1932 Weird Tales by Edmond Hamilton, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth and David H. Keller

One of my favorite weird stories is Clark Ashton Smith's "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis," which was first published in the May 1932 issue of Weird Tales.  (I expressed my love for this classic tale of exploration, terror, and possession on the red planet Mars back in 2019.)  Along with Smith's name in the table of contents of that 1932 issue of the unique magazine we see a bunch of other familiar names--why don't we check out stories by Edmond Hamilton, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth and David H. Keller that were experienced by horror fans alongside "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis"?  I'll be reading the versions of the stories that appeared in that May 1932 magazine via the scan of it available at the internet archive, though all four of the stories we are talking about today can be found in book form in one place or another. 

"The Terror Planet" by Edmond Hamilton

It took 81 years for "The Terror Planet" to appear in book form, but it finally did so in 2013 in Volume Four of Haffner Press's The Collected Edmond Hamilton.  We can surmise from this that "The Terror Planet" didn't exactly set the world on fire, but we can't let that stop us from reading it--maybe it is an overlooked gem.

For years the scientific establishment (jerks!) has been ridiculing astronomer Robert Hunt's theory that Uranus is habitable.  But in the same way that I, MPorcius, am capable not only of washing the dishes here at MPorcius headquarters, but also do the laundry and swiffer the floors, Hunt is not only a forward-thinking astronomer, but also a physicist and engineer of a revolutionary caliber.  He has figured out a way to bend and focus "the lines of radiated gravitational force" and has built the machine that can do it.  By affixing this machine to an airtight steel bell, like a diving bell, Hunt has created a vehicle with which to travel between planets.

At least that is the way he puts it.  The scientific world is full of rivalries and interpersonal strife, and there is another scientist, Harker Crail, who helped Hunt with his space-bell.  Hunt kicked Crail off the project when Crail not only wanted to make money off the device (heaven forbid!) but started making time with Hunt's slender dark-haired sister Jean!  We certainly don't want men who are distracted by a desire for money and sex working on our scientific projects now, do we?

The fourth character in this drama is our narrator, Devlin.  Hunt is planning to head to Uranus tonight and spend a few days there collecting proof that every 12-year-old comedian's favorite planet is habitable, so he wired his old university pal Devlin to come by to look after Jean while he is gone.  (Rob, why don't you let this chick run her own god-damned life for ten seconds?)  Anyway, as we readers expected, Crail shows up with a pistol to steal the space-bell and in the ensuing fracas all four of these goofs end up in the space-bell as it hurtles to Uranus.  The rushed takeoff knocks everybody unconscious, and they don't wake up until they are on the surface of Uranus! 

On Uranus they have Edgar Rice Burroughs-style adventures.  Reminding us that Hamilton loves to write about evolution, and reminding us of the planet Althar in his superior space opera The Star of Life, and reminding us a little of Burroughs's own Chessmen of Mars, Uranus is inhabited by three distinct races of humans, all descended from the same basic stock.  One group focused on the intellect above all else and have evolved into creatures with big heads and tiny impotent bodies, while another group has focused on physical development and evolved into a horde of savage quadrupeds.  A third group dedicated to balance still looks and acts like ordinary people like you and me.  Hunt, Devlin, Jean and Crail get mixed up in the endless war between the beast-man horde and the city-dwelling balanced people; the balanced men have aircraft and an effective weapons system that shoots acid, but when Crail becomes leader of the beast-men his scientific expertise is enough to give these hairy brutes a decisive advantage.  To save the balanced men, Devlin acts as ambassador to the aloof brain-men, who come to the rescue with their irresistible weaponry.  Devlin kills Crail in hand-to-hand combat, and the three surviving Earthers return to mother Terra, where we are led to believe that Devlin and Jean will get married.  

This is a routine but successful little adventure story; Hamilton is a pro at this sort of thing.  I guess maybe we should call it acceptable filler, though Hamilton does try to mix up the formula a bit by including novel propulsion systems and weapons (the brain-men hypnotize all the beast-men into committing suicide, for example) instead of just relying on the standard issue rockets and ray guns.        

