Today three stories, one each by Robert Bloch, the creator of Norman Bates; Fritz Leiber, the creator of The Gray Mouser; and medical man David H. Keller, squirm under our bloodshot eyes. Each of today's trio of terror debuted here in the September '42 issue of D. McIlwraith's magazine, but the issue includes another story of note that is a reprint, a 1934 tale by California-based titan of the weird, Clark Ashton Smith. We read "The Epiphany of Death," which appears here under the title "Who Are the Living?", back in 2019, which I guess means we've already fulfilled the criteria of our long term campaign when it comes to this issue, but here at MPorcius Fiction Log we like to do the side quests!
"A Question of Etiquette" by Robert Bloch
Our narrator is a census taker going from door to door asking people questions. He's a real comedian who makes extravagant jokes centered on how sick he is of this job--these jokes would fit in perfectly in one of those Henry Miller or Charles Bukowski I-am-a-smart-guy-who-hates-his-job things. The narrator comes to a house inhabited by a woman who claims to be a witch centuries old. She uses sorcery to trap the narrator in the house and the joke quotient diminishes and the horror level escalates radically.
Held captive, the witch's familiar, a pretty disturbing monster, spreads magic ointment all over the narrator's body. The witch strips naked and puts this goop on herself. Then they fly to a hill where a Black Mass is being held--the witch has shanghaied the narrator because a mass must have thirteen members, and one of the witches can't make it.
Satan is summoned, and Bloch does a creditable job describing the Devil, but undermines his work a little with a satirical take on Satan and witches, suggesting they are like businesspeople with ledgers who are just doing business--the Black Mass is like the board meeting of a business firm. Commies will appreciate this, I guess, but it feels kind of out of place.
The witch who couldn't make it inexplicably shows up, and Satan is enraged because you can't have 14 at one of these meetings. The witch who kidnaped the census taker is killed and the narrator is compelled to take her place. The interesting thing, probably the best thing in the story (unless it is the familiar), is that the narrator's soul is implanted into his captor's nude body--he is now a woman, potentially immortal and ever youthful, and the monstrous familiar is now his servant. How can he escape the horrible fate of being a woman? By doing what she did, incurring Satan's wrath and having himself replaced! He begins to plot the capture of one of his work colleagues, the census taker whom he knows by name who will have to come to his new lair to collect the data he, the narrator, failed to report to census HQ--our protagonist has become as evil as the witch whose body is his prison, ready to exploit others with black magic to fulfill his goal, that goal being the liberation of himself from a foul predicament through carefully premediated self-destruction.
There are some plot issues with the story, like the question of why the witch who said she wouldn't show up then did show up--she must have known a sabbath of fourteen would anger Satan and 'ol Scratch would kill somebody, and wouldn't she be the one most likely to be punished? Also noteworthy are the cultural references Bloch includes, such as to Superman and Sam Walter Foss' "The House by the Side of the Road," which must have been famous at the time because Bloch refers to it without naming the author, assuming you are familiar with it. Some readers may look askance at the narrator's view of what witch hunting in the past was like (he believes "millions" were burned in the "medieval days"), though I guess this ahistoricism is OK for fiction. The title of the story hints the tale may be a satire of social norms and rules, a reminder that conventions such as how you shouldn't refuse a host's offer of tea are irrational and maybe even burdensome or dangerous.
The good parts are good enough that they outweigh the bad, so I'm giving "A Question of Etiquette" a grade slightly above acceptable, just poking into the "good" range.
"A Question of Etiquette" was reprinted in several anthologies, including two by Kurt Singer: the man's oft-reprinted and variously named anthology of Ray Bradbury and Robert Bloch stories as well a volume of stories by several authors that goes by Terror Tales and, in abridged form, The Day of the Dragon and Other Tales of Terror.
Our narrator Tom and his wife Helen are driving through a terrific nighttime thunderstorm in the South. Tom wants to stop and see his old friend, whom he has not seen in over a year, Malcolm Orne, a "midget." Helen doesn't like midgets, but the weather is so horrible she agrees to stop at the old mansion.
As they open the door to the mansion, a huge "Negro" servant fires a shotgun near their feet, apparently panicked by their approach. Luckily, none of the shot strikes Tom or Helen. Another surprise is that Malcolm Orne is no midget, but a giant who towers over even his oversized, though skittish, black servant.
At dinner Orne describes how he came to be a man over six feet tall. But first, he introduces Tom and Helen to his beautiful blonde wife, Cynthia. Leiber dwells on the psychology of Orne and Cynthia. As a midget, Orne was bitter and resentful, hated the world because people found him disgusting or felt sorry for him and women had no desire for him. Now that he is bigger than everybody else he is arrogant and bullies everybody, seeking to master and achieve revenge on the world that was cruel to him. Cynthia is so cowed she never speaks, but passes a warning note to Helen.
