farm next door to Deborah's estate, getting out of Deborah's hair a neighbor she didn't like who had been refusing to sell out of spite until the genie offered him ten times the value of the property.  Deborah is happy the genie she has fallen in love with will be living next door and is now marriageable, and uses up half a page of text telling the formerly supernatural being, who at first is a little upset to lose all his magic powers, how beautiful Martha's Vineyard is, half a page of mind-numbing text about flowers and sea food.  (Is this half page sincere, or a goof on how people on Martha's Vineyard are intolerable bores?)  The story ends by telling us that cis-human Deborah and trans-human Djinn get married and their kids are hybrids who can teleport or turn invisible or something.

"Deborah and the Djinn"  is just a women's wish-fulfillment fantasy that lacks any kind of conflict or drama and has many long tedious passages about primping and dressing up and how awesome Martha's Vineyard is.  Thumbs down!  I guess Santesson published it and Merril promoted it because Cores by this time had published multiple mainstream novels and was thus "a name," but "Deborah and the Djinn" is like a saccharine children's book burdened down by overly long filler passages and thus totally lame.               

"Letter from Tomorrow" by Lee Corey

"Lee Corey" is the pen name of G. Harry Stine, a libertarian and an expert on rocketry.  That sounds promising, but note that "Letter from Tomorrow," like "Deborah and the Djinn," was printed in Fantastic Universe and never saw print again.  Could Merril be foisting another piece of junk on us?

Not junk, but no big deal; we might call "Letter from Tomorrow" a male wish-fulfillment fantasy, a story that romanticizes the scientific method and the scientist but also offers a deus ex machina shortcut to achieving scientific goals, the same way "Deborah and the Djinn" offers a deus ex machina shortcut to a woman's sexual and family goals.  Have I told you I don't like the deus ex machina plot device?

The protagonist of "Letter from Tomorrow" is a scientist working on rockets, one of many people toiling at the laborious step-by-step process of making space flight a reality.  "Letter from Tomorrow" includes lots of talk about science, Corey throwing around mathematical terms and names of chemicals and all that, more to build atmosphere than to impart to the reader anything substantive.  One of the main character's duties is to answer some of the mail the space program receives: fan mail, questions, ideas, denunciations.  Corey uses a session of mail-reading as an opportunity to praise young boys interested in science and ridicule religious people, two staples of classic science fiction, which seeks to not only entertain readers but mold them and hand-that-rocks-the-cradle style, mold the future.

Some of the letters come from a guy with odd handwriting and syntax, a guy who proposes new theories.  Corey uses this as an opportunity to talk about Einstein and the history of science, and to promote open-mindedness; again and again in history, we are told, old ideas are superseded, establishments overthrown, by radical thinkers.  Sure, maybe 99% of radical thinkers are wrong, but we have to keep our minds open because 1% of them produce the ideas that make progress, that revolutionize our view of the universe and change society in beneficial ways.

The protagonist is told by specialists that this correspondent must be full of crap, but our hero decides to investigate, and it turns out the writer is a space alien stranded here on Earth who would like to leave; he can't build a star ship himself, but maybe his knowledge can jump start the US space program; the story ends with the expectation that it will.  "Letter from Tomorrow" has what we might call a sense of wonder ending, as Corey leaves us wondering how exactly the protagonist is going to spring his discovery on his colleagues and the wider American public--the possibilities are endless, though the final outcome looks bright, with the human race about to embark on a series of terrific adventures and gain incalculable knowledge.

This is an acceptable classic-style science fiction story that teaches you a little science and promotes science and urges you to abandon religion and keep an open mind.  One of the interesting things about "Letter from Tomorrow," and something it shares with other science fiction work (I'm thinking of Arthur C. Clarke's oeuvre, like Childhood's End and 2001, and for all you classic anime fans, Yamato and Macross) is how the human race does not independently come up with the paradigm-shifting new technology, but gets it from aliens.  Doesn't this betray a lack of confidence in humanity?  Might not a religious person say that, for all the goofing on religion that SF writers do, that they have a tendency to just slot a space alien into the role held traditionally by God or His prophet, that science fiction writers seem to share the religious person's belief that humanity needs a super powerful guide?  If anybody can believe that mankind could come up with space travel all on his lonesome, shouldn't it be a libertarian science fiction writer?

Better than the Coles and the Cores, but kind of limp and boring.  One of the reasons I read so many weird/horror things is that they all try to get some kind of emotional charge out of you, and often use crazy stuff like the living dead and space monsters as allegories or metaphors of the trials you face in normal life, relationship challenges, existential angst, etc., while actual serious science fiction stories sometimes are just trying to coldly tell you stuff you already know, like that science is good, or facts you are not emotionally invested in, like what percentage of the sun is made up of hydrogen or what velocity you'd need to achieve to escape Earth's gravitational pull.

"Danger! Child at Large" by C. L. Cottrell

Charles Cottrell represents our only chance of reading an actually good story today.  Cottrell has three fiction credits at isfdb, and after its initial appearance in Frederik Pohl's all-original anthology Star Science Fiction No. 6, "Danger! Child at Large" has never been reprinted, so maybe don't get your hopes up.  (We've already read a story from this anthology recommended by Merril, "The Dreamsman" by Gordon R. Dickson.)

Alright, "Danger! Child at Large" is today's best story, but it is too long so I am not sure if it is just barely good or if it is at the upper limit of "acceptable."  I don't actually read Stephen King or The X-Men but "Danger! Child at Large" is reminding me, in tone and subject matter, of what my glimpses of that material via the idiot box have led me to think a Stephen King novel or an X-Men comic arc are like: long, histrionic, heavy-handed and exploitative, an exhausting over-the-top take on ideas we've already seen elsewhere.

In the first chapter of this novelette we meet Jill, an eight-year-old with many psychic powers--this chapter makes it clear she can fly and may have telekinesis.  (We eventually learn she can set stuff on fire and teleport and make other things teleport.  She can do it all!)  Jill is selfish and scatter-brained and appears to have run away from home.  Cottrell later makes it clear we are not to think Jill's character is unique, but that she represents a typical child, that all kids are selfish and scatter-brained.)  Jill travels around near a highway and then into a town, where she loots an abandoned store, taking dolls.  It is implied some kind of apocalyptic scenario is taking place--the town is essentially deserted, and all the men milling around on the highway have guns.

