Weird Tales, Jan '44: M W Wellman, H Bok, N S Bond & R Bradbury

There's nothing wrong with skipping around a little bit while we pursue our eldritch endeavor of trying to read at least one story from every issue of Weird Tales.  So let's take a little break from 1927 and look at the January 1944 issue of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual.  The cover of this issue was reused for the July 1954 issue, and I'm pretty sure I also saw it on some recent vampire anthology, but I can't recall the title of that recent volume.  In the letters column we have jocular biographical sketches from Nelson S. Bond (useless banal and juvenile jokes) and Frank Belknap Long (Long takes the task seriously and tells us tidbits about his ancestors, early life, and his evolving writing career.)  Bond and Long have stories in this issue--we read Long's story like two years ago, but we'll be reading Bond's today, plus the contributions of Southerner Manly Wade Wellman, beloved draughtsman Hannes Bok, and one of the mainstream's favorite speculative fiction writers, Ray Bradbury.  

(If, like me, you suffer from a congenital distrust of secondary sources, don't listen to what I have to say about these stories and instead read them yourself at this link.)

"The Golden Goblins" by Manly Wade Wellman 

This is the second John Thunstone story; we read the first, "The Third Cry of Legba," back in August.  

A successful college man, an honor student and captain of the basketball team, comes to visit John Thunstone.  Long Spear is this paragon's name, and he is a Native American, and though he wears a fashionable business suit and is a fraternity man he still worships the gods of his ancestors.   Long Spear asks Thunstone to keep for him an ancient artifact, a mysterious something given to his tribe (Long Spear is current chief) ages ago by the gods.  Even Long Spear doesn't know what the thing, bound up inside many layer of rawhide coverings, is, but it is his sacred duty to protect it, and somebody is after it!  This artifact, whatever it is, keeps Long Spear's tribe united, and if the white man gets it, his tribe will be more easily abused by the pale faces.  Long Spear even knows which white man is after the mystery object--Barton Siddons, a man who has the ear of Congressmen and is trying to get Long Spear's tribe's worship forbidden.  

Siddons approaches Thunstone that very day, at a restaurant.  These two men talk about Long Spear's tribe.  Siddons accuses the tribe of human sacrifice, and Thunstone counters that it has been like 100 years since they sacrificed anybody.  Thunstone can tell that Siddons doesn't really care about stopping human sacrifice or anything like that--Siddons wants to steal the mineral wealth that lies under the tribe's reservation!

Later, after Long Spear and Thunstone conduct a ceremony with the mystery object (Long Spear isn't just chief of his tribe, but also medicine man) and Long Spear gets a premonition of danger, Siddons, having crept into Thunstone's flat, knocks Thunstone out and ties him up.  As Thunstone watches, Siddons unwraps the bundle containing the artifact, peeling off layer after layer, including a layer that consists of a white person's scalp!  Further down, beyond all the hides, is a sort of brick or clay box, and inside the box a little clay vase.  And in the vase--a little gold figure of a warrior.  And another, and another.  An entire army of little fighting men armed with spears, clad in feather headdresses, more than can physically fit in the tiny vase, which must be a portal to another universe or something like that.  The little models come to life, kill Siddons, free Thunstone, and return to the vase.

"The Golden Goblins" is a lot like Raiders of the Lost Ark, and, somewhat amazingly, Long Spear actually mentions The Ark of the Covenant at one point in the story.  In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the hero does surprisingly little substantive in regards to the plot, and in the climax doesn't defeat the enemies or solve a problem or whatever, but just observes a supernatural phenomena, and Thunstone performs the same function here.  In the Spielberg film, we learn that the God of the Jews is real and will smite those who oppress God's chosen people.  In "The Golden Goblins," we learn that the gods of a Native American tribe are real and will smite those who seek to oppress the Indians.

It is sort of interesting to see such a pro-Indian story--Thunstone even says that Native American religion is as good as Christianity.  Compare this to Cornell Woolrich's "The Moon of Montezuma," which we just read, in which the religion of the Native Americans is explicitly compared to Christianity and found to be wanting, to be no more than murder and human sacrifice.  Whether today's diversity celebrators would like "The Golden Goblins," I don't know, they may find the story patronizing--Thunstome even calls Long Spear "a credit to any race."

"The Golden Goblins" is pretty well-written and the supernatural element is good, but I'm grading it just acceptable.  The cardboard archetype characters--the Indian who beats the white man at the white man's game but is also 100% committed to his own vibrant authentic nonwhite traditions; the white man whose virtue and role in the story consist solely of validating everything about the nonwhite exemplar; and the rapacious white racist--don't do much of anything, just stand there exuding their virtue or their evil.

"The Golden Goblins" has reappeared in Wellman collections and, like all four of today's stories, in the May 1944 Canadian edition of Weird Tales.

"Dimensional Doors" by Hannes Bok

Bok's name appears on the cover of that Canadian edition of Weird Tales, but it doesn't seem that "Dimensional Doors" was ever printed in a book.  Well, let's see what it is all about.  In the American magazine we are reading, "Dimensional Doors" is accompanied by a full page drawing by Bok of a young man with nice hair hanging out with a strange long-necked monster.

Danny is at a crowded bar when he is approached by a "husky" young man with a big ring with a glimmering red jewel in it.  Will Danny help him?  Will Danny take the ring?  The guy is obviously scared, says he is being followed.  Danny isn't that interested in taking the ring, but offers to hear the man's story, and the nervous man, so nervous he is shaking, tells his tale, which Bok relates in the third person. 

