It's time for another trip to the dark and dangerous world that is
Weird Tales, the essential pulp magazine, edited, from 1940 to 1954, by Dorothy McIlwraith. Today, the September 1943 issue. We've looked into this issue already to admire
"Fredric Brown's story "The Geezenstacks" and a Hannes Bok illustration. But it is stories by Robert Bloch, August Derleth, and Ralph Milne Farley that bring us to
WT's pages today. Feel free to read along at the scan of the World War II-era magazine that I will be reading, which you can find at
this link.
"Black Barter" by Robert Bloch
"Black Barter" is a sequel to November of 1942's "Nursemaid to Nightmares," a story I called "an absolute waste of time." I counted, and saw that "Black Barter" filled 20 pages of Ms. McIlwraith's magazine. Then I gritted my teeth and forged ahead. "Unto the breach once more, dear friends...."
Our narrator, in the earlier story, was hired by an eccentric hobbyist to look after his collection of mythical and supernatural individuals--a vampire, a werewolf, a mermaid, and the rest. Then the eccentric collected a Medusa and it turned everybody to stone (except the narrator.) As "Black Barter" begins, the narrator is missing his charges and his employer and hopes to someday figure out how to get them reanimated. A witch, an old friend of the collector, comes to visit. We get lots of lame jokes and silly interplay as the narrator tries to convince the witch to summon a demon to reanimate his friends. Part of his strategy is to get the witch drunk, but when she performs the black mass to summon the demon she botches it and gets a substandard demon. The narrator cuts a deal with the demon, and he reanimates the statues, but puts the wrong soul in each body--the mermaid's body is animated by the centaur's soul, etc. These are the kind of jokes you get on Gilligan's Island and The Flintstones, but we like those shows because we already like the actors and/or characters and so care what happens to them--of course the characters in this story are interchangeable and forgettable. Somehow the mermaid's soul gets stuck in a wax dummy the witch is using as a 1:1 scale voodoo doll. Here I provide an example of the wordplay that Bloch engages in on almost every line.
“Nevertheless, the window dummy is mine. It’s my poppet, and I shall pop off with it.”
“Go fly your broomstick,” shrilled Trina the mermaid. “And don’t call me a dummy, you Halloween hag!”
Five or ten pages of this would be a waste of time, and here we have twenty. And yet, "Black Barter," while bad, is better than "Nursemaid to Nightmares," because whereas its predecessor was an almost plot-free series of gags, "Black Barter" has a conventional narrative structure in which the protagonist pursues a goal. The narrator takes the witch on a date, including a harrowing broomstick ride, hoping to seduce her into summoning another demon to rearrange his friends' souls; hijinks ensue when the jealous mermaid and all the other monsters try to chaperone the date, and everybody ends up in front of a judge at night court, rehashing the plot to the incredulous magistrate (this kind of thing also happens in The Flintstones) who orders the witch to summon the demon to put everybody back in the correct body--the wily sorceress double crosses our cast, leaving all the weirdos once again inanimate statues and the narrator all alone (as in an episode of Gilligan's Island, at the end of the story the characters are all back at square one.)
A step up, but still way down in the basement. Thumbs down.
"Nursemaid to Nightmares" and "Black Barter" were reprinted together in a 1955 issue of the magazine Imaginative Tales and in the Bloch collection Dragons and Nightmares; Dragons and Nightmares also reprints "The Eager Dragon," another Bloch joke story I have denounced here at MPorcius Bitch Blog, and "A Good Knight's Work," a 1941 story that debuted in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown which I expect I will be grousing about here some day.
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| This is how you sell garbage stories, in America, in Germany, and beyond |
"Baynter's Imp" by August Derleth
Cyril Baynter is a fat, vain, lazy rich man whose wealth was inherited from his grandfather, a lumber baron who made a pile devastating the environment. Baynter is "a great hand with the ladies," thanks to his wealth, but one woman, the beautiful Belle Fassett, has given him the cold shoulder; she is instead interested in Bert Trayle. By chance, Baynter acquires an old vessel, a sealed carafe, with warnings in Greek and Latin inscribed upon it; after he opens it, it becomes evident a supernatural entity has been released. This imp reads Baynter's mind, sees his desires, and has Trayle killed in an accident and then Belle Fasset's father similarly killed, clearing a path for Baynter to marry Miss Fassett. But Baynter worries about the imp--if he marries Belle and Belle finds out about the imp she will leave him or figure out what happened to her father and previous beau or something like that. So Baynter tries to seal the imp back up in the bottle, but the imp reads his mind and turns the tables on him--Baynter is entombed in the bottle more or less forever, and the imp takes his form and marries Belle Fassett and lives happily ever after.
