Frank Belknap Long: "The Dog-Eared God," "The Man Who Died Twice," and "The Black Druid"

Let's continue our readings of 1920s weird fiction with three stories by Frank Belknap Long, one of H. P. Lovecraft's more intimate associates.  We'll be venturing beyond Weird Tales today, and even into 1930, as we hunt for stories by Long we haven't already read--we've already read a lot of them!

Today's stories have all been reprinted in books, but I'm reading the original magazine versions in scans at the internet archive, and you can too by just clicking these handy dandy links:

"The Dog-Eared God"  "The Man Who Died Twice"  "The Black Druid"

 "The Dog-Eared God" (1926)

We get the ethnic stereotypes right out of the gate today as the narrator of "The Dog-Eared God" tells us about his friend, a short and hideous neurotic New York Jew with a hook nose.  Our protagonist's pal is a college professor and he has an elaborate hobby--an amateur Egyptologist, he has smuggled 83 mummies into Gotham and destroyed them one by one in his mansion on Riverside Drive in the course of performing experiments on them.

The professor shows the narrator his latest acquisition, a mummy of strange proportions.  The prof shares with our narrator one of his theories--that the animal-headed gods of the Egyptians were based on real beings, members of a nonhuman intelligent race who lived upon the Earth long ago.

Somewhat ridiculously, the professor proposes that he and the narrator sleep in the room with the strange mummy.  I guess this is an experiment?  Long could have come up with a more plausible reason for the men to be asleep in the room with the mummy, like having them fall asleep while translating boring documents late into the night or after drinking to celebrate the acquisition of this bizarre over-sized and queerly-shaped mummy. 

Anyway, the narrator wakes up in the middle of the night and has a vision that indicates that, indeed, in ancient Egypt, lived people with the heads of lizards and other beasts.  The mummy here in the professor's mansion was their king and god, a cruel ruler from outer space who drank people's blood and devoured virgins.  The narrator observes, in his vision, the ceremony at which the space monster-god was buried, and at which the king's resurrection was predicted.

Our guy then observes that resurrection as the mummified alien, who has an elephant nose in the center of its bat-face and big dog ears to either side of it, busts out of its wrappings and attacks the prof.  The prof is briefly thrilled to see his theory proven correct, but has little time to celebrate as the monster god breathes fire on him, killing him and setting the whole place aflame.  The narrator runs out of the house screaming, at a subway station jumping the turnstile and boarding a train without paying.  The next day he reads about the fire in the paper--it seems that the firemen had a hard time putting out the blaze because dozens of people who concealed their heads under hoods kept trying to get into the burning building!  The animal-headed people theorized by the professor are still alive, living in concealment in New York City!  

Though ridiculous, this story is a lot of fun--thumbs up!  Professional scholars of the weird also like it--you can find it in the 2022 volume Weird Tales: Best of the Early Years: 1926-27 (edited by Kaye Lynne Booth and Jonathan Maberry) and 2026's Weird Tales Volume One: The Early Years (edited by Stephen Jones.)  "The Dog-Eare God" also appeared in 2000's Arkham's Masters of Horror: A 60th Anniversary Anthology Retrospective of the First 30 Years of Arkham House.

"The Man Who Died Twice" (1927)

Here's today's non-WT story.  "The Man Who Died Twice" first haunted the material world in Ghost Stories, a magazine that endured from 1926 to 1931.  I don't know if I have ever read a story from this magazine before; some of the covers are pretty good, with attractive women being menaced by skeletons, the devil, a clown, a cobra, and--of course--figures that look like freshly laundered white sheets, but I can't recognize hardly any of the names on the table of contents pages.  One day we may dig through a (virtual) stack of these magazines to read stories by people we know, like Ray Cummings, who has "They Hanged a Phantom for Murder" in the same issue that presents Long's" "The Man Who Died Twice," Robert E. Howard, who has a boxing story, "The Apparition in the Prize Ring," in a 1929 issue under a pen name, and Hugh B. Cave, who appears in a 1931 ish with "The Strange Case of No. 7."

Hazlitt walks into the office of the insurance company where he has worked for twenty years, and, in his own mind, at least, been essential to the building of the firm to its current state.  He sees another man at his desk, dictating to a secretary!  Has he been let go?  Enraged, Hazlitt busts into the boss's office, where the boss and three other bigwigs are smoking and talking over some business.  He yells at the boss, insults him, but the boss and the other executives just ignore Hazlitt.  Hazlitt goes so far as to strike the boss in the face, but the boss just touches his chin and remarks that he has felt a sudden pain.  The business talk resumes, and, humiliated, Hazlitt sobs and then returns home, despondent, to face the wife.  Similarly, the wife--and a man in the apartment with her!-- ignores Hazlitt.  Hazlitt realizes, remembers, he is a ghost, that he died six months ago!  How did Hazlitt die?  His wife poisoned him!  He seeks revenge, but when he tries to strangle the bitch, she feels a pain in her neck and throat, but can still breathe.  Hazlitt exerts all his strength, and his diabolical widow senses that somehow the man she promised to have and to hold in sickness and in health, is punishing her, but Hazlitt exhausts his ectoplasmic strength and doesn't even come close to slaying his killer.

