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

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

"No Light for Uncle Henry" by August Derleth

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

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

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

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

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

"Under Your Spell" by Henry Kuttner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A Bottle of Gin" by Robert Bloch

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

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

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

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

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

**********

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

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

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

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

"Bindings Deluxe" by David H. Keller 

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The Eager Dragon" by Robert Bloch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"McElwin's Glass" by August Derleth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Seventh Sister" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

**********

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

Weird Tales Project: 1923

Nineteen-Twenty-Three was the first year in which Weird Tales was published, Edwin Baird serving as editor.  Eight issues were published that year, and today I can report that I have read a story from each issue--the links below will take you to my absolutely scientific, unbiased, and incontrovertible assessments of each story.  We've already done this for quite a few of the unique magazine's later years--find immediately below links to index post covering each of those years.

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

March 

Farnsworth Wright:  "The Closing Hand"

Otis Adelbert Kline: "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes"

April

Farnsworth Wright:   "The Snake Fiend"

May

Kenneth Duane Whipple:   "The Secret Fear"

Vincent Starrett:                  "Penelope"

E. Thayles Emmons:           "Two Hours of Death"

Mollie Frank Ellis:              "Case No. 27"

June

Otis Adelbert Kline: "The Phantom Wolfhound"

Loual B. Sugarman: "The Gray Death"

Henry Leverage:      "The Voice in the Fog" 

Helen Rowe Henze: "The Escape"

July-August

Otis Adelbert Kline:  "The Corpse on the Third Slab"

September

Farnsworth Wright:   "The Teak-Wood Shrine"

Otis Adelbert Kline: "The Cup of Blood"

October

Farnsworth Wright: "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension"

November

Farnsworth Wright: "Poisoned"

Farnsworth Wright: "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension," "Poisoned," and "The Great Panjandrum"

A few weeks ago we read three 1920s stories by Farnsworth Wright, famous editor of Weird Tales.  Let's go back, Jack, and do it again!  Two of today's stories were printed in Weird Tales in 1923, when the magazine was edited by Edwin Baird; the third appeared in the first issue Wright edited, the November 1924 number.

"An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" (1923)

In 1997 there appeared an anthology edited by Marvin Kaye and John Gregory Betancourt and graced with a great Stephen Fabian cover entitled The Best of Weird Tales: 1923, and "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" was among its contents.  So I guess we have a treat ahead of us!

Or not!  This is a wacky joke story, a sort of filler piece.  It isn't good, but it isn't particularly annoying, so we'll call it barely acceptable.  

The narrator of "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" is a goofy sort of character who addresses us chummily and colloquially.  I guess we are supposed to both like him and look down on him as a dope, sort of like how we look at a Wodehouse narrator.  He relates to us a ridiculous tale in which a space ship from Jupiter lands right next to him in Chicago.  Hundreds or thousands of Jupiterians emerge form the ship; the aliens are hard to visualize because the narrator describes them in a way that is totally absurd, and their behavior is almost as ridiculous.  A college professor of the narrator's acquaintance s on hand and he explains that the Jupiterians are from or encompass a fourth-dimension, so can fold themselves inside out, change their size, pass though walls, etc.   As we expect of a college professor, he prefers the aliens to his own race, calling them superior, the only true intellectuals, etc.

The leader of the expedition from Jupiter gets drunk on the narrator's whisky, and loses some of his fourth-dimension powers and so is trapped here in Earth.  His fellows try to rescue him and in a way I won't describe this leads to an explosion that kills all the aliens...and wakes up the narrator, who was having a nightmare after trying to read a book by Einstein.

The somewhat understated style of humor in "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" is easier to swallow than the style of humor employed by Robert Bloch in the story we read by the Psycho scribe for our last blog post, this story is mercifully brief, and I appreciated the satire of college professors, so I'm not being as hard on Wright's filler piece here as I am on so many other joke stories.  Still, I find it confounding that Kaye and Betancourt considered "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" one of the best stories from Weird Tales' first year, and that in 1927 it was included in the anthology The Moon Terror, like four years after its debut in the October 1923 ish of WT.  Don't people open up Weird Tales for the blood and guts, the sex and violence, the terror and despair?  Are people really looking to Weird Tales for laughs?

