Weird Tales, Nov '42: Bloch, Bradbury, Leiber, & Bok

The November 1942 issue of Weird Tales has one of the worst covers in the magazine's history--the composition haphazard, the style primitive, the colors dull.  Ugh.  But there are some big names inside--Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Hannes Bok, Damon Knight, H. P. Lovecraft, David H. Keller, Stanton Coblenz.  Let's whittle the list down a bit.

Coblentz's story, "The Victory of the Vita-Ray" is probably a lame joke or a broad satire, so I'm skipping it, even though it is advertised on the cover (curiously, without mentioning Coblentz's name.)  Should you be hankering for MPorcius commentary on Coblentz, I offer my blog posts about the stories "Triple-Geared," "The Daughter of Urzun," and "The Man from Xenern" and the novel Hidden World. 

I blogged about Keller's 1934 "The Golden Bough" back in 2020.  (It says "NO REPRINTS" on the table of contents, but this is a reprint.  Tsk, tsk.)

I read a book version of "Herbert West: Reanimator" long ago and don't feel like reading it again yet.

Damon Knight's contributions to the issue are illustrations that include skulls and bones in their sort of flat, wood-cut like compositions.

So that leaves us with Bob "Psycho" Bloch; the man who is likely mainstream America's favorite SF writer, Ray Bradbury; Fritz "Grey Mouser" Leiber; and one of the most distinctive of SF illustrators, Hannes Bok.  We'll read these gents' stories in their 1942 versions.

"Nursemaid to Nightmares" by Robert Bloch

The narrator of "Nursemaid to Nightmares" is one of those creative types who is astounded to find that his alleged artistic ability is not much help getting a job.  Our guy has been showing up at the employment agency only to be told there are no jobs for which he is qualified, seeing as he has no marketable skills.  But today he is luck!  Some eccentric millionaire is looking to hire a servant with an IQ over 180 who can ride horses and who can climb trees!  Our guy fits the bill and gets the job sight unseen!

"Nursemaid to Nightmares" is an irritating joke story.  Margate the eccentric millionaire collects mythical creatures, and he doesn't chain them in a dungeon to work experiments on them or shanghai them into his evil army or anything cool like that; Margate treats the monsters as houseguests and assures the narrator that they are "goodhearted."  The monsters are an occasion for Bloch to subject us to childish jokes.  The millionaire has his guest the vampire's teeth pulled by a dentist.  He has the narrator buy his werewolf flea powder, and also directs him to take the werewolf on a walk around the block.  The werewolf urinates on a tree that turns out to be a hamadryad.  And Bloch doesn't spare us the puns, either:

Jason Harris operated one of the most thriving mortuary chapels in the city.  Business was never dead.  Mr. Harris himself was always on hand to welcome a fresh customer.  That’s the only way he liked his customers—fresh.

There's not much plot to "Nursemaid to Nightmares," just a series of stupid episodes.  The narrator helps the vampire buy a new coffin.  He and a mermaid start dating.  He takes the centaur to the smith to be shod and the centaur manages to get his hands on some beer, gets drunk, and causes a bar brawl.

The final episode, which is foreshadowed clearly, involves a new creature joining the household--Medusa the Gorgon!  She turns almost everybody, including Margate, to stone, but the narrator shows her a mirror and turns her to stone.  The final gag of this anemic story is the narrator using the various creatures, now statues, to decorate the estate's lawn.

An absolute waste of time--thumbs down!  A sequel to "Nursemaid to Nightmares," "Black Barter," appeared in 1943.  These two Margate stories were combined to form a novella included in a 1955 issue of Imaginative Tales and in the 1969 collection Dragons and Nightmares.

Were people enraged when the book advertised to them with photos of 
beautiful women turned out to be filled with joke stories?

"The Candle" by Ray Bradbury

This story, apparently, is Bradbury's first published horror story.  In his intro to 1975's The Best of Henry Kuttner, Bradbury expresses a low opinion of "The Candle," excepting the ending, which he tells us was written by Kuttner.  As it turns out, this is a pretty good story, with a strong central theme, good images, and a good (if obvious) twist ending.  Thumbs up for "The Candle."

Our protagonist, pale, dark-haired, tall and skinny Jules Marcott, has big problems, which we learn about in dribs and drabs amid the descriptions of his actions and the sights around him.  In brief, his wife Helen has left him for his friend Eldridge and will soon be flying to Reno to get a divorce and to marry Eldridge.  Marcott looks into the window of an odd little shop, at all the old firearms, thinking of buying a gun and killing Eldridge.  But among the weapons is an even more alluring artifact--a blue candle wrought in the shape of a beautiful naked woman.  Though unlit, the candle seems to glow, and it draws Marcott into the store almost against his will!

The ugly store owner, whose appearance is in every way the opposite of young Marcott's, explains to Marcott the candle's black power, how it can be used to kill from a distance.  Uggo stupidly teaches Marcott the spell before Marcott has passed over any money, and Marcott, who can't afford the announced fee, physically beats down the proprietor and steals the candle.

