Weird Tales, March '43: Derleth, Kuttner, & Bloch

We continue to creep through Weird Tales!  Last time we read four stories from the January 1943 issue, and today we've got three tales from the issue dated March 1943, the second of the six issues of the Unique Magazine published that year.  Big names today: Arkham House co-founder August Derleth; fixture at Astounding as well as Weird Tales, Henry Kuttner; and script writer for Joan Crawford's Strait-Jacket, Robert Bloch.  A still bigger name, Ray "Martian Chronicles" Bradbury, has a story in this issue we read a few years ago, "The Wind."

"No Light for Uncle Henry" by August Derleth

This is a decent ghost/revenge story with no dumb mistakes.  Mild recommendation for "No Light for Uncle Henry."

Edward is a young man who runs into financial trouble and has to move in with his Uncle Herbert, in the house Herb once shared with his brother Henry, who died a year or so ago.  Derleth stresses that Edward is a "prosaic," boring, staid, square.  Edward doesn't chase women or hang around with friends or get drunk or read popular fiction, as soon as he finds a new job he just goes to work and in the evenings works in the garden on his Uncle's property.

Uncle Herbert warns Edward not to go into dead Uncle Henry's room, and by no means should he shed any light in there.  But one day while gardening Edward looks up into the window of Henry's room and thinks he sees somebody or something.  He goes inside to investigate the dark room, and lights a match to get a better look.  On the wall he sees a shadow--not of himself, but of a seated man, a very fat man!  Hey, wasn't Uncle Henry a big fatso?

The ghost of Uncle Henry starts communicating with Edward in his dreams, but Edward is not the kind of man to believe his dreams and follow the orders of a dead relative who appears in those dreams.  So Henry has to exert direct influence over Edward.  Edward becomes more assertive, less square--he talks back to the boss at the office, he starts reading detective novels, he brings some booze home.  Edward, under supernatural and alcoholic influence, facilitates Uncle Henry's vengeance on his greedy and murderous brother and we readers and Edward learn what foul deeds Herbert committed to earn the hatred of his obese brother Henry.

"No Light for Uncle Henry" was reprinted in the Derleth collections Something Near (1945), that book's 1951 Argentinian edition, and in The Sleepers and Other Wakeful Things: The Ghost Stories of August Derleth (2009).

"Under Your Spell" by Henry Kuttner

Here we have a long joke story.  Forty-something Tinney owns a shop in New York City that sells magic supplies and practical jokes (like itching powder) and that sort of thing.  He advertises for an assistant, and a preternaturally good-looking man, blond curls and blue eyes and a sort of nasty smile, shows up whom we quickly realize is Hermes/Mercury; this god, who uses the pseudonym Quinten Silver, is on vacation from Mount Olympus, a place, we learn, that is pretty boring.  When another man arrives hoping to take the position, Mercury reduces this poor bastard to ashes with a lightning bolt.  Mercury then uses his magic to bilk a customer and to drive off an annoying woman.  Then he drives off Tinney himself, from his own store, when Tinney, despite all the evidence, refuses to admit his new employee is truly a god.  When Tinney tries to enlist aid from the police or friends in the task of ejecting Mercury from his establishment, wacky hijinks triggered by mercury's magic ensure that nobody will help Tinney.

If you can't beat them, join them.  Tinney starts coming up with ways to profit from working arm in arm with a god.  He is sick of running a store, and doesn't like his landlord, but has already paid for a four-year lease on the shop, and convinces Mercury to destroy the shop with a meteor.  This liberates Tinney from the lease (insurance covers all that lost itching powder), but Tinney is injured in the meteor strike and hospitalized, and the meteor contained diamonds, so the landlord whom Tinney resented is richer than before.  (This portion of "Under Your Spell" is in the tradition of stories about people who get three wishes or make a deal with the devil and suffer because they didn't word their request perfectly clearly, and a minor character who witnesses the god's magic at work does mistake Mercury for Satan.)

Mercury gives the money hungry Tinney an "inexhaustible purse;" whenever Tinney opens it, there is 200 bucks inside.  The money is not created, but teleported from some other person's property into the purse--magic, and his greed, have made Tinney a thief.

