Weird Tales July 1933: Edmond Hamilton, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard

Back in 2017 we read "The Horror in the Museum," a story credited to Hazel Heald but heavily revised by H. P. Lovecraft that first saw print in the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales.  That issue of Weird Tales also features a story under the Lovecraft byline, as well as pieces by MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton and top shelf weirdies Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard.  Let's check! them! out!

"The Fire Creatures" by Edmond Hamilton 

"The Fire Creatures" takes place in Hawaii.  I haven't been to Hawaii, but my brother has, and he says it's "a paradise!"  And of course I remember watching those classic episodes of Sesame Street and The Brady Bunch in which our surrogate families went to Hawaii, so I think I have the necessary background research under my belt to appreciate this story.

Professor Newsom and his daughter Helen live in a house on the slope of the volcano Muana Loa.  When Jerry Holt lands his small plane nearby and comes to visit, Helen tells him her father, a leading expert on volcanoes, put on a suit of heat armor he'd invented and went into a fissure in the side of Muana Loa.  That was yesterday, and he hasn't returned yet, and so Helen and Jerry put on heat armor suits and go in after him.

Hamilton describes how they walk through infernos of burning gasses and jump over crevices and aall that as they explore the inside of the volcano.  Then they encounter a herd of beasts and a race of people who actually live among the fires!  There is fighting, and Helen is captured.  Then Professor Newsom shows up--he has been observing the native lifeforms from the safety of concealment, and absentmindedly forgot what time he had told Helen he'd be back.  Doh!

Jerry and Newsom go after Helen's captors, descending deeper into the earth, finally coming to a vast cavern in which ripples a sea of lava.  On opposite banks of the molten lake are cities.  Wearing over their armor the raiment of some fallen fire-people, and carrying some of the natives' weapons (guns that shoot compressed, refrigerated air--low temperatures are deadly to the volcano-dwellers) Jerry and the prof infiltrate the city to which Helen has been taken.  Jerry gets captured himself, and joins Helen on stage at her public execution!

The natives, thinking the surface people's heat armor is their skin, have assumed Helen and Jerry are members of an ethnicity of their own race whom they haven't met before, and since they are at war with all the other fire people and execute everybody they capture, Helen and Jerry are afforded the same treatment.  On stage they are sprayed with cold air before a cheering crowd.  The pair pretend to die in agony and are carted off; Professor Newsom reappears to rescue them just as they are about to be thrown into the sea of lava by the burial detail.

There is a chase in boats across the lava lake, and then our three adventurers make it back to the surface.  Newsom is excited at the prospect of organizing an expedition to return to the fire world he has discovered and fully explore it, but Helen and Jerry won't be joining him--they'll be embarking on a perilous adventure of their own--marriage!

Acceptable filler; this is a standard Edgar Rice Burroughs type of adventure story and Hamilton tells it with enthusiasm.  "The Fire Creatures" does not seem to have been a big hit, and would not be reprinted until this very year, when it was included in DMR Books' Hamilton collection, The Avenger from Atlantis.   

"The Dreams in the Witch House" by H. P. Lovecraft

I read "The Dreams in the Witch House" years ago, and today I'm rereading it in my Corrected Ninth Printing of Arkham House's At The Mountains of Madness and Other Novels.  I don't need to tell you that this story has been reprinted in innumerable Lovecraft collections and plenty of anthologies in both English and foreign translation.  

Back in the late 17th Century, in Arkham, Mass., lived a witch, Keziah Mason, who was reputed to know the sort of abstruse mathematics that enable you to travel between dimensions.  She was also believed to have as her familiar a creature called Brown Jenkin who looked like a big rat with a man's face and human hands for paws; complementing Keziah's STEM credentials, Brown Jenkin had the ability to speak any language.  When early 20th-century math nerd Walter Gilman (an homage to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of "The Yellow Wallpaper," another story about a scary room?) enrolls in classes at Arkham's Miskatonic University he is eager to rent as an apartment the attic of the very house in which Keziah Mason purportedly worked her esoteric researches, said house now serving as a boarding house.  You see, Gilman is a well-rounded chap--he doesn't just love math, but also loves to pore over the texts of such rare and sinister volumes as The Necronomicon of Abdul Al-Hazared, The Book of Eibon and von Junzt's Unspeakable Cults.  