Marcott comes up with a too-clever-by-half scheme to get Helen to cast the spell and destroy her lover--will Marcott's diabolical plans backfire as we readers expect?

A cynical story in which every character is evil and foolish, a story with solid sex and violence elements.  I like it; Bradbury and Kuttner deserve their high reputations.  If you prefer the Bradbury of stories like "The Silent Towns" and "The October Game" to the more sentimental Bradbury, check out "The Candle." 

A year after Bradbury himself dismissed "The Candle" in print as no good, Peter Haining over in jolly old E reprinted it in the anthology The First Book of Unknown Tales of Horror.  It seems this rare tale by Bradbury, which in my opinion is nothing to be ashamed of, has only ever been reprinted in the land of the free and the home of the brave in the first volume of The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury (2011).

"The Hound" by Fritz Leiber

Here's today's second werewolf story, a story that has been reprinted in many Leiber collections and multiple werewolf-themed anthologies.

Leiber presents a depressing picture to us in this story.  David works in the bargain basement at a department store and is dating a wholesome but "serious, not-too-pretty" salesgirl.  He lives with his very sick father and quite sick nag of a mother in an apartment they can't afford to heat properly.  He can't sleep because of oppressive thoughts and nightmares involving a wolf; images of wolves have haunted him since childhood, generating fears closely linked to the unpleasantness of early 20th-century urban life--the loud trains and automobiles, the rats, big city smells.  The monster wolf in his mind is associated with black grease and oil, the lubricants and power source of modern machinery.  

As the story proceeds, David' thoughts of wolves seem to be manifesting themselves in reality, to himself and even to others!  Who got into his locker at work and dug through his lunch bag?  What was that sniffling his mother heard last night?  Did his girlfriend really see a big dog among the throngs at the store?  Why is he always finding black grease everywhere?

The story ends sort of inconclusively.  David flees the city, in a sort of daze, arrives at a suburban zoo in the dark of night, the cage where the arctic wolves are housed.  One of the wolves is no mere wolf, but "malformed," with "eyes" that are "those of no animal."  This thing, the monster from his nightmares, chases him back towards the city, its true lair, and eventually it catches up to him, injures him.  The attack is witnessed, and the witness says the attacker was nothing like a wolf, but rather like "something from the factories of hell."  David has survived the attack, and is relieved that he is not the only one to have seen the monster, that the danger the monster represents is a "danger shared."

Rather than being about a traditional werewolf, this is a story about the horror of modernity--the city, the factory, the machine.  "The Hound" is well-written and I like it and I am giving it a thumbs-up, but is the werewolf really a good symbol for urbanism or industrialism or modernity or capitalism or whatever it is Leiber is complaining about here?  Isn't the werewolf a symbol of man's animal nature or the barbarism that lurks beneath the veneer of civilization?  Does it really make sense to link the wolf with grease and oil, the black goop that makes machines run?  Maybe Leiber chooses the werewolf because the werewolf turns its victims into werewolves, the way a commie might say capitalism or modernity "manufacture consent," turn people into cogs in the machine, but vampires and zombies kind of do the same thing, don't they?  I guess Leiber just likes the wolf as a symbol--recall when we read that collection The Night of the Wolf?  

How do we feel about the more or less hopeful, but absolutely vague, ending?  I sort of expected David to be killed, or turn out to be a werewolf, or get turned into a werewolf.  I guess Fritz, after painting his horror vision of modern life, wants to suggest we can escape modernity if we all work together to build socialism or return to the land or something like that, but without even hinting at what the solution to modernity might be.  I guess the first step is admitting you have a problem.   

I have problems with the story's ideology (I loved living in New York City and think motor cars and locomotives and skyscrapers and the market economy are fine) and question its choice of symbols and the nature of the ending and all that, but "The Hound" is well-written and structured and paced and works on an emotional level, so good on Fritz.  

"The Evil Doll" by Hannes Bok

Here we have a rare story, a story that it seems was never reprinted.

Maksim is a starving artist!  Skinny, subject to bouts of weakness, so poor he has to wire his dilapidated furniture together, whining to his girlfriend Eileen that she doesn't have enough faith in him and that the bourgeoisie are keeping him down.  Oy, these creatives, always a pain to have to deal with!  (I like that Bok, a painter himself, portrays a painter as an absolute piece of garbage.  It can be fun when a writer depicts his own profession in a negative light, and is usually aggravating when people deify or canonize their fellows, the way teachers and journalists always are.) 

"I know that my work is good. These art dealers—bourgeois pigs!—how can they understand what I am trying to express? They look at my work—pictures that I have slaved over, sweat blood in the making — and they say, 'Yes, it is good, but will the public understand it?’’’  His voice squeaked in mimicry. "The public! How can it understand what it has never been given the chance to understand?”

