Weird Tales, Sept '42: R Bloch, F Leiber & D H Keller

"Onwards!" we cry as we open the penultimate issue of Weird Tales published with a 1942 cover date.  Today we advance another step in our sacred journey, forge one more link in the chain that is the quest that was written in our stars, our mission to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales!  

Today three stories, one each by Robert Bloch, the creator of Norman Bates; Fritz Leiber, the creator of The Gray Mouser; and medical man David H. Keller, squirm under our bloodshot eyes.  Each of today's trio of terror debuted here in the September '42 issue of D. McIlwraith's magazine, but the issue includes another story of note that is a reprint, a 1934 tale by California-based titan of the weird, Clark Ashton Smith.  We read "The Epiphany of Death," which appears here under the title "Who Are the Living?", back in 2019, which I guess means we've already fulfilled the criteria of our long term campaign when it comes to this issue, but here at MPorcius Fiction Log we like to do the side quests!

"A Question of Etiquette" by Robert Bloch

I have mixed feelings about this one.  On the one hand, "A Question of Etiquette" is almost a joke story--it is certainly full of jokes.  But most of the jokes aren't that bad, aren't based on puns or farcical absurdities, and the actual plot isn't a joke--"A Question of Etiquette" is a black magic horror story and has many elements of what we might call body horror that seek to leverage the reader's disgust at being pawed over by animals and the male reader's despair at finding himself feminized.  Two themes I always find compelling, corruption and suicide, also play prominent roles in the climax of the story, and Bloch handles most of the black magic and horror elements well, so I guess "A Question of Etiquette," despite all the humor, has won me over.

Our narrator is a census taker going from door to door asking people questions.  He's a real comedian who makes extravagant jokes centered on how sick he is of this job--these jokes would fit in perfectly in one of those Henry Miller or Charles Bukowski I-am-a-smart-guy-who-hates-his-job things.  The narrator comes to a house inhabited by a woman who claims to be a witch centuries old.  She uses sorcery to trap the narrator in the house and the joke quotient diminishes and the horror level escalates radically.

Held captive, the witch's familiar, a pretty disturbing monster, spreads magic ointment all over the narrator's body.  The witch strips naked and puts this goop on herself.  Then they fly to a hill where a Black Mass is being held--the witch has shanghaied the narrator because a mass must have thirteen members, and one of the witches can't make it.

Satan is summoned, and Bloch does a creditable job describing the Devil, but undermines his work a little with a satirical take on Satan and witches, suggesting they are like businesspeople with ledgers who are just doing business--the Black Mass is like the board meeting of a business firm.  Commies will appreciate this, I guess, but it feels kind of out of place.  

The witch who couldn't make it inexplicably shows up, and Satan is enraged because you can't have 14 at one of these meetings.  The witch who kidnaped the census taker is killed and the narrator is compelled to take her place.  The interesting thing, probably the best thing in the story (unless it is the familiar), is that the narrator's soul is implanted into his captor's nude body--he is now a woman, potentially immortal and ever youthful, and the monstrous familiar is now his servant.  How can he escape the horrible fate of being a woman?  By doing what she did, incurring Satan's wrath and having himself replaced!  He begins to plot the capture of one of his work colleagues, the census taker whom he knows by name who will have to come to his new lair to collect the data he, the narrator, failed to report to census HQ--our protagonist has become as evil as the witch whose body is his prison, ready to exploit others with black magic to fulfill his goal, that goal being the liberation of himself from a foul predicament through carefully premediated self-destruction.

There are some plot issues with the story, like the question of why the witch who said she wouldn't show up then did show up--she must have known a sabbath of fourteen would anger Satan and 'ol Scratch would kill somebody, and wouldn't she be the one most likely to be punished?  Also noteworthy are the cultural references Bloch includes, such as to Superman and Sam Walter Foss' "The House by the Side of the Road," which must have been famous at the time because Bloch refers to it without naming the author, assuming you are familiar with it.  Some readers may look askance at the narrator's view of what witch hunting in the past was like (he believes "millions" were burned in the "medieval days"), though I guess this ahistoricism is OK for fiction.  The title of the story hints the tale may be a satire of social norms and rules, a reminder that conventions such as how you shouldn't refuse a host's offer of tea are irrational and maybe even burdensome or dangerous.

The good parts are good enough that they outweigh the bad, so I'm giving "A Question of Etiquette" a grade slightly above acceptable, just poking into the "good" range.

"A Question of Etiquette" was reprinted in several anthologies, including two by Kurt Singer: the man's oft-reprinted and variously named anthology of Ray Bradbury and Robert Bloch stories as well a volume of stories by several authors that goes by Terror Tales and, in abridged form, The Day of the Dragon and Other Tales of Terror. 

"Spider Mansion" by Fritz Leiber 

This is a sort of obvious horror story with some disturbing sexual and bondage elements.  Nothing that happens is very surprising, but Leiber tells the story competently and I enjoyed it.

Our narrator Tom and his wife Helen are driving through a terrific nighttime thunderstorm in the South.  Tom wants to stop and see his old friend, whom he has not seen in over a year, Malcolm Orne, a "midget."  Helen doesn't like midgets, but the weather is so horrible she agrees to stop at the old mansion.

As they open the door to the mansion, a huge "Negro" servant fires a shotgun near their feet, apparently panicked by their approach.  Luckily, none of the shot strikes Tom or Helen.  Another surprise is that Malcolm Orne is no midget, but a giant who towers over even his oversized, though skittish, black servant.

At dinner Orne describes how he came to be a man over six feet tall.  But first, he introduces Tom and Helen to his beautiful blonde wife, Cynthia.  Leiber dwells on the psychology of Orne and Cynthia.  As a midget, Orne was bitter and resentful, hated the world because people found him disgusting or felt sorry for him and women had no desire for him.  Now that he is bigger than everybody else he is arrogant and bullies everybody, seeking to master and achieve revenge on the world that was cruel to him.  Cynthia is so cowed she never speaks, but passes a warning note to Helen.

Orne had an older brother, Marvin, a genius scientist.  Marvin Orne developed a process to make animals or people grow--the process also altered the subjects' cells, including brain cells, increasing intelligence.  As various clues, including in-your-face meta clues like the story title and Boris Dolgov's illustration, make clear to us, Malcolm Orne isn't the only surviving subject of his brother's experiments--Martin Orne also grow a spider to the size of a mastiff and rendered it intelligent enough to follow commands.

The horror centerpiece of the story comes when Tom discovers the spider's web, which fills much of an oversized living room that Malcolm Orne has shut up.  Malcolm lied when he claimed his brother is dead--Martin is in fact alive but entwined in the web, as he has been for months!  As for Cynthia, as a means of punishing her, Malcolm Orne directs his pet spider to bind and suspend her in the web for periods of time, and she is thusly being punished today and hangs among the bodies of various dead or paralyzed animals, future sources of food for the eight-legged monster.

Among nice guy Tom, intelligent wife Helen, brutalized blonde bombshell Cynthia, vengeful Malcolm and genius Martin Orne, the two bullied black servants, and the giant spider, who will survive the fiery action climax?  Who among the survivors can hold his or her head high at having saved him or herself and others, and who will simply experience the relief at having been rescued?  Among the dead, who will go down fighting and who will simply be laid low?

No big deal, but a decent gory entertainment that tries to leverage reader anxieties related to race, sex, biology, psychology, social status, confinement, envy, jealousy, etc.  "Spider Mansion" can be found in the Leiber collection The Black Gondolier and Other Stories and Leo Margulies' anthology Weird Tales, which was translated into German.

