"The Phantom Wolfhound" by Otis Adelbert Kline
Kline is a somewhat important member of the weird and science fiction communities; he published various stories and novels that appeared in the pulps and in book form, apparently worked at Weird Tales in some kind of assistant editorial capacity, and was for a time Robert E. Howard's literary agent, as well as Carl Jacobi's. I read an Ace paperback edition of Kline's Burroughs pastiche Planet of Peril in the period before the inauguration of this blog and thought it OK, and during this blog's life read his collaborations with E. Hoffman Price "The Spotted Satan" and "The Cyclops of Xoatl;" you can click the links to see what I thought of those. Starting today with "The Phantom Wolfhound," we are going to get better acquainted with Mr. Kline's 1920s work and see if, as the Science Fiction Encyclopedia warns us (promises us?), his fiction is "crudely racist" and "sniggeringly sexist."
Dr. Dorp is an expert on the supernatural. His friend Detective Hoyne brings over a pathetic character, a worn-out skinny man Dorp immediately dislikes, Ritsky of the cold clammy handshake. (You kids living in the post-coronavirus world may not know it, but it used to be that careers, business concerns, and entire empires rose and fell due to how well a guy could shake hands.)
Ritsky tells his improbable story. He killed a dog two years ago and ever since, whatever house or apartment in the Chicago area he moves to, the ghost of a dog haunts him, keeping him from sleeping, allowing him no peace. His servants could hear the dog and have left his employ, except for a deaf woman. Ritsky lives with a 12-year-old niece, who has apparently not heard the dog.
In Chapter II, Kline describes in detail how Dr, Dorp sets up cameras in hopes of catching a photo of the phantom dog, should it be real. In Chapter III Dorp and Hoyne witness the ghost--it comes out of the niece's mouth and floats from her room, down the hall, through the keyhole to Ritsky's door, to take the shape of a dog and terrorize Ritsky. After having done this for over a year, the ghost finally decides to attack Ritsky; Ritsky dies of a heart attack, and the ghost vanishes, leaving behind what appears to be dog slobber; Dorp collects some of the slime.
Chapter IV includes a sort of lecture on ectoplasm AKA psychoplasm AKA teleplasm, and the people who have studied it, including Arthur Conan Doyle. Then we get the explanation for what was going on. Ritsky, editor of a radical newspaper in New York, was given guardianship of the niece when her parents died. The niece had a dog, a present from her parents, and the dog hated Ritsky, and bit him. So Ritsky shot the dog behind the niece's back. The niece doesn't consciously know who shot her pooch, but her subconscious mind figured it out! Energized by the stress of all the trouble the girl had been through and its hatred of Ritsky, the niece's subconscious was able to mobilize the ectoplasm that naturally occurs in the air to create a form with which to achieve revenge by terrorizing Ritsky. In case we didn't already hate Ritsky for being a dog-killing commie, Dorp also reveals that Ritsky was slowly poisoning the niece with small doses of arsenic; he being her closest relative, he'd get her money if she croaked.
Kline finishes the story in an odd way. After Dorp has explained everything, the photos arrive that show Ritsky's last moments, and Kline puts in italics the revelation that the exposures show a ghost dog as if this should be a surprise to us, even though the entire story has been telling us that a ghost dog was haunting Ritsky.
Personally, I am not crazy about the trope in fiction of people performing elaborate activities at the direction of their subconscious selves, murdering people or whatever and then being totally unaware they have done it. In my opinion, it would be more compelling if the niece was somehow deliberately in cahoots with a ghost dog or had become a witch who made a deal with the devil to kill her uncle in self defense or just out of revenge. Of course, Kline's aim is to portray the niece as totally innocent and sympathetic, and Ritsky as totally evil, not to depict the kind of moral ambiguity and troubling trade offs experienced by people in real life who have to fight for their lives or set out on a campaign of vengeance.
As we so often do here at MPorcius Fiction Log, we are giving this story an "acceptable" grade--it isn't bad, but it is pedestrian and there are what I would call missteps. As we read more Kline it will be interesting to see if negative depictions of radicals are a recurring theme in his work. The fact that Ritsky is some kind of left-wing intellectual is just thrown in here in "The Phantom Wolfhound" unnecessarily (perhaps to appeal to readers' supposed hostility to the Bolshevik Revolution and dismay over the recent founding of the Soviet Union--the dog Ritsky murdered is a Russian wolfhound and the niece's name is Olga), but maybe in his other work Kline expands on his political or social ideas?
After lying dormant for almost a century, "The Phantom Wolfhound" sprang back to life in two 21st-century anthologies, one with Chi-town as its theme, the other a "best of Weird Tales" compilation.
"The Gray Death" by Loual B. Sugarman
Our narrator is pissed off at his friend Anthony because his Tony, whom he hadn't seen in quite a while, was repulsed by his new wife. But Tony then explains his reaction was involuntary, a response to seeing the woman all clad in grey, including grey gloves. Tony then explains why he can't stand the sight of gray.
