Weird Tales, May 1940: E Hamilton, R Bloch and E H Price

Today we're talking about the first issue of Weird Tales edited by Dorothy McIlwraith, the May 1940 ish.  And it contains stories by four of WT's heavy hitters--Edmond Hamilton, Robert Bloch, E. Hoffman Price and Fritz Leiber!  Fritz's story, "The Automatic Pistol," we just read when we blogged about selected stories from the 1961 anthology The Unexpected.  But the stories by Ed Hamilton, husband of screenwriter, crime yarn creator and prolific planetary romance scribe Leigh Brackett, Bob "Psycho" Bloch, and adventurer and Oriental carpet collector Price we have yet to read.  So let's get crackin'!

"City from the Sea" by Edmond Hamilton

Our tale begins in the Pacific, on the deck of wealthy Mr. Wade's yacht.  The vessel has just been hit by a tremendous wave, and all the boats and half the crew have been washed overboard!  Our hero, second-in-command Kirk Wilson, was knocked out, but awakens on deck, more or less OK.  He finds that the captain is acting oddly, and has set the damaged yacht on a reckless course, away from civilization!  We readers immediately recognize that the captain is under hypnotic control by dangerous agents, something that regularly happens in the stories we read at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Modern people who live as we Americans do in a system of bourgeois liberalism feel like they should do what they want to do, the ethic of bourgeois liberalism being that of freedom and individualism.  When they can't do what they really want to do because they have to work for money or behave in a certain way to win the favor of members of the opposite sex, moderns can't take comfort in the belief that they are stuck doing something they don't want to do because of the will of a benign God, or the verdict of the indifferent Fates, or out of a duty to king and country, modern people having abandoned belief in religion, the supernatural and any positive duty to others.  The prevalence of hypnotic control in modern popular fiction is a reflection of this tension in the modern mind, which lacks the myths our ancestors had that could reconcile the human love of freedom with the many obstacles to freedom that people inevitably encounter.  19th- and 20th-century readers are doubly fascinated by the idea of hypnotic control: horrified, as they recognize such control as an extreme form of the control the boss or the "significant other" wields over them, but also attracted to its darkly seductive charms, as it represents a liberation from responsibility, and perhaps even an opportunity to indulge in otherwise forbidden things.  

At least that is the theory I am workshopping today.

Wade tries to sack the captain and put Kirk in command, but the captain whips out his revolver and maintains control via threat of violence--when everybody else was discombobulated after the ship was struck by the wave, he threw overboard all of the other firearms on the vessel.  The hypnotized captain guides them to an uncharted expanse of land, apparently the ancient country of Mu, today risen from the deeps.  Off in the distance as the sun sets the crew and passengers of the yacht can see a city of slender towers.

At night Kirk dreams of a beautiful alien princess with green hair and skin and purple eyes.  This woman is trying to take over his body!  Kirk resists, and wakes up to find the captain, still possessed, has left the ship and is heading alone for the mysterious city.  Kirk and one other guy set off after him--he is their friend and feel a duty to make sure he doesn't harm himself while under hostile influence.  The captain outfights his well-meaning pursuers and Kirk flees for the yacht, stricken with horror by what he has experienced.  But he is intercepted by a young woman, a passenger on the yacht upon whom he has a crush.  This girl is also possessed, but not by a diabolical villain, as is the captain, but by the green princess of Kirk's dream!

Through the human girl's mouth, the princess explains that she is one of two survivors of the high-tech race that ruled the world before the rise of man.  The other is an evil male who thinks of us humans as little better than monkeys.  The humans of Mu worshipped the green princess and her evil counterpart as gods, but eventually rebelled against the evil one's cruel rule.  The evil one wiped out the people of Mu and, after putting himself and the green princess into suspended animation, sank the island.  Today, ten thousand years later, Mu has risen.  The princess and the evil ancient are still dormant in their sarcophagi, unable to open them themselves, but can seize control of humans who are vulnerable--while sleeping, say--and direct them to open the sarcophagi.  If the evil one gets out of his sarcophagus he will use his astonishing powers to take over the entire world and enslave the human race.

Kirk and Mr. Wade help the princess battle the evil one and the humans over whom the villain exercises control.  Some crew and passengers are killed, but in the end the human race is preserved, the princess commits suicide and destroys the city of Mu to keep it out of human hands, and Kirk hooks up with the girl he has a crush on.               

I totally understand people who get exasperated that Hamilton again and again uses the same A. Merritt-Edgar Rice Burroughs plot in which a guy goes to another world and helps a princess fight her wars.  But I personally like this kind of plot, and Hamilton is an able writer, and so I enjoyed "City from the Sea."  I particularly like Hamilton's description of the slime-covered island and city, and of the green girl, who has some creepy ophidian or vermiform features (e.g., no fingernails!) and I also think Hamilton effectively conveys the distress of those aboard the yacht who find themselves under the sway of a man whom they hours ago liked, trusted and admired but who is now forcing them to sail in the wrong direction, presumably to their doom.

I have a particular interest in Hamilton, so take my recommendation with a grain of salt.  Also consider that "City from the Sea," though a Weird Tales cover story, has never been reprinted on paper according to isfdb.  The SF community hasn't elevated it to prominence, but I think "City from the Seas"'s themes, images and pacing make it fun, something that might serve as the basis of an entertaining film or comic book.

"The Ghost-Writer" by Robert Bloch 

Here we have a relatively rare Bloch story, one that has only been reprinted in English once, in the 1963 Pyramid paperback collection Bogey Men.  (It was also collected in the French volume Contes de terreur.)  As always before starting a Bloch story, I am praying to Yog-Sothoth that "The Ghost-Writer" is going to be full of death and destruction, of sex and violence, and not a bunch of childish puns and boring social commentary.

Our prayers have been answered!  "The Ghost-Writer," is a story of human personality and human relationships that draws on Bloch's own experiences as a member of the Lovecraft circle of writers who built friendships and professional relationships through frequent in-the-post correspondence.  What social commentary there is is subtle and appropriate (by which I mean I agree with it), and the humor elements are not farcical or absurd but integrated realistically into the story.  And, perhaps most importantly, while the supernatural gimmick at the heart of the story is obvious, it is good, instantly and enduringly compelling.

The narrator of "The Ghost-Writer" is a middle-level writer of stories for fantasy magazines named Bloch.  The other two characters are the top such writer, an older man named Hawkins, and a new up-and-comer whose early work is poor, Ayres.  H. P. Lovecraft famously offered support and advice to new young writers via correspondence and Hawkins generously helps out Ayres in the same way.  But Ayres returns the favor by taking advantage of Hawkins in pretty severe ways.  Hawkins dies, and leaves to Ayres his typewriter; this typewriter turns out to be an instrument of supernatural revenge, and the narrator witnesses it in action when Ayres seeks Bloch's aid.

Thumbs up for "The Ghost-Writer."  One of the things that makes "The Ghost-Writer" satisfying is that Bloch does a good job creating and depicting in action the distinct personalities of Hawkins and Ayres.  The role Hawkins plays in the fictional world of the story is obviously based on the role Lovecraft played in real life, but Hawkins' personality is very different than Lovecraft's; HPL was an urbanite and a skeptic, for example, while Hawkins is from a rural background and actually believes in the supernatural.  Good on Bloch, whose work I don't always look so kindly on.

"Khosru's Garden" by E. Hoffman Price

Price has something in the letters column as well as among the fiction of this issue, a missive in which he writes about collecting Oriental rugs and suggests ways to make any collecting hobby more enjoyable, a curious little bit of self-help advice to find in this magazine famous for stories about guys fighting monsters and aliens or getting killed by the vengeful dead.

Bayne, the protagonist of "Khosru's Garden," is a successful stockbroker--his eye and mind are very good at detecting patterns and making distinctions, netting himself and his firm a lot of moolah via clever investments.  Where Bayne is not a hit is in his family life.  His wife is a slut and is cheating on him with another successful guy.  Bayne tries to be "modern" and "civilized" about it, to tolerate her indiscretion, but it ain't easy.  

