E. Hoffmann Price: "The Rajah's Gift," "The Sultan's Jest," and "The Prophet's Grandchildren"

Today we read three 1925 stories by E. Hoffmann Price as part of our exploration of 1920s Weird Tales.  WT first hit the racks in 1923, and we have read at least one story from each of those 1923 issues--click this link for a list of those stories and links to my blog posts about them--and we have done the same for 1924--click this link for an index of Weird Tales stories I have read from that second year of the magazine's long history.  Price was fascinated by the mysterious East, and if the titles are any indication, you've got trips booked to the lands of the Hindus and the Mohammedans today.  Hopefully you've had all your shots.

"The Rajah's Gift"

"The Rajah's Gift" debuted in the same January issue of WT as a bunch of stories we've already read: Frank Belknap Long's stay-out-of-the-water story "The Ocean Leech," C. M. Eddy, Jr.'s perils-of-dating-among-cavemen-caper "Ahrl-a of the Caves," H. P. Lovecraft's don't-go-to-the-family-reunion story "The Festival," and Henry S. Whitehead's don't-cheat-your-undead-clients tale "The Fireplace."  Those stories were full of good advice--what wisdom does E. Hoffman Price have to impart in this story?

It is the 19th century.  Zaid the Persian, as a little boy, twenty years ago, found himself in India, in a principality where the reign of a new rajah was being inaugurated.  Seeing the new rajah astride his elephant, the focal point of a grand procession, Zaid became obsessed with a desire, a fervent dream, to himself some day ride just such an elephant in state in just such a royal parade.

Ten years later, Zaid managed to get himself employed by the rajah he witnessed being honored during his inauguration, and in the ten years since, Zaid has been a loyal, even essential, servant to the rajah, even saving the prince from one of the many assassins that plague court life in this principality.  Today, the Rajah asks Zaid to name a boon so that he might reward his most trusted servant.  Zaid says he wants to ride in state as he saw his master ride that long ago day.  The rajah would rather give Zaid his sexiest slave girl or a pile of money or something like that, because if the people get the idea Zaid is the royal favorite or something, a jealous courtier might assassinate Zaid.  The rajah even locks Zaid in a room with the hottest girl he can find for three days, but afterwards Zaid obsession with riding an elephant in state in a grand procession is as feverish as ever.

Zaid's dream comes true.  As he rides through the streets atop a huge elephant, amid a grand procession, Zaid recalls a bit of ancient wisdom, the idea that the gods will strike down a man who fulfills his dreams, because such a man will become arrogant enough to challenge the gods.  Meanwhile, the rajah is instructing his sharpshooter to snipe Zaid the moment the procession reaches its final destination--the rajah knows that Zaid will never be happy again if he climbs off that elephant, that reverting to mere mortal status after experiencing life as something like a god will be intolerable agony.  

At the end of the parade Zaid topples from the elephant, but who put an end to Zaid, his merciful friend the rajah or the jealous gods?

This is a decent filler story that feels like a fairy tale and is short on events and long on description and verbiage.  Acceptable.  Farnsworth Wright reprinted "The Rajah's Gift" in WT in 1936, and the story of Zaid the Persian has also reappeared in the Price collection Strange Gateways and various anthologies of stories from Weird Tales.

"The Sultan's Jest" 

"The Sultan's Jest" debuted in the September 1925 ish of Weird Tales.  WT would become famed for sporting sexually provocative covers featuring scantily-clad young ladies in imminent danger of death, and this issue I believe bears one of the very first of such covers, and a relatively tame one it is--the victim is fully dressed and the would-be killer is wearing the kind of outfit we see all the time adorning absolutely harmless women at the supermarket in 2026 America.  Behind this prophetic cover are two stories we've already read by leading weirdies, H. P. Lovecraft's "The Temple" and Frank Belknap Long's "The Were-Snake."  Let's check out Price's contribution.

The Sultan is a sadist who loves coming up with fancy tortures and means of execution for criminals.  His favorite among the girls in his harem has been found to be cheating, so he and his wazir sit up all night coming up with some elaborate way to punish the illicit lovers.  (The eunuch who facilitated their meetings is just sewn up in a bag and tossed in the river.)  The court poet, who is buddies with the male half of the pair of doomed lovers, is privy to his masters' sinister brainstorming session and plots to protect the lovers.

This story isn't very good because the punishment inflicted on the lovers, the effort of the poet to help the lovers, and the eventual fate of the sultan, are all convoluted and sort of illogical.  The sultan has his gigantic African executioner pour two goblets for the lovers.  The sultan tells the lovers that one goblet's contents is poison, and the other is not.  The lovers have to choose which of them will drink from which goblet, and each will be put in a separate cell to drink from his or her goblet alone.  The sultan says the punishment of the survivor is living out life feeling guilty for being responsible for killing the other.  

The male lover, in his cell, drinks from his goblet.  The wine is bitter, so he figures it is poison, so he stabs himself to death with a dagger he concealed from his guards--in this way, the woman he loves need not feel guilty that she killed him by giving him the poisoned goblet, as instead he killed himself.  The sultan, standing over the bleeding man who cuckolded him, finds this amusing, and explains why.  The sultan put poison in neither goblet--they were simply filled with a bitter vintage of wine; the sultan's intention was that both man and woman would live out their lives feeling the guilt of having killed the other.  The dying male lover calls the sultan a liar, and the sultan, to prove he is not lying, takes up the goblet and drinks from it.

The twist is that the poet put deadly poison in both the goblets when the African executioner wasn't looking, the poet thinking to spare the lovers the torture that would be life feeling responsible for the other's supposed demise.  So now the lovers and the sultan are all three dead, whereas if the poet had done nothing all three would be alive.

