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"The Scythe" by Ray Bradbury
A couple with two kids are driving across the country, having lost their farm to the Dust Bowl. They run out of gas by a farm, the father goes into the farmhouse to find a dead man and his will--the dead man has left the farm to whoever arrives to find his body. The will also refers vaguely to duty and fate.
The family takes over the farm, thinking this a tremendous piece of luck. The farm has a huge wheat field, one that appears much too large for a single man to deal with. But the wheat is never all ripe at one time, but instead ripens in patches small enough for a man to reap in one day. The wheat, once cut down, rots at once; by the next morning a different patch has ripened and is ready to be reaped. Cutting this wheat is pointless, as the wheat cannot be used, but the man feels a compulsion to take his scythe and cut away every single day.
Eventually he realizes he is the Grim Reaper, that each stalk of wheat represents a man or woman, and that individual dies the day he cuts that stalk down. He is able to identify when he comes upon the stalk of somebody he knows. When the time comes to cut down his wife and kids, he balks. The farmhouse burns down while he is in the field, and finds his family asleep inside, among the ashes, alive but comatose, suffering a fate worse than death!
The man goes a little crazy and starts chopping away at the wheat at random, reaping the ripe and the unripe. This is World War II, Bradbury suggests, indiscriminate death not ordained by God.
"The Scythe" is well-written, so thumbs up, but the theology of the Second World War being outside of God's control is a little sketchy. Of course, this has been reprinted a billion times. Multiple editions of the Bradbury collection The October Country have covers that refer to "The Scythe" directly.
"Yours Truly--Jack the Ripper" by Robert Bloch
The narrator of "Yours Truly--Jack the Ripper" is a Chicago psychiatrist. (As you know, psychological theory and psychiatric practice are at the center of Bloch's body of work.) A British guy with a vague sort of position at the British embassy, maybe he's a diplomat or something, comes to visit the shrink, and begins a conversation about how London is the perfect location for murder and murder is an enduring feature of British culture. Sherlock Holmes and Alfred Hitchcock are namechecked, and we get a list, one of those lists I always suspect are just an effort to pad a story's word count, of novels (and plays?) apparently about murder; I didn't recognize any of the titles but maybe they were famous in 1943. The Englishman then fills up a page with an account of the career of Jack the Ripper. Eventually, he presents his theory, a theory based on painstaking research in documents and legwork all over the civilized world, that the Ripper is alive, has been killing women all over the place for decades, and is now in the Windy City! How could a guy in his 80s still be running around, slaying women and evading the authorities? He's a wizard who kills women at just the right moment, when the stars are aligned, and offers their blood as a sacrifice to dark gods (Hecate is mentioned by name), and those malignant deities in turn reward him with eternal youth, that's how!
"Return of the Undead" by Otis Adelbert Kline and Frank Belknap Long
This collaboration would go on to be reprinted in the 1992 anthology Weird Vampire Tales and in the colossal (1100 pages!) Frank Belknap Long collection presented to the world in 2010 by Centipede Press.
The "stage Englishman," as the narrator calls him, wants the shrink to introduce him to his friends among the bohemian intellectual set of Chi-town, of which he is aware due to detective work that the narrator is a member. The Briton is sure Jack is hanging out with that crowd. First stop is a party. Bloch whips out some ethnic humor I'd never heard before, calling a game of craps at the party "African polo." These two examples of Bloch's humor, though based on ethnic stereotypes so perhaps offensive to our delicate 21st-Century ears, are integrated into the story, tell us something about the narrator and his milieu, so actually contribute to the story rather than distracting us and thus diminishing the effect of the narrative, as Bloch's more absurd and pun-based humor so often does. Not that there aren't lame puns in "Yours Truly--Jack the Ripper"--there are, but they come from the mouth of a drunken life-of-the-party hipster, so they fit comfortably within the structure and narrative of the story.
