Weird Tales by Frank Belknap Long from the 1920s

For decades I have been wondering, "What is up with that Frank Belknap Long?"  He has a good reputation and some nice awards, but when I read his work I am usually astounded by how poor it is.  Maybe what I need to do is go back, back, back to the very beginning, and read some of Long's earliest work, stories that appeared in 1920s issues of Weird Tales, including two stories the isfdb specifically places in the "Cthulhu mythos;" maybe this is the Frank Belknap Long everybody is in love with. 

"Death-Waters" (1924)

"Death-Waters" first appeared in Weird Tales in '24, and was reprinted by that unique magazine in 1933.  Both issues have covers guaranteed to start difficult conversations with your "woke" friends should they see them in your collection.  Maybe keep these babies out of sight, bro!  I read the 1933 reprint version in a PDF file available at the very useful SFFaudio Public Domain PDF page.

(Whether you find Margaret Brundage's sadistic sex-oozing cover entrancing or enraging, the September 1933 issue of Weird Tales looks like an exciting one, with a Robert E. Howard Conan story*, stories by MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton and critical darling Clark Ashton Smith, and letters from Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch.  Nice!)

A guy is travelling in a passenger ship along the coast of Latin America, accompanied by his friend, who lies dead in a coffin.  He tells the other passengers on the ship the story of how his friend got killed, and how he himself got all those nasty snake bites on his arm.

The guy (Long doesn't provide him a name) was in a canoe in the center of a lake fed by a jungle spring with his now dead buddy, Byrne, and "a huge black savage," the "oily skin" of whose "animal-like body" was "hideously tattooed."  Byrne wanted to bottle the water from the spring as a health tonic to sell to gullible people back in New York, but a taste test was required, and both he and the narrator were afraid to imbibe any of it, it being full of "animalcules" and smelling foul.  So Byrne forced the black guy to taste it.  After drinking it down the black dude screamed manically, his shrieks more like the sounds of "a gorilla under torture" than any utterance one might expect to come from a human throat.  Apparently in response to the scream, thousands of snakes rose out of the lake! These serpents, apparently a nonvenomous species, swarmed into the boat to bite Byrne, but not our narrator or the black man.

The black guy rowed them to the shore, then left them.  From over a hill crawled and slunk an army of poisonous toads, venomous snakes, and even horned lizards--a carpet of scaly death!  The white men beat at the swarm of herps, killing hundreds of them, but eventually the cold-blooded creepy-crawlies overwhelmed Byrne, poisoning him to death.  The beasties only bit the narrator when he tried to pull them off Byrne, and once Byrne has expired they squirmed away.

This story is entertaining because it is so crazy in so many ways.  There are the nightmarish and gruesome images of swarming reptiles being smashed by the score.  And there are the racial elements--students of depictions of non-whites in genre literature may find the story a valuable window into 1920s thinking about race; the narrator has a whole theory of the psychology of blacks and how whites should interact with them, and one might say that the point of the story is that Byrne suffered for not treating the black guy in a just and prudent manner.  And then there is Long's strange style which features odd phrases and makes strange little jokes; I'll just give you this one example: "I became as flabby as an arachnid on stilts."  What? 

I'm judging "Death-Waters" acceptable, largely as a curious, strange, artifact.

*It looks like nowadays, even though "The Slithering Shadow" is a fun title and looks great in the typescript chosen for use on the cover of the magazine, we are calling this story "Xuthal of the Dusk."

"The Were-Snake" (1925)

"The Were-Snake" appears in a book I own, the 1979 collection Night Fear.  (You'll remember I read the short story "Night Fear" back in mid 2014 when it was masquerading as a novelet.)  Night Fear has mind-bogglingly effusive praise for Long from Gordon R. Dickson and Richard A. Lupoff printed on its back cover (reproduced above) and on its front cover a painting by Clyde Caldwell of Chaugnar Faugn, star of "The Horror from the Hills," a long story I read back in late 2014.  Caldwell did lots of illustration work for TSR during the years my brother and I played endless hours of AD&D and Star Frontiers and devoured every month's Dragon magazine, and we became very familiar with Caldwell's style.  We called him "the Gemster" because every one of his paintings seemed to include a glittering jewel or gem, no matter how inappropriate its inclusion might be.

Our narrator for "The Were-Snake" is an American adventurer; this guy is visiting some remote ancient ruin, a temple dedicated to Ishtar, a goddess, we learn, whose worship goes back thousands of years before Homer, Stonehenge, and the Egyptian pyramids.  He tells his girlfriend, a Miss Beardsley, that Ishtar's "terrestrial manifestations" were femmes fatale who seduced and destroyed countless men.  He wants to spend the night alone at the temple, investigating, and dismisses Miss Beardsley's fears a native girl will seduce him while she is away.  Our narrator's native guide, in a sort of digression, tells him that the East is superior to the West because Easterners educate the soul and care not for technology--the West, he opines, went down the tubes when Europe chose Sir Isaac Newton over John Dee.

At night two green eyes appear in the darkness and try to mesmerize the narrator.  He shoots at the eyes, with no effect.  Miss Beardsley appears, wanting to help, but she is snatched by the creature and dragged down into the ruin.  When the hero catches up he can see that Ishtar is a thing like a giant snake that oozes slime and has a dog-like head.  Overcoming his fear, he chops off the monster's head with a sharp rock, rescuing Miss Beardsley.  In the morning his guide reports that a woman without a head and a disembodied cobra's head were found in the ruin.

The "Were-Snake" is a turgid mess that moves slowly and tries, with no success, to generate excitement by describing at length, but with little clarity or power, psychological states.  Much of the story is dissonant; the opening hints that Ishtar is sexy, but Ishtar turns out to be a thing like a slug; when bullets had no effect on the creature I thought it must be an illusion or a non-corporeal ghost, but then it grabs Miss Beardsley; the narrator goes from paralyzed by fear one second to galvanized into action in another for reasons that are not made clear; we are expected to believe that bullets don't harm the monster but a sharp stone can decapitate it in one blow; the monster is slimy like a slug at one point, scaly like a snake at another, and goes from having a canine head to a serpentine head.  The story is confusing in a way that is frustrating and irritating, that takes you out of the story, rather than in a way that sucks you in by exciting a desire to see a mystery solved.

Weak.  If I may be allowed to play editor to a World Fantasy Award winner, I would suggest that this simple plot could be made to work if the narrator and/or Miss Beardsley were interesting characters with psychological attributes which gave them the ability to overcome Ishtar.  Maybe their love for each other gave them strength, or their belief in Christianity, or a belief in reason andf familiarity with science that immunizes them to superstition and allows them to see through ancient myths to the reality behind them.  Maybe the hero could kill the monster with a knife his girlfriend gave him or a sword blessed by a priest, a symbol of what makes him and Miss Beardsley special as people.  Anything to make sense of the story and give readers some emotional or intellectual handle to grasp.

"The Space-Eaters" (1928)

isfdb tells us this story is part of "The Cthulhu Mythos;" it seems to be one of the first (maybe the very first) Mythos stories published by someone other than Lovecraft himself.  I read it in a scan of its original appearance made available by the good people at SFFaudio.

