(I read the versions of these stories in the scan of Night Chills at the internet archive; all three have been republished in other books since 1975.)
"Alice and the Allergy" first saw light of day in the same issue of Weird Tales as Edmond Hamilton's "Day of Judgment," which we read back in 2017.
About three years ago Alice was raped by a serial killer who was terrorizing the upper Midwest, a man the newspapers called "the mystery strangler." Alice married the doctor who came to treat her after she suffered this crime, and six months after their wedding she began suffering severe allergies and bouts of depression and anxiety. As our story begins, Alioce can't stop thinking the strangler is coming to get her, to kill her as he killed most of his other victims, even though he was found dead two years ago.
There is a lot of medical and psychological jibber jabber in this story. Alice's husband, Howard, is working with pharmacists trying to figure out what Alice is allergic to so they can make up shots for her. Howard also thinks some of her psychological problems are because of the prudish misandrist aunt who raised her and filled her head with fear of men. Howard says jazz like "Maybe, in a sense, your libido is still tied to the past. Unconsciously, you may still have that distorted conception of sex your aunt drilled into you, something sadistic and murderous." When the latest of many tests provides evidence that Alice is allergic to "household dust," Howard suspects her allergies are psychosomatic--maybe Alice's system reacts to dust because Alice was raped on a dusty couch!
By some unbelievable coincidence the household dust for the allergy test came from the same room where the strangler was found dead, and when Alice is given the first shot to relieve her allergy symptoms she dies of a bronchospasm.
Maybe all that psychoanalytic stuff felt fresh in 1946, but to 48-year-old MPorcius, in 2019, who has seen many movies and TV shows with psychoanalaytic elements, it feels tired and boring. Even if Leiber here is introducing it as a red herring and using it to portray Howard as a callous dope, it takes up too much space. The business of the dust sample used for the allergy test coming from the strangler's room is kind of ridiculous--are we supposed to think the strangler's ghost contrived via some uncanny influence to have dust from his body selected for use by the lab that Howard works with so it would be introduced into Alice's bloodstream and, because it is imbued with the strangler's consciousness or evil, it somehow killed her? Or just that it was a crazy coincidence, and Alice really did die because her subconscious recognized the dust of her rapist entering her body again and just couldn't take it? Either explanation is too complicated and unlikely for the reader to accept, crippling the story.
Gotta give this one a thumbs down.
Etchison died earlier this year--check out Will Errickson's post from May commemorating Etchison's life and career at his terrific blog Too Much Horror Fiction. I thought Etchison's 1979 story "The Dead Line" quite good; and am happy to report that I found this one, which first appeared in the short-lived SF magazine Gamma, equally admirable.
"Wet Season" is an effective horror story that plays on our sadness over the deaths of our loved ones, anxieties regarding unpredictable natural forces like the weather, and dismay over the changes to our environs and our own lives wrought by the arrival of new people. Madden recently married Lorelei, a slim beauty with cool skin who moves with a dancer's grace; she brought with her to their marriage a pair of giggling twin boys. Madden finds himself unable to bond with the strange little boys, and doesn't enjoy much emotional intimacy with beautiful Lorelei, either. Not long after their marriage Madden's daughter from a previous marriage dies, drowned in the bathtub. This tragedy precipitates a mind-blowing talk with Madden's brother, who lays out the clues, both quantitative--weather patterns and old photographs--and qualitative--unnerving feelings about changes in the town and in Madden's home--that suggest that, over the last two or three years, Madden, as well as other men in town, have married aquatic monsters who are transforming the county into some kind of swamp and killing anyone who stumbles on the horrible truth!
Much of "Wet Season" reads like a mature mainstream story about loss and relationships--Madden's relationship with his brother, his heartbreak over the death of his daughter, and his failure to relate with the giggling twins and his slinky beauty of a wife ring true and gave me chills. The weird monster stuff that comes at the end is also good, and is effectively foreshadowed throughout the earlier parts of the story, so the realistic human drama elements and the Lovecraftian infiltration-by-and-miscegenation-with-evil-fish-people climax make a seamless whole. Bravo.
An enthusiastic thumbs up for this one!
"The Shadow Over Innsmouth," from 1936, is one of Lovecraft's masterpieces (I gushed about it in early 2018); let's see what connections to that story, if any, Derleth contrives in this story, which first appeared in his 1971 anthology Dark Things and has since been reprinted in the various collections of Derleth/Lovecraft "collaborations" going under variations of the title The Watchers Out of Time. (It is my understanding that the stories in The Watchers Out of Time were essentially written by Derleth but that Lovecraft's meager posthumous contributions have often been exaggerated for marketing reasons.)
"Innsmouth Clay" is a sort of memoir about vanished sculptor Jeffrey Corey, penned by his closest friend and the administrator of his estate. Around the time of the events described in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," Corey returned to America from Paris and moved into a seaside cottage five miles south of Innsmouth, home to some relatives of Corey's with whom he had never had much interaction. After the Federal raid on Innsmouth and the Navy attack on the submarine colony of fish people mentioned in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," Corey found some blue clay washed up on the beach and decided to make a sculpture of a sea goddess out of it. Like the guy in "The Call of Cthulhu," Corey does some sculpting while asleep, and wakes up to find he has given his sea goddess gills!
The narrator provides text from Corey's journal describing his dreams, dreams it is obvious to us are in fact memories of his real nocturnal activities, which include having sex with a mysterious woman and bringing his sea goddess sculpture to the ocean, where Corey swims with fish people.
The narrator accompanies Corey on one of his visits to the half-ruined town of Innsmouth, where they see the destruction wreaked by the Federal raid and talk to an old local who rehashes all the stuff we learned in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."
Eventually Corey and the sculpture disappear, and the final scene of the story describes the narrator's outing in a row boat, during which he is exposed to evidence that Corey has joined the fish people (like the guy in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," Corey is descended from the fish people, something Derleth makes clear on the story's first page) and that his blue clay sculpture of a beautiful woman has, like Pygmalion's, come to life and become his lover.
"Innsmouth Clay" is a pointless exercise that paint-by-numbers-style rehearses Lovecraftian themes and directly appropriates Lovecraft's characters and settings but denudes them of the mystery, horror and disgust that gave them power in their original form. Derleth's only original elements, the Pygmalion business of sculpting a hot chick who comes to life to be your girlfriend, doesn't mesh at all with Lovecraft's philosophical ideas or emotional themes. "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" is a tragedy about degeneration, miscegenation, murder and parasitism, about learning truths (including about yourself) that are almost too horrible to face and lead to cataclysmic destruction, but the story of Pygmalion (and apparently Corey's own story) is a love story about the generosity of a deity, the joy of creation and the achievement of your heart's desire. Derleth fails--he doesn't even seem to try--to integrate these two disparate components of the story, so "Innsmouth Clay" is not only totally derivative, but emotionally incoherent in a way that undermines the virtues and attractions of the source material he is stealing from.
A frustrating waste of time.
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| 1992 and 2008 editions of The Watchers Out of Time |
Etchison's "Wet Season" is really good, but the Leiber and Derleth stories are misfires and I wonder why McCauley chose them. Well, we'll read more from Night Chills and get a further sense of McCauley's taste in the near future.
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