"Poisoned" (1923)

"Poisoned" feels like a mainstream story about scandal and broken friendships and blackmail and all that sort of thing--it has no weird or science fiction elements.  It is also boring.  Thumbs down!

Two middle-class guys, an apothecary and a lawyer, are best buddies.  They do everything together!  They both bear the first name Aubrey.  They got the flu together and recovered together, both tended to by the same nurse.  One of them fell in love with the nurse, and he and the nurse are engaged to be married.

These jokers play cards together every day, and every day get into stupid arguments because one of them plays carelessly, throwing down a card that only a dolt would play, and then saying he'd made a mistake and should be able to take the card back and put down a more appropriate one.  One day their argument gets very heated and one of the men storms off and the men stop seeing each other.

The plot gets kind of convoluted and the Aubrey who is not engaged tries to get his mitts on the nurse to which his former pal is engaged and as part of his strategy reveals to her that the other Audrey, her fiancé, has an illegitimate child with some other woman.  The marriage is called off and the nurse marries some third guy.  

Both Aubreys are miserable, each lacking the woman he desired and lacking his only real friend.  The lawyer contemplates suicide and buys poison--the apothecary hears through the apothecary grapevine about the purchase of the poison and looks forward to hearing of the other Audrey's demise, but the attorney decides not to kill himself after all.  The apothecary goes to visit the lawyer to see how unhappy he is and there is a complicated scene involving wine with poison in it and some uncertainty about whether one guy wants to commit suicide in front of the other guy and/or murder the other guy blah blah blah and both of them end up drinking poison and keeling over.

Waste of time.  In general I like disastrous sexual relationships and men acting stupidly over a woman and people committing suicide in my fiction, but Wright absolutely fails to make these characters interesting and the business with the cards and with the glasses of wine is a little hard to follow even though Wright spends too many words explaining it all.  A failure.

"Poisoned" has never been reprinted.

"The Great Panjandrum" (1924)

This story, appearing a year after "Poisoned," was printed under a pseudonym in an issue of the magazine Wright himself edited.  The identity of the author of the piece would have been no mystery to veteran readers of the magazine, as under the bogus name we see "Author of 'The Teakwood Shrine,'" a tale which appeared under Wright's real name in the September 1923 issue.  A little joke, I guess.

Jokes abound on the ten pages which "The Great Panjandrum" occupies.  Wright immediately gets on my bad side by employing one of my least favorite literary devices--using phonetic spelling to represent an accent.     

‘‘Why yo’ all didn’t go an’ ’list in de ahmy an’ come back f’um France a hero, like Mandy Johnson’s man, so’s I could be proud ob yo’? I’se plumb tired ob scein’ de same ol’ face, day aftah day, day aftah day. Ah sho wishes yo’ had gone an’ ’listed.’’

Maybe this would be amusing to hear an actor say, but reading it is kind of a chore.

The protagonist of "The Great Panjandrum" is George Washington, an African-American gentleman of leisure who lives on the South Side of Chicago with his wife Martha.  Martha, quoted above, regrets that her husband didn't join the army, but how could our hero have joined the colors and fought the Hun when he suffers from rheumatism?

Out delivering a load of laundry Martha has washed, George crosses paths with the man he considers the wisest among the inhabitants of the South Side.  Eavesdropping, George realizes that this savant is in cahoots with a voodoo master, the Great Panjandrum, who is going to launch a race war in hopes of establishing an independent black nation right there in Chicago.

George hurries to the police station to report the coming revolution, but the Irish sergeant on duty there just insults George, dismissing his valuable intelligence on the coming revolt--scheduled for this very afternoon!--as the delusions of a drunk.  So George takes matters into his own hands!  He makes his way to the Great Panjandrum's HQ and fast talks his way past the various voodoo-adherents into the lair of the voodoo master himself!  The diabolical sorcerer has just sacrificed a goat and its heart sits in a bowl of blood!  George's entreaties that the uprising will only cause pointless death on a large scale among the "colored" population of the Windy City fall on deaf ears, and a comic fight ensues that sees George, the high priest of darkness, and several other "negroes" fall down into a pit under a trap door.  In the fracas, George's hat is dislodged, and some of the blood of the poor goat who is the real victim of all this stains it.  Somebody has corroborated George's report and so the police arrive, and find the blood-stained hat before they find George.  The authorities report to Martha that her husband has been slain, and Mrs. Washington makes a dramatic show of being hysterical over her hero husband's untimely demise in the course of sparing the South Side a catastrophic race war.  But when George shows up, having finally been rescued by the police, she sets him to work helping her with the washing and points out that in the excitement he seems to have forgotten he has "de rheumatiz."