Bayne loves Oriental carpets and one of the ways he "chills out" as you kids say is by sitting in his living room and studying a particularly ornate rug that is hanging on the wall.  Price expends quite a bit of ink describing this rug and its provenance.  It depicts a garden with trees and birds, etc., and was once in an emir's palace as part of a much larger carpet that was cut to pieces to make it more easily salable, the way they cut your car up to sell the parts after they steal it.  Bayne and we readers come to realize a sorcerer must have participated in the creation of this carpet.

On the day all his fears about his wife's fidelity have been confirmed, Bayne walks up to the carpet and discovers he can walk right into it, and finds himself in the garden, which appears to him totally authentic and alive, in three dimensions with the birds moving and singing and so forth.  Being in there is very soothing, and he begins regularly entering the carpet to enjoy its calming effects on him.  He can still faintly see the living room from inside the garden, though to leave the carpet he has to walk to a precise spot between two cypress trees--there are quite a few such trees, but remember, Bayne has that very perceptive pair of eyes and nimble grey matter.

One day he is in the garden and sees his wife and her lover canoodling in his living room.  He emerges, and the lovers accuse him of hiding behind the hanging rug to snoop.  In their social set, snooping is a more outrageous transgression than cheating on your spouse, so Bayne denies being a snooper, insisting he was in a garden in another universe or whatever.  So the faithless bitch and bastard don't think he's off his rocker, Bayne guides them into the rug and garden, which they of course find astonishing.

This shocking event seems to end the affair--are Bayne's marital problems a thing of the past?  Sadly, no.  One day the man comes home and realizes that the cheaters are in the garden in the rug--they went in there to be alone together, but can't figure out how to escape (the cypress trees all look alike to them.)  Bayne finally has had enough, and makes a terrible sacrifice to exact vengeance on the lovers and end his marital problems once and for all.

Some might find the description of the garden and rug too much, but I think this is a pretty good story; like Bloch's "The Ghost-Writer," the supernatural gimmick is not particularly novel, but it is well-executed, and "Khosru's Garden" greatly benefits from its compelling and convincing human characters and all-too-believable depiction of unhealthy human relationships and subtle social commentary.  

You can find this story in the 1975 Price collection Far Lands, Other Days, a copy of which a guy at Second Story Books on Dupont Circle made a serious effort to sell me once.

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When last we met, I lamented that the final issue of Weird Tales edited by Farnsworth Wright was kind of weak, but today I can celebrate that the first issue edited by D. McIlwraith has at least four good stories in it by important names in the history of genre literature.  Kudos to Messrs. Leiber, Hamilton, Bloch and Price, and of course Ms. McIlwraith.  

More weird material when next we convene here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Weird Tales, Mar 1940: M Jameson, T McClusky & A Derleth

Here we have the last issue of Weird Tales edited by Farnsworth Wright, an issue with a colorful Hannes Bok cover.  In the letters column, Ray Bradbury speaks at length on the greatness of Bok and brings to our attention Bok's relationship with Maxfield Parrish, a guy whose prints fill the antique stores my wife and I frequent.  I can't sign on to Robert W. Lowndes' letter with the enthusiasm I endorse Bradbury's, however; Lowndes writes in to praise P. Schuyler Miller's "Spawn," a story I gave a thumbs down to when I read it last year.

Let's read three more stories from this ish of the magazine of the bizarre and unusual (we've already read Manly Wade Wellman's contribution, "The Song of the Slaves"), those by Malcolm Jameson, Thorp McClusky and August Derleth.  

"Train for Flushing" by Malcolm Jameson

Nine years ago I read a science fiction story by Jameson and denounced it, though I admitted it may have been "so bad it is good."  Two years ago I was able to give a passing grade to the second science fiction story I read by the man.  But today Jameson's stock here at MPorcius Fiction Log is back in the toilet because "Train for Flushing" is a gimmicky filler story that feels incredibly long, a story in which the characters don't do anything but marvel at the bizarre events of which they are victims.

As the editor's intro alerts you, "Train for Flushing" relies for its effects on the reader being familiar with the story of the Flying Dutchman.  Like so many weird stories, the meat of "Train for Flushing" is a memoir written by a guy in the middle of a horrible experience which somehow gets into the hands of the authorities.  The memoir is that of a senior citizen who got on the New York subway and found, when he was one of only two passengers remaining, that his train was hijacked by the cursed ghost ship captain of the Flying Dutchman legend, who thought the train, bound for Flushing, Queens, would return him to his home town, Vlissingen, for which Flushing is named.  Like the Dutchman, the two passengers become ghosts and must ride a ghost train beneath the world's greatest city year after year, unable to interact with the real world, though somehow the narrator can keep a journal that people in the real world eventually find.  As the years go by, the passengers notice that they are growing young and the world they see through the windows of the ghost train is moving backwards in time--they can see people walking backwards, that the posters advertise  products that were current years ago, etc.  This goes on for decades, and when the ghost train reaches the period of time before the construction of the subway, the Dutchman and his two captives find themselves travelling on other vehicles, elsewhere in 19th-century America.  Eventually the two passengers become children and then babies, at which point the journal is no longer updated.

The reader quickly grasps what is going on, but Jameson keeps describing it anyway, page after tedious page, and he doesn't come up with anything for the characters to do--it seems the 20th-century passengers just sit there in the train car for decade after decade looking out the window and chit chatting with each other--the Dutchman barely notices they are there so they don't interact with him.  A total bore--thumbs down!

I'm here telling you that this story is a drag but Peter Haining reprinted it in his anthology of Flying Dutchman stories and Tony Goodstone included it in a book of representative material from the pulps,  so it seems opinions on "Train for Flushing" vary.

"Slaves of the Grey Mold" by Thorp McClusky

Thorp McClusky wrote five stories starring cops Ethredge and Peters, and we've already read three of them, 1937's "The Woman in Room 607" and 1938's "The Thing on the Floor" and "Monstrosity of Evolution."  Do I remember anything about these stories?  Of course I don't, but that is why I spend my time writing this blog instead of making money on Wall Street or fighting in Ukraine or whatever it is that productive people do--so I'll have a record on hand of all the crazy stories that I read about seductive female cult leaders who cheat death, obese hypnotists who sideline in torture, and mad scientists who become the slaves of the monsters they have created.

Having boned up at the above links on the careers of police commissioner Charles Ethredge, his better half Mary Ethredge nee Roberts, and detective Peters, whose first name doesn't seem to appear in these stories, let's tackle "Slaves of the Grey Mold," which I believe is the final published Ethredge/Peters adventure, though it takes place before Chuck and Mary got hitched.  

If my old blog posts are to be believed, the adventures of the Ethredges and their pal Peters mostly, maybe always, revolve around people being hypnotized.  Maybe these stories reflect the fears of modern man, who recognizes how psychology and market forces guide and restrict his actions, that free will is a myth.  Anyway, in "Slaves of the Grey Mold" McClusky is not breaking any new ground.  As the story (22 pages, oy) begins, Peters is taking a morning walk in town on his day off and sees a well-turned out professional lay his briefcase down on the sidewalk in front of a homeless man; the bum takes up the case and walks off, and Peters, smelling a rat, follows the wretch, who returns the briefcase to the businessman's office and receives a healthy reward.  Peters wonders how the derelict knew where to go, and when the bum looks at Peters the detective notices a mold around the bum's eyes and then falls into a stupor and when he wakes up an hour later finds he has walked home in a daze.

That afternoon, Peters' boss, Charles Ethredge, is at the track.  The commish observes as a shabbily-attired man bets hundreds of bucks on longshots and wins again and again!  It is the very same homeless person Peters followed!  (It's a small world.)  His incredible good fortune makes the bum an instant celebrity and a journalist tries to take his photo and mysteriously keels over dead!  We readers of course recognize that the alien mold in the bum's brain used hypnosis to whip those horses into prodigies of speed as well as to kill the nosy reporter.  (Why it slew the journalo and not Peters, who will be its nemesis, is a mystery.)  

