Weird Tales, Dec 1936: R E Howard, J R Fearn, O A Kline & E H Price and A Derleth & M Schorer

Let's revisit the December 1936 issue of one of our favorite periodicals, Weird Tales.  Way back in 2014, when we were young, we read the Robert Bloch story from this issue, "Mother of Serpents," and in 2019 we read Henry Kuttner's contribution, "It Walks By Night."  But this issue includes a bunch of stories by other guys we are interested in, so let's read four of them, Robert E. Howard's cover story "The Fire of  Asshurbanipal," John Russell Fearn's "Portrait of A Murderer," and two collaborations, one between Otis Adelbert Kline and E. Hoffmann Price, "The Cyclops of Xoatl," as well as August Derleth and Mark Schorer's "The Woman at Loon Point."

"The Fire of Asshurbanipal" by Robert E. Howard (1972/1936)

I decided to read "The Fire of Asshurbanipal" in an electronic edition of the 2010 collection El Borak and Other Desert Adventures because sometimes these 21st-century books have versions based on Howard's own manuscripts that lack the editorial changes sometimes seen in magazines and present a text closer to Howard's original intent.  After finishing the story, I drafted my reactions to it and then took a gander at a scan of the December '36 Weird Tales to find that the illustration for "The Fire of Asshurbanipal" showed a monster that I did not recall appearing in the text.  A few moments' look at the intro to El Borak and Other Desert Adventures and at isfdb opened my eyes--the version I had read was first printed in 1972 in Glenn Lord's The Howard Collector and is an alternative version with almost no supernatural elements; the WT version includes explicit fantastical and Yoh-Sotherish material.  In light of this revelation, I then read the 1936 version of the story in an electronic edition of the 2008 collection The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard; except for a few typos, that book version, we are told, is identical to the 1936 magazine version.  

So, below, find my assessment of the mundane '72 version of "The Fire of Asshurbanipal" and then some comments on how different the '36 WT version is.

1972 realistic version

Here we have a pretty routine adventure story, but Howard tells it well so I enjoyed it.

An American adventurer and his friend, a huge Afghan, came to the desert to search for a lost city they had heard about--within the city is said to rest, in the hand of the skeletal remains of a king upon his throne, the jewel of the title, the Fire of Asshurbanipal.  Howard's story begins in medias res, as our heroes fight off some Bedouins with their Lee-Enfield rifles.  (Howard may be making a mistake; I think the Lee-Enfield is a bolt action rifle, but at one point Howard tells us that the Afghan "levered out his last empty shell and slipped a single cartridge into the breech of his rifle," which sounds like maybe he's using a Martini-Henry.)

Then comes the long march to the city; Howard spends a lot of time on the agony of the journey, our guys having lost most of their supplies in a sandstorm, on describing the appearance of the ruined city, and on the American's speculations about the history of the city and the Afghan's fears it is haunted by devils and protected by curses.  Howard is good at this sort of thing and I was into it.  Just as the men find the throne and the jewel in a huge temple dedicated to Baal, a "hawk-faced" sheik appears at the head of his band of thieves--the American has met this guy before, in East Africa, when he protected a "wretch of a negro" from this slave-trading Arab.  The sheik seeks elaborate vengeance on our guys so even though the Yank and his Afghan comrade kill many of the sheik's lackeys in the fight, the sheik insists they be taken alive.  

Before our heroes can be tortured or whatever, the sheik snatches up the jewel and a small snake emerges from the bones on the throne and kills him, scaring off his superstitious followers.  The bandits leave behind not only the jewel but some equipment and supplies which our heroes sorely need--a happy ending for them.

The interesting thing about this story for 21st-century readers is how all the characters' behavior is driven by their ethnic or cultural background.  Two examples: the American seeks the Fire of Asshurbanipal because "deep in his soul lurked the age-old heritage of the white man, the urge to seek out the hidden places of the world," and when the sheikh seizes the jewel he "was like one hypnotized, as all the slumbering mysticism and mystery of his Semitic blood were stirred to the deeps of his strange soul."  These quotes may also give you an idea of the sort of melodramatic style Howard employs in this story in reference to everything, not just people's racial makeup, and which I personally find fun. 

1936 supernatural version 

The version of "The Fire of Asshurbanipal" that appeared in Weird Tales is similar to the non-weird version first published in 1972 up until our heroes come upon the throne on which lies the jewel.  The scenes in the throne chamber are full of weird stuff; for example, the jewel seems to pulsate as if it is a living heart, and even move of its own volition.  The Afghan is revealed to have an "Oriental telepathic instinct" that warns him of danger.  When the sheik (or "shaykh" as it is styled in this version) captures the protagonists, one of his subordinates, a Bedouin, relates the eerie history of the city and the Fire of Asshurbanipal, a history which involves a wizard and a monster and includes mention of Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth.  When the sheik grabs up the jewel despite his follower's warnings, the monster attacks via a secret door, killing him.  The American glimpses the monster and the sight of it almost drives him insane.  Luckily, the monster only kills those who touch the Fire of Asshurbanipal, so our heroes are spared and get out of the city alive.

Though the idea of an "Oriental telepathic instinct" is a little much, not only goofy but unnecessary, Howard otherwise handles the supernatural elements pretty well, and this version certainly feels more complete, what with the history of the city being revealed and the sheik being destroyed not by some random event but by his own effrontery in ignoring the warnings of his fellow Muslims.  

I'll also note that, in the Weird Tales version, instead of "negro" we get the full strength "n-word;" did Glenn Lord in 1972 do a little editing of the manuscript of the mundane version of the story?

Both versions are good, but the supernatural version of "The Fire of Asshurbanipal" is more satisfying.  You can find the weird version of the tale in many Howard collections and some anthologies of Lovecraftian stories.  As for the version lacking weird elements, besides the El Borak volume, it has been reprinted in Joe Marek's The "New" Howard Reader and Robert M. Price's Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos.

"Portrait of a Murderer" by John Russell Fearn

Looks like this will be our third Fearn story, we having read an Amazing story by the gentleman, "The Secret of the Ring" in June of 2024, and an Astounding story of his, "Mathematica," in September of that year. "Portrait of a Murderer" was reprinted in 1946 in an issue of the British magazine Strange Tales which, it seems, was printed with two different sexy covers (gotta catch 'em all), and then had to wait until our own strange 21st century to appear in book form in a Best of collection of Fearn's work. 

The bulk of the text of "Portrait of a Murderer" is the first-person testimonial of a dead man, a journalist executed for murder, transmitted to this world through a medium.   

The journalist tells us that while on holiday in the environs of Coniston Old Man, apparently a famous mountain in England, he met a fat guy with a beautiful voice and captivating eyes, Pym.  Pym is one of those guys we meet on the regular in SF stories, the guy who is studying the occult, and one of those people we meet regularly in all fiction*, the individual who is sick of his or her spouse.  The plot of "Portrait of a Murderer" follows the journalist as he is hypnotized by the "podgy" little Pym into murdering Mrs. Pym and carries this small attractive woman up the mountain to throw her down into a chasm.  The narrator thinks the murder is all a dream while he is committing it, but come the morning, the boys in blue carry him off to jail.  Pym visits the imprisoned journalist and tells him that the missus was unfaithful and so a perfectly suitable subject for Pym's experiment investigating the possibility of using mental powers alone to commit a murder.

*Don't say "And in real life!" you comedians--it's Christmas, for goodness' sake!

Following conviction and execution, the journalist found himself in the afterlife, envisaged by Fearn as a sea of empty darkness in which one swims amid the jumbled vague thoughts of most living people but the clearer thoughts of gifted clairvoyants and trained mediums.  He achieves vengeance on Pym, exerting his mental force to drive the fat little hypnotist insane.

Like Howard's "The Fire of Asshurbanipal," "Portrait of a Murderer" is a sort of routine or traditional story, but it is well-told, Fearn doing a particularly good job on the hypnotism bit and making the actual murder pretty exciting, so I enjoyed it.  The vision of the afterlife Fearn paints, and the journalist's method of revenge, are a little questionable (the deceased journalist detects no sign of other dead people, but can sense the teeming masses of living people?) and probably should have been eliminated, but this rocky stretch at the end doesn't sink the story. 

"The Cyclops of Xoatl" by Otis Adelbert Kline and E. Hoffmann Price

Earlier this year we read Kline and Price's story about a white hunter and his Afghan pal fighting a leopard monster in Burma, "Spotted Satan."  I gave that 1940 work a passing grade, so let's see if this story published like four years earlier can also escape condemnation by the ruthless MPorcius Fiction Log staff.  The heartless jury that is the editors of the SF community has already passed a severe judgement on "The Cyclops of Xoatl," as reflected in the fact that the story has never been reprinted, but maybe I'll find the story more palatable?