 

"The Bridle" by David H. Keller

The narrator of "The Bridle" is a young doctor whose first practice is in a tiny impoverished and isolated Pennsylvania town, a sort of hillbilly milieu.  In his capsule history of the little town, the doctor portrays the pioneers who first cleared and settled the region pretty negatively, depicting a beautiful landscape of trees wrecked by these white men who proceed to exhaust the soil so their descendants cannot make much of a living off farming--each harvest is smaller than the last, so the intelligent and ambitious of those descendants leave the village and those who remain starve.  

We hear about various people in the penurious community, how this one is diseased and that one is a shyster and this one has birth defects.  (Maybe this story counts as "hicksploitation.")  An ugly young man with epilepsy is in love with a striking young beauty--she just makes fun of him because of his epileptic fits.  The town blacksmith, an educated man, tells the doc that the beauty is a witch; of course the narrator scoffs at this.  The narrator quickly develops a crush on this beauty, and is relieved when she vanishes from town--maybe he can get her out of his mind.

The epileptic somehow acquires a beautiful horse, but he mistreats the beast and it contrives to kill him, pounding him to goop with its hooves.  The narrator buys the killer horse, but it quickly escapes him.

The next day the beautiful witch reappears at home, in bad shape, sick, her limbs injured.  Of course we readers immediately recognize that she was the horse whom the epileptic cruelly mistreated, damaging its hooves by ordering the blacksmith to fit horseshoes that were still hot.  Her drunken father is ready to beat the sick girl to death, and the narrator carries her away, declaring, on the spur of the moment, almost against his will, that he will marry her.  Has the witch used her black powers to seduce the doctor?

The key to what is going on is the bridle worn by the horse that slew the epileptic and then escaped the doctor; at the suggestion of the blacksmith, the doctor takes the bridle to New York City to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to have the armor expert look at it.  It is a magical item of terrible evil, fashioned from human skin by Satan worshipping witches, used by workers of black magic to turn men into horses for them to humiliatingly ride!  The epileptic clearly used it to transform the witch girl into a horse, turning the tables on her after she had used it on him.  

Can the doctor tame the sexy witch girl whom the epileptic failed to tame?  Will he turn her into a Christian, or will she use her gorgeous body and black abilities to recruit the doctor into the legions of the Devil?  

Interestingly, as in Bloch's story, the "normal" middle-class narrator who starts out the story not believing in magic is corrupted by the end of the story and seeks to use witchcraft to resolve the plot--the doctor gets the bridle into the girl's mouth, turning her into a horse, and tries to tame her while she is in that condition, risking at any moment being trampled into jelly as was the epileptic.

A pretty good black magic story that includes one of my favorite themes, the femme fatale.  One of the interesting elements of the story is its apparent contempt for country folk and pessimistic view of the pioneers who tamed the American wilderness and lay the foundations for today's world-dominating neoliberal behemoth, illustrating the misanthropy and pessimism that is the main focus of the wikipedia page on Keller.  (Keller seems to have lots of enemies among those who write about speculative fiction, but I have liked or given "acceptable" ratings to like a dozen of his stories and only condemned one.)    

"The Bridle" was reprinted in Keller collections, and a French anthology.

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Keller's story is today's best, it having the least mistakes and feeling the most fresh, the most surprising--a bridle that turns you into a horse feels newer to me than a giant spider or an urban witch.  Leiber's story is standard-issue, but good, while Bloch's more risk-taking, more idiosyncratic story is a combination of good and not-so-good elements.  All three stories reside above the "acceptable" category, though, making this a leg of our Weird Tales journey that is leaving me with a good feeling. 

Our weird trek continues next time--stay tuned!

Weird Tales, July '42: M W Wellman, A Derleth & H Bok

Let's take another step in our eldritch journey--our quest to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales, the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual!  Today, we consider the July 1942 issue and we've got three stories lined up, one each by historian of the American South and chronicler of the adventures of John the Balladeer Manly Wade Wellman, founder of Arkham House and creator of Solar Pons August Derleth, and top tier weird artist Hannes Bok.  I'm reading all these stories in a scan of the magazine, which was edited by D. McIlwraith and sports a cover by Margaret Brundage that features more clothing on its female figure than do so many of Brundage's more famous covers.

"Coven" by Manly Wade Wellman

The narrator of "Coven" is Cole Wickett, 14-year-old cavalry private in the Confederate Army.  Captured by the Federals, he is pressed into an esoteric service by a Union Chaplain and sergeant when they are certain that Wickett is a virgin.  You see, Sarge and the chaplain are hunting a vampire!  A virgin on horseback cannot cross the grave in which a vampire rests, and these two enemies of the forces of Satan need Wickett's help finding which grave conceals the monster.  The collaboration is a success, though Wickett narrowly escapes statutory rape by the pale green-eyed female vampire.  After the vampire has been destroyed, Wickett is allowed to escape back to the rebel lines.

Chapter II takes place over ten years later.  Wickett is an impoverished wanderer with no friends or family, close to starvation!  Reconstruction has been hard on this guy, and he has tried his hand at gambling, stealing, scavenging, even joining the KKK!  Walking one night, desperate, he sees a flying monster approach three men--two of the men are torturing the third!  He rescues the man being flogged, and drives off his tormentors; the monster also disappears, and then suddenly appears that Yankee sergeant, now a minister.  These two guys are fated to help each other fight the Devil, it seems.

In Chapter III the former sergeant explains to Wickett his current struggle against a coven of devil-worshippers and the bat-winged monster Wickett glimpsed, and enlists his aid.  In Chapter IV the coven approaches the house in which our heroes await, and in Chapter V we get the fight with the human enemies.  In Chapter VI, Wickett witnesses the flying demon punish its followers for their failure and then confronts the winged monster alone.  In Chapter VII, the monster exiled to another sphere along with its followers, things get wrapped up--it is suggested that Wickett will start his own farm and marry a minor character, an attractive young woman.  This chapter also puts forward baldly a Lovecraftian assessment that we saw dramatized earlier, that increasing your knowledge may well lead to disaster rather than benefit--the human leaders of the coven learned how to summon a demon, and that demon ended up destroying them all.          

This is a good black magic story.  The way Wellman handles the magic--the various spells and counterspells and the relationship between the demon and those who summoned it--is compelling, much of it feeling fresh and all of it being exciting.  (Here is where I will complain that Brundage on the cover of this issue of WT gives the monster human legs when Wellman specifically describes its legs as being much more alien, much more like an animal's--she missed a real opportunity here.)  Wellman's fight scenes are also good, fast and brutal and disturbing, and I also liked the somewhat darkly erotic scenes with the vampire.  Thumbs up for "Coven."

"Coven" has been reprinted in Wellman collections, and in Nightmares in Dixie, an anthology of horror stories set in the South.  I should also note that "Coven" is a sequel to a three-part serial by Wellman that appeared in Weird Tales in 1939, "Fearful Rock," that also features that sergeant; I should get around to reading that novella someday.

"Lansing's Luxury" by August Derleth 

Here we have one of those stories that Derleth, a man famous for his connection to his home state of Wisconsin, sets in England.  Why does he do this?  "Lansing's Legacy" is also one of those stories that seeks to exploit the reader's supposed envy or hatred of rich people.  Plus, it is one of those horror stories which, to my mind, is not a horror story at all, but a morality tale, a tale in which the author does not seek to horrify us by telling us that the world is chaotic and terrible, but rather assures us that the world is orderly and just, a story in which a person behaves immorally and is then punished by supernatural forces.