The next day the now wealthy bum pays a visit to one of Mary Roberts' old boyfriends, a stock broker.  As the broker's Italian chef watches, the mold moves from the body of the filthy derelict into that of the well-appointed financier.  The bum drops dead; and the mold, in the body of the broker, for some reason calls the police instead of just hiding the body, and E and P come investigate.  The government doctors assume the bum died of a heart attack, and Ethredge doesn't take seriously Peters' theory that a hypnotic monster from outer space has taken over the broker's body.  In the same way that I couldn't find any evidence of what Peters' first name was by flipping through the pages of the story, I also couldn't find any evidence of what happened to the Italian chef, who actually saw the mold.  I guess he was killed and his body hidden.   

Weeks later, Mary calls off her engagement to Ethredge--the mold from space has hypnotized her into picking up her relationship with the broker whose body it is controlling.  Peters, when he hears the news, theorizes (in so many words) that the mold wants to reproduce by being in the broker's body while the broker has sex with Mary.  (These Ethredge and Peters stories all have an erotic undertone.)  E and P rush upstate to the broker's lodge in the country, where Ethredge confronts a Mary who has doll-like dead eyes and speaks in a monotone.  The monster hypnotizes Ethredge into giving up on the love of his life and leaving, but Peters knows the score and convinces Ethredge that they should go back to the lodge.  There occurs the final battle in the room where the alien mold has built a portal to its home dimension--our fellow humans triumph over the mold from beyond the stars because Peters had the sense to bring a rubber helmet and lead goggles that protect him from the mold's deadly hypnotic powers.             

"Slaves of the Grey Mold" is a weak filler story.  The style and structure are amateurish, there are what I am considering plot holes, and then there is the fact that there are too many scenes, too many sentences, and that individual sentences are too long, rendering the story slow--even the action scenes are slow and thus lack tension and excitement.  But the story is not that annoying, so I am not sure if I should judge it barely acceptable or let it fall into the abyss of "bad."   

This mediocrity has only ever been reprinted in the 1975 McClusky collection that reprints most of the Ethredge and Peters tales, Loot of the Vampire.

"Bramwell's Guardian" by August Derleth

Here we have a filler piece, but an acceptable one, more or less competent, though unremarkable.

Bramwell is an elderly but active English gentleman who likes to go to old houses and old caves and so forth.  He finds an ancient ring in an old hole on a lonely plain.  Immediately after finding the ring, which he carries around in a pocket, people start reacting oddly to him--his servants, waiters, the clerk at the ticket counter at the theatre, etc., think he has a friend with him, but he has no such companion.  Eventually he tells this story to an archaeologist at his club.  The archaeologist looks at the ring and puts two and two together and judges that the ring is a Druid magic item that it is protected by a guardian monster.  He advises Bramwell return the ring to the hole in which he found it tout suite.

Bramwell is a skeptic who does not believe in the supernatural and scoffs at this explanation and advice; when he starts seeing the guardian himself he dismisses it as mere figments of his imagination.  Then he decides to mail the ring to the archaeologist as a joke, forgetting that his crony told him that if he gave the ring away the monster would kill him.  Sure enough, the guardian monster tears Bramwell to pieces.  The archaeologist returns the ring to the hole.

Derleth does a shoddy job of explaining the "rules" governing the operations of the ring and the monster.  Why does the guardian kill Bramwell after he gives the ring to another person?  Why didn't the monster kill Bramwell when he took the ring from its resting place--isn't that what we would expect a guardian to do?  Otherwise the story is OK.  

"Bramwell's Guardian" would be reprinted in the 1941 Arkham House collection of Derleth stories Someone in the Dark, which contains sixteen stories, as well as a 2009 collection, August Derleth's Eerie Creatures, which reprints thirty stories.  Derleth, it seems, produced a vast quantity of forgettable and half-baked stories like "Bramwell's Guardian" in order to finance the risky business venture that was Arkham House.

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I'd like to say that the final issue of Weird Tales edited by Farnsworth Wright contains some memorable or important story, but as far as I can tell it is full of weak pieces that have all kinds of problems that a hands-on editor might have solved.  Well, at least we have the Bok cover, which is pulsating with color and personality.  And we can hope that new editor Dorothy McIlwraith will offer up some stellar work later in 1940.

Southern Comfort by Barry N. Malzberg

It was as if—and I concede that I am now for the first time letting a certain mild mental imbalance shine through lustrously like rotting patches of a swamp in mid-moonlight—all of the shapes and events of the comprehensible universe had conspired to the exact point of placing me in the most terrible situation imaginable. I know full well—oh how I know it—that I am barely consequential enough to deserve such treatment and yet thus were my feelings gentlemen, thus were my emotions.

It has been a month since we read anything that might be described as porn (on April 15 we blogged about a Karl Edward Wagner story bubbling over with fetishistic sex, "Locked Away," as well as Kathe Koja's more sophisticated story about a dancer who has sex with low status men, "Pas de Deux") so maybe readers will forgive me if we indulge in some nasty erotic exploitation literature today.  I have a feeling this sex novel by our hero Barry N. Malzberg, Southern Comfort, which appeared in 1969 under the pen name Gerrold Watkins, can also serve as a component of the national conversation about race, a conversation I am told is "much-needed."  Well, let's get to it!  I have under different tabs on my screen an electronic version of the novel I believe produced in 2009 as well as a PDF scan of a 1972 paperback edition--the image at the left is of the cover of that printing.  These texts seem to be the same--the electronic text with misguided fidelity even reproduces the woefully common typos found in the PDF.   

Our narrator, Gerrold Watkins, is a Union spy during the American Civil War.  He has infiltrated Atlanta society and is having sex with Elizabeth, the nymphomaniac wife of a Confederate intelligence officer, Eric, in hopes she will drop some valuable information during their trysts.  The text of Southern Comfort consists of the spy's reports back to Washington, which for some reason include detailed descriptions of his sexual activities as well as his musings about how much he wants to have sex with a black woman ("a Negress" or "negress") even though he considers blacks to be members of a "damnable race" and finds black people "loathsome."

I agree with the libertarian purposes of the President's declaration but there must, after all, be limits to such things. I find them almost entirely loathsome. 

There are seven such reports covering four days.  Malzberg engages in only the most limited efforts to make any of the characters sound like they are living in the nineteenth century or hail from a specific region of this great nation of ours or a particular social class or anything like that--all the white characters talk like Malzberg characters generally do: they ramble, equivocate, ruminate in circles about their own psychologies and the fact that knowledge of the world is hard to come by and probably not useful even if you manage to acquire it.

“I certainly don't remember. Eric tells me so many things and they all go right outside of me. Who can keep up? Who knows what's going on anyway?"

.... 

“Well, I guess that it wouldn't do me any good even if I did know. After all, I'm only an unsuitable. I'll never know a thing about military tactics and it's all very depressing.”

(Watkins' cover while in Atlanta is that of a man who is medically unable to serve in the Confederate Army; this man, who demonstrates the ability to have three orgasms in fewer than three hours, strives to convince Elizabeth and others that he can't shoulder a pack and a musket and defend Atlanta from the Federals because, he tells people, he has a fainting disease that strikes at inappropriate times.  This is presented as a bogus story but Watkins does actually faint while having sex a few times.)

Like much of Malzberg's work, Southern Comfort is "recursive" or "meta" and is full of commentary and jokes about being a writer and the act of writing.  The second report ludicrously begins with a flashback in which Watkins describes his meeting with the intelligence chief who blackmailed him into taking this assignment--Watkins quotes the chief at length in a report destined to be read by this very chief.  The second report also includes a long scene describing Watkins having sex with a woman, Dorothy, who just comes into the narrator's hotel room, claiming to have been rented the room by mistake--this woman is a masochist who wants to be hurt, to be whipped with a belt, and we readers wonder if she is a Southern counterspy who already knows of Watkins' S&M proclivities.           

