1947 Weird Tales by C H Thompson, R Bradbury, A Derleth, R Bloch & M W Wellman

I love the cover of the November 1946 issue of Weird Tales, the work of Boris Dolgov.  I love the colors, for one thing.  And of course I love the long-limbed female figure, the contemplative fishman, and the fun sea mountain with its arches and spires, and the sea dragon is just perfect.  Very fine!

Behind its terrific cover this issue also offers stories by many writers we are interested in here at MPorcius Fiction Log, so let's embrace the weird and check them out!

"Spawn of the Green Abyss" by C. Hall Thompson 

The gorge cover painting of this issue of Weird Tales illustrates C. Hall Thompson's "Spawn of the Green Abyss."  In March of 2020 I read Thompson's story "The Will of Claude Ashur" and quite liked it.  So I approach this one with some hope.

"Spawn of the Green Abyss" is the sealed testimonial, to be opened after his death, of a brain surgeon who has just been convicted of the murder of his wife and is scheduled to be executed!  He tells us that he welcomes his imminent death because he sees extinction as a release from a life burdened with knowledge no man should ever have to bear!  (Whereas classic science fiction romanticizes the quest for knowledge and suggests that knowledge of the universe makes your life better, in a Lovecraftian tale a guy who learns something new about the universe typically gets killed or driven insane.)

In his memoir of 24 or so pages the narrator relates the hellish adventure he experienced in the tiny seaside town of Kalesmouth in New Jersey, greatest state in the Union.  Our boy went there for a nice long rest, needing to relieve the stress built up sawing open people's skulls and digging around in their grooves and ridges.  In Kalesmouth he became fascinated by a big old house on the tip of the peninsula, a decrepit and sinister pile he was told was home to reclusive old Lazarus Heath, retired sailor, and his beautiful daughter Cassandra, whom he brought back from overseas after being shipwrecked on some Atlantic island for over a year.  One night, dark and graceful Cassandra with her black eyes and black hair came to the brain surgeon's bungalow to ask for his help--her father was quite ill.  Doc tended to Mr. Heath for two weeks, up until his death, at the same time falling in love with the mysterious Cassandra.  The Heath case was an odd one; not only would this old codger be taciturn for long stretches and then deliriously babbling about some submarine goddess, but he had scaly skin, like a fish's, and weird openings in his neck, like gills!  When nobody was looking he would sneak away to a cove behind the house where there were some queer old pillars, and it was there that, on the very day our narrator proposed to Cassandra, Lazarus Heath was found dead, though the narrator's autoposy showed no sign of what killed him.

Cassandra and our hero married and moved to New York City, but it wasn't long before Cassandra convinced her husband they should move back to the huge and fish-smelly Heath House.  There, as the months went by, Cassandra grew distant from her husband, spending as much time as possible alone, glaring at him with hate-filled eyes when she thought he was trying to get into her father's locked library, the key to which hung from a necklace she always wore.  It was as if the hideous old house, and the sea that nearly surrounded it, was stealing Cassandra from him.  Cassie even began developing scales and gills like her father!

The stormy night the surgeon learned Cassandra was pregnant, and she collapsed after telling him it was not his child, the brain surgeon took the key and got into the library, to read Lazarus Heath's diary and learn the horrible truth of Cassandra's origin and the threat to all mankind that lurks beneath the waves!  From the library window our sawbones watched climb up from the cove the creature which had fathered the thing growing in Cassandra's womb, a slimy blob monster like an unholy fusion of reptile and amoeba!  Only by killing Cassandra, who in a lucid moment begs for death, can the surgeon sever the connection to our surface world of this prince of a diabolical race long exiled to the briny deep and send it back from whence it came.

