Now our focus, four pieces of fiction by people we have been reading here at MPorcius Fiction Log for some time.
"Drifting Atoms" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman
This will be our eighth Counselman story. Of the seven we have already read (links below), I think I only liked one-- again we are witnesses to the triumph of hope over experience.
"The Unwanted"
"The Black Stone Statue"
"Twister"
"The Girl with the Green Eyes"
"The Cat-Woman"
"Mommy"
"The Web of Silence"
"The Black Stone Statue"
"Twister"
"The Girl with the Green Eyes"
"The Cat-Woman"
"Mommy"
"The Web of Silence"
"Drifting Atoms" is an acceptable cosmic horror story; to be specific, by "cosmic horror" I mean the characters learn the true nature of the universe and it drives them insane. There is also some ancillary racism in the story, which adds some kind of historical value, I guess.
Five childhood friends, now middle-class professionals, regularly meet to play poker and shoot the shit. They are all kind of interested in the supernatural and esoteric. Tonight, one of them talks about how all the universe is nothing but atoms, that different materials are just the same atoms arranged differently. He suggests that the power of the mind is what keeps a chair a chair, a stone a stone, a man a man, implying that he means the mind of God or some similar creator figure, but also suggesting that we mere mortals ourselves have a tiny spark of that divine mind and thus a modest ability to arrange atoms.
Counselman's story is long and the action takes place over a succession of meetings with lots of dialogue full of speculations and lots of descriptions of how the men are sweating or jittery and so forth as they investigate the nature of the universe. One of the guy's uncles, who ended up in an asylum, had a collection of occult books and guy produces one such volume one night and reading it inspires the men to hold something like a seance in which they sit at a table and concentrate in an effort to make a gold watch materialize on the table. Their first effort succeeds in making a spot on the table warm. Then they decide to have a witness for their second attempt and summon a black delivery boy to the apartment. Behind his back they call this young man a "darky" and a "nig" and say that black people are "very sensitive, like dogs." Sure enough, the "Negro" sees a gold watch on the table after the men concentrate on trying to conjure one up, though it vanishes soon after they cease concentrating.
The idea that we are mere atoms that, should God's mind wander, could fly apart into nothing at any moment, has a negative effect on the men's psychology and one ends up in the loony bin and another commits suicide by jumping into traffic. The survivors continue the experiments, and the fear that they might succeed, that soon people the world over will be creating out of thin air ersatz objects and even people (of course men will use this power to conjure their dream girls) with their minds, drives one of them to murder the others to save the world from a nightmare paradigm shift.
Long and slow, but not actually bad. "Drifting Atoms" would be reprinted in 1990 in the anthology When the Black Lotus Blooms. For that edition, like it was a John Lennon boxed set, "Drifting Atoms" was edited to remove slurs used to describe black people, as well as the word "Negro," and the men suggest that "some kids are very sensitive, like dogs." This is your reminder to consult primary sources if you truly want to learn about the past. Armchair Press reprinted the story in 2022 in their collection of Counselman stories, Hostess of Horror and Fantasy, which I do not have access to, so I don't know if in this 21st-century appearance "Drifting Atoms" has been sanitized for your protection.
"The Phantom Pistol" by Carl Jacobi
"The Face in the Wind"
"The Elcar Special"
"The Chadwick Pit"
"The White Pinnacle"
"The Street That Wasn't There" (with Clifford Simak)
"Revelations in Black"
"A Pair of Swords"
"The Cane"
"The Satanic Piano"
"The Gentleman is an Epwa"
"Spawn of Blackness"
"The Elcar Special"
"The Chadwick Pit"
"The White Pinnacle"
"The Street That Wasn't There" (with Clifford Simak)
"Revelations in Black"
"A Pair of Swords"
"The Cane"
"The Satanic Piano"
"The Gentleman is an Epwa"
"Spawn of Blackness"
"The Phantom Pistol" is an OK werewolf story, straightforward and more or less competent. It would be reprinted in the 20th century in the Jacobi collection Revelations in Black as well as a few European anthologies; in our own 21st century it has reappeared in Jacobi collections put out by Weird House Press and Centipede Press.
Our narrator is a British guy who collects old books. He makes a new friend, a guy who collects old pistols. I'm afraid Jacobi's writing suggests he doesn't know much about firearms, using the words "revolver" and "pistol" interchangeably and offering a description of a guy loading a 1712 pistol that feels all mixed up. Anyway, pistol guy buys a decrepit old house in a decayed part of the country and book guy goes to visit him. The narrator finds the villagers all agitated because a wolf or dog has been killing their kids.
The pistol collector is excited to show his bookish friend that he has recently purchased a fancy early 18th-century pistol. Amazingly, this very pistol is described in the gift that book guy has brought his pal, an old book on firearms. The pistol in question, according to the old book, was crafted specifically to destroy werewolves for a continental who had been the victim of a werewolf attack. The firearms expert should have figured this out himself, seeing as the pistol has silver bullets in its case and "Death to the werewolf" inscribed on its barrel, but I guess the print is small and in German besides--give pistol guy a break, he's a Latinist, not a Germanist! The realization that this gun was built to exterminate lycanthropes seems to upset the firearms collector.
Soon after, book guy finds a bunch of books in the house, all of them about the occult. One volume is about how to become a werewolf, and includes notes in English and Latin indicating the firearms collector has indulged in Satanic rituals and become a werewolf. People in these stories always commit some monstrous deed and then explicitly make a record of their crimes right where some other guy can find it.
