Frank Belknap Long: "The Thought Materializer," "In the Lair of the Space Monsters," and "The Dark Beasts"

I recently spent some time looking up references to Frank Belknap Long in the correspondence of H. P. Lovecraft in my copies of Hippocampus Press's Letters of H. P. Lovecraft Volume 7, Letters to Robert Bloch and Others and Volume 9, Letters to F. Lee Baldwin, Duane W. Rimel, and Nils Frome, as well as Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth: 1932-1937.  I came upon mentions of Long stories I hadn't yet read, and decided today to read three that have evocative titles, "The Thought Materializer," "In the Lair of the Space Monsters" and "The Dark Beasts."

"The Thought Materializer" (1930) 

In an April 24, 1935 letter to William F. Anger, Lovecraft writes about Hugo Gernsback's reputation for failing to pay writers for their stories, saying that "Hugo the Rat" never paid Frank Belknap Long for his story in the Spring 1930 issue of Science Wonder Quarterly, "The Thought Materializer."  Let's see what Gernsback got for free.

A scientist invites his friend over to test his latest invention on him.  Of course he does!  The inventor has developed a device that you strap around your head and chest and which amplifies the "vibrations" that are your thoughts.  The idea is that this device will amplify psychosomatic effects.  The example the scientist gives to his remarkably accommodating pal is that, if he thinks about hanging around on a sunny beach, he will get a sunburn, even though he is here in an apartment.  The scientist straps the thing to his friend and warns him multiple times to not think of anything really dangerous, like knives or tigers or car crashes or airplane crashes.  Then he directs his biddy to imagine he has burned his finger.  Ouch!  The man's finger is truly damaged, the skin blackened!  The device works!

The phone rings--the scientist is expecting a call from a potential investor, so he leaves the room to take this perhaps career-making call.  He doesn't turn off the machine or unstrap his friend because that would waste electricity--he's only going to be gone three minutes, he says.  While he is gone his hapless subject falls asleep and dreams he is attacked by a monster--in response to his buddy's screams the scientist rushes back to find his friend's clothes torn and his flesh mauled!  

America's most gullible man is patched up and after two weeks or so is good as new.  Meanwhile, America's worst friend has destroyed the device he invented.  When these two pals get back together the inventor laments that he will always wonder what would have happened if he had strapped the device on some animal--for some reason he is fascinated by the idea of strapping the thing on a snake and thereby inferring what a snake dreams about.

This is an amateurish sort of story with odd word choices and plot holes (how would a psychosomatic effect damage your clothes?)  The title doesn't even match the content--I expected the device to make physical matter appear.  Barely acceptable.  I am not giving it a thumbs down because it made me smile--it is entertaining, with its crazy sitcom plot, like if Lucy Ricardo was a mad scientist and got Ethel Mertz to be her guinea pig.  "The Thought Materializer" is accompanied by a drawing of a mustachioed young Long, and a little editor's intro that briefly describes (with no dates or locations or names or citations of sources) how some young girl suffered oozing stigmata, I guess in order to make this wacky story more convincing and bring it more in line with the Gernsbackian mission of teaching people science (it is alleged that stigmata are a phenomenon "recognized by science" and that medical records abound with testimony to the reality of such cases.)

"The Thought Materializer" has never been reprinted, as far as I can tell.  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are into unearthing the "deep cuts!"    

"In the Lair of the Space Monsters" (1932)

In a late August 1932 letter to August Derleth, Lovecraft talks about how Long resented Strange Tales editor Harry Bates' cuts to his story "In the Lair of the Space Monsters," contrasting Long with Hugh B. Cave, who apparently had a more business-like tolerance of editorial alterations to his work.  A major theme of Lovecraft's correspondence is that he is an artist and doesn't write for money or to please anybody, and he is always lamenting that other writers, from Edmond Hamilton to C. L. Moore to Long and many others, are at risk of squandering their talent and becoming hacks.   

Jim Harvey and Frank Taylor are buddies serving on a submarine.  The boat collides with something and takes on water and sinks deep, much of the hull collapsing in on itself.  Long describes in detail Harvey's experiences and his psychological state as he struggles to survive in the wrecked vessel and finds many of his comrades dead, and Taylor unconscious.

The boat comes to rest, and tentacles like those of an octopus, but 15 or 20 feet long and ending in claws, reach through a hole in the sub's hull and pull out the dead bodies as well as the still living Harvey and Taylor.  The sub has apparently travelled through a vent or hole and been cast ashore in a subterranean world that lies under the Pacific, and the crew, dead and living, collected by hairy brutish men with flat noses whose lower extremities are eight tentacles!

The octopus-men carry the corpses and the captives across a desolate cratered landscape to a forest of soft flexible trees inhabited by big drooling reptiles.  Throughout the story, paragraph after paragraph, Long endeavors to horrify and disgust the reader., and one memorable volley in the long barrage of gross stuff is when foul-smelling reptile drool lands on Harvey.  Beyond the forest is a cavern, and when the octopus-men carry their captives through a low-ceilinged tunnel a stalactite cuts open Harvey's forehead and blood runs down his face and into his mouth.  Inside the cavern are many chambers full of human bones, among them remains of clothing identifiable as those of sailors.  

