"Mother leapt to my side, bent over me. 'Do not fear, Olivia,' she said, mockingly. 'After tonight you'll be one of us and will know yourself the taste of young rich blood....'"
Like a vampire with its fangs imbedded deep in a young lady's throat, Weird Tales still has an unbreakable grip on MPorcius Fiction Log. In our last episode we read a story by Edmond Hamilton, prolific contributor to SF magazines and husband of Leigh Brackett, that was published in Weird Tales under the pen name Hugh Davidson. Today we read another, "The Vampire Master," a serial that appeared across four issues of Farnsworth Wright's famous magazine from October 1933 to January 1934. These four issues feature some of Margaret Brundage's best covers, superior not just because they are among her sexiest (though yeah, they are pretty hot) but because here Brundage made quite good use of color and offered up some compelling compositions.
"The Vampire Master" is split into 14 chapters, four appearing in the early installments and two in the final. In Chapter 1, we meet the characters, who unfortunately Hamilton fails to give much personality. Dale has a van dyke and is in his early 40s, while Henderson is old, and that is about it. More significantly we learn what Hamilton's vision of vampires is in this story. In "The Vampire Master" the vampires are wholly unsympathetic, they are 100% pure Grade A evil. They can be repelled by the cross, but Hamilton divorces his story from Christianity, having Dale claim that "the cross is no mere token of a religious sect, but is an age-old symbol that has been used by the peoples of the earth in all times to combat evil forces." I think this is one of Hamilton's missteps. If you want to write a scientific vampire story which abandons religious ideas I think you should probably abandon the whole business of using a cross to repel vampires. You can make some chemical argument for garlic and silver and sunlight scaring or harming the living dead, but for a simple image of two intersecting lines to repel them, I think there has to be some kind of mystical explanation. And Hamilton doesn't even go the full secular route, but just replaces the rich and familiar mythology of Christianity with two sentences of nonsense he pulled out of the air about the cross being "a symbol through which the benign forces of the universe can convey themselves to oppress the malign ones...." Lame.
In Chapter 2, Henderson tells the sad story of that is the recent history of prominent Maysville family the Raltons. Like half a month ago, wealthy James Ralton's wife Allene suddenly began to suffer from anemia, growing weaker every day until she finally died after two weeks of illness, despite all of Henderson's ministrations. Then the Raltons' older daughter Olivia fell ill with the exact same symptoms! She even has the same little marks on her neck that Henderson had ignored when he saw them on Allene's neck. Henderson realized what this must mean, that there was a vampire in the neighborhood, so he rushed down to the Big Apple to get the aid of the only man he could think of who might know how to fight a vampire. Dale asks what else has been going on in Maysville, and quickly deduces that the vampire leading the fanged insurrection against Maysville's elite is a man named Gerritt Geisert who just recently came to town, moving into an abandoned 18th-century home owned by his family in a lonely valley full of abandoned 18th-century houses. Dr. Dale has a book on his shelf that apparently nobody in Maysville has read, one that tells you a vampire named Gerritt Geisert was driven out of that valley near Maysville in the early 1700s after terrorizing the region. This guy Geisert must be a 200-year-old living dead monster presenting himself as his own descendant.
In Chapter 3 Dale and Owen are up in Maysville and meet Ralston and his daughters Olivia and Virginia, as well as Olivia's fiancé, Edward Harmon. In Chapter 4 the men all wait in Olivia's room at night, hoping to ambush the vampire should it appear, and it does--it is Olivia's mother and James Ralston's wife, Allene, risen from her coffin to drink the blood of her own daughter! With crosses they drive her off, and then Gerritt Geisert himself shows up, acting like a friendly neighbor, unaware that Dle has blown his cover. When Dale accuses him of being a vampire Geisert admits it and tries to kill him, but again crosses are employed and he is sent packing.
