Tales of The Other Worlds by T Sturgeon, M W Wellman, and A Derleth (w/Mark Schorer)

In our last episode I read Murray Leinster's "The Fourth Dimension Demonstrator," an unfunny 1935 joke story I told you was a waste of time.  In 1941, "The Fourth Dimension Demonstrator" reappeared in the anthology edited by Phil Stong, The Other Worlds, a book some (including Robert Silverberg, according to wikipedia) consider the first ever science fiction anthology.  With a clickety click of our mice, let's navigate over to the internet archive and their scan of a 1942 edition of The Other Worlds and read five more stories selected by Stong that were penned by people we are interested in here at MPorcius Fiction Log, in this case Theodore Sturgeon, Manly Wade Wellman, and August Derleth.

"A God in a Garden" by Theodore Sturgeon (1939)

The big theme of Sturgeon's body of work is the power of love, and "A God in a Garden" is a story about a loving marriage and the obstacles to happiness faced by a husband and his wife.  It is also a tiresome joke story.

Kenneth enjoys his job as a truck driver and his hobby of landscaping and gardening his yard.  He loves his wife, but his bad habit of lying about things (like telling her he is working late when in fact he is playing cards with the boys, or saying he is "swell" when she asks how he is, even though he is visibly upset) is threatening their relationship.    

The next addition to his elaborate garden will be a lily pond, and for weeks Ken has been seeking an ugly idol to set above the pond.  By an unbelievable coincidence, while digging the pond, he uncovers a hideous stone idol like five feet tall, right there where he wants to install such a thing.  Ken calls over a friend who has a hoist and a comedy accent ("Hokay Kan...I feex") and gets the idol into place.

The idol is a god, the last surviving relic of a race which strode the Earth millions of years ago.  The god can read Ken's mind and so knows all his problems and offers to help him.  After considering and discarding the idea of making it impossible for Ken to lie, the god hits upon the scheme of altering the universe so that everything Ken says becomes true.  This has obvious benefits; Ken can just say "I have twenty thousand in the bank," and voila, $20,000 appears in his account.  But careless talk on Ken's part also leads to the problems that constitute the story's jokes; for example, when Ken says that it is raining cats and dogs, canines and felines fall from the sky and Ken has to figure out a way to use his new powers to clean up the mess and make everybody who witnessed this unusual weather forget about it.

All the crazy stuff that happens puts a strain on his wife's sanity and their marriage, and she decides to leave Ken, but Ken resolves the crisis by using his powers to neutralize those powers and to turn the god into an inert hunk of stone.

Sturgeon is a good writer and the relationship between husband and wife rings true, but the plot devices are lame and gimmicky, and I rarely appreciate jokes that revolve around humorous accents or puns or taking cliched metaphors literally.  Let's call this one barely acceptable.

In 1988 "A God in the Garden" was dug up for inclusion in an anthology of stories from Unknown, and has also appeared in the first volume of the Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon.     

"School for the Unspeakable" by Manly Wade Wellman (1937)

"School for the Unspeakable" first saw light of day in an issue of Weird Tales with lots of good Virgil Finlay illustrations; particularly memorable are some monsters' heads and some powerfully muscled male bodies.  Worth a look, illustration fans.

"School for the Unspeakable" is a competent filler story.  A fifteen-year-old boy gets off the train after sunset in some little town--he will be attending a boarding school nearby.  An eighteen-year-old boy addresses him, says he is a student at the school and has come to collect him.  This guy looks weird, has a cold handshake, and drives a horse drawn cart instead of an automobile.  A few miles away he stops and introduces the 15-year old to two more ugly guys, purportedly other students.

The hideous trio explain that they are Satanists, and tell of how the headmaster of the school, a serious Christian, tried to foil their worship of the Devil and failed because Ol' Scratch has rendered them indestructible.  When the protagonist refuses to join their cult, the three pounce on him and are about to slay him when a tall figure that casts no shadow arrives to rout the devil worshipers and save the boy.

