Star-Spangled Supernatural Stories by H. P. Lovecraft, Manly Wade Wellman, and Frank Belknap Long

Poking around in the internet archive as I sometimes do, I came upon Marvin Kaye's 1991 anthology Haunted America: Star-Spangled Supernatural Stories.  The gimmicky conceit of this anthology is that it breaks our great nation into five regions, New England, The East, The South, The West, and The Midwest, and presents eight to ten stories for each of the regions.  (One of the questions I would like to ask people here in Maryland, where I have lived, or you might say survived, for like two years now, but which I am way too shy to pose to people, is whether Maryland is in The South.  Manhattanite Kaye assures us that Maryland is in fact in The East.)  I noticed Haunted America contained quite a few pieces of fiction by writers we care about here at MPoricus Fiction Log, so I decided to read some of them.  I was at first reluctant to delve into Haunted America, as Kaye in his self-important and tendentious Introduction (he hates religious people, apparently) hints that this is a book of ghost stories:

Once I found tales of devils, ghouls, monsters, werewolves, witches and vampires frightening, but time has diluted their potency; they are offshoots of a dualistic theology that has wrought great harm on the human mind and spirit.  But ghost stories still chill me.   

I have to admit that Kaye's claim--that monster stories do not scare him but ghost stories do--seems nonsensical to me.  Devils, ghouls, werewolves, witches and vampires are allegories, symbols, of all too real human evil, of the tyrants, murderers, rapists and thieves who threaten our lives and liberty and property every day, as well as nonhuman dangers like disease or predatory creatures or natural disasters.  Such things are truly scary.  But what is a ghost?  A ghost is not a symbol of anything, it is just a pile of hokum, something so obviously untrue that it should have no emotional effect on a person, like Kaye, who realizes religion is bunk.  (Kaye's excuse is a vague assertion that he has witnessed ghostly phenomena himself during his acting career in Great Britain.)  If anything, seeing a ghost should cheer you up rather than scare you, because the existence of a ghost proves that the soul is real and your personality does not expire after death.  In short, I don't care for ghost stories.

Anyway, Kaye then explains that he didn't really limit Haunted America to ghost stories, but, putting the emphasis on the word "haunt," to stories about beings or creatures or whatever closely associated with a particular place.  Alright, then.  Let's take a look at stories Kaye selected by our old friends H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, Fritz Leiber and Barry Malzberg, and two people whose work I am really just beginning to explore, Manly Wade Wellman and Carl Jacobi.  We'll do three stories today and four in the next blog post.

(First I should note that I have already read and scribbled about four stories that appear in Haunted America: Donald Wollheim's "Bones," which I did not like, Henry Kuttner's "We Are the Dead," another dud, Richard Matheson's good "Slaughter House," and Anthony Boucher's "They Bite," which I also enjoyed.)

"The Terrible Old Man" by H. P. Lovecraft (1921)

"The Terrible Old Man," one of Kaye's New England selections, first saw print in the amateur press publication The Tryout, and reappeared in the same 1926 issue of Weird Tales that featured Edmond Hamilton's "The Monster-God of Mamurth."  I read "The Terrible Old Man" in my year 2000 printing of The Dunwich Horror and Others.

This three-page story is written in a sort of ironic, jocular tone.  An old sea captain is said to be hoarding a pile of gold and silver coins.  This guy is shunned by the locals because of his strange ways--it is obvious to us readers that this odd personage has learned some sinister magic while over in the mysterious East, and Lovecraft presents a memorable vision of the captive/preserved souls of the mariner's former shipmates, which are somehow associated with pieces of lead suspended in bottles.  The old sailor will talk to these bottles, and the pieces of lead vibrate in response.  Creepy!

Three interlopers with "ethnic" names--I guess Italian, Slav and Portuguese--try to rob the old man and are killed in a mysterious way.  Their bodies later wash up on the shore, looking as though they have been hacked to death by cutlasses.

Sort of trifling, but entertaining.  I love the thing with the lead in the bottles.  The ethnic identities of the criminals and the light-hearted tone Lovecraft uses as he relates their horrendous deaths presumably reflect Lovecraft's snobby nativism, adding a layer of interest to this early work by one of speculative fiction's most influential and controversial voices.

"Nobody Ever Goes There" by Manly Wade Wellman (1981)

This is one of Wellman's stories of John the Balladeer, and appears here in Kaye's section of stories about The South.  We read a John the Balladeer story, "Trill Coster's Burden," in July, and I thought it pretty good.  "Nobody Ever Goes There" was first printed in the third of a series of four paperback books published in the early 1980s bearing the Weird Tales moniker and edited by Lin Carter.  I read the story in a scan at the internet archive of that 1981 printing, the typeface there being a little easier on my eyes than that in Haunted America.