"The Horror from the Mound" by Robert E. Howard

One of the many places "The Horror from the Mound" has been reprinted is in the 2005 collection People of the Dark, the third volume of Wildside Press's The Weird Works of Robert E. Howard.  In his introduction to People of the Dark, fellow Texan Joe R. Lansdale talks about how Howard's work strongly reflects the culture of the Lone Star State: "...no matter how wild the story, how bizarre the idea, or what location he claimed for it, I assure you, Howard was always writing about Texas and Texans."  Lansdale particularly points to "The Horror from the Mound," a favorite of his, as exhibiting such "hallmarks" of Howard's fiction, and of the people of Texas, as self-reliance, courage and confidence.

(Lansdale in this intro also compares Howard to Edgar Rice Burroughs and suggests that something Howard wrote that appears in the paperback collection Wolfshead inspired him to quit college and "make my own way by my wits, doing work of my choosing...."  Lansdale's is a pretty interesting little essay that fans of Howard and Lansdale should read if they have the chance.  I borrowed an electronic version of People of the Dark from a library in Ohio to which I still have electronic access even though I've lived in Maryland for like three years now.) 

Steve Brill is a cowboy who decided to take up farming, but, thanks to bad weather, his farm is a disaster and he's got money troubles.  There is an Indian burial mound on the property he is leasing, and, despite the dire warnings of Lopez, his Mexican neighbor, Brill decides to bust into the mound to see if there is anything of value in there.  Howard tells us that Texas cowboys "live by impulse," so Brill wastes no time getting to work even though the day is almost over--he starts plying his pick and shovel even though the sun is setting.  

Brill is half done digging into the tomb when it gets so dark he decides to go get a lantern.  When he gets back he finds the tomb has been opened and is empty!  No doubt his Mexican neighbor (Brill calls him a "Greaser" and a "Spig") stole the treasure while Brill wasn't looking!  All that talk of a curse was just an effort to deter Brill from getting at the treasure!  Brill heads over to Lopez's hut, and there his night of terror truly begins, the night during which Brill will learn the astonishing and horrifying truth of the mound from Lopez and be forced to fight for his life against no ordinary foe.

This is a good action-horror story, with satisfying suspense and a good, characteristically Howardian, climactic fight to the death.  We've all read and seen a billion vampire stories, but somehow this one manages to hold the reader's attention and feel fresh and exciting.  Lansdale is right to favor it; as I recall, I also concurred with his high opinion of Robert Bloch's "The Animal Fair"--it seems that Joe. R. Lansdale has good taste!     

"The Horror From the Mound" is included in four different paperback printings of Wolfshead. The Lancer editions have Frazetta covers and an introduction which strongly impressed Joe R. Lansdale that consists of text from a letter Howard wrote to H. P. Lovecraft; the Bantam edition has a Lehr cover and an essay by Robert Bloch in which Bloch compares Howard's work to the theories of Carl Jung

"The Last Magician" by David H. Keller

Weird Tales readers loved "The Last Magician;" according to Sam Moskowitz's research, it was the most popular story in the issue, receiving 26 positive notices from readers ("Vaults of Yoh-Vombis"  only received 25.)  It looks like it has never been anthologized, though, just reprinted in Keller collections produced by small presses.

The bulk of "The Last Magician" is kind of tedious, a long-winded story with poor pacing that appeals to the self-importance and persecution complex of the cognitive elite who feel superior to, resentful of, and underappreciated by, the masses of normies.  Honestly, it feels a little childish.  Fiction in general, and SF in particular, often consists of wish fulfillment fantasies, but "The Last Magician" is more obvious and less artful than most such indulgences.

A young wizard, age 30, returns to the seaside castle of his master, age 90, to tell a tale of how ungrateful the world has been to him and his fellows.  The old wizard trained a Brotherhood of twenty-one men in the ways of white magic, and they went out into the world and did wonderful things, improving the economy and everybody's life.  But envious merchants, jealous priests, and corrupt rulers conspired to capture and torture to death twenty of the white wizards and their families--only this guy managed to escape, after seeing his wife killed and having one of his hands chopped off.

The master wizard explains that it was ever thus!  He tells the tedious story of how, before the birth of Man, the world used to be ruled by colossal behemoth monsters, monsters hundreds of miles long!  When they died out they were succeeded by still huge but somewhat smaller monsters.  When they died out, beasts like cave bears, mammoths, and saber-toothed cats roamed the Earth.  The first humans came down from the trees at the same time, and had to fight an endless war with the bears and cats, spending most of their time hiding in caves from these ferocious beasts.  The bears and cats would have exterminated the human race if it had not been for the first wizards, who taught mankind how to kill the beasts!  But did mankind appreciate the invaluable service provided by the selfless smarties?  No!  All through history manipulative priests and the ignorant masses have hunted down and oppressed the smart people who give and give and never get anything in return, just abuse!  Sixty years ago a mob of witch hunters even killed the master's own wife!  Today almost no wizards survive because of this persecution.  

