Before we get to the fiction I have to point out that Farnsworth Wright seems to have had Virgil Finlay working overtime for this issue because not only does Finlay contribute the cover but eight or nine new interior illos, and it is a fine collection of lovely ladies, shirtless dudes, studies of human physiognomy, and hideous monsters. I don't recognize them, so I guess they are not famous, so all you Finlay fans out there are encouraged to flip through this issue, as several of the drawings are pretty good and maybe you haven't seen them yet either.
"The Metal Chamber" by Duane W. Rimel (1939)
"The Metal Chamber" comes to us as a manuscript hand-written on scratch paper by a misanthropic scientist. He tells us he has woken up with partial amnesia in a strange metal room; he retains fragmented memories of conducting experiments in telepathy on his Chinese cook. As the story progresses through later entries of this impromptu diary, the narrator has dreams and begins recovering memories so that he and we learn that after perfecting a drug that strengthened his telepathic abilities he contacted some space aliens, and said E. T.s sent a ship to Earth to pick him up and bring him to their planet. He didn't bring his drugs with him, however, and can't communicate with the aliens. (I can sympathize--how many times have I stepped into a hotel room to realize I forgot toothbrush, comb or cell phone charger?) The Earthman can't see his hosts either; they are a color his brain cannot recognize, and he is in fact glad they are not visible to him, because he is certain they look so hideous that the sight of them would drive him insane.
We leave the story with every reason to doubt the narrator's sanity, whether or not he saw the aliens' true form. After a brief look around the aliens' vast and symmetrical city, which is sheltered under a dome, the narrator becomes convinced that humans should stay on Earth and suffers such terrible fears that he tries to commit suicide. A post script written by a police officer indicates that the aliens brought him back to Earth and he probably failed to kill himself, and instead died from psychological stress or maybe from something the aliens did to him. I guess the point of the story is that the human mind is not ready to face the reality of alien worlds and alien beings, that contact with them will drive us insane.
Mildly good. The "Hallowmas" 1991 issue of Crypt of Cthulhu was a special Duane W. Rimel tribute issue and it included "The Metal Chamber" as well as six other Rimel stories; this thing is available for like $25.00 on ebay--tempting!
"The Return of Hastur" by August Derleth (1939)
"The Return of Hastur" is a Lovecraft pastiche set in the environs of HPL's fictional towns of Arkham and Innsmouth and it is full of references to the Necromicon, Cthulhu and other of the fictional books of eldritch lore and alien monster gods invented by HPL and his friends. In its style and structure, and in some of its clever and creepy little elements, it isn't bad. Our narrator is a lawyer. One of his clients, a rich old geezer named Amos Tuttle, is on his deathbed at the start of the story. He stresses to our narrator that the unusual clause in his will instructing that his house and a bunch of his queer old foreign language books be totally destroyed be followed to the letter. But after A. Tuttle dies, the narrator and the late Tuttle's nephew and heir, Paul Tuttle, see fit to ignore those instructions on the grounds that A. Tuttle was likely insane when he wrote the will and, besides, the house and books are extremely valuable--one of those books was purchased from a dude in Tibet for $100,000, which was real money in the late Twenties! In the months that follow Paul Tuttle conducts research in and about his uncle's library and he and the narrator see, hear and smell some scary stuff, and are finally witnesses to--and participants in!--a mind-shattering, norm-defying, reality-warping event of horror. It seems that Amos Tuttle agreed to have his body, after death, become a vessel for the return from outer space of the alien monster god Hastur, but some other weird being is contesting this return!