Nobody in this story acts like a person would act in real life, and everybody in this story makes predictions about other individuals' psychology that make no sense.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  The real interesting thing about "The Sultan's Jest" is that it is the second story today in which Price has a character try to help another character of whom he is fond--a young physically healthy person,  by the way--by murdering him.  This is a pretty twisted theme to base multiple stories around.  My young and healthy days are behind me, and I still wouldn't think somebody was doing me a favor by murdering me.

"The Sultan's Jest" has not been reprinted widely, though Stefan Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg, and Robert Weinberg saw fit to include it in 1996's 100 Tiny Tales of Terror.  Recent changes in federal policies mean MPorcius Fiction Log no longer has any interns on staff, but if I still had such interns at my disposal I would set one of the Anglophonic ones to work listing all the stories I have blogged about that appear in any of these Barnes and Noble instant remainder anthologies like 100 Tiny Tales of Terror, 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories, and 100 Creepy Little Creatures--I must have read scores of them at this point, this insane blog being over ten years old and having to live with the guilt of having fathered over 1,500 posts.

"The Prophet's Grandchildren"  

The October 1925 issue of Weird Tales, in which "The Prophet's Grandchildren" first saw print (the only time "The Prophet's Grandchildren" saw print in the language of William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson and James Patterson's ghost writers), has what must be one of the most sophisticated covers of a 1920s issue of the unique magazine, maybe of any issue of WT.  Weird Tales covers often look flat and static, and cover the same basic themes again and again and again, but this one conveys depth and movement and its bizarre and unsettling theme really takes the viewer by surprise.  So, kudos to Andrew Brosnatch for excelling himself and his colleagues on this one.

"The Prophet's Grandchildren" is less than two pages long.  Price presents it as a wacky folk tale that makes little sense that is current among the Muslims of the island of Jolo; Price suggests the people of Jolo are a real fun group,

fierce Moros who with kris and kampilan carve their way to eternal glory through the ranks of the unbeliever. The road to Paradise, they say, is paved with the heads of the infidel; and whoever dies slaying Christians is assured of a seat at the Prophet’s right hand.

This folk tale is an explanation for why Muslims do not eat pork.  In the same way so much fiction we love portrays human beings and dinosaurs living at the same time and battling it out for our amusement, in this folk tale Jesus and Muhammad live at the same time and have divided the world between them and are constantly at odds, each trying to outdo the other.  The episode of their rivalry related in this tale concerns a banquet held by Muhammad; Muhammad invites Jesus to the banquet with the idea of humiliating the Lord of Lords and King of Kings before the assembled Muslims.  Jesus comes, confident he can outwit Muhammad.  Muhammad urges Jesus to perform a miracle to prove he really is who he says he is, but Jesus refuses, saying he doesn't perform miracles just to please crowds.  Then Muhammad tells Jesus that he can prove his power by performing an act of prophecy, which Muhammad figures is a less serious feat that isn't subject to so many use restrictions.  At first Jesus refuses on the same grounds, but eventually Muhammad gets our lord and savior's goat and Jesus agrees to prophesize something. 

Muhammad points to a locked door, and asks Jesus to divine what is in the room behind the door.  Muhammad has put his two grandchildren in the little room, and assumes Jesus will not be able to figure this out.  But Jesus inflicts a blow on the Muslims.  The Nazarene says "When you open that door, you will release two beasts the like of which there are none in the entire world," and when the doors are open two pigs come out--these are the first two pigs to ever trot upon the earth, Jesus having just created a new (delicious) species.

"The Prophet's Grandchildren" is a weak filler piece, and, like "The Sultan's Jest," is pretty convoluted, Price coming up with difficult to credit justifications for portraying Jesus Christ acting totally out of character in a silly fantasy setting.  (Maybe Muhammad is also acting out of character in this story--I mean, he doesn't rape any children or massacre anybody in the story.)  "The Prophet's Grandchildren" is slightly more clever than "The Sultan's Jest," but lacks the melodrama of that story in which many different types of torture and execution are discussed and in which plenty of people get killed.  I think I have to give "The Prophet's Grandchildren" a thumbs down as well.

Our Italian friends in 2019 included a translation of "The Prophet's Grandchildren" in the magazine Zothique, which took as its cover the Kelly Freas painting found on the E. C. Tubb novel Mayenne, which we read like eleven years ago. 

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Not good, I'm afraid, not good.  We won't give up on Price, though--we'll be reading three or four more stories by him from the 1920s, and probably later stories as well.

August 2026 Collection Post

There was a time when I chronicled my purchases at book stores, antique stores, flea markets, etc., on Twitter, but since the pirates of cyberspace seized my X account I have been unable to post on the everything app.  So today I experiment with listing recent additions to my haphazard collections here at the blog.  Click the images to get a closer look, dear reader, and skip ahead to a post on Weird Tales if this is a drag!

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For two bucks I got this Berni Wrightson anthology from 1983, featuring a story about a woman being turned into a cat and an ad for books by Jeff Jones, Chris Foss, J. G. Ballard, Roger Dean, H. Rider Haggard, and other luminaries.  You can read about this comic and learn where the stories included therein first appeared at this link to the Grand Comics Database. 

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I got The Mighty Barbarains for its Steranko cover for only a dollar, and Stanley G. Weinbaum's The New Adam for its Jeff Jones cover; I can't recall for how much, maybe 5 or 6 bucks.  I might read The New Adam some day; as for the sword and sorcery anthology, I've already blogged about three of the included stories, Robert E. Howard's "A Witch Shall Be Born," Henry Kuttner's "Dragon Moon," and Fritz Leiber's "When the Sea King's Away."

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Raise your hand--or beak--if you participated in McDonald's Hello Kitty/Godzilla crossover event.

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I got this reproduction Greek vase for five bucks at a junk shop that mostly had old tools for sale.   

