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.