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.