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Finally, we have this severely distressed copy of the Fall 1949 issue of Jungle Stories, edited by Jerome "It's A Good Life" Bixby, for which I parted with three bucks.  It is full of illustrations that remind you how safe and cozy big city life is and hey, maybe I'll read some novelets of Congo terror and dark dramas of jungle menace some day.   

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Maybe I'll do this again next month, or in October, depending on how much stuff I buy in September, and whether I have the energy to do all this resizing and cutting and pasting again, which is kind of tiring.

Weird Tales, July 1925: H P Lovecraft, E H Price & R E Howard

As any sanctioned psyker can tell you, time in the warp can move in unexpected ways, so you shouldn't be surprised that we are looking at the July 1925 issue of Weird Tales after we looked at the August 1925 ish in our last episode.  Anyway, before talking about that August ish, we'd already sampled this July one, reading Henry S. Whitehead's heartwarming tale of a guy's dream girl just landing in his lap without him having to do anything to court her, "The Wonderful Thing."  Maybe today's stories will be more in the thrilling blood-and-guts, politically incorrect foreigners-are-scary, and/or cosmic horror life-is-meaningless-suffering vein that we are used to from Weird Tales.  If you share my skepticism of secondary sources and want to find out for yourself what "The Unnamable" by cosmic horror icon H. P. Lovecraft, "The Stranger from Kurdistan" by real-life adventurer E. Hoffmann Price, and "Spear and Fang" by titan of sword-and-sorcery Robert E. Howard are like, click this link to be whisked away to the internet archive and a scan of the very issue of WT under discussion today.

"The Unnamable" by H. P. Lovecraft 

This seems like one of those Lovecraft stories, like "He," that is semi-autobiographical.  The narrator, whose name is apparently Randolph Carter, is hanging around in a cemetery next to an abandoned house with a friend, shooting the shit.  Carter's pal believes the universe is rational, that science and religion can accurately describe the universe, that nothing is "unnamable," a word that comes up again and again in the story and I guess means to the two men something like "unclassifiable" and "inexplicable" and "incapable of comprehension by the scientific method or within a Christian theological framework."  The narrator is a writer of weird stories who gets published in a magazine called Whispers and argues against the rational man, suggesting, for example, that maybe intangible life forces endure after one has died and these forces can affect places and people.

Carter recently got a story published about a monster child who lived for centuries hidden in a New England town and terrorized the residents by looking in windows and that sort of thing.  In an effort to convince his friend that there are more things in the universe than our philosophy can encompass, Carter describes the sources for his story-- some 18th century diaries that offer hints of the existence of just such a monster, locked in the attic of an abandoned 17th-century house or even escaping confinement to assault people and leave strange wounds upon them, and some bones Carter found, those of a malformed child that he deposited into a tomb.  Carter's punchline is that the house and tomb in question are right here, in view of the two of them.  

Suddenly there are scary sounds and smells and both men are battered unconscious by some sort of attack.  Carter didn't get a good look at their assailant, but when they wake up in the hospital the rational friend admits that he saw the blob monster of no defined shape that attacked them and left upon them wounds like those in the 18th-century accounts Carter read.  The rational friend must admit that this monster was unnamable.

This is a decent horror story with good concepts and images, and is perhaps noteworthy as one of the more jokey Lovecraft stories, the subtle jokes expressing HPL's criticisms and commentaries on regions of this great country of ours, especially New England (though HPL's commentary is not limited to that area) as well as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Cotton Mather.  The rational friend offers literary criticism that Lovecraft presumably disagrees with and is presenting ironically, but which feels like a sincere description of a literary theory, not a spoof or lampoon.  

"The Unnamable" feels like a good story to read to understand what Lovecraft is all about, and unlike some of the man's more famous works, it is pretty brief and to the point.  Thumbs up!

I read "The Unnamable" in my copy of the Corrected Ninth Edition of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales.  "The Unnamable" is one of five Randolph Carter stories by Lovecraft; I've blogged about three now, this one, "The Statement of Randolph Carter," and "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" (co-authored with E. Hoffman Price), leaving "The Silver Key" and "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," which I'll probably get to some day.  "The Unnamable" has been reprinted uncountable times--I'll include in this blog post images from anthologies that include it.

"The Stranger from Kurdistan" by E. Hoffmann Price 

Soldier, orientalist, fencer and boxer Price sets his tale in a ruined city with a tremendous tower at its center.  Tonight, 77 worshippers of the devil are holding a black mass at the base of this tower, and a man in black infiltrates the ceremony.  The ceremony Price describes in detail; the focus of it is a denigration of Christ, a long speech from the Satanic priest listing how Jesus has disappointed his followers, failed to fulfill the promises he made.

The black-clad interloper reveals himself to be the very Satan the 77 and the priest have come to this creepy locale to praise.  The Devil is disappointed in his followers, who are merely mocking Satan's foe, and ludicrously so, as that foe has stymied the Devil for many centuries.  The Satanic priest accuses this figure of being an imposter and the 77 unhappy people who have turned to Satanism because they have been disappointed in their conventional pursuits converge on the stranger to tear him limb from limb, but he really is Satan and (apparently) summons a fire that massacres all of them.

This is more like a little vignette more than a real story, though I suppose it is interesting in that it takes Christianity seriously and that it makes the point that Satanists are not really serious rebels against Christianity and our society; if they are legitimately worshipping Satan they are admitting the reality of Jesus' power and divinity, and if they are just atheists then their whole practice of worshipping the Devil is just childish playacting.  

I guess it is also interesting that the theme of the story is disappointment.  Of the 77, we are told

In the main, the seventy-seven were persons of wealth and distinction, who, having tried and found wanting every field of human endeavor and achievement, had sought thrills in the foulness and degradation of the medieval rites of devil-worship; rakes whose jaded appetites sought satiation in the orgies that followed the celebration of the Black Mass; atheists who, deeming passive atheism an inadequate form of rebellion, found expression in a ritual whose sacrilege satisfied their iconoclastic desires.