Eddie dropped out of school and left home and found himself, after an illness, out of work and with no place to stay.  He hasn't eaten in three days when a strange guy, six feet eight inches tall with an alien accent and a face that reminds Eddie of a cat, approaches him.  Aslanvik offers Eddie a place to sleep and hopes for a job, takes him to an apartment in a former industrial building, an apartment with elaborate weird decor, like the decor of an alien world where the animals are different than here, where even the people are different!  

Aslanvik feeds Eddie, then tells him the job he has to offer him entails adventure, even danger.  He takes Eddie to a room full of elaborately carved canvases (one such appears in Bok's illustration for his story) that turn out to be portals to other worlds, each activated by a jewel in a ring.  Aslanvik wants Eddie to do a little housework in this place, and, more importantly, to lock the portals after he has passed through them and unlock them at a set time so he can return.  If the portals are left open, alien monsters might come to Earth, and nobody wants that!  Aslanvik is some kind of merchant or bandit, brings valuable items from other worlds here to Earth to sell.

The rest of the story follows Eddie's new life and his efforts to escape it, to sneak or brazen his way past such obstacles as Aslanvik's scrutiny and his alien watch-monsters.  Will Eddie escape?  Or die in the attempt? Or remain Aslanvik's slave forever?  Knowing Bok was gay, one wonders if this story maybe symbolizes some kind of abusive or predatory homosexual relationship--two men living together in an old elaborately furnished business building that smells of incense, one keeping house and the other engaged in a strange business involving art and interior design, keeping the subordinate member of the couple under his thumb with all-too-believable threats.

"Dimensional Doors" is well-written and I like the plot--thumbs up!  It is too bad this story never got into an anthology and so is not that widely available.  Further proof that reading these old magazines is worthwhile, though no such proof is necessary--I consider it self-evident that reading these magazines is worthwhile.   

"The Master of Cotswold" by Nelson S. Bond 

I guess people liked Nelson S. Bond, because his name is emblazoned on the very top of this issue of Dorothy McIlwraith's magazine.  Do I like Nelson S. Bond?  Survey says....

"Magic City"                          "marginally positive"

"Prescience"                           "pretty good"

"To People a New World"      "Lame twist ending...little plot...thumbs down"

"Pipeline to Paradise"            "acceptable filler"

"The Cunning of the Beast"   "thumbs down"

It looks like Nelson S. Bond's score here at MPorcius Fiction Log is teetering on a knife edge, with two pluses, two minuses and a zero.  It looks like "The Master of the Cotswold" may be the deciding factor in this man's fate as he sits before the merciless court of MPFL. 

When I was working at a research center at a public university, my boss, the director of the center, who used the research grants for her personal expenses and so was rolling in the moolah, used to brag about her fancy ass vacations, and would tell us "Oh, how I love The Cotswolds" and shit like that.  One of my jobs as a "research assistant" was to help the boss plan her vacations, and I would have to call hotels and theatres and so forth to get reservations and all that.  You'll be happy to hear I did a shit job as a travel agent.  I also did a shit job trying to get her granddaughter's poetry bragging about these vacations into The New Yorker.  I did a good job taking long lunches with the pinko girls working in the office, though.  That is where I shone, hanging out in Midtown restaurants for hours, trying to convince these young women that the Fulan Gong were the innocent victims of the Chinese Communist Party and not the reverse as they believed.

Anyway, the American narrator of Bond's story, like my corrupt boss of twenty-odd years ago, goes on vacation from New York to the Cotswolds.  "The Master of Cotswold" is a series of his diary entries penned by this guy, a novelist.  He rents a dilapidated manor house in the Cotswolds which has an abandoned limestone quarry on its grounds.  He has the place repaired, furnishes it, hires a London family to be his servants, etc.  The locals warn him not to be too "inquisitive," and object when he has an old well uncovered.  After taking all the rocks and the metal slab off the ancient well, our narrator starts hearing pipe music at night, music that disturbs his sleep, even seems to affect his psychology.  Mysterious creatures start tearing up the lawn, and one of the servants turns up dead.  The pipes get louder and louder and more upsetting every night.  More people die as they try to seal up the well, and then comes the reveal and the climax--it is Pan who came out of the well, a god who can control animals and plants and offer men one night of blissful union with nature, a night of hedonistic joy that is paid for with a horrible death.

Everything that happens in "The Master of Cotswold" is predictable and obvious, but Bond does a professional job in writing the story.  He throws around architectural terms and references to 18th-century English luminaries like Hogarth, Goldsmith, and Sterne, guys I read and read about years ago when I was laboring under the fantasy that I might someday become a college professor, and this adds a little something to Bond's tale.  I can moderately recommend "The Master of Cotswold."

"The Master of Cotswold" is included in the Bond collection Mr. Mergenthwirker's Lobblies and Other Fantastic Tales and in the 60th anniversary Arkham House anthology, Arkham's Masters of Horror.

"The Sea Shell" by Ray Bradbury

So, today we've had a story about a white racist who gets killed by Native American gods, a story about a man down on his luck who is enslaved by some kind of interdimensional desperado, and a story about an American who foolishly summons a cruel god and gets himself and at least four innocent English people killed.  And what does Ray Bradbury bring us?  A sappy story about how you should enjoy yourself when you are young.

Johnny is a Midwestern boy, age eleven.  He is sick, and has to stay in bed.  Impatiently, he watches through his window at the neighborhood kids out there, who play all day.  The doctor gives him a sea shell, and he holds it to his ear and hears the ocean.  Never having seen the ocean, he becomes obsessed with seeing the sea, wants to go to the shore, which is like two days drive away.  He wants to go to the ocean now, but of course Dad won't be able to take off from work for a while.  Mom talks about impatience, about how impatient children are, how part of becoming an adult is learning patience.  But she also urges Johnny to enjoy himself while he is young, recognizing that adults lose some capacity to enjoy themselves.  

