Enemies of the System by Brian Aldiss

Back in September I engaged in a shopping spree at the Second Story Books warehouse store in Rockville, Maryland, the bookstore endorsed not only by MPorcius Fiction Log but the great tarbandu of The PorPor Books Blog.  Among the affordable books I got there was a 1980 paperback printing of Brian Aldiss's 1978 novel Enemies of the System.  Speaking of endorsements, this thing has a back cover blurb from Anthony Burgess (remember when we read The Wanting Seed?--those were the days!) who called it "unfailingly interesting."  So let's check out this shortish novel (my copy has like 115 pages of text with pretty big print) and see if we can agree with Burgess, oh my brothers.

Enemies of the System is one of those SF books about a stifling socialist totalitarian society in which the government computer chooses your sex partners for you, children have no relationship with their parents--they are gestated in artificial wombs and raised in government creches--certain words and ideas have been declared forbidden, and a small elite nomenklatura talks about "unity" all the time but looks down on the proles and enjoys many privileges.  Aldiss sets his novel a million years in the future, in a one-government civilization with Moscow as its capitol that spans the Solar System and has expanded to some extent into interstellar space.  The BioCom (short for Biological Communism) system that guides this society was made possible by a technological breakthrough--the "bio-shunt" that all citizens have been genetically engineered to be born with.  This shunt "is an in-built processor which phases out much of the activity of the old autonomic nervous system or renders it subject to the direct control of the thought system."  This means people are rarely driven by their emotions and are more calculating, acting much more rationally.  A striking example is that men decide when to have an erection; another is that people no longer dream when asleep.  War, religion and love are a thing of the past.

It is hard to believe that any human institution, much less the unworkable ideas and inhuman methods of the Soviet Union, would endure a million years, but Aldiss has a reason for setting his tale so far in the future, as readers soon see.

Though the structure of the novel is that of an adventure story in which people are stranded on an alien planet and meet the dangerous natives and must struggle to survive, what Enemies of the State does in practice is explore what life is like in a totalitarian police state through the medium of the dialogue of the overclass members of such a state as they face novel situations.  Over the course of the entire novel readers are subjected to page after page of expository dialogue, debates among the characters, and what amount to speeches from them.  Reflecting the kind of personalities BioCom produces, while within the confines of the System, the characters speak in a way that is sort of flat, emotionless and self-consciously performative, but, beyond the protection and the oppression of the System, as they experience stress and a little freedom, their speech gets increasingly frantic, emotional and personal.  These people's speech is peppered with lame and/or sinister revolutionary slogans ("Unity Breeds Immunity;" "Never Think What Cannot Be Said;" "Resolution Is The Foe of Deviation") the way people in the 18th and 19th centuries quoted The Bible and Virgil and Horace and people now quote Seinfeld and The Godfather.  Demonstrating how life in a police state turns everyone into both an enforcer and a target and makes it impossible for anyone to trust anyone else, almost all the dialogue consists of dominance games, probings for weakness and efforts to build coalitions, with authority figures bragging, subordinate figures sucking up, and those careless enough to express new ideas beaten down with threats of being reported for deviationist thinking.  In extremis, outside the System's confines, some of the characters pathetically grope for some kind of human connection, only to be rebuffed by those who have truly taken the ideology of the System to heart, or who expect the System to reassert itself shortly.

The first 30 or so pages of Enemies of the State introduce us to the characters and their milieu, though we keep getting new revelations throughout the book.  The characters are all members of the elite of the BioCom System, gathered from various planets--Earth, Venus, Jupiter--to take a vacation, a privilege of their membership in the high echelons of the Party.  The computer has paired them off, assigning them companions/sex partners, and early in the novel Aldiss demonstrates how mechanistic and utilitarian sex is in this society--a public address system that continually offers guidance and advice to citizens has as one of its announcements this reminder:

"Remember that sexual intercourse is an approved social usage.  It is pleasurable.  Inevitably, it increases the physical and mental well-being of both partners, thus enhancing their value to the system."   

Once in their cabin on the vacation starship the male member of one government-approved pair says to his female partner, "Kindly move over and open your legs."  Foreplay is unnecessary, as these people can just will their genitals into readiness for action.