Frank, our narrator, and Howard, his friend, a writer of horror stories, are sitting around talking.  Howard engages in some interesting literary criticism, discussing the reason various horror writers' stories are effective and lamenting that he is not able to achieve in his own writing his goal of depicting horrors from outer space that have no earthly analog.  Then one of Frank's friends, Wells, bursts in to tell a story of horror that matches Howard's aspirations--as he was travelling through a foggy wood full of trees shaped like "evil old men," Wells experienced the most horrifying and most bizarre sights and feelings imaginable.  And he has the head wound to prove the truth of his story--a perfectly smooth and bloodless hole has been bored through his skull to his brain!

As the story progresses Frank and Howard must confront, and try to puzzle out the mysterious nature of, a creature which has come to Earth to suck out human brains.  One of the surprising things about this story is its solution to the problem of the aliens.  I think of Lovecraft's stories as being, in part, a refutation of traditional beliefs about the universe held by the faithful of the monotheistic religions--Jews, Christians and Muslims think that God manages the universe and that God loves and protects mankind, while in Lovecraft stories the universe and powerful "gods" are indifferent or even inimical to mankind.  But Long's "The Space-Eaters" suggests that some power, represented by the sign of the cross, has defended Earth from alien invasion in the past, and in this story that power does so again.  (An epigraph to the story, ostensibly from the John Dee translation of The Necronomicon, foreshadows this by attesting to the power of the sign of the cross.)   

This is a story I can recommend.  It is of course fun to see Long writing a story about himself and his buddy H. P. Lovecraft facing alien monsters, and I enjoyed the literary criticism "Howard" delivers in the beginning of the story.  "The Space-Eaters" also has some good images and genuinely disturbing horror elements, like when Frank is asked to hold up a lamp to help a doctor conduct brain surgery on Wells--our narrator is too scared to look at his friend's exposed brain and may not even have the guts to hold the lamp steady!  Long thus exploits not only our visceral disgust at physical gore and our cerebral fears about our place in the universe, but our fears of being too weak to aid our friends should they find themselves in desperate need.

"The Space-Eaters" has been reprinted numerous times, including in a 1988 edition of August Derleth's 1969 anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, which has a striking cover illustration by Tim White.

Hannes Bok appropriately depicts the Hounds as being composed of straight lines and angles
in his cover illo for the 1946 collection of Long stories published by Arkham House

"The Hounds of Tindalos" (1929)

OK, here it is, the (I believe) most famous Frank Belknap Long story, and one of the most famous Cthulhu Mythos stories by somebody other than H. P. Lovecraft, "The Hounds of Tindalos."  "The Hounds of Tindalos" is the title story of a 1946 Arkham House collection of Long stories, and the Tindalos "brand" is so recognizable that a 2008 anthology of stories written by Long and by a number of other writers inspired by his work was entitled The Tindalos Cycle.  Well, let's see what the fuss is all about!  I read "The Hounds of Tindalos" in a scan of the nearly 90-year-old issue of Weird Tales in which it made its debut that is available at the internet archive. 

Halpin Chalmers is a genius who breaks all the rules!  "I have always been a rebel, a champion of originality and lost causes...."  He has disdain for Bertrand Russell and the positivism and materialism of 19th- and 20th-century scientists, admires the alchemists and mystics of the more distant past, and reveres Einstein as "A priest of transcendental mathematics."  Chalmers wants to know the truth about man's origin and man's destiny, and condemns modern biologists for their slow progress in uncovering the secrets of human development.  He believes that, armed with his knowledge of modern mathematics, he can travel through time by using a drug little known in the West but used in the East by such savants as Lao Tze and see man's beginning and man's end!  "Time and motion," he declares, "are both illusions," and through the use of the Far Eastern drug he is going to "strip" from his eyes "the veils of illusion time has thrown over them."

(This story is full of name dropping: Darwin, Haeckel, Plotinus, Aquinas, and John Dee, a guy I never hear about whom Long brings up in three of today's four stories, are among those mentioned.  The story also reflects the fascination of Western intellectuals with Eastern mysticism and philosophy--Chalmers bases much of his thinking on the concept of the Tao.)

Like that of so many Lovecraftian-type stories, the bulk of "The Hounds of Tindalos" is a first-person narrative.  Our narrator is a friend of Chalmers's whose aid he requests in his drug-induced journey back in time.  "...if I go back too far you must recall me to reality.  You can recall me by shaking me violently."  Our narrator thinks the Tao and all this time travel jazz is "rubbish" and tries to dissuade Chalmers from this risky experiment with foreign intoxicants, but he is willing to help his buddy if he can't convince him to just say "no."

Chalmers takes one of his Oriental pills and our narrator sits and with his "pale green Waterman" fountain pen writes down everything his adventurous crony says during his "trip."  Chalmers reports that he can see all of time simultaneously, and reels off a list of incidents from Atlantis and Lemuria, medieval Italy and Elizabethan England, ancient Greece and ancient Rome, the migration of the Neanderthals and the age of the dinosaurs.  He can perceive time as "curves" and "angles," and far back, before the time of multi-cellular life on Earth, the angles become strange and horrifying.  Chalmers throws a fit and crawls around the room like a crazed canine until our hero shakes him and the mystic collapses, stunned.

After recovering with the help of some whiskey, Chalmers tells the narrator that, at the beginning of time, he saw the Hounds of Tindalos, creatures of angles who became the repository of all foulness after a terrible "deed" that is symbolized in our culture by the myth of the Fall.  (Like "The Space-Eaters," "The Hounds of Tindalos" makes use of Christian symbolism, Chalmers saying "The tree, the snake and the apple--these are the vague symbols of a most awful mystery."  As did Eve, Chalmers has taken a tremendous risk in the reckless pursuit of knowledge.)  Evil is represented by angles, and goodness by curves, and the angular Hounds lust to devour human beings, the good part of whom is descended from a curve.  Upon smelling Chalmers, the Hounds pursued him, or so he says--the narrator thinks this all nonsense.

The brief second part of the story tells how Chalmers, with the narrator's aid, used plaster of Paris to fill in all the corners and angles of his room, so that, as far as possible, Chalmer's room resembled the interior of a sphere.  Chalmers thinks this may keep the Hounds from reaching him.  The final part of the story is a series of excerpts from newspapers, a chemist's report, and Chalmers's own published work, providing us clues as to Chalmers's ultimate fate.

This is a good horror story, with strange ideas and memorable images, and it is more economically structured than "The Space-Eaters."  I can see why this would be Long's most renowned and influential story, reprinted not only in Lovecraftian volumes, but in anthologies of stories about drug use and stories representing an overview of 20th-century SF.

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"The Space-Eaters" and "The Hounds of Tindalos" are good enough that it makes sense that people still admire Long, even though he also produced a vast quantity of mediocre and poor work later in his career.  These stories have provided a useful addition to my weird education.

More Weird Tales in our next episode!

Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth by Richard Lupoff, Basil Copper and Ramsey Campbell

Today we're reading three Lovecraftian tales from Stephen Jones's 2005 anthology Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth.  In our last episode we read stories by British writers Basil Copper and Ramsey Campbell that appeared in Jones's 1994 anthology Shadows Over Innsmouth, and today we take another crack at Copper and Campbell, and throw American Richard A. Lupoff into the mix.