In Chapter II we meet Gordon the journalist and learn why the town is deserted--a "radioactive dust bomb" has been accidentally dropped on the town.  It has not detonated, and Gordon is there to watch as Air Force personnel hoist the bomb on the back of a truck and take it away.  Gordon is told by low-ranking servicemen that the bomb is actually quite safe--it wasn't armed and doesn't contain any radioactive material.  Could the dropping of the bomb be a deliberate ruse, a means of clearing the town so the government could find a psychic little girl without admitting the world is menaced by a god-like eight-year-old?

In Chapter III we learn more about Jill as she robs a candy store and then breaks into a furniture store to sleep in a bed.  Her telekinesis is powerful enough to blow holes in walls, and she has a little trouble calibrating her abilities--obviously, she is a menace.  We begin to learn that Jill has escaped from a scientific institution, where a Dr. Prann was studying her and training her.  Prann and the Air Force are now trying to catch her, and Gordon joins the Jill-hunter group after sneaking away from the bomb retrieval group.

In Chapter IV Prann and Gordon catch up to Jill, but Jill just had a scary dream and is on edge and so uses her powers to mangle an Air Force colonel to death.  The scientists try to approach Jill, one of them putting on a clown costume to put Jill at ease (her favorite TV show features a clown.)  Jill uses her powers to burn the guy in the clown mask alive.  Then she starts teleporting around and blowing up the whole town, maiming Air Force personnel in the process.  Cottrell offers up some real gruesome terror and horror moments, with Gordon impotently screaming in fright, men retching at the sight of mangled and the smell of burnt flesh, one guy moaning that he has lost his arm, another calling for help on the radio, shouting "Please!...Come to us!  We're dying!"  It's like reading about a real life battle in a history book or some kind of heinous crime in the newspaper, disturbing stuff.

Chapter V has lots of expository dialogue from Dr. Prann.  Jill is the greatest most powerful psyker of all time, with many talents and abilities already fully usable; Prann is a telepath himself and can read Jill's mind and kids' minds are scary but he still loves her like a daughter.  And so forth.  Since she is so powerful and, as a child, totally unreasonable, Prann feels he may have to gun Jill down with his revolver to prevent her from causing a cataclysm.

Chapter VI is more exposition, this time as Prann projects visions directly into Gordon's mind via his telepathy, and VII is more of the same.  Chapters V, VI and VII feel like padding, a lot of superfluous expansion of and elaboration on stuff we have already been told (e.g., Jill is superpowerful and Jill has escaped) and additional exploitative gore material that isn't as shocking as the gore in Chapter IV.  I thought the Chapter IV grue effective, but the mutilations in Chapters VI and VII, consisting of flashbacks to when Jill killed insects and a cat, feel unnecessary, even pointless, as we have already seen Jill mutilate and kill human beings, so seeing her destroy animals is not an escalation but a let down.  I've never been a fan of the narrative strategy of showing us the big event in the beginning of the story and then flashing back for most of the book or film to watch how the characters got to the big moment, and, for example, learning all about Jill's first time flying three-quarters of the way into the story, after we already saw her flying on the second page of this 38-page tale, didn't interest or excite me.  

In Chapter VIII Prann projects his own memories into Gordson's noggin yet again, this time presenting the journalist with a story that describes his own discovery and use of his own psychic powers as a young man in Poland trying to escape along with other refugees.  (Cottrell doesn't specify what year this adventure takes place or use any words like "Soviets" or "Communists" or "Nazis" to place the event in time, so I guess "Danger! Child at Large" takes place near the end of a 20th century in which the Cold War is still on, but I don't know.)  Anyway, the horror element of this Chapter is that Prann and his sister are hiding from guards and Prann's sister's baby is crying so Prann covers the infant's mouth to silence it and accidentally kills the baby.  This of course foreshadows the killing of Jill.

In climactic Chapter IX Prann and Gordon catch up to Jill in a library.  Prann tries to knock Jill unconscious but she kills him with her psychic powers.  Gordon picks up the revolver (which, for some reason, we are told has a "clip") and manages to shoot Jill in the head before she can destroy him.  Gordon collapses among some books on the Civil War.  

One thing about "Danger! Child at Large" that I haven't mentioned is its attitude towards religion, which is not dismissive.  Prann often invokes the concepts of God and of Heaven, perhaps Cottrell trying to hint we should think of Jill, who has limitless power, and Prann, who in his efforts to save groups of people is willing to destroy individuals who, as children, lack moral agency, as seeking to wield god-like power.

Cottrell's is the most sophisticated and ambitious of today's stories, and the best at having an emotional effect on the reader, but I am reluctant to say it is good.  I have already given you a long list of problems I have with the story, and I will leave you with one more.  Gordon is not really a useful character, he is just a spectator until the last moment, when he shoots Jill.  Why didn't Cottrell just tell the story from the points of view of Jill and Prann?  Most of the chapters are from Jill's or Prann's point of view, anyway.  Just give Prann's story straight instead of in flashbacks projected into Gordon's brain.  Prann could have shot Jill in the head and then died from her last psychic blast.

**********

A rough patch in our tour under the direction of Ms. Merril.  Two stories that are bad, one that is acceptable and one that barley drags itself across the threshold of recommendable because it is heavily burdened with many superfluous scenes, characters and pages.  Here's hoping Merril's "D"s are better!

Robert Arthur: "The Believers," "The Book and the Beast," and "Ring Once for Death"

Recently, one of my well-read commenters recommended the author Robert Arthur.  Not long after, I encountered at an antique mall a hard cover edition of the one Arthur collection listed at isfdb, Ghosts and More Ghosts, the one with an owl on the cover, not one of the editions with a ghost on the cover.  I didn't drop 20 bucks for this thing, being an inveterate cheapo, but I still felt its appearance in my life  was a sign I should read some of Arthur's stories.  While this early 1960s collection was marketed to young people, the stories were originally printed in places like Weird Tales and Argosy, so presumably suitable for a 54-year-old like myself, at least in their original forms.  So let's hie to the internet archive and read the magazine versions of three tales by Robert Arthur that were reprinted in Ghosts and More Ghosts, two from Weird Tales and one from Amazing.

(You can read the 1963 1st revised edition of Ghosts and More Ghosts at the internet archive here.  The headings of each section below will be a link to the internet archive scan of the appropriate issue of D. McIlwraith's WT or Howard Browne's Amazing.)  