Harvey and Taylor are glued to a wall with a substance much like spider webbing that the octopus-men vomit up onto them.  Then the same webbing is used to seal the chamber they are in.  There is a big egg case in the chamber with them, and it bursts open and hundreds of larval octopus men, each just eight inches long, crawl over to the sailors and start eating them alive!  Harvey goes insane and his maniacal laughter, somehow, scares the larva and they flee precipitously, chewing a hole through the sealed doorway.  The larva having chewed away most of the webbing holding Harvey and Taylor captive, they manage to break free and escape the cavern.

Then, somehow, the pair and the submarine end up on the beach of an island.  They theorize that the sub didn't sink down into a subterranean world after all, but was in fact pushed by a tidal wave into and through a point where our dimension impinges upon another dimension.  This must happen to Earth ships periodically--not only were there all those human bones, but the "Oriental" sailor who rescues them says that many strange events have been related about this island.

This is a sort of shaggy dog story in which the characters don't do anything, just observe a list of weird sights and suffer a series of horrible torments.  Why Long chose to include both the subterranean world idea and the alien dimension idea, I don't know; it is almost like he was making up the story as he went and realized that he didn't know how to get Harvey and Taylor back to the surface, so changed gears.  We'll call this one barely acceptable, as all the disgusting mishaps the sailors are subjected to are sort of fun.          

"In the Lair of the Space Monsters" was reprinted by Robert A. Lowndes in his Magazine of Horror in 1971.  The story also reappears in an 800-page volume of Long's work published this very year edited by S. T. Joshi which has a handsome photo of Long on its cover.  (People used to wear nice clothes around!)

"The Dark Beasts" (1934)

In a number of letters, Lovecraft praises "The Dark Beasts," a good example being a letter to F. Lee Baldwin dated May 16, 1934, in which Lovecraft calls the story "among his [Long's] very best."  Dare we hope this piece, which debuted in the magazine Marvel Tales, which isfdb tells us was "saddle-stapled" and included a major printing error, will be better than "The Thought Materializer" and "In the Lair of the Space Monsters?"

Well, "The Dark Beasts" is certainly better than the other two stories we are talking about today, but I wouldn't call it "good"--I'll call it "OK."  The style is better, like maybe Long revised it and somebody edited it; the dialogue, for example, feels more like real human speech and conveys personality, and the plot feels like it was outlined before hand and not just made up as the author was going along.

"The Dark Beasts" is the weird tale of a small family living off in the wilderness, near a dark sinister wood.  We first meet the youngest member of the family, eighteen-year-old Peter, who "has the mind of a child."  He is near the scary wood, by a creek, and has found a dead frog with a wire noose around its neck.

The middle section of the story, which takes up most of the page count, consists largely of dialogue between Ma and Pa, and some background that comes to us in the form of Peter's musings.  We learn the tragic history of this dysfunctional family out of chronological order, you know, for dramatic effect, but I'll just list it in order here.  Peter's grandfather made some kind of deal with the monsters who live in the wood.  (The nature of the deal is hard for me to understand--it is explained in the words of the developmentally disabled Peter, so maybe he doesn't understand it either.  It sounds like the dark things gave Grandpa immortality, and, in return, they were to be permitted to rest in Grandpa's grave with him when he died, which of course makes zero sense.)  Grandpa left the area and has never come back to fulfill his half of the deal, and so the monsters ("the dark things") cursed the family.  (When he was eight Peter saw one of the "things" talking to grandpa--it was a short bipedal monster with a body like a bear's and a head like a giant snake's!)  Peter's father Jim also had dealings with the things.  Jim died and Ma remarried; Pa is Peter's stepfather.

The dark things have, apparently, got ordinary animals to side with them against the cursed family, and worked magic against their farm, making the crops fail and the cows "dry up."  Ma and Pa disagree about the frogs--Peter's stepfather is certain the frogs are the front rank of the enemy offensive, that their croaking is black magic, but Ma thinks the frogs are their only allies, that their croakings are warnings.  She is dismayed to hear that today Pa killed all the frogs by tying wires around their necks.  As with the bargain, the role of the frogs in the story is hard to really understand; why would they protect the family, and why would Pa kill them by tying a wire noose round them instead of just clubbing them or shooting them?  Why doesn't Long explain this stuff better?  Is Long alluding to traditional folklore about frogs that I have never heard before? 

That night the things use their mental powers to convince Peter to open his window; a swarm of frogs and a snake-bear climb in.  When the authorities arrive in response to reports of a fire they find the house burned down, Ma and Peter's bodies torn to pieces, and Pa's body intact, a wire noose around its neck.  Also significant is a report from a witness who saw an odd short figure running from the house, carrying a lit torch.    

I read "The Dark Beasts" in the internet archive scan of 1975's The Early Long.  The story has been reprinted in several other Long collections, and one of those Barnes and Noble anthologies, 100 Fiendish Little Frightmares.  

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These stories aren't that great, which is no surprise, as I often find Long's work underwhelming.  My interest in the weird keeps me coming back, though.  

More horror stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

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It has been a long time since I have recommended a transgressive and politically incorrect manga about the challenging emotional lives of Japanese schoolgirls.  (And I have to say with sorrow that some of the ones I have recommended in the past have since lost steam as they shifted their focus from characters and plot threads that were hilarious and adorable and even heart-moving to figures and situations that are just plain boring.)  But today I am recommending Henjo by Yoshiru Konogi, which is laugh-out-loud funny and always surprising (at least up to chapter 45, which is where I am.)  Check it out but maybe don't let anybody see you doing so--it can be our little secret.