"The Cyclops of Xoatl" turns out to be the story of a white adventurer and his Mexican pal fighting a one-eyed ogre in a Mexican village, a tale built along the same lines as "Spotted Satan," but, unfortunately, less interesting and entertaining than that later work; "The Cyclops of Xoatl" is a mish mosh of tedious detective story elements, less than credible science fiction elements, and mediocre action sequences, while its pacing and structure are poor, rendering the story a repetitive series of scenes that don't flow logically or satisfyingly from one to the next.    

Well-known American he-man Bart Leslie, a veteran of the Border Patrol known as "Two-Gun Bart," has been summoned to a little Mexican village by his friend Arturo Hernandez.  Arturo, who speaks a sort of comedy Spanglish presented here in phonetic form ("Son of wan gun!  That ees good") recently purchased a hacienda, I guess a sort of ranch-slash-farm, but is having trouble making it pay because all his employees ("peons" or "mozos") are liable to quit due to a series of murderous attacks upon them; these murders are attributed to an eleven-foot tall cyclops that drinks the blood of its victims.  

"I cannot work the property. It is a total loss, but if I abandon it, I am what you call busted! Clean’ out.”

The day he arrives in his roadster, somebody tries to murder Bart with a machete.  That night, a waiter tries to drug Bart, but Bart turns the tables on the creep, making him drink the coffee he tried to serve to our hero.  Bart puts the unconscious waiter in the bed he himself was to occupy, and during the night the waiter is murdered--this poor bastard's throat is torn out, like those of the victims at the hacienda, and Arturo declares that it must have been the blood-drinking cyclops that slew him.  

A German anthropologist has been eavesdropping on Bart and Arturo as they discuss the weird goings on at the hacienda, and this nosey Teuton asks to join our gang when they head out to the estate--herr doktor, of course, thinks there is no monster, that the workers are letting their superstitions get the best of them.

In his absence, another of Arturo's men has been slain and drained of blood.  The entire workforce threatens to quit, but the presence of Bart, a famous gunslinger, and the example of the loyal housekeeper, a pretty middle-aged mestiza, stiffens them.  Throughout the story the Mexican peasant and working class are shown to be emotional and excitable, fickle and erratic like women or children, quick to take fear and quick to take heart again when things seem to be going their way, and Bart and Arturo often talk about methods of managing these people.  Bart leads a hunting party in search of the cyclops; they don't find the monster, but do discover a clue that seems to suggest there is no monster, that somebody is hoaxing the peons as well as murdering them, as herr doktor has been saying. 

"The Cyclops of Xoatl" is like a mystery story in its requirement that there be many characters to serve as suspects, and Arturo's sister Maria, the most beautiful woman Bart has ever seen, arrives at the hacienda, followed by Pacheco, the old man who sold Arturo this cursed estate and seems to have had some relationship with the mestiza housekeeper in her youth.  Bart carefully watches the facial expressions of the many characters, trying to figure out the connections between them and assess whether they might be behind the murders and the monster--Pacheco is a prime suspect, as he now wants to buy the hacienda back.  Then Bart catches sight of the monster and he as well as those of us reading this thing have no choice but to accept the reality of a towering blood-drinking ogre.  Professor Jerry of Kraut U. suggests the being is an atavism, a throwback to the race of the cyclops Polyphemus described in Homer, and should be captured and put in a museum or zoo.  

There are multiple scenes in which the monster attacks and gets away, sometimes after grabbing a woman and then dropping her, and the behavior of the various Mexicans as well as of the German anthropologist during the monster encounters raises questions about who is in cahoots with the monster and clues as to why.  For example, Bart is about to catch the ogre but then his horse is felled by one bullet of the wild fusillade coming in the monster's general direction from the posses of trigger-happy peons accompanying him--is this an accident born of Latin exuberance or deliberate sabotage? 

The story grinds on, suspicion drifting from one figure to another, people getting killed, etc., until somebody betrays Bart and our hero ends up trapped in a cave with the bloodthirsty cyclops.  "The Cyclops of Xoatl" then resembles a science fiction story for a brief period as we get a description of the monster's biology and scenes of Bart using his knowledge of literature and the properties of the batteries in his flashlight to improvise a means of escape from the blood-drinking menace.  Then, as at the end of a conventional detective story, we are provided a full accounting of which of the characters has been using the monster to achieve his or her goals, passages on the how and the why of each murder, plus the less than believable origin story of the monster, which turns out not to be a space alien or a member of a lost race but the product of the illicit liaison of Pacheco and the mestiza housekeeper, what Bart explains as

"an example of teratology, caused by a deficiency in formative power in the embryo, and resulting in what the doctors call 'imperfect separation of symmetrical parts.’"

Oh, brother, a birth defect that makes you eleven feet tall and keeps you from growing any grinding teeth so you can't eat hard food and can only subsist on milk and blood?  "The Cyclops of Xoatl" would work better if it was more Lovecraftian or more Christian, with the monster being the product of sex with an alien or sex with Satan or representing God's punishment for infidelity or something like that.  Random instances of bad luck have no moral weight and do not reflect poor decisions, and so are far far less satisfying in a story than when bad things happen as a result of a character's actions or judgement.  Tsk, tsk.

Anyway, the monster is dead, the manipulators and killers are all punished, Maria falls in love with Bart, and I guess Arturo's hacienda will now turn a profit.

Thumbs down for the deservedly obscure "The Cyclops of Xoatl," though it may perhaps be of value to students of depictions of Latin America in popular fiction with its sexy and sophisticated Maria, stolid and Catholic Arturo, and excitable and malleable masses of superstitious Mexican peons.

"The Woman at Loon Point" by August Derleth and Mark Schorer

"The Woman at Loon Point," which you can find in Derleth collections and which Charlotte F. Otten included in her anthology The Literary Werewolf, is illustrated here in Weird Tales with an interestingly flat and square Virgil Finlay drawing that is reminding me of a Greek frieze, like from the Parthenon or something.  (This issue of Farnsworth Wright's magazine also includes a more conventional female nude by Finlay that illustrates Granville Hoss's "Out of the Sun.")  

"The Woman at Loon Point" is an obvious and traditional werewolf tale.  The narrator is spending a few months at his father's remote hunting cabin in the woods of Minnesota and learns from the locals about a pretty girl and her brother who live in a cabin a few miles away, how the girl was happy and carefree when the pair first arrived in the area but now she is always nervous and sad and is almost never seen.  Her brother has become very ill and is seen even less often.  Oh yeah, and a wolf is terrorizing the neighborhood. 

Our narrator tries to build a relationship with the hermitish girl, at the same time avoiding the dangerous wolf which is always skulking around, and eventually she tells him the truth and enlists his aid in freeing her brother from the malign influence of the werewolf.  Our guy kills the monster and marries the girl and the brother heals up.

The plot of "The Woman at Loon Point" is routine but Derleth and Schorer do a good job with the individual scenes, the characters are sympathetic and act in a manner that is believable, and the narrative moves forward in a fluid, logical fashion, and so I enjoyed this competent filler piece.  I can recommend the story moderately.  Critics are always praising work that pushes the envelope or subverts expectations or innovates, but here in "The Woman at Loon Point" we have a healthy specimen of the foundations, the norms, the conventions, that those innovators are lauded for subverting or expanding, and it is an entertaining read.

**********

None of these stories is groundbreaking, but three of them are entertaining, so we are not going to lodge a formal complaint--here we have a worthy issue of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual.  

More 1930s stories when next we convene here at MPorcius Fiction Log!

Weird Tales Sept 1939: T McClusky, E H Price, A Derleth & M Schorer, and C A Smith

No doubt you have heard that it is time to get weird!  (It's long been the time to get weird here at MPorcius Fiction Log.)  Let's not buck the zeitgeist and check out more Weird Tales from 1939 with the September issue.  In these pages Farnsworth Wright reprints a classic H. P. Lovecraft story I have read multiple times (before I started this blog, I think), "Cool Air," so I won't be talking about it today other than to say I really like it; instead we'll focus on four stories I haven't read before by some other weirdies with whom we have some familiarity.

"While Zombies Walked" by Thorp McClusky

Every day I have a reason to ruefully mutter, "Don't leave New York," be it because there is something wrong with the car or something wrong with the lawn mower or because of the distinct lack of Greek vases, Roman statues, skyscrapers and ocean-going vessels where I now reside.  The protagonists of Thorp McClusky's "While Zombies Walked" have their own reasons to utter my catchphrase, though he doesn't actually record them vocalizing it.