Gilman has precisely the sort of experiences you might expect as a tenant in that attic.  He hears weird sounds all the time, and finds the odd angles of the room's corners and the strange pitch of walls and ceilings alluringly evocative.  He dreams that Brown Jenkin comes to him through a hole in the wall, a hole Gilman tries to stuff up during the day but which is always open again when he wakes in the morning, and he dreams of meeting Keziah Mason; other tenants claim Gilman must be walking in his sleep, as they hear footsteps in his room and when they come to see him at night he is absent.  Gilman makes rapid progress in his revolutionary work on interdimensional mathematics as his dreams of the witch and her familiar become more and more vivid.

In his dreams Gilman travels bodiless through fourth dimensional space to strange locales, accompanied by a conglomeration of bubbles and a rapidly changing polyhedron, I guess the astral forms of the witch and her familiar.  In the company of the witch Keziah and the monstrous Brown Jenkin, Gilman meets extra terrestrials on an alien planet, and, in secret rooms within the witch house (or its equivalent in another dimension) the witch and Brown Jenkin introduce Gilman to a man with black skin, European features and hooved feet; this Black Man is apparently a senior servant of the abominably evil Azathoth.  When Gilman awakes from these dreams he finds in his room evidences of what we readers have always assumed, that these are not dreams at all and Gilman, coveted by alien beings of unutterable evil, has been traveling through hyperspace to other worlds.  One such piece of evidence is a decorative finial sculpture from the railing of a building in an alien city--the finial is of a style that no professor at the university can identify and is composed of elements unrecognizable by chemists.

In the climax of the story it is Walpurgis Night, and Gilman is an unwilling accomplice to a human sacrifice performed by Keziah.  He breaks the spell Azathoth's minions have over him and interrupts the murderous ritual, and in a ferocious fight kills Keziah, only to in turn be slain by the cruel fangs of Brown Jenkin.  In a sort of epilogue we learn of the horrifying evidence of Keziah's career of crime and sorcery discovered behind the walls in the attic when the witch house is finally torn down years after Gilman's death.

This is a good story, but it can feel too long and repetitive.  Gilman doesn't just have a few dreams, he has dream after dream after dream, the Arkham natives retail their sightings of the witch and her familiar again and again, and warn Gilman again and again.  Gilman also deals with many strange phenomena I have not mentioned--Lovecraft really piles up a catalog of bizarre goings-on in this story--and while these phenomena are individually interesting and make sense in the context of the story, the sheer volume of them means the story is very long.    

A curious aspect of the story that might be considered a weakness is the fact that there is no "WTF?" moment during which the horrible reality of the universe is revealed to a character.  Lots of horror stories include a scene in which a character says or thinks something like "WTF?  Vampires are real???!!!"  But in "The Dreams in the Witch House" the characters, early in the piece or even before the story begins, have already accepted all the story's most incredible elements.  Gilman immediately suspects that Keziah may have developed mathematics that gave her the power to travel to other dimensions.  All the Arkhamites accept implicitly the reality of a witch and of a talking rat with a human face--they not only think Keziah and Brown Jenkin lived in the past, but are confident that these beings are still haunting Arkham two centuries later and claim to actually see them all the time.  On the ground floor of the boarding house lives a superstitious Christian, Joe Mazurewicz, and he suggests Keziah must be busy cooking up something big for Walpurgis Night because he hasn't seen her or Brown Jenkin in a while.

Joe Mazurewicz brings us to another noteworthy feature of "The Dreams in the Witch House," hints that Christianity may be "real" and have some efficacy.  Joe, worried for Gilman, gives him a crucifix blessed by a priest, and in the final fight with the witch Gilman brandishes it, repelling her, and then uses its chain to strangle her to death. 

I think I have to call this one below average for a Lovecraft-penned Cthulhu mythos story. 

"Ubbo-Sathla" by Clark Ashton Smith 

I read this tale in an e-copy of 2007's A Vintage from Atlantis: Volume Three of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith I borrowed from a library.  At the back of this volume editors Scott Conners and Ron Hilger offer interesting tidbits about the story, like comments from Smith's correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft about it and about the fictional Book Of Eibon, and speculations about why Farnsworth Wright initially rejected the story and then purchased it upon resubmission.