"The Believers" (1941)

"The Believers" appears in Ghosts and More Ghosts under the title "Do You Believe in Ghosts?"  No, I do not, though I regularly meet people who claim they do.  "The Believers" debuted in an issue of Weird Tales that has a wild cover by Hannes Bok and stories we have already read by Ray Cummings ("The Robot God"), Clark Ashton Smith ("The Enchantress of Sylaire"), Ralph Milne Farley ("I Killed Hilter") and Manly Wade Wellman "It All Came True in the Woods.") 

You have probably heard about Orson Welles' 1938 broadcast of an adaptation of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds that is said to have scared the rubes out in Hicksville.  Ever since, from the day it happened to this day, this event has served journalists, politicians and historians as a case in evidence supporting their contentions that [some segment of] the American people are dolts, [some segment of] the media is out of control and too powerful, or people in 1938 were quaking in their boots over Hitler.  Suffice to say that journalists, politicians and historians are always making mistakes and have innumerable career and ideological reasons to lie, and that the number of people who really were scared by Welles' broadcast, and the proportion of them who took concrete actions in response to their fear, is in dispute.  Anyway, Arthur may have been influenced by this famous event in crafting "The Believers."

Nick Deene is a writer who travels the world having adventures and then writing about them, exaggerating his experiences for effect, suggesting he was in far more danger than he really was.  Arthur stresses how fake Deene is--his tan is from a sun lamp, for example, no from time spent outdoors.  Deene relates and dramatizes some of these past events for broadcast on his regularly scheduled radio program.  His latest stunt is to broadcast live as he is handcuffed in an 18th-century house in the remote countryside, a house that has been abandoned for decades.  Deene and his broadcast team have spread rumors--rumors they themselves made up--that the house is haunted.

The techs and advertising men and print journalists who accompanied Deene into the bedroom of the dusty old ruin leave him once he is handcuffed to the ancient four-poster bed, a microphone set up close to his mouth.  The plan is for Deene to just make up a sighting of some creature, after spending plenty of time setting the stage and building atmosphere by describing the dark bedroom and the sounds he hears and all that.  Arthur tells us, multiple times, that thousands and thousands of radio listeners have tuned in and implicitly believe every phony thing the Deene says.  

Deene describes the sounds and smells of an approaching creature, employing special effects to simulate the former.  He then describes the fanciful monster as it enters the room and then retreats, apparently driven off by Deene's Bible and crucifix.  Then Arthur unleashes his gimmick on us, which unfortunately the editorial intro to "The Believers" has already spoiled for us.  The belief of hundred of thousands of credulous radio listeners has through collective psychic power brought to life the hideous monster Deene described!  After the broadcast ends, but before his fellow broadcasters have entered the house to unlock his handcuffs, this creature attacks Deene!  Will Deene survive?

Not a bad story at all, I'm saying marginally recommendable.

"The Believers" has been reprinted in multiple anthologies in Europe and America, including one edited by Richard Darby which has a preface by one of our favorite thespians, Christopher Lee. 

"The Book and the Beast" (1943)

This story was reprinted in Ghosts and More Ghosts under the title "Mr. Dexter's Dragon," which makes it sound more like a kid's story.  Well, let's see.  We're reading "The Book and the Beast" in an issue of Weird Tales we just looked at, one that includes stories we read by famous weirdies August Derleth, Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch.  It doesn't look like "The Book and the Beast" has been anthologized.

Murchison is a short balding man whose hobby is collecting books and manuscripts about the occult.  (Of course it is.)  In a Manhattan second-hand shop he finds a very unusual book--a handwritten book of spells!  One of the spells is "To Bring Three Beautiful Females to Your Room After Dark."  Wow!  And you thought "Fireball" was a good spell, you nerd!  Curious, I looked at the version of the story in Ghosts and More Ghosts and found that not only had "Murchison" been changed to "Dexter," but that "To Bring Three Beautiful Females to Your Room After Dark" had been changed to "To Make a Demon Bring Three Bags of Gold."  Booooriiiiiinnnnng.  Well, I suppose with three bags of gold you could persuade three women to come to your room at night...but it's just not the same.

Anyway, back home on Long Island, Murchison looks over the book, finding a painting of a dragon on one page particularly interesting.  The dragon is skinny, as if starved.  Behind it is a pile of human bones including thirteen skulls.  Murchison writes to a fellow old book collector, a Muir, who lives in Brooklyn, about his terrific find.

When Muir comes over for a visit the next day, the police are at Murchison's place because Murchison's servants have reported that Murchison has vanished.  The unscrupulous Muir steals the spell book, which is right there on the missing man's desk.  Muir, we are told, enjoys the company of young blondes, and just such a delightful creature distracts him from the book when he gets back home, but he does have time to look over the painting of the dragon and find it is not all that skinny and that there are fourteen skulls behind it, not thirteen as reported by his friend.  (In the Ghosts and More Ghosts version of the story, the whole blonde angle is dropped.)  The next morning, Muir's servants report their own master has also disappeared.  They see the book, which has a picture of a fat dragon.

Some time later faulty wiring burns down Muir's house, and in the wreckage the authorities unexpectedly find the bones of sixteen people as well as those of some big prehistoric beast, leading to much speculation.

This is a pretty good story; thumbs up for "The Book and the Beast."  I find the black magic angle and the sex angle more engaging than the hokey gullible-radio-audience angle of "The Believers," and find it odd that anthologists preferred "The Believers" over this story.

"Ring Once for Death" (1954)

"Ring Once for Death" appeared in an issue of Amazing that includes a story we are already familiar with, Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s "Death of a Spaceman," a book version of which we read in 2020.  The version of "Ring Once for Death" that appears in Ghosts and More Ghosts was retitled "The Rose Crystal Bell" and it looks like it was this 1963 version that was anthologized in 1991 in Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh's Back from the Dead.  We of course are reading the 1954 magazine version.

Twenty years ago a honeymooning couple visited a shop run by an Asian man (an "Oriental") and purchased a necklace with a crystal pendant.  Today they are back at the shop, now run by the previous owner's son.  A curious crystal bell with no clapper catches wifey's eye--the young proprietor tells a crazy story about how his father separated the bell from its clapper because a weird religious sect claimed if the bell was rung it could bring a person back to life--but only by taking the life of some other person.  The wife recognizes that the pendant of her necklace must be the clapper, and back home she reunites the two pieces of the magic bell.

There follows a somewhat predictable series of tragic events in which people close to the wife get, apparently, killed and then turn out to be unexpectedly OK but at the same moment of the happy revelation somebody else keels over.  All the miraculous recoveries and mysterious deaths can be explained as bizarre coincidences, but of course the wife thinks the magic of the bell is responsible.  The bell is accidently destroyed so we'll never know, and the wife will ever after have to live with the possibility that she chose to preserve one of her loved ones and destroy another.

