1954 stories by Carl Jacobi, Clark Ashton Smith and Evelyn E. Smith

I believe this 1969 paperback
edition includes all twelve of
the stories from the hardcover ed.

Let's read three more stories from Time to Come, a 1954 anthology of all new fiction edited by August Derleth. These stories, Derleth tells us in his introduction, present "visions of the world of the future."  I am reading from a hardcover 1954 edition I borrowed via interlibrary loan; Time to Come has appeared in paperback several times, but many of those paperback editions are abridged.

"The White Pinnacle" by Carl Jacobi

"The White Pinnacle" isn't really a "vision of the world of the future;" it is barely a science fiction story at all, being more like a horror story set on an alien planet, full of odd phenomena for which Jacobi presents no explanation.

The text is a log or testimonial penned by a spaceman, Judson, a member of the crew of a starship that travels around the galaxy seeking new sources of mineral wealth.  The ship lands on an unexplored planet, suffering minor damage in the process that prevents the ship from taking off again until a few days are spent on repairs.  Visible in the distance is a kind of white obelisk, with writing on it, and the sensors detect a source of radiation near the obelisk--this radiation is unusual, and the ship's geologist believes it indicates that a rare form of very valuable ore is present.

Proceeding concurrently with this obelisk and ore plot, but unconnected to it as far as I could tell, is a plot concerning stone-age natives of the planet.  One member of the starship's crew, McKay, is an amateur perfume enthusiast who collects scents from around the galaxy.  When he smells an unusual scent, one which strikes fear into Judson, McKay runs out into the night and disappears.

The next day McKay reappears, slightly injured, claiming he fought and captured a native (he doesn't bring this native to the ship with him, however.)  When the rest of the crew goes to investigate the obelisk later that day, they find a native tied up.  They also notice that, around the obelisk, every blade of grass, every flower, every pebble and stone, has a duplicate.  The crew bring the alien back to the ship, spend some hours trying to communicate with it, then let it go.  Judson has copied the hieroglyphs on the obelisk, and in a few hours back at the ship he manages to decipher them; not only is his ability to read the alien writing unconvincing, but the message the hieroglyphs convey has no effect on the plot.  McKay runs off again, and when he returns he says he caught up to the alien, captured it a second time, and amputated its scent gland.  In the same way that Judson does nothing with the info he gets from the hieroglyphs and the crew learns nothing from bringing the alien to the ship, McKay does nothing with the scent gland.  Jacobi includes these potentially interesting or important events in the story, but does nothing to exploit their possibilities--they don't tell the reader anything that makes him think or feel, and they don't advance the story in any way.

The resolution of "The White Pinnacle" comes when a duplicate of McKay shows up.  The duplicate touches the original McKay, they fuse together into a single McKay, and the new McKay walks to the obelisk and drops dead.  This sort of thing happens to more crewmembers, until all are dead or missing.  The last lines of Judson's log relate how he, the only surviving spaceman, sees a duplicate of himself coming towards the ship.

This story is just a bunch of bizarre events jumbled together semi-coherently; Jacobi fails to present a unifying theme or to make any kind of point or generate any feeling in the reader beyond mystification as to what he is getting at.  He tries to make "The White Pinnacle" feel like a science fiction story by having the characters uses phrases like "Gantzen rays" and "Planck's Quantum Theory" and "deflector auricles," but it is just extraneous window-dressing.  Thumbs down for this one.

You may recall that I had very similar complaints about Jacobi's 1936 story "The Face in the Wind" back in July when I read it.  My patience with Jacobi is running thin.

"The White Pinnacle" would be reprinted in 1972 in the Jacobi collection Disclosures in Scarlet.

"Phoenix" by Clark Ashton Smith

Since its initial appearance in Time to Come, "Phoenix" has been reprinted in the expected Smith collections as well as an anthology edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh called Catastrophes! and one by edited by Richard Hurley for Scholastic Book Services titled Beyond Belief.

It is the far future!  The sun has turned black, the surface of the Earth is frozen, and the remnants of mankind, mere thousands, live in underground caverns, heated and lit by nuclear power.  For many centuries the human race, and its attendant agriculture and livestock, has lived thus, but of late the surviving flora and fauna have begun to degenerate--presumably there is something vital in sunlight that the atomic lights cannot reproduce, and so life on Earth is doomed.

A desperate plan is conceived--for thousands of years spacecraft and nuclear weapons have lay in storage, and a plan is hatched to detonate the nuclear warheads on the surface of the sun and thereby reactivate Sol and thaw Mother Earth--perhaps men and women will again walk in the sunlight among the flowers and trees!

"Phoenix" is written in a poetic and romantic style that is very effective, even moving.  Smith gives us all that background and describes the farewell to his lover of the man charged with operating the nuclear bombs on the spaceship and the tragic course of his voyage to the sun.  I quite like this one--the science is probably all totally bogus, but Smith provides in "Phoenix" many of things I hope to find when I start reading a piece of fiction: well-crafted sentences, human feeling, and striking images.  Thumbs up!

