Weird Tales, Jan 1927: A Derleth, R E Howard and W Collins

Those fireworks you heard two weeks ago were part of the fiery but peaceful celebration triggered by the announcement that MPorcius Fiction Log had read and blogged about at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales printed in 1926.   We've rested on our laurels enough and now the machete starts swinging again as we begin working our way through 1927.  Today, the January 1927 number, which has a pretty good monster cover with a fully clothed damsel in distress (somewhat amateurish but charming covers like this one remind me of the beloved covers of the 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual and Dungeon Master's Guide by David C. Sutherland.)  Among other things, inside this issue lurks H. P. Lovecraft's "The Horror at Red Hook," which we read back in August, and an editorial in which Farnsworth Wright admits that it is the science fiction stories ("the Jules Verne type of stories, about trips to other planets, weird surgical experiments, stories that forecast the tremendous possibilities of imaginative science, such as 'The Metal Monsters' in last month’s issue") that get the most enthusiastic responses from readers.  Our main interest today is three stories from this issue that I don't think will be in the Jules Verne category, August Derleth's "The Night Rider," Robert E. Howard's "The Lost Race," and a version of Wilkie Collins' "The Dream Woman."  To read the 1927 printings of these stories that I will be reading, click this link to the internet archive scan of the issue.  

"The Night Rider" by August Derleth (1927)

This is a two-page trifle, set in Italy during some war centuries ago, maybe Charles VIII of France's invasion of Italy in 1494.  Messer Morini and Madonna Lucrezia live in a house by the highway.  At midnight, Morini hears a horseman, riding hard and fast, and goes outside to watch him ride by; Lucrezia joins him.  In attire and figure the rider looks much like Morini's son, who is in the army now resisting invasion, but his face is obscured.  The next day a cavalryman comes to the gate to inform Morini that his son was killed in the fighting.  Lucrezia reveals she did not see any rider last night, it must have been the ghost of Morini's son, a ghost only he could see.

Acceptable filler.  In 2009 "The Night Rider" galloped back into the view of weird fans in the Derleth collection The Sleepers and Other Wakeful Things.  

"The Lost Race" by Robert E. Howard (1927)

"The Lost Race" is categorized as belonging to Howard's Bran Mak Morn series, and has been reprinted a million times all over the world.  We've already read some Bran Mak Morn pieces, "Worms of the Earth," which is great, and "The Children of the Night" and "The Dark Man," two stories in which Bran is not so much a character as a theme of the story.  There are three additional stories associated with Bran, "Men of the Shadows," "Kings of the Night," and "The Little People," and I will read them soon in my copy of Del Rey's 2005 Bran Mak Morn: The Last King.  Today's story, "The Lost Race," I will be reading in Weird Tales out of convenience because it seems the text in the magazine is the same as the text in my book.

Cororuc, a "fine figure of a man" whose features are "of the highest type of Briton, clear, straightforward, the shrewd, practical determination of the Nordic mingling with the reckless courage and dreamy artistry of the Celt," is returning home from a diplomatic mission to the "savage court of the Cornish King."  Howard tells us all about his looks and his attire and his equipment; I was reminded that until recently there were bison ("buffaloes") in Europe--the hide of such a beast covers Cororuc's shield.  In the creepy woods he is marching through, he encounters a panther fighting a wolf.  (Did great cats and human beings ever live in Britain at the same time?)  Howard is really into attributing character traits to a person's ethnicity, and so Cororuc interferes in the fight, scaring off the panther out of "the reckless chivalry of the Celt," and then follows the departing wolf's trail thanks to his "Celtic curiosity."  This is no ordinary wolf--its tracks suggest it walks on two legs!  Cororuc loses the trail and returns to his earlier path.

Soon after, Cororuc runs into the famous bandit Buruc the Cruel, "the scourge of Cornwall," with two of his thugs.   Our guy kills Buruc and one thug, but the third bandit escapes and raises the bandit horde, which pursues Cororuc through the forest.  In a narrow defile that the bandits seem afraid to enter, Coruruc is ambushed and knocked out; when he awakens he is the captive of dark-skinned men four feet tall!  They carry him into a cave, then through a series of caverns, to present Cororuc to their leader, who regales the Briton with the history of his people, the Picts, who once ruled all of Britain after driving to the margins the native redheads, only to, in turn, be driven underground by invading Celts.  Then this chief declares that, like 100 Celts before him, Cororuc will be executed with a special dagger as part of the Picts' enturies-old campaign of revenge on those who defeated them.  When Cororuc objects that he personally never hurt a Pict (he never even saw a Pict until today) he is told

“You pay, not for what you did, but for what your race has done”

Then comes Cororuc's salvation.  That wolf he rescued was not a wolf at all, but a Pict in a wolf skin.  He arrives and tells the Pict leader of Cororuc's good deed, and, because the race of Picts never shows ingratitude and always pays its debts, Cororuc is freed.    

"The Lost Race" is a pretty good sword and sorcery adventure story.  (Even though the werewolf isn't real, but a guy in a suit, the Pict leader is hundreds of years old, because of a curse laid on him by a witch, or maybe because he never leaves the cavern so has no sense of time--which comes from the sun and stars, of course--or maybe because he has a magic potion, and to my mind at least two of those explanations count as sorcery.)  You might quibble that the story is anticlimactic, what with the fights early on, then a history lesson, and then a resolution that relies on oratory rather than violence--I had certainly expected the wolf to reappear and save Cororuc, but to be a werewolf who killed a bunch of Picts, not a Pict himself cosplaying a wolf.  Still, Howard does a good job building up atmosphere with his descriptions of the forest and subterranean settings and of the various people, and his fantasy version of European history and the cultural traits of Europe's diverse people are fun.  So, thumbs up for "The Lost Race," even if I don't think Bran Mak Morn is even mentioned in the text.  Could the old leader be Bran Mak Morn?

