Weird Tales, July 1925: H P Lovecraft, E H Price & R E Howard

As any sanctioned psyker can tell you, time in the warp can move in unexpected ways, so you shouldn't be surprised that we are looking at the July 1925 issue of Weird Tales after we looked at the August 1925 ish in our last episode.  Anyway, before talking about that August ish, we'd already sampled this July one, reading Henry S. Whitehead's heartwarming tale of a guy's dream girl just landing in his lap without him having to do anything to court her, "The Wonderful Thing."  Maybe today's stories will be more in the thrilling blood-and-guts, politically incorrect foreigners-are-scary, and/or cosmic horror life-is-meaningless-suffering vein that we are used to from Weird Tales.  If you share my skepticism of secondary sources and want to find out for yourself what "The Unnamable" by cosmic horror icon H. P. Lovecraft, "The Stranger from Kurdistan" by real-life adventurer E. Hoffmann Price, and "Spear and Fang" by titan of sword-and-sorcery Robert E. Howard are like, click this link to be whisked away to the internet archive and a scan of the very issue of WT under discussion today.

"The Unnamable" by H. P. Lovecraft 

This seems like one of those Lovecraft stories, like "He," that is semi-autobiographical.  The narrator, whose name is apparently Randolph Carter, is hanging around in a cemetery next to an abandoned house with a friend, shooting the shit.  Carter's pal believes the universe is rational, that science and religion can accurately describe the universe, that nothing is "unnamable," a word that comes up again and again in the story and I guess means to the two men something like "unclassifiable" and "inexplicable" and "incapable of comprehension by the scientific method or within a Christian theological framework."  The narrator is a writer of weird stories who gets published in a magazine called Whispers and argues against the rational man, suggesting, for example, that maybe intangible life forces endure after one has died and these forces can affect places and people.

Carter recently got a story published about a monster child who lived for centuries hidden in a New England town and terrorized the residents by looking in windows and that sort of thing.  In an effort to convince his friend that there are more things in the universe than our philosophy can encompass, Carter describes the sources for his story-- some 18th century diaries that offer hints of the existence of just such a monster, locked in the attic of an abandoned 17th-century house or even escaping confinement to assault people and leave strange wounds upon them, and some bones Carter found, those of a malformed child that he deposited into a tomb.  Carter's punchline is that the house and tomb in question are right here, in view of the two of them.  

Suddenly there are scary sounds and smells and both men are battered unconscious by some sort of attack.  Carter didn't get a good look at their assailant, but when they wake up in the hospital the rational friend admits that he saw the blob monster of no defined shape that attacked them and left upon them wounds like those in the 18th-century accounts Carter read.  The rational friend must admit that this monster was unnamable.

This is a decent horror story with good concepts and images, and is perhaps noteworthy as one of the more jokey Lovecraft stories, the subtle jokes expressing HPL's criticisms and commentaries on regions of this great country of ours, especially New England (though HPL's commentary is not limited to that area) as well as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Cotton Mather.  The rational friend offers literary criticism that Lovecraft presumably disagrees with and is presenting ironically, but which feels like a sincere description of a literary theory, not a spoof or lampoon.  

"The Unnamable" feels like a good story to read to understand what Lovecraft is all about, and unlike some of the man's more famous works, it is pretty brief and to the point.  Thumbs up!

I read "The Unnamable" in my copy of the Corrected Ninth Edition of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales.  "The Unnamable" is one of five Randolph Carter stories by Lovecraft; I've blogged about three now, this one, "The Statement of Randolph Carter," and "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" (co-authored with E. Hoffman Price), leaving "The Silver Key" and "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," which I'll probably get to some day.  "The Unnamable" has been reprinted uncountable times--I'll include in this blog post images from anthologies that include it.

"The Stranger from Kurdistan" by E. Hoffmann Price 

Soldier, orientalist, fencer and boxer Price sets his tale in a ruined city with a tremendous tower at its center.  Tonight, 77 worshippers of the devil are holding a black mass at the base of this tower, and a man in black infiltrates the ceremony.  The ceremony Price describes in detail; the focus of it is a denigration of Christ, a long speech from the Satanic priest listing how Jesus has disappointed his followers, failed to fulfill the promises he made.

The black-clad interloper reveals himself to be the very Satan the 77 and the priest have come to this creepy locale to praise.  The Devil is disappointed in his followers, who are merely mocking Satan's foe, and ludicrously so, as that foe has stymied the Devil for many centuries.  The Satanic priest accuses this figure of being an imposter and the 77 unhappy people who have turned to Satanism because they have been disappointed in their conventional pursuits converge on the stranger to tear him limb from limb, but he really is Satan and (apparently) summons a fire that massacres all of them.

This is more like a little vignette more than a real story, though I suppose it is interesting in that it takes Christianity seriously and that it makes the point that Satanists are not really serious rebels against Christianity and our society; if they are legitimately worshipping Satan they are admitting the reality of Jesus' power and divinity, and if they are just atheists then their whole practice of worshipping the Devil is just childish playacting.  

I guess it is also interesting that the theme of the story is disappointment.  Of the 77, we are told

In the main, the seventy-seven were persons of wealth and distinction, who, having tried and found wanting every field of human endeavor and achievement, had sought thrills in the foulness and degradation of the medieval rites of devil-worship; rakes whose jaded appetites sought satiation in the orgies that followed the celebration of the Black Mass; atheists who, deeming passive atheism an inadequate form of rebellion, found expression in a ritual whose sacrilege satisfied their iconoclastic desires.

The Satanic priest's black sermon, addressed to Christ, is full of stuff like

From the day that the virgin gave thee birth thou hast failed in thy promises; the ages have wept in awaiting thee, mute and fugitive god! Thou wert to redeem mankind, and thou hast failed.... 

And then we have Satan himself, who disavows his followers because they are so lame.

If you have a bad attitude, reject your rightful station, and embrace rebellion for rebellion's sake, you are going to be disappointed and your life is going to be rough and you are going to make some dumb decisions that will kill you before your time or lead to a life of regret.  Traditional wisdom straight from the pages of Weird Tales.  

I'll call "The Stranger from Kurdistan" acceptable.

Just four years later, "The Stranger from Kurdistan" would be reprinted in Weird Tales; apparently it was a big hit with readers.  Does this suggest that 1920s Weird Tales readers had more or less conventional religious and philosophical beliefs?  You can find "The Stranger from Kurdistan" in Price collections and in various anthologies, including Satan-themed anthologies and Darrell Schweitzer's 2025 volume Weird Tales: The Best of the 1920s.  One of these days I will look at the table of contents of Schweitzer's book and see how many of his selections I have read and maybe read some things he recommends that I have skipped. 

"Spear and Fang" by Robert E. Howard 

We recently read some caveman stories by C. M. Eddy, Jr., "With Weapons of Stone" and "Ahrl-a of the Caves," and here is one by the creator of Conan!  Sam Moskowitz, who briefly edited Weird Tales during a 1973-4 revival period, reprinted "Spear and Fang" in the 50th anniversary issue, and you can also find it in a bunch of Howard collections.

Ga-nor is a big tall handsome he-man of a Cro-Magnon, but he's more than a pretty face!  He's also the tribe's best cave painter!  A-aea of the rippling black wave of hair has a crush on him!  A-aea is no demure maiden who follows the conservative social conventions of her time, but a modern woman who knows what she wants and is willing to take risk to get it!

...little A-«ea was herself a mark of progress. Covert glances had failed to attract the attention of the young man who seemed engrossed with his artistry, so she had taken to the unconventional way of spying upon him, in hopes of finding some way to win him.

Despite their reputation, which is based on the covers more than the stories behind those covers, these old pulp magazines are full of ambitious, brave, competent women who take initiative and pursue their goals whatever obstacles may be in their way.  

A mere girl might not intrude upon the councils of men, but such was A-sa’s curiosity, that she dared a scolding by slipping nearer.

