Anyway, today I decided to look at one of these crumbling 60-odd-year-old magazines, one with a particularly fetching cover by Ed Valigursky, the issue of Fantastic for May, 1958. This issue includes a story by a woman I've never heard of before, Genevieve Haugen, a man I've never heard of before, Lawrence Kingery, and two stories by Psycho scribe Robert Bloch, one under a pseudonym. Let's expose these, perhaps rarely read, Eisenhower-era stories to the sunlight of 2020. Feel free to play along--without depleting your PayPal account!--by surfing over to the internet archive.
"The Illegitimate Egg" by Genevieve Haugen
Haugen has four short story credits at isfdb. There is no wikipedia page or imdb page for Haugen, but UCLA holds her papers and their webpage dedicated to her (it has many interesting photos) informs us that she was a pilot, a novelist, a screenwriter and technical adviser for movies involving flight. A real Hollywood character. This story, "The Illegitimate Egg," is named on the cover of Fantastic, and adorned inside with an illustration by the great Virgil Finlay.
Haugen's "The Illegitimate Egg," it turns out, is a pedestrian filler story, very sappy, with many characters crying and many declarations of love expressed by the characters. If I didn't know it was sexist to say so, I would say this is the kind of conventional mainstream story you'd expect a woman to write that has been dressed up in SF trappings, and I suspect whoever composed the intro to the story here in Fantastic (presumably Editor Paul Fairman or Managing Editor Cele Goldsmith) felt the same way, introducing the story by saying, "The author of this story called it science fiction. We call it just plain fun."
(A gander at the letters column of this issue suggests that Fantastic was in this period experimenting with a different style of content, de-emphasizing SF and trying to appeal to a broader--more mainstream and more female--audience. Some letters from readers decry the change and predict doom, others laud it.)
An old farm couple has a seven-year-old son whose hair, eye, and skin color are different than theirs. As the story proceeds we learn that their son has no ears, but does have a long tail, so they dress him as a girl--long hair and long skirts--to hide these oddities. Little Egbert is also very smart for his age, and well-educated, because, while they don't let him go to school, they do bring him books from the library. The kid starts asking why he looks different from everybody else, and Ma and Pa have to admit that he is a foundling, that seven years ago a big egg was left on their porch and when it hatched he came out. Unable to have a child of their own, raising little Egbert has been the only joy in their difficult hardscrabble lives.
The very same night on which they explain to Egbert his true origin, a flying saucer lands and an attractive young woman with Egbert's coloration and her own tail knocks on the door. She explains that she is from Venus and had to leave Egbert here because she and Egbert's father were not married, and hatching him would have caused a scandal; her lover was serving in the war on Mars and has spent the last seven years in a POW camp on the red planet. Now that the war is over they are together again and have gotten married and she wants to have her son back. Maybe this is supposed to be funny.
Egbert is of course excited to be among his own people, but also loves his adoptive Earth parents, so convinces his Venerian mom to bring them along with them to Venus; everybody lives happily ever after.
Barely acceptable.
Kingery only has this one story listed at isfdb. It was reprinted in a 1968 issue of Great Science Fiction, a reprint magazine.
"Snake Pit" is even more lame than "Illegitimate Egg." It feels like an action scene pulled out of a longer piece of fiction--it doesn't really tell a full story, there is no evolution of the characters or surprise ending or anything like that. There is also no SF content, and the style is amarteurish--it feels kind of like something a kid would write.
Big Andy is the town buffoon, a huge man with a childish mind, a sort of pathetic bully who always threatens people but never follows through. Every spring he likes to go out in the woods and hunt rattlesnakes, which he hates for some reason. The narrator gets cajoled into reluctantly accompanying Big Andy on one of these snake killing outings. He is dismayed to find that Big Andy is drunk as they enter the woods, even though it is early morning.
Most of the text of the story consists of a scene in which Big Andy slips and falls into a pit full of rattlesnakes and the narrator tries to rescue him. There is a surfeit of repetitive descriptions of snakes biting the men and the men smashing them with cudgels and stomping on them with boots. Maybe this would be barely acceptable as a scene in a longer work, but, as is, "Snake Pit" feels like a fragment.
Gotta give this one a thumbs down.
"Two By Two" by Robert Bloch (as by E. K. Jarvis)
If isfdb is to be believed, this story by the prolific Robert Bloch has never appeared anywhere else. And not surprisingly, as the story is pretty weak.
