In a 1972 interview (check it out in an elaborate fanzine full of illustrations by people like Tim Kirk, Richard Corben and Stephen Fabian!) one of H. P. Lovecraft's closest colleagues, prolific writer Frank Belknap Long, told Stuart D. Schiff that he felt his best short stories and novelettes were those published in the 1940s by John W. Campbell, Jr. in Astounding and Unknown. Investigating this claim, we at MPorcius Fiction Log are reading some of those World War II-era Long stories in scans of Campbell's famous magazines. Today we've got three stories from 1942 issues of Unknown, which I guess at this point was technically called Unknown Worlds (the magazine had abandoned beautiful painted covers back in 1940 in favor of a soul-draining academic look. Why oh why?) I happen to be reading these stories in scans of the 1942 magazines, but they are available in meat space in the many editions of the famous Hounds of Tindalos collection as well as the 1975 collection The Early Long.
"The Census Taker"
This is a whimsical joke story that, like the joke stories by Long we read in our last episode, has its share of disturbing violence.
The protagonist of "The Census Taker" is a middle-class guy who is engaged to be married, Philip. He is home alone relaxing, reading a detective novel, when someone knocks on the door. It is an odd little character in strange clothes who claims to be a census taker. He asks Philip how many wives he has, and when Philip says none, the guy is amazed, and denounces Philip as a tax dodger because men who have fewer than twenty wives are subject to additional taxes. The weirdo vanishes, and Philip, worried he is going mad, calls up his fiancé Claire. Moments before she arrives giant thugs, cops, appear at Phil's place and drag him away; when Philip resists they beat him bloody. Spotting Claire, they grab her as well.
Philip and Claire are put into what I would call a paddy wagon and what Long calls a Black Maria; you should call such a vehicle a "police van" because talking like Long and I do is probably grounds for dismissal from whatever job you have. The vehicle gets going, but doesn't follow the course of the street, instead passing ghost-like through various structures and even people--it becomes apparent that the machine and its passengers exist in two dimensions at once to varying degrees; the alien driver is following the course of a street in another world or time or something, and can't see the road on our Earth, while Earth people can see Philip and Claire, but not the aliens or the van, so our heroes appear to them to be flying a few feet above the ground. Our heroes are in some peril; for example, when the van drives through water they are at risk of drowning. Eventually, though, Philip and Claire themselves pass out of the vehicle and it proceeds without them.
The last section of the story stars the little census taker, who lives in another universe or on another planet or in the future or something. He and the cops are guinea pigs, testing out new "sleeping cabinets" that offer exciting dreams and allow telepathic contact with other sleepers so multiple people can share a dream--he and the cops have just shared the dream of discovering and arresting polygamy-resistors Philip and Claire.
This story doesn't make any sense. For most of the tale it seems that the alien census taker and the cops and their vehicle have, accidentally and unwittingly, passed through a portal and arrived on 20th-century Earth. But then Long gives us that last section which tells you that the census taker and the ogrish policemen just dreamed our Earth. The problem is, we had scenes of Philip and Claire that were totally independent of the aliens--we saw them watch the alien police vehicle fly away through the air up into space, for example--so Philip and Claire are real, not some computer program or hypnotic recording. The presence of the vehicle indicates that the aliens aren't just being astrally projected or teleported to Philip's world via the sleep cabinets--they obviously didn't bring the vehicle into the coffin-sized cabinets with them.
Thumbs down.
One of the frustrating things about "The Census Taker" is that Long posits the existence of a world somewhat like ours, one with government police and taxes, private companies and commerce, motor vehicles, etc., but with a major difference in that the government strongly encourages that men have twenty or more wives, but Long never even touches on the issue of why the government might have such a bizarre policy or what effect such a policy might have on society and on individuals. I guess he is just using the idea as an absurd joke and never had any intention of exploring this provocative idea.
"The Census Taker" shows up in a 1967 Italian anthology which I am guessing is built around the theme of sex, Fantasesso.
The core plot of "Grab Bags Are Dangerous" is not bad, but Long's writing is laboriously slow, tediously overwritten, and very repetitive, as multiple characters have a sort of chant or mantra or catch phrase that we have to read again and again. And then there are a weak jokes.
"Grab Bags Are Dangerous"
Satterly the playwright is in his early thirties and is engaged to a somewhat annoying woman, Ellen. Ellen has a sister who is in her early teens, and her birthday is coming up. Ellen wants Satterly to attend the party dressed as Friar Tuck, carrying a big grab bag of presents for the kids to reach into for a surprise. So Satterly buys a huge burlap sack from Tony the iceman, an Italian immigrant. (In these old weird stories we often see Italians portrayed as the mysterious other.*) At night Satterly has a horrible nightmare about this sack, a dream which he later, after expressing some reluctance to do so, describes to Ellen in tedious detail. Ellen, after badgering him to tell her the dream, is angry at him after he has complied because hearing this terrifying dream has ruined her mood--right before her sister's birthday party! (This realistic depiction of a heterosexual relationship is the best part of the story.)