The vacation these high level members of the World State are privileged to enjoy is a tour of a planet many light years away, Lysenaka II (presumably a deliberately chosen joke name, seeing as both evolution and suppression of dissenting scientific theories are themes of the novel), a somewhat barren world just recently taken over.  Once there, the vacationing apparatchiks, college professors, engineers and secret police agents pile into three busses and set out to see a waterfall some hundreds of kilometers away.

The significant thing about Lysenka II is that over a million years ago, before the revolution that ushered in the BioCom system, an American colony ship headed someplace else crash landed here, giving rise to the most original and memorable thing in Aldiss's novel.  Stranded, the Americans (most of the time the characters just call them "the capitalists") had to make a go of building a viable colony on this inhospitable rock.  But Lysenka II's soil was so infertile it could not support agriculture, and the castaways were reduced to the primitive methods of hunters and gatherers--mostly gatherers, as the planet was home to no large animals.  To find enough sustenance to survive on this desolate planet the humans had to spread out widely.  Some maintained their intelligence and humanity, but, over the millennia, many of the seperate human groups evolved to fill the vacant ecological niches occupied on Earth in our day by large animals.  Some developed into water-dwelling carnivores much like seals or crocodiles, others into herd animals like zebra or deer, or pack animals like wolves or jackals.  Amazingly enough, some of the still-human Lysenkans ride domesticated zebra-men and use domesticated canine-men as guards and hunting dogs.

Far from the waterfall, the third bus crashes when the road, weakened by the tunneling of mole-people, collapses.  (Aldiss has a little fun with this, with some characters talking about how "magnificent" is this road through the wilderness, how it represents the triumph of their socialist society, even after it has just been fatally undermined by capitalist savages.)  The other two buses are far ahead and don't know they have left the third of their number behind, and radio communications are impossible because the workers up on the satellite are striking.  (A subtheme of Aldiss's novel is how, the further you get from Earth, the more people question and even resist the System's iron grip.)  Five of the passengers and the tour guide set off from the crashed bus to seek help, and are quickly captured by a tribe of Lysenkans who have maintained their humanity over the last million years; they have language (though nothing the tourists can understand), wield primitive weapons and wear armor made of pine cones stitched to fabric. 

As captives, the protagonists witness the natives' religious ceremonies (a playacting of their ancestors' efforts to fix their spaceship) and have plenty of time to deliver lectures and engage in debate.  Far from the System, and expecting death, one of the captives expresses his hostility to the System, pointing out that in the million years the socialists have had total control, civilization has made almost no technological or cultural advances, unlike the rapidly changing capitalist civilization that preceded it, and that the abolition of the family and the prohibitions on individual thought--and the secret police system that enforces those prohibitions--all of them instituted in the name of Unity, have in fact placed almost insuperable barriers between people, made community impossible.  Proving his point, the other captives tell him that if they survive their ordeal he will be put on trial for expressing his opinions and no doubt suffer corrective psychiatric treatment!

In the abrupt climax of the short novel, the natives, when one of the tourists draws a gun and blasts their leader, begin worshipping the tourists as gods.  "Everyone worships power" is the lesson the tourists take from this turn of events.  Finally, soldiers in hovercraft arrive to rescue the captives.  One of tourists immediately reveals herself to be a secret agent of the security apparatus and has the other five arrested for thought-crime and sedition.  

I am totally on board with attacks on socialism and big government interference in people's rights to free speech, free exercise of religion, freedom of assembly, etc.  So I am simpatico with what I take to be the attitude of this novel.  But is Enemies of the System fun or thought-provoking?

Obviously this is not true of everybody, but I am fifty years old and spent much of that time studying or working in academia and so have heard all the arguments for and against socialism and government interference in the economy and the broader life of the community a million times over and Aldiss doesn't whip out anything new or surprising to me here.  (One reason I have been reading stuff like Weird Tales and Spicy Mysteries is that the questions SF so often addresses--is religion a scam? should we have more or less government? is technology good? is the environment in trouble? should we conquer outer space?--are questions I have already resolved to my own satisfaction, and going over them again and again is boring, but sex and violence still have the ability to excite my interest.)  And whereas a Jack Vance novel about politics--I'm thinking of the Alastor and Cadwal books--might also have fun jokes and great adventure/mystery/horror elements, Enemies of the System's action and adventure components are just OK, and, among all the lectures and debates, they are few and far between.  As a result, while not bad by any means, Enemies of the System is not exactly thrilling.    