Orne had an older brother, Marvin, a genius scientist. Marvin Orne developed a process to make animals or people grow--the process also altered the subjects' cells, including brain cells, increasing intelligence. As various clues, including in-your-face meta clues like the story title and Boris Dolgov's illustration, make clear to us, Malcolm Orne isn't the only surviving subject of his brother's experiments--Martin Orne also grow a spider to the size of a mastiff and rendered it intelligent enough to follow commands.
The horror centerpiece of the story comes when Tom discovers the spider's web, which fills much of an oversized living room that Malcolm Orne has shut up. Malcolm lied when he claimed his brother is dead--Martin is in fact alive but entwined in the web, as he has been for months! As for Cynthia, as a means of punishing her, Malcolm Orne directs his pet spider to bind and suspend her in the web for periods of time, and she is thusly being punished today and hangs among the bodies of various dead or paralyzed animals, future sources of food for the eight-legged monster.
Among nice guy Tom, intelligent wife Helen, brutalized blonde bombshell Cynthia, vengeful Malcolm and genius Martin Orne, the two bullied black servants, and the giant spider, who will survive the fiery action climax? Who among the survivors can hold his or her head high at having saved him or herself and others, and who will simply experience the relief at having been rescued? Among the dead, who will go down fighting and who will simply be laid low?
No big deal, but a decent gory entertainment that tries to leverage reader anxieties related to race, sex, biology, psychology, social status, confinement, envy, jealousy, etc. "Spider Mansion" can be found in the Leiber collection The Black Gondolier and Other Stories and Leo Margulies' anthology Weird Tales, which was translated into German.
"The Bridle" by David H. Keller
The narrator of "The Bridle" is a young doctor whose first practice is in a tiny impoverished and isolated Pennsylvania town, a sort of hillbilly milieu. In his capsule history of the little town, the doctor portrays the pioneers who first cleared and settled the region pretty negatively, depicting a beautiful landscape of trees wrecked by these white men who proceed to exhaust the soil so their descendants cannot make much of a living off farming--each harvest is smaller than the last, so the intelligent and ambitious of those descendants leave the village and those who remain starve.
We hear about various people in the penurious community, how this one is diseased and that one is a shyster and this one has birth defects. (Maybe this story counts as "hicksploitation.") An ugly young man with epilepsy is in love with a striking young beauty--she just makes fun of him because of his epileptic fits. The town blacksmith, an educated man, tells the doc that the beauty is a witch; of course the narrator scoffs at this. The narrator quickly develops a crush on this beauty, and is relieved when she vanishes from town--maybe he can get her out of his mind.
The epileptic somehow acquires a beautiful horse, but he mistreats the beast and it contrives to kill him, pounding him to goop with its hooves. The narrator buys the killer horse, but it quickly escapes him.
The next day the beautiful witch reappears at home, in bad shape, sick, her limbs injured. Of course we readers immediately recognize that she was the horse whom the epileptic cruelly mistreated, damaging its hooves by ordering the blacksmith to fit horseshoes that were still hot. Her drunken father is ready to beat the sick girl to death, and the narrator carries her away, declaring, on the spur of the moment, almost against his will, that he will marry her. Has the witch used her black powers to seduce the doctor?
The key to what is going on is the bridle worn by the horse that slew the epileptic and then escaped the doctor; at the suggestion of the blacksmith, the doctor takes the bridle to New York City to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to have the armor expert look at it. It is a magical item of terrible evil, fashioned from human skin by Satan worshipping witches, used by workers of black magic to turn men into horses for them to humiliatingly ride! The epileptic clearly used it to transform the witch girl into a horse, turning the tables on her after she had used it on him.
Can the doctor tame the sexy witch girl whom the epileptic failed to tame? Will he turn her into a Christian, or will she use her gorgeous body and black abilities to recruit the doctor into the legions of the Devil?
Interestingly, as in Bloch's story, the "normal" middle-class narrator who starts out the story not believing in magic is corrupted by the end of the story and seeks to use witchcraft to resolve the plot--the doctor gets the bridle into the girl's mouth, turning her into a horse, and tries to tame her while she is in that condition, risking at any moment being trampled into jelly as was the epileptic.
A pretty good black magic story that includes one of my favorite themes, the femme fatale. One of the interesting elements of the story is its apparent contempt for country folk and pessimistic view of the pioneers who tamed the American wilderness and lay the foundations for today's world-dominating neoliberal behemoth, illustrating the misanthropy and pessimism that is the main focus of the wikipedia page on Keller. (Keller seems to have lots of enemies among those who write about speculative fiction, but I have liked or given "acceptable" ratings to like a dozen of his stories and only condemned one.)
"The Bridle" was reprinted in Keller collections, and a French anthology.
Keller's story is today's best, it having the least mistakes and feeling the most fresh, the most surprising--a bridle that turns you into a horse feels newer to me than a giant spider or an urban witch. Leiber's story is standard-issue, but good, while Bloch's more risk-taking, more idiosyncratic story is a combination of good and not-so-good elements. All three stories reside above the "acceptable" category, though, making this a leg of our Weird Tales journey that is leaving me with a good feeling.
Our weird trek continues next time--stay tuned!
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