Strange Ports of Call: D H Keller, H Wandrei, and C A Smith

In 1948 Pellegrini and Cudahy published a 400-page hardcover anthology bearing the legend "20 Masterpieces of Science Fiction" on cover and spine alongside the title Strange Ports of Call.  Strange Ports of Call was edited by the tireless August Derleth, correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft and major figure in the effort to get weird material printed in book form, and this volume is full of stories by people we associate with Weird Tales.  Let's read three stories from Strange Ports of Call by weirdies today, those by David H. Keller, Howard Wandrei, and Clark Ashton Smith.  (We may read more from this book in the future, stories by people less closely associated with the weird.)

But before all that, let's list the seven stories reprinted in Strange Ports of Call that we have already read in other venues.

"The Crystal Bullet" by Donald Wandrei

"At the Mountains of Madness" by H. P. Lovecraft

"Call Him Demon" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

"Far Centaurus" by A. E. van Vogt

"The Lost Street" by Clifford Simak and Carl Jacobi

"Thunder and Roses" by Theodore Sturgeon

"A Guest in the House" by Frank Belknap Long

(Nota Bene: I will be reading all of today's stories in a scan of Strange Ports of Call, though I may check original magazine versions, or other reprints, if there are confusing typos or printing errors.)

"The Worm" by David H. Keller (1929)

We start with a story that has been reprinted many times after its debut in Amazing, including in a Best of Amazing anthology in 1967 and in two different issues of Fantastic, one in 1965 and one in 1979.  The cover of the '79 issue promotes "The Worm" as "Probably the most intriguing tale you'll ever read anywhere."  Wow!

For centuries Thompson's Valley, Vermont, was a prosperous village, with productive farms and a busy mill, but today the place is deserted, only the miller remaining, the mill still turning, though there is no corn for it to grind.  The miller is a recluse, his only friends his books and his dog, and mechanically minded; he has hooked the mill mechanism up to generate electricity.  This practical engineering ability is put to the test when appears an uncanny threat to the building in which his family has lived and worked for generation after generation.

The monster plot of "The Worm" has some similarity to Ray Bradbury's 1951 "The Fog Horn."  The grinding of the mill has attracted a monstrous worm, a thing thirty feet thick, and it burrows up to the mill, thinking the sound of the mill is the sound of a worm of the opposite sex!  Slowly, over the course of days, the mega-sized worm chews through the foundation of the mill and then up through the building's multiple floors, all the while the miller essaying various means to stop or destroy the monster in his determination to preserve his ancestral home.  Who will win, man or beast? 

"The Worm" has something of the ethic or ideology we see in lots of early science fiction.  One man, alone, relies on his wits, sangfroid and knowledge of science and engineering as he struggles against a novel, alien, challenge.  Keller may be subverting the expectations of science lovers who see man as equal to the task of mastering the natural world, though, when he has the man fall before the monster; Keller even specifically has the miller gain confidence, in the event unfounded, from reflecting that as a man he has "brains" and the worm is just a "thing."

"The Worm" is well written, Keller producing sharp images and ably using the reactions of the dog to generate emotional content--suspense and fear--and I was actually a little surprised that the worm killed the miller instead of the other way round.  So thumbs up for "The Worm," a good science fiction horror story.

Stephen Fabian fans should check out the July '79 issue of 
Fantastic which features six pages of art by Fabian: knights, galleys, 
churning waves, a topless woman--some of your favorite things! 

"The God-Box" by Howard Wandrei (1934)

A few years ago I purchased the recent Howard Wandrei collections Time Burial: The Collected Fantasy Tales of Howard Wandrei (1995) and The Eerie Mr. Murphy: The Collected Fantasy Tales of Howard Wandrei: Volume II (2003) largely because I was captivated by H. Wandrei's grotesque drawings.  I did read some stories from these books, among them "For Murderers Only," "The Molester," "Danger: Quicksand" and "The African Trick," but have left many more unread.  "The God Box" (no hyphen) appears in my 2017 paperback edition of Time Burial, but I am reading it today in Strange Ports of Call, where, for whatever reason, the hyphen was introduced.  (There is no hyphen in the title where the story was first printed, under a pseudonym, in F. Orlin Tremaine's Astounding.)

Like Keller's "The Worm," H. Wandrei's "The God-Box" stars smart knowledgeable guys who employ their wits in dealing with an alien challenge, and perhaps reflecting the author's weird sensibilities, in the end they come up short and are overwhelmed--like Keller's, Wandrei's tale is not of the triumph of the man of science but a sort of horror story.

Pence is an Egyptologist who, by bizarre coincidence, discovers in New York City a box the size of a camera made of what looks like gold but is incredibly hard and astoundingly dense--the little box weighs a ton or more!  Elaborately carved with Egyptian motifs and characters, the box is studded with many little heads of pharaohs and of gods of the Egyptian pantheon.  Pence contacts an engineer with a good reputation in the scientific community and the two of them tinker with the box, begin unraveling the secrets of its mind-boggling powers.  After activating the box by charging it with electricity, they find that manipulation of the heads, which are like knobs, allows them to view as through a TV any spot in the universe!  They can even create portals through which they can instantaneously travel to those distant locales or just manipulate the matter there, moving things and people around, drawing them to New York, or destroying them.  The Egyptian box has conferred upon them god-like power!

One of the odd wrinkles of using the box is that it attracts cats from all over the city to the building in which Pence found it, and the felines become such a nuisance that the men have to use the box's powers to dispose of them by the thousands.

Pence and the engineer are clever men but not necessarily good men, and Pence in particular lets his newfound powers go to his head.  The box is used to commit many trespasses, some even worse than teleporting felines wholesale out of the greatest city in the world, and eventually the men scheme against each other and end up lost on a distant planet.

