, but I can't be as enthusiastic about the illustrations in this one. The cover by Margaret Brundage is kind of weak, though that red outfit does remind us 2022 readers of
. August Derleth's "The Satin Mask" is illustrated by Derleth's friend Frank Utpatel; Lovecraft's correspondence is full of praise for Utpatel's work*, but the picture here is unremarkable. Moore illustrates her own story, "The Dark Land," but while I loved her illustration for
Let's read three stories from this issue, though, in the interest of getting the best possible texts, not necessarily the versions available to 1936 readers.
*See e.g., HPL to Donald A. Wollheim, April 19, 1936 and HPL to Henry Kuttner, May 18, 1936 in Volumes 7 and 10 of Hippocampus Press' Letters of H. P. Lovecraft, eds. Schultz and Joshi. "The Satin Mask" (1936)
OK, we
are actually reading this one from the scan of the January 1936 issue of
Weird Tales that is available at the internet archive, world's greatest webs site. "The Satin Mask" would be reprinted in book form
en ingles in
Something Near in 1945 and
August Derleth's Eerie Creatures in 2009, and in Spanish in a 1951 Argentinian Derleth collection, but I don't have access to any of those. (
Something Near is going for $250 on ebay, so if you have a copy, take care of it--it can be a significant component of your retirement plan!)
At the center of "The Satin Mask" is a good fun element, an Italian mask with strange and terrible properties. Cursed and given to his enemies by some Italian way back when, the thing is so beautiful that women adore it and can't help but don it, but, essentially alive, the thing sucks out your life force after you wear it, and before you die you are haunted by visions of the women who wore it and were slain by it before.
So I like the mask, but Derleth does a poor job of coming up with a plot and characters to showcase the thing--the characters are totally flat and act in ways that don't make sense, and the plot is too long and convoluted.
A young woman, Monica, is living with her Aunt Susan and Uncle Henry and their daughter Alice. Her hosts know all about the dangerous evil of the mask--it killed Susan's siter Julie--and want to keep it from Monica, but they stupidly do things that make it more likely that Monice will get her hands on the living death trap. For example, the mask is hanging up on the wall in a room like a decoration; now, you may object that the room's door is locked, but I will respond, "true, but the key is right there above the door on the lintel and everybody knows it is there!" Monica's relatives have never mentioned the mask, but then Susan encourages Monica to read Aunt Julie's letters to Monica's mother, which describe the mask and how beautiful it is.
The story of how Julie got the mask in the first place is equally hard to credit. Julie met a guy in Italy, Bellini, while on a trip to Europe, and they fell in love. While they were separated by the Atlantic, Bellini kept sending gifts to her from Italy. He sent the mask, because it was so beautiful, but warned Julie not to wear the mask--he believed in the story of the mask's vampiric life, and knew it had killed women already. So why was he sending it to the woman he loved? (When he heard the mask had killed Julie, Bellini committed suicide, so we can't speculate that he was trying to murder Julie, and it is too bad Derleth didn't take that tack, which would have been more believable, more scary, and built more interesting and more sympathetic characters--it is easy to feel for a woman who is being abused by a man, and it is even possible to feel for a man who gets stuck in a relationship he wishes he wasn't in, but it is hard to understand a bunch of dopes who know they have an unexploded bomb in their midst and instead of trying to get rid of it, share it with their loved ones.)
Disappointing. August Derleth was a founder and manager of Arkham House, the small publisher that did so much to keep the work of H. P. Lovecraft available and to publish early work by authors like Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley who went on to stellar success. Despite its heroic work in the interest of the weird community, Arkham House never ran at a profit, and apparently was only kept afloat by Derleth subsidizing it from his own earnings, which it seems lead to him producing stories at a furious pace--the result of such a pace is stories like "The Satin Mask" that are kind of half-baked.
We'll call this one barely acceptable.
An interesting facet of "The Satin Mask" that we might think about is its portrayal of Italian people. We have seen in the work of H. P. Lovecraft (I'm thinking of "The Haunter of the Dark" here) and Carl Jacobi and Edmond Hamilton this idea that Italians are superstitious and even primitive; you could probably write a master's thesis that compares and contrasts the treatment of Italians and Africans/African-Americans in weird fiction--both demographics are commonly portrayed as a community that is subordinate and inferior to Anglo-Saxon- and German-Americans, but also possesses occult knowledge that can threaten or aid America's dominant classes.
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| Nice socks! |
"The Dark Land" (1936)
"The Dark Land" is the fourth story of aristocratic swordsperson Jirel of Joiry, a baroness or something who commonly leads soldiers into battle, has a habit of getting transported to alien worlds, and tragically killed the man she loved. Witness my opinions about the first three Jirel tales,
"Black God's Kiss," "Black God's Shadow" and
"Jirel Meets Magic" at the links; the first three Jirel stories are full of big emotions, bizarre images and unhealthy sexual relationships. Let's see how #4 stacks up. (I'm reading it in my copy of
Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams, Gollancz's 2002 Moore collection.)
As our story begins, Jirel lies in bed, near death! While Jirel was innocently participating in one of the wars that seem to be her primary occupation, some foeman had the temerity to stab her with a pike, and now it looks like she is not long for this world. Literally--when the priest comes to perform her last rites, her body is gone! The cleric thinks Jirel must have spent too much time defying the natural order and travelling to other universes and has been taken directly to hell, body as well as soul, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 sous!