In the third report Watkins expresses his opinion that by having sex with Dorothy and describing it in his reports he may not be producing intelligence about Atlanta's defenses and Confederate troop movements, but something even more important--the very nature of the American South, which "evidentially, shall be with us forever.  Or at the very least for a very long time."  Dorothy sets up a date with him that coincides with a date he has already made with Elizabeth.  A dilemma!  Then Watkins out the window of his hotel room sees a riot, the men of Atlanta about to beat and maybe murder a young attractive black woman; Watkins rescues her and brings her to his hotel room.  

In rendering the dialogue of Melinda of Baltimore, Malzberg often drops the verb "to be" ("They crazy....They all crazy down here;" "What I doing with you in this room anyway?"), I guess so she sounds like a black person, but also setting up a scene in the fourth report which serves to push one of Malzberg's themes in the novel, that people are essentially the same across racial and geographic lines.  Of course, Malzberg is not suggesting that people are all good, but rather that they are all pretty reprehensible.

Watkins and Melinda have sex, and he admits to her he is a Northern spy who in civilian life is a professional philatelist.  Watkins includes in his report not only a blow-by-blow account of his sexual activities with Melinda but reproduces his description to her of the ins and outs of being a professional stamp collector.  Plus, we get some literary criticism that offers Malzberg a chance to lay some contemporary social commentary on us.  Here, and in a few other places, Watkins presents predictions of the future.  In this third report he suggests that in 19th-century America there is little explicit sex in literature because the as yet unconquered west of the continent provides people room to explore and to express themselves, but that in the 20th century, when American civilization and stability stretches from Atlantic to Pacific, people and writers will turn inward and explore themselves and especially their sexuality and explicit sex will become typical of popular literature.  In a later report Watkins seems to predict Hollywood and television:

The largest number of things we will do to one another in the decades ahead will come out of boredom. Boredom will be a commodity as basic and demanding as sexuality. There will have to be industries erected to minister to it, to satiate it but at the same time to leave enough of it left to explore the possibilities of titillation. Ah, America! America! America!

Dorothy arrives and a confrontation ensues when she sees Melinda; both women angrily leave Watkins, who goes to keep his date with Elizabeth.  

The fourth report begins with an interesting sequence that suggests Watkins is going native, is coming to see the point of view of white Southerners who fear blacks will wreak havoc if allowed to slip out of white control and is beginning to suspect that Northern refusal to allow secession is not the product of anti-racist idealism but rather of economic interests.  And while Watkins complains at length about the terrible heat in the South, he also suggests the South is the "last refuge of courtesy" and that the North, specifically New York, has been ruined by industrialization.  Southern Comfort is a pornographic book, but Malzberg uses it as an opportunity to say controversial things about social issues, race relations and sexual relations, to air, in the voice of a disreputable character, beliefs about society and in particular about women and black people, that Malzberg himself probably doesn't hold, or at least would not admit to holding, but which make the book shocking and/or thought-provoking.

Elizabeth has found out Watkins had sex with a black woman (she uses the dreaded "n-word," as do people again and again in this book) and laid a trap for him--her husband Eric is hiding in a closet and she tries to get Watkins to admit in Eric's hearing that he is a Union spy.  Suggesting that all women are really the same underneath, an angry Elizabeth begins speaking like Melinda, dropping those verbs ("You tell me, Mr. Watkins, what you had in mind. Why you rescuing niggers. Why you prancing around here looking for information. Why you always want to know about Eric. Y'hear? Tell me.”)  Women, of course, are all envious, jealous, manipulative, horny, and sneaky, a pack of liars who love to dominate others and love to be dominated, who seek to hurt others and maneuver men into inflicting pain and suffering pain while also craving to be hurt themselves.

Eric, as a spy himself who himself has had to deal with the troublemaker Elizabeth for twenty years, is more or less sympathetic to Watkins, and when Elizabeth keeps egging her husband on to beat up Watkins, Eric actually strikes Elizabeth.  Eric claims that all of Watkins' reports have been intercepted and not read in Washington but instead by Eric and other Confederate intelligence officers.  

Watkins expects to be arrested but Eric lets Watkins leave his house unmolested--nobody can get out of Atlanta anyway, the place is about to be under siege.  Watkins has so come to enjoy writing that he decides to keep on writing his reports, even though he doesn't know who is actually reading them.  At the start of the fifth report he suggests that these reports will be essential, even immortal, works of literature of inestimable value to the people of the future and be long remembered when most people have forgotten who Lincoln, Grant and Lee were.

The rest of the fifth report consists of a description of Watkins having sex with Melinda again and a disquisition on the role of pain in sexual intercourse.

The sixth and penultimate report is cataclysmic.  (The epigraph to this blogpost is taken from this report.)  Melinda reveals that she is a prostitute who came from Baltimore to Atlanta not to help relatives as she has been saying, but to work at a party.  At the same time, the Union forces are close enough that gunfire can be heard and the city is in chaos.  We get an interesting character study of the owner of the hotel, a terribly obese racist, and his righthand man, a giant black man who backs up the boss no matter how racist the boss's dialogue.  Watkins hints that these men may be gay lovers.  The sixth report ends with a bombshell, Watkins' confession that he has murdered Melinda.

Throughout the novel there have been hints of some dire event in Philadelphia in the narrator's past; it is this event which gave the Union intelligence services leverage with which to blackmail Watkins.  In the final report Watkins describes this episode, his accidental killing of a prostitute while in a frenzy during a sadomasochist sex session.  Then he describes his murder of Melinda in detail; furthering the novel's theme that accurate information is hard to come by and when acquired can cause trouble, Watkins killed her because she revealed her true profession and reason for being in Atlanta--both she and her murderer would have been better off if she had continued her deception.  Union troops take the city while Watkins is writing, and he completes his transformation into a Southerner, preparing to shoot it out with Union soldiers who are investigating the hotel.  (One of the themes of the novel is the suggestion that Northerners are no better than Southerners.)  We readers presume he is killed.

(It is hard not to see similarities between Southern Comfort and a stereotypical Lovecraftian story--a narrator of questionable mental stability learns a terrible truth that destroys him and he puts the last touches on a memoir moments before he is killed.)

Having summarized this bit of pornography and tried to interpret its more intellectual strands, we come to the question of whether I can recommend Southern Comfort.  As a devoted Malzberg fan, of course I found reading it worthwhile, but I can also say it moves at a decent pace, has a sort of conventional plot structure with foreshadowing in the beginning and twists at the end, and is never boring or frustratingly confusing.  The sex in Malzberg's work is often sad or disgusting, but the sex in Southern Comfort is meant to be arousing, and seeks to appeal to various fetishes--we've got interracial sex, whipping and general sado-masochist activity (there's lots of biting), name calling, and lots of business involving the breasts and nipples.  The jokes I found generally funny; particularly amusing is Watkins' commentary on his own writing, which he ludicrously finds outstanding ("my style alone seems to be rising to a kind of thorough-going professionalism...my ability to see into the very core of purposes is astonishing...I have evinced superb narrative gifts...") and leads to him planning to become a novelist after the war and lamenting that he hadn't devoted his life to literature.

And then we have the book's ideas.  Obviously you should avoid Southern Comfort if you find explicit sex offensive or if seeing the "n-word" a hundred times, seeing women portrayed as masochistic jerks or hearing unpatriotic theories about the motives behind the Union effort to retain the Southern states is going to hurt your feelings.  But Malzberg's depiction of Watkins' equivocal and hypocritical attitudes towards African-Americans is perhaps interesting.  I suspect here we have an artifact that reflects the psychological tensions endured by many urban liberals of 1969, the complex and painful sensibilities of people who were ideologically committed to and/or vocally supported civil rights policies, social welfare spending and affirmative action, but whose direct personal contact with urban crime and/or events like the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers' strike may have caused them to, if only inwardly, question those commitments and that rhetorical support.  Watkins asserts that he believes in equality, and he does rescue a black woman from a violent mob, but at the same time he has a lot of misgivings about black people and when he interacts with them directly he responds to them in ways that are irrational and passionate rather than logical or intellectual and are fundamentally selfish and exploitative.  It is easy to say the socially approved thing and to assert idealistic beliefs, but not so easy to overcome your own prejudices and to put ideals into action if you fear such action will compromise your safety or comfort.  Whatever Watkins says, his actions are fundamentally selfish, and maybe Malzberg is hinting that white people's professed beliefs about black people and how they should be treated, and how they actually behave when interacting with African-Americans, are essentially determined by the pursuit of self-interest, be it defined rationally or irrationally, and that this is equally true in 1969 and 1864.

