Weird Tales, Feb '38: Lovecraft & Lumley, Kuttner, Ball, Moretti

Back in January of 2021 I set myself the sacred duty of reading and blogging about at least one story from each of the 115 or so issues of Weird Tales published in the 1930s.  Great strides have been made in this quest; in fact, I have covered at least one story from each issue published from January 1930 to January 1938!  And I can prove it at the links below!

1930  1931  1932  1933  1934  1935  1936  1937  JAN 1938

Today we wrangle some stories from the February 1938 issue, including works by the premier Weird Tales writer, New England's Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and one of our favorite scribblers, Henry Kuttner, the young man from California.  And in the spirit of exploration which I like to think characterizes this journey, we'll read two stories by individuals we've never read before, one by Clifford Ball and one by M. G. Moretti.  I chose these two stories because I liked their titles, a perfectly legitimate means of discriminating, I'm sure you will agree.

"The Diary of Alonzo Typer" by H. P. Lovecraft and William Lumley 

"The Diary of Alonzo Typer" appears under William Lumley's name in Weird Tales, but it is one of the many stories which H. P. Lovecraft revised for others.  In the introductory matter to my copy of Arkham House's The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, scholar S. T. Joshi tells us he has seen Lumley's draft for this story as well as Lovecraft's revision, and HPL "preserved only the nucleus of the story...all the prose is his."  I am reading "The Diary of Alonzo Typer" in my hardcover edition of that collection, unlike the Kuttner, Ball and Moretti stories, which I am reading in the internet archive scan of the original 1938 magazine.

The title character of "The Diary of Alonzo Typer" is a specimen of the type of person we meet all the time here at MPorcius Fiction Log, the student of the occult who travels the world investigating weird phenomena.  Typer's diary takes up the lion's share of the story (like 16 pages in the edition I am reading), which the preceding frame (like three pages) tells us was discovered in the 1930s in a ruined 18th-century house near a mysterious circle of stones (a "cromlech" of "menhirs"); this long-abandoned house was home back in the 18th and 19th centuries to a family reputed to be deeply involved in witchcraft, the van der Heyls.

Typer's diary chronicles his 1908 exploration of the van der Heyl house, from which he finds that, once having entered, he cannot escape.  Lovecraft rehearses many of the themes and elements characteristic of his work, like degeneracy and miscegenation, the horror of learning one's own identity, and the reading of a pile of documents that reveal forbidden lore and esoteric history.  The portraits on the walls in the house indicate the van der Heyls had ophidian and swine-like features, suggesting they interbred with aliens, and the local villagers who supply Typer with food are described as "degraded idiots" of "singular hereditary strains."  In the house, Typer discovers such books as The Necronomicon as well as an elaborate drawing of a statue of Cthulhu or some similar monster, plus plenty of alien hieroglyphs.  Among other amazing tidbits, Typer learns about how millions of years ago the Earth was colonized by spacefaring Venusians.

What stands out to me as distinctive about "The Diary of Alonzo Typer" is how Typer sees many ghosts of long dead van der Heyls as well as visions or hallucinations of clawed alien monsters--I feel like this is a device Lovecraft doesn't regularly employ.    

Finally, on Walpurgis night, Typer, having put together all the many clues in the house and prepared his protective spells, unlocks the vault in the cellar behind which he has been hearing the slitherings of a titanic monster.  He also realizes that he is himself a van der Heyl, and has been fated to open the vault whether he wants to or not.

"The Diary of Alonzo Typer" is a decent slice of Yog-Sothery, though not as good as, say, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," which deals with much the same themes and elements.  Besides a multitude of Lovecraft collections, the story has been anthologized by Peter Haining, Robert M. Price and Franklyn Searight. 

Way back in 2014 I read a sequel to "The Diary of Alonzo Typer" penned by Brian Lumley, and I didn't like it; at the link I say it had a good plot but was full of extraneous material.

"World's End" by Henry Kuttner

"World's End" is a time travel story that doesn't really hold together--in particular, the plot resolution didn't satisfy this reader.

Young Blake and his senior citizen colleague Norwood have spent seven years building a time machine, and today Blake is strapping on his vacuum suit and gathering together his books, binoculars, rifles and other essential equipment for his maiden voyage to the future!  He throws the bakelite switch and finds himself in the first of a series of bizarre locations tens of thousands of years in the future.  One such setting is a snowy plain from which he sees on the horizon a vast black form, like a wall or glacier or something, rushing towards him.