I am reading the electronic version of the 2013 Titan books edition of Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, made available to those of us serving time in Maryland by the Baltigore County Public Library.

"Brackish Water" by Richard A. Lupoff (2005)

Lupoff is a scholar who has written extensively about genre fiction icon Edgar Rice Burroughs as well as the history of comics; he has also penned lots of fiction.  The critics love his Space War Blues sequence; back in 2017 I read an early component of this project, "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama," a satire of Southerners (Lupoff is from New York City) that features an interstellar race war in which black scientists make zombies out of captured rednecks.  In the years prior to experiencing that "dangerous vision" I read Lupoff's novels Crack in the Sky (a dystopia about pollution and overpopulation with a multi-racial cast that Lupoff padded out with long discussions of his scholarly interests) and Sandworld (the story of college-educated white political activists protecting blacks and Hispanics from the abuses of a white ethnic cop...on another planet.)  I wasn't exactly crazy about this material, but I'm willing to read "Brackish Water" to see if Lupoff uses Lovecraftian settings and themes to further lecture us about racism and pollution.

DATELINE: The San Francisco Bay Area, during World War II.  College professor Delbert Marston is one of the world's best marine geologists, and the most eligible bachelor on the Berkeley campus!  For some reason his closest friend is an elderly spinster, the academic who mentored him.  She convinces him to forgo a concert (Marston loves classical music) to attend a meeting of a club of goofy college students.  These weirdies, The New Deep Ones Society of the Pacific, believe that the fish people described in Lovecraft's "Shadow Over Innsmouth" are real!  Even crazier, they are split into two factions: the faction that thinks the Deep Ones are mankind's implacable enemies and the faction that wants to make friends with the amphibian aliens!

Marston tells them that Lovecraft stories aren't real and leaves the meeting early, but the next part of the story reveals to us that his mother was an avid swimmer who disappeared beneath the waves when he was young, and, sure enough, Marston's body begins to change so that he only feels comfortable when underwater and develops a taste for raw sea food!  He becomes a virtual recluse, sneaking off to swim in the bay at night and working hard all day advising the Navy on anti-submarine defenses.  (I guess this guy doesn't have to teach classes--sweet gig!)

Marston is given the job of advising the Navy on the safest route out of Port Chicago for the ship carrying the atomic bomb.  Lupoff mentions repeatedly that there are many black enlisted personnel working at Port Chicago, all of whose officers are white.  In the story's final scene Marston is swimming underwater near the ship upon which the A-bomb is being loaded, and spots other fish people, like the one he is becoming.  It looks like they are planting a mine on the bottom of the A-bomb ship!  As foreshadowed at the meeting of The New Deep Ones Society of the Pacific and in an offhand remark by a naval officer, somebody, presumably one or all of the German, Japanese and American governments, has allied with or suborned some Deep Ones!  There is a terrible explosion in which Marston and presumably the Deep Ones frogmen are killed.

Lupoff appends a "Historical Note" about the real life disaster at Port Chicago, mentioning the theory (dismissed by the authorities) that the U. S. government intentionally detonated an atomic bomb there as a test, using the black servicemen there as guinea pigs.  I guess Lupoff wants us to sympathize with the Deep Ones and see them as exploited by land-dwellers, treated as expendable second-class citizens, the way blacks are mistreated by whites in America.  By making the fish people sympathetic (and downplaying the practices, like worship of an alien god and human sacrifice, that characterize them in the source material) we may judge Lupoff to be turning his back on major Lovecraft themes, even betraying Lovecraft's vision, but I suspect what he is really doing is following the Lovecraftian template but sliding the United States government into the "inscrutable and/or evil alien entity with irresistible power" slot usually occupied by the likes of Dagon or Cthulhu!  (Maybe the painful memory of doing my 2017 taxes is inclining me to this interpretation!)   

"Brackish Water" has some problems; in particular, some elements that end up not really going anywhere receive more ink than perhaps they deserve, making the story too long.  Marston's relationship with his mentor, for example, gets a lot of attention early on but then is just dropped, leaving a sort of loose end.  (I wonder if Lupoff included in the story a likable woman scientist in a position of authority to demonstrate his commitment to diversity; if so his options for resolving her relationship with Marston would be limited--he couldn't have them have sex or have Marston cause her death without undercutting his feminist message and/or his larger sympathy-for-the-alien message.)  Lupoff also engages in lots of discussion of San Francisco geography and architecture, 1930s automobiles (Marston has a 1937 Cord Phaeton) and classical music; maybe this is just padding, but it does sort of give a strong sense of time and place, and of course in Lovecraft's original story there is lots of talk about architecture and objets d'art.  I was kind of expecting a scene in which Marston was torn over joining the Deep Ones because it would mean abandoning forever the music he loved, or a scene in which he learned that the Deep Ones have their own complex and sophisticated music--as with the mentor, I feel like this music business constitutes a lost opportunity or loose end.

Despite these problems, I'm giving "Brackish Water" a mild recommendation because Lupoff does a good job of describing Marston's physical and psychological transformation into a fish person, and because making the Deep Ones good and the US government evil, flipping the script of Lovecraft's "Shadows Over Innsmouth," is outside-the-box thinking that deserves some recognition and adds some welcome variety when you are reading ten or a dozen Lovecraftian pieces in a row, as I am.

"Brackish Water" would go on to be included in two Lupoff collections, Visions and The Doom That Came To Dunwich.

"Voices in the Water" by Basil Copper (2005) 

Roberts is a London-based painter; largely thanks to the work of his wife, a talented salesperson and indefatigable woman of business who travels all over Europe and America selling his work to galleries and wealthy clients, he has made quite a bit of money.  The couple decides to buy a huge 16th-century mill out in the country and convert it into a studio, gallery and living space.

2005 edition cover

With his wife so often out of the country selling his work, Roberts spends lots of time alone in his huge new house, and the sound of the river flowing beneath his studio begins to get on his nerves.  He begins to hear voices in the "constant rush of the water," voices saying things like "Come to us!" and "Eternal life awaits!" and "Iä-Ryleh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä!"  His buddy Kent, writer of detective stories, comes over sometimes, but not very often.  In the closing pages of the story Kent visits the mill late at night at the behest of the police, to identify Roberts's body--it lies in the studio, by the open hatch above the rushing river, torn apart and drained of blood.

"Voices in the Water" is reasonably well-written and well-structured, Roberts, his wife (cleverly named "Gilda") and Kent are interesting enough characters, and the idea of hearing voices in presumptively white noise is a good one.  Most of the story is in the third-person, but there are entries from Roberts's diary.  (I thought it amusing that in his personal diary Roberts was punctilious enough to include the diaeresis in "Iä!")  What exactly is going on is perhaps a little muddled, though.  The voices imply that Roberts is one of the Deep Ones, like the narrator of Lovecraft's original story or Marston in Lupoff's contribution to Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth (they say, among other things, "You are one of us and we are reclaiming you!") but then why murder him?  I'm guessing that the body was not Roberts's at all, but a decoy; earlier in the story it is mentioned that a canoe was found overturned in the river and that no sign of its occupants was ever recovered.  The problem with my theory is that Kent identifies the body, but I guess references to the fact that some of Roberts's face is missing and that Gilda won't be asked to look at the body are clues that we can't trust Kent's identification.