The councilors have reason to think some of those savage cannibals, the Neanderthals, whom Howard tells us are the source of our legends and myths of ogres, werewolves and goblins, are nearby.  And, sure enough, when the son of one of the tribe's councilors, the arrogant Ka-nanu, carries A-aea off to rape her (Howard unleashes some social criticism on us by sarcastically suggesting Ka-nanu himself is "another mark of progress") he is interrupted in the commission of this crime by an attacking Neanderthal and torn to pieces.  Yikes!  The monster carries off A-aea to his lair, where he offers her the arm of a Cro-Magnon child for a meal!  He doesn't even cook the arm!  Yikes again!  The Neanderthal then tortures the girl by tearing out her hair.  Triple yikes!  He strips A-aea naked, but, before he can rape her, Ga-nor arrives, having followed the trail.  It is a close fight, but in the end Ga-nor defeats the Neanderthal and he and A-aea become man and mate.

"Spear and Fang" has exploitation elements, what with all the gore and threat of rape, but Howard also advances a lot of historical and anthropological theories about the nature of progress and how modern man overthrew the Neanderthal and how both Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal people lived and thought.  The action elements, all the fighting and chasing and so forth, are good.  So, thumbs up.

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All three of today's stories present a philosophy and/or try to make arguments about groups of people instead of just offering simple entertainment, and the philosophies and arguments are striking (if not necessarily convincing) and so contribute to the value of the stories, to their ability to maintain the reader's interest.  Lovecraft in "The Unnamable" also delivers the horror elements, and Howard in "Spear and Fang" the eroticized action-adventure elements, that make their stories work on a simpler, more direct, level so that they also succeed as entertainment.  Price's story is the weakest of the three, with the least surprising intellectual content and the least thrilling horror/violence content, but still is not bad.  We have here a solid issue of Farnsworth Wright's unique magazine.

Otis Adelbert Kline: "The Malignant Entity," "The Radio Ghost," and "The Demon of Tlaxpam"

In Volume 9 of Hippocampus Press' Letters of H. P. Lovecraft, we find HPL telling Duane W. Rimel that Otis Adelbert Kline is "probably the best agent in the business" (p. 305), "a wizard at placing things" (290) with lots of "influence" (306) who "regard[s] fiction writing as a business & not an art" (286).  In our last blog post I was talking about how good some of Frank Belknap Long's early stories are, in contrast to his reprehensible later work, and in a September 8, 1934 letter to August Derleth*, Lovecraft blames Kline for Long's decline:

Belknap reports great successes in the pulp field.  Under the tutelage of Otis Adelbert Kline he is getting to be a highly enterprising young business man---but the artist of yesteryear seems lost in the shuffle!   

Indeed, in a March 25, 1933 letter to Robert E. Howard*, HPL admits "I simply can't read the crap Kline and [Hugh B.] Cave grind out...."

*See Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth: 1932-1937 and A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard: 1933-1936.  

Well, today let's see if we can read some of that ground out "crap."  Under Otis Adelbert Kline's entry, the indispensable isfdb lists three stories in a Dr. Dorp series and two stories in a Bart Leslie series.  We've already read the first Dorp story, 1923's "The Phantom Wolfhound," and the second Leslie story, 1936's "The Cyclops of Xoatal," a collaboration with E. Hoffman Price.  Let's finish up these two series today with "The Malignant Entity," "The Radio Ghost" and "The Demon of Tlaxpam"; I'll be reading these stories in scans of the magazines in which they first came under the eye of the pulp readers to whom Kline was, according to HPL at least, slavishly catering, and you can do the same by clicking the links in this sentence.

"The Malignant Entity" (1924)

First we're going back to the super-sized issue of Weird Tales in which we read Lovecraft's famous collaborations with Harry Houdini--"Imprisoned with the Pharaohs"-- and C. M. Eddy, Jr.'s--"The Loved Dead."  "The Malignant Entity" is the second Dr. Dorp story, and takes up like seven pages of the unique magazine.

Our narrator is a guy named Evans who is pals with Dr. Dorp; I guess their relationship is modelled on that of Watson and Holmes.  These two nerds are talking about their mutual hobby, interest in psychic phenomena and the occult, when the police chief comes in and requests Dorp's aid.  A scientist has turned up dead--he was healthy last night but this morning his daughter found him just a skeleton, still clad in his typical clothes and jewelry.  Where did all his flesh and organs go?  

The chief brings the narrator and the doctor to the house of death where they look at the skeleton of the scientist and at a vat of clear gelatinous liquid sitting there in the lab with the bones.  Then, in other rooms, our heroes look for clues the way you'd expect people to in detective fiction--reading through files and questioning people.  A cop is guarding the lab, and when his relief comes this second uniformed officer finds that his predecessor is dead, a skeleton still clad in his police uniform.  

We get a lot of dialogue from Dr. Dorp about the debate over what constitutes life and whether the soul is real because the dead scientist was trying to create life synthetically.  Dorp theorizes that the scientist created a monster that had no soul and so hated ensouled natural life and would set out to destroy natural life.  In between such conversations, our guys notice that there is more liquid in the vat than before, and look at a drop of it in a microscope--the drop contains two forms of animated matter, the more numerous destroying the minority.  Dorp then revises his theory--maybe an alien soul that lacked a body and was just floating around the universe, unable to interact with the material world, came upon this protoplasm created by the dead scientist--a body without a soul--and filled its soul-shaped vacancy.  Once united with a body, the alien soul started devouring people to increase its new body's size.  These theories are kind of interesting, but I don't feel like they are integrated with the rest of the narrative--they feel tacked on, parallel to the plot and the characters' actions.  

The most exciting part of the story follows as our two heroes and the police strive to destroy the blob monster with various weapons and methods as it flees from them.  Eventually they succeed.  At the same time the hunt is on for the creature, the hunt for more documents that will reveal more about the synthetic creature continues, and this quest also succeeds.  Unfortunately, these two quests operate in parallel instead of one somehow supporting the other.    

"The Malignant Entity" has the makings of a good story, but the structure is a mess.  For example, our heroes catch the monster and then find those additional documents that tell them more about the blob monster.  Wouldn't it make more sense, story-wise, for the men to learn about the monster and then use their newfound knowledge to defeat it?  As it is, the narrator catches the blob monster (which has been shrunken to the size of a golf ball after barely surviving a direct hit from acid poured on it by Evans and Dorp) in the totally mundane way I catch wasps up in the attic that is MPorcius HQ--by putting a glass jar over it--the new info doesn't really do anything for the plot.  Similarly, it seems like Dorp figures out that the liquid in the vat is the monster, but instead of immediately telling everybody so they all can work together to destroy the menace, he takes his time, attending a meeting with government officials, before acting on his theory, even though the monster has already killed two upstanding productive citizens.  Dorp doesn't even put a cover on the vat to confine the suspected killer while he hobnobs with the authorities!

I'm also a little curious why the blob monster, which we are told can only feed on living creatures, consumes the fur of animals and hair of humans but not the bones of man or beast or the clothes of people--aren't your bones alive, your hair dead, and people's clothes in 1924 made of organic materials?  Another thing--the shock ending of the story is that the blob monster, as it dies while being heated in a furnace, takes the shape of the head of the scientist who created it, but while our heroes are chasing it around the house it never demonstrates any shape-shifting ability, never takes the form of a mouse or cat or dog or any of the other creatures the scientist fed it.  Obviously Kline does what he does to create dramatic images, but all the science talk makes you expect the science to add up, and it is disappointing when it doesn't.

We're judging "The Malignant Entity" barely acceptable; I like blob monsters and the hunt for the creature is fun, so I'm not consigning this one to "bad" status.  This second Dorp adventure was reprinted three times in Amazing Stories, first in June 1926, then in the 1934 Fall Quarterly, and finally in the February 1966 issue.  It is interesting that it was Amazing and not Weird Tales that reprinted the story, and that Amazing's staff or owners kept going back to it--is this evidence of Kline's business acumen?  Or just a testament to how much people love blob monsters? 