I didn't like the style of this one as much as that of Keller's, it being a little flippant and jokey rather than sharp and clear, but I'm still giving "The God-Box" a thumbs up.  The premise of Damon Knight's 1976 "I See You" bears some similarity to that of "The God-Box," and Carl Jacobi's 1954 "Made in Tanganyika," has not only a similar premise but a similar plot.  Were Jacobi and Knight influenced by Wandrei's story?

"Master of the Asteroid" by Clark Ashton Smith (1932)

I'm a little surprised I haven't read this one yet, I having read quite a volume of stories by Smith.  "Master of the Asteroid" debuted in Wonder Stories, as the cover story, in the same issue as Hazel Heald's collaboration with H. P. Lovecraft "Man of Stone," which we read in 2017.

The editor's intro to "Master of the Asteroid" in Wonder Stories tells us Smith's tale focuses on the psychological stress astronauts will face.  Sure enough, the protagonists of the story are three men who, as members of a scientific expedition on Mars consisting of fifteen men, go insane and steal one of the expedition's ships and try to fly through the asteroid belt to a moon of Jupiter without bringing enough supplies with them.  After a sort of preface or frame, we get to the meat of the story, the log discovered decades later aboard the stolen vessel where it lies wrecked on an asteroid; also found inside the ship was the skeleton of one of the three mutineers, while around the ship lay the remains of a bunch of grotesquely skinny insectoid aliens.

In brief, the narrator survives while the other two madmen expire during the trip.  The narrator goes catatonic but recovers when the vessel crashes into a large asteroid which actually has an atmosphere and a whole ecosystem of plants, animals and people who have a culture that, apparently, includes religion.  The ship is all bent so the narrator cannot open the airlock, and he lacks the weapons or tools to bust through the porthole or hull, so he is stuck in the ship, and learns all about life on the asteroid by watching through the porthole.  We get a description of that life, and the man's mental trials, then finally clues as to the uncanny cause of his death.

"Master of the Asteroid" is a very good horror story set in space.  The style is direct though not unadorned, and totally believable as the record of a man under terrible stress.  The behavior and psychologies of the three broken men are very convincing and striking, and the story is full of dreadful, even haunting, images and events.  Yet again Clark Ashton Smith proves he deserves his high reputation.

Recommended.

"Master of the Asteroid" has been reprinted quite a number of times over the years.  In 1964 it appeared in Arkham House's Smith collection Tales of Science and Sorcery, which our French friends retitled Morthylla and put out in translation in 1989 with an ooo la la cover.  (Those Frenchies know how to separate a man from his francs.)

**********

Three good stories, so kudos to the authors and to Derleth, who selected these pieces.  All three stories have the trappings of science fiction, but instead of celebrating the work of the scientist and engineer and vindicating the ability of man to solve problems and master his environment, these stories exhibit a weird sensibility.  The focus is on the horror of the alien, the danger presented by novel conditions, and the inability of humans, even those devoted to the scientific method, to survive the physical threats, solve the mysteries, and resist the temptations presented by alien beings, artifacts and conditions.  You can't handle the truth of the unknown, man--it will destroy you physically, shatter you psychologically, and tempt you into abandoning your morality!   

Weird Tales March 1941: D Wandrei, D Quick, A Derleth and T McClusky

Our aim is to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales published in the year 1941, and today we look at the second of the six 1941 issues, March.  This issue reprints a poem from a 1938 British fanzine by C. S. Youd, the man also known as John Christopher and responsible for the Tripods books and No Blade of Grass AKA The Death of Grass, which I blogged about ten years ago.  (Joachim Boaz blogged about No Blade of Grass in 2019.)  That is sort of interesting.  There is also an ad for the upcoming appearance of the posthumously published Lovecraft story The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which I have read multiple times but not during the period of this blog's apocalyptic life.  Our focus today will be the stories in the issue by founders of Arkham House Donald Wandrei and August Derleth, by Thorp McClusky, who has made like a dozen appearances here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and by Dorothy Quick, a relative newcomer to these pages, we only having read two stories by her.

"The Crystal Bullet" by Donald Wandrei

I feel like we've read a stack of stories by Donald Wandrei from a variety of magazines including Astounding, of course Weird Tales, and even detective magazines.   OMG, it's links time.

"Raiders of the Universes"

"The Fire Vampires"

"Colossus"

"Something from Above"

"The Red Brain"

"The Painted Mirror"

"The Tree-Men of M'Bwa"

"The Lives of Alfred Kramer"

"Spawn of the Sea"

"The Destroying Horde"

"Infinity Zero"

"Black Fog"

"Earth Minus"

"Life Current"

"Dramatic Touch"

"Come Clean"

"The Man Who Never Lived"

"The Atom Smasher"

"The Blinding Shadows"

"The Whisperers"

"Colossus Eternal"

"Uneasy Lie the Drowned"

"The Lady in Gray"

"Giant-Plasm"

"The Crystal Bullet" starts with some romantic slosh about the beauty of the natural world in the spring, the birds and the squirrels and a farm with big strong horses and black loamy soil, etc.  In contrast to these images and themes of warmth and life and peace and quiet is the sound of some sort of airborne object flying overhead and crashing nearby, atop a hill; when a farmer goes to investigate he finds a two-foot long thing like a crystal torpedo that radiates cold and a green glow.  Though the cold is more severe than any he has experienced, as if hypnotized he grasps the fallen artifact and brings it to the yard outside his house.  At home he seems to regain his mind, decides that when he is done with the spring planting he'll write a letter to somebody at the university or in the government about the crystal from space.  His wife wants him to take the thing away, but he tells her maybe they can sell it for a lot of money.  That night, his wife leaves their bed and goes to the crystal and, I guess, is frozen to death by it.  The farmer takes the crystal away and hurls it into an artificial lake, a flooded quarry.  He has the impression that the crystal is a spacecraft, fashioned by aliens with feathers and eyes on stalks whose bodies are part-gas, to carry either passengers or advanced three-dimensional means of communication; it might have offered humanity invaluable secrets but immersion in water totally destroys the object and its passengers and/or cargo.  It seems his wife is doomed, though maybe if the farmer hadn't destroyed the crystal the people/knowledge it carried could have revived her, even transformed her into a superior being?

