There's nothing wrong with skipping around a little bit while we pursue our eldritch endeavor of trying to read at least one story from every issue of
Weird Tales. So let's take a little break from 1927 and look at the January 1944 issue of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual. The cover of this issue was reused for the July 1954 issue, and I'm pretty sure I also saw it on some recent vampire anthology, but I can't recall the title of that recent volume. In the letters column we have jocular biographical sketches from Nelson S. Bond (useless banal and juvenile jokes) and Frank Belknap Long (Long takes the task seriously and tells us tidbits about his ancestors, early life, and his evolving writing career.) Bond and Long have stories in this issue--we read
Long's story like two years ago, but we'll be reading Bond's today, plus the contributions of Southerner Manly Wade Wellman, beloved draughtsman Hannes Bok, and one of the mainstream's favorite speculative fiction writers, Ray Bradbury.
(If, like me, you suffer from a congenital distrust of secondary sources, don't listen to what I have to say about these stories and instead read them yourself at this link.)
"The Golden Goblins" by Manly Wade Wellman
This is the second John Thunstone story; we read the first,
"The Third Cry of Legba," back in August.
A successful college man, an honor student and captain of the basketball team, comes to visit John Thunstone. Long Spear is this paragon's name, and he is a Native American, and though he wears a fashionable business suit and is a fraternity man he still worships the gods of his ancestors. Long Spear asks Thunstone to keep for him an ancient artifact, a mysterious something given to his tribe (Long Spear is current chief) ages ago by the gods. Even Long Spear doesn't know what the thing, bound up inside many layer of rawhide coverings, is, but it is his sacred duty to protect it, and somebody is after it! This artifact, whatever it is, keeps Long Spear's tribe united, and if the white man gets it, his tribe will be more easily abused by the pale faces. Long Spear even knows which white man is after the mystery object--Barton Siddons, a man who has the ear of Congressmen and is trying to get Long Spear's tribe's worship forbidden.
Siddons approaches Thunstone that very day, at a restaurant. These two men talk about Long Spear's tribe. Siddons accuses the tribe of human sacrifice, and Thunstone counters that it has been like 100 years since they sacrificed anybody. Thunstone can tell that Siddons doesn't really care about stopping human sacrifice or anything like that--Siddons wants to steal the mineral wealth that lies under the tribe's reservation!
Later, after Long Spear and Thunstone conduct a ceremony with the mystery object (Long Spear isn't just chief of his tribe, but also medicine man) and Long Spear gets a premonition of danger, Siddons, having crept into Thunstone's flat, knocks Thunstone out and ties him up. As Thunstone watches, Siddons unwraps the bundle containing the artifact, peeling off layer after layer, including a layer that consists of a white person's scalp! Further down, beyond all the hides, is a sort of brick or clay box, and inside the box a little clay vase. And in the vase--a little gold figure of a warrior. And another, and another. An entire army of little fighting men armed with spears, clad in feather headdresses, more than can physically fit in the tiny vase, which must be a portal to another universe or something like that. The little models come to life, kill Siddons, free Thunstone, and return to the vase.
"The Golden Goblins" is a lot like Raiders of the Lost Ark, and, somewhat amazingly, Long Spear actually mentions The Ark of the Covenant at one point in the story. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the hero does surprisingly little substantive in regards to the plot, and in the climax doesn't defeat the enemies or solve a problem or whatever, but just observes a supernatural phenomena, and Thunstone performs the same function here. In the Spielberg film, we learn that the God of the Jews is real and will smite those who oppress God's chosen people. In "The Golden Goblins," we learn that the gods of a Native American tribe are real and will smite those who seek to oppress the Indians.
It is sort of interesting to see such a pro-Indian story--Thunstone even says that Native American religion is as good as Christianity. Compare this to Cornell Woolrich's "The Moon of Montezuma," which we just read, in which the religion of the Native Americans is explicitly compared to Christianity and found to be wanting, to be no more than murder and human sacrifice. Whether today's diversity celebrators would like "The Golden Goblins," I don't know, they may find the story patronizing--Thunstome even calls Long Spear "a credit to any race."