Lansing is a rich guy in his sixties or maybe late fifties, a successful businessman with lots of connections.  Derleth makes it clear he is not some old money guy who inherited his wealth, but a sharp operator who made his money--this story is not an attack on the aristocracy, but on the bourgeoisie.  The leitmotif of Derleth's story is that this guy has no imagination; we hear that Lansing has no imagination like ten times over the story's five pages.  I guess the people who write for and read Weird Tales think of themselves as people with imagination, and have contempt for guys with no imagination, another way this story tries not to horrify but to comfort its readers.  I daresay that a guy who built a fortune must have some kind of imagination, like, he must have come up with business plans or something, but I suppose Derleth and Weird Tales readers think "having imagination" means you believe in the supernatural.

There's our character.  Now, our plot.  Lansing learns a new railway will be built soon.  Before the public knows of the new project, Lansing buys up all the land the track will be laid on--he will be able to sell the land at a big profit because the owners he purchases it from don't know how valuable the land is about to become.  It seems Lansing doesn't need money, but just does this for love of the game and to assuage the boredom old men feel.  One property owner refuses to sell.  Lansing hires a private investigator to figure out what is up with this joker.  It seems everybody in his environs thinks he is a wizard or an immortal monster or something.  

Lansing pulls strings to have the wizard's property condemned so he can buy it, but the wizard is still able to keep his house; this part of the story I didn't quite get.  The wizard sets out to assassinate Lansing,  I guess out of a desire for vengeance because killing Lansing won't get his property back and the monster is still in its house anyway--it is not like the wizard has to kill Lansing to retake its territory.  Anyway, the monster stays abed all day and projects his astral form out into the world.  This astral form can touch people, and keeps trying to push Lansing down the stairs or in front of a truck ("lorry") or onto the train tracks.  Lansing manages to catch himself twice, and is preserved during the third attempt when a porter saves him from falling on the tracks.

For some reason, Lansing goes to the former wizard's property to watch the construction of the railroad; why bother when he doesn't own the property anymore and never had any connection to the railroad?  The engineer in charge of the project says they probably won't build the railway here after all, as there are caverns under this area (it is implied that the wizard is a subterranean monster who emerged from these caverns long long ago.)  Lansing walks over to a path along a cliff or something ("He found himself alone, with the steep slope of rock on one side of him, and a shorter, more dangerous declivity on the other") where the wizard's astral form causes an avalanche that crushes the businessman--Derleth twists the knife by telling us for the first time that Lansing is fat, too fat to run out of the path of the avalanche.

This story is sloppy.  The fact that Lansing has no imagination isn't well integrated into why he gets killed--I guess we are expected to think that if he believed in the supernatural he wouldn't have used his connections to buy the wizard's property after learning the guy had magic powers.  I totally didn't understand how the government could condemn the wizard's property in such a way that Lansing could then buy it and sell it to the railroad, except for the actual house, which the wizard was still allowed to live in.  And twice Lansing saves himself from being pushed to his death, making you think he is spry, but then at the bottom of the last page of the story, Derleth tells us he is fat.  At the top of the first page of the story, Derleth gave a physical description of Lansing, and there is no mention of him being fat.

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  It is true I am biased against this story for numerous reasons, some of which are listed in my first para on "Lansing's Luxury."  Another reason: I am often turned off by stories in which the writer stacks the deck against a character, egging you on to hate him and enjoy seeing him get killed--when the writer of a story is manipulating you too blatantly into having it in for some character, I start to sympathize with the character.  (As a kid I always sympathized with the people Benson and Alan Alda made fun of on their shows, perhaps because the kids at school always made me the butt of their jokes, and I am fully aware of how my parents talk about me behind my back, and so always take people's extravagant depictions of others as villains with a grain of salt.)  Even discounting my own prejudices, I think "Lansing's Luxury" deserves a negative vote because of all the sloppiness I have detailed above. 

"Lansing's Luxury" has been reprinted in several Derleth collections; maybe it was revised for book publication to solve some of the issues I am complaining about?  (Something maybe D. McIlwraith should have done?  Tsk, tsk!)

"Poor Little Tampico" by Hannes Bok

I am of course a fan of Bok's paintings and drawings, but, when I read three of his stories back in 2019, I found them a mixed bag, more curious than enjoyable.  But let's give "Poor Little Tampico" a chance.

Our tale is laid in wartorn Spain.  Everywhere you look are shell craters and burned or bombed houses.  Our protagonist is 11-year-old orphan Tampico, son of a doctor in Madrid who died in the fighting; Tampico wanders the countryside, begging for food--everybody tells him they are too poor to help him.  One farm seems to be in better shape than the rest, seems to be thriving!  Little Tampico is told to stay away from that house, as it is the home of a witch who makes money telling people's fortunes.  Is Bok here betraying a weak grasp of economics--if everybody is impoverished, how do they pay the witch?--or satirizing the tendency of poor people to stupidly waste money on nonsense like fortune telling?

Ignoring the warnings, Tampico sneaks into the house and, finding the witch absent, drinks the hot broth in the cauldron over the fire.  Ay caramba, he gets sick soon after.  The witch arrives and moans because Tampico has eaten the goop she looks in to predict the future for her customers, a goop composed of such unsavory ingredients as bat wings and desiccated lizards! 

A pregnant woman whose husband is away participating in the war wants her fortune told and the witch finds that she can read the future in the ill Tampico's eyes.  When word gets out to the rest of the peasants that the witch can read the future in a kid's glazzies, they all want their fortune told this way, like novelty-loving consumers.  The opening pages of the story that describe the blasted countryside and Tampico's poverty seem so sincere, these satirical elements come as a surprise.

Tampico and the witch get a profitable business going, and the witch even tidies up the kid's hair and clothes so he is more presentable.  But eating a broth made from worms, amphibians, reptiles and bats every day is doing a number on Tampico's health.  He tries to leave the witch, but she stops him, and entices him to stay by telling him she has legally adopted him and he will inherit her relatively well-appointed farm when she eventually expires.

General Blasco, a ruthless dictator with an interest in the occult, summons the witch and her adopted son when he hears of their feats of divination.  This caudillo has people shot over the slightest offenses, and tells the witch she will be shot if her fortune-telling is proven to be a scam.  To her horror, when she tries to read the General's future in Tampico's eyes, she can see nothing!  The General has her summarily executed, but allows Tampico to leave; he will now enjoy running the witch's farm, the best in the village.  The punchline of the story is the revelation that, after consuming the noxious broth this time around, Tampico took some bicarbonate of soda to settle his stomach, thus inadvertently short circuiting the broth's magical effect.

I guess this story is a little funny, and not poorly written, so we'll judge it acceptable.  "Poor Little Tampico" has never been reprinted, unless you count the Canadian edition of Weird Tales, which did bear a different cover.

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Wellman is a strong performer, and "Coven" is quite good, easily the best of today's stories.  I'm actually not really interested in the Civil War or the South or hillbillies, but Wellman is regularly able to overcome my lack of sympathy for these settings simply with his effective writing.  

Derleth's story is some kind of rush job, full of problems that should have been ironed out in revisions.  Today's loser.  Bok's tale is not bad, though certainly odd, starting out like some tearjerker and transitioning into satire and then ending with a wacky joke that undermines all the energy its depiction of black magic might have had.

Stay tuned as we continue our journey through the long history of Weird Tales here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  

Possible Worlds of M Jameson, T Sturgeon & M St. Clair

One of my well-read commenters recently mentioned Groff Conklin's 1951 anthology Possible Worlds of Science Fiction and a story by Malcolm Jameson it reprints from Astounding, "Lilies of Life."  Let's get that mouse wheel spinning and read "Lilies of Life" and two other stories from a scan of the hardcover edition of Possible Worlds of Science Fiction; this is a big book at 388 pages and it contains a bunch of stories worth looking at, but today we'll confine ourselves to exploring that Jameson story, the story by Ted Sturgeon of "Killdozer" fame and Margaret St. Clair's contribution.