This ridiculous and tendentious history seems to take forever for the master wizard to relate--Keller spends a particularly large volume of ink describing how the wizards made life-sized model bears and used them to train their fellow cave men in bear anatomy so they would know the best place to jab a bear with a spear.  (Keller's story actually reminds me of The Kinks' brilliant spoof of the self importance of educators, "Education," which describes the miraculous effect of education on a cave man.)  These model bears lead to the fortuitous discovery of the principles behind the voodoo doll.

In the story's ending we see the various silly elements of the master's history come together.  You see, the country where the Brotherhood of Twenty-One were murdered lies on one of those ancient hundred-mile-long monsters, and said leviathan is not dead, it is merely resting!  The master makes a three-dimensional map of the monster out of dirt and twigs and so forth, and then, by poking and prodding it, disturbs the sleep of the behemoth, so that it shifts, causing earthquakes that destroy the corrupt politicians, the jealous priests and the stupid masses of the ungrateful country.  The master sends his pupil away to another land, and then kills the monster, totally destroying the region and himself--the master goes to heaven to be with his long dead wife.

A story to warm the heart of every nerd who has ever been called names and dreamnt of exterminating the human race in revenge.  

"The Last Magician" is ambitious, and an interesting artifact that perhaps provides insight into the psychology of Keller himself and speculative fiction fans in general, but it is not what I would call a good story.  There is something so remarkable about it, however, that I don't regret reading it...I guess I am giving "The Last Magician" an "acceptable" rating.                 

"The Bishop Sees Through" by August Derleth 

This is a trifling little story, competent but very slight, I guess written to fill space in the magazine.  It has only been reprinted once, in the 2009 collection "Who Shall I Say is Calling?" and Other Stories. 

The Bishop's chauffer is driving him down the coast road in a ferocious rainstorm to visit the Count.  Visibility is so poor the driver gets lost and stops by a Georgian house to ask directions.  The Bishop gamely goes to the door and is greeted by a butler, who warns him not to take the coast road, as it has been washed out near the Count's, and gives directions to an alternate route.

On his friend's arrival, the Count tells the Bishop he knows of no landslide.  Later, during their visit, somebody phones to warn the Count about the landslide--it seems that that butler, somehow, knew about the landslide before it happened and saved the Bishop's (and the chauffer's) life!  The Count believes in ghosts and the second sight and so on, and thinks this an example of a paranormal phenomenon, but the Bishop is a skeptic.  On the way home he has his chauffer stop at the Georgian house so he can ask the butler how he knew about the landslide earlier than anybody else, but there is no house--where it sat earlier in the evening is only a Georgian ruin!

Acceptable.

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The Howard story is quite good, and the Hamilton and Derleth pieces, while routine, are successful.  The Keller story has many problems, but is certainly memorable and noteworthy.  Considering that it also includes the very good "Vaults of Yoh-Vombis," you'd have to say this is a pretty good issue of Weird Tales.   

Early '70s horror stories by Robert Bloch, T. K. Brown III, and Eddy C. Bertin

Only three stories remain in 1974's The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series II; let's check them out!

Frontispiece by Jack Gaughan and title page 

"The Animal Fair" by Robert Bloch (1971)

This story, by the much beloved author of Psycho and a book I almost bought a few days ago at an antiques store in Catonsville, MD, first appeared in Playboy.  I wish I could like Bloch's work as much as so many people do, but generally I find him underwhelming.  "The Animal Fair" is apparently Joe R. Lansdale's favorite horror story, or at least Lansdale's favorite Bloch story (Lansdale wrote an essay introducing it that appeared in the collection Robert Bloch: Appreciations of the Master and the anthology My Favorite Horror Story) so perhaps we have here the prime slice of Bloch that is going to help me see in Bloch what everybody else sees.

