Strange Stories from 1940 by Henry Kuttner, August Derleth, and Robert Bloch

If you search for the name Sam Moskowitz on the internet archive, one of the books that comes up is an anthology from 1973 titled Horrors in Hiding, edited by Moskowitz and Alden H. Norton.  Horrors in Hiding, we are told in an introduction, collects "horror masterpieces little known and unknown," none of which has ever appeared before in an anthology.  One of these forgotten masterpieces was by Henry Kuttner, "Time to Kill," and I figured I would read that, being a Kuttner fan.  "Time to Kill" first appeared in a 1940 issue of Strange Stories, along with another Kuttner tale appearing under a pseudonym, two stories by August Derleth (one appearing under a pen name) and a story by Robert Bloch.  Curious, I decided to read all five of these stories--if you want to take a free-of-charge trip to the pop culture of 1940 yourself, you can also read them at the internet archive here.

"Time to Kill" by Henry Kuttner

Here is the story Moskowitz and Norton thought a masterpiece, so we can afford to have high hopes for this one.

The narrator of "Time to Kill" is a physician living in a ruined city devastated by an ongoing war.  His wife and children were killed in the first air raid, and since then the city has been blasted to rubble by bombs and artillery shells--the front is nearby, and all day and night he can hear the heavy guns.  Kuttner does a good job of setting a mood, describing the wreck of the city and the psychological strain on the few surviving inhabitants, who find shelter and scavenge food as best they can.  Presumably inspired by the progress of the Second World War, Kuttner strikes an apocalyptic tone, with characters saying things like "It's the end.  Man's committing suicide.  We can't escape" and "We're in hell here.  We can't get out of it.  The whole land--the entire world for that matter..." and "We were the damned." 

The physician lives in a half-ruined office with another guy, Rudolph Harmon.  Harmon is a mechanic or engineer or something, and, to pass time, he repairs a dictaphone he found in the office.  One night he, in a daze, records a first person narrative onto the dictaphone--the stream of consciousness story of a murderer who strangles a dog and then a soldier!  When he goes out scavenging the next day Harmom hears that a soldier has indeed been murdered, and he also finds the corpse of a strangled dog!  That was no dream, but a reflection of reality!  Is Harmon one of those Jekyll and Hyde characters with a second personality that commits heinous atrocities?  Or has the intolerable stress of the war altered his mind so that he is involuntarily receiving telepathic transmissions from another person, a person driven by a lust to kill?

Moskowitz and Norton were right to try to bring this story to the attention of 1970s horror fans--it is quite good.  Bravo to them and of course to Henry Kuttner.

"The Room of Souls" by Henry Kuttner (as by Keith Hammond)

This one wouldn't be reprinted until 2016, in The Watcher at the Door: The Early Kuttner, Volume Two.

Eldon Forsythe is back home in New York after a three-year trip to Baghdad, Damascus, and Tibet, where he studied demonology, learned hypnotism and joined a cult!  This adventure drained his bank account, so he enlists the help of a Manhattan socialite, Shackleton, who pretends to be a satanist in order to gull wealthy decadents.  Forsythe, who can really summon demons and perform other supernatural feats, dominates Shackleton with ease and steps up Shackleton's operations--they get the wealthy decadents to put fake charities (owned by Forsythe) in their wills, then Forsythe uses his occult powers to get them to step off of balconies, one by one.  Soon Forsythe and Shackleton are incredibly rich, but Shackleton's exposure to real supernatural phenomena, and his guilty conscience over the murders, are ruining his mental and physical health.  Shackleton wants out of the supernatural murder biz, but of course Forsythe won't let him break off their partnership and live, so Shackleton sets a death trap for Forsythe.  Who (if anybody) will survive their desperate battle of wits and oriental sorcery? 
 
Mediocre filler--we'll judge this one barely acceptable.

"The Four Who Came Back" by August Derleth (as by Tally Mason)

I can't say I have whole-heatedly enjoyed all the fiction I've read by August Derleth before, but he is an important figure in the history of speculative fiction, particularly the weird, so let's give him a chance today.