Before reading "Lilies of Life," "Completely Automatic" and "The Pillows," I'll note that of the 22 stories in Possible Worlds of Science Fiction we have already blogged about four, Frank Belknap Long's "Cones," James H. Schmitz's "Second Night of Summer," Arthur C. Clarke's "A Walk in the Dark," and Hal Clement's "Proof,"  I think I have read at least three more, the van Vogt, the Heinlein and theVance, back in pre-blog days.  Also, I remind you that I am reading the versions of today's stories that appear in Conklin's 1951 anthology, not the magazine versions.

"Lilies of Life" by Malcolm Jameson (1945)

"Lilies of Life" debuted in Astounding alongside Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's "The Piper's Son," which I read over ten years ago (damn, don't that time fly) and Fritz Leiber's "Wanted--An Enemy," which I haven't read yet but will get around to some day, no doubt.

"Lilies of Life," I find, is a good classic science fiction story, a tale full of science and also a healthy share of adventure in the world of the exotic other, including anti-imperialist (but still racist by 2026 standards) depictions of Westerners corrupting and exploiting primitive peoples.

Venus is a source of valuable uranium, and so Earthmen have set up mining operations there.  But Venus has a bewilderingly diverse and complex ecosystem that includes all kinds of diseases that lay Terrans low at an alarming rate and terrifying speed.  Being on Venus makes humans so sick so fast that Terrans that go to Venus are forbidden to stay longer than six months, and the government has a harsh quarantine system that keeps many diseased Earthmen from ever seeing home again.  The intelligent natives of Venus are savages with duck-like feet to help them navigate the swamps that cover the second planet from the sun; they are very big, strong and healthy--if they stick to their own communities.  Those natives who leave their villages become just as vulnerable to all those diseases as are Earthmen, and they drop like flies.  And they leave in droves because the natives of Venus are very vulnerable to addiction to tobacco and will take any crummy job with the Terrans if it means payment in that stinking weed!  Those with a familiarity with European imperialism will recognize echoes in Jameson's story of British and French colonialism in the New World and the Far East, and Jameson drives this point home by repeatedly calling the Earthmen on Venus "white men" or just "whites."

They were the bearers, the helots of this hole. They stood gaunt and shivering, for they were sick men, too, sicker even than the whites. It was thought profitable to keep Earthmen alive by periodic doses of paracobrine, but a waste of good drugs when it came to natives.

Parks and Maxwell are human scientists.  They both are afflicted with "the jitters" and are trying to find a cure for this deadly Venerian disease that drives people insane and then kills them.  Every day they have to take a shot of "paracobrine," a drug with very uncomfortable side effects, to stave off madness and destruction.  P and M were working on a cure on Earth, using material smuggled in from Venus, but the government is cracking down on smuggling and so they resort to travelling to Venus themselves to investigate.

(A weakness of "Lilies of Life" is that it is not clear how Parks and Maxwell got the disease--does this story chronicle their second visit to Venus?  I don't remember Jameson ever mentioning a prior trip to Venus.)

On Venus, P and M follow clues that suggest something about the natives' crazy protects them from the jitters--all natives who work for the white man--the natives who get the jitters--are converted to Christianity because otherwise the natibves are too lazy and violent to make good workers.  (Like so much classic science fiction, "Lilies of Life" tells you Christianity is a scam.)  At the Venerian equivalent of an opium den, Parks and Maxwell meet a native who converted to Christianity, got the jitters, then abandoned the white man's wicked ways and is healthy again now that he is back to practicing his native religion.  With promises of tobacco, Parks and Maxwell get this two-time turncoat to guide them to a native religious ceremony that Terrans call "an orgy."  No Terran has ever witnessed this twice yearly sacred rite!  The first few days of the ceremony consist of the natives getting drunk.  The climax of the ceremony is when the priests defang spiders the size of your fist and feed to their parishioners the spiders' poison sacs!  P and M observe this drunken revelry and disgusting feast secretly, totally sober, but their native guide gets drunk and forces one of the poison sacs down Maxwell's throat!

The venom arrests Maxwell's symptoms it is what protects the natives from all the diseases.  The rest of "Lilies of Life" the story is about how Maxwell uses the scientific method to trace how the spiders fit into Venus' bewildering ecology and how to duplicate the beneficial effects of the spider venom without allowing a horde of greedy Earthmen to come to the temple and overhunt the spiders the way the American bison back on Terra has been overhunted.

I like "Lilies of Life," a fun pulpy melodrama that serves to glorify the man of science and cast doubt on the propriety of Western interactions with less advanced civilizations.  Jameson's speculative biology and ecology are entertaining, as is all the imperialism stuff.  Jameson depicts Parks and Maxwell's reaction to the realities of Terran-Venerian contact with grim realism--the scientists recognize the trouble humans are causing the natives but just accept it as inevitable and go about their business without becoming revolutionaries or going native or starting a civil-rights-for-Venerians NGO or something like that.  I appreciate that Jameson doesn't tell you how to feel about the world he depicts, just depicts it and lets you judge as you will.  

"Lilies of Life" was included in one of the paperback abridgements of Possible Worlds of Science Fiction as well as a number of other anthologies, including an Australian one titled Planet of Doom.  

"Completely Automatic" by Theodore Sturgeon (1941)

Another story from John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Astounding, this one appearing alongside "Magic City," a story by Nelson S. Bond we read back in 2015 that I use as my go-to example of a SF story with a strong female protagonist that examines gender stereotypes long before the New Wave.  Sturgeon's "Completely Automatic" didn't make it into any of the multiple paperback edition of Possible Worlds of Science Fiction or any other publication until 1995 when it was included in the second volume of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Microcosmic God.  I guess we can call this a relatively rare story from Ted.

It is the socialist interplanetary future!  For 300 years ships have been travelling hither and thither across the solar system.  Nowadays the government controls the economy and maintains full employment by giving people jobs that require no work, including "supervising" those fully automatic space ships.  A passenger on a space liner asks a crewmember who has one of these fake jobs why these jobs even exist, when the ships are fully operated by machines and remote control from Earth.  The crew member tells a story about the bad old days when private companies ran the space ships and tried to increase profits by discharging all these superfluous crewmen, whom the story teller admits were mostly slackers who got these fake jobs through connections and not any kind of expertise.

The story within the frame story includes quite a bit of description of how space ships and space colonies three or four centuries from today might operate, and I suppose that is sort of interesting.  

Her capacity was something like two hundred thousand tons net, and she was loaded to the ceil plates with granular magnesium and sodium for the Sun mirrors of Titan. I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors that circulate around the satellite, making it habitable.

Anyway, for over a hundred years the automatic ships have operated without incident and the superfluous crewmen have had nothing to do.  Then, on the very first space flight without the superfluous crewmembers, there is an incident.  Sturgeon describes in some detail the science behind the complicated chemical reaction that is caused by the incident and threatens to destroy the ship and kill the crew who still have jobs on the ship, men who are basically janitors and know very little science and very little about how the ship really operates.  Sturgeon also describes their many futile attempts to fix the problem and their agony as their predicament gets more and more painful.  Despite all the talk of pain, the story is told in a jocular tone, with lots of little jokes about how ignorant these guys are.

The ship and the crew are saved by what amounts to luck in a twist ending that is sort of jokey, sort of macabre.  The government insists that those superfluous jobs be filled again in case another once-in-a-century crisis occurs. 

