Otis Adelbert Kline: "The Malignant Entity," "The Radio Ghost," and "The Demon of Tlaxpam"

In Volume 9 of Hippocampus Press' Letters of H. P. Lovecraft, we find HPL telling Duane W. Rimel that Otis Adelbert Kline is "probably the best agent in the business" (p. 305), "a wizard at placing things" (290) with lots of "influence" (306) who "regard[s] fiction writing as a business & not an art" (286).  In our last blog post I was talking about how good some of Frank Belknap Long's early stories are, in contrast to his reprehensible later work, and in a September 8, 1934 letter to August Derleth*, Lovecraft blames Kline for Long's decline:

Belknap reports great successes in the pulp field.  Under the tutelage of Otis Adelbert Kline he is getting to be a highly enterprising young business man---but the artist of yesteryear seems lost in the shuffle!   

Indeed, in a March 25, 1933 letter to Robert E. Howard*, HPL admits "I simply can't read the crap Kline and [Hugh B.] Cave grind out...."

*See Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth: 1932-1937 and A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard: 1933-1936.  

Well, today let's see if we can read some of that ground out "crap."  Under Otis Adelbert Kline's entry, the indispensable isfdb lists three stories in a Dr. Dorp series and two stories in a Bart Leslie series.  We've already read the first Dorp story, 1923's "The Phantom Wolfhound," and the second Leslie story, 1936's "The Cyclops of Xoatal," a collaboration with E. Hoffman Price.  Let's finish up these two series today with "The Malignant Entity," "The Radio Ghost" and "The Demon of Tlaxpam"; I'll be reading these stories in scans of the magazines in which they first came under the eye of the pulp readers to whom Kline was, according to HPL at least, slavishly catering, and you can do the same by clicking the links in this sentence.

"The Malignant Entity" (1924)

First we're going back to the super-sized issue of Weird Tales in which we read Lovecraft's famous collaborations with Harry Houdini--"Imprisoned with the Pharaohs"-- and C. M. Eddy, Jr.'s--"The Loved Dead."  "The Malignant Entity" is the second Dr. Dorp story, and takes up like seven pages of the unique magazine.

Our narrator is a guy named Evans who is pals with Dr. Dorp; I guess their relationship is modelled on that of Watson and Holmes.  These two nerds are talking about their mutual hobby, interest in psychic phenomena and the occult, when the police chief comes in and requests Dorp's aid.  A scientist has turned up dead--he was healthy last night but this morning his daughter found him just a skeleton, still clad in his typical clothes and jewelry.  Where did all his flesh and organs go?  

The chief brings the narrator and the doctor to the house of death where they look at the skeleton of the scientist and at a vat of clear gelatinous liquid sitting there in the lab with the bones.  Then, in other rooms, our heroes look for clues the way you'd expect people to in detective fiction--reading through files and questioning people.  A cop is guarding the lab, and when his relief comes this second uniformed officer finds that his predecessor is dead, a skeleton still clad in his police uniform.  

We get a lot of dialogue from Dr. Dorp about the debate over what constitutes life and whether the soul is real because the dead scientist was trying to create life synthetically.  Dorp theorizes that the scientist created a monster that had no soul and so hated ensouled natural life and would set out to destroy natural life.  In between such conversations, our guys notice that there is more liquid in the vat than before, and look at a drop of it in a microscope--the drop contains two forms of animated matter, the more numerous destroying the minority.  Dorp then revises his theory--maybe an alien soul that lacked a body and was just floating around the universe, unable to interact with the material world, came upon this protoplasm created by the dead scientist--a body without a soul--and filled its soul-shaped vacancy.  Once united with a body, the alien soul started devouring people to increase its new body's size.  These theories are kind of interesting, but I don't feel like they are integrated with the rest of the narrative--they feel tacked on, parallel to the plot and the characters' actions.  

The most exciting part of the story follows as our two heroes and the police strive to destroy the blob monster with various weapons and methods as it flees from them.  Eventually they succeed.  At the same time the hunt is on for the creature, the hunt for more documents that will reveal more about the synthetic creature continues, and this quest also succeeds.  Unfortunately, these two quests operate in parallel instead of one somehow supporting the other.    

"The Malignant Entity" has the makings of a good story, but the structure is a mess.  For example, our heroes catch the monster and then find those additional documents that tell them more about the blob monster.  Wouldn't it make more sense, story-wise, for the men to learn about the monster and then use their newfound knowledge to defeat it?  As it is, the narrator catches the blob monster (which has been shrunken to the size of a golf ball after barely surviving a direct hit from acid poured on it by Evans and Dorp) in the totally mundane way I catch wasps up in the attic that is MPorcius HQ--by putting a glass jar over it--the new info doesn't really do anything for the plot.  Similarly, it seems like Dorp figures out that the liquid in the vat is the monster, but instead of immediately telling everybody so they all can work together to destroy the menace, he takes his time, attending a meeting with government officials, before acting on his theory, even though the monster has already killed two upstanding productive citizens.  Dorp doesn't even put a cover on the vat to confine the suspected killer while he hobnobs with the authorities!

I'm also a little curious why the blob monster, which we are told can only feed on living creatures, consumes the fur of animals and hair of humans but not the bones of man or beast or the clothes of people--aren't your bones alive, your hair dead, and people's clothes in 1924 made of organic materials?  Another thing--the shock ending of the story is that the blob monster, as it dies while being heated in a furnace, takes the shape of the head of the scientist who created it, but while our heroes are chasing it around the house it never demonstrates any shape-shifting ability, never takes the form of a mouse or cat or dog or any of the other creatures the scientist fed it.  Obviously Kline does what he does to create dramatic images, but all the science talk makes you expect the science to add up, and it is disappointing when it doesn't.

We're judging "The Malignant Entity" barely acceptable; I like blob monsters and the hunt for the creature is fun, so I'm not consigning this one to "bad" status.  This second Dorp adventure was reprinted three times in Amazing Stories, first in June 1926, then in the 1934 Fall Quarterly, and finally in the February 1966 issue.  It is interesting that it was Amazing and not Weird Tales that reprinted the story, and that Amazing's staff or owners kept going back to it--is this evidence of Kline's business acumen?  Or just a testament to how much people love blob monsters? 

"The Radio Ghost" (1927)

The third Dr. Dorp story, "The Radio Ghost," debuted in Amazing but has never been reprinted anywhere.  We will soon join the ranks of the few people alive today in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Six who have read this thing!

Our story begins as the narrator, Evans, and the good doctor are talking about ectoplasm (ectoplasm was a major element of the first Dr. Dorp story, "The Phantom Wolfhound," I'm sure you remember.)  A pretty blonde calls on Dr. Dorp, interrupting the discussion, for which we have reason to thank her, as ectoplasm has nothing to do with this hard-science-based story.  This young woman is the niece of yet another student of the occult with whom Dorp was on familiar terms, a man recently deceased, and she has come for advice in dealing with some bizarre and disturbing phenomena that have occurred to her as she has been fulfilling the obligations placed upon her by unc's will.  You see, to keep her uncle's estate worth $600,000, she has to live for a year in his old house (this kind of thing happens all the time in fiction) because he plans on contacting her there from the other side!  And, sure enough, since she moved in she has been hearing footsteps, smelling ugly odors, seeing doors opening and closing on their own, etc.  Are these legitimate supernatural phenomena?  Or are uncle's servants and/or the woman's cousin, who was estranged from the uncle because of their disagreement as to who deserved to prevail in the Great War, trying to drive away the blonde in hopes of getting their own mitts on the inheritance?  Keep in mind this is Amazing, the pro-science magazine, and not Weird Tales, we are reading.