This story is written poetically; it is full of mind-numbingly long sentences and much of what goes on is kind of vague and mysterious, maybe in part because I am not inclined to pout in the effort to laboriously decipher those long sentences.  I'm not crazy about "The Crystal Bullet."  We'll be generous and call this sterile literary exercise and effort to achieve the famous "sense of wonder" "acceptable."  August Derleth was more generous still, reprinting "The Crystal Bullet" in an anthology of "Masterpieces of Science Fiction" entitled Strange Ports of Call.  You can also find it in two Donald Wandrei collections, The Eye and the Finger and Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei.

"Edge of the Cliff" by Dorothy Quick

Here we have a two-page story that was reprinted in one of those Barnes and Noble anthologies, a story about assisted suicide.  

An attractive young woman (I don't think we learn her name), was in love with Bob but her family made her marry Jim, who had money.  She hated Jim, a "drunken beast" who beat her.  She cheated on Jim with Bob, who promised to take her away when he had enough money.  Jim caught them and killed Bob; "Jim got off--he was a wronged husband."  Tonight she is standing on the edge of a seaside cliff, rocks below, wanting to commit suicide but too scared to do so.

The ghost of Bob comes along and urges her, pleads with her, to kill herself so they can be together for "Eternity."  She jumps and that is our happy ending.

We might see this as a pro-suicide story, and/or as a feminist story about how society puts so much pressure on women that it drives them to destroy themselves--the decision to live or die is the only decision the patriarchy leaves to women!  It is certainly odd to see a man plead that the woman he loves kill herself so that she will be with him; everyone in this story acts very selfishly.  It is also sort of interesting that Quick asserts there is an afterlife, so "Edge of the Cliff" is more or less a religious story, but totally ignores the prohibition on suicide of those religions which have been dominant in the West for many centuries.

Acceptable.

"Come to Me!" by August Derleth

I don't find lawyers and court room dramas very interesting, so kind of groaned when the first paragraph of "Come to Me!" introduced us readers to Judge Hillier and the case of Elsa Laing over which he is presiding.  Derleth's story only gets more boring and stupid as it proceeds.  Thumbs down!

"Come to Me!" is a deus-ex-machina Christian wish-fulfillment fantasy of a very childish type.  You have heard me in the past praise speculative fiction stories for addressing or promoting Christian thinking, and of course two of the most exciting and talented SF writers, Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty, are serious Christians.  But Derleth here produces a dreadful piece of junk that has me shaking my head.

Elsa Laing, a single woman responsible for her aged mother, is on trial for selling people valueless stocks and bonds through the mails.  She has just been convicted when a message comes to the court--a higher power is intervening and will take over the trial tomorrow!

The next day a charismatic figure arrives and takes Judge Hillier's place.  This figure explains that Elsa Laing was tricked by a fat (Derleth tells us he looks like a pig) banker and a rich guy who wears pince-nez, hat and gloves, into unknowingly defrauding people.  As part of their operations the fatso and the clotheshorse also blackmailed some other woman.  This substitute judge seems to know what everyone has done, what everyone thinks, and everybody feels compelled to obey him.  This super-judge specifies at tedious length how the obese banker and the fancy dresser are to recompense their many victims (the two women and all the people who bought worthless stocks and bonds) and of course rules that the two women are totally absolved of any wrongdoing.  The government attorney who prosecuted Elsa Laing is also to be investigated by the local authorities, while Judge Hillier is commended for doing his best.  Then the mysterious judge glows and vanishes.  The substitute judge was Jesus Christ!  

A strikingly silly and bad story, with no plot tension, no characters, an idiotic view of theology and of the legal system of the United States, and also a story that tries to exploit readers' disgust at obese people and envy of the wealthy.  If Jesus can come down and stop people from getting defrauded, why isn't he doing anything about German and Soviet imperialism and tyranny?  Jesus, look at the calendar, it's 1941, if you are going to intervene in Earthly affairs, you've got bigger fish to fry!  

Abysmal.           

This embarrassment was reprinted in the Derleth collections Dwellers in Darkness and That is Not Dead.   

"The Graveyard Horror" by Thorp McClusky

When we talked about the January 1941 issue of Weird Tales, I was mesmerized by a Hannes Bok illustration of a tall skinny woman and Bok delivers another such image for this story.  The female lead in Henry Kuttner's "Dragon Moon" was a sort of fish-woman, providing Bok a reason to depict an impossible slender woman, and "The Graveyard Horror" offers him a similar opportunity because the women in this story are having the life sucked out of them by vampires!  

Like Quick's "Edge of the Cliff," "The Graveyard Horror" is about suicide and people who welcome death, but this 16-page story takes a very different attitude towards self-destruction and religion than does Quick's brief tale.

Young Karl and Jorma were in love, but Jorma's father Sven opposed their marriage because Karl's family were a different Protestant sect than his own.  (This story argues that the Christian religion is true and that conflict between different Christian denominations is dangerously counterproductive.)  So Karl committed suicide by tying a weight to himself and jumping in a body of water.  Jorma wasted away within a month, dying though she suffered no apparent disease.  The local undertaker of this small town tells the local doctor, our narrator, in a sort of roundabout way, that he thinks Karl became a vampire because suicides can't go right to heaven and murdered Jorma.  Of course the doctor scoffs.  But when Jorma's sister Hildur begins wasting away and tells people she is looking forward to joining Jorma, the doctor, the mortician, and Hildur's husband spring into action!  The mortician deliberately takes a page from the book of the Roman Catholics and employs an arsenal of crucifixes to attack Karl and Jorma and to defend Hildur.

