Magazine of Horror Aug '63: F B Long, E D Hoch and R Silverberg

A fun book to flip through is Art of the Imagination:20th Century Visions of Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy, an oversized omnibus edition of Frank M. Robinson's Science Fiction of the 20th Century, Robert Weinberg's Horror of the 20th Century and Randy Broekner's Fantasy of the 20th Century.  Weinberg, in Horror of the 20th Century, opines that Frank Belknap Long's best story is "The Man With a Thousand Legs," and I figured I should read it during our current Long kick.  "The Man With a Thousand Legs" first appeared in Weird Tales in 1927 and would be reprinted numerous times, including in the first issue of The Magazine of Horror in 1963.  Volume 1, Number 1 of Robert A. W.  Lowndes' magazine includes alongside the Long reprint a new story by super-editor Donald A. Wollheim and one by prolific genre author and SF Grand Master Robert Silverberg that I figured I'd read as well as Long's tale.  But then I realized I've actually read and blogged about Wollheim's "Babylon: 70 M." already, so to round out this blog post we'll be talking not only about Silverberg's offering to those men and women of 1963 who sought horror at the newsstands but also that of Edward D. Hoch, a guy whose name I regularly see as I glance through old books and magazines but whose work I have only sampled once, with negative results; I called Hoch's story "Versus" "bewilderingly lame," "sterile" and "gimmicky," but let's give the guy a second chance, why don't we?  (I keep giving Long second, third, fourth, etc., chances, don't I?)  

"The Man With a Thousand Legs" (1927/1963) by Frank Belknap Long

Lowndes, in his intro to "The Man With a Thousand Legs" in The Magazine f Horror tells us the version of the story he is printing has been revised by Long, and so I'll be reading it there instead of any of the other places in which the tale has reappeared, among them Donald Wollheim 's Avon Fantasy Reader (1948) and Kurt Singer's Horror Omnibus (1965), which has a cool woman-in-distress cover that I can't find a decent image of.

"The Man With a Thousand Legs" is a pretty good mad scientist/monster story told through the medium of nine first-person accounts--diaries, the testimonials of various people, even a message found in a bottle.  The whole thing is actually pretty well-written, certainly better than Long's average.

In brief, a young scientist some years ago became celebrated when he discovered some kind of "etheric vibrations," but some other scientist debunked his work and the youngster fell into disrepute.  But he continued his work and developed a device that emitted a ray that could transform animal matter into a different form, a form more pliable, something like that of a jellyfish or a squid.  He tested the ray on himself and the affected portion of his became monstrous--yellow and tentacled, and even worse, independent-minded and voraciously hungry!  At first, by exerting his will, our risk-taking scientist could return the monster parts of himself back to normal, but eventually the yellow beast predominates.  From the point of view of victims, witnesses and the mad scientist himself we experience a series of gruesome episodes that highlight shocking images of injury and death, culminating in a scene like something out of a kaiju film in which the yellow monster has grown giant and attacks a naval vessel, killing scores of men.  In the denouement a homeless man discovers the scientist's apparatus.

Thumbs up for "The Man With a Thousand Legs."  Robert Weinberg didn't steer me wrong!    

"The Maze and the Monster" by Edward D. Hoch (1963)

This is a filler story, competently written but gimmicky and totally obvious.  Merely acceptable.

An Englishman is shipwrecked alone on an island.  Captured, he is taken to the island's mad dictator.  This goof, inspired by the famous story "The Lady or the Tiger," has had a subterranean maze constructed.  Our hero is thrown into the maze naked, told that there are two exits, one leading to a paradise, the other to a monster.  Our guy proceeds through the maze and finds himself in a well-appointed chamber in which awaits the hottest chick he has ever seen!  Hubba hubba!  Oh no, the beauty paralyzes him with a touch and, starting with his eyes, begins flaying him with her fingernails!  He hasn't found the paradise but the monster, a sadistic madwoman with an expert knowledge of human anatomy!

This mediocrity was inexplicably reprinted in Marvin Kaye's Devils & Demons.

"The Unbeliever" by Robert Silverberg (1963)

This appears to be a rare Silverberg; at least isfdb doesn't list any reprints.  And I can see why, as this story is quite lame.  Thumbs down!

"The Unbeliever" is a joke story about the Devil.  Steiner is an unethical businessman who seduces women and commits blackmail as well as other sins, so Satan figures he will soon gain custody of Steiner's soul.  But I guess in the world of this story Satan can only get your soul if you believe in him, and Steiner is the kind of guy who is so confident that there is no such thing as the supernatural that he has started a club of people who defy superstitions; these skeptics meet on Friday the 13th to intentionally walk under ladders and break mirrors and so forth.  Satan sends one of his top lackeys, our narrator, up to Earth to convince Steiner that Hell and the Devil are real, and we witness one of the skeptics' club meetings.  The narrator does everything in his power to convince Steiner of the reality of Satan and Hell, without success--or so it appears.  The surprise revelation at the end of the story is that Steiner is immune to Satan's power now matter how far he has gone astray because he is a space alien and/or the Devil of another planet.  In the world of Silverberg's story only Earth people are subject to the rule of God and Satan, I guess.

The twist ending of this story feels stupid and cheap, coming out of left field as it does--the theology of "Unbeliever" makes no sense in relation to traditional views of Satan, Hell and damnation and worse it feels internally inconsistent.  Steiner is not an unbeliever--he obviously believes in Hell and Satan.  The narrator can read people's minds and he looks into Steiner's but doesn't detect that the guy isn't human and isn't really an atheist and a materialist--what he sees in Steiner's mind confirms his own belief and that of readers that Steiner simply doesn't believe in the supernatural.  Maybe we are supposed to think Steiner is so powerful a demon that he can spoof the narrator's mind reading powers with a sort of psychic cloak or facade, but it still feels like a low trick, that Silverberg has used us poorly by selling us a theory that undergirds the entire story and then pulling the rug out from under us at the very end.  Even worse, the meat of the story is a bunch of lame jokes that are not funny.  Bad.

**********

Long comes through for us, but the Hoch and Silverberg stories are forgettable filler.  The Magazine of Horror would continue publication up and into the year of my birth, 1971, so I guess those filler pieces didn't cripple it.

Look forward to more magazine stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, fantasy fans!

Mars is My Destination by Frank Belknap Long

"That silver hawk gives you a Colonization Board clearance that’s a little on the special side...you’ll have to admit. The first man who wore it got a little angry when anyone addressed him as ‘General’ because that’s a strictly military title, and military titles haven’t been in common use for forty years. There’s not supposed to be any army anymore—on Earth or on Mars. But I’ve always sort of liked ‘General’ and that insignia is practically the equivalent of five stars.”

“I’m afraid I don’t like ‘General’ at all,” I said. “The title is...Ralph.”

Can't stop, won't stop--Frank Belknap Longapalooza grinds on!  Today we pull down from the shelves of the MPorcius Library Mars is My Destination.  (Ripped from today's headlines, eh?)  I own a copy of the 1962 Pyramid paperback that at one time was on the shelves of the Paperback Exchange in sunny California.  It looks like Mars is My Destination was published in Spanish translation in 1963 and that there have been some reprints in our own 21st century; I guess this novel has achieved greater respect than some of the novels by Long we've been reading, like The Witch Tree, Legacy of Evil and The Mating Center.  So let's "blastoff for danger" in hopes we can heap praise upon Long today.

It is the future--the year 2020!  A colony has been founded on Mars, and its existence has galvanized human society, given people hope, ignited a spirit of adventure!