In Chapter 5 the men go to the Ralston tomb to destroy Allene Ralston by putting a stake through her heart and chopping off her head, but they find that her coffin is not in its vault! Investigating where Mrs. Ralton may currently be residing, Dale and company learn that Geisert has murdered and turned into a vampire a second person, the young man Arthur Newton; Newgton's grave is also empty!
Chapter 6 sees Dale, Owen and Harmon drive out on an unmaintained road to the old Geisert place, where nobody has lived for like 200 years. They search the house but can't find the sleeping vampires, so decide to hide in the house, in a loft, overnight; by this method they are able to spy on the vampires' operations in Chapter 7. These scenes in which we observe the relationship of Geisert, vampire master, to his subordinate vampires are good--when the newest vampire, Newton, returns from drinking somebody's blood Geisert bites Newton's neck and takes for himself most of the life-giving fluid, giving rise to much whining complaint from the younger bloodsucker. When a few drops land on the floor, Allene Ralston and Arthur Newton wrestle over the opportunity to lick them up!
The vampires retire to the cellar as sunrise approaches, and Dale and company search the cellar after daybreak, but cannot find the secret door that must conceal the chamber where lie the three monsters inside their coffins. They leave, planning on coming back with sledgehammers so they can just smash the cellar walls down. In Chapter 8 our heroes learn that there is another young woman in town, Alice Wilsey, who is suffering the same "anemia" that killed Allene and currently plagues Olivia. This Wilsey girl was Arthur Newton's fiancé! Dale, Henderson and the narrator go to see her, but she vigorously resists all help, though the marks on her neck leave no doubt but that she is the victim of one of the living dead! In Chapter 9, somewhat implausibly, Dale, Owen and even old Henderson somehow sneak into negligee-clad Alice's room without her noticing and hide in her closet to wait for a vampire to come visiting. It is pretty hard to believe a young woman wouldn't notice three men hiding together in her closet, mere feet away from her. I also think Hamilton has too many scenes in which Dale and Owen hide in the shadows waiting for vampires to appear.
Anyway, Newton comes through the window and they have a romantic dialogue: Alice Wilsey is eager for him to turn her into a vampire so she can spend all eternity with him! This Newton must be a real ladykiller! Our heroes drive Newton off with their crosses, but Alice is far from grateful to them for delaying her post-mortem union with her dreamboat.
While our three foremost vampire fighters were hanging around in Alice Wilsey's bedroom watching her eagerly await her demonic inamorato's visit, Edward Harmon was sitting in Olivia Ralton's bedroom, protecting his fiancé. In Chapter 10 we find out how that went--not too good! Geisert and Allene Ralton stopped by, and with their devilish powers put Harmon to sleep and hypnotized Olivia into taking all that garlic off the windows so the vampires could come right on in and suck the last of her blood! When Dale gets to her all he can do is pump her full of drugs so she has the strength to tell him the story of her murder with her dying breaths! As she finally expires her eyes seem to glow red--now that she is dead, she is herself a vampire! Dale wants to drive a shaft through her chest and chop her head off right then and there! But her father and fiancé refuse to follow the science, and Dale gives in to their begging that her destruction wait until after her funeral!
In Chapter 11, Dale, Owen and the elderly Henderson return to the cellar of the 18th-century Geisert home with sledges and chisels and spend hours breaking through a wall. I'm amazed old doc Henderson hasn't had a heart attack from all this labor, not to mention the excitement of watching a girl in her negligee all night. Anyway, somewhat hilariously, when the men finally bust open the wall they find that the vampires have, like Saddam Hussein, taken up the practice of sleeping in a different place every day and there is no sign of them. Cripes! They start searching the other decaying 18th-century houses in this long-abandoned valley but have no luck. Exhausted, they return to the Raltons' place and are greeted with more bad news--Olivia, from her coffin in the Ralton library, started talking to Edward Harmon and hypnotized him into setting aside all the garlic and crosses Dale put on the coffin and letting her out! This accomplished, she wanted to drink her fiancé's blood, but Geisert arrived and told her to pick up her coffin and hurry on out of there.
