Henry Kuttner: "The Shadow on the Screen," "The Transgressor" and "The Watcher at the Door"

Let's continue our exploration of Farnsworth Wright's magazine of the bizarre and unusual and our (sometimes rocky!) love affair with Henry Kuttner by reading three stories by C. L. Moore's husband that first appeared in Weird Tales in the late 1930s.  As you've come to expect, I read all these at the internet archive in scans of the 80-odd-year-old magazines in which they made their debuts.

"The Shadow on the Screen" (1938)

Californian Kuttner here joins the chorus of people who tell you Hollywood is full of decadent creeps, a refrain we've heard from Kuttner's friend and collaborator Robert Bloch many many times.  Our narrator is Peter Haviland, a director of formulaic horror films, a guy who strings women along and doesn't condemn a scandal-sheet reporter who blackmails women into sleeping with him.  Haaviland is surprised to learn from this journalo that Arnold Keene has just finished a new picture--Haviland thought Keene was dead!  Years ago Keene made a horror movie in Mexico, Ape of God, the production of which was plagued by rumors that multiple people had been killed on set.  Ape of God was never released to the public, but Haviland saw it and considers it a masterpiece.  Keene disappeared after the career disaster that was that innovative film, and it turns out he has spent the intervening years quietly raising money and filming an even more groundbreaking work of weird cinema, The Nameless.  

Haviland, eager to see this new film, hunts down Keene; Ann, the woman he has been stringing along, follows him.  In a remote house in the wilderness they find Keene, who is all too happy to show them his not quite finished film.  Keene himself stars in The Nameless, as a man who discovers a hideous monster god under an Aztec ruin and then lures people to his remote domicile to sacrifice to the voracious deity!  As we readers expect, the god is real and the scenes in which "actors" are killed by the monster are in fact Keene's footage of the fate of those poor bastards (that reporter among them) he has tricked into serving as monster food!  Keene tosses Haviland to the monster, planning to film his fellow director's death for the climax of his macabre masterpiece, but Keene gets careless and, with the help of Ann, Haviland manages to outfight him and the man-eating god.

A good story; economical, with good images and quickly drawn but interesting characters whose motivations and actions all make sense.  The monster is original, something crazy Kuttner came up with, not just a giant frog or snake or whatever.  An additional bit of interest is provided by some literary criticism from Kuttner; Haviland and Keene offer up examples of what they consider the best weird stories, and one presumes these are some of Kuttner's own favorites.  Thumbs up for "The Shadow on the Screen."

"The Shadow on the Screen" would be reprinted in anthologies of stories about dark doings in Hollywood as well as foreign SF anthologies and 21st-century Kuttner collections.

"The Transgressor" (1939)

Here's a deep cut that wasn't reprinted until the second decade of this here century, when in 2011 Centipede Press included it in its Masters of the Weird Tale volume on Kuttner, and Haffner Press included it in The Watcher at the Door: The Early Henry Kuttner, Volume Two.  

"The Transgressor" is a three-page story about time travel and the paradoxes of such travel.  The narrator has invented a time machine but not tested it yet.  Suddenly his double appears and says that he has come from 30 minutes in the future to report that the time machine works.  This future edition of the narrator gets killed by the narrator's dog, but not before he says that he senses that travelling through time has broken some kind of mysterious laws that lie beyond the laws we know of, the breaking of which will lead to a terrible punishment.  

The narrator knows if he goes into the time machine he will be killed by his own dog when he arrives 30 minutes before he left, but he feels compelled to do so anyway.  

I think I have to give this gimmicky and contrived filler story a thumbs down.  Why does the narrator willingly march off to his death?  Why does his own dog kill him?  Because agents or mechanisms we don't know about are enforcing laws we also don't know about?  How does the narrator even know there are laws and mechanisms he doesn't know about?  Lame!  This kind of vague contrived plot that consists of loose ends is totally unsatisfying, and because "The Transgressor" is so short that there is no time for any development of interesting characters or memorable images or anything like that, the lame plot is the entire story, so the entire story is lame.   

"The Watcher at the Door" (1939)

I'm also calling this one a deep cut, even though it reappeared in the second issue of a fanzine called Revelations from Yuggoth that was printed yearly for three years, from 1987 to 1989, and would go on to be the title story of the aforementioned 2016 Haffner Press volume (the cover of which, by Jon Arfstrom, I really like.)  

This is an OK story, no big deal.  The narrator goes to visit his friend the artist who has rented a dilapidated old house in the New England countryside.  Since moving in, the artist while abed at night has been having vivid and terrible dreams of a door, and during the day he has hallucinations of a cat's glowing eyes.  A little investigating, like talking to farmers living nearby and rummaging about the detritus in the yard, has led the artist to believe that a witch lived in this house ages ago and that she figured out how to preserve her soul after death in her nearby forgotten grave; from the grave she is working a spell to take over the artist's body--if he steps through that door in his dream she will take possession of his body!  And each night the compulsion to do just that is stronger!

Eventually this horrible consummation is effected, and the witch speaks to the narrator with the artist's lips.  We learn that the "life" of a ghost witch is even more difficult than we the living have been imagining!  For the witch to shift her soul into a body it must be very healthy, and this sorceress has taken over multiple bodies over the decades, but each one conked out on her almost at once, sending her back to her lonely grave!  The artist is too unhealthy to survive the invasion process, and keels over after the witch's little explanation of her posthumous career, but you know who is the picture of health?  Our narrator!  The narrator becomes the witch's next target, and he starts dreaming of the door and seeing the cat's eyes while awake, even after he flees to Beantown.  He resolves to commit suicide.

Proofreading my summary of the story above (yeah, I really do proofread this typo-ridden blog, you comedians!) I find this story sounds pretty good--after all, it incorporates many of my favorite elements and themes: a woman manipulating a man, somebody taking over somebody else's body, a guy committing suicide.  But somehow I didn't find this story very effective.  There is a lack of personality, a lack of feeling; the narrator, the artist, and the witch are bland tokens that just make the plot run, they don't excite any emotion or spur any thought, they are like placeholders in an outline which hasn't been given the spark of life yet.  There are also some flashy elements which are sort of superfluous and don't necessarily make sense; small animals and insects shun the house, for example, and I don't get the whole business with the cat and its eyes--for some reason when the artist is inhabited by the witch his eyes are like a cat's. 

If I had been the editor of Weird Tales in 1939, I would have told Kuttner to get rid of the cat stuff and severely cut down the role of the narrator.  Instead of the narrator visiting the artist and telling him again and again that he was just suffering from overwork and should come along to see a doctor, in my plot outline the narrator comes to the house and finds the artist dead and also finds the artist's diary, which would make up the bulk of the story's text.  After reading the diary the narrator realizes the witch is going to try to take over his body now and so he decides to kill himself.  (I hear you saying the diary bit is cliched, but I pronounce "cliched" as "classic.")   

Oh well; I'm grading "The Watcher at the Door" as "merely acceptable."  

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"The Shadow on the Screen" is a solid weird story that has plenty of noirish L. A. material and engaging characters as well as the traditional Lovecraftian alien god stuff, a story that is easy to recommend.  Unfortunately "The Transgressor" and "The Watcher at the Door" have plots that don't really hold together as well as they should and lack novelty and human feeling.  

I don't think I need to tell you that you can safely bet we'll be seeing more of Henry Kuttner and more of Weird Tales in the future here at MPorcius Fiction Log.