If you want a story about a suicidal mission to reignite the sun written by an actual scientist instead of a poet you can try Ted Thomas's 1970 piece "The Weather on the Sun," but be forewarned: when I read it in early 2019 I bitterly denounced it as a mind-numbing government-worshiping piece of junk and implied it only got published in Orbit 8 because Thomas was friends with Damon Knight's wife.

"DAXBR/BAXBR" by Evelyn E. Smith

Evelyn E. Smith and Farrar, Straus and Young conduct a little experiment in graphic design with the title to this story, which appears in Time to Come as a cross, with the two words sharing the "X."  In the little biographical sketch appearing before the story we learn that Smith not only writes fiction, but "carries on an appreciable program of crossword puzzle work."  Wikipedia says she "compiled" crosswords--I don't know if that means she created crossword puzzles entire or if somebody else wrote the clues.

(In the days before cable TV, my mother and maternal grandmother would do lots of crossword puzzles.  There was a period during my employment by the New York government when some of the women in the office and I would spend hours doing the Monday and Tuesday New York Times crossword puzzles--your tax dollars at work!)

Like Smith's 1961 vampire story, "Softly While You're Sleeping," which I quite liked, "DAXBR/BAXBR" is a New York story, but, unfortunately, it is a silly joke story.  A man who makes crossword puzzles boards the subway and sits next to a short little guy in dark glasses.  The short guy is reading his correspondence, and over the little guy's shoulder the crossword maker spots an unusual word in one of his letters, "baxbr."  Such an odd word would be useful in designing crossword puzzles, so the protagonist asks the shorty about it.  As it turns out, the diminutive individual is a Martian spy, and, his cover now blown, he has to advance the timetable for extermination of the human race.  As the story ends, Manhattan is under bombardment and the crossword maker is killed.

I'm tempted to call this story pointless filler, though maybe crossword puzzle fans will like it, as much of the text is taken up with discussion and examples of the creation of grids of letters suitable for use in constructing a crossword puzzle; numerous names famous in 1954 crop up because the newspapers who buy crosswords like having topical answers and clues.  If I want to be generous I can say it is a curious oddity, I guess.

"DAXBR/BAXBR" reappeared in F&SF in 1956, and has been anthologized four or five times, including in Edmund Crispin's Best SF Four.  We humorless bastards just have to accept that there is a big market for joke stories.

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Unsurprisingly, Clark Ashton Smith offers us something quite fine and Carl Jacobi tries to lay an incompetent half-finished piece of dreck on us.  Maybe August Derleth was just doing his friend in dire straits a solid when he accepted Jacobi's story for publication, the way the person who recommended me for that government job back in the '90s was doing me a solid--everywhere you go, dear reader (MPorcius Advice Column is kicking in here), be as nice to everybody as you can, because you never know who will some day have an opportunity to do you a favor or to get revenge on you.  The Evelyn Smith story is disappointing but at least it is competent--she's still in my good books.

I'm afraid that I have to point out that of these three stories only Clark Ashton Smith really tackles the "vision of the world of the future" theme; Derleth obviously wasn't keeping a very tight rein on his contributors.

Followers of my twitter feed know what my favorite Opal song is and also know I got another anthology edited by August Derleth via interlibrary loan along with this one--we'll start reading stories from that anthology in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

Stories of Haunted America by Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, Carl Jacobi, and Barry N. Malzberg

Let's dip again into Marvin Kaye's 1991 anthology Haunted America.  As I mentioned in our last installment, for this book Kaye split the USA into five regions, and selected eight to ten stories to represent each region.  Today we'll look at one story set in The West, Fritz Leiber's "The Glove," and three about The MidWest: Robert E. Howard's "The Dead Remember," Carl Jacobi's "The Chadwick Pit," and Barry Malzberg's "Away."

"The Glove" by Fritz Leiber (1975)

"The Glove" is about a rape at a San Francisco apartment building where live a bunch of homosexuals, people who believe in witchcraft, women who get attention by cutting themselves or overdosing on pills, a guy with some strange sexual fetish that drives him to violence, and other weirdos.  Leiber infuses the story with sad nostalgia, using the building and its inhabitants as a sort of model in miniature of a United States in social decline.  The now grim apartment building was once a bustling hotel, the now empty closets and inert dumbwaiters then in constant use by a legion of accommodating servants.  Almost all the current tenants of the building are single, and there are no servants, making the big building feel empty and lonely, and our narrator says that because people nowadays have fewer children that the entire world is perhaps similarly becoming big and lonely.