The Satanic priest's black sermon, addressed to Christ, is full of stuff like

From the day that the virgin gave thee birth thou hast failed in thy promises; the ages have wept in awaiting thee, mute and fugitive god! Thou wert to redeem mankind, and thou hast failed.... 

And then we have Satan himself, who disavows his followers because they are so lame.

If you have a bad attitude, reject your rightful station, and embrace rebellion for rebellion's sake, you are going to be disappointed and your life is going to be rough and you are going to make some dumb decisions that will kill you before your time or lead to a life of regret.  Traditional wisdom straight from the pages of Weird Tales.  

I'll call "The Stranger from Kurdistan" acceptable.

Just four years later, "The Stranger from Kurdistan" would be reprinted in Weird Tales; apparently it was a big hit with readers.  Does this suggest that 1920s Weird Tales readers had more or less conventional religious and philosophical beliefs?  You can find "The Stranger from Kurdistan" in Price collections and in various anthologies, including Satan-themed anthologies and Darrell Schweitzer's 2025 volume Weird Tales: The Best of the 1920s.  One of these days I will look at the table of contents of Schweitzer's book and see how many of his selections I have read and maybe read some things he recommends that I have skipped. 

"Spear and Fang" by Robert E. Howard 

We recently read some caveman stories by C. M. Eddy, Jr., "With Weapons of Stone" and "Ahrl-a of the Caves," and here is one by the creator of Conan!  Sam Moskowitz, who briefly edited Weird Tales during a 1973-4 revival period, reprinted "Spear and Fang" in the 50th anniversary issue, and you can also find it in a bunch of Howard collections.

Ga-nor is a big tall handsome he-man of a Cro-Magnon, but he's more than a pretty face!  He's also the tribe's best cave painter!  A-aea of the rippling black wave of hair has a crush on him!  A-aea is no demure maiden who follows the conservative social conventions of her time, but a modern woman who knows what she wants and is willing to take risk to get it!

...little A-«ea was herself a mark of progress. Covert glances had failed to attract the attention of the young man who seemed engrossed with his artistry, so she had taken to the unconventional way of spying upon him, in hopes of finding some way to win him.

Despite their reputation, which is based on the covers more than the stories behind those covers, these old pulp magazines are full of ambitious, brave, competent women who take initiative and pursue their goals whatever obstacles may be in their way.  

A mere girl might not intrude upon the councils of men, but such was A-sa’s curiosity, that she dared a scolding by slipping nearer.

The councilors have reason to think some of those savage cannibals, the Neanderthals, whom Howard tells us are the source of our legends and myths of ogres, werewolves and goblins, are nearby.  And, sure enough, when the son of one of the tribe's councilors, the arrogant Ka-nanu, carries A-aea off to rape her (Howard unleashes some social criticism on us by sarcastically suggesting Ka-nanu himself is "another mark of progress") he is interrupted in the commission of this crime by an attacking Neanderthal and torn to pieces.  Yikes!  The monster carries off A-aea to his lair, where he offers her the arm of a Cro-Magnon child for a meal!  He doesn't even cook the arm!  Yikes again!  The Neanderthal then tortures the girl by tearing out her hair.  Triple yikes!  He strips A-aea naked, but, before he can rape her, Ga-nor arrives, having followed the trail.  It is a close fight, but in the end Ga-nor defeats the Neanderthal and he and A-aea become man and mate.

"Spear and Fang" has exploitation elements, what with all the gore and threat of rape, but Howard also advances a lot of historical and anthropological theories about the nature of progress and how modern man overthrew the Neanderthal and how both Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal people lived and thought.  The action elements, all the fighting and chasing and so forth, are good.  So, thumbs up.

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All three of today's stories present a philosophy and/or try to make arguments about groups of people instead of just offering simple entertainment, and the philosophies and arguments are striking (if not necessarily convincing) and so contribute to the value of the stories, to their ability to maintain the reader's interest.  Lovecraft in "The Unnamable" also delivers the horror elements, and Howard in "Spear and Fang" the eroticized action-adventure elements, that make their stories work on a simpler, more direct, level so that they also succeed as entertainment.  Price's story is the weakest of the three, with the least surprising intellectual content and the least thrilling horror/violence content, but still is not bad.  We have here a solid issue of Farnsworth Wright's unique magazine.

Weird Tales, August 1925: R E Howard and N Hawthorne

Let's take a look at the August 1925 issue of Weird Tales, one of the most important of the pulps, one of the greatest of the speculative fiction magazines, the place where so many people first encountered H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Edmond Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, and the list goes on.  Check it out with me by clicking this link, the click that will take you to a scan of the issue under discussion at the indispensable internet archive.

This August issue has a quota of high brow content, including a reprint of an 1820 poem by John Keats, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," a poem about a guy who is heartbroken because some faerie or elf maiden has won his love and abandoned him--he has become a wretched hermit, hanging around the lake where he last saw her.  At least I think that is what is going on; I think it is safe to assume that "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," like all great literature, is a reminder to not let women drive you crazy.

There's also a poem by our pal Frank Belknap Long, "Stallions of the Moon," that is less plot-focused, and more hopeful--Long describes some flying horses in brief quatrains, three or four words per line, and then tells us they are "Mounts for you and me!"  How often do we get this kind of optimism in Weird Tales?  (I know, we got some optimism from WT last time we read from the magazine, and I bitched about it, but Long here delivers the optimism in like 80 words, while Henry S. Whitehead with his "dream story" "The Wonderful Thing" took seven pages!)  We also find Long in the letters section, where he praises the cover of the June issue, in which a man armed with an axe faces a spider the size of a buffalo ("bison" to you pedants), though Long's praise does come across as kind of a gross-out joke ("I cannot imagine a more gigantic, reddish, loathsome or delicious—but I sputter and go out!")

