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.

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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!