If you happen to be a regular reader of MPorcius Fiction Log, you will know that stories that advocate for socialism, stories that are essentially jokes, and stories the outcome of which turn on luck, are not my bag.  However, Sturgeon's style here is smooth and the science regarding the space disaster and the speculation on what human life beyond Earth might be like are actually kind of interesting, so we'll judge "Completely Automatic" acceptable.

"The Pillows" by Margaret St. Clair (1950) 

"The Pillows" debuted in Thrilling Wonder Stories and was included in several of the paperback editions of Possible Worlds of Science Fiction as well as an Australian anthology, The Sands of Mars, and multiple St. Clair collections.

"The Pillows" is a decent SF thriller/horror story.  On otherwise barren and frozen Triton have been discovered "pillows," items like black disks a few inches across (St. Clair repeatedly compares them to sand dollars.)  These "pillows" are always warm, and are practically indestructible, and people have a sort of irrational fondness for them, and even think that they bring good luck.  A company has been mining the pillows from Triton and bringing them back to Earth and they sell like hot cakes, and everybody who has one has some story about how his relationships or business prospects or whatever improved after acquiring one.   

Our hero is a scientist who wants to figure out what is going on with the pillows.  He has acquired some, but can't learn much about them.  Even though they are famously always warm, in the lab they cool down to room temperature quite quickly.  To learn more, he signs on to work as a deckhand on one of the Triton-bound ships that collects the pillows and brings them back to Terra.

On Triton our guy realizes that the pillows are intelligent, can manipulate human minds, can "reverse entropy" and even "influence the flow of events."  No doubt they are using their powers to hitch rides to Terra en masse so they can take over our beloved home planet!  The scientist must prevent any more from coming to Earth!  But the pillows realize that the scientist is on to them!  The pillows can raise or lower the temperature, direct people's psychology, and exercise "some sort of control over events"--is there any chance the scientist can get back to Earth sane and alive to warn the world of this alien danger, or is Earth doomed?

This is a pretty entertaining story.  I legitimately didn't know who was going to triumph, the scientist or the alien monsters.  St. Clair also succeeds in describing the standard SF stuff we all love--space craft, space suits, ray guns, and aliens--in a fun way.  Thumbs up!

**********

Jameson is today's winner for best story, but St. Clair is not far behind.  Sturgeon's story is less economical, with a lot of what feels like extraneous material plus a surfeit of details, and is also less exciting because you know the story within a story is going to turn out OK, and because of all the jokes that deflate any suspense.  Not exactly bad, though.

We may return to Possible Worlds of Science Fiction, as I don't think I've read the included Poul Anderson, Clifford Simak, or Katherine MacLean stories, but we've got a lot of projects here at MPorcius Fiction Log running concurrently, so it may be a while.

Merril-approved '59 (kinda) stories: A Bester, R Brossard & F Brown

You are going back, young man (or lady), back...back...back...to 1959!  And what will you do in the year in which Fidel Castro took over the land where Desi Arnaz was born, the year Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev debated the best way to squeeze a lemon, the year the first Barbie dolls hit the market?  You're going to read magazines, of course!  But you won't be staying long in the year Norm Macdonald, Tracey Ullman and Colin Quinn were born!  So which magazines do you read?  Well, we have a guide for you!  Judith Merril read all the magazines in 1959, and even produced a list of stories worth reading from that year!

Yes, folks, today we're going to read more stories from Judith Merril's alphabetical list of honorable mentions at the back of her 1960 volume Year's Best SF: 5th Annual Edition. We're still on the "B"s, and today we've got stories by Alfred Bester, Raymond Brossard and Fredric Brown.  The Brown entry is a little odd and may not quite fit the supposed rules of this blog post or Merril's book, but we'll get to that after tackling Bester and Brossard.

"The Pi Man" by Alfred Bester (1959)

"The Pi Man" debuted in the 10th anniversary issue of F&SF alongside an installment of the serialized version of Starship Troopers and Theodore Sturgeon's "The Man Who Lost the Sea."  For some reason, Merril cites not that magazine but a 1960 book publication of the tale in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Ninth Series.  So I will dutifully read the story from a scan of that book rather than from the magazine, following Merril's advice to the letter!

I haven't read anything by Bester during the period of this blog's tortured existence, though I read the famous The Stars My Destination in my New York days.  Barry Malzberg wrote in 1976 that Bester was "The best stylist pound-for-pound (I'd make him a light heavyweight) in the history of this field," so Bester is probably one of those writers I should read more of; if I love "The Pi Man," maybe you'll see Bester's name a lot more here at MPorcius Fiction Log in the future.

Well, I'm afraid we are not making a love connection today.  "The Pi Man" is a show-offy literary piece full of quotes and foreign phrases, sentence fragments and strange typography, present tense first-person narration and onomatopoeia; you can see why critics who are into modern literature like Merril and Malzberg would like it.  The plot and themes of "The Pi Man" reminded me of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories, in which a guy is compelled to travel through time and space to fight in wars so that the forces of Law and Chaos remain in balance.  Except Bester here is largely kidding and we get a happy ending instead of a tragic ending (maybe.)

The narrator of Bester's tale is driven by an obsessive dedication to symmetry and balance.  For example, on his morning commute he reads the newspapers that he senses other subway riders are not reading.  At the restaurant he senses a lot of people are eating sugar so he takes his coffee black.  The story contains a multitude of gags like this.  Sometimes our hero acts voluntarily based on his own senses, like with the newspapers and the coffee.  Other times, otherworldly forces or an irresistible need compel him to do things he doesn't understand, doesn't want to do, in order to maintain some balance he isn't aware of--for example, he assaults an old man who works in an office, injures him and destroys his documents, his spectacles and his pens.  

We readers grok the gimmick after four or five pages of this, but there are still 14 pages for us to machete our way through.  Luckily, Bester enlivens most of these pages with some edgy material that may or may not directly relate to his plot or primary themes.  Bester satirizes beatniks (they don't bathe, etc.) and suggests that women are sexually attracted to men who treat them poorly.  There's actually a lot of sexually suggestive stuff in this story; e.g., beatnik men's beards are likened to pubic hair, the claim is made that Americans like "over-stuffed" women while Englishmen like "skinny" women, and there is even some implied homosexual activity.  Then there's the violence, like the revelation that the narrator beat his own dog to death.  This stuff is all played for laughs.

The narrator is caught by the FBI, partly because a woman is chasing him, a woman desperate to have sex with him, and her pursuit distracts him.  Then we get several pages of the narrator explaining to the Feds this whole balance thing.  As an agent of the balance, some kind of essential cog in the machine that is the universe, the narrator always escapes prosecution and imprisonment, but is always denied friendship and love.  The FBI has to let him go, but the girl who has been chasing him refuses to leave his side, and as the story ends there is the possibility that the narrator's loneliness will be assuaged, at least for a little while.                  

A crazy story that at times is pretty difficult or annoying to read, though it gets less difficult as you proceed.  We're going to call "The Pi Man" OK, though this feels like a cop out, seeing as it is the kind of story that will have some readers gushing over its ambition and zaniness and others yawning at its self-indulgence or gritting their teeth at the challenges it imposes.  And I suppose people may find the sex and violence offensive.

You can find "The Pi Man" in several anthologies, including one of Richard Lupoff's books about stories that he feels should have won a Hugo (the short story Hugo for 1960 went to "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes), and multiple Bester collections, including 1976's Star Light, Star Bright, for which, according to isfdb, it was revised.