Aldiss accomplished what I believe he set out to do in Enemies of the System--depict the psychologies of the educated elite living in a totalitarian state--but that doesn't necessarily produce an entertaining novel.  I guess I can give this one a moderate recommendation.

Four Spicy Mysteries by E. Hoffmann Price

My local library offers the hoopla service that facilitates the borrowing of e-books, and, still curious about E. Hoffmann Price's stories from the "spicy" pulps, I borrowed The 11th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK, an e-book of 18 stories by Price.  On this episode of MPorcius Fiction Log we'll be reading four of those 18, each a cover story from an issue of Spicy Mystery Stories that appeared between 1935 and 1942.

"The Walking Dead" (1935)

We immediately wade into troubled waters with this story, which by today's standards is alarmingly racist.  A week ago Walt Connell gave the black man who acts as his gardener, handy man and gofer, Plato Jones, some money to drive down to the Mississippi Delta, sixty miles away, to pick up some orange wine.  Connell hasn't seen the man since then, and assumes he drank the wine himself and is scared to come back.  But today Jones's fat wife, crying, comes by to say she has not seen her husband in a week.  Price makes jokes abut how white people who hire blacks are always having to bail them out of jail and always in danger of being outwitted by their "African guile" and forced into doing them favors. And you know how people who have pet cats joke that the cat actually owns them, and dog owners will joke that the dog walks them instead of vice versa?  Well, Price makes a similar joke about how a white person doesn't hire a "negro," rather, a white is "adopted" by a black.  Oy. 

Anyway, Mrs. Jones, whose speech Price renders phonetically ("Ah knew you'd take care of yo'ah cullud folks") gives Connell the gift of a chocolate cake and some salted cashew nuts and gets him to go look for her husband ("Ah don' baked yo'all a chocolate cake for yo' lunch when you go to get dat no good niggah!")  The next day he drives down to the Delta, the cake and nuts in his glove compartment, stopping at every small town jail on the way to ask after Jones.

At the last town he asks the pretty Cajun girl with large breasts who is working behind the counter of the general store about Jones.  She hints that Jones has been turned into a zombie and is working on the plantation of one Pierre Ducoin!  This shocking news doesn't stop Connell from having sex with the curvaceous Cajun seductress in the back room of the store.  As the sun begins to set he remembers why he came down here and books it on over to the Ducoin plantation where he sees Jones's distinctive red Model T half hidden behind some shrubs.  Then he meets Ducoin himself, shepherding and a squad of silent and vacant-eyed African-American workers--the zombies!

Ducoin agrees to let Connell talk to his workers to see if any of them know about Jones, but insists that will have to wait until tomorrow.  Ducoin has Connell over for dinner and gives him a room.  At night, Connell can see blacks silently working the fields, even though there is no overseer present.  He also receives a surprise visitor, the beautiful pale-skinned black-haired Madeline Ducoin, Pierre's niece.  She warns him to leave at once, and tells him Jones is now one of the walking dead!  Connell seduces the girl and they agree to sneak off together to be married.  When Connell opens the trunk of his car to put Madeline's luggage in there, Mrs. Plato emerges--she has been hiding there the whole time!  (Like eight or twelve hours?)

Ducoin, and the black sorceress who acts as his assistant, have spotted Connell and Madeline trying to steal away and sic the zombies on them; Connell's blows have no effect on their nerveless dead bodies, and he and Madeline are captured.  After a little gloating the two villains leave to make the potion that will turn Connell and Madeline into zombies.  They assign some of the zombies to guard them--one of them is poor Plato Jones!

Price portrays the zombies as emotionless robots with no initiative who follow instructions precisely and otherwise do nothing.  This helps explain how Mrs. Jones has eluded capture.  Another piece of zombie lore that I can't recall ever having seen before leads to Mrs. Jones saving the day.  She remembers something her grandmother told her about zombies--salt makes zombies go berserk and kill their masters, and then bury themselves--and gives her undead husband some of her salted cashew nuts.  Fed these salty treats, the zombies tear Pierre Ducoin and the black witch to pieces, and then run off; our surviving cast can see them in the distance, feverishly digging their own graves in the bare earth.  Connell promises to hire the widowed Mrs. Jones full time as Madeline's maid after they get married, so I guess everybody has a happy (?) ending.