"The Radio Ghost" (1927)

The third Dr. Dorp story, "The Radio Ghost," debuted in Amazing but has never been reprinted anywhere.  We will soon join the ranks of the few people alive today in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Six who have read this thing!

Our story begins as the narrator, Evans, and the good doctor are talking about ectoplasm (ectoplasm was a major element of the first Dr. Dorp story, "The Phantom Wolfhound," I'm sure you remember.)  A pretty blonde calls on Dr. Dorp, interrupting the discussion, for which we have reason to thank her, as ectoplasm has nothing to do with this hard-science-based story.  This young woman is the niece of yet another student of the occult with whom Dorp was on familiar terms, a man recently deceased, and she has come for advice in dealing with some bizarre and disturbing phenomena that have occurred to her as she has been fulfilling the obligations placed upon her by unc's will.  You see, to keep her uncle's estate worth $600,000, she has to live for a year in his old house (this kind of thing happens all the time in fiction) because he plans on contacting her there from the other side!  And, sure enough, since she moved in she has been hearing footsteps, smelling ugly odors, seeing doors opening and closing on their own, etc.  Are these legitimate supernatural phenomena?  Or are uncle's servants and/or the woman's cousin, who was estranged from the uncle because of their disagreement as to who deserved to prevail in the Great War, trying to drive away the blonde in hopes of getting their own mitts on the inheritance?  Keep in mind this is Amazing, the pro-science magazine, and not Weird Tales, we are reading.

Evans and Dorp drive from downtown Chicago ("the loop") up to Highland Park where sits the haunted house.  There they meet the creepy servants and witness a multitude of poltergeist-type phenomena-- flickering lights, inexplicably cold breezes, a luminous image of a man, etc.  The blonde faints during one such incident, and Evans carries her outside so she can get some fresh air.  Dr. Dorp remains inside the house still and ends up trapped in a closet that is so cold it threatens his life and Evans has to rush in and rescue the old geezer.  Then the blonde's dog goes berserk and tries to kill Evans, and the blonde has to gun down her own pet.

By the next day Dr. Dorp has it all figured out, and enlists some technician/engineer types and police detectives to catch the overweight bespectacled German-sympathizer cousin, who has been using radio, television, remote-controlled electro magnets and refrigerators, etc., to cause all the strange events in the house from his lair eight miles away.  As for the dog, the cousin simply injected it with rabies.

The "using technology to try to scare a woman out of money" theme is bland next to perennial fan favorite "a blob monster attacks!", but "The Radio Ghost" is better written and better structured than "The Malignant Entity."  The characters' motivations all make sense, the science and technology makes sense and is fully integrated into the plot, the action scenes are good (and make sense--compare to the action scenes I'll be talking about below), and lectures on the paranormal virtually absent, while the narrative moves smoothly and logically from scene to scene.  I can mildly recommend this one, even if it has been forgotten by history in favor of its inferior predecessor.  The world is unjust!       

"The Demon of Tlaxpam" (1929)

Here we have the first Bart Leslie story, which debuted in an issue of Weird Tales alongside fiction by the aforementioned messrs. Lovecraft, Howard and Derleth.  As far as I can tell, "The Demon of Tlaxpam," like "The Radio Ghost," hasn't been reprinted.

Two-Gun Bart is a US Secret Service agent working near the border with Mexico; recently, he dismantled a group of murderous Mexican bandits known as the Gila Men.  Today he is invited to dinner at a "notorious cafe" with one of the former Gilas, now working for the Mexican government.  (Sounds about right.)  Having already gotten permission from Washington, the government of Mexico is asking Two-Gun Bart for aid in solving a problem they are having near the town of Tlaxpam.  People riding along a trail are being mysteriously decapitated, and the local police have had no luck figuring out what is up or finding the lost heads.  Some of the locals think the devil is to blame.  If Bart can solve the problem, the Mexican authorities will reward him 20,000 pesos.

The former Gila Man accompanies Bart by train to Tlaxpam, where Bart outwits an assassin armed with a machete and then sets out on his mission, guided by a man who is three-quarter Aztec and backed up by a dozen brave Mexican fighting men.  Why does the Mexican government need Bart when they have all these brave and apparently competent personnel who are already familiar with the area of operations?  Anyway, this international task force gets to the narrow stretch of trail between a body of water and a towering cliff where these murders keep happening and spends some days investigating.  They stay at the little home of a holy hermit who looks after a shrine to Saint Anthony and a pool said to have medicinal properties.  Those dozen fighting men start getting killed one by one whenever one of them is dim enough to go some place alone, decapitated in an instant, their heads no where to be found.  Leslie tries to lay a trap and catch the decapitator, but makes limited progress.

Finally, Leslie spots something odd about the hermit's domicile and discovers a secret door that leads underground to a room full of skulls--and the heads of his Mexican colleagues, cooking in a cauldron!  He captures a man wearing a devil mask--of course behind the mask is the hermit.  The hermit explains that he is a Yaqui, one of a tribe of Indians oppressed by the white man for centuries.  The serial decapitator describes how all the members of his immediate family were abused by and died at the hands of the Mexican government and its supporters--raped, enslaved, killed for insubordination, etc.  His family's sole survivor, he escaped slavery to embark on a campaign to collect 1000 Mexican heads--he chose decapitation as his method because his brother's head was cut off with a machete by a slave overseer.

Having some Spanish blood, and knowledgeable of priestly ways, he was able to pass as a devout Catholic Mexican and develop a good reputation as the keeper of the shrine.  He invented a special device, a metal box with one open face and an internal spring-loaded blade.  From the cliff above the trail to Tlaxpam, he can throw the box down over a man's shoulders, then pull the box back up with the severed head inside.

Just like you and me, Leslie is amazed that a dude can reliably throw a metal box with pinpoint accuracy, even able to make sure which of its six sides strikes the target.  The Yaqui offers to demonstrate to Leslie his ability, and Leslie puts his revolvers back in their holsters so he can roll a target along the floor that the murderer can throw his box at.  What?  Of course, the killer throws the box over Leslie's cabeza, but Leslie is somehow able to interpose his hand between his shoulder and the trigger that activates the spring, so the blade does not sever his head.  Then he outfights the Yaqui hand to hand.

The decapitating box is kind of silly, and Leslie letting the killer throw it at him is sillier still, and the fight between Bart and the killer, one trying to keep the spring from being tripped and the other trying to activate the spring, is hard to credit.  The denouement is also silly.  The Gila Man shows up minutes after Leslie has tied up the Yaqui and this former bandit, current government official, explains that he has also solved the mystery and is fully aware the holy hermit is the killer--he got impatient and tortured the assassin who tried to kill Leslie back in Tlaxpam to solve the mystery the easy way.

I think we are giving this one a grade of "barely acceptable."  The action scenes are silly and hard to follow, and Leslie's detective work isn't satisfying because he discovers who the culprit is by luck and some other guy solves the mystery at the same time using (admittedly monstrous) logical methods.  But Kline writes with enthusiasm and I was curious as to what the hell was going on, actually did care about how some bastard was decapitating all these people without leaving a trail or trace of himself, so I can't say reading "The Demon of Tlaxpam" was a bad experience.  The noteworthy thing about "The Demon of Tlaxpam" is the story's portrayal of the government of Mexico as tyrannical and corrupt; maybe "The Demon of Tlaxpam" will be a useful text for those studying the depiction of Latinos and/or Native Americans in American genre fiction of the interwar period.

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Not a stellar performance, but no "F"s, either.  "Crap" is, in my opinion, a little harsh.  I'm not sure when we will read Kline again, but we may very well do so--if and when Kline come sup again here at MPorcius Fiction Log, I will likely focus on stories he had in Thrilling Wonder instead of his weird work.

