Stories by Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch and Donald Wandrei from Avon Fantasy Reader 9 (1949)

In our last episode we read a 1935 story by Clark Ashton Smith, "The Flower-Women," that in 1949 was reprinted in Donald Wollheim's Avon Fantasy Reader.  Let's read three more stories that appeared in that issue of the magazine, tales by people we are interested in here at MPorcius Fiction Log: Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, and Donald Wandrei.

"The Man Who Never Grew Young" by Fritz Leiber (1947)

This story by the Grey Mouser scribe first appeared in a hardcover collection of Leiber stories published by Arkham House, Night's Black Agents.  "The Man Who Never Grew Young" has been widely anthologized and included in many Leiber collections since its first appearance, including in Ballantine's 1974 paperback The Best of Fritz Leiber.  I own a copy of the 1979 second printing of The Best of Fritz Leiber (purple cover, $2.25) that I got years ago at a book sale at the Des Moines Public Library's  South Side branch.  I am reading "The Man Who Never Grew Young" in that book, as the typeface is more comfortable for my 48-year-old eyes than that in the scan of Avon Fantasy Reader No. 9.

To my disappointment, this is a gimmicky story about time running backward.  Almost the entire text (like seven and a half pages in my 1979 paperback) is sentences like "I have seen Shakespeare unwrite the great plays" and scenes like those in which a weeping old woman goes to a funeral to watch her husband dug up and then he is taken to an embalmer to have embalming fluid taken out of his veins and blood put in and tedious sketches of history running in reverse, like how the Indians drove the white man out of the New World.

The narrator is a guy like John Carter who has lived forever; while everybody else rises from his death bed or from a battlefield or murder site and grows young and eventually climbs into his mother's womb, this dude is always in his mid-thirties.  His earliest memory is of living in the 20th (I guess) century, in the US.  It appears that a nuclear war caused time to run backwards, and the narrator has lived for thousands of years as history has regressed from the space age to the Bronze Age, and at the time of his relating this story it is the dawn of the civilization of Ancient Egypt.

There is no character, no plot, no feeling to this story, it is just an idea that, I guess, people find clever, and that, I suppose, is meant to inspire a reaction from the audience by exploiting our fear of nuclear war.  Leiber's effort to dramatize his idea is repetitive and silly.

Lame.

It looks like Damon Knight, Les Daniels, and Terry Carr
all liked "The Man Who Never Grew Young" a lot more than I did 

"The Unspeakable Betrothal" by Robert Bloch (1949) 

"The Unspeakable Betrothal" made its first appearance in Avon Fantasy Reader, which of course consists mostly of reprints, and in an intro Wollheim explains why.  He (Wollheim) was editing a book for Avon, The Girl with the Hungry Eyes and Other Stories, and Bloch's "The Unspeakable Betrothal" was supposed to be in it, but had to be cut for space reasons.

Since its debut the story has appeared in many Bloch collections and anthologies, and I read it in a scan of Marvin Kaye's 1995 Angels of Darkness: Tales of Troubled and Troubling Women.  You've come a long way, baby.

If the Fritz Leiber story we read today is a below average example of his work, we are fortunate in that "The Unspeakable Betrothal" is an above average specimen of Robert Bloch's writing.  The story moves quickly, and Bloch does a good job of describing its setting and the protagonist's feelings, and of mixing Lovecraftian horror with the ordinary horror of our lives, and of maintaining a level of ambiguity about the heroine: is she a victim or a hero, should we bemoan what she is doing as a catastrophic error or admire her for taking charge of her own life?