Eileen Perry rushed out of The Big Apple when the uncle who raised her and put her through college, Robert Perry, had a stroke, joining him on his plantation in the remote rural South.  Her boyfriend Tony soon received a letter from her, telling him she never wanted to see him again.  That doesn't sound like the Eileen whom Tony knows!  So he hopped in his car and burned rubber southwards, finally reaching the end of a treacherous unpaved track to find what he assumes is uncle's plantation.  Hmm, what is up with that guy working the cotton fields...with that head injury he looks like a walking corpse!

Tony alerts the apparently feeble-minded Robert Perry and the man who has taken over operations of the farm, a pale-skinned, hugely muscular minister, Reverend Barnes, about the man working the fields even though his head is bashed in, and Barnes, who gives Tony the willies, tries to convince the New Yorker that he was hallucinating.  Things get worse when Eileen appears and tries to signal Tony that something terrible is going on at her uncle's farm and he should book it on out there--Tony ends up a prisoner in a tiny room in Uncle Robert's decrepit old house.  Luckily this little room is above the dining room, and Tony can peer down through a crack in the floorboards and watch how Reverend Barnes treats his black henchmen; somebody better call HR because he addresses his subordinates using the dreaded "n-word."  The "n-word" who was supposed to keep a lookout for unwanted visitors like Tony is executed--method of execution is voodoo doll!

Eileen is conveniently imprisoned in the room next door so our lovebirds can whisper to each other.  As we believers in true love never doubted, Eileen only wrote that dear John letter under coercion, and explains that the Reverend has voodoo dolls of her and of her uncle so they are at the pale-skinned voodoo master's mercy.  The couple is dragged down to the cellar where a bound Tony is forced to watch as Reverend Barnes murders the rest of his black gang and gets to work cooking up the spells that will make Eileen and Tony his slaves.  The Rev obligingly tells Tony the story of how he was corrupted and became a practitioner of voodoo, and also how he has never had a woman and is looking forward to having Eileen as his mindless slave.  Tony manages to get loose from his bonds and he fights the Reverend, but that guy is huge and our hero gets a drubbing.  Then Uncle Robert appears, providentially having overcome the spell that was restraining him, and attacks the Rev from behind with an axe, killing him.  The zombies, freed from their afterlife slavery, hurry back to their graves, and Eileen and Tony live happily ever after.       

"While Zombies Walked" is a merely OK zombie story; the ending could definitely be better.  For one thing, McClusky should have made it more clear how Uncle Robert got free of the spell that had paralyzed his legs and dimmed his mind--a few lines about how in the fight with Tony the voodoo doll of Robert Perry fell out of the Reverend's pocket would have helped.  Another problem is that the Rev doesn't have a very good reason to kill his henchmen down in the basement before he has filled their positions with the white New Yorkers--McClusky obviously feels a need to get rid of them to facilitate the workings of his plot, and the lack of a convincing in-story reason for their deaths undermines the story's believability.    

Sebastian Wolfe included "While Zombies Walked" in his anthology Reel Terror, suggesting that the makers of the 1943 film Revenge of the Zombies based their movie on McClusky's story without giving McClusky credit--it's too bad McClusky didn't have Harlan Ellison or A. E. van Vogt's lawyers.  "While Zombies Walked" also shows up in some zombie-themed anthologies.

"Spanish Vampire" by E. Hoffmann Price

"Spanish Vampire" is a cynical joke story, full of quips about the shallowness and faithlessness of women, the greed and corruption of business people and professionals, the propensity of people for thievery, and so forth.  Our narrator is a law student who works at a gas station.  He recently participated in a student riot, helping to destroy a theatre because the establishment refused to offer a student discount.  An important lawyer in town, for whose firm our narrator had hoped to some day work, saw him overturning the ticket booth, and drives into the gas station specifically to upbraid our hero and tell him he'll never get a job in his office.  Our guy then gets to work on polishing a rich professor's Packard; when he grows bored of the wax-on-wax-off routine he opens up the briefcase the prof left in the car and peruses the papers therein about the synthetic blood the prof is developing.

Late at night, this antinomian law student decides to hang around in a secluded wood, and comes upon a grave dating from the Spanish Occupation.  From it emerges a beautiful woman who openly admits she is a vampire.  The law student considers destroying her, it being sort of his duty as a citizen, especially after learning the vampire is drinking the blood of local children, but he falls in love with her because she is so beautiful and she falls in love with him because he's the first person in over a century not to scream and flee from her.

So instead of putting a stake through her he tries to reform her.  He permits her to drink his blood and maintains his health by supplementing his own blood with synthetic blood he steals from that professor, the law student figures he can eventually wean the vampire off human blood and get her to subsist on animal blood.  He steals some nice clothes for the vampire (who has been walking around in a burial shroud) and they go to a charity ball where our hero impresses that legal eagle with his beautiful date and finds himself back in this guy's good books.  Everybody is impressed by the gorgeous young lady; in fact, when the law student isn't looking she gets into a car with a hunk and starts making out with him!  After a brief break up the law student and vampire make up again, but then she dies after drinking his blood--thinking they were quits, he ate some chili with garlic.  He gets a job at the big law firm, though, so, happy ending, I guess.

Thumbs down for "Spanish Vampire."  I rarely like joke stories--everybody in the world thinks he's a comedian (and I am as bad an offender as any), so there is no shortage of jokes out there, so I look to these old genre magazines for wild and crazy images and ideas, for suspense, for human feeling, and obviously Price's jokes and cynicism keep you from being scared by the horror parts or sad over the rocky romance between two blood sucking creeps, one living and one undead.  

"Spanish Vampire" was first reprinted in 1945 in one of those British pamphlets of "American Fiction" whose main selling point seems to have been their artistic nude covers; this one's title story is "Lady in Danger" by Jack Williamson, a Yellow Peril/mad scientist story which we read in a 1934 issue of Weird Tales under its original title, "Wizard's Isle."  In 1973 "Spanish Vampire" would resurface in Kurt Singer's Satanic Omnibus and if you savvy the lingo you can also read it in a 1978 German anthology.

"Spawn of the Maelstrom" by August Derleth and Mark Schorer

This is one of those stories about English guys who have a club where they hang out when they aren't at their country estates.  We’ve got three such guys: 1) the narrator, Bassett, 2) Warwick, one if these people we are always encountering in fiction whose hobby is investigating the supernatural, and 3) Sir John.  "Spawn of the Maelstrom" is also one of those stories, like so many Lovecraftian tales, in which in the first paragraph we are told the upshot of the caper (in this case, Warwick has vanished without trace) and then the main narrative relates the events that led to this bizarre circumstance.

Warwick has heard rumors that some abandoned island off of Norway, one of the Lofotens, near the Maelstrom, is haunted by a "deathless" and "soulless" monster and so he goes there.  While there he writes letters to Sir John.  When Bassett runs into Warwick again back in London, Warwick seems pretty strange: his gait is different, he doesn’t even recognize Bassett at first, and his whole personality has changed; once eager and outgoing, Warwick is now cold and subdued.  Sir John goes on a little trip to the Continent, tracing Warwick’s path from the Norwegian island back to England, and learns that along that route many people have turned up dead, their corpses oddly unmarred by wounds.  Then somebody breaks into Sir John’s country house, kills one of the servants in a fashion that leaves no visible injury, and steals the letters Warwick wrote to Sir John from that mysterious island.  The narrator and Sir John glimpse the killer as he runs off into the night—it looked like Warwick!

One of the letters Warwick sent to Sir John is still in Sir John's custody, because Warwick didn't send it by post, but instead put it in a bottle and threw it into the ocean from the island.  We read this message along with Bassett.  It tells of how Warwick discovered that on the island has lived since before the rise of mankind a monster from another dimension, a monster that can take any shape it desires!  The thing is trapped on the island until it has devoured three souls--oops, it has taken two souls already and Warwick warns that he will soon be soul #3, so the monster will be able to escape the island and terrorize the world.  One thing can stop the monster, a five-pointed star stone that a priest gave to Warwick when Warwick came round asking about the monster.  For some reason Warwick didn't bring the stone to the island with him, but left it at his lodgings, and tells Sir John to acquire it from his landlord, helpfully attaching a note authorizing the landlord to transfer this magic stone to Sir John.

The story ends anti-climactically with the ancient being that is taking Warwick's form falling into a transparent trap laid by Sir John and crumbling to dust.