Acceptable.

On the left, a 1972 paperback edition of Ghosts and More Ghosts

**********

Despite the collection's title, none of the stories we read today that appear in Ghosts and More Ghosts, at least in their magazine versions, is really about a conventional ghost.  Which is fine by me, as I generally don't find the conventional idea of a ghost very compelling.  Taken as a group these stories are pretty good, so probably we'll be seeing more of Arthur in the future, whose work appeared in publications we are interested in here at MPorcius Fiction Log like Thrilling Wonder Stories and John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown, as well as elsewhere, including a magazine Arthur himself edited, Mysterious Traveler, and a bunch of anthologies Arthur ghost edited for Alfred Hitchcock.

Fugitive of the Stars by Edmond Hamilton

"In the Federation, human and non-human have managed to work together pretty well.  The day may come when your world will want to join them."

Someplace in the Middle West, I forgot to record where, I recently bought a copy of the 1965 Ace Double of Edmond Hamilton's Fugitive of the Stars and Ken Bulmer's Land Beyond the Map, a two dollar souvenir of my visit to one of many antique malls.  We here at MPorcius Fiction Log are big fans of child prodigy, Superman and Batman script writer, and Weird Tales alum Hamilton, who at one point was Isaac Asimov's favorite writer,* so let's read Fugitive of the Stars today.  (If you can't find a two dollar copy yourself, maybe try the scan at the internet archive here, or spend like eleven smackers shopping unlocal at ebay.)

*See page 16 of the hardcover edition of Asimov's Before the Golden Age.

It doesn't actually mention this in my 1965 Ace Double, but Fugitive of the Stars began life in 1957 as a novella in Imagination.  The cover illustration of that magazine, by Malcolm Smith, recreates with exactitude a scene from the novel.  (As of today, you can read this issue of Imagination at the internet archive here.)  Jack Gaughan's cover for the Ace Double publication of the expanded and revised novel is correct thematically, showing how much more powerful the non-human aliens are than the Terran and Skereth-type humans, but in Gaughan's picture they are two or three times as tall as humans--in the book they are just 50% or so taller.  Gaughan also provides an interior illo for the novel of one of the non-human heroes of the book.  Looking inside the volume, we can also see some sloppy editing--the page headings read "FUGITIVES OF THE STARS," rendering the novel title, incorrectly, plural.  Tsk, tsk.

Fugitive of the Stars would be reprinted in an Italian magazine in 1969, a German magazine in 1972, the cover illustration of which reflects the pervasive hand-to-hand fighting and up close and personal physical abuse that characterizes the novel, and again in Italy in 2006 in a Hamilton collection.  (I hope Ed and Leigh got plenty of lire and marks out of these deals.)

Fugitive of the Stars is a decent adventure story of 110 pages about a guy who is cruelly tricked by evil almost-human aliens and failed by the Terran-human establishment and so goes on a star-hopping campaign in search of revenge and redemption that is marked by violence and culminates in him saving interstellar civilization.  We might see hard boiled or noir elements in the story--remember that Hamilton's wife, Leigh Brackett, was a writer of tough guy detective stories.  Barry Malzberg has pointed out how much the first Star Wars movie resembled Hamilton's space operas, and Fugitive of the Stars is sort of like Star Wars in that it is an action adventure tale set in an interstellar civilization full of weird aliens, a story that has a veneer of politics to set the stage for all its action but largely lacks the science and speculations about how technology will change our lives that gives substance to the claim that science fiction is the literature of ideas and a sense of wonder.  (Though Hamilton here makes token gestures towards talking about whether a powerful enough computer will achieve consciousness and/or ruin our lives.)

The Federation spans many solar systems and counts as members various human, human-like and radically nonhuman races.  On the edge of the Federation is the Fringe, systems not yet in the Federation, but that trade and have diplomatic relations with the Federation.  Rumors abound that the Fringe is currently plagued by slavers, but the Federation space navy can't patrol the Fringe because space ports with the facilities to maintain space warships are too far away.  If any of the Fringe worlds join the Federation, the Feds will be able to solve the slaver problem.

Jim Horne is pilot of a Federation packet, Vega Queen.  After dropping off a Federation diplomat named Denman on a Fringe planet of primitives who are said to be victims of the slavers, with the mission of learning more about the slavers, Vega Queen lands on another Fringe planet, Skereth.  The dominant race on Skereth are people who are almost human (Terran-type humans can have sex with them, which is close enough for Horne and every other horny spaceman) and the Skereth have an advanced civilization with starships and ray guns and the rest of it.  Skereth is currently riven by political turmoil.  Half the people want to join the Federation, while half are opposed.  An unfortunate series of events involving fist fights results in Horne's assistant pilot being incapacitated so that a Skereth pilot, Ardric, is hired on to replace him.  Ardric claims to be of the pro-Federation faction, but, while ferrying the pro-Federation diplomat Morivenn somewhere, Vega Queen is destroyed when it flies right into a well-mapped meteor swarm.  Like a hundred people, most of the crew and passengers, Morivenn among them, are killed.  Horne was out cold during the disaster, and survived because somebody dragged him onto a lifeboat.  Horne thinks Ardric was an anti-Federation terrorist in disguise and drugged him and intentionally flew the ship into the meteors to kill Morivenn and then escaped unnoticed on a different lifeboat, but everybody on Horne's lifeboat thinks Horne is a drunk and responsible for the disaster--the diabolical Ardric left clues to lead the gullible Federation authorities to this conclusion.  Horne finds himself in jail and on trial.  Thanks to his wits and his ability to fist fight, he is able to escape jail and make his way back to Skereth where he hopes to find Ardric and clear his name.

On Skereth, Horne steals a surface boat and travels across an ocean teeming with sea monsters and then marches across a wilderness, his intended destination the city where he expects Ardric lives; there is a scene with a sea blob monster that reminded me of a memorable scene from Jack Williamson's classic space opera Legion of Space.  Hamilton distinguishes his hero from Tarzan or Conan or John Carter or whoever by talking about Horne's psychological trauma, how his adventure has corrupted and damaged him--he steals when he never would have stolen before, he has the shakes, he suffers "black depression" and "black despair," considers suicide or abandoning his quest, but then his anger at being framed, at being blamed for the deaths of over 100 people, drives him onwards.