In the dream, a repetitive voice (Long compares it to a broken record) kept telling Satterly to put the bag over his head, and he hears the same voice at the kids' party. Long portrays the kids as a bunch of jerks, which is sort of interesting. Also at the party is a grossly obese woman, and Long keeps reminding us how fat she is, as a joke or as part of the story's horror elements, I don't know. This 280-pound woman wants to be the first to draw a gift from the bag--Ellen has included adult gifts in the bag as well as gifts appropriate for children--and when she reaches into the sack she is bitten by something. In hopes of hiding from sensitive Ellen the fact that this bag is inhabited by a dangerous monster or has some kind of evil curse on it, Satterly tries to convince everybody that the injury the fat woman has suffered is not a bite, but just papercut or maybe a cut from a pocket knife that is one of the gifts.
Satterly finds himself unable to further resist the voice; he pours the gifts out on to the ground, and while the kids fight over the gifts around him, puts the bag over his head and falls unconscious. He gets the rest of the story from Ellen when he wakes up. Tony arrived and whipped the sack off Satterly just in time. Tony was there to retrieve the bag because he stole it from the Arab to whom he is renting a room and the Arab threatened to commit suicide if he didn't get the sack, a family heirloom, back. The tale ends with a lame pun based on the inability of these foreigners to pronounce and understand English--Tony thought it was a coal sack but it is in fact a ghoul sack--and a lame joke about how Ellen kicked her little sister in the ass because the teenager thought Satterly's predicament amusing.
This story is full of moments that made me do a double take and chipped away at its plausibility. Why would you ask the ice man for a burlap sack? Why would you steal a burlap sack from your tenant? Is Friar Tuck famous for giving out gifts? Why would you mix adult gifts and children's gifts in the same grab bag? The ghoul bites the woman's hand immediately, but doesn't bite Sattery's face? Thumbs down.
If you can read French--the language of love!--you can experience "Grab Bags Are Dangerous" in the 1977 collection Le druide noir. (I wonder how that "ghoul-coal" pun was handled by the translator.)
*See "Revelations in Black" by Carl Jacobi, August Derleth's "The Satin Mask," Edmond Hamilton's "The House of the Evil Eye" and H. P. Lovecraft's "The Haunter of the Dark."
"Step Into My Garden"
Ted Kendrick is a tractor salesman who is often away from home for weeks at a time. He is also a happily married man; his wife Anne is the bee's knees! He returns home after a sales trip to find Anne is unexpectedly away, looking after her ill sister. More remarkably, the big beautiful garden he and Anne have been tending in the back yard has been radically changed--the plants are not only different, but species he can't even identify, and the insects in the garden are equally alien. Working in this strange new garden is a three-foot tall man, presumably a new gardener hired by Anne.
Back in the house an amazed Kendrick encounters a big thuggish man with a severe head wound--despite the injury, which looks like it should have been fatal, this brute is walking around and talking about how he has to find some fruit to eat.
Fearing he is insane, Kendrick rushes over to his friend's house; this guy, Middleton, is a psychiatrist. Middleton explains that Kendrick's bizarre visions must be the result of his having recently read a poem by Swinburne about Proserpina, the Queen of Hades, and his familiarity with Frazer's The Golden Bough. Proserpina, you see, has a garden down there in the world of the dead, and if living people who have somehow made their way down to Hades eat from the fruit of this garden, they cannot leave. Middleton also tells Kendrick some major local news--a criminal took refuge in Kendrick and Anne's garden while Kendrick was on his recent three-week sales trip, and was fatally injured there in a gun fight with police.
The scene shifts back to the Kendrick house, some time later. Anne returns, and she hears voices in her house, two she recognizes as those of her husband Ted and his friend Dr. Middleton, but she can see no one. The upshot of this scene is, I think, that the Kendrick and Middleton we saw in the first three quarters of the story, as well as the thug with the head wound, are all disembodied souls or ghosts. All dead people's souls go to Proserpina's garden to eat, this eating being the final step of one's passage into the afterlife. The dwarf who is Proserpina's servant put in a satellite office of Proserpina's garden in the Kendricks' garden out of convenience, seeing as the thug and Kendrick and Middleton were all dying at about the same time. As Anne listens, the criminal and Middleton eat alien fruits. But when Ted's turn comes around he is reluctant to take the decisive bite that will consign him to the afterlife. Suddenly, Proserpina herself comes into Anne's view; Long suggests Proserpina has African facial features ("thick-lipped, Negroid.") Ted also appears. It turns out that Middleton a few weeks ago moved to New York, and Kendrick's sales trip was in the New York area, so the two friends met to play golf. While driving to or from the golf course, they were in a car accident; Middleton has died, but Kendrick has made a miraculous recovery. Proserpina upbraids the dwarf for trying to prematurely trap Kendrick in Hades, and Anne receives a phone call from the New York hospital where her husband is recuperating.
Acceptable.
"Step Into My Garden" would go on to be reprinted in two anthologies of stories about scary plants, one of which is marketed as being full of joke stories.
I can't say I am impressed by these stories, but I am not yet abandoning this investigation into Frank Belknap Long's body of work. Next time we'll read 1940s stories by Long that appeared in Astounding.
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