Johnny begins hearing voices through the shell, beckoning him.  Eventually he is transported to the sea by the shell, and when Mom comes to his room, she finds his bed empty, except for the shell.  When she holds the shell to her ear, she can hear her son playing in the surf.

"The Sea Shell" is well-written, but it feels like filler, sentimental "nice" filler instead of blood and guts horror filler, though I suppose Bradbury's story is "bittersweet," as it recognizes the inevitable tragedy of having to grow up, and maybe we are supposed to think of how scared Mom and Dad are going to be that their kid disappeared and nobody will believe that he is now in (I guess) California, 1500 miles away.  Will they ever see him again?  We're grading "The Sea Shell" acceptable.

Peter Haining and some continental European and Japanese editors included "The Sea Shell" in anthologies in the 20th century, but it doesn't look like the story was included in any Bradbury collections until the 21st century.

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A good issue!  Our weird journey through 1944 will be a smooth and comfortable one if every issue is as good as this January one!

Frank Belknap Long: "The Dog-Eared God," "The Man Who Died Twice," and "The Black Druid"

Let's continue our readings of 1920s weird fiction with three stories by Frank Belknap Long, one of H. P. Lovecraft's more intimate associates.  We'll be venturing beyond Weird Tales today, and even into 1930, as we hunt for stories by Long we haven't already read--we've already read a lot of them!

Today's stories have all been reprinted in books, but I'm reading the original magazine versions in scans at the internet archive, and you can too by just clicking these handy dandy links:

"The Dog-Eared God"  "The Man Who Died Twice"  "The Black Druid"

 "The Dog-Eared God" (1926)

We get the ethnic stereotypes right out of the gate today as the narrator of "The Dog-Eared God" tells us about his friend, a short and hideous neurotic New York Jew with a hook nose.  Our protagonist's pal is a college professor and he has an elaborate hobby--an amateur Egyptologist, he has smuggled 83 mummies into Gotham and destroyed them one by one in his mansion on Riverside Drive in the course of performing experiments on them.

The professor shows the narrator his latest acquisition, a mummy of strange proportions.  The prof shares with our narrator one of his theories--that the animal-headed gods of the Egyptians were based on real beings, members of a nonhuman intelligent race who lived upon the Earth long ago.

Somewhat ridiculously, the professor proposes that he and the narrator sleep in the room with the strange mummy.  I guess this is an experiment?  Long could have come up with a more plausible reason for the men to be asleep in the room with the mummy, like having them fall asleep while translating boring documents late into the night or after drinking to celebrate the acquisition of this bizarre over-sized and queerly-shaped mummy. 

Anyway, the narrator wakes up in the middle of the night and has a vision that indicates that, indeed, in ancient Egypt, lived people with the heads of lizards and other beasts.  The mummy here in the professor's mansion was their king and god, a cruel ruler from outer space who drank people's blood and devoured virgins.  The narrator observes, in his vision, the ceremony at which the space monster-god was buried, and at which the king's resurrection was predicted.

Our guy then observes that resurrection as the mummified alien, who has an elephant nose in the center of its bat-face and big dog ears to either side of it, busts out of its wrappings and attacks the prof.  The prof is briefly thrilled to see his theory proven correct, but has little time to celebrate as the monster god breathes fire on him, killing him and setting the whole place aflame.  The narrator runs out of the house screaming, at a subway station jumping the turnstile and boarding a train without paying.  The next day he reads about the fire in the paper--it seems that the firemen had a hard time putting out the blaze because dozens of people who concealed their heads under hoods kept trying to get into the burning building!  The animal-headed people theorized by the professor are still alive, living in concealment in New York City!  

Though ridiculous, this story is a lot of fun--thumbs up!  Professional scholars of the weird also like it--you can find it in the 2022 volume Weird Tales: Best of the Early Years: 1926-27 (edited by Kaye Lynne Booth and Jonathan Maberry) and 2026's Weird Tales Volume One: The Early Years (edited by Stephen Jones.)  "The Dog-Eare God" also appeared in 2000's Arkham's Masters of Horror: A 60th Anniversary Anthology Retrospective of the First 30 Years of Arkham House.

"The Man Who Died Twice" (1927)

Here's today's non-WT story.  "The Man Who Died Twice" first haunted the material world in Ghost Stories, a magazine that endured from 1926 to 1931.  I don't know if I have ever read a story from this magazine before; some of the covers are pretty good, with attractive women being menaced by skeletons, the devil, a clown, a cobra, and--of course--figures that look like freshly laundered white sheets, but I can't recognize hardly any of the names on the table of contents pages.  One day we may dig through a (virtual) stack of these magazines to read stories by people we know, like Ray Cummings, who has "They Hanged a Phantom for Murder" in the same issue that presents Long's" "The Man Who Died Twice," Robert E. Howard, who has a boxing story, "The Apparition in the Prize Ring," in a 1929 issue under a pen name, and Hugh B. Cave, who appears in a 1931 ish with "The Strange Case of No. 7."

