we read some "proper" science fiction, two stories about space aliens shipwrecked here on Earth and a story about an eight-year-old girl who has psychic powers that threaten all of humanity. (We also read a story about an upper-middle-class woman who dates a djinni and gets him to expand her real estate holdings and then marry her and father her children, so if that is your bag, check that out.) But today it is back to the weird!
The May 1943 issue of
Weird Tales has an attractive woman on the cover painted by Margaret Brundage. During Farnsworth Wright's reign as editor of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual, Brundage's sexy girls were a staple of the magazine's covers, but under D. McIlwraith's regime such images have been rare, and while we welcome Ms. Brundage's return, we note this painting is quite tame compared to some of
the artist's more
famous efforts. (It is perhaps better composed and painted, though.)
Inside, a long story by P. Schuyler Miller and shorter pieces by August Derleth, Stanton Coblenz, and Ray Bradbury catch the eye. Let's get cracking! If you want to read along, you can probably find a copy of the May 1943 ish of WT on ebay for less than 100 bucks, or you can do like me and read a scan at the internet archive. (Keep in mind that this is the only facet of your life in which you should "do like" embittered misanthropic middle-aged grad-school-dropout MPorcius.)
"John Cawder's Wife" by P. Schuyler Miller
It's Miller time! P. Schuyler Miller's biggest contribution to the speculative fiction world may have been his work as book reviewer for Astounding/Analog from 1945 to 1975, but before performing this service at John W. Campbell, Jr.'s magazine, Miller published a lot of fiction, starting in the early Thirties. I guess I've read five things by Miller and liked four of them, "As Never Was," "Bird Walk," "Forgotten," and "The Cave." (The one I didn't like was "Spawn.") "John Cawder's Wife" was apparently never reprinted, so I guess it doesn't bear the seal of approval of the genre fiction community, but maybe it's an overlooked gem? It is promoted on the cover of WT here, so McIlwraith must have thought it was alright.
"John Cawder's Wife" is actually a pretty good story with decent writing and images, and good relationship and supernatural drama. Thumbs up!
John Cawder is a painter, son of a poet, grandson of a biochemist who did his research in scary jungles. An odd character, young Cawder didn't make many friends in high school and college--his only real pal was Roger Thorne, a mathematician. Thorne hasn't seen Cawder in years; in the period of their separation, Cawder became a world-famous artist, while Thorne developed mathematical theories so complex only half a dozen people can really understand them, but which are revolutionizing our understanding of atoms and the stars. After some European travel, Cawder has disappeared into the American mountains where lies his huge family mansion. The Cawder family estate is surrounded by forbidding fences and armed guards, but Thorne, curious what is up with his old chum, overcomes these obstacles, sneaking on to the grounds and into the mansion to make a surprise visit to his old friend.
Within the mansion, Thorne confronts a bizarre domestic situation. Cawder has a wife, a dark woman with a magnificent curvaceous body and spectacular black hair, a woman whose face has no beauty but is strangely compelling, a woman who is evidently highly intelligent and highly educated and has an air of great maturity. Cawder also has a young blonde secretary with spectacles, and it is obvious that Cawder and this girl are having an affair, and that there is terrible tension between Mr. and Mrs. Cawder. Thorne immediately is drawn to and sympathizes with Mrs. Cawder, especially after she demonstrates some knowledge of his mathematical work.
Eventually Thorne and we readers learn the astonishing truth about the unique Mrs. Cawder--she is an immortal monster, something like a witch, something like a vampire; her husband calls her a lamia. The captivating dark lady feeds off the life force of men, and the more intelligent a man is, the greater his genius, the finer and more satisfying a meal he provides! All through history Mrs. Cawder has gravitated towards the great artists and thinkers; she doesn't just take, though--she has been the muse of many a genius! Mrs. Cawder tries to seduce Thorne, and when he looks into her eyes he sees new mathematical formulae, brilliant solutions to math problems that have stumped him, the keys to astounding new realms of knowledge! Thus it was that the monster inspired Cawder's recent success as a painter, and in the distant past the greatest successes of Leonardo and Shakespeare! (Miller includes lots of Shakespeare references in this story, and he does so pretty effectively.) Cawder's father and grandfather achieved success in their fields thanks to this creature, but they refused to have sex with her--as has Cawder, a bastard and the son of a bastard.
Will our guy Thorne fall under the lamia's spell and lose his health and life but first become the greatest mathematician in history? Will Cawder and his blonde secretary sacrifice Thorne to the monster so they can escape its clutches? Who will live? Who will die? Will any of these characters enjoy a healthy sexual relationship?
A solid weird story; I should probably check out more of Miller's work.
