Weird Tales October 1937: D H Keller, H P Lovecraft, M W Wellman, & H Wandrei

We've been away from Weird Tales for a while, but today we return to the Unique Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual for four stories from the October 1937 issue, the cover of which features a redhead wielding a cat-o-nine-tails against what appear to be manacled assailants whose eyes lack pupils.  This sex and violence tableau by Margaret Brundage illustrates the issue's cover story, "Tiger Cat" by David H. Keller, which the table of contents blurb hails as "A story as fascinating as any of the horrors conceived in the tortured mind of Dante or of Poe" and which the little intro on its title page describes as "A grim tale of torture."  Let's get cracking, torture fans!

"Tiger Cat" by David H. Keller (1937)

This is a pretty good exploitation story.  A New York man of exquisite taste learns of a beautiful fountain on the grounds of an isolated villa on an Italian mountain, and he goes to Italy to buy the villa with the idea bringing the fountain back to Manhattan.  He learns that the villa has been sold to English-speaking young men numerous times, but these purchasers have then disappeared, without a trace, shortly after taking possession of the property.  In the villa's cellar is a thick fortified door with a huge lock; the old peasants who act as the villa's caretakers and as servants to the men who have been buying the villa claim that they have never seen the door open, a claim belied by the fact that the massive doors hinges are well lubricated.

Our narrator figures out for whom the real estate agent has been selling the villa to a series of apparently doomed men--Donna Marchesi, the most beautiful woman the narrator has ever seen!  Not only does she have red hair and long white limbs, but pupils that are vertical slits rather than circles and very long very sharp fingernails!  The narrator is struck by her similarity to that most selfish and most sadistic of all domesticated animals--the cat! 

A little detective work reveals the horrible truth behind the disappearances and this feline female.  Donna Marchesi aspired to be an opera singer, but at her debut in New York she choked and the young men in attendance hissed her.  So she has been pursuing an elaborate campaign of revenge against sophisticated Anglophonic young men!  Behind that impregnable door are all the men whom she and her agents have lured to the villa--a score of them--chained to stone pillars, emaciated, their eyes gouged out by Donna Marchesi's nails.  Donna Marchesi regularly visits the cellar to sing for the bound men, and should any member of her captive audience body fails to applaud with sufficient enthusiasm he is further tortured and refused his crust of bread and gulp of water.  The narrator frees the men and at the next little concert they pounce on Donna Marchesi and rip her gorgeous body to pieces.  (All you frustrated musicians out there who have been pulling for this red-headed hellion will be happy to know that she goes down fighting, tearing up faces with her whip and her talons for as long she has the strength.)

A decent story of grue, vengeance, and an exotic femme fatale.  My big criticism would be that Keller introduces a subplot involving the police that adds nothing to the story, wastes our time, and renders the story less plausible--would the cops really just let the narrator drug the peasant servants and permit the prisoners to tear Donna Marchesi limb from limb?  Better to have left the fuzz out of it altogether.

"Tiger Cat" would be reprinted in the Keller collection Tales from Underwood and a 1969 anthology with a great vampire woman cover full of stories by writers I have never heard of.

"The Shunned House" by H. P. Lovecraft (1928)

I don't think I have ever read this one before.  isfdb is giving me the idea that "The Shunned House" has a strange and frustrating publication history and was first put out by a small publishing house in the late 1920s in a scarce edition with a preface by Frank Belknap Long.  It seems that the story was first made widely available here in the October '37 issue of Weird Tales, where it is announced as "A posthumous story of immense power, written by a master of weird fiction" and adorned with a Virgil Finlay illustration  Of course it has been reprinted a bazillion times since then, in Lovecraft collections as well as anthologies edited by such people as August Derleth, Groff Conklin, and Kurt Singer.  (I have endeavoured to find a photo of the cover of Kurt Singer's 1973 Satanic Omnibus, without success.)  I am reading "The Shunned House" in my Corrected Ninth Printing of At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels.  

I feel like this blog of mine offers the most value when I talk about things that are rarely read, or when I challenge, however feebly or quixotically, the conventional wisdom about some well known writer or work, and I always fret like I am wasting everybody's time if I just ratify some popular or critical consensus on some well worn topic, like when I tell you Ray Bradbury is good.  So I am a little disappointed to have to say that H. P. Lovecraft here produces a quite good haunted house story and monster story which includes great descriptions of the creepy house in question and fun scientific explanations for the phenomena that have given rise to the pervasive belief in werewolves and vampires.