This is a mediocre story in which traditional fantasy/horror elements are just jammed together.  Again and again the reader has to swallow plot elements that are just not convincing.  Warwick gets a super weapon that can easily kill the immortal monster and he doesn't bring it to the island of the monster?  Where did the priest get the star stone?  How does the priest know what it does?  How does everybody know that three souls will be enough to allow the monster to leave the island?  Why does the monster take Warwick's form and go to England?  Why does the monster just blithely fall into the trap?  Sir John and Bassett can sense an ancient power in the star stone without touching it, but the monster can't sense this, the one power to which he is vulnerable, and just reaches out and touches it and gets destroyed?  

Fiction is commonly full of these kinds of lacunae and plot holes, but if a work has other virtues the reader feels generous about overlooking them.  (The plots of Star Wars movies, Star Trek movies, Indiana Jones movies, giallo movies, etc., are often nonsensical or just stupid, but viewers will forgive because the films deliver good visuals, good music, likable characters, etc.)  But "Spawn of the Maelstrom" doesn't offer human feeling, striking images, or elegant sentences, so its entire value proposition (as business people might say) lies in its plot, and if there are problems there, it has no other virtues to fall back on.

"Spawn of the Maelstrom" is not noxious, just weak, so we'll call it barely acceptable.  After debuting in Weird Tales, this limp production saw print in the 1966 Derleth and Schorer collection Colonel Markesan and Less Pleasant People and then our Italian friends included "Spawn of the Maelstrom" in a 1989 collection of stories from Weird Tales for which I am having trouble finding a decent cover image; it is also in the 1998 Derleth collection In Lovecraft's Shadow.

"A Night in Malneant" by Clark Ashton Smith (1933)

This is a reprint of a story that first appeared in 1933 in Smith's small press collection The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies.  I am reading "A Night in Malneant" in the 2007 collection The End of the Story; we are told this text follows that in the 1933 pamphlet and that the Weird Tales printing is an edited text.   

The narrator is wandering the world, trying to forget the woman who committed suicide over love for him--he was an inconstant lover, and broke her heart.  He comes to an odd city where the sun doesn't shine and funereal bells ring at all hours of the day.  He wanders the sparsely populated, narrow winding streets between the grim, unlived-in looking houses.  He can't find an inn or tavern, so he stops some people, asks for directions.  They say that they are busy preparing for the funeral of the lady Mariel--"Mariel" is the name of the woman who destroyed herself for love of the narrator!

Similar incidents occur, culminating in the narrator coming to a cathedral in which rests a dead body in preparation for burial--of course it is Mariel.  Is this entire city a product of the narrator's grief?  Could the tragic death of Mariel have been instantiated in an entirely new dimension?  The narrator leaves the city of death and never returns.

"A Night in Malneant" is well-written but it is more like a mood piece or idea than an actual story with a plot and a character who changes and/or deals with obstacles in his pursuit of some goal, and it is sort of predictable.  A good example of what it is, though.

"A Night in Malneant" has reappeared in numerous Smith collections, and Robert Hoskins included it in his 1973 anthology of "tales of the supernatural," The Edge of Never. 

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Gotta say, this batch of stories is pretty middling.  McClusky's and Derleth and Schorer's pieces are routine in content and weak in execution.  Price's is a lame joke story.  Smith's is good for what it is, but slight.  Not one of the highlights of our long investigation of the history of Weird Tales, I'm afraid.  There are still some more 1930s issues of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual for us to cross off our list, however, so we can hope to come upon a blockbuster before this project has reached its conclusion.

Strange Stories Feb' 1939: H Kuttner, M W Wellman, and A Derleth & M Schorer

The very first issue of Strange Stories, the February 1939 issue, includes many stories by people we know from Weird Tales.  Back in 2017 we read one of Henry Kuttner's included stories, "The Frog," and just days ago we read both of Robert Bloch's two contributions.  Today let's examine Kuttner's other story in the issue, as well as Manly Wade Wellman's piece and the "Complete Novelet" by August Derleth and Mark Schorer.

"The Invaders" by Henry Kuttner

"The Invaders" appears under the pen name Keith Hammond, who is touted as the author of "The Seventh Coffin" and "The Hand of Ahrimam," two stories I can't find records of at isfdb or philsp.com.  Did the editors of Strange Stories just make up names for non-existent stories in order to give the impression that the fictitious Mr. Hammond had a long successful career behind him?  Tsk, tsk.

"The Invaders" is an OK horror story that Kuttner seeks to firmly embed in the Lovecraftian mythos, integrating lots of common weird themes and including direct references to Cthulhu and to The Mysteries of the Worm, the forbidden book conceived by Robert Bloch (Bloch and Kuttner were buddies who collaborated on stories and whom you can see together in a photo taken at the Weird Tales offices with editor Farnsworth Wright, Kuttner looking like a movie star and comedian Bloch striking a self-consciously ludicrous pose.) 

The narrator, newspaperman Gene, and his buddy Bill Mason have received an urgent telegram from their pal Michael Hayward, one of the world's most innovative and exciting horror writers.  When they arrive at Hayward's cottage on the California coast they realize that their buddy--and now they--are under siege by flying tentacled monsters from another world!

Hayward reveals to them the astonishing secret behind both his stellar career as an author and his devilish current predicament.  You see, Hayward got himself some photostatic copies of a few choice pages from The Mysteries of the Worm, including a recipe for a special drug, a drug that when ingested allows you to access memories from your past lives!  The libertarians will tell you that the past before the Industrial Revolution was a nightmare of poverty and drudgery, and maybe that is true, but what they won't tell you is what Hayward discovered: that in the ancient past the Earth was a battleground between different factions of alien monster gods!  It is this sort of esoteric knowledge, gleaned from his ancestors' memories, that has been the raw material of Hayward's acclaimed stories!

That recipe page in Mysteries of the Worm included warnings about the drug and also prescribed various protective measures to ensure the user of the drug didn't summon to his own time any dangerous beings.  Hayward didn't take those warnings much more seriously than nicotine addicts take those warnings from the Surgeon General on their packs of cancer sticks, and that is why those monsters from another dimension are floating around his cottage on the Pacific.

The monsters capture Mason and sacrifice him to their alien god.  Kuttner tries to shock us with some physical horror, describing how the dying Mason crawls on the sand, leaving a trail of blood, looking as if he has been "flayed alive," his eyes torn out and the white of his skull showing through his wounds.  Then, as our narrator Gene watches, Mason's body passes backwards through evolutionary history until his friend is just a blob of black goo.

The sacrifice of Mason is the essential component of the ritual that will open a bridge to another universe through which an invincible horde of malevolent beings can travel to Earth and reduce the entire human race their play thing.  Luckily, one of Hayward's other ancestral memories surfaces, one from a predecessor of his who was a high priest in forgotten Mu; Hayward chants a spell that summons the aid of one of the friendly gods who in the ancient past protected mankind, and it drives off the invaders. 

This story isn't terrible, but it isn't great; it sort of feels like the various conventional weird elements--knowledge of past lives,* evolution in reverse, human sacrifice, invasion from another dimension--are just sort cobbled together instead of being smoothly integrated into a coherent whole.  For instance, Kuttner doesn't do a great job of explaining how using a drug that allows you to access ancestral or racial or past life memories might open a portal to another hostile universe unless you paint a pentagram on the floor or something.  The way Mason's body suffers radical devolution as he dies is even less explicable.

Below average for the justly admired Kuttner.  "The Invaders" has been reprinted a number of times in fanzines like Fantasy Crossroads and Kuttner collections, as well as Robert M. Price's anthology Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos. 

*See Robert E. Howard's 1931 "The Children of the Night" and 1932 "People of the Dark,"  Clark Ashton Smith's 1931 "A Necromantic Tale," and Donald Wandrei's 1932 "The Lives of Alfred Kramer"

"Changeling" by Manly Wade Wellman

This is a trifling little thing, its plot simple, its style somewhat clumsy and overblown.  Wellman writes the story in the third person omniscient, but all the information in the story seems to come from one of the characters, as if the narrator interviewed him; the narrative is burdened with unnecessary phrases such as "today he remembers with clarity only..." and "He does not today pretend to know...."  Wellman also, in my opinion, uses too many metaphors and fancy descriptions that fail to add to the atmosphere or furnish powerful images.

David, thirty-six today, is the only surviving individual who was any sort of witness to a strange series of deaths in a little midwestern town twenty-eight years ago, when he was eight years old.  David accompanied his father, a college professor, to the stricken town to meet the couple suspected by the locals of poisoning their neighbors.  It is a dry and hot summer, and all the yards in the town are brown, save the yard of the suspects, whose grass is green and whose garden boasts a rich variety of brilliantly-colored exotic flowers.  