Man had lived too long in a closed-circuit that had almost destroyed him.  The great barrier that was no longer there had brought the world to the brink of a universal holocaust, and just knowing that it had been shattered forever was enabling men and women everywhere to lead healthier lives, set their goals higher.

Woah, is this Frank Belknap Long the optimist singing the gospel of manifest destiny?  Well, there is a fly in the ointment.  Millions of people--fifty mil in the USA alone!--want to move to Mars to participate in the grand adventure of setting up a new civilization there, but the government isn't building its fleet of rocket ships fast enough to meet demand, and only a small number of carefully selected people can be taken to the red planet every month, and the way the feds pick and choose who can go is giving rise to widespread envy and a popular belief in corruption and favoritism.

The title of Mars is My Destination reminds us of Alfred Bester's critically lauded 1956 novel The Stars My Destination, which I read many years ago.  I recall Bester's novel having a sort of hard-boiled, noirish style and Long brings this sort of style to Mars is My Destination, our narrator, Ralph Graham, telling his tale in a cynical, somewhat sarcastically jocular, voice like you might find in a detective novel.  Long's novel is full of elements that remind us of those detective stories; Ralph spends the first five chapters of Mars is My Destination moving around Chicago, the world's leading spaceport, trying to figure out various mysteries and getting himself into a fist fight in a bar, engaging in a flirtation with a gorgeous blonde femme fatale, and surviving multiple attempts to murder him (one of these involves a robotic snake.)  The mysteries include: why has Ralph been selected to go to Mars?, who is trying to kill him?, and who is the femme fatale?  

Making the novel feel even more like a detective story in its early chapters, the narrator withholds information from readers, for example only telling us he is happily married after the flirtation with the femme fatale and that he is actually a high level employee of the Colonization Board after making us think the reason is being permitted to go to Mars is some kind of mystery.  When Long springs such basic and essential information—old to the narrator but new to us readers—on us it is a surprise that changes our whole perception of what is going on, like a plot twist.

If memory serves, The Stars My Destination was one of those stories in which big powerful private companies whose influence rivals that of the government are fighting private wars with each other, and Long makes just this sort of thing a central element of Mars is My Destination--I guess this type of material comes natural to Long, who, in the 1930s at least,* was a supporter of the Soviet Union.  The idea raised early on that the common people don't trust the government is dismissed and discarded--those who doubt the Colonization Board are villains or fools, and Long's book is a vindication of government authority, which Ralph comes to embody in himself.

*See H. P. Lovecraft's June 19, 1936 letter to C. L. Moore, Nov 26, 1932 letter to August Derleth, and early December 1932 letter to Derleth; also Robert E. Howard's Jan-Feb 1935 letter to Lovecraft. 

Ralph reports to his boss to find out why he is being sent to Mars and gets a lecture on the conflict between the company that runs the atomic reactor on Mars, Wendel Atomics, and the fuel company that brings to Mars the radioactive fuel Wendel needs, Endicott Fuel.  The two companies are manipulating the colonists to take sides in their dispute over the price of fuel and forming their own heavily armed police forces and so forth.  Ralph’s vaguely defined mission is to save the colony from this strife, and to achieve this lofty goal Ralph is given unmatched authority, basically made dictator of Mars, but he is supposed to stay undercover until he needs to wield this authority, and he won't be accompanied by any official associates who can enforce his authority.  Ralph's authority is represented by a silver insignia in the shape of a hawk--when people see it, it is assumed, they will obey Ralph's orders. 

We just read a book by Long all about sex roles and sexual relationships, The Mating Center, and Mars is My Destination is also chock full of gender stuff, with many female characters and with lots of dialogue in which Ralph and other men offer their theories about women and their behavior.  This material on women essentially puts women on a pedestal, in a way that by today's standards is sexist, patriarchal and condescending, Long and his characters setting up sharply distinct gender roles and double standards.  

One of the obstacles facing Ralph in the early pages of Mars is My Destination is that his wife Joan doesn't want to go to Mars--he was in that bar drinking whiskey because he was upset about an argument with his wife over their future.  Ralph loves his wife, but he is also feverishly eager to participate in the Mars venture (even before he knew that he had been appointed secret king of Mars.)  Ralph's boss has the idea that a man without a woman at his side is not a man who can accomplish great things, expressed in one of Long's bizarre and difficult to parse metaphors:

"You've got to go to Mars and if you went alone you'd be about as useful to us as a celibate kangaroo, all packaged and ready to be sent on a journey to the taxidermist."

This is sort of an old fashioned way to praise women, the hackneyed idea that behind every great man is a great woman, and it is accompanied by a somewhat less flattering diagnosis of how women think--the boss tells Ralph that Joan will probably be eager to go to Mars once she sees his new silver hawk insignia, even suggesting that, while he has to keep his authority a secret for now, he can wear the badge around the house to impress Joan.  While I suspect that the stereotype that women admire men of high status has some truth to it, when Ralph told us readers that the last four men who wore this famous insignia were all killed, I was reminded of “Billy, Don’t be a Hero” and all those civil rights movies in which the spouse wishes the activist lead wouldn’t endanger their family by crusading for the marginalized.  Will your wife really be thrilled to know the government just put a huge target on your back, Ralph?

(The whole issue of Joan's reluctance to move to Mars fizzles out in anti-climax--when Ralph gets home she has already changed her mind and packed their bags.) 

On his way home on the futuristic subway (Long fills up some pages describing this technological marvel) Ralph almost becomes the fifth bearer of the silver hawk to be killed!  (One of the loose ends in Long's novel is the matter of who told the bad guys Ralph was being sent to Mars to bring them to justice before even Ralph knew it.)  While this super-advanced train that moves at half the speed of sound is in a dark tunnel somebody tries to knife Ralph but instead kills the innocent civilian standing next to him!  Ralph grabs the wrist of the knife-wielding hand in the dark, and before it slips away Ralph discerns it is the hand of a woman!

The sixth of Mars is My Destination’s 21 chapters sees Ralph and Joan on the rocket to the red planet.  Ralph hears a noise from what I would call the bridge but Long calls "the chart room" and goes to investigate—right there among the four robots who pilot the vessel he sees a brutish crewman wrestling down the blonde woman Ralph met in that bar back on Earth!  Ralph is afraid the woman will be hurt so he strikes the man, who falls into one of the robots and is killed when the machine goes haywire.  Ralph feels no remorse, he so abominates men who treat women badly.  

The idea that the robots responsible for the safety of the ship are so fragile as to be liable to breakdown from simply being bumped into gets even harder to accept when the blonde, whom we learn is named Helen, explains that she stowed aboard the Mars ship by hiding inside one of the four robots and has been repeatedly climbing out of and back into it when she thought the chart room otherwise unoccupied.  Why is Helen so desperate to get to Mars that she is willing to break the law and take up residence in the narrow gaps between the electronic components in a robot's interior?  She says that her brother, some kind of engineer or something, is in trouble; bro works for Wendel Atomics and is dying from radiation poisoning.  As for the now deceased crewman who caught her, Ralph and the ship’s captain (whose title is "Commander" instead of "Captain") learn from looking at documents found on his corpse that he was a Wendel spy.

Ralph and the Commander are still discussing the Helen issue when the ship is again menaced—some guy with a bomb is outside on the hull, making his way slowly to the engines!  The bomber is eliminated in perhaps the craziest and most impenetrable scene of the novel.  It seems communication between Earth and Mars is facilitated by millions upon millions of needle-thin wires or shards of filaments left floating around in space!  Somehow these filaments can be moved by controls on the rocket and a bunch of them are directed to converge around the Mars-bound vessel and they somehow annihilate the bomber.  This scene is so vaguely described and the idea behind it so counterintuitive it is impossible to visualize or understand what is going on, and the fact that Long uses the word "interstellar" when one would expect "interplanetary" and "airframe" when one would expect "hull" does not give the reader much confidence that he knows what he is talking about.

