"The Bride of Osiris" by Otis Adelbert Kline

As you know, we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are reading stories from 1927 issues of Weird Tales.  The cover of the August 1927 issue of the unique magazine promotes a three-part serial by Otis Adelbert Kline, "The Bride of Osiris," and today it is the subject of our examination.  This novella would resurface in 1975 in a 96-page collection of Kline stories put out by Robert Weinberg, first of his Lost Fantasies series, and in 2018 in a 240-page(?) hardcover edition by Fiction House.  Over three numbers of Weird Tales, I think "The Bride of Osiris" takes up like 60 pages.    

All three of the Weird Tales stories we read last time dealt with nonconsensual sexual relationships, and maybe this is more of the same.  Just look at the cover and title!  Well, let's see what our latest excavation of the 99-year-old treasure trove that is WT'27 turns up.  Join the dig here, here and here.

Somewhat to my surprise, "The Bride of Osiris" is not a supernatural story with evil wizards and animated mummies and that sort of thing, but a science fiction story about a high tech city hidden underneath Chicago.  Kline talks quite a bit about the mechanics of such a city--its ventilation and drainage, its architecture, its rulers' eugenic breeding of a race of super strong men and women as tall as seven feet tall, and so forth.  One way the city thrives is by tricking gullible wealthy people (people we today might think of as "New Age" types) into joining their cult, which is based on the religion of ancient Egypt.  Another way is working with the organized crime for which Chicago is known worldwide to direct into the subterranean city both stolen material wealth and kidnapped beautiful women.  The plot of "The Bride of Osiris" consists of conventional detective and action adventure elements, you know, people getting captured again and again and escaping again and again, people listening in on the meetings of the crooks, people being scheduled for sacrifice, women forced to marry some creep, a huge explosion at the end.  There are quite a few gory injuries--even the female leads get whipped or stabbed until they bleed.  Kline does tend to describe architecture at some length, but in general the pace is fast, and the story is kind of fun.  I can mildly recommend "The Bride of Osiris" as boilerplate entertainment.  If you want a plot breakdown and a little more analysis, read on below.

**********   

Our tale begins in Chicago with Alan Buell, son of a wealthy importer, and his fiancé Doris, daughter of a college professor.  For months a big strong man who looks like a retired military officer has been staring at Doris at the symphony and tonight he is staring at her as she dance with her betrothed at a night club.  While Alan is getting his top hat at the coat check, somebody seizes Doris and throws her into a limo.  Alan jumps on the limo's running board and fights the kidnappers through the window, but is thrown off into the street.

The cops and a medic show up to interview and patch up Alan.  Clenched in Alan's bloody fist is a little piece of jewelry with Egyptian symbols on it--Alan must have torn it off a kidnapper's garb during the fight.  Despite his lack of experience in law enforcement, Alan convinces the Chicago police chief to hire him on as a detective and put him on the Doris Lee case.  He is partnered with a short muscular Irishman who loves to wrassle, Dan Rafferty.  ("The Bride of Osiris" is kind of like a comic book with its silly plot devices and stock characters.)  Alan and the Irishman, while going all over Chi-town talking to jewelers and pawn shop owners about the piece of Egyptian jewelry, spot a car backing out of a garage--it is the limousine that carried off poor Doris!  When they investigate the garage they get ambushed and captured.  His first day on the job and already he's been outwitted by the underworld! 

Kline shifts the scene backwards to Doris, the day she was seized, and we hear about how she is bound and gagged and blindfolded and driven a long distance, then led by a series of guides down many flights of stairs and elevators to a subterranean lair where Doris is attended to by pretty girls and an Amazonian woman clad in mail and armed with scimitar and spear.  Everybody calls Doris "glorious one" and it becomes clear she is destined to marry Osiris, Lord Karneter, and take the name of Isis!