"A Wig for Miss DeVore" by August Derleth
Here we have a broad satire of the fakery that characterizes Hollywood and that seems to suggest that woman, hear her roar, is also characterized by manipulation and deceit. "A Wig for Miss DeVore" feels sort of misogynist, but there is also the sense that Derleth has contempt for men who go to the cinema and buy magazines to ogle pretty girls (and not, I guess,
experience art.) Derleth really lays the contempt on thick in "A Wig for Miss DeVore," essentially telling readers how to feel about the characters rather than giving them room to come to their own conclusions, which really diminishes the ability of the story to emotionally or intellectually engage the reader. At the same time, the man from Sauk City short circuits any suspense his tale might generate by telling us at the start of the story that his vapid characters are doomed.
Sheila DeVore has a voluptuous body, and has used it to become a Hollywood star. Her publicity guy spreads endless lies about her to obscure the fact that she is a selfish and petty bitch who abandoned her family and has no acting ability. Claims that she bought her mother a house are one example (mom, in fact, died alone years ago.) Derleth just comes right out and has the omniscient narrator assert that Sheila has abrogated any right to live. Maybe this is supposed to be funny? (After all, the story title and main character's name are puns.)
She was as selfish as an inhibited pack-rat, and had never heard of moral scruples. As for ethics — there was no room for ethics in her profession. She was, in short, one of those people for whom there does not seem to be any excuse for permitting them to continue an existence which is giving them no pleasure, and is burdening others far too much.
A rich playboy whom Derleth tells us is stupid falls in love with Sheila and she strings him along for publicity purposes. Sheila starts work on a movie about Meg Peyton a famous red-headed woman who murdered multiple men but got away with it by showing off her legs to the male jury. Sheila insists on acquiring a spectacularly good red wig for her performance; the wig turns out to be an Aztec artifact infused with magic. The wig comes with instructions on how to avoid suffering the ill effects of the dangerous magic, but Sheila flouts them as deliberately as I do the Ikea instructions that are always telling me to anchor furniture to the wall--how can I bolt that shit to the wall when my wife rearranges the furniture every three months? There are also clues suggesting that this very wig was worn by Meg Peyton, that it was this very wig that led ole Meg to embark on the career as a serial killer that rendered her life celluloid-worthy.
The wig changes Sheila's personality--most significantly, she starts eating raw meat. Derleth tells us Sheila acts like an evil bitch even more than before, which is pretty lame--a real horror story would depict a nice person turning evil, not an evil person getting extra evil. On a whim, Sheila buys an ancient cutting tool at the antiques store. With this tool she murders the playboy and then her publicity guy; Sheila herself lands in the loony bin. The police hide some info about the murders from the public, but a fat (350 pounds, says Derleth) gossip columnist unearths the gory details--that blade of Sheila's was another Aztec artifact, a knife designed to remove the heart from the body, and Sheila used it to extract and then eat the hearts of the two most important men in her life.
"A Wig for Miss DeVore" is no good for many reasons. The mechanism of how the wig comes into Sheila's (and Peyton's, for that matter) possession is hard to accept; if she is such a shitty actress, why does she go to the trouble of getting a special wig to enhance her performance, which suggests she takes her job seriously, and if the owner of the wig knows it made Peyton kill people, why did he still give it to Sheila? A better story would have some jealous horndog after being rejected or some envious actress with talent but no sex appeal, maybe that fat gossip columnist, give the wig to Sheila after flattering her.
There is no real horror to "A Wig for Miss DeVore" because Derleth spends the entire story telling us the people who get killed or imprisoned deserve destruction. And "A Wig for Miss DeVore" is not one of those stories in which the death or incarceration of the villains is cathartic, either, because the villains aren't really that bad--it is not like they are murderers or something. And it isn't really their sins that lead to their undoing, they just suffer because of mistakes anybody might make. If I am a bank robber, and I get killed while robbing a bank, that is justice, and me suffering in the course of acting on my evil impulses. If I am a guy who finds a woman attractive and gets killed because I try to date her up, that is neither justice nor me being undone by my peculiar nature, that is me having bad luck, because being attracted to women is normal mundane behavior. I guess we readers are supposed to enjoy seeing the playboy and publicity guy murdered and mutilated and Sheila locked away forever because we envy their wealth or look down on Hollywood and advertising and people with below average intelligence or something, but I'm afraid this doesn't speak well of Derleth or of the readers of Weird Tales, should Derleth's suspicions of their attitudes be accurate.
(One of Derleth's biographers, according to wikipedia, claims Derleth had homosexual affairs, and this story does kind of read like a gay man venting.)
Unlike Miller's quite good story of a dangerous woman, which has never been reprinted, Derleth's lame satire about a dangerous woman has been reprinted again and again in Derleth collections and anthologies by important editors. This really is a fallen world, isn't it?
"The Glass Labyrinth" by Stanton Coblentz
Speaking of
satires, here we have Stanton Coblentz. I am a
Coblentz skeptic, but somehow here I am giving him a chance. I'm a softie, as much as I try to deny it.
Skepticism is warranted; "The Glass Labyrinth" is a filler piece almost lacking in plot. I guess the story's supposed value lies in its faint jokes and its somewhat interesting images. I have to give this one a thumbs down as being a lifeless waste of time.
