Howard Wandrei: "The 15th Pocket," "For No Ransom," and "Don't Do It, Mister!"

Just days ago we read four gruesome and titillating crime stories by Howard Wandrei that featured science fiction or sorcerous elements.  Those stories debuted in the 1930s in the magazine Spicy Mystery, and we read them in the 1990s Wandrei collection Time Burial.  H. Wandrei produced a long list of stories for crime magazines and yesterday I scoured the internet archive for scans of old magazines offering stories published under the H. Wandrei pseudonym Robert Garron, and now let's check out three of the short ones.

"The 15th Pocket" (1936)    

"The 15th Pocket" debuted in Spicy Detective, and would be reprinted in a 1938 issue of Private Detective as "Death's Passenger" under a different penname, and then (again as "Death's Passenger") in 2 Book Mystery Magazine in 1946.

Lord's is a manufacturer and seller of high-end lingerie, and business is good--Lord's 50-something Vice-President Bannon is rich.  Was rich--he turns up dead in an abandoned cab, shot full of holes and covered in bruises from a ferocious fight.  He wasn't robbed--his pockets are full of expensive watches and money--or was he?  One pocket is empty!  The cops figure the key to the mystery is what was in that pocket.

Police Lieutenant Hanrahan investigates.  The driver of the cab is cleared--somebody beat him up and stole his cab.  Hanrahan heads to the Bannon mansion looking for Mrs. Bannon; on the way somebody shoots at him, but misses.  At the mansion, Hanrahan finds the missus isn't home and badgers the sexy maid into admitting Bannon was having an affair with his secretary and Mrs. Bannon was having an affair with some young rich idler and that she (the maid) was plotting to blackmail them both.  The maid tries to seduce Hanrahan but he brushes her aside.

Hanrahan pays a visit to the home of Mrs. Bannon's lover and finds the two of them there; he decides they are too drunk to have been involved in the murder.  So he proceeds to the residence of Bannon's secretary, a third floor apartment.  Hanrahan becomes certain she and an accomplice are behind her boss's untimely death, and searches her apartment while she tries to distract him with her body.  The accomplice tries to sneak up on Hanrahan but Hanrahan's partner shows up just in time to gun the murderer down.  Then Hanrahan finds the item the murderer took from that empty pocket--a pair of banknotes worth ten thousand bucks each, Bannon's bonus from the owner of Lord's, which the secretary must have known he had received and coveted for herself.

I don't really get this story's central gimmicks.  Is it so remarkable that a guy who has fifteen pockets has one empty pocket?  In the summer I have like four pockets and half of them are empty.  And then there is the elaborate way the banknotes were hidden by the secretary and the murderer--they folded them up to the size of postage stamps and put them inside an empty watch case and sealed it with candle wax and tied a fishing line to it and threw the watch into a pond in the courtyard of the secretary's apartment complex but left one end of the fishing line in her apartment so they could pull the treasure up through her window.  Wouldn't the super or the gardener blunder into the fishing line?  Couldn't someone on the first or second floors see the line hanging in front of his window?

The interesting thing about this bland story is perhaps its misogyny.  "Murders are like women; they’re all the same’’ says one cop, and all the women in the story are monsters:

There were three women in this case, and none of them reacted to Bannon’s murder with any grief. The maid was disappointed because the neat fabric of her blackmail scheme was blown sky-high. Mrs. Bannon responded with hysterical gratification. And this Haworth dame [the secretary] was strictly indifferent. Damn their scheming, selfish, hard little hearts!

This story is obviously not good, but, with its fast pace and a car crash, a shooting, somebody getting punched or slapped or showing off her legs every page or so, it is not boring or annoying, so I guess we'll call it barely acceptable.

"For No Ransom" (1940)

"For No Ransom" is the cover story of the issue of Spicy Detective in which is appears.  I'm not finding any evidence it was ever reprinted.  

Edith is a junior executive at a Manhattan department store who aspires to work in the fashion industry.  And a gorgeous babe!  (One of the characters considers her "yum-yum.")  Edith is more or less engaged to her boyfriend Phil, a sculptor who works in wood who was born into a wealthy family.  Their wedding is on hold because they disagree about her work--he wants her to quit and be a housewife and she wants to keep working.  

Otto the retired surgeon has seen the yum-yum Edith walking about town and hired an unscrupulous private investigator to uncover where she lives and works and so forth.  When he has a thick enough dossier on Edith, Otto moves into an apartment in the same building as Edith's and contrives a way to get into her apartment and then to get her into his--his methods reminded me of the way children are warned not to help strangers who say they have lost a puppy or whatever and came off as a little unbelievable.  Otto chloroforms Edith and then injects her with some kind of tranquilizer and drives off with her unconscious form in the passenger seat after instructing the PI to stay in the Big Apple to keep his private eye on Phil.  

It's a 1200 mile drive west to Orto's destination, and he enlivens the trip by playing with the inert Edith with one hand while driving with the other.  Cripes!  When she wakes up in a hospital bed, Otto tells Edith she has been in shock.  Phil dumped her, he explains, which triggered a catatonic event!  After recovering in the hospital she married Otto, one of her doctors.  But then she had a relapse and when she awoke she had forgotten all about her marriage to Otto.  Weeks go by, and Edith starts to believe Otto's crazy story.  Back in New York, Phil and the police try to find Edith, but get nowhere.

Three months after Edith's disappearance, a sad Phil is listening to a live radio broadcast of a famous orchestra performing at a club in the Midwest.  Somehow, the mic picks up chatter in the audience and Phil recognizes Edith's voice!  (This story is pretty ridiculous.)  Phil flies to the town with the club.  The PI follows him, but Phil is big and strong from carving iron-hard wood and has noticed this jerk following him and gets the jump on him and beats him up.  Then he does a little detective work, figuring out what is going on, finally confronts Otto and beats him up and reunites with Edith.

This story is rather half baked.  The individual plot elements are not only silly but often clunky (for example, minor characters who don't contribute much to the drama) and the way they are put together poor (there isn't a sense of mounting tension or much of a climax, for example.)  Edith, Phil and Otto have personalities that have little or no effect on the plot, or lack personality altogether so you don't care what happens to them.  In a good story of this sort the author would convey the overpowering lust of Otto, the paralyzing fear and then deadening despair and finally mind-numbing resignation of Edith, and the maddening frustration and then tremendous relief of Phil, but Wandrei doesn't do any of that here.

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

"Don't Do It, Mister!" (1943)

 

This story does all the things I just told you "For No Ransom" didn't do but should have.  The characters have personality, exhibit emotions you can identify with, and the tension in the story grows as the story proceeds.  Thumbs up for "Don't Do It, Mister!"

Lewis likes beautiful things.  He likes stamps, and collects them.  He has a book of them, all the rare and lovely stamps he spends most of his income on--he hasn't bought a new suit or new shoes in two years--carefully arranged.

Or he had such a collection.  Lewis is married to a gorgeous brunette with a terrific body, Eleanor.  He thought he'd like to have such a beautiful creature around, but he didn't want a woman who would interfere with him, bother him, so he didn't just marry Eleanor for her looks--he married her because she was an ignorant dimwit.  

This decision today has bit Lewis in the ass.  While he was in his Manhattan office, Eleanor, back home in Brooklyn, decided she would go on a shopping spree, get an expensive dress.  I guess in the 1940s you could at some stores use uncancelled postage stamps like cash, just buy things with them as if they were money worth the value printed on them.  (What with the banknotes in "The 15th Pocket" Wandrei is giving me an education in Depression and World War II-era microeconomics.)  So Eleanor took a bunch of stamps out of Lewis's book, like 70 or whatever dollars worth face value, but worth thousands and thousands of dollars to a collector, to buy her dress.  Eleanor is not only a pea-brained ignoramus who has no idea the old stamps are worth more than the value printed on them and thinks Lewis can just get more at the post office any time, but also a resentful and bull-headed harpy who thinks his spending time every day looking at the book of stamps and using tweezers to add new stamps to it to be embarrassing childishness (we might charge this story with misogyny like we did "For No Ransom") and they have a fierce argument.