Bloch loves puns and jokes and wordplay, and on the first page of "The Animal Fair" we get lines like "...Dave hit the main drag.  And it was a drag." and "Phil's Phill-Up Gas stood deserted."  This kind of stuff detracts from creating a mood of suspense or fear, in my opinion, foregrounding the third-person omniscient narrator and reminding you this is not real.  Fortunately, Bloch cuts it out after that first page, or at least I didn't notice it again.  (The actual title of the story may well be a subtle pun on the disparate meanings of "fair," referring to a place where animals are displayed before spectators, a beautiful creature, and a creature who is just.)

Dave is hitchhiking across Oklahoma, on his way to Hollywood.  Dave thinks Oklahoma and its people are disgusting! 

Dave could smell oil in the air; on hot summer nights in Oklahoma, you can always smell it.  And the crowd in here smelled worse.  Bad enough that he was thumbing his way through and couldn't take a bath, but what was their excuse?  

Dave goes to a travelling carnival to get a hamburger (all the local stores are closed) and finds himself in a tent full of "red-necks."  In a cage in the tent is a sick gorilla, forced to dance for Oklahomans!  Dave is so sickened by this crime he throws up!  He takes a nap on the side of the road, and when he wakes up he hitches a ride...on the trailer with the gorilla and its cruel master, "Captain" Ryder!

Ryder tells the sad story of his life as he drives with one hand and drinks a bottle of "fresh corn likker" with the other.  He was a trapper in Africa, then a Hollywood stuntman who handled big dangerous animals for jungle movies, and wore animal suits for closeups of fights between actors and beasts.  He got rich doing all this work!  But then tragedy struck!  Four drug-addled criminals he calls "hippies" broke into his house and drugged and raped his niece, the joy of his life, whom he had raised like his own daughter.  Ryder caught them in the act, and in the ensuing fight killed one of the rapists and seriously wounded two others, but his niece also died from an overdose of whatever the creeps had used on her.  The hippies' ring leader escaped.  Ryder went to prison for two years, and when he got out his career was ruined and he resorted to this carny business.

(The sensational crimes of Charles Manson, as well as the greatest movie of all time, King Kong, seem to have served as inspiration for much of this story.)

"The Animal Fair" appears in this Finnish
collection  

This blog is all about spoilers, so of course I am going to tell you what all the clues in Ryder's narrative add up to.  While in Africa, Ryder learned all kinds of crazy witch doctor stuff, like how a shaman can use drugs and psychological torture to make a person who has been sewn up inside a lion skin (!) think he is a lion.  Without coming out and saying it, Bloch is implying that Ryder used his jungle skills to track down the leader of the rapists, and then sewed this jerk up in his Hollywood gorilla suit and is achieving his revenge by (mis)treating the rapist like an animal!

(Remember how in the second Aubrey-Maturin novel the naval officer escapes from France by disguising himself as a bear?  I read a dozen or more of those books, but that was the most unbelievable passage, and ironically the most memorable, in all of them.)

This is a good story--Lansdale, Davis and Playboy didn't let readers down in promoting it.  Perhaps my favorite thing about it is how it took me by surprise--Dave's demeaning of the small-town Oklahomans, and the initial appearance of Captain Ryder, whom Dave hates, and his first few lines of dialogue, which consist of bitching about drugs, hippies and Hollywood, led me to expect that the story's point would be to mock retrograde country people from the point of view of a sophisticated liberal urbanite.  Instead, Hollywood, one of America's cutting-edge cultural capitals, is said to be in terminal decline, and we are given reason to hate and fear forward-thinking young people (as well as African medicine men) and lament their destructive and corrupting influence on healthy people like Ryder and his niece.  What I thought was going to be a smug animal rights piece morphed before my eyes into something like 1974's Death Wish!

("The Animal Fair" actually includes many of the themes I saw in Bloch's 1989 novel Lori, among them alcohol, an America in cultural and societal decline, and a young woman at the mercy of predatory men.) 

In addition to the way the story subverted my expectations, it is economically and smoothly written, and the central gimmick feels new and is surprising.  Thumbs up for "The Animal Fair."  Maybe I need to seek out more of Bloch's "greatest hits," guided by the horror cognoscenti like Lansdale.

"Haunts of the Very Rich" by T. K. Brown III (1971)

"Haunts of the Very Rich" first came under the eyes of the public in the very same issue of Playboy that printed Bloch's "The Animal Fair."  Was this a special horror issue of our most pretentious girlie rag?  (Actually, this issue is full of big names, like John Wayne, V. S. Pritchett, Jean Shepherd and Garry Wills, and there's an article about James Dickey, whose Deliverance I read just before moving out of New York State during my brief Westchester County period, and even an illustration by Gene Szafran, who did so many SF book covers.)