I'm willing to give this one a mild recommendation.

On the last page of "Voices in the Water" Roberts's last painting is mentioned; we are told it is "vile" and depicts "some loathsome thing."  I decided to reread Lovecraft's famous story "Pickman's Model," to look for possible connections between it and Copper's story, written almost 80 years later.

"Pickman's Model" by H. P. Lovecraft (1927)

"Pickman's Model" has appeared in many
publications, including this British
 collection with a Richard Powers cover 

"Pickman's Model" is presented to us as the transcription of one side of a conversation, a Bostonian art lover telling one of his cronies about his relationship with Pickman, a painter of the macabre who has since disappeared.  Pickman's work was so horrifying that before he died many of his fellow artists and patrons of the arts had stopped seeing him socially (this was before James Carville published his magnum opus, kids.)  Our narrator was one of the last to drop him, and it wasn't because of how twisted and disgusting Pickman's art was--"Morbid art doesn't shock me, and when a man has the genius Pickman had I feel it an honour to know him....Boston never had a greater painter...." The narrator goes on to explain just why he dropped Pickman.

Pickman had a second, secret, studio in an old and slummy part of Boston, one where "foreigners" and "Dagoes" live.  "I've got a place that I don't believe three living Nordic men besides myself have ever seen."  He took our narrator to this dilapidated shack to show him his most extreme work ("I've let myself go a bit"), explaining that he believes you have to paint terror from life, just as you paint beauty from life, and this place is where "terror lives."

Lovecraft spends a lot of time describing these horrifying paintings, which depict monsters in historical and contemporary Boston slum and cemetery settings.  These monsters are shown murdering or eating people, among other things (one is an elaborate bit of gallows humor) in exacting detail.  The narrator stresses that these canvases are not in the least bit romantic, impressionistic or dream-like, but remarkably realistic--they bring to life an unacknowledged world that thrives under Boston in centuries-old tunnels, a world of ghouls who feed on the freshly-buried dead and occasionally ambush the living.  Then comes the punchline we have all been expecting for many pages--on his visit to the slum studio our narrator came face to face with evidence that Pickman, via the big hatch in his cellar studio, had access to this all too real world of man-eating monsters and was painting his most shocking work from photographs he himself took in those tunnels and graveyards.

Like Pickman in "Pickman's Model," Roberts in "Voices in the Water" had a cellar studio with a hatch to a dark subterranean world, and both artists disappeared into that world.  Copper's story certainly seems like it was influenced by Lovecraft's; perhaps it constitutes an homage.

"Raised by the Moon" by Ramsey Campbell (2001)

Isfdb lists this as a 2001 story, but doesn't list any places of publication before Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth in 2005.  (A mystery!)  Since 2005 it has been included in some collections and anthologies with sad sad amateurish covers.

Bill Grant is a grad student or something, driving near the seashore when his poorly-maintained automobile conks out near an almost abandoned fishing village.  He lodges with a working-class couple, Tom and Fiona, while he waits for a mechanic, based twenty miles away, to arrive the next morning.  The man of the house, a failed fisherman, blames the use of automobiles and electricity by the middle-classes for the dearth of fish and the village's bleak fate.

It transpires that the couple have an alliance or modus vivendi with the local Deep Ones--the fish people permit the last two humans in the village to eat dead Deep Ones.  Fiona feeds some Deep One flesh to Grant, and this, I think, begins the process of turning the young academic into a fishman himself!  As a fishman Grant will serve as, it seems, Fiona's surrogate child and perhaps a future source of food?

"Raised by the Moon" is a verbose story, full of long wordy descriptions of scenery and buildings and such, but I found Campbell's long sentences to be opaque jumbles of words rather than brushstrokes that conjured up vivid images.  With deliberate irony Campbell's characters all speak with cryptic brevity, something the author takes pains to point out to us readers.

The plot of "Raised by the Moon" is fine, if slight, but the style made it something of a slog--I feel like it requires more work than is justified by the pay off.  I'm torn between judging it barely acceptable and giving it a marginal negative vote...I guess I'll give Campbell the benefit of the doubt because I think he is making conscious artistic choices here, that my problems with the story are a response to those decisions and not to any incompetence on his part.

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In our next episode, if my psyche can take it, we'll be going back to the dawn of Yog-Sothery and reading weird tales from the roaring '20s!

Shadows Over Innsmouth by Basil Copper, Adrian Cole and Ramsey Campbell

I recently became acquainted with prolific British genre writer Basil Copper via his story in DAW 109, the second of DAW's Year's Best Horror Stories volumes.  The current HQ of MPorcius Fiction Log is in the suburban miasma between America's two crime capitals, and the first place I turned to for additional Basil Copper stories was the Baltimore County Public Library website.  There did not seem to be any physical books available that feature Copper's fiction, but a pair of Copper stories were available electronically, one each in the e-books of Stephen Jones's 1994 Shadows Over Innsmouth and 2005 Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth.  I decided to read three stories from each of these anthologies by people whose work I have already discussed on this here blog; in this episode we'll look at the contributions to Shadows Over Innsmouth by the aforementioned Basil Copper, Adrian Cole, whose Dream Lords trilogy we read in June of 2016, and the famous Ramsey Campbell.

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" by H. P. Lovecraft (written 1931, published in 1936)

First edition, famously
full of typos

First I reread Lovecraft's classic "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" from my "Corrected Eleventh Printing" of Arkham House's The Dunwich Horror and Others, so it would be fresh in my mind.  The text appears in Jones's anthology, but I found it more comfortable to read it in book form than from the computer screen.

If you haven't read "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" I highly recommend it (5 out of 5 unblinking fish eyes); it is a great horror story, and resonates with political and cultural issues we can read about every day in the newspaper: skepticism about immigration and foreign trade; communities resistant to new residents and the demographic and cultural changes they bring; fear of aliens and their strange religions and values; desperate measures which betray our traditions and threaten to corrupt our institutions.  The story also exploits more personal fears about individual and ethnic identity.

When the isolated New England fishing town of Innsmouth ran into economic trouble in the early 19th century, one of the town's leaders, Obed Marsh, resolved the economic crisis by convincing the townspeople to abandon Christianity and take up the worship of the ancient alien god Dagon and to conduct trade with the civilization of alien amphibian people who lived underwater nearby (what goods can Innsmouth offer the aliens known as the Deep Ones?  Human sacrifices, of course!)  Marsh learned all about this stuff from Polynesian savages when he was a ship captain trading in the Pacific.  Innsmouth residents who opposed this revolution were murdered.  Before long, the Deep Ones were basically running the town and having sex with the town's human women, so that by the late 1920s, the time the story takes place, the population of Innsmouth is almost entirely composed of hybrid human-fish people.  The story itself is the testimonial of the young antiquarian who in 1927 visited Innsmouth to examine its architecture and discovered the town's horrifying secret.  He managed to escape and alert the authorities of the alien menace, and the federal government then attacked and wiped out the town, even using a submarine to torpedo the underwater colony of aliens.  Sometime later his researches turn up evidence that he himself has Deep One blood in his veins and could be soon turning into an amphibian himself!