     

"The Dream Woman" by Wilkie Collins (1855?)

Wilkie Collins is a famous name that I recognize but I don't think I have ever read anything by him.  According to Wikipedia, "Collins often revised—sometimes drastically—and retitled his periodical short stories for book publication" and spending a few minutes online I found various versions of this story appearing under various names.  I think the version of "The Dream Woman" reprinted in this January 1927 issue of Weird Tales is the very first version of the story, that which appeared in the periodical Household Words under the title "The Ostler" in 1855.  The story was reprinted in 1859 in The Queen of Hearts, which seems like what in SF we would call a "fix-up" novel, and then in a radically revised form  reappeared in the 1874 collection The Frozen Deep.  Since then the story has reappeared again and again in Collins collections and anthologies of ghost and general horror stories. 

Isaac Scatchard makes a precarious living as an "ostler" or "stable-helper," unable to get steady work from reliable employers because of bad luck; though perhaps of limited intelligence, he is sober, honest and industrious, but somehow always misses opportunities for good jobs and ends up working only intermittently for people who have a tendency to pay him irregularly.  Everybody knows him as "Unlucky Isaac."  Isaac has never had a girlfriend ("sweetheart") and when out of work he lives with his widowed mother.

Isaac takes a long walk--over a day--to apply for a job, and doesn't get it because another man applied while he was still walking there.  He takes a new road on the way home and stops at night at an inn during inclement weather to sleep.  He wakes up in the middle of the night to see an attractive woman in his room!  She bears a clasp knife, and twice, no expression on her face, tries to stab him--both times he dodges and the blade sinks into the mattress.  She disappears and Isaac calls for help, incurring the wrath of the landlord--there is no damage to the bed, and no way for anybody to have gotten through all the locked doors and windows, so Isaac must have been dreaming and awoken the house over nothing.

Back home, Isaac describes the dream to his mother, who finds the timing of the dream significant--it afflicted him precisely on the 40th anniversary of his birth.  Mom writes down Isaac's description of the woman and seals it in her desk.  Soon after Isaac's fortunes look up--he gets a good job and keeps it for seven years, until his employer dies, and leaves it with an annuity, a reward for saving the life of his employer's wife.  Isaac has forgotten his horrible dream, but not Mom--she looks at her paper record every time Isaac's birthday rolls around.

On his 47th birthday Isaac meets a woman, Rebecca, apparently a gentlelady down on her luck after being taken advantage of by a callous man or something of that nature.  She is contemplating suicide and Isaac talks her out of this desperate measure.  Or so it appears.  We readers of course recognize the woman from the dream, but Isaac is a little slow on the uptake.  Isaac and Rebecca meet several times and decide to get married.  Of course Mom recognizes her as the woman from the dream when they are introduced, but Isaac is in love with the blonde with the light grey eyes and fair skin and graceful accent and manners, and refuses to act on Mom's advice to never see Rebecca again.  It is not long after their wedding that Rebecca becomes sullen and starts drinking heavily and palling around with questionable characters.  Then a clasp knife just like the one in the dream shows up--Rebecca bought it at a good price and is especially proud of it and refuses to hand it over when Isaac demands it.  

Things come to a head when Isaac's mother dies and Rebecca acts disrespectfully before and during the funeral.  Isaac, provoked beyond limits, strikes her, and Rebecca leaves him, only to return a week later to try to murder him in his sleep with the clasp knife!  The attack occurs precisely 48 years since he was born and eight years since he had his terrible dream in the inn!  Isaac overpowers his wife, seizes the knife and leaves.  When he returns to the house, she is gone, and, despite hiring people to search for her, he never sees her again.

This is a smoothly written and well-paced story, and the plot isn't bad, so thumbs up.  Would it have been more shocking if somebody got killed?  Maybe, but Collins is perhaps more interested in leaving the reader with a feeling of mystery and uneasiness, of lifelong worry about what might happen next, anxiety over what might have been, and wonder about the inexplicable nature of the universe than he is in shocking the reader but also relieving him with a decisive and cathartic conclusion in which Isaac is killed with a knife in his chest or sends a woman to the morgue.

One item that will be of interest to historians of literature and society, especially you sex and gender types, is how Collins describes how the apparently well-brought up Rebecca ended up in so much trouble.

Little by little, in answer to his question, the sad story of the woman came out. There is no need to relate it here; it is told over and over again in police reports and paragraphs about attempted suicides.

Collins implies that Victorian England was full of fallen women, or, at least, that the newspapers were full of stories of fallen women, the topic apparently fascinating the literate public, so that he need only hint to the reader what happened to Rebecca, as if the degraded or fallen woman is a stock character familiar to all his readers.

Of course, "The Dream Woman" in its entirety is about the relationships of a working-class man to women to whom he is in some way subordinate or inferior.  Mom has the legitimate authority of a parent, and is much smarter than Isaac, while the dream woman (also presumably more clever than Isaac) is from the middle or upper classes.  When Isaac asserts independence from his mother by marrying against her will, and tries to assert authority over Rebecca by taking her as a wife and ultimately, when she is rebellious and malicious, striking her, disaster results.  Trying to bust out of the box that society and biology have placed you in is a risky endeavor.  We might also wonder if, by ignoring the warning that is his dream, Isaac is acting insubordinately towards God or the universe.

Collins anthologies, one from the 1990s and one from the 21st century

**********

A good start to our weird journey through 1927.  More weirdness next time!