Wandrei's description of Lewis's shock and dismay, and the dialogue between him and Eleanor about the stamps and the dress, are totally convincing and very effective.  My heart sank along with Lewis's when he realized his wonderful rare valuable stamps were gone, and my blood temperature rose when Eleanor insisted he must be lying in telling her the stamps were worth more than what was printed on them.

Wandrei also does a good job with the murder scene and Lewis' psychological response to killing someone with his own hands, killing his own wife!  And the ending, which leaves us unsure whether Lewis has got away with the crime or not, but confident the sight of his wife's dead face will haunt him forever, is not bad.

"Don't Do It, Mister!" appeared in Super-Detective and as with "For No Ransom" I find no evidence it has ever been reprinted. 

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"The 15th Pocket" and "For No Ransom" are just filler that are full of flaws, but "Don't Do It, Mister!" is a powerful crime story and psychological horror story about a man who makes terrible life choices but with whom we can sort of identify.  So this exploration into disreputable pulp detective magazines has paid off, even if we didn't find the mad scientists and evil wizards we met in the Spicy Mystery batch.   

Howard Wandrei: "Exit Willy Carney," "The Glass Coffin," "Master-the-Third," and "O Little Nightmare"

Let's read four stories from the Howard Wandrei collection Time Burial, stories that first appeared in the later 1930s not in respectable magazines like Astounding or Weird Tales but in the "shudder pulp" or "weird menace" magazine Spicy Mystery.  The appeal of this magazine is its depiction of women at risk of or actually suffering sexualized violence, and my flipping through the scans of Spicy Mystery I can find, and the assertions of Robert Kenneth Jones in his book The Shudder Pulps: A History of the Weird Menace Magazines of the 1930s, suggest this magazine had more illustrations than was usual for pulp magazines, and most of those illos featured scantily clad women in some terrible danger.  If you want to see drawings of young ladies in lingerie being tied up, slashed with knives, or thrown into bottomless pits or off of cliffs, Spicy Mystery is the periodical for you, but don't tell them I sent you.

This is far from the first expedition of the bold explorers of MPorcius Fiction Log into the salacious and sanguinary jungles of shudder pulp territory.  In 2021 we read, from the collection The Eerie Mr. Murphy, three other Howard Wandrei stories that debuted in Spicy Mystery, as well as a bunch of shudder pulp tales by E. Hoffman Price and one by Henry Kuttner  Prompted by a reading of Frederik Pohl's memoir, way back in 2018 we read five shudder pulp stories from 1940 by Ray Cummings.

(Nota bene:  I am reading all four stories from my copy of Time Burial, and an introductory note in the book indicates the texts are different from those printed in the 1930s issues of Spicy Mystery in which they debuted; we are told these texts are "much truer to the author's intent" and "appreciably more risqué.")      

"Exit Willy Carney" (1935)

This is a wild and crazy story full of sex and horrible criminal violence, with a surprise ending featuring one of my favorite SF tropes--the brain transplant!

Wandrei starts us with a sex scene.  Model Madge is having sex with organized crime figure Caldwell.  Caldwell is an expert lover!  But then an assassin shoots through the window of Caldwell's apartment--head shot!  Caldwell bites Madge's tongue as he dies, drawing her blood--gross!

Madge flees the scene, and we get a flashback to Madge's first days in New York, incidents of artists sexually harassing her and the start of her love affair with Caldwell.  Then, back in the present, we follow the cops as they pursue Caldwell's killer, professional hitman Willy Carney.  Carney is in his girlfriend's apartment, engaging in foreplay, when the cops arrive.  Carney sneaks out and his girlfriend tries to slow down the fuzz by offering them her body, but the flatfoots catch up to Carney regardless and a ferocious fight erupts in the apartment building's courtyard.  Carney is an expert fighter and triumphs over the forces of justice, killing multiple officers as he escapes.

Carney goes to a famous surgeon who does business with the underworld, hoping to get plastic surgery to hide his identity.  The surgeon has something else in mind, but they need to be patient, to wait for the ideal conditions in which to pull off a coup that pushes the envelope of medical science and of crime!

Madge shows up at the surgeon's, looking for an abortion--she was impregnated by Caldwell seconds before he died and this girlboss doesn't want a baby putting a crimp in her career!  Seeing how healthy Madge is, the surgeon sees that the time is ripe to put his innovative plan into action.  That annoying baby isn't the only clump of cells the doctor removes from Madge's perfect body--he also relieves her of her brain!  He puts the model's grey matter in Carney the killer's skull, and fills Madge's gorgeous brainpan with Carney's brain.

The surgeon releases Madge (in Carney's body) after a few months and when the cops catch "him" they consider him insane as he rants and raves about not actually being Carney.  Carney (in the body of sexalicious model Madge) learns how to walk in heels and to enjoy the feel of silky undergarments and so forth.  As the story ends it seems that somehow Madge's memories have been preserved in her body and her personality takes over Carney's implanted grey matter and he forgets he was ever a man and had brain transplant surgery and picks up Madge's life where she left off.

Wandrei's style here is a little crude, and there are elements of "Exit Willy Carney" that might be considered pornographic, gratuitously gory, and racist, and thus disturbing or offensive, but I found a lot of the story surprising and entertaining, and I can't deny I enjoyed it.

After appearing under a pseudonym in the September '35 ish of Spicy Mystery, "Exit Willy Carney" was reprinted in the March 1942 issue of Spicy Mystery under a different title, "Not Counting Death," and under a different pen name.  Tricky!

"The Glass Coffin" (1937)

Maxwell Heights is a well-to-do riverside neighborhood inhabited by wealthy fashionable people; lately young women of the district have been vanishing--fourteen of them, in fact!  We are introduced to beautiful Kathleen, her brother, painter Arnold, and Arnold's girlfriend, sexy Jeanne.  We learn all about these three people's good looks, especially the women's bodies, and witness Jeanne posing nude for Arnold and doing a sexy dance for him.

Kathleen becomes the fifteenth well-heeled young lady to disappear, and Arnold suspects Zuchet, the florist, a short fat guy, is to blame--the painter thinks Zuchet's evil eyes, his "sexual voice," and the way he looked at Kathleen one day, mark him as a pervert.  Jeanne dons her most revealing dress and goes to Zuchet's place of business to investigate--Zuchet knocks her out and takes her to a secret laboratory where he gropes her and then hooks her up to elaborate scientific machinery.

Arnold busts into the florist's when Jeanne doesn't return and punches Zuchet out (Wandrei describes people's bloody injuries in this story with as much gusto as he does women's breasts) and starts searching for the girls.  As luck would have it, as a youth he explored the beach below Zuchet's gardens, and knows there is a natural tunnel that leads inland to the basement of Zuchet's house.

In the lab, Arnold discovers the amazing, mind-shattering truth.  Zuchet is a genius, an expert in botany, biology, physics.  He has figured out a way to transfer the blood and the souls of people into orchids, thus creating orchids of unparalleled beauty that are sentient, mobile, immortal!  The orchid in which Jeanne's soul is entombed sends forth tendrils which caress Arnold--she recognizes him!  Zuchet appears, shoots Arnold full of holes with a revolver.  With his last breath, Arnold punches Zuchet and knocks the felonious florist out--while he is unconscious the tendrils of the flower that is Jeanne entangle him and suck his blood!  Zuchet awakes briefly before dying, long enough to know that his sixteenth victim is achieving her vengeance on him!

While not nearly as well written as something by Smith, the plot of "The Glass Coffin" reminds me of something Clark Ashton Smith would write, though set in some ancient or far future fantasy world.  A fun bit of exploitation insanity.

"The Glass Coffin" was reprinted under a different pseudonym and with a different title--"Murder for a Soul"--in a 1941 issue of Spicy Mystery.

"Master-the-Third" (1937)

 

This one is perhaps a little more ridiculous and less thrilling than "Exit Willy Carney" and "The Glass Coffin," and is also distinct from them in having a happy ending.  But the gore and sexualized violence are there, as well as a crazy science-fiction means of defying death.  While gruesome and full of people getting murdered, these stories all offer hope that humans can somehow achieve immortality through brain transplants, soul transfers, or, as in this one, being preserved for thousands of years via sorcery.  Of course, Wandrei's project may be to pour cold water on these hopes--in these stories brain transplants change your personality, soul transfers leave you a plant instead of a human, and sorcery may leave you a disembodied eye in a jar, slave to a renegade limey! 