"Ubbo-Sathla" begins with an excerpt from The Book of Eibon that suggests that, before Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu came to Earth, our world was inhabited by a big blob of goo, a sort of primordial ooze, called Ubbo-Sathla, and that all earthly life evolved from this formless muck.  And, that, eventually, all life on Earth will return to it!

The text of the story concerns Londoner Paul Tregardis.  Tregardis is the kind of guy who spends his time taking copious notes as he reads The Necronomicon and The Book of Eibon, recording concurrences and discrepancies between these two ancient volumes.  (You meet a surprising number of these guys in the pages of Weird Tales.)  One day he is in the curio shop of a weird little Jew and finds a crystal sphere which reminds him of just such a glass globe described in The Book of Eibon.  He buys it and brings it back to his apartment.  

(In the same way that people in Lovecraft's "The Dreams in the Witch House" don't question the reality of dimension-hopping witches, Tregardis and the Jewish shopkeeper just casually accept that in the shop is a crystal ball from ancient times that you can look through to see distant places, the way you or I would just accept the possibility of a shop selling a Greek vase or a Rembrandt print.)

Gazing into the globe, Tregardis is sucked into the past, his soul merging with that of a wizard who lived in a prehistoric age, a wizard who also owned the globe.  The wizard wants to use the globe to view the most distant past, to read tablets of wisdom inscribed by gods who lived before mankind evolved.  These tablets, he believes, are in the goop that was the first life on Earth, a goop known by the name of Ubbo-Sathla!

The wizard gets sucked into the globe, and one after the other he and Paul Tregardis inhabit the bodies and live the lives of successively earlier men and women, and then of the snake-people who lived on Earth before the rise of man, and of such creatures as pterosaurs, icthyosaurs, and finally blobs of slime!  As a blob of slime the wizard, and Tregardis, now oblivious, crawl over the divine tablets, unable to read them.  (These Lovecraftian stories are often about the danger of or the pointlessness of the quest for knowledge.) 

Back in London, there is no trace of Tregardis or of the crystal sphere. 

I feel like there are lots of these stories in Weird Tales about people's souls travelling to the past to inhabit the bodies of earlier people or creatures.  Donald Wandrei in 1932 offered up "The Lives of Alfred Kramer," in which a guy, like Paul Tregardis, actually becomes primordial ooze.  Smith had a guy temporarily merge his soul with an ancestor in "The Necromantic Tale," but that guy made it back to his 20th century life, as do the men in Robert E. Howard's "The People of the Dark" and "The Children of the Night" whose souls merge with their ancestors' bodies so they can experience a life of barbaric violence.  

Anyway, the plot of this one is a little slight, but it is a decent little story, well-written and evocative.  In addition to the expected Smith collections, it would be reprinted in anthologies of Cthulhu Mythos stories.

"The Man on the Ground" by Robert E. Howard

This is one of Howard's tales of the American West, and has been reprinted in cowboy-centric Howard collections, but it is also a tale of the supernatural and has been included in general Howard collections and horror anthologies.

Two cowboys hate each others' guts and for years have been pursuing every opportunity to murder each other!  Both bear the scars of these attempts, but so far neither has been killed or maimed.  But today is the final showdown!  The cowpunchers find themselves taking cover behind rocks, shooting at each other with rifles, each determined that today the feud will end and one of them will be sent to Hell!

Howard's descriptions of the men's hatred of each other and of the fight is quite good--almost the entire brief (four pages here where I am reading it in Weird Tales) is a compelling, tense action scene.  Unlike Hamilton, Lovecraft and Smith, Howard writes about human passion, and here he powerfully sets up the idea that hate has become part of these cowboys' very being, that this hate can outlive death!  And sure enough, when one of the cowpunchers is hit in the head and falls, dead, and the other approaches the corpse of his foe, the dead man's ghost pulls the trigger of his rifle one last time so that both men are slain!

Good.  

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Four solid stories that give us reason to be glad there are still many stories by Hamilton, Lovecraft, Smith and Howard in our future!