I don't like the way "The Graveyard Horror" is constructed.  The narrator and the mortician go to Karl's grave three times, the first two times deciding that their suspicions he is a vampire have not been confirmed and so not doing anything.  I find it boring and annoying in stories when people do the same thing again and again.  On the other hand, I like that the vampires in the story don't open their coffins, bust out of their vaults and dig through the dirt of their graves to stalk the night, but issue forth as gaseous or immaterial beings.  And I like that Karl and Jorma, decent sweet people when alive, are foully evil vampires when undead.    

We're going to rate this one marginally good; it is certainly the best of today's stories.  Quick's, which has the virtue of brevity, is second.  

German anthologists Kurt Singer and Manfred Kluge included "The Graveyard Horror" in volumes of ghost, horror and vampire stories.

It turns out I'm not going to get out of this blog post without a lot more copying and pasting of links to all the Thorp McClusky stories we have talked about here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Here they are:  

"The Crawling Horror"

"The Woman in Room 607"

"The Thing on the Floor"
"Kidnappers of Space"

"Monstrosity of Evolution"        

"Black Gold"

"Fothergill's Jug"

"Workshop of the Living Dead"

"The Red God Laughed"

"While Zombies Walked"

"The Considerate Hosts"

"Slaves of the Grey Mold"

**********

Looking on the bright side, none of these stories is rote uninspired filler; they all do something novel or tweak the formula or make some kind of counterintuitive argument.  Of course, the most entertaining one is the most traditional one, a reflection that stretching yourself and doing something off the beaten path is a risk.

We'll take a break from Weird Tales for our next episode, but the material we examine will likely be quite weird-adjacent.  So stay tuned!

Weird Tales, Jan 1941: H Kuttner, D H Keller, R Bloch and R M Farley

Last year we read Henry Kuttner's first three Elak stories, "Thunder in the Dawn," "Spawn of Dagon" and "Beyond the Phoenix."  Today we will read Kuttner's fourth and final story of Elak of Atlantis, "Dragon Moon," which appears in the January 1941 issue of Weird Tales.  (Adrian Cole, whose Dream Lords trilogy I read in 2016 and tarbandu started last year, took up the saga of Elak in our own 21st century.)  We'll also tackle the stories in this ish by David H. Keller, Robert Bloch and Ralph M. Finley.  Hopefully these stories will he better than those we read last time we cracked open an issue of the magazine of the bizarre and unusual.  At least thid go round we have a cover with a muscleman, a monster and a damsel in distress.

(I considered reading Nelson S. Bond's story from this issue, but it is advertised as a joke story so I am abstaining--I know you don't want to hear me yet again groan about how little I appreciate joke stories.)

"Dragon Moon" by Henry Kuttner

"Dragon Moon" has ten chapters, and each is preceded by an epigraph.  Most of these are from poems by G. K. Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling, or William Rose Benet--or the Bible, but Kuttner does quote his own 1936 poem "The Sunken Towers" before Chapter 6.  ("The Sunken Towers" appeared in the December 1936 issue of Donald Wollheim's zine The Phantagraph and was reprinted in 1967 in Operation Phantasy: The Best from The Phantagraph.  The poem is easy to find if you search around a bit.)  

Chapter 1 finds errant prince Elak and obese comic relief sidekick Lycon in a harborside tavern in southern Atlantis.  Elak gets into a fight over a wench and is about to be killed when the Druid from "Thunder in the Dawn" busts into the room and uses sorcery to save Elak's life.  In Chapter 2 the Druid delivers astonishing news--an alien entity known as Karkora is taking over the bodies of the monarchs of Atlantis!  When Elak's brother, Orander, king of the northern land of Cyrena, realized he was being possessed by a being from another universe, he killed himself!  The Druids want Elak to take the throne of Cyrena, but Elak refuses, thinking himself unfit!  

In Chapter 3, Elak has a dream in which he has a vision of Karkora the Pallid One and finds it so loathsome he decides to travel to Cyrena to seize control of the kingdom after all.  The Druid is nowhere to be found, so Elak and Lycon try to get passage on a ship, only to find it is captained by the guy Elak had that bar brawl with!  Elak and Lycon are chained at the oars among the galley slaves and help propel the ship northward with their own muscles.  In Chapter 4, Elak and Lycon lead a revolt of the galley slaves and take over the ship.  Kuttner includes lots of gruesome details in the fight that might appeal to gorehounds, but the sequence feels a little shoddy, with a metaphor used twice in as many pages and some confusion as to what is going on.  Chapter 4 would have benefited from some additional polishing and editing.

In Chapter 5 the Druid speaks to Elak in a dream--he must go to the red delta!  Whatever that is!  The next day is spotted a castle on an island in a delta; the sand here is red.  Ah!  Elak and Lycon bid farewell to the mutineers and disembark.  They meet a local potentate, Aynger, one of the last of a dispersed people, the Amenalk.  He tells Elak that within the castle lives a woman, Mayana, one of the few survivors of a pre-human race of sea people, a race of puissant wizards.  She was married to the human king of the nation just south of Cyrena, Kiriath, but left him when Karkora the Pallid One took over his body.  In Chapter 6, Elak, alone, ventures across a scary bridge, through a creepy tunnel, across a haunted underground lake, to the island under the island, where sits among a ruined city the temple under the castle, where he meets Mayana.  Mayana is incredibly tall and thin, and Hannes Bok provides an absorbing illustration of her kneeling before an idol of some kind of bird god. 

