A Derleth: "The Sleepers," and, w/ M Schorer, "The River," "The Black Castle," and "The Turret Room"

I haven't been keeping it a secret--I'm trying to read a story from each issue of Weird Tales, the famed magazine that was the vehicle for some of the most famous work of such giants as H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard and the early work of breakout successes Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury, as well as the showcase for the writing of many less famous but well-loved members of the speculative fiction community like Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, and Manly Wade Wellman.  And the list goes on.  One name that belongs on the list is that of August Derleth.  Today we read four stories that appeared under Derleth's name in 1927 issues of Farnsworth Wright's unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual.  The pages of Weird Tales credit one of these four as a collaboration with Marc R. Schorer AKA Mark Schorer, and isfdb suggests that the 2009 Derleth collection The Sleepers and Other Wakeful Things labels two additional stories as Derleth/Schorer collabs, though Schorer is not credited in the 1927 printings.  All four of today's tales would be included in The Sleepers and Other Wakeful Things, but I'll be reading them in scans of the original magazines--here are links to the scans I'll be reading:

Feb     May     Sept     Dec  

Speaking of lists and links, here are links to webpages with lists of Weird Tales stories I have already blogged about, organized by year.

1923   1924    1925   1926

1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938    1939  

1940    1941   1942

"The River"

From the February '27 issue we've already grappled with Edmond Hamilton's "The Atomic Conquerors," and now we take a dip in Derleth's contribution.  (It looks like The Sleepers credits Schorer  as a collaborator on this one.)    

"The River" is not very good.  It is a little silly and obvious, and, besides, is too long, even though it is only three pages here in WT.  The first half of the story is a letter.  A British firm is building a dam on the Volga, and the foreman of the project is writing to England to tender his resignation, and he explains why.  The local peasants and a college professor and a hunchback all keep telling the British team that spirits protect the Volga from molestation and somebody will get killed if they build the dam.  Sure enough, somebody disappeared and an inexplicable wave destroyed half of the progress made on the dam, so the writer, and all the workers, quit.  The head engineer is staying on, however.

We then switch to third-person narration, witnessing that stubborn engineer have another interaction with the hunchback, who yells "Death!  Death!  Death!" at the top of his lungs.  Then the engineer watches the ghosts of the boatmen of the Volga rise up to wreck the rest of the dam; these ghosts then wash the engineer downriver, killing him.

Why is there a college professor and a hunchback?  Why is the narration half a letter and half third-person omniscient?  It doesn't seem like much thought went into this thing.  Weak filler, thumbs down.

"The Black Castle"

In the May 1927 issue of Weird Tales, "The Black Castle" is attributed to "Marc R. Schorer and August W. Derleth."

A European count in his high castle above the village feels a strange, irresistible compulsion!  He sits down to write--someone else is controlling his hand, sending him a message!  The message is from some guy he destroyed, a dead man, a man whose widow and child are suffering in poverty because the count coveted the man's wealth!  The count's victim announces that, with his astral body, he is seeking revenge!  The count has a dim-witted son, and the dead man says he will be using his superior intelligence and willpower to try to push the son's low-IQ soul out of his body and take it over and use it to murder the count!

For weeks the count is worried about this, watches his son, judges his behaviors.  The son falls ill, and, when he recovers, the count thinks he is acting like a different person!  When he catches the son taking a stiletto off the wall and taking it to his room, the decides desperate action is called for--the count takes up the other blade of the pair, creeps into his son's room, and murders his son in his sleep.

Then the ghost controls the counts hand again, writes another message!  The ghost tricked the count!  He didn't take over his son's body, the count murdered his son unnecessarily!  But the count is still going to die tonight!  Sure enough, a lightning bolt hits the castle and kills the count, and the villagers below hear a laugh!  

I like the idea of a dead person's restless soul taking over a body to use for vengeance, and the revelation that it was all a bluff was a disappointment.  "The Black Castle" also has way too many loose ends.  The ghost can control the count's hand, even though the count is clever, so why are we expected to believe taking over the son is facilitated by the son's dim wits?  Why did the son act differently after his illness--why did he carry the stiletto to his room?  Is it just a coincidence?  And then the dead man is shown to be able to control the weather?  Why build a story around one creepy supernatural phenomenon, and then have the resolution of the story come through the use of a totally different, less interesting and less creepy, phenomenon?  