Have no doubt we will return to Malzberg in the future, but first it is back to the World War II era and Weird Tales.

Earthblood by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown

“I’m all Terry,” Roan said. “Raff was only my foster father. Ma wasn’t really human. They lived all their lives in a garbage dump on account of me and Dad got killed on account of me."

Back in 2022 I read two novels by Rosel George Brown, Sibyl Sue Blue and the sequel, Waters of Centaurus.  They weren't bad, but better was Brown's short story "David's Daddy," which I read in 2023.  Brown died at a tragically young age and only produced one other novel, a collaboration with Keith Laumer that was serialized in If in 1966 titled Earthblood.  As for Laumer, I have blogged about quite a few things by him and it is a real mixed bag; plenty of stories I liked, but also plenty of stories I judged filler and others I thought a waste of time.

Earthblood seems to have been a success, seeing reprint again and again, including in Swedish, Portuguese and German, as well as a Bluejay edition with many illustrations by Alan Gutierrez.  When I blogged about some of the other stories in an issue of If which includes a segment of the novel, one of my well-read commenters had nice things to say about Earthblood.  So let's snag a PDF scan of one of the paperback editions of the book (the Berkeley 1968 printing with a Richard Powers cover, one of, in my opinion, Powers' least effective covers) and check out this piece of work, one component of the regrettably brief catalog of Brown's fiction and of Laumer's large body of published work.  (I'll note here that this novel seems to take place in the same universe as the Bolo books, and Bolos make a brief appearance.)

The prologue introduces us to Raff, a human man, and his wife Bella, a Yill, some kind of almost-human alien with blue skin and eyes with vertical pupils.  Their species are only two among the many intelligent races that make up a chaotic interstellar civilization.  Raff and Bella want to parent a human boy, and so purchase on the grey market from a bird-man a human embryo, purportedly that of some kind of aristocrat with excellent genes; their purchase incurs tremendous financial sacrifice and Raff and Bella have to engage in a bloody fight with a multicultural gang of aliens who also want the superior human embryo

Bella has the embryo implanted in her womb, and she and Raff raise the boy, naming him Roan; the novel's 25 numbered chapters relate to us Roan's exciting life and career.  We follow the kid's growth in a poor ghetto inhabited by pterosaur-people.  Throughout the novel, and in these early parts especially, Laumer and Brown do a solid job making all the characters feel real--they exhibit believable emotions and behave in understandable ways and participate in meaningful relationships with each other.  The humans and the Yills (Raff and Bella have a Yill slave, one of the aliens they outfought when they secured Roan's embryo) have psychologies we readers can identify with, while the bird people and pterosaur people and fish people and lizard people and on and on have psychologies that are quite alien but make sense.

As Roan learns galactic history, so do we.  The humans of Terra were the first to develop space travel and they mastered the galaxy, founding an empire to maintain order among the many intelligent species which gained space travel by emulating humanity.  Raff and Bella's Yill slave asserts that only humans could have built the first space ship, and Raff just out and out tells Roan that humans are superior.  This superiority is demonstrated when we see Roan dealing with the other kids in the neighborhood.  The pterodactyl-kids goof on Roan because he doesn't have wings and try to bully him, but Roan is able to dominate them when he so chooses thanks to his superior ability to use logic to manipulate his environment.  When cruel upper-class lizard-people kids come to abuse the dim-witted pterosaur-kids, Roan tries to protect the pterosaur-kids, taking on the natural role of the human race, that of maintaining order and meting out justice among the lesser races.  (We are reminded of the lines in the sixth book of the Aeneid that assert that the role of Rome is to rule the world, to spare the conquered and battle down the proud.)   

Lately, though, Terra and its people have faced some tough times.  Extragalactic aliens, like five thousand years ago, invaded the Earth space empire and defeated its space navy and put a blockade on Terra, and nobody has left or landed on Earth for all those centuries.  Immediately upon hearing this, patriotic readers like myself are hoping Roan is going to lead the campaign to make Earth great again by sending these extragalactic bastards, the Niss, to hell and putting mankind and its buddies back where we belong, on top of the heap!  At the same time, twist endings being so common in SF, we are worried that Raff and the Yill slave are full of BS and that by the end of the story Roan will realize that Terra was evil and the Niss are the good guys--this generates some dramatic tension as we advance further into the 285-page novel.

In his late teens, Roan sneaks into a travelling circus without a ticket, gets nabbed, and tries to fight his way out.  Raff comes to help, but gets killed and the circus carries off Roan to other planets--the tentacled owner of the circus has never seen a pure-strained human before (most humans today beyond Terra are mutants or crossbreeds, genetically engineered to better fit alien environments) and wants to pay Roan to be a freak and wire walker in his circus.  (Roan again and again in the novel exhibits great agility and speed.)  In the way a guy today might have a hobbyist's interest in ancient Rome, and admire the accomplishments of the Roman Empire, this alien is a Terra buff.

Aboard the circus ship we get the idea that the galactic civilization, bereft of Terran leadership, has grown technologically stagnant and culturally decadent.  There is no music, for example, and the spaceships everybody flies around are relics from the time before the Niss attack that largely operate automatically.  Among the carnies and geeks, Roan demonstrates how different pure-strain Terrans are from aliens and from mutant humans.  For one thing, Terrans have empathy and a sense of justice, while other races are fatalistic and casually cruel.  Roan gets revenge on the fish-man who killed Raff and gets a human(ish) girlfriend, an erotic dancer.  When Roan worries someone will figure out he killed the fishman, his lover suggests nobody cares if some working-class brute got killed--Roan, she says is thinking like a Terran.  Similarly, Roan insists on helping an injured carny when everyone else is willing to leave him to die.  

Perhaps more interesting and "sciency" than the idea that pure-blood Earthers are more empathic and moral than aliens and muties is the idea that, for the most part, the many nonhuman alien races act on instinct--they know how to fly or whatever without study or education while, in contrast, humans must learn new things and need to practice new skills to master them.

The circus ship is taken by a pirate ship; all but two of the carnies--Roan and a hulking metallic professional fighter--die in the fight, crushed by the acceleration as the automatic vessel engages in evasive maneuvers.  The captain of the pirates is a human of pure or almost pure strain; he is a sort of privateer or long distance scout connected to the far distant remnants of the Terran space navy and he aspires to put the human race back in charge of the anarchic galaxy, and is searching the galaxy for pure-strain humans like Roan.  Initially Roan is bitter that the pirates killed all his colleagues (including his girlfriend) but a friendship with the pirate captain is cemented after the two human men save each others' lives during fights (this novel is chock-full of fights) and Roan visits an abandoned human city, largely intact after 5,000 years because human-built robots have maintained it, and sees how awesome the Terran Empire must have been.

For five years the two humans and their alien and mutant crew search for other humans and collect supplies by raiding aliens.  They come upon a rare Niss ship and their vessel is crippled in the fight; again those who have become Roan's closest friends are killed, but Roan and some of the mutant crew escape the wreck in a boat and board the miles-long Niss ship, which has been running on automatic for thousands of years, its Niss crew nothing but bones.  During the campaign which saw the Niss, in what now appears to have been a Pyrrhic victory, overthrow Terran rule of the galaxy, this Niss vessel captured a smaller Terran ship and Roan finds that this Earth ship is fully functional.  Roan commandeers it and he and his motley crew head to the planet where Roan grew up, he hoping to find his foster mother Bella the Yill, and her slave Yill, still alive and able to tell him who his genetic parents were.