Blake is then transported to the lab of a man of the future, a dwarf with a huge head!  Future brainiac explains that centuries ago a meteor landed on Earth from which sprang an alien life form, a sort of black void, that has slowly been devouring the Earth.  By the time the people of Earth had developed a disintegrator ray effective against the monster it had reduced most of the Earth to an uninhabitable waste, and today there are only a few hundred human beings left alive.  With their disintegrator ray artillery they can hold off the black void, but the survivors are running out of fuel to power the ray projectors and so will soon succumb to extinction.

The big-brained dwarf is excited to learn of Blake's time machine; his people have teleporters (that is how he brought Blake here to the last little bit of inhabitable Earth) but have never developed time travel.  Future man says that if Blake can carry him and a pistol-sized disintegrator ray projector back in time to the moment the meteor carrying the black void first arrived on Earth, he can neutralize the menace and save the human race!

Future man boards the time machine and he and Blake try to go back in time, and we get our disappointing twist ending.  Blake reappears in his 20th-century lab, having totally forgotten his future adventures.  Norwood doesn't even realize Blake ever left--Blake reappeared the same moment he departed, as if throwing the bakelite lever did nothing.  It seems that the universe forbids that you travel backwards in time to a moment before your birth, and also prohibits retention of memories of events yet to happen, so Blake's trip has been fruitless--he has no recall of anything that occurred in the future, and we readers must assume the future man's effort to save the world of the far future was a failure.

I don't like the way time travel works in the story, but putting that aside, "World's End" suffers a bigger, literary, failing.  The fact that the scientists' seven years of work on the machine, and Blake's and the dwarf's adventures, yield absolutely zero result is pretty annoying--it makes reading the story feel like a waste of time.  We expect something to happen in a story, that the characters or their environment will change, and when that doesn't happen, it is frustrating.  I suppose that some will appreciate how Kuttner "subverts reader expectations" of an Edgar Rice Burroughs-style ending in which the hero who visits an alien milieu proves to be the savior of the sympathetic natives and the undoing of their enemies, but I have to say I found this subversion more irritating than refreshing.  

I'm going to grade "World's End" barely acceptable; I like the menace in the story, the future brainiac and the vacuum suit, and can forgive the problems with the time travel; my real gripe is with the resolution (or, perhaps I should say, lack thereof.)

"World's End" would not be reprinted until our 21st century, when the good people at both Haffner Press and Centipede Press put out huge Henry Kuttner collections within a year of each other.

"The Goddess Awakes" by Clifford Ball  

"The Goddess Awakes" is a sort of long (26 pages here in WT) and pedestrian Conan-style story.  Two thieves who have taken up careers as mercenary soldiers flee the battlefield upon which the army of which they were members has been routed and climb a mountain only to be captured by the women soldiers of a remote kingdom whose citizens are all women.  These women have a queen but she is dominated by a centuries-old wizard and his giant black panther; this creep has decreed, for generations, that the nation's men toil out of view, slaves whose minds are dulled to insensibility by drugs.  Our heroes get thrown unarmed into the arena with the panther, but the queen and one of the soldiers have fallen in love with them and toss them the weapons they need to defeat the Brobdingnagian feline.  Then the queen kills the wizard, the kingdom's men are freed and our heroes are acclaimed the new leaders of the country.    

Ball's basic plot outline (two hunks arrive in a nation of women under the thumb of an evil wizard and his monster and trigger a reassertion of the women's natural heterosexuality and the overthrow of the wiz and monster) is good but his execution is poor.  The text of a good Conan story focuses on heroic feats, creepy magic and scary monsters, building up a weird and/or horrible atmosphere and advancing a plot in which there are high stakes.  Unfortunately, Ball here in "The Goddess Awakes" expends a lot of ink on mildly humorous dialogue between the two main characters, so his story feels more like a light-hearted buddy movie than a tale of uncanny horror or thrilling sword-and-sorcery; his bargain-basement efforts to produce witty banter are distracting and undermine any possibility of fear or excitement.

(It is hard to successfully integrate sword-and-sorcery thrills and humor in an adventure story; the biggest success I can think of is Jack Vance's two Cugel books.)   

We are generously grading "The Goddess Awakes" barely tolerable.

"The Goddess Awakes" would see print again in 1976 in Lin Carter's anthology Realms of Wizardry (in his intro to the tale, Carter calls "The Goddess Awakes" "superbly rousing;" I beg to differ.)  The Weird Tales devotees at DMR books in 2018 published a volume containing all of Ball's stories under the title The Thief of Forthe.

"The Strangling Hands" by M. G. Moretti

Moretti only has one story listed at isfdb, and this story has never been reprinted--we are really peering into the dim corners today at MPorcius Fiction Log.