Not only are the plot and themes all messed up, Derleth and Schorer pad out the story with a lot of unneeded romantic goop about melting snowbanks and shadows and moonlight and all that.  Another thumbs down, I'm afraid.  

"The Turret Room" 

We've already read Edmond Hamilton's story in this September issue, "The Moon Menace."  "The Turret Room" here in WT is credited solely to Derleth, and to Derleth and Schorer in The Sleepers.    

This one is an acceptable trifle.  A bunch of British aristocrats are hanging out, and, when the Duke of Kent says that talk of ghosts is just balderdash and poppycock, Lord Alving tells a story about his own sight of a ghost.  He was at the Duke of Gloucester's castle with a bunch of people, including the poet Harry Longworth.  When the Duke of Gloucester mentions that the turret room in his central tower is haunted, Lord Alving says he wants to spend the night there, hoping to see a ghost.  Harry jokes that if Alving doesn't see one, he'll have one sent up.  Alving sits in the room hour after hour--no ghost.  He dozes, awakes, sees Harry in the room with him.  Harry is not very communicative, just sort of smiles.  The Lord looks out the window, looks back, and Harry is gone.  He doesn't return.  In the morning, Alving reports to the party that he has seen no ghosts, only Harry.  As we readers expect, Alving is informed that, sadly, Harry passed away in his sleep last night--before Alving saw him.

Not good, but competently and smoothly put together with no unnecessary frills or confusion.

"The Sleepers"

This story from the December issue serves as the title piece of that 2009 collection we've been referring to--hopefully a clue that it is an above average production--and is the only of today's stories that nobody claims is a collab with Schorer.

Well, I can mildly recommend "The Sleepers," which is almost as economically written as "The Turret Room" and feels more original and creepy (to me at least.)

An important writer, a man whose books get made into movies, tells a story to a bunch of people as they sit before a fireplace.  He was in Hollywood, and was suddenly called back to Chicago.  He gets a bed on a midnight train, but it turns out that the Pullman cars are all full up.  Another traveler is in the same predicament, and they make enough of a fuss that the train adds an additional Pullman for the two unhappy customers.

Once in the Pullman, the men find people sound asleep in their beds!  They call the porter, a sort of comic relief "negro," who gets the conductor.  When the conductor touches the man sleeping in the bed the writer paid for, his hand passes through the man like he is an illusion!  

It turns out that this Pullman is a recently repaired car that was wrecked in a disaster that killed all onboard.  These forms are the images of the dead!  Another ghost, the conductor who died on the train that was wrecked, walks through car and the ghosts of the sleepers vanish.

Not bad.  There is an additional plot thread--the ghost conductor comes to the fireplace to hear the story and comment on it--that is superfluous but doesn't sink the story.

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These are all quite minor stories, and two of them are pretty bad.  But on a long journey, you gotta take the rough with the smooth.  This little kink in the road is not going to dissuade us from achieving our weird destiny.   

Weird Tales, July 1926: E H Price, C W Harris and A Derleth & M Schorer

After a brief break in the year 1980, let's return to the interwar period and read three stories from the July 1926 issue of Weird Tales, which has a cover that looks like one of my recurring pre-adolescent daydreams.  (I mean the guy shooting a gigantic reptile--the rosy cheeked brunette resembles elements of my postpubescent daydreams.)  We'll read a story by E. Hoffmann Price, one by Clare Winger Harris, and a collab between August Derleth and Mark Schorer.  I'll be reading these tales in a scan at the internet archive--click here to join me.  

"The Dreamer of Atlanaat" by E. Hoffmann Price 

This story takes place in the ummah.  A wanderer, Haaj Isfendiyar, arrived in the city of Nippur ten years ago, and over that time has become a close friend of the Calif.  A skilled fighter and a clever and courageous man, today he commands a unit of 1000 cavalry and lives in a beautiful house.  But he has an enemy--the Calif's wazir, Ismail.  Ismail contrives to steal a dagger owned by Isfendiyar and one night while the Calif is out taking a walk, Ismail throws it at the Calif so that it looks like Isfendiyar tried to murder the Calif.  Isfendiyar is exiled and impoverished, his home and belongings given over to the city mob.  