All financial worries behind him, Tinney wants to retire, but Mercury wants to see the world and so begins preparations and launches publicity stunts for a Tinney the Great worldwide stage tour.  The god promises the tour will only last two years and he will do all the real work--Tinney just has to memorize lines and gestures, all the spectacle will be produced by Mercury with trivial ease.  Tinney, scared of the ruthless and amoral deity, has to agree to this onerous program, but he schemes behind Mercury's back with another magician, a stage performer who is far from eager to compete with the act Mercury can put on.  (I guess Kuttner has dropped the whole idea that Mercury isn't letting Tinney tell people about Mercury's identity.)  

The moment of crisis comes during Tinney the Great's debut performance at a big Manhattan theatre.  Right there on stage, where Mercury has been conjuring mermaids, centaurs, a harpy, a dragon, and still more mythological creatures, Tinney's accomplice tries to trick the god into a death trap.  As it turns out, all of these selfish characters suffer disaster when their shenanigans draw the attention of Circe the witch, whose brunette beauty Kuttner compares to that of Theda Bara.

I like the theme that power is corrupting and all that, but "Under Your Spell" is mostly a joke story and I am no fan of joke stories as you know and the narrative doesn't really hold together all that well, doesn't really flow smoothly.  The fact that Mercury murders an innocent stranger right at the start of the story diminishes the drama of the piece--corruption in a story should escalate, and the fact that association with Mercury turns Tinney into a thief in the middle of the story and then an attempted murderer near the end is no big deal because he has already seen Mercury kill a man immediately upon meeting him and didn't do a thing about it.  Why Kuttner has the rival applicant get killed instead of just teleported away (that is what Mercury does to the rival magician who tried to murder him on stage) I am not quite sure.  To establish that the gods are amoral, I guess.  But then why not also slay the rival magician?  Another problem is that the debut performance should be the big climax, the plot she be resolved there and the story should end there.  But the entire Circe business comes after the stage show and feels tacked on, less exciting and dangerous than the actual show.

One interesting aspect of the story I will point out is that Kuttner assumes readers are familiar with the Odyssey and know what Circe is all about.

Barely acceptable filler.  "Under Your Spell" has only been reprinted in a small press Kuttner collection in 1991 that I suspect is just photocopies from old magazines.

"A Bottle of Gin" by Robert Bloch

Another jocular story.  Collins, a young guy, short, who loves booze, works at the museum.  His boss, who has a huge collection of valuable art objects and artifacts, sends Collins to an antique store to buy a rare Korean vase.  While Collins is there, robbers appear and murder the store owner and Collins flees with the vase.  For three days the three thieves pursue Collins, the four of them zig zagging back and forth, jumping on and off subway cars.  We don't learn it until close to the end of the story, but Collins undertook this mission with such vigor because his boss promised a raise if he succeeded and Collins needs moolah to marry his sweetheart.  

When Collins finally gets to the museum, to his boss' office, which is stuffed full of books and valuable items, Collins is dying for a drink.  When he asks what is in all these bottles, he thinks his boss says "gin" when in fact he said "djinn," and so Collins ends up with a genie in his stomach.

Having the djinn in his stomach helps Collins deal with the three thugs when they catch up to him, but is very uncomfortable and Collins struggles to figure out how to get rid of the djinn.  Back home, the three criminals a bloody mess behind him, Collins drinks from a bottle of his own gin and gets the djinni drunk.  Then, after abandoning a plan to commit suicide, he tricks the djinn into getting trapped in the bottle of gin.  Then the girl appears and they plan to marry and live happily ever after.

I'm going to say this filler falls below the acceptable mark and deserves a thumbs down.  The rules governing how the djinn operates don't seem consistent, and neither does Collins' personality and motivations, or at least that stuff is not explained well.  And I am bored from a lifetime of exposure to fiction about verbally crafting wishes and deals with the devil and the djinn or Satan outsmarting mortals or being outsmarted by grammatical legalisms or whatever, and there is a lot of that business in this repetitive story, though it doesn't really go anywhere.

"A Bottle of Gin" was stoppered up in the 1998 Bloch collection Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies, which was translated into Italian in 2000. 

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An underwhelming leg in our long trek through the pages of Weird Tales.  The Kuttner and Bloch stories left very little impression on me, even as I was reading them.  There was quite little in these tales that grabbed me emotionally or intellectually, a dearth of arresting images, and I kept wondering why the characters were doing what they were doing.  Of course I think it is because these stories lack any weight because they are meant to make the reader laugh and not think or feel, but could it be that I am suffering weird fatigue?  Is it time to read about spacemen and energy weapons, about speculations on what life in the future or in some other solar system might be like?  Could be.