Maksim refuses to get a real job, and Eileen is sick of financing the production of his unprofitable paintings--she barely has enough money to keep herself fed and sheltered.  It looks like they are quits!  Before Eileen leaves for good, Maksim convinces her to let him make a doll of her, to serve as a souvenir, a memento of their doomed relationship.  This chick is so ingenuous she humors Maksim to the point that she kisses the wax doll and trims a fingernail and a lock of hair for him to integrate into the doll.  It isn't long before another woman is telling Eileen that Maksim is a witch and will use the doll to control Eileen, and it isn't long before Eileen realizes that girl was telling the horrible truth!

I liked "The Evil Doll" quite a bit when Maksim was railing against the bourgeoisie and dominating and manipulating women, and when these women were trying to seduce or murder Maksim or commit suicide.  But then Bok introduces a new character, a self-described lonely bookworm who is also physically strong and courageous and who takes control of the situation, pushing Eileen around for her own good and also pushing around Maksim to save the day.  The scenes with this guy also muddy the waters when it comes to whether the voodoo dolls actually work as advertised, or the women are just suffering psychosomatic symptoms due to the power of suggestion.  I'm afraid the bookworm acts inconsistently, sometimes acting as if he doesn't believe in magic and other times acting as if he does, and Bok writes some scenes to suggest the magic is truly effective and others that indicate that the women are victims of their own anxieties, anxieties exploited by Maksim.  This bookworm's behavior and personality also aren't as believable and as compelling as those of Maksim, Eileen, and the second woman.  This new character really derails the story, in my opinion--it feels like Bok had written himself into a corner and so has this new guy come out of nowhere to resolve the plot, but he does so unconvincingly and unsatisfyingly.  Too bad.

I'll call this story acceptable, but it could have been legitimately good if Bok had come up with a better ending, with either Eileen or Maksim determining the outcome by putting into practice some brilliant stratagem or by committing some terrible blunder instead of having some super-competent bookworm with whom readers are expected to identify resolve the plot with ease in a way that is a little confusing.  I'll even play intrusive editor, take on the role of a John W. Campbell, Jr. or an H. L. Gold, and tell you my ideas for ending the story.  First off, no damned bookworm character for god's sake.  Secondly, Eileen and Maksim both die as the climax of a hand-to-hand fight over the doll of Eileen--because Maksim is so sickly and Eileen is so desperate, she is a match for him.  Possibilities: She pushes him into a roaring fireplace, but he has the doll of her in his hand, so she burns up just as he does.  Or, he falls out a window and every bone in his gaunt body is shattered, but lands on the doll so she gets mysteriously crushed to death back upstairs.  Or, he falls in the river and drowns and, because he has the doll with him, she also, inexplicably, drowns while on dry land.  If we want Eileen to live, maybe use the fire idea but instead of burnt to a crisp, Eileen is only horribly scarred for life, having reached into the fire to retrieve the doll before it is entirely consumed--her arm and face are ruined, but she lives on, her hideous scars a constant reminder of her brush with the supernatural!  (It is too bad Bok didn't send this story to Henry Kuttner!)

*********     

Bloch is doing his comedy thing, which I do not appreciate, especially in a story with no plot that is just a series of wretched gags.  Compare to Bloch's much later "ETFF," which we read two years ago.  Bok's story starts out competent, with solid black magic and exploitative sexual relationship material, but then he muffs the landing.  Disappointing.  Leiber's story is well-written and takes a strong stand, but I think today's biggest success is the Bradbury-Kuttner collab, which portrays horrible human relationships, gore, and black magic quite compellingly.  The exasperating Bloch aside, this has been a solid chunk of World War II-era weirdness.  Stay tuned as we continue our journey through the weird of the 1940s, marveling at the jewels and excoriating the dross.

Weird Tales, July '42: M W Wellman, A Derleth & H Bok

Let's take another step in our eldritch journey--our quest to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales, the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual!  Today, we consider the July 1942 issue and we've got three stories lined up, one each by historian of the American South and chronicler of the adventures of John the Balladeer Manly Wade Wellman, founder of Arkham House and creator of Solar Pons August Derleth, and top tier weird artist Hannes Bok.  I'm reading all these stories in a scan of the magazine, which was edited by D. McIlwraith and sports a cover by Margaret Brundage that features more clothing on its female figure than do so many of Brundage's more famous covers.

"Coven" by Manly Wade Wellman

The narrator of "Coven" is Cole Wickett, 14-year-old cavalry private in the Confederate Army.  Captured by the Federals, he is pressed into an esoteric service by a Union Chaplain and sergeant when they are certain that Wickett is a virgin.  You see, Sarge and the chaplain are hunting a vampire!  A virgin on horseback cannot cross the grave in which a vampire rests, and these two enemies of the forces of Satan need Wickett's help finding which grave conceals the monster.  The collaboration is a success, though Wickett narrowly escapes statutory rape by the pale green-eyed female vampire.  After the vampire has been destroyed, Wickett is allowed to escape back to the rebel lines.