Hazlitt walks into the office of the insurance company where he has worked for twenty years, and, in his own mind, at least, been essential to the building of the firm to its current state.  He sees another man at his desk, dictating to a secretary!  Has he been let go?  Enraged, Hazlitt busts into the boss's office, where the boss and three other bigwigs are smoking and talking over some business.  He yells at the boss, insults him, but the boss and the other executives just ignore Hazlitt.  Hazlitt goes so far as to strike the boss in the face, but the boss just touches his chin and remarks that he has felt a sudden pain.  The business talk resumes, and, humiliated, Hazlitt sobs and then returns home, despondent, to face the wife.  Similarly, the wife--and a man in the apartment with her!-- ignores Hazlitt.  Hazlitt realizes, remembers, he is a ghost, that he died six months ago!  How did Hazlitt die?  His wife poisoned him!  He seeks revenge, but when he tries to strangle the bitch, she feels a pain in her neck and throat, but can still breathe.  Hazlitt exerts all his strength, and his diabolical widow senses that somehow the man she promised to have and to hold in sickness and in health, is punishing her, but Hazlitt exhausts his ectoplasmic strength and doesn't even come close to slaying his killer.

Hazlitt gives up and walks the streets.  He sees a child stupidly standing in the middle of the street, about to get hit by a car.  Hazlitt runs at the child, pushes him to safety, and is himself struck by the car and killed, his soul sent to its final rest.  The woman driving the car saw Hazlitt briefly as she ran him over, and jumps out of the car to look for the dead or wounded man, by passersby tell her she has hit no one and conclude she is "batty."

This is a good story up until the end; Long describes Hazlitt's wild emotions in a way that is compelling and amusing.  And then there is the wife:

...standing above him with a spoon, and a bottle in her hand, on which was a skull and crossbones....She bent and forced the spoon between his teeth. “I don't love you,” she laughed shrilly. 

I also like the colloquialisms Long's characters utter, like "I hope he chokes" and "She'll think I'm a jellyfish."  

Stories in which people express and act upon passion are entertaining, even if, as here, people's dialogue and behavior reminds you of Looney Tunes.

It feels like Long didn't know how to end the story, however.  Hazlitt walks down the street, people again and again passing through him, but then he can touch a little boy to save him and get hit hard enough by a car to be slain?  And after being invisible the whole story, even to people he is physically assaulting, he can be seen by the female motorist?  These inconsistencies are a little hard to take.       

 I still like "The Man Who Died Twice", even if the ending doesn't quite work.  Endings are hard.

"The Man Who Died Twice" had to wait until the year 2000 to rematerialize in an anthology of stories from Ghost Stories, and it was also included in 2010's huge (1100 pages!) volume of Long stories from Centipede Press.

"The Black Druid" (1930)

Long ago, I read Edmond Hamilton's "The Death Lord" from the July 1930 issue of Weird Tales, but I skipped the Long and Donald Wandrei contributions to the issue.  Well, today we fill in one of those gaps by reading Long's "The Black Druid," which has been reprinted in multiple Long collections and anthologies with cool covers.

Benefield is a New Yorker and an archaeologist who has been around the world, explored the Egyptian pyramids and read forbidden books in China and all that sort of thing.  His colleagues consider him something of a crank because he seems to believe in vampires and voodoo.  He also dresses sloppily and unfashionably, and has an unhappy marriage and money troubles.  

He consults a book at the library, reads a passage that suggests the Druids invested magical power into all they touched, so that it was dangerous for people to come into contact with any item or article touched by a Druid.

When Benefield makes to leave the library he finds his overcoat is on a different hook--someone must have moved it.  On the subway ride home his face feels odd, and people are looking at him curiously.  He touches his face and it is wet, slimy--some goop must have dripped down onto him from a drain or a roof or something.  He hurries homewards and in a reflection in the glass of the door to his building he sees that his face has changed, become bestial!  His hands likewise are like those of an animal, all claws and hair!  Even his mind has unbidden thoughts, as if another being's consciousness is invading his mind!  He suddenly realizes his overcoat is causing this transformation.  He throws the coat off and enters the building and proceeds to his apartment, his appearance being back to normal.   

The next morning his wife tells him a story a neighbor told her.  Last night a mysterious figure climbed into the neighbor's apartment via the window, went out the door and, down by the entrance, picked up and donned an overcoat and walked off with it.  This burglar or whatever he was had odd pointy ears.

I guess we are to think Druids are living secretively in New York and one of them accidentally took Benefield's overcoat because it looked like his, leaving the professor with the Druid's coat.  The Druid than used his magic to find his coat.

It is a little annoying that a guy reads about a vanishingly rare phenomenon that almost nobody in the world knows about and then, amazingly, by coincidence, he experiences it like ten minutes later.  Maybe we are to think the Druid, lurking in the library, heard Benefield request that particular book and so set out to lay a trap for him, and then retrieved the coat when the trap failed?  Long also makes a lot out of the fact that Benefield is a Saxon, the mortal enemy of the Celtic druids, suggesting he is able to resist the conquest of his mind and throw off the overcoat because his blood is that of those who defeated the Celts.  Maybe the Druid sensed Benefield's ethnicity and sought to attack him because of it?

This caper feels a little clunky and confusing; I'm calling this one merely acceptable. 

The Fifteenth Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories reprints
Anthony Boucher's "They Bite," which we read back in 2019.

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These stories really exercise your suspension-of-disbelief muscles, but "The Dog-Eared God" and "The Man Who Died Twice" keep you interested with their driven, emotional characters.  "The Black Druid" has an odd and interesting character, but he doesn't propel the narrative--the story happens to him, rather than he determining the course of the story.  I can recommend the first two stories; as for the last, it isn't actually bad, but merely merits a passing grade.

Weird Tales, August 1925: R E Howard and N Hawthorne

Let's take a look at the August 1925 issue of Weird Tales, one of the most important of the pulps, one of the greatest of the speculative fiction magazines, the place where so many people first encountered H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Edmond Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, and the list goes on.  Check it out with me by clicking this link, the click that will take you to a scan of the issue under discussion at the indispensable internet archive.