"Beyond the Reef" by Basil Copper (1994)

"Beyond the Reef" would later appear in
this 2002 Copper collection...

Copper was one of my big finds from DAW No. 109, so I had high hopes for this one, but I was disappointed--this is a very pedestrian story rendered boring and confusing by its poor construction and weak style.

The year is 1932, and for the past few years Miskatonic University in Arkham, the town next over from Innsmouth, has been plagued with odd poltergeisty events like lights going on and off and doors opening and closing on their own.  There was also the robbery of some sinister ancient books from the locked special collections room at the library, and just recently a bizarre homicide.  Oh yeah, also some strange weather.  (I know there are lots of Weather Channel obsessives out there, but I find weather boring.)  Early in the story a monument to Miskatonic alumni killed in the Civil War and the Great War, a huge stone cross, falls over and almost kills the Dean.  The surveyor leading the crew trying to repair the cross discovers a vast network of artificial tunnels under the monument, passages full of carvings reminiscent of the images in those stolen books.

This story has a superfluity of bland uninteresting characters.  There's the Dean, the surveyor, a cryptologist who is translating copies of the arcane texts, the police detective investigating the murder, and his buddy the "local police surgeon," and each of these guys has his own individual little adventures.  Copper wrote many detective stories, and I believe he is following a convention of detective novels here in which a book begins with numerous disparate incidents and plot threads that have little apparent connection to each other until late in the story, when the detective ties them all together.  I am no fan of this way of constructing a story, nor of the similar practice in adventure stories of shifting the narrative back and forth between multiple protagonists who are in different parts of the battlefield or otherwise geographically separated.  I believe a horror story or adventure story benefits from a relentless forward drive, and that switching between subplots and characters dissipates tension without catharsis, frustrates and distracts the reader.  (A famous example would be to compare the climactic sequences of Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, in which the action switches among three different fights, and that of the very first Star Wars movie--the climax of the 1977 film, which follows a single battle and features a single main character, is far more compelling.)

Copper's story moves along in fits and starts, popping from one character to another, and even going back and forth in time for no apparent reason.  Like many horror stories, "Beyond the Reef" begins with a brief chapter in which a character in the custody of the authorities is about to give a statement or testimonial, but instead of "Beyond the Reef" consisting primarily of this guy's first person narration, the story is a third-person omniscient narrative mixed with police reports written by the detective.  In my opinion Copper never even really ties all these threads together very well; the detective just seems to realize that the torpedoes didn't destroy the Deep One city near Innsmouth after all, which we readers knew already, and surmises that the Deep Ones are about to launch an assault via the tunnels on Arkham.  The story also lacks a proper climax and resolution, abruptly ending after a tedious description of the complicated means by which the heroes hope to blow up the Deep One's city, leaving us to guess whether or not the scheme succeeds (assuming we care about any of these boring characters and monsters.)

"Beyond the Reef" feels long (its like 50 pages) and tedious, with lots of extraneous details that fail to set a mood or even give you a clear picture of what is going on.  The action scenes are not very good, being overwritten and conveying no excitement.  There are plenty of boring detective story conventions: the detective writes down a list of clues on a piece of paper, for example, and two different characters have their automobiles sabotaged.  Besides these lame detective cliches, Copper tosses in some elements lifted from "Shadow Over Innsmouth" as, I guess, an homage to Lovecraft.  In a memorable scene in Lovecraft's original 1930s story, the narrator hears footsteps on the other side of a door and nervously awaits a knock or the sound of a key in the lock, and Copper includes just such a scene in his 1990s sequel.

...and this 2010 volume

For the most part, "Beyond the Reef" is just an abstract collage of old bits and pieces we've seen before in mystery and horror stories, tossed on the canvas at random, but Copper throws in a few new things as well.  One newish element is a serpentine monster that has the ability to erase things.  For example, the notes kept by the cryptologist over the many months he has worked to translate the evil books are magically turned into blank pages, while the detective, reading old newspapers looking for clues, finds that stories advertised on the front page of periodicals are missing from the back pages.  All distinguishing features of the homicide victim's face were removed, and eventually we learn that the monster can even erase memories from people's minds.  Additionally, this monster can generate a kind of heat ray.  I suppose the erasing ability sort of connects to Lovecraftian themes of the unreliability of knowledge and the instability of identity, but a heat ray?  Copper includes lots of stuff in this story that don't contribute much to the mood or plot, and this heat power is one of them.

Another element meant to be novel: the cryptologist built a mechanical device to help him translate the ancient texts, which I guess is supposed to remind readers of a Babbage engine or an Enigma machine (this device adds nothing to the story, the monster just destroying it.)  Is this a nod to steampunk?

A mere jumble of almost random stuff just thrown together that absolutely fails to generate interest or fear--thumbs down for the very disappointing "Beyond the Reef."

"The Crossing" by Adrian Cole (1994)

Our narrator for "The Crossing" is a middle-aged Englishman who lives far from the coast.  He hasn't seen his father, a sailor, since he was a few months old.  His marriage has failed, and he hasn't seen his son, a college student with a new girlfriend, in a year.  Then a cryptic postcard and a strange premonition--the smell of the seashore--draws him to a small fishing village.  Here he encounters his father; for decades the sailor has been capturing human sacrifices for the Deep Ones, and now that he is very old, he wants to join the amphibian monsters in their submarine city.  To win this boon, he has to find somebody to fill his position, and he figures his own son would be an ideal candidate!  The murderous mariner tells our narrator that when he gets old, he can hand over his own son to the service of Dagon and in turn join the fish people in their undersea utopia.  Will the narrator go along with this insane plan?  Looking for sympathy, Dad says if he can't convince his son to follow in his piratical footsteps, the Deep Ones will inflict upon him "eternal revenge!"

In Lovecraft's original "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" there is some business in which the narrator evades the locals by running along roofs, and Cole's narrator in "The Crossing" does some of the same kind of stuff.

The broad strokes and the basic ideas of "The Crossing" are not bad, but one element makes it difficult for me to suspend my disbelief.  Instead of the confrontations between father and son and between normies and Dagon-worshipers being set in the little English fishing village, the narrator fools his son into following him through some kind of magical gate to Innsmouth, all the way on the other side of the Atlantic.  This isn't some kind of Deep Ones high technology left over from ancient times--the fish people can't use the gate, only the narrator and his father.  Somehow, in a way that is deliberately not explained, the narrator's deadbeat Dad is some kind of wizard.

Why would Cole choose to include this additional, seemingly superfluous, magical device?  Why not just set the story entirely in the USA or the UK?  While in Innsmouth, the narrator sees some human sacrifice victims being marched off to their doom, and they remind him of films of Nazi Holocaust victims.  If Cole is mining that historical atrocity to add some oomph to his story, maybe he is likewise including a crossing-the-Atlantic element in order to remind us of other past crimes and tragedies, like the trans-Atlantic African slave trade and/or the migration to the New World of impoverished Scotsmen and Irishmen in the 18th and 19th centuries due to economic and political developments and crises in the British Isles.