The scene switches back to Buell and his Irish-American colleague.  Our boys are taken by truck to some distant house, but overpower their captors and tie them up.  They search the house, spy on the contentious private meeting of two criminal masterminds.  When these gangsters can't come to terms, the host presses a button on his table's leg and a huge "negro" with a scimitar emerges silently from a secret door and kills the visitor with one blow.  The detectives explore further, travelling down many stairs, and eventually fall into a trap that drugs them so they experience queer hallucinations.  Recaptured, Alan and Dan come to under the guard of men in the attire of ancient Egyptian soldiers and brought to a sinister court, where the head cultists, clad in wacky costumes including animal masks so that they take on the personae of Egyptian deities like Horus the Hawk and Anubis the Jackal, judge lesser cultists who have committed infractions as well as outsiders like Alan and Dan.  One guy gets thrown to Sebek the sacred crocodile and is devoured.  Alan recognizes that the head of the court-- Osiris, Lord Karneter--as the military man who has been eying Doris for months.  Doris is to be wed to this man,  and Alan is sentenced to death--he will play the role of Osiris N in the elaborate marriage ritual in the Temple of Re in which Osiris N is killed to make way for the reborn Osiris who marries Isis. 

The Irish cop is not to be executed, but put to work as a slave, and, in the September installment of "The Bride of Osiris," Dan takes center stage and we watch as he is guided to his quarters in the middle of what appears to be a full-sized Arabian town, full of haggling merchants, half-naked children playing in the streets and veiled women looking down from the upper story windows.  Is there a whole Near Eastern city hidden beneath the streets of Chicago?  Sure enough, the detective learns that this city of Karneter was founded like a century ago, complete with a quite convincing artificial sky with mechanical simulacra of the stars and artificial lighting that fosters the growth of luxurious gardens.  The city thrives through attracting wealthy converts from all over the world, theft from the surface world, and the kidnapping of attractive women from Chicago.  Even though he is an invader and an agent of the surface world government, Dan is given the job of electrician and tasked with working on the light switches at the Temple of Re.  While working, he gathers clues about poor Doris.

Meanwhile, Alan also learns about this astounding subterranean city as part of his training for his role in the marriage ritual.  The lax security devoted to keeping an eye on the two detectives is a little hard to credit.  I certainly hope when the FBI catches an ISIS-linked terrorist or a CCP spy they don't immediately put him in charge of maintaining the electricity at the Pentagon or Fort Dix.  The Irishman, doing electrical work in the dungeons, sneaks off with ease to talk to a prisoner, a former high priest who was the victim of a conspiracy and is now a rebel, willing to help the surface dwellers.  Dan also meets an Irishwoman, Mary Mahoney, a newly captured slave, and the two of them fall in love when our guy beats up a guard who is sexually harassing her.  As for Alan Buell, upon seeing Doris dressed up as Isis, he briefly escapes with his fiancé, only to be captured again.  Alan and Doris are not punished for their escape attempt, and the end of this second installment of the serial depicts the beginning of the marriage ritual in which Alan will be slain and Doris married to Lord Karneter.  

In the final installment in the October issue, Dan and that defrocked priest work together to sneak into the backstage at the Temple of Re.  When Alan is to be killed, they ensure it is Lord Karneter who is killed and that Alan can impersonate Karneter.  (Everybody in the ritual wears some crazy mask.)  Thinking she is about to be married to Lord Karneter, Doris tries to commit suicide with a dagger, but doesn't drive the blade deep enough.  All of our cast--Alan, Doris, Dan, Mary, and the renegade priest, fight their way out of the Temple of Re to a secret passage.  At the end of the passage is a secret getaway submarine that will take them to Lake Michigan.  The defrocked priest has no interest in the surface world, only in revenge, and stays behind to blow up the entire underground city using the secret self-destruct mechanism.  The tremendous explosion and the burying of the secret city of Karneter and its many thousands of inhabitants does not in the least affect Chicago and its bizarre version of pizza, thank goodness.

The 1975 collection's cover illo depicts Doris' failed suicide attempt