Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading stories from the first issues of Weird Tales, those with 1923 cover dates. Today we'll tackle stories by Otis Adelbert Kline, whose "The Phantom Wolfhound" we read in our last episode.
"The Thing of a Thousand Shapes"
This here is a serial published in two parts across the first issue of
Weird Tales, the March 1923 number, and the second, the April 1923 ish. This early artifact of the weird has not been reprinted so I'm afraid we can't count on it being a blockbuster, but who knows, maybe we will enjoy it anyway--book editors aren't always right, after all.
The narrator's only relative, Uncle Jim, has just died at the young age of forty-five. Uncle Jim financed the narrator's education so he could get an office job--the narrator's parents died in a fire when he was twelve. Uncle Jim lived on a big farm but left its operation to others--he was an amateur scientist who devoted all his time to his studies of the occult and psychic abilities.
The narrator goes to the farm where he has bizarre experiences that suggest Uncle Jim is trying to contact him from the beyond! He is also surprised to learn that Uncle Jim left explicit instructions not to bury him or do anything to preserve his body until there is incontrovertible evidence that it is decaying. Strange animals are seen about the house, a big white cat and a big bat, creatures which disappear soon after being spotted.
The next day one neighbor falls ill, and another's wife dies--the community begins to suspect Uncle Jim is a vampire who casts his soul into bats and felines and feeds on the living! At night, sitting with his uncle's corpse, the narrator beholds an astonishing apparition. An amoeba bigger than your fist appears on the floor, crawls around, then transforms into a trilobite, then a starfish! The vision transforms again and again, each time into a more advanced form of life (at least in Kline's view--he has a porpoise evolve into a lizard, which is backwards, or we might say orthogonal--maybe Kline thought a porpoise was a fish?), eventually taking the form of an ape man and then going to cave man with a club to Roman soldier with a javelin to 18th-century soldier with a musket. The apparitions disappear when the wind of the thunderstorm we expect to find in these kinds of stories hurls a broken branch into a window, breaking it.
Thus ends the first installment of "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes."
The narrator falls asleep and dreams he is a caveman pursued by a dinosaur through a jungle of giant fungi. When he wakes up, he sees more strange apparitions, disembodied hands apparently signaling him, then a menacing figure that approaches him. The narrator flees outside, runs into the road and is hit by a car. When he comes to in the morning, a beautiful girl is tending to him. She and her father, a college professor who studies psychic phenomena and was friends with Uncle Jim, were coming by to pay their respects to the deceased when they hit the panicked narrator.
The doctor who sets the narrator's broken ribs looks over Uncle Jim's cadaver and finds that no decomposition has yet taken place.
The local people are up in arms, many having fallen ill, some fatally, and the mob demands the narrator surrender Uncle Jim's body to them so they can drive a stake through its heart. This will be a real tragedy, as the professor is sure Uncle Jim is alive, in a state of catalepsy or suspended animation. The prof helps unravel what is going on, giving a lecture on the subconscious mind and one on "psychoplasm"--oy, Kline used these same phenomena as the basis of "The Phantom Wolfhound." Anyway, all the apparitions are said to be products of Uncle Joe's subconscious bringing to life ectoplasm.
(Kline insists on saying "psychoplasm" instead of "ectoplasm" and "objective mind" and "subjective mind" instead of "conscious mind" and "subconscious mind," which I found a little annoying.)
Uncle Jim's subconscious is sending telepathic messages to the narrator's subconscious, and the prof figures out how to expose these messages to the conscious world. He directs the narrator to hold hands with his daughter (sounds good), a woman who is not only a looker but adept at automatic writing. Sure enough, after dad hypnotizes her by making passes with his hands and holding a mirror in front of her face, this beauty facilitates conversations between the subconscious minds of the two men by mindlessly writing down each man's dialogue. These conversations are not very interesting, merely providing assurance that Uncle Jim is, as we have been told already, alive but cataleptic.
The mob of superstitious farmers who believe in vampires (unlike logical college professors, who know vampires are a myth and instead believe only in rational facts like that ectoplasm that can be turned into animals by the subconscious minds of people in comas) arrives to put a stake through the cataleptic Uncle Jim. The prof and his gorgeous daughter trick the mob into putting a stake through an empty lidded coffin. Then Uncle Jim wakes up, just fine. We are told that all the illness and deaths among the local community have nothing to do with Uncle Jim, its all a coincidence, the work of a brand new disease that is hitting the area. As the story ends the narrator is going to leave behind office work in the city and bachelorhood to become business manager of Uncle Jim's farm and husband of the professor's daughter.
