From the July 1931 Weird Tales: D H Keller, C A Smith & H P Lovecraft

Having been suitably impressed by the style and psychological concepts of David H. Keller's "The Thing in the Cellar," I looked at the isfdb page listing Keller's works, thinking to read something else by him.  My eye alighted on the title, "The Toad God," which struck a chord with me because I like frogs and toads and think the idea of worshiping a batrachian deity is very fun.  Unfortunately, the 1939 issue of Strange Stories in which "The Toad God" makes its sole appearance is not available at the internet archive, and it looks like the only copies on ebay or amazon run over a hundred dollars.  Too bad, because this looks like a great issue of Strange Stories, with an astonishingly grotesque cover and stories by Manly Wade Wellman, Henry Kuttner, August Derleth, and Robert Bloch.  (We actually have already read one of the Kuttner stories in the magazine, "The Hunt.")

Shifting gears, I decided to read Keller's "The Seeds of Death," which was first published in the July 1931 Weird Tales, and, according to Sam Moskowitz's 1983 article "The Most Popular Stories in Weird Tales: 1924 to 1940," the most popular story in the issue.  SF historian Moskowitz, who had acquired Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright's notes, tells us that 21 people wrote in to Weird Tales to praise "The Seeds of Death."  The second place story in the July '31 issue was the reprint of Lovecraft's "The Outsider" with 19 "votes."  I figured I'd reread "The Outsider," and the Clark Ashton Smith story that appears in this issue of WT, "The Venus of Azombeii," as well as ghe Keller.

"The Seeds of Death" by David H. Keller (1931)

The first sentence of this story feels like a joke.  "The Duke of Freud was distinctly unhappy."  Duke of Freud?  Is that a nickname?  Is it a typo?  Neither--this guy, whose name we eventually learn is Ferdinand, is a Spanish aristocrat, currently hanging out in New York, and no reference is made to the similarity of his title or duchy or dukedom or whatever it is to the name of the father of psychoanalysis.

The Duke is a womanizer, and he is unhappy because he just spent an entire year's budget on jewelry and the woman he gave the jewels too just left him.  The Duke has some very strict bankers watching over his finances and they won't be allowing him access to any more money this year, so the Duke looks in the wants ads for a job!  Duke, baby, I've tried this myself, and nothing good will come of it!  If you need a TV or something, just steal one from Target and say you are participating in a mostly peaceful protest!

Through the want ads the Duke finds a job, and as I could have predicted, it is a doozy.  James Garey's brother disappeared while visiting a beautiful woman, Helen Moyennes, at her castle in Spain.  Garey has learned that several other men have similarly disappeared at that woman's castle.  He wants help investigating his brother's vanishing, and the Duke, as a Spaniard and a womanizer accustomed to hanging with people who live in castles, is an ideal applicant and is hired.

The plan is for Garey to visit the Moyennes woman, and then for the Duke to arrive at the castle three or four days later.  Garey will leave secret messages in the castle for the Duke that, should Garey also disappear, will help the Duke figure out what happened to him and the other men.  In the event, when the duke arrives Garey has indeed vanished, but his secret messages are not very helpful.  The Duke does succeed in impressing Helen Moyennes--she calls him "a real man" after he takes her on a dangerous drive on mountain roads.  (When I drive dangerously on mountain roads my wife just calls me a maniac.)  Moyennes, it is revealed, has had her eye on the Duke even when he was back in New York--she gives him as a gift the jewels he gave to the woman who dumped him!  She hints that she wants to marry the Duke and live out her life with him.

When the Duke presses her to explain what happened to all the men who preceded him, she tells a crazy story about discovering strange seeds which, when eaten, paralyze a person and then grow in his stomach, living off his tissues, until he is a mummified husk and out his mouth and nose emerge beautiful orchids.  These orchids have strange properties, apparently having absorbed some of the animal life of their hosts--Helen wears flowers that she has picked from the bodies of her victims, and their long stamens and pistils move, caressing her breasts and face like a lover!  These blossoms bring the greatest of pleasures to the diabolical Helen, and she has been tricking the men into ingesting the seeds in order to assure herself a fresh supply of these beloved joy-sparking orchids!  As she shows Ferdinand, the many guest rooms of the castle are each tenanted by a dead or paralyzed man, each hosting a crop of orchids in a different stage of their life cycle.

Ferdinand is inclined to kill Helen, and I am right there with him, but Helen's servants also have guns, and will blast him the instant he blasts her.  Ferdinand and Helen are both gamblers, and she proposes a life and death game that will determine which of them should eat one of the seeds and become the fertile ground for the next crop of weird orchids.  She cheats, and Ferdinand joins the Garey brothers in a lingering death, becoming the host to another batch of the orchids whose caresses give Helen's otherwise lonely life meaning.