In depicting black people as ridiculous schemers and deceivers, and in its liberal use of the "n-word," "The Great Panjandrum" is very racist by today's standards.  The jokes are weak and the plot is just a rickety frame upon which to hang the jokes.  Thumbs down for this one, which has never been reprinted as far as I can tell.

**********

Not good, Mr. Wright, not good.  Three stories full of banal material ("It was all a dream!" "Blacks are lazy!" "Did he switch the glasses while I was in the other room?"), two of them silly joke stories, none of them with any legit weird elements.  It is unlikely we will read any additional stories by Farnsworth Wright, though two more lurk in 1930s issues of WT.

Hopefully we'll encounter some more impressive material the next time we crack open a copy of the magazine of the bizarre and unusual.

Weird Tales Project: 1942

Yes, we are still doing this!  Trying to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales printed in the 1940s!  We've already done this for the 1930s, after all, so why do you doubt we can do it for the 1940s?  It is early days, admittedly, but we still going to celebrate our conquest of 1942's six issues of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual.  Below find links to the 1942 WT stories we have blogged about, as well as links to the 1930-1941 indices that will send you to my blog posts on hundreds of earlier WT stories.

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

January

H. P. Lovecraft:                        "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"

Fritz Leiber:                             "The Phantom Slayer" 

Mary Elizabeth Counselman:  "Parasite Mansion" 

Dorothy Quick:                        "The White Lady"

March

Robert Bloch:        "Hell on Earth"  

David H. Keller:    "Death of the Kraken"

August Derleth:     "Here, Daemos!"

May 

Henry Kuttner:        "Masquerade"

Dorothy Quick:       "Enchanted River"

Robert Bloch:          "Black Bargain" 

Malcolm Jameson:  "Vengeance in Her Bones" 

July

Manly Wade Wellman:   "Coven"

August Derleth:              "Lansing's Luxury"

Hannes Bok:                   "Poor Little Tampico"    

September

Clark Ashton Smith: "Epiphany of Death" AKA "Who Are the Living?"

Robert Bloch:           "A Question of Etiquette" 

Fritz Leiber:              "Spider Mansion"

David H. Keller:       "The Bridle"

November

David H. Keller: "The Golden Bough"

Robert Bloch:     "Nursemaid to Nightmares"

Ray Bradbury:    "The Candle"

Fritz Leiber:        "The Hound"

Hannes Bok:       "The Evil Doll"

 

Weird Tales, Nov '42: Bloch, Bradbury, Leiber, & Bok

The November 1942 issue of Weird Tales has one of the worst covers in the magazine's history--the composition haphazard, the style primitive, the colors dull.  Ugh.  But there are some big names inside--Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Hannes Bok, Damon Knight, H. P. Lovecraft, David H. Keller, Stanton Coblenz.  Let's whittle the list down a bit.

Coblentz's story, "The Victory of the Vita-Ray" is probably a lame joke or a broad satire, so I'm skipping it, even though it is advertised on the cover (curiously, without mentioning Coblentz's name.)  Should you be hankering for MPorcius commentary on Coblentz, I offer my blog posts about the stories "Triple-Geared," "The Daughter of Urzun," and "The Man from Xenern" and the novel Hidden World. 

I blogged about Keller's 1934 "The Golden Bough" back in 2020.  (It says "NO REPRINTS" on the table of contents, but this is a reprint.  Tsk, tsk.)

I read a book version of "Herbert West: Reanimator" long ago and don't feel like reading it again yet.

Damon Knight's contributions to the issue are illustrations that include skulls and bones in their sort of flat, wood-cut like compositions.