Near the end of the magazine is a hilarious ad for back copies of the extra-large May-June-July 1924 issue of WT, the one with the story Lovecraft wrote for Houdini and the one the man from Providence co-wrote with C. M. Eddy, Jr.  As if the cartoon four-eyes and his diminutive dog, desperately running to the mailbox to send for the "mammoth" issue of his fave magazine, wasn't risible enough, the text actually says "Your life is not complete until you have read this issue," which is even funnier than Long saying a kaiju spider looks delicious.  I have blogged about five stories from this "3 in 1" issue, and please allow me to say that your life will not be complete until you have clicked on the links below:

H. P. Lovecraft and Harry Houdini:  "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs"

H. P. Lovecraft and C. M. Eddy, Jr.:  "The Loved Dead"

Galen C. Colin:                                  "Eyes"

H. P. Lovecraft:                                  "Hypnos"

Otis Adelbert Kline:                           "The Malignant Entity"

Enough with the comedy!  Let's get to why we are here, the fiction, and today that means stories by the creator of Conan, Kull and Solomon Kane, Robert E. Howard, and that guy they tried to make you read in school, Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Oh yeah, there's a story in here by science fiction pioneer Murray Leinster that we read back in 2024, "The Oldest Story in the World."  If you expect all my short story blog posts to cover at least three stories, click the link in the previous sentence and count that one!

"In The Forest of Villefere" by Robert E. Howard (1925)

As we expect of a piece of work by a giant of American popular culture like Howard, "In The Forest of Villefere" has been reprinted in many collections and anthologies, the first of which was the collection The Dark Man.  (We read that collection's title story, "The Dark Man," back in 2021, and I judged it "a pretty good sword and sorcery story.")  I'm just going to read "In the Forest of Villefere" here in Weird Tales, though, where it takes up like two and a half pages.

In Early Modern or Renaissance France or whenever it is everybody carries a rapier around, our narrator is hurrying on foot through the night, carrying an important message.  He has been told this woods is inhabited by a werewolf, but his mission is urgent.  He meets an odd character with a mask and asks this mystery man for directions.  Of course it is the werewolf and of course it leads the narrator into a trap and he has to fight for his life.

This has the plot and themes of a filler story but somehow Howard makes it pretty scary and exciting, really elevating the material.  I'm inclined to think Howard is a master who knows exactly how many words to devote to each element of the story so that each component--atmosphere, image, the period of mounting suspense when everybody knows the action scene is coming up but it hasn't come up yet, and then the actual bloody action scene in which somebody gets horribly mutilated--has maximum effect, and that is why the story feels fresh and fun and I really enjoyed it, but it seems possible I am projecting that ability on him, that I am meeting Howard halfway because I knew it was him and like him already and was primed to enjoy the story as long as it met minimum criteria.  Would I have liked the story so much if I had read it not knowing it was him, like a blind taste test?  I'm going to say I would have, because, among other things, Howard gives the werewolf a strange and unnerving personality through its attire, behavior and dialogue, and that is one reason why the story feels fresh and pushes my buttons, even though I've seen so many werewolves.   

Whether this really is a very good werewolf story, or just a decent werewolf story that the magic of Howard's name is making me overrate, thumbs up for "In the Forest of Villefere."  According to isfdb, this is the first of two stories about de Montour of Normandy; the second debuted in Weird Tales in 1926 and we can expect to read it as we continue our advance through the history of the unique magazine.

 

"Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1837) 

This piece (a portion of the "high brow material" I mentioned earlier) appears under the simple text heading "Weird Story Reprints"--the beautiful hand drawn mermaid heading by Hugh Rankin (I reproduced it at the bottom of my August 14 post) is still in the future, first appearing in 1928.  This story by the man who brought you Hester Prynne was, according to wikipedia, first printed anonymously under the title "The Fountain of Youth" in 1837 in the magazine The Knickerbocker, and that same year in the Hawthorne collection Twice-Told Tales.  "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" was one of the three stories adapted in the Vincent Price film Twice-Told Tales, and genre fiction anthologists like Peter Haining have presented the story to readers many times.

Elderly Dr. Heidegger is a physician, an amateur scientist, and, reputedly, some kind of wizard, or at least possessor of a book of spells and magic devices like a bust of Apollo that some say can talk and a painting of a lost love that some have said can move.  The doctor invites over four friends, fellow oldsters who are kind of losers--Hawthorne flat out says they would be better off dead.  ("They were all melancholy old creatures, who had been unfortunate in life, and whose greatest misfortune it was that they were not long ago in their graves.")  Among them is a woman, once attractive, now ugly, whom the other three friends, men, all courted at one time; a merchant who lost all his money on a desperate gamble and is now almost a beggar; a politician whose career collapsed after a scandal and who is now forgotten; and an army officer who in his youth wrecked his health pursuing pleasures.

Heidegger has acquired water from the Fountain of Youth, and suggests the four drink it, warning them not to waste their second youths misbehaving, like they did the first time they were young.  Of course, within seconds of becoming young they act like total jerks, insulting Heidegger, fighting amongst themselves, and so forth.  It then becomes apparent that the water only works for a few minutes--they are old again.  The four head to Florida so they can drink from the Fountain all day.

The descriptions of Heidegger's home and magic items are good, and the writing over all is pretty good, but the plot and characters are kind of obvious.  If I am biased for Howard because of my admiration for many of his works, it is possible I am biased against Hawthorne because I associate him with school and a sort of established canon of writers you are supposed to like, but I think this story is merely acceptable, no big deal.