Chapter 7 is an expository chapter in which Mayana tells her own sad story and of the coming of Karkora the Pallid One.  You see, Mayana loved her human husband, king of Kiriath, and wanted to bear him a son, but as a nonhuman was unable.  A wizard in her husband's court offered to aid her with his sorcery, and she took him up on the offer, but the child she bore thereby was a stillborn misshapen mutant.  The wizard offered to revive it, and Mayana again accepted the sorcerer's aid; the wizard brought the baby back to feeble life and took it under his tutelage.  Eventually it was revealed that the sorcerer had summoned from another universe a horrible immaterial being to inhabit the embryo in Mayana's womb!  Having brought the deformed baby back to some semblance of life, along with the powerful alien spirit dwelling within it, the wizard put the child into what amounts to a sensory deprivation tank, denying it its natural five senses in order to strengthen an alien sixth sense!  This malformed human inhabited by an extradimensional spirit is now Karkora, and it seeks to conquer this world and others with the array of astounding powers this sixth sense confers upon him!

Mayana knows a talisman that can destroy Karkora, the monster whose earthly form came from her own womb, even if its alien soul did not, and Elak convinces her to provide it to him--she agrees to do so at the right moment.  Mayana even enchants Elak's blade, and gifts him some of her own magical strength, so he will be able to succeed in battle against Karkora and the Pallid One's unwitting human servants.  Kuttner doesn't say that impossibly tall, creepily skinny, shockingly pale and disturbingly scaly Mayana of the sea-folk has sex with Elak in order to give him this strength, but it is sort of metaphorically or euphemistically implied. 

"Stay with me for a moon--drinking the sea-power and Poseidon’s magic.”

“A moon—”

"Time will not exist. You will sleep, and while you sleep strength will pour into you."

(There's a lot of bestiality in the world of Lovecraftian and Lovecraftian-adjacent fiction.)

All the business with Mayana is good because it is about disturbing and heart-breaking human relationships and at the same time about the evil wizards, extradimensional aliens, lost races and lost cities, and undertone of perverse sex that we are looking for when we open up an issue of Weird Tales.

In Chapter 8, Elak makes his way to the capital of Cyrena and with the help of the Druid's magic wins the throne and raises an army.  In Chapter 9, Elak's army of Cyrena and Aynger's army of the reassembled Amenalk diaspora battle the army of Kiriath, led by Mayana's husband, who is controlled by her alien son.  Kuttner dwells on blood and wounds, on the writhing bodies of dying horses and men in the dirt and mud underfoot.  Elak kills the possessed king of Kiriath with the blade ensorcelled by the king's own wife, and then comes Chapter 10, the surreal psychic battle in a parallel dimension between Elak, supported by the Druid and Mayana, and the alien Karkora the Pallid One.  Stories by Kuttner and his wife C. L. Moore often feature these sorts of psychic battles as a climax (see Kuttner's "Where the World Is Quiet," and "The Time Axis," Moore's "The Tree of Life" and "Black God's Shadow," the Moore/Kuttner collab "Quest for the Starstone," and numerous others I am too lazy to link to.)  Uniting the two themes that make "Dragon Moon" noteworthy, the Mayana tragedy and the gore Kuttner fills the story with, our surprise ending is that the talisman Mayana gives to Elak at the moment he requires it is her own beating heart!  The heart, oozing blood, cast upon the hidden body of her son, makes the body disappear and sends the alien entity inhabiting it packing, saving the Earth.

While not as good as one of the better Conan, Elric, or Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, "Dragon Moon" is a solid sword and sorcery caper, maybe the best Elak story, thanks primarily to the Mayana material, though Kuttner's use of the Aynger character, which I have not gone into in this already too long blog post, is also interesting.     

"Dragon Moon" has been reprinted in various Elak collections and, among other anthologies, L. Sprague de Camp's The Fantastic Swordsmen, an abridged version of which was published by our Teutonic pals as Science Fiction Stories 20 and then in full as Drachenmond.

"The Goddess of Zion" by David H. Keller

Let's see, in the history of MPorcius Fiction Log we've read eleven stories by Keller.  OMG it is links time.

"The Thing in the Cellar" 

"The Seeds of Death"

"The Dead Woman"

"The Golden Bough"

"The Typewriter"

"The Last Magician"

"Tiger Cat"

"Valley of Bones"

"Dust in the House"

"A Piece of Linoleum"

"Lords of the Ice"

Today with "The Goddess of Zion" we make it a round dozen!  Maybe this is a good one--Jacques Sadoul and Messrs. Greenberg, McSherry and Waugh thought it worthy of reprinting in anthologies, and it also appears in the first volume of the David H. Keller Memorial Library.

This is a pretty good one, actually, well-written and exhibiting a higher tone than much of the sex and violence exploitation stuff we often read, but the sex and violence are still there!  "The Goddess of Zion" also offers plenty for intellectual types interested in issues of race and gender to chew on.

Out narrator relates to us the uncanny experience he had while visiting Zion National Park back in 1938.  At a far corner of the park, where there are no other tourists, he comes upon a sort of white mountain, shaped a little like a throne, with a hole in its crest through which he could see the sky.  Then another man appears, a handsome blue-eyed blonde.  Blonde invites the narrator to accompany him in a hike up the white mountain.  The mountain looks unscalable, but Blue-Eyes knows a path.  Along the way they discover sophisticated wall paintings featuring a mammoth and a beautiful blonde woman.

At the summit Blonde tells his crazy story.  His soul is that of a Viking ancestor who explored America centuries ago--his soul has shifted from father to son over many generations.  He forgets many intervening events, but recalls perfectly his adventure here on the mountain.

He was the last survivor of his Viking band, which had marched far across the continent, fighting Indians and facing other hardships for years.  He was taken prisoner by a race of brown pygmies who lived around and on this white mountain.  These pygmies regularly captured Indians and sacrificed them to their gods--a wooly mammoth who lived with them on top of the mountain and a gorgeous blonde woman with blue eyes who was their queen.  The mammoth would lift the Indians in its trunk one at a time and hurl them down through that hole in the mountain.  When the blonde queen showed signs of losing her looks with age, a new blonde queen, a teenager, would then appear and the older queen would be thrown down the hole to her death.