In my opinion, a strong way of ending the story would be for the book collector to realize he has a duty to God and society to destroy his friend and pursue that weighty task, overcoming or failing to overcome his attachment to his buddy; maybe he does the right thing, maybe he joins his friend in becoming a monster, maybe he gets killed by his friend. Instead, Jacobi has unseen forces, presumably God or maybe the spirit of the man who had the pistol made, compel the narrator against his will to load the special gun and blast his friend as he comes home, mouth dripping with the blood of children. The narrator even succeeds in convincing the authorities that the firearms collector accidentally shot himself while cleaning the pistol, so the book collector doesn't have to pay any price for killing his friend. Taking away a character's agency and liberating him from responsibility for his actions is not good drama, Carl!
The more I think about "The Phantom Pistol" the less I like it. Still, it remains within the broad range of "acceptable."
"Beauty's Beast" by Robert Bloch
I've read over one hundred stories by Robert Bloch. One day I should do a post on Bloch with a list of links to all my now many posts about his work and maybe a list of my top ten favorite Bloch stories, but today is not that day.
"Beauty's Beast" starts off with a reference to the Smith Brothers, which might not land today, and a series of jokes that work because they are about human relationships and not the lame puns I associate with Bloch's sense of humor. Our narrator is going steady with Peg, a vapid woman who dominates him. Walking down the street with our narrator, Peg is enticed into a pet shop by the sight of a puppy; once inside, the "Hindu" proprietor, who tells them that all the animals he sells are sacred in one Eastern religion or other, convinces Peg, perhaps by hypnotism, to buy a monkey (with the narrator's money, of course.) At a party it comes out that numerous women in their circle have recently purchased pets suggested by this Hindu.
The story progresses and we and Peg and the narrator realize that the Hindu is an evil wizard whose pets steal the souls of the women he sells them to--the women fall dead and the comes around to collect the snake or dog or monkey or bird, which is now inhabited by the woman's consciousness. Is Peg doomed to be trapped in the body of a monkey? Can the wizard be defeated? Will Peg's friend, a woman whose soul has apparently been imprisoned in the body of a cobra, achieve revenge on the diabolical subcontinental? We get a somewhat apocalyptic climax, the final confrontation taking place during a torrential downpour and flood that destroys the pet shop and all evidence of these incredible goings-on.
I can mildly recommend this one--you know I like stories about difficult sexual relationships and about black magic, and "Beauty's Beast" is pretty well put together stylistically and structurally. "Beauty's Beast" would be reprinted in the several editions of The Living Demons and in a 1970s French collection of Bloch stories, Parlez-moi d'horreur....
"Altimer's Amulet" by August Derleth
"Altimer's Amulet" appeared in the Derleth collection Someone in the Dark in the same year it was printed here in Weirds Tales, and would go on to be the title story of a 1985 French collection of Derleth stories.
We had a dangerous Hindu in Bloch's tale and here Derleth delivers more weird menace from the mysterious East. But while Counselman portrays a nonwhite as an inferior to be dismissed and Bloch offers a devilish nonwhite figure, and in both stories whites are essentially innocent, Derleth's depiction of nonwhites and whites in "Altimer's Amulet" is more of the exploitative-white-imperialist-gets-an-eerie-comeuppance-at-the-hands-of-the-inexplicable-other variety.
Altimer, the well-known explorer, a man of curiosity and ambition, returns to London with an amulet he stole from a Tibetan temple. To get the artifact, he bribed some priests and sneaked in clad in a disguise and armed with some kind of dagger or sword, I suppose. When the Tibetan charged with protecting the amulet tried to stop Altimer, the Englishman outfought this guardian, cutting off both of the man's hands at the wrist before escaping with the treasure.
Altimer hopes to be knighted for his exploit and for gifting the amulet to the British Museum. But he hasn't gotten out of his Oriental adventure scot-free, it turns out. A package comes in the mail--the head of one of the priests he bribed! The protectors of the amulet are on to him! Another Englishman, an expert on the mysterious East, warns Altimer repeatedly to return the amulet. Altimer refuses, and, sure enough, the severed hands of the man Altimer outfought come after him, retrieving the amulet and strangling the explorer. The punchline of the story is the suggestion that the king had never even noticed Altimer nor heard about the amulet until after Altimer's mysterious death and the amulet's disappearance--Altimer ran the risks that ultimately led him to an early grave pointlessly.
A competent piece of work, maybe we can call it a mildly good filler piece?
**********
None of today's four stories is a failure, but none is spectacular, either. Bloch's is probably the best, with Derleth's in second place; Bloch and Derleth commit no blunders and Bloch's humor, relationships and images are pretty good, actually generating some feeling in the reader. Jacobi makes what I would consider a bunch of mistakes as well as poor choices in his story, and Counselman's tale is too long and slow. I think I enjoyed Jacobi's more than Counselman's while I was reading it, as it moves at a good pace, but, looking back, Counselman's plot holds together better--the characters behave logically and people's fates are determined by their personalities and decisions, so the ending is satisfying, and Counselman is ambitious, putting forth a whole philosophy of how the universe works and speculating on how learning how the universe operates might affect human society and individual people. So we've got Counselman in third place.
An above average issue of Weird Tales. How will the July 1941 issue compare? Stay tuned to find out!
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