Our narrator is Jeff Winter.  He tells us he slept through the break-in of the apartment next to his and the rape of its occupant, Evelyn Mayne, a 65-year-old woman who is neglected by her family, is always hitting the bottle and who makes half-hearted attempts to commit suicide several times a year.  Winter knows all the details of the crime through conversations with the victim and another tenant, an attractive woman he is dating, Marcia Everly, who was the first person Mayne went to for help.  After the police have come and left, Mayne finds a clue in her apartment, a glove.  When Mayne is taken away by her family, Marcia Everly gets custody of the glove, but the glove creeps her out so she asks Jeff to keep a hold of it until the cops return.

That night Jeff keeps waking up, thinking the glove has come to life and is touching him, and it does seem to move about the room, though probably this is just because of the wind from an open window.  When the police come to collect the glove, the glove's unusual movements (merely at the whims of the wind and gravity, probably) help to pinpoint the rapist, who turns out to be the most outwardly helpful and neighborly person in the building!  In the story's last line we learn the gloves worn by the rapist were handed down to him by his father, who was a judge.

This is a well-written and enjoyable story, though the business with the moving glove is probably the least interesting part, and I suppose in a lot of ways the piece isn't "woke."  I note that Leiber seems to write a lot about rape--see: "Alice and the Allergy" (1947) and "The Sadness of the Executioner" (1973)--and politically incorrect sex in general--see "The Bait" (1973.)  The rape scene in "The Sadness of the Executioner" is played for laughs, and I thought Leiber was pulling an inside joke on us here in "The Glove" when he has Jeff relate that, after hearing Mayne describe her victimization, "I realized, perhaps for the first time, just what a vicious and sick crime rape is and how cheap are all the easy jokes about it."  On second thought, perhaps this is not a sly joke directed at his fans, but Leiber's subtle mea culpa.

Of the stories in Haunted America I have read, "The Glove" seems most successfully to accomplish what Kaye set out to do with the anthology: it actually paints a recognizable picture of the place it is set in (San Francisco as a place full of people with sexual appetites outside the mainstream) it actually features a haunt focused on a particular location or item, it actually has something to say about American culture, and it is actually good.

"The Glove" was first printed in the June 1975 issue of Stuart David Schiff's Whispers, and selected by Gerald Page for DAW's The Years Best Horror Stories: Series IV.

"The Dead Remember" by Robert E. Howard (1936)

"The Dead Remember" was first printed in Argosy, but Cele Goldsmith included it in a 1961 issue of Fantastic 25 years later, even advertising it on the cover and printing a page-long essay by speculative fiction historian Sam Moskowitz on Howard along with it.

"The Dead Remember" is a solid competent horror story about cowboys and race relations.  Over half of the tale consists of a letter written by cowboy Jim Gordon back home to his brother Bill; Jim was working a cattle drive from Texas that has just reached its destination in Kansas.  Jim tells Bill he expects that he will soon be dead, and explains why.  Jim, who seems like something of a swaggering jerk who was always throwing his weight around, four months ago, before the cattle drive, got drunk and outrageously mistreated a black man, Joel.  After abusing Joel's hospitality and accusing Joel of cheating him at dice, Jim instigated a fight with Joel in which Joel's wife, Jezebel, a light-skinned black woman reputed to be a witch, also became involved.  When the fight was over Joel and Jezebel were dead, but as she was expiring Jezebel put a curse on Jim.  While on the way to Kansas with the herd of 3,400 head of cattle, Jim repeatedly escaped death, narrowly, from various accidents--no doubt these accidents were the work of the curse!

After the letter comes a bunch of legal testimonials from a sheriff and various witnesses which relate to us readers how Jim was finally undone by Jezebel's curse in Dodge City, Kansas.

I like it.  In my last blog post I mentioned how one of Lovecraft's early stories, "The Terrible Old Man," perhaps had something to tell us about the author's attitudes about immigrants, and maybe this story, one of Howard's last, similarly can tell us something about Howard's attitudes about African-Americans and their relationship with the white majority.

"The Chadwick Pit" by Carl Jacobi (1980)

This story appeared in the first of four paperback editions of Weird Tales published in the early 1980s and edited by Lin Carter; in that book it was simply titled "The Pit."  In his intro to "The Chadwick Pit" here in Haunted America, Kaye tells us a version of the story with all the supernatural elements removed appeared in a 1976 issue of Mike Shane's Mystery Magazine.

Back in July I read Jacobi's 1936 story "The Face in the Wind" and bitterly denounced it, but maybe this one will be good?

Chadwick is a dude who likes to live alone and has just moved into a house in a relatively remote area.  At the edge of his property is a huge sinkhole full of stones and black water; he has been told this is the site of an Indian burial mound that some enterprising jokers dug up, looking for artifacts.  The pit is an eyesore and a danger, but when Chadwick says he is thinking of filling it in, people warn him to just leave it alone.     

