1930s vampire stories by H B Cave, A Derleth and C Jacobi

Hugh B. Cave, August Derleth and Carl Jacobi are all writers whose work I have found pretty uneven.  But they are also writers closely associated with Weird Tales, and as readers of MPorcius Fiction Log know, Weird Tales, and the unique magazine's 1930s issues in particular, is a topic close to this blog's heart.  So today we take a look at one story by each of these guys that debuted in an issue of Weird Tales from the early Thirties.  These three stories come under the spotlight because they were all selected by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg for 1997's female-vampire-oriented anthology Girls' Night Out, a recent addition to the MPorcius Library.  As these three tales have been vetted by Messrs. D, W and G, maybe we can feel some confidence that they constitute good specimens of their authors' bodies of work.

"The Brotherhood of Blood" by Hugh B. Cave (1932)

Paul Munn is a vampire who sleeps at day in his grave and at night stalks Cambridge, Mass!  In this document he tells us the tale of how he become one of the living dead.  

Munn was a twenty-six-year old writer, an authority on the supernatural who spent his days banging away at his typewriter in his flat near Haaaavud Yaaahd.  He had only one friend, a medical student, Rojer Threng, who would hang around in Munn's apartment and tell him the supernatural was BS--but Threng was not being very sincere!  One night a beautiful woman, Margot Vernee, came to Munn's apartment seeking Munn's aid, and was horrified to see Threng there--you see, Threng loved Vernee, and she had rejected him.

Munn learns the story of the Vernee family from Threng.  Hundreds of years ago, in France, twenty-eight-year-old Armand Vernee was burned to death for being a sorcerer.  Ever since, the Vernee family has lived under a curse.  When his son turned twenty-eight, Armand Vernee rose from his grave as a vampire, able to turn into a bat or a mist and thus circumvent almost any obstacle, and killed his son.  His son in turn rose from the grave to kill his own child after said child's twenty-eighth birthday.  And so on over the centuries, each Vernee dying at 28 and rising from the grave to kill his offspring when he or she reached 28.  Margot Vernee is 27 and her birthday is soon , she has sought out  Munn looking for help in escaping a horrible death and a horrible unlife as a vampire.

Munn falls in love with Margot Vernee, but he can't figure out a way to protect her from her mother, who comes to her night after night after Margot's 28th birthday to drain her blood.  After several such nights, during which Munn futilely fights vampire Mom, Margot expires.  Before she dies Margot warns Munn that, since she has no children, Munn is the person she will rise from the grave to torment and kill when he turns 28 in two years!

Two years later Margot attacks right on schedule, and Munn is inclined to surrender to her and join her in living death.  But Rojer Threng is still in love with Margot and he achieves a spectacular revenge!  He has constructed an elaborate trap, and with Munn as bait destroys vampire woman Margot Vernee.  Munn, weakened by Margot's drinking his blood over several nights, dies in the trap himself and soon is rising from his own grave every night to pursue the wily Threng; as the story ends Threng has thus far eluded our narrator's vengeance.

Unremarkable in its execution, but not bad--"The Brotherhood of Blood" is acceptable, or maybe mildly good.  The fact that Threng is introduced as a scientifically-minded guy who thinks the supernatural is bunk but turns out to be more knowledgeable about, and more adept at dealing with, the occult than Munn is a little jarring and is perhaps something that should have been smoothed out in an additional draft, but this wrinkle doesn't kill the story. 

After its debut in the same issue of Weird Tales as stories I've blogged about by Clark Ashton Smith, Edmond Hamilton and Robert E. Howard, "The Brotherhood of Blood" was included in the collection Murgunstrumm and Others (1977) and Martin H. Greenberg and Lawrence Schimel's Blood Lines: Vampire Stories from New England (1997).

"Nellie Foster" by August Derleth (1933)

"Nellie Foster" first appeared in the same issue of Weird Tales as Robert E. Howard's "Black Colossus," Clark Ashton Smith's "Genius Loci" and Hugh B. Cave's "The Crawling Curse," all of which have served time under the MPorcius microscope.  It has since reappeared in various Derleth collections and a 1999 Martin H. Greenberg and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough anthology of stories about people who kill vampires.