So that leaves us with Bob "Psycho" Bloch; the man who is likely mainstream America's favorite SF writer, Ray Bradbury; Fritz "Grey Mouser" Leiber; and one of the most distinctive of SF illustrators, Hannes Bok.  We'll read these gents' stories in their 1942 versions.

"Nursemaid to Nightmares" by Robert Bloch

The narrator of "Nursemaid to Nightmares" is one of those creative types who is astounded to find that his alleged artistic ability is not much help getting a job.  Our guy has been showing up at the employment agency only to be told there are no jobs for which he is qualified, seeing as he has no marketable skills.  But today he is luck!  Some eccentric millionaire is looking to hire a servant with an IQ over 180 who can ride horses and who can climb trees!  Our guy fits the bill and gets the job sight unseen!

"Nursemaid to Nightmares" is an irritating joke story.  Margate the eccentric millionaire collects mythical creatures, and he doesn't chain them in a dungeon to work experiments on them or shanghai them into his evil army or anything cool like that; Margate treats the monsters as houseguests and assures the narrator that they are "goodhearted."  The monsters are an occasion for Bloch to subject us to childish jokes.  The millionaire has his guest the vampire's teeth pulled by a dentist.  He has the narrator buy his werewolf flea powder, and also directs him to take the werewolf on a walk around the block.  The werewolf urinates on a tree that turns out to be a hamadryad.  And Bloch doesn't spare us the puns, either:

Jason Harris operated one of the most thriving mortuary chapels in the city.  Business was never dead.  Mr. Harris himself was always on hand to welcome a fresh customer.  That’s the only way he liked his customers—fresh.

There's not much plot to "Nursemaid to Nightmares," just a series of stupid episodes.  The narrator helps the vampire buy a new coffin.  He and a mermaid start dating.  He takes the centaur to the smith to be shod and the centaur manages to get his hands on some beer, gets drunk, and causes a bar brawl.

The final episode, which is foreshadowed clearly, involves a new creature joining the household--Medusa the Gorgon!  She turns almost everybody, including Margate, to stone, but the narrator shows her a mirror and turns her to stone.  The final gag of this anemic story is the narrator using the various creatures, now statues, to decorate the estate's lawn.

An absolute waste of time--thumbs down!  A sequel to "Nursemaid to Nightmares," "Black Barter," appeared in 1943.  These two Margate stories were combined to form a novella included in a 1955 issue of Imaginative Tales and in the 1969 collection Dragons and Nightmares.

Were people enraged when the book advertised to them with photos of 
beautiful women turned out to be filled with joke stories?

"The Candle" by Ray Bradbury

This story, apparently, is Bradbury's first published horror story.  In his intro to 1975's The Best of Henry Kuttner, Bradbury expresses a low opinion of "The Candle," excepting the ending, which he tells us was written by Kuttner.  As it turns out, this is a pretty good story, with a strong central theme, good images, and a good (if obvious) twist ending.  Thumbs up for "The Candle."

Our protagonist, pale, dark-haired, tall and skinny Jules Marcott, has big problems, which we learn about in dribs and drabs amid the descriptions of his actions and the sights around him.  In brief, his wife Helen has left him for his friend Eldridge and will soon be flying to Reno to get a divorce and to marry Eldridge.  Marcott looks into the window of an odd little shop, at all the old firearms, thinking of buying a gun and killing Eldridge.  But among the weapons is an even more alluring artifact--a blue candle wrought in the shape of a beautiful naked woman.  Though unlit, the candle seems to glow, and it draws Marcott into the store almost against his will!

The ugly store owner, whose appearance is in every way the opposite of young Marcott's, explains to Marcott the candle's black power, how it can be used to kill from a distance.  Uggo stupidly teaches Marcott the spell before Marcott has passed over any money, and Marcott, who can't afford the announced fee, physically beats down the proprietor and steals the candle.

Marcott comes up with a too-clever-by-half scheme to get Helen to cast the spell and destroy her lover--will Marcott's diabolical plans backfire as we readers expect?