Chadwick builds what he calls "a summer house."  In my experience, in New Jersey and New York, people use the phrase "summer house" to mean an actual second house you own or rent that is far from your main residence, a place you go to on vacations.  My boss when I worked in public academia in Manhattan had a summer house in the Hamptons; she cunningly claimed to the tax collector that it was her main residence, thus allowing her to avoid paying income taxes to New York City, where she lived in an apartment like 300 days of the year.  Anyway, I was amazed when Jacobi wrote that Chadwick built this summer house in "several weeks."  A quick look at wikipedia indicates that some people use the phrase "summer house" to mean a thing like a shed or shack you put in your yard to sit in instead of sitting in your actual house.  I guess you use such a thing the way you'd use a porch or veranda, especially if you don't have an air conditioner in your house. 

Anyway, Chadwick uses stones from the pit to build the foundation of this "summer house."  He starts sleeping in the little summer house, but he always has nightmares when he does so, nightmares in which he chases people and is chased in turn.  When news comes from town that people are being murdered, we readers assume Chadwick, under the influence of the stones from the pit, is spending his nights driving around murdering people, Mr. Hyde-style.  Chadwick suddenly finds a room in his house that he never noticed before. (?)  In it are a bunch of psychology books; they fall open naturally to their chapters about dreams.  There is also a bunch of books about Native Americans, including one that claims a mysterious race inhabited North America before the arrival of the Indians.  (I'm guessing that in the Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine version of the story the Lovecraftian lost race jazz was left out.  Maybe Lin Carter should have convinced Jacobi to leave the psych books out of the Weird Tales version and focus a little more on the ancient monster people.)

Chadwick has a crush on the girl who works at the library, whom he met when checking out books on how to build a summer house.  (If only these books had warned him not to use stones from an Indian burial mound.)  When this girl turns up missing, Chadwick's Dr. Jekyll side briefly overpowers his Mr. Hyde side and he leads the cops to where he has hidden the librarian while in his most recent Mr. Hyde period.  The police rescue the girl and drag Chadwick off to jail.

An unremarkable and pedestrian piece of work that feels clumsy and contrived at times.  One example is that room with the books that comes out of nowhere.  Whose psychology books were those?  Did the people who were there before have bad dreams, even though they didn't build a haunted summer house?  (Jacobi makes clear that Chadwick doesn't have the bad dreams if he sleeps in the actual house he bought.)  Another example is how when Jacobi needs the sheriff to be a passenger in Chadwick's car for his plot to work, all of a sudden Chadwick reveals he was a cop back in Chicago in '55 so the sheriff will deputize him.  Instead of the two of them searching for the missing librarian separately, you know, to cover more ground, the sheriff decides he'll leave his police car behind and ride with Chadwick in his civilian car.  What?  I'll judge "The Chadwick Pit" just barely acceptable.     

"Away" by Barry N. Malzberg (1985)

In "Away," Barry Malzberg, a creature of New York and New Jersey, like myself, tries to say something about Iowa, where I lived for four years.  I don't know if Malzberg ever lived there.  This story is a first-person narrative with stream of consciousness elements, delivered by the ghost of Josiah Bushnell Grinnell, the New Englander who founded Grinnell College in 1846.  Grinnell materializes at a Fourth of July picnic in 1954 where one of Iowa's senators, Bourke B. Hickenlooper, is giving an anti-communist speech.  Grinnell's ghost cries out that the orator is "all wrong....This man is not telling the truth!  We lived to open frontiers, he is closing them!"  Neither Malzberg nor the ghost of Grinnell bothers to make a case that we should be more open to communism--instead ad hominem attacks are employed, Grinnell accusing the politician of hating black people and suggesting he doesn't really believe what he is saying.

The main interesting and sole creative element of "Away" is the idea that the character of the people of Iowa is the product of the influence of the ghosts of white people murdered in an 1857 massacre perpetrated by Sioux Indians at Spirit Lake.  Hickenlooper's hostility to black people, for example, is said to be the result of his being "linked to Spirit Lake by ancestry and blood, [he] still sees the frame of the assassin arched against the moonlight."  Grinnell is also linked to the massacre, having flashbacks to the murders and, in what I guess is a joke, yelling to the crowd that Hickenlooper "speaketh with forked tongue!"

Needless to say, Malzberg's work is much more interesting and valuable when he is writing from his own experience of working as a writer and social worker in New York and New Jersey, or addressing universal problems like sexual dysfunction and the general futility of life.  Here he seems to be writing about Iowa based on stuff he read in an encyclopedia.  Malzberg is famous for arguing that the space program is a pointless waste of time, that humanity is not up to the task of colonizing space, and there is an additional flicker of interest in "Away" when it is hinted that Malzberg feels the same about American expansion to the West; for example, when the ghost of Grinnell moans that he was gullible to take seriously Horace Greeley's suggestion "Go West, young man."  I wish Malzberg had spent more energy on this theme, though, just as it is hard to argue that communism was a big success, it is hard to argue that the settlement of the American West has been a failure.  As it stands, "Away" feels like a dashed off bit of New York parochialism, an expression of the stereotypical New Yorker's view that, beyond the Big Apple, white people are all irrational racists with an irrational skepticism of all the wonderful things their betters in government, academia and the media are doing for them, and not a very entertaining or self-conscious one.

