Weird Tales, April 1938: Jacobi, Smith, and Farley

Way back in 2014 I read three stories about mummies, including Psycho-scribe Robert Bloch's "The Eyes of the Mummy."  Bloch's tale made its debut in the April 1938 issue of the famous magazine edited by Farnsworth Wright, Weird Tales, a magazine close to the hearts of the staff here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Ten years on, let's continue our exploration of this issue of the Unique Magazine, reading three more stories that lurk behind its sex-and-death Virgil Finlay cover, two by men whose work we have been reading for ages, Carl Jacobi and Clark Ashton Smith, and one by a guy who has never before fallen beneath the MPorcius microscope, Ralph Milne Farley.

"The Devil Deals" by Carl Jacobi

First, it's links time!  Here find links to all my blog posts about Carl Jacobi stories (arrows indicate if I thought the story good or bad; mediocre or merely acceptable stories get no arrow):

"The Face in the Wind" ↓
"The Elcar Special"
"The Chadwick Pit"
"The White Pinnacle" ↓
"The Street That Wasn't There" (with Clifford Simak) 
"Revelations in Black" ↑
"A Pair of Swords"  ↓
"The Cane" 
"The Satanic Piano" ↑
"The Gentleman is an Epwa" ↓
"Spawn of Blackness"  ↑

With four stories I condemned and only three I actually liked, it looks like Jacobi is running a deficit here at the First National Bank of MPorcius.  But today we give him a chance to break even.

"The Devil Deals" is a competent filler story.  Basically, in foggy London a globe-trotting professional gambler has been having an affair with the hot wife of some Spanish dude.  The Spaniard lays a trap for the gambler using his unusual deck of cards, a deck the suits of which are snakes and harpies and the joker a skull, a deck which he hints may be the oldest deck of cards in existence.  The cards have an hypnotic effect on the gambler, eventually ushering him to his destruction--are the cards cursed, or are their apparently supernatural effects merely the product of the trickery of the man the gambler has been cuckolding working to exploit his addiction to risk? 

Seeing as this story is merely acceptable, Jacobi is still in the hole here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

"The Devil Deals" would be republished under the title "The King and the Knave" in various Jacobi collections.   

"The Garden of Adompha" by Clark Ashton Smith

Here we have the cover story of this issue of Weird Tales, one of Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique stories; we've read a bunch of these already.  Good grief, more links!  (No arrows this time--trust all content from Clark Ashton Smith!)

"The Master of the Crabs"
"The Empire of the Necromancers"
"The Witchcraft of Ulua"
"The Dark Eidolon"
"The Isle of the Torturers"
"The Weaver in the Vault"
"The Charnel God"
"Xeethra"
"The Voyage of King Euvoran"
"The Death of Ilalotha"

"The Last Hieroglyph"

Smith is a good writer, and in "The Gardens of Adompha" he develops a striking setting and atmosphere; the undertone of bestiality and necrophilia adds a little zing to the story.  The plot is a little slight, though.

Adompha is the debased king of the decadent people of the island of Sator.  Many a night, when the citizens of the capitol city of Sator lie in their accustomed drugged sleep, Adompha will retire behind a magically barred door, to his garden.  Only the king and his wizard Dwerulas can open this door and enter the singular garden, which is sheltered under a metal roof so no ray of sunlight may fall upon it.  Inside this vault hovers a ball of fire, a miniature sun summoned by Dwerulas from Hell, and below it squirm the tangle of animalistic plants Dwerulas has grown from Hell-born seeds.  Dwerulas has employed his fell sorcery to graft to the stems, stalks and trunks of this weird foliage the body parts of people the King has had murdered, and these human heads, eyes, hands, breasts and (Smith implies) genitals still live, drawing sustenance from the alien plants to which they are attached.

The latest human addition to Adompha's garden is to be the king's favorite mistress, Thuloneah, a woman whom the king remarks was expertly skilled in using her hands in the arts of love.  Adompha directs the wizard Dwerulas, a man whose skin has been blackened and whose bones have been twisted by age, to sever Thuloneah's talented hands and graft them onto a tree.  Then, on a whim, perhaps triggered by the impression that Dwerulas is sexually attracted to Thuloneah's limp body, even as blood oozes from the stumps at her wrists, Adompha attacks the magician from behind, crushing his skull and propelling him and Thuloneah down into the grave the wizard has prepared for the doomed girl.

The next time the king visits his garden he suffers a terrible revenge apparently orchestrated by the souls of his murdered wizard and mistress: while Thuloneah's masterful hands caress Adompha, the body parts of the monarch's other victims rip him to shreds.

"The Garden of Adompha" has been reprinted many times in Smith collections and horror anthologies (nota bene: I read it, like all three of today's stories, in a scan of the April 1938 issue of Weird Tales available at the internet archive.)  

"The House of Ecstasy" by Ralph Milne Farley

Farley seems to have been a pretty successful SF writer, with many short stories published and a fair share of reprints; "The House of Ecstasy." for example, has reappeared in anthologies of weird, science fiction, and suspense stories.  Maybe I'll enjoy this tale and Farley will join the list of writers I regularly read.

Like Smith's "Garden of Adompha," Farley's "The House of Ecstasy" appeals to readers' interest in fetishistic sex.  It is also one of those stories that uses the second-person gimmick--this story is about you, the reader, and purports to revive the memory of some terrible adventure which you have forgotten about.

The narrative reminds you in detail about that recent night you went out for a walk and were tricked into calling at a nondescript brownstone much like its neighbors.  This was the home of a hunchbacked dwarf, a "toad-like" man with "yellow skin" and "claw-like hands."  This little creep is a master hypnotist and he explained that "my poor crumpled body cannot thrill to the pleasures of the flesh, except vicariously," so he imprisoned you in a cell with a beautiful woman with olive skin and a "perfect figure" so he could watch the two of you make out!  After you fell in love with the woman, kissed her and promised to rescue her, you were freed, but not before being hypnotized into forgetting the whole insane caper.  Farley has triggered your memory of your love and your duty to liberate her, but you'll never be able to find that brownstone in this city chock full of identical brownstones.

This is an entertaining little thing.  I probably will read more Farley.

Both Smith's "Garden of Adompha" and Farley's "House of Ecstasy" appear
in Sadoul's third volume of selections from Weird Tales, alongside Henry 
Kuttner's "Shadow on the Screen" and C. L. Moore and Forrest J. 
Ackerman's "Nymph of Darkness"

**********

A respectable crop of stories, especially if you've got a thing for nonwhite dwarves abusing beautiful women.  If you are looking for more 1930s perversity and gore, keep coming back to MPoricus Fiction Log, as we'll be reading more Weird Tales in the coming weeks.