It is time to check in with Henry Kuttner, whom H. P. Lovecraft said, in letters to Wilson Shepherd, "seems an extremely brilliant young man" (Sept. 5, 1936) and "is among the brightest & most promising of the newcomers" (Feb 17, 1937.) Kuttner was also something of a comedian who wrote many joke stories in his career and, it appears from that February 17, 1937 letter, tried to trick Shepherd, an associate of Donald Wollheim's who worked with Wollheim putting out the fanzines The Phantagraph and Fanciful Tales, into believing that Abdul Alhazred and The Necronomicon were real. Today's topic is three early Kuttner stories that appeared in Weird Tales in 1936 and 1937 that I hope are not jokes but sincere expeditions into the realm of horror. These stories all appear in Haffner Press's Terror in the House but, as usual, I am reading them in scans of the original magazines at the internet archive.
"The Secret of Kralitz" (1936)
Our narrator is a German baron, Franz Kralitz, who lives in a castle. Franz knows that his family bears a curse; the very first Baron of Kralitz, centuries ago, murdered all the monks in a monastery because a woman he desired had taken refuge there--the abbot cursed the Kralitz family as he died. Franz doesn't know the nature of the curse, but on his deathbed his father told him he would eventually learn it; Kuttner's story describes the night Franz finally acquires this knowledge.
One night Franz awakes to find two mysterious figures at his bedside. They lead him down a secret passage and a long stairway, to a vast subterranean cavern with a dark lake--monsters of various types slither and stalk about the cavern, fly in the air above, and swim in the lake, and at a table sit twenty odd looking men, men scarred and gaunt. It turns out these are the twenty earlier Barons, Franz's ancestors, who have been damned to an eternal existence as the undead. Though cursed to never die, they seem to be enjoying themselves. They hold a big feast, served by monsters (a thing like a skinned child fills Franz's goblet), and are in communication with Yuggoth and know all about Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and other Lovecraftian secrets. I guess the cavern is in another dimension or linked to another planet or something. They drink, eat, sing songs, and laugh and laugh. Sounds like a hell of a party!
After the feast the living dead Barons retreat to their tombs--the shock end of the story is that Franz is undead himself, I guess he died in his sleep, and instead of being permitted to return to life up in the castle, he has to lay down in a newly prepared tomb with his name on it.
This is mostly a mood piece--there is very little plot. What plot there is makes little sense: the fate of the Barons Kralitz--to live forever and gain esoteric knowledge and have truck with the fungi people of Yuggoth and with the followers of Yog-Sothoth (who, we are told, are acquainted with "strange pleasures") doesn't sound like a curse you inflict on rapists and murderers, it sounds like the end goal towards which many a wizard toils for decades.
Merely acceptable. Robert M. Price included "The Secret of Kralitz" in a special Kuttner issue of Crypt of Cthulhu in 1986 and in 1995 it appeared in a Finnish anthology of Lovecraftian stories; since then it has been reprinted in various Kuttner collections, among them The Book of Iod.
Our narrator, assistant director Mart Prescott, returns to La La Land from filming in the desert to find all his Tinseltown cronies in disarray. Sandra Colter, the actress wife of one of Hollywood's biggest stars, Hess Deming, has died, and Hess is totally broken up over it, hitting the sauce so hard he's probably going to ruin his looks and his career. Hess tells Mart that Sandra died of what the doctors called anemia, getting all white and feeble before expiring and insisting shortly before death that her body be cremated. Then Mart runs into the director he works with--this guy used to be robustly stocky and ruddy, now he's unhealthily skinny and pale, and wears a scarf around his neck! He introduces Mart to the man who is going to star as the vampire in their next picture, Red Thirst, Frenchman Pierre Futaine, whom he just brought over on "the steamer."
The melodrama that follows includes stuff we kind of expect--Futaine doesn't show up on film!--or have seen before--Mart's girlfriend Jean Hubbard looks just like Futaine's beloved of centuries ago and this Gallic ghoul becomes determined to possess her!--but Kuttner tries to mix up the formula a little and adds some interesting bits--Sandra, for example, wakes up in the crematorium, shrieking and pounding the glass as she burns to death. After Futaine locks himself and Jean in the vault in which lies his coffin, Mart hires a former stage magician and safe cracker to try to bust into it, but no dice, the vault is impregnable. When the vampire and a hypnotized Jean emerge at sunset, Mart attacks with a knife but Futaine is able to use his hypnotic power to stay Mart's hand.
Then comes our big twist. Futaine was in love with the woman he says Jean resembles while they were both still mortal; a vampire turned him into a vampire, and he turned his beloved into a vampire in turn so they could be together forever. But he regretted doing this evil to her, especially after a priest found her coffin and destroyed her. Jean being so beautiful, and reminding him of his own experience of love as a mortal, he can't bring himself to do to her what he did to that girl centuries ago; he decides his reign of terror must end. Futaine gives Mart the key to his vault and then returns to his coffin so Mart can come kill him, freeing the hypnotized Jean, who has not yet been fully vampirized.
An acceptable vampire story. "I, the Vampire," has been anthologized quite a few times, in translation as well as in English.
"The Jest of Droom-Avista" (1937)
In a beautiful city in a fantasy world a bunch of wizard-priests seeks "the Elixir," AKA "The Philosopher's Stone," AKA "that strange power which would enable them to transmute all things into the rarest of metals." Frustrated after many years of research which has yielded only failure, one wizard takes the ultimate step, calling upon Droom-Avista, the scariest of deities, the Dweller Beyond who is also known as The Jester. This dark shining god gives the wizard a recipe and the critical ingredient, and the wizard casts the indicated spell. The first part of the joke is that, instead of giving the wizard the means of turning stuff into the rarest of metals, the spell just turns the entire city, people included, into the lifeless metal. The second part of the joke is that on this planet gold, silver and jewels are common--the rarest metal on this planet is iron.
I'm not crazy about dreamy fairy tale stories in the first place, and the jokes in this one are like the jokes an 8-year-old makes. The story is only like two pages, though, so I guess I can cut Kuttner some slack. Barely acceptable.
"The Jest of Droom-Avista" has reappeared in Kuttner collections like 1995's The Book of Iod and 2010's Terror in the House: The Early Kuttner, Volume One. In 2018 it was included in a volume edited by Robert M. Price entitled Lin Carter's Simrana Cycle. A look at Celaeno Press's website suggests that this book is a collection of dreamy stories by Lord Dunsany and stories in the same vein by Lin Carter and others, among them Kuttner, Price, Adrian Cole and Darrell Schweitzer.
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Another day, another batch of weird stories from Farnsworth Wright's magazine of the bizarre and unusual under my belt. Expect to hear me discuss stories from 1930s issues of Weird Tales by Henry Kuttner's famous wife soon, here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
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