"The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" is not good. The main character does not do much of anything, just spectates. The real protagonists of the story, the professor and his daughter, the people who have special knowledge and special skills and who make the decisions and perform the actions that save the day, do not appear until the second half of the story. Most of the weird stuff in the story has no effect on the plot--the dream of being a dinosaur-fleeting caveman, the vision that dramatizes evolution, the use of automatic writing to exploit subconscious telepathy, are all just padding.
Thumbs down! Book editors were right to pass on this cobbled-together mess.
"The Corpse on the Third Slab"
"The Corpse on the Third Slab" debuted in the July-August edition of
Weird Tales. In our own 21st century it has been reprinted in the Italian magazine
Providence Tales, and in the American anthology
Horror Gems: Volume 17.
This is not a gem but merely an OK filler story. A corpse was stolen from the morgue recently, so an Irish cop is assigned the duty of watching over the room with the cadavers from dusk til dawn. His friend, a "wop," has provided him some booze to keep him company. Our guy keeps thinking he sees or hears one of the corpses shifting around. After falling asleep on the job, a sound wakes him, and that suspicious corpse walks up to the cop and talks about how he got killed. The policeman can't move a muscle, can only sit still and listen to this living dead monologue--is this just a dream? Having said tis piece, the corpse returns to its slab. The cop, now able to move, goes over to the slab but slips and falls unconscious upon hitting his noggin on the hard floor. The luck of the Irish is with him--he wakes up just before the chief and the morgue staff arrive. The conversation between the police chief and the coroner reveals that the murder described by the corpse last night really happened--it wasn't a dream after all!
Pedestrian but not incompetent, silly but memorable in its slapstick and exploitation of ethnic stereotypes.
"The Cup of Blood"
This one comes from the September 1923 issue of
WT, the one with the cover depicting a woman with nice shoes about to be mauled by the king of the beasts We've already read a story from this one,
Farnsworth Wright's tale of people driven to suicide by forbidden knowledge disseminated by a creepy Oriental artifact. In addition to the aforementioned 2019
Horror Gems: Volume 17, Kline's "The Cup of Blood" was included in the 1975 Kline collection
The Bride of Osiris and Other Weird Tales as well as a 2023 German anthology of stories from early issues of
Weird Tales, so perhaps we can hope this piece is superior to the disjointed and tiresome "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" and the mediocre "The Corpse on the Third Slab." Germans are known for their high standards and meticulous judgement, aren't they?
Well, "Cup of Blood" feels better written and more adult, more serious and less exploitative, than the two other stories we read today, and is certainly better constructed than "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," but it also feels old fashioned and a little boring. I guess a more respectable story than "The Corpse on the Third Slab," but less amusing and less memorable, so approximately as good, meaning merely acceptable.
Our narrator and his friend are American veterans of World War I hiking through Scotland. After being acquainted with the long convoluted story of how the local castle became haunted, they decide to camp within its walls. It seems a few hundred years ago an old tyrannical noble married a pretty young woman and at about the same time appointed a young cleric to handle the local parish or chapel or whatever. The laird eventually learned that his wife and the minister had known each other, been in love, before her marriage, and wrongly suspected they were conducting an adulterous affair behind his noble back. So he came up with an elaborate means of punishing them involving sealing them up in the wall or something. To this day, the locals think the ghosts of these three people still haunt the castle and avoid the ruins like the plague.
The two doughboys set up camp inside the castle and Kline spends a lot of time describing the place and the hikers' mundane camping activities. The men split up and the narrator's friend fails to return in a timely fashion and so, during a thunderstorm, the narrator looks for his comrade. It takes him a while, but eventually the narrator finds his friend--this guy fell into what amounts to a trap and found himself injured and confined in a secret room where he uncovered clues that explained all that went on with that love triangle long ago. My eyes were kind of glazing over, so maybe I am making a mistake, but I felt like the clues this guy accidentally found at the cost of a broken leg just confirmed what we already suspected.
"The Cup of Blood" feels long and slow and nothing about it is very compelling, but I suppose there aren't any major blunders in it.
**********
Not great. We'll probably be reading the rest of Kline's 1920s Weird Tales work as we continue our trek through the unique magazine's early days; hopefully those stories will be better.
It's been five or six Weird Tales posts in a row, so we'll see if we can get some "real" science fiction with rocket ships, space suits, and speculations about life in the future lined up for next time. In the mean time, look out for those thunderstorms and all that ectoplasm you know is out there, just lurking in the spaces between the mundane atoms, waiting to be activated by your subconscious.
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