Out in the country, Isfendiyar is accosted by an old man he at first takes to be a beggar.  The man corrects our hero, identifying himself as a darvish and promising to use his occult power to help Isfendiyar achieve revenge.  He leads Isfendiyar to the sinister ruins of a city in a forest to consult a being he refers to as Lord of All the Worlds, whom he says is more powerful even than Allah, a creature of whom the darvish claims his "idle fancy created not only Allah, but all the gods before whom men have bowed!"  All the world, all the universe, is created by this being's dreams, and when he ceases to dream of something, that thing ceases to exist!

This dreamer takes the form of an old sleeping man.  Isfendiyar can see something the old man is dreaming--an assassination attempt on the Calif!  Still sympathetic to the Calif, Isfendiyar kills the dreamer to save his former friend in a high place, even though he exiled him

Then the boring truth is revealed!  The "darvish" is Isfendiyar's grandfather in disguise, and this whole sacrilegious caper has been a test of Isfendiyar's loyalty to the Calif, who has watched the whole thing.  Isfendiyar's visions were induced by drugs fed to him by grandpa.  By killing the dreamer to save the Calif, Isfendiyar has passed the test and their friendship is renewed.  Who was impersonating the dreamer whom Isfedniyar killed?  It was a drugged Ismail, whom the Calif had begun to suspect had faked the assassination attempt to frame Isfendiyar.

Long, somewhat silly, convoluted to the point I'm not sure it even holds together--we're grading "The Dreamer of Atlanaat" merely acceptable.  The improbable saga of Isfendiyar the wanderer would be reprinted in 1975's Far Lands, Other Days, a big collection of Price stories.

"A Runaway World" by Clare Winger Harris

Way back in 2015, when we were young, we read two stories by Clare Winger Harris printed in 1920s issues of Amazing, "The Fate of the Poseidonia" and "The Miracle of the Lily," and I didn't exactly burnish my bona fides as a feminist by saying they were "interesting" as "historical document[s]" but "mediocre as...entertainment or literature."  Still, I didn't say they were bad, so I have no qualms about reading more Harris stories, and here we have one adorned with an illustration of a guy scared out of his mind by something seen through a telescope, which is promising.

"A Runaway World" is set 100 years in the future, in the year 2026.  Two scientists, a French expert on astronomy and an American expert on atomic physics, meet.  Harris' writing reminds me of the over-the-top dialogue of a comic book and a dramatic presentation in which everybody is overacting:

"La Rue is my name; Leon La Rue.”

Henry Shipley’s eyes grew wide with astonishment.

“Indeed I am honored by the visit of so renowned a scientist,” he cried with genuine enthusiasm.

“It is nothing," said La Rue. "I love my work.”

These eggheads talk about the theory that the planets in our universe are subatomic particles in other universes, the sun a nucleus and the planets electrons or something, and that similarly the protons and neutrons and all that here are stars and planets in tiny little universes.  When we cause chemical reactions, we are destroying whole galaxies full of people.

Well, it looks like our turn has come!  In Harris's 2026 there aren't space ships, but we are able to contact the alien civilizations on Mars, Venus, etc., via radio.  Harris has the men talk about the way Earthers figure out how to talk to aliens--by founding a code on universal mathematical principles.  "A Runaway World" is classic science fiction, all about teaching us readers science and romanticizing and valorizing the scientist while denigrating and lampooning religious people, and trying to give us that old sense of wonder as we contemplate the vastness of the universe.  

But "A Runaway World" also has weird horror elements, like those Edmond Hamilton space operas and disaster stories from Weird Tales that include mass death, torture and bondage.  The Martians are reporting that their planet is being pulled away from the sun and soon they will all freeze to death!  Our universe is suffering from chemical reactions in the universe one step larger than ours!  At least, so say the scientists--the common people of Earth think the Martians have offended God by learning too much science and are being punished like some big red Gomorrah.