"The Golden Goblins" is pretty well-written and the supernatural element is good, but I'm grading it just acceptable. The cardboard archetype characters--the Indian who beats the white man at the white man's game but is also 100% committed to his own vibrant authentic nonwhite traditions; the white man whose virtue and role in the story consist solely of validating everything about the nonwhite exemplar; and the rapacious white racist--don't do much of anything, just stand there exuding their virtue or their evil.
"The Golden Goblins" has reappeared in Wellman collections and, like all four of today's stories, in the May 1944 Canadian edition of Weird Tales.
"Dimensional Doors" by Hannes Bok
Bok's name appears on the cover of that Canadian edition of
Weird Tales, but it doesn't seem that "Dimensional Doors" was ever printed in a book. Well, let's see what it is all about. In the American magazine we are reading, "Dimensional Doors" is accompanied by a full page drawing by Bok of a young man with nice hair hanging out with a strange long-necked monster.
Danny is at a crowded bar when he is approached by a "husky" young man with a big ring with a glimmering red jewel in it. Will Danny help him? Will Danny take the ring? The guy is obviously scared, says he is being followed. Danny isn't that interested in taking the ring, but offers to hear the man's story, and the nervous man, so nervous he is shaking, tells his tale, which Bok relates in the third person.
Eddie dropped out of school and left home and found himself, after an illness, out of work and with no place to stay. He hasn't eaten in three days when a strange guy, six feet eight inches tall with an alien accent and a face that reminds Eddie of a cat, approaches him. Aslanvik offers Eddie a place to sleep and hopes for a job, takes him to an apartment in a former industrial building, an apartment with elaborate weird decor, like the decor of an alien world where the animals are different than here, where even the people are different!
Aslanvik feeds Eddie, then tells him the job he has to offer him entails adventure, even danger. He takes Eddie to a room full of elaborately carved canvases (one such appears in Bok's illustration for his story) that turn out to be portals to other worlds, each activated by a jewel in a ring. Aslanvik wants Eddie to do a little housework in this place, and, more importantly, to lock the portals after he has passed through them and unlock them at a set time so he can return. If the portals are left open, alien monsters might come to Earth, and nobody wants that! Aslanvik is some kind of merchant or bandit, brings valuable items from other worlds here to Earth to sell.
The rest of the story follows Eddie's new life and his efforts to escape it, to sneak or brazen his way past such obstacles as Aslanvik's scrutiny and his alien watch-monsters. Will Eddie escape? Or die in the attempt? Or remain Aslanvik's slave forever? Knowing Bok was gay, one wonders if this story maybe symbolizes some kind of abusive or predatory homosexual relationship--two men living together in an old elaborately furnished business building that smells of incense, one keeping house and the other engaged in a strange business involving art and interior design, keeping the subordinate member of the couple under his thumb with all-too-believable threats.
"Dimensional Doors" is well-written and I like the plot--thumbs up! It is too bad this story never got into an anthology and so is not that widely available. Further proof that reading these old magazines is worthwhile, though no such proof is necessary--I consider it self-evident that reading these magazines is worthwhile.
"The Master of Cotswold" by Nelson S. Bond
I guess people liked Nelson S. Bond, because his name is emblazoned on the very top of this issue of Dorothy McIlwraith's magazine. Do
I like Nelson S. Bond? Survey says....
It looks like Nelson S. Bond's score here at MPorcius Fiction Log is teetering on a knife edge, with two pluses, two minuses and a zero. It looks like "The Master of the Cotswold" may be the deciding factor in this man's fate as he sits before the merciless court of MPFL.