Mom killed herself after Raff was killed and Roan kidnapped, but the slave is still alive.  Following clues, Roan and his pirates make a decade-long journey to Alpha Centauri, committing acts of piracy on the way.  Through trickery and violence, Roan and three of his senior pirates infiltrate the rump Terran space navy.  The current Navy is totally unconnected from Earth, which they think is behind an impenetrable Niss blockade, and the officers of the Terran navy prove themselves, in the main, to be brutal and incompetent bigots, no better than the ruthless and violent aliens and mutants Roan has spent his life interacting with.  The navy officers revere pure-strain humans, but most of them and their men are themselves mutants and crossbreeds.  Roan learns that he, as an embryo, was a rare specimen meant to be breeding stock that was stolen and fought over. 

Almost immediately, Roan learns that the ranks of the navy are riven, that a coup against the Admiral is planned, and he has to choose which side of the divide to join--which side is more likely to get Roan to Terra, where he is sure lies his destiny?  In the aftermath of the coup attempt, Roan is imprisoned in a slimy pit where he has to fight a rat and pass many days in a fever, near starvation.  His pirate comrades rescue him and they go to Earth, finding the Niss blockade ships little more than lifeless hulks.

At first Earth appears to be something of a paradise, with intelligent talking dogs and beautiful pure strain humans living in orderly and bucolic surroundings, in glass towers among lovely gardens.  But the upper-class Terrans are disturbingly feminized and there is a rigid class system in which some Terrans are docile dim-witted slaves, doing the work that in earlier ages was done by horses, like pulling carts, and others barely eke out an existence in slums built of huts among crumbling ruins of ancient cities.  Roan hopes to inspire the upper-class Terrans with the knowledge that Terra is no longer cut off from the larger galaxy, and tries to warn them that the corrupt remnants of the Navy, when they realize the Niss blockade is toothless, may try to raid or conquer Earth, but the upper-class Terrans are totally decadent, interested only in pleasure, unambitious and unable to defend themselves--the dogs, which have hands for paws and can walk upright, do their policing and fighting for them.

Roan learns that he is the son or clone of a Terran space war hero of thousands of years ago, a man of the formative crusading era in which the Terran Empire was established whose frozen body was discovered a few decades ago.  (The cycles of history stuff in Earthblood, and the idea that people on the frontier are hardy, brave and resourceful while people back in the metropole are decadent and perverted reminds me of similar material in Poul Anderson's work, and to a lesser extent in Robert Heinlein's.)  Several of the Terran chapters of Laumer and Brown's novel consist largely of parties and performances that demonstrate how deracinated and immoral the virtually immortal Terrans are; one shindig is the vandalism of an art museum where works of art familiar to us readers like the Mona Lisa are destroyed one by one, and one performance is a striptease in which the woman after shedding her clothes attempts to commit suicide with a knife.  Earlier in the novel it was brought home to us that Terrans have a will to survive that aliens lack, and Laumer and Brown highlight how far native Terrans have fallen by suggesting they have lost that will to live and taken the attitude toward death we saw among aliens.

Roan interrupts the dancer's suicide attempt and escapes into a disgusting slum in a ruin with the help of the dancer (our latest love interest, again an erotic dancer) and the dog assigned to Roan, who, dog-fashion, has become loyal to Roan over the native-born Terrans.  For a year they hide in the slum while police dogs hunt them.  Finally, Roan decides that he can hide no longer and has a showdown with the leader of the police dogs.  Roan gets the lower-class slum Terrans to rise against the dogs and the upper-class humans, and at just the right moment Roan's pirate comrades arrive in a Navy space battleship they seized and over the course of the last year crewed.  Roan and his people overthrow the decadent upper-class Terrans and we are lead to believe they will unite the pure-strain Terrans, the intelligent dogs, and the mutants of the pirates and the Navy into a decent polity and lay the groundwork for a new Terran Empire that will spread order and justice throughout the galaxy.

I can moderately recommend Earthblood, which is well-written on a sentence-by-sentence basis and has lots of action and lots of relationships and tackles interesting ideas, but it is good, not great, as there are problems when looked at as a whole that render it less than the sum of its parts. 

For one thing, the novel feels long, partly because the same sort of thing happens again and again--similar gory fights, imprisonments and rescues; Roan proving how fast he is again and again; people getting killed in the course of trying to help Roan again and again; people holding each other at gunpoint again and again; people being maimed again and again; mortally wounded people begging to be finished off again and again (as I have suggested, welcoming death is a recurring motif of the novel.)  At 285 pages, Earthblood is long compared to the SF novels I typically read, though I hear that 21st-century SF novels are typically even longer.  For people who read SF novels to meet likable characters and get cozy with them and spend pleasant times with them, long novels probably make sense.  If you read SF to encounter strange ideas and find surprises and experience awe and horror, a long novel is less welcome--the first time a guy discovers something amazing and almost gets killed and sees his friends and enemies torn asunder or burned to a crisp, it shakes you up, but if the same dude has those same sorts of capers again and again it loses its effect on you, or at least on me.

Another problem with Earthblood is that the milieus and scenarios Roan finds himself in get less interesting as the novel progresses.  Being the only human kid growing up in a pteranodon-man ghetto among flying people who are oppressed by haughty lizard-people is strange and compelling, as are Roan's relationships with his parents and all these reptilian aliens--this stuff is all fresh and exciting.  Running away to the alien circus is also kind of interesting, but not something we haven't experienced before.  Space pirates is even less novel.  And a decadent Earth doesn't feel fresh or exciting at all, and on Terra Roan doesn't have the affecting relationships he had earlier--Raff and Bella in the pterodactyl-people ghetto, and Roan's first dancing lover and his giant metallic friend among the carnies, are a lot more memorable than the Terran dancer and the talking dog.  Think of how King Kong, Dorothy Gale, and Luke Skywalker, the heroes of your favorite movies, get into increasingly crazier adventures in increasingly bizarre locales as their stories progress--poor Roan's career moves in the opposite direction, each segment of his novel being more and more of a SF cliche.

Still, a pretty good novel.

Weird Tales, Jan 1940: O A Kline & E H Price, M E Counselman and F Garfield

Last year, we here at MPorcius Fiction Log completed our project of reading at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales with a 1930s cover date.  Here find links that testify to the success of our sacred quest:

1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938   1939

The classic run of Weird Tales was from 1923 to 1954 and there is no reason to refrain from extending our project backwards and forwards.  So today let's check out some stories from the penultimate issue of Weird Tales edited by Farnsworth Wright, the January 1940 ish.

This issue has work by two of our favorite WT artists, Hannes Bok and Virgil Finlay, but when it comes to fiction the really big names are in the letters column.  There's a letter from Robert Bloch defending his treatment of druids in his story "The Dark Isle," citing his sources.  (We read "The Dark Isle" in June of last year.)  Clark Ashton Smith is among the many who write in to praise Henry Kuttner's "Towers of Death."  (I wrote about "Towers of Death" in 2019, but, alas, it was not to praise it.)  Edmond Hamilton has nice things to say about H. Warner Munn and Thomas Kelly, two writers I haven't read anything by yet.

The most important writer (to us here at MPFL, at least) whose fiction appears in the issue is probably E. Hoffman Price, who has the cover story, something he co-wrote with Otis Adelbert Kline.  I read one or two of Kline's planetary romances in the days before I started the blog and found then unremarkable, and during the period of this blog's imperium over the interwebs we've explored I guess a dozen stories by Price.  So we'll tackle their collaboration.  I've been reading Mary Elizabeth Counselman, so we may as well give her contribution a shot.  To round out the blog post, we'll check out a story by Frances Garfield.        

"Spotted Satan" by Otis Adelbert Kline and E. Hoffman Price

"Spotted Satan" presents standard, traditional adventure story characters walking through a similarly routine adventure plot; this kind of material can be compelling and very fun if well-written, but I found Kline and Price's style to be poor, with many clunky sentences I was rewriting in my head as I read them.  For like half the time I was reading "Spotted Satan" I was expecting to give it a thumbs down, but in the second half I found myself wondering what the answer to the mystery was and what would happen to the various characters, who would live and who would die, who was innocent and who was responsible for the crimes, so I guess I have to admit this story gets a passing grade of barely acceptable.  (A real writer, a talented stylist, like Jack Vance or Tanith Lee, could have really done this plot and its various themes up good.)