The current queen and the Viking became lovers.  The mammoth was somehow affected by their love, and, when the new queen arrived because the current queen got sick, the mammoth flipped the script by throwing the teenager down the hole, casting pygmy society into disarray.  The queen, near death from her illness, told the Viking that after she died he would live for many centuries but eventually return here to follow her so they could be together forever.  Then at her request the Viking threw the queen down through the hole.  

The day after hearing this story, the narrator descends the mountain, leaving the reincarnated Viking on the mountain top; that night he watches from below as the man jumps down through the hole so he can rejoin his beloved.

I like it.

"House of the Hatchet" by Robert Bloch
 

Here we have one of Bloch's Hollywood writer stories that references the fact that California is full of freaks and conmen, but, unlike the totally lame "Wine of the Sabbat" that I told you sucks earlier this month, "House of the Hatchet" is a good one with real human feeling and real human personalities.  Our third good story in a row today, and our third story with a strange sexual relationship at its core.

(This story also has a good Hannes Bok illustration.  This is shaping up to be a superior issue of Weird Tales.) 

Our narrator has been married for three years to Daisy, a pretty girl who has a sadistic streak and loves reading horror and murder stories, following the crime news in the paper, and watching detective and monster movies.  (Bloch's work is full of evidence that he suspected the line of work he himself was in was somehow bad for individuals and/or society, or reflected deficiencies in its fans or society at large.)  Their marriage is rocky; the narrator has a crush on another woman and Daisy has detected it, and for quite a while now the narrator's expenses have been exceeding the proceeds he gets from selling scripts, leading Daisy to moan about their finances.  

On their third anniversary they drive up to the region where they spent their honeymoon after eloping.  On the way they come upon a tourist attraction that advertises itself as a haunted house.  Daisy loves this kind of thing and so they go in.  The owner, a guy like W. C. Fields (this story has quite a few Hollywood references), describes how a Russian emigre, a failed film director, owned the house and murdered his wife before disappearing, and how since then hoboes and burglars who have invaded the house have been found killed in the same way the director's wife was killed--with a hatchet on a Satanic altar--and how people have seen the wife's ghost. 

The writer and Daisy are shown to the room in which the murders took place, which is complete with hatchet and altar.  The room has a powerful effect on both the narrator and on his wife.  Will one of them kill the other, possessed by the ghost or perhaps with the alleged ghost merely providing an excuse?

Bloch does a good job imagining the thoughts of both a murderer and his victim, and the twist ending isn't bad--the narrator murders his wife and then the ghost of his wife starts killing people, blossoming into reality the bogus story cooked up by the owner of the macabre tourist trap.  One of Bloch's better efforts, he keeping the jokes and the Kal-if-OR-NIGH-AYYY local color to a manageable level and delivering a powerful dose of "look into the mind of a killer" and "explore the psychology of a vengeful ghost" material.  Thumbs up!  

Among the numerous Bloch collections in which "House of the Hatchet" has been reprinted are two different British collections for which it serves as title story and a French volume with a cool mummy cover. 

"Test Tube Twin" by Ralph Milne Farley  

Last year we read six stories by Farley, a soldier, lawyer, politician and writer who is said by some to have sometimes collaborated with his daughter.  Of the six stories, I liked "House of Ecstasy," "Liquid Life," and "Horror's Head," and thought "Time for Sale," "Mystery of the Missing Magnate" and "Stratosphere Menace" were OK.  As things go here at MPorcius Fiction Log, that is a pretty good record!  Hopefully Farley's run of luck here at MPFL will continue today as we read "Test Tube Twin," which it seems has never been reprinted.  (Uh oh.)

Happily, "Test Tube Twin" is a diverting crime/science fiction story about a ruthless murderous gangster who tries to use cloning techniques to get revenge on people and escape justice.  Public Enemy Number One is our main character, and Farley succeeds in making him sort of interesting, and pretty evil, equally willing to kill with his own hand those who have been loyal to him and those who have betrayed him, providing the reader plenty of shocking thrills.

To be brief, the mobster through bribes and threats gets a scientist to develop a means of cloning a person by taking samples of his tissue and growing a genetically identical twin of him in a test tube.  He also has the egghead come up with techniques to make the clone grow at a super fast rate--it will appear to be 30 years old when it is only six or seven months old.  When a clone of the mobster has been produced that looks just like him, as if it is his age (though its mind is that of a child), the gangster murders the clone.  Now the police will think he is dead and stop looking for him.  He plants the gun on a rival gangster so that guy will be tried for murder.  Then, to cover his tracks, he tries to kill a woman who loves him (a trained nurse, she worked with the scientist in raising the clone), his most loyal associate (a dim-witted thug), and the scientist.  Who will live?  Who will die?  Who will end up in prison?  Will the scientist prove to have an ace in the hole that will preserve his highly educated hide and dump the gangster in the clink for his various murders?

An entertaining crime story.  

**********

Four good stories?  Amazing!  Bravo to all involved, McIlwraith, Kuttner, Keller, Bloch, and Farley, and let's not forget Bok who has multiple fine illustrations in the issue.  Weird Tales lives up to its reputation today and gets 1941 off to a good start.

Weird Tales Project: 1940

Originally, MPorcius Fiction Log's Weird Tales Project aimed to read one story from each issue of Weird Tales with a 1930s cover date.  But with that mission accomplished, why not continue the project into the 1940s?  So here we have proof I have blogged about at least one story from each of the six issues of Weird Tales published in 1940, the year the magazine changed to a bimonthly schedule and in which the role of editor passed from Farnsworth Wright to Dorothy Stevens McIlwraith.

(And first, links to records of my bloggings about the 1930s issues of the Unique Magazine.)

