McCauley tells us he chose the stories for Night Chills based largely on the fact that they were not yet published in widely available books. Bloch's "The Funny Farm" was first printed in August Derleth's anthology Dark Things (I denounced Derleth's own story from Dark Things just a few blog posts ago) and I think qualifies as a rare Bloch story; to this day it has only been printed four times, according to isfdb, and two of those times have been in French language collections. I guess Robert Bloch completists need a copy of Dark Things or Night Chills in their collections.
Joe Satterlee has been collecting newspaper comics since he was seven years old, back in the Twenties. Today, in the early Seventies, he is retired, the hermitish owner of a huge collection of comic strips.
We've remarked on Bloch's cultural conservatism before; for example, there's his denunciation of youth rebellion in 1958's "A Lesson for the Teacher," and his portrayals of Tinseltown as an immoral cesspool in 1957's "Terror Over Hollywood" and 1971's "The Animal Fair." Here in "The Funny Farm," setting the stage and building up the character of Satterlee, Bloch serves out a hearty helping of nostalgia, opining that "The funny pages were actually funny in those days," and then layering on many long sentences that consist of extensive lists of comic strips of the 1920s, '30s and '40s and allusions and references to their characters. I know a little bit about Superman, Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy and Krazy Kat, but a lot of these comics meant zilch to me.
Once Bloch has set the stage for us, he introduces the plot--a professional thief learns of Satterlee's collection, then (as we say) cases the joint, and then, late at night, breaks in, hoping to steal a fortune in comic books. Of course Satterlee doesn't have any comic books--he just collects the newspaper funny pages. Enraged, the burglar murders Satterlee, but then we get the predictable and totally lame gimmick I was hoping Bloch would refrain from indulging in--comic strip characters come to life and mete out vigilante justice; the goofy specifics are that Little Orphan Annie commands her dog Sandy to tear out the thief's throat.
Not good; the plot is mediocre and the story seems to be merely a vehicle for Bloch to talk about the old comic strips, but it is not clear if he is praising or satirizing the strips and the attachment of readers to them--he just sort of lists them, without saying anything interesting about them. Maybe I can recommend "The Funny Farm" to people who already know who Dixie Dugan, Moon Mullins and Major Hoople are--perhaps they will be able to appreciate nuances in the tale that went over my head. (For example, is the fact that Little Orphan Annie leads the attack on the thief supposed to be a surprise or a joke to readers, because Annie is a little girl, or is it a knowing acknowledgement that the Annie strip actually was full of crime, war and sharp commentary on current events including sympathetic portrayals of vigilante violence?)
"Minnesota Gothic" first appeared under a pseudonym in the same issue of Fantastic that carried another Disch story, "A Thesis on Social Norms and Social Controls in the U.S.A.," and the first part of the serialized Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story "Lords of Quarmall." (Fritz Leiber co-wrote "Lords of Quarmall" with his friend Harry Fischer and there is reason to consider it the first Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story, but when I read "Lords of Quarmall" back in the Eighties in my Jeff Jones-adorned copy of Swords Against Wizardry I thought it had a different tone than most of the other Fafhrd and Mouser stories and did not care for it. Probably I should read it again.)
Seven-year-old Gretel is living in Onamia, Minnesota, a world of gravel roads and clapboard farmhouses, though it seems her parents are more in tune with city life. "Minnesota Gothic" is the story of Gretel's relationship with her neighbor, 100-year-old Minnie Haeckel, reputed to be a witch. When Gretel was younger her mother would threaten to give her to Minnie Haeckel if she refused to eat her vegetables, and when Gretel's grandfather out in California dies and her parents have to fly out to the left coast they leave their young daughter with the strange Haeckel woman, in whose house Gretel has weird and life-altering experiences.
Disch is one of the best prose writers in SF, and this story is a pleasure to read; Disch manages to achieve not only a real sense of menace, but a level of childish whimsy and even what you might call psychological insight or wisdom about human nature. The plot contains many references and allusions to the famous story of Hansel and Gretel, and I have to admit I found elements of the plot a little confusing, maybe because I'm not intimately familiar with a legit 18th- or 19th-century version of Hansel and Gretel.
Minnie Haeckel has a familiar that looks like her dead brother Lew, who died in 1923 in a car wreck in far off New York. I'm not sure if the creature is 1) the brother brought back to ghoulish life, 2) Lew's reanimated corpse inhabited by a spirit or demon or whatever, or 3) a spirit or whatevs that has been made to look like Lew. The familiar connives with Gretel to destroy Minnie, and at some points talks like he is Lew ("She hexed me. I was a thousand miles away, I was in New York....She made my leg go bum,") but other times talks like maybe he is a different being made to look like Lew or inhabit Lew's cadaver ("...Minnie had to have something that looked like her brother--so she dug him up. I had to do all the work....") The familiar seems to be sexually attracted to seven-year-old Gretel, and suggests that Gretel, now a witch in her own right--and he now her familiar-- transform him into a likeness of Fabian or Bobby Kennedy; Gretel instead opts to turn him into a cocker spaniel. If Gretel really could make the familiar look like the crooner who gave the world "Tiger" or the third or fourth most famous of Marilyn Monroe's sex partners, this implies that there was no reason for Minnie to dig up Lew's corpse to make the creature look like Lew. Another data point: Minnie spends her last moments, just before Gretel breaks the spell that has been keeping her alive past her natural term, digging around Lew's grave. I just can't make all these clues add up.As when I read Gene Wolfe, often when I read Tom Disch I feel like I am reading the work of a genius, work that, while satisfying, has facets I am not quite able to grasp.