Tony was in the Amazon with a German scientist and some superstitious "natives" as guides. I assume these guides are Indians or maybe Hispanics but the German refers to them with the "n-word;" maybe people in 1923 used that word to refer to any non-whites or maybe this is a reflection of this guy having English as a second language--Sugarman writes the German's dialogue phonetically, so he says stuff like "Ach, dot iss new. I haf not smelled it before. But—I do not lige it. It iss not goot. Smells is goot or bat—und dat is not goot."
This German is smart and brave and fun and willing to risk his life to help others and so forth--Tony is very fond of him, which makes the climactic horror scene of "The Gray Death" all the more powerful. You see, the two men discover a giant fungus monster, a writhing thing Sugarman does a very good job describing. The monster devours organic matter lickety split, as well as metal, but it can't digest silicon, and is confined to its current locale by the fact that it is surrounded by a patch of sand. The German wants a sample of this monster to study, and accidentally gets a tiny spot of the grey stuff on the American's foot, and it starts devouring Tony's foot so quickly that the German has to cut off part of his friend's foot and our guy gets feverish and is bedridden quite a space. Undeterred, the German tries again to collect a sample, but again blunders and Tony has to watch as the grey fungus, in seconds, eats away his beloved pal's arms as he screams in agony. The German begs Tony to shoot him in the head to put him out of his misery.
A solid bit of gross horror. The best or second best of the 1923 Weird Tales stories I have read so far, and the monster makes it legitimately weird, not just a crime story or psychological story like its competition, Mollie Frank Ellis' "Case No. 27."
"The Voice in the Fog" by Henry Leverage
Leverage seems to have been a wacky and nefarious character who spent time in prison and had scores of stories published, but, according to isfdb, only one in Weird Tales, this baby right here, which is promoted by reminding readers that Leverage produced the novel The Whispering Wires.
Paul Richter is the chief engineer on an oil tanker and has travelled aboard the ship all around the world, making some serious cash doing some smuggling and grey market and black market trading on the side. Richter has been plunging that money into making a lady of his daughter Hylda, so he isn't happy when one day he gets home and 27-year-old Hylda is making time with some guy named Gathright, a mere sailor! Richter tells this joker he'll get him a job on his ship, but it's a trap--Richter knocks him out and sticks him in a boiler, then operates the boiler, aiming to cook Gathright to death.
The rest of the story follows various episodes on the ship that lead the reader to believe the flesh and bones of Gathright are causing malfunctions in the ship propulsion systems, and lead Richter to fear the ship is now haunted so that he starts drinking heavily and neglecting his duties. Eventually an amazing coincidence occurs that reveals the truth of Gathright's fate and resolves the plot. Gathright escaped the boiler out another opening, and signed on to a different ship. Months later that ship flounders in a storm and the ship Richter is on rescues Gathright, who is unrecognizable due to a bandage on his face. Gathright of course recognizes the father of the woman he loves--his would-be murderer!--and works some psychological tricks on Richter, then, revealing himself, gets Richter to agree to allow him to marry Hylda.
The happy ending is a little hard to swallow--shouldn't Gathright kill Richter or at least sic the police on him? "The Voice in the Fog" otherwise is quite convincing and well written. A professional piece of work, better than acceptable but not as good as "The Gray Death" or "Case No. 27." I guess it is easier to come up with a good premise and compose the body of a weird story than it is to produce a good ending.
It doesn't look like "The Voice in the Fog" has ever been reprinted.
"The Escape" by Helen Rowe Henze
Another writer with only one isfdb credit about whom you can read at the Tellers of Weird Tales blog. And another story that has not, it seems, ever been reprinted. We're all about the nooks and crannies here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
"The Escape" has a compelling premise--a man who is afraid to sleep in a room with another, to get drunk, or to undergo anesthesia because he fears what he might say when he lowers his guard, relaxes his self restraint. I myself have always worried about what I might say if I started hitting the sauce, or when I had dental surgery or a colonoscopy--I often think things I know will get me in trouble if I voice them. Of course, the guy in the story has it worse than I do--he murdered his wife, and I have yet to murder anybody!
Henze's story is effective in describing this guy's anxiety as he learns he needs an appendix operation and has to decide if he should agree to the surgery the medicos claim is essential. He eventually has no choice but to have the operation, and when he wakes up he worries he has revealed his monstrous sin while under the ether and the police are on the way to the hospital. I thought this guy was going to try to sneak out or fight his way out of the hospital, but instead he comes up with an elaborate means of committing suicide. I'm all for suicide in stories, but somehow the suicide in this one was a let down, both premature (why not try to get away first?) and overly complicated (he takes a sheet and tries to strangle himself by tying the sheet around the bed posts and sticking his head between the head board bars or something like that.) Also, he didn't seem suicidal until the end of the story, after he had survived a threat (appendicitis)--having put one obstacle behind him, shouldn't he have gained confidence that he could survive the next obstacle?
For the most part, the story works, so we're calling "The Escape" acceptable, maybe the high end of acceptable.
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The story by the famous guy is probably the worst of the lot, but it isn't bad, so sampling the fourth issue of Weird Tales has been a good experience. Stay tuned for more weirdness right here at MPorcius Fiction Log--we'll be done with 1923 before you know it!
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