Edmond Hamilton: "Murder in the Grave," "The House of the Evil Eye," "When the World Slept," and "The Door into Infinity"

We've spent weeks reading mainstream literature from Philip Roth and Doris Lessing, popular fiction by P. G. Wodehouse, pulp SF by such peeps as Ray Bradbury, Leigh Brackett, Henry Kuttner and Poul Anderson, and "serious" literary SF by the likes of Brian Aldiss and Samuel R. Delany.  But I haven't abandoned my plan of reading a story from each and every issue of Weird Tales published in the 1930s!  Today let's check out four stories by MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton first published in Farnsworth Wright's magazine of the bizarre and unusual in 1935 and '36.  These are what a DJ would call deep cuts, stories that, with one exception, were never reprinted in the 20th century and are still quite rare.  Of course, I am reading them all at the world's greatest website, the internet archive, and so can you.

"Murder in the Grave" (1935)

We've read two stories from this issue of Weird Tales already, Robert E. Howard's "The Grisly Horror" AKA "The Moon of Zambebwei" and Frank Belknap Long's "The Body-Masters" AKA "The Love-Slave and the Scientists." 

"Murder in the Grace" is the story of a carny, Walters, who is cuckolding one of his fellow carnies, Morden.  The main character's gag is to be buried in a roomy coffin ten feet underground for a week at a time; there is a foot-wide square tube connecting the coffin to the surface, and carnival customers pay to look down the tube into the lighted coffin to see Walters.  

One night Walters is lying in his coffin, sleeping, when Morden wakes him up by calling down the tube.  Having discovered his wife's infidelity, Morden shot her down and now has come to murder Walters by dropping a rattlesnake down the ten-foot tube and into the coffin!  

This story is actually pretty good if you want to read a claustrophobic piece about a guy's terror-addled mind racing as he tries to figure out how to escape certain death.  And there is a little twist at the end.  Thumbs up!  

"The House of the Evil Eye" (1936)

Here's another issue of Weird Tales we've already explored a little; we read Robert Bloch's "The Grinning Ghoul" in January of this year and Robert E. Howard's "Black Canaan" in June of 2019.  

"The House of the Evil Eye" appears under the pen name Hugh Davidson, and features the same character as Hamilton's other Hugh Davidson piece, "The Vampire Master," which we read in February: Doctor John Dale, specialist in fighting evil!

Our narrator is Harley Owen, Dr. Dale's assistant.  A rich guy from Tauriston, Massachusetts, Henry Carlin, comes to Dale's New York office to beg for help--his son Donald is a victim of the evil eye!  Dale gives a lecture on the evil eye.  A person, Dale relates, who makes a pact with "the forces of evil" can acquire the ability to sicken people by looking in their eyes.  Dale goes on to say that descendants of the person who made the pact will "inescapably" inherit this power, even if they are not evil themselves, which sounds like Lamarkism to me, but let's be charitable and figure making a pact with the forces of evil alters your genes.  After the lecture Carlin tells the story of how his son Donald became pale and weak and soon collapsed soon after he met and fell in love with a young woman from Tauriston's Italian neighborhood, Rose Mione.

Dale and Owen go to Tauriston's "dingy foreign section" to investigate; the Italian-American community there explains that the Mione family uses its power of the evil eye to dominate and abuse them.  A series of episodes demonstrates that Rose and her father Joseph are decent people who would like to be rid of the evil eye that prevents them from having healthy friendships with other people.  Joseph tells our heroes the story of his father Peter's career of evil in Italy and America and of his own dreadful discovery that he himself carried the curse of the evil eye and had sickened and killed his own wife, Rose's mother, simply by looking at her.       