In our last episode we read a story by David H. Keller in which black Africans unleash a supernatural vengeance on a white man who mistreated them, and "The Strangling Hands," which is adorned with a good drawing of a witch doctor by fan favorite Virgil Finlay, has a similar theme.  

Our narrator is a professional writer who got scooped by an amateur writer!  You see, our guy was one of five men on a dangerous expedition in Africa, and everybody sorta kinda agreed he would chronicle the adventure and publish a book on it.  But narrator's best friend, also on the trip, published his own account as soon as they got back to New York, rendering narrator's book unsalable!  Hilarious!

The narrator hasn't spoken to his frenemy since, and some years have gone by, but out of the blue he hears from the guy, and grudgingly goes to see him.  It turns out that the other three men who accompanied them on the African expedition have died under mysterious circumstances.  One of the capers the five adventurers indulged in while on the Dark Continent was stealing the eye from a statue in a temple of Death, an institution whose regularly scheduled festivities include human sacrifice by strangulation.  The three men who have all turned up dead these last few months all had this eye in their possession (each having inherited it from the previous victim.)  Now the amateur writer has custody of the eye, and he tells our narrator that every night he sees the horrifying image of black hands creeping closer and closer to his white throat!  Obviously the priest of Death is performing decolonization activities via long distance magic!  The narrator of course thinks the deaths are just a coincidence and his backstabbing buddy is just lying, or maybe the target of an elaborate prank.

Still, he is persuaded to spend the night with his friend, a night of terror in which he learns the astonishing truth!

This is a good black magic story.  I groused that Clifford Ball rendered "The Goddess Awakes" a drag with his emphasis on totally lame jocular dialogue between his two main characters, but M. G. Moretti here does caustic dialogue between two buddies right--via their speech Moretti develops an interesting relationship between the two men, and the stuff they say, instead of seeming incongruous and distracting from the horror/adventure aspects of the story, actually helps build an atmosphere of tension and uncanny wonder.  

Thumbs up!  It is too bad there is only one Moretti story out there!  

"From Beyond" by H. P. Lovecraft (1934)

This February 1938 issue of Weird Tales reprints "From Beyond," one of H. P. Lovecraft's Dream Cycle stories, a piece which made its debut in 1934 in the fanzine The Fantasy Fan.  I am reading it in my copy of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales.

Short and to the point, this is an effective story.  Lovecraft adds interest to the tale by doing more than he usually does to develop his character's personalities and human relationships.

Our narrator has a fat and emotional friend who is conducting some crazy research leveraging his knowledge of both electronics and metaphysics.  The narrator warned him that this might be dangerous, and the researcher, a real sensitive sort, threw a fit and broke off their friendship.

Over two months later, fatso summons the narrator to his lab in his big attic.  Shockingly, this dude is now skinny and haggard, his hands trembling, his formerly clean shaven face covered in whiskers.  Even more shockingly, the mad scientist has plotted an elaborate revenge on the narrator, whom he says "discouraged me when I needed every drop of encouragement I could get...."  The complicated electrical machine he has finally completed generates radiation which revivifies vestigial and atrophied senses that we humans don't even realize we have; under the influence of the machine, people can "see" into and "listen" in on parallel worlds that coexist with our own--when the vengeful inventor turns the machine on, the narrator can sense all kinds of extradimensional monsters floating through the attic walls and even his own body.

The horrifying twist is that the radiation from the machine also enables some of the alien monsters to sense and interact with our own world!  In fact, the researcher's own servants have all vanished without trace, carried off or devoured by alien entities!  And the mad scientist gloats that the narrator is next!  Can the narrator escape?

Thumbs up!  Lovecraft can be long-winded and repetitive, and his stories often lack human feeling, so it is fun to see him producing in "From Beyond" a brisk and economical tale with a human relationship and an exciting personality at its center.  

Like most of Lovecraft's work, "From Beyond" has been reprinted a billion times, including in anthologies like Jack C. Wolf and Barbara H. Wolf's Ghosts, Castles and Victims: Tales of Gothic Horror and Xavier Aldana Reyes' Promethean Horrors: Classic Tales of Mad Science.

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A mixed bag, but the Lovecraft stories go to show that the man from Providence deserves his high reputation, and I really liked one-hit-wonder M. G. Moretti's "The Strangling Hands."  So, a satisfying step in our long march through the pages of the unique magazine.  We may return to this issue one day, as it contains (under a pen name) part of a werewolf serial by Manly Wade Wellman that has been reprinted multiple times and so perhaps is worth checking out.  Time will tell.