While not suitable for today's audiences, and poor at best because it doesn't maintain a consistent tone--there are too many jokes and silly sex scenes for it to work as a horror story, and the disgusting killings keep it from being light-hearted fun--"The Walking Dead" is perhaps a story scholars of the depiction of African and African diaspora culture in genre literature, and in particular the depiction of zombies, should read.  

Like our next story, "The Walking Dead" would be included in the 2004 Price collection Satan's Daughter and Other Tales form the Pulps.

"Satan's Daughter" (1936)

Price appends to the start of "Satan's Daughter" three lines about Lilith from Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem "Eden Bower."  (Check out Rossetti's paintings and drawings on the theme of Lilith at wikipedia.)  

Morton Reed is an archaeologist.  He discovers a forgotten city under the desert, and unearths a fine statue of a gorgeous woman with Semitic features standing on the back of a lion.  The thing scares his faithful Arab servant, who thinks it represents Bint el Hareth--the Queen of Demons!  

(Price never actually uses the name "Lilith" in the text of "Satan's Daughter," but I guess we are supposed to see Bint el Hareth as Lilith under another name or perhaps a related figure.)

At night a beautiful woman comes to Reed's tent, a woman who looks just like the statue of the Queen of Demons.  She and Reed have an enthusiastic make out session, but she won't go all they way--it seems she can't because of a silver girdle she wears.  She explains that if he wants her Reed must come to her in Kurdistan, and exhorts him to study the inscription on the base of the statue, which describes the spell he must cast to summon her.  Then she bites him and drinks some of his blood, and convinces him to bite her and drink some of her blood.  Then, she is gone.

Weeks later Reed, disguised as a native, rides a donkey into Kurdistan, to the ruined tower where he can cast the spell that will summon Bint el Hareth.  In the tower's crypts lie the dried mummies of the many men who have summoned the Queen of Demons over the centuries--each of these desiccated husks has the mark of a woman's lips on its forehead!  

By the ruin sits a village.  Reed goes to it to buy food, and while there he spots a white missionary providing medical care to the locals; with him is a beautiful red-headed girl, the first white woman Reed has seen in years!  His desire is enflamed!  Suddenly, bandits attack the village.  Reed is good at fighting with a sword and at shooting with a rifle, and rescues the redhead.  They retreat to the ruin; the missionary, her uncle, is dead, and the village has been burned.

The bandits lay siege to the ruin, and Reed and the redhead have sex--she assumes the bandits will eventually get them, and says she doesn't want to die a virgin.  Could love be blossoming between them?  Should Reed abandon his quest for Bint el Hareth and try to figure out a way to elude the bandits so he and this girl can live happily ever after together?  But hopes of escaping are dashed when the Reed runs out of ammo; doomed he casts the spell to summon the Queen of Demons... and finds the joke is on him!  The redhead is the Queen of Demons!  The real redhead was slain in the village with her uncle--Bint el Hareth just took over her body to have a little fun.  At first Reed fears his demon lover is going to punish him for cheating on her, but she doesn't care about that--she fulfills his dream, and Reed dies of ecstasy while enjoying Bint el Hareth's charms.  When the bandits finally bust into the tower they can't find the redhead they had hoped to enslave, just the white man's inert body, the mark of a woman's lips on his forehead. 

This is actually a decent story, with a plot that makes sense and a unity of tone.  Long time readers of MPorcius Fiction Log know I like stories about disastrous sexual relationships and stories about the crazy and stupid things men will do when driven by sexual desires.  I think this is the first of these spicy stories I can legitimately recommend to general SF/pulp readers.

"Prayer to Satan" (1942)

A bunch of anthropologists are in Kurdistan, measuring and photographing a tribe of Yezidis, people who, according to this story, worship the devil!  (According to wikipedia this is a misconception about the Yezidi religion that is actually offensive to Yezidis, so I advise against going around saying this to people.)  Dan Mason is a senior member of the expedition--he's not an anthropologist himself, but as a friend of the Yazidis he  plays the role of guide, ambassador and peacekeeper; for some reason (I guess to move the plot along and enhance the story's theme of vision), he also has the job of developing the expedition's film.