(Another crazy thing about this component of the novel is that Long never explains who the bomber was or where he got his bomb, something you think the commander could figure out easily enough.)  

In Chapter 9, Ralph and Joan step out of the rocket and onto the ramp that descends to the Martian surface three hundred feet below.  Long, who gave short shrift to the outré idea of wires in space, spends a lot of time talking about the "corkscrew" shape of this ramp and its construction and people's natural fear of heights and how to overcome them.  Poor Ralph doesn't even make it to the surface on his own two feet as someone shoots him in the back with a poison dart and he immediately suffers convulsions and has to be rushed to the hospital.  A feverish Ralph looks out the window of the ambulance and gets his first view of the Mars he has come to save, and here we have some of Long's best and most interesting writing as he describes the colony with metaphors that actually work and indulges in some philosophizing about cycles of history.  Chapter 10 has more philosophizing, this time about sexual relationships, as Ralph lays in his hospital bed and his doctor and nurse flirt with each other.  Oy.  

Chapter 11 begins with the unwelcome news that Ralph is changing narrative strategies and will be giving us an account of stuff he himself did not witness.  We spend two chapters looking in on a typical Mars family of six, the Lyntons, observing with growing boredom as father John mansplains the economic situation on Mars to his wife and wifey periodically responds with exasperation that "I know all that, John," and "We've gone over this a hundred times."  Wendel Atomics needs fuel for their power plant, but Endicott Fuel, as part of their resistance to domination by Wendel, doesn't want to sell to Wendel and so sells fuel on margin to the colonists so the colonists can speculate on fuel prices--some of these colonists get rich thereby and others lose their shirts.  (There are hints that Long is basing the economic situation on the frontier of Mars with that of America in the 19th century when many small wildcatters extracted oil from their own land.)  John has brought home some cylinders of fuel he didn't buy outright but on margin, and his wife is worried they will explode and kill them and their four children and everybody for miles around.  In Chapter 12, Wendel agents sneak onto John's land and tinker with one of the fuel cylinders, turning it into a time bomb.  John realizes what has happened and decides, after a discussion with his wife (people in Long novels who should be in a rush often stop to have long conversations), to drive the cylinder to the spaceport in hopes somebody there can fix it before it goes boom.

Chapter 13 returns us to Ralphie boy, who wakes up to find somebody from Wendel Atomics in his room.  This guy wants to interrogate our hero and threatens Ralph with Big Image torture, offering Long a chance to talk about the power of the cinema for a few pages.  Long suggests that watching films alters one's brain and makes real life seem puny and lame in comparison, and describes how in the world of his novel police interrogators figured out how to create movies that function as torture devices that so disorient people that they will provide all the answers the cops want--prolonged exposure to these films is likened to a lobotomy that erases your personality.  Throughout Mars is My Destination, Long suggests that the current government on Earth is competent and admirable--the armed forces have been abolished, for example--and Ralph assures us that on Earth movie theatres are strictly regulated by the government and thus safe, and that the Earth police no longer use Big Image torture, but the story is different here on Mars where the government can't rein in Wendel--Big Image torture is a credible threat to Ralph's psyche!

Luckily, Ralph isn't as weak as he and his interrogator think he is, and he jumps out of the bed and beats up the man from Wendel Atomics, who turns out to be no mere flunky, but none other than the president of Wendel Atomics, Wendel himself!  Ralph is too much of a gentleman to exercise the legitimate authority conferred upon him by the silver hawk and just kill Wendel, and so, with the help of a nurse of whom Ralph sings encomiums, our hero sneaks out of the hospital and heads to the spaceport on foot, expecting to find there that the commander of the space ship will have under his protection Joan and the little insignia that will inspire obedience to Ralph across Mars.  Ralph figures every Wendel employee and sympathizer will be gunning for him so he doesn't try to find transport.  As Ralph walks between the towering machines that oxygenate the Martian atmosphere for the benefit of the human colonists we get Long's descriptions of this system, some of the better passages in this crazy and uneven book.

There is a huge explosion some miles away--one of the fuel cylinders in colonist hands that the ruthless agents of Wendel Atomics have turned into bombs has detonated!  The blast knocks Ralph over.  A vehicle stops and an old guy jumps out to check on Ralph, and spends some time chatting about the explosion, the fuel cylinders, and that guy John Lynton, the first to alert the people of the red planet of Wendel's sabotage of the cylinders.  Then this chatty Cathy says he has to get to the spaceport as fast as possible to defuse the fuel canister John brought there, because probably there is nobody at the spaceport that can do so.  If time is of the essence to protect the spaceport from blowing up, why did this old codger stop to shoot the breeze with a stranger?  Anyway, this guy turns out to be the president of Endicott Fuel, who, like his mortal enemy at the head of Wendel, apparently just flits hither and thither without assistant, entourage or bodyguard!

The fuel company prez drives to the spaceport with Ralph in the passenger seat; being old, his heart can't take this excitement and he keels over just as they reach the port, so now there is nobody capable of defusing the fuel cylinder-turned-bomb.  So Ralph has the cylinder put in the space ship that brought him to Mars and the ship is launched into space without any human passengers...or so he thinks!  Ralph and the ship's commander decide to watch the robots in the chart room of the doomed ship via screen and are amazed to find that Helen the stowaway has stowed away on the ship again!  She explains that she sneaked aboard to retrieve a document that would prove she was a Wendel spy--she was working for Wendel so she could infiltrate the Wendel operations and help her dying brother or get revenge or something.  Helen admits that she murdered the man on the subway, but says it was some other agent who shot Ralph with the poison dart.  The commander tells her to get in a space suit and abandon ship--she gets off before the ship explodes and is eventually rescued.  One of the recurring themes of Mars is My Destination is Ralph's chivalrous treatment of women and another example of the book's sympathetic but perhaps condescending view of the fair sex is Ralph's promise that he will use all his vast authority to help Helen when she has to go on trial for all her crimes, which of course include that subway slaying.  

With the spaceport saved and Ralph now wearing his silver hawk insignia for all to see, Ralph sets out to solve the problem of Mars by arresting Wendel and breaking up his atomic power company.  John drives him to the installation where all the nuclear weapons on Mars sit ready for launch.  Long never mentioned this arsenal before, and, in fact, has been suggesting throughout the book that there is no more military on Earth or Mars.  (You have to wonder if Long was making up his story as he went along, conceiving of plot obstacles and writing passages setting them up with no idea how he would later resolve them.)  Ralph briefs the guy who is in command of these weapons of mass destruction and then has John drive him to Wendel's office at the atomic plant.  The Wendel guards have all been given orders to shoot Ralph on sight, but when they see he wears the silver hawk they all stand down, except for one guy who assaults Ralph from behind with a weapon Long calls a "heavy metal thong."  Long employs his own idiosyncratic lexicon in this book that sometimes left me at a loss, and even though Long says this thing is metal and "gleams," I visualized it as a blackjack or kosh.  When this guy is disposed of, Ralph and John seize Wendel and put him on the video phone with the nuclear weapons guy and Ralph threatens to nuke the atomic plant--with him in it--unless Wendel surrenders.  Wendel has every reason to doubt Ralph will do it, but then Joan appears on the screen next to the missile commander and says that she knows her husband and she knows he'll do it out of his sense of duty!  Wendel surrenders, his company is disbanded, and Mars is saved, thanks to Joan, just as Ralph's boss might have predicted.  We don't ever learn who shot the dart or who tried to blow up the space ship on its way to Mars, and we don't get any insight into who will now run the atomic power plant and the fuel deliveries the plant needs--maybe we are to assume all these essential services are to be nationalized?