Evans and Dorp drive from downtown Chicago ("the loop") up to Highland Park where sits the haunted house.  There they meet the creepy servants and witness a multitude of poltergeist-type phenomena-- flickering lights, inexplicably cold breezes, a luminous image of a man, etc.  The blonde faints during one such incident, and Evans carries her outside so she can get some fresh air.  Dr. Dorp remains inside the house still and ends up trapped in a closet that is so cold it threatens his life and Evans has to rush in and rescue the old geezer.  Then the blonde's dog goes berserk and tries to kill Evans, and the blonde has to gun down her own pet.

By the next day Dr. Dorp has it all figured out, and enlists some technician/engineer types and police detectives to catch the overweight bespectacled German-sympathizer cousin, who has been using radio, television, remote-controlled electro magnets and refrigerators, etc., to cause all the strange events in the house from his lair eight miles away.  As for the dog, the cousin simply injected it with rabies.

The "using technology to try to scare a woman out of money" theme is bland next to perennial fan favorite "a blob monster attacks!", but "The Radio Ghost" is better written and better structured than "The Malignant Entity."  The characters' motivations all make sense, the science and technology makes sense and is fully integrated into the plot, the action scenes are good (and make sense--compare to the action scenes I'll be talking about below), and lectures on the paranormal virtually absent, while the narrative moves smoothly and logically from scene to scene.  I can mildly recommend this one, even if it has been forgotten by history in favor of its inferior predecessor.  The world is unjust!       

"The Demon of Tlaxpam" (1929)

Here we have the first Bart Leslie story, which debuted in an issue of Weird Tales alongside fiction by the aforementioned messrs. Lovecraft, Howard and Derleth.  As far as I can tell, "The Demon of Tlaxpam," like "The Radio Ghost," hasn't been reprinted.

Two-Gun Bart is a US Secret Service agent working near the border with Mexico; recently, he dismantled a group of murderous Mexican bandits known as the Gila Men.  Today he is invited to dinner at a "notorious cafe" with one of the former Gilas, now working for the Mexican government.  (Sounds about right.)  Having already gotten permission from Washington, the government of Mexico is asking Two-Gun Bart for aid in solving a problem they are having near the town of Tlaxpam.  People riding along a trail are being mysteriously decapitated, and the local police have had no luck figuring out what is up or finding the lost heads.  Some of the locals think the devil is to blame.  If Bart can solve the problem, the Mexican authorities will reward him 20,000 pesos.

The former Gila Man accompanies Bart by train to Tlaxpam, where Bart outwits an assassin armed with a machete and then sets out on his mission, guided by a man who is three-quarter Aztec and backed up by a dozen brave Mexican fighting men.  Why does the Mexican government need Bart when they have all these brave and apparently competent personnel who are already familiar with the area of operations?  Anyway, this international task force gets to the narrow stretch of trail between a body of water and a towering cliff where these murders keep happening and spends some days investigating.  They stay at the little home of a holy hermit who looks after a shrine to Saint Anthony and a pool said to have medicinal properties.  Those dozen fighting men start getting killed one by one whenever one of them is dim enough to go some place alone, decapitated in an instant, their heads no where to be found.  Leslie tries to lay a trap and catch the decapitator, but makes limited progress.

Finally, Leslie spots something odd about the hermit's domicile and discovers a secret door that leads underground to a room full of skulls--and the heads of his Mexican colleagues, cooking in a cauldron!  He captures a man wearing a devil mask--of course behind the mask is the hermit.  The hermit explains that he is a Yaqui, one of a tribe of Indians oppressed by the white man for centuries.  The serial decapitator describes how all the members of his immediate family were abused by and died at the hands of the Mexican government and its supporters--raped, enslaved, killed for insubordination, etc.  His family's sole survivor, he escaped slavery to embark on a campaign to collect 1000 Mexican heads--he chose decapitation as his method because his brother's head was cut off with a machete by a slave overseer.

Having some Spanish blood, and knowledgeable of priestly ways, he was able to pass as a devout Catholic Mexican and develop a good reputation as the keeper of the shrine.  He invented a special device, a metal box with one open face and an internal spring-loaded blade.  From the cliff above the trail to Tlaxpam, he can throw the box down over a man's shoulders, then pull the box back up with the severed head inside.

Just like you and me, Leslie is amazed that a dude can reliably throw a metal box with pinpoint accuracy, even able to make sure which of its six sides strikes the target.  The Yaqui offers to demonstrate to Leslie his ability, and Leslie puts his revolvers back in their holsters so he can roll a target along the floor that the murderer can throw his box at.  What?  Of course, the killer throws the box over Leslie's cabeza, but Leslie is somehow able to interpose his hand between his shoulder and the trigger that activates the spring, so the blade does not sever his head.  Then he outfights the Yaqui hand to hand.

The decapitating box is kind of silly, and Leslie letting the killer throw it at him is sillier still, and the fight between Bart and the killer, one trying to keep the spring from being tripped and the other trying to activate the spring, is hard to credit.  The denouement is also silly.  The Gila Man shows up minutes after Leslie has tied up the Yaqui and this former bandit, current government official, explains that he has also solved the mystery and is fully aware the holy hermit is the killer--he got impatient and tortured the assassin who tried to kill Leslie back in Tlaxpam to solve the mystery the easy way.

I think we are giving this one a grade of "barely acceptable."  The action scenes are silly and hard to follow, and Leslie's detective work isn't satisfying because he discovers who the culprit is by luck and some other guy solves the mystery at the same time using (admittedly monstrous) logical methods.  But Kline writes with enthusiasm and I was curious as to what the hell was going on, actually did care about how some bastard was decapitating all these people without leaving a trail or trace of himself, so I can't say reading "The Demon of Tlaxpam" was a bad experience.  The noteworthy thing about "The Demon of Tlaxpam" is the story's portrayal of the government of Mexico as tyrannical and corrupt; maybe "The Demon of Tlaxpam" will be a useful text for those studying the depiction of Latinos and/or Native Americans in American genre fiction of the interwar period.

**********

Not a stellar performance, but no "F"s, either.  "Crap" is, in my opinion, a little harsh.  I'm not sure when we will read Kline again, but we may very well do so--if and when Kline come sup again here at MPorcius Fiction Log, I will likely focus on stories he had in Thrilling Wonder instead of his weird work.