Rawls is a detective, I guess in New York, investigating a mysterious suicide.  The dead man: a millionaire who just married the sexiest girl in town, Karen the world's most agile stripper.  Why would this rich guy who had the hottest chick in the world kill himself?  A little sleuthing turns up the fact that the millionaire recently made friends with a globe-trotting Englishman, Lamphier.  Lamphier is a student of the occult, in fact, he has been anointed "Master-the-Third" of the "Great White Lodge of the Himalayas."  Lamphier has a history of making rich friends and marrying rich women all over the world and then inheriting piles of money from them when they commit suicide. 

Rawls follows Karen, who is so good-looking he is falling in love with her, to Lamphier's apartment building.  Along the way he is ambushed and beaten up, but doesn't see who hit him--Wandrei makes it clear to readers that the detective was attacked either by an invisible man or a telekinetic force.  Through a rooftop skylight Rawls looks into Lamphier's huge studio apartment on the top floor, watches as Karen's clothes come off of her of their own accord and then Karen has ecstatic and acrobatic sex with an invisible man or, again some kind of projection of telekinetic force.  Now he's really in love with her!

Karen and Lamphier leave the building and Rawls sneaks into the Englishman's richly appointed apartment.  It's a trap!  Waiting in there is a gorgeous "golden-skinned" Asian woman who is an expert in hand-to-hand combat, and we get a sadistic and sexualized fight scene in which the woman's breasts are bared when her dress is ripped; she manages to overpower Rawls after kicking him in the balls and proceeds to torture him.

Lamphier returns and explains what is going on.  He has in a glass jar the thousands-year-old living eye of the king of Atlantis, a great wizard and the source of the Greek myth of Uranus.  The eye can perform all manner of magical feats, hypnotism and telekinesis and so forth, if you can order it around in Atlantean, as Lamphier through long study has learned how to do.  Wandrei provides a long gruesome description of the glass jar, its contents and the pictograms carved into it that is pretty cool.

It looks like Rawls is going to follow in the footsteps of the millionaire, committing suicide in an elaborate fashion thanks to Atlantean hypnotism, when an actual Atlantean busts into the apartment to save the day!  This sorcerer has been chasing Lamphier around the Earth, trying to get the eye of his king back.  It may have taken him a while to catch up to Lamphier, but this wizard is invincible.  The Asian karate girl tries to win his favor and gets humiliated in a disgusting sexualized way.  Lamphier's punishment is being blasted to pieces.  The Atlantean avenger spares innocent Rawls and Karen, even (it is suggested) uses his magic to make Karen fall in love with Rawls so Rawls can look forward to having sex with the world's foremost erotic athlete for the rest of his life.

After all this crazy wizardry, torture and sex, Wandrei's twist ending feels very mundane and anticlimactic.  When the police chief asks Rawls why he was so sure the millionaire had been murdered, even though all evidence clearly indicated suicide, Rawls explains that he and the millionaire were relatives and he knew his people were too tough to ever commit suicide.

It doesn't look like "Master-the-Third" was recycled by the editors of Spicy Mystery the way "Exit Willy Carney" and "The Glass Coffin" were.

"O Little Nightmare" (1939)

This is the best story we are talking about today, better written than those three other stories and with a better constructed plot; perhaps more importantly "O Little Nightmare" is a legitimately effective weird story and not just an exploitation story with weird elements tacked on.  And as a bonus for you feminists out there, the characters talk about our society's double standard, how the promiscuity and infidelity of men is tolerated while that of women is condemned.  

Rodney the successful Greenwich Village painter is married to Ursula, the gorgeous model.  These two hipster sophisticates drink too much and of course everybody knows artists of any talent are crazy and so when Rodney starts hearing weird noises in the apartment and glimpsing a little monster dashing through the bedroom neither Rodney, nor Ursula, nor we readers can be sure what to think.  Wandrei does a good job describing the sounds Rodney hears and the way Rodney reacts to them--solid horror story stuff.

Ursula has a buddy, a globe-trotting Englishwoman who is a big game hunter and Olympic athlete; this chick has great breasts, "one of those horsey English faces" and an apartment right across the street.  From horse-face's flat, Ursula, using horse-face's German binoculars, watches Rodney have sex with one of his other models.  When Ursula dismisses the idea of divorce, the Englishwoman talks about how, while on safari in Africa, two guys tried to rape her and she shot them down and the authorities listed the deaths as "hunting accidents" and suggests Ursula murder Rodney--she'd be rich after inheriting all the money Rod has made on his paintings and Ursula has several male friends who would love to marry her if she got lonely.

After the model leaves, Rodney sees the monster and it taunts him and he tries to destroy it, without success.  Again Wandrei, describing the creature and the fight, gives us superior horror story material.  Ursula comes home, changes and showers while Rodney watches, then goes to the cinema (Rodney has contempt for motion pictures.)  Soon after his wife's departure Rodney sees the rat-sized monster eat a roach.  Rodney is determined to destroy the monster, and this times fights with strategy as well as fanatical zeal.  When Ursula comes home she finds that her husband has gone totally insane and so she will have access to all his money without having to murder or divorce him, but she still shaken to the core by the sight of him eating some kind of little animal--we readers recognize he is following the example of the monster itself, eating the intruder the same way it ate the roach.

Thumbs up for "O Little Nightmare," a well-put-together weird tale with sexual exploitation elements tacked on to it.  In its action sequences and its family-life-is-hell theme it reminds me of Richard Matheson's famous "Prey."  I don't see any evidence "O Little Nightmare," though a gem, was reprinted before its reappearance in 1995 in Time Burial.

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I sometimes tell you a story is easy to admire but challenging to enjoy, but today I have to say the opposite about three of our stories, "Exit Willy Carney," "The Glass Coffin" and "Master-the-Third;" these shoddily written tales full of violence against women, torture and gore, racism and mad scientists, are hard to admire but easy to enjoy, I guess like junk food.  Luckily, I can recommend "O Little Nightmare" without reservation to fans of weird and horror stories--at least those that won't be offended by gratuitous descriptions of women's legs or breasts on every other page.

Well, we've had our fill of Spicy Mystery for a little while; next time we'll look at stories from somewhat more prestigious periodicals.

Strange Ports of Call: D H Keller, H Wandrei, and C A Smith

In 1948 Pellegrini and Cudahy published a 400-page hardcover anthology bearing the legend "20 Masterpieces of Science Fiction" on cover and spine alongside the title Strange Ports of Call.  Strange Ports of Call was edited by the tireless August Derleth, correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft and major figure in the effort to get weird material printed in book form, and this volume is full of stories by people we associate with Weird Tales.  Let's read three stories from Strange Ports of Call by weirdies today, those by David H. Keller, Howard Wandrei, and Clark Ashton Smith.  (We may read more from this book in the future, stories by people less closely associated with the weird.)

But before all that, let's list the seven stories reprinted in Strange Ports of Call that we have already read in other venues.

"The Crystal Bullet" by Donald Wandrei

"At the Mountains of Madness" by H. P. Lovecraft

"Call Him Demon" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

"Far Centaurus" by A. E. van Vogt

"The Lost Street" by Clifford Simak and Carl Jacobi

"Thunder and Roses" by Theodore Sturgeon

"A Guest in the House" by Frank Belknap Long

(Nota Bene: I will be reading all of today's stories in a scan of Strange Ports of Call, though I may check original magazine versions, or other reprints, if there are confusing typos or printing errors.)

"The Worm" by David H. Keller (1929)

We start with a story that has been reprinted many times after its debut in Amazing, including in a Best of Amazing anthology in 1967 and in two different issues of Fantastic, one in 1965 and one in 1979.  The cover of the '79 issue promotes "The Worm" as "Probably the most intriguing tale you'll ever read anywhere."  Wow!

For centuries Thompson's Valley, Vermont, was a prosperous village, with productive farms and a busy mill, but today the place is deserted, only the miller remaining, the mill still turning, though there is no corn for it to grind.  The miller is a recluse, his only friends his books and his dog, and mechanically minded; he has hooked the mill mechanism up to generate electricity.  This practical engineering ability is put to the test when appears an uncanny threat to the building in which his family has lived and worked for generation after generation.