This book is obviously a mess, full of poorly written passages and superfluous descriptions that add nothing to the plot or atmosphere.  However, it is only rarely boring, and Long's strange pro-government and pro-woman politics are fascinating in their oddity, and lend the story a sense of purpose.  I think I'm going to call Mars is My Destination barely acceptable.

The Mating Center by Frank Belknap Long

"We are not sex-privileged, and the penalty for our rebellion, if we are overtaken by the savagery which the Monitors call justice, will not be a severe reprimand or even a long term of imprisonment. The penalty will be death."

Frank Belknap Longapalooza continues!  Today we look at a scan at the internet archive of 1961's The Mating Center, a novel brought to us by Chariot Books, who published Long's Woman From Another Planet in 1960, a book we read in 2022. 

The Mating Center has a pedestrian SF plot--people rebelling against the authoritarian government of the future which severely limits sexual activity--and an obvious if commendable message--that love and sex are good and give meaning to life--and these serve as a kind of skeleton upon which Long hangs a series of mediocre scenes of sex and violence that seek to appeal to the ordinary interests of thriller readers as well as a broad array of fetishes.  The book is pretty shoddy, with lots of typos and inconsistencies in the text that should have been ironed out during copy-editing and proofreading.  For example, early on we are told that the story takes place in 2061 and of our main character that "Theoretically all physical desire had been eliminated from his biogenetic heritage for four generations," but then that the current social structure has "stood firm for four centuries" and later a character notes that "for three centuries we have tried to eradicate the love impulse by rigorously controlled selective mating...."  Maybe "2061" is a typo, or maybe all those "centuries" were meant to be "generations."  Whatever the case, it is clear that Long and Chariot Books were not putting in the hours needed to provide SF readers and horndogs the best possible product.  (We'll leave to the cynics whether Mating Center is the product its readers deserve.)   

It is the tyrannical future!  The prologue and the first chapter of The Mating Center inform us that the current economy rests on a foundation of specialization--every man and every woman is genetically engineered and eugenically bred to fulfil a particular duty.  One in fifty people is given the task of reproducing; these lucky people are allowed to go to the mating center to create new citizens.  (Let's not do the math required to show if you can maintain a population for "generations" or "centuries" if only 2% of women of that population are giving birth.)  Everybody else is forbidden to have sex, and in general it is no big deal because these non-sex-privileged people, due to their genetic makeup, feel no sexual desire, can only understand it intellectually.

Until recently--it seems people are getting horny all over and the World State government is having to quash rebellions all over the place as people try to have sex with each other and fall head over heels in love.  (One of Long's failings in The Mating Center is that he never suggests why the anti-sex program, after working for "centuries" or "generations," is all of a sudden collapsing now.  Probably Long should have founded people's lack of sex drive not on eugenic breeding but on drugs in the water supply that have run out or were sabotaged by elite dissidents or something.)  

The prologue is set in an auditorium where a man with authority is giving a speech via TV screen to an assembly of Monitors, this society's commissars and administrators.  One Monitor, an attractive woman, suddenly starts yelling that love is essential and denying it is to deny joy and creativity and so forth; she declares that the people are rising up against the anti-sex policy and then she strips nude right there in the auditorium to ram her point home.  

Chapter Five (if you'll permit me to skip ahead) illustrates another act of rebellion.  The government maintains pleasure boats upon which people can relax and do healthy exercises, but everyone on this boat has become sexually aware, even the undercover security guard who has been sexually harassing the women aboard, trying to blackmail them into having sex with him.  The civilians murder the guard and then the couples all have sex; while they sleep afterwards, government aircraft bomb the boat, annihilating them.  As is his wont, Long overexplains and overdescribes everything and we hear about each plunge of the knife into the guard and each little move of the attacking aircraft, and are provided lengthy passages of dialogue from the lovers that I guess are supposed to appeal to reader fetishes and offer Long's theories about sex and love: there are descriptions of unwanted sexual advances, discussion of how virginity is more to be expected from a woman than a man, a woman's expression of her desire to be taught about sex by a man, etc.

The spine of The Mating Center is the narrative of our heroes, Teleman and Alicia, as they strive to evade the authorities.  Teleman, an engineer has inexplicably begun having erotic desires, and in Chapter One he stares at the women he sees as he rides the slidewalk to work, especially the women who are permitted to go to the mating center and who wear flattering or revealing clothes.  Alicia, "an emotional therapy specialist" who also lacks sex privileges but has started getting the sex urge, sees Teleman staring at women and she throws herself at him when there are few other people nearby.  They start groping each other and making out, only to be spotted by a security guard and a skinny old woman who turns out be one of the most senior of the Monitors in civilian dress, Monitor 6 Y 9!

"Unlawful love-making would destroy all specialization and without specialization we would all perish."

Through the first two thirds or so of the book we follow the adventures of Teleman and Alicia as they outfight the security guard and have an impromptu debate with Monitor 6 Y 9, Alicia using her psychological manipulation skills to humiliate her, and then take cover in a forest, eluding high-tech pursuit (scanners, airborne soldiers, fifty-foot tall war robots) bug finding time to do a lot of kissing and declaring their love for each other.  Eventually they lose their virginity.

In the forest Teleman and Alicia come upon a house or cottage to which two sex-privileged lovers have retired to have sex because they think having sex in the mating center cramps their style.  Teleman and the man have a fight, then agree to work together to evade the authorities--Teleman and Alicia take the sex-privileged couples' clothes and ID.  Melodramatically, a government bomb kills the woman and her man collapses into sobs and Long provides us talk about what it is like when you lose your beloved to death.

The Teleman-Alicia narrative is broken up by the extraneous boat episode and multiple chapters starring Monitor 6 Y 9, who is commanding the pursuit of Teleman and Alicia from her office.  She watches screens, issues orders, yells at her subordinates, that kind of thing.  A couple of lovers captured by her troops are brought in to her and she whips the naked back of the woman; her man jumps 6Y9 and he is shot dead by a guard.  Two gratuitous chapters are devoted to 6 Y 9's observation of an experiment.  The World State's scientists have created a hairy misshapen Neanderthal-visaged acromegaliac giant by taking a typical man and spending months messing with his pituitary glands and conducting upon him a whole battery of other surgeries; this man is intended to serve as proof of concept for a new population of superior citizens, people totally devoid of sexual desire.  As a test, the white lab coat crew brings in the most beautiful woman in the world, whom the government has trained in the ancient art of seducing men!  (Why does an anti-sex regime spend resources teaching the hottest chick in the world how to be even hotter?  I guess this is an example of that "gain of function" research we heard so much about a couple of years ago.)  This sex goddess does a striptease before the monster, to see if he remains unmoved--when he jumps up from his hospital bed to grab the girl and start kissing her and groping her the government flunkies know they have failed.

Teleman and Alicia in their disguise make it to a mating center where they sneak around, investigating, finding the huge nursery where the government raises babies wholesale.  When Monitor 6 Y 9 shows up we get speeches from a distraught mother about how the government has stolen from women the right to the joys of motherhood and a rebuttal from Monitor 6 Y 9, who maintains that sex is a disgusting necessary evil.  Alicia knocks 6 Y 9 out with a series of blows, and then the agonized mother explains to our heroes that the sex-privileged are also rebellious--they are permitted to have sex but are denied the ability to build relationships with their own kids--as well as a third of the guards in the mating centers; this dissident proposes to set up a transmitter so Teleman and Alicia, whom she immediately identifies as natural leaders, can broadcast a speech which will trigger an uprising.  The last two chapters of The Mating Center show us the ruler of the World State wondering what to do about the rebellion and then getting killed in an explosion and then Monitor 6 Y 9 being killed while in an aircraft--it is suggested that Teleman is at the controls of the aircraft that shoots her down, or, that in her insanity, she thinks it is him.