Peter Haining included in Beyond the Curtain of Dark several stories
we've already read, among them Robert Bloch's 
"Lizzie Borden Took an Axe..." and "Return to the Sabbath,"
Fredric Brown's "Come and Go Mad," and
Theodore Sturgeon's "The Other Celia"

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I feel like these are competently constructed stories with unexceptional plots and themes that you have to judge on style--is each just adequate, or particularly effective and enjoyable?  Howard and Hawthorne being famous names whose work is important in American culture, it can be hard to judge these stories without letting preconceived notions influence that judgement, but the importance of their authors also makes it all the more easy for me to say that all students of horror and fantasy should read "In The Forest of Villefere" and all students of American literature should read "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment." 

The weird train rolls on to another station next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log; don't lose your ticket.

Henry S. Whitehead: "Sea Change," "The Thin Match," and "The Wonderful Thing"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log, we are reading stories from 1925 issues of Farnsworth Wright's unique magazine, Weird Tales.  Today, three stories from Henry S. Whitehead, an Episcopal minister from the greatest state in the union, New Jersey, who, like myself, left the Garden State seeking education and adventure.  Whereas my travels took me to New York City and the Middle West, where I explored varied forms of goldbricking, loafing and slacking, Whitehead, before settling in Florida, spent many years in New England and in the Virgin Islands, where he learned about voodoo, learning which he integrated into his fiction.  I don't know if today's stories will be about voodoo, but soon we'll find out.

Some of today's tales have been reprinted in book form, but we will be reading "Sea Change," "The Thin Match," and "The Wonderful Thing" in the pages of scans of the appropriate issues of Weird Tales.  Click the links in the previous sentence to read along.  

"Sea Change" 

"Sea Change" debuted in the first issue of WT to reprint H. P. Lovecraft's 1920 "The Statement of Randolph Carter," a story that would reappear in WT in 1937 and which I would blog about (after reading a book printing) in 2022.  "Sea Change" was included in the 1946 Arkham House Whitehead collection West India Lights as well as the 21st-century Whitehead collections Passing of a God and Other Stories and Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead.  Does this story take place in the West Indies?  Does it include voodoo or a ghost?  I don't think so.  

Chapter 1 introduces us to newlyweds Edward and Marian Redwick, who are on their honeymoon aboard a "windjammer."  Sailing the seas is dangerous, at least in the stories we read here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and this opening chapter is consumed with a typhoon which the vessel finds itself in, Whitehead describing the curious nature of the sky before the storm hits and then the way the ship is violently tossed about and the damage it suffers and the casualties suffered among the crew.  In the end, through a freak happenstance, Edward and Marian are the only survivors!  

Chapter 2 flashes back and we get a biography of young Edward's life heretofore.  As a little kid he suddenly became extremely ill, skin paling, hair falling out, teeth turning black, muscles paralyzed, mind becoming so vegetative he didn't recognize his family, etc.  The medicos eventually figured out that he needed to take thyroid pills, and he recovered.  He has taken these pills every day of his life since.  In his twenties he met Marian and they found they shared a fascination with the sea, maybe from reading Conrad and Kipling.  Maybe they should have read Frank Belknap Long--then they might have stayed ashore where thyroid pills are available at every pharmacy!  As it is, they book passage on that windjammer and get stranded on a little island with a few dozen Polynesian inhabitants and no drug stores!

Chapters 3 and 4 concern the first week or so the island.  The natives are very friendly, and tell Ed a ship comes by maybe every one or two years.  Ed is in trouble--he only has eight thyroid pills in his pocket!  After they are consumed he'll probably start turning into a "Caliban!"  Ed realizes the wreck of the windjammer is just barely visible from the beach--a single spar emerges from the waves, the actual hull is totally submerged.  Within that hull is his waterproof container packed with a generous supply of thyroid pills!  So in Chapter 5, when he is out of pills and fears he will soon grow weak and feeble-minded, he braves the waves and the sharks to swim out to the wreck!  But the wreck is further than he realized--the spar, due to some optical illusion, is not nearly as close as it appears from the shore.  He decides to turn back before confronting the sharks that haunt the wreck, presumably eating the dead crewmen.  

When Edward fully realizes how far he has swum, and how he is suffering only minimal fatigue, he comes to another realization--he has grown out of his childhood illness!  He doesn't need the pills anymore!  He can enjoy a year or two on this island paradise with his charming wife and then a life together with her wherever they elect to be.

With its lack of supernatural or science fiction elements, its focus on a man's relationship with his parents and with his wife, its allusions to Shakespeare, and its happy ending (for the good-looking middle-class couple at least--maybe not the prole crewmen who are now shark food), "Sea Change" is more like a mainstream story than anything weird or speculative.  But it is alright.  We'll mildly recommend it; it is pretty well-written, and I am interested in storyies about family dynamics, though usually I read about people who hate their parents and about sexual relationships that are catastrophic, relationships unlike those in this story, in which everybody is lovey dovey and going the extra mile to look out for each other--I don't know, maybe this is a fantasy.

"The Thin Match" 

This is another mainstream-like story, ably told, but far from weird.  The odd sort of gimmick Whitehead employs here is anthropomorphizing matches; they don't move or talk or anything, but they have feelings.  

Anyway, we follow a match which is particularly thin from the factory and through the hands of all the people who by chance acquire the box of sixty matches into which it has been packed.  It feels like two dozen people in this story acquire the box of matches and then somehow lose it.  Being so thin, the match who is our inanimate main character slips into a corner of the box and goes unnoticed and is thus the final to be used.  Along the way we are privy to the hopes and dreams of matches.  Whitehead contrives a situation in which a man in the frozen north's life depends on his last match successfully lighting.  (This guy also has only one cartridge left for his rifle when a lynx is attacking--learn to plan ahead, guy, or just stay in the city and goldbrick or the suburbs and slack like the rest of us.)  Will the match save this guy, or will he freeze to death?