The monster plot of "The Worm" has some similarity to Ray Bradbury's 1951 "The Fog Horn."  The grinding of the mill has attracted a monstrous worm, a thing thirty feet thick, and it burrows up to the mill, thinking the sound of the mill is the sound of a worm of the opposite sex!  Slowly, over the course of days, the mega-sized worm chews through the foundation of the mill and then up through the building's multiple floors, all the while the miller essaying various means to stop or destroy the monster in his determination to preserve his ancestral home.  Who will win, man or beast? 

"The Worm" has something of the ethic or ideology we see in lots of early science fiction.  One man, alone, relies on his wits, sangfroid and knowledge of science and engineering as he struggles against a novel, alien, challenge.  Keller may be subverting the expectations of science lovers who see man as equal to the task of mastering the natural world, though, when he has the man fall before the monster; Keller even specifically has the miller gain confidence, in the event unfounded, from reflecting that as a man he has "brains" and the worm is just a "thing."

"The Worm" is well written, Keller producing sharp images and ably using the reactions of the dog to generate emotional content--suspense and fear--and I was actually a little surprised that the worm killed the miller instead of the other way round.  So thumbs up for "The Worm," a good science fiction horror story.

Stephen Fabian fans should check out the July '79 issue of 
Fantastic which features six pages of art by Fabian: knights, galleys, 
churning waves, a topless woman--some of your favorite things! 

"The God-Box" by Howard Wandrei (1934)

A few years ago I purchased the recent Howard Wandrei collections Time Burial: The Collected Fantasy Tales of Howard Wandrei (1995) and The Eerie Mr. Murphy: The Collected Fantasy Tales of Howard Wandrei: Volume II (2003) largely because I was captivated by H. Wandrei's grotesque drawings.  I did read some stories from these books, among them "For Murderers Only," "The Molester," "Danger: Quicksand" and "The African Trick," but have left many more unread.  "The God Box" (no hyphen) appears in my 2017 paperback edition of Time Burial, but I am reading it today in Strange Ports of Call, where, for whatever reason, the hyphen was introduced.  (There is no hyphen in the title where the story was first printed, under a pseudonym, in F. Orlin Tremaine's Astounding.)

Like Keller's "The Worm," H. Wandrei's "The God-Box" stars smart knowledgeable guys who employ their wits in dealing with an alien challenge, and perhaps reflecting the author's weird sensibilities, in the end they come up short and are overwhelmed--like Keller's, Wandrei's tale is not of the triumph of the man of science but a sort of horror story.

Pence is an Egyptologist who, by bizarre coincidence, discovers in New York City a box the size of a camera made of what looks like gold but is incredibly hard and astoundingly dense--the little box weighs a ton or more!  Elaborately carved with Egyptian motifs and characters, the box is studded with many little heads of pharaohs and of gods of the Egyptian pantheon.  Pence contacts an engineer with a good reputation in the scientific community and the two of them tinker with the box, begin unraveling the secrets of its mind-boggling powers.  After activating the box by charging it with electricity, they find that manipulation of the heads, which are like knobs, allows them to view as through a TV any spot in the universe!  They can even create portals through which they can instantaneously travel to those distant locales or just manipulate the matter there, moving things and people around, drawing them to New York, or destroying them.  The Egyptian box has conferred upon them god-like power!

One of the odd wrinkles of using the box is that it attracts cats from all over the city to the building in which Pence found it, and the felines become such a nuisance that the men have to use the box's powers to dispose of them by the thousands.

Pence and the engineer are clever men but not necessarily good men, and Pence in particular lets his newfound powers go to his head.  The box is used to commit many trespasses, some even worse than teleporting felines wholesale out of the greatest city in the world, and eventually the men scheme against each other and end up lost on a distant planet.

I didn't like the style of this one as much as that of Keller's, it being a little flippant and jokey rather than sharp and clear, but I'm still giving "The God-Box" a thumbs up.  The premise of Damon Knight's 1976 "I See You" bears some similarity to that of "The God-Box," and Carl Jacobi's 1954 "Made in Tanganyika," has not only a similar premise but a similar plot.  Were Jacobi and Knight influenced by Wandrei's story?

"Master of the Asteroid" by Clark Ashton Smith (1932)

I'm a little surprised I haven't read this one yet, I having read quite a volume of stories by Smith.  "Master of the Asteroid" debuted in Wonder Stories, as the cover story, in the same issue as Hazel Heald's collaboration with H. P. Lovecraft "Man of Stone," which we read in 2017.

The editor's intro to "Master of the Asteroid" in Wonder Stories tells us Smith's tale focuses on the psychological stress astronauts will face.  Sure enough, the protagonists of the story are three men who, as members of a scientific expedition on Mars consisting of fifteen men, go insane and steal one of the expedition's ships and try to fly through the asteroid belt to a moon of Jupiter without bringing enough supplies with them.  After a sort of preface or frame, we get to the meat of the story, the log discovered decades later aboard the stolen vessel where it lies wrecked on an asteroid; also found inside the ship was the skeleton of one of the three mutineers, while around the ship lay the remains of a bunch of grotesquely skinny insectoid aliens.

In brief, the narrator survives while the other two madmen expire during the trip.  The narrator goes catatonic but recovers when the vessel crashes into a large asteroid which actually has an atmosphere and a whole ecosystem of plants, animals and people who have a culture that, apparently, includes religion.  The ship is all bent so the narrator cannot open the airlock, and he lacks the weapons or tools to bust through the porthole or hull, so he is stuck in the ship, and learns all about life on the asteroid by watching through the porthole.  We get a description of that life, and the man's mental trials, then finally clues as to the uncanny cause of his death.

"Master of the Asteroid" is a very good horror story set in space.  The style is direct though not unadorned, and totally believable as the record of a man under terrible stress.  The behavior and psychologies of the three broken men are very convincing and striking, and the story is full of dreadful, even haunting, images and events.  Yet again Clark Ashton Smith proves he deserves his high reputation.

Recommended.

"Master of the Asteroid" has been reprinted quite a number of times over the years.  In 1964 it appeared in Arkham House's Smith collection Tales of Science and Sorcery, which our French friends retitled Morthylla and put out in translation in 1989 with an ooo la la cover.  (Those Frenchies know how to separate a man from his francs.)

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Three good stories, so kudos to the authors and to Derleth, who selected these pieces.  All three stories have the trappings of science fiction, but instead of celebrating the work of the scientist and engineer and vindicating the ability of man to solve problems and master his environment, these stories exhibit a weird sensibility.  The focus is on the horror of the alien, the danger presented by novel conditions, and the inability of humans, even those devoted to the scientific method, to survive the physical threats, solve the mysteries, and resist the temptations presented by alien beings, artifacts and conditions.  You can't handle the truth of the unknown, man--it will destroy you physically, shatter you psychologically, and tempt you into abandoning your morality!   

Weird Tales March 1941: D Wandrei, D Quick, A Derleth and T McClusky

Our aim is to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales published in the year 1941, and today we look at the second of the six 1941 issues, March.  This issue reprints a poem from a 1938 British fanzine by C. S. Youd, the man also known as John Christopher and responsible for the Tripods books and No Blade of Grass AKA The Death of Grass, which I blogged about ten years ago.  (Joachim Boaz blogged about No Blade of Grass in 2019.)  That is sort of interesting.  There is also an ad for the upcoming appearance of the posthumously published Lovecraft story The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which I have read multiple times but not during the period of this blog's apocalyptic life.  Our focus today will be the stories in the issue by founders of Arkham House Donald Wandrei and August Derleth, by Thorp McClusky, who has made like a dozen appearances here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and by Dorothy Quick, a relative newcomer to these pages, we only having read two stories by her.

"The Crystal Bullet" by Donald Wandrei

I feel like we've read a stack of stories by Donald Wandrei from a variety of magazines including Astounding, of course Weird Tales, and even detective magazines.   OMG, it's links time.