Merely acceptable.

"The Church in High Street" by Ramsey Campbell (1962)

Except for Lovecraft's original, this is the oldest story in Jones's anthology.  According to isfdb, "The Church in High Street" is the first component of the "Severn Valley Series."  It appeared first in August Derleth's anthology Dark Mind, Dark Heart and would go on to appear in several books, including the oft-reprinted Campbell collection Cold Print.

Temphill is a small town in the Cotswalds, avoided by outsiders because of its bad reputation.  The narrator's friend, Albert Young, is there conducting research on witchcraft, and when the narrator, in need of money, learns that Young may be looking to hire a secretary, he drives out there from London in a borrowed car to see if the position is still open.  Once in the queer decaying town he is told by one of Young's neighbors that the scholar has been taken "Outside" by a mysterious "They," and warned to leave Temphill at once.  Our narrator sticks around to investigate, going through Young's papers and diary, which include translations from the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred's tome The Necronomicon, and which point to the local church.  At the (decrepit and apparently abandoned) church, the narrator finds a staircase to an underground chamber of statues and corpse-bearing slabs.  He witnesses a magical gate opening on to another planet or dimension, and out of it emerge protoplasmic monsters!  The hero falls unconscious, and when he awakes he has fungi on his person.  He flees, only barely escaping the town when a car hits him and again he falls unconscious--the car's driver takes him out of town to a hospital.  Despite his successful escape, something about Temphill has got into his psyche or blood, and as the story ends we readers know he will be inexorably drawn back to the weird place.

The most interesting part of the story is perhaps the aliens' power--they can "disarrange space in small regions," to quote Abdul Alhazred, so that when Young and our narrator try to leave Temphill they find, surreally, that any road out of town they take has somehow looped around, bringing them back to Temphill.

It is a little odd seeing this story here in Shadows Over Innsmouth, because it has nothing to do with Innsmouth or the sea or the Deep Ones, though there is the theme of a Christian church repurposed to the worship of an alien entity (this time Yog-Sothoth, who is associated with "gates" and "keys" and "ways.")  Lovecraftian references include fungi, Leng, and Nyarlathotep--I don't think Dagon is mentioned.  Still, it is better written and more convincing than the Copper and Cole stories, and deserves a mild recommendation.

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In our next episode, Lovecraftian capers first published in the current century!           

Early '70s horror stories by Robert Bloch, T. K. Brown III, and Eddy C. Bertin

Only three stories remain in 1974's The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series II; let's check them out!

Frontispiece by Jack Gaughan and title page 

"The Animal Fair" by Robert Bloch (1971)

This story, by the much beloved author of Psycho and a book I almost bought a few days ago at an antiques store in Catonsville, MD, first appeared in Playboy.  I wish I could like Bloch's work as much as so many people do, but generally I find him underwhelming.  "The Animal Fair" is apparently Joe R. Lansdale's favorite horror story, or at least Lansdale's favorite Bloch story (Lansdale wrote an essay introducing it that appeared in the collection Robert Bloch: Appreciations of the Master and the anthology My Favorite Horror Story) so perhaps we have here the prime slice of Bloch that is going to help me see in Bloch what everybody else sees.

Bloch loves puns and jokes and wordplay, and on the first page of "The Animal Fair" we get lines like "...Dave hit the main drag.  And it was a drag." and "Phil's Phill-Up Gas stood deserted."  This kind of stuff detracts from creating a mood of suspense or fear, in my opinion, foregrounding the third-person omniscient narrator and reminding you this is not real.  Fortunately, Bloch cuts it out after that first page, or at least I didn't notice it again.  (The actual title of the story may well be a subtle pun on the disparate meanings of "fair," referring to a place where animals are displayed before spectators, a beautiful creature, and a creature who is just.)

Dave is hitchhiking across Oklahoma, on his way to Hollywood.  Dave thinks Oklahoma and its people are disgusting! 

Dave could smell oil in the air; on hot summer nights in Oklahoma, you can always smell it.  And the crowd in here smelled worse.  Bad enough that he was thumbing his way through and couldn't take a bath, but what was their excuse?  

Dave goes to a travelling carnival to get a hamburger (all the local stores are closed) and finds himself in a tent full of "red-necks."  In a cage in the tent is a sick gorilla, forced to dance for Oklahomans!  Dave is so sickened by this crime he throws up!  He takes a nap on the side of the road, and when he wakes up he hitches a ride...on the trailer with the gorilla and its cruel master, "Captain" Ryder!

Ryder tells the sad story of his life as he drives with one hand and drinks a bottle of "fresh corn likker" with the other.  He was a trapper in Africa, then a Hollywood stuntman who handled big dangerous animals for jungle movies, and wore animal suits for closeups of fights between actors and beasts.  He got rich doing all this work!  But then tragedy struck!  Four drug-addled criminals he calls "hippies" broke into his house and drugged and raped his niece, the joy of his life, whom he had raised like his own daughter.  Ryder caught them in the act, and in the ensuing fight killed one of the rapists and seriously wounded two others, but his niece also died from an overdose of whatever the creeps had used on her.  The hippies' ring leader escaped.  Ryder went to prison for two years, and when he got out his career was ruined and he resorted to this carny business.

(The sensational crimes of Charles Manson, as well as the greatest movie of all time, King Kong, seem to have served as inspiration for much of this story.)

"The Animal Fair" appears in this Finnish
collection  

This blog is all about spoilers, so of course I am going to tell you what all the clues in Ryder's narrative add up to.  While in Africa, Ryder learned all kinds of crazy witch doctor stuff, like how a shaman can use drugs and psychological torture to make a person who has been sewn up inside a lion skin (!) think he is a lion.  Without coming out and saying it, Bloch is implying that Ryder used his jungle skills to track down the leader of the rapists, and then sewed this jerk up in his Hollywood gorilla suit and is achieving his revenge by (mis)treating the rapist like an animal!

(Remember how in the second Aubrey-Maturin novel the naval officer escapes from France by disguising himself as a bear?  I read a dozen or more of those books, but that was the most unbelievable passage, and ironically the most memorable, in all of them.)

This is a good story--Lansdale, Davis and Playboy didn't let readers down in promoting it.  Perhaps my favorite thing about it is how it took me by surprise--Dave's demeaning of the small-town Oklahomans, and the initial appearance of Captain Ryder, whom Dave hates, and his first few lines of dialogue, which consist of bitching about drugs, hippies and Hollywood, led me to expect that the story's point would be to mock retrograde country people from the point of view of a sophisticated liberal urbanite.  Instead, Hollywood, one of America's cutting-edge cultural capitals, is said to be in terminal decline, and we are given reason to hate and fear forward-thinking young people (as well as African medicine men) and lament their destructive and corrupting influence on healthy people like Ryder and his niece.  What I thought was going to be a smug animal rights piece morphed before my eyes into something like 1974's Death Wish!

("The Animal Fair" actually includes many of the themes I saw in Bloch's 1989 novel Lori, among them alcohol, an America in cultural and societal decline, and a young woman at the mercy of predatory men.) 

