Farnsworth Wright: "The Closing Hand," "The Snake Fiend" and "The Teak-Wood Shrine"

As I keep telling you, I aspire to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales.  But you may have noticed that I only ever seem to read stories from issues of the magazine printed after January 1, 1930, but that the first issue of Weird Tales has a cover date of March, 1923.  Well, today we take action to begin filling that gap by reading three stories from the Unique Magazine published in 1923, stories written by the most famous editor of the magazine, Farnsworth Wright.  Wright did not actually begin editing WT until late 1924, so these stories appeared during the editorship of Wright's predecessor, Edwin Baird.

"The Closing Hand" 

Alright, a story from the very first issue of Weird Tales!  We won't be lingering on this inaugural issue of the magazine of the bizarre and unusual for long, as Wright's story here occupies two pages and there is room left over for an advertisement on the second page.  Weird Tales Volume 1, Number 1 does include the first installment of a serial by Otis Adelbert Kline, so maybe we will return to it someday; we'll see.

"The Closing Hand" is barely a story, more like an anecdote with lots of essentially superfluous description.  On a stormy night, two sisters are trying to sleep in a house reputed to be haunted.  They just moved in today; their parents will arrive tomorrow.  We hear all abut the house's reputation and the sounds of the wind and all that.

The sisters hear movement downstairs.  One of them goes to investigate.  She is very late in returning, and sister #2 sits in bed terrified.  Something creeps up the stairs, into the bedroom--is it a ghost, a monster, a killer?  No, it is sister #1, dying from a stab wound administered by a burglar whose despoiling of her family's property she interrupted--the sisters hold hands as sister #1 dies.  

We'll call this mere filler; it isn't bad, just slight, and is more of a crime story than a weird story.  I guess in some ways, "The Closing Hand" is more disturbing than a story with vampires or zombies or alien gods from other dimensions--there are no vampires or zombies, and we have yet to see concrete evidence of alien visitors to Earth (though it could happen any day!), but there are thousands of burglaries and dozens of homicides every day here in the United States, and this story reminds you of that.  Stay safe out there!

In 2020, "The Closing Hand" was reprinted in an Italian magazine, Providence Tales.  One of the fun things about maintaining this blog has been realizing how robust a speculative fiction scene there is in Italy, how Italian fans have embraced English-language science fiction, fantasy and horror and how handsomely Italian publishers present American and British spec fic to Italian readers.

"The Snake Fiend"

The second issue of Weird Tales has a different look than the first, and Wright's included story, "The Snake Fiend," is like three times as long.  Like "The Closing Hand," "The Snake Fiend" is a crime story in which one of the characters scares himself by thinking a mundane danger is a supernatural one.

The theme of "The Snake Fiend" is how passionate, how emotional, how excitable, how superstitious Italians are!  (I know, just after I was saying nice things about them!)  I have noted in the past how, in American weird fiction, Italians sometimes play the role of the superstitious or irrational "other," and here we have another example.  

Italian-American Jack Crimi, a collector of snakes since his youth, falls in love with his friend Marjorie Bressi, but Marjorie is in love with Jack's pal Allen Jimerson.  Jack never reveals his desire for Marjorie, and when Allen and Marjorie get married, Jack continues acting like their buddy, even though his thoughts are dominated by a determination to murder them!

Engineer Allen gets a job in the remote desert and Jack follows the married couple, saying he is going to write a scholarly paper on the rattlesnakes endemic to the region.  Jack collects dozens of the serpents and one day seals up the Jimersons' house and leaves the swarm of venomous reptiles in the house with them while they sleep.  He assumes they will be killed.

The Jimersons get bit, but Allen busts open a window and they escape and are able to recover.  Wright opines that rattlesnake venom is not as deadly as ordinary people assume, and tells us that, despite his life-long familiarity with snakes, Jack shared the ignorance of the common run of humanity.  A few days later the Jimersons go to Jack's shack to visit their friend, whom they do not suspect (they blame a minor character whom Allen gave the sack) and when Jack sees them he thinks they must be ghosts seeking vengeance and he goes insane.

Certainly better than "The Closing Hand" because the plot is driven by the personality and decisions of the protagonist.  Filler, but a higher grade of "acceptable" than "The Closing Hand."  Doesn't look like it has ever been reprinted, though.

"The Teak-Wood Shrine"

"The Teak-Wood Shrine" appears in the sixth issue of Weird Tales, which sports yet another cover design.  Like "The Snake Fiend," this one does not seem to have been reprinted.

The shrine of the title of this two-page story is a wooden box carved by Indians to represent some kind of fat devil and decorated with jewels.  One of the jewels conceals a push button that activates a spring that slides open a little door and reveals something--something the sight of which drives people to insanity, to suicide!  The story details how the shrine falls into the hands of white people, the havoc it wreaks among those who acquire it, the strategies they employ in hopes of rendering themselves immune to its supernatural power, and their efforts to destroy it.  The text comes to us in the form of the dialogue of the shrine's current possessor, who is standing at a bridge with the plan of hurling the cursed artifact into the waters below and is accosted by a friend who seeks to stop her.

This story is pretty good--thumbs up!

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It is fun to read hundred-year old stories that I assume few other people alive today have read, and especially so when they aren't bad.  Hopefully the rest of the 1923 Weird Tales stories we sample will be as entertaining as these.