'But his blood is mine--and I won't go until I have it!' cried Olivia....'I say no, and I am master!' thundered Geisert, his eyes hell-red. 'You will learn now to obey me as the others do.'
Perhaps the best thing about "The Vampire Master" is how Hamilton portrays all the vampires as selfish jerks who respect power and nothing else and hate each other and everything else; Geisert the master has to constantly browbeat his rebellious subordinate vampires to keep them in line. More recently there has been a trend of making vampires sympathetic, of making of them allegories of oppressed minorities or sexy rebels against our square society, but Hamilton in this story relentlessly portrays them as diabolically evil, monsters of animal cunning and animal hunger.
When Harmon got in Geisert's way the master vampire just picked him up and threw him across the room, breaking his back so that he dies after telling Dale and Owen his story.
In Chapter 12 our heroes learn that Alice Wilsey has been killed by her fiance, Arthur Newton, and this time around Dale and Owen was no time driving a stake though her heart--it takes three blows to penetrate all the way through, and between the first and final swings of the sledge Alice's body writhes like a dying snake as she unleashes a hellish scream! Then, off with her head.
Chapter 14 covers the final struggle. That night Dale has Virginia tied to a chair, and the men all sit round her. They have to hold the girl down when Geisert works his spell on her and she thrashes about, spitting at her protectors, straining to escape with such passion the ropes cut her flesh. Yikes! Arthur Newton comes crashing through a window and tries to carry off Virginia, but is shot down and then staked and beheaded. He loosened Virginia's bonds, however, and she is off and running. The men chase her to one of those abandoned 18th-century houses, where they fight Geisert, Allene Ralton and Olivia Ralton and ultimately destroy them, freeing Virginia to try to live a happy life even though her entire family has been wiped out by vampires. Build back better, Virginia, build back better.
I think that in my exhaustive summary of "The Vampire Master" I have pointed out the good and bad points of Hamilton's story. The style and pacing and so forth are unremarkable but not bad; the story never feels slow or boring. The vampires and the violent scenes are good, but the heroes and victims are forgettable--maybe if the narrator had been one of the men whose fiancés was being tormented, or maybe if Virginia had been the narrator, the story would have packed more of an emotional punch. As it stands, this is an acceptable piece of entertainment, but no big deal.
"The Vampire Master" has only ever been reprinted as the title story of a 2000 Hamilton collection put out by the good people at Haffner Press.
While I don't think I'll read this one, I've been enjoying your Edmond Hamilton reviews! I find it fascinating that he is also the author of the spectacular (and very un-pulp) "What's It Like Out There?" (1952) (which I reviewed relatively recently for my series on contested/negative visions of astronauts and the culture that produced them).
ReplyDeleteOh, and it looks like whatever Blogger issue was preventing me from leaving a comment has been resolved!
I'm glad you've tamed the Blogger commenting system--everyday I lament the changes to Blogger that have made it less pleasant to use and less efficient, at least for me.
DeleteI wrote about "What's It Like Out There?" in 2017; I think I liked it a little less that you did, but it gave me a chance to write about Campbell and Malzberg's competing conceptions of what SF is (or should be) and about how reductive and overly based on secondary sources people's view of SF history can be.
https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2017/06/exile-day-of-judgement-and-whats-it.html
Hamilton's career is interesting, and shows the breadth of SF--he wrote the kind of science-based SF that Asimov loved (Asimov praises Hamilton highly in his book Before the Golden Age but also stories with vampires and black magic for Weird Tales, and of course Asimov looked down on Weird Tales.
You might think about reading A. E. van Vogt's "The Problem Professor" AKA "Project Spaceship," which, while it is pro-science and pro-space program, is kind of cynical about what ordinary people think of the space program and how the elite establishment has to manipulate the populace into supporting it.
https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2016/08/four-mind-benders-from-e-van-vogt.html