Before reaching the city, Horne hooks up with members of the pro-Federation resistance (he has to fist fight them first) who clue him in to Skereth politics.  The anti-Federation party, the Vellae, control most of the business and politics on Skereth and are probably behind all the slave-taking on the Fringe, and maybe something bigger, something galaxy-shaking.  Among these resistance people is a beautiful blonde, the daughter of Morivenn, Yso.  Yso is no damsel in distress; when there is a dogfight between pro-Fed and Vellae aircraft, she is the gunner on one and kills plenty of people.  We even get a feminist exchange, Yso saying "What's the matter, haven't you ever seen a woman fight before?" and Horne replying that when he was an officer in the Federation space navy some of his fightingest subordinates were women.  We also get a fist fight aboard the aircraft between Horne and a resistance stalwart because Horne wants to fight on against impossible odds and Yso's colleague wants to try to escape.

Our heroes have to crash land in the wilderness, and there we get more scenes to warm your diversity-celebrating heart.  Two dozen non-human aliens of many different species--tentacle people and spider people and elf/vampire people, etc.--rescue the main characters from starvation; the members of this multicultural party are all escaped slaves of the Vellae.  There is a dispute among the escaped slaves over what to do with our heroes, and in keeping with the anti-religious nature of classic science fiction, the leader of the splinter group hostile to Horne and Yso is a priestess whom the other escaped slaves, save her two worshippers, all think is a charlatan.  In keeping with Fugitive of the Stars' practice of periodically including some fisticuffs, the three religious people get manhandled after losing the debate.  (I'll note here that, despite the novel's feminist elements, Hamilton comes up with reasons that both Yso and this priestess, who looks like a human with pointy ears and "over-prominent teeth," have to take off their tops in public--the women object to being stripped but are overruled--getting Skereth into the Federation is more important than your modesty, ladies!)

The religious aliens stay behind, but the other twenty or so escaped slaves join the clandestine march to the city.  As slaves, they toiled in tunnels, part of some secret "Project" so evil the Vellae felt they couldn't use native labor--that is why they were enslaving aliens to do the work.  Horne punches out a Vellae guard and the aliens torture him into giving up info on Ardric and the Project.  The diabolically evil Project is the construction of a subterranean computer the size of a city they call a "brain!"  The Federation outlaws the construction of a computer this powerful, one big reason the Vellae are so adamant about resisting integration into the Federation.  The Feds fear a super computer will drink all the water in the galaxy and win all the short story contests held by magazines nobody reads--oh no, wait, that is why we are scared of super computers in real life.  In Hamilton's book, super computers are anathema because the Federation fears some bad actors will use their computing power to develop invincible weapons, unbeatable military strategies and irresistible propaganda.  I'm sure glad we don't have to worry about anything like that!

The multicultural group busts into the brain control room and captures Ardric (after Horne fist fights him into submission) and triggers a slave uprising.  The slaves capture the underground brain city, and try to hold off the Vellae counterattack on brain city while the leaders of the revolt try to figure out how to destroy the brain once and for all (squeezing info out of prisoners via threats.)  Our multi-species heroes maintain the upper tentacle, burning up the entire subterranean brain complex which is then crushed under an avalanche.

In the last chapter we learn that the Vellae have been largely killed and their cause discredited and Skereth has joined the Federation.  Ardric's treachery is recognized by the authorities and Horne's name cleared--he will get his job as a space pilot back and will be able to marry Yso.

I like Fugitive of the Stars and mildly recommend it to adventure fans.  But I do have some criticisms.  Hamilton should have mentioned Horne's naval career and service in a space war early in the book, not in the middle, just to buttress boilerplate feminist virtue-signaling.  This would have given us insight into his character and helped make his leadership and fighting skills all the more believable to the reader.  Also, we should have been told that the Federation was scared about super computers earlier, instead of at the very end of the book.  Hamilton tells us that ne'er-do-wells three times in the past have tried to build a super computer and been squelched by the Federation, so it should be a thing well known to a naval officer like Horne--it was a mistake for it all to come as a surprise to him.  Finally, Hamilton talks enough about diplomat Denman and the charlatan priestess that I expected to hear about them again, for them to affect the plot or at least to have their fates explained, but they don't show up again and there is no indication if they lived to see the slaves liberated and Skereth made a member of the Federation.  Maybe Ace editor Donald Wollheim gave Hamilton a strict page limit or something.

I got my two dollars worth this time, without even reading the Bulmer half of this Ace Double.  All you Ace Doubles collectors should feel free to weigh in down in the comments on whether Bulmer's Land Beyond the Map is worth reading, and whether the cover of Land Beyond the Map is by Jerome Podwil or John Schoenherr, a fact apparently in dispute.

Next time we'll probably be back in weird territory; until then, keep an eye on those thirsty super computers, my fellow flesh creatures.  

Weird Tales, March '43: Derleth, Kuttner, & Bloch

We continue to creep through Weird Tales!  Last time we read four stories from the January 1943 issue, and today we've got three tales from the issue dated March 1943, the second of the six issues of the Unique Magazine published that year.  Big names today: Arkham House co-founder August Derleth; fixture at Astounding as well as Weird Tales, Henry Kuttner; and script writer for Joan Crawford's Strait-Jacket, Robert Bloch.  A still bigger name, Ray "Martian Chronicles" Bradbury, has a story in this issue we read a few years ago, "The Wind."

"No Light for Uncle Henry" by August Derleth

This is a decent ghost/revenge story with no dumb mistakes.  Mild recommendation for "No Light for Uncle Henry."

Edward is a young man who runs into financial trouble and has to move in with his Uncle Herbert, in the house Herb once shared with his brother Henry, who died a year or so ago.  Derleth stresses that Edward is a "prosaic," boring, staid, square.  Edward doesn't chase women or hang around with friends or get drunk or read popular fiction, as soon as he finds a new job he just goes to work and in the evenings works in the garden on his Uncle's property.

Uncle Herbert warns Edward not to go into dead Uncle Henry's room, and by no means should he shed any light in there.  But one day while gardening Edward looks up into the window of Henry's room and thinks he sees somebody or something.  He goes inside to investigate the dark room, and lights a match to get a better look.  On the wall he sees a shadow--not of himself, but of a seated man, a very fat man!  Hey, wasn't Uncle Henry a big fatso?