The Mating Center is better than the two Gothic romances we recently read by Long because it has an elementary conventional plot structure and a plot that is driven by the personalities and decisions of the main characters, as well as a clear ideology, all things that Legacy of Evil and The Witch Tree largely or entirely lack.  But The Mating Center is still bad.  It is poorly written and contains too much extraneous material--superfluous chapters like the boat and the science experiment chapters, and in the main chapters unnecessary descriptions of stuff like shafts of morning sunlight--Proust or Nabokov can get away with describing sunlight or a reflection in a puddle for a paragraph but Long is not in their class as a prose stylist and those sorts of prose poems don't contribute to the kind of book this is, a book that seeks to entertain with sex and violence and hopes to offer speculations about human life under an even worse government than the one we know.  Long thought of himself as an artist, as a poet, as we see reflected in Lovecraft's letters that mention him, and Long's writing is ambitious when it comes to style, but the text of The Mating Center suggest his abilities did not match his ambition, or that he didn't put in the time needed on this project to meet his potential.  Consider the book's stylistic nadir, this inexplicably inapposite metaphor:

His fist became a magnet and his opponent an iron robot with swiftly moving appendages and when the magnet crashed into the iron the appendages jerked convulsively and the robot figure went toppling backwards.

The whole point of a magnet is that it attracts something and/or sticks to it, but a fist in general does not attract or hold fast to things and in this sentence in particular we see the fist neither attract nor hold fast to something but actually violently repel it.  Embarrassing.

The pacing of Long's novel is also bad; the novel as a whole feels long and slow, and in the middle of individual scenes that should be fast paced, like chases and fights, Long inflicts long digressions upon us or has characters stop to give long speeches, so the reader gets no sense that the characters, who are in danger, feel any fear or desperation.

So, thumbs down for The Mating Center, though, as I have suggested, this thing is marginally better than the Long Gothics we read recently.  And don't think that Longapalooza is over--we've got more SF from FBL coming up in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!

Astounding, February 1936: F B Long, R Z Gallun and J R Fearn

We here at MPorcius Fiction Log have been reading fiction by that iconic Weirdie Frank Belknap Long.  In response to my blog post about Long's 1971 Gothic romance stinker The Witch House, one of my perceptive and well-informed readers suggested giving Long's 1936 story from Astounding, "Cones," a spin, pointing out that important SF anthologist Groff Conklin reprinted "Cones" in his 1951 anthology Possible Worlds of Science Fiction.  We love Astounding here at MPorcius Fiction Log, so let's read "Cones" and two additional stories from the same issue of the leading magazine of science fiction of the World War II era, then edited by F. Orlin Tremaine, one penned by Raymond Z. Gallun, whose work we are pretty fond of, and one by John Russell Fearn, about whom we are somewhat skeptical.  (We've already blogged about this issue's immortal cover story, H. P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness.")

"Cones" by Frank Belknap Long (plus special bonus: 1951 version!)

"Cones" comes to us as four chapters.  Chapter I is full of science lectures on Mercury, first discussion of climate and orbit and rotation and such, and later descriptions of the horrible dangers of the Mercurian surface, like the electric current that runs through the soil that, in some spots, is powerful enough to reduce a man to ashes in seconds.  We actually witness a man being burned thusly, with Long describing the whole horrific process, the guy's limbless torso jerking around and that sort of thing, but first we meet our heroes.  We've got our male lead, Gibbs Crayley.  On Earth, Crayley was an innovating, risk-taking bacteriologist who aroused public and government animosity, and so left Earth to become an adventurer, exploring Venus, Mars, Luna, Pluto, asteroids, and now Mercury.  He bickers with our female lead, Mona Massin, one of Earth's most beautiful women, a woman who rejected the many men who pursued her on Earth because all she cares about is astronomy.  Oh yeah, she also cared about her cat, which stepped on one of those Mercurian shock patches and was reduced to a cinder.  Along with our leads are six other smarty smarts, each described in a single line, one of whom gets killed as Chapter I ends.  Zap!

Another man dies at the start of Chapter II, this guy being felled by an even more mysterious danger, his body shriveling within his space suit--when Crayley lifts his stricken body it is astonishingly light.  Long spends much of this chapter describing the reactions of the surviving  astronauts to this horror, the fainting and the stunned staring and the agonized groaning and so forth; "Cones" really feels like a horror story.  Long also dwells on the fact that all the men on the team are obsessed with Massin.  

This obsession takes center stage in Chapter III, as men declare their love for Massin, who feels only contempt and pity for their misery.  As we all have heard a thousand times, the way to win a woman is to play hard to get, to ignore her or even "neg" her, and so of course it is the cold and callous Crayley, as obsessed with knowledge as is Massin, who attracts the interest of the frigid astronomer.    

Crayley looked at her.  He had always thought her a rash little fool, but he had to concede that her impersonality matched his own and was really magnificent.

(I can never remember the difference between "psychopath" and "sociopath," and suspect like most psychological jargon that these terms are just sloppy catchphrases that reflect the intellectual bankruptcy of the soft sciences, but if I took psychobabble more seriously I'd say that in Crayley and Massin we have portraits of one or the other or maybe both.)

Crayley experiments on the dead man's shriveled blue body and Massin watches.  It becomes clear that all of the calcium in the man's body has been removed!  We get more science lectures as Crayley tries to figure out what sort of creature did this to his fellow astronaut and how to capture a photograph of an apparently invisible form of native life.  

Crayley prepares a camera that can photograph creatures of energy that move so fast the human eye can but dimly perceive them.  But he slips while climbing a ladder and hurts his ankle so he can't go out onto the Mercurian surface to get the snaps himself.  Two other guys have to go and they are dramatically killed while Crayley and Massin watch; happily, these pioneers didn't die in vain--Crayley and Massin get the pictures back and learn that the natives are 20-foot tall cones of energy and they are massing to attack the ship!  Just then the one non-American member of the crew, "a Latin," goes berserk and launches the ship into space and tries to murder all the other men aboard so he can have Massin all to himself.  As the ship ascends the natives cast one last bolt of energy up at it, killing the trigger-happy Latin.  Crayley and Massin, only survivors of the expedition, admit their love for each other and head back to Earth with some amazing data on Mercury and its native life.

This is a crazy science-fiction horror story and I like it.  I enjoyed all the science and technology stuff, all of which, by accident or design, serves the story's weird horror atmosphere--for example, the space suits don't have radios so outside the ship the astronauts have to communicate via sign language, which adds to their danger and the story's feeling of isolation.  I always like stories about disastrous sexual relationships and Long delivers that kind of material in spades; I also like how their single-minded pursuit of knowledge has turned the main characters into amoral anti-social jerks.  And then there is the gore and the otherworldly nature of the aliens, the sort of stuff we might expect from a Weird Tales alum like Long.  

So, thumbs up for "Cones," a story that doesn't deny that the quest for love and the quest for science are worthwhile, but also tells you that pursuing love or pursuing knowledge can turn you into a monster who puts himself and everybody nearby at terrible psychological and physical risk.  Were truer words ever spoken?

