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

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

"The Night Rider" by August Derleth (1927)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Betrayal" (1952)

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

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

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

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

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

"The Hunter and the Hunted" (1956)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Little Girl in Black Stockings" (1960)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hugh B. Cave: "Inn of the Shadow-Creatures," "The Fugitive Face" and "The Mission"

When we read Shirley Jackson's story from the Saturday Evening Post admonishing you to embrace newcomers to your community even if they forthrightly admit that they use magic, "Strangers in Town," we learned that Hugh B. Cave also had a story in that famous magazine in the year 1959.  Today we'll read that Saturday Evening Post story of Cave's, "The Mission," but first we'll sample some of the genre work for which Cave is famous, a long blood-drenched horror piece from a 1934 issue of Dime Mystery Magazine, "Inn of the Shadow-Creatures," and a short story from a 1942 issue of Dime Detective, "Fugitive Face."

"Inn of the Shadow-Creatures" (1934)

At some point I downloaded a scan of the December 1934 issue of Dime Mystery Magazine and that is where I am reading "Inn of the Shadow-Creatures," but today I can't recall where I found it.  Luckily for you if you want to read this gruesome exploitation novella, I can direct you to this link to a scan of a 2012 Cave collection, Devils in the Dark that reprints "Inn of the Shadow-Creatures" and two other 1930s Cave creations.

"Inn of the Shadow-Creatures" is not very good.  On the plus side, Cave imbues the tale with a feverish energy that is stimulating and entertaining; on almost every page Cave tells us about how protagonist Cary is haunted by the vision of face of the man he beat to death for raping his sister, or is in agony over his bullet wound, which periodically starts bleeding again, or is stricken by fear at seeing some strange figure, be it a mutilated corpse ("Blood congealed in Cary's veins and he stood rigid, eyes bulging") or a living man who merely looks like a corpse ("Black fear chilled Cary's muscles, left him a prey to the slashing blows of Sibley's balled fists") or a man all in black, only his evil green eyes visible ("But the terror-scream in Cary Booth's heart was an unuttered sound of madness...Welling into his throat it gurgled there, became a hoarse sob as the monster turned to look at him.")  Cave employs some crazy metaphors--"His hands opened, closed convulsively like broken crabs;" "Gravlin scuffed forward like a monstrous toad;" "Like a gnome in some dark grotto, he sat hunched in his chair and the chair was bigger than he, despite the deformity that made a camel-hump of his bent back;" "Strong arms lifted Cary from the chair, enfolded his trembling body as the tentacles of an octopus might have coiled about the body of something to be crushed and devoured."  This material isn't exactly good, but it is sort of amusing, and shows some kind of spirit, some vim and vigor.  This story is not boring.

Unfortunately, the plot of "Inn of the Shadow-Creatures" is pretty terrible, just an excuse to string together descriptions of injuries, corpses, and gory fights.  The characters, of which there are many so as to afford the author a long list of suspects, never behave in a way that makes any sense, though Cave tries to inoculate himself from this charge by making it clear that all the characters are insane or on the brink of insanity.  Objectively, we have to say that "Inn of the Shadow-Creatures" is a bad story, but somehow I still kind of enjoyed it.  I guess I'll score it acceptable, and tell you that it perhaps resides in "so bad it's good" territory. 

Below follows a summary of the plot I just excoriated complete with a recounting of much of "Inn of the Shadow-Creatures"' exploitative and often sexualized violence.  Feel free to skip ahead to our next story if you are pressed for time. 

Cary Booth is in trouble, trudging along the less-travelled roads, exhausted, pain emanating from a wound in his side inflicted by a bullet from a police officer's service weapon!  How could this college man who studied medicine (but never got a medical license, it seems) have come to this desperate pass?  Well, Cary's sister, "sweet and lovely" Madge, was ravished by some rich city slicker, Bastone!  Now Madge's eyes are "dead" and "dull" with "black shame"!  So Cary went to Bastone's luxurious apartment and beat the hell out of the ravisher!  Bastone's screams brought the police who shot at Cary as he fled!  Cary figures he killed Bastone and the fuzz are on his tail to send him to the electric chair!