After that party, our two heroes investigate what in this 1943 version of "Yours Truly--Jack the Ripper" Bloch calls a "colored neighborhood" but which in the 1988 version of the story in the anthology Dark Descent is referred to as a "black neighborhood." Maybe if the story gets reprinted in the future the phrase will be updated to a "Black neighborhood." The word "Negro" also crops up in this magazine version of the tale--that word is excised from the '88 version, along with the phrase "prognathous jaw and ape-like torso." Obviously you can't say this sort of thing about black people today but it creates a vivid image and gets a rise out of the reader, so, on objective criteria, it makes the story more powerful and effective. I wonder what black people write about white people's looks to make whites seem scary or disgusting..."his skin was white like"..."the stomach of a lizard"? "His hair was straight and his nose pointy like"...I keep thinking of arrows and swords and rockets and fighter planes, but those are things that are awesome, not things that are disgusting. Well, there must be something.
Anyway, in the African-American slum the identity of the Ripper is revealed and blood is spilt.
"Yours Truly--Jack the Ripper" is a better than average Bloch. I like the black magic elements, the descriptions of bohemian life and the slum are not bad, and it seems that many people find the Ripper content more compelling than I do. The resolution, the revelation of which character is the Ripper, is acceptable. The stage setting in the shrink's office, where we hear the story of the Ripper for the hundredth time and get that analysis of British culture that is a little questionable ("British law regards a prisoner as guilty until proven innocent") is kind of weak, but I guess you sort of need it to get up to speed people who are not familiar with Jack, and Bloch sort of admits that that first part of the story is a little boring--"I’ve given the gist of that first interview in all its intricate and somewhat boring detail, because I think it’s important," the narrator tells us--so it is easy to forgive. Not a great story, but a good one.
In the tenth chapter of the second volume of his memoirs, Giacomo Casanova tells the story of how a guy played a practical joke on him, sabotaging a board over a muddy creek so that our Giacomo fell into the mud and soiled his beautiful clothes. In revenge, Casanova, something of a sociopath if you ask me, dug up a corpse and cut off its arm and then used the arm to scare the other joker late at night while said joker was trying to sleep. The victim of Casanova's joke went insane and Casanova, whom everybody assumed was the culprit because he was the only man they knew who would do something so crazy, was charged with blasphemy, in part because a woman was out for revenge on Casanova because he had beaten her daughter with a broomstick for refusing to have sex with him after he had paid her six zecchinni. Casanova's memoirs are pretty wild.
I bring this up because in "Return of the Undead" a bunch of medical students dig up a corpse for use in a practical joke. Their fellow student Fred is squeamish, and they are envious because he has a date with cutie pie redhead Nancy. So the four students dig up the body of a hermit who "lived like an animal, alone in the woods" and put it in Fred's room while he is on that date. The four jokers watch from a dorm window, and after hearing a strange noise, see a figure running from Fred's room out into the night. They assume the running man is Fred, scared out of his mind, and the noise the sound of Fred tearing away the screen on his window in his frantic eagerness to flee. But when they get to Fred's room the corpse of the hermit is gone, and Fred is there, almost dead, suffering a neck injury, drained of blood!
The rest of the story concerns the various college kids, Fred, Nancy, and five or six others, trying to figure out whether the dead hermit is a vampire or if it is just some mundane but mischievous murderer who is threatening them; once that mystery is solved, the battle for survival against the villain continues. Various people get killed or injured, and we are presented with some bloody sexualized violence against women, but we also witness Nancy saving a woman by shooting the villain with an arrow. In addition, we have various subplots and themes about young people's sexual relationships on campus that betray a pretty cynical view of young love on the part of Messrs. Kline and Long. This story left me feeling a little soiled and depressed; "Return of the Undead" really has some of the spirit of a teenage slasher picture.
We'll call this one acceptable, though exploitative and with parts that are a little clumsy.
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No bad stories today--all three of these pieces have a plot that is engaging and all three provoke thought or emotion or both from the reader. You'd have to say these stories are each a success. Let's hope we can say the same about whatever it is we talk about in our next blog post!
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