Most of that stuff is pretty good. But Derleth missteps by doing things in the story that seem silly, like making Lovecraft a minor character in the story and indicating that Weird Tales and the story "The Call of Cthulhu" are real in the universe of "The Return of Hastur," or incongruent with Lovecraft's attitudes, like trying to cram like a square peg into a round hole all the alien beings of the Cthulhu Mythos--Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Yog Sothoth, et al--into a conventional good vs evil framework, and categorize them into a scheme based on the four traditional elements--for example, Paul Tuttle's researches indicate Cthulhu is a "Water Being." When the lawyer and the younger Tuttle hear fearsome noises emanating from below the Tuttle estate, the narrator nervously asks, "Is it Hastur?" and P. Tuttle says "It cannot be he, because the passage below leads only to the sea and is doubtless partly full of water...it can only be one of the Water Beings...." On the final page of the story it appears that Cthulhu and Hastur are going to wrestle right there on the New England seashore, but then the power of good in the form of lightning casts the former into the ocean and the latter back into space. Mapping ordinary conceptions of good and evil and elemental affinities onto the Cthulhu Mythos entities robs them of their alienness and their ability to inspire cosmic horror--one of the distinguishing characteristics of this material is that it argues that the universe cannot be understood, cannot be mapped or its components categorized--and is a mistake.
I'm not crazy about where Derleth tries to take Yog Sothery in this story, but it is competently produced and has some good bits, so I guess I'll average it all out to "acceptable."
"Comrades of Time" by Edmond Hamilton (1939)
However crazy the 21st century might be, the 12,437th century seems like it is going to be even crazier! This is what we learn in
"Comrades in Time," which has one of Edmond Hamilton's typical Edgar Rice Burroughs-style plots, featuring a fighting man who finds himself in another world and gets involved in the local war, joining the side represented by an attractive woman, of course. Hamilton uses the same gag here in "Comrades in Time" that he employed in 1935's "The Six Sleepers"--six soldiers from different eras of history, each with a different comic relief personality (the veteran of Cromwell's army is a religious fanatic, the buckskin-clad frontiersman has a goofy backwoods accent, the conquistador brags about his close relationship with Cortez, etc.) join forces to fight the bad guys. Maybe we shouldn't be surprised that Hamilton is reusing that gimmick here, because readers voted "The Six Sleepers" the best story in the issue of Weird Tales in which is appeared.
"Comrades in Time," which has one of Edmond Hamilton's typical Edgar Rice Burroughs-style plots, featuring a fighting man who finds himself in another world and gets involved in the local war, joining the side represented by an attractive woman, of course. Hamilton uses the same gag here in "Comrades in Time" that he employed in 1935's "The Six Sleepers"--six soldiers from different eras of history, each with a different comic relief personality (the veteran of Cromwell's army is a religious fanatic, the buckskin-clad frontiersman has a goofy backwoods accent, the conquistador brags about his close relationship with Cortez, etc.) join forces to fight the bad guys. Maybe we shouldn't be surprised that Hamilton is reusing that gimmick here, because readers voted "The Six Sleepers" the best story in the issue of Weird Tales in which is appeared.
(We read "The Six Sleepers" back in 2017 for a blog post about three Hamilton stories that won the best in issue vote, including "The Avenger from Atlantis." "Comrades in Time" didn't win best in issue--that honor went to "The Return of Hastur.")
Ethan Drew is an American in the French Foreign Legion whose patrol gets wiped out by Tuaregs. He loses consciousness a moment before one of the Muslim swordsmen strikes him down, and wakes up in a room with five other men, five fighting men from the past! Working together, they escape from the room, encounter a beautiful woman and rescue her from some sword swinging thugs. (The six comrades have their weapons with them--four swords, an axe--the Viking's--and the frontiersman's muzzle-loading rifle.) The woman, Chiri, explains that her father, Kim Idim, has used his time travel device to transport the six soldiers here to the year 1,243,665! She briefs them on the crises facing the world of 1.24 million years in our future!
The seas have been rising for centuries, and most of what is land in the 20th century is now underwater--soon the entire globe will be submerged. Knowledge of this doom has lead to widespread psychological and sociological decline, and concomitant technological decline--that is why the thugs are armed with swords and ride horses instead of shooting people with ray guns from the comfort of aircars, as we might have expected. Kim Idim is one of the world's few remaining scientists, and he invented the time ray that summoned the six comrades; when tyrant king Thorold, the only living man to have access to this society's mysterious living god, the Wise One, learned of the device he seized it and its maker; hoping to use it to travel to some more salubrious epoch.