1930      1931     1932     1933      1934      1935      1936      1937      1938      1939 

January

Otis Adelbert Kline & E. Hoffman Price: "Spotted Satan"
Mary Elizabeth Counselman: "Twister"
Frances Garfield: "Forbidden Cupboard"

March

Manly Wade Wellman: "The Song of the Slaves"
Malcolm Jameson: "Train for Flushing"
Thorp McClusky: "Slaves of the Grey Mold"
August Derleth: "Bramwell's Guardian"

May

Edmond Hamilton: "City from the Sea"
Robert Bloch: "Ghost-Writer"
E. Hoffmann Price: "Khosru's Garden"
Fritz Leiber: "Automatic Pistol"

July

Robert Bloch: "The Fiddler's Fee"

Manly Wade Wellman: "The Dreadful Rabbits"

Maria Moravsky: "Beyond the Frame"

September

Edmond Hamilton: "Sea Born"

November

H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop: "The Mound" 

Robert Bloch: "Wine of the Sabbat"

August Derleth: "The Sandwin Compact"

Dorothy Quick: "Turn Over"

Weird Tales, Nov 1940: R Bloch, A Derleth and D Quick

Today we are on the final leg of our quest to read at least one story from every 1940 issue of the classic fantasy magazine Weird Tales, fabled in story and song for its role in the careers of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, and others.  On this day our subject is the November issue, the last of the year.  We've actually already read a good story from that issue, H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop's "The Mound," a story I likened to "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Shadow Out of Time," it being a science fiction horror story that integrated within its text Lovecraft's late in life technocratic ideas.

When I read "The Mound" in 2017 I didn't actually read the version of the tale printed in Weird Tales, but a more complete version that hadn't been edited by August Derleth and WT editor D. McIlwraith.  But today when we read stories by Robert Bloch, Derleth, and Dorothy Quick we'll read a scan of the actual magazine, grappling with the same texts enjoyed (or endured?) by the weirdies of 85 years ago.

Looking over this issue, we see it has a pretty tame cover--did McIlwraith put an end to the sexy covers so common under the reign of her predecessor Farnsworth Wright?  (If you want to hear me gab about exciting WT covers bubbling over with monsters and women who are either dangerous or in danger, check out my recent post on my favorite 1930s WT covers.) Fortunately, inside we find some striking renderings by Hannes Bok of some disturbingly twisted and some eerily beautiful semi-human beings.  The letters column includes a notice of the death of Wright, and an obituary full of praise for the man from perennial WT contributor Seabury Quinn.  And there are the usual ads for products and services that promise to improve your health ("Do You Want to Stop Tobacco?"; "Need Relief from Agony of Stomach Ulcers") or advance your career ("Make More Money Taking Orders for the Nimrod Line"; "Become an Expert Bookkeeper".)  I have to admit, these reminders of pain, death and poverty in the pages of WT are more upsetting to me than the fiction the magazine regularly dishes out about vampires, witches and lost cities full of aliens--being a salesman or a bookkeeper who suffers ulcers and is addicted to nicotine sounds pretty horrible.

"Wine of the Sabbat" by Robert Bloch

Here we have a story narrated by a struggling novelist living in Los Angeles, a man who habitually hangs out at the house of a wealthy woman with a crowd of all the California types we see in fiction, the Hollywood writers and actors and the mystics and so forth.  The story takes place in 1940 and is full of references to classic and contemporary writers, Poe, Thorne Smith, Ben Hecht, etc.  The many uninteresting characters all make smart alecky comments all the time.  To me, "Wine of the Sabbat" feels mind-numbingly long and slow, but maybe fans or students of old Hollywood would find it more compelling.

On Walpurgis Night, the rich woman brings to the regular get-togethers at her house a guy who looks like the devil and a huge Haitian guy and we witness the reactions of the novelist and all the other LA character types to these sinister weirdos.  Everyone assembles for dinner and the new attendees, presumably a Satanist and a voodoo priest, provide wine they say is from Europe.  The narrator is canny enough not to drink his share, but to pour it out onto the carpet under the table.  With many metaphors and references to literature and much repetition Bloch describes how the wine turns the Hollywood people into beasts--dogs and cats, pigs and rats and so on; the rich woman has been cultivating the acquaintance of all these celebrities and creatives for three years so tonight she and her coreligionists could hold a Black Mass and sacrifice these Angelenos, or something.  The narrator foils the event, starting a fire that burns down the house, but is himself temporarily turned into a wolf when he accidentally drinks some of the wine.

"Wine of the Sabbat" is tedious, and so boring I had trouble paying attention to what is going on.  Bloch uses lots of words, but fails to paint vivid pictures or delineate clear personalities or relationships, rendering the story hard to follow.  Everybody in the story is a sort of drunken libertine who lives in a haze or an intentionally obscure sneak who seeks to deceive, so maybe the vagueness of the story is intentional, but I don't like it.  Thumbs down!

I suspect Bloch and publishers recognize that this is one of the Psycho scribe's lesser works, and isfdb only lists it being reprinted in a single anthology (a German one) and a sole Bloch collection, 1998's Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies, which reappeared in 2000 in Italian. 

"The Sandwin Compact" by August Derleth

"The Sandwin Compact" has been reprinted numerous times, including in the many editions of the Derleth collection The Mask of Cthulhu and in one of those Italian Lovecraftian anthologies that has a Boris Vallejo bestiality-themed cover illustration.  (isfdb lists 38 volumes in the 1985-1991 series I Miti Di Cthulhu and 20 of them have Boris covers, and most of the those I have looked at depict or imply sex between a human woman and some kind of monster.)      

"The Sandwin Compact," like a lot of Derleth's "Cthulhu Mythos" stories, controversially imbeds Lovecraftian alien deities within a framework of a universal struggle of good versus evil and the ancient concept of the four elements, with Cthulhu representing water and Yog-Sothoth representing Earth, for example.  If you believe that what makes Lovecraft's work unique and appealing is HPL's apparent argument that the universe is meaningless and inexplicable, then you of course might find Derleth's facile moralism and effort to taxonomize the alien monster gods to be a superfluous distraction or even a castration that robs the Lovecraftian sub-genre of all of its power and value.

