Weird Tales Aug '39: M W Wellman, E H Price, P S Miller, F B Long & R Bloch

The long eldritch march continues!  I've made it my quest to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales, the magazine associated with H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and many others, printed in the 1930s, and only a handful of issues remain!  Today: August, 1939!  This issue is packed with work by authors I read, including poetry by Lovecraft, part of a serial by Howard, and a letter from Bloch, none of which I will talk about because I'll be busy talking about five stories from the issue.  Let's get to it!

"The Valley Was Still" by Manly Wade Wellman

Wellman was an expert on Southern history and wrote multiple books about the Confederacy and the American Civil War and here we have a fantasy story about the War Between the States.  "The Valley Was Still" is an acceptable filler piece; some might be annoyed by the fact that it seems to serve as a bit of Southern apologia, a wish fulfillment fantasy that offers Lost Cause enthusiasts an explanation for the Confederacy's defeat that valorizes Southerners.

It is the early Civil War, and Southern soldiers are full of confidence, having won several battles against the Union Army.  A Confederate cavalryman scouts out a small village in a valley and discovers a Union detachment in an eerie condition--the men are all asleep, a deep sleep much like death!  A local civilian with a long beard appears--he claims that he cast a spell upon the Union troops, using this here spell book.  A glance at the spell book convinces the cavalryman that this wizard gets his power from the Devil!  Wellman has been emphasizing how pious Southern gentlemen are, and so this does not sit well with the scout.  The wizard further disturbs our guy by suggesting that he will use his magic power to become ruler of America.  When the cavalryman objects to all this ungentlemanly warfare business, the witch-man warns that having been summoned, old Scratch can't be put back in his box safely--if his aid is refused, Satan will side with the Union as a means of punishing the people who scorned him!  The protagonist kills the wizard anyway and reads the spell that wakes up the Union troops, this being the gentlemanly way to fight the war.  The South of course goes on to lose the war, which the scout knows is because Lucifer himself backed the Stars and Stripes!

This story has been a hit for Wellman, and was even turned into an episode of The Twilight Zone which I guess I forgot about.  Leo Margulies included "The Valley Was Still" in his 1961 anthology The Unexpected, Frank McSherry, Jr. reprinted it in The Fantastic Civil War, and the story has reappeared in numerous other places.

"Apprentice Magician" by E. Hoffman Price

The narrator of "Apprentice Magician" is a poorly-educated Georgia farm boy with the odd first name of "Panther," and Price does a good job of giving this kid's voice a convincing personality without burdening us with a lot of annoying phonetic spelling.  Panther has a great uncle in California who is reputedly rich, so after he graduates from high school his family sends Panther out to stay with "Uncle Simon" in hopes the wealthy old geezer will remember his East Coast relatives in his will instead of just endowing all his moolah to some damn college.

Uncle Simon is a wizard with a library of books in Greek, Latin and Hebrew, and takes on Panther as his apprentice!  Soon Panther is walking on red hot coals and casting spells.  Wow!  Even more exciting, he has enticing visions of a beautiful woman who sometimes wears a lioness's head instead of her own human head--Sekhmet, the Egyptian fire goddess!  Ninety-year-old Simon has been trying to get in touch with Sekhmet for decades, without success, but here our boy Panther is already getting the eye from her!  Will Panther consummate a relationship with the beautiful goddess, maybe even become her consort in the World of Fire?  Or will Uncle Simon use his grandnephew as a means to getting his own ancient claws on the luscious Sekhmet?  Who will live and who will die?  And what about all that money Uncle Simon has conjured up?

A good black magic story, written in a smooth style and full of subtle natural jokes that don't undermine the sex and horror elements of the story--thumbs up!         

"Apprentice Magician" was included in that 1945 British pamphlet with the nude cover photo that reprinted Edmond Hamilton's "The Six Sleepers" under the title Tiger Girl.  Hubba hubba!  "Apprentice Magician" has also been reprinted in the 1967 Price collection Strange Gateways and Vic Ghidalia's 1972 anthology Wizards and Warlocks.

