"The Willow Landscape" by Clark Ashton Smith (1931)
isfdb tells us that Clark Ashton Smith's "The Willow Landscape" first saw print in Philippine Magazine, and then was included in the 1933 small press collection The Double Shadow. After its inclusion in Weird Tales in 1939, here it was promoted as an "ingenious Chinese fantasy" on the contents page, it would resurface in several Smith collections. If you are scoring at home, be aware I am reading the Weird Tales version.
"The Willow Landscape" is a creditable little fantasy, one with a happy ending, something we don't necessarily expect from California's chief weirdie, who kills off protagonists at a pretty alarming rate.
Shih Liang is a lonely man, a scholar with a clerical job at the imperial court, but no friends or family save his younger brother, who is studying to become a scholar himself. His ancestors left Shih Liang a bunch of art treasures but also a pile of debts, and most of Shih Liang's salary goes to paying off these debts and financing his little brother's education. The man's only real recreation is staring at his favorite painting, which depicts a beautiful landscape with willows and a bamboo bridge, and, on the bridge, a pretty young woman. Admiring this painting refreshes Shih Liang as would a walk in the country.
Disaster strikes! Thanks to the maneuvers of some jerk off at the imperial court, Shih Liang loses his job! Disgraced, no other job is open to him. To survive, and to complete payment on his brother's schooling, Shih Liang has to start selling the art collection. He leaves his favorite painting until last. As he takes one final look at the painting, he is magically transported to the world of the painting, where he lives happily ever after with the young woman--in the last line of the story Smith hints that if anybody watched the painting carefully they'd notice Shih Liang having sex with her. Cheeky!
Not bad, though you can see the ending (entering the painting) a mile away (the sex joke is a surprise, at least.)
"The Death Watch" by Hugh B. Cave (1939)
Our narrator, Harry Crandall, works at a radio station, but the station doesn't broadcast the 1939 equivalents of Led Zeppelin, Rush Limbaugh, U2 and Howard Stern--this station sends and receives important business and safety messages for ships and their owners and that sort of thing. Our story is set in Florida, and there are lots of references to spiders and swamps and insects as well as what those so inclined might consider opportunities for "Florida Man" jokes.
An attractive young woman of Harry's acquaintance, Elaine, was very close with her brother, Mark, and they lived together in a big house set far from any other building, on the edge of a swamp. Elaine moved out when she married Peter, a writer who, like so many of us nowadays, works at home. Mark died recently--Harry was at his bedside as he expired. Elaine and Mark have moved into Mark's big house, and Peter often comes to hang out with Harry at night at the radio station, when Harry is on watch at the radio set--Peter seems pretty interested in radio and learns a lot during his time at the station. While hanging out there, Peter reports on the horrible effect Mark's death has had on Elaine--she has started reading occult books and has hired a Seminole Indian to work at the big house and she spends a lot of time with this taciturn, creepy drunk and barely talks to Peter. Most disturbing of all is how Elaine keeps saying Mark told her he would come back to her from the grave, and how she actually seems to believe he will.
Harry suggests that Peter read some of Elaine's crazy books so he can better refute their stupidities and convince his wife to abandon the insane idea her brother can return from the dead. Peter stops coming by the radio station, and a curious Harry goes to visit the big house on the swamp. These visits offer Harry some disturbing revelations: Elaine and that Indian, in furtherance of their quest to bring Mark back from the grave, are trying to contact alien gods Nyarlathotep and Hastur via traditional black sorcery means, while Peter--who has read Elaine's books and found them not stupid but pretty damn persuasive--has set up an elaborate radio apparatus in an upstairs room and is himself trying to communicate with N and H via cutting-edge 20th-century means. Peter has let Elaine think he is doing his writing up there--he wants to the good news to be a surprise to her should he actually ever get through to the other side and summon back her beloved brother. Imagine her surprise when it turns out Mark wanted to return from the grave not because he loved Elaine but because he felt Elaine betrayed him by marrying Peter and wanted to exact on her a gruesome vengeance!
I really like "The Death Watch"--the love triangle aspect, the use of modern technology, the Native American element, the critter-haunted swamp, all of it works, and Cave's style here is effective. Recommended to all Yog-Sothery aficionados! In 1977 "The Death Watch" was reprinted in the Cave collection Murgunstrumm and Others and in 1994 it appeared in the Chaosium volume Cthulhu's Heirs alongside a bunch of brand new Mythos fiction.
"Celephais" by H. P. Lovecraft (1922)
"Celephais" bears considerable similarities to Smith's "The Willow Landscape," but is more dreamy, long-winded, bitter and sad, in part because it is set not in some vague fantasy version of the Mysterious Orient but rather in something like real life in the West.