H. P. Lovecraft Collabs: "The Horror at Martin's Beach" (w/ S Greene), "Two Black Bottles" (w/ W B Talman) & "The Trap" (w/ H S Whitehead)

Remember how awesome some of those Lovecraft collabs with Hazel Heald and Zealia Bishop were?  Let's try to recapture that magic with three more H. P. Lovecraft collaborations read from the pages of my Corrected Fifth Printing of The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions.  Today's stories appear in the "Secondary Revisions" section of The Horror in the Museum; editor S. T. Joshi describes secondary revisions as stories "which Lovecraft merely touched up--albeit sometimes extensively."  All three were published in magazines under the names of Lovecraft's collaborator, and you can read those versions by clicking the following links:

"The Horror at Martin's Beach" AKA "The Invisible Monster" by Sonia Greene 
"Two Black Bottles" by Wilfred Branch Talman
"The Trap" by Henry S. Whitehead

"The Horror at Martin's Beach" (w/ Sonia Greene) (1923)

It appears Greene sent Lovecraft a draft of this story and the man from Providence "edited and revised" the tale, which appeared across two pages of Weird Tales under the title "The Invisible Monster."  The story has since been seen in a billion Lovecraft collections, and, in our own bizarre and unusual 21st century, editors seem to be looking kindly upon it, Gregory Luce reprinting it as one of the best weird stories of 1923 and Stephen Jones including it in his 2026 volume Weird Tales, Volume One: The Early Years.

"The Horror at Martin's Beach"/"The Invisible Monster" is a pretty good story, thumbs up!  The crew of a ship catch a monstrously large fish, like 50 feet long, a bizarre specimen never before seen, presumably from the black depths, with a single eye and what look like legs where it ought to have fins.  A sensation among scientists and the public, it is put on display on an anchored ship by a public beach near a fancy resort.  Biologists point out that the colossal corpse has a preternaturally complex and large brain, and indications that suggest this fish is not fully grown, but newly hatched!  

A few days later the ship upon which the dead monster is displayed is lost at sea during a terrific storm and never seen again.  A few days later that very beach is the scene of an uncanny horror that makes the thoughtful wonder if perhaps highly advanced animals might have hypnotic powers.

A scream is heard from the sea and the lifeguards, even though the scream seems not quite human, rush to the water and throw in the life preserver on a long rope.  The floatation device is pulled beneath the surface and the lifeguards grasp the rope from shore.  The pull on the rope is so strong that the lifeguards enlist help from male beachgoers.  No matter how many men pull at the rope, they cannot seem to bring the submerged life saver one foot closer to land.  Then, the men realize they cannot let go of the rope.  At the same time, onlookers are somehow psychologically unable to come to the stuck men's aid.  A storm hits, the tide comes in, and all the men gripping the rope drown and their bodies are never found.

Pretty cool, a story that feels fresh, that has some new or rarely seen gimmicks and no fat.

Greene, as you probably already know, met Lovecraft at an amateur press convention before this story was written and after it was published in 1923 the two married, a collaboration not nearly as successful as "The Horror at Martin's Beach."

"Two Black Bottles" (w/ Wilfred Blanch Talman) (1927)

This one debuted in an issue of Weird Tales that printed a story by Frank Belknap Long we read a few years ago, "The Man with a Thousand Legs."  Joshi can't be sure how much of the text of "Two Black Bottles" is Lovecraft's, as apparently HPL made many additions and changes and Talman got angry and may have ignored them.  I guess we've all had the experience of somebody asking for an honest opinion or advice and them reacting negatively when you actually follow through instead of just validating everything he or she has already done--your friend or colleague didn't really want help, but for you to say "You are awesome, rock star."

Well, I don't know how much to credit Lovecraft and how much to credit Talman, but "Two Black Bottles" is a good story, pretty well-written and with a good plot, so thumbs up!

Our narrator has travelled to a remote and impoverished village in the mountains, having heard that a uncle he never met, a clergyman reputed to be large and strong physically but weak-willed, has died, and any inheritance is due to the narrator.  The church is on the edge of the village, on the other side of a swamp, and is shunned by all the villagers, our guy learns upon arrival.  From a villager he hears a wild story about how the creepy old sexton, the guy who maintains the church grounds and graveyard and gets the supplies at the store every week or so, dominated the narrator's uncle, got him to begin preaching in a way that upset the parishioners so fewer and fewer attended services and eventually on Sunday not a soul was in the the church besides the clergyman and the old sexton.  The villagers believe that the sexton worships the devil and they are all scared of him.  

Thinking this a load of nonsense, the narrator heads to the church even though it is getting dark, to meet the sexton, who lives in the church basement, and get the business of his inheritance sorted out ASAP.  The swamp and the church are pretty creepy at dusk and after sundown and the narrator almost loses his nerve, but eventually finds the sexton up in the belfry of the church with a bunch of ancient books and manuscripts.  The sexton, spine crooked and body skinny, is drunk and scared, and tells the narrator that he has learned black magic and demonology from the books, that he used sorcery to steal the narrator's uncle's soul and put it in a bottle.  The preacher is buried in a grave, unable to rest because his soul is trapped in the bottle, and the sexton is afraid the man is strong enough to bust out of his grave and come get his revenge!  When the narrator comes to believe this, being able through the belfry window to see the makeshift cross on his uncle's grave shifting as unc's soulless body struggles to escape, he desperately resolves to take the bottle to his undead uncle, thinking to appease his wrath in this manner.  But there are two such bottles--the sexton himself is like 250 years old because in the 18th century another wizard put his soul in a bottle--he has "lived" as a soulless man since colonial times!  Which bottle is which?  What will happen if in the confusion either of these bottles shatters and a trapped soul is released?

I like the plot, and I like all the descriptions of physical things and of people's fear--either Talman or Lovecraft did a good job putting them together.  "Two Black Bottles" is a creditable piece of work.  August Derleth included "Two Black Bottles" in his anthology Sleep No More, as did Stephen Jones in his aforementioned 2026 anthology of stories from Weird Tales.  And of course it is in countless Lovecraft collections. 

"The Trap" (w /Henry S. Whitehead) (1931)

Almost two years ago I read three stories by Henry S. Whitehead and enjoyed them, so let's see if Whitehead can maintain his streak of good grades here at MPorcius Fiction Log--he'll have to produce, because this institution has yet to fall to the spreading plague of grade inflation.

The tone of "The Trap" is very different than that of the other Lovecraftian stuff we've been reading--instead of being scared and/or on the brink of insanity, the protagonist is confident, competent, and calm.  When somebody gets stuck in a parallel dimension, instead of finding everything crazy and inexplicable, the protagonist in "The Trap" calmly figures out the "rules" of this alien universe.  And instead of dreams being horrifying, the hero welcomes dreams as a means of communication, as a solution to the plot's obstacles.  

I like the basic plot and the ideas of "The Trap," but the story feels long and the pace is slow, like there are too many sentences and they are too deliberate.  The style of the story does not communicate any urgency to the reader, and much of the text is not concerned with describing the behavior of the characters (who actually do but little) but with describing the setting, and those descriptions are not exciting or disturbing, but merely curious.  There is also the fact that the narrator is not at risk, but a sort of spectator.

That narrator is a Gerald Canevin, a recurring character in Whitehead's body of work, a man who has travelled all over the world and is knowledgeable in the occult.  In this story he is living at a boarding school in New England, working as a tutor.  It is winter and when the heating system in the classrooms breaks down he has his students attend class in his rooms, where he has a fire in the fireplace.

In his rooms Canevin has an elaborate 17th-century Danish mirror he found in an abandoned building in the West Indies.  A favorite student, Robert, notices a weird pattern in the glass of the mirror, visible only from certain angles, and becomes fascinated by it.  Touching a particular spot on the mirror where Robert sees dimly noticeable lines converging, he tells Canevin that it feels like the mirror is trying to suck him in.