The ghost of Uncle Henry starts communicating with Edward in his dreams, but Edward is not the kind of man to believe his dreams and follow the orders of a dead relative who appears in those dreams.  So Henry has to exert direct influence over Edward.  Edward becomes more assertive, less square--he talks back to the boss at the office, he starts reading detective novels, he brings some booze home.  Edward, under supernatural and alcoholic influence, facilitates Uncle Henry's vengeance on his greedy and murderous brother and we readers and Edward learn what foul deeds Herbert committed to earn the hatred of his obese brother Henry.

"No Light for Uncle Henry" was reprinted in the Derleth collections Something Near (1945), that book's 1951 Argentinian edition, and in The Sleepers and Other Wakeful Things: The Ghost Stories of August Derleth (2009).

"Under Your Spell" by Henry Kuttner

Here we have a long joke story.  Forty-something Tinney owns a shop in New York City that sells magic supplies and practical jokes (like itching powder) and that sort of thing.  He advertises for an assistant, and a preternaturally good-looking man, blond curls and blue eyes and a sort of nasty smile, shows up whom we quickly realize is Hermes/Mercury; this god, who uses the pseudonym Quinten Silver, is on vacation from Mount Olympus, a place, we learn, that is pretty boring.  When another man arrives hoping to take the position, Mercury reduces this poor bastard to ashes with a lightning bolt.  Mercury then uses his magic to bilk a customer and to drive off an annoying woman.  Then he drives off Tinney himself, from his own store, when Tinney, despite all the evidence, refuses to admit his new employee is truly a god.  When Tinney tries to enlist aid from the police or friends in the task of ejecting Mercury from his establishment, wacky hijinks triggered by mercury's magic ensure that nobody will help Tinney.

If you can't beat them, join them.  Tinney starts coming up with ways to profit from working arm in arm with a god.  He is sick of running a store, and doesn't like his landlord, but has already paid for a four-year lease on the shop, and convinces Mercury to destroy the shop with a meteor.  This liberates Tinney from the lease (insurance covers all that lost itching powder), but Tinney is injured in the meteor strike and hospitalized, and the meteor contained diamonds, so the landlord whom Tinney resented is richer than before.  (This portion of "Under Your Spell" is in the tradition of stories about people who get three wishes or make a deal with the devil and suffer because they didn't word their request perfectly clearly, and a minor character who witnesses the god's magic at work does mistake Mercury for Satan.)

Mercury gives the money hungry Tinney an "inexhaustible purse;" whenever Tinney opens it, there is 200 bucks inside.  The money is not created, but teleported from some other person's property into the purse--magic, and his greed, have made Tinney a thief.

All financial worries behind him, Tinney wants to retire, but Mercury wants to see the world and so begins preparations and launches publicity stunts for a Tinney the Great worldwide stage tour.  The god promises the tour will only last two years and he will do all the real work--Tinney just has to memorize lines and gestures, all the spectacle will be produced by Mercury with trivial ease.  Tinney, scared of the ruthless and amoral deity, has to agree to this onerous program, but he schemes behind Mercury's back with another magician, a stage performer who is far from eager to compete with the act Mercury can put on.  (I guess Kuttner has dropped the whole idea that Mercury isn't letting Tinney tell people about Mercury's identity.)  

The moment of crisis comes during Tinney the Great's debut performance at a big Manhattan theatre.  Right there on stage, where Mercury has been conjuring mermaids, centaurs, a harpy, a dragon, and still more mythological creatures, Tinney's accomplice tries to trick the god into a death trap.  As it turns out, all of these selfish characters suffer disaster when their shenanigans draw the attention of Circe the witch, whose brunette beauty Kuttner compares to that of Theda Bara.

I like the theme that power is corrupting and all that, but "Under Your Spell" is mostly a joke story and I am no fan of joke stories as you know and the narrative doesn't really hold together all that well, doesn't really flow smoothly.  The fact that Mercury murders an innocent stranger right at the start of the story diminishes the drama of the piece--corruption in a story should escalate, and the fact that association with Mercury turns Tinney into a thief in the middle of the story and then an attempted murderer near the end is no big deal because he has already seen Mercury kill a man immediately upon meeting him and didn't do a thing about it.  Why Kuttner has the rival applicant get killed instead of just teleported away (that is what Mercury does to the rival magician who tried to murder him on stage) I am not quite sure.  To establish that the gods are amoral, I guess.  But then why not also slay the rival magician?  Another problem is that the debut performance should be the big climax, the plot she be resolved there and the story should end there.  But the entire Circe business comes after the stage show and feels tacked on, less exciting and dangerous than the actual show.

One interesting aspect of the story I will point out is that Kuttner assumes readers are familiar with the Odyssey and know what Circe is all about.

Barely acceptable filler.  "Under Your Spell" has only been reprinted in a small press Kuttner collection in 1991 that I suspect is just photocopies from old magazines.

"A Bottle of Gin" by Robert Bloch

Another jocular story.  Collins, a young guy, short, who loves booze, works at the museum.  His boss, who has a huge collection of valuable art objects and artifacts, sends Collins to an antique store to buy a rare Korean vase.  While Collins is there, robbers appear and murder the store owner and Collins flees with the vase.  For three days the three thieves pursue Collins, the four of them zig zagging back and forth, jumping on and off subway cars.  We don't learn it until close to the end of the story, but Collins undertook this mission with such vigor because his boss promised a raise if he succeeded and Collins needs moolah to marry his sweetheart.  

When Collins finally gets to the museum, to his boss' office, which is stuffed full of books and valuable items, Collins is dying for a drink.  When he asks what is in all these bottles, he thinks his boss says "gin" when in fact he said "djinn," and so Collins ends up with a genie in his stomach.

Having the djinn in his stomach helps Collins deal with the three thugs when they catch up to him, but is very uncomfortable and Collins struggles to figure out how to get rid of the djinn.  Back home, the three criminals a bloody mess behind him, Collins drinks from a bottle of his own gin and gets the djinni drunk.  Then, after abandoning a plan to commit suicide, he tricks the djinn into getting trapped in the bottle of gin.  Then the girl appears and they plan to marry and live happily ever after.

I'm going to say this filler falls below the acceptable mark and deserves a thumbs down.  The rules governing how the djinn operates don't seem consistent, and neither does Collins' personality and motivations, or at least that stuff is not explained well.  And I am bored from a lifetime of exposure to fiction about verbally crafting wishes and deals with the devil and the djinn or Satan outsmarting mortals or being outsmarted by grammatical legalisms or whatever, and there is a lot of that business in this repetitive story, though it doesn't really go anywhere.