This August issue has a quota of high brow content, including a reprint of an 1820 poem by John Keats, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," a poem about a guy who is heartbroken because some faerie or elf maiden has won his love and abandoned him--he has become a wretched hermit, hanging around the lake where he last saw her.  At least I think that is what is going on; I think it is safe to assume that "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," like all great literature, is a reminder to not let women drive you crazy.

There's also a poem by our pal Frank Belknap Long, "Stallions of the Moon," that is less plot-focused, and more hopeful--Long describes some flying horses in brief quatrains, three or four words per line, and then tells us they are "Mounts for you and me!"  How often do we get this kind of optimism in Weird Tales?  (I know, we got some optimism from WT last time we read from the magazine, and I bitched about it, but Long here delivers the optimism in like 80 words, while Henry S. Whitehead with his "dream story" "The Wonderful Thing" took seven pages!)  We also find Long in the letters section, where he praises the cover of the June issue, in which a man armed with an axe faces a spider the size of a buffalo ("bison" to you pedants), though Long's praise does come across as kind of a gross-out joke ("I cannot imagine a more gigantic, reddish, loathsome or delicious—but I sputter and go out!")

Near the end of the magazine is a hilarious ad for back copies of the extra-large May-June-July 1924 issue of WT, the one with the story Lovecraft wrote for Houdini and the one the man from Providence co-wrote with C. M. Eddy, Jr.  As if the cartoon four-eyes and his diminutive dog, desperately running to the mailbox to send for the "mammoth" issue of his fave magazine, wasn't risible enough, the text actually says "Your life is not complete until you have read this issue," which is even funnier than Long saying a kaiju spider looks delicious.  I have blogged about five stories from this "3 in 1" issue, and please allow me to say that your life will not be complete until you have clicked on the links below:

H. P. Lovecraft and Harry Houdini:  "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs"

H. P. Lovecraft and C. M. Eddy, Jr.:  "The Loved Dead"

Galen C. Colin:                                  "Eyes"

H. P. Lovecraft:                                  "Hypnos"

Otis Adelbert Kline:                           "The Malignant Entity"

Enough with the comedy!  Let's get to why we are here, the fiction, and today that means stories by the creator of Conan, Kull and Solomon Kane, Robert E. Howard, and that guy they tried to make you read in school, Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Oh yeah, there's a story in here by science fiction pioneer Murray Leinster that we read back in 2024, "The Oldest Story in the World."  If you expect all my short story blog posts to cover at least three stories, click the link in the previous sentence and count that one!

"In The Forest of Villefere" by Robert E. Howard (1925)

As we expect of a piece of work by a giant of American popular culture like Howard, "In The Forest of Villefere" has been reprinted in many collections and anthologies, the first of which was the collection The Dark Man.  (We read that collection's title story, "The Dark Man," back in 2021, and I judged it "a pretty good sword and sorcery story.")  I'm just going to read "In the Forest of Villefere" here in Weird Tales, though, where it takes up like two and a half pages.

In Early Modern or Renaissance France or whenever it is everybody carries a rapier around, our narrator is hurrying on foot through the night, carrying an important message.  He has been told this woods is inhabited by a werewolf, but his mission is urgent.  He meets an odd character with a mask and asks this mystery man for directions.  Of course it is the werewolf and of course it leads the narrator into a trap and he has to fight for his life.

This has the plot and themes of a filler story but somehow Howard makes it pretty scary and exciting, really elevating the material.  I'm inclined to think Howard is a master who knows exactly how many words to devote to each element of the story so that each component--atmosphere, image, the period of mounting suspense when everybody knows the action scene is coming up but it hasn't come up yet, and then the actual bloody action scene in which somebody gets horribly mutilated--has maximum effect, and that is why the story feels fresh and fun and I really enjoyed it, but it seems possible I am projecting that ability on him, that I am meeting Howard halfway because I knew it was him and like him already and was primed to enjoy the story as long as it met minimum criteria.  Would I have liked the story so much if I had read it not knowing it was him, like a blind taste test?  I'm going to say I would have, because, among other things, Howard gives the werewolf a strange and unnerving personality through its attire, behavior and dialogue, and that is one reason why the story feels fresh and pushes my buttons, even though I've seen so many werewolves.   

Whether this really is a very good werewolf story, or just a decent werewolf story that the magic of Howard's name is making me overrate, thumbs up for "In the Forest of Villefere."  According to isfdb, this is the first of two stories about de Montour of Normandy; the second debuted in Weird Tales in 1926 and we can expect to read it as we continue our advance through the history of the unique magazine.

 

"Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1837) 

This piece (a portion of the "high brow material" I mentioned earlier) appears under the simple text heading "Weird Story Reprints"--the beautiful hand drawn mermaid heading by Hugh Rankin (I reproduced it at the bottom of my August 14 post) is still in the future, first appearing in 1928.  This story by the man who brought you Hester Prynne was, according to wikipedia, first printed anonymously under the title "The Fountain of Youth" in 1837 in the magazine The Knickerbocker, and that same year in the Hawthorne collection Twice-Told Tales.  "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" was one of the three stories adapted in the Vincent Price film Twice-Told Tales, and genre fiction anthologists like Peter Haining have presented the story to readers many times.