Not great, but acceptable.  In some ways this is more of a mystery than a weird story.  Christine Campbell Thomson included "The Seeds of Death" in her 1931 anthology At Dead of Night, and Robert A. W. Lowndes selected it for republication in his Magazine of Horror in 1964. 

"The Venus of Azombeii" by Clark Ashton Smith (1931)

I'm reading this one in a scan of the 2015 anthology, The End of the Story, which will, I presume, have a text closer to Smith's original intent, if somebody at Weird Tales in 1931 saw fit to make any alterations to Smith's manuscript.

Julius Marsden of San Francisco spent two years travelling in Africa, a continent which had long fascinated him.  He brought back with him a finely crafted foot-tall statuette carved from black wood, the image of a woman much like the famous Venus de' Medici, but with more African features.  The narrator of the frame story, one of the reclusive Marsden's few friends, also notices that Marsden seems nervous and unhealthy, and his health declines rapidly until, like two months after his return from Africa, he is a shriveled wreck of a man--a mysterious disease seems to have actually shrunk him.  Marsden gives his friend a manuscript to be read after he has died and three quarters of the story consists of this manuscript, which describes the astonishing ups and downs of Marden's last few months in Africa.

Marsden was being rowed up a river by some "negroid Mohammedans" when they approached an area they called "Azombeii."  The Muslim boatmen were so scared of the people of Azombeii, explaining they were pagans who worshiped a goddess Wanaos and kept to themselves, having never been pacified by the Muslims who conquered this region long ago or the Germans who currently administer the area, that, after Marsden expressed interest in meeting the Azombeii, they abandoned him in the jungle, sneaking off while he slept.

Upon awakening Marsden met a woman of great beauty, a woman with black skin but features much like a particularly comely Italian or Greek.  This was the queen of the Azombeii, Mybaloe.  She lead him to her village.  The Azombeii, Marsden found, were better-looking, cleaner and more organized than any African pagans he had run into before.  They hated Muslims, but adored white people.  Talking to one member of the tribe who had been to Nigeria and spoke English, Marsden came to believe that in ancient times a party of Romans settled with this tribe, which explains their mixed race character, their worship of a goddess much like Venus, and the sculptures much like the Venus de' Medici in the village.

Marsden quickly fell in love with Mybaloe, who was kind and clever and sweet as well as beautiful, and with the blessing of almost every person in the village they were married in an orgiastic ceremony in a cavern that serves as the Azombeii temple to Venus.  But one guy resented Marsden, high priest Mergawe, the feared witch doctor!  Until Marsden showed up with his white skin, Mergawe had figured he would be marrying gorgeous Mybaloe!

Marsden's life for some weeks was a paradise--he was married to a beautiful queen, living in communion with nature:

I lived as never before, and never again, to the full capacity of my physical being.  I knew, as an aborigine knows, the mystic impact of perfume and color and savor and tactual sensation.  Through the flesh of Mybaloe, I touched the primal reality of the physical world.

But there was trouble in paradise!  While Mybaloe was away on some diplomatic mission to a sub-village or something like that, Mergawe pushed Marsden into a pool full of crocodiles!  Mybaloe, warned by a premonition of evil, arrived just in time to jump into the pool, kill two crocs with her dagger, and pull Marsden to safety!

Mergawe was driven from the village, but he was not through working his evil!  He contrived to poison Marsden with a magic potion that would shrivel him up after months of agony!  When she realized this, Mybaloe, refusing to live on without her husband, drank some of the poison herself!  That is real love!  The Azombeii caught Mergawe and threw him to the crocs.

Marsden and Mybaloe decided it would be too upsetting to watch each other shrink and die, so they agreed that he should return to America.  She gave him one of the statuettes of Venus carved by a Roman long ago as a keepsake.

"The Venus of Azombeii" is not bad.  Obviously its equating of good looks and civilization and intelligence with Europeans and the opposite with Africans would be unacceptable today.  The story also exhibits such noble savage tropes as the idea that nonwhites are close to nature and the physical world and benefit thereby.  Perhaps a little more surprising is the way Smith connects the idea that Africans are oversexed with the European goddess Aphrodite/Venus.  Seeing a woman rescue a man from crocodiles by killing them with a knife was also unexpected--when the queen suddenly appeared on the scene as Marsden was being chased down by the crocs, weapon in hand, I expected her to give the blade to Marsden so he could fight the reptiles!