This is an acceptable filler piece, written in a somewhat but not quite obnoxiously sarcastic style; no big deal, but better than some of the
junk Derleth banged out on the old typewriter (
according to David Drake, a huge Olivetti) to help fill up the pages of
Weird Tales. "Baynter's Imp" would go on to be included not only in Derleth collections but the anthologies
Alone By Night (1962) and
100 Creepy Little Creature Stories (1994).
"Wings of Death" by Ralph Milne Farley
Remember when
I defended Farley from a scurrilous attack by one Isaac Asimov? I was contending with giants in those days! I would go on to praise
Farley's story about a gangster who integrates cloning into his criminal enterprises. I even gave
a mildly positive review to Farley's story about a guy being sent back in time by a Hindu swami to strangle a young Hitler! Let's hope I can champion Farley today; at least "Wings of Death" is a good title. (Remember how much I loved H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald's
"Winged Death"? I was consorting with giants in those days!) Plus, here in
Weird Tales "Wings of Death" is accompanied by a decent illustration by
Weird Tales veteran Margaret Brundage.
"Wings of Death" is a little long and a little convoluted, with too many twists and turns that I feel don't really accomplish anything and plot elements that are not quite believable, but not bad. We're judging it acceptable.
Our narrator is a reporter, who is interviewing Ames, a New England business guy who inherited a fleet of ships, as he lounges poolside with his wife, both of them in skimpy swimwear. Mrs. Ames suggests her husband tell the journalo the story of the sacred flies of Malea, and most of the text is a third-person account of Ames' wild adventure in the South Pacific.
Ames' father had a lot of business in the Pacific, and when Ames was a kid took him to an uncharted island only he knew about, Malea. Ames senior was pals with the head of the tribe on the island, but not the priest, a skeletal old guy. Ames junior made friends with the chief's son, Tamu. These two kids realized that the tribe's religion was a load of crap. The island of Malea is infested with big flies, flies as big or bigger than wasps, which the tribesmen considered gods. The flies emerge from a slimy pool that writhes with maggots. According to the local religion, this is the pool of life, and if it were to expire, all life on Earth would die. So, the tribespeople toss food--including human sacrifices--in the maggot pool all the time, and it is forbidden to kill any of the flies, even though they bite people.
Young Ames is hanging with Tamu one day when a fly bites him and he kills it by reflex. When Tamu sees his white friend isn't immediately struck dead, he realizes his religion is a sham--no biggie, Tamu didn't like the sinister head priest, anyway. The boys agree to, one day, maybe when Tamu is chief, to destroy the fake religion.
Ames didn't return to Malea until he was an adult, after his dad died. He and Tamu have kept up a correspondence over the years, and get along well, and Tamu's sister has grown up to be very attractive. When Ames talks about how hot this girl is, the reporter is a little surprised to see the businessman saying this stuff around his wife, whom the narrator takes to be a typical Bostonian. Anyway, there is a whole complicated thing with a member of the ship's crew killing a fly and the priest witnessing it and sentencing the sailor to death and Ames coming up with a crazy plan to save the man and destroy the pool, a plan that miscarries at first. At the same time, the annual Mating Dance comes up, a ceremony that imitates the mating practices of the flies. The marriageable women dance around a fire, and pick men out of the crowd to dance with them--if nobody objects, they become man and wife. But men in the audience are permitted to object, and then the two men fight. Tamu has to fight some guy to get his girl, and Ames similarly fights to get Tamu's sister. Tamu's sister is then instrumental in conceiving and accomplishing a back up plan to save the sailor and Ames and to discredit the local religion. As we see quite often in these old genre stories, a woman takes initiative and puts herself at risk to resolve the plot, making me think "Wings of Death" has feminist elements, but since she performs this heroic deed to save her man and because the story fails the Bosporus test, I doubt academic feminists would appreciate the feminist aspects of the story.
The twist at the end of the story is that Ames's wife is Tamu's sister. I found it a little hard to believe that the reporter would have a conversation with a South Sea Islander in a swimsuit who learned English as an adult and mistake her for a "typically Bostonian wife." This and some other needless complications and hard-to-swallow elements mean I can't really say "Wings of Death" is good, but it certainly falls in the acceptable range.
It looks like "Wings of Death" has never been reprinted, so I am one of the relatively few people to have read it--I guess you are one of the rather small number of people to have ever heard of it. We dig deep here at MPorcius Fiction Log!
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Probably the high point of this issue of Weird Tales is "The Geezenstacks," but Derleth's and Farley's contributions are not shameful. As for the Bloch, we'll sweep that one under the magic carpet. Maybe the next issue, which features Edmond Hamilton, Manly Wade Wellman, and Ray Bradbury, will be a little better. Fingers crossed!
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