Cary is now trying to reach some rural village on foot so he can flop down in an inn.  A car pulls up--the driver is a pretty girl, Irma Sibley, who offers to give him a lift.  She drives him to her fancy house, where she lives with her brother John and her controlling father.  On the way a sinister figure crosses their path, briefly visible in the headlights of Irma's roadster.  A horrified Irma tells Cary that this monster has been terrifying the village for a long time, committing murders.  

Cary can't stay with the Sibleys because Dad is such a suspicious control freak, leaving our guy no choice but to stay in the inn, even though Irma and her brother John warn him not to.  The inn is run by the Gravlins: obese mother Mariah, hunchbacked father Abel, and "half-witted" "moron" son Saul.  Cary hasn't been in his room long when he hears something queer in the hall and peeks out to see a naked man, his body bloated like a corpse's, stumbling down the corridor.  Cary hears a woman's scream and rushes to find the strange figure covered in blood, in a coma, in a room where hangs from the ceiling the butchered corpse of a bottle blonde with heavy breasts!  Affixed to one of those breasts with a pin is a note--a warning that the dead have risen and the living cannot safely stay at this inn!

"Inn of the Shadow Creatures," advertised as a "chilling feature-length novel" and a "full-length mystery-terror novel" is made up of six chapters.  In Chapter Two we learn more about the cast of suspects and potential victims.  Abel Gravlin is a retired chemistry professor who only recently purchased the inn.  A fat guest, Quentin Planchard, is in town to buy up property, confident it will increase in value when the new state highway comes through the village.  Clay learns these truths about the secretive Gravlin and Planchard from a nervous old maiden lady, Hattie Benson.  For her part, Mariah Gravlin thinks the bloated and now comatose naked man, a guest named Redfern, is a vampire.

People's behavior in this insane story makes no sense.  For a variety of reasons, nobody calls the police or a doctor, and Cary returns to his room and gets locked in by a mysterious figure who fills his room with poison gas.  Cary busts out of the room just in time to see a sinister figure and hear a woman's scream before he falls unconscious in the hall.  When he wakes up he has been bound and stands accused of the murder of that source of accurate gossip Hattie Benson, who lies in the same room, naked and mutilated!  Cary manages to loosen his bonds and run out of the inn.

In Chapter Three, Cary is pursued through the village and eventually takes refuge in the cellar of the big Sibley house.  When he hears Cary stumbling around down there, John Sibley comes down to investigate.  John knows how crazy the villagers are and is willing to shelter Cary.  But John and Irma's father wants nothing to do with Cary, draws a gun on him.  Old and cadaverous, but tall and strong, Mr. Sibley and Cary end up grappling and pounding each other after Irma interferes and Dad knocks his daughter to the floor with a sweep of his long arm.  Cary realizes he has fallen in love with Irma and is enraged, but old Sibley outfights our hero, knocks him out, and hands him over to the village mob.  In Chapter Four Cary is back at the inn where all the murders and mutilations took place, once again tied up--the events of Chapter Three have had no discernible effect on the narrative, leaving Cary back where he was in Chapter Two, though we later learn that proximity to Mr. Sibley has provided Cary a clue to the identity of the killer.

A black-clad figure, only its green eyes visible, appears at the inn in Chapter Four, drives off the scared villagers (who shot at Cary and sicced hunting dogs on him--where did the rifles and dogs go?) and takes off Cary's rope bonds to put metal shackles in their place.  Cary is carried to a room where Irma lies on a bed, unconscious, almost naked.  In Chapter Five, Cary has to watch as the mysterious figure tears off Irma's lingerie, listen as his tormentor gloats that he will kill both Cary and Irma.  The villain even tells Cary that he read in the newspapers that Bastone isn't dead, has fully recovered, and is going on an extended trip to Europe, so Cary was fleeing through the countryside for nothing!  The monster strips Cary naked and lays him on top of the drugged Irma and then takes up a hammer and a metal stake with which to bind them together.  But Cary somehow manages to outfight the black-robed man, kicking him with shackled feet and biting him.  The monster flees.  Out in the corridor, the idiot son of chemistry professor Gravlin shoots dead a black robed figure, but it is not the man who sought to murder Cary and Irma, but another man who apparently put on the killer's robes after he tossed them off in flight.  Cary then trips thanks to his shackles and falls unconscious again.        