The least convincing part of Dr. Dale's lecture at the start of the story was the idea that the person who made the pact with the forces of darkness could renounce the pact, giving up the power of the evil eye and even freeing his descendants from its curse.  (The idea that the forces of darkness would be so accommodating--once some evil god or devil has its hooks in you, would it really set you free if you just asked?--is a real weakness of "The House of the Evil Eye.")  Anyway, Dale uses this unlikely fact to save the day.  The good doctor and Owen ambush Peter Mione and tie him to a chair and Dale sits across from him, staring into his eyes.  (In a more exploitative tale, the lead villain who gets wrestled into a chair and tied up would be an attractive woman.)  Dale uses esoteric devices to channel the powers of good and the two have a stare-off, Dale trying to bend Mione's will, to force him to renounce his pact with the forces of darkness.  As this psychic struggle rages a violent mob comes to the Mione house to kill Peter Mione--this morning Mione used the evil eye to slay a teenaged girl and the local people have had it with him.  (As does so much fiction, Hamilton's story here argues that ordinary people, presented as a mob, shouldn't try to solve their problems themselves but rather rely on elites with credentials to solve their problems for them.)  Dale (and the forces of goodness through him) force Mione to revoke the pact just as the mob busts into the house; the strain of the spiritual battle kills Mione, which appeases the mob.  Joseph and Rose Mione are cured, their eyes becoming normal, so Rose and Donald Carlin can be married. 

As I thought of Hamilton's "The Vampire Master," I think "The House of the Evil Eye" might be better if it embraced conventional religion or mythology and had Satan and the God of Abraham as animating forces, or maybe Greek or Egyptian gods, or even just gods he made up as Lovecraft famously did.  Supernatural forces with some kind of emotional resonance among readers would be a big improvement over the vaguely defined "forces of darkness" and "benign forces" Hamilton invokes here without telling us anything interesting or affecting about them.

Acceptable filler.  "The House of the Evil Eye" might be interesting to cultural historians for its depiction of an early-20th-century New England factory town with its ethnic ghettos and the uneasy relationship between the WASPs who have lived there since colonial days and the Catholic population who arrived relatively recently to work in the factories.  Dr. Dale's expedition into the ghetto has something of an imperialist narrative to it--the Anglo man of science arrives and liberates the somewhat childish "other" (more or less decent and innocent people who are emotional, ignorant and not really ready for self-government) from their fiendish oppressors and shows them a better way to live; this story might serve as a piece of evidence in the debate over the thesis that, in the past, Irishmen, Italians and other European ethnicities weren't considered white by Anglo-Saxon Americans and German-Americans.   

In 2000, "The House of the Evil Eye" was reprinted by Haffner Press in its Hamilton collection The Vampire Master and Other Tales of Terror.

"When the World Slept" (1936)

This issue of Weird Tales includes stories by Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and C. L. Moore that, barring death, senility, or the total collapse of the internet, I will one day blog about.  But today we read Hamilton's contribution.    

For over a year now, all the responsible members of the establishment have been telling us that lab leaks don't happen, that world wide plagues are just a natural occurrence, not the result of the negligence of careless scientists, and that people who talk about lab leaks are dangerous renegades, bigoted conspiracy theorists!  Well, schedule Edmond Hamilton for cancellation because "When the World Slept" is all about a global epidemic caused by some boneheaded scientist letting germs get out of his poorly maintained laboratory!

Our narrator is Jason Lane, a twenty-something bacteriologist who, in his remote cabin in the woods of upstate New York, was reviving and fostering the multiplication of two different germs found dormant on a meteorite.  He injected the first sort of germs into a rabbit to see what would happen; when nothing happened he did the logical thing and injected them into himself, with the same lack of result.  After following the same process with the second germ culture and again seeing no result he did the emotional thing and angrily threw the vial with the second of the germ cultures out the window against a tree.

A few days later he notices that the birds aren't singing and the insects aren't buzzing and the grocery delivery guy hasn't delivered his Ovaltine.  (I'm just assuming that, like all educated people, he drinks Ovaltine--Hamilton doesn't actually give us Lane's shopping list.  Remember that A. E. van Vogt in his literary criticism has told us that SF is the type of literature in which there are gaps which the creative reader must fill.)  Lane explores the surrounding countryside and finds that every living creature is asleep!  Even germs are asleep!  When he goes down to New York City he finds that everybody there is also asleep!  The streets are jammed with cars, sleepers bent over their steering wheels.  The sidewalks are carpeted with sleeping men and women!  (Oy, imagine sleeping on all those cigarette butts--gross!)  Lane sees a pretty girl asleep on a park bench and falls in love with her!  He puts her in a wheel chair and starts pushing her around the city, propping her up in seats at restaurants, tucking her into hotel beds at night, talking to her like she is awake.        