Weird Tales, Nov '24: F B Long, O A Kline and H S Whitehead

Years ago, I pledged to read at least one story from each issue of the seminal speculative fiction magazine Weird Tales bearing a 1930s cover date.  That quest accomplished, I expanded the scope of my eldritch ambitions to encompass the entire century-long history of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual and began chipping away at the 1940s and 1920s.  Some progress has been made, but more lies ahead.  (Click the links below to see the evidence that backs up my boasting.)

1923 

1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938    1939

1940    1941   1942   1943

Today's stride in this long journey will see us read three stories from the November 1924 issue of the magazine, the first issue edited by Farnsworth Wright.  We've got a story by Frank Belknap Long, one of H. P. Lovecraft's closest associates and author of such dud post-war novels as Monster from Out of Time,Woman from Another Planet and Journey Into Darkness (good titles, though) and good pre-war stories as "The Ocean Leech," "The Red Fetish," and "Dark Vision."  We've got a piece by Otis Adelbert Kline, three of whose underwhelming stories we recently read. And a story by Henry S. Whitehead, known for his ghost and voodoo stories, three of which we read in the fall of 2024.  I'll be reading "The Desert Lich," "The Phantom Rider," and "The Door" in a scan of the magazine that you too can explore at this link.

"The Desert Lich" by Frank Belknap Long

The narrator of "The Desert Lich" was an adherent to the religion of peace we have all been learning about, whether we wanted to or not, since September 11, 2001.  But a faithless one!  "The Desert Lich" is the tale of how he for the first time called upon Allah for help and finally realized one must "never violate the Qoran."

Our narrator is a slave merchant who sells wives to lonely men who live out in the desert, far from the walled city in which he does business.  He sold a customer some shoddy merchandise--a woman who cheated on her husband!  Our guy tries to rationalize that he himself did nothing wrong, but of course it is a crime to sell defective goods!  The customer has killed his faithless wife, and come to town to wreak a revenge on our narrator.  Too cowardly to fight, the merchant allows himself to be led out into the cold desert night and dropped down a hole into the sepulcher where lies the dead wife--and other disgusting things!

Long puts on a bravura performance describing the evolving mental state of the merchant--his horror at what he finds in the sepulcher, his regret, his maddening, obsessive, desire for food--at describing the shocking and sickening contents of the tomb--mildew, rats, snakes, the corpse!--and at describing the physical pain suffered by the slave merchant due to his fall and the frostbite that threatens to relieve him of possession of his ears and the rat bite that draws his blood.  There is even effective black humor:

During the day I devoured my headdress. It was not pleasant, of course, but I got it down somehow. It had a sweet starchy taste.

Very good.  For years I wondered why Long had such a good reputation when his later work was so shoddy as to defy belief.  But early pieces like this that are so truly disturbing and disgusting, that convey so ably the psychology of a horrible person in a horrible circumstance, that describe so memorably images and events so monstrous, justify the fund of good will Long has enjoyed.  Thumbs up for "The Desert Lich."

"The Desert Lich" was reprinted in a 1986 special Long-centric issue of The Crypt of Cthulhu and in the 1996 Barnes & Noble anthology of short-shorts 100 Tiny Tales of Terror.  You can also find it in the colossal 1100-page Long collection put out by Centipede Press in 2010. 

Some websites show this red image (right) as the cover of Centipede Press'
Masters of the Weird Tale: Frank Belknap Long, while others show a 
blue-green cover.  This thing is a mystery, and I don't have $1500
to fund an investigation.

"The Phantom Rider" by Otis Adelbert Kline

Advertised on the contents page as a "Western Ghost Story," "The Phantom Rider" is a competent filler piece.  A guy who has spent many years prospecting for gold ran out of cash and had to take on a young inexperienced partner who could finance his next operation.  They find a fortune in gold, and the older guy resents having to share with the younger.  So, he pushes the "greenhorn" and his horse off a ledge into quicksand, the subject of many jokes by lame comedians and tiresome hipsters.  As the young man sinks to his death, he curses his murderer, saying he will climb out of hell to get his revenge.  Sure enough, later in the story, after the killer has gotten drunk with his newfound wealth and fled a saloon because he got a little rowdy and drew the attention of the sheriff, the ghost or revenant or whatever of the murder victim--and his horse--chase down the killer, lassoing him--the next day he is found dead, rope marks on his neck.  

A professional job with foreshadowing and a character who acts in accordance with his personality and all that, just not a big deal.  "The Phantom Rider" has not been reprinted--maybe it is true that the internet is convincing kids to eat detergent and chop off their body parts, but without it we'd have a hell of a time reading this story.

"The Door" by Henry S. Whitehead

Here's another story that was immortalized in one of those "instant remainder" B&N anthologies, this one 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories.  "The Door" was also reprinted in a 1933 ish of WT under the "Weird Story Reprint" heading, and in various Whitehead collections.

Little more than three pages of text in the November 1924 issue of Weird Tales, "The Door" is a better than average filler piece, a sort of twist ending story the twist of which you know from the first column.  I can marginally recommend it.  

A guy hits something as he is driving down the street, goes back to see what it was--Whitehead doesn't say it is a person, but we readers are led to assume it is.

We are then introduced to young Phillips, apparently some kind of troublemaker.  Recently he was thrown out of the house of his socially prominent parents for committing some crime.  Tonight he feels a shudder as he crosses the street to sneak into his parents' apartment while they are at the symphony and the "colored maid" is on a train for Boston.  Whitehead doesn't tell us quite what, but he is on a mission to do something to try to make up in some small way for his misdeeds, return stolen money or something like that.  But when he gets to the apartment door he can't open it.  He hears a commotion down on the street.  Then a bunch of men come up the stairs, carrying an awkward bundle.  The makeshift shroud flaps open and Phillips sees his own dead face!  He couldn't open the door because he is a ghost!  

We know the whole time that Phillips is dead, but still the story is sort of engaging. 

**********

It feels good to award three passing grades, and a high mark for Frank Belknap Long, whom I have had to upbraid so many times in the past.  This stretch of our weird journey has been pretty smooth.  We'll be seeing more of Long, Kline and Whitehead in the days ahead.

H. P. Lovecraft Collabs: "The Horror at Martin's Beach" (w/ S Greene), "Two Black Bottles" (w/ W B Talman) & "The Trap" (w/ H S Whitehead)

Remember how awesome some of those Lovecraft collabs with Hazel Heald and Zealia Bishop were?  Let's try to recapture that magic with three more H. P. Lovecraft collaborations read from the pages of my Corrected Fifth Printing of The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions.  Today's stories appear in the "Secondary Revisions" section of The Horror in the Museum; editor S. T. Joshi describes secondary revisions as stories "which Lovecraft merely touched up--albeit sometimes extensively."  All three were published in magazines under the names of Lovecraft's collaborator, and you can read those versions by clicking the following links:

"The Horror at Martin's Beach" AKA "The Invisible Monster" by Sonia Greene 
"Two Black Bottles" by Wilfred Branch Talman
"The Trap" by Henry S. Whitehead

"The Horror at Martin's Beach" (w/ Sonia Greene) (1923)

It appears Greene sent Lovecraft a draft of this story and the man from Providence "edited and revised" the tale, which appeared across two pages of Weird Tales under the title "The Invisible Monster."  The story has since been seen in a billion Lovecraft collections, and, in our own bizarre and unusual 21st century, editors seem to be looking kindly upon it, Gregory Luce reprinting it as one of the best weird stories of 1923 and Stephen Jones including it in his 2026 volume Weird Tales, Volume One: The Early Years.