Trimble is a little town on the Catch River, near the border of Kentucky and North Carolina.  Across the river is plainly visible an abandoned textile mill at the base of Music Mountain.  As a kid Mark always wondered about that old mill and the workers' housing alongside it, but all anybody would ever tell him is that no one ever crosses the bridge to Music Mountain; the one time he tried to cross the bridge the police rushed to stop him.  Eventually the oldest man in town, Glover Shelton, let on that one day seventy-five years ago the entire population of the mill, management, labor, and all their wives and children, suddenly vanished

As an adult Mark is the Trimble school's phys ed teacher, and he is dating the new history teacher, Ruth, a transplant who wants to write a history of Trimble and is curious about that mill on the other side of Catch River.  Old man Shelton is dead, but John the Balladeer is passing through town, and he knows a little about Music Mountain.  The Indians, he relates to the young couple, believe that a race of dangerous monsters lives over there; Native Americans would pacify these creatures by singing to them (hence the mountain's name.)  Impulsive Ruth, a bold seeker after knowledge, runs across the bridge, and Mark chases after her.  When the monsters emerge from the shadows, John saves the day by playing his silver-stringed guitar and singing, thus keeping the creatures at bay.

Wellman's style and pacing are good, making this somewhat slight story a smooth and pleasant entertainment.

"The Elemental" by Frank Belknap Long (1939)

"The Elemental" was first printed in Unknown, a sort of fantasy companion to John W. Campbell Jr.'s seminal Astounding.  I have often found Long's work to be poorly written and poorly constructed, but if both Campbell and Kaye (who files "The Elemental" in Haunted America's section on The South) chose to print it, how bad can "The Elemental" be?

Pretty bad, it turns out.  The tone is uneven, Long unsure if he is writing a joke story or a tragedy, giving us lame jokes in one paragraph and a self-sacrificing death in the next paragraph, only to quickly return to the bad jokes. (I noticed this same unevenness in one of Long's most famous works, "The Horror from the Hills.")  The dialogue is embarrassing.  Long uses incomprehensible metaphors: on the first page our protagonist is at the track in Kentucky, watching a horse race, and Long tells us "She [racehorse Ebony Lady] retook the lead in less than five seconds spurting past three horses like a jet of liquid petrolatum."  Then he uses the exact same terrible metaphor on the next page!  "Like jets of liquid petrolatum three horses, including Radio Crooner, spurted past Ebony Lady."

"The Elemental"'s plot is contrived and dumb.  Wheeler, a man down on his luck, has been possessed by a poltergeist-like spirit that calls itself an elemental.  But even though the spirit is said to possess him, it is Wheeler who controls the spirit, and can command it to achieve telekinetic-like effects, such as making Ebony Lady win the horse race, propelling fat people through the air, and even allowing Wheeler to fly.  Wheeler flies so long that he exhausts the spirit, and he has to land on an island.  Long comes up with the weakest and least convincing possible explanations for why and how the elemental has possessed Wheeler and cannot escape him.  The spirit derives its energy from light, and dies because the island becomes fog bound.  When the spirit dies it explodes in a flash of fire, and the fire attracts the attention of a seaplane full of passengers--the plane lands on the ocean and picks up Wheeler and the passengers give him some of their dry clothes.  The story ends with a joke that a child might have written, right after Wheeler's heartfelt lament that he could feel the spirit dying, and that it died to save him.

This story is very bad, and Long is to blame, which is what matters, but I also want to take a moment to bitch about whoever put Haunted America together.  I briefly compared the versions of "The Elemental" in Unknown and Haunted America and the 1991 version introduces irritating typos that were not in the 1939 version.  Sad!

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You read stories like "The Terrible Old Man" and "Nobody Ever Goes There" and you think, "These stories are pretty good, no big deal."  Then you read something so utterly incompetent as Frank Belknap Long's "The Elemental" and it makes H. P. Lovecraft's and Manly Wade Wellman's basically ordinary work look like scintillating masterpieces.  Maybe Campbell had trouble finding copy, but what is Kaye's excuse for inflicting this stinker on the SF-reading public?

In our next episode we'll read stories Kaye selected to represent the West and MidWest by Robert Howard of Conan fame, Fritz Leiber of Fafhrd and Grey Mouser fame, Carl Jacobi (whom I fear may be as overrated as Frank Belknap Long), and New Jersey's own Barry N. Malzberg.