The couple turns out to be a fat Englishman and his skinny American wife.  This dude hails from Devonshire, and Wellman seems to imply that stories of changelings are associated with Devon.  Wellman also writes the Englishman's dialogue phonetically in an effort to represent his accent, a literary technique I generally find annoying, and it is annoying here.  The couple has a skinny eight or nine-year old daughter, Sarah; all of the numerous people who have died unexpectedly in the town of late expired after receiving a bouquet from Sarah, whom her parents proudly report tends their garden assiduously every day.

While the adults talk, Sarah takes David to her little play house and tries to get him to accept a gift of flowers.  Wellman's story briefly flickers into life in these scenes of temptation, which of course have disturbing erotic overtones.  David wisely rejects Sarah's offerings; he also witnesses Sarah conducting a conversation with a voice that emanates from a hole in the ground; Wellman leaves no doubt to what is going on, the monster voice actually explaining for the benefit of the audience stuff that Sarah must already know, that she is a monster sent out into the world to kill people so the unseen monsters can absorb their life force.  

The climax of the story takes place at tea time; the professor pours boiling water on Sarah, and the evil skinny little girl vanishes and an innocent fat little girl, who resembles the Englishman, appears in her place.  The prof explains that back in England when Sarah was a baby an evil changeling must have been substituted for her--luckily the prof knew that boiling water would banish the monster and summon the couple's true child.  

I'm calling this one barely acceptable, but it has reappeared in Wellman collections like Worse Things Waiting and Sin's Doorway.

Left: 1982 edition by Carcosa; Right: 2018 edition by Shadowridge Press

"Eyes of the Serpent" by August Derleth and Mark Schorer

At like 14 pages, "Eyes of the Serpent" is about twice the length of Wellman's "Changeling" and like 50% longer than Kuttner's "The Invaders."  Sadly, I can't say it is any better than those two tales; this is a filler story that could have used some additional work.

Our narrator is a resident of the Windy City.  His girlfriend is Monica Crittendon, secretary to the police commissioner.  One night she bursts into the narrator's house via the (unlocked?!) French doors to gasp that she is being pursued, and that the commish has been found dead, only hours after a sort of death token ("ouanga") was found on his desk!  The government has been keeping it secret from the people, but Monica knows all too well a truth she reveals to the narrator--the Chi-town PD is locked in a struggle with a voodoo cult that worships Damballah, the voodoo serpent god!  

Monica has brought with her a file on the cult which provides evidence supporting her belief that the Damballah-worshipers are led by a woman who was shot down by a Haitian cop 25 years ago but survived because she is an adept at astral projection and her soul was outside her body when she was hit and the establishment refused to follow the instructions of those in-the-know that they should burn her body!  Monica is sure that it is this voodoo priestess ("mamloi"), Ulrika Bayne, who is responsible for the death of the commish--only someone in astral form could have gotten into the commish's seventh floor office, after all.

Sure enough, a tall "singularly beautiful" woman--Ulrika Bayne herself--appears in the house.  She tosses an ouanga on the narrator's desk and then flees when another figure appears--the cop who shot Bayne 25 years ago, Gabriel Lantora!  Lantora explains that he has made it his life's work to battle Bayne, who murdered his father, a clergyman down in his and Bayne's homeland of Haiti.  We are led to believe that both Bayne and Lantora have appeared in the narrator's home in their astral forms, and both exercise some kind of power over electricity.

I didn't like how astral projection was handled in this story--Lantora and Bayne pass through walls, fly, appear and disappear, but they also can touch people and carry around objects.  People, like the police  commissioner, whom Bayne murders are found with their throats torn out.    

After Lantora leaves, some cops come to arrest Monica, as she is the lead suspect in the murder of the commissioner (even many members of the poli e force don't seem to know about the twilight struggle against the voodoo cult.)  The narrator consults a bishop whom Lantora knows and who is familiar with voodoo.  Monica is released from jail, and then captured by Bayne and two "Negroes."  The narrator and Lantora head to the voodoo temple in a "squalid Negro district" on Chicago's south side.  The temple is in the basement of an abandoned building; our heroes spy a gruesome ceremony through a curtain--Ulrika Bayne, before a horde of chanting blacks, sacrifices a goat and collects the blood so her flock of Damballah worshippers can drink it in an orgiastic frenzy.  I guess this exploitation scene, with the detailed description of the death of the goat and what happens with its blood, are the story's "money shot," its most carefully composed and memorable element. 

But the goat is just an appetizer!  A hypnotized Monica is brought to Bayne to be sacrificed!  Lantora interrupts the ceremony, scaring off the blacks and releasing Monica from the spell of the mamaloi with a word.  Then the narrator and Monica watch as the two astrals engage in a final showdown.  Ulrika Bayne suggests to Lantora that the two of them unite and jointly rule, but he is having none of it.  We also learn that long ago they were lovers.  Employing his superior psychic power, Lantora compels Bayne to reveal the secret location of her body.  Then the cast proceeds to its hiding place, where the body is burned, destroying Bayne.  Lantora, his work on this Earth complete, also vanishes.   

"Eyes of the Serpent," like Kuttner's "The Invaders," feels like a bunch of standard genre fiction tropes just jammed together, whether they actually go together or not.  For example, the way Monica is arrested and jailed has no effect on the plot--she just gets right out of jail.  Other superfluous material includes three unnecessary characters who contribute nothing to the plot and have zero interest or appeal: the bishop, whom I have mentioned, and two people who live in the narrator's house, his sister and his Japanese servant.

If Wellman indulges in one of my pet peeves--phonetic rendering of dialogue--Derleth and Schorer more seriously offend my sensibilities by committing another of my pet peeves: presenting main characters are more spectators to than prime movers of the plot.  "The Eyes of the Serpent" is about the climax of the decades-long feud between sorcerous adepts Gabriel Lantora and Ulrika Bayne, both of whom hail from exotic Haiti, and these two figures make all the big decisions and engage in all the fighting, so the story should have had one or both of them as viewpoint characters.  Instead our protagonists are two boring Chicagoans with little at stake emotionally and very little influence on the course of the conflict.  A story the same length narrated by Lantora, expressing his guilt and ambivalence over using black magic to achieve justice, or narrated by Bayne, full of ranting and raging that reflect her ambition and bloodlust, would have been far more interesting and exciting.

 

I guess I am feeling generous because I am going to call this one barely acceptable.

After reappearing in the Arkham House volume Colonel Markesan and Less Pleasant People in 1966, "Eyes of the Serpent" would be included in the 2009 Derleth collection That is Not Dead.

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These stories aren't so hot.  Maybe these are pieces Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright rejected, or ones their authors didn't feel comfortable sending to Wright but sent off to the new magazine on the block, fingers crossed.  Whatever the case, these stories aren't so bad as to invoke my rage, just my disappointment.    

Tales of The Other Worlds by T Sturgeon, M W Wellman, and A Derleth (w/Mark Schorer)

In our last episode I read Murray Leinster's "The Fourth Dimension Demonstrator," an unfunny 1935 joke story I told you was a waste of time.  In 1941, "The Fourth Dimension Demonstrator" reappeared in the anthology edited by Phil Stong, The Other Worlds, a book some (including Robert Silverberg, according to wikipedia) consider the first ever science fiction anthology.  With a clickety click of our mice, let's navigate over to the internet archive and their scan of a 1942 edition of The Other Worlds and read five more stories selected by Stong that were penned by people we are interested in here at MPorcius Fiction Log, in this case Theodore Sturgeon, Manly Wade Wellman, and August Derleth.

"A God in a Garden" by Theodore Sturgeon (1939)

The big theme of Sturgeon's body of work is the power of love, and "A God in a Garden" is a story about a loving marriage and the obstacles to happiness faced by a husband and his wife.  It is also a tiresome joke story.

Kenneth enjoys his job as a truck driver and his hobby of landscaping and gardening his yard.  He loves his wife, but his bad habit of lying about things (like telling her he is working late when in fact he is playing cards with the boys, or saying he is "swell" when she asks how he is, even though he is visibly upset) is threatening their relationship.    

The next addition to his elaborate garden will be a lily pond, and for weeks Ken has been seeking an ugly idol to set above the pond.  By an unbelievable coincidence, while digging the pond, he uncovers a hideous stone idol like five feet tall, right there where he wants to install such a thing.  Ken calls over a friend who has a hoist and a comedy accent ("Hokay Kan...I feex") and gets the idol into place.

