Robert Bloch: "The Druidic Doom," "The Brood of Bubastis" and "Fangs of Vengeance"

Readers of my last blog post know I currently have in my custody a copy of Haffner Press's Henry Kuttner collection Terror in the House.  This volume includes a photo taken in the offices of Weird Tales, showing the magazine's business manager Bill Sprenger, editor Farnsworth Wright, and contributors Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch.  Sprenger, Wright and Bloch look like nerds, but Kuttner looks like a god-damned movie star!  (Richard Matheson, in the foreword to Terror in the House, uses the word "dapper" to describe Kuttner, and you can see in the photo that this guy knew how to dress.)    

Continuing our tireless quest to read at least one story in every issue of Weird Tales printed in the 1930s, today the dark alien gods have served us up three stories by Kuttner's friend and collaborator Robert Bloch that were published in Wright's magazine in 1936 and '37.

"The Druidic Doom" (1936)

Speaking of Kuttner, he appears in the letters column of the April 1936 Weird Tales, praising August Derleth ("one of my favorites"), his future wife C. L. Moore, and H. P. Lovecraft, as well as Bloch.  There's actually a lot of fulsome praise of Moore in the letters column, as well as of Robert E. Howard--people love Northwest Smith and Conan!  More controversial are artist Margaret Brundage and journalist and writer on the American West Forbes Parkhill, both of whom have supporters and detractors.  William Blackfort of Hawaii implores "Please don't ruin WT by having space-ships or anything else on WT covers but the Brundage nudes or semi-nudes" while one guy grouses that Brundage's January cover was "a lemon," another says she is inferior to J. Allen St. John, who did a bunch of WT covers in 1932 and 1933 and a few in '36, and a third critic gripes that she paints too many blondes and should present more redheads and brunettes.  Several people complain that Forbes Parkhill's story "Coils of the Silver Serpent," his only credit at isfdb, is not a weird story at all but merely a detective story while others denounce its use of slang and vulgarities.  Joseph Robinsky of Elizabeth in the great state of New Jersey writes a particularly hilarious attack on "Coils of the Silver Serpent," calling it an "imbecile thing," "your latest outrage," and "an inane 'thriller.'''  Robinsky warns Farnsworth Wright that the inclusion in his magazine of the phrase "Drive like hell" "further cheapens" Weird Tales and asks if Wright is "trying to compete with the trashy magazines."  Robinsky's letter had me laughing hysterically and wishing Wright had offered him a monthly column.  

Bloch starts off his story in the issue, "Druidic Doom," by telling us that Sir Charles Hovoco died under mysterious circumstances and since he was a greedy nouveau riche, a boy from the London slums who became a titan of industry and dismissed the warnings of the locals as superstition, many people think his death amounted to poetic justice.  Cold!  

Hovoco bought an old country estate and had it renovated and even started clearing the land around the manor of rocks and trees so it could be put to use as farmland.  The local villagers hated these changes to the countryside they and their ancestors grew up in.  I guess this story is Bloch's attack on the modern cult of efficiency and defense of tradition and his depiction of the smug arrogance of city folk who think country folk are superstitious bumpkins.  

One of the things Hovoco wants removed is an ancient altar on a hilltop.  Villagers warn him not to mess with this thing, hinting that pagans for centuries--and to this day!--sacrifice at this altar and if Hovoco interferes with them something terrible will happen.  The local parson spends like three pages telling Hovoco the history of the altar and its use as a place of sacrifice for Celts, Druids, Romans, Satanists, etc.  He also warns Hovoco to avoid it, as it must be a place of terrible evil.  

Hovoco ignores all these warnings, and hires two men from the city to remove the altar.  These dudes also scoff at warnings from the yokels about the dangers of the altar.  Under it they find a bottomless shaft.  The two workmen end up falling (or being pulled?) down the hole, and not long after so does Hovoco.  The parson sees Hovoco's last moments on this Earth--Hovoco, hypnotized or possessed, runs to the hill on all fours and is pulled down the hole by mysterious hands.  Later the locals put the altar back, and the sacrifices are resumed.

Mediocre.  Whatever I might think, "The Druidic Doom" won the favor of Kurt Singer, who included it in Kurt Singer's Ghost Omnibus (1965) and the oft-reprinted Bloch and Bradbury (1969). 

The 1975 Portuguese translation of Bloch and Bradbury bore the title A Sombra do Campanario

"The Brood of Bubastis" (1937)

Robert Bloch of Milwaukee has a letter in the March 1937 issue of WT extolling the magazine and in particular the "peerless" work of Virgil Finlay and the "exquisite" Henry Kuttner story "Eater of Souls."  He also has a story in the issue that, like "The Druidic Doom," is set in jolly old (eerie old?) England, and like "Fangs of Vengeance" is about cats!  Meow, guvnah!