The Yezidis warn Mason that all the white people on the expedition are his enemies, and invite him to join their tribe.  One of the Yezidis casts a spell on Mason, giving him, literally and metaphorically, better sight.  That evening he discovers that, while he is in the film-developing tent every night, his wife Diane has been cheating on him!  He also learns that the anthropologists are sneaking into the Yezidi's sacred temples and stealing their artifacts!  Holy crap!  Mason demands that the expedition leave at once, because the Yezidis will probably kill them all if they discover the thefts; he tells everybody to hastily pack while he returns to the Yezidi temple a purloined copy of the Black Book of Satan.

On his way to the temple, in the dark, Mason is ambushed, shot down and killed!  But with his augmented vision he is able to see a beautiful woman approaching him--it is Laylat, one of the daughters of Lilith, a demon who haunts the night!  (Lilith it seems, is a recurring theme in Price's work.)  As a sort of ghost, hanging between life and death, Mason has sex with this otherworldy being.  More importantly, perhaps, she tells him that all men are given the choice of whether to live or die, and Mason can now choose to live on or expire.  Mason wonders why so few men choose life over death, and Laylat explains that most men are weary of living, even if they don't admit it to themselves, and their souls crave the rest of death.  Price is laying some heavy philosophy on us here!  Oh yeah, there is another reason men who are sick or injured might choose to die instead of to live--men who choose life must make a deal with the Devil to secure that additional life!  Mason decides that he needs to restore his life so he can return the Black Book to his Yezidi friends and make sure the expedition, for which he has responsibility even if they are a bunch of shits, gets out of Kurdistan alive. 

Laylat the sexy demon leads Mason the responsible ghost into the Yezidi temple where they meet Satan himself, who appears as a glowing vortex.  Mason is flabbergasted, but Laylat negotiates for him, offering the lives of Diane and the other members of the expedition in exchange for prolonging Mason's life.  Well, there goes Mason's hope of rescuing the expedition!  But maybe the expedition doesn't deserve to be saved--when Mason gets to the expeditions' tents, still in invisible ghost form, Diane and her lover are not packing, but talking about how they hired some Arabs to kill Mason and get the Black Book back from him!  Mason thought that it was bandits or Yezidi guards who killed him, but it was agents of his own unfaithful wife and greedy colleagues!  The Yezidis, knowing the score, attack the expedition to retrieve their book and avenge Mason, killing everybody--the leader of the Yezidis bares Diane's breasts before ending her life with a sword.

Mason wakes up, back in his body, in the tent of his true friend, the leader of the Yezidi tribe.  The chief has a beautiful daughter, Layla, who looks like Laylat and already wants to be Mason's second wife.  Price hints that she is, somehow, an incarnation of Laylat and knows all about their passionate tryst and momentous visit with Ole Scratch while he was in ghost form.

Like "Satan's Daughter" this is a solid weird story about men and their risky sexual relationships.  It is also a story about going native; in "South Sea Justice," a Price story we looked at in our last episode, we saw a guy resist going native, but this time the protagonist takes the plunge.  It is nice to see Price exploring this theme from a different angle.  Similarly, while the Lilith figure in "Queen of the Lilin," Price's 1934 Weird Tales cover story we recently read, is an abominable monster, the Lilith figure here, while eager to consign people to death, is helpful to the hero and can be seen as an agent of (rough!) justice. 

"Prayer to Satan" was included in the 1975 Price collection Far Lands Other Days.             

"Web of Wizardry" (1942)

Here's another story that was reprinted in Far Lands Other Days.

Barry Baylor is an American in Iran, a businessman who buys Persian rugs for export.  An acquaintance of his is fellow Yank Allan Ostrom; Ostrom works for some kind of transportation company, managing bus and train stations.  Ostrom has a beautiful wife, Marta, and Marta and Baylor are having an affair.  Baylor keeps imploring Marta to leave her husband, but Baylor doesn't have enough money to maintain the lifestyle Marta enjoys with Allan--the war has really disrupted the international Persian rug trade.  This kind of feels like an excuse--it seems that Marta actually likes Allan, and isn't in love with Baylor--she just enjoys having a little sex on the side.  Baylor, on the other hand, is seriously smitten by Marta.