The idol is a god, the last surviving relic of a race which strode the Earth millions of years ago.  The god can read Ken's mind and so knows all his problems and offers to help him.  After considering and discarding the idea of making it impossible for Ken to lie, the god hits upon the scheme of altering the universe so that everything Ken says becomes true.  This has obvious benefits; Ken can just say "I have twenty thousand in the bank," and voila, $20,000 appears in his account.  But careless talk on Ken's part also leads to the problems that constitute the story's jokes; for example, when Ken says that it is raining cats and dogs, canines and felines fall from the sky and Ken has to figure out a way to use his new powers to clean up the mess and make everybody who witnessed this unusual weather forget about it.

All the crazy stuff that happens puts a strain on his wife's sanity and their marriage, and she decides to leave Ken, but Ken resolves the crisis by using his powers to neutralize those powers and to turn the god into an inert hunk of stone.

Sturgeon is a good writer and the relationship between husband and wife rings true, but the plot devices are lame and gimmicky, and I rarely appreciate jokes that revolve around humorous accents or puns or taking cliched metaphors literally.  Let's call this one barely acceptable.

In 1988 "A God in the Garden" was dug up for inclusion in an anthology of stories from Unknown, and has also appeared in the first volume of the Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon.     

"School for the Unspeakable" by Manly Wade Wellman (1937)

"School for the Unspeakable" first saw light of day in an issue of Weird Tales with lots of good Virgil Finlay illustrations; particularly memorable are some monsters' heads and some powerfully muscled male bodies.  Worth a look, illustration fans.

"School for the Unspeakable" is a competent filler story.  A fifteen-year-old boy gets off the train after sunset in some little town--he will be attending a boarding school nearby.  An eighteen-year-old boy addresses him, says he is a student at the school and has come to collect him.  This guy looks weird, has a cold handshake, and drives a horse drawn cart instead of an automobile.  A few miles away he stops and introduces the 15-year old to two more ugly guys, purportedly other students.

The hideous trio explain that they are Satanists, and tell of how the headmaster of the school, a serious Christian, tried to foil their worship of the Devil and failed because Ol' Scratch has rendered them indestructible.  When the protagonist refuses to join their cult, the three pounce on him and are about to slay him when a tall figure that casts no shadow arrives to rout the devil worshipers and save the boy.

The boy flees back to the train station.  There he meets somebody who really is from the school he is to attend.  Reading the last sentences of the story we recognize the alarming truth: thirty years ago, three rich boys at a now-defunct school on the other side of town, one catering to troublesome lads thrown out of other schools, were killed by their headmaster--presumably the three boys who harassed our hero are vampires or something similar.  The murderous headmaster was shut up in a lunatic asylum, and just tonight passed away.  It must have been the headmaster's ghost who saved the protagonist.

Acceptable.  "School for the Unspeakable" has been reprinted in many anthologies built around such enduringly popular themes as vampires, ghosts, devil worshippers, and magic.  

"Song of the Slaves" by Manly Wade Wellman (1940)

This is a story about the effort of a small businessman to achieve savings by cutting out the middleman.  Gender is the owner of a plantation in South Carolina in 1835, and instead of buying slaves at the slave market he gets a ship and sails to Africa and seizes a village and chains up forty-nine people himself!  The truth, of course, is that this doesn't really save Gender any money--he launched this expedition because he is the kind of guy who gets satisfaction out of dominating others.

For days, Gender marches with his forty-nine captives back to the ship, the whole time the Africans singing the same song, no matter how much Gender and his men beat them.  One of his subordinates tells Gender that the song is a magic spell, that the blacks are singing a song that they believe will bring about Gender's death!

Soon after setting sail, Gender's ship is spotted by a British warship engaged in the suppression of the slave trade.  The limeys give chase, and the Royal Navy vessel is the speedier--there is no escaping it.  So, under cover of dark, Gender attaches the empty fiftieth collar on the chain that shackles all the Africans together to an anchor and throws the anchor overboard, sending his forty-nine captives to a watery grave.  When the British captain catches up to Gender in the morning he declares that he knows what Gender has done and will write a letter to a friend in Charleston so that everybody knows of his crime.

Sure enough, back home, Gender is soon persona non grata; his erstwhile friends refuse to see him, the father of the woman he was courting forbids her to talk to him.  Then at night he hears that song again--his forty-nine victims climb out of the ocean, put that fiftieth collar around his neck, and return to the sea with him.    

Pretty good; the plot, ideas and themes are all good, and Wellman does a fine job with the images, characters, tone and pacing.  "Song of the Slaves," after first appearing in Weird Tales as a cover story, has been reprinted in quite a few anthologies and even some magazines, like a 1959 issue of Cavalier.  

"The Panelled Room" by August Derleth (1933)

This story here is pretty bad.  There are numerous distractingly clumsy and overly long sentences, plot developments come out of nowhere, and the characters and settings are poorly realized and uninteresting.

The basic plot of "The Panelled Room" is pedestrian and the way Derleth handles it is lame.  Childless Lydia and her sister Irma, who has a daughter, move into a house in which a man strangulated his wife and then hanged himself.  The neighbors keep coming over to warn them that the place is haunted and that they will soon be haunted by the ghostly vision of the dead bodies of the killer and his wife; in addition, the wall panels of the room in which the deaths took place will be seen to move.  They had better leave because other people have mysteriously died in the house since the murder-suicide, presumably slain by the ghost of the murderous husband.

As predicted, Lydia starts seeing the ghosts and, unsurprisingly, starts thinking they should leave.  But Irma tries to convince her they should stay, because she secretly hopes her sister will get killed by the ghost and Irma stands to inherit her sister's money.  An interfering neighbor who somehow intuits Irma's evil scheme tries to save Lydia by helping her write a will that specifies that in the event that Lydia dies in the haunted house, Irma will only inherit if she lives the rest of her life in the house.  As predicted, Lydia keels over in the panelled room and Irma's little daughter sees the panels moving.  Lydia goes insane and starts beating her daughter.

Derleth fails to make any of the characters' actions or motives believable or interesting--neither Irma's scheme to get her sister killed nor the nosy neighbor's legal stratagem to protect Lydia makes any sense, and neither has any real effect on the course of events.  Derleth also neglects to connect the phenomena of the moving panels to all the deaths.  Very shoddy. 

Thumbs down!  This piece of junk debuted in a magazine I've never heard of, The Westminster Magazine, and then was printed in a fanzine full of material by members of the Lovecraft circle, Leaves, in 1937; it first appeared in book form in 1941 in the Derleth collection Someone in the Dark.  Despite how terrible it is, people like Bill Pronzini and Peter Straub followed in Stong's footsteps, selecting "The Panelled Room" for inclusion in anthologies.  Go figure.

"The Return of Andrew Bentley" by August Derleth and Mark Schorer (1933)

After the exposing myself to the worthless rubbish that is "The Panelled Room," I wasn't exactly relishing the prospect of reading the eighteen pages taken up by "The Return of Andrew Bentley," which Derleth wrote in collaboration with his friend Mark Schorer, a Harvard and UC Berkeley prof and biographer of Sinclair Lewis.  But, as we just saw in our last blog post, Derleth is capable of good work, so it is not impossible that "The Return of Andrew Bentley" will be good, so I'm diving in.

It is with relief that I can report that "The Return of Andrew Bentley" is an entertaining yarn.  The narrator is summoned from his city life to the country by his irascible old Uncle Amos.  Amos tells the narrator that he will inherit his land and house and enough money to live comfortably on the condition that he promises to live in the house and every day check on his uncle's burial vault; should he find that the vault has been tampered with, he is to open a sealed letter and follow the instructions therein.

Uncle Amos dies just a few days later, presumably a suicide.  Amos is buried in the vault behind the house in which the narrator takes up residence.  Sure enough, weird things start happening, including the appearance of shadowy figures that seem to be trying to get into that vault wherein lies Uncle Amos's body!  The narrator has a dream that Uncle Amos is speaking to him, imploring him to get the local clergyman to bless the vault--it seems this punctilious cleric refused to bless Amos's grave because the man was a suicide.  

The narrator looks over his uncle's library, which like the libraries in many of the stories I read is well stocked with books of black magic, unseals that envelope, talks to various locals, and eventually we have the whole picture.  Uncle Amos made friends with an evil wizard, Andrew Bentley, and then murdered Bentley out of fear of the sorcerer's evil.  But Bentley had already summoned a familiar from Hell, and this familiar and Bentley's ghost tormented Amos.  Amos knew that to dispel ghost and familiar he had only to destroy Bentley's body, but the familiar has hidden the body.  Even worse, if the familiar, which currently is only able to operate at night and can't stray far from its master's bones, can get its mitts on a fresh dead body it can take over that body and greatly increase its sphere of operations.