"Raiders of the Universes"

"The Fire Vampires"

"Colossus"

"Something from Above"

"The Red Brain"

"The Painted Mirror"

"The Tree-Men of M'Bwa"

"The Lives of Alfred Kramer"

"Spawn of the Sea"

"The Destroying Horde"

"Infinity Zero"

"Black Fog"

"Earth Minus"

"Life Current"

"Dramatic Touch"

"Come Clean"

"The Man Who Never Lived"

"The Atom Smasher"

"The Blinding Shadows"

"The Whisperers"

"Colossus Eternal"

"Uneasy Lie the Drowned"

"The Lady in Gray"

"Giant-Plasm"

"The Crystal Bullet" starts with some romantic slosh about the beauty of the natural world in the spring, the birds and the squirrels and a farm with big strong horses and black loamy soil, etc.  In contrast to these images and themes of warmth and life and peace and quiet is the sound of some sort of airborne object flying overhead and crashing nearby, atop a hill; when a farmer goes to investigate he finds a two-foot long thing like a crystal torpedo that radiates cold and a green glow.  Though the cold is more severe than any he has experienced, as if hypnotized he grasps the fallen artifact and brings it to the yard outside his house.  At home he seems to regain his mind, decides that when he is done with the spring planting he'll write a letter to somebody at the university or in the government about the crystal from space.  His wife wants him to take the thing away, but he tells her maybe they can sell it for a lot of money.  That night, his wife leaves their bed and goes to the crystal and, I guess, is frozen to death by it.  The farmer takes the crystal away and hurls it into an artificial lake, a flooded quarry.  He has the impression that the crystal is a spacecraft, fashioned by aliens with feathers and eyes on stalks whose bodies are part-gas, to carry either passengers or advanced three-dimensional means of communication; it might have offered humanity invaluable secrets but immersion in water totally destroys the object and its passengers and/or cargo.  It seems his wife is doomed, though maybe if the farmer hadn't destroyed the crystal the people/knowledge it carried could have revived her, even transformed her into a superior being?

This story is written poetically; it is full of mind-numbingly long sentences and much of what goes on is kind of vague and mysterious, maybe in part because I am not inclined to pout in the effort to laboriously decipher those long sentences.  I'm not crazy about "The Crystal Bullet."  We'll be generous and call this sterile literary exercise and effort to achieve the famous "sense of wonder" "acceptable."  August Derleth was more generous still, reprinting "The Crystal Bullet" in an anthology of "Masterpieces of Science Fiction" entitled Strange Ports of Call.  You can also find it in two Donald Wandrei collections, The Eye and the Finger and Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei.

"Edge of the Cliff" by Dorothy Quick

Here we have a two-page story that was reprinted in one of those Barnes and Noble anthologies, a story about assisted suicide.  

An attractive young woman (I don't think we learn her name), was in love with Bob but her family made her marry Jim, who had money.  She hated Jim, a "drunken beast" who beat her.  She cheated on Jim with Bob, who promised to take her away when he had enough money.  Jim caught them and killed Bob; "Jim got off--he was a wronged husband."  Tonight she is standing on the edge of a seaside cliff, rocks below, wanting to commit suicide but too scared to do so.

The ghost of Bob comes along and urges her, pleads with her, to kill herself so they can be together for "Eternity."  She jumps and that is our happy ending.

We might see this as a pro-suicide story, and/or as a feminist story about how society puts so much pressure on women that it drives them to destroy themselves--the decision to live or die is the only decision the patriarchy leaves to women!  It is certainly odd to see a man plead that the woman he loves kill herself so that she will be with him; everyone in this story acts very selfishly.  It is also sort of interesting that Quick asserts there is an afterlife, so "Edge of the Cliff" is more or less a religious story, but totally ignores the prohibition on suicide of those religions which have been dominant in the West for many centuries.

Acceptable.

"Come to Me!" by August Derleth

I don't find lawyers and court room dramas very interesting, so kind of groaned when the first paragraph of "Come to Me!" introduced us readers to Judge Hillier and the case of Elsa Laing over which he is presiding.  Derleth's story only gets more boring and stupid as it proceeds.  Thumbs down!

"Come to Me!" is a deus-ex-machina Christian wish-fulfillment fantasy of a very childish type.  You have heard me in the past praise speculative fiction stories for addressing or promoting Christian thinking, and of course two of the most exciting and talented SF writers, Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty, are serious Christians.  But Derleth here produces a dreadful piece of junk that has me shaking my head.

Elsa Laing, a single woman responsible for her aged mother, is on trial for selling people valueless stocks and bonds through the mails.  She has just been convicted when a message comes to the court--a higher power is intervening and will take over the trial tomorrow!

The next day a charismatic figure arrives and takes Judge Hillier's place.  This figure explains that Elsa Laing was tricked by a fat (Derleth tells us he looks like a pig) banker and a rich guy who wears pince-nez, hat and gloves, into unknowingly defrauding people.  As part of their operations the fatso and the clotheshorse also blackmailed some other woman.  This substitute judge seems to know what everyone has done, what everyone thinks, and everybody feels compelled to obey him.  This super-judge specifies at tedious length how the obese banker and the fancy dresser are to recompense their many victims (the two women and all the people who bought worthless stocks and bonds) and of course rules that the two women are totally absolved of any wrongdoing.  The government attorney who prosecuted Elsa Laing is also to be investigated by the local authorities, while Judge Hillier is commended for doing his best.  Then the mysterious judge glows and vanishes.  The substitute judge was Jesus Christ!  

A strikingly silly and bad story, with no plot tension, no characters, an idiotic view of theology and of the legal system of the United States, and also a story that tries to exploit readers' disgust at obese people and envy of the wealthy.  If Jesus can come down and stop people from getting defrauded, why isn't he doing anything about German and Soviet imperialism and tyranny?  Jesus, look at the calendar, it's 1941, if you are going to intervene in Earthly affairs, you've got bigger fish to fry!  

Abysmal.           

This embarrassment was reprinted in the Derleth collections Dwellers in Darkness and That is Not Dead.   

"The Graveyard Horror" by Thorp McClusky

When we talked about the January 1941 issue of Weird Tales, I was mesmerized by a Hannes Bok illustration of a tall skinny woman and Bok delivers another such image for this story.  The female lead in Henry Kuttner's "Dragon Moon" was a sort of fish-woman, providing Bok a reason to depict an impossible slender woman, and "The Graveyard Horror" offers him a similar opportunity because the women in this story are having the life sucked out of them by vampires!  

Like Quick's "Edge of the Cliff," "The Graveyard Horror" is about suicide and people who welcome death, but this 16-page story takes a very different attitude towards self-destruction and religion than does Quick's brief tale.

Young Karl and Jorma were in love, but Jorma's father Sven opposed their marriage because Karl's family were a different Protestant sect than his own.  (This story argues that the Christian religion is true and that conflict between different Christian denominations is dangerously counterproductive.)  So Karl committed suicide by tying a weight to himself and jumping in a body of water.  Jorma wasted away within a month, dying though she suffered no apparent disease.  The local undertaker of this small town tells the local doctor, our narrator, in a sort of roundabout way, that he thinks Karl became a vampire because suicides can't go right to heaven and murdered Jorma.  Of course the doctor scoffs.  But when Jorma's sister Hildur begins wasting away and tells people she is looking forward to joining Jorma, the doctor, the mortician, and Hildur's husband spring into action!  The mortician deliberately takes a page from the book of the Roman Catholics and employs an arsenal of crucifixes to attack Karl and Jorma and to defend Hildur.

I don't like the way "The Graveyard Horror" is constructed.  The narrator and the mortician go to Karl's grave three times, the first two times deciding that their suspicions he is a vampire have not been confirmed and so not doing anything.  I find it boring and annoying in stories when people do the same thing again and again.  On the other hand, I like that the vampires in the story don't open their coffins, bust out of their vaults and dig through the dirt of their graves to stalk the night, but issue forth as gaseous or immaterial beings.  And I like that Karl and Jorma, decent sweet people when alive, are foully evil vampires when undead.    

We're going to rate this one marginally good; it is certainly the best of today's stories.  Quick's, which has the virtue of brevity, is second.  

German anthologists Kurt Singer and Manfred Kluge included "The Graveyard Horror" in volumes of ghost, horror and vampire stories.