"A Bottle of Gin" was stoppered up in the 1998 Bloch collection Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies, which was translated into Italian in 2000. 

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An underwhelming leg in our long trek through the pages of Weird Tales.  The Kuttner and Bloch stories left very little impression on me, even as I was reading them.  There was quite little in these tales that grabbed me emotionally or intellectually, a dearth of arresting images, and I kept wondering why the characters were doing what they were doing.  Of course I think it is because these stories lack any weight because they are meant to make the reader laugh and not think or feel, but could it be that I am suffering weird fatigue?  Is it time to read about spacemen and energy weapons, about speculations on what life in the future or in some other solar system might be like?  Could be. 

Weird Tales, Jan 1943: Keller, Bloch, Derleth, Counselman

Here comes a new dawn!  Here comes a new day!  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are trying to read at least one story from each issue of influential speculative fiction magazine Weird Tales and today we begin chipping away at issues with a cover date of 1943.  We've already got over a dozen years under our belts, 1923, 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941, and 1942, so prospects we can handle 1943, the year of the Battles of Kursk and Kasserine Pass, of the Zoot Suit riots and the Aqua-Lung, of the births of Christopher Walken and Dennis Etchison, are good!

We're tackling four stories from this ish, the illustration of which is I'm afraid below average.  On the docket today are Dr. David H. Keller; Robert "Psycho" Bloch; August Derleth, whom I have heard won a Guggenheim Fellowship and told the Guggenheim people he was going to use the money to travel but instead used it to finance binding his comic book collection; and cat-loving Alabaman Mary Elizabeth Counselman.  Note that I am reading the 1943 versions of these stories, not later book versions--as we shall see, later versions are sometimes revised, and not necessarily for the better!

"Bindings Deluxe" by David H. Keller 

The first line of this story by the controversial David H. Keller is "I don't like women!"  Way to lean in to the controversy, my guy!  Two men meet at the Turkish baths, our narrator, a medical doctor (Keller himself was a doctor) who binds books as a hobby, and a fat older guy who talks at length about how terrible women are.  The fat guy also binds books, as a pro, and he has a curious mark on his back which Keller doesn't disclose at first, though we know what it is because the illustrator of "Bindings Deluxe," John Giunta (future associate of Frank Frazetta), reveals it in his BDSM-friendly illo for the story.  

Some time later the men meet for a second time, at the pro's digs in Boston.  The overweight Beantowner is wealthy, and has a Chinese servant, and tells the sawbones that he likes the Chinese--because their culture is misogynistic.  I find this kind of humor, about a strange character with an obsessive fixation, more amusing than the puns and absurd hijinks that Robert Bloch passes off as humor.  Anyway, the professional bookbinder tells his story of horror to our narrator.  

Decades ago the binder was a founding member of an international association of bookbinders who met once a year, London, Paris, Chicago, San Fran, etc.  There were dozens of them, and they really enjoyed each others' company.  But then one year a woman joined, a woman beautiful and earnest despite the best efforts of the misogynist to prevent this invasion of a male space.  She presented a paper at one meeting and revealed she was merely competent, not deeply versed in the profession, and had a lot of goofy ideas about bookbinding.  She admitted, proudly, of basing her paper not on specialist texts on the art of bookbinding, but on the Encyclopedia Britannica!  The men laughed at her, and then she wreaked a terrible revenge on them!

Over a course of years, one by one, she seduced each of the men who had laughed at her, first the youngest, working her way up to the fat guy, the eldest.  She murdered each man and bound a volume of her copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica with his skin!  The fat man was to be the last victim, his hide to adorn the final volume, and she got as far as tattooing the title of the volume on his back, but he got lucky and turned the tables on her, killed her and bound the final volume with her skin!  The encyclopedia, bound with the skin of his friends and their female nemesis, now resides in his Boston domicile!

If we can look past the wacky coincidence that the encyclopedia has the same number of volumes as the association had members, and the misogyny of the whole thing, this story is pretty good--the frame story is as entertaining as the main story, there is sex and gore, foreshadowing, economical pacing, etc.  I like it.           

"Bindings Deluxe" has not been anthologized, but has appeared in two Keller anthologies, 1978's The Last Magician and 2010's Keller Memento. 

"The Eager Dragon" by Robert Bloch

Brace yourselves, it's another Bloch story I suspect is a joke.  Why do I indulge in such suspicions?  Because "The Eager Dragon" has only ever been reprinted in the various editions of Dragons and Nightmares, the 1969 collection which entombs the long version of "Nursemaid to Nightmares," the Bloch humor piece I have been moaning about ever since I read it a few days ago.

I can grok jokes about how women are terrible because I deal with women in real life.  But like Grand Master of Science Fiction Harlan Ellison and President of the United States Donald John Trump, I don't drink, so jokes about the taste of booze and being drunk are abstract and theoretical to me.  I bring this up because "The Eager Dragon" starts off with a barrage of just such jokes, calling cheap whiskey "anti-freeze," talking bout how a guy steps into a cuspidor and walks around with it on his foot for a while.  Hardy har har har.

Our narrator, who I guess is a former gangster and maybe an immigrant--his narration is in present tense like a cartoon depiction of an ESL speaker--moved to the country some time ago to raise chickens.  He is at the local bar, getting drunk, and is accosted by two travelling salesmen.  He tells the men the story of how Merlin and various Knights of the Table Round travelled through time here to this hick farm town and enlisted the narrator's help in retrieving from the local museum a valuable artifact.  The salesmen don't believe him, so he invites them to his farm so he can show them the warhorse one of the knights left behind.

The warhorse is missing when they get there, but there is a note from Merlin and a gift--a three-foot-long egg.  Soon the egg hatches and the baby dragon, like eight feet long, emerges.  The jokes about alcohol keep on coming because all the narrator has on hand to feed the baby monster is beer.

More interesting than the tired jokes are the topical references that tie the story to the WW2 era in which it was written.  Among these are mentions of Betty Grable, Dorothy Lamour, Hitler, Boy's Town, and La Guardia (whom we are told looks like a gorilla.)  The dragon's crying is said to sound like a dive-bomber, its hiccups like anti-aircraft fire or Louis Armstrong on the trumpet.  There is what I think is a reference to derogatory propaganda about the Japanese, who during the war were often depicted in cartoons as having huge toothy smiles:

And the dragon lets go with another smile, this time showing enough teeth to supply the entire Japanese army.