The narrator has to find Bentley's bones and destroy them before the familiar can get into the vault and inhabit Amos's body, but it won't be easy!

I like the plot and the themes here, and Derleth and Schorer do a decent job with all the descriptions of the hellish familiar and the moonlit country landscape and all that, and with the horror scenes and so forth, so I enjoyed this one.  Thumbs up for "The Return of Andrew Bentley."

After first rising from the pages of Weird Tales--the same issue as stories by Robert E. Howard, Edmond Hamilton, Clark Ashton Smith and Frank Belknap Long we have already read--"The Return of Andrew Bentley" would reappear in Derleth collections as well as several anthologies, including books edited by Bennett Cerf and Marvin Kaye.

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Students of the history of genre literature and speculative fiction might find Stong's long foreword to The Other Worlds of interest; in it he surveys and delivers strong opinions on the science fiction, fantasy and horror fields, even briefly offering harsh assessments of detective literature and of fantastic motion pictures.  (Stong and I are not necessarily on the same page; he dismisses King Kong, which I hold to be the greatest film of all time, as "very silly," and condemns all stories of interplanetary travel and adventure.  He also thinks the pulp magazines should have more joke stories, when I think there are way too many, waiting for me between the covers of almost every magazine and anthology like so many anti-personnel mines.)  The Other Worlds isn't just one of the first SF anthologies, but an early example of serious SF criticism. 

From the June 1934 Weird Tales: J Williamson, R E Howard, C A Smith and A Derleth & M Schorer

In our last episode, we read mid-1930s stories from Amazing full of robotics, ray guns and aliens both malignant and beneficent.  Let's stick with the mid-Thirties, but shift gears to the weird!  Today's subject: the June 1934 issue of Weird Tales, which includes numerous stories by important figures in the history of speculative fiction. Let's check out four, stories by Jack Williamson, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and August Derleth in collaboration with Mark Schorer.

"Wizard's Isle" by Jack Williamson 

I haven't read much Williamson since this blog wriggled out from under the overturned rock of my mind, but in the years prior I read many Williamson novels, among them The Legion of Space, The Cometeers, One Against the Legion, Seetee Ship, The Reefs of Space (with Frederik Pohl), The Power of Blackness, Star Bridge (with James E. Gunn), The Black Sun, and Life Burst.  All those were science fiction stories featuring space travel, and I tend to think of Williamson as a pioneer of space opera and hard science fiction concepts like terraforming and antimatter, but The Black Sun has Lovecraftian elements and The Legion of Space has some serious horror elements and Williamson also wrote a famous novel about witches and werewolves--Darker Than You Think--which I have not read, so it seems he was far from averse to handling fantasy and horror themes.  Let's check out "Wizard's Isle," a Weird Tales cover story, and see to what extent it sticks to the hard sciences and how much it explores supernatural material.  

Jason Wade is a Yale man!  He has spent two years in China, "working a tin concession," or, as a college professor might put it, exploiting the labor of the developing world and stealing natural resources from the global south.  While there, he got word that his fiancé back in New York, Tonia Hope, had disappeared!  He hired a Big Apple private dick by wire and got to Gotham as fast as he could--"as fast as he could" adds up to two months!  As the story begins Jason is in the P. I.'s office, learning that Tonia was probably seized by some mysterious weirdo called "Mr. Alexander," an Asian ("Oriental" is what they say in this 1934 story) also known as "Iskandar the Wizard of Life."  Iskandar has been buying millions of dollars worth of scientific equipment and is rumored to have spent millions more on some mysterious construction in the Arabian Sea which has since vanished.  Iskandar is also suspected in the kidnapping of biologist Jerry Travers, a fellow Yalie!

Jason begins his own investigation, and is almost immediately kidnapped and taken by plane to a huge ship, an artificial floating island somewhere on the ocean, to be dragged before Iskandar himself, a man half-Oriental, half-Occidental, with almond eyes, ivory skin, and feminine red lips.  The man is a genius and a sadist who used drugs and radiation to transform Jerry Travers's body into that of a giant scorpion, while keeping the man's human head and brain intact so Jerry knows the horror that has befallen him!  Jerry's wife was forced to watch this weeks-long transformation, which drove her insane before she died of misery.

You might say that Williamson is trying to exploit our fear of and disgust at things which live on both sides of boundaries, things that violate borders and do not stay within the sharply defined categories with which we are comfortable.  Is Iskandar white or Asian?  Is he male or female?  Is Jerry Travers a human or an arachnid?  The fact that Iskandar is both Western and Eastern, and a man with some feminine characteristics, and that Travers is part human and part scorpion, is meant to disturb us, to excite our horror and disgust.

Iskandar shares his plans with Jason, as evil geniuses in fiction are wont to do.  Like his namesake and ancestor Alexander of Macedon, Iskandar is going to remake the world!  The Wizard of Life is going to create a new race of supermen who will conquer and enslave homo sapiens, and beautiful blond and blue-eyed Tonia Hope, after her body is suitably altered via drugs and radiation, will be the mother of this new super race!  

Among his army of Asians, Iskandar has two Caucasian-American thugs who represent his interests in the USA--it is these jokers who captured Jason in NYC.  Iskandar orders them to throw Jason into the ocean, and as they drag him to the edge of the artificial island Jason implores them to think of themselves as white men, to help him avenge their fellow whites Mr. and Mrs. Travers and protect white woman Tonia Hope from a fate worse than death.  They scoff, saying Iskandar pays them a thousand bucks a week!  These race traitors throw Jason into the ocean, but luckily he is a strong swimmer and finds his way to a drainage outlet and crawls back into the floating island.

Right into a giant terrarium thing, a dense jungle under a huge dome.  The jungle is bathed in radiation that causes the jungle life to mutate in mind-boggling ways!  Jason is confronted by such sights as maggots two or three feet long boring into gigantic mushrooms covered in monstrous vines, and even worse nightmare visions.  Iskandar with two Chinese riflemen comes down into this mad house of evolution run wild to destroy a giant centipede which is out of control and Jason ambushes them, but after a tough fight Jason ends up captured again.

Jason is to be turned into a half-man, half-scorpion like Jerry Travers was, but when he is dragged to the radiation cell in which Travers is held the biologist recognizes Jason and attacks the Chinese soldiers.  Jerry and Jason run through the corridors of the ship's superstructure, killing Chinese soldiers, the American thugs, and finally Iskandar.  Jerry the scorpion man succumbs to the grisly gunshot wounds he suffered during the fighting, but Jason and Tonia, after shooting it out with some more Chinese, escape in the plane in which he was brought.  (Jason can fly planes as well as swim and shoot like a champ--these Yale men are well-rounded!)  Right before he died, Iskandar rotated the control that scuttled his floating island, so his experiments and the remnants of his army are lost forever beneath the waves.

An entertaining Yellow peril/mad scientist story with lots of horror and gore content that also reflects Williamson's hard science interests (Williamson was, according to wikipedia, one of the first people to write about genetic engineering and apparently coined that term.)  This is a competent weird story much akin to something our pal Edmond Hamilton might write--Hamilton and Williamson lack the sort of distinctive literary style that top shelf weirdies like H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard bring to their work, but the boys from Ohio and Arizona have an interest in the sciences that distinguishes their productions from those worthies. 

"Wizard's Isle" was reprinted in England in 1945 under the title "Lady in Danger" in a sort of pamphlet with a photo of a nude woman on its cover.  It is also the title story of the third volume in Haffner Press's eight-volume series The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson. 

"The Haunter of the Ring" by Robert E. Howard

Speak of the devil, on the next page of Weird Tales's June '34 issue we see the title of Robert Howard's contribution to the issue and a somewhat crude drawing of a topless woman.  "The Haunter of the Ring" has of course been reprinted many times, including in the 1968 issue of Robert A. Lowndes's magazine Startling Mystery Stories (which reproduces not only the text of the tale but the drawing of the topless woman.)  

James Gordon is the great-grandson of Sir Richard Gordon of Argyle.  Sir Richard is famous for being a cruel jerk and for murdering his wife in a jealous fit.  Well, as the story opens, Jim Gordon tells his buddies, our narrator Michael O'Donnell and some Irish adventurer type named Kirowan, that he thinks he is the reincarnation of his nefarious ancestor, and his wife Evelyn is Sir Richard's reincarnated wife, Lady Elizabeth, because over the last few days Evelyn has tried to murder him three times!