"The Brood of Bubastis" comes to us researchers into the weird as a suicide note!  Our self-destructive correspondent hopes that this last testimonial will be valuable to archaeologists and ethnographers, but fears that it will simply be dismissed as evidence of his insanity!

Last year, the narrator relates, he went to England, to Cornwall, to visit a wealthy college chum, Malcolm, at his country estate.  Sitting in his study full of books on the occult and creepy decorations like a human skull and scary paintings, Malcolm tells our narrator the story of how by poring over old volumes, including Mysteries of the Worm by Ludvig Prinn, he realized the ancient Egyptians had colonized Cornwall, and then discovered a mine or tunnel dug by the Egyptians on the nearby coast, accessible via a cliffside path.  The next day, Malcolm leads our narrator to this subterranean labyrinth, which turns out to be a series of tombs full of mummies of priests of Bubastis, the feline ghoul-goddess!  The worshippers of Bubastis were a dangerous subversive force, so three thousand years ago they were driven from Egypt and it was England to which these cannibalistic creeps fled and continued their worship and their unwholesome dietary practices.  

Examination of the mummies indicates that the priests of Bubastis were able to somehow mate humans with animals, to create centaurs, snake-men, and a whole panoply of other freaks.  Paintings on the walls document the feeding habits and sexual proclivities of these monsters!  Gross!  In the deepest chamber, a cavern carpeted with bones, Malcolm reveals the mind-shattering truth--a monster god created by the evil priests lives down here still--after 30 centuries!--and Malcolm has been feeding it people, and our narrator is next on the menu!

There is a fight, Malcolm is stunned and falls over the altar, and when the monster, a ten-foot tall mockery of human form with a cat-like head and paws, emerges to eat Malcolm, the narrator escapes.  He makes it all the way home to New York, which, as I keep telling people, he obviously never should have left, but is too mentally scarred, too scared of his own shadow and especially of cats, to go on living.  I wonder who will get his apartment.

This is a good Lovecraftian story with so many of my favorite things--a monster-god, crazy experiments that confer longevity, underground tunnels, and suicide.  Thumbs up!

I like "The Brood of Bubastis" but for some reason it was not reprinted until 1989, in Fear and Trembling, and would also appear in the later, expanded, editions of Mysteries of the Worm. 

"Fangs of Vengeance" (1937)

We've already read one story by Bloch from the April 1937 issue of the Unique Magazine, "The Mannikin."  Besides that story and "Fangs of Vengeance," which appears under a pseudonym, Bloch also has a letter in this issue, in which he implores WT to reprint particular early stories of H. P. Lovecraft's.  Many letter writers express their sadness over the death of Robert E. Howard and their admiration of the Texan's work, and multiple readers argue no other author should try to write additional tales of Conan of Cimmeria.  (We all know how successful those arguments were.)   There are also many letters extolling the brilliance of Virgil Finlay, including one from Henry Kuttner.  

"Fangs of Vengeance" is a story about a circus.  After a bad season, the circus manager hires two new exotic acts, a European animal tamer who has nine African leopards, Captain Zaroff, and a troupe of six African "savages," the Ubangis, who have a strange lip deformity that looks like a duck bill almost a foot long.  The narrator, who is like assistant manager or something, and the boss are amazed by the animal trainer's act; it is by far the best they have ever seen, the leopards doing all kinds of astonishing tricks, almost as if they are intelligent.  But when the Ubangis see Zaroff's act they quit--they say that Zaroff is an evil shaman who speaks with his leopards in their own tongue! 

The narrator does some investigating, discovers that Zaroff has a wife he keeps in his trailer, with whom he has ferocious arguments and whom he beats with the whip he uses to discipline the leopards.  Then the wife disappears, around the same time a tenth beast, a black panther, joins Zaroff's act.  Zaroff gets drunk one night and blabs about his adventures in Africa during and after the Great War.  We readers realize Zaroff spent time with the Leopard Men of Sierra Leone, who know spells with which to turn themselves and others into animals, and that Zaroff learned this sorcery from them.  The narrator, of course, thinks this is impossible.

The climactic scene of the story takes place at the last rehearsal before the show goes on.  Zaroff is in the cage with the ten great cats.  The cats attack him, the black panther taking the lead.  In a moment Zaroff is buried under a mountain of slashing snarling cats!  The guards shoot into the melee, killing all of the ferocious felines, but too late--Zaroff has been torn to pieces.  The ten beast corpses change shape, into the dead bodies of nine African men and one white woman--Zaroff's wife!  

Acceptable.  "Fangs of Vengeance" would be reprinted in the 1998 Bloch collection Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies and the 2012 anthology Cats of Shadow, Claws of Darkness.  

In 2000 Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies appeared in Italian translation

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"The Brood of Bubastis" is the clear winner here, but "The Druidic Doom" and "Fangs of Vengeance" aren't exactly bad. No doubt we'll be seeing more from "America's acknowledged King of Terror" as we continue to explore the speculative fiction of the 1930s and beyond here at MPorcius Fiction Log.