Chiri (not to be confused with Chili, Millie the Model's red-headed rival) leads the soldiers whom her father has shanghaied from across the eons through a jungle to Tzar, the Earth's last city, a walled metropolis of ziggurats where Thorold holds Kim Idim and his invention. Earthquakes herald Tzar's imminent descent beneath the waves. Ethan Drew and company creep through the storm drains to the cellars beneath the Citadel of the Wise One, steal uniforms and in disguise make their way up the pyramid's ten levels. They stumble into the chamber of the Wise One, who turns out to be the disembodied head of a mad scientist, kept alive for thousands of years by mechanical apparatus so he can serve as a repository of knowledge. He tells our heroes where they can find Thorold and Kim Idim after they promise to euthanize him.
Ethan Drew and the others rescue Kim Idim from the torture chamber (as I have pointed out in the past, Hamilton's Weird Tales stories often feature a torture scene) and outfight Thorold and his guards; then, as the water rises and the Citadel of the Wise One begins to collapse, Kim Idim sends the warriors back to their proper times and places.
Acceptable. We'll be seeing Ethan Drew again in the April, 1939 issue of Weird Tales.
"The Quest of Iranon" by H. P. Lovecraft (1935)
The men of Teloth are sober and practical, and so they are not very impressed when Iranon, the exiled prince of beautiful Aira, comes to their city to sing his songs of his dreams of his own city, which he is having trouble getting back to. They tell him to get a job or leave, so he departs, but a kid who is equally uninterested in working comes along with him. For years these two wander the forests in search of Aira, living on berries, the kid growing older while Iranon seems to stay the same age. They finally come to a city where people enjoy Iranon's songs, Oonai, but in a shallow, not a sophisticated way; whereas the men of Teloth were cold and unfeeling, those of Oonai are frivolous and drunken. Iranon's companion is infected with Oonai's decadence, grows old and dies, and the ageless Iranon departs alone.
In the surprise ending Iranon is reminded that he is not in fact a prince and that Aira is merely a fiction he himself fabricated, and he kills himself by walking into quicksand. (This is the third quicksand reference here at MPorcius Fiction Log in the space of a month.)
"The Quest of Iranon" is the kind of fairy tale a sad teenager who thinks of himself as an artist might write, a tragic melodrama about how nobody understands him and the world sucks because you have to work. (It kind of reminds me of Harlan Ellison's famous "Repent etc.") The pretentiousness and self-indulgence of Lovecraft's tale are as silly in their own way as the contrivances and coincidences of Edmond Hamilton's swashbuckling melodrama here in the same ish of WT.
"The Quest of Iranon" is well-written and achieves its goals, but I'm not exactly impressed with what those goals are. Like all these stories we are reading today, it has its virtues and ends up in the acceptable-mildly good range.
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Of these four stories from the March 1939 Weird Tales, Hamilton's story is the most pedestrian, a sort of filler piece, though entertaining. Personally I would have been happier if he had ditched the gimmick of the other five soldiers and spent more time on the Wise One and on the themes of decadence and decline--in the same way Robert E. Howard uses Conan to dramatize the differences between the barbarian and the civilized man, Hamilton could have used Ethan Drew to throw into relief the differences between young and vital and democratic America and an old and sclerotic and tyrannical civilization represented by Tzar.
Rimel's story is a little more "weird" than Hamilton's, in that it tries to portray alienness, but one could argue it is standard issue WT fodder. Derleth's story is a Lovecraft pastiche which more or less succeeds, but is also an ambitious but quixotic effort to make the Cthulhu Mythos conform to optimistic mainstream thinking. The Lovecraft reprint is the most literary, heartfelt and personal of the four stories we have looked at today, but perhaps the least fun.
None of these stories is great, but none is a waste of time; a decent issue of The Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual.
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