The boy flees back to the train station.  There he meets somebody who really is from the school he is to attend.  Reading the last sentences of the story we recognize the alarming truth: thirty years ago, three rich boys at a now-defunct school on the other side of town, one catering to troublesome lads thrown out of other schools, were killed by their headmaster--presumably the three boys who harassed our hero are vampires or something similar.  The murderous headmaster was shut up in a lunatic asylum, and just tonight passed away.  It must have been the headmaster's ghost who saved the protagonist.

Acceptable.  "School for the Unspeakable" has been reprinted in many anthologies built around such enduringly popular themes as vampires, ghosts, devil worshippers, and magic.  

"Song of the Slaves" by Manly Wade Wellman (1940)

This is a story about the effort of a small businessman to achieve savings by cutting out the middleman.  Gender is the owner of a plantation in South Carolina in 1835, and instead of buying slaves at the slave market he gets a ship and sails to Africa and seizes a village and chains up forty-nine people himself!  The truth, of course, is that this doesn't really save Gender any money--he launched this expedition because he is the kind of guy who gets satisfaction out of dominating others.

For days, Gender marches with his forty-nine captives back to the ship, the whole time the Africans singing the same song, no matter how much Gender and his men beat them.  One of his subordinates tells Gender that the song is a magic spell, that the blacks are singing a song that they believe will bring about Gender's death!

Soon after setting sail, Gender's ship is spotted by a British warship engaged in the suppression of the slave trade.  The limeys give chase, and the Royal Navy vessel is the speedier--there is no escaping it.  So, under cover of dark, Gender attaches the empty fiftieth collar on the chain that shackles all the Africans together to an anchor and throws the anchor overboard, sending his forty-nine captives to a watery grave.  When the British captain catches up to Gender in the morning he declares that he knows what Gender has done and will write a letter to a friend in Charleston so that everybody knows of his crime.

Sure enough, back home, Gender is soon persona non grata; his erstwhile friends refuse to see him, the father of the woman he was courting forbids her to talk to him.  Then at night he hears that song again--his forty-nine victims climb out of the ocean, put that fiftieth collar around his neck, and return to the sea with him.    

Pretty good; the plot, ideas and themes are all good, and Wellman does a fine job with the images, characters, tone and pacing.  "Song of the Slaves," after first appearing in Weird Tales as a cover story, has been reprinted in quite a few anthologies and even some magazines, like a 1959 issue of Cavalier.  

"The Panelled Room" by August Derleth (1933)

This story here is pretty bad.  There are numerous distractingly clumsy and overly long sentences, plot developments come out of nowhere, and the characters and settings are poorly realized and uninteresting.

The basic plot of "The Panelled Room" is pedestrian and the way Derleth handles it is lame.  Childless Lydia and her sister Irma, who has a daughter, move into a house in which a man strangulated his wife and then hanged himself.  The neighbors keep coming over to warn them that the place is haunted and that they will soon be haunted by the ghostly vision of the dead bodies of the killer and his wife; in addition, the wall panels of the room in which the deaths took place will be seen to move.  They had better leave because other people have mysteriously died in the house since the murder-suicide, presumably slain by the ghost of the murderous husband.

As predicted, Lydia starts seeing the ghosts and, unsurprisingly, starts thinking they should leave.  But Irma tries to convince her they should stay, because she secretly hopes her sister will get killed by the ghost and Irma stands to inherit her sister's money.  An interfering neighbor who somehow intuits Irma's evil scheme tries to save Lydia by helping her write a will that specifies that in the event that Lydia dies in the haunted house, Irma will only inherit if she lives the rest of her life in the house.  As predicted, Lydia keels over in the panelled room and Irma's little daughter sees the panels moving.  Lydia goes insane and starts beating her daughter.

Derleth fails to make any of the characters' actions or motives believable or interesting--neither Irma's scheme to get her sister killed nor the nosy neighbor's legal stratagem to protect Lydia makes any sense, and neither has any real effect on the course of events.  Derleth also neglects to connect the phenomena of the moving panels to all the deaths.  Very shoddy. 