But wait--there's more!  I encountered a typo early in my reading of the version of "Cones" in Astounding and so took a glance at the version in Possible Worlds of Science Fiction and found that the story there was quite different!  Radically different!  In the book version, Crayley isn't a renegade who left Earth because both the establishment and the masses scorned him and feared his risky experiments--instead he's the head of a government expedition!  And the female lead is not some super beautiful woman with whom Crayley has a difficult relationship--it is his wife Helen!  The cat is now a dog!  Most radical of all, the entire business of all the other men competing for the female crewmember's affections has been excised!  In fact, whereas in the magazine version of "Cones" the presence of a gorgeous woman on the ship makes the men go crazy and jeopardizes the mission, in the book version the presence of a woman inspires them to greater heroism!

The 1951 book version of "Cones" is a much more optimistic, pro-woman, pro-humanity, pro-science text than the 1936 magazine version.  Casualties are lower (but still high), and the men all behave much better, both more chummy and more competent.  The plot regarding the aliens is the same, but the character arc subplot of the magazine version--involving the callous and combative male and female leads realizing they love each other--is gone and in its place we get a character arc which has a member of the crew who thinks Crayley's science obsession makes the man inhuman coming to understand that it actually makes Crayley the best kind of human!  

In reading the book version I missed the over-the-top bitterness and melodrama of the magazine version--the astronauts in the book printing are a bunch of pro-social goody goodies and Crayley's singlemindedness is vindicated!  The science is perhaps better in the book version, though--for example, the sign language bit makes more sense, as it is explained that the electrified surface of Mercury interferes with radio reception.

I will say that the book version of "Cones" is just acceptable--I like all the weird horror and sexual tension that leads to internecine violence in the original.  I wonder what's behind these changes to "Cones"--did Conklin demand a less sexist and racist story, or just a less sexy story, or just a more optimistic story, or just a story which focused more on Mercury and less on interpersonal drama?  Did Long pick up the manuscript thinking to update the science and fix some typos and while he was reading it decide to change its tone because he was in a better mood or had changed some of his thinking after 14 or 15 years?  I also wonder what version of the tale was included in the 1972 Long collection Rim of the Unknown.  

"Buried Moon" by Raymond Z. Gallun

With "Buried Moon," a story I think may never have been reprinted, Gallun delivers a solidly entertaining story with striking images, strange ideas, horror elements and a vividly realized psychological experience.  Gallun is becoming a sort of MPorcius favorite!

"Buried Moon," like both versions of Long's "Cones" addresses the idea that science can take away your humanity.  Tod Cram (Dickensian name, I guess) was a brilliant scientist and inventor who married a beautiful woman but neglected her to focus on his work--building a vehicle that could bore through the earth so he could investigate a mysterious crater on the ocean floor!  These two came to hate each other and Cram even struck her.  (New Wave types would complain that "old" science fiction didn't deal with the issue of sex--I note the examples of Barry Malzberg and Harlan Ellison in my blog post on Malzberg's Herovit's World--but today we have 1936 stories by Long and Gallun that are all about sexual relationships.  Today I warn you again that you can't trust what critics say about texts, you have to look at the texts themselves.) 

The mole machine is wrecked during its voyage, but it breaks into a mile-wide hollow meteor that was once a tiny moon of Earth--the interior of this little moon is home to a sophisticated civilization of spider-people, the typical specimen of which is somewhat larger than a tarantula.  The spider people capture Dr. Cram and use their technology to mess with his brain, making him identify with these arachnid aliens as if he is one of them and getting his help in fixing the mole machine so they can use it to travel to the surface and take over!

Gallun starts his story in medias res, with a dazed Cram waking up all confused, both identifying with and finding revolting the spider people--we readers learn about his true identity and earlier life and about the history of the spider moon in fragments as Cram himself recalls things and as data is inserted into his brain by his many-limbed captors.  He is about to launch the mole machine upwards to unleash the intelligent arachnids on the native people of Earth when he stumbles upon a photo of his wife and it jars him into realizing his true duty lies not with the eight-legged freaks, but with the bipeds who are his own kind!  He commits suicide, and the ability to control the mole machine dies with him, saving the human race...for now! 

Gallun has a good writing style, and this story has a pile of elements I always appreciate, like spiders, failed sexual relationships, suicide, and people messing with your brain.  Thumbs up!

In "Buried Moon" we have a forgotten gem I enthusiastically recommend to classic SF readers!  I say again that it pays to look into these old magazines!

"Mathematica" by John Russell Fearn 

It is the future--1980!  Man's first space flight took place five years ago, and there is already a human settlement on Mars.  In 1977 a tiny planet was discovered quite close to the Sun, an artificial planet made of metal!  A sample of the metal has been brought back to Earth, where its astonishing properties are investigated.  When a person in proximity to the fragment thinks of something, those thoughts materialize!  You think of a tiger, a tiger appears!  But the new thing vanishes almost immediately.

Unable to make either heads or tails of the mysterious new element, the fragment is put into storage.  A year later a strange being appears at the lab.  Like so many men of the future in SF, this guy has an emaciated body and a huge skull housing a super brain.  This freak, Pelathon, tells Dr. Farrington and his assistant (our narrator) that Farrington created his (Pelathon's) universe just by thinking it up while near the fragment!  While one year passed in our universe, thousands have passed in Pelathon's, giving humanity there time to evolve into superbrainiacs.  Pelathon built a time-space ship to find his maker, and having found him, proposes that he, Farrington, and the narrator embark on the quest to discover the maker of our own universe!

Chapter II features some jawing about James Jeans and Arthur Eddington and how electrons are waves that exist in multi-dimensional space and how our universe is merely an atom in Pelathon's universe and so on.  Then in Chapter III our three heroes set out to the artificial planet near the Sun, sadly confident they will never return to their native universes.  Inside the metal sphere they find innumerable gigantic wires and cables and a bewildering array of titanic machinery, gears and pistons and what not, all working smoothly.  Pelathon begins shrinking their ship, and they enter another universe that encompasses no more space in our universe than does a single electron.

In Chapter IV, after descending through six or seven levels of universes within universes, Pelathon's ship guides them to a red planet they hope is the world from which emanated the thoughts that generated our universe.  There they meet a man with an even bigger head than Pelathon's--so big he has to wear an appliance to hold it up!  This guy, Si-Lafnor, created our universe to precise specifications, including the potential for human life.  Si-Lafnor delivers a science lecture incomprehensible to me about how all universes and everything in them are just mathematical figures, and the chapter ends with the disclosure that he wants to travel to smaller universes himself in search of the maker of his universe.

In Chapter V, after some additional work which our heroes observe, Si-Lafnor, the man who created Earth, vanishes, seeking his own creator.  Having learned from him, and now with access to Si-Lafnor's vast store of equipment, Pelathon tackles the project of sending our narrator and Farrington back to their native universe and himself back to his.  He doesn't make much headway, and Farrington and the narrator die because there is no food on this red world (Si-Lafnor used his technology to transmit energy directly to their bodies, but Pelathon--who doesn't need to eat himself--didn't figure that technique out quickly enough to nourish them.)  But don't fear--the Earthers live on as a corporate entity of pure thought, unburdened by physical bodies!  After an indeterminate period, maybe thousands of years, in blackness, where living, and knowing, and being have never been heard of, the two scientists find themselves in bodies again, strange alien ones, confronted by a being of everchanging indistinct form--the being that created all mathematics and the first universe from which all others have ultimately sprung!