As Chapter Six begins, Cary wakes up as the police are filing off his shackles.  It is revealed that the man Saul the imbecile shot down was Mr. Sibley!  The senior Sibley, son John explains, was insane after an accident that burned his face and hands; not wanting to see anyone ever again, he moved the family to this tiny village.  Like Pritchard, r. Sibley knew a state highway would be built through the village and sought to purchase the inn from the Gravlins, and to enhance its reputation as a place of horror because he thought that would bring in tourists.  (He moved to a place to get away from people and then tried to attract mobs of tourists to the place?  He really was insane!)  Everybody thinks that the mystery is solved, that Sibley committed all the murders, but Cary knows better!  After  the police leave and everybody else has gone to bed, Cary searches the inn himself.  He finds the corpse of Redfern hanging in a closet, apparently having been impaled on a metal stake, and then sees the black robed monster in the corridor!  There is a vicious fight.  The robed one draws a revolver that shoots not bullets but poison gas, but Cary gets the gun away from the fiend and beats the monster to death with it.  And that monster is revealed to be John Sibley, Irma's brother!  Ah, but not her natural brother, but her step-brother!  As Irma explains, John hated Sibley, and tried to frame his step-father for the murders he committed.  Oh, by the way, Redfern was not a vampire, but a man with a terrible disease that distorted his body, made him wander around naked, and sometimes caused hemorrhages.  Irma and Cary, now that the mystery is truly solved, and anybody who might be trouble is dead or in Europe, can live happily ever after, a fact symbolized by the singing of an oriole near the big Sibley house, which is now all Irma's.            

"The Fugitive Face" (1942) 

The issue of Dime Detective Magazine in which "The Fugitive Face" appeared is readily available at the internet archive here.  I poked around a little online and can't find any evidence "The Fugitive Face" has ever been reprinted.  

Nick Sydney is an "agency dick" working out of Miami.  "King" Clark is a New York pretty boy and a gangster who has been charged with three murders--but he beat the rap all three times!  Myra Donelson is a girl who is always getting into trouble, daughter of a Florida hotel magnate.  Mr. Donelson has hired Nick to get back Myra, who apparently had been kidnapped, by paying the ransom demanded.  Instead, Nick has figured out Clark is involved and followed the gangster to an island in the Everglades that is surrounded by alligators.  Nick finds the two lovebirds--all that talk of kidnapping is a ruse to get money out of Papa Donelson--in the big shack on the little island, but the three of them are stranded on the island when somebody, presumably one of Clark's criminal associates, steals the boats tied up outside.  Nick has to tie up the beautiful girl and the handsome crook, but Myra gets free while Clark is outside building a raft at gunpoint and she turns the tables on our guy so that Nick is now tied up and Myra and Clark have the guns.  You see, the local sheriff came over to the island after following the same clues Nick did, and when he freed Myra she knocked him out from behind.  Kids these days.