In search of a solution to his woman problem, Baylor visits a witch who lives in a cave, a hideous old hag named Aisha.  Her cave is full of looms with half-finished rugs on them that depict recognizable human figures amid their complex patterns--Aisha determines the courses of people's lives by weaving their fates on these magic looms!  Aisha agrees to use her sorcery to help Baylor achieve his ambition of sailing away with Marta, after of course warning him that trying to change the patterns set by Allah is dangerous and "the blessing you seek will become a doom and Satan the Damned will mock you."  People in stories always ignore good advice like this.  

The rest of the story chronicles the wild twists of fate which Baylor and the Ostroms experience as Aisha weaves their fates in unexpected and often unwelcome ways.  Baylor and Ostrom are usually pretty even-tempered guys, but something (guess what!) makes them act impulsively and aggressively and they get in a fist fight which almost kills Ostrom.  Afraid he will continue to act impulsively, Baylor decides to bury his pistol in the courtyard under a stone so he can't easily access the weapon, and in the dirt he finds an ancient treasure trove!  Now he can afford to take Marta back to America!  But Marta refuses to leave Allan, because he is having a tough time and needs her support--the big company he works for has been seized by the Iranian government and those corrupt bastards laid him off because he can't afford to pay a huge bribe!  Thinking Marta may feel comfortable leaving Allan if he has his job back, Baylor uses some of the treasure to bribe the necessary Iranian officials so Ostrom is rehired!

This sort of stuff keeps happening, Baylor, Ostrom and Marta suffering all kinds of problems, but Baylor never actually getting any closer to getting Marta all to himself.  At one point Baylor goes to the witch's cave to try to get the old hag to do a better job with her sorcery, and instead of finding Aisha there he meets a beautiful young woman wearing a veil, who says she is Aisha's daughter, Shireen.  Shireen says living in a cave with her mother gets pretty lonely, and she seduces Baylor and they have sex; Shireen promises to rework her mother's weaving to Baylor's benefit. 

Things don't work out, however.  It seems you just can't trust witches who live in caves, even the hot ones!  Baylor and Ostrom ending up having a duel in a mountain pass near Aisha's cave.  Ostrom shoots first and misses.  Baylor doesn't want to kill Ostrom--Marta will never love the murderer of her husband--so he aims to miss on purpose, but his shot starts an avalanche that kills Ostrom and critically injures Marta, who was secretly watching the duel.  Baylor tells the Marta he is going to get help, but knows getting a doctor will take too long, so he goes to the witch cave.  When Shireen refuses to revise her weaving so as to undo the deadly disaster that has befallen the Ostroms, Baylor grabs the half-finished rug and throws it on the fire!  Shireen laughs and reveals that there is no Shireen--Aisha just put on that sexy disguise so he would have sex with her!  Cripes!  Even worse, burning up the weaving that was determining their fates has killed him. In the final scene of the story Baylor, Allan and Marta are all ghosts, walking listlessly by a caravan; one of the Iranian mule drivers shivers and prays to Allah for protection from the evils of the night, witches, and people driven by envy.

This is a pretty good weird story that reminds you that--no matter how horny or envious you get--you should deal honestly with people and should definitely not under any circumstances enlist witches to help you accomplish your unethical intrigues.    

**********

The first "spicy" story by E. Hoffmann Price I read, "Tailor Made Mummy," was a series of sex scenes and scenes of violence against women to which were tacked lame weird mystery story elements in an effort to justify them.  This batch of stories is different: "The Walking Dead" is a weird story with gratuitous sex scenes tacked onto it--not good, but an improvement.  The three stories we talked about today about white men in the Islamic world, "Satan's Daughter," "Prayer to Satan," and "Web of Wizardry," are weird stories about sexual relationships--men's perilous risk-taking in pursuit of sexual gratification is at their core.  Those three tales, whose erotic elements are fully integrated into their depictions of the occult and of the mysterious and exotic Near East, are successful and entertaining--I guess I am becoming an E. Hoffmann Price fan.