Our narrator is a librarian at Miskatonic U in Arkham, and is familiar with The Necronomicon and what happened at Innsmouth and all that.  As a child he spent a lot of time with his cousin at the seaside house of his uncle, his cousin's father.  Unc was always an odd character, a man squat and frog-like who had access to plenty of money but had no visible source of income.

At the start of "The Sandwin Compact" the narrator receives an urgent but cryptic phone call from his cousin, and the narrator rushes to the old house to see what is up.  While there at the house he figures out, by Unc basically telling him, that he (Unc) and his ancestors got rich by making a deal with the evil deities Cthulhu, Ithaqua, etc., promising to them the service of their sons after their deaths.  Unc's father and grandfather are, apparently, now undead automatons doing the bidding of the evil alien gods in remote parts of the world.  Derleth here has produced a sort of deal-with-the-devil story, a story with a Christian framework, in which the forces of evil tempt mankind and humans have the free will to submit to them--selling their souls and betraying their kin--or to stand up to them, sacrificing themselves to preserve those for whom they have responsibility.  These are not bad themes for a story, but they assume human beings have agency and put the human race at the center of the universe, a contrast to a lot of Lovecraft's original work, in which it is suggested the aliens have a relationship with humanity akin to that of humans to insects or cattle, that we humans are impotent and have no way to resist the aliens and very little to offer them.  

Unc has refused to continue the deal--the narrator's cousin will not become an undead servant and Unc will soon be punished by Lloiger, like Ithaqua a "wind elemental" whom Derleth himself contributed to the Mythos.  During the story, alien agents come to negotiate with Unc, and while the narrator and his cousin don't actually see these aliens, they hear their voices and footsteps and witness other evidence of their visits, like wet footprints and wind within the house when there is no wind outside.  The story's tension is undermined by the fact that the aliens come by again and again and nothing is ever concluded, and that weeks go by between cousin's phone call and the story's climax, with the narrator leaving the house to return to Miskatonic U to read up on Cthulhu and co and then coming back to find Unc looking even more like a frog.  The climax takes place behind a door which the narrator and his cousin cannot open until long after Unc has been carried off by Lloiger.  This is one of those stories in which the man we see as the protagonist, the narrator, makes no decisions and has no effect on the plot but is merely a spectator.

Reducing Cthulhu and other alien monster gods from incomprehensible divinity to the status of organized crime figures who cut deals with legitimate businessmen and then send their muscle over in an effort to pressure the guy paying protection money from welching is probably Derleth's worst sin here in "The Sandwin Compact" but there is also the fact that Derleth overdoes everything in this story.  I've already suggested the story is too long and that adding the concept of the four elements is superfluous.  Another example is how he doubles up the terrible things that happen to Unc--he becomes a frog man and he is carried away by winds; having two horrible things happen to a guy doesn't make a story twice as horrifying, instead it dilutes the story, makes it less powerful.  And then we have to wonder why there is a narrator outside the immediate family--the librarian character adds nothing to the story other than giving Derleth a chance to namecheck Miskatonic U and Arkham and The Necronomicon.  The story would be improved if the if the nephew was eliminated and the son was the narrator--his father's sacrifice would be all the more powerful, and the horror of seeing his father turn into a frog and die in an eerie way all the more shocking.

The more I think about "The Sandwin Compact" the worse it seems; when I had first finished reading it I planned to say "The Sandwin Compact" was merely acceptable but writing about it has convinced me that I gotta give it a thumbs down.  Sorry, August.

"Turn Over" by Dorothy Quick

In 2023 we read Quick's Weird Tales cover story about an Irish-American in a love triangle, "The Witch's Mark," and judged it acceptable.  I told you then that "The Witch's Mark" had never been reprinted, but today I see that a Quick collection was put out in 2024, a volume edited by the indefatigable literary scholar S. T. Joshi and titled The Witch's Mark and Others.  Today's Quick tale, "Turn Over," also appears in that book. 

"Turn Over" is a tiresome joke story with a plot like a ridiculous comedy movie, maybe with Jerry Lewis or something.  A rich old man has a family full of irresponsible people whose behavior does not meet his approval.  His granddaughter Celia is promiscuous, going on dates even though she is engaged to the son of Gramps' lawyer.  (Celia's betrothed is our narrator.)  One family member is a drunk.  One is a commie.  And so on; there are a lot of boring and forgettable family members.  Gramps dies and his lawyer reveals the absurd instructions of his will.  His many heirs will receive their inheritances in monthly installments.  Gramps is to be buried in a coffin equipped with an array of electronic devices.  Should Gramps turn over in his grave in reaction to the outrageous behavior of any of his beneficiaries, this event will be detected and reported in the lawyer's office via a bell, and the bad actor will lose this month's installment.

The bell rings again and again as Gramp's heirs misbehave again and again.  Celia, now the narrator's wife, goes out dancing with another man while our narrator is working late.  The drunk gets drunk.  One heir signs a business deal Gramps would not have approved of.  The commie donates to the CPUSA and then plots a bombing.  And so on.  Quick's story has no real climax or twist.  The family members decide to change their ways, and they do so, and the ringing stops, and they get the dough.

I'd like to endorse a story that offers the valuable advice that you should refrain from being a faithless slut, a self-destructive boozehound or a Bolshevist terrorist, but I cannot; "Turn Over" is absurdity and tedium--thumbs down!

**********     

Ouch, three bad stories.  Derleth's story has a clear narrative but is full of what I would consider poor artistic choices, while Bloch's and Quick's stories are so diffuse and so lacking in substance I had a hard time focusing my attention on them.  A definite rough patch in our journey through the pages of Weird Tales.  We have to hope McIlwraith will marshal a higher grade of material as we slither forward into 1941.