Not long after, Robert disappears and all efforts to find him bring up zilch.  At night while asleep, Canevin gets telepathic messages from Robert.  In these visions, Robert's blue coat is yellow, his skin is a queer color, and Robert seems to have trouble talking.  Over a series of nights, Robert explains what happened to him via these psychic conversations.  So interested in the mirror was the teenaged boy that he came to Canevin's rooms when the tutor was absent and got sucked into the mirror when he touched it at that particular point.  This mirror is the work of a 17th-century Danish glazier, Europe's finest maker of mirrors, a guy named Holm.  Holm was also a student of the occult, like half the people in the fiction we read here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Holm feared death, and sought immortality in the fourth dimension.  He acquired a little mirror known as "Loki's glass" and integrated it into a larger mirror of his own fabrication.  By entering this mirror, you enter the fourth dimension, a place where you don't have to eat, use the toilet, or sleep, where you will not grow old or die or get sick, where there are no insects or vermin.  Holm sent two black slaves into the mirror with lots of books and then joined them.

Much of the text of "The Trap" describes in detail bordering on tedium the "rules" of life in the mirror.  Everything in the mirror is reversed or opposite.  The "Negro" slaves have white skin, for example, the midday sky is yellow instead of blue and so forth.  New arrivals to the fourth dimension take a few minutes to learn how to walk and a few days to learn how to talk because nerves and muscles are wired in reverse or something like that.  Most unbelievably, when you walk closer to something it takes up less of your field of view, and if you retreat from something it appears to grow larger.

The environment inside the mirror takes on the appearance of those places which have been reflected in its surface for a sufficient period of time, so, places like Canevin's rooms and some Caribbean locales; for many decades the mirror was leaning with its glass towards a wall so there is a limited number of "scenes."  Transient movable objects like furniture are not in the world of the mirror, and you can't really interact with the "scenes" that are there--they are just like a painted background.  

Over the years, Holm used telepathy to hypnotize people, Robert being the latest, into joining him in the mirror.  There being nothing to do, the inhabitants of the mirror spend a lot of time chatting, talking about differences in life between the 17th, 18th, and now 20th centuries.  There is a long list of such people, but Whitehead doesn't give them personalities or relationships or describe any of these conversations.  We can only hope that Robert had his wits about him and became the world's expert on 17th-century European table manners or the practical aspects of cultivating, storing and selling sugar in the 18th century or something like that.

Eventually, Canevin gets a glass cutting tool and carefully removes "Loki's glass" from the rest of the mirror.  Robert comes through to our world more or less intact, but all the other people, who should have died over 100 years ago, instantly degrade into dust.  Robert finds that he is now left-handed and his heart is now in the right side of his chest instead of the left, you know, like Dr. No.  We also get an overly long denouement in which Canevin comes up with an elaborate story to explain to people where Robert was these two weeks.

I'm grading this one acceptable.  "The Trap" lacks human drama; it is more of an idea story than a horror story or adventure story, lacking thrills or chills, sex and violence.  Other writers might have used the mirror-world as a setting for a battle of wills, a love triangle, a tragically doomed romance, a debate on the social order or religion or political systems, but that is not Whitehead's project.  Whitehead does what he set out to do just fine, but it is not really my cup of meat.

Joshi tells us that there is reason to believe that Lovecraft wrote "the entire central section of the story."  Maybe I have to blame HPL for some of "The Trap"'s long-windedness.    

"The Trap" debuted in Strange Tales and editors have favored it since then; you can find it in a multitude of Whitehead collections, Lovecraft collections, reprint magazines and anthologies. 

We've read several stories from Donald Wollheim's Avon Fantasy Reader No. 6:
Thorp McClusky's "The Crawling Horror,"
David H. Keller's "The Thing in the Cellar,"
and Edmond Hamilton's "The Star Stealers" 

**********

All of these stories are worth reading for the student of the weird, and the Greene and Talman stories are good economical tales deserving of a wide audience.  Let's hope our next foray into interwar genre magazines meets the standard today's stories met.

H P Lovecraft: "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family," "The Festival," "He," and "The Horror at Red Hook"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading stories from 1920s issues of Weird Tales, the widely beloved pioneering speculative fiction magazine.  Today we are going to tackle four WT stories from the era by an author closely associated with WT, H. P. Lovecraft, stories I haven't blogged about yet, though I may have read some of them in the distant past.  I will be reading them from my Arkham House hardcover Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (Corrected Ninth Edition), but I'll include links to the stories' 1920s Weird Tales appearances: just click the magic words below to be whisked off to the hellish landscapes which lie just beneath the surface of our own mundane reality:

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh

Cthulhu R'lyeh
wgah'nagl
fhtagn

"Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" (1921)

This tale debuted in a publication called The Wolverine, and appeared in Weird Tales three years later under the title "The White Ape," a title of which HPL did not approve.

This story, a history of a now extinct noble English family,  contains, in concise concentrated form, many of the standard Lovecraftian themes--lost cities, degenerated races, miscegenation, unwelcome revelations about one's identity, and scholars and explorers who search for the truth and are driven mad by what they find.  The opening paragraph is almost a thesis statement for the whole Lovecraft oeuvre, asserting that life is "hideous" and that the more science discovers, the more hideous we realize life is, and if science ever uncovers the truth about our identity we may well all kill ourselves.  The male members of the Jermyn family dramatize this morbid claim, many of them dying in shocking, melodramatic, fashion, their remains disposed of in ways that are particularly macabre.

In brief, an 18th-century head of the Jermyn clan was an explorer in Africa, and upon his return to Britain claimed to have discovered the ruins of an ancient city apparently once inhabited by a race of white people and/or a race of human-ape hybrids.  His discoveries are scoffed at, and he ends up in a madhouse, where he dies.  This guy's descendants tend to be ugly, even deformed--it is hinted they have simian features--and the men tend to have unusual marriages, to women of the lower classes and/or women they refuse to allow out of the house, lest they be seen in public.  Quite a few Jermyns are murdered by family members or commit suicide, including the last of the line, who dies without issue.  These murders and self-murders are generally a reaction to a realization about the Jermyn ancestry--it seems that several of the Jermyn men have mated with women who are part-ape, surviving members of the ancient race that built or lived in that ruined city.  One female Jermyn was crudely mummified and worshipped as a god or used as a totem or good luck charm by various black tribes.

"Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" generates a mood and has lots of solid horror ideas--all the varied shocking fates individuals and their bodies suffer--but it is not a traditional story with a plot and characters and all that.  I like it.  

As with most of Lovecraft's work, you can find "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" in a multitude of Lovecraft collections.  I will point out that this tale has also been reprinted in a 1973 Roger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia anthology, Androids, Time Machines and Blue Giraffes, and in a 2008 Marvel comic alongside a graphic novel adaptation of the story by Richard Corben.

"The Festival" (1925)

This one debuted in the same issue of Weird Tales as Frank Belknap Long's "The Ocean Leech" and C. M. Eddy, Jr.'s "Ahrl-a of the Caves."   Besides in the inevitable mountain of Lovecraft collections, "The Festival" has been reprinted in a few anthologies, including some on a Christmas or holiday theme and Peter Haining's The Satanists, even though this story isn't really about Satan or his worshippers.  

Our narrator makes clear immediately that he is of a secretive people small in number whose culture, a culture that stretches back long before the rise of Christianity, a culture with an affinity for the stars, has been suppressed, but who have striven to keep that culture alive by holding a festival every 100 years.  At Christmas time he comes to a coastal New England town to participate in this ceremony, makes his way to a seventeenth century house inhabited by an old man and an old woman who through disguises keep the narrator from seeing their flesh and who utter no speech--the man communicates via stylus and wax tablet.  Lovecraft does a good job describing these weirdos and their house.