So, there will be more Price in this blog's future.  But first, after two posts about magazines full of low class exploitative entertainment, we'll have a post about a serious science fiction novel that addresses serious issues, written by a serious science fiction author everybody respects.  So stay tuned!

Spicy Stories by E. Hoffmann Price and Henry Kuttner

The wikipedia page on E. Hoffmann Price, which I looked at while writing a recent installment of MPorcius Fiction Log, brought to mind the pulp magazines Spicy Mystery Stories and Spicy-Adventure Stories.  So today I typed "spicy" into the internet archive to check out what stories by Price and other Weird Tales writers from these magazines might be available for free.  Now let's read three of them, two by Price and one by Henry Kuttner, a long time favorite of us here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

"Tailor Made Mummy" by E. Hoffmann Price (1936)   

Back in 1976 Odyssey Publications reprinted the July 1936 issue of Spicy Mystery Stories, which included Price's "Tailor Made Mummy;" it is this reprint that is available at the internet archive.  The contents page of the issue, which has an awesome illustration depicting a cabal of skull-faced villains lowering a curvaceous babe into a pit where she will be devoured by some kind of ravenous goblin or gremlin, also has a funny typo, "Dummy" for "Mummy."  Oh, brother!

Merrill Kane is an unscrupulous chemist, living in Egypt with his wife, the beautiful blonde Ida.  Kane's rich uncle was an Egyptologist with a fringe theory about the whereabouts of some ancient queen's mummy; in an early example of cancel culture, when he couldn't substantiate his theory, this guy was disgraced before the Egyptologist community.  In his will this scholar  stipulated that his nephew Merrill could only inherit his worldly goods if Merrill first found the mummy of that queen and proved his theory.

As the story begins Kane has hired a down-and-out Egyptologist, Denis Foster, a man who has not been able to find work with his Egyptology degree and has been going hungry.  (Should have studied engineering or something like that, pal.)  Foster's first assignment is to mummify a beautiful brunette suicide whose fresh corpse Kane has acquired from the morgue!  At first, Foster refuses--he says he is against defiling the bodies of the dead.  But then Kane draws a gun, tells Foster that this estate is surrounded by electrified wires so he can't escape, and if he doesn't mummify this poor suicide at once he'll let one of his native thugs rape the corpse.  So Foster mummifies the 20th-century body using the methods employed in Egypt thousands of years ago.

At night Foster is locked up in a basement.  Ida comes to him--she hates her husband, who hasn't been paying attention to her, and she has sex with Foster.  The sex in this story is not explicit--the lovers are in each other's arms, and then there is an ellipsis, and the next para starts with some indication that time has passed, and we are left to assume what went on.  After their lovemaking is finished, Ida explains to Foster why Kane needs a counterfeit mummy to secure his inheritance. 

When he is not busy working on the mummy or the mummy case, Foster sneaks around the estate, trying to figure out a way to deactivate those electrified wires.  He discovers that his first go at mummifying a woman was just for practice--Kane and his Arab thugs have caught a girl alive whom they are going to slay and compel Foster to mummify.  The villains lock this girl in the wine cellar, which shares a wall with the basement.  

Foster finds some loose blocks in the wall, and makes himself a passage through which he joins the new captive.  He and this olive-skinned beauty, Nefeyda, while plotting a means of escaping, fall in love and have sex.  

Foster and Nefeyda's first escape attempt is a failure, and after a brutal fight with Kane's Arab goons, our heroes end up back in their makeshift cells; Foster again sneaks into the wine cellar.  

Ida comes to the basement looking for Foster, and then goes to the wine cellar when she finds he's not there.  Foster loosens the light bulb that illuminates the wine cellar, rendering the place pitch black, and directs Nefedya to hide in the corner.  Ida, thinking them alone, wants to have sex with Foster, and our hero, who doesn't want to cheat on Nefeyda while she is right there, silences the blonde her by knocking her cold with a single punch.  But too late--jealous Nefedya, sensing the intimacy between Foster and Kane's wife, has already sneaked out the open door.