A cynical story in which every character is evil and foolish, a story with solid sex and violence elements.  I like it; Bradbury and Kuttner deserve their high reputations.  If you prefer the Bradbury of stories like "The Silent Towns" and "The October Game" to the more sentimental Bradbury, check out "The Candle." 

A year after Bradbury himself dismissed "The Candle" in print as no good, Peter Haining over in jolly old E reprinted it in the anthology The First Book of Unknown Tales of Horror.  It seems this rare tale by Bradbury, which in my opinion is nothing to be ashamed of, has only ever been reprinted in the land of the free and the home of the brave in the first volume of The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury (2011).

"The Hound" by Fritz Leiber

Here's today's second werewolf story, a story that has been reprinted in many Leiber collections and multiple werewolf-themed anthologies.

Leiber presents a depressing picture to us in this story.  David works in the bargain basement at a department store and is dating a wholesome but "serious, not-too-pretty" salesgirl.  He lives with his very sick father and quite sick nag of a mother in an apartment they can't afford to heat properly.  He can't sleep because of oppressive thoughts and nightmares involving a wolf; images of wolves have haunted him since childhood, generating fears closely linked to the unpleasantness of early 20th-century urban life--the loud trains and automobiles, the rats, big city smells.  The monster wolf in his mind is associated with black grease and oil, the lubricants and power source of modern machinery.  

As the story proceeds, David' thoughts of wolves seem to be manifesting themselves in reality, to himself and even to others!  Who got into his locker at work and dug through his lunch bag?  What was that sniffling his mother heard last night?  Did his girlfriend really see a big dog among the throngs at the store?  Why is he always finding black grease everywhere?

The story ends sort of inconclusively.  David flees the city, in a sort of daze, arrives at a suburban zoo in the dark of night, the cage where the arctic wolves are housed.  One of the wolves is no mere wolf, but "malformed," with "eyes" that are "those of no animal."  This thing, the monster from his nightmares, chases him back towards the city, its true lair, and eventually it catches up to him, injures him.  The attack is witnessed, and the witness says the attacker was nothing like a wolf, but rather like "something from the factories of hell."  David has survived the attack, and is relieved that he is not the only one to have seen the monster, that the danger the monster represents is a "danger shared."

Rather than being about a traditional werewolf, this is a story about the horror of modernity--the city, the factory, the machine.  "The Hound" is well-written and I like it and I am giving it a thumbs-up, but is the werewolf really a good symbol for urbanism or industrialism or modernity or capitalism or whatever it is Leiber is complaining about here?  Isn't the werewolf a symbol of man's animal nature or the barbarism that lurks beneath the veneer of civilization?  Does it really make sense to link the wolf with grease and oil, the black goop that makes machines run?  Maybe Leiber chooses the werewolf because the werewolf turns its victims into werewolves, the way a commie might say capitalism or modernity "manufacture consent," turn people into cogs in the machine, but vampires and zombies kind of do the same thing, don't they?  I guess Leiber just likes the wolf as a symbol--recall when we read that collection The Night of the Wolf?  

How do we feel about the more or less hopeful, but absolutely vague, ending?  I sort of expected David to be killed, or turn out to be a werewolf, or get turned into a werewolf.  I guess Fritz, after painting his horror vision of modern life, wants to suggest we can escape modernity if we all work together to build socialism or return to the land or something like that, but without even hinting at what the solution to modernity might be.  I guess the first step is admitting you have a problem.   

I have problems with the story's ideology (I loved living in New York City and think motor cars and locomotives and skyscrapers and the market economy are fine) and question its choice of symbols and the nature of the ending and all that, but "The Hound" is well-written and structured and paced and works on an emotional level, so good on Fritz.  

"The Evil Doll" by Hannes Bok

Here we have a rare story, a story that it seems was never reprinted.

Maksim is a starving artist!  Skinny, subject to bouts of weakness, so poor he has to wire his dilapidated furniture together, whining to his girlfriend Eileen that she doesn't have enough faith in him and that the bourgeoisie are keeping him down.  Oy, these creatives, always a pain to have to deal with!  (I like that Bok, a painter himself, portrays a painter as an absolute piece of garbage.  It can be fun when a writer depicts his own profession in a negative light, and is usually aggravating when people deify or canonize their fellows, the way teachers and journalists always are.) 