"Spawn" by P. Schuyler Miller

If you can tear your eyes away from Tiger Girl for a few minutes let's talk about P. Schuyler Miller and his off-the-wall monster and gore epic "Spawn."  Miller produced quite a volume of short stories in the Thirties and Forties and then in the Fifties, Sixties and early Seventies he was the book reviewer for Astounding (after 1960 titled Analog.)  In 2018 I gave a mixed review to his story "As Never Was," saying it was well-written but was frustrating because it boldly and intentionally made no sense, and in 2023 I read his "Bird Walk" and enjoyed it, suggesting it shared many characteristics with the work of Jack Vance.  Seeing as this guy was an important member of  John W. Campbell, Jr.'s crew and I have liked his writing style thus far, I should read more of his work, and here today I have an opportunity to do so.

After a little prologue that is half comedic and half profound about the odds against the appearance of life and of human beings in particular, "Spawn" introduces us to a pilot of an aircraft who is inebriated.  Yikes!  He looks down at the Andes and sees something mind-blowing--is that a mountain melting, exposing veins of gold?  A few days later some people aboard a ship, among them a German zoologist, themselves see something mind-blowing on the surface of the Atlantic--is that a giant blob monster devouring a pod of whales?  

The scene shifts to the politics of this future world, a world which has been split into five major powers.  The most important is the Central European bloc, ruled until recently by genius benevolent dictator Svadin, who just died during some kind of major international conference.  Svadin is laying in state as dignitaries from the Asian bloc, the Hispanic bloc, the North American bloc and the Anglo-Scandinavian bloc are paying their respects when he inexplicably comes back to life, even though he's already been embalmed!  The world surrenders all authority to this zombie, whose genius has only been enhanced by death and resurrection!

The scene shifts to Miami, where that zoologist witnesses the kaiju-sized blob monster ooze up onto the beach and eat scores of beachgoers, spitting out their clothes and bones after absorbing their flesh and ignoring the gunfire and bombs of government forces.

These various scenes all sound exciting in summary, but actually reading them in the magazine is a chore because Miller inflicts upon us readers overly long, repetitive, vague and cryptic descriptions that I guess he thinks are poetic but which are in fact mind-numbing sludge that obstruct the ability of these  melodramatic episodes to generate any interest or thrills in the reader.

Wave after wave, rising and falling and rising higher with the flooding tide. Waves rising to lap the sea-green tumulus, to bathe its redveined monstrousness whose crimson rills were fading to pink, to gray, to lucent white. Waves laving it, tickling its monstrous palate, pleasing it mightily; waves into which it subsided and left Miami’s white beaches naked for a league save for the windrows of heaped bones and the moist, bright rags that had been men’s condescension to the morality of men.

More politics follows.  In Latin America, a bloody revolution that Miller characterizes in racial terms erupts, inspired in part by the city-stomping of a giant humanoid monster made of gold and crystal whom primitive Indians worship as a god.  For all you gluttons for punishment out there, here's another sample of Miller's exhaustingly repetitive and vacuous prose:

Revolution stalking the upthrusting spine of a continent like a pestilence, sucking in crazed brown warriors from the montes, from the pampas, from barren deserts and steaming jungles. Blood of brown ancestors rising beneath white skins, behind blue eyes. Revolution like a flame sweeping through brown man and white and mostly-white and half-white and very-little-white and back to the brown blood of ancient, feathered kings! Guns against machetes. Bayonets against razorwhetted knives. Poison gas against poison darts. 

The revolutionaries massacre the white elite of their countries and take over Latin America but are stopped at the northern border by a multinational army from the "white nations" plus everyone's favorite white-adjacent nation Japan (first Pocky and now this--how can we ever repay the sons and daughters of Nihon for all the good turns they have done us?)  Then that drunken pilot and the German zoologist, who have become Svadin's intimate advisors, and the benevolent living dead dictator himself, direct the construction of an apparatus that attracts the giant of gold and crystal so they can destroy the god through the use of special methods I won't describe here.  The Svadin team lays a similarly elaborate trap for the aquatic blob monster and destroy it in another long and tedious scene.