"The Shunned House" has the sort of characters and structure we expect from a Lovecraft story.  The narrator as a kid heard rumors about an abandoned house in Providence, and he and his friends used to trespass on the house's grounds and within its walls, and Lovecraft does a great job telling us about all the strange weeds and queer fungi and the odd sinister silhouettes of piles of decrepit furniture that the kids see.  (Some of this is perhaps reminiscent of "The Fall of the House of Usher," and Lovecraft mentions Poe by name in the story, saying Poe must have walked past this house while living in Providence.)  It turns out that the narrator's uncle, an elderly but spry physician and veteran of the Civil War, has amassed a whole file of research on this house, and we get an evocative history of its various owners and inhabitants over the centuries.  Narrator and uncle conduct further investigation, and conclude that some monster must be living under the house who made making those who lived there sick unto death.  They decide it is their duty to destroy this malevolent alien being.  Will  anyone emerge unscathed from the showdown between heavily armed antiquarians and centuries-old monster?  

Lots of fun, a real weird classic, which you probably already knew.  Four and a half out of five carboys of sulphuric acid!

We've already read the stories in Twisted by Murray Leinster,  
Theodore Sturgeon and David H. Keller

"The Golgotha Dancers" by Manly Wade Wellman (1937)

Our narrator is fortunate enough to live in a big city with a big art museum.  (Once I myself was so fortunate a man!)  I guess the story is set in New York, though Wellman doesn't actually come out and say that.  On his latest visit to the museum this art lover finds that Arnold Bocklin's Isle of the Dead has been taken down and replaced with an eerie picture depicting odd obese figures, vague pink forms lacking clothes and facial features who are dancing around a normally proportioned who is being crucified.  A guard approaches, irritated--he tells our narrator that a weird character has been coming by the museum, insisting they put up this creepy canvas.  The museum staff has always rebuffed this freakazoid, and he must have sneaked in somehow, taken down the world famous Bocklin and put up this disturbing thing.  If somebody in authority finds out what has happened this guard will be in trouble.  Fortunately, the guard quickly finds and puts the Bocklin back up, and the narrator, who has taken a liking to the weird picture, offers to cart it off.

Back home our hero hangs up the bizarre painting.  At night he is attacked by the disgusting fat faceless figures; a woman in a nearby apartment hears his cries and rescues him--it is she who figures out that to kill the monsters you have to damage the canvas.  Then they fall in love.

Acceptable filler.  I guess it is sort of interesting that the woman rescues the man instead of vice versa.

"The Golgotha Dancers" would have to wait until this degraded century of ours--in which a guy who vandalizes famous art treasures would be regarded as a hero--to be reprinted in 2003's Sin's Doorway and Other Ominous Entrances, edited by John Pelan.

"Here Lies" by Howard Wandrei (1937)

"Here Lies" appears under the Wandrei penname H. W. Guernsey. isfdb lists like ten stories which Wandrei had printed under this pseudonym, and we've already blogged about some of them, like "The African Trick" and "Danger: Quicksand," which appeared in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown, and "The Last Pin," which debuted in the famous detective magazine Black Mask.  I liked those three stories, and have hopes of liking this one.

Hopes are dashed; this is a weak joke story.  Two grey-haired old country boys, friends all their lives, reside on the same property; Old Chauncey is a "practical communist" who shares everything he has with the lazy Old Shep.  Shep lives in the former ice house on Chauncey's land, and furnishes it by taking some of Chauncey's furniture, uses Chauncey's tab at the general store to buy tobacco, takes cash out of Chauncey's house for his own purposes, etc.  He even has eyes on Chauncey's housekeeper, whom Chauncey himself aspires to wed!

Before he can marry the woman right out from under Chauncey, Shep is found dead.  At least the coroner thinks he is dead; Chauncey has reason to believe Shep may just be having some kind of seizure, and is in fact alive.  Chauncey had his own grave prepared like five years ago, and, as a joke, I guess, outfitted it with pipe, tobacco, ashtray and alarm clock.  I guess as revenge, he has Shep buried in this grave after setting the alarm clock, with the idea it will wake up Shep and Shep will, with horror, find himself buried alive.

This story is contrived and unbelievable, the characters acting in absurd ways to make the lame joke work, as well as acting in absurd ways that don't advance the plot but simply waste our time.  (I must be getting impatient; I feel like I am complaining even more lately about stories wasting my time.)

Gotta give "Here Lies" a thumbs down.

"Here Lies" would be republished in the 1995 collection Time Burial, which I actually own (out of convenience I read the story in the internet archive scan of Weird Tales instead of getting the book off the shelf, however) and was selected by prolific anthologists Stefan Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg, and Robert Weinberg for 100 Twisted Little Tales of Torment.

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In the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log: more Weird Tales from 80-something years ago.