It turns out I'm not going to get out of this blog post without a lot more copying and pasting of links to all the Thorp McClusky stories we have talked about here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Here they are:  

"The Crawling Horror"

"The Woman in Room 607"

"The Thing on the Floor"
"Kidnappers of Space"

"Monstrosity of Evolution"        

"Black Gold"

"Fothergill's Jug"

"Workshop of the Living Dead"

"The Red God Laughed"

"While Zombies Walked"

"The Considerate Hosts"

"Slaves of the Grey Mold"

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Looking on the bright side, none of these stories is rote uninspired filler; they all do something novel or tweak the formula or make some kind of counterintuitive argument.  Of course, the most entertaining one is the most traditional one, a reflection that stretching yourself and doing something off the beaten path is a risk.

We'll take a break from Weird Tales for our next episode, but the material we examine will likely be quite weird-adjacent.  So stay tuned!

Weird Tales Feb '39: Robert Bloch, August Derleth, and Donald Wandrei

Let's take a gander at the February 1938 issue of Weird Tales, one of the most important of the old pulp magazines.  We've already read Henry Kuttner's story from this issue, "The Transgressor," and a 1933 story by Clark Ashton Smith that is reprinted in this issue, "The Double Shadow."  But we haven't yet experienced the included stories by Robert Bloch, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, so let's tackle them now.  (Though available in book form, I'm reading these stories from a scan of the original magazine.)

"Death is an Elephant" by Robert Bloch (as by Nathan Hindin)

This is a relatively rare Bloch story.  It wasn't reprinted until 1998 in the Arkham House collection of Bloch stories Flowers on the Moon and Other Lunacies; in 2008 Robert M. Price included it in the anthology The Tindalos Cycle.

Promoted on the cover of the magazine as a "thrill tale of the circus" and lifting its title from Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race," "Death is an Elephant" is narrated by the PR man working for a circus and most certainly involves an elephant killing people, though it is an Indian elephant, not an African one.  (Sensitive types should be aware that one of the characters uses the dreaded "N-word" to refer to some Hindu priests, however.)

The narrator and his boss, the owner of the circus, take a trip to the Far East in search of a novelty for the circus and return to America with a Westernized rajah from Malaya ("he greeted us in perfect English"), a squad of priests led by "the High Priestess of the Temple of Ganesha" ("the lissome curves of her perfectly molded body" are "dressed in a robe of white") and The Sacred White Elephant of Jadhore, a huge beast whose "oiled body" is "a leprous silver."  The rajah is eager to make money showing off his elephant, but the green-eyed High Priestess who knows no English, Leela, opposed this venture and is along to make sure the dignity of the elephant is not besmirched.  Tying his story into the Cthulhu Mythos, Bloch has the rajah warn the narrator that Ganesha is an incarnation of Chaugnar Faugn and Lord Tsathoggua, that Ganesha is an "evil" god to whom the Hindus dedicate human sacrifices.  (Frank Belknap Long introduced Chaugnar Faugn in "The Horror From the Hills," which we read ten years ago, and Clark Ashton Smith created Tsathoggua in a story we somehow haven't read yet, "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros.")  And sure enough, on the steamship journey to California, and then back in America, men who interact with Leela and the elephant start turning up dead, apparently of suicide.  The narrator notices other odd behavior--circus performers and staff apparently fascinated by the silver elephant, Leela and the mighty beast caressing each other the way lovers might--and then there's the rajah, so stressed out over something that he keeps himself in a perpetual state of drunkenness.

Tragedy strikes on opening day of the season, one of the expert trapeze artists falling to his death during his performance, another unaccountable suicide; similar deaths before the paying public follow on succeeding days.  Leela must be to blame, somehow hypnotizing people to achieve revenge on those who would toy with and exploit Ganesha's avatar, the Sacred White Elephant!  The narrator takes steps to neutralize Leela, but things don't go according to plan, and before a horrified audience there is a gruesome showdown between Leela and the giant silver beast and the rajah, who realizes he never should have let his need for money drive him to bring the elephant across the sea and risks his own life to end Leela's campaign of destruction. 

This is a good weird story with plenty of sex and violence that builds to a satisfying climax.  Bloch does commit a blunder he or editor Farnsworth Wright should have caught at some point--the contemptuous and bitter Leela is generally stone faced, but smiles on the ship right after the first suicide throws himself overboard.  Then, when she smiles after a suicide at the circus, the narrator says he'd never seen her smile before.  Oops!

I think Bloch could also have improved the ending by just leaving out a superfluous element.  I suppose to add an additional twist, after the climax, Bloch has the narrator tells us that when Leela rode into the big top astride the elephant she was a sort of living corpse, that a guard had already shot her.  This makes us wonder why the dagger the rajah threw at her had the effect of neutralizing her, though I guess we can say it was magical or whatever, that as a Hindu priestess she was vulnerable to a Hindu knife wielded by a rajah.  Also, in the circumstances Bloch describes, it is a little hard to visualize a man just blasting a woman, and hard to believe none of the thousands attending the circus heard the shot.  

It doesn't bother me, but "Death is an Elephant" is also pretty politically incorrect; besides the "N-word," we've got Bloch's depiction of Ganesha as evil and Hindus as practitioners of human sacrifice, and his casting as the hero who redeems himself a totally Anglicized Hindu, which our colleagues who are currently camped out on the quad wearing keffiyehs would probably call "centering whiteness."  

It is not beyond reproach, but I am still giving a thumbs up for "Death is an Elephant."  Maybe I'm just a Yog-Sothery fanboy, but I think I may prefer Bloch's early Lovecraftian stuff to his more famous pun and psychology stories.

"The Drifting Snow" by August Derleth

This story by one of the founders of Arkham House has been reprinted in numerous vampire anthologies as well as Derleth collections.  It is an acceptable horror story with a decent basic gimmick, but feels slow, long and talky.  "Drifting Snow" is one of those stories in which there are too many characters and you have to make an effort to remember who is the nephew and who is betrothed to who and is that guy the servant or the son and so on, but none of that matters because none of the characters has a personality or a motivation, they are just cardboard pieces on the chessboard moving in such a way that allows the author to illustrate the gimmick he came up with.  

A rich old woman lives in a big house with her servants in a pretty remote area of (I guess) Illinois.  [UPDATE: 5/16/2024: I now see that this story takes place in Wisconsin.]  Some of her younger relatives are visiting.  One of her eccentricities is that she insists that the curtains facing west always be kept closed.  

A snowstorm hits--everybody is going to be stuck here a while.  Through the west-facing French doors somebody sees what appears to be people out in the storm--it is so cold and the nearest house is so far away that the young people think somebody should run out there to help these people.

The old lady doesn't want them to go out there, and after some rigamarole where she tries to convince everybody those figures are an optical illusion, she explains the real reason.  The old widow tells a hard-to-believe tale about how her father, long ago, threw out a pretty servant who had been dallying with one of his sons.  There was a terrible snowstorm under way, and Dad regretted his harsh action at once, but the family didn't find this cute chick until it was too late and she was dead, a veritable chickcicle.  Years later, during a snowstorm, through the west windows, Dad saw the dead girl, and ran outside to her--the family eventually found Dad's body in the same spot the girl had died, frozen to death as she had been.  A few years after that people started seeing both of them out the west window, tempting them to join them in a cold death, and so the custom of always keeping those windows obscured began.

Will the young people take this story seriously, or will somebody run out there and become the third member of the snow vampire crew?

I like the gimmick and even the plot structure of this story, but the execution is weak, as I have already suggested.  We'll call "The Drifting Snow" acceptable.

"Giant-Plasm" by Donald Wandrei 

This story by the other founder of Arkham House has never appeared in an anthology, but was reprinted in Donald Wandrei collections.  

Maybe you remember Donald Wandrei's story about a blob monster entitled "Spawn of the Sea."  Maybe you remember Donald Wandrei's other story about a blob monster called "The Destroying Horde."  Well, blobapalooza continues today with "Giant-Plasm," another story from Wandrei about a blob monster.

"Giant-Plasm" is the diary of a passenger on a ship that mysteriously sinks in the Pacific, perhaps due to a tsunami spawned by an undersea earthquake, far from any charted land.  A small number of people--the writer, a few rough tough men, and an attractive woman--survive the disaster, and for days, low on food and water, they drift on a boat--a "dory"--having interpersonal squabbles and suffering psychological stresses and gazing up at the stars at night and across the barren sea during the day and so forth.  Wandrei handles this adventure story material pretty well.