Clark's criminal associate, the huge and bandaged-covered Dirk, returns.  Dirk, a wanted man, just had plastic surgery to change his facial features and jokes that he looks like a mummy.  Clark drowns the unconscious sheriff in the swamp.  Nick manages to escape to the mainland, and hooks up with the cops.  They stake out all the plastic surgeons in Miami; Nick watches the office of the most likely suspect, a plastic surgeon with a "hazy background."  Sure enough, Clark and Dirk show up and Nick rushes in to capture them.  You see, while the wanted man was sleeping off a drunk, and Clark and Myra were outside looking at the moon, Nick took off Dirk's bandages, wrote "KILLER" on his face in iodine (Myra carries iodine with her for some reason--maybe this is something women do, who knows what they have in their purses, especially in the 1940s?), and then put the bandages back on.  Dirk has come to the doctor's office to kill the sawbones, he thinking the doc disfigured his face with acid.  Dirk shoots the surgeon before Nick can gun down Dirk.  Clark gets arrested and Papa Donelson gets Myra back and puts her over his knee and spanks her while Nick watches.  (Is this the only punishment Myra will receive?  Isn't she now an accessory to murder and some kind of fraudster besides?)  The story ends with a sort of homoerotic joke as Mr. Donelson suggests he should also spank Nick.

This story is OK.  On the island the constant talk of mosquitos and snakes and 'gators is sort of fun.  And while people get tied up and physically abused and murdered, like in "Inn of the Shadow-Creatures," the plot of "The Fugitive Face" holds together more or less and there are little bits of detection and trickery and little jokes, which you can't say about the story of Cary Booth's unconventional courting of Irma Sibley.  A tick or two above "Inn of the Shadow-Creatures," but not quite in "good" territory.

Admit it, you want to read about what inspires Diane Sawyer, what Bill Cosby thinks
about fatherhood, and why teenagers aren't drinking their Ovaltine like they used to

"The Mission" (1959)

I'm reading "The Mission" in the 1959 anthology in which I read Jackson's "Strangers in Town," and you can do the same here.  "The Mission" was apparently a big success, and was even published in book form, even though it is pretty short, like 18 pages of text in The Saturday Evening Pots Stories 1959.  In 1987, "The Mission" was republished as a serial across two issues of the Saturday Evening Post, which by that time had apparently evolved in the interest of appealing to TV audiences.

"The Mission" is set in Haiti, where Cave spent like five years after working as a war correspondent in the Pacific and before moving to Jamaica where he lived for a while until the Jamaican government seized his business.  This guy lived a life of adventure.

Yolande is six years old, a peasant girl, and is trying to walk the 90-odd miles from her home to Port-au-Prince because her mother died and her father is working in the capital.  Wherever she goes she sets a good example for people, and they are nicer and more disciplined after she leaves.  A father sees her washing herself in a stream, and tells his own kids they are dirty and should wash more often.  This guy's wife is a nag who never stops complaining, but the example of Yolande's gratitude and generosity at the dinner table serves as an example to the nag to have a better attitude.  A shop owner who charges high prices to customers and offers low prices to his suppliers is shamed into changing his ways by Yolande when she refuses to accept his overpriced merchandise.  

Yolande arrives in Port-au-Prince during Mardi Gras.  She asks for her father, whom Mom told her was a famous artist, but nobody seems to have heard of him.  Yolande puts her own quest for her father on hold when she encounters a little middle-class girl even younger than she who has lost her parents.  Seconds after they find the little girl's parents, Yolande saves her from a speeding truck with bad brakes and is injured herself in the process.  (I guess it is symbolic that Yolande is felled by the wing of the figure of an angel on a passing parade float.)  The little girl's father takes her to the doctor--she's gonna be OK.

The middle-class guy does some detective work and discovers that Yolande's mother lied, there is no artist by the name Yolande's mother gave her and there is no evidence of who Yolande's father is (they actually say "the child has no father," maybe a clue Yolande is a Christ figure?) The man decides to adopt Yolande.  He tells her that he was friends with the (nonexistent) artist she expected to find here in the capital and he recently died but before expiring asked him to look after Yolande.  He says that he wants to be her new father and live with her in his big fancy house, and, when he makes it clear it will make him happy, selfless Yolande agrees to stay.

"The Mission" is a competent mainstream story, a wish fulfillment fantasy in which virtue is rewarded and people who are misbehaving are shown to have the capacity to reform.  A little sappy for my tastes, but acceptable.