Abruptly, we find that "A Runaway World" is a first person narrative, our narrator a business professional who works in an office.  Like in a sitcom, the narrator, expert accountant Griffin, reveals that he thinks Mars--before the current catastrophe--was closer to the sun than is Earth, and is humiliated when his assistant and next-door neighbor Zuttell corrects him and expresses astonishment at his boss's ignorance.  

The Zuttells and Mardens come over to watch the President give an address on the TV--the Griffin family has the latest model, and Harris talks a bit about "the televisio" and its operation and capabilities.  In the middle of the President's speech, it starts getting dark and cold outside, and the President tells everyone to tune their radios to the French astronomer whom we readers met earlier--as we readers feared, the Earth is now being pulled away from the sun!

Griffin is humiliated again when Marden, an astronomer from the university across the street, takes charge during the crisis and directs the three families to collect food and clothes and come to his observatory where they have an atomic reactor and thus will have heat longer than most people.

The three families spend months in the observatory as the Earth travels away from the sun, accelerating all the time.  It is so cold outside that to leave the atomic-heated building would mean instant death.  Marden is able to calculate the speed the Earth is travelling, and at the two year mark good ol' Terra is moving at the speed of light!  At the three year mark, the air begins to warm up as the Earth approaches a star--will our big blue marble crash into the star and be annihilated?

People can go outside again and they do so to bury the masses of dead who had no access to atomic energy or who had not stockpiled enough food.  The Earth begins to orbit the alien star--it looks like the human race will survive in a new solar system!  Mars has already arrived, and is now closer to its sun than is Earth, as if Griffin's boneheaded mistake has now been manifested in the real world.

Harris' style is sophomoric at times, but the plot--at least once the scientists are left behind--works and "A Runaway World" is fun, so thumbs up!  The tale of Griffin and the human race's harrowing journey through interstellar space would be reprinted in the 1947 Harris collection Away from the Here and Now, the 2019 collection The Artificial Man and Other Stories, and in 2026 in Stephen Jones' big anthology of stories from 1920s issues of Weird Tales.    

"The Elixir of Life" by Marc Schorer and August Derleth

This two-and-a-half-page story is advertised as a "Five-Minute Story."  We've read a few of these Derleth-Schorer collaborations:

"Pacer"

"They Shall Rise"

"Death Holds the Post" 

"Colonel Markesan"

"The Return of Andrew Bentley"

"Eyes of the Serpent"

"Spawn of the Maelstrom"

"The Woman at Loon Point"

"The Elixir of Life" is an obvious filler story, a trifle I will charitably say is barely acceptable.  

A Duke, residing in Milan, has hired a wizard to make him an elixir that will prolong his life.  He comes to the wizard's abode on a narrow alley in the city and gets pissed off that the elixir isn't quite ready.  The wizard admits he has not yet acquired the final ingredient--the blood of a child.  The duke angrily orders the wizard's black servant ("Nubian servitor") to just go out and seize the first child he sees.  Then the Duke leaves, saying he will return in three hours and the elixir better be ready.

When the Duke returns he drinks the elixir and then makes some comment on how his son has escaped his nurse.  Everybody realizes the elixir includes the blood of the Duke's son's, and the Duke is responsible for the murder of his own son.  

A banal and pedestrian thing, but not exactly bad.  It doesn't look like it has reappeared in any Derleth collections or anthologies.

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Clare Winger Harris is today's big winner.  While Price and the Mssrs. Derleth and Schorer give us tired and obvious twist ending wizard murder stories that, I guess, they mean to elevate by setting them in the exotic and diabolical worlds of the Muslim Near East and the Italy of the Borgias, Harris, while her writing is a little childish, lays a lot of big science theories on us, tries to predict the roles of television and nuclear power in our future, and gives us actual human relationships we as middle-class Americans of the 20th century can identify with, along with horrible danger, privation and death.  Maybe I should read more of Harris' stories from the Gernsback magazines. 

Stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log for more stories published before you were born about wizards, scientists, and murderers.

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. 

**********

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.