"Minnesota Gothic" was reprinted in Fundamental Disch, the 1980 anthology edited by Samuel R. Delany; I actually own a copy and have blogged about some of its contents.
You know I love Weird Tales. H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Edmond Hamilton, C. L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Ray Bradbury, and on and on. Well, one member of the Weird Tales gang whose work I have never read is Carl Jacobi. Today I cross a new frontier and explore another tract of weird country in hopes that it will be to my taste and present me another rich vein of weird goodness to mine.
Minnesotan Jacobi sets "The Face in the Wind" on a crumbling English country estate named Royalton; the tale is narrated by a Hampstead, the 20th-century inheritor of the decayed estate. Hampstead decides to get a wall on the estate repaired; he calls this wall the "frog wall" because it was originally built (he has been led to believe) to keep frogs from the nearby marsh out of the estate because their croaking would make it hard for the Hampsteads to sleep. A young painter Hampstead has befriended, Peter Woodley, begs the narrator to cancel the repairs because he believes the wall is a mystical barrier against an unspecified entity and any change will weaken the barrier. Hampstead gets the gaps in the 18th-century wall patched up anyway, and, sure enough, that very night, minutes after midnight, a giant bird attacks the estate and Hampstead shoots an antique percussion cap pistol at it from a window, driving it off. Bizarrely, the bird had the face of a beautiful woman!
Only one other person lives on the decrepit estate, Classilda Haven, a hideous septuagenarian woman who has rented the gardener's cottage for the last four months. She had urged Hampstead to tear the frog wall down entirely, saying that she loves frogs. The day after the giant bird attack, Hampstead notices that the old crone looks kind of like a bird, and Woodley shows him a canvas he painted the night before, while in a sort of daze, a landscape showing the frog wall and the half ruined manor house where our narrator resides. Hampstead keeps the painting, and, by looking at it in a mirror, suddenly sees the lovely feminine face of that monster bird, cunningly hidden in the brushstrokes!
That night, at the frog wall gate, hidden in the shadows, Hampstead watches Haven conduct a sort of ritual that apparently summons a sleepwalking Woodley, but the painter wakes up and flees before the woman can be whatever she had planned to him. The next day Hampstead finds that Woodley's painting has been stolen from a locked cabinet in the manor house, and when Woodley shows up, his arm, where Haven touched him, is a blackened gangrenous mess. Woodley shows Hampstead an 18th-century book about magic that Hampstead hadn't realized was in his own library, and convinces the narrator that Classilda Haven is a harpy who has been terrorizing Hampstead's family throughout history. Woodley has a bottle of holy water and a bow and two silver arrows and that night they fight Haven and her two harpy sisters; Haven and Woodley are both killed (Haven evaporates, leaving no corpse), Hampstead is permanently scarred (his hair turns white) and the other two harpies just leave after being sprinkled with holy water.
This story stinks. The plot is just a bunch of silly events jumbled together haphazardly without any kind of connective tissue, no foreshadowing or building of suspense or anything like that. The supernatural elements make little sense. Jacobi withholds and reveals information in a way that seems arbitrary rather than guided by some kind of narrative strategy. None of the characters or images are the least bit interesting. It feels like the author was just making it all up as he went along and never bothered to do any revisions. Long and tedious, "The Face in the Wind" is incompetent and McCauley's inclusion of it in his anthology is inexcusable.
Or is it? In the program to the 1983 World Fantasy Convention is an article by SF historian Sam Moskowitz in which Moskowitz, based upon the extensive records kept by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, lists the most popular stories in Weird Tales from 1924 to 1940. (I wrote about this fascinating article in connection with Edmond Hamilton back in 2017.) Moskowitz indicates that readers' favorite story in the April 1936 issue of Weird Tales was the final installment of the serialized version of Robert Howard's Conan novel The Hour of the Dragon (The Hour of the Dragon is actually probably my own favorite Conan story.) But in second place, with 14 people writing in to Weird Tales to praise it, is Jacobi's "The Face in the Wind." I may think it sucks, but it seems like Weird Tales readers appreciated it, so maybe by making it available almost 40 years after its first publication McCauley was doing the weird community a service.
"The Face in the Wind" would be reprinted twice more in the 1970s, in a British volume featuring the severed head of a woman hanging from a nail on its cover and an American volume whose cover bears a characteristically over-the-top Stephen King blurb and a stupid gimmicky illustration that is reminding me of the work of Giuseppe Arcimboldo.
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| A better image of Les Edwards's painting for The Tomb from Beyond is available here |
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I can heartily endorse four stories from Night Chills--the Disch, the Howard, the Wagner and the Etchison, but there seem to be quite a few clunkers in there (at least in my opinion!)
It's back to space opera in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log--see you then!
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