Jirel wakes up in another world, fully healed. The very first Jirel story, "Black God's Kiss," started off with some hunky warlord trying to kiss Jirel against her will, and "The Dark Land" has a similar theme. King Pav of Romne, who has "heavy shoulders" and an "arrogant, majestic face," has used his magic to preserve her from death and summon her to his dimension, intent that she, the most savage woman in the known universes, be his bride!
"...there is in you a hot and savage strength which no other woman in any land I know possesses....None but you is fit to be my queen. So I have taken you for my own."
Hubba hubba!
Pav, an alien being of tremendous power, and red-haired and yellow-eyed Jirel have a sort of test of wills. (Moore's Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith stories always seem to involve some kind of psychic struggle.) Pav could just use his sorcery to compel Jirel's submission, but he wants a willing woman, so agrees to a bargain--he gives Jirel a chance to figure out how to escape his dimension or outfight him, and she agrees to surrender to his desires if she should fail in this presumably hopeless endeavor. Then he teleports away in a "swirl of rainbow dazzle."
Jirel travels around the surreal and untenanted landscape of Romne, where everything is black and no matter how far away something is, your view of it is perfectly clear, making it hard to judge distances, and where you can travel instantaneously by just willing it. Jirel encounters just one person, an emaciated old witch who sees Jirel as a rival for the number 2 spot in this Dark Land and initially wants to kill Jirel, but whom Jirel convinces to reveal Pav's weakness by suggesting that, if they work together, old skull-face can be #1 and Jirel can get back to Earth and get back to hitting people with swords.
Pav reappears and we get more S&M undertones as Pav physically dominates Jirel and she kneels before him in submission--but it is all sham! Guided by telepathic messages from the witch, Jirel focuses her indomitable will in such a way that hunkalicious Pav and the entire Dark Land, which were merely illusions masking Pav's true nature, are whisked away to reveal endless darkness, a blackness relieved only by the whiteness of the skeletal witch. The perfidious witch is about to destroy Jirel when but Pav musters enough power to save our heroine, transporting her back to castle Joiry.
As I have suggested, "The Dark Land" is of a piece with the other Jirel stories we have read. The story relies for its effects on its depiction of Jirel's expansive emotions and heroic will power, its strange images and its themes of sexual domination and submission. Perhaps we should see it as a sort of wish fulfillment fantasy for women--Jirel competes with a woman of a superior social strata for a hot guy of similarly exalted status and beats her, winning the man's heart and receiving valuable gifts from him without even having to put out! Jirel has her cake and eats it too, getting the guy without giving of herself or making any sort of compromise.
"The Dark Land" has of course appeared in various Moore collections, but also a few anthologies, including an anthology of SF stories written by women (among them Agatha Christie) edited by Vic Ghidalia and Roger Elwood and a German anthology edited by Hugh Walker.
"Dagon" (1919)
I've read "Dagon" multiple times, but I guess that was before an earthquake triggered the arising of this blog from the black depths of my febrile mind. "Dagon" is a great little story that exhibits many of the stereotypical characteristics of Lovecraft's work: the discovery of a hidden civilization, shocking revelations gleaned from studying pictographic carvings, the terror from the deep, a memoir or testimonial, a guy who goes insane. "Dagon" first appeared in
The Vagrant, and has been reprinted innumerable times in the mountain of Lovecraft collections out there; I am reading it my copy of Arkham House's
Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, the Corrected Ninth Printing. "Dagon" would be reprinted in
Weird Tales three times under three different editors, in 1923 (Edwin Baird), 1936 (Farnsworth Wright), and 1951 (D. McIlwraith), and in anthologies such as James Gunn's 1979
From Wells to Heinlein and Jacques Sadoul's
Une historie de la science fiction.
Many of Lovecraft's famous works are vulnerable to the charge that they are too long and include superfluous detail as they depict the process or actually reproduce the products of exploration and research ("At the Mountains of Madness," "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and "The Shadow Out of Time" are good examples.) "Dagon," in contrast, is very short. The memoir of a sailor who is about to commit suicide, he tells us that he can no longer bear living because he saw something so horrible he would rather die than continue remembering it. Alone in the middle of the ocean on a little boat after his ship was captured by Germans during the Great War, this guy wakes up one day to find that a large section of ocean floor has somehow risen to the water's surface and his boat is marooned in the middle of a slimy landscape littered with the dead bodies of fish and more exotic aquatic life that extends to both horizons. Exploring this risen continent, he discovers a towering monument or religious stele covered in creepy carvings that indicate that, for thousands of years, giant fish people have been living on the ocean floor. When he spots one of these fish people in the flesh he goes insane. This mariner doesn't even remember being rescued and brought to a California hospital, and since his release from the hospital he has been finding relief from his obsessive memories with drugs, but the drugs have run out and now he plans to throw himself out a high window. But wait, what is that at the door? Will the sailor be able to destroy himself, or will he be murdered by a monster, or will something even worse befall him?
A classic of genre literature; it makes sense for people like Gunn and Sadoul to include "Dagon" in their "history of SF" surveys because it is a great representative of the Weird and provides readers a good idea of what Lovecraft is all about in a tight little package.
**********
"Dagon" is of course an enduring classic. Derleth's "The Satin Mask" feels like a filler piece that more work could have turned into something more impressive. You can't call Moore's "The Dark Land" a mere filler piece because she packs so much emotion and strangeness into it, but unfortunately it is more of the same from her, and lacking compared to some of the proceeding Jirel stories (for example, the first two Jirel stories are about Jirel's relationship with Guillaume and in them we witness evolutions in Jirel's personality and milestones in her life, but here in "The Dark Land" Jirel's character seems static and the episode seems self-contained.)
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