Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading stories printed in 1920s issues of Weird Tales. In fact, we've already blogged about 17 stories that appeared in 1923 issues of Weird Tales, 17 stories that appeared in 1924 issues of the unique magazine, and 26 from issues with 1925 cover dates. Click the links in the previous sentence to see lists of the stories I read and blogged about, and links to those blog posts. Today we read three stories from 1926 issues of WT by August Derleth, famous correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft and champion of the legacy of the man from Providence, and a prolific writer and editor working in an array of genres.
Today's three tales from 100 years ago have all been reprinted in anthologies, but I am reading the original magazine versions in scans of 1926 issues of Farnsworth Wright's essential periodical. To make it as easy as possible for you to read along, I provide links to the scans I will be consuming below:
"Bat's Belfry"
Some wealthy guy, his valet and his cook, move to an old house in the country. It is this gentleman who writes the letter (never sent) and keeps the diary. As we expect of the characters in the stories we read here at MPorcius Fiction Log, this guy is a student of the occult--he aspires to be a wizard. He hears strange things about the family who previously lived in the house, he finds strange books in the attic, inexplicable drafts blow out lanterns in the basement, his Catholic servant whips out the holy water, the writer of the letter and diary starts dreaming that beautiful women are coming to him and withdrawing his lifeforce via kisses, etc. Derleth handles the material competently, and I enjoyed reading the story, but the ending is a bit of a letdown. The narrator, instead of leaving the house of the vampires, who are sucking his blood nightly and who have killed many children in the area, as evidenced by a pile of little skeletons discovered in a secret room, decides to try to summon the vampires and trick or coerce them into revealing their hiding place so he can destroy them. This is obviously crazy, but we can accept it because this guy is trying to become a sorcerer. But what is harder to accept is that he forgets to make preparations to protect himself from the monsters' attack, so after he summons them, they just kill him (and apparently turn him into a vampire.) Maybe we should charitable and assume the vampires sort of hypnotized him into being careless, that his summoning them was not him laying a trap for them, but them entrapping him? But aren't they already coming to him every night to drink his blood anyway, so why the need to sham being summoned?
Another little kink in Derleth's story is that while most of the text consists of the letter and the diary, there is a brief omniscient third-person narration section that describes the examination of the dead man's body and the destruction of a book of magic, The Book of Thoth. This content would have been better if it also appeared to us in the form of a written source.
An interesting thing about "Bat's Belfry," something that makes it a little different from other vampire stories, is that the writer of the letter and diary can't call upon God for aid because, as an aspiring wizard, he has in the past called upon Satan for aid. This is perhaps a reflection of the fact that Derleth, unlike Lovecraft, took Christianity seriously. Also noteworthy is how much "Bat's Belfry" owes to Dracula by Bram Stoker. An early edition of Dracula is among the books the protagonist discovers, and of course the epistolary form echoes the form of Dracula, and then we have the fact that there is a single male vampire with multiple female associates and that they devour children.
"Bat's Belfry" has been pretty popular with editors, seeing reprint almost immediately in the British Not At Night series of anthologies, a Latin American magazine in 1939, cool 1970-1980 books with covers by Jeff Jones and Tom Barber, and in 21st-century anthologies by people like Kaye Lynne Booth and Johnathan Maberry (Weird Tales: The Best of the Early Years: 1926-27) and Peter Haining (Weird Tales Volume One: The Early Years.)
"The Devil's Pay"
The wizard makes a wax doll of the target and tosses it in the fire. The duke pays the sorcerer in gold, and the wizard warns Satan has yet to be paid his fee. Right after he gets back to his palace, the protagonist receives news his enemy has suddenly died of some sudden and mysterious ailment; he then trips and falls down the stairs and dies of a broken neck--Satan's fee for killing his enemy was the duke's soul.
There's nothing wrong with this three-page anecdote, but there isn't much to it. "The Devil's Pay" was reprinted in a 1985 fanzine and in a 2009 Derleth collection.
"The Coffin of Lissa"
This story, according to isfdb, has not appeared in a Derleth collection, but it has been reprinted in multiple anthologies. "The Coffin of Lissa" is less than three pages long.
Our narrator has been condemned by Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition! He is put in the Iron Coffin of Lissa. His torturers thread his arms through holes in the coffin and chain them to the floor, so his hands can serve as food for the local rats! Slowly, ever so slowly, the metal lid of the coffin descends to eventually crush the narrator's skull.
This whole process is described in the first person, and then we are led to believe the narrator, though he has lost some fingers, has not in fact been tortured to death by the Inquisition, but is a lunatic in a cell in a mad house. He has hallucinated the whole Iron Coffin business, perhaps eaten off his own fingers in his insanity.
For what it is, "The Coffin of Lissa" is pretty good.
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I've harshly criticized work by Derleth in the past, but today's three stories go down pretty smoothly--I like all three of them. When next we meet we'll be looking at three more stories by a famous Weird Tales writer and I hope they are at least as good as these three have been.
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