More tedium as the plot shifts from giant monsters to a conspiracy to overthrow Svadin.  Miller tells us that Svadin is an effective ruler, his computer-like calculations crafting policies that provide peace and prosperity, but, as the years go by, many grow to hate him as he becomes progressively less and less human--more and more like a cold-hearted machine in his role as ruler of Earth and more and more like a decadent pervert in his not-quite secret private life.  A small cadre of smarty smarts infiltrates and explores the dungeons under his Budapest castle, seeking a secret door through which to invade his sanctum and learns his secrets.  A worldwide revolt breaks out and the global civil war climaxes with Svadin and the ten little Svadins that have budded off of his bloated undead carcass being burned by a mob.

In the final pages of the story we get the explanation for all these bizarre events--spores of life from outer space that landed in the Andes, the ocean and on Svadin.  Oh, brother.    

There is a lot of disgusting horror stuff in "Spawn" (the most compelling parts of the story are Miller's repeated descriptions of the risen Svadin's animated corpse, its sagging flesh and blue skin and smell of formaldehyde and so on) but that can't save Miller's story from its many weaknesses in style, pacing, and characterization.  "Spawn" would work better as a Japanese movie, what with all its Brobdingnagian monsters attacking cities and being attacked in turn by aircraft and all the sickening body horror, than it does in the medium of the written word.  As I copyedit this blog post, 24 hours after reading "Spawn" and drafting this attack on it, my memory of the insane events the story depicts endures while my memory of how bad Miller's writing was fades, so I am feeling more warmly towards the story than I was while I was reading it.  Still thumbs down, though.     

Somewhat to my surprise, "Spawn" has been reprinted quite a few times.  It is available in the 1952 Miller collection The Titan, a 1976 issue of the US edition of Perry Rhodan (editor Forrest J. Ackerman calls "Spawn" "a masterpiece"), Michel Parry's 1978 anthology The Rivals of King Kong: A Rampage of Beasts and still more places.

"Giants in the Sky" by Frank Belknap Long

Here's another story with a wild and crazy narrative that is marred by bad writing.  Long in "Giants in the Sky" describes every little breath and eye movement of his characters, and includes all sorts of other superfluous dross in his text which does not move the plot or add to atmosphere, making his story much longer and less compelling than it might be.

A young couple, both of them meteorologists, are atop a Swiss mountain.  Suddenly the world turns dark!  When light returns, the sun is not a sphere but a cube!  And then the female member of the pair is snatched up and away by some bright form!

Planet Icurus is billions of miles in circumference; Earth is only like 25,000 miles in circumference.  (One of the many hiccups in Long's spotty prose is that he compares the circumference of Icurus with the "semi-diameter" of Earth; why would you do this as a writer, and why would you not fix it as an editor?)  The Earth is like the size of a pebble to the natives of Icurus, who are more or less humanoid but whose eyes are on the end of long stalks, a fact which Virgil Finlay illustrates in the pages of the magazine, if not on the cover of Worlds of the Weird, alas. The Icuruns are highly advanced and have all manner of starships and super microscopes and devices that can halt time within a prescribed area and so forth.  These jokers have captured our Solar System in an energy net and dragged it to Icurus; on the way something went wrong with the sun so they replaced old Sol with a radiating cube.  Then they threw a small net down to scoop up an Earthling and put her on a slide so they could observe her.

There are three Icurun characters in Long's story: the oldest and wisest individual of their race, plus a young man and a young woman who are a married couple.  In the same way that Ross Rocklynne in "Into Darkness" gave us what at first appeared to be incomprehensibly foreign aliens and then put them in a love/sex plot that mirrored ordinary life for everybody here on Earth, Long gives us these otherworldly aliens and then runs them through a standard love triangle scenario.  As we Earthmen are all too aware, Earthwomen are irresistible and the young male alien, through the lens of his microscope, falls in love with the meteorologist, exciting the jealousy of his wife.  But then the Icuruns spot an odd light, an explosion, on the surface of Earth.  The aliens use their net to collect a sample from the outer reaches of Earth's atmosphere and deposit it on the slide next to the lady meteorologist--it is Earth's first space ship, and out of it emerges the male meteorologist!  The two weather experts embrace and the male alien is broken hearted, laying down in the dirt in despair likes he's in Horace's eleventh Epode or a fan of The Cure or something.  But then his forgiving wife comforts him.  Both couples, the humans stranded on a giant microscope slide and the gargantuan aliens whose relationship has been shaken by exposure to an exotic lady, realize that the universe can throw a lot of crazy stuff at you, but what really matters is love, and with love you can weather any storm.