When I was working at a research center at a public university, my boss, the director of the center, who used the research grants for her personal expenses and so was rolling in the moolah, used to brag about her fancy ass vacations, and would tell us "Oh, how I love The Cotswolds" and shit like that. One of my jobs as a "research assistant" was to help the boss plan her vacations, and I would have to call hotels and theatres and so forth to get reservations and all that. You'll be happy to hear I did a shit job as a travel agent. I also did a shit job trying to get her granddaughter's poetry bragging about these vacations into The New Yorker. I did a good job taking long lunches with the pinko girls working in the office, though. That is where I shone, hanging out in Midtown restaurants for hours, trying to convince these young women that the Fulan Gong were the innocent victims of the Chinese Communist Party and not the reverse as they believed.
Anyway, the American narrator of Bond's story, like my corrupt boss of twenty-odd years ago, goes on vacation from New York to the Cotswolds. "The Master of Cotswold" is a series of his diary entries penned by this guy, a novelist. He rents a dilapidated manor house in the Cotswolds which has an abandoned limestone quarry on its grounds. He has the place repaired, furnishes it, hires a London family to be his servants, etc. The locals warn him not to be too "inquisitive," and object when he has an old well uncovered. After taking all the rocks and the metal slab off the ancient well, our narrator starts hearing pipe music at night, music that disturbs his sleep, even seems to affect his psychology. Mysterious creatures start tearing up the lawn, and one of the servants turns up dead. The pipes get louder and louder and more upsetting every night. More people die as they try to seal up the well, and then comes the reveal and the climax--it is Pan who came out of the well, a god who can control animals and plants and offer men one night of blissful union with nature, a night of hedonistic joy that is paid for with a horrible death.
Everything that happens in "The Master of Cotswold" is predictable and obvious, but Bond does a professional job in writing the story. He throws around architectural terms and references to 18th-century English luminaries like Hogarth, Goldsmith, and Sterne, guys I read and read about years ago when I was laboring under the fantasy that I might someday become a college professor, and this adds a little something to Bond's tale. I can moderately recommend "The Master of Cotswold."
"The Master of Cotswold" is included in the Bond collection Mr. Mergenthwirker's Lobblies and Other Fantastic Tales and in the 60th anniversary Arkham House anthology, Arkham's Masters of Horror.
"The Sea Shell" by Ray Bradbury
So, today we've had a story about a white racist who gets killed by Native American gods, a story about a man down on his luck who is enslaved by some kind of interdimensional desperado, and a story about an American who foolishly summons a cruel god and gets himself and at least four innocent English people killed. And what does Ray Bradbury bring us? A sappy story about how you should enjoy yourself when you are young.
Johnny is a Midwestern boy, age eleven. He is sick, and has to stay in bed. Impatiently, he watches through his window at the neighborhood kids out there, who play all day. The doctor gives him a sea shell, and he holds it to his ear and hears the ocean. Never having seen the ocean, he becomes obsessed with seeing the sea, wants to go to the shore, which is like two days drive away. He wants to go to the ocean now, but of course Dad won't be able to take off from work for a while. Mom talks about impatience, about how impatient children are, how part of becoming an adult is learning patience. But she also urges Johnny to enjoy himself while he is young, recognizing that adults lose some capacity to enjoy themselves.
Johnny begins hearing voices through the shell, beckoning him. Eventually he is transported to the sea by the shell, and when Mom comes to his room, she finds his bed empty, except for the shell. When she holds the shell to her ear, she can hear her son playing in the surf.
"The Sea Shell" is well-written, but it feels like filler, sentimental "nice" filler instead of blood and guts horror filler, though I suppose Bradbury's story is "bittersweet," as it recognizes the inevitable tragedy of having to grow up, and maybe we are supposed to think of how scared Mom and Dad are going to be that their kid disappeared and nobody will believe that he is now in (I guess) California, 1500 miles away. Will they ever see him again? We're grading "The Sea Shell" acceptable.
Peter Haining and some continental European and Japanese editors included "The Sea Shell" in anthologies in the 20th century, but it doesn't look like the story was included in any Bradbury collections until the 21st century.
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A good issue! Our weird journey through 1944 will be a smooth and comfortable one if every issue is as good as this January one!
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