The plot:  As a little girl Avis (for once Bloch's wordplay is legitimately clever, as this girl gains the ability to fly) preferred laying in her bed and looking out the circular window high in the wall of her top story room to playing outside or reading books.  The wind that came through the window caressed her, and through the window she pretended she could see other worlds--she told the stories of those other worlds to a little boy, Marvin.  As time went by, on nights without a moon, she began to hear voices, see visions of impossible creatures; these beings wanted her to join them on Yuggoth, and she wanted to go with them, but they warned her that for her to come with them, they would have to alter her body, and as payment for helping her she would have to surrender something of herself to them.  She agreed, and one night her aunt and uncle, with whom she lived, found her perilously perched on the edge of the open window, which was much too high for her to have reached by any ordinary means.  They saved her from falling to her death, boarded up the window, and forced her to start playing outside and acting more like a regular kid.

I am totally in love with Tom Barber's
cover illo for this edition of
Mysteries of the Worm; the croc and the
bones are great, but the sunlight and shadow
on the walls are what really sell it

Avis grew up, went to college, Marvin and her got engaged.  But then her aunt and uncle died in a car wreck, and Marvin was sent overseas as part of his military service, leaving Avis alone in the big house.  She has the boards over the round window removed, and renews her relationship with the voices.  When Marvin gets back, eager to marry Avis, she is ill with a sickness no doctor can really understand, and she tells Marvin she doesn't want to get married, that she doesn't belong "here," like he does, but "somewhere else."

Can Marvin stop her from going to Yuggoth?  What form could her trip there possibly take?  What do the aliens want in return for aiding her?  Should we admire Avis as an individualist or feminist who is choosing a life of adventure over the boring domesticity of late 1940s American suburbia, or pity her as a dupe about to be exploited by merciless entities from another universe?

Bloch often disappoints me, but here he does everything just right.  "The Unspeakable Betrothal" works like clockwork--everything makes sense logically and emotionally and the story and individual passages are just the right length, with the right amount of detail and mystery.  Nine out of ten (spoiler alert!) decapitated starry-eyed young ladies!

"The Painted Mirror" by Donald Wandrei (1937)

Wow, this story first appeared in Esquire!  Fancy!  You can see what the original text looked like, as well as the painting of a woman in pink lingerie, black stockings and white heels (hubba hubba) on the page facing the story, at the Esquire website.

A child, Nicholas, is son of a man who owns a pawn shop.  Dad's business practices are a little odd; among other things, he will run a shop in one town for a year or two and then pack up and move to another town.  Nicholas is fascinated by old things and likes to hang around the shop and imagine the story behind each item, weaving elaborate tales about them.

One day Nicholas discovers that the door to the attic of the current location of the shop is unlocked, and he visits the attic for the first time.  Among the old junk and cans of paint and dried up brushes up there, apparently left by previous tenants, is a mirror whose surface is painted black.  A curious kid, Nicholas finds a chisel and commences the tedious project of scraping the mirror clean.  This takes some days, but luckily Dad has not noticed that the attic door has been unlocked and Nicholas can get back up to his little project day after day.  Instead of seeing his own face in the mirror, Nicholas sees a barren landscape interrupted by a cave mouth and a figure, a little girl like an "elfin princess," fleeing the cave!  This mirror is a window into another universe!  The image appears still at first, but Nicholas realizes that in fact it is moving at a very slow pace.  Over the course of a few days the beautiful little girl seems to take notice of Nicholas and begin running towards the mirror, her face, originally contorted with terror, taking on a look of hope.  When the lovely figure finally reaches the mirror Nicholas touches it, expecting some kind of wonderful friendship to ensue, but instead his soul is sucked into the slow and horrible mirror world, and an alien soul seizes his own body.  From within the mirror, Nicholas watches, powerless, as his own body takes up a can of black paint and paints over the mirror, trapping Nicholas, perhaps forever in the world of the mirror.

Not bad.

"The Painted Mirror" was first reprinted in the Arkham House collection The Eye and the Finger in 1944, which was translated into French in 1977.

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Of these three, the Bloch is the real find, though for us students of the weird and early 20th-century SF the Leiber and Wandrei are also important texts.

More short stories will be judged without fear or favor in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.