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Thursday, May 16, 2024

Weird Tales Feb '39: Robert Bloch, August Derleth, and Donald Wandrei

Let's take a gander at the February 1938 issue of Weird Tales, one of the most important of the old pulp magazines.  We've already read Henry Kuttner's story from this issue, "The Transgressor," and a 1933 story by Clark Ashton Smith that is reprinted in this issue, "The Double Shadow."  But we haven't yet experienced the included stories by Robert Bloch, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, so let's tackle them now.  (Though available in book form, I'm reading these stories from a scan of the original magazine.)

"Death is an Elephant" by Robert Bloch (as by Nathan Hindin)

This is a relatively rare Bloch story.  It wasn't reprinted until 1998 in the Arkham House collection of Bloch stories Flowers on the Moon and Other Lunacies; in 2008 Robert M. Price included it in the anthology The Tindalos Cycle.

Promoted on the cover of the magazine as a "thrill tale of the circus" and lifting its title from Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race," "Death is an Elephant" is narrated by the PR man working for a circus and most certainly involves an elephant killing people, though it is an Indian elephant, not an African one.  (Sensitive types should be aware that one of the characters uses the dreaded "N-word" to refer to some Hindu priests, however.)

The narrator and his boss, the owner of the circus, take a trip to the Far East in search of a novelty for the circus and return to America with a Westernized rajah from Malaya ("he greeted us in perfect English"), a squad of priests led by "the High Priestess of the Temple of Ganesha" ("the lissome curves of her perfectly molded body" are "dressed in a robe of white") and The Sacred White Elephant of Jadhore, a huge beast whose "oiled body" is "a leprous silver."  The rajah is eager to make money showing off his elephant, but the green-eyed High Priestess who knows no English, Leela, opposed this venture and is along to make sure the dignity of the elephant is not besmirched.  Tying his story into the Cthulhu Mythos, Bloch has the rajah warn the narrator that Ganesha is an incarnation of Chaugnar Faugn and Lord Tsathoggua, that Ganesha is an "evil" god to whom the Hindus dedicate human sacrifices.  (Frank Belknap Long introduced Chaugnar Faugn in "The Horror From the Hills," which we read ten years ago, and Clark Ashton Smith created Tsathoggua in a story we somehow haven't read yet, "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros.")  And sure enough, on the steamship journey to California, and then back in America, men who interact with Leela and the elephant start turning up dead, apparently of suicide.  The narrator notices other odd behavior--circus performers and staff apparently fascinated by the silver elephant, Leela and the mighty beast caressing each other the way lovers might--and then there's the rajah, so stressed out over something that he keeps himself in a perpetual state of drunkenness.

Tragedy strikes on opening day of the season, one of the expert trapeze artists falling to his death during his performance, another unaccountable suicide; similar deaths before the paying public follow on succeeding days.  Leela must be to blame, somehow hypnotizing people to achieve revenge on those who would toy with and exploit Ganesha's avatar, the Sacred White Elephant!  The narrator takes steps to neutralize Leela, but things don't go according to plan, and before a horrified audience there is a gruesome showdown between Leela and the giant silver beast and the rajah, who realizes he never should have let his need for money drive him to bring the elephant across the sea and risks his own life to end Leela's campaign of destruction. 

This is a good weird story with plenty of sex and violence that builds to a satisfying climax.  Bloch does commit a blunder he or editor Farnsworth Wright should have caught at some point--the contemptuous and bitter Leela is generally stone faced, but smiles on the ship right after the first suicide throws himself overboard.  Then, when she smiles after a suicide at the circus, the narrator says he'd never seen her smile before.  Oops!

I think Bloch could also have improved the ending by just leaving out a superfluous element.  I suppose to add an additional twist, after the climax, Bloch has the narrator tells us that when Leela rode into the big top astride the elephant she was a sort of living corpse, that a guard had already shot her.  This makes us wonder why the dagger the rajah threw at her had the effect of neutralizing her, though I guess we can say it was magical or whatever, that as a Hindu priestess she was vulnerable to a Hindu knife wielded by a rajah.  Also, in the circumstances Bloch describes, it is a little hard to visualize a man just blasting a woman, and hard to believe none of the thousands attending the circus heard the shot.  

It doesn't bother me, but "Death is an Elephant" is also pretty politically incorrect; besides the "N-word," we've got Bloch's depiction of Ganesha as evil and Hindus as practitioners of human sacrifice, and his casting as the hero who redeems himself a totally Anglicized Hindu, which our colleagues who are currently camped out on the quad wearing keffiyehs would probably call "centering whiteness."  

It is not beyond reproach, but I am still giving a thumbs up for "Death is an Elephant."  Maybe I'm just a Yog-Sothery fanboy, but I think I may prefer Bloch's early Lovecraftian stuff to his more famous pun and psychology stories.