Chapter II takes place over ten years later.  Wickett is an impoverished wanderer with no friends or family, close to starvation!  Reconstruction has been hard on this guy, and he has tried his hand at gambling, stealing, scavenging, even joining the KKK!  Walking one night, desperate, he sees a flying monster approach three men--two of the men are torturing the third!  He rescues the man being flogged, and drives off his tormentors; the monster also disappears, and then suddenly appears that Yankee sergeant, now a minister.  These two guys are fated to help each other fight the Devil, it seems.

In Chapter III the former sergeant explains to Wickett his current struggle against a coven of devil-worshippers and the bat-winged monster Wickett glimpsed, and enlists his aid.  In Chapter IV the coven approaches the house in which our heroes await, and in Chapter V we get the fight with the human enemies.  In Chapter VI, Wickett witnesses the flying demon punish its followers for their failure and then confronts the winged monster alone.  In Chapter VII, the monster exiled to another sphere along with its followers, things get wrapped up--it is suggested that Wickett will start his own farm and marry a minor character, an attractive young woman.  This chapter also puts forward baldly a Lovecraftian assessment that we saw dramatized earlier, that increasing your knowledge may well lead to disaster rather than benefit--the human leaders of the coven learned how to summon a demon, and that demon ended up destroying them all.          

This is a good black magic story.  The way Wellman handles the magic--the various spells and counterspells and the relationship between the demon and those who summoned it--is compelling, much of it feeling fresh and all of it being exciting.  (Here is where I will complain that Brundage on the cover of this issue of WT gives the monster human legs when Wellman specifically describes its legs as being much more alien, much more like an animal's--she missed a real opportunity here.)  Wellman's fight scenes are also good, fast and brutal and disturbing, and I also liked the somewhat darkly erotic scenes with the vampire.  Thumbs up for "Coven."

"Coven" has been reprinted in Wellman collections, and in Nightmares in Dixie, an anthology of horror stories set in the South.  I should also note that "Coven" is a sequel to a three-part serial by Wellman that appeared in Weird Tales in 1939, "Fearful Rock," that also features that sergeant; I should get around to reading that novella someday.

"Lansing's Luxury" by August Derleth 

Here we have one of those stories that Derleth, a man famous for his connection to his home state of Wisconsin, sets in England.  Why does he do this?  "Lansing's Legacy" is also one of those stories that seeks to exploit the reader's supposed envy or hatred of rich people.  Plus, it is one of those horror stories which, to my mind, is not a horror story at all, but a morality tale, a tale in which the author does not seek to horrify us by telling us that the world is chaotic and terrible, but rather assures us that the world is orderly and just, a story in which a person behaves immorally and is then punished by supernatural forces.

Lansing is a rich guy in his sixties or maybe late fifties, a successful businessman with lots of connections.  Derleth makes it clear he is not some old money guy who inherited his wealth, but a sharp operator who made his money--this story is not an attack on the aristocracy, but on the bourgeoisie.  The leitmotif of Derleth's story is that this guy has no imagination; we hear that Lansing has no imagination like ten times over the story's five pages.  I guess the people who write for and read Weird Tales think of themselves as people with imagination, and have contempt for guys with no imagination, another way this story tries not to horrify but to comfort its readers.  I daresay that a guy who built a fortune must have some kind of imagination, like, he must have come up with business plans or something, but I suppose Derleth and Weird Tales readers think "having imagination" means you believe in the supernatural.

There's our character.  Now, our plot.  Lansing learns a new railway will be built soon.  Before the public knows of the new project, Lansing buys up all the land the track will be laid on--he will be able to sell the land at a big profit because the owners he purchases it from don't know how valuable the land is about to become.  It seems Lansing doesn't need money, but just does this for love of the game and to assuage the boredom old men feel.  One property owner refuses to sell.  Lansing hires a private investigator to figure out what is up with this joker.  It seems everybody in his environs thinks he is a wizard or an immortal monster or something.  

Lansing pulls strings to have the wizard's property condemned so he can buy it, but the wizard is still able to keep his house; this part of the story I didn't quite get.  The wizard sets out to assassinate Lansing,  I guess out of a desire for vengeance because killing Lansing won't get his property back and the monster is still in its house anyway--it is not like the wizard has to kill Lansing to retake its territory.  Anyway, the monster stays abed all day and projects his astral form out into the world.  This astral form can touch people, and keeps trying to push Lansing down the stairs or in front of a truck ("lorry") or onto the train tracks.  Lansing manages to catch himself twice, and is preserved during the third attempt when a porter saves him from falling on the tracks.

For some reason, Lansing goes to the former wizard's property to watch the construction of the railroad; why bother when he doesn't own the property anymore and never had any connection to the railroad?  The engineer in charge of the project says they probably won't build the railway here after all, as there are caverns under this area (it is implied that the wizard is a subterranean monster who emerged from these caverns long long ago.)  Lansing walks over to a path along a cliff or something ("He found himself alone, with the steep slope of rock on one side of him, and a shorter, more dangerous declivity on the other") where the wizard's astral form causes an avalanche that crushes the businessman--Derleth twists the knife by telling us for the first time that Lansing is fat, too fat to run out of the path of the avalanche.