A hobo is riding the rails through the Wisconsin night.  An employee of the railroad sees him, and he is forced to leave the train in the middle of nowhere.  He comes upon a house, knocks, asks the woman who answers if he can spend the night there.  She assents, and he lays down on a cot in a backroom while, incongruously, the woman and two men in the front room discuss their recent hijacking of a shipment of booze owned by some gangster named Redding.  Redding suddenly busts into the house and shoots down the three thieves; the woman gets one shot off, winging the gangster.  Redding arranges the corpses so it looks like the thieves got in a argument and then all shot each other, and departs.  The hobo finds the local sheriff and tells his story; it turns out that the murders the hobo witnessed took place three months ago--the hobo saw these vicious criminals' ghosts!  The cops had fallen for Redding's ruse, but Redding hasn't escaped scot-free; just last night he died of an infection because he hadn't gotten that bullet wound looked at.

Ridiculous filler, but so ridiculous it made me laugh, so I can't deny I enjoyed it.  "The Four Who Came Back" would have to wait until 2009 to be reprinted in The Sleepers and Other Wakeful Things: The Ghost Stories of August Derleth.

"After You, Mr. Henderson" by August Derleth

Henderson, Inc. is a brokerage firm founded fifty years ago.  The firm has a high reputation, having been ably managed for thirty years by its founders, Enoch and Joshua Henderson, and for the last twenty by Latichia, Enoch's daughter, who owns 40% of the business.  Joshua's sons, Eliot and Lucas, each own 25% of the firm (10% is in the hands of outside investors.)  Eliot and Lucas always want to pull risky deals and manipulate the stock market in ways that skirt the rules of ethics and government regulations, but conservative and moralistic Latichia, determined to preserve the family firm's good reputation, has always prevented them.  But today Latichia lies on her death bed, and Eliot and Lucas are planning to launch one of their risky and unethical schemes the moment she expires!

After Latichia dies, complicated transactions that I'm not sure I understand take place: Eliot and Lucas try to dump their stocks in Continental so the price will go down and then they can buy them back at a lower price, but the ghost of Latichia appears on the trading floor and by her own trades in Continental ruins her cousins and also preserves Henderson, Inc. and makes sure the firm's business will pass into the portfolio of another reputable brokerage firm so that the Henderson name will not be besmirched.  I think.  Anyway, Eliot and Lucas end up so deep in debt that they commit suicide  by jumping out a skyscraper window.  (Maybe this is the special "It's raining rich guys" issue of Strange Stories.)

I don't find stock trading to be very interesting, so I'm giving this one a marginal negative vote.  Derleth himself, or somebody else at Arkham House, thought highly enough of "After You, Mr. Henderson" that it was included in the 1948 Derleth collection Not Long for this World, which you can buy on ebay for over $100.00.

"Power of the Druid" by Robert Bloch

The Roman Emperor Tiberius is bored of life and work in Rome, and so has retired to the island of Capri, where he desperately pursues entertainment and pleasure.  One diversion with which he occupies his time is torturing people!  When a hapless fisherman offers the Emperor a gift of a lobster, Tiberius has his German guards thrust the lobster in his face until it tears out the fisherman's eyes with its claws.  Yikes!  Now blind, the fisherman falls off a seaside cliff to his death.  (It's raining poor guys, too!)

Another man comes to visit Tiberius, a man who proves impervious to the Emperor's efforts to mangle and murder him--after shrugging off the futile Roman and German attacks, this strange figure introduces himself as the Archdruid of all Britain.  He claims he left Britain because his position of leadership there was stifling his ambition to become rich.  Tiberius and the Druid cut a deal--Tiberius will make the Druid rich, and the Druid will transfer Tiberius's soul into the body of his young nephew, Caligula, when Tiberius's death approaches.  Bloch goes on to describe how the crimes and insanities of Caligula's reign were the result of the fact that Tiberius inhabited Caligula's body and that Tiberius kept following the Druid's counterintuitive advice.

The story's gore livens things up a little, but "Power of the Druid" is essentially boring and kind of shoddy, a jokey tone undermining any horror or shock the gruesome and wizardly elements might generate.  It would be republished in 1998 in the Bloch collection Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies.

**********

With the exception of Kuttner's "Time to Kill," which bears the marks of committed craftsmanship and pursuit of an artistic vision, these are filler stories of varying entertainment value, of interest primarily to students of SF history and the careers of Kuttner, Derleth and Bloch.

More old short stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log--I believe the next crop will be more akin to the traditional notion of science fiction (speculations on life in the future) and less in the realm of horror or the weird.