This First Creator, "the original mathematician," is no pussycat and proposes reducing Farrington and assistant to mere dust, or some other similarly horrible fate, "cancelling them for all time."  But in Chapter VI Si-Lafnor appears--Si-Lafnor knows enough math to have made himself uncancellable, and after a psychic battle of competing math equations with "the original" he confers this immortality on the Earthmen.  In Chapter VII he builds a new universe much like that of the Earth in which Farrington and his assistant were born and sends them there in new--superior and immortal--human bodies.  They are soon joined by Pelathon.  But the Earthmen find this new Earth not much like their own at all, and as unkillable immortals they have nothing in common with its people.  Si-Lafnor goofed, and an endless life of loneliness awaits them as the story ends, though Fearn hints that in a sequel Pelathon may be able to figure something out.  (Indeed, a sequel to "Mathematica" appeared in Astounding a few months later.)

"Mathematica" drags during the lectures, which are largely about abstract mathematical concepts and subatomic physics, stuff I can't even visualize and which carry no emotional weight, unlike Long's lectures about Mercury's geography which paint pictures in the mind and can stir human feelings.  And of course "Mathematica" is one of those stories in which the main characters are passengers and spectators instead of the drivers of the plot.  Still, some of the ideas and some of the images are entertaining, so we'll call the story acceptable.  "Mathematica" would be reprinted in 2001 in The Best of John Russell Fearn.  The cover of this book seems to be illustrating "Mathematica," what with the formulas and the fact that there are three men in the ship and one has an oversized noggin.

**********

The Long and the Gallun are good, with the Gallun being a real winner, and the Fearn isn't bad--looks like we've got a good issue of Astounding here!  It is nice to see Long acquitting himself well after having read so many misfires from him.  It's more Long next time, something from the 1960s, so place your bets on whether we'll be getting another fun interesting piece or another shoddy heap of sludge.

Legacy of Evil by Frank Belknap Long

"He must have loved me, despite what I always thought, and that means something to me."

After seeing how shoddy and lame was Frank Belknap Long's 1971 Magnum Gothic Original The Witch Tree just three or  four days ago, perhaps you are amazed that today we are talking about Long's 1973 Beagle Gothic Legacy of Evil.  Maybe I'm amazed myself!  Well, we can explain or at least rationalize this odd course of action: I am of course interested in the life and career of Long, a prolific author whose work appeared in many important magazines and anthologies and who was close to H. P. Lovecraft; I like reading stuff other people don't read or read and denigrate, as an act of independence or rebellion and because there may be a chance that I will actually like something others don't, something that does sometimes happen; and many writers' bodies of work are uneven, with both good and bad components, so just because Long wrote a terrible Gothic romance the year I was born doesn't mean he couldn't write an awesome one when I was two or three years old.

I own a copy of The Witch Tree, somewhat warped and adorned with price stickers from multiple stores, but to experience Legacy of Evil we have to take advantage of that invaluable resource for explorers of the popular culture of the 20th century, the internet archive.  Like The Witch Tree, Legacy of Evil is credited to Lyda Belknap Long, a pen name incorporating Long's middle and last name with his wife's first name.  The copy of Legacy of Evil scanned for the internet archive has a price sticker on it that says "HOOK'S," so maybe it was sold at the famous Midwestern drug store, and a handwritten note before the title page that reads "Read B P." I don't know who or what "B P." refers to, but we can be confident I will not be the first person to enjoy (or endure--we'll see!) this artifact of an early-Seventies intersection of women's popular literature and the circle of Weird Tales writers.

Susan Ravenor was a smart and mature child in those days when she was growing up in the clifftop mansion Ravenor Heights AKA Ravenor Towers with her kindly father, the mansion's kindly housekeeper Jenny Hallman, and her callous and antisocial Uncle Daniel, owner of the mansion.  Three times as a little girl she woke to behold a horrifying apparition, an animated corpse covered with seaweed!  Relations between the brothers Ravenor soured so badly that Dad and Susan moved out when she was eight, and Dad made enough money as an ad exec to buy a mansion of his own!  Awesome!  But then he took out mortgages to finance a risky investment and lost everything.  Oops!  Dad died almost two years ago, and now Susan is living in an apartment and working as a secretary and has lost all her friends because they, it seems, find her relative poverty embarrassing.  

A telegram arrives from a Boston lawyer!  Uncle Daniel is dead!  In the prologue we readers saw an old dude jump out the window of a mansion to the rocky seashore below--probably that was Uncle Daniel!  On the phone the lawyer tells Susan that she has inherited everything--his estate totals up to like a million bucks!  Susan is eager to get back to her ancestral home, which she misses dearly, despite some terrible memories.  Long's big theme in Legacy of Evil is that people often have mixed, equivocal, evolving and just plain inaccurate feelings and beliefs about people and places.  Susan gets in touch with the beloved housekeeper of her childhood Jenny Hallman, who agrees to come live at Ravenor Towers, even though Hallman has received some creepy messages warning her to stay away from the Towers--one such message is a voodoo doll of Daniel Ravenor!

Before Susan gets to Ravenor Towers we readers are presented with a creepy interlude.  A malformed freak with a muscular upper body, a stunted and asymmetrical lower body, and the vacant visage of a moron, approaches Susan's boarding house, only to be stopped by a woman in a black dress who recklessly drives up in her car just in time.  The developmentally disabled hulk wants to see Susan, but the woman insists Susan is a witch who will slay him with sorcery, and she drives him into her car using both violent and esoteric means of persuasion.

The first four Chapters (and Prologue) of Legacy of Evil are so much better than The Witch Tree that as I read I almost found it hard to believe they were written by the same guy, and wondered if some hardass editor at Beagle had forced Long to make a lot of revisions or had chopped away at Long's inadequate prose him- or herself or maybe given Long a plot outline to follow or something.  The characters all had personalities, back stories, and/or actual relationships with each other and the supernatural elements were exciting, while Long's extraneous digressions and superfluous descriptions, though still common, were somewhat shorter and somewhat less inappropriate.  I was actually enjoying the story and curious to see what happened next!  

I regret to say I cannot tell you that Legacy of Evil is good, however.  Long's style is still weak--for example, Long has an odd tic that gets on my nerves in which instead of saying "she was frail" or "she was familiar with the house" he says "she was the opposite of robust" or "the house was the opposite of new to her"--why oh why?  Dialogue is unnatural, with characters talking about inane nonsense instead of blurting out critical news like that some guy just got murdered.  Pacing is slow, even in scenes which should convey urgency, like when someone is trying to escape a death trap or pursuing a murderer.  And Long fails to live up to the promise of the first four chapters, almost totally dropping the cool stuff he presents in the start of the novel--there is no payoff or explanation for Susan's childhood nightmares of a seaweed covered corpse, and Jenny Hallman and the threatening messages, and the retarded freak and the woman who browbeats him, vanish from the narrative for like 100 pages and when they do resurface in the last ten or so pages of the novel they do so in an anticlimactic way. 

Before I started Chapter Five, I was expecting to be able to say that Legacy of Evil was acceptable, that the style was mediocre but the plot worked.  But things went downhill precipitously as I read Chapter Five and succeeding chapters, and I am duty bound to report that Legacy of Evil is a poor production I am giving it a thumbs down, though it is considerably easier to swallow than The Witch Tree.  An "F" may be an "F," but there is a difference between a 50 and a 25.

All you masochists, Long obsessives and MPorcius Fiction Log completists can read on for the rest of the plot and more analysis, but others should feel free to resume real life, climbing mountains or performing heart surgeries or restoring Greek vases or whatever worthy pursuits my readers, exemplary citizens all, are customarily engaged in.  

**********

In the village over which looms her childhood home, Susan meets the sheriff, Henry Goves, and the sheriff's cousin, John Goves, who is helping handyman Fred Ransome and current housekeeper Mrs. Ridgeway--Uncle Daniel fired sweet Jenny Hallman a few years ago--to look after the clifftop mansion.  