Late at night the entire town of people, all of them dressed to obscure their forms and visages, assembles at a church and descends through trap door and spiral stair deep into the earth, to hold a bizarre ceremony involving a monstrous flame that generates no heat and causes no shadows, and a herd of queer monsters that are to serve as the assembled throng's steeds and carry them to even stranger ceremonies deeper still beneath the surface.  The old man who welcomed the narrator into his home is apparently the leader of the group, and uses a copy of The Necronomicon in the ritual; it is suggested this creature is an ancestor of the narrator, somehow still alive, though horribly decayed or transformed, centuries after his burial.  The narrator, horrified, escapes, almost dying in the effort, and wakes up in a hospital after being rescued as he floated in the harbor.  The town seems different, more modern--was the narrator cast back in time last night, or drawn into some intersection of our world and another?

Quite good, a sort of embryonic, more concise, less extreme version of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."  In this story the narrator's jump from ignorance to knowledge of his heritage is less radical, as he starts off knowing his people are unlike others and doesn't end the story as an actual monster, as does the narrator of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."     

"He" (1926)

I lived in New York City for over a decade, and so found very compelling the first two or three pages of "He," in which the narrator describes his initial fascination with the Big Apple upon his arrival and then his rapid disillusionment after taking up residence in Gotham.  Particularly interesting was Lovecraft's idea that New Yorkers lack a sense of history, that changes to the city erase earlier achievements and characteristics rather than building upon them as one builds upon a foundation: 

...this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life.

I guess this is the sort of criticism of Americans we can expect from a self-described conservative like Lovecraft, that Americans are deracinated and obsessed with the self and progress and so have no use for the past, see the past as something to be escaped or overcome or just ignored and forgotten.  I'm not sure how seriously we can take Lovecraft on the particulars about New York--while he did spend time in New York, I don't think he ever went to Paris or London, so his comparisons among the three cities must largely be based on stuff he read or heard.  And of course a lot of Lovecraft's criticisms of this sort are animated by the fact that the New York of the 1920s is full of Jews and blacks and Catholics, not just the Dutch and English who founded and then sized New Amsterdam.  Still, a provocative line of thinking, and the idea of New York as a dead thing inhabited by parasites and scavengers a powerful image, making for compelling reading.

The narrator spends his time searching New York for streets whose buildings are all old, streets where there are no foreigners.  He is accosted by a man who, apparently, has a similar avocation, and this taciturn guy leads the narrator on a curious maze-like journey through old neighborhoods where they see no people, an odyssey that includes a climb over a brick wall and a long stretch of crawling through some kind of low tunnel.  Finally, the man brings the narrator to an 18th-century house in a walled yard and doffs his cloak to reveal he wears 18th-century costume.  Emaciated and ancient, he claims to be an antiquarian who affects the dress of two centuries ago, and to have at his command the magic learned by an ancestor who lived in this house when it was built, magic his ancestor learned in England and France and from the local Indians.  With this magic he is able to show the narrator, through a window, the New York of the past, and, horrifyingly, the New York of the future, a future of dizzyingly tall towers, flying machines, and "yellow, squint-eyed people...dancing insanely to...ceaseless dirges...."  The narrator cries out in fear at the nightmare fate which awaits NYC, summoning the ghosts of the Indians who once dwelt here and were murdered by the 18th-century wizard.  The strange old antiquarian is surely in fact that very wizard, and the Native ghosts carry him off as he finally decays as he should have decayed way back in colonial times.  The house collapses and the narrator barely escapes being crushed under it, falling unconscious from wounds he suffers on the way out.

(Today's stories are all about decaying bodies and/or collapsing buildings--change in Lovecraft is always for the worse.)  

A solid piece of work that exploits our fears of the future and of foreigners, our all too appropriate expectation that our culture and way of life are going to be swept away and forgotten and we will be replaced by people who are incomprehensible to us and, perhaps, evil and disgusting.

After its debut in Weird Tales alongside a rarely reprinted Edmond Hamilton serial we can look forward to reading soon and reprinted work by Shelly and Poe, "He" has been included in some attractive anthologies, like Donald A. Wollheim's Terror in the Modern Vein and various European volumes.

Wollheim included in Terror in the Modern Vein his own story of New York disillusionment, 
"The Rag Thing," and Robert Heinlein's story of discovering the horrible reality behind
apparent reality, "They"

"The Horror at Red Hook" (1927)

I don't think I had read "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family," "The Festival," or "He" before today, but I am confident I read "The Horror at Red Hook" when I lived in New York, over ten years ago.   I don't remember it very well, so it may hold surprises for me.

In Chapter I, we are introduced to Malone, a New York police detective with "the Celt's far vision of weird and hidden things" who is living in Rhode Island after a terrible experience in Brooklyn left him with deep psychological wounds.  He was in some kind of raid in which a collapsing building killed many of his comrades, and the general public thinks that this disaster is what has led to his mental illness.  In fact, he witnessed "a horror of houses and blocks and cities leprous and cancerous with evil dragged from elder worlds," but is canny enough to know nobody will believe his story so he keeps it to himself.

The narrative shifts backwards in time in Chapter II, and we learn a little more about Malone, a smart guy who has always been interested in the occult, in the evil that lurks beneath the surface, has read books about witches and has his own theories about human behavior and human history.  We also learn about Red Hook, where Malone is stationed, a decayed Brooklyn neighborhood inhabited by blacks, Italians, Syrians and "Spaniards," many of them up to no good or just hanging around, likely, Malone theorizes, even long before he comes face to face with the terrible truth, "heirs of some shocking and primordial tradition; the sharers of debased and broken scraps from cults and ceremonies older than mankind."  

Chapter III introduces us to Suydam, a fat old Dutchman with a nice house and huge library of books on the occult in Flatbush.  This guy has been spending a lot of time in Red Hook, hanging around with groups of "swarthy" people and making strange comments about "unlimited powers" he is striving to acquire.  He was also wasting all his money importing from Europe rare books on strange topics and acquiring buildings in Red Hook where are housed throngs of dark foreigners.  His relatives want him declared insane, but fail in their legal efforts, as before the judge Suydam appears normal; the local and Federal police, however, keep an eye on Suydam as the man's many contacts in Red Hook are among the worst criminals in the area, thieves and importers of illegal immigrants.  Malone is assigned the job of leading the investigation and effort to round up the undocumented Near Eastern weirdos--Kurdish Yezidis said to worship the devil--with which Suydam's swarthy cronies are populating Red Hook.

    

Chapter IV covers Malone's investigation and developments in Suydam's life.  Suydam's appearance, behavior, health and finances improve, his white hair even regaining its original youthful color, and he wins over the relatives who previously thought him mad.  The Dutchman spends more time at home in Flatbush, even has the place renovated and becomes more social than ever before in his life--he even gets engaged!  Meanwhile, Malone and his comrades are able to get into some of the Red Hook houses where Suydam's Kurdish and other non-white cronies have been living, discovering strange, sinister, inscriptions in esoteric tongues on the walls.  

Chapter V tells of the death of Suydam and his new wife on the Europe-bound ocean liner just after their wedding.  Some kind of animal or monster, only glimpsed by a member of the crew before it vanished out a porthole, massacres the newlyweds, and almost immediately afterwards a boarding party of Arabs and other strange characters from a tramp steamer take custody of Suydam's mangled body.

At the same time Suydam is killed and his carcass carried off, in Red Hook there is a big excitement described in Chapter VI.  Some little white boys with blue eyes have disappeared from Gowanus and the local Scandinavians are forming a mob to invade Red Hook to try to rescue them, so the police raid suspicious buildings in Red Hook to forestall civil unrest.  The cops interrupt some kind of elaborate ceremony, and, in one of Suydam's buildings, Malone has an impossible experience he'd like to chalk up to a dream or hallucination.  A wind that seems alive sucks him into a subterranean world of vast chambers and shores upon dark seas where he sees monsters of all shapes and sizes and witnesses a perverted marriage ceremony which culminates in the mutilated corpse of Suydam, again obese and white-haired and impossibly and frantically alive, flees a horde of monsters.