Revised, eh?  Did Bester take out some of that sex stuff I highlighted above?  Were the references to beatniks and Englishmen's taste in women in the 1959 "The Pi Man" dated by 1976?  My inquiring mind wanted to know!  So I took a quick glance at a scan of Starlight, an omnibus that includes Star Light, Star Bright, and, sure enough, the 1976 version of the story is totally different, with no references to beatniks, England, or skinny women that I could find with my own bleary bespectacled 54-year-old eyes or with the internet archive's search function.  In the intro to the story penned by Bester himself, the author confides that the original version was "rather crude."  Bester, old boy, it was all that crude stuff that was keeping me awake!  Now I am wondering if Lupoff included the '59 original or the '76 revision in his 1981 What If? Volume 2, but I can't find a scan of the thing.  Maybe a trip to WonderBook is in order.   

Woah, some real treasures today from Richard Powers.

"Mr. Merman" by Raymond Brossard (1959)      

We all make mistakes.  Every time I go back and look at some old blog post of mine I find a typo.  Then there was the time I mixed up Greg Bear and Gregory Benford, or was it it Ben Bova?  And of course, for a while there I thought Fantastic and Fantastic Universe were the same magazine, the way Analog and Astounding are the same magazine or the way you call Amazing Stories just Amazing most of the time.  So when I tell you that on page 318 of the paperback edition of Year's Best SF: 5th Annual Edition, the story by Raymond Brossard that appeared in the July 1959 issue of Fantastic Universe is listed as "The Merman" when in fact the story in question is titled "Mr. Merman," I say it with love and sympathy, not derision or contempt.

Raymond Brossard only has this one story listed at isfdb or philsp.com.  Apparently he was a painter from New Jersey, greatest state in the Union, and spent much of his career in Mexico.  This story has never been reprinted, as far as I can tell.

"Mr. Merman" is a pretty conventional story with wish fulfillment and twist ending elements.  It is well written, though, so it is too bad Brossard didn't write more.  Hopefully he found his life as a painter satisfying.

Mr. Merman slips in the bathroom, hitting his head and falling into a full tub, unconscious.  He wakes up aware of a superpower of which he has heretofore been ignorant--he can breathe underwater!  Most of this story consists of Mr. Merman testing his abilities, then looting a sunken ship and quitting his job and living the high life on the cash he retrieved from the ocean floor, having sex with many different women.  When funds begin to run short he decides to loot a ship sunk quite a bit deeper.  Oops, the pressure down there is too much for him and he dies.

Well, not quite.  He dies alright, but all this business of being able to breathe underwater and finding sunken treasure and having sex with a bunch of hot babes was the dream he had as he was dying, drowning in the bath tub.  It's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" all over again!              

"Three" by Fredric Brown (1959, sort of)

"Three" appeared in Gent, a men's magazine that, like Playboy, included fiction by SF writers.  (For example, the cover of the February 1959 issue of Gent bears the names of Margaret St. Clair and Henry Slesar.)  I couldn't find a record of this story on isfdb, but a look at philsp.com solved the mystery--"Three" is a series of reprints, three stories that originally appeared in F&SF and Astounding.  We've already read the two F&SF stories, "Millennium" and "Too Far."   We'll read the third story, "The Weapon," in the issue of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Astounding in which it debuted. 

"The Weapon" by Fredric Brown (1951)

Dr. Graham is a top scientist with a son who is, as Brown puts it, "mentally arrested"--don't worry, I'm not going to trigger you with the "r-word" like I did in our last post.  Harry, fifteen, has the mind of a four-year-old.

A guy comes to visit Dr. Graham.  Dr. Graham is working on a superweapon, and his visitor warns Graham that his work could end the human race.  Graham, of course, has heard it all before and wants to dismiss this crank.  The crank tricks Graham into leaving him alone with his (intellectually) 4-year-old son.  (Add your Michael Jackson and Marion Zimmer Bradley jokes here.)  The crank leaves, and Graham goes to Harry's room.  He finds his visitor has left Harry with a loaded revolver.  Brown ends his two-and-a-half-page story in italics:

...only a madman would give a loaded revolver to an idiot.

Groan.  Brown takes a one-line piece of manipulative elitist bumper-sticker sophistry and expands it to two and a half pages.  Thumbs down!

**********

Now is the time on Sprockets when we try to diagnose why Merril recommended these six (five?) stories.  Merril is famous as the cheerleader of the New Wave, and Bester's "The Pi Man" is like a New Wave story with its many experimental modernist narrative techniques and its emphasis on sex, so that one is easy.  Brossard's story is a little less explicable, but one of Merril's big life projects was to point out how the divisions between genre literature and mainstream literature were bogus, and "Mr. Merman," as the editor of Fantastic Universe Hans Stefan Santesson himself points out in his intro to the story, isn't really science fiction--it blurs or straddles the line Merril thinks isn't really there or at least shouldn't be there.  Also, it is a decent story, so maybe she legitimately really liked it.

Then we have the three Brown stories.  "Millennium" is a one-page story about a guy outwitting the Devil by making the Devil grant his wish that the general population be smarter and less evil; you could maybe interpret this story as exhibiting the kind of misanthropic elitism we expect of lefties like Merril.  "Too Far" is another one-page "vinnie," one with edgy sexual content, so maybe also New Wavey?  I'm guessing, however, that the main reason Merril liked "Three" was that its largest component, "The Weapon," is a story that tells you the American people are morons and so can't be trusted to have a defense against the Soviet Union.

A strange assortment today: a wild experimental piece that was radically rewritten a decade and a half after Merril promoted it; a competent one-off; and three short-shorts that actually were not new in 1959 but in fact reprints.  One reason I pursue these Merril-oriented projects is that Merril's choices are full of surprises (sometimes surprises to me because my sensibilities are very different than hers) and today really has borne that out.  Who knows what we will encounter the next time we take direction from Judith Merril?  Stay tuned to find out.

R Bloch: "A Question of Identity," "Death Has Five Guesses," and "The Bottomless Pool" (w/ R M Farley)

I think we've covered two of the thirteen stories that appear in the April 1939 issue of Strange Stories, Henry Kuttner's sword and sorcery tale "Cursed Be the City" and David H. Keller's story of a failed marriage, "The Dead Woman."  Behind the woman-in-esoteric-bondage cover of this issue also lurks Henry Kuttner's "The Bells of Horror," which I read before this blog began haunting the interwebs.  That leaves ten stories in the mag which constitute virgin territory.  We'll blaze a trail through three of those ten today, the three which were produced with the participation of the man who scripted Barbara Stanwyck's The Night Walker, the last black and white film made by Universal Pictures, Chicago-born Los Angeleno Robert Bloch.

All three of today's stories saw reprint in the 1998 collection Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies, a book which I mentioned in our last blog post, as well as a 1986 French collection with an amateurish cover illustration--zoinks, is that Bloch himself on the cover, caught in the act of molesting a green female mummy?  The title story of Les cadavres ne meurent jamais, "The Dead Don't Die!," we read way back in 2018, early in our now old and comfortable relationship with Bob "Psycho" Bloch.  Note that I am going to read these stories in their 1939 form in a scan of the issue of Strange Stories in which they first appeared.

"A Question of Identity" by Robert Bloch (as by Tarleton Fiske)

"A Question of Identity" treads very familiar ground, but it is well-written, so I enjoyed it.  So, thumbs up!  Besides the aforementioned books put out by Arkham House and our freres over in Gaul, "A Question of Identity" would be reprinted in 1983 in the British magazine Fantasy Tales edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton.

"A Question of Identity" is a first person narrative.  A guy has been buried alive!  He can't remember his true identity!  He fights his way out of his grave, walks around at night, eventually remembers who he is and how he died, goes to his fiancé's place and, as the story ends, realizes he is a vampire and is about to drink his horrified betrothed's blood.