A rich guy has built an atomic-powered ocean liner with a computer brain to run it so no crew is required. He advertises a position for a married couple, and employs private eyes and complex tests to select from the applicants the couple with the very top physical and psychological profiles. Our narrator is the male component of the wining couple. But when he and his wife meet the rich guy, who explains to them that he is fleeing to the high seas because he fears the fallout of nuclear weapons tests and eventual nuclear war, they think he is a nut and decline the job of accompanying him.
If you haven't caught the gag already, in the end of the story Bloch makes it obvious. The couple read in the newspaper that the atomic-powered liner has set sail, full of animals. Then, after the test of a new atomic weapon, it begins to rain, and it looks like this rain may never stop.
Barely acceptable.
Here is a story that has been reprinted widely, though under the less weird title "Sweet Sixteen." Just two years later it was included in Arkham House's hardcover Bloch collection Pleasant Dreams--Nightmares, which has reappeared in various forms in paperback, and it was selected for a few anthologies on the theme of devil-worship, like Peter Haining's The Satanists and a DAW book, Devil Worshipers, edited by Greenberg and Waugh.
We've seen a lot of social commentary from Bloch. In "The World Timer" he suggested the institution of the family was the source of our problems. In "The Funnel of God" he denounced almost every aspect of our civilization, including the violence in cartoons! In "The Animal Fair" and "Terror Over Hollywood," Bloch decried Hollywood immorality. Here in "Spawn of the Dark One" the topic is juvenile delinquency and the general decline of our society.
Ben Kerry is an anthropologist who prefers "savages" to civilized people. He lives in the country in order to avoid people as much as possible, and resents all the city folks moving in to the neighborhood. He makes an exception for former student Ted Hibbard, who has just moved into the area so his son Hank wouldn't have to attend crummy city schools full of juvenile delinquents. Kerry warns Hibbard that every weekend teen-aged ruffians take over the rural town where Hibbard has been buying his groceries during the week; Kerry is writing a monograph on these trouble-making kids, and invites Hibbard to accompany him into town Saturday morning to see what the score is.
Bloch shovels on long descriptions of the teenagers thronging the streets of the town: their motorcycles and hot rods; the boys' shaved heads, Mohawks and tight jeans; the girls' cropped hair, overly made-up faces and tight sweaters. We realize how psychopathic these teens are when they intentionally run over a cat!
Back at his place Kerry shows Hibbard his scrap books of newspaper clippings that chronicle increasing rates of violence, drug use, and sex crimes, and we hear synopses of individual cases of parricide and infanticide. They discuss theories as to why this rebellion has occurred and seems to be the purview of the middle classes, not the underprivileged--is it comic books or TV, Hollywood or the long shadow of World War II?
Ahhh, World War II. Kerry, the anthropologist who takes the beliefs of primitive people seriously and is skeptical of civilized man and his science, thinks World War II is key, but not the way Hibbard (or any sensible person) might think. Kerry believes that while their husbands were off serving in the war, the women of America were raped in their sleep by demons--incubi!--and all these hooligans are half-human, half-devil, driven by a lust to rebel, kill and torture that even they do not know the true source of! And nobody will learn any time soon, because Hibbard is the first person Kerry tells his crazy theory to, and the both of them get burned at the stake after young Hank Hibbard is attacked and his father gets intercepted by the fiendish teens while he is on his way to the county seat to get the cops.
This story is mostly lengthy descriptions of the delinquents and a long catalog of atrocities lifted from newspapers--there is very little plot or character development or human feeling. We don't follow a guy figuring out the horrible truth--instead, we sit and listen to a guy tell us the horrible truth over page after page after page. It is easy to imagine a good horror story being developed about a war veteran who is alienated from his son or daughter because the kid is a thug or a slut and who somehow comes to believe that the child he thought was his own is really the product of his wife being raped by a demon and the way this wrecks his relationship with his wife and leads to a fight to the death and even explains broad unwelcome social trends, but Bloch just has the idea, he doesn't do anything interesting or scary or sexy or shocking with it.
Have to give this one a thumbs down. Maybe it was rewritten for inclusion in Pleasant Dreams--Nightmares? As it stands here in Fantastic, the title "Sweet Sixteen" doesn't make any sense.
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These stories aren't too hot; I guess if I had been writing letters to Fantastic in 1958 I would have been mailing in comments like those of Jack Jones of Florida about the March 1958 issue:
More short stories in our next episode...hopefully better ones!
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