"The Horror at Martin's Beach"/"The Invisible Monster" is a pretty good story, thumbs up!  The crew of a ship catch a monstrously large fish, like 50 feet long, a bizarre specimen never before seen, presumably from the black depths, with a single eye and what look like legs where it ought to have fins.  A sensation among scientists and the public, it is put on display on an anchored ship by a public beach near a fancy resort.  Biologists point out that the colossal corpse has a preternaturally complex and large brain, and indications that suggest this fish is not fully grown, but newly hatched!  

A few days later the ship upon which the dead monster is displayed is lost at sea during a terrific storm and never seen again.  A few days later that very beach is the scene of an uncanny horror that makes the thoughtful wonder if perhaps highly advanced animals might have hypnotic powers.

A scream is heard from the sea and the lifeguards, even though the scream seems not quite human, rush to the water and throw in the life preserver on a long rope.  The floatation device is pulled beneath the surface and the lifeguards grasp the rope from shore.  The pull on the rope is so strong that the lifeguards enlist help from male beachgoers.  No matter how many men pull at the rope, they cannot seem to bring the submerged life saver one foot closer to land.  Then, the men realize they cannot let go of the rope.  At the same time, onlookers are somehow psychologically unable to come to the stuck men's aid.  A storm hits, the tide comes in, and all the men gripping the rope drown and their bodies are never found.

Pretty cool, a story that feels fresh, that has some new or rarely seen gimmicks and no fat.

Greene, as you probably already know, met Lovecraft at an amateur press convention before this story was written and after it was published in 1923 the two married, a collaboration not nearly as successful as "The Horror at Martin's Beach."

"Two Black Bottles" (w/ Wilfred Blanch Talman) (1927)

This one debuted in an issue of Weird Tales that printed a story by Frank Belknap Long we read a few years ago, "The Man with a Thousand Legs."  Joshi can't be sure how much of the text of "Two Black Bottles" is Lovecraft's, as apparently HPL made many additions and changes and Talman got angry and may have ignored them.  I guess we've all had the experience of somebody asking for an honest opinion or advice and them reacting negatively when you actually follow through instead of just validating everything he or she has already done--your friend or colleague didn't really want help, but for you to say "You are awesome, rock star."

Well, I don't know how much to credit Lovecraft and how much to credit Talman, but "Two Black Bottles" is a good story, pretty well-written and with a good plot, so thumbs up!

Our narrator has travelled to a remote and impoverished village in the mountains, having heard that a uncle he never met, a clergyman reputed to be large and strong physically but weak-willed, has died, and any inheritance is due to the narrator.  The church is on the edge of the village, on the other side of a swamp, and is shunned by all the villagers, our guy learns upon arrival.  From a villager he hears a wild story about how the creepy old sexton, the guy who maintains the church grounds and graveyard and gets the supplies at the store every week or so, dominated the narrator's uncle, got him to begin preaching in a way that upset the parishioners so fewer and fewer attended services and eventually on Sunday not a soul was in the the church besides the clergyman and the old sexton.  The villagers believe that the sexton worships the devil and they are all scared of him.  

Thinking this a load of nonsense, the narrator heads to the church even though it is getting dark, to meet the sexton, who lives in the church basement, and get the business of his inheritance sorted out ASAP.  The swamp and the church are pretty creepy at dusk and after sundown and the narrator almost loses his nerve, but eventually finds the sexton up in the belfry of the church with a bunch of ancient books and manuscripts.  The sexton, spine crooked and body skinny, is drunk and scared, and tells the narrator that he has learned black magic and demonology from the books, that he used sorcery to steal the narrator's uncle's soul and put it in a bottle.  The preacher is buried in a grave, unable to rest because his soul is trapped in the bottle, and the sexton is afraid the man is strong enough to bust out of his grave and come get his revenge!  When the narrator comes to believe this, being able through the belfry window to see the makeshift cross on his uncle's grave shifting as unc's soulless body struggles to escape, he desperately resolves to take the bottle to his undead uncle, thinking to appease his wrath in this manner.  But there are two such bottles--the sexton himself is like 250 years old because in the 18th century another wizard put his soul in a bottle--he has "lived" as a soulless man since colonial times!  Which bottle is which?  What will happen if in the confusion either of these bottles shatters and a trapped soul is released?

I like the plot, and I like all the descriptions of physical things and of people's fear--either Talman or Lovecraft did a good job putting them together.  "Two Black Bottles" is a creditable piece of work.  August Derleth included "Two Black Bottles" in his anthology Sleep No More, as did Stephen Jones in his aforementioned 2026 anthology of stories from Weird Tales.  And of course it is in countless Lovecraft collections. 

"The Trap" (w /Henry S. Whitehead) (1931)

Almost two years ago I read three stories by Henry S. Whitehead and enjoyed them, so let's see if Whitehead can maintain his streak of good grades here at MPorcius Fiction Log--he'll have to produce, because this institution has yet to fall to the spreading plague of grade inflation.

The tone of "The Trap" is very different than that of the other Lovecraftian stuff we've been reading--instead of being scared and/or on the brink of insanity, the protagonist is confident, competent, and calm.  When somebody gets stuck in a parallel dimension, instead of finding everything crazy and inexplicable, the protagonist in "The Trap" calmly figures out the "rules" of this alien universe.  And instead of dreams being horrifying, the hero welcomes dreams as a means of communication, as a solution to the plot's obstacles.  

I like the basic plot and the ideas of "The Trap," but the story feels long and the pace is slow, like there are too many sentences and they are too deliberate.  The style of the story does not communicate any urgency to the reader, and much of the text is not concerned with describing the behavior of the characters (who actually do but little) but with describing the setting, and those descriptions are not exciting or disturbing, but merely curious.  There is also the fact that the narrator is not at risk, but a sort of spectator.

That narrator is a Gerald Canevin, a recurring character in Whitehead's body of work, a man who has travelled all over the world and is knowledgeable in the occult.  In this story he is living at a boarding school in New England, working as a tutor.  It is winter and when the heating system in the classrooms breaks down he has his students attend class in his rooms, where he has a fire in the fireplace.

In his rooms Canevin has an elaborate 17th-century Danish mirror he found in an abandoned building in the West Indies.  A favorite student, Robert, notices a weird pattern in the glass of the mirror, visible only from certain angles, and becomes fascinated by it.  Touching a particular spot on the mirror where Robert sees dimly noticeable lines converging, he tells Canevin that it feels like the mirror is trying to suck him in.