"Away" appears to have been written to fill in the Iowa slot of the 1985 anthology A Treasury of American Horror Stories, a book which presents fifty-one horror tales, one for each state plus an additional one for the District of Columbia.  Of the 51 stories, it looks like 49 were reprints, with only Malzberg's "Away" and Edward D. Hoch's "Bigfish" being original to the anthology.  (Too bad Martin H. Greenberg didn't recruit Iowa-born Thomas Disch to fulfill that commission.)

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

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I feel like I have been pretty bitchy about Kaye and his anthology here, but there's nothing wrong with livening up the blog a little, am I right?  And Haunted America does include numerous good stories--the Lovecraft, Howard, Leiber, Wellman, Matheson and Boucher stories are worth the time of all you Weird Tales kids, and Kaye also includes in the anthology stories by major American authors you are supposed to like, like Poe, Twain, Cather, Irving, Wharton, James and Hawthorne.  So don't let my irascibility keep you from checking it out for free at the internet archive. 

After this year-end rapid fire barrage of posts about short stories, we'll start the new year at MPorcius Fiction Log with a novel.  See you in 2020!

Whispers II: Brennan, Grant, Russell, Jacobi and Weinstein

Let's tackle five more stories from Stuart Schiff's 1979 anthology Whispers II.  Can anyone challenge the hold of R. A. Lafferty's "Berryhill" on the title of "Best Story in Whispers II?"

Patty cake, patty cake...

"Marianne" by Joseph Payne Brennan (1975)

Tuna, rubber, little blubber in my igloo...

I've never read anything by Brennan, but the Wikipedia article on him makes him sound like a fascinating guy with an interesting career: working at the Yale Library, publishing scores of stories and hundreds of poems, managing his own horror magazine and his own poetry magazine.  Let's get a taste of what this guy is all about!

"Marianne," which is like a page and a half long, describes a lonely tourist beach in chill October, the wind making padlocks clank and the grey waves and the cries of gulls and all that.  A guy goes to the water's edge and cries out the name of his girlfriend (or wife?) who drowned there.  Her corpse rises up and claims him for the sea!

This is fine for what it is, I suppose...it kind of feels like part of a larger work, like the end of a story of a disastrous relationship or the prologue of a story about aquatic zombies.  Acceptable.

"Marianne" first appeared in Whispers #6-7 and would be reprinted in the Brennan collection The Borders Just Beyond.

"The Fourth Musketeer" by Charles L. Grant (1979)

I've read a few Grant stories over the years.  There was that piano-playing witch, the sarcophagus found in a secret room in a Connecticut house, and those stories about robots and tyrannical governments and creepy New Jersey women.  "The Fourth Musketeer" was original to Whispers II and I don't think it ever appeared anywhere else.

"The Fourth Musketeer" is about mid-life crisis, and I guess about masculinity and gender roles.  Everett Templar is forty, and has quit his job and left his wife, and ridden a bus to the neighborhood of his childhood.  There is a lot of description of his aches and pains and his failing memory (the title of the story refers to the fact that he can't remember the names of all of Dumas's Musketeers) as well as of the landscape of his youthful haunts.  In flashbacks we see he quit his job because his superiors at the office thought he should act his age, that with his long hair and loud music he was starting to appear like a hippie and that might drive away clients; it is also hinted that his wife was a nag who complained about his toy trains.

Having been away from home for some months (he can't remember if it was two months or six months or something in between) he decides to telephone his wife and gloat (and maybe negotiate a reconciliation?)  But when Templar speaks into the phone his wife can't hear him, and we readers are given reason to believe that Templar is not really alive, that he is a ghost, or something--it's not really clear, at least not to me.  Maybe his inability to be heard, his lack of a voice, is symbolism for alienation and marginalization?

This is an OK mainstream story about a guy unhappy with his family and job with a little supernatural stuff tossed in.

"Ghost of a Chance" by Ray Russell (1978)

Oh no, it is Ray Russell, the guy who worked at Playboy and wrote lots of short-short stories that I think are a waste of time.  Let's see how Russell uses the two pages he usually limits himself to this time.