Elderly Dr. Heidegger is a physician, an amateur scientist, and, reputedly, some kind of wizard, or at least possessor of a book of spells and magic devices like a bust of Apollo that some say can talk and a painting of a lost love that some have said can move.  The doctor invites over four friends, fellow oldsters who are kind of losers--Hawthorne flat out says they would be better off dead.  ("They were all melancholy old creatures, who had been unfortunate in life, and whose greatest misfortune it was that they were not long ago in their graves.")  Among them is a woman, once attractive, now ugly, whom the other three friends, men, all courted at one time; a merchant who lost all his money on a desperate gamble and is now almost a beggar; a politician whose career collapsed after a scandal and who is now forgotten; and an army officer who in his youth wrecked his health pursuing pleasures.

Heidegger has acquired water from the Fountain of Youth, and suggests the four drink it, warning them not to waste their second youths misbehaving, like they did the first time they were young.  Of course, within seconds of becoming young they act like total jerks, insulting Heidegger, fighting amongst themselves, and so forth.  It then becomes apparent that the water only works for a few minutes--they are old again.  The four head to Florida so they can drink from the Fountain all day.

The descriptions of Heidegger's home and magic items are good, and the writing over all is pretty good, but the plot and characters are kind of obvious.  If I am biased for Howard because of my admiration for many of his works, it is possible I am biased against Hawthorne because I associate him with school and a sort of established canon of writers you are supposed to like, but I think this story is merely acceptable, no big deal.

Peter Haining included in Beyond the Curtain of Dark several stories
we've already read, among them Robert Bloch's 
"Lizzie Borden Took an Axe..." and "Return to the Sabbath,"
Fredric Brown's "Come and Go Mad," and
Theodore Sturgeon's "The Other Celia"

**********

I feel like these are competently constructed stories with unexceptional plots and themes that you have to judge on style--is each just adequate, or particularly effective and enjoyable?  Howard and Hawthorne being famous names whose work is important in American culture, it can be hard to judge these stories without letting preconceived notions influence that judgement, but the importance of their authors also makes it all the more easy for me to say that all students of horror and fantasy should read "In The Forest of Villefere" and all students of American literature should read "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment." 

The weird train rolls on to another station next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log; don't lose your ticket.

Frank Belknap Long: "Men Who Walk Upon the Air," "The Devil-God," and "The Sea Thing"

Having just fulfilled our vow to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales with a 1924 cover date, let's get cracking on 1925, with three 1925 stories from Frank Belknap Long, a fancy dresser with exciting hair.  We were just talking about Long, about how H. P. Lovecraft lamented the change in the formerly artistic Long's work wrought, according to HPL at least, by the influence of business-like Otis Adelbert Kline.  Today's stories, I believe, must all be from before that influence can be felt.  You can find all three of these tales of uncanny bloodshed and death in France and the Pacific in the 2022 volume of Centipede Press' Library of Weird Fiction (808 pages) dedicated to Long, but I'll be reading them in scans of the original issues of Farnsworth Wright's magazine available to the masses for free at the internet archive.  Experience the mind-bending mayhem yourself in its Roaring Twenties form, along with accompanying illustrations and work by other weird authors, by clicking the links below:

"Men Who Walk Upon the Air"

"The Devil-God"

"The Sea Thing"

"Men Who Walk Upon the Air"

Early in his career, Long was a poet and here in "Men Who Walk Upon the Air" he shows skill in conjuring yellow skies and decaying flesh and other images of horror as well as enticing images of a blue-eyed blonde woman and the feast she lays out for a man from whom she desires a favor.  And as we expect of serious literature, "Men Who Walk Upon the Air" is full of ambiguity and human psychology that is both bewildering and all too comprehensible, disturbingly alike the actions of those around us in real life and our own secret thoughts.  What is really happening?  Are the characters good or evil?  Are they animated by love and generosity or by lust and selfishness?

It is medieval France, and a poet, Long's image of Francois Villon exiled from Paris, is sadly wandering the countryside, which is presented by Long as desolate and disgusting.  The versifier comes upon a hanged man.  (I am not familiar with Villon's work, having spent the time I might have allotted to reading him and learning about medieval Europe to watching Speed Racer and learning about Chim-Chim and Racer X, but wikipedia suggests death by hanging was a preoccupation of Villon's, he always being in trouble with the law.)  The hanged man's wife begs Villon to cut down her husband's corpse.  He more or less agrees, and then with gusto devours the food she prepares him in her little house--Villon has not eaten decent food or drunk wine in days and stuffs himself and gets drunk.  He asks the woman if he can kiss her--just once!--and she relents.  Immediately Villon releases her, having done a little more than kiss her just once, the widow is overcome by fits of terror, thinking her husband, a half-decayed corpse, has climbed down from the gibbet to bust down the door and attack her.  Is Villon's fight with the animated corpse real or just the product of a disordered, depressed, inebriated mind?  Whatever the case, the ghastly assault and pathetic struggle Long depicts is shocking and, as Villon walks away, he sees two corpses, one gripping the other, hanging from the gibbet. 

Very good!  I am probably missing allusions to Villon's work that my more educated readers will recognize, and I recommend this story to all you students of French literature as well as my fellow weirdies.  Besides the aforementioned 2022 Centipede Press collection, "Men Who Walk Upon the Air" would rise from obscurity to terrorize the guilt-stricken living in anthologies of stories from Weird Tales edited by Marvin Kaye (USA, 1988) and Frank Festa and Hardy Kettlitz (Germany, 2023.)    

"The Devil-God"

Mpatanasi is a sort of wizard-priest, a skinny old man with a yellow beard, "malachite" eyes and "monstrous" lips that "seemed to overlap his face," who intercedes between his people, black-skinned jungle-dwelling savages, and their forest devil-god, reputed to be a big furry monster with a single eye in the center of its forehead.  I guess "The Devil-God" takes place in Melanesia--parakeets are in evidence--and not Madagascar, even though Long refers to a lemur--the lemur just appears in a simile.    