**********

Well, now I have a broader and more intimate familiarity with the work of Hugh B. Cave.  Are you interested in more MPorcius Fiction Log content about Cave?  Maybe I'll look further into Cave's oeuvre, sample more of his Saturday Evening Post stories, many of which take place in the Caribbean.  Until then, you can click the links below like a pigeon in a Skinner box and your wish will be fulfilled.

"From the Lower Deep"

"The City of Crawling Death"

"The Crawling Curse" 

"The Black Gargoyle"

"Brotherhood of Blood"     

"The Cult of the White Ape" 

"The Isle of Dark Magic" 

"The Door Below" 

"Ladies in Waiting" 

"The Watcher in the Green Room"

"The Death Watch"

October Collections Post

I spend a lot of time in antique stores, second hand book shops, and flea markets, and sometimes the desire to add something to the collection overwhelms my inherent cheapness.   Let's look at a few recent items added to the shelves and stacks at MPorcius HQ.  I think if you click, you can see larger versions of the photos.

At the most recent Big Flea event in the DMV, I think at Timonium, MD, I spent fifty bucks on this copy of Victor Arwas' Art Deco Sculpture, which is more than I like to pay for anything, but there were a bunch of images in it I had never seen before, so I ponied up the cash.

At the Wonder Book in Hagerstown, MD I spent ten dollars on this paperback copy of The Collection of Alfred Stieglitz by Weston Naef, which is closer to what I like to pay for art books.  Last time I checked, you can look at a scan of this book at the internet archive at this link.  

Whenever I am flipping through Cold War-era issues of my favorite magazine about jazz, Playboy, I read the one-panel cartoons.  And, of course, some of the SF magazines have these sorts of one-panel cartoons.  Just recently, you may recall, I read two or three entire books of such cartoons by Peter Arno.  So I was intrigued when I saw Ghouling Around, edited by Phil Hirsch and Paul Laikin, at Route 11 Antique Mall in Hagerstown, MD, and bought it for three bucks.  The content of this book turns out to largely consist of groan-inducing puns for children, but there are also some cartoons I have to admit I didn't really get.  Two are reproduced above; maybe you can explain them to me.  On the left, we have a dog stabbing a man in the back as he reads a newspaper.  What is the joke?  Is it a riff on the cliche that "dog bites man" is not news but "man bites dog" is news?  Are we supposed to consider whether "dog stabs man" is news?  Or maybe the joke is that the man has in the past hit the dog with a rolled-up newspaper, and, so seeing the man with a newspaper in his hand, the dog has decided to launch a preemptive strike on his supposed master?  On the right, we have a fat janitor in the morgue, smiling down at a dead body as he grips his broom.  Why is he smiling?  Is he going to eat the corpse?  Is that why he is fat?  I hope the joke isn't that he is a necrophiliac, that the way he holds is broom handle is supposed to make us think of masturbation.  Could it just be that he swept dust into the drawer wherein resides the deceased, like the traditional joke in which a lazy worker sweeps dust under a rug?  "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust"?  I don't get it.

As a kid I was dinosaur-crazy, and I still love dinosaurs, not necessarily the science of paleontology, but dramatic and gruesome representations of dinosaurs, like in old paintings such as those of Zdenek Burian and Charles R. Knight, and old movies, like the original King Kong, the greatest film of all time.  I collect the dinosaur books I had as a kid and those I borrowed from libraries, and books from the same era with a similar aesthetic.  At an antique mall in Spencer, WV, I picked up this British dinosaur book for like $1.50, it being on sale.  This book's art is pretty amateurish, the colors drab, the perspective and anatomy questionable, and the dinosaurs wearing human-like expressions, but it is suitably gruesome.  I also have to wonder about the science presented in the book, though, when a three-fingered horned dinosaur is labelled "Tyrannosaurus Rex."

Speaking of dinosaurs, I picked up a plateosaurus I think is by Marx (the seller said it was Marx) at a flea market in an outlet mall parking lot for 25 cents and three Flintstones figures--plus a stegosaurus--for a similar price at a yard sale in a church parking lot.