The plot is obvious but Bloch does a good job describing the narrator's mental state--his emotions and his confusion--and his experiences of busting out of the coffin and exploring the cemetery and the town.  The tone and pacing are just right.  A creditable piece of work.

"Death Has Five Guesses" by Robert Bloch 

This story begins with a longish description of Rhine cards and a depiction of their use by a college professor with his class.  (Wikipedia calls these "Zener cards"; is "Rhine cards" like "B.C.," "retard" and "Negro," once common terms that have been replaced in our day by verbiage considered more sympathetic, or is Bloch just making a mistake here?*)  One student, Harry Clinton, is particularly good, amazingly good in fact, at guessing which card has been drawn, and he and prof spend a lot of time together experimenting.  As the months go by, Harry gets better and better at guessing the cards, but otherwise his mental state gets worse--his memory becomes poor, for example, and he suffers headaches and fatigue.  Sometimes the images from the cards--cross, circle, etc.--come to his mind unbidden during his off campus daily life.  He begins to have bouts of amnesia.

*[UPDATE APRIL 21, 2026: One of my number-crunching readers addresses the issue of "Zener cards" vs "Rhine cards" with hard data in the comments below!

Bloch loves puns and double entendres and homophones and that sort of thing, and he employs such devices here in "Death Has Five Guesses."  As you know, each Rhine/Zener card has one of five simple symbols printed on it.  Bloch's story becomes repetitive as Clinton, during amnesiac episodes, commits murders, one after the other, each thematically related to one of the five symbols.  For example, when his mind is oppressed by the image of the star, he takes up a mace, the head of which has five points, and kills a movie actress, you know, a "star."  Eventually Clinton kills himself.

This story is just OK, though well-written enough on a sentence by sentence basis.  "Death Has Five Guesses" is long and repetitive for one thing, what with the description of the cards and then five different killings.  Another problem is that the killings are largely lacking in motivation--when a person kills his or her spouse because spouse was stifling or cheating, or kills his or her boss or a business partner over envy or theft or whatever, it is easier to identify with murderer and with victim, but in "Death Has Five Guesses" the killer is killing for somewhat silly and contrived reasons and the victims lack personality and sometimes any connection to the killer.   

As the story proceeded, I was kind of hoping that, like in Warhammer 40,000 (at least the WH40K I paid attention to in the '80s and '90s), opening up his psychic powers had opened up Harry Clinton to control by alien monsters or the Devil, and I guess that reading is possible given the vague way Bloch explains what is going on in "Death Has Five Guesses," but it seems more likely that Clinton just went insane.  Not a bad story, but an overly long and convoluted filler piece.  I guess the emphasis on the trappings of psychology makes this the most characteristic of Bloch's work of today's three tales. 

"The Bottomless Pool" by Robert Bloch and Ralph Milne Farley (as by Ralph Milne Farley)

I think I've read eight stories by Ralph Milne Farley, and thought them all at least OK.  Here find links to my blog posts about them.

"The House of Ecstasy"

"Time for Sale" 

"Liquid Life"

"Horror's Head"

"The Stratosphere Menace" 

"Mystery of the Missing Magnate"

"Test Tube Twin"

"I Killed Hitler"

It would be wild if collaborating with the far more famous Bloch dragged down Farley's batting average here at the MFL.

The text of "The Bottomless Pool" is a testimonial penned by a man at risk of being accused of murder by the authorities.  You see, our narrator is a writer, and he had a friend who was a writer, but who was in poor health and had a terrible case of writer's block.  So the narrator invited his pal up to his cabin in the woods to relax.  Pal got better, and was always wanting to take hikes and explore the woods.  Pal actually grew up in this area, and takes the narrator to a sinister spot in the swamp he visited once as a kid--the Bottomless Pool!

The Bottomless Pool is like six feet across, and the writers see floating on its black inky surface a dead lizard.  When our guy tries to retrieve this specimen he finds a wire is attached to the little corpse and a hook is imbedded in the little dead creature.  When the line is jerked back under the water the hook slashes our guy painfully.  

The wound gives our guy a fever and he stays in while his friend investigates the obviously true but totally incredible fact that some kind of monster of the underworld is fishing for human beings through the eerie pool.  When the friend fails to return, our feverish narrator, a little out of his mind, continues the investigations and comes face to face with the reptilian fisher of the nether depths and retrieves an artifact of that secret world.  But will anybody believe him?  Will the government take steps to close up the pool?

This is a good story when it comes to topic, theme, pacing, etc.  So thumbs up.  (Farley's record here at MPorcius Fiction Log is safe!)  In general the style is good, but there are some odd word choices, clumsy metaphors, that should have been revised or excised.  I refer to "The limbs of dead trees interred the sunlight" and "warm blood scalded the deep wound in my side."  I checked a scan of 1998's Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies and "interred" and "scalded" are still there, so multiple professional writers and editors think the words I find distractingly inappropriate to be just fine.  What can I say?

**********

Nothing groundbreaking here, but two solid entertainments and one acceptable piece that demonstrates for the hundredth time Bloch's interest in psychology and wordplay.  Perhaps ironically, I think Bloch's best work is that which relies least on in-your-face psychological jargon and theories and least on puns and double entendres.  Maybe that stuff is more "literary" or "original" than vampires and Yog-Sothothery, but I find the metaphors of the vampire and of Lovecraftian alien monster gods more emotionally powerful and better at representing my view of life and the universe than Freudianism and puns.

More magazine short stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, but we'll be rotating the time machine dial forward 20 clicks.

Weird Tales, May 1942: D Quick, R Bloch and M Jameson

Back in 2019, we read Henry Kuttner's twist-ending story "Masquerade," a tale I wasn't crazy about but which was admired by anthologists and even the people who produce TV programs.  "Masquerade" debuted in the May 1942 issue of Weird Tales, an issue which has three other stories the MPorcius Fiction Log staff is curious about, so let's take some time to check them out.

But before we get to the fiction, I am going to recommend you look at this issue of Weird Tales even if you couldn't care less about Henry Kuttner, Robert Bloch, Dorothy Quick or Malcolm Jameson, because this issue is chock full of striking illustrations by Hannes Bok and Boris Dolgov.  Skeletons!  Male and female nudes!  A woman being strangled!  Reptilian monsters! Ships in the moonlight!  Evocative architecture!  McIlwraith got some stellar work out these guys for this issue, work that deserves to be widely known among fans of horror and fantasy illustration.   

"The Enchanted River" by Dorothy Quick

This will be the sixth story by Dorothy Quick with which the staff of MPorcius Fiction Log has grappled.  Below find links to our first five bouts with Quick, who, it seems, was famous in her lifetime for her friendship with Mark Twain, a relationship immortalized in a TV movie in 1991.  Maybe this weekend you can watch Mark Twain and Me as the life-affirming half of a Weird Tales double feature with the movie in which Vincent D'Onofrio plays Robert E. Howard, The Whole Wide World, as the downer half.  (Are there Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch and H. P. Lovecraft biopics?  Clark Ashton Smith and E. Hoffmann Price are probably the most suitable Weirdies for cinematic memorialization, as Smith could be shown carving his crazy sculptures and Price actually spent time in foreign countries and participated in thrilling violence.)    

"The White Lady"
"The Witch's Mark"
"Turn Over"
"Edge of the Cliff" 
"The Lost Gods"

"The Enchanted River" is a decent happy-ending fantasy story, though it has some horror elements (a guy gets trampled into paste by an invisible elephant, after all.)  Quick's story also incorporates some elements we see all the time in weird fiction but which are pretty superfluous here, but these unnecessary components don't quite wreck the story.  Moderate recommendation.