Like the protagonists of "The Festival" and "He," after his glimpse of the horrible reality behind our complacent reality, Malone falls unconscious and is awoken by rescuers.  The buildings the cops raided collapsed on him and his comrades, killing many of the police and most of the captured worshippers.  Chapter VII, the denouement, describes how tunnels were discovered leading from Suydam's Flatbush house to various locales and the authorities chalk it all up to an illegal immigrant smuggling operation.  But Malone knows better, that the Suydam affair is connected to evil from beyond space and time that threatens to overwhelm our universe, and we readers are assured that the evil traditions practiced in Red Hook continue to this day.

"The Horror at Red Hook" is a good horror story that leaves behind all the fun (or boring, to some) architecture and history talk we see in "The Festival" and "He" and serves up a double helping of racial essentialism and race hatred, romanticizing Celts ("sensitive") and Scandinavians ("Vikings"), dismissing Southern Europeans slightingly, and depicting Arabs, Asians and blacks as disgusting and alien ("the leader of the visiting mariners, an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth..."; "Their [the Yezidi Kurds'] squat figures and characteristic squinting physiognomies, grotesquely combined with flashy American clothing, appeared more and more numerously among the loafers and nomad gangsters of the Borough Hall section....")  The horror of "He" I feel is more rational and historically grounded, depicting the white man displacing the natives of the New World while appropriating the native's wisdom, and then being displaced in turn by the Oriental who, presumably, took advantage of Western advances in science and technology to build his super city and armada of aircraft, while the horror in "The Horror at Red Hook" is based simply on disgust at the appearance and alleged behavior of nonwhites.  Still effective, but less thought-provoking, visceral rather than intellectual, the horror of seeing something gross under a rock, not the horror of considering where your society is heading.

"The Horror at Red Hook" received immediate recognition, being included in the 1927 British anthology edited by Christine Campbell Thompson, You'll Need a Night Light and the 1928 American anthology Not At Night! edited by Herbert Asbury.

**********

I like all these stories, and I think they are a good example of what Lovecraft, at least in his early work, is all about, and for personal reasons I think "He" is my favorite.  And stories about a changing New York and about illegal immigrants may resonate with readers today.  So of course I recommend you read these stories, though be careful not to start including words like "squint-eyed" and "negroid" in casual conversation.

I'm putting my copy of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales back on the shelf but pulling down The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, so brace yourself for more Lovecraft material when next we meet here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and, in the meantime, just accept the world as it appears and don't go digging into caves and caverns and sewers trying to unearth the real truth--you'll be better off.

An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe

"The rich are his clients.  Rich people, governments—they're all rich, never let anybody tell you different—and rich corporations.  Nobody else can afford his fees.  He takes the money and does what they want.  Sometimes it's good.  Sometimes it isn't.  He's a wizard.  I'll give him that."

Back when it was pretty new, I read 2008's An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe, a man whose knowledge of genre literature, high literature, and science and technology, as well as his deep philosophical, emotional and intellectual commitments, prolificity and abilities as a wordsmith probably make him the greatest or the ultimate speculative fiction writer, and I have to admit it didn't make much of an impression on me.  As I recall, its relatively simple style (compared to something like The Book of the New Sun, which is full of hard words and elaborate images and difficult to follow passages) underwhelmed me and the fact that much of it was set in the world of the Broadway-style musical theatre and dealt with detective genre goop didn't grab me. But today I am a more mature and more patient reader and somewhat less dismissive of mystery writing conventions and a little less dismissive of Broadway, so this month, a month in which a lot of my time has been taken up with the pursuit of the almighty dollar and dealing with my family, I gave An Evil Guest another shot.  I read a scan of a first edition.    

An Evil Guest is set in an alternate/future Earth where mind-reading and necromancy are real, cancer was cured a year and a half ago, and the human race has developed a warp drive, with the result that rich people own private "hoppers" the size of automobiles and can explore the universe on their own and the United States is in diplomatic contact with an alien civilization on planet Woldercan.  We readers don't learn all this stuff immediately from the omniscient third-person narrator or in blocks of exposition, but in dribs and drabs in the conversation of our characters.  The text of An Evil Guest consists largely of dialogue, snappy repartee made up of brief and clever sentences in which characters offer the reader and each other info in an ofttimes oblique manner, and often involuntarily--again and again characters do that Sherlock Holmes thing in which they intuit something from clues within another character's speech.  

An Evil Guest has three principal characters, and they form a love triangle.  As with the setting, we learn about these people's personalities and lives through dialogue, in bits and pieces, sometimes learning very important things about them quite late in the game, and, since our info comes from the spoken words of people who are all experts in art of deception who are trying to manipulate each other we have every reason to doubt the truth of everything we learn.  We've got our protagonist, Cassie Casey, an attractive stage actress based in some northern American city.  (We eventually learn it is the New England town of Kingsport from H. P. Lovecraft's oeuvre.)  We've got Gideon Chase, a famous college professor, a philosopher who is also known among the elite as "a wizard" who can solve almost any problem for those willing to pay his astronomical prices.  In the first of An Evil Guest's chapters the President of the United States hires Chase to help the Feds deal with our third lead character, Bill Reis.  The President considers Reis terribly evil, and so elusive that the federal government can't seem to keep track of him or figure out just what he is up to.  Or so the Commander-in-Chief and his chief lackey say.  Reis is like the richest man in the world and owns many businesses of all types--banks, restaurants, you name it--often under assumed names, and he is in close contact with the aliens on Woldercan, people who have a large supply of gold, which they can apparently create via molecular manipulation.  (This novel is all about taking something and changing it into something else, or at least making it look like something else.)  Cassie is almost always "on screen," but Chase and Reis just show up occasionally, though their actions drive the plot more than Cassie's, and Cassie and minor characters are always talking about and acting in response to these two mega-rich operators.

What unites Cassie, Chase and Reis is that they are all famous important people whose names, identities, and appearances are constantly changing, Cassie must mundanely, she being an actress whose assumption of other names and identities is (initially, at least) overt and expected by those around her.  False names, shape shifting and people assuming multiple identities are a major theme of An Evil Guest, with even the many minor characters often pulling such shenanigans--a cop looks like one of Cassie's two ex-husbands; two people with the same name show up, one impersonating the other; people whom we have been led to believe are good turn out to be evil or vice versa; and on and on.  A werewolf even makes an appearance.   

I won't go into all the twists and turns of the plot, which includes in its first two thirds lots of detective story elements like minor characters getting kidnapped and murdered, leaving Cassie and us readers wondering who committed these foul deeds and why, and then science fiction stuff like hyperdrive travel and interaction with alien; in the final third the scene shifts into Weird Tales territory and Cassie finds herself on a tropical island near R'lyeh where she must contend with worshippers of Cthulhu.

Early in the book, Chase, wanting to use Cassie to help him get a hold of Reis, takes the actress to the top of a mountain and performs some manner of eldritch ceremony there--afterwards Cassie is irresistibly beautiful and charismatic, and attracts Reis to her like a moth to a flame.  Both Chase and Reis quickly fall in love with Cassie, and compete for her at the same time they are trying to use her to learn about each other and perhaps control or destroy each other.  Though the Lovecraftian elements of An Evil Guest are in-your-face obvious, we might also see Wolfe's novel as having a plot much like an A. E. van Vogt production--the main character gains special powers and becomes embroiled in the conflicts and machinations of the superpowered elites who run the world behind the scenes and things get crazier and crazier as the story proceeds.  But as I have already suggested, Cassie, in contrast to many of the Canadian madman's heroes, is closer to a puppet or a victim than to a genius who masters the omni-science of Nexialism or prepares mankind to rule the sevagram or otherwise willfully launches a paradigm shift.   