This story is sloppy.  The fact that Lansing has no imagination isn't well integrated into why he gets killed--I guess we are expected to think that if he believed in the supernatural he wouldn't have used his connections to buy the wizard's property after learning the guy had magic powers.  I totally didn't understand how the government could condemn the wizard's property in such a way that Lansing could then buy it and sell it to the railroad, except for the actual house, which the wizard was still allowed to live in.  And twice Lansing saves himself from being pushed to his death, making you think he is spry, but then at the bottom of the last page of the story, Derleth tells us he is fat.  At the top of the first page of the story, Derleth gave a physical description of Lansing, and there is no mention of him being fat.

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  It is true I am biased against this story for numerous reasons, some of which are listed in my first para on "Lansing's Luxury."  Another reason: I am often turned off by stories in which the writer stacks the deck against a character, egging you on to hate him and enjoy seeing him get killed--when the writer of a story is manipulating you too blatantly into having it in for some character, I start to sympathize with the character.  (As a kid I always sympathized with the people Benson and Alan Alda made fun of on their shows, perhaps because the kids at school always made me the butt of their jokes, and I am fully aware of how my parents talk about me behind my back, and so always take people's extravagant depictions of others as villains with a grain of salt.)  Even discounting my own prejudices, I think "Lansing's Luxury" deserves a negative vote because of all the sloppiness I have detailed above. 

"Lansing's Luxury" has been reprinted in several Derleth collections; maybe it was revised for book publication to solve some of the issues I am complaining about?  (Something maybe D. McIlwraith should have done?  Tsk, tsk!)

"Poor Little Tampico" by Hannes Bok

I am of course a fan of Bok's paintings and drawings, but, when I read three of his stories back in 2019, I found them a mixed bag, more curious than enjoyable.  But let's give "Poor Little Tampico" a chance.

Our tale is laid in wartorn Spain.  Everywhere you look are shell craters and burned or bombed houses.  Our protagonist is 11-year-old orphan Tampico, son of a doctor in Madrid who died in the fighting; Tampico wanders the countryside, begging for food--everybody tells him they are too poor to help him.  One farm seems to be in better shape than the rest, seems to be thriving!  Little Tampico is told to stay away from that house, as it is the home of a witch who makes money telling people's fortunes.  Is Bok here betraying a weak grasp of economics--if everybody is impoverished, how do they pay the witch?--or satirizing the tendency of poor people to stupidly waste money on nonsense like fortune telling?

Ignoring the warnings, Tampico sneaks into the house and, finding the witch absent, drinks the hot broth in the cauldron over the fire.  Ay caramba, he gets sick soon after.  The witch arrives and moans because Tampico has eaten the goop she looks in to predict the future for her customers, a goop composed of such unsavory ingredients as bat wings and desiccated lizards! 

A pregnant woman whose husband is away participating in the war wants her fortune told and the witch finds that she can read the future in the ill Tampico's eyes.  When word gets out to the rest of the peasants that the witch can read the future in a kid's glazzies, they all want their fortune told this way, like novelty-loving consumers.  The opening pages of the story that describe the blasted countryside and Tampico's poverty seem so sincere, these satirical elements come as a surprise.

Tampico and the witch get a profitable business going, and the witch even tidies up the kid's hair and clothes so he is more presentable.  But eating a broth made from worms, amphibians, reptiles and bats every day is doing a number on Tampico's health.  He tries to leave the witch, but she stops him, and entices him to stay by telling him she has legally adopted him and he will inherit her relatively well-appointed farm when she eventually expires.

General Blasco, a ruthless dictator with an interest in the occult, summons the witch and her adopted son when he hears of their feats of divination.  This caudillo has people shot over the slightest offenses, and tells the witch she will be shot if her fortune-telling is proven to be a scam.  To her horror, when she tries to read the General's future in Tampico's eyes, she can see nothing!  The General has her summarily executed, but allows Tampico to leave; he will now enjoy running the witch's farm, the best in the village.  The punchline of the story is the revelation that, after consuming the noxious broth this time around, Tampico took some bicarbonate of soda to settle his stomach, thus inadvertently short circuiting the broth's magical effect.

I guess this story is a little funny, and not poorly written, so we'll judge it acceptable.  "Poor Little Tampico" has never been reprinted, unless you count the Canadian edition of Weird Tales, which did bear a different cover.

**********

Wellman is a strong performer, and "Coven" is quite good, easily the best of today's stories.  I'm actually not really interested in the Civil War or the South or hillbillies, but Wellman is regularly able to overcome my lack of sympathy for these settings simply with his effective writing.  

Derleth's story is some kind of rush job, full of problems that should have been ironed out in revisions.  Today's loser.  Bok's tale is not bad, though certainly odd, starting out like some tearjerker and transitioning into satire and then ending with a wacky joke that undermines all the energy its depiction of black magic might have had.