In addition to the way the story subverted my expectations, it is economically and smoothly written, and the central gimmick feels new and is surprising.  Thumbs up for "The Animal Fair."  Maybe I need to seek out more of Bloch's "greatest hits," guided by the horror cognoscenti like Lansdale.

"Haunts of the Very Rich" by T. K. Brown III (1971)

"Haunts of the Very Rich" first came under the eyes of the public in the very same issue of Playboy that printed Bloch's "The Animal Fair."  Was this a special horror issue of our most pretentious girlie rag?  (Actually, this issue is full of big names, like John Wayne, V. S. Pritchett, Jean Shepherd and Garry Wills, and there's an article about James Dickey, whose Deliverance I read just before moving out of New York State during my brief Westchester County period, and even an illustration by Gene Szafran, who did so many SF book covers.)

T. K. Brown III only has five credits at isfdb, but when you google his name you find that "Haunts of the Very Rich" was made into a TV movie in 1972 starring actors I don't like!  You can watch it on youtube!  (Having no desire to lay eyes on the  visages nor lend ear to the voices of Ed Asner, Donna Mills, Lloyd Bridges and Cloris Leachman, I'll stick to the printed word, myself.)

Six incredibly wealthy people pay an exorbitant fee to go on a mystery vacation--they are flown on a small jet whose windows are shuttered to a jungle resort by a lake surrounded by volcanoes.  Once there everything goes wrong--the power goes out so there is no air conditioning or refrigeration, natives raid their booze supply, the "exotic" prostitute turns out to be from Brooklyn.  Yes, this is a comedy, one which is not in the least bit funny.  When the characters, like the reader, realize nothing that is happening makes any sense, they theorize that they are dead and this is hell.

Lame.

"Like Two White Spiders" by Eddy C. Bertin (1971)

Bertin is a German-born Belgian, a prolific writer of genre stories and children's books.  As I said in the comments to the first installment of our look at DAW No. 109, when Mats Paulsson pointed out that the cover of this anthology is by Swiss-born resident of Sweden Hans Arnold, The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series II is a real international production.  I mercilessly criticized a story by Bertin from this same time period, "Timestorm," back in 2016, but gave a moderate recommendation to a late '70s story by Bertin, "My Beautiful Darkling," a year before that.

"Like Two White Spiders" comes to us in the form of a transcript of a tape recorded statement from a guy in an insane asylum.  This guy describes how, several times over the course of his life, his hands acted with a mind of their own to kill small creatures and even people!  He has been imprisoned because of his crimes, but he claims he is in fact innocent, that his hands have been taken over by some alien from another dimension, or are separate alien entities with their own internal organs, or some such thing.  Of course, the story is full of clues that hint that this guy is just a murderer with mental problems who has consciously or subconsciously come up with this bizarre possession narrative as an excuse. 

Bertin's is one of the more viscerally gruesome stories in this anthology, with descriptions of how it feels to strangle an eight-year old girl and crush the skull of a canary--and then there are the narrator's efforts to deter or liberate his hands by holding them in a fire or chopping them off with a scythe!  Jeez!

I should note, for all you Yog-Sothery fans out there, that besides comparing his hands to spiders and scorpions, the narrator likens them to The Hounds of Tindalos; even though he usually disappoints me, I really have to read the story of that name by Frank Belknap Long someday.

This is a good horror story that exploits our fears of our bodies betraying or failing us as well as our willingness to blame others for or otherwise rationalize our misdeeds.  And our fears of chopping off our own hands--yikes!  It is well-written and well-structured, the length and pace just right.  Thumbs up!  "Like Two White Spiders" was first printed as "Als Twee Grote Witte Spinnen" in the 1971 Belgian collection De Achtjaarlijkse God; the author himself translated it into English and it first appeared in the tongue of William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson and Dan Brown in the 1973 collection that is the source of much of the material in DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories Series II, Sphere's The Year's Best Horror Stories No. 3.

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DAW No, 109, The Year's Best Horror Stories Series II, is a good anthology; there is only one serious clunker, and several quite good stories.  Looking at Amazon, ebay and abebooks, I am getting the idea that it is sort of rare; maybe I shouldn't have bent the cover of mine scanning the title page and the page of ads in the back?

Ah, the ads.  Six DAW titles are pushed, including Brian Lumley's first Titus Crow novel, the eighth of John Norman's (in)famous Gor books, and the 1974 edition of Donald Wollheim's Annual World's Best anthologies that includes R. A. Lafferty and E. C. Tubb stories I don't own; I would probably grab this one if I saw it going for a buck or two.  Also promoted is D. G. Compton's The Unsleeping Eye; Joachim Boaz has gushed about this baby (5 of 5 stars!), which I own in a later Pocket Books edition, but I have yet to read it myself.  The Weathermonger, which I'd never heard of, is, apparently, some kind of "young adult" book about a future anti-technological England and was the basis for a TV series.

Early '70s horror tales from Brandner, Copper, Pedler and Klein

It's the pick of the nightmare crop!  More early 1970s horror stories, selected by British anthologist Richard Davis for Sphere's The Year's Best Horror Stories No. 2 and No. 3, and included in DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series II.

(I chose today's stories because I thought all the last names together sounded like a law firm.)

"The Price of a Demon" by Gary Brandner (1972)

Some of the writers whose work appears in DAW No. 109 I am familiar with, and others are people I have never heard of.  Gary Brandner is one of the latter, even though he wrote the novel The Howling, the inspiration for the 1981 film, and the novelization of the 1982 film Cat People.  (I haven't seen these films, but wikipedia is making them sound like they are nonstop fetishistic sex.)  "The Price of a Demon" is, I believe, Brandner's first published story, and appeared originally in Witchcraft and Sorcery #7, a magazine that also featured art from MPorcius faves Jeff Jones and Stephen Fabian.

For a while, before we got married, my wife worked at a small, old and somewhat snooty firm based in New York City.  The firm was purchased by a huge national corporation based in California, and there was a lot of talk about how different were the corporate cultures of the New Yorkers and the Californians, the East Coast peeps thinking the West Coasters a bunch of flaky and goofy hippies and surfers.  Anyway, I thought perhaps "The Price of a Demon" a subtle reflection of this view of Californians.

Paul Fielding, some kind of scientist or engineer, lives in Encino with his beautiful blonde blue-eyed wife, Claire.  Claire is a housewife and regularly gets involved in silly hobbies and fads, and currently is taking classes in witchcraft.  Following the instructions in an old book she found in a bookstore on Ventura Boulevard, she summons a demon, an invisible creature which begins taking bites out of her.  Paul rushes his wife to her teacher, who is able to summon a second invisible demon that neutralizes the one afflicting Claire.  But, the witch warns, a summoned demon exacts a price, and as the story ends we readers are lead to assume that Paul is about to suffer even more grievously than was his wife.

This story has problems with tone; Claire is a kind of vapid ditz character who belongs in a comedy, and doesn't mesh well with the blood and gore, especially since she is just as ditzy after her ordeal as before.  Maybe this was originally meant to be a story about mismatched spouses, a serious intelligent man who married a good-looking dolt and is disappointed, but Brandner gave up on that idea or just failed to flesh it out?   The plot also feels kind of contrived, and there are nagging unanswered questions, like what comes next--is Paul going to be killed by this second demon?  Barely acceptable.