"Ghost of a Chance" is like a story written by a child.  (If you were paying me to sell the story I would say, "It's a whimsical flight of fancy into the macabre!")  One dude says there are no ghosts, that no proof of the existence of ghosts has ever been produced.  A second dude says he will prove to dude #1 that ghosts exist by committing suicide in front of dude #1 and then haunting him.  Bang goes the revolver!  After the police have left, sure enough, dude #1 sees a glowing form with the face of dude #2.  But dude #1 just figures it is a guilt-induced hallucination, and dude #2 laments that he killed himself for nothing.  It's like a skit from The Carol Burnett Show or something (you know you can see Tim Conway shooting himself in the head and then going "Wooooooooo...Harvey Korman...I am haunting you....")

A waste of everybody's time. "Ghost of a Chance" first appeared in Whispers #11-12 and would later appear in the Russell collection The Devil's Mirror.   

"The Elcar Special" by Carl Jacobi (1979)

Oh no, it is Carl Jacobi, the guy who wrote a story that was so bad it made me angry.  I feel like that fit of dismay and rage occurred just a week ago, but here I am giving Carl Jacobi another chance!  Don't believe what the beggars that hang around Dupont Circle say--I am a generous man!

The narrator of "The Elcar Special" is a loser, a 32-year-old who lives with his mother and keeps getting sacked from poorly paid jobs due to incompetence and negligence.  He gets a job helping to maintain the fleet of pre-World War II cars owned by a collector.  The prize possession of this collector is an Elcar used by Lillian Boyer the woman daredevil in her act, which consisted in part of climbing out of a moving car and onto an airborne airplane.  (I have to admit that I was a little surprised to find that Elcar and Boyer were real.)  Associated with the car is an unsubstantiated tale about the psychiatrist who bought it from wing walker Boyer, my new feminist hero.  This headshrinker married a Caribbean woman, a woman who practiced obeah.  When their marriage started falling apart the shrink killed the woman by running her over with the Elcar.

After setting the scene and presenting the characters, Jacobi bangs out a mediocre but not quite irritating supernatural story about the narrator driving the car, feeling a presence, thinking he has been transported from the roads of America to the roads of Martinique, picking up a sinister man and then running over a dark-skinned woman, only to wake up in the hospital, having crashed the Elcar.  The cops wonder why a shred of a woman's dress is stuck to the bumper of the wrecked Elcar.  Dun dun dun!

This is an unremarkable, standard issue horror story, which is an improvement over the half-baked abortion of a Jacobi story I had to endure a week ago.

"The Elcar Special" first appeared in Whispers II, and was included in the 1994 Jacobi collection, Smoke of the Snake.     

"The Box" by Lee Weinstein (1976)

Weinstein has four fiction credits at isfdb, and this is the first.  Its initial appearance was in Whispers #9, and Schiff also included it in his Mad Scientist anthology.

"The Box" is actually a good story, which is refreshing after reading so many poor and mediocre stories in a row.

The story takes place in a medical museum, which Weinstein describes in detail, all the skeletons, model eyes, jars containing diseased organs and deformed fetuses.  Every week for years a guy has come to the museum; today he comes in carrying a package--he's never brought a package before.  He picks the lock on a glass cabinet containing malformed fetuses, begins shifting a jar containing a baby with one eye.  He makes enough noise to alert the guards, who come to stop him, and we learn that the cyclops is his own son, and today would have been his 21st birthday--in the package is a wreath.

This is a sad and surprising story, and quite well-written, the second or third best tale in the anthology so far, a story which relies for its effects on universal human feelings for one's own flesh and blood and not supernatural nonsense or extravagant gore.  Thumbs up! 

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Five stories and only one you can consider a noteworthy success in the lot?  Sad!  Well, we'll be reading four more stories from Whispers II in our next blog post, and maybe we can dig up another story or two that is in the same league as those of Lafferty, Davidson and Weinstein. 

Night Chills from Robert Bloch, Thomas Disch and Carl Jacobi

While taking a breather between volumes of Edmond Hamilton's Starwolf trilogy, in which a space pirate joins a team of space mercenaries and travels through space dealing with ancient artifacts, let's read three more tales of suspense and/or horror chosen by Kirby McCauley for his 1975 anthology Night Chills.

"The Funny Farm" by Robert Bloch (1971)

McCauley tells us he chose the stories for Night Chills based largely on the fact that they were not yet published in widely available books.  Bloch's "The Funny Farm" was first printed in August Derleth's anthology Dark Things (I denounced Derleth's own story from Dark Things just a few blog posts ago) and I think qualifies as a rare Bloch story; to this day it has only been printed four times, according to isfdb, and two of those times have been in French language collections.  I guess Robert Bloch completists need a copy of Dark Things or Night Chills in their collections.

Joe Satterlee has been collecting newspaper comics since he was seven years old, back in the Twenties.  Today, in the early Seventies, he is retired, the hermitish owner of a huge collection of comic strips.