Let's finish up with this (original, repro, or totally bogus, I have no idea) lobby card for the 1925 film The Lost World, a pioneering special effects film featuring many dinosaurs fighting each other and running amok in London.

Maybe we'll do this again next month; until then, keep an eye open for bargains and keep an eye on your dog.

Merril-approved 1959 stories by S Jackson, C Kapp and G Kersh

Let's continue our investigation of 1959 with Judith Merril, reading the sole "J" and two of the "K" stories from her list of Honorable Mentions at the back of the fifth of her famous Year's Best anthologies.  Damon Knight's "What Rough Beast?" is a third "K" story that merited the Merril nod, but we read it way back in 2015.  That leaves us with Shirley Jackson's "Strangers in Town," Colin Kapp's "Breaking Point," and Gerald Kersh's "The Oracle of the Fish."  The titles of the stories in the previous sentence are links to the scans of the stories that I will be reading, so feel free to read along as we enjoy or endure these stories recommended by the critic all the critics adore.

"Strangers in Town" by Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson is one of those writers I, childishly, I know, avoid because people are always telling you to read her.  The more people tell me to do something, the less I want to do it, and I'm not going to grow up now at age 55.  But today we are cosplaying maturity and reading this thing that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post behind a cover that is some kind of joke about traffic jams and alongside an installment of a Perry Mason serial.  I'm reading "Strangers in Town" in an anthology of stories drawn from 1959 issues of The Saturday Evening Post, a book with a cover illo that I guess is making fun of a woman for being a poor singer, a poor dresser, and/or ugly; enough with the punching down, Saturday Evening Post snobs!  It's not like we can all be as blessed as a Peter Gabriel or a Deborah Harry!  One of the stories in this anthology is actually by Hugh B. Cave, a name I didn't expect to find in The Saturday Evening Post.  Jackson's "Strangers in Town" would also be anthologized in one of those Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthologies, Alfred Hitchcock's Witch's Brew.  Damn, spoiler alert.

"Strangers in Town" starts with a traditional obvious joke.  Our narrator, a housewife, tells us she hates gossip, and then proceeds to provide us readers page after page of gossip and descriptions of the many ruses and maneuvers she engages in to facilitate her spying on her new next door neighbors so she can talk about them with her other, long-term, neighbors.  Based on limited evidence, she fears the new neighbors keep a dirty house and drink a lot.  Then she meets the next door people's maid, and it turns out she is a witch who uses magic as a labor-saving device.  I guess the joke is that the witch, and the lady of the house when our narrator meets her, just openly talk about magic instead of being sneaky about it.

The narrator and her fellow gossips are suspicious of the new neighbors, whom they think may be foreigners and/or heathens, but the new neighbors are very kind and sweet, always using their magic to do good deeds about the town, so I guess the banal point of this story is that suburban people are closed-minded and judgmental and mean to new comers and minorities who try to join the community even though the new comers and minorities are generous and helpful and in fact better than the suburbanites, smarter and more sophisticated (this family with the witch for a maid have modern furniture and are vegetarians.)  I guess this story is an allegory of blacks or Jews or Catholics or bohemians or whoever moving into a middle-class WASP neighborhood and being cruelly rejected by the bourgeois WASPs, who are scared by their different (but superior!) cultural practices.   

Anyway, the kids in the little town like the new people because they give them gifts and because their talking cat can tell them stories.  Eventually the women of the town get together in a mob (except for a fat woman who is late to the gathering because she has to put on her corset) and insult the new people and the new people leave.  But the strangers leave something behind--their magical cat impregnated the narrator's cat and the kittens have strange eyes and are quite oversized; the neighborhood kids adore these kittens but they scare the adults.

