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:
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.
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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.
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