Not long after, Robert disappears and all efforts to find him bring up zilch.  At night while asleep, Canevin gets telepathic messages from Robert.  In these visions, Robert's blue coat is yellow, his skin is a queer color, and Robert seems to have trouble talking.  Over a series of nights, Robert explains what happened to him via these psychic conversations.  So interested in the mirror was the teenaged boy that he came to Canevin's rooms when the tutor was absent and got sucked into the mirror when he touched it at that particular point.  This mirror is the work of a 17th-century Danish glazier, Europe's finest maker of mirrors, a guy named Holm.  Holm was also a student of the occult, like half the people in the fiction we read here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Holm feared death, and sought immortality in the fourth dimension.  He acquired a little mirror known as "Loki's glass" and integrated it into a larger mirror of his own fabrication.  By entering this mirror, you enter the fourth dimension, a place where you don't have to eat, use the toilet, or sleep, where you will not grow old or die or get sick, where there are no insects or vermin.  Holm sent two black slaves into the mirror with lots of books and then joined them.

Much of the text of "The Trap" describes in detail bordering on tedium the "rules" of life in the mirror.  Everything in the mirror is reversed or opposite.  The "Negro" slaves have white skin, for example, the midday sky is yellow instead of blue and so forth.  New arrivals to the fourth dimension take a few minutes to learn how to walk and a few days to learn how to talk because nerves and muscles are wired in reverse or something like that.  Most unbelievably, when you walk closer to something it takes up less of your field of view, and if you retreat from something it appears to grow larger.

The environment inside the mirror takes on the appearance of those places which have been reflected in its surface for a sufficient period of time, so, places like Canevin's rooms and some Caribbean locales; for many decades the mirror was leaning with its glass towards a wall so there is a limited number of "scenes."  Transient movable objects like furniture are not in the world of the mirror, and you can't really interact with the "scenes" that are there--they are just like a painted background.  

Over the years, Holm used telepathy to hypnotize people, Robert being the latest, into joining him in the mirror.  There being nothing to do, the inhabitants of the mirror spend a lot of time chatting, talking about differences in life between the 17th, 18th, and now 20th centuries.  There is a long list of such people, but Whitehead doesn't give them personalities or relationships or describe any of these conversations.  We can only hope that Robert had his wits about him and became the world's expert on 17th-century European table manners or the practical aspects of cultivating, storing and selling sugar in the 18th century or something like that.

Eventually, Canevin gets a glass cutting tool and carefully removes "Loki's glass" from the rest of the mirror.  Robert comes through to our world more or less intact, but all the other people, who should have died over 100 years ago, instantly degrade into dust.  Robert finds that he is now left-handed and his heart is now in the right side of his chest instead of the left, you know, like Dr. No.  We also get an overly long denouement in which Canevin comes up with an elaborate story to explain to people where Robert was these two weeks.

I'm grading this one acceptable.  "The Trap" lacks human drama; it is more of an idea story than a horror story or adventure story, lacking thrills or chills, sex and violence.  Other writers might have used the mirror-world as a setting for a battle of wills, a love triangle, a tragically doomed romance, a debate on the social order or religion or political systems, but that is not Whitehead's project.  Whitehead does what he set out to do just fine, but it is not really my cup of meat.

Joshi tells us that there is reason to believe that Lovecraft wrote "the entire central section of the story."  Maybe I have to blame HPL for some of "The Trap"'s long-windedness.    

"The Trap" debuted in Strange Tales and editors have favored it since then; you can find it in a multitude of Whitehead collections, Lovecraft collections, reprint magazines and anthologies. 

We've read several stories from Donald Wollheim's Avon Fantasy Reader No. 6:
Thorp McClusky's "The Crawling Horror,"
David H. Keller's "The Thing in the Cellar,"
and Edmond Hamilton's "The Star Stealers" 

**********

All of these stories are worth reading for the student of the weird, and the Greene and Talman stories are good economical tales deserving of a wide audience.  Let's hope our next foray into interwar genre magazines meets the standard today's stories met.

H P Lovecraft: "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family," "The Festival," "He," and "The Horror at Red Hook"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading stories from 1920s issues of Weird Tales, the widely beloved pioneering speculative fiction magazine.  Today we are going to tackle four WT stories from the era by an author closely associated with WT, H. P. Lovecraft, stories I haven't blogged about yet, though I may have read some of them in the distant past.  I will be reading them from my Arkham House hardcover Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (Corrected Ninth Edition), but I'll include links to the stories' 1920s Weird Tales appearances: just click the magic words below to be whisked off to the hellish landscapes which lie just beneath the surface of our own mundane reality:

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh

Cthulhu R'lyeh
wgah'nagl
fhtagn

"Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" (1921)

This tale debuted in a publication called The Wolverine, and appeared in Weird Tales three years later under the title "The White Ape," a title of which HPL did not approve.

This story, a history of a now extinct noble English family,  contains, in concise concentrated form, many of the standard Lovecraftian themes--lost cities, degenerated races, miscegenation, unwelcome revelations about one's identity, and scholars and explorers who search for the truth and are driven mad by what they find.  The opening paragraph is almost a thesis statement for the whole Lovecraft oeuvre, asserting that life is "hideous" and that the more science discovers, the more hideous we realize life is, and if science ever uncovers the truth about our identity we may well all kill ourselves.  The male members of the Jermyn family dramatize this morbid claim, many of them dying in shocking, melodramatic, fashion, their remains disposed of in ways that are particularly macabre.

In brief, an 18th-century head of the Jermyn clan was an explorer in Africa, and upon his return to Britain claimed to have discovered the ruins of an ancient city apparently once inhabited by a race of white people and/or a race of human-ape hybrids.  His discoveries are scoffed at, and he ends up in a madhouse, where he dies.  This guy's descendants tend to be ugly, even deformed--it is hinted they have simian features--and the men tend to have unusual marriages, to women of the lower classes and/or women they refuse to allow out of the house, lest they be seen in public.  Quite a few Jermyns are murdered by family members or commit suicide, including the last of the line, who dies without issue.  These murders and self-murders are generally a reaction to a realization about the Jermyn ancestry--it seems that several of the Jermyn men have mated with women who are part-ape, surviving members of the ancient race that built or lived in that ruined city.  One female Jermyn was crudely mummified and worshipped as a god or used as a totem or good luck charm by various black tribes.

"Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" generates a mood and has lots of solid horror ideas--all the varied shocking fates individuals and their bodies suffer--but it is not a traditional story with a plot and characters and all that.  I like it.  

As with most of Lovecraft's work, you can find "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" in a multitude of Lovecraft collections.  I will point out that this tale has also been reprinted in a 1973 Roger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia anthology, Androids, Time Machines and Blue Giraffes, and in a 2008 Marvel comic alongside a graphic novel adaptation of the story by Richard Corben.

"The Festival" (1925)

This one debuted in the same issue of Weird Tales as Frank Belknap Long's "The Ocean Leech" and C. M. Eddy, Jr.'s "Ahrl-a of the Caves."   Besides in the inevitable mountain of Lovecraft collections, "The Festival" has been reprinted in a few anthologies, including some on a Christmas or holiday theme and Peter Haining's The Satanists, even though this story isn't really about Satan or his worshippers.  