"Spawn of the Green Abyss" is a very good Lovecraftian story.  Thompson is a skilled writer: the tale is thick with atmosphere thanks to Thompson's powerful descriptions of the settings and characters, and he ably uses such elements as Greek mythology (the sirens from The Odyssey are, we learn in Heath's forbidden library, based on the evil beings who in ancient times were banished to the abyss--in the story they use their seductive songs to win the aid of such people as Lazarus and Cassandra Heath in their campaign to conquer the surface world) and our anxieties about sex to add dimensions of interest and drama to the story.  I can definitely recommend this one to all you fans of Yog-Sothery out there.

"Spawn of the Green Abyss" was reprinted in Kurt Singer's 1968 anthology Tales of the Uncanny, the cover of which incorporates one of those troll dolls designed by Thomas Dam that are now (I hear) the basis for major motion pictures.  Robert M. Price selected it for 1992's Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos, and S. T. Joshi included the story in his huge (over 600 pages) 2014 anthology A Mountain Walked.    

"Let's Play 'Poison'" by Ray Bradbury 

This is a good but not particularly remarkable story of only three pages or so.  A teacher quits teaching after a mob of his students murders one of their classmates.  He conceives a somewhat irrational hatred of children.  When, after seven years of retirement, he is dragged back into the teaching profession for a brief stint as a substitute, his hostile attitude and rage at their childish games quickly inspires among his students a powerful antipathy towards him.  The kids' campaign of harassment, by chance or by design, climaxes in the teacher's death, which Bradbury marks with a clever little gimmick.  

A solid piece of work, "Let's Play 'Poison'" has been reprinted many times in Bradbury collections and in a few anthologies.  This is my opportunity to point out to those who don't already know that the surreal image on the 1972 Japanese edition of Bradbury's 1947 collection Dark Carnival features a woman's bare ass.  Lewd!  

"A Collector of Stones" by August Derleth

I have passed a just but merciless verdict on several weak or actually bad Derleth stories at this blog, but am happy to report that this five-page story is inoffensive, even mildly enjoyable. 

"A Collector of Stones" is a light-hearted humor story.  A fat rich guy who has a big estate in the country is driven by a mania to collect.  His eccentric passion is to collect stones, nothing fancy, just mundane paving stones and the like.  He has built entire houses on his estate out of the stones he collects, and hundreds of feet of meandering walks.  

One day he finds four stones in a remote wood, stones that will be perfect for the walk he is currently laying.  He doesn't realize that he has stumbled on a decayed family cemetery, these are gravestones, the names on them being almost effaced.  The story's gimmick is that after he has laid them in his stone path the ghosts whose graves he has unwittingly robbed try to bring the stones back to where they belong.

Better than average among the Derleth stories I have read; I didn't actually laugh at any of the jokes, but I didn't find them irritatingly bad, either.  "A Collector of Stones" has been reprinted in a few Derleth collections, including 1948's Not Long for this World and That is Not Dead, a 2009 collection with an intro by David Drake you can read at Drake's website here that describes Drake's meeting with Derleth and Derleth's influence on Drake's career.        

"Lizzie Borden Took an Axe..." by Robert Bloch

The eighth page of this issue of Weird Tales, nestled between a full-page ad for a truss ("Quick help for Rupture!") and a full-page ad for the Rosicrucians ("Are You in Tune with the Infinite?") is a full page ad for a radio show, Stay Tuned for Terror.  Stay Tuned for Terror was a 15-minute program which presented dramatizations of stories by Robert Bloch.  "Lizzie Borden Took an Axe..." was one such story and you can listen to the radio version of it at the internet archive here, and read an article about Stay Tuned for Terror by Karl Schadow in The Old Radio Times here.  

"Lizzie Borden Took an Axe..." is an acceptable though pedestrian story.  Our narrator is in love with a woman, Anita, who lives in a big decrepit house with her eccentric uncle, a dude who is reputed to be a wizard who puts hexes on people's farms.  The uncle keeps Anita under tight control, forbidding her marriage to the narrator.  Anita also claims that in her dreams an incubus in the form of a black mist comes to harass her.