I can't say there is anything wrong with "Strangers in Town"--the pacing is fine, the characters all act in a more or less believable way, Jackson gives the narrator a personality and a consistent voice, and so forth.  (I won't get into whether or not there is a risk associated with inviting strangers into your town, whether they might rape your daughter or burn down your townhall or defraud your welfare system or start a grenade-throwing gang war with the other immigrants you invited in last month.  Jackson asserts that immigrants and minorities are awesome and we are going with that.)  "Strangers in Town" is professionally written and polished.  But the themes and the plot are boring, like stuff we've seen a hundred times before on TV--this isn't the first time I have been told that suburbanites are unsophisticated jerks and native-born middle-class white Christians should treat non-whites and immigrants and non-Christians better than they do.  I'll call "Strangers in Town" acceptable.  We don't have to wonder why Merril would enjoy and promote this story, as it expresses boilerplate liberal/left ideology and appeared in a mainstream publication, and Merril is always looking for examples of mainstream writers and outlets in the act of employing speculative fiction devices in order to buttress her contention that genre boundaries are bogus.

"Breaking Point" by Colin Kapp

Ten years ago we read Kapp's "The Cloudbuilders" and Patterns of Chaos, and more recently his "Enigma" and "Ambassador to Verdammt."  "Breaking Point" debuted in John Carnell's New Worlds and has never been reprinted.  Maybe we will join Merril in seeing something in this story that other editors and anthologists missed?  Or maybe Merril just liked it because she is the cheerleader of the New Wave and this story is in the vanguard of that movement--Carnell, without using the words "New Wave," firmly places the story in that category in his intro to "Breaking Point":

...the current story which follows, a breakaway from the traditional approach to a psychological story. Colin Kapp now joins Brian Aldiss and Jim Ballard as British writers who are pioneering the new type of science fiction which is rapidly replacing the old.

"Breaking Point" is a quite pretentious but quite weak story full of empty and uninteresting philosophical banter among the various uninteresting characters; all the major characters declare each other insane and unfit to wield authority, though each has some kind of claim to authority, and then it is revealed that all the characters are secretly working together.

Civilization (sometimes spelled "civilisation" in this poorly copyedited story which doesn't maintain fidelity to either US or UK spelling but switches between them) is collapsing and the nation is being shaken by mass rioting.  Our lead character is Lieutenant Penny, an Army officer and a psychologist.  The Army is trying to quell the riots, without success, and we get poorly written action scenes in which the mob attacks the soldiers with bricks and bottles, Army trucks crash while trying to negotiate the barricaded streets, and so forth.  Serving in the same unit as Perry is Major Bannerman.  When Penny's unit is about to be overwhelmed and destroyed by the mob, a tall man among the the crowd, Pandi, stops the attack by emotionally manipulating the mob members using poetry.  Penny and Bannerman compare this man's charisma, his ability to drive men hither and thither with words that seem like nonsense, to Hitler's.  They also discuss the nature of civilization--is it natural or unnatural?  Colonel Foresyte appears on the scene, demands the capture of Pandi and conducts an interrogation of this enigmatic figure.  Here is a sample, from that interrogation, of typical dialogue from this sterile and dog-chasing-its-own-tail story.

"...that which is obvious is frequently not logical, and therefore difficult to justify. I claim that you cannot give me a rational reason why you must save civilisation.”

“That may be true, but the relevance escapes me. Civilization is an illogical entity. It has a different meaning for every man. I intend to save it for what it means to me.”

“Would you believe me,” asked Pandi, "if I said that your kind of civilization is already dead?”

“No,” said Foresyte,“it is going through a period of trial, but it will rise again.”

“Not so!  It should never have existed...."

Foresyte's interrogation becomes extreme, little better than torture, so Penny assaults Foresyte and liberates Pandi.  Bannerman appears--is he trying to capture Penny and Pandi or trying to help them?  Is he trying to run them over with his truck or trying to pick them up?  A theme of this story is that everybody's motives and goals are unknowable and changeable besides.  The Army camp erupts into gunfire, bullets and shells whipping every which way.  Is there an enemy attack under way?  No, like civilization itself, the Army camp is collapsing into violent insanity because modernity--"dogma, advertising, education, politics, brainwashing, and similar invasions of the soul"--have driven every individual and the entire human race insane.  Or sop says Bannerman.