We've remarked on Bloch's cultural conservatism before; for example, there's his denunciation of youth rebellion in 1958's "A Lesson for the Teacher," and his portrayals of Tinseltown as an immoral cesspool in 1957's "Terror Over Hollywood" and 1971's "The Animal Fair."  Here in "The Funny Farm," setting the stage and building up the character of Satterlee, Bloch serves out a hearty helping of nostalgia, opining that "The funny pages were actually funny in those days," and then layering on many long sentences that consist of extensive lists of comic strips of the 1920s, '30s and '40s and allusions and references to their characters.  I know a little bit about Superman, Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy and Krazy Kat, but a lot of these comics meant zilch to me.

Once Bloch has set the stage for us, he introduces the plot--a professional thief learns of Satterlee's collection, then (as we say) cases the joint, and then, late at night, breaks in, hoping to steal a fortune in comic books.  Of course Satterlee doesn't have any comic books--he just collects the newspaper funny pages.  Enraged, the burglar murders Satterlee, but then we get the predictable and totally lame gimmick I was hoping Bloch would refrain from indulging in--comic strip characters come to life and mete out vigilante justice; the goofy specifics are that Little Orphan Annie commands her dog Sandy to tear out the thief's throat.

Not good; the plot is mediocre and the story seems to be merely a vehicle for Bloch to talk about the old comic strips, but it is not clear if he is praising or satirizing the strips and the attachment of readers to them--he just sort of lists them, without saying anything interesting about them.  Maybe I can recommend "The Funny Farm" to people who already know who Dixie Dugan, Moon Mullins and Major Hoople are--perhaps they will be able to appreciate nuances in the tale that went over my head.  (For example, is the fact that Little Orphan Annie leads the attack on the thief supposed to be a surprise or a joke to readers, because Annie is a little girl, or is it a knowing acknowledgement that the Annie strip actually was full of crime, war and sharp commentary on current events including sympathetic portrayals of vigilante violence?)

"Minnesota Gothic" by Thomas Disch (1964)

"Minnesota Gothic" first appeared under a pseudonym in the same issue of Fantastic that carried another Disch story, "A Thesis on Social Norms and Social Controls in the U.S.A.," and the first part of the serialized Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story "Lords of Quarmall."  (Fritz Leiber co-wrote "Lords of Quarmall" with his friend Harry Fischer and there is reason to consider it the first Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story, but when I read "Lords of Quarmall" back in the Eighties in my Jeff Jones-adorned copy of Swords Against Wizardry I thought it had a different tone than most of the other Fafhrd and Mouser stories and did not care for it.  Probably I should read it again.) 

Seven-year-old Gretel is living in Onamia, Minnesota, a world of gravel roads and clapboard farmhouses, though it seems her parents are more in tune with city life.  "Minnesota Gothic" is the story of Gretel's relationship with her neighbor, 100-year-old Minnie Haeckel, reputed to be a witch.  When Gretel was younger her mother would threaten to give her to Minnie Haeckel if she refused to eat her vegetables, and when Gretel's grandfather out in California dies and her parents have to fly out to the left coast they leave their young daughter with the strange Haeckel woman, in whose house Gretel has weird and life-altering experiences.   

Disch is one of the best prose writers in SF, and this story is a pleasure to read; Disch manages to achieve not only a real sense of menace, but a level of childish whimsy and even what you might call psychological insight or wisdom about human nature.  The plot contains many references and allusions to the famous story of Hansel and Gretel, and I have to admit I found elements of the plot a little confusing, maybe because I'm not intimately familiar with a legit 18th- or 19th-century version of Hansel and Gretel.

Minnie Haeckel has a familiar that looks like her dead brother Lew, who died in 1923 in a car wreck in far off New York.  I'm not sure if the creature is 1) the brother brought back to ghoulish life, 2) Lew's reanimated corpse inhabited by a spirit or demon or whatever, or 3) a spirit or whatevs that has been made to look like Lew.  The familiar connives with Gretel to destroy Minnie, and at some points talks like he is Lew ("She hexed me.  I was a thousand miles away, I was in New York....She made my leg go bum,") but other times talks like maybe he is a different being made to look like Lew or inhabit Lew's cadaver ("...Minnie had to have something that looked like her brother--so she dug him up.  I had to do all the work....")  The familiar seems to be sexually attracted to seven-year-old Gretel, and suggests that Gretel, now a witch in her own right--and he now her familiar-- transform him into a likeness of Fabian or Bobby Kennedy; Gretel instead opts to turn him into a cocker spaniel.  If Gretel really could make the familiar look like the crooner who gave the world "Tiger" or the third or fourth most famous of Marilyn Monroe's sex partners, this implies that there was no reason for Minnie to dig up Lew's corpse to make the creature look like Lew.  Another data point: Minnie spends her last moments, just before Gretel breaks the spell that has been keeping her alive past her natural term, digging around Lew's grave.  I just can't make all these clues add up.

As when I read Gene Wolfe, often when I read Tom Disch I feel like I am reading the work of a genius, work that, while satisfying, has facets I am not quite able to grasp.