I'm going to call this one acceptable filler; it is shorter and tighter than Miller's story and its "love is the thing that matters" theme is a little more congenial, more human. than Miller's "even the most improbable things will happen because space and time are so vast" theme.

Not a hit, it looks like "Giants in the Sky" has only been reprinted in Leo Margulies' 1965 anthology Worlds of Weird.  As of today we've read five of the seven stories in Worlds of Weird: Robert E. Howard's "The Valley of the Worm," Edmond Hamilton's "He That Hath Wings," Clark Ashton Smith's "Mother of Toads," and David H. Keller's "The Thing in the Cellar."    

"The Totem-Pole" by Robert Bloch 

Wow, it's another story immortalized in one of those strange British pamphlets of "American Fiction" with a nude woman on the cover.  (Don't worry, though, Tiger Girl--you're still #1 with us.)  "The Totem-Pole" was first reprinted in this odd artifact of a world in which pornography was not ubiquitous, Sea Kissed, which collected four Bloch stories, including three we've already read (some under alternate titles): "The Black Kiss," "Beetles," and "Waxworks."  "The Totem-Pole" would later reappear in the 1987 hardcover collection Midnight Pleasures and its 1991 paperback edition, a high quality scan of the cover of which has eluded me.  

Bloch starts his story with a peroration about how the uniformed attendants at museums never talk to you and so remain totally nondescript and totally forgettable.  I found this amusing because for two years or so, every time I went to the National Gallery of Art, and I was going often, one of the attendants would rush over to me to ask me if I had any questions about the pieces on display, a sort of creepy look on his face, and this guy made me so uncomfortable that I started going to the museum less often.  

Anyway, this is one of those stories in which the bulk of the story doesn't happen to the narrator, but is related to the narrator by another character.  Our narrator is at a bar and a museum attendant in obvious distress runs in, drinks heavily, and then tells our narrator his story.  This guy works on that floor of the museum which displays American Indian artifacts, and a new artifact recently came in, a totem pole depicting six human heads looking the same direction, one atop the other, and decorated with arms along its sides.  This is a newly constructed totem pole; the junior member of the expedition that collected it, a fat guy, explained that it was built for him as a gift by the medicine man of the Alaskan tribe the expedition was staying with.  The leader of the expedition died up there, you know, of natural causes, said fatso.

By the simplest of methods, the museum attendant has figured out that the fat guy murdered the head of the expedition so he could take credit for the expedition's success and then murdered a bunch of the Alaskan natives who were witnesses.  The totem pole began talking, and the attendant came to realize that the faces on it were representations of the five native murder victims and the white expedition leader, whose head is on top.  It seems the medicine man knew fatso slew those six men and then imbued this totem pole with the souls of fatso's victims so they could achieve revenge.

Fatso decided to destroy the totem pole with fire, but when he went into the room with the pole, carrying matches and kerosene, the attendant, keeping out of the way in another part of the museum, heard fatso's screams and fled in terror.  Having calmed himself down by drinking and unburdening himself to our narrator, he and the narrator find a policeman and the three of them go into the museum to find the totem pole has grabbed the fat murderer with its arms and bitten him to death with its six sets of teeth.

This is an acceptable filler story, too long and pretty obvious but not obnoxiously bad.

**********

The Price story is quite good, and of the rest only Miller's is actually bad, and its wild plot is at least memorably strange instead of forgettably rote or derivative.  So a decent issue of Farnsworth Wright's magazine.  Stay tuned for a look at some of the fiction in the September 1939 issue!