One day Anita telephones our hero in a panic, and he rushes over to the creepy old house to find the uncle dead, his head demolished by a blow from an axe.  Anita's description of her discovery of the body reminds the narrator of the story of Lizzie Borden, and Bloch uses up a page and a half of the six-page story relating the celebrated Borden murder case.  Anita and the narrator separate when looking for clues, and when he sees Anita again she has a black mist about her face and the axe in her hands, and is apparently stalking him!  Our narrator overpowers Anita, the mist vanishes and she faints, and then our hero has to consider if maybe the incubus is real and has been possessing Anita, forcing her to kill, or if stress is making her crazy to murder people and him crazy enough to see the black mist.  If the incubus is real, presumably it was an incubus that fifty or whatever years ago drove Lizzie Borden to massacre her parents!

The narrator falls asleep, and when he wakes up Anita has been slain with the axe, presumably by him.  Was he also possessed by the incubus?  Or is he just a nut?  

A routine piece of work.  Is there really any reason to cobble together the Lizzie Borden story with satanism and wizardry?  Feels arbitrary.  "Lizzie Borden Took an Axe..." has appeared in a bunch of Bloch collections, like The Skull of the Marquis de Sade, and anthologists like Peter Haining and Martin H. Greenberg have also reprinted it.

"Frogfather" by Manly Wade Wellman 

Ranson Cuff is a fat guy everybody hates.  The richest man in this stretch of swamp country, Cuff made his money catering to Northerners who come down here to hunt and fish at his camps, and now is a money lender who holds the mortgages to many of the locals' homes and boats.  The narrator tells the tale of Cuff's last day, when he was a teenager, working for Cuff, practically his slave, to help his aunt pay off her debt to the man.  

Cuff loves frog's legs, and on that memorable night he, the narrator, and an Indian who speaks better English than either Cuff or our hero but ended up in Cuff's employ, set out on a boat to hunt frogs with which to stuff Cuff's pie hole.  Cuff directs his paddlers to a spot the Indian warns him to avoid, because it is there that resides Khongabassi, the father of all frogs who has lived since the beginning of time.  Cuff thinks this is ridiculous nonsense, and fires the Indian on the spot.  Of course, around the bend in the river, the boat is overturned by a frog at least nine feet long which carries Cuff down to its glowing lair but permits the narrator to escape.  The Indian finds the narrator and together they must contrive a story of how Cuff vanished that won't bring more ignorant white men to the lair of the Frogfather.

The plot elements of this switcheroo story (a guy who hunts little frogs is hunted by a big frog!) are of course old and obvious, but Wellman gives the setting and the characters personalities, and he treats the material with seriousness and sincerity, and so I enjoyed it.  "Frogfather" presents a strong contrast to Bloch's "Lizzie Borden Took an Axe..."; Bloch gives his characters no personality at all and he doesn't bring old ideas like haunted houses and demons and wizards to life by employing them skillfully and sincerely--instead he draws attention to how well worn they are and begs the reader's forgiveness for using them by having his narrator say recursive "meta" stuff like, "There are no legend-haunted houses looming on lonely hillsides.  Yet Anita lived in one....There are no gaunt, fanatical old men who brood over black books...yet Anita's uncle, Gideon Godfrey, was such a man."  A lazy strategy that reminds you you are reading a story instead of helping you get caught up in the story.

"Frogfather" has been reprinted in two Wellman collections and the anthology 100 Creepy Little Creatures AKA 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories.  As I have said before, Wellman is somebody whose work I should try to become more familiar with.           

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A pretty good crop of stories.  After my wishy washy response to the stories I read in Avon Fantasy Reader a couple of blogposts ago, it is nice to read some short stories I can get excited about.  Dorothy McIlwraith, who edited Weird Tales from 1940 to the magazine's demise in 1954, put together some decent art and fiction for this issue. 

More short stories in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.