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

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

"The Phantom Wolfhound" by Otis Adelbert Kline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The Gray Death" by Loual B. Sugarman

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

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

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

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

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

"The Voice in the Fog" by Henry Leverage

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

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

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

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

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

"The Escape" by Helen Rowe Henze

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The Secret Fear" by Kenneth Duane Whipple

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

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

Barely acceptable filler.

"Penelope" by Vincent Starrett

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

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

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

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

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

   

"Two Hours of Death" by E. Thayles Emmons

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Case No. 27" by Mollie Frank Ellis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Farnsworth Wright: "The Closing Hand," "The Snake Fiend" and "The Teak-Wood Shrine"

As I keep telling you, I aspire to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales.  But you may have noticed that I only ever seem to read stories from issues of the magazine printed after January 1, 1930, but that the first issue of Weird Tales has a cover date of March, 1923.  Well, today we take action to begin filling that gap by reading three stories from the Unique Magazine published in 1923, stories written by the most famous editor of the magazine, Farnsworth Wright.  Wright did not actually begin editing WT until late 1924, so these stories appeared during the editorship of Wright's predecessor, Edwin Baird.

"The Closing Hand" 

Alright, a story from the very first issue of Weird Tales!  We won't be lingering on this inaugural issue of the magazine of the bizarre and unusual for long, as Wright's story here occupies two pages and there is room left over for an advertisement on the second page.  Weird Tales Volume 1, Number 1 does include the first installment of a serial by Otis Adelbert Kline, so maybe we will return to it someday; we'll see.

"The Closing Hand" is barely a story, more like an anecdote with lots of essentially superfluous description.  On a stormy night, two sisters are trying to sleep in a house reputed to be haunted.  They just moved in today; their parents will arrive tomorrow.  We hear all abut the house's reputation and the sounds of the wind and all that.

The sisters hear movement downstairs.  One of them goes to investigate.  She is very late in returning, and sister #2 sits in bed terrified.  Something creeps up the stairs, into the bedroom--is it a ghost, a monster, a killer?  No, it is sister #1, dying from a stab wound administered by a burglar whose despoiling of her family's property she interrupted--the sisters hold hands as sister #1 dies.  

We'll call this mere filler; it isn't bad, just slight, and is more of a crime story than a weird story.  I guess in some ways, "The Closing Hand" is more disturbing than a story with vampires or zombies or alien gods from other dimensions--there are no vampires or zombies, and we have yet to see concrete evidence of alien visitors to Earth (though it could happen any day!), but there are thousands of burglaries and dozens of homicides every day here in the United States, and this story reminds you of that.  Stay safe out there!

In 2020, "The Closing Hand" was reprinted in an Italian magazine, Providence Tales.  One of the fun things about maintaining this blog has been realizing how robust a speculative fiction scene there is in Italy, how Italian fans have embraced English-language science fiction, fantasy and horror and how handsomely Italian publishers present American and British spec fic to Italian readers.

"The Snake Fiend"

The second issue of Weird Tales has a different look than the first, and Wright's included story, "The Snake Fiend," is like three times as long.  Like "The Closing Hand," "The Snake Fiend" is a crime story in which one of the characters scares himself by thinking a mundane danger is a supernatural one.

The theme of "The Snake Fiend" is how passionate, how emotional, how excitable, how superstitious Italians are!  (I know, just after I was saying nice things about them!)  I have noted in the past how, in American weird fiction, Italians sometimes play the role of the superstitious or irrational "other," and here we have another example.  

Italian-American Jack Crimi, a collector of snakes since his youth, falls in love with his friend Marjorie Bressi, but Marjorie is in love with Jack's pal Allen Jimerson.  Jack never reveals his desire for Marjorie, and when Allen and Marjorie get married, Jack continues acting like their buddy, even though his thoughts are dominated by a determination to murder them!

Engineer Allen gets a job in the remote desert and Jack follows the married couple, saying he is going to write a scholarly paper on the rattlesnakes endemic to the region.  Jack collects dozens of the serpents and one day seals up the Jimersons' house and leaves the swarm of venomous reptiles in the house with them while they sleep.  He assumes they will be killed.

The Jimersons get bit, but Allen busts open a window and they escape and are able to recover.  Wright opines that rattlesnake venom is not as deadly as ordinary people assume, and tells us that, despite his life-long familiarity with snakes, Jack shared the ignorance of the common run of humanity.  A few days later the Jimersons go to Jack's shack to visit their friend, whom they do not suspect (they blame a minor character whom Allen gave the sack) and when Jack sees them he thinks they must be ghosts seeking vengeance and he goes insane.

Certainly better than "The Closing Hand" because the plot is driven by the personality and decisions of the protagonist.  Filler, but a higher grade of "acceptable" than "The Closing Hand."  Doesn't look like it has ever been reprinted, though.

"The Teak-Wood Shrine"

"The Teak-Wood Shrine" appears in the sixth issue of Weird Tales, which sports yet another cover design.  Like "The Snake Fiend," this one does not seem to have been reprinted.

The shrine of the title of this two-page story is a wooden box carved by Indians to represent some kind of fat devil and decorated with jewels.  One of the jewels conceals a push button that activates a spring that slides open a little door and reveals something--something the sight of which drives people to insanity, to suicide!  The story details how the shrine falls into the hands of white people, the havoc it wreaks among those who acquire it, the strategies they employ in hopes of rendering themselves immune to its supernatural power, and their efforts to destroy it.  The text comes to us in the form of the dialogue of the shrine's current possessor, who is standing at a bridge with the plan of hurling the cursed artifact into the waters below and is accosted by a friend who seeks to stop her.

This story is pretty good--thumbs up!

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It is fun to read hundred-year old stories that I assume few other people alive today have read, and especially so when they aren't bad.  Hopefully the rest of the 1923 Weird Tales stories we sample will be as entertaining as these.

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!

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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.