Bannerman, Penny, and Pandi take refuge in a remote cabin.  Pandi leaves with the truck and returns with the injured Foresyte.  Bannerman reveals that Pandi is an actor working for Foresyte.  Foresyte set up the whole complicated business with Pandi in order to test to see if Penny was one of the few sane men left in the world.  And Penny passed the test!  Such men as Penny will be sent to an island like Arthur was sent to Avalon--the few sane men will rebuild civilization after all the insane have killed each other.  Penny in the last sentence of the story weeps.            

Thumbs down for this ridiculous thing.  We might see it as a New Wave story, but at the same time it bears many resemblances to the work of Golden Age SF writers like Asimov, Heinlein, and van Vogt, in which the cognitive elite behind the scenes manipulate people with their superbrains and incredible knowledge of psychology and sociology in hopes of guiding fragile civilization to the conquest of the stars someday.  But while those old stories had a measure of gee whiz fun about them, and felt fresh and exciting, "Breaking Point" is depressing and drab and wears you out.  

"The Oracle of the Fish" by Gerald Kersh

Merril read "The Oracle of the Fish" in an issue of Nugget that has a lovely green cover and trumpets its inclusion of a "guide to amatory literature" for "gentlemen."  Wow!  Lamentably, I can't find a text of this treasure trove of invaluable knowledge, so I'm reading "The Oracle of the Fish" in a scan of the Kersh collection The Terribly Wild Flowers.

"The Oracle of the Fish" is a joke story the beginning of which is full of obvious jokes of the kind with which Jackson tried to entertain us, people saying something and then contradicting it with their actions.  A barkeep says she trusts her customers but always empties the till into her pocket when she leaves the bar, a Welshman says that Welshmen all brag about their ancestors, but he never does, and then proceeds to do so.  Set in Wales, Kersh also makes jokes about how long and unpronounceable Welsh names are.  these jokes are not bad, but feel very tired.  

The narrator, an Englishman, encounters a Welshman with a PhD and has a long conversation with him; the Welshman takes over as first-person narrator and his story is the meat of "The Oracle of the Fish."

The Welshman tells the story (full of digressions and trivia) of how in 1939 he acquired by his cleverness from a talking fish an ancient ring with symbols on it, and then a goat accidentally pointed him to an ancient standing stone carved with identical symbols, so he hired a mute imbecile (mentally damaged by a fall on his head two decades prior) who is also an expert miner to help him dig under the stone.  The two explored a cave, found ancient coins and fossilized bones of cave men and mammoths, and eventually came upon a lost race of troglodytes, descendants of the Picts driven underground by the Romans who have kept up their numbers and diversified their gene pool by kidnapping babies from the surface at night.  The imbecile realizes these are his people, and joins them--the PhD escapes the hideous cannibalistic subterraneans by blinding them with the flash bulb on his camera.  The Welshman planned to explore the caverns further, with a heavily equipped team, but an errant German bomb hit the site and caused a cave-in that destroyed everything.

A jocular version of an H. P. Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard story.  Parts are engaging, some of the jokes inspire a smile, but portions of "The Oracle of the Fish" are long and tedious.  Adding up the pluses and minuses, we come to zero, the break-even point, and conclude this story is acceptable.

**********
 

These stories are not great.  But I feel like they are a good representation of Merril's characteristic and closely linked projects--dissolving the boundaries between genres and promoting the New Wave.  We've got two professionally written mainstream stories from magazines that are not ostensibly dedicated to speculative fiction, and we've got a story from a science fiction magazine that features no high technology and focuses exclusively on psychology and sociology and is vague, philosophical in a show offy but ultimately empty way, and pessimistic, thus ticking plenty of the boxes of what we think of as New Wave.

A crop of stories that are more interesting from an historical point of view than actually enjoyable to read.  Maybe the 1959 "L" stories picked by Merril will go down more smoothly?  Stay tuned and find out.