Coblentz's story, "The Victory of the Vita-Ray" is probably a lame joke or a broad satire, so I'm skipping it, even though it is advertised on the cover (curiously, without mentioning Coblentz's name.) Should you be hankering for MPorcius commentary on Coblentz, I offer my blog posts about the stories "Triple-Geared," "The Daughter of Urzun," and "The Man from Xenern" and the novel Hidden World.
I blogged about Keller's 1934 "The Golden Bough" back in 2020. (It says "NO REPRINTS" on the table of contents, but this is a reprint. Tsk, tsk.)
I read a book version of "Herbert West: Reanimator" long ago and don't feel like reading it again yet.
Damon Knight's contributions to the issue are illustrations that include skulls and bones in their sort of flat, wood-cut like compositions.
So that leaves us with Bob "Psycho" Bloch; the man who is likely mainstream America's favorite SF writer, Ray Bradbury; Fritz "Grey Mouser" Leiber; and one of the most distinctive of SF illustrators, Hannes Bok. We'll read these gents' stories in their 1942 versions.
"Nursemaid to Nightmares" by Robert Bloch
"Nursemaid to Nightmares" is an irritating joke story. Margate the eccentric millionaire collects mythical creatures, and he doesn't chain them in a dungeon to work experiments on them or shanghai them into his evil army or anything cool like that; Margate treats the monsters as houseguests and assures the narrator that they are "goodhearted." The monsters are an occasion for Bloch to subject us to childish jokes. The millionaire has his guest the vampire's teeth pulled by a dentist. He has the narrator buy his werewolf flea powder, and also directs him to take the werewolf on a walk around the block. The werewolf urinates on a tree that turns out to be a hamadryad. And Bloch doesn't spare us the puns, either:
Jason Harris operated one of the most thriving mortuary chapels in the city. Business was never dead. Mr. Harris himself was always on hand to welcome a fresh customer. That’s the only way he liked his customers—fresh.
There's not much plot to "Nursemaid to Nightmares," just a series of stupid episodes. The narrator helps the vampire buy a new coffin. He and a mermaid start dating. He takes the centaur to the smith to be shod and the centaur manages to get his hands on some beer, gets drunk, and causes a bar brawl.
The final episode, which is foreshadowed clearly, involves a new creature joining the household--Medusa the Gorgon! She turns almost everybody, including Margate, to stone, but the narrator shows her a mirror and turns her to stone. The final gag of this anemic story is the narrator using the various creatures, now statues, to decorate the estate's lawn.
An absolute waste of time--thumbs down! A sequel to "Nursemaid to Nightmares," "Black Barter," appeared in 1943. These two Margate stories were combined to form a novella included in a 1955 issue of Imaginative Tales and in the 1969 collection Dragons and Nightmares.
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| Were people enraged when the book advertised to them with photos of beautiful women turned out to be filled with joke stories? |
"The Candle" by Ray Bradbury
Our protagonist, pale, dark-haired, tall and skinny Jules Marcott, has big problems, which we learn about in dribs and drabs amid the descriptions of his actions and the sights around him. In brief, his wife Helen has left him for his friend Eldridge and will soon be flying to Reno to get a divorce and to marry Eldridge. Marcott looks into the window of an odd little shop, at all the old firearms, thinking of buying a gun and killing Eldridge. But among the weapons is an even more alluring artifact--a blue candle wrought in the shape of a beautiful naked woman. Though unlit, the candle seems to glow, and it draws Marcott into the store almost against his will!
The ugly store owner, whose appearance is in every way the opposite of young Marcott's, explains to Marcott the candle's black power, how it can be used to kill from a distance. Uggo stupidly teaches Marcott the spell before Marcott has passed over any money, and Marcott, who can't afford the announced fee, physically beats down the proprietor and steals the candle.
Marcott comes up with a too-clever-by-half scheme to get Helen to cast the spell and destroy her lover--will Marcott's diabolical plans backfire as we readers expect?