Mpatanasi has a daughter who resents him; she would like to color her thin lips and play music, and it seems lay in the arms of the man Mu-senyui, but as a priest's daughter she is forbidden these pleasures.  Mu-senyui is in love with Mpatanasi's daughter, and we hear how he admires her lips, talks about kissing her, how the lovers each touch the other's lips when sneaking around to insist upon silence.  Lips are a theme of Long's story--we also hear about the lips of the gods and monsters in the story, monsters the daughter, and maybe even Mpatanasi the priest, don't really believe in.  

Mu-senyui and the girl scheme to get rid of Mpatanasi so they can be together in the open.  Mu-senyui convinces the priest that the king is not fulfilling his duties, and gets Mpatanasi to pronounce a doom on "the king;" Mpatanasi holds an elaborate ceremony in which he calls upon the forest-devil to make "the king" commit suicide.  As Mu-senyui hoped, Mpatanasi does not speak the king's name in his ritual--the trick is that the man whom the priest believes to be king is already dead, murdered a few days ago by handsome 12-year-old Bamuti, whom the queen and her handmaidens all covet.  The king found the charming boy alone with the queen and his majesty ended up with a knife in the ribs, something the court has kept secret from the priest.  With the death of the king, Mpatanasi is king, and so by cursing "the king" he has pronounced a doom on himself.

Mpatanasi flees the village into the forest.  In a surreal scene involving an earthquake and a forest fire, he is attacked by a monster that Long tells us is such a "caricature of evil" that not even Aubrey Beardsley or Felicien Rops could have conceived it.  (The mention of these European artists is a questionable move by Long, like mentioning the lemur--are these Pacific Islanders familiar with these men's work?  It kind of pulls you out of the setting.)  The monster, which is, apparently, a distinct monster from the forest devil, apparently tears Mpatanasi limb from limb, though maybe this is all a dream or hallucination? 

In the final scene the priest's daughter has painted her lips and adorned herself with other cosmetics and jewelry and she kisses and caresses Mu-senyui while they play with her father's severed head.

I like this story but it is a little opaque.  Is the forest-devil real or just a lie the priests tell people to keep them in line?  Is the "caricature of evil" monster real or just Mpatanasi's delusion as he commits suicide or is murdered by Mu-senyui?  Why does the priest inherit the throne?  Who is king now?  Who is priest now?  Still, "The Devil-God" is well-written on a sentence by sentence basis and I like the theme of vain and horny women more than willing to destroy their own families, their people's government and their people's religious establishment in order to satisfy their base lusts, so thumbs up, but this one isn't as well organized and coherent as "Men Who Walk Upon the Air" or "The Desert Lich."  

Robert M. Price printed "The Devil-God" in the 1986 issue of Crypt of Cthulhu dedicated to Long, and you can also find it in the 2010 Centipede Press Long collection, the one that is 1100 pages long.

"The Sea Thing"

This is a mundane ordinary horror story, but well told, with cool horror images and atmosphere, so thumbs up.  "The Sea Thing" is less original than the crazy "The Devil-God," but has a more straightforward structure, with fewer loose ends, and is far less literary than "Men Who Walk Upon the Air," but still a better than average piece of weird fiction.

Our text is a captain's log, the log of a clipper ship that has suffered one disaster after another!  Damaged, the ship was becalmed and then the crew got cholera and like three quarters of them perished.  Only six crewmen and the captain survive as the narrative begins.  The ship is taking on water and food is running out--they are likely doomed.  But then a guy appears in a boat!  He is the only survivor of a sinking (he says!) and has with him lots of supplies!

Everybody is thrilled and morale recovers and this new guy turns out to be a skilled healer and a real raconteur who has tons of stories with which to entertain everybody.  But after a few days the new guy starts acting strange and people start getting inexplicable injuries and mysteriously losing blood.  Men start dying.  By chance the captain is looking through a century-old book of odd anecdotes, and comes upon the story of a scaly man who was able to live under the ocean--holy crap, the scaly guy's name is the same as that of their new friend!  No wonder this guy has lots of cool old stories--he's some kind of immortal aquatic vampire!

The captain and the most trustworthy of the surviving crew hatch a plot to destroy the monster, which, in the final showdown, exhibits some of the characteristics of a shape-shifting blob!  Who will live?  Who will die?

"The Sea Thing" is pretty fun.  It was reprinted in 1926 in Britain in the second book in Christine Campbell Thomson's Not at Night series of anthologies, and in 1928 in the similarly titled American anthology Not At Night! 

**********

Nineteen-Twenty-Five was a good year for Long--I can heartily recommend all three of these stories.   A most felicitous step in our long journey through the history of the Unique Magazine--another step next time we meet here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The Malignant Entity" (1924)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The Radio Ghost" (1927)

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

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

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

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

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

"The Demon of Tlaxpam" (1929)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**********

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

Weird Tales, Nov '24: F B Long, O A Kline and H S Whitehead

Years ago, I pledged to read at least one story from each issue of the seminal speculative fiction magazine Weird Tales bearing a 1930s cover date.  That quest accomplished, I expanded the scope of my eldritch ambitions to encompass the entire century-long history of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual and began chipping away at the 1940s and 1920s.  Some progress has been made, but more lies ahead.  (Click the links below to see the evidence that backs up my boasting.)