Hazlitt gives up and walks the streets.  He sees a child stupidly standing in the middle of the street, about to get hit by a car.  Hazlitt runs at the child, pushes him to safety, and is himself struck by the car and killed, his soul sent to its final rest.  The woman driving the car saw Hazlitt briefly as she ran him over, and jumps out of the car to look for the dead or wounded man, by passersby tell her she has hit no one and conclude she is "batty."

This is a good story up until the end; Long describes Hazlitt's wild emotions in a way that is compelling and amusing.  And then there is the wife:

...standing above him with a spoon, and a bottle in her hand, on which was a skull and crossbones....She bent and forced the spoon between his teeth. “I don't love you,” she laughed shrilly. 

I also like the colloquialisms Long's characters utter, like "I hope he chokes" and "She'll think I'm a jellyfish."  

Stories in which people express and act upon passion are entertaining, even if, as here, people's dialogue and behavior reminds you of Looney Tunes.

It feels like Long didn't know how to end the story, however.  Hazlitt walks down the street, people again and again passing through him, but then he can touch a little boy to save him and get hit hard enough by a car to be slain?  And after being invisible the whole story, even to people he is physically assaulting, he can be seen by the female motorist?  These inconsistencies are a little hard to take.       

 I still like "The Man Who Died Twice", even if the ending doesn't quite work.  Endings are hard.

"The Man Who Died Twice" had to wait until the year 2000 to rematerialize in an anthology of stories from Ghost Stories, and it was also included in 2010's huge (1100 pages!) volume of Long stories from Centipede Press.

"The Black Druid" (1930)

Long ago, I read Edmond Hamilton's "The Death Lord" from the July 1930 issue of Weird Tales, but I skipped the Long and Donald Wandrei contributions to the issue.  Well, today we fill in one of those gaps by reading Long's "The Black Druid," which has been reprinted in multiple Long collections and anthologies with cool covers.

Benefield is a New Yorker and an archaeologist who has been around the world, explored the Egyptian pyramids and read forbidden books in China and all that sort of thing.  His colleagues consider him something of a crank because he seems to believe in vampires and voodoo.  He also dresses sloppily and unfashionably, and has an unhappy marriage and money troubles.  

He consults a book at the library, reads a passage that suggests the Druids invested magical power into all they touched, so that it was dangerous for people to come into contact with any item or article touched by a Druid.

When Benefield makes to leave the library he finds his overcoat is on a different hook--someone must have moved it.  On the subway ride home his face feels odd, and people are looking at him curiously.  He touches his face and it is wet, slimy--some goop must have dripped down onto him from a drain or a roof or something.  He hurries homewards and in a reflection in the glass of the door to his building he sees that his face has changed, become bestial!  His hands likewise are like those of an animal, all claws and hair!  Even his mind has unbidden thoughts, as if another being's consciousness is invading his mind!  He suddenly realizes his overcoat is causing this transformation.  He throws the coat off and enters the building and proceeds to his apartment, his appearance being back to normal.   

The next morning his wife tells him a story a neighbor told her.  Last night a mysterious figure climbed into the neighbor's apartment via the window, went out the door and, down by the entrance, picked up and donned an overcoat and walked off with it.  This burglar or whatever he was had odd pointy ears.

I guess we are to think Druids are living secretively in New York and one of them accidentally took Benefield's overcoat because it looked like his, leaving the professor with the Druid's coat.  The Druid than used his magic to find his coat.

It is a little annoying that a guy reads about a vanishingly rare phenomenon that almost nobody in the world knows about and then, amazingly, by coincidence, he experiences it like ten minutes later.  Maybe we are to think the Druid, lurking in the library, heard Benefield request that particular book and so set out to lay a trap for him, and then retrieved the coat when the trap failed?  Long also makes a lot out of the fact that Benefield is a Saxon, the mortal enemy of the Celtic druids, suggesting he is able to resist the conquest of his mind and throw off the overcoat because his blood is that of those who defeated the Celts.  Maybe the Druid sensed Benefield's ethnicity and sought to attack him because of it?

This caper feels a little clunky and confusing; I'm calling this one merely acceptable. 

The Fifteenth Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories reprints
Anthony Boucher's "They Bite," which we read back in 2019.

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These stories really exercise your suspension-of-disbelief muscles, but "The Dog-Eared God" and "The Man Who Died Twice" keep you interested with their driven, emotional characters.  "The Black Druid" has an odd and interesting character, but he doesn't propel the narrative--the story happens to him, rather than he determining the course of the story.  I can recommend the first two stories; as for the last, it isn't actually bad, but merely merits a passing grade.