T. K. Brown III only has five credits at isfdb, but when you google his name you find that "Haunts of the Very Rich" was made into a TV movie in 1972 starring actors I don't like!  You can watch it on youtube!  (Having no desire to lay eyes on the  visages nor lend ear to the voices of Ed Asner, Donna Mills, Lloyd Bridges and Cloris Leachman, I'll stick to the printed word, myself.)

Six incredibly wealthy people pay an exorbitant fee to go on a mystery vacation--they are flown on a small jet whose windows are shuttered to a jungle resort by a lake surrounded by volcanoes.  Once there everything goes wrong--the power goes out so there is no air conditioning or refrigeration, natives raid their booze supply, the "exotic" prostitute turns out to be from Brooklyn.  Yes, this is a comedy, one which is not in the least bit funny.  When the characters, like the reader, realize nothing that is happening makes any sense, they theorize that they are dead and this is hell.

Lame.

"Like Two White Spiders" by Eddy C. Bertin (1971)

Bertin is a German-born Belgian, a prolific writer of genre stories and children's books.  As I said in the comments to the first installment of our look at DAW No. 109, when Mats Paulsson pointed out that the cover of this anthology is by Swiss-born resident of Sweden Hans Arnold, The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series II is a real international production.  I mercilessly criticized a story by Bertin from this same time period, "Timestorm," back in 2016, but gave a moderate recommendation to a late '70s story by Bertin, "My Beautiful Darkling," a year before that.

"Like Two White Spiders" comes to us in the form of a transcript of a tape recorded statement from a guy in an insane asylum.  This guy describes how, several times over the course of his life, his hands acted with a mind of their own to kill small creatures and even people!  He has been imprisoned because of his crimes, but he claims he is in fact innocent, that his hands have been taken over by some alien from another dimension, or are separate alien entities with their own internal organs, or some such thing.  Of course, the story is full of clues that hint that this guy is just a murderer with mental problems who has consciously or subconsciously come up with this bizarre possession narrative as an excuse. 

Bertin's is one of the more viscerally gruesome stories in this anthology, with descriptions of how it feels to strangle an eight-year old girl and crush the skull of a canary--and then there are the narrator's efforts to deter or liberate his hands by holding them in a fire or chopping them off with a scythe!  Jeez!

I should note, for all you Yog-Sothery fans out there, that besides comparing his hands to spiders and scorpions, the narrator likens them to The Hounds of Tindalos; even though he usually disappoints me, I really have to read the story of that name by Frank Belknap Long someday.

This is a good horror story that exploits our fears of our bodies betraying or failing us as well as our willingness to blame others for or otherwise rationalize our misdeeds.  And our fears of chopping off our own hands--yikes!  It is well-written and well-structured, the length and pace just right.  Thumbs up!  "Like Two White Spiders" was first printed as "Als Twee Grote Witte Spinnen" in the 1971 Belgian collection De Achtjaarlijkse God; the author himself translated it into English and it first appeared in the tongue of William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson and Dan Brown in the 1973 collection that is the source of much of the material in DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories Series II, Sphere's The Year's Best Horror Stories No. 3.

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DAW No, 109, The Year's Best Horror Stories Series II, is a good anthology; there is only one serious clunker, and several quite good stories.  Looking at Amazon, ebay and abebooks, I am getting the idea that it is sort of rare; maybe I shouldn't have bent the cover of mine scanning the title page and the page of ads in the back?

Ah, the ads.  Six DAW titles are pushed, including Brian Lumley's first Titus Crow novel, the eighth of John Norman's (in)famous Gor books, and the 1974 edition of Donald Wollheim's Annual World's Best anthologies that includes R. A. Lafferty and E. C. Tubb stories I don't own; I would probably grab this one if I saw it going for a buck or two.  Also promoted is D. G. Compton's The Unsleeping Eye; Joachim Boaz has gushed about this baby (5 of 5 stars!), which I own in a later Pocket Books edition, but I have yet to read it myself.  The Weathermonger, which I'd never heard of, is, apparently, some kind of "young adult" book about a future anti-technological England and was the basis for a TV series.