It is no wonder Greenberg included this piece in two different anthologies; "Nellie Foster" is quite short, and it is actually a good story.  And it suits the purported feminist angle of Girls' Night Out, as I think you can call it a feminist story--not only does it pass the Baldanders test, but when a vampire is sucking the blood of the children in the little town, the men are no use--they don't believe in vampires!--so women have to save the day!  Not only do women defeat the vampire (the Nellie Foster of the title) but men's typical underestimation of women protects the vampire slayer, Mrs. Kraft, from being harassed by the authorities when they find Foster's grave has been dug up and they seek the vandal.

Derleth is an important figure in the history of weird fiction and so it is nice to find a decent piece of weird fiction by him and one that is safe from cancellation because it accords with 2021 sensibilities!

"Revelations in Black" by Carl Jacobi (1933)

"Revelations in Black" is perhaps Jacobi's most famous story--it is the title story of a collection of his work, and has appeared in many anthologies, including one edited by famous publisher and fixture on What's My Line? Bennett Cerf and three edited by Martin H. Greenberg--this here Girls' Night Out, the aforementioned Vampire Slayers, and 1992's Weird Vampire Tales.  You may recall that I thought Jacobi's "The Face in the Wind" and "The White Pinnacle" were quite poor; let's hope I have a better reaction to this baby.

Our narrator is a lawyer living in an American city who has fancy hobbies--he buys antiques, he is a keen amateur photographer, he goes on vacation to Europe.  At an antiques store run by an Italian immigrant he finds an expertly handbound book with the image of a skull on its cover.  The store owner is reluctant to part with the book--his poor brother, who went insane, bound it and hand wrote the text inside it, and this book and its two sequels(!) ended up in the store somehow by mistake.

Lawyer dude manages to overcome the store owner's objections and bring the books home one at a time through cajolery, bribery, and shoplifting.  (This is how we expect an officer of the court to act!)  The text in the books is cryptic, like imagistic prose poetry, but instill in him an irresistible desire, an undeniable compulsion, to walk the night streets.  His feet carry him to an elaborate old house with a garden full of fountains and statues--he realizes that the strange disconnected images in the Italian madman's book were descriptions of the carvings on this abandoned house and the fountains in its garden.  Then a veiled woman who smells of heavy perfume and is accompanied by a big powerful dog appears and the lawyer sits with her on a bench and she tells him all about her brother, an Austrian captured by the French in the Great War who then emigrated to the USA without first returning home to bid farewell to his family.  This woman, Perle von Mauren, came to America to find her brother, but Johann was not the man she remembered.

To make a long story short ("Revelations in Black" is over 20 pages here in Girls' Night Out), over the course of the story the lawyer discovers over repeat visits to the garden and veiled Perle von Mauren that Johann became a vampire at some point and when Perle found him he turned her into a vampire.  This brother and sister tag team preyed upon the Italian bookbinder, drinking his blood and driving him mad, but he made the three books, which (somehow) bind the Austrian monsters to the grounds of that house, but also draw any who read them to those deadly grounds like a moth to a flame.  Perle and Johann begin to drink the lawyer's blood, but he figures out what is going on and breaks a leg off the wooden tripod of his camera to make stakes with which he destroys the vampires while they sleep.

This is a decent traditional vampire story with the additional attraction of the fresh element of the Italian's books.  Maybe scholars will find interesting the role of immigrants in the story, both the Italians (portrayed as skilled craftsmen with superstitious beliefs) and the Austrians (physically beautiful but evil monsters)--maybe these reflect early 20th-century American prejudices or something.  I certainly feel like Italian-Americans regularly play the (sympathetic but subordinate) role of superstitious foreigners in stories from Weird Tales, "Revelations in Black" here, Edmond Hamilton's "The House of the Evil Eye," and H. P. Lovecraft's "The Haunter of the Dark" being examples.

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Three stories I can tell you are worthwhile--it looks like Dziemianowicz, Weinberg, and Greenberg made some solid picks when putting together Girls' Night Out.