A cynical story in which every character is evil and foolish, a story with solid sex and violence elements. I like it; Bradbury and Kuttner deserve their high reputations. If you prefer the Bradbury of stories like "The Silent Towns" and "The October Game" to the more sentimental Bradbury, check out "The Candle."
A year after Bradbury himself dismissed "The Candle" in print as no good, Peter Haining over in jolly old E reprinted it in the anthology The First Book of Unknown Tales of Horror. It seems this rare tale by Bradbury, which in my opinion is nothing to be ashamed of, has only ever been reprinted in the land of the free and the home of the brave in the first volume of The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury (2011).
"The Hound" by Fritz Leiber
Leiber presents a depressing picture to us in this story. David works in the bargain basement at a department store and is dating a wholesome but "serious, not-too-pretty" salesgirl. He lives with his very sick father and quite sick nag of a mother in an apartment they can't afford to heat properly. He can't sleep because of oppressive thoughts and nightmares involving a wolf; images of wolves have haunted him since childhood, generating fears closely linked to the unpleasantness of early 20th-century urban life--the loud trains and automobiles, the rats, big city smells. The monster wolf in his mind is associated with black grease and oil, the lubricants and power source of modern machinery.
As the story proceeds, David' thoughts of wolves seem to be manifesting themselves in reality, to himself and even to others! Who got into his locker at work and dug through his lunch bag? What was that sniffling his mother heard last night? Did his girlfriend really see a big dog among the throngs at the store? Why is he always finding black grease everywhere?
The story ends sort of inconclusively. David flees the city, in a sort of daze, arrives at a suburban zoo in the dark of night, the cage where the arctic wolves are housed. One of the wolves is no mere wolf, but "malformed," with "eyes" that are "those of no animal." This thing, the monster from his nightmares, chases him back towards the city, its true lair, and eventually it catches up to him, injures him. The attack is witnessed, and the witness says the attacker was nothing like a wolf, but rather like "something from the factories of hell." David has survived the attack, and is relieved that he is not the only one to have seen the monster, that the danger the monster represents is a "danger shared."
Rather than being about a traditional werewolf, this is a story about the horror of modernity--the city, the factory, the machine. "The Hound" is well-written and I like it and I am giving it a thumbs-up, but is the werewolf really a good symbol for urbanism or industrialism or modernity or capitalism or whatever it is Leiber is complaining about here? Isn't the werewolf a symbol of man's animal nature or the barbarism that lurks beneath the veneer of civilization? Does it really make sense to link the wolf with grease and oil, the black goop that makes machines run? Maybe Leiber chooses the werewolf because the werewolf turns its victims into werewolves, the way a commie might say capitalism or modernity "manufacture consent," turn people into cogs in the machine, but vampires and zombies kind of do the same thing, don't they? I guess Leiber just likes the wolf as a symbol--recall when we read that collection The Night of the Wolf?
How do we feel about the more or less hopeful, but absolutely vague, ending? I sort of expected David to be killed, or turn out to be a werewolf, or get turned into a werewolf. I guess Fritz, after painting his horror vision of modern life, wants to suggest we can escape modernity if we all work together to build socialism or return to the land or something like that, but without even hinting at what the solution to modernity might be. I guess the first step is admitting you have a problem.
I have problems with the story's ideology (I loved living in New York City and think motor cars and locomotives and skyscrapers and the market economy are fine) and question its choice of symbols and the nature of the ending and all that, but "The Hound" is well-written and structured and paced and works on an emotional level, so good on Fritz.
"The Evil Doll" by Hannes Bok
Here we have a rare story, a story that it seems was never reprinted.
Maksim is a starving artist! Skinny, subject to bouts of weakness, so poor he has to wire his dilapidated furniture together, whining to his girlfriend Eileen that she doesn't have enough faith in him and that the bourgeoisie are keeping him down. Oy, these creatives, always a pain to have to deal with! (I like that Bok, a painter himself, portrays a painter as an absolute piece of garbage. It can be fun when a writer depicts his own profession in a negative light, and is usually aggravating when people deify or canonize their fellows, the way teachers and journalists always are.)