An Englishman's once-wealthy family has decayed and he is the last of his line, living a lonely life in a London garret, the country estate where he grew up lost. He has abandoned his writing because anyone who saw it considered it ridiculous, and the comfort and joy of his existence is to be found in his dreams in which he travels to other universes where different laws of physics apply and to other lands, among them the valley of Oorth-Nargai, where people do not grow old and where ships can fly from the city of minarets Celephais up into the clouds to other cities stranger still. Once having visited Celephais, the Englishman strives to return to it, taking drugs he hopes will facilitate sleep until he runs out of money and is thrown out of his garret. The final lines of the story indicate that the failed writer dies after falling off a seaside cliff and bitterly suggest a fat businessman now lives in his ancestral home, but before we get that we hear all about how the writer meets a party of knights who carry him off to Oorth-Nargai, where he reigns as a god over the people whom he created in his dreams. I guess we can choose to think the writer's soul really is enjoying life in a better world, or that he was just a nut, .
I don't have to tell you that the young Englishman in the story is based on Anglophile Lovecraft himself, also a writer who, during his life, was little appreciated and also a man who came from a formerly wealthy line then in financial decline but who didn't quite feel up to getting a regular job and earning a respectable income, and that "Celephais" is part bitter plaint and part wish-fulfillment. "Celephais" is OK; the long passages describing the worlds the Englishman sees, and where he actually does very little, can feel a little tedious, and a story in which a guy doesn't do anything but is just acted upon by others, for good or for ill, is sort of a hard sell.
"Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" AKA "Under the Pyramids" by H. P. Lovecraft and Harry Houdini (1924)
This is a pretty long story, and much of the start of it is like a travelogue, our narrator Houdini describing his trip with his wife across Europe to Egypt, en route to Australia. We get his opinions of various sights in Port Said, Cairo and Giza, and trivia on who is said to have built which pyramid, how tall this pyramid is, etc. This is sort of entertaining, I guess. I am always of mixed mind whether this sort of realistic material is a waste of the reader's time or is useful for making the alien and weird aspects later in the story stand out in sharper relief.
Houdini hires a guide and this joker gets into a fight with some other local, and the two solemnly declare their intention to duel atop the Great Pyramid after midnight. Houdini is eager to witness this bit of local color, and he accompanies the duelists and their two dozen seconds up to the peak of the pyramid only to find it is all a trap--the Arabs tie Houdini up and gag and blindfold him and then lower him by rope down a stone shaft into a cavern deep below the surface; the sides of the narrow shaft tear his clothes and draw blood from many small wounds, and Houdini loses consciousness and has wild dreams that hint that his treacherous guide is the descendant or reincarnation of the pharaoh who built one of the pyramids and is a sort of representation of Ancient Egypt, a land of evil and sorcery, a civilization preoccupied by death.
Houdini escapes his bonds and starts crawling around the stygian black cavern--he can see nothing, as there is no light, but can smell something horrible, and then he hears something horrible--the sound of a marching party, the footsteps of many types, as if animals are walking in time with men. Houdini connects these queer sounds with the rumors he has heard that the ancient Egyptians constructed composite mummies--mummies part human and part animal--and with the Egyptian belief that the life force of a dead person might fly around and sometimes enter the body of a dead creature and animate it.
The members of the hideous and disgusting procession of half-human and half-animal mummies, and of half-eaten and half-torn corpses, carry torches, and so provide the hiding Houdini light with which to spot the staircase out of this prehistoric subterranean temple dedicated to a god of death. The magician escapes, but not before getting a mind-reeling eyeful--the evil priests and their congregation of living dead freaks and cripples offering worship and sacrifices to the giant multi-headed monster god that emerges from a huge aperture.
"Under the Pyramids" is a pretty good Lovecraftian story, even though the behavior of the monster-worshipers may not make much sense--they go to a lot of trouble to capture Houdini and lower him down to the evil temple, but then they leave him alone? Didn't they capture him in order to feed him to their monster god? Isn't Houdini, as a European-American magician whose "magic" is like a mockery of their legit sorcery and whose ethnicity and civilization constitute their age-old enemies, an extremely important captive to them? Houdini sees the treacherous guide among the leaders of the worshipers--why didn't this villain go to the place to which he had lowered Houdini and have his crocodile-headed and hippo-bodied congregants seize the American and lug him over to the orifice from which the monster emerges? And if the guide walked down a set of stairs to the underground temple, why didn't the Arabs just carry Houdini down the stairs with him? There's also the idea that a small monster was pecking away at Houdini while he was unconscious, a mystery which is never really resolved.
I like "Under the Pyramids," but there are problems, as you can see. Besides in the pages of many of the component volumes of the vast mountain of available Lovecraft collections, you can find the story in a handful of anthologies with an ancient Egyptian theme, including a tie-in to a British TV series that explores the cultural impact of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen.
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None of these stories is bad, which is nice; here we have a comfortable leg of our long journey through the 1930s issues of Weird Tales. A leg which offers an interesting surprise: the best of the stories we have read today is by Hugh B. Cave and not the iconic H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith who doth bestride the weird world like cyclopean colossi. Maybe I'm a simple-minded man, but I prefer stories about tangible things in which people set goals and pursue them to stories about dreams in which the characters are buffeted by forces beyond comprehension.
More short stories await us in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.
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