Stay tuned as we continue our journey through the long history of Weird Tales here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  

Three 1940s stories by Hannes Bok from Future

I am of course familiar with the art of Hannes Bok, who created striking and distinctive covers as well as interior illustrations for a multitude of SF books and magazines.  But Bok was not only a painter and draughtsman of the fantastic--he also took up the pen to write SF fiction and poetry!  Today. for the first time, I will read some fiction by Bok, three stories that first appeared in the early 1940s in Future Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine.

There's Yarra and Frank Rogers as painted
by Bok himself

"The Alien Vibration" (1942)

"The Alien Vibration" was first published in the February 1942 issue of Future Combined with Science Fiction (Future went through a lot of name changes during its life), but I can't seem to find that issue at the internet archive.  But here at MPorcius Fiction Log, if we can't get in through the door we get in through the window!  "The Alien Vibration" was reprinted by super-editor Donald A. Wollheim in 1952 in Avon Science Fiction Reader, which is available at the internet archive, and that is where I read it. 

Frank Rogers has lived most of his life in congested cities, but now he has a house in the remote forest.  He spends a day walking in the woods, opening his consciousness up to nature.  That evening, he hears what must be a voice, and follows it into the woods and into another dimension, a dimension of chaos where the landscape around him is in constant flux.  The voice comes from a child-like figure floating amid "half-visible lilac draperies;" this giggling mischievous creature, named Shi-Voysieh, and its fellows, lead Rogers to a beautiful twenty-foot tall woman named Yarra, who is also known as "The Woman."  Yarra strongly attracts Rogers, but not sexually--rather, she is motherly: her "pervasive whiteness" and "milkiness" "sent him back to childhood...[she] seemed the mother of all mothers, the essence of maternity."

The Woman embraces Rogers and explains that the inhabitants of this universe create their environment via thought; the terrain and everything else around Rogers keeps changing because Yarra and Shi-Voysieh and his siblings--her children--are creating it and then, quickly tiring of what they have wrought, creating something new.  Yarra helps Rogers learn to create and manipulate matter himself.

While Yarra is away, Shi-Voysieh reveals that Rogers was once one of them, but he was ambitious and created his own entire universe and retired to it--that dimension, of course, is our own, dear reader!  Shi-Voysieh, Rogers's brother, missed him and so brought him back when Rogers rendered himself open to communication.  Rogers doesn't care for this chaotic universe, and tries to, by the power of his thoughts, recreate and return to our more orderly universe.  Yarra, his mother, is sick of her husband, B'Kuth (AKA "The Man"), the first creator and senior entity of this dimension, and begs Rogers to bring her with him.  B'Kuth is a sort of tyrant, and Yarra and her children are expected to ceremoniously salute him whenever they say his name--I wondered if this was an allusion to the Nazi salute.

Rogers succeeds in getting them back to his house in the forest, but Yarra doesn't stay more than a moment, perhaps because she missed her other children.  With her gone, Rogers has no concrete evidence that he really went to another dimension (or "vibration," as Bok sometimes calls parallel universes in this story) and decides his whole crazy adventure was just a dream or his imagination getting away from him.

I'm going to have to give "The Alien Vibration" a marginal thumbs down.  Elaborate descriptions take up too big a proportion of the text, and the plot too little.  My eyes were glazing over trying to read all the details about surreal vistas that a paragraph later would disappear and be replaced by some other phantasmagoria.  The story lacks real conflict--B'Kuth doesn't have any lines and doesn't really appear on screen, we just hear people talk about him and hear his menacing footfalls in the distance--and Rogers doesn't really make any decisions.  Stories in which the protagonist is just led by the nose and doesn't actually do anything are a pet peeve of mine.

At the same time, the story is packed with elements ripe for some kind of psychological analysis.  Presumably one could dissect the story to try to suss out the beliefs and attitudes of Hannes Bok--a homosexual artist who abandoned his birth name and concocted a name for himself out of "Johann Sebastian Bach"--about gender roles, relationships between parents and children, and creativity.  Rogers and Shi-Voysieh have a whole conversation about whether creative artists can produce things that are truly original or can only rework things they have already seen.  Another thing that jumped out at me was a reference, when Rogers is trying to traverse radically changing terrain, to Eliza and the ice-floes; also notable is how, when Rogers compares our world to the world of B'Kuth and Yarra, Bok includes mention of prejudice and lynchings.  Perhaps this is a sign that Bok, as a member of one marginalized group (gay men), identified with, or, at least had at the forefront of his mind, the plight of another marginalized group, African-Americans.

"The Alien Vibration" is interesting, if not quite a success as a piece of entertainment.

I like Bok's depiction of the shadow elf;
it could have made a great mascot for Future,
a sort of SF version of Playboy's Femlin.

"Beauty" (1942)

A young woman in a "shabby coat" visits a psychic, begs that "gaunt wreck of an old woman" to make her pretty--nobody wants or needs her now, but she knows that if she were pretty "people would flock around me like they do to all the pretty girls."  She even tells the psychic that if she can't be pretty, she doesn't want to live!