Acceptable filler.  "The Thin Match" has not been reprinted.

"The Wonderful Thing"

"The Wonderful Thing" was reprinted in the 2007 Whitehead collection Passing of a God and Other Stories.

It is the early 1840s.  O'Hara, a man with "Celtic common-sense," moves from New Jersey to Connecticut to work as a land-surveyor and engineer for New England railroads, building bridges and the like.  He hires an elderly black couple, former slaves, to be his servants.  He works too hard to have time for a social life.

One night he has a very vivid dream in which he has a close relationship with a rich family in a nearby town, visiting them regularly, and he falls in love with a young woman in the family and she returns his love and they get engaged.  Whitehead describes this happy dream, in which O'Hara rides his horse to visit his friends, in exacting detail--the beautiful clothes, the beautiful scenery, the beautiful architecture, et al--trying the patience of those of us who open up a copy of Weird Tales hoping to read about Americans and Europeans fighting for their lives against monsters, aliens and members of marginalized demographic groups, not going to tea parties at each other's mansions.  When O'Hara wakes up from the most memorable dream of his life he is in love with the fiancé from his dream and is in a funk for three weeks.

At the end of those three weeks O'Hara takes a day off from work (his railway bridges are several days ahead of schedule--maybe "The Wonderful Thing" really does count as a utopian science fiction story) and rides his horse on the same route he rode in the dream.  We heave to hear about the same scenery and architecture and all the rest again--good grief!  He comes to the mansion of his friends from the dream, and meets the woman from the dream with whom he got engaged.  The woman tells him she had a dream of falling in love with and getting engaged to him three weeks ago, and we get a happy ending.

This story, like the other two Whitehead stories we read today, feels like it belongs in a mainstream magazine full of opinion pieces on tax and trade policy, a report on the latest trends in wallpaper, an interview with a Hollywood star, and advice for the housewife on how to get better deals from the grocer, not the magazine of Conan, Cthulhu, and more vampires and space monsters than you can shake a cross and a ray pistol at.  "The Wonderful Thing" is not bad, but it is certainly not for me.  Barely acceptable.

**********

I really expected there to be voodoo in at least one of these stories.  Or a murder or a ghost or something.  I guess a storm kills lots of people in "Sea Change" and a guy shoots a lynx in the face in "The Thin Match," but those incidents of mayhem are hardly the focus of the stories in which they appear, and the main characters are neither perpetrators nor victims of the violence.  Today's stories feel like they could be in a grade school reading text book designed to teach you concepts like "flashback," "metaphor," "simile," and "personification," and I don't relish reliving that experience.  At the same time, I can't fault the stories on any kind of technical grounds--they are professionally written--the content and themes just aren't what I want to read, and not what I expect from the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual.

Well, we'll be seeing Whitehead in 1926; maybe those stories will be a little more on the thrilling side?  Till then, stay tuned for more 1925 weirdness.

Frank Belknap Long: "Men Who Walk Upon the Air," "The Devil-God," and "The Sea Thing"

Having just fulfilled our vow to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales with a 1924 cover date, let's get cracking on 1925, with three 1925 stories from Frank Belknap Long, a fancy dresser with exciting hair.  We were just talking about Long, about how H. P. Lovecraft lamented the change in the formerly artistic Long's work wrought, according to HPL at least, by the influence of business-like Otis Adelbert Kline.  Today's stories, I believe, must all be from before that influence can be felt.  You can find all three of these tales of uncanny bloodshed and death in France and the Pacific in the 2022 volume of Centipede Press' Library of Weird Fiction (808 pages) dedicated to Long, but I'll be reading them in scans of the original issues of Farnsworth Wright's magazine available to the masses for free at the internet archive.  Experience the mind-bending mayhem yourself in its Roaring Twenties form, along with accompanying illustrations and work by other weird authors, by clicking the links below:

"Men Who Walk Upon the Air"

"The Devil-God"

"The Sea Thing"

"Men Who Walk Upon the Air"

Early in his career, Long was a poet and here in "Men Who Walk Upon the Air" he shows skill in conjuring yellow skies and decaying flesh and other images of horror as well as enticing images of a blue-eyed blonde woman and the feast she lays out for a man from whom she desires a favor.  And as we expect of serious literature, "Men Who Walk Upon the Air" is full of ambiguity and human psychology that is both bewildering and all too comprehensible, disturbingly alike the actions of those around us in real life and our own secret thoughts.  What is really happening?  Are the characters good or evil?  Are they animated by love and generosity or by lust and selfishness?

It is medieval France, and a poet, Long's image of Francois Villon exiled from Paris, is sadly wandering the countryside, which is presented by Long as desolate and disgusting.  The versifier comes upon a hanged man.  (I am not familiar with Villon's work, having spent the time I might have allotted to reading him and learning about medieval Europe to watching Speed Racer and learning about Chim-Chim and Racer X, but wikipedia suggests death by hanging was a preoccupation of Villon's, he always being in trouble with the law.)  The hanged man's wife begs Villon to cut down her husband's corpse.  He more or less agrees, and then with gusto devours the food she prepares him in her little house--Villon has not eaten decent food or drunk wine in days and stuffs himself and gets drunk.  He asks the woman if he can kiss her--just once!--and she relents.  Immediately Villon releases her, having done a little more than kiss her just once, the widow is overcome by fits of terror, thinking her husband, a half-decayed corpse, has climbed down from the gibbet to bust down the door and attack her.  Is Villon's fight with the animated corpse real or just the product of a disordered, depressed, inebriated mind?  Whatever the case, the ghastly assault and pathetic struggle Long depicts is shocking and, as Villon walks away, he sees two corpses, one gripping the other, hanging from the gibbet. 