"I know that my work is good. These art dealers—bourgeois pigs!—how can they understand what I am trying to express? They look at my work—pictures that I have slaved over, sweat blood in the making — and they say, 'Yes, it is good, but will the public understand it?’’’ His voice squeaked in mimicry. "The public! How can it understand what it has never been given the chance to understand?”Maksim refuses to get a real job, and Eileen is sick of financing the production of his unprofitable paintings--she barely has enough money to keep herself fed and sheltered. It looks like they are quits! Before Eileen leaves for good, Maksim convinces her to let him make a doll of her, to serve as a souvenir, a memento of their doomed relationship. This chick is so ingenuous she humors Maksim to the point that she kisses the wax doll and trims a fingernail and a lock of hair for him to integrate into the doll. It isn't long before another woman is telling Eileen that Maksim is a witch and will use the doll to control Eileen, and it isn't long before Eileen realizes that girl was telling the horrible truth!
I liked "The Evil Doll" quite a bit when Maksim was railing against the bourgeoisie and dominating and manipulating women, and when these women were trying to seduce or murder Maksim or commit suicide. But then Bok introduces a new character, a self-described lonely bookworm who is also physically strong and courageous and who takes control of the situation, pushing Eileen around for her own good and also pushing around Maksim to save the day. The scenes with this guy also muddy the waters when it comes to whether the voodoo dolls actually work as advertised, or the women are just suffering psychosomatic symptoms due to the power of suggestion. I'm afraid the bookworm acts inconsistently, sometimes acting as if he doesn't believe in magic and other times acting as if he does, and Bok writes some scenes to suggest the magic is truly effective and others that indicate that the women are victims of their own anxieties, anxieties exploited by Maksim. This bookworm's behavior and personality also aren't as believable and as compelling as those of Maksim, Eileen, and the second woman. This new character really derails the story, in my opinion--it feels like Bok had written himself into a corner and so has this new guy come out of nowhere to resolve the plot, but he does so unconvincingly and unsatisfyingly. Too bad.
I'll call this story acceptable, but it could have been legitimately good if Bok had come up with a better ending, with either Eileen or Maksim determining the outcome by putting into practice some brilliant stratagem or by committing some terrible blunder instead of having some super-competent bookworm with whom readers are expected to identify resolve the plot with ease in a way that is a little confusing. I'll even play intrusive editor, take on the role of a John W. Campbell, Jr. or an H. L. Gold, and tell you my ideas for ending the story. First off, no damned bookworm character for god's sake. Secondly, Eileen and Maksim both die as the climax of a hand-to-hand fight over the doll of Eileen--because Maksim is so sickly and Eileen is so desperate, she is a match for him. Possibilities: She pushes him into a roaring fireplace, but he has the doll of her in his hand, so she burns up just as he does. Or, he falls out a window and every bone in his gaunt body is shattered, but lands on the doll so she gets mysteriously crushed to death back upstairs. Or, he falls in the river and drowns and, because he has the doll with him, she also, inexplicably, drowns while on dry land. If we want Eileen to live, maybe use the fire idea but instead of burnt to a crisp, Eileen is only horribly scarred for life, having reached into the fire to retrieve the doll before it is entirely consumed--her arm and face are ruined, but she lives on, her hideous scars a constant reminder of her brush with the supernatural! (It is too bad Bok didn't send this story to Henry Kuttner!)
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Bloch is doing his comedy thing, which I do not appreciate, especially in a story with no plot that is just a series of wretched gags. Compare to Bloch's much later "ETFF," which we read two years ago. Bok's story starts out competent, with solid black magic and exploitative sexual relationship material, but then he muffs the landing. Disappointing. Leiber's story is well-written and takes a strong stand, but I think today's biggest success is the Bradbury-Kuttner collab, which portrays horrible human relationships, gore, and black magic quite compellingly. The exasperating Bloch aside, this has been a solid chunk of World War II-era weirdness. Stay tuned as we continue our journey through the weird of the 1940s, marveling at the jewels and excoriating the dross.
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