"The Knocker at the Portico" by Basil Copper (1971)

Like Ramsay Campbell's "Napier Court," which we dissected with gusto in our last episode, "The Knocker at the Portico" initially appeared in the Arkham House anthology Dark Things.  The story would later be included in a few different Copper collections, including the first volume of Darkness, Mist and Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper, which has a nice wintry cover by our guy Stephen Fabian.

Copper is new to me, but he had a long and industrious career, producing scores of detective novels of both the hard-boiled and Holmesian varieties, as well as horror stories of various types.  "The Knocker at the Portico" is a Lovecraftian title; let's see if it lives up to or subverts (or disappoints) our expectations.

The story comes to us as a manuscript, written by an independently wealthy scholar living in London who conducts his research outside the academic system (and good for him, I say!)  The forty-something scholar works himself to the bone trying to finish a long project involving Hebraic texts written in tiny characters that he must strain to read by his "flickering pressure-lamps," and distance grows between him and Jane, his hot twenty-something wife.  When Jane hurts her leg in a fall off a horse, a thirty-something physician insinuates himself into that distance!  When the scholar begins to hear loud knocks at his large house's front door, knocks none of the servants can hear and which resound even when there is nobody to be seen on the porch, he assumes that the interloping doctor is to blame in some indefinable way.

Long hours toiling on his research, jealousy, and the sound of the knocking over a period of months, drive the writer insane, culminating in a murderous rage.  He chases his wife and the doctor through the streets of London, an Oriental knife (a Malay kris) in hand.  His quarry enters an elaborate building, closing the door behind them.  When he beats on the door he recognizes the sound--that knocking he heard was his own, somehow communicated to his backwards across time!  The building he stands before is the mad house where he will spend the next three decades, the final years, of his life!  Jane and the doctor, a shrink, have been trying to help the unbalanced scholar all along!

(There is also a very brief frame which suggests the scholar's family suffers a curse and the horror has not claimed its last victim!)

So far, this is my favorite story from The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series II.  I like the style--it actually conveys some emotion and charts a guy's mental breakdown--and the plot feels somewhat original and is a little surprising.  Maybe I need to keep an eye out for more stories by Copper.

"The Long-Term Residents" by Kit Pedler (1971) 

Pedler is another writer with whom I am not familiar.  My look at the wikipedia page on this individual indicates that he contributed to some Doctor Who episodes I never saw (I've only ever seen Tom  Baker episodes) and was a big proponent of the use of psychic powers and protecting the environment (zzzzz....)  Let's see if this story is about the horror of some psionic government bureaucrat using remote viewing to monitor the alacrity with which you rinsed that peanut butter jar before tossing it in the recycling bin.

Riker, a stressed-out London scientist (a bio-chemist or something like that) without much by way of friends or family, takes the advice of a colleague, Kempton, and drives to a distant seashore hotel to rest a few days.  The hotel is run by a woman he dimly recognizes, and inhabited by quite elderly permanent residents.  It turns out the hotel is a terrible trap!  The woman is a scientist, Pribram, who, plagued by scandal, was said to have committed suicide years ago; in reality she faked her death and she and Kempton are secretly working on longevity elixers, unhindered by any ethical rules!  The permanent residents are guinea pigs and fellow scientists selected by the rebel researchers because of a certain rare attribute of their body chemistry.  They are imprisoned in the "hotel," which is no hotel at all, and can be kept alive indefinitely; Pribram and Kempton exploit their expertise in service of their revolutionary project.  (The feeble captives crave the elixir like drug addicts.)  Kempton recently discovered that Riker himself has that important "anti-R factor" in his blood, and now Riker will join the old timers as a virtually immortal conscripted research assistant and test subject.

I guess this story is sort of original, but Pedler's style is not very good and the characters didn't excite my interest or elicit any emotion from me.  Merely acceptable.

"The Long-Term Residents" was first printed in The Seventh Ghost Book. 

"The Events at Poroth Farm" by T. E. D. Klein (1972)

Klein's is a name I have seen numerous times, but for whatever reason I have not read anything by him.  "The Events at Poroth Farm" first appeared in the second issue of a fanzine, From Beyond the Dark Gateway, but has since been reprinted numerous times and has enjoyed much acclaim.  Hopefully I will be able to join in the adulation!

(The story has also, it appears, been expanded and revised numerous times--I guess I am reading the original published version, not the author's preferred version.)

"The Events at Poroth Farm" takes place in the great state of New Jersey, land of my birth!  It is funny to hear boring suburbs with which I am familiar talked about as if they are places of looming menace or the haunt of fringe religious minorities.

This story comes to us in the form of a manuscript, an "affidavit," written by another one of those scholars who wants to be left alone; this guy plans to read a mountain of books in preparation for teaching a college course on Gothic literature.  (College professors in books and on TV work a lot harder than those I have met in real life.)  In search of peace and quiet he rents an outbuilding for the summer from a couple who own a farm in rural New Jersey, the Poroths of the title.  The Poroths are members of small idiosyncratic sect distantly related to the Mennonites and/or the Amish, with their own customs and rules (they watch TV and think good cats go to heaven and bad cats to hell, for example.)

"The Events at Poroth Farm" is longish (like 45 pages here) but it doesn't drag; everything that Klein includes in the story is interesting or adds to the mood or advances the plot.  The lion's share of the affidavit consists of excerpts from the narrator's journal, which include descriptions of how his relationship with the Poroths evolves over the course of weeks and complaints about all the insects and spiders and mildew that infest the farm and his rented dwelling--Klein does a good job depicting an urbanite's response to life in the country, reminding me of the cabin in Maine woods that my wife and I rented for a few days years ago.  (Is Klein trying to say something about human nature or to mirror the attitude of his story's weird antagonist with his many descriptions of the academic's sometimes grim and at other times gleeful efforts to wipe out the creepy crawlies that intrude upon him?)  The journal entries also provide comments on the famous Gothic novels and stories the narrator is reading--Walpole's Castle of Otranto, Austen's Northanger Abbey, Lewis's The Monk, Machen's "The White People," and many others get capsule reviews.

The main plot thread of the story involves the farmers' numerous cats.  (The narrator not only relates his own efforts to kill bugs, but the cats' massacring of rodents, birds and reptiles--this story is full of killing.)  One cat, the oldest and meanest, is (as gradually becomes apparent) killed and its dead body taken over by some kind of mouse-sized intelligent alien monster.  The creature, in the animated feline corpse, stalks the humans, who have little idea what is going on, and before the story ends the alien has shifted from controlling a quadruped to a biped, and our narrator considers the possibility that our entire civilization may be at risk from this alien invasion.

A solid and entertaining Lovecraftian story; there is a lot going on in here (there's plenty of religious stuff I haven't talked about here, for example), all of it engaging, and Klein obviously took a lot of time and care putting all these elements together.  "The Events at Poroth Farm" is giving Copper's "Knocker at the Portico" serious competition for best piece in this anthology.

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Two good pieces from writers new to me whom I look forward to reading again (and two mediocrities from guys I will probably never think about again.)  Three more stories from The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series II await us in our next episode, which will conclude our look at DAW No. 109.