In college one of Lane's hobbies was flying planes, and he finds a plane and flies all over the world, looking for somebody who is awake like he is; this reminded me of the behavior of the guy in M. P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud, which I read ages ago, and I guess is sort of the exemplar of these "last man on Earth" style stories.  (That guy has a ship or a boat, not a plane.)  Lane brings the sleeping girl with him everywhere.  After a year of finding no people awake he decides to commit suicide, and returns to his upstate New York cabin to end his life.  When he sees the broken vial of the second germ culture under that tree he realizes what we readers have known all along--he is responsible for everybody falling asleep and he didn't fall asleep himself because he had first injected himself with that first germ culture, which inoculated him.  He breaks open the vial with the first germ culture and everyone the world over is soon awake; well, except for all the people who fell asleep in airplanes or while rock climbing or whatever.  Adding to the happy ending is the fact that Lane is (God knows why) confident that the girl he has been lugging around for a year is going to fall in love with him.

"When the World Slept" is entertaining in large part because it is so crazy; it is hard to call it "good" because much of it is so incredible, though I would consider the scenes describing a New York in which everybody has fallen asleep and some of Lane's insane actions, like falling in love with a sleeping young woman, legitimately good.  A mild recommendation then, I suppose--it is better than my oft-deployed rating of "acceptable" because it has novelty.   

"The Door into Infinity" (1936)

We finish up with a Hamilton story that dominates the cover of its issue of Weird Tales (which also contains an August Derleth story we read in February, "Death Holds the Post.")  

Paul Ennis is a good-looking American, blond and blue-eyed, who was on his honeymoon in London when his wife Ruth was kidnapped!  The story begins in an office at Scotland Yard, where Inspector Pierce Campbell is telling Ennis that Ruth has probably been captured by "the most unholy and blackly evil organization that has ever existed on this earth," The Brotherhood of the Door!  This multicultural worldwide organization gathers in England around this time every year and kidnaps a bunch people; said people are never seen again, and rumor has it that they are tossed through a door to another universe as a sacrifice to extra-dimensional aliens!  This crime against humanity has been going on for decades, and somehow it has been kept out of the newspapers!  (Maybe this sheds light on the recent anti-free speech activism of certain mentally ill members of the British royal family.) 

Paul and Ruth may have had the bad luck to schedule their honeymoon to coincide with this yearly convention of people who worship aliens, but they have also had the good luck that, after investigating The Brotherhood of the Door for twenty years (no rush, bro), Inspector Campbell has just recently figured out where their headquarters in London may be--a dive bar on the docks owned by a "Hindoo" named Chandra Dass.  Campbell and a bunch of coppers disguise themselves and go to this bar to look for Ruth and they let Ennis accompany them!  

Hamilton gives us some decent action and horror scenes as Ennis and the bobbies try to search the bar surreptitiously, get captured, escape, then jump in a police cutter to chase Chandra Dass's motor boat up the Thames and into the Channel.  There is fighting against dagger-wielding Malays and numerous people are slain.  Our heroes discover the secret meeting place of the Brotherhood in a cavern by the sea, and get captured again and escape again, killing Chandra Dass in the process.  Ennis dons Chandra Dass's concealing robe and hood and infiltrates the sacrificial ceremony at which hundreds of alien-worshippers are in attendance.  Campbell and Ennis interrupt the sacrifice and rescue Ruth just as the alien beings' pseudopods are reaching through the door to snatch her away.  In the ensuing confusion they exterminate the entire assembled Brotherhood and close the door by triggering a cave-in from which they themselves, of course, manage to escape.

This is a decent Fu Manchu style story with added Lovecraft/Howard elements--there's even a pre-James Bond Bondian element in that Campbell resolves the plot by using special concealed spy gadgets.  I can mildly recommend this one.

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Despite their neglect from anthologists and collections editors, I think these four stories are pretty entertaining.  Viva Hamilton!