The old woman, through use of a pentagram, some prisms, and a bell, sends the girl to another dimension, to a ruined city in the middle of a rocky desert.  The ruin is inhabited by moaning shadow figures.  As the Earth woman watches, one of the shadows climbs the stairs of an ancient temple and hurls itself at a huge dull gem embedded in the wall there; the figure is absorbed, and the gem briefly glows red, its rays bringing the desert to verdant life and revealing the sad wraiths to be jovial elves.  But only briefly; soon the gem is again dull and the jungle a barren desert, the elves again dim phantoms.

The nameless protagonist decides to throw herself into the gem, a way of committing suicide that will help the shadow elves see again the beauty of their wasted world.  But the psyker back on Earth is watching her, and just as she touches the gem the girl is transported back to our world.  Her adventure has (somehow--I think Bok could have made this a little more clear) taught her that there are more important things than looking pretty and cured her of her suicidal inclinations.

"Beauty" is similar to "The Alien Vibration" in its plot and in that it addresses a topic of interest to an artist, this time "beauty," and also in the fact that it is top heavy with images and descriptions.  However, being shorter than "The Alien Vibration," it doesn't wear out its welcome.

Acceptable.

"Beauty" would be reprinted in the 1997 anthology Ackermanthology, edited by Forrest J Ackerman.

The image on the right is Bok's own illustration for "Dusk on the Moon," showing the moon of
200 million years ago, as meteors rain down on Yssa's people and a colossal statue of herself 

"Dusk on the Moon" (1943)

"Dusk on the Moon" begins by introducing us to Shizek, a spider creature the size of a cat who lives in a ruin in a crater on the Moon (breathable atmosphere persists in those craters.)  Shizek hides when an emergency space boat lands in the crater and two Earth people, Bob and Loretta, emerge.  Bob and Loretta are newlyweds and adventurers or government agents of some kind--they fled a space liner in the emergency life boat because a dangerous radical who resents them for interfering with his revolutionary plans was aboard.

When spotted by the Earthers, Shizek scats down a stairway into a series of sublunar chambers.  B & L then spot a space ship landing nearby--when a squad of those revolutionaries climbs out of it they flee down the stairs into the underground chambers themselves.  The radicals follow their tracks, and an energy gun firefight ensues--Bob shoots down one pursuer with an entropy ray that makes the thug decay into dust in seconds.  The villains chase the heroes through a labyrinth, where the arachnoid lunar natives help B & L prevail.

The spider people lead B & L to a cavern full of jungle where a gorgeous woman, a brunette as lovely as a goddess, lies in repose behind a force field.  Our heroes awaken her and she uses telepathy to transmit to them the story of her race, of whom she, Yssa, was absolute dictator thanks to her mental powers.  In times so ancient the continents of Earth had not yet separated, a meteor approached Luna.  The beautiful dictatrix hypnotized her people into building her the underground shelter in which B & L found her; all the lunar people save her were wiped out by the meteor's impact.  Then Yssa put herself into suspended animation; she has slept through the millions of years that have passed since then until today she was aroused by our heroes.

Instead of being grateful to or fascinated by her Terran rescuers, Yssa treats B & L as servants, making Loretta help her at her bath, for example.  Yssa is vain, spending lots of time looking in the mirror and primping.  When she realizes Earth is inhabited by millions of people she seeks to hypnotize the Earthers into taking her back home with them, where she will make herself Queen-Goddess of the world, and the skyscrapers of New York will be torn down to make way for hundreds of monumental statues of her!  Luckily, Shizek sneaks up on Yssa and stings her, killing her.

This is a sort of pedestrian story, and there are underdeveloped elements.  The revolutionaries and Bob and Loretta's relationship to them could have been fleshed out--as it stands we don't know anything about their aims or ideology and they just act like thugs, not leftist intellectuals or resentful proletarians or anything compelling like that.  I also expected Bok to do a thing where Bob and Loretta's young love was tested, with Yssa trying to seduce Bob, but the author only barely hints at such a plot element.

Still, I kind of like "Dusk on the Moon."  It is easy to imagine somebody like Leigh Brackett or Jack Vance taking this raw material and making an awesome short novel out of it, filling it with sexual tension and/or bitter irony, comparing the tyrannical government the revolutionaries are trying to erect on Earth with the tyrannical government Yssa had on Luna all those years ago, making the Earth rebels and the vain Queen into really interesting characters, etc.  But as it stands, still marginally good.

It looks like "Dusk on the Moon" was only reprinted once, in a sort of semi-pro anthology called Incredible Adventures 2.

**********

These stories are not great, but I don't feel like I wasted my time sampling Bok's literary efforts.  Maybe we'll see more of Bok's fiction here at MPorcius Fiction Log (but no guarantees!)