Our narrator makes clear immediately that he is of a secretive people small in number whose culture, a culture that stretches back long before the rise of Christianity, a culture with an affinity for the stars, has been suppressed, but who have striven to keep that culture alive by holding a festival every 100 years.  At Christmas time he comes to a coastal New England town to participate in this ceremony, makes his way to a seventeenth century house inhabited by an old man and an old woman who through disguises keep the narrator from seeing their flesh and who utter no speech--the man communicates via stylus and wax tablet.  Lovecraft does a good job describing these weirdos and their house.

Late at night the entire town of people, all of them dressed to obscure their forms and visages, assembles at a church and descends through trap door and spiral stair deep into the earth, to hold a bizarre ceremony involving a monstrous flame that generates no heat and causes no shadows, and a herd of queer monsters that are to serve as the assembled throng's steeds and carry them to even stranger ceremonies deeper still beneath the surface.  The old man who welcomed the narrator into his home is apparently the leader of the group, and uses a copy of The Necronomicon in the ritual; it is suggested this creature is an ancestor of the narrator, somehow still alive, though horribly decayed or transformed, centuries after his burial.  The narrator, horrified, escapes, almost dying in the effort, and wakes up in a hospital after being rescued as he floated in the harbor.  The town seems different, more modern--was the narrator cast back in time last night, or drawn into some intersection of our world and another?

Quite good, a sort of embryonic, more concise, less extreme version of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."  In this story the narrator's jump from ignorance to knowledge of his heritage is less radical, as he starts off knowing his people are unlike others and doesn't end the story as an actual monster, as does the narrator of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."     

"He" (1926)

I lived in New York City for over a decade, and so found very compelling the first two or three pages of "He," in which the narrator describes his initial fascination with the Big Apple upon his arrival and then his rapid disillusionment after taking up residence in Gotham.  Particularly interesting was Lovecraft's idea that New Yorkers lack a sense of history, that changes to the city erase earlier achievements and characteristics rather than building upon them as one builds upon a foundation: 

...this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life.

I guess this is the sort of criticism of Americans we can expect from a self-described conservative like Lovecraft, that Americans are deracinated and obsessed with the self and progress and so have no use for the past, see the past as something to be escaped or overcome or just ignored and forgotten.  I'm not sure how seriously we can take Lovecraft on the particulars about New York--while he did spend time in New York, I don't think he ever went to Paris or London, so his comparisons among the three cities must largely be based on stuff he read or heard.  And of course a lot of Lovecraft's criticisms of this sort are animated by the fact that the New York of the 1920s is full of Jews and blacks and Catholics, not just the Dutch and English who founded and then sized New Amsterdam.  Still, a provocative line of thinking, and the idea of New York as a dead thing inhabited by parasites and scavengers a powerful image, making for compelling reading.

The narrator spends his time searching New York for streets whose buildings are all old, streets where there are no foreigners.  He is accosted by a man who, apparently, has a similar avocation, and this taciturn guy leads the narrator on a curious maze-like journey through old neighborhoods where they see no people, an odyssey that includes a climb over a brick wall and a long stretch of crawling through some kind of low tunnel.  Finally, the man brings the narrator to an 18th-century house in a walled yard and doffs his cloak to reveal he wears 18th-century costume.  Emaciated and ancient, he claims to be an antiquarian who affects the dress of two centuries ago, and to have at his command the magic learned by an ancestor who lived in this house when it was built, magic his ancestor learned in England and France and from the local Indians.  With this magic he is able to show the narrator, through a window, the New York of the past, and, horrifyingly, the New York of the future, a future of dizzyingly tall towers, flying machines, and "yellow, squint-eyed people...dancing insanely to...ceaseless dirges...."  The narrator cries out in fear at the nightmare fate which awaits NYC, summoning the ghosts of the Indians who once dwelt here and were murdered by the 18th-century wizard.  The strange old antiquarian is surely in fact that very wizard, and the Native ghosts carry him off as he finally decays as he should have decayed way back in colonial times.  The house collapses and the narrator barely escapes being crushed under it, falling unconscious from wounds he suffers on the way out.

(Today's stories are all about decaying bodies and/or collapsing buildings--change in Lovecraft is always for the worse.)  

A solid piece of work that exploits our fears of the future and of foreigners, our all too appropriate expectation that our culture and way of life are going to be swept away and forgotten and we will be replaced by people who are incomprehensible to us and, perhaps, evil and disgusting.

After its debut in Weird Tales alongside a rarely reprinted Edmond Hamilton serial we can look forward to reading soon and reprinted work by Shelly and Poe, "He" has been included in some attractive anthologies, like Donald A. Wollheim's Terror in the Modern Vein and various European volumes.

Wollheim included in Terror in the Modern Vein his own story of New York disillusionment, 
"The Rag Thing," and Robert Heinlein's story of discovering the horrible reality behind
apparent reality, "They"

"The Horror at Red Hook" (1927)

I don't think I had read "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family," "The Festival," or "He" before today, but I am confident I read "The Horror at Red Hook" when I lived in New York, over ten years ago.   I don't remember it very well, so it may hold surprises for me.

In Chapter I, we are introduced to Malone, a New York police detective with "the Celt's far vision of weird and hidden things" who is living in Rhode Island after a terrible experience in Brooklyn left him with deep psychological wounds.  He was in some kind of raid in which a collapsing building killed many of his comrades, and the general public thinks that this disaster is what has led to his mental illness.  In fact, he witnessed "a horror of houses and blocks and cities leprous and cancerous with evil dragged from elder worlds," but is canny enough to know nobody will believe his story so he keeps it to himself.

The narrative shifts backwards in time in Chapter II, and we learn a little more about Malone, a smart guy who has always been interested in the occult, in the evil that lurks beneath the surface, has read books about witches and has his own theories about human behavior and human history.  We also learn about Red Hook, where Malone is stationed, a decayed Brooklyn neighborhood inhabited by blacks, Italians, Syrians and "Spaniards," many of them up to no good or just hanging around, likely, Malone theorizes, even long before he comes face to face with the terrible truth, "heirs of some shocking and primordial tradition; the sharers of debased and broken scraps from cults and ceremonies older than mankind."  

Chapter III introduces us to Suydam, a fat old Dutchman with a nice house and huge library of books on the occult in Flatbush.  This guy has been spending a lot of time in Red Hook, hanging around with groups of "swarthy" people and making strange comments about "unlimited powers" he is striving to acquire.  He was also wasting all his money importing from Europe rare books on strange topics and acquiring buildings in Red Hook where are housed throngs of dark foreigners.  His relatives want him declared insane, but fail in their legal efforts, as before the judge Suydam appears normal; the local and Federal police, however, keep an eye on Suydam as the man's many contacts in Red Hook are among the worst criminals in the area, thieves and importers of illegal immigrants.  Malone is assigned the job of leading the investigation and effort to round up the undocumented Near Eastern weirdos--Kurdish Yezidis said to worship the devil--with which Suydam's swarthy cronies are populating Red Hook.