Our tale is laid in Burma.  The native employees of a British logging company are being killed by a leopard, jeopardizing the operation.  Local hunters have signally failed to destroy the beast, which many have come to believe is no mundane cat but a shape-shifting demon.  So the head of the logging company has hired American hunter Steele and his sidekick, towering Afghan Achmet, to bring down the monster.

We get the expected episodes.  Steele has crazy dreams.  A wiry man in a breechclout tries to murder the sleeping Steele with a kukri knife, only to be foiled by loyal Achmet.  Steele and Achmet witness "the grandfather of leopards" eating some poor native, and the oversized feline somehow eludes a round from crack shot Steele's express rifle.

For the 21st-centruy reader, one of the interesting things about "Spotted Satan" is its portrayal of many cultures and ethnicities, most of whom enjoy ample description as to physical appearance and behavior.  We've got an American, an Afghan, Britons, Burmese, a Gurkha, and nautch dancers.  The exotic Achmet has more personality, more interesting dialogue (e.g., regularly invoking "Allah," "the One True God," and muttering or even inscribing upon bullets prayers against "shaitan") and behaves in a more exciting manner (e.g., chasing women and waving around a tulwar) than sober white man Steele or any of the other, more submissive, nonwhites.  Behold this description of the only white man permanently attached to the logging camp where Steele and Achmet first see the monster leopard.

There was no doubt that he was a white man: his skin, tanned as only that of a Nordic can be, and the high bridge of his nose, and the unprominent cheek-bones, testified to his race. Yet his hazel-flecked eyes were slanted like those of a Tartar or Mongol. His mustaches, sandy-colored and bristling, jutted straight out on both sides instead of being upturned at the ends, or decently drooping, or close cropped.

Achmet immediately concludes this guy, Kirby, is in league with the leopard or actually is the leopard.  For his part, Kirby admits he believes in local superstitions, thinks the oversized leopard has been sent to attack his logging camp by some supernatural entity because he ordered a new road constructed through sacred ground.

Steele fires upon and misses the leopard again, and is told by a local priest that he needs special weapons to harm the demon.  A third time Steele's fire fails to fell the beast.  Clues pile up that hint that Kirby really is transforming into a leopard at night to terrorize the camp; other clues suggest he may simply by an agent for a rival logging company, sent over to sabotage this camp's production--could he be some kind of leopard tamer?  Visiting nautch dancers are attacked by the monster, and Steele the generous man of responsibility and Achmet the horndog make the safety of these fetching young ladies their number one priority.  In the end Achmet kills the leopard and we get a half-scientific and half-mhystical explanation for what is going on and it looks like Achmet is not only going to get a pile of reward money but a hot girlfriend besides.  

Not a great story, unfortunately, but perhaps useful to those interested in Orientalism in speculative fiction, seeing as it is full of descriptions of nonwhites and mixed race people from Afghanistan through the subcontinent to Burma and we are expected to be sympathetic to at least some of them, while we also get skeptical portrayals of Western Europeans.  (Price was fascinated by China, Arab culture and Buddhism, and was a military veteran, so probably had more real life knowledge of other countries and of actual dangerous adventure than most or all the other Weird Tales authors.)    

"Spotted Satan" would not spring into print again until our own 21st century, when it appeared in the anthology Cats of Shadow, Claws of Darkness: Stories of Were-cats, Ghost Cats and Other Supernatural Felines.

"Twister" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman

Here we have an obvious and banal filler story.

A newlywed couple from the North is driving through the South on their honeymoon.  It is a rainy night and they have been driving all day and want to stop, and do so when they come to a town that, curiously, is not on their map.  But the people there tell the travelers that they cannot stay, bidding them to hurry away because a twister is coming.  Obvious clues indicate to us readers that the townspeople are ghosts, that this town was destroyed by a tornado years ago, but Counselman makes us read through multiple pages in which the newlyweds leave the ghost town, get to another town, talk to a guy, spend the night, and for contrived reasons go back to the ghost town the next morning, before she tells us what we have already figured out.

Gotta give "Twister" a thumbs down--Counselman takes a tired plot and makes it unnecessarily long and even more unbelievable than it need be.  That is not an improvement!

"Twister" was reprinted in the Counselman collection Half in Shadow. 

"Forbidden Cupboard" by Frances Garfield

Garfield is a pen name for Manly Wade Wellman's wife, Frances Obrist, who has 11 fiction credits at isfdb.  She wrote a little about herself for the "Meet the Authors" column in the December 1939 issue of Amazing, reporting that she was a tall blonde Kansan who tried to get into acting but found she couldn't deal with the kind of people who run the world of the theatre.  (This seems like a veiled reference to the ubiquity of sexual harassment in show biz, but I could be reading too much into things.)  A revised version of "Forbidden Cupboard," retitled "Don't Open that Door," appeared in a 1970 issue of the British magazine Fantasy Tales.

Like Counselman's "Twister," "Forbidden Cupboard" consists of routine material and the style is just OK, but Garfield doesn't screw up the pacing and length, so we're calling this one acceptable.

Our narrator is a young woman who moves to Greenwich Village to pursue her dream of becoming a writer.  Pushing the writing theme, Garfield includes explicit references to Edgar Allen Poe, Washington Irving, William Blake, Walter Scott, etc.  The narrator already has a project she is working on, having been hired by a widow to pen the hagiographic (and largely fictional) biography of her businessman husband.  This section is, I guess. a joke.

The young wordsmith arrives at the apartment she is renting a day early.  The old building is owned by the church, and the priest who is acting as landlord hasn't had the room quite finished yet--he wants to plaster over a closet, and the plasterers are coming today.  He forbids our narrator from opening the closet.  Our narrator and this clergyman also have a conversation about a previous resident of the house, a locally famous wizard or mad scientist who disappeared after arousing the wrath of the populace.

Once the man of the cloth is out of sight, the narrator goes to open the closet door.  Unexpected distractions delay her--the most interesting element of the story is the speculation that these distractions are the work of God trying to stop the narrator from making a stupid mistake.  But she does eventually manage to open the closet.  The wraith or ghost or whatever of the wizard emerges and the narrator is at risk of being taken over by the monster but then the priest returns, scaring off the undead sorcerer.  

I don't like deus ex machina endings--I prefer the protagonist to be defeated or to triumph based on his or her own abilities or decisions.  So a better ending of "Forbidden Cupboard," to my mind, would have the writer taken over by the mad scientist because she was too curious and ignored God's warnings, or somehow using her knowledge of writers or history or something to outwit the monster.  It is easy to imagine an entire novel in which the woman becomes a famous writer of horror stories because she is inhabited by an evil genius, who uses her wealth to conduct still more diabolical experiments only to eventually be discovered and fought by the priest and the woman's boyfriend or whoever who must try to destroy the wizard without destroying the woman.

Could have been better, but I wouldn't go so far as to call "Forbidden Cupboard" bad.   

**********

I'm afraid this looks like one of the weaker issues of Weird Tales.  Well, they can't all be winners, can they?  Hopefully the last issue edited by Farnsworth Wright, the March 1940 issue, will be better.

The Unexpected: A Boucher, F Brown & E F Russell

In the last installment of MPorcius Fiction Log we read three stories from McIlwraith-era Weird Tales that Leo Margulies reprinted in his 1961 anthology The Unexpected, the cover of which promises "strange" and "hair-raising" stories that will transport you to a "nightmarish world."  Let's do the same today, but whereas last time our writers were Margaret St. Clair, Mary Elizabeth Counselman and Fritz Leiber, today we've got Anthony Boucher, Fredric Brown and Eric Frank Russell.  Somehow, all three of these stories debuted in WT in 1949.

Before we begin, I remind you that I don't own a copy of The Unexpected and so I'll be reading these stories in scans of the original 1949 magazines.