Our narrator is a college professor who goes out for a night walk to smoke his pipe. He is accosted by a short man with skinny arms and an oversized head, a man who is bubbling over with excitement, jumping up and down and waving his stick arms around. This frenetic freak is a fellow college professor, and has invented a machine he wants to show somebody. He is thrilled to find the narrator, whom he recognizes from a conference.
Coblentz takes a long time to describe all this. And to describe the machine and its operation and the theory behind it. The inventor has filled a room with hundreds of mirrors of all types, shapes, and sizes, each in a very specific spot and each connected to motors so its angle can be determined with exactitude. From the ceiling depend many powerful light bulbs that project a newly discovered ray. Working together precisely, these bulbs and mirrors can provide the viewer a glimpse of the past or future. The inventor shows the narrator medieval knights and cave men and the teeming cities of the future in which commuters fly via backpack wings. Etc. Then a malfunction occurs and the inventor disappears, presumably trapped in some other dimension and/or time. The End.
This waste of time has itself vanished into the ether and has not been reprinted.
"The Crowd" by Ray Bradbury
This is a famous story that has been reprinted a billion times and which I read as a kid and must have reread later in life, though I guess not during the life of this blog. I remember being underwhelmed by "The Crowd," thinking it the same tired condemnation of the common people as a mindless horde animated by a lust for blood and ready to explode into mob violence at any moment that we are served up by smart people (and people who think they are smart) on a regular basis. But maybe as an old man of 55 I will have a different response to the story? Maybe the book versions I read were different than this magazine version and I will like the magazine version better? Let's see!
OK, my memory of this story was pretty distorted; maybe I was mixing it up with a different Bradbury story, one in which there is a crowd or a mob that absorbs people so they lose their individual identities. Anyway, I didn't recognize any portion of this tale.
"The Crowd" is a sort of supernatural detective story. A guy with an office job who makes enough money to afford a butler, Spallner (
hmmm, Dickensian name?) is in a one-car wreck when his tire blows; he hits a wall and suffers a head injury. A crowd of people comes to look at him, and the faces of some of them and the mannerisms of others are quite distinctive, quite memorable. Later, thinking about the accident, Spallner realizes the crowd appeared very quickly, almost impossibly quickly considering the time of day and location of his accident.
Spallner does research on accidents with the help of his business partner and his butler, going through tons of old newspapers. He also witnesses what seems like a preternaturally high number accidents, like he's jinxed or something, and rushes over to examine the crowds that gather around each accident. Spallner's explorations lead him to a mind-blowing conclusion: within a certain geographic area, the same bunch of unmistakable people arrive with uncanny promptitude at the scene of every accident. Even in newspaper photos of accident sites from ten years ago the people Spallner saw at his own accident appear, looking to be the same age and to be wearing the same clothes as when Spallner first encountered them. There is even evidence that these odd individuals are perhaps causing accidents, even exacerbating the injuries of accident victims to ensure they expire.
Spallner decides to take his file of carefully compiled evidence to the police, but while driving to the police station he is in an accident and the crowd members he recognizes as regulars make sure he is going to die and take custody of his dossier. Spallner realizes they are the ghosts of people who died in accidents and he is now going to join their ranks.
"The Crowd" is pretty good, well-written and structured and all that. But I am sort of wracking my brain, wondering if people in real life gather in crowds around accidents, eager to see blood, as this story assumes, trying to recall if I witnessed this behavior in real life when I lived for over a decade in New York City or for 18 months in Columbus, OH, or, if I have seen such goings on during the current swamp-embedded phase of my life in Washington, D.C., or if this behavior is just something I have seen in fiction.
Another thing we might consider is Bradbury's relationship with the automobile. Bradbury never learned to drive, and should we see this story, in which automobiles are engines of gruesome death that excite and feed people's bloodlust, as a reflection of Bradbury's antipathy to cars? Also, this story includes descriptions of motor vehicles in operation, and I think it is fair to ask if a man who never drove a car himself can produce descriptions of such operations that ring true.
A huge freight truck just ahead of Spallner, suddenly threw on its air-brakes.
It stopped too suddenly.
Spallner shouted, jammed his brakes. Ramming, his new car crashed into the rear of the truck. The windshield hammered back into Spallner's face. His body was forced back and forth in several lightning jerks.
I don't know, Ray. Still, a good story.
*********
The Miller is today's big deal; I'll make it a point to read more stories by the gentleman. The Bradbury of course is good, and was a surprise to me because I was expecting something quite different, thanks to my bad memory. Derleth and Coblentz deliver unsuccessful filler stories, Derleth's sort of complicated and heartfelt as he tries to address various issues and express what are (maybe) his own feelings about Hollywood and maybe women, but full of missteps, while Coblentz's simple and banal story is just too long and too boring and suffers a terminal lack of emotional, intellectual, and plot content.
Alright, another issue of Weird Tales under our belts. Maybe someday we really will have read at least one story from each issue! At the following links you can marvel at the progress we have already made!
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