In the second third of the novel Cassie is the star of a musical financed by Reis to be a vehicle for her--thanks to Chase's sorcery, Cassie is a brilliant singer and a top-class dancer and makes a success of the show, which I think Wolfe intends us to think is silly and stupid, though at the same time its tropical island and volcano god content foreshadows the final third of the novel.  New players, significantly government entities, stride on to the scene and themselves try to manipulate Cassie--the aforementioned kidnapping and murdering are part of this manipulation.  This portion of the novel makes explicit that this America is one in which federal agencies are totally corrupt, ignoring the elected political leadership and acting independently as they compete with each other for power; these agencies are not above murdering innocent people.  Gideon Chase and Bill Reis, fabulously wealthy and ultracompetent businessmen, swim with the government entities in this same pool of jockeying elites who ignore the law, where alliances are ever-shifting and the economy of which is based on exchanging favors.  A local police official tells Cassie, referring to Chase, that 

"Our friend helps me out sometimes, and I repay him whenever I can. There's a lot of that in my business."

Another of the players among these corrupt elites is the news media.  One of the things that makes Wolfe an exciting and unusual writer is that in a genre full of atheists who are libertarians and atheists who are commies, Wolfe is a committed Catholic and a conservative, and in An Evil Guest Wolfe takes some swipes at that perennial punching bag of all right wingers, the mainstream media.  Cassie has a friend who is a reporter who (like just about everybody) seems more interested in using Cassie to further her career or other desires than being her friend.  Early in the book Gideon Chase remarks that "Newspapers are not notorious for their painstaking accuracy."  One of the starkest but also subtle ways in which Wolfe suggests the world he is depicting, in particular its government and the media, is corrupt and reprehensible is through a TV news report that indicates that in this alternate USA women who regret their pregnancies are allowed to kill their children up to one year after birth and left-wing activists are pushing for the right to kill children up to age five.  A TV news reader presents this little tidbit this way:

"In an unrelated story, the Supreme Court has extended the period for post-parturition terminations to one year. Civil rights organizations continue to press for five for defectives."

This news story comes after a commercial in which a bottle of ketchup uncaps itself and pours out its own contents in a "crimson fountain," perhaps Wolfe priming us to think of blood and perhaps even self-destruction (a society that murders its children is one that is killing itself) and a report about the collision of a train and a school bus.  (Putting "In an unrelated story" between two different stories about dead children is one of Wolfe's little jokes.)  This news program, delivered dead pan and casually by the talking head but gruesome to us readers, also includes notice that famous philosopher Gideon Chase was injured in an assassination attempt.  (One of An Evil Guest's many instances of shape-changing is Chase having to have a limb amputated after he is shot and getting a battery of prostheses for use in different circumstances.) 

The euphemistic references to the murder of children is one of the grimmer examples of wordplay in An Evil Guest, which includes some lame puns and plenty of jokes and clues within people's names.  Cassie's agent has the last name "Youmans;" one woman's first name is "India," a source of jokes, and her assistant's full name is "Ebony White;" Cassie calls Gideon Chase "Gid" which of course looks a lot like "God," and another man is named "Gil" which is only one letter away from "Gid"--is it Chase in disguise?  One of the more clever pieces of wordplay is an adage Cassie whips out during a one-sided discussion of religion and good and evil with her perplexed journalist friend: "add nothing to God and you get good."  Did Wolfe come up with this or is it famous?  Are we supposed to think Cassie, who is often portrayed as ignorant, came up with this, or that she got it from Chase, the philosopher who has proclaimed that good and evil do not exist?

The final third An Evil Guest is more fantastical and has more of the flavor of horror fiction than detective fiction, and is less dialogue-oriented, with more images and more action.  Reis has Cassie brought to a Polynesian archipelago of which he is king--Cassie is considered queen by the inhabitants, Reis's subjects, whom we hear again and again are tall and fat.  Also among these islands we find that among the secret elites always negotiating or fighting a shadow war with each other behind the scenes and determining Earth's fate are various monster gods, including a shape-shifting shark god and Great Cthulhu himself, whose sunken city R'lyeh rests nearby.  Wolfe delivers a good horror sequence involving a woman killed by a shark and two very good horror sequences involving, first, a female Cthulhu worshipper who tries to get Cassie to betray Reis, and, second, a female private investigator hired by Reis to infiltrate the Cthulhu cult.  This poor P.I. becomes a living dead tool of Cthulhu and has horrifying experiences down in R'lyeh and back on the surface; her adventures are probably the most immediately effective scenes/or in the novel.

Who will live and who will die in the cataclysmic battle that erupts when Reis manipulates the US Navy into attacking R'lyeh?  Who is a Cthulhu worshipper and who is willing to die to save humanity?  Will Cassie end up with either of the two powerful men who love her?  Will the reader be able to figure out the significance of all the vague complicated hints in the Afterword about time travel and cloning?  Can it be that people who have died are going to reappear, and/or that some of the characters we have met are in fact clones or younger or older versions of other characters?  

What else can we say about An Evil Guest?  Well, there is a theme that wealth and gold are perhaps more trouble than they are worth (the quote from which the novel's title is taken and which serves as its epigraph suggests as much) but then there is also the suggestion that businesspeople are more honest and better stewards of society than politicians and other government bastards.  Is the world depicted in the novel, one in which infanticide is the norm and, apparently, Cthulhu is the real ruler of the Earth, some kind of satire of our real world where abortion is common and dictatorship and terrorism are rife? 

Then we have the fact that our main character is an attractive woman who has been victimized and exploited her entire life and who has two failed marriages behind her.  Like all the novel's characters, our feelings about Cassie must be ambiguous.  Is she a heroine, or just a pawn, a victim, of others?  Does Cassie ever really make a decision, ever accomplish a goal, or is she just pushed hither and thither by others, used by others and rescued by others?  The difficult experiences she endures after the battle between Cthulhu and the US Navy change her looks, but do they teach her how to be self-sufficient?  At the end of the novel Cassie is about to start a new phase of life; can we safely hope she will be happy and/or the mistress of her own fate, or is this new phase of life just the product of her being rescued by others yet again and should we expect Cassie to pull another blunder and enter into a third unhappy marriage?

An Evil Guest is a novel about dangerous space aliens, dangerous technologies and dangerous supernatural powers, but at its core it is a story about sexual relationships (and, after all, what could be more dangerous than sex?)  Wolfe offers theories of sexual relationships that I assume are pretty mainstream among regular people but perhaps not the kinds of theories that would be voiced among the educated, as Cassie and Wolfe acknowledge.  Why do Reis and Chase fall in love with Cassie?  Because she is good looking!  And what inspires Cassie's love for them in return?  It seems like she likes them because they are wealthy, successful, big and strong, and offer her gifts and attention.  Cassie seems fascinated by Chase's hi-tech automobile, and as for Reis, Cassie says to another character (referring to Reis by using one of the man's numerous aliases, "Wallace")

"Wally's strong, really strong.  We're not supposed to like strong men, but we do.  Or most of us do.  I do.  I know too many wimps already.  Wally says he loves me, and he means it.  I can tell.  It's hard not to like somebody who loves you."

An Evil Guest is a (take your pick) realistic or cynical book that tells you the world and people are the way you fear they are, not the way you hope they are.  Yikes!

Finally, can I recommend An Evil Guest?  Well, I like it, but I don't love it.  The style is smooth and easy to enjoy even if you have trouble keeping track of what is going on with all the detective parts in the first half or so and with all the time distortion and clone elements in the ending.  The horror stuff in the islands section is remarkably good.  And Wolfe gives us quite a bit to think over on the level of philosophy and when it comes to what actually happens in the story--some will embrace all the mystery and ambiguity, while others will complain that there is no real resolution of some of the plot elements and that we don't really find out what happens to many of the characters.  We don't even know if Cthulhu is OK!