The Nets of Space by Emil Petaja

The front of my shopworn copy

In the nigh-forgotten past, back in the period known to historians as "January 2014," I read Emil Petaja's The Stolen Sun.  Examination of the records covering this dimly recalled epoch will lead the careful scholar to admit that there is a possibility that this blog did not merely express dislike for The Stolen Sun, but denounced DAW Books for unleashing it upon an unsuspecting public.

As the politicians tell us, America is the land of second chances.  In that spirit, I read The Nets of Space, Mr. Petaja's 1969 paperback from Berkley Medallion (X1692), which is adorned with an irresistibly awesome cover painting.  The Stolen Sun, the cognoscenti will recall, was inspired by the Kalevala, the national saga of Finland; as I cracked open The Nets of Space I pondered the possibility that this time around Mr. Petaja was inspired by the menu at Red Lobster.

The first chapter of this 20 chapter (128 page) book is a dream sequence.  Our hero, Donald Quick (his father named him after The Knight of the Woeful Countenance), is naked, in a huge bowl along with dozens of other naked people.  Above the bowl are Brobdingnagian crab people who are reaching into the bowl to seize the squirming humans and then devour them like appetizers!  The crabs discuss this new delicacy, one of them assuring another that he should eat a black person--the blacks have the most meat, while the Asians are too small and the whites are too fat!  Somebody should tell these outer space crab people that race is just a social construct!

Don wakes up and we find ourselves in the middle of what threatens to become a mainstream novel.  Vietnam vet Don is a victim of mental illness who loves the booze, and is holed up in a mountain cabin all alone with a nice bottle of vodka.  He quotes Amy Lowell and thinks back to his psychiatrist's advice (this advice was to stay away from the booze.)  He looks around his cabin (it's full of dust).  A pretty nurse shows up at the cabin at four in the morning so the two can reminisce about Don's psychiatry treatment and his abortive astronaut career.  Don and the nurse, whose name is Donna, begin a beautiful romance.

And the back

Don received training to go on man's first trip to interstellar space, but failed a physical and so ended up on the ground crew.  In an accident he breathed some of the time-space ship's "time gas" fuel, which put him in the hospital for months.  Eventually scientists at the space agency realize that Don's vivid dreams about the giant alien crabs are not dreams at all--Don is tuning in telepathically on the Earth astronauts, witnessing their horrible fate at the hands (er, claws) of invincible extraterrestrials!

As the kids might say, I totally dig the gargantuan crab aliens.  Petaja has come up with a whole culture, history and religion for them, and the crab peoples' leaders are more interesting than Don's shrink and the head of the Earth space agency, a Scandinavian scientist who says "ja" all the time. So why does Petaja spend so many pages giving us descriptions of the California mountains and flora, snatches of Don Quixote, conversations about Don and Donna's families, and Psych 101 lectures from Don's headshrinker?  Maybe to pad out the page count?

Petaja's writing style isn't the best, either.  Here are three passages that had me laughing or scratching my head:

"To face the enemy of night alone with this on his mind was something that shriveled his viscera, no matter how hard he tried to laugh it off." (43)   

"Whatever was in the Doc's new drugs seemed to be pinpointing one small section of his mind, thesaurus-like." (60)

A later edition

"Panic was all-inclusive.  Yet Don thought he heard parts of names.  Names.  The crew members sought refuge in withness." (86)

Believe me, I spent a long time trying to figure out that thesaurus simile. 

The Nets of Space has lots of problems, including the science, which doesn't seem to make any sense and is not applied consistently.  But I still enjoyed the book.  The crabs are great, and the scenes in which Don negotiates with a different alien race, tiny insect people, are good.  The Lilliputian race has developed a gas that can save the Earth from the crabs (the hungry crabs are on their way to Earth with their nets, seeking to add all of mankind to their larder), but the insect people have to be persuaded to take sides in the crab vs human war.  Only one race can survive; if they don't conquer Earth, the crabs will starve.  Why should the insect people choose the humans over the crabs?  Showing a commendable respect for the arts, Petaja has Don trade the insect people, who are literary connoisseurs as well as great scientists, a copy of Don Quixote for the war gas the Earth needs.  Petaja seems to be saying that, despite the manifold sins of mankind, the human race deserves to survive because it has numbered amongst its members great artists like Cervantes.  This is a message I can endorse!

So, thumbs up for The Nets of Space.  The aliens are great, its heart is in the right place, and many of its numerous problems have their own weird charm.  (Shriveled his viscera?)

***************

Gossipy side note:  The Nets of Space is dedicated to Harold Taves.  I had never heard of Taves before, and a google search revealed him to be a Seattle bookstore owner and one of Hannes Bok's boyfriends.  Anybody interested in early SF fandom, or gay figures in the SF community, should check out Jessica Amanda Salmonson's reminiscences of Taves; Taves sounds like an odd and interesting character.  [UPDATE NOVEMBER 21, 2018: It looks like that link to Ms. Salmonson's memoir of Taves is kaput, but I believe I have found a version of it via the waybackmachine at https://web.archive.org/web/20130609003309/http://www.violetbooks.com/taves.html .]