Our narrator quickly links this bizarre turn of events to Joseph Roelocke, a rich guy who reads lots of books and looks like a foreigner, maybe an "Oriental."  Roelocke dated Evelyn before she married Gordon, and recently sent Evelyn a ring in the shape of a snake biting its tail as a sort of belated wedding gift.  O'Donnell and Kirowan join the Gordons at home to have a look at this ring, which Evelyn says is stuck so tight to her finger she can't get it off.  Then two more characters appear (for a story of this length there are a lot of characters), Doctor Donnelly and Bill Bain, old friends of Evelyn's family.

During their confab Evelyn gets hold of a pistol and shoots her husband, proving the truth of Gordon's incredible story of being targeted for death by his wife, but not all that reincarnation bunk.  While Donnelly and Bain tend to Gordon's wound, Kirowan and O'Donnell jump in the car and drive over to Roelocke's.  It turns out Kirowan and Roelocke, whose real name is Yosef Vrolok, studied the occult together in Hungary, but their friendship ended when Vrolok embraced the dark side!  Vrolok used his black magic to steal Kirowan's girlfriend, whom he then "debauched;" Kirowan tried to kill Vrolok, but the guy's sorcery preserved him.

Now the two foes meet again, and Kirowan exposes the truth of the curse suffered by Evelyn.  Vrolok has summoned a demon to possess Evelyn so she will murder her husband; in return Vrolok promised the demon a soul, intending the soul to be Evelyn or James Gordon's.  Kirowan works a psychological trick on Vrolok, making the wizard doubt his ability to control the demon, and this moment of weakness gives the demon a chance to kill Vrolok and carry off his soul with it to a place "outside the human universe."

(Don't worry, Gordon only suffered a graze and he and Evelyn live happily ever after.)

This story is OK.  I have to admit that it was a little disappointing that all that reincarnation business turned out to be a red herring.  Another noteworthy and perhaps disappointing thing about "The Haunter of the Ring" is how everybody in it is so passionate--all the characters are constantly yelling or weeping or threatening to beat each other up; maybe this is Howard depicting the idea that Celtic people--Irishmen and Scots--are loud and boisterous.  But after raising the temperature of the story to a fever pitch there is no cathartic violence to release all that pressure.  Instead of one of these excitable Irishmen resolving the plot through physical activity, the demon, who has no dialogue or personality, just carries off Vrolok's soul and the sorcerer collapses. 

(I can't pin this on Howard, of course, but it is also odd and something of a let down that the illustration features a woman whose breast is bared but there is no sex in the story.  The illo suggests the demon is going to try to seduce or molest or rape Evelyn, but nothing like this happens in the text.)

We also might consider this, like Williamson's "The Wizard's Isle," a yellow peril story, as Vrolok is strongly associated with the mysterious East--he is wearing a Chinese silk dressing gown with a dragon pattern on it when Kirowan and O'Donnell burst in on him, for example.

Acceptable, but not one of Howard's better works, in my opinion.    

"The Colossus of Ylourgne" by Clark Ashton Smith

"The Colossus of Ylourgne," which is one of Smith's stories of Averoigne, the French province in which all manner of supernatural events take place, is actually illustrated by Smith himself, which is fun.  This story seems to have really struck a chord with practitioners of the weird, as there have been two sequels to it written by other authors, one by Brian McNaughton in 1995 and another by Peter Rawlik in 2014.

In 1281, six years after moving to the cathedral city of Vyone, the squat little wizard Nathaire and his pupils disappear from that town, nobody is sure why or how.  Later in the year, the corpses of recently dead young men begin busting out of tombs and cemeteries all over Averoigne and marching to the abandoned castle Ylourgne in the hilly eastern reaches of Averoigne.  Two brave monks investigate the diabolical goings on at the ruined castle, and find Nathaire directing some tremendous undertaking by his pupils and a veritable army of demons and familiars.  The monks are detected by the dwarfish Nathaire and humiliatingly ejected from Ylourgne by two corpses that are possessed and animated by demons. 

One of Nathaire's former students, Gaspard du Nord, investigates the castle himself, and discovers the horrific, almost unbelievable truth!  Nathaire and his satanic followers are processing the dead bodies of young men, separating the bones from the flesh and, somehow, reconstituting the bones into gigantic bones and then clothing the titanic bones with the flesh of the dead.  Nathaire is creating a man a hundred feet tall!  After Gaspard is captured and dragged before the little wizard, Nathaire explains how this colossal figure will be animated--old and ill, Nathaire will soon die, and his soul, thanks to spells cast by his pupils, will inhabit the gargantuan body, in which Nathaire will wreak havoc upon Averoigne!

Gaspard is thrown into a dungeon full of bones and snakes, but manages to sneak out through the drainage system and witness the animation of the giant.  He flees home to Vyone as, behind him, the giant, shouting obscenities, devastates the countryside and inflicts a long list of atrocities upon the people of Averoigne.  Finally, in the cathedral town, Gaspard is able to muster enough sorcery to neutralize the giant.    

This is a terrific story about necromancy, full of grotesque and gruesome images and Smith's extravagant metaphors and esoteric verbiage:

Gaspard, returning from his plunge into Lethean emptiness, found himself gazing into the eyes of Nathaire: those eyes of liquid night and ebony, in which swam the chill, malignant fires of stars that had gone down to irremeable perdition.

Very good!  A weird classic!          

"The Colossus of Ylourgne" was the favorite story of readers of this issue of Weird Tales, and has been reprinted not only in the expected Smith collections (I read it in an electronic library copy of A Vintage from Atlantis: Volume Three of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith) but various anthologies.

For the record, in Before the Golden Age (on page 729) Asimov says that the stories
in Weird Tales were "fearfully overwritten" and that the style of H. P. Lovecraft,  
 "the author most typical of Weird Tales," "revolted" him.

"Colonel Markesan" by August Derleth and Mark Schorer

In February I read three stories from Colonel Markesan and Less Pleasant People, a collection of tales cowritten by Derleth and Schorer, and declared them "discouraging."  Yet here I am reading another one.  Dogged persistence, my boy, dogged persistence.

The structure and pacing and style of this story are acceptable, but it has a fatal flaw.  Our narrator is a former school teacher who, for no apparent reason, decides to take the job of live-in caretaker at some old geezer's estate near Cambridge, Mass.  The geezer, Colonel Markesan, says he has returned to this estate, which has been in his family over a century, after living in Virginia for some time.  Markesan insists the narrator remain in his room all night, and actually locks the new caretaker into his quarters after he retires.

After a week and a half or so the narrator figures out how to sneak out of the room at night and discovers that something crazy is going on, and some research at the library completes the picture.  Colonel Markesan is no colonel; rather, he is a college professor.  (The horror!)  Professor Markesan was thrown off the Harvard faculty years ago because he kept claiming there were ways to communicate with and even control the dead.  (I guess there are limits to tenure protections after all.)  He went to Virginia where he disguised himself not by changing his name, but by affecting a different title.  (Whatevs.)  Markesan died in Virginia and was buried, but rose from the grave and came to his family estate in New England in order to achieve revenge!  His revenge is to, every night, go to the graveyard where the Harvard profs who hounded him out of academia are buried, summon up there souls and make them come to the estate with him, where he berates them for being wrong about his theories about controlling the dead.

This plot is OK, but Derleth and Schorer screw it all up by not being consistent about whether Markesan and his victims are immaterial spirits or animated corpses.  Sometimes they pass through doors and walk without touching the ground, like ghosts.  Other times they can lock doors and wrestle with living humans and be damaged by edged weapons.  When the narrator and a comrade fight Markesan, Markesan's victims, who floated through the walls of their tombs when summoned by Markesan and are now assembled in the house to be humbled, suddenly become half-decayed dead bodies.

Another issue with the story is the fact that there is no reason for the undead Markesan to hire a living person to mow the lawn of his estate.  He should have just made the dead Harvard profs do it--imagine the humiliation these Brahmins would suffer from being compelled to perform manual labor!

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  With a little more care and thought, it could have worked, but Derleth and Schorer were sloppy.  Despite my attacks on the story, it was included in the 2009 collection Who Shall I Say Is Calling? and Other Stories.

**********

The June 1934 issue of Weird Tales prints a bunch of reader letters praising C. L. Moore, including one by Donald A. Wollheim of New York City.  The future super editor not only praises Moore (whom he thinks is a man) to the skies, but expresses disappointment in Edmond Hamilton's "Corsairs of the Cosmos," saying he enjoyed the earlier Interstellar Patrol stories, but found this one the worst thing Hamilton ever committed to paper, even claiming it was "hard to read!"  Ouch!  When as an editor at Ace in 1965 Wollheim would publish a collection of Hamilton's Interstellar Patrol stories, "Corsairs of the Cosmos" was one of those left out.