"The Drifting Snow" by August Derleth

This story by one of the founders of Arkham House has been reprinted in numerous vampire anthologies as well as Derleth collections.  It is an acceptable horror story with a decent basic gimmick, but feels slow, long and talky.  "Drifting Snow" is one of those stories in which there are too many characters and you have to make an effort to remember who is the nephew and who is betrothed to who and is that guy the servant or the son and so on, but none of that matters because none of the characters has a personality or a motivation, they are just cardboard pieces on the chessboard moving in such a way that allows the author to illustrate the gimmick he came up with.  

A rich old woman lives in a big house with her servants in a pretty remote area of (I guess) Illinois.  [UPDATE: 5/16/2024: I now see that this story takes place in Wisconsin.]  Some of her younger relatives are visiting.  One of her eccentricities is that she insists that the curtains facing west always be kept closed.  

A snowstorm hits--everybody is going to be stuck here a while.  Through the west-facing French doors somebody sees what appears to be people out in the storm--it is so cold and the nearest house is so far away that the young people think somebody should run out there to help these people.

The old lady doesn't want them to go out there, and after some rigamarole where she tries to convince everybody those figures are an optical illusion, she explains the real reason.  The old widow tells a hard-to-believe tale about how her father, long ago, threw out a pretty servant who had been dallying with one of his sons.  There was a terrible snowstorm under way, and Dad regretted his harsh action at once, but the family didn't find this cute chick until it was too late and she was dead, a veritable chickcicle.  Years later, during a snowstorm, through the west windows, Dad saw the dead girl, and ran outside to her--the family eventually found Dad's body in the same spot the girl had died, frozen to death as she had been.  A few years after that people started seeing both of them out the west window, tempting them to join them in a cold death, and so the custom of always keeping those windows obscured began.

Will the young people take this story seriously, or will somebody run out there and become the third member of the snow vampire crew?

I like the gimmick and even the plot structure of this story, but the execution is weak, as I have already suggested.  We'll call "The Drifting Snow" acceptable.


"Giant-Plasm" by Donald Wandrei 

This story by the other founder of Arkham House has never appeared in an anthology, but was reprinted in Donald Wandrei collections.  

Maybe you remember Donald Wandrei's story about a blob monster entitled "Spawn of the Sea."  Maybe you remember Donald Wandrei's other story about a blob monster called "The Destroying Horde."  Well, blobapalooza continues today with "Giant-Plasm," another story from Wandrei about a blob monster.

"Giant-Plasm" is the diary of a passenger on a ship that mysteriously sinks in the Pacific, perhaps due to a tsunami spawned by an undersea earthquake, far from any charted land.  A small number of people--the writer, a few rough tough men, and an attractive woman--survive the disaster, and for days, low on food and water, they drift on a boat--a "dory"--having interpersonal squabbles and suffering psychological stresses and gazing up at the stars at night and across the barren sea during the day and so forth.  Wandrei handles this adventure story material pretty well.

Eventually they get to a mysterious uncharted island with odd plants and structures on it.  Part of the plot involves the brave and resourceful but also greedy and lustful senior member of the survivors and his competition for the woman with the diarist.  The important, or at least the SF, part of the plot involves strange mounds the diarist discovers on the island while looking for firewood and food.  The narrator, based on various clues, suspects this island, thousands of years ago, sank and then in the last few years rose again.  Even more mind-blowing is that investigation of those mounds suggests that in ancient times an alien space ship crashed on the island and three aliens in space suits--beings dozens of feet tall!--survived the crash, but were severely injured.  These interstellar travelers lived long enough to build a queer structure that the narrator finds inexplicable.  This structure is the cradle or incubator or skeleton of a blob monster bigger than the dory.  When the blob reveals itself to be very dangerous the diarist wants to leave the island tout suite, but the greedy sailor wants to stick around to try to collect specimens of the alien metal from which the alien space suits are made.  Only the diarist and the woman escape the island alive.

"Giant-Plasm" may be a little on the slow side, but the adventure elements and the fights are engaging, and there is some pretty disgusting gore when the blob starts killing people.  Then we have the sense-of-wonder business with the giant alien space suits and the undecipherable apparatus that lies under the killer blob, which isn't bad.  I like this story.

**********

All three of today's stories have good weird or science fiction gimmicks, and Bloch and Wandrei manage to build good stories around their gimmicks by coming up with characters who have emotions, motives, relationships, and personalities and offering multiple disturbing scenes of bitter conflict and of gruesome death.  Derleth, a busy man who threw off half-baked stories to finance his various ventures, didn't make the effort to populate his story with believable or interesting characters, and his story suffers as a result.

When we take into account the fact that the Clark Ashton Smith story in this issue is great, and that the issue includes a good Virgil Finlay illustration of the Sacred White Elephant of Jadhore and its lover Leela, we have to conclude that this is a highly recommendable issue of Weird Tales--check it out, weirdies!

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