Very good!  I am probably missing allusions to Villon's work that my more educated readers will recognize, and I recommend this story to all you students of French literature as well as my fellow weirdies.  Besides the aforementioned 2022 Centipede Press collection, "Men Who Walk Upon the Air" would rise from obscurity to terrorize the guilt-stricken living in anthologies of stories from Weird Tales edited by Marvin Kaye (USA, 1988) and Frank Festa and Hardy Kettlitz (Germany, 2023.)    

"The Devil-God"

Mpatanasi is a sort of wizard-priest, a skinny old man with a yellow beard, "malachite" eyes and "monstrous" lips that "seemed to overlap his face," who intercedes between his people, black-skinned jungle-dwelling savages, and their forest devil-god, reputed to be a big furry monster with a single eye in the center of its forehead.  I guess "The Devil-God" takes place in Melanesia--parakeets are in evidence--and not Madagascar, even though Long refers to a lemur--the lemur just appears in a simile.    

Mpatanasi has a daughter who resents him; she would like to color her thin lips and play music, and it seems lay in the arms of the man Mu-senyui, but as a priest's daughter she is forbidden these pleasures.  Mu-senyui is in love with Mpatanasi's daughter, and we hear how he admires her lips, talks about kissing her, how the lovers each touch the other's lips when sneaking around to insist upon silence.  Lips are a theme of Long's story--we also hear about the lips of the gods and monsters in the story, monsters the daughter, and maybe even Mpatanasi the priest, don't really believe in.  

Mu-senyui and the girl scheme to get rid of Mpatanasi so they can be together in the open.  Mu-senyui convinces the priest that the king is not fulfilling his duties, and gets Mpatanasi to pronounce a doom on "the king;" Mpatanasi holds an elaborate ceremony in which he calls upon the forest-devil to make "the king" commit suicide.  As Mu-senyui hoped, Mpatanasi does not speak the king's name in his ritual--the trick is that the man whom the priest believes to be king is already dead, murdered a few days ago by handsome 12-year-old Bamuti, whom the queen and her handmaidens all covet.  The king found the charming boy alone with the queen and his majesty ended up with a knife in the ribs, something the court has kept secret from the priest.  With the death of the king, Mpatanasi is king, and so by cursing "the king" he has pronounced a doom on himself.

Mpatanasi flees the village into the forest.  In a surreal scene involving an earthquake and a forest fire, he is attacked by a monster that Long tells us is such a "caricature of evil" that not even Aubrey Beardsley or Felicien Rops could have conceived it.  (The mention of these European artists is a questionable move by Long, like mentioning the lemur--are these Pacific Islanders familiar with these men's work?  It kind of pulls you out of the setting.)  The monster, which is, apparently, a distinct monster from the forest devil, apparently tears Mpatanasi limb from limb, though maybe this is all a dream or hallucination? 

In the final scene the priest's daughter has painted her lips and adorned herself with other cosmetics and jewelry and she kisses and caresses Mu-senyui while they play with her father's severed head.

I like this story but it is a little opaque.  Is the forest-devil real or just a lie the priests tell people to keep them in line?  Is the "caricature of evil" monster real or just Mpatanasi's delusion as he commits suicide or is murdered by Mu-senyui?  Why does the priest inherit the throne?  Who is king now?  Who is priest now?  Still, "The Devil-God" is well-written on a sentence by sentence basis and I like the theme of vain and horny women more than willing to destroy their own families, their people's government and their people's religious establishment in order to satisfy their base lusts, so thumbs up, but this one isn't as well organized and coherent as "Men Who Walk Upon the Air" or "The Desert Lich."  

Robert M. Price printed "The Devil-God" in the 1986 issue of Crypt of Cthulhu dedicated to Long, and you can also find it in the 2010 Centipede Press Long collection, the one that is 1100 pages long.

"The Sea Thing"

This is a mundane ordinary horror story, but well told, with cool horror images and atmosphere, so thumbs up.  "The Sea Thing" is less original than the crazy "The Devil-God," but has a more straightforward structure, with fewer loose ends, and is far less literary than "Men Who Walk Upon the Air," but still a better than average piece of weird fiction.

Our text is a captain's log, the log of a clipper ship that has suffered one disaster after another!  Damaged, the ship was becalmed and then the crew got cholera and like three quarters of them perished.  Only six crewmen and the captain survive as the narrative begins.  The ship is taking on water and food is running out--they are likely doomed.  But then a guy appears in a boat!  He is the only survivor of a sinking (he says!) and has with him lots of supplies!

Everybody is thrilled and morale recovers and this new guy turns out to be a skilled healer and a real raconteur who has tons of stories with which to entertain everybody.  But after a few days the new guy starts acting strange and people start getting inexplicable injuries and mysteriously losing blood.  Men start dying.  By chance the captain is looking through a century-old book of odd anecdotes, and comes upon the story of a scaly man who was able to live under the ocean--holy crap, the scaly guy's name is the same as that of their new friend!  No wonder this guy has lots of cool old stories--he's some kind of immortal aquatic vampire!

The captain and the most trustworthy of the surviving crew hatch a plot to destroy the monster, which, in the final showdown, exhibits some of the characteristics of a shape-shifting blob!  Who will live?  Who will die?

"The Sea Thing" is pretty fun.  It was reprinted in 1926 in Britain in the second book in Christine Campbell Thomson's Not at Night series of anthologies, and in 1928 in the similarly titled American anthology Not At Night! 

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Nineteen-Twenty-Five was a good year for Long--I can heartily recommend all three of these stories.   A most felicitous step in our long journey through the history of the Unique Magazine--another step next time we meet here at MPorcius Fiction Log.