Eventually they get to a mysterious uncharted island with odd plants and structures on it.  Part of the plot involves the brave and resourceful but also greedy and lustful senior member of the survivors and his competition for the woman with the diarist.  The important, or at least the SF, part of the plot involves strange mounds the diarist discovers on the island while looking for firewood and food.  The narrator, based on various clues, suspects this island, thousands of years ago, sank and then in the last few years rose again.  Even more mind-blowing is that investigation of those mounds suggests that in ancient times an alien space ship crashed on the island and three aliens in space suits--beings dozens of feet tall!--survived the crash, but were severely injured.  These interstellar travelers lived long enough to build a queer structure that the narrator finds inexplicable.  This structure is the cradle or incubator or skeleton of a blob monster bigger than the dory.  When the blob reveals itself to be very dangerous the diarist wants to leave the island tout suite, but the greedy sailor wants to stick around to try to collect specimens of the alien metal from which the alien space suits are made.  Only the diarist and the woman escape the island alive.

"Giant-Plasm" may be a little on the slow side, but the adventure elements and the fights are engaging, and there is some pretty disgusting gore when the blob starts killing people.  Then we have the sense-of-wonder business with the giant alien space suits and the undecipherable apparatus that lies under the killer blob, which isn't bad.  I like this story.

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All three of today's stories have good weird or science fiction gimmicks, and Bloch and Wandrei manage to build good stories around their gimmicks by coming up with characters who have emotions, motives, relationships, and personalities and offering multiple disturbing scenes of bitter conflict and of gruesome death.  Derleth, a busy man who threw off half-baked stories to finance his various ventures, didn't make the effort to populate his story with believable or interesting characters, and his story suffers as a result.

When we take into account the fact that the Clark Ashton Smith story in this issue is great, and that the issue includes a good Virgil Finlay illustration of the Sacred White Elephant of Jadhore and its lover Leela, we have to conclude that this is a highly recommendable issue of Weird Tales--check it out, weirdies!

Nightmare stories by B. Stoker, H. B. Cave, D. Wandrei and N. S. Bond

In the last thrilling episode of MPorcius Fiction Log we talked about a story by Edmond Hamilton from a 1938 issue of Weird Tales that would be reprinted in the 1993 anthology edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Weinberg entitled To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare.  This volume is available for us cheapos at the internet archive, so let's borrow it and check out some more stories that won the favor of Messrs. D, G and W. 

We've actually already read a bunch of things Dziemianowicz and company selected for To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare, and here are the linkerinos to prove it:

"The Black Stone" by Robert E. Howard     
"Ubbo-Sathla" by Clark Ashton Smith
"Scarlet Dream" by C. L. Moore
"The Dreams in the Witch-House" by H. P. Lovecraft 
"The Isle of the Sleeper" by Edmond Hamilton
"The Unspeakable Betrothal" by Robert Bloch  
"Perchance to Dream" by Charles Beaumont

(Does anybody ever click these links?  The interns are always bitching about how long it takes them to copy and paste these links sections together, and I assure them that they are doing God's work, but maybe their time would be better spent out in the yard pulling weeds and stomping on spotted lanternflies or something.  Hell, probably my time would be better spent doing such things.)

At like 500 pages, To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare is full of stories new to me that look like they are worth reading, and today we'll explore four of them, tales by the inventor of the immortal Count Dracula, Bram Stoker; a guy I suspect is overrated, Hugh B. Cave; intimate associate of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, Donald Wandrei; and finally a guy I think I have only ever read one story by, but who has a long list of published SF stories, Nelson S. Bond.

"A Dream of Red Hands" by Bram Stoker (1894)

Like everybody, I love Dracula, and I actually think about Dracula all the time, having read it multiple times.  I can still remember sitting in the New York Public Library periodical room as a grad student, reading Dracula when I was supposed to be absorbing some bloodless, impotent and sleep-inducing academic garbage from some sterile mind-numbing scholarly journal.  My poor parents, tricked by my standardized test scores into thinking I was some kind of genius, financed my residence in Manhattan, where, instead of laying the foundations of a career in academia, I spent my time playing vanilla Angband, sitting by the river watching ships and birds go by, and eating the world's finest pizza, bagels and hot dogs.  Time well spent!

(We read a short story by Stoker, "The Judge's House," back in 2021 when we talked about the March 1935 issue of Weird Tales.)

Here in "A Dream of Red Hands" we have a Christian story of redemption.  Stoker's narrator is a gentleman and a writer who develops a friendship with a kind and generous working man who lives alone in a hut on the moor.  One day the narrator comes calling to find the worker quite ill.  The sick man says he can't sleep because God is punishing him with a terrible dream!  Eventually the narrator learns the dream and its genesis.  Years ago the worker was in love with some chick, and some scoundrel of a gentleman seduced her and ruined her life, and, in a sort of fit triggered by the rascal speaking disparagingly of the woman he had taken advantage of, the worker killed the gentleman and hid the body.  Now the worker knows he is barred from heaven; in the dream that has been plaguing him, angels keep him from entering paradise because his bloody hands make filthy the white raiment worn by those permitted to pass through the pearly gates.

The narrator assures the man that God is merciful and if he truly repents and does good deeds he will, after all, be permitted to enter heaven.  The murderer moves away, and years later, by coincidence, the narrator is close to the scene when the worker sacrifices himself to save a fellow worker during an industrial accident.  The narrator sees the murderer's corpse; the circumstances of the accident have bleached the man's hands white, and the narrator is sure the man has been forgiven by God.

A well-written story, and one ripe for class and gender analysis at the hands of historians and social scientists for its depiction of Victorian attitudes about class (among other things, we see one gentleman outrageously abuse members of the working class and another act as a wise guide to them) and religion.

It looks like "A Dream of Red Hands" made its debut in the weekly newspaper The Sketch and has seen book publication in the oft-reprinted collection Dracula's Guest and other Stoker collections.

"The Watcher in the Green Room" by Hugh B. Cave (1933) 

It looks like I've read nine stories by Cave over the course of this blog's hideous life.  (JFC with the links again.)  

"From the Lower Deep"

"The City of Crawling Death" ↓

"The Crawling Curse" ↑

"The Black Gargoyle"

"Brotherhood of Blood" ↑    

"The Cult of the White Ape" 

"The Isle of Dark Magic" 

"The Door Below" 

"Ladies in Waiting" 

Of these nine stories I only gave two positive reviews, but only one received a clear cut condemnation; running the numbers shows Cave's record to be better than I recalled; I guess my recollection is still dominated by my bad experience with a late novel of Cave's which I read before this blog sprang from my pate like Athena from the head of Zeus.  We'll see how today's Cave story, "The Watcher in the Green Room," which made its debut in an issue of Weird Tales with a Margaret Brundage BDSM cover and a Conan story with a good setting and good villains, affects my opinion of Cave's body of work. 

Well, on the first page of the story I am reminded that I don't like Cave's writing style; in this story he tries to be fancy and elaborate but sentences like this one end ups being clunky:

"He stood staring, apparently unaware that the hour was midnight and that the rain which had fallen steadily since early evening had made of him a drenched, disheveled street-walker."

(Rain doesn't make you a street-walker, for one thing, and how would this guy's lack of awareness of the time be made apparent to others by the fact that he is staring?  Is it abnormal to stare at certain times of the day?  Are there certain behaviors we expect of people at midnight?  Cave would be better off just straightforwardly telling us what he wants us to know instead of adding in superfluous phrases and concepts.)

On the other hand, the plot of "The Watcher in the Green Room" is not bad, and there are some good images.  Our "plump, stumpy" protagonist, Anthony Kolitt, lives in a city in an upstairs apartment--through the window over his bed comes green light from a neon sign on a nearby roof; this green light illuminates and casts shadows from Kolitt's oversized bureau, which we quickly learn is where Kollit has hidden the body of the complaining wife he murdered five days ago.  He thinks of the bureau, and/or the shadows it casts at night, as a "beast" which has swallowed up his annoying spouse and even as a friend.