    

Chapter IV covers Malone's investigation and developments in Suydam's life.  Suydam's appearance, behavior, health and finances improve, his white hair even regaining its original youthful color, and he wins over the relatives who previously thought him mad.  The Dutchman spends more time at home in Flatbush, even has the place renovated and becomes more social than ever before in his life--he even gets engaged!  Meanwhile, Malone and his comrades are able to get into some of the Red Hook houses where Suydam's Kurdish and other non-white cronies have been living, discovering strange, sinister, inscriptions in esoteric tongues on the walls.  

Chapter V tells of the death of Suydam and his new wife on the Europe-bound ocean liner just after their wedding.  Some kind of animal or monster, only glimpsed by a member of the crew before it vanished out a porthole, massacres the newlyweds, and almost immediately afterwards a boarding party of Arabs and other strange characters from a tramp steamer take custody of Suydam's mangled body.

At the same time Suydam is killed and his carcass carried off, in Red Hook there is a big excitement described in Chapter VI.  Some little white boys with blue eyes have disappeared from Gowanus and the local Scandinavians are forming a mob to invade Red Hook to try to rescue them, so the police raid suspicious buildings in Red Hook to forestall civil unrest.  The cops interrupt some kind of elaborate ceremony, and, in one of Suydam's buildings, Malone has an impossible experience he'd like to chalk up to a dream or hallucination.  A wind that seems alive sucks him into a subterranean world of vast chambers and shores upon dark seas where he sees monsters of all shapes and sizes and witnesses a perverted marriage ceremony which culminates in the mutilated corpse of Suydam, again obese and white-haired and impossibly and frantically alive, flees a horde of monsters.

Like the protagonists of "The Festival" and "He," after his glimpse of the horrible reality behind our complacent reality, Malone falls unconscious and is awoken by rescuers.  The buildings the cops raided collapsed on him and his comrades, killing many of the police and most of the captured worshippers.  Chapter VII, the denouement, describes how tunnels were discovered leading from Suydam's Flatbush house to various locales and the authorities chalk it all up to an illegal immigrant smuggling operation.  But Malone knows better, that the Suydam affair is connected to evil from beyond space and time that threatens to overwhelm our universe, and we readers are assured that the evil traditions practiced in Red Hook continue to this day.

"The Horror at Red Hook" is a good horror story that leaves behind all the fun (or boring, to some) architecture and history talk we see in "The Festival" and "He" and serves up a double helping of racial essentialism and race hatred, romanticizing Celts ("sensitive") and Scandinavians ("Vikings"), dismissing Southern Europeans slightingly, and depicting Arabs, Asians and blacks as disgusting and alien ("the leader of the visiting mariners, an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth..."; "Their [the Yezidi Kurds'] squat figures and characteristic squinting physiognomies, grotesquely combined with flashy American clothing, appeared more and more numerously among the loafers and nomad gangsters of the Borough Hall section....")  The horror of "He" I feel is more rational and historically grounded, depicting the white man displacing the natives of the New World while appropriating the native's wisdom, and then being displaced in turn by the Oriental who, presumably, took advantage of Western advances in science and technology to build his super city and armada of aircraft, while the horror in "The Horror at Red Hook" is based simply on disgust at the appearance and alleged behavior of nonwhites.  Still effective, but less thought-provoking, visceral rather than intellectual, the horror of seeing something gross under a rock, not the horror of considering where your society is heading.

"The Horror at Red Hook" received immediate recognition, being included in the 1927 British anthology edited by Christine Campbell Thompson, You'll Need a Night Light and the 1928 American anthology Not At Night! edited by Herbert Asbury.

**********

I like all these stories, and I think they are a good example of what Lovecraft, at least in his early work, is all about, and for personal reasons I think "He" is my favorite.  And stories about a changing New York and about illegal immigrants may resonate with readers today.  So of course I recommend you read these stories, though be careful not to start including words like "squint-eyed" and "negroid" in casual conversation.

I'm putting my copy of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales back on the shelf but pulling down The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, so brace yourself for more Lovecraft material when next we meet here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and, in the meantime, just accept the world as it appears and don't go digging into caves and caverns and sewers trying to unearth the real truth--you'll be better off.

C. M. Eddy, Jr.: "With Weapons of Stone," "Arhl-a of the Caves" and "The Better Choice"

During a period in 1924 and 1925, many stories in Weird Tales bore a heading
that tightly integrated title and illustration in a rectangle as here

Back in 2020 we read four stories H. P. Lovecraft produced in collaboration with C. M. Eddy, Jr.  Today let's read three stories published under Eddy's name in Weird Tales that deal with themes far removed from those we associate with HPL.  Read along with us at these links three:  ONE  TWO  THREE  

"With Weapons of Stone" (1924)

"With Weapons of Stone" debuted in the same December 1924 issue of Weird Tales we were just looking at because we were reading Galen C. Colin's story of a man on a quest to reunite with a love from which he had been parted during the days of the Pharaohs, "The Song Eternal."  (The same issue also prints Frank Belknap Long's story of a guy trying to avoid being overcome by a slithering swarm of cold-blooded creatures, "Death-Waters.") 

"With Weapons of Stone" is a straightforward adventure drama set among a tribe of cave people.  It is time for a young cavewoman, Zo-na, to mate.  This tribe has "progressed from the days when the male, by sheer brute force, took the female of his choice to his cave" and so she can select her own mate, though that choice has to be approved by the tribal elders.  Two men have caught her eye; one is Gra, the son of the chief, and the other is Ra-nor, whom she really does prefer.  Who to choose?  Zo-na comes up with what to me seems a crazy scheme, but the assembled cave men love it--Zo-na announces that she will mate with whichever of these two guys slays the saber-toothed tiger that has been bedeviling the tribe. 

As we might expect of the son of a politician, Gra is pretty corrupt, and, on the day Ra-nor sets out early into the jungle to look for the saber-tooth, Gra, reputedly a great hunter, is just bidin' his time, having breakfast with his dad, the big guy, and carefully looking over his flint and stone equipment.  Then he follows Ra-nor, who has tracked the cat, with the idea of letting Ra-nor fight the monster, said to have the strength of ten men, and then finishing off whichever of the exhausted combatants has survived the struggle.  While Ra-nor lies in ambush for the saber-tooth, nearby Gra himself watches Ra-nor and waits.

Sure enough, when Ra-nor, after suffering some serious wounds, has killed the great cat, Gra sneaks up behind him and reaches back his arm to throw a stone dagger at Ra-nor.  But love wins!  Zo-na, having realized how much she loves Ra-nor, has followed Ra-nor's trail herself, and sees Gra about murder her man, the true victor of the contest!  Zo-na throws her own dagger at Gra, scoring a direct hit on his black heart and killing him instantly!  

"With Weapons of Stone" is an acceptable entertainment, like a chapter out of a Burroughs novel.  It has reappeared a number of times in small press publications, including a 2008 Eddy collection, The Loved Dead and Other Tales, edited by Eddy's grandson Jim Dyer (wow, we encounter filial devotion in real life!) and a 2021 anthology, Prehistoric Adventures, edited by D. M. Ritzlin for his DMR Books.