The road to remote Ravenor Heights is so narrow and impassable that a car can't reach it--people have to ride a cart drawn by a pony to get there!  While Susan is riding up to the house on a windy night the pony goes berserk and starts running out of control all over the road.  Susan has a terrible vision of a phantom face that glows like fire and is floating towards her and the out of control cart!  Susan is thrown and knocked unconscious.  She wakes up in a sea cave, where somebody has somehow wedged her between two boulders.  This scene is not very convincing--how would you wedge a thin young woman between two boulders so she was held fast without ripping her clothes and mangling her flesh?  Susan is none the worse for wear after this episode, so Long should have just done the conventional thing and had Susan's mysterious kidnapper just tie her wrists together or something.  Anyway, the cave is filling with the rising tide, threatening to drown her, so Susan extricates herself from between the boulders, strips to her undies (hubba hubba) and swims out of the cave.   

On the beach Susan meets handsome local business man and horse racing enthusiast Richard Kilmore, who is out for a swim on this dark and windy night.  Uncle Daniel was a major investor in Kilmore's shipbuilding firm, and now Susan owns those shares.  Kilmore knows all about Susan, Uncle Daniel having talked fondly about her all the time--one of the few memorable things about Legacy of Evil is Long's theme that as a child Susan thought Uncle Daniel a total jerk (and Daniel Ravenor was in fact a real piece of crap when dealing with many people), but after his death Susan encounters evidence he loved her and was kind to Kilmore.  Kilmore identifies with Susan, he also having been a lonely child, he have grown up in an orphanage.  I guess Kilmore is Long's idea of what women consider a dreamboat--a good-looking self-made wealthy man with no family to get between him and a girlfriend or wife--but affixed to him that Dickensian name to make us wonder if Kilmore isn't a wolf in sheep's clothing.  Adding to the tension, Susan doesn't tell Kilmore somebody tried to murder her, instead claiming she is also out for a swim and the wind carried off her dress.  These scenes with Kilmore, a rich sensitive good-looking man Susan has never met before who already seems to be in love with her, deliver the "romance" in "Gothic romance," something that was almost entirely absent from The Witch Tree.  

Chapter Seven found Susan waking up in an unexpected place--the sea cave--and Chapter Nine, the novel's halfway point, finds her doing the same.  But then she remembers how hunky Kilmore helped her ascend the cliff to the mansion and Mrs. Ridgeway showed her to her childhood room, little changed since she left fifteen years ago as an eight-year-old.  And how from the front door she saw the pony cart--the pony nowhere in sight and the cart mysteriously scorched!  A terrible scream ends her long ruminations over the day's events and in Chapter Ten she goes out into the dark hall to investigate and again is confronted by the burning phantom face!  Susan flees outside and in Chapter Eleven is chased and seized by handyman Fred Ransome, whom she hasn't met before.  Ransome is only grabbing her because he's afraid she's about to fall off the cliff.  Fred Ransome and John Goves are both handymen who talk about working on roofs, a misstep by Long in his characterizations, perhaps--why have two handymen hanging around the mansion in your story instead of a handyman and a gardener or a handyman and an accountant or something?

Most of Chapters Eleven and Twelve consist of forgettable conversations and descriptions of the mansion.  Long does throw in what feel like gratuitous mentions of Lizzie Borden and Marcel Proust, and in Chapter Thirteen we see what the Lizzie Borden reference was foreshadowing when Susan finds in the scorched pony cart the hacked body of John Goves and the axe with which he was whacked!  Sheriff Henry Goves appears a moment later and Susan tells him her story.  He sends her back to the mansion and begins his investigation in the sea cave.  But, before Susan can get into the house, she hears shots from the beach, and rushes over to investigate--the Sheriff is dead, killed by a thrown dagger!  We learn that Ravenor Towers is full of decorative weapons, something Long maybe should have told us earlier when he was describing a piano or a chair or a tapestry or how there were this many lights in the mansion when Susan was a kid but now there were this many lights etc.  We also learn that Susan is an expert marksman who often used the shooting range at the mansion her father bought and then lost--maybe Long should have told us that earlier as well.  Anyway, Susan picks up the dead Sheriff's pistol and looks for the Sheriff's killer.  She comes upon the culprit almost at once--it is the retarded freak!  Susan has never met this guy before, but he knows all about Susan, and goes on and on about how he has to kill Susan because Susan is a witch but how he regrets it because Susan is so beautiful.  (If they have never met, how does he know how beautiful she is?)  He approaches Susan, Susan shoots at him, misses, and he seizes Susan.  Susan falls unconscious and wakes up to find she has been rescued by Kilmore, who knocked out the imbecile by beating him with the pistol Susan dropped.

Kilmore has not only saved Susan and knocked out the killer off screen but solved all the crimes without Susan's help--without Susan even knowing it.  Maybe Kilmore should have been the main character of this story.  He mansplains everything to Susan, and we find Long has undercut all possible tension and excitement of his story.  The evil woman who convinced the idiot Susan was a witch and must not be suffered to live is none other than Jenny Hallman!  You see, back in the day, Uncle Daniel banged Hallman, and she gave birth to their son, a physically and mentally malformed wretch!  Daniel refused to acknowledge the freak as his own flesh and blood, wanting to leave everything to Susan, and this drove Hallman insane and she pursued a course of revenge which consisted of trying to drive Daniel to suicide (here she succeeded) and drive Susan insane by using a film projector to scare her with images of a burning face.  Kilmore has already apprehended Hallman off screen.  When Susan asks what burned the pony cart if the face was not really on fire, he tells her it must have just been a coincidence, that the pony pulled the cart so fast that the friction generated started the cart on fire.

This less than convincing explanation for the burned cart is on the final page of the novel and is followed by a passage assuring us that Kilmore and Susan are going to be happy as lovers living in the mansion, visited by the friends who abandoned Susan when she lost her other mansion to Dad's incompetent financial management.

I'm not the target audience for a Gothic romance, perhaps, but I think Long has committed malpractice in his plotting.  The seaweed-covered corpse is a much better motif than a glowing phantom face, and Long should have integrated that nautical horror image into the second half of the story instead of introducing the idea that Jenny Hallman is using a movie projector to make people think a burning face is flying after them, an idea which is impossible to take seriously; she should have dressed up her limping dullard son in seaweed to scare Susan.  The relationships between Susan and Hallman and between Hallman and her idiot son have the potential to be interesting and those characters should have gotten more screen time.  And Susan, the main character, should have solved the crime and/or defeated the villains----it is especially galling that Long, out of nowhere, tells us Susan is a good shot and then a page later we see that under pressure she isn't so hot a shot after all.  Long could have at least had Susan witness the hero figuring the mystery out and triumphing over the killers so we readers didn't have to experience these climactic moments through expository dialogue!  In having Susan not solve her own problems but rather inherit wealth from a guy she wasn't even nice to, enjoy rescue by men who defeat the villains offscreen, and hook up with a wealthy hunk who loves her before she even meets him, is Long appealing to some element of women's fantasies, a feminine desire to be protected, loved and provided for without any corresponding obligation to work or persuade?  Are Gothic romances generally plotted this way?  Is Long here pushing an anti-feminist message, arguing that even women who think they have the stuff to fight really do not and for all of our sakes women should leave the fighting to the boys?  Even if that is good advice or "realistic," it doesn't make for compelling fiction--at least not for me!

So, thumbs down for Legacy of Evil.  There is another Long Gothic romance at internet archive, 1969's To the Dark Tower, but I'll need a break before I scale that cliff.  We will be hearing more from the man H. P. Lovecraft called "my young grandchild Francis, Lord Belknap," "Little Belknap" and "Sonny" in our next episode, however, so Long fans stay tuned!