The narrative describes Kollit's psychological state as he plots to escape the apartment with the body and has to deal with visits from his concerned neighbors--he told them that his wife left him and they are worried about his heavy drinking.  Most of these neighbors Cave makes ethnic stereotypes, I guess some kind of reflection of life in the melting pots/glorious mosaics that are American cities (perhaps a  sarcastic or derisive one--I don't know much about Cave, but we know that his more famous Lovecraft was no fan of ethnic diversity.)  The most significant neighbor is a "Latin" "psychopathist" whom it is hinted may be a homosexual.  This guy, Bellini, foreshadows the story's gory climax by cautioning Kollit not to imagine that the bureau is an animal, as one's imagination, he warns, can bring to life dangerous monsters.

Also noteworthy are slight "meta" elements of "The Watcher in the Green Room"; Kolitt goes out and sees a movie about a wizard or mad scientist who summons a monster which destroys him, Kollit listens to a scary drama on the radio and reads a "weird detective" story.  This consumption of genre fiction, in concert with the effects of booze and Kollit's fears of being found out by the cops, energizes his imagination to summon his own doom.

IMHO, Cave messes up the ending of the story a little.  We know from early on that Mrs. Kolitt's body is in the bureau, so the real shock ending is that a monster appears, eats half of Kolitt and then climbs out Kollit's window.  But instead of making this incredible event the focus of the final scene, Cave extends the story further to include a scene of Bellini and the cops discovering the wife's dismembered corpse, and the story's final line is "It is his wife," as if this is a shocking revelation, when it is not at all a surprise to us readers.  (If I was Cave's editor, I would have told him to make the Bellini-and-police  scene a foreword, so the story would end with the discovery of Kollit's half-eaten body and the trail of green slime leading out the window.)  

I'll call this one acceptable.  "The Watcher in the Green Room" would go on to be included in Cave collections as well as Christine Campbell Thomson's 1934 hardcover anthology Terror by Night and a 1952 issue of Donald Wollheim's Avon Fantasy Reader.        

You might know "The Witch from Hell's Kitchen" as "The House of Arabu"

"The Lady in Gray" by Donald Wandrei (1933)

The records suggest I have read 23 stories (kaboom!) by Donald Wandrei, and I may be courting a labor dispute here, but, hey, behold these links!

"Raiders of the Universes" ↑

"Fire Vampires" ↑

"Colossus" ↑

"Something from Above" ↑

"The Red Brain" ↑

"The Painted Mirror" ↑

"The Tree-Men of M'Bwa" ↑

"The Lives of Alfred Kramer" ↑

"Spawn of the Sea" ↑

"The Destroying Horde" ↑

"Infinity Zero" ↓

"Black Fog"

"Earth Minus"

"Life Current" ↑

"The Rod and the Staff" ↑

"Come Clean"

"Dramatic Touch"

"The Man Who Never Lived" ↓

"The Atom Smasher" 

"The Blinding Shadows" ↑

"The Whisperers" ↓

"Colossus Eternal" ↑

"Uneasy Lie the Drowned" ↑ 

Look at all those upwards-facing arrows!  I guess I'm a big Wandrei fan!  Figures don't lie!  

Whereas I found Cave's "The Watcher in the Green Room" poorly written but supplied with a good plot, I'm afraid "The Lady in Gray" is well-written, with many terrific images, but has a slight plot.  

The narrator tells us he is about to commit suicide.  He relates how all his life he has had terrible terrible dreams, and how he has tried a multitude of drugs and therapies and consulted shrinks all over America and Europe in an effort to free himself from these nightmares, to no avail.  Wandrei does a good job succinctly summarizing these dreams--with a minimum of verbiage, he summons up exciting, vivid visions.  (It is noteworthy that Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian staples figure in the dreams--I guess this story is set in the "Cthulhu Mythos.")  

The narrator fell in love with and became engaged to a woman with a gray personality and gray eyes named Miriam (you know, like Felix's adorable girlfriend, who always seems so much more suitable a life partner than the somewhat annoying Gloria.)  Miriam was killed in a plane crash the day before their wedding was to be held, and then the narrator started having dreams about her in which he and she travel in impossible ways to horrible alien environments, even interacting with a sort of monstrous slug or worm.  When the narrator awakes he is greeted by physical evidence that these dreams have been in some sense real, that he really has been to slimy seas and met a huge disgusting worm with a sort of face.  Upon awakening from the most recent of these dreams, the narrator found Miriam's animated corpse sitting beside his bed, which triggers his determination to slay himself.  I guess he and Miriam will now spend eternity together, exploring the universe via esoteric means.

I guess in the end I'm giving this one a marginal "good" grade, seeing as it is full of so many good sentences and striking images.  I kind of wish more was going on, however, or that whatever is going ono was more clear to my dim understanding.    

"The Lady in Gray" first saw print in an issue of Weird Tales with one of my favorite Brundage covers; a masterpiece of Yellow Peril drama with better composition and use of color that Brundage's average.  The story would go on to be included in, among other places, the Donald Wandrei collection The Eye and the Finger and Ramsey Campbell's Uncanny Banquet.

"Prescience" by Nelson S. Bond (1941)

I think of Bond, Nelson S. Bond, when people offhandedly assert that before such and such a date SF lacked strong female characters, because, during World War II, Bond published a series of three stories starring an admirable woman who is leader of her tribe in a post-apocalyptic America; I read one of these stories, "Magic City," an Astounding cover story, back in the early days of this here blog.  "Magic City" is in fact the only Bond story I've ever read--until today, when we read a Bond tale from John W. Campbell, Jr.'s other famous and important magazine, Unknown. "Prescience" debuted alongside Kuttner and Moore's "A Gnome There Was," and would be reprinted in an anthology collecting "the greatest stories" from Unknown.

Dr. Barton, psychiatrist, is having a case of the Mondays!  He is sick of his job, sick of dealing with neurotics all day, every day.  "They're fools--the whole lot of them!" he vents to his nurse.  You see, Barton knows that all neuroses stem from fear--specifically, fear of the afterlife, and that this is foolishness, because there is no need to fear the afterlife.

At the end of the day, a working-class woman comes to see Dr. Barton; nearly all of Barton's patients are middle-class, and in his tirade to his nurse he even made the claim that "the laboring classes of our race," like "'backward' or 'pagan' people" rarely suffer neuroses because they have no fear of the afterlife, so this housekeeper, Mrs. Williams, is an unusual case.  Williams tells the shrink that she often has prescient dreams, that during the course of her days she often realizes that the quite ordinary event she is living through is proceeding exactly as something experienced in a recent dream.  As the events are occurring in real life, she can't change her course of action, but feels compelled to do precisely what she did in the predictive dream. 

Barton doesn't take this woman too seriously, thinking she is just experiencing the very common phenomenon of deja vu.  However, he decides to conduct a little experiment on Williams, feeling free to take unusual measures with her because she lacks social standing and the ability to damage his reputation.  He hypnotizes her, making her think she is asleep, and she has one of her prescient dreams, and in her trance describes it to him.  The dream, however, presages no quotidian event, but a devastating fire at the house where she works.  As she describes climbing out onto the fire escape, Barton orders her to return into the burning house, insisting the fire is a mere illusion and harmless.  Under his hypnotic influence, Williams, in her dream, climbs back into the burning building and chillingly describes the agony of burning to death and then the behavior of the demons and the damned in Hell!  

Barton finds Williams' description of death and the afterlife curious, but unimportant.  He releases the woman from her trance; as usual, she remembers none of what she dreamed.  Barton sends her home, figuring he has cured her.  But the next day he reads a story in the newspaper--Williams has died in a house fire!  Witnesses report seeing her escape the conflagration and then climb back into the burning house to be killed!  Barton realizes that Hell is real and he goes insane!

This is a pretty good story; maybe Bond deserves more screen time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

**********

It looks like Dziemianowicz, Weinberg and Greenberg made good selections for this anthology, performing a service for their clients at Barnes & Noble and SF fans everywhere.  We'll read more stories from To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare soon.

(But before we part, one final link!  To the trailer for the mediocre 1968 giallo Nude... si muore, a movie that is pretty disappointing as a whole, but has a good sex-and-violence opening and perhaps my favorite giallo vocal theme, a fast-paced song (perhaps inspired by the theme of the Batman TV show) with English lyrics all about nightmares.  I highly recommend the first five minutes of Nude... si muore, but after the opening credits have rolled it's a whole lotta zzzzzzzzzz....)