"I know that my work is good. These art dealers—bourgeois pigs!—how can they understand what I am trying to express? They look at my work—pictures that I have slaved over, sweat blood in the making — and they say, 'Yes, it is good, but will the public understand it?’’’  His voice squeaked in mimicry. "The public! How can it understand what it has never been given the chance to understand?”

Maksim refuses to get a real job, and Eileen is sick of financing the production of his unprofitable paintings--she barely has enough money to keep herself fed and sheltered.  It looks like they are quits!  Before Eileen leaves for good, Maksim convinces her to let him make a doll of her, to serve as a souvenir, a memento of their doomed relationship.  This chick is so ingenuous she humors Maksim to the point that she kisses the wax doll and trims a fingernail and a lock of hair for him to integrate into the doll.  It isn't long before another woman is telling Eileen that Maksim is a witch and will use the doll to control Eileen, and it isn't long before Eileen realizes that girl was telling the horrible truth!

I liked "The Evil Doll" quite a bit when Maksim was railing against the bourgeoisie and dominating and manipulating women, and when these women were trying to seduce or murder Maksim or commit suicide.  But then Bok introduces a new character, a self-described lonely bookworm who is also physically strong and courageous and who takes control of the situation, pushing Eileen around for her own good and also pushing around Maksim to save the day.  The scenes with this guy also muddy the waters when it comes to whether the voodoo dolls actually work as advertised, or the women are just suffering psychosomatic symptoms due to the power of suggestion.  I'm afraid the bookworm acts inconsistently, sometimes acting as if he doesn't believe in magic and other times acting as if he does, and Bok writes some scenes to suggest the magic is truly effective and others that indicate that the women are victims of their own anxieties, anxieties exploited by Maksim.  This bookworm's behavior and personality also aren't as believable and as compelling as those of Maksim, Eileen, and the second woman.  This new character really derails the story, in my opinion--it feels like Bok had written himself into a corner and so has this new guy come out of nowhere to resolve the plot, but he does so unconvincingly and unsatisfyingly.  Too bad.

I'll call this story acceptable, but it could have been legitimately good if Bok had come up with a better ending, with either Eileen or Maksim determining the outcome by putting into practice some brilliant stratagem or by committing some terrible blunder instead of having some super-competent bookworm with whom readers are expected to identify resolve the plot with ease in a way that is a little confusing.  I'll even play intrusive editor, take on the role of a John W. Campbell, Jr. or an H. L. Gold, and tell you my ideas for ending the story.  First off, no damned bookworm character for god's sake.  Secondly, Eileen and Maksim both die as the climax of a hand-to-hand fight over the doll of Eileen--because Maksim is so sickly and Eileen is so desperate, she is a match for him.  Possibilities: She pushes him into a roaring fireplace, but he has the doll of her in his hand, so she burns up just as he does.  Or, he falls out a window and every bone in his gaunt body is shattered, but lands on the doll so she gets mysteriously crushed to death back upstairs.  Or, he falls in the river and drowns and, because he has the doll with him, she also, inexplicably, drowns while on dry land.  If we want Eileen to live, maybe use the fire idea but instead of burnt to a crisp, Eileen is only horribly scarred for life, having reached into the fire to retrieve the doll before it is entirely consumed--her arm and face are ruined, but she lives on, her hideous scars a constant reminder of her brush with the supernatural!  (It is too bad Bok didn't send this story to Henry Kuttner!)

*********     

Bloch is doing his comedy thing, which I do not appreciate, especially in a story with no plot that is just a series of wretched gags.  Compare to Bloch's much later "ETFF," which we read two years ago.  Bok's story starts out competent, with solid black magic and exploitative sexual relationship material, but then he muffs the landing.  Disappointing.  Leiber's story is well-written and takes a strong stand, but I think today's biggest success is the Bradbury-Kuttner collab, which portrays horrible human relationships, gore, and black magic quite compellingly.  The exasperating Bloch aside, this has been a solid chunk of World War II-era weirdness.  Stay tuned as we continue our journey through the weird of the 1940s, marveling at the jewels and excoriating the dross.