"Minnesota Gothic" was reprinted in Fundamental Disch, the 1980 anthology edited by Samuel R. Delany; I actually own a copy and have blogged about some of its contents. 

"The Face in the Wind" by Carl Jacobi (1936)

You know I love Weird Tales.  H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Edmond Hamilton, C. L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Ray Bradbury, and on and on.  Well, one member of the Weird Tales gang whose work I have never read is Carl Jacobi.  Today I cross a new frontier and explore another tract of weird country in hopes that it will be to my taste and present me another rich vein of weird goodness to mine.

Minnesotan Jacobi sets "The Face in the Wind" on a crumbling English country estate named Royalton; the tale is narrated by a Hampstead, the 20th-century inheritor of the decayed estate.  Hampstead decides to get a wall on the estate repaired; he calls this wall the "frog wall" because it was originally built (he has been led to believe) to keep frogs from the nearby marsh out of the estate because their croaking would make it hard for the Hampsteads to sleep.  A young painter Hampstead has befriended, Peter Woodley, begs the narrator to cancel the repairs because he believes the wall is a mystical barrier against an unspecified entity and any change will weaken the barrier.  Hampstead gets the gaps in the 18th-century wall patched up anyway, and, sure enough, that very night, minutes after midnight, a giant bird attacks the estate and Hampstead shoots an antique percussion cap pistol at it from a window, driving it off.  Bizarrely, the bird had the face of a beautiful woman!

Only one other person lives on the decrepit estate, Classilda Haven, a hideous septuagenarian woman who has rented the gardener's cottage for the last four months.  She had urged Hampstead to tear the frog wall down entirely, saying that she loves frogs.  The day after the giant bird attack Hampstead notices that the old crone looks kind of like a bird, and Woodley shows him a canvas he painted the night before, while in a sort of daze, a landscape showing the frog wall and the half ruined manor house where our narrator resides.  Hampstead keeps the painting, and, by looking at it in a mirror, suddenly sees the lovely feminine face of that monster bird, cunningly hidden in the brushstrokes!

That night, at the frog wall gate, hidden in the shadows, Hampstead watches Haven conduct a sort of ritual that apparently summons a sleepwalking Woodley, but the painter wakes up and flees before the woman can be whatever she had planned to him.  The next day Hamptead finds that Woodley's painting has been stolen from a locked cabinet in the manor house, and when Woodley shows up his arm, where Haven touched him, is a blackened gangrenous mess.  Woodley shows Hampstead an 18th-century book about magic that Hampstead hadn't realized was in his own library, and convinces the narrator that Classilda Haven is a harpy who has been terrorizing Hampstead's family throughout history.  Woodley has a bottle of holy water and a bow and two silver arrows and that night they fight Haven and her two harpy sisters; Haven and Woodley are both killed (Haven evaporates, leaving no corpse), Hampstead is permanently scarred (his hair turns white) and the other two harpies just leave after being sprinkled with holy water.

This story stinks.  The plot is just a bunch of silly events jumbled together haphazardly without any kind of connective tissue, no foreshadowing or building of suspense or anything like that.  The supernatural elements make little sense, Jacobi witholds and reveals information in a way that seems arbitrary rather than guided by some kind of narrative strategy, and none of the characters or images are the least bit interesting.  It feels like the author was just making it all up as he went along and never bothered to do any revisions.  Long and tedious, "The Face in the Wind" is incompetent and McCauley's inclusion of it in his anthology is inexcusable.

Or is it?  In the program to the 1983 World Fantasy Convention is an article by SF historian Sam Moskowitz in which Moskowitz, based upon the extensive records kept by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, lists the most popular stories in Weird Tales from 1924 to 1940.  (I wrote about this fascinating article in connection with Edmond Hamilton back in 2017.)  Moskowitz indicates that readers' favorite story in the April 1936 issue of Weird Tales was the final installment of the serialized version of Robert Howard's Conan novel The Hour of the Dragon (The Hour of the Dragon is actually probably my own favorite Conan story.)  But in second place, with 14 people writing in to Weird Tales to praise it, is Jacobi's "The Face in the Wind."  I may think it sucks, but it seems like Weird Tales readers appreciated it, so maybe by making it available almost 40 years after its first publication McCauley was doing the weird community a service.

"The Face in the Wind" would be reprinted twice more in the 1970s, in a British volume featuring the severed head of a woman hanging from a nail on its cover and an American volume whose cover bears a characteristically over-the-top Stephen King blurb and a stupid gimmicky illustration that is reminding me of the work of Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

A better image of Les Edwards's painting for The Tomb from Beyond is available here

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I can heartily endorse four stories from Night Chills--the Disch, the Howard, the Wagner and the Etchison, but there seem to be quite a few clunkers in there (at least in my opinion!)

It's back to space opera in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log--see you then!