Thumbs down!  This piece of junk debuted in a magazine I've never heard of, The Westminster Magazine, and then was printed in a fanzine full of material by members of the Lovecraft circle, Leaves, in 1937; it first appeared in book form in 1941 in the Derleth collection Someone in the Dark.  Despite how terrible it is, people like Bill Pronzini and Peter Straub followed in Stong's footsteps, selecting "The Panelled Room" for inclusion in anthologies.  Go figure.

"The Return of Andrew Bentley" by August Derleth and Mark Schorer (1933)

After the exposing myself to the worthless rubbish that is "The Panelled Room," I wasn't exactly relishing the prospect of reading the eighteen pages taken up by "The Return of Andrew Bentley," which Derleth wrote in collaboration with his friend Mark Schorer, a Harvard and UC Berkeley prof and biographer of Sinclair Lewis.  But, as we just saw in our last blog post, Derleth is capable of good work, so it is not impossible that "The Return of Andrew Bentley" will be good, so I'm diving in.

It is with relief that I can report that "The Return of Andrew Bentley" is an entertaining yarn.  The narrator is summoned from his city life to the country by his irascible old Uncle Amos.  Amos tells the narrator that he will inherit his land and house and enough money to live comfortably on the condition that he promises to live in the house and every day check on his uncle's burial vault; should he find that the vault has been tampered with, he is to open a sealed letter and follow the instructions therein.

Uncle Amos dies just a few days later, presumably a suicide.  Amos is buried in the vault behind the house in which the narrator takes up residence.  Sure enough, weird things start happening, including the appearance of shadowy figures that seem to be trying to get into that vault wherein lies Uncle Amos's body!  The narrator has a dream that Uncle Amos is speaking to him, imploring him to get the local clergyman to bless the vault--it seems this punctilious cleric refused to bless Amos's grave because the man was a suicide.  

The narrator looks over his uncle's library, which like the libraries in many of the stories I read is well stocked with books of black magic, unseals that envelope, talks to various locals, and eventually we have the whole picture.  Uncle Amos made friends with an evil wizard, Andrew Bentley, and then murdered Bentley out of fear of the sorcerer's evil.  But Bentley had already summoned a familiar from Hell, and this familiar and Bentley's ghost tormented Amos.  Amos knew that to dispel ghost and familiar he had only to destroy Bentley's body, but the familiar has hidden the body.  Even worse, if the familiar, which currently is only able to operate at night and can't stray far from its master's bones, can get its mitts on a fresh dead body it can take over that body and greatly increase its sphere of operations.

The narrator has to find Bentley's bones and destroy them before the familiar can get into the vault and inhabit Amos's body, but it won't be easy!

I like the plot and the themes here, and Derleth and Schorer do a decent job with all the descriptions of the hellish familiar and the moonlit country landscape and all that, and with the horror scenes and so forth, so I enjoyed this one.  Thumbs up for "The Return of Andrew Bentley."

After first rising from the pages of Weird Tales--the same issue as stories by Robert E. Howard, Edmond Hamilton, Clark Ashton Smith and Frank Belknap Long we have already read--"The Return of Andrew Bentley" would reappear in Derleth collections as well as several anthologies, including books edited by Bennett Cerf and Marvin Kaye.

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Students of the history of genre literature and speculative fiction might find Stong's long foreword to The Other Worlds of interest; in it he surveys and delivers strong opinions on the science fiction, fantasy and horror fields, even briefly offering harsh assessments of detective literature and of fantastic motion pictures.  (Stong and I are not necessarily on the same page; he dismisses King Kong, which I hold to be the greatest film of all time, as "very silly," and condemns all stories of interplanetary travel and adventure.  He also thinks the pulp magazines should have more joke stories, when I think there are way too many, waiting for me between the covers of almost every magazine and anthology like so many anti-personnel mines.)  The Other Worlds isn't just one of the first SF anthologies, but an early example of serious SF criticism.