You know how Arthur C. Clarke went to Ceylon and found the place and its people so captivating he spent the remainder of his life there enjoying its native beauty?  Well, the guy in this story does the same thing!  A rich business guy from the West, Wells Barrington, comes to Ceylon and falls in love with the place and decides to give up his career to stay forevermore.  Wells gets along just fine with the natives, especially after he shoots down a tiger that was terrorizing everybody.

One day Wells sees a beautiful girl bathing in the river.  Ava is her name.  Ava tells Wells that this is a magic river, that the spirit of the river helps guide lovers together.  She is at the river because she hopes the river will somehow bring the man she loves to her--Ava is in one hell of a pickle, the local priests having set her up with a guy she doesn't want to marry.  Of course, the man she wants to marry is Wells, the white savior who slew the tiger and has a pile of money.  And of course Wells is willing to marry Ava, she being so good-looking.  This story is pretty realistic!

Wells talks to the priests and the local prince and tries to solve Ava's problem the way we solve problems over here in the West, by handing out money.  Nothing doing--these natives care more about their faith than your filthy silver and gold and the gods have decreed that Ava will marry the prince.  As a last resort, Wells takes a nude dip in the river himself, Ava having maintained that the spirit of the river might help bring the lovers together.

At the bottom of the river Wells finds a little bell.  When rung, the little bell summons an invisible elephant.  This phantom pachyderm comes in handy when the prince and the priests lead a mob to Wells' house to kill him and Ava.  The elephant stomps the prince and cows the populace, who now see Wells as a hero blessed by the divine.  Wells and Ava live happily ever after.

Then comes the superfluous denouement that Quick tacked on to the end of her story or no reason I can discern after the satisfying gore climax and the assertion that our heroes will be living long happy lives in paradise.  You see, the prince, Wells, and Ava are the reincarnated members of a love triangle that rocked Ceylon thousands of years ago!  Tragedy befell the sympathetic couple that made up the base of the triangle even though an elephant tried to save them from the evil prince who was the disruptive third angle of the love triangle.  Today the ghost of that elephant finally finished the job it started so long ago by mashing the prince into a stain on the ground and making sure the two lovers could be reunited.  To my mind this reincarnation business is quite unnecessary, and if Quick felt the need to include it, maybe she should have hinted at it before the resolution of the plot instead of after.

"The Enchanted River" would not be reprinted until 2024 when S. T. Joshi retrieved it from the depths and included it in the Quick collection entitled The Witch's Mark and Others.

"Black Bargain" by Robert Bloch

Here's a Bloch story that both the aforementioned Joshi and editor Marvin Kaye included in anthologies, and which was included in a bunch of Bloch anthologies in English and in other tongues.  Everyone here at MPorcius HQ so enjoyed making the list of links above for Quick that we're putting together a list of Bloch links for this segment of the broadcast--links to my blog posts about stories that we have already read from the 1998 Arkham House Bloch collection Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies, one of those books in which "Black Bargain" reappeared.

"The Druidic Doom"
"Fangs of Vengeance"
"Death is an Elephant" 
"Power of the Druid" 
"He Waits Beneath the Sea"
"The Dark Isle"
"Wine of the Sabbat"
"A Sorcerer Runs for Sheriff"

"Black Bargain" is a pretty good horror story, and it qualifies as a tale of the Cthulhu Mythos because it mentions the forbidden book invented by Bloch, Mysteries of the Worm.  (Several of H. P. Lovecraft's friends created their own books of mind-blowing lore in imitation of and homage to HPL's famous Necronomicon.)  

Our narrator is a pharmacist who is operating a drug store.  Almost all his customers come in for ice cream, Coca-Cola, cigarettes, etc., and so his work more resembles that of a waiter or candy store clerk than that of a man who has a degree in pharmacy.  Probably the best part of the story is the narrator describing his customers and bitching about them like a butter guy in a mainstream story.

One evening, a nerdy-looking guy (he is skinny and has glasses and the narrator compares him to "Caspar Milquetoast") comes in and asks for specific chemicals.  He has with him a very old book, and drops clues we Weird Tales readers, and the narrator, recognize as signs that this joker is going to sacrifice a cat to a supernatural entity!

Our narrator crosses paths with this guy multiple times, and he learns that ol' "Caspar" in a matter of days has risen in status from an impoverished goofball with no women to a wealthy guy with a high status job and dates with the hotties!  His new position is at a chemical company--he already has his own office and authority over an entire division!  The mysterious chemist invites our guy to join the chemical firm as his assistant--after all, the narrator knows about chemistry from getting his pharmacy degree, and is sick to death of dishing out the ice cream and the cokes to the local brats.  But our guy notices something strange about the newly minted success' shadow--it seems to move independently of "Caspar," and it seems to become more solid and more independent the more successful "Caspar" is in his career and with the ladies!  Will this alien monster, the devil the chemist has made a deal with to secure success, become fully independent?  Will it take over the chemist's body?  Who will live and who will die?

It is no masterpiece, but "Black Bargain" is a competent bit of weird fiction that Bloch successfully integrates into a little early-20th century career drama.  

"Vengeance in Her Bones" by Malcolm Jameson

Naval officer Jameson's contribution to this issue of Weird Tales, the cover story, is a sentimental and somewhat silly thing, a real product of its time.  Captain Tolliver is retired--he lost a hand and a leg in the Great War.  But the United States government calls upon him to again serve his country!  In World War I, Tolliver commanded a cargo ship that had many wild adventures, including sinking multiple German naval vessels.  The ship was to be broken up after the war, but when workers went aboard to tear her apart, they died in mysterious accidents!  So it was decided to just let the ship sit and rust.  But come World War II, the government had her refurbished  and returned to service.  However, the ship keeps running aground, her rudder and engines inexplicably refusing to accept orders.  The government realizes only Tolliver can command this temperamental vessel.

Tolliver takes command, and just lets the ship run itself.  This ship is a genius, not only detecting torpedoes, submarines, and German raiders disguised as Allied merchantmen, but also figuring out which crewmembers aboard are German saboteurs!  Jameson's story is repetitive, the ship pulling off one improbable feat after another, such as pointing out to friendly warships the locations of enemy boats and ships so they can be destroyed or just ramming them herself.  Eventually the ship is totally wrecked and everyone aboard killed, and we get a sappy ending as Tolliver and his ship sink beneath the waves.

Barely acceptable.

I hope it goes without saying that I am a fan of the United States Navy and think that the Navy has been a force for good in the world since its founding and up to this day and so forth.  And I have no reason to doubt that as an officer in the Navy that Jameson did good work and contributed to the success of that great institution and our great country.  I baldly state all this because, as you may remember, a reader once took me to task for criticizing Alistair MacLean's writing, apparently thinking MacLean's exemplary war service rendered the man immune from criticism, and I have to report that Jameson's work, four specimens of which I have read as of today, have not exactly knocked my socks off.  If you are interested, check out my three earlier blog posts touching upon Jameson's career at the following links:

"Bullard Reflects" 

"Slacker's Paradise"

"Train for Flushing"

A lot of people seem to be more impressed with Jameson than I am.  Donald Wollheim included "Vengeance in Her Bones" in his Avon Fantasy Reader in 1949 and Frank McSherry, Jr. reprinted it in 1990's Fantastic World War II.

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Another step in our eerie march lies behind us--before you know it, we will have read a story from every issue of Weird Tales published in 1942.  We've already dealt with every year from 1930 to 1941, as the links below will attest.

1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938    1939    1940   1941

More such material when next we meet here at MPorcius Fiction Log.