"The Scrawny One" by Anthony Boucher (1949)

This is a two-page twist story on those perennial topics, being tricked by the Devil or some similar stygian entity and screwing up the magic wish a genie or whoever gives you.  A California man in the 20th century exhaustively researches the fringe characters for which the Golden State is famous and eventually hooks up with a real wizard.  He convinces the sorcerer to summon a demon for him, and then murders the magician.  The demon begrudgingly offers the murderer a wish, as he is obligated, and the killer wishes to be the richest man in the world.  So the demon puts him in the body of the richest man in the world, some kind of Hindu feudal ruler or something who is suffering some horrendous decaying disease and is moments from death.  Every year this lord or whatever he is holds a ritual which involves being laid upon a giant scale and having a pile of precious stones heaped on the other end of the scale until the pile is his own weight, and her spends his last moments in the middle of this bizarre local custom.  Boucher's gruesome touch is that the murderer watches one of his new body's digits fall off its hand before he expires.  The demon, meanwhile, formerly a noncorporeal form jealous of the flesh of human beings, is now in the murderer's body and is about to enjoy all the pleasures in which a material body can indulge.

We'll declare this gimmicky and contrived thing acceptable filler, I guess.  The beginning, when the murderer kills the wizard, before we know this is yet another deal-with-the-devil and magic-wish-backfires story, is good, and what comes after is a big disappointment.  "The Scrawny One" would be reprinted in the men's magazine Cavalier in the same year it reappeared in The Unexpected, and would later see print in anthologies of stories from Weird Tales as swell as NESFA's The Compleat Boucher.

"Come and Go Mad" by Fredric Brown (1949)

The way Bloch and Quinn's names
appear on this cover reminds me of
feminist artist Barbara Kruger's
derivative and gimmicky work

Like Leiber's "The Automatic Pistol," Brown's "Come and Go Mad" is famous and the title was so familiar to me that I kind of thought I had already read it when I first started looking into The Unexpected.  But it turned out I hadn't.  You can find this story in many Brown collections and many anthologies.   

"Come and Go Mad" is one of those stories with a protagonist who has amnesia.  Read enough fiction and the same gimmicks come up again and again.  Maybe I need a new obsessive hobby.  Anyway, newspaper reporter George Vine, apparently, lost his memory in a car accident three years ago, and can recall nothing of his life before he woke up in the hospital after the wreck.  In the first of "Come and Go Mad"'s eight chapters, his editor convinces Vine to go undercover as a mental case into an asylum to investigate something odd detected by the asylum's director, Randolph.  What unusual phenomena did the director notice?  The editor doesn't provide Vine any details about Randolph's suspicions, so the reporter will go into this assignment with an open and unbiased mind.

In Chapter II we get a plot twist--reporter George Vine has been lying about the amnesia for three years, he in fact does have extensive memories of life before the accident--and the life he remembers is not that of 20th-century journalist G. Vine, but that of the young Napoleon Bonaparte!  Vine has hidden this fact from everyone for three long years, and it is true he has no Vine memories of the pre-crash period.  We readers are led to believe that George Vine is insane or that the soul or consciousness or whatever of the Corsican ogre is cohabiting this 20th-century American body with that of the reporter.  

Brown in this story strives is to keep everything uncertain, to keep the reader in suspense, always wondering which of the possibilities presented, some of them quite hard to believe, might be the truth.  The final punchline is that none of the characters' or reader's speculations matter, because life is meaningless and to know the truth is impossible because the truth is so horrible it will drive the truth-knower insane.

Chapters III and IV introduce more mystery--are Vine's friends and colleagues colluding with Randolph to get Vine committed against his will?  Do they think he is insane and so, with the best intentions, are tricking him into getting treatment?  A man can only be admitted to the asylum on the recommendation of two shrinks, so Vine has to go see a second doctor and fool him into thinking he is insane.  When he tells this second psychiatrist in Chapter V that he thinks he is somehow Napoleon Bonaparte, transported at age 29 to the 20th century, is he doing it to further his undercover journalism mission, or to sincerely get psychiatric treatment?

In the asylum we get various compelling scenes in which we meet the madmen and the guards; these scenes are the most conventionally entertaining in the story.  Then we get the finale, a sort of distillation or parody of Lovecraftian themes.  Napoleon Bonaparte/George Vine is informed by aliens that mankind is a parasitic race created by the immense alien intelligences that rule Earth to serve as entertainment--our evolutions and wars and so forth are games that different aspects of this intelligence play against each to stave off boredom.  As part of the game, the consciousness of Bonaparte was shifted across space and time from one body to another.  This knowledge threatens to drive the protagonist insane, so it is blotted from his mind and he eventually is released from the asylum and lives what amounts to a normal life.  The author tells us that the question of who among Vine's friends were acting for the aliens is immaterial, and in fact everything is immaterial.  The last sentence of the story is the assertion that "Nothing matters!"  

"Come and Go Mad" succeeds in embodying its theme that life and the universe are complicated and trying to figure them out is a waste of time because you can't and it wouldn't help you if you could, so I guess, based on the fact that it achieves its objectives, you have to call it a good story.  But is it entertaining?  The asylum scenes are certainly enjoyable and the in-your-face Lovecraftian there-is-no-God and you-can't-understand-the-universe-so-life-is-without-meaning ending suits Weird Tales, but the first half is kind of weak.  Those early chapters feel long and slow, with lots of characters who don't appear later and lots of talk about the protagonist looking out the window, looking at pigeons, wiping sweat off his forehead, lighting a cigarette, stubbing out a cigarette, etc.  I guess all the distant gaze and cigarette business is supposed to set the mood, to give readers insight into Vine's emotions and state of mind, but it all feels kind of like chaff you have to get through to get to the actual story.  On the other hand, this stuff makes the story feel "sophisticated," like a mainstream story and not a story you find in a magazine full of vampires and zombies and scantily clad ladies.

We'll end up at a mild recommendation.

Two of the many editions of Space on My Hands;
left is 1980 USA, right is 1995 Romania

"The Big Shot" by Eric Frank Russell (1949)

Remember when we read an entire book of "weird" material from Eric Frank Russell over four blog posts?  (ONE TWO THREE FOUR)  Good times, good times.  Well, here is a weird Russell story that didn't get reprinted in that 1962 book, Dark Tides.  Why wasn't it included in that volume?  Maybe because it is a weak filler piece?

"The Big Shot" is one of those stories in which the author speculates on the afterlife, another well worn topic of SF writers.  (If you go to those websites where you can read manga for free, you'll find that half the comics in Japan are about some 21st-century goof who gets his ass killed in an accident and wakes up in a Dungeons and Dragons world.)  In "The Big Shot" a big hulking organized crime figure gets blasted by some joker who owes him money and can't pay and then the crook wakes up to find himself on a white road, marching inexorably towards a shining city below a rainbow-colored mountain range.  The brief story covers his realization of what is going on, his bluster and anxiety upon recognition that he is about to be judged, his claims that if he did bad things it was because he had no choice, and the assertion of the great powers that judge human souls that he did have a choice, that he could have been a decent person.

Merely acceptable filler, pedestrian and forgettable.  In 2006 Midnight House put out a volume of Russell weird stories that includes "The Big Shot," Darker Tides.

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I have to say that I am not that impressed with Margulies' choices for The Unexpected, the covers of which promise some kind of hellish nightmare experience, stories that are original and disturbing.  Too many of these stories are typical and routine, not scary at all and/or mediocre.  Bloch's story is lame jokes and lame social commentary, while Counselman's is tedious sappy sentimentality about a loving mother. St. Clair, Boucher and Russell offer obvious, even trite, filler pieces.  Leiber's is well done, but the plot is still a little obvious.  Brown's is the most disturbing of the ones we've read recently, seeing as it comes right out and tells you that life is meaningless and you are a fool to try to figure it out, after demonstrating this fact with its plot of pointless unsolvable mysteries.  Looking back over the years, recalling the stories in the book by Manly Wade Wellman, Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon, I think we can say Wellman's is in the banal filler category, Bradbury's is sort of disturbing though not great, while Sturgeon's is likely the best in the book, well written as well as actually disturbing and somewhat original. Well, hats off to 'ol Ted.

More Weird Tales next time, folks.