"The Crystal Bullet" by Donald Wandrei
"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.
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.
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:
"Monstrosity of Evolution"
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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!
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