1923 

1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938    1939

1940    1941   1942   1943

Today's stride in this long journey will see us read three stories from the November 1924 issue of the magazine, the first issue edited by Farnsworth Wright.  We've got a story by Frank Belknap Long, one of H. P. Lovecraft's closest associates and author of such dud post-war novels as Monster from Out of Time,Woman from Another Planet and Journey Into Darkness (good titles, though) and good pre-war stories as "The Ocean Leech," "The Red Fetish," and "Dark Vision."  We've got a piece by Otis Adelbert Kline, three of whose underwhelming stories we recently read. And a story by Henry S. Whitehead, known for his ghost and voodoo stories, three of which we read in the fall of 2024.  I'll be reading "The Desert Lich," "The Phantom Rider," and "The Door" in a scan of the magazine that you too can explore at this link.

"The Desert Lich" by Frank Belknap Long

The narrator of "The Desert Lich" was an adherent to the religion of peace we have all been learning about, whether we wanted to or not, since September 11, 2001.  But a faithless one!  "The Desert Lich" is the tale of how he for the first time called upon Allah for help and finally realized one must "never violate the Qoran."

Our narrator is a slave merchant who sells wives to lonely men who live out in the desert, far from the walled city in which he does business.  He sold a customer some shoddy merchandise--a woman who cheated on her husband!  Our guy tries to rationalize that he himself did nothing wrong, but of course it is a crime to sell defective goods!  The customer has killed his faithless wife, and come to town to wreak a revenge on our narrator.  Too cowardly to fight, the merchant allows himself to be led out into the cold desert night and dropped down a hole into the sepulcher where lies the dead wife--and other disgusting things!

Long puts on a bravura performance describing the evolving mental state of the merchant--his horror at what he finds in the sepulcher, his regret, his maddening, obsessive, desire for food--at describing the shocking and sickening contents of the tomb--mildew, rats, snakes, the corpse!--and at describing the physical pain suffered by the slave merchant due to his fall and the frostbite that threatens to relieve him of possession of his ears and the rat bite that draws his blood.  There is even effective black humor:

During the day I devoured my headdress. It was not pleasant, of course, but I got it down somehow. It had a sweet starchy taste.

Very good.  For years I wondered why Long had such a good reputation when his later work was so shoddy as to defy belief.  But early pieces like this that are so truly disturbing and disgusting, that convey so ably the psychology of a horrible person in a horrible circumstance, that describe so memorably images and events so monstrous, justify the fund of good will Long has enjoyed.  Thumbs up for "The Desert Lich."

"The Desert Lich" was reprinted in a 1986 special Long-centric issue of The Crypt of Cthulhu and in the 1996 Barnes & Noble anthology of short-shorts 100 Tiny Tales of Terror.  You can also find it in the colossal 1100-page Long collection put out by Centipede Press in 2010. 

Some websites show this red image (right) as the cover of Centipede Press'
Masters of the Weird Tale: Frank Belknap Long, while others show a 
blue-green cover.  This thing is a mystery, and I don't have $1500
to fund an investigation.  [UPDATE 8/18/2026: One of our
valued commenters below solves the mystery!]

"The Phantom Rider" by Otis Adelbert Kline

Advertised on the contents page as a "Western Ghost Story," "The Phantom Rider" is a competent filler piece.  A guy who has spent many years prospecting for gold ran out of cash and had to take on a young inexperienced partner who could finance his next operation.  They find a fortune in gold, and the older guy resents having to share with the younger.  So, he pushes the "greenhorn" and his horse off a ledge into quicksand, the subject of many jokes by lame comedians and tiresome hipsters.  As the young man sinks to his death, he curses his murderer, saying he will climb out of hell to get his revenge.  Sure enough, later in the story, after the killer has gotten drunk with his newfound wealth and fled a saloon because he got a little rowdy and drew the attention of the sheriff, the ghost or revenant or whatever of the murder victim--and his horse--chase down the killer, lassoing him--the next day he is found dead, rope marks on his neck.  

A professional job with foreshadowing and a character who acts in accordance with his personality and all that, just not a big deal.  "The Phantom Rider" has not been reprinted--maybe it is true that the internet is convincing kids to eat detergent and chop off their body parts, but without it we'd have a hell of a time reading this story.

"The Door" by Henry S. Whitehead

Here's another story that was immortalized in one of those "instant remainder" B&N anthologies, this one 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories.  "The Door" was also reprinted in a 1933 ish of WT under the "Weird Story Reprint" heading, and in various Whitehead collections.

Little more than three pages of text in the November 1924 issue of Weird Tales, "The Door" is a better than average filler piece, a sort of twist ending story the twist of which you know from the first column.  I can marginally recommend it.  

A guy hits something as he is driving down the street, goes back to see what it was--Whitehead doesn't say it is a person, but we readers are led to assume it is.

We are then introduced to young Phillips, apparently some kind of troublemaker.  Recently he was thrown out of the house of his socially prominent parents for committing some crime.  Tonight he feels a shudder as he crosses the street to sneak into his parents' apartment while they are at the symphony and the "colored maid" is on a train for Boston.  Whitehead doesn't tell us quite what, but he is on a mission to do something to try to make up in some small way for his misdeeds, return stolen money or something like that.  But when he gets to the apartment door he can't open it.  He hears a commotion down on the street.  Then a bunch of men come up the stairs, carrying an awkward bundle.  The makeshift shroud flaps open and Phillips sees his own dead face!  He couldn't open the door because he is a ghost!  

We know the whole time that Phillips is dead, but still the story is sort of engaging. 

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It feels good to award three passing grades, and a high mark for Frank Belknap Long, whom I have had to upbraid so many times in the past.  This stretch of our weird journey has been pretty smooth.  We'll be seeing more of Long, Kline and Whitehead in the days ahead.