"Arhl-a of the Caves" (1925)

A footnote at the end of "With Weapons of Stone" promises "another story of prehistoric men by C. M. Eddy, Jr., will appear in the next issue of Weird Tales" and Farnsworth Wright was as good as his word, printing Eddy's "Arhl-a of the Caves" in the January '25 issue.  "Arhl-a of the Caves" reappeared in all the same places "With Weapons of Stone" did, including a 1976 Xeroxed pamphlet that collected Eddy stories, Terror Out of Time.    

Like our previous cave man adventure, "Arhl-a of the Caves" revolves around a love triangle.  It is a tale as old as time, after all.  Arhl-a is a cave woman, and in love with handsome Wagh, but ugly Zurd also desires her, and Zurd has tied her up and carried her off.  Eddy doesn't stint when it comes to describing how Arhl-a's wrists bleed as she tries to escape her bonds or how this prehistoric Lucretia is more than ready to bury her dagger in her own chest before enduring defilement at Zurd's hands--something for all you violence against women fans.  Later, Eddy dwells on Arhl-a taking a bath naked in the ocean and then laying nude on the beach.  All this would be more compelling in a movie than on the page, but I guess in 1925 (and maybe in 2026 if you are 12) it was sort of titillating. 

Arhl-a manages to get out of her bonds when Zurd isn't looking and she kills Zurd with her dagger when he comes for her, animated by lust--somehow Zurd forgot to search Arhl-a at some point between capturing her yesterday and finally deciding to rape her today.  This means that when Wagh follows Zurd's trail to the kidnapper's hideout, he doesn't find Arhl-a, just Zurd's corpse.  So then he has to follow Arhl-a's trail.  Wagh catches up to Arhl-a just as she is attacked by a huge ape; he kills the ape and the lovers are reunited.

"Arhl-a of the Caves" is well-written enough on a line-by-line basis; all the descriptions of tracking and cooking food and all that as well as the fear and anger of the three characters are conveyed in an entertaining manner, but the plot is so very basic that the story is like a fragment of a longer work.  It's like the pre-credit sequence of a James Bond movie.  We're calling this one barely acceptable.    

"The Better Choice" (1925)

"The Better Choice" is a more serious and ambitious story than the previous two cave men stories, but it is not very satisfying as it doesn't really hold together logically and what it is trying to accomplish is elusive.  

Scientist John Castle has invented a means of reviving the dead.  He has tested his technique on scores of animals.  Now comes the ultimate test--on a human being!  Who will be the scientist's guinea pig?  Castle himself!

Castle has all ready a drug of his own devising that will kill him while leaving no evidence he committed suicide--this is so his wife will get his life insurance, should the technique fail on a human.  And he has prepared his life-reviving gas in its machine, the operation of which involves pumping the gas into the dead animal or person's nostrils and mouth.  Castle has left a note for his lifelong friend, businessman Montague White, explaining how to revive Castle when White finds his pal's dead body.  I didn't really understand why Castle didn't brief White in person, why he insisted on keeping his experiments a secret even from the man he expected to put his new technique into operation for the first time on a human being.  As for the note, won't it be solid evidence that Castle committed suicide?  I guess White will be expected to destroy the note if the revival technique fails.

Castle takes the pill and dies.  In his astral body he flies around, through walls and so forth, looking down at his beloved wife and adorable kids asleep in their rooms.  Then an astral being appears, to guide Castle to the afterlife.  (Eddy avoids terms a religious person might use, like "God" or "soul" or "angel" or "Heaven.")  Castle speculates about what he will tell people about his astral experiences when he is alive again soon, but the guiding entity gently scoffs at the scientist's expectations, implying that other scientists before Castle have tried just such a stunt--reviving the dead--and failed and he is just the latest.  The thought of missing out on life with his wife and kids leads Castle to beg the being for another twenty years of life.  It is sort of implied that "the great All-Power that ruled the universe" has decided that Castle is to die on this day, but the guide entity gives Castle a chance to see what the next twenty years will be like if he in fact does return to life.

Castle wakes up, the poison having apparently failed to kill him.  He remembers all that jazz about astral flight and a guide spirit but thinks it was a dream.  He abandons all scientific work, keeping his revival experiments a secret, and goes into business with his best friend, White.  But he and White soon  quarrel and become rivals.  Castle becomes a very successful businessman by being ruthless and crushing all sorts of people.  But then his business goes sour, and, twenty years after he abandoned science, he is financially ruined.  He blames White, who is apparently behind the businesses that are putting Castle out of business.  Eddy leaves all this business stuff absolutely opaque, offering no clue what Castle and White argued over or what business they are in or anything like that, presenting us a view of the business world that is like a caricature of what commies think private enterprise is all about:

...for every dollar he made an enemy.  Merciless, showing no quarter, he crushed his victims with as little compunction as a thoughtless boy smashes a tiny ant....Now the tables were turned.  Now he was the fly, his enemies the spiders.... 

Driven insane by his impending financial defeat, Castle goes to White's office and shoots his old chum dead.  Eddy puts a lot of effort into describing Castle, his wits recovered, in prison, moaning over how he has ruined the lives of his wife and kids by murdering White, wishing he had died twenty years ago, etc., and then being convicted in a court of law and hanged.  

After the hanging, Castle is back in outer space with the guiding spirit.  But only briefly.  He is sucked back into to his dead body, which is surrounded by wife and kids, the family doctor (wait, so this guy and Castle's wife must know about the note), and White, who has put the tubes in Castle's dead nose and dead mouth and is about to pump the life-giving gas into him.  Even though he is dead, now that Castle is back in his body he is able to reach up and pull on the tubes that are in his face hard enough to destroy the machine and prevent his revival, as all these people watch.  So, he's committing suicide in front of everybody?  The story ends there, but I guess we have to assume Castle's astral form leaves his body again and goes to the afterlife.  Eddy does not speculate on the reaction of Castle's family and best friend to these incredible events.

This whole thing is ridiculous.  Among many other incongruities, Eddy fails to provide any reason why Castle and White become monsters who hate each other after being nice guys and best pals for decades.  And what is the point of the story, the ideology of the story?  That death is good?  Castle is discouraged from reviving the dead, and encouraged to choose death over life.  Maybe the theme is that you shouldn't defy the decree of fate, but Castle isn't punished for doing so, so the story has no bite and offers no real reason to not defy fate.

Thumbs down for "The Better Choice."  This mess has been reprinted in the aforementioned small press publications Terror Out of Time and The Loved Dead and Other Tales.

Illustrator Andrew Brosnatch seems to have ignored Eddy's
assertion that the guiding spirit is a voice lacking any visible form

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Eddy's cave man stories achieve their modest goals and are passable entertainments that, perhaps interestingly, portray women taking the initiative and fighting for the futures and relationships that they want--again we see the stereotype that women in old speculative fiction stories are mere damsels in distress exploded.  Eddy's afterlife story, on the other hand, is a total failure.

More 1920s Weird Tales in our next episode.  Try to keep body and soul together until then, friends!