Where "The Venus of Azombeii" falls a little short is in the plot and structure.  There is a lack of suspense and surprise in the second half of the story--as soon as Mergawe is introduced we know how Marsden got sick, for example.  The story also lacks a proper climax, Smith failing to raise the emotional pitch higher with the poisoning than he already had with the wedding and the fight with the crocodiles.  The whole crocodile scene, though I like it, doesn't really add to the plot or atmosphere--other scenes establish Mergawe's animosity towards Marsden and Mybaloe's dedication to Marsden.  Maybe the crocodile business was added to the story so there would be some action?  Another odd choice Smith makes in constructing the tale makes me wonder if the crocs were added late in the development of the story.  After Marsden and Mybaloe have drunk the poison, Mergawe is forced to drink it himself--this is poetic justice, he will die the same miserable death as his victims.  But then the villagers just throw him to the crocs, so the potion has no chance to take effect on him.  This strikes me as muddying the narrative. 

Marginally good.  "The Venus of Azombeii" has never been anthologized, but has appeared in numerous Smith collections, including as the title story of one Italian collection.

"The Outsider" by H. P. Lovecraft (1926)

"The Outsider" appears in the June 1931 issue of Weird Tales as a "Weird Story Reprint," having debuted in a 1926 issue of the magazine.  I believe "The Outsider" is one of the more widely acclaimed of Lovecraft's stories, with critics saying it is one of his best--it was also the title story of an early anthology of Lovecraft stories.  But when I read "The Outsider" as a teen in a book I borrowed from the library, I remember thinking it was a big letdown; I reached the end of it and thought, "That's it?"  We'll see how I feel upon a reread some 35 years later.

(I'm reading the version in my Corrected Eleventh Printing of The Dunwich Horror and Others.)

Having reread it, I can see how "The Outsider" would appeal to people who have no friends and have no success with the opposite sex and don't get along with their parents and feel out of step with their time, disagreeing with mainstream politics and disliking the popular culture of their nation and generation and so on.  And the writing isn't bad.  But there is almost no story here, it is almost like a prose poem, a mood piece describing a setting and a character but little plot.

Basically, a guy is living in a crumbling old castle with slimy walls, all alone, and can't remember ever hearing a human voice and has only the vaguest and faintest memories of ever meeting another person.  He has never seen the sun or moon or stars because the castle is surrounded by a dense forest of trees taller than the castle walls.  This story doesn't make logical sense--it makes emotional sense--it is like a dream (isfdb categorizes "The Outsider" as part of Lovecraft's "Dream Cycle.")  The story's images, the castle and forest for example, are not particularly sharp, do not conjure up a clear picture in the mind, but instead achieve a feeling.  One example of the emotionally resonant but illogical nature of the story is the fact that the narrator doesn't know what he looks like; he has never seen his reflection... nor looked down at his own body?

The castle has a tall tower whose stairs have partially collapsed--this tower, it seems, extends above the tree tops, and so one day the narrator takes the risk of climbing it in hopes of seeing the sky for the first time.  One of the most dreamlike elements of the story is how, when he climbs through the trapdoor at the top of the stairs, he finds he is not in the expected room atop the tower but in a ground level tomb in a cemetery.  As he passed through the trap door he entered another world.  And he is stuck in this new world, because he can't open the trapdoor again.

In this world he wanders around, coming to a castle, perhaps the castle he inhabited in the other world, but at an earlier or later time--he finds it is well lit and full of people attending a party.  When he tries to join the party, everybody flees in terror.  Then he sees himself in a mirror--he's a hideous monster, perhaps an animated corpse.

Maybe we are to think that the narrator is dead, and the first castle and forest were hell or just a dream he dreamed in his grave--now he is risen from the grave and back in the real world.  But this world is also dreamlike; the church at the cemetery, the castle with the party, and the meadows between them, make one think of Europe, but on the last page of the story the narrator's description of how he spends his time in this new world mentions the Nile and the Great Pyramid, as if it is Egypt.

I can sympathize with a character who is alienated and deracinated, who is wholly divorced from his ancestors and contemporaries, but I'm not crazy about surreal and dream-like stories and about mysteries which are not resolved.  I like stories in which the images are sharp and the characters have believable motivations and some kind of resolution is achieved.  So to me "The Outsider" is just OK, maybe marginally good; I guess here I am going against the conventional wisdom.

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I feel like I've been a real hard ass today, a real stickler, even though none of these stories is actually bad, and each of them is an interesting specimen with some unusual elements and each is certainly worth reading.     

More stories from before you were born in our next episode!