I looked quickly at a book version of "The Eager Dragon," and many of these references are missing--gee whiz, Bob, your reminders of how sexy men thought Betty Grable was and how ugly Fiorello La Guardia was and how bitter Americans were over Pearl Harbor were the most valuable components of this lame story!

Anyway, the narrator and the dragon interact with a runaway kid (the son of a circus owner), and with the local gangster (a fat guy), and the dragon grows to tremendous size by eating the wooden floor of the barn as well as metal farm tools, and when the gangster kidnaps the kid a fight erupts between dragon and gangster and both are destroyed in an explosion.  The dragon has already laid an egg (just like this story!  Ha ha!) so the circus owner and the narrator may still be able to achieve their dream of getting rich by selling tickets to the only show on Earth with a real fire-breathing dragon.

"The Eager Dragon" is bad and I am giving it a thumbs down but it is better than the egregious "Nursemaid to Nightmares" because it has a little more going for it in the plot department and the jokes are marginally less terrible and thanks to the fact that all the timely references--and the fact they were excised for book publication in the late '60s--gives the story historical interest.  You should probably read "The Eager Dragon" if you are working on a dissertation entitled "World War Weird: The influence of the Second World War on American fantasy fiction from Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki." 

"McElwin's Glass" by August Derleth

I'm always learning, I am.  The title character of "McElwin's Glass" was born with a "caul," and his mother regarded this as some kind of omen that foretold great success for her child.  I had no idea what they were talking about, but wikipedia soon enlightened me.

Anyway, McElwin, a short and fat and ugly man (I feel like fat men have really been getting it in the neck lately here at MPorcius Fiction Log) becomes a stage magician of moderate success.  Then he finds a telescope at an antique store and discovers it can look into the future and the past.  He starts a new, more lucrative, career as a fortune teller, even though the performance of the telescope is very unreliable and McElwin ends up winging it much of the time, just lying to his customers.

An old geezer shows up, claiming the telescope was stolen from him; his name is also McElwin--they are distant cousins.  Old timer explains that the device only reveals to the viewer events somehow related to himself, stuff that has happened or will happen to him or to ancestors or descendants or colleagues or the like.

Fat McElwin refuses to sell the telescope to old McElwin.  Fatso describes things he has seen in the device to the old geezer, and it is implied that the old geezer figures out these visions predict fat McElwin will die an early death.  So the old man asks his young cousin to leave him the telescope in his will.

Fat McElwin marries a rich woman, one of the few people whose futures his telescope has offered insights into.  This woman seemed sweet when they were dating, but once they are married she is intolerably tyrannical, always nagging and complaining, One thing leads to another, and fat McElwin, in an impulsive moment, shoots her dead.  He flees Chicago, pursued by one of the other people whose life he has been afforded glimpses of in his telescope--a police detective!

I want to like "McElwin's Glass" because I like the theme of the disastrous marriage, and I think Derleth does a good job of describing the phenomenon of a man being viciously berated by his "significant other" for something innocuous and trivial he did long ago and doesn't even remember doing.  I also like the way the vague suggestive visions in the telescope foreshadow events, but in a way that can be misinterpreted.  But the story has problems--like so many Derleth stories, it would benefit from revision and editing.  For example, the caul business and the fact McElwin is a magician don't seem to have any impact on the actual plot of the story.  

I guess we're going to grade this one acceptable.     

"Seventh Sister" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman

Here we have a pretty well-thought-of story; "Seventh Sister" was reprinted by August Derleth, Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg in anthologies, as well as in two different Counselman collections. 

Counselman's tale takes place at a semi-abandoned plantation on the Alabama-Georgia state line.  It is the 1930s, and an African-American family lives in semi-decrepit slave quarters on the estate, growing yams and growing in population as the matriarch has a new "pickaninny" each year.  The seventh child is born two months premature on a night of omens and portents (lightning, dogs barking, owls hooting, etc.) and Mom dies in childbirth.  Named "Seven Sisters," the new baby is albino--paper-white skin and hair, and pink eyes--and the father fears the baby is a "woods colt" while an aunt suggests such a baby, the seventh of seven girls, must have "de Power."  

The father is inclined to neglect the baby, but the owner of the estate, a doctor whose family uses the planation house as a vacation home and allows the blacks to live on the grounds rent-free, comes by and explains that the baby really is his offspring and threatens to evict him if he doesn't properly tend to the child.  Seven Sisters exhibits strange abilities as she grows older, and the local African-American community comes to believe she is a powerful "conjure 'oman;" people pay her father and aunt so Seven Sisters will prepare charms for them and cast spells for them.        

Counselman puts a lot of effort into developing atmosphere and drawing characters in "Seven Sisters," though the way she does it may cause the head of anybody born after September 11 to explode.

Light from the sooty lamp threw stunted shadows. The reek of its kerosene and the smell of negro bodies blended with the pungent odor of peaches hung in a string to dry beside the window.

She hummed tuneless little chants, in the eerie rhythm of all darkies.

Or maybe anybody born after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Anyway, as Seven Sisters gets older she has a tough time as all her fellow blacks are scared of her or exploit her--they don't even go to the trouble of baptizing her.  The doctor who lets all of these black people live on his land and is always helping them out is the only person who treats her decently.  Then comes a crisis.  The doctor's mother-in-law moves in and starts pushing the doctor around.  She insists he sell the old wrecked plantation--this will leave Seven Sisters' family with no place to live (her father of course is too lazy and irascible to get a job and buy or rent any kind of home for his family.)  Seven Sisters tries to use her black magic powers to resolve the crisis, but commits a blunder and a terrible tragedy results and everyone in the story suffers terribly.

A pretty good story, even if we can't publicly endorse its message that dealing with black people is inherently dangerous and even doing them a favor is putting yourself into terrible jeopardy.  A close contender for today's best story.

  

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With the possible exception of the Derleth, today's four stories from Weird Tales serve as a kind of time machine that exposes us to the mental milieu of the early 1940s in America.  The past is a foreign country, the cliche goes, and Keller, Bloch and Counselman demonstrate to us what was on the minds of 1940s people who produced and consumed popular fiction, and a lot of that stuff is stuff people in 2026 wouldn't write or say, or maybe even think, if they wanted to function in middle-class society.  Beyond that, Keller's is a pretty good edgy crime story, Counselman's a quite good black magic tale whose bleak ending took me by surprise (I naively thought the doctor's family might adopt the albino), and Derleth's has entertaining elements.  As for the Bloch, it stinks, but every production by such a major figure in popular culture is worth reading, right?