In the climax to the story Kane the evil chemist has Foster at gunpoint in the operating room and sends one of his Arab brutes to bring Nefedya to be mummified.  The Arab strangles the girl he finds in the dark wine cellar and brings the pulchritudinous corpse to Kane and Foster--everybody is shocked to see the goon has murdered Ida!  Foster takes advantage of his tormentors' confusion to attack, and a bloody fight ensues.  Foster incapacitates Kane, but that huge Arab is about to kill our hero when Nefedya arrives and stabs the thug in the back, killing him.  Foster assures Nefedya that Ida meant nothing to him, and we are given to believe that Foster and Nefedya will live happily ever after. 

The plot of "Tailor Made Mummy" is contrived, convoluted and ridiculous, Price concocting unlikely circumstances and portraying people acting in unconvincing ways to provide himself opportunities to serve up hearty helpings of sex and violence, the descriptions of injuries and transgressions against the human body, designed to appeal to the prurient interests and particular fetishes of readers drawn in by the sexy and sadistic illustrations on the cover and contents page of the magazine.  And these passages are legion: women who have been rendered helpless by drugs, battery or death are manhandled and violated; Nefedya strips in front of Foster on the pretext that he needs her silk undergarments for use as insulation in his (ultimately abortive) scheme of cutting the live wires leading to the electrified fence; Nefedya bites and scratches men bloody in fights in which she is herself bruised and bloodied.  And then there are Price's invocations of necrophilia and voyeurism.

"Tailor Made Mummy" is a crazy piece of work on every level.  I can enjoy a story full of sex and violence, and I am not the kind of guy to condemn a work of art or fiction simply because it is sexist or racist (for example, I think the illustrations on Spicy Mystery's cover and contents page are great), but "Tailor Made Mummy" is poorly put together and I feel I have to give it the old thumbs down. 

"South Sea Justice" by E. Hoffmann Price (1941)

In 1974, Odyssey Publications published a reprint of the February 1941 issue of Spicy-Adventure Stories, which includes Price's story "South Sea Justice;" it is this reprint that I found at the internet archive. 

"South Sea Justice" takes place in French Polynesia, where "Red" Lawton has been running a coconut plantation for five years.  Over that time a young native girl, Vikahue, whose body is covered in tattoos, has blossomed into voluptuous womanhood, and she has a crush on Red!  Red's plantation was financed by his 50/50 partner Vince Durbin; Durbin has spent most of that time back home in America, but recently arrived on the island.  As our story begins, Durbin is missing and Vikahue interrupts Red's search for him to flirt and to tell him some unhappy truths about Durbin.  For one thing, Durbin has been frequenting taboo locations on the island, and Vikahue warns Red that her tribe's priests will kill Durbin if he doesn't quit it.  For another, Durbin has been making time with the white woman Red has been courting, Paris-educated Irinea Salazar, daughter of a neighboring planter.  

Red catches up with Durbin at Salazar's, where he learns Irinea and Durbin are practically engaged.  Irinea is gorgeous, and seeing her slip through his fingers--and hearing Durbin remind him that he would be nothing without his investment--enrages Red.  It doesn't help when Durbin scoffs at Red's warnings about the need to stay away from the natives' taboo spots--Durbin admits he's hoping to find the rumored treasure trove of pearls said to be hidden at one of the native temples.  In his rage Red makes a fool of himself in front of Irinea and it looks like his hopes of marrying her are dashed.

Red doesn't give up, though.  He lets Durbin take over management of the plantation, a task for which he is totally unprepared and to which he is temperamentally unsuited, hoping that the stress of the troubles that arise will convince him to leave the island, or that his demonstrated incompetence will discredit him with the Salazars--Irinea's father won't let her marry some goof who causes a native uprising or can't run the business profitably.  The scheming Vikahue plays her own game; she wants Red to be her man, and is very jealous of Irinea; for his part Red desires Vikahue's luscious brown body, finding those long legs with their blue tattoos particularly fascinating, but he knows bringing a nonwhite wife back to the U.S. will be trouble and so keeps rejecting Viki's advances.  For some reason Vikahue also torments Durbin, perhaps trying to make Red jealous, egging Durbin on and then spreading rumors he has been harassing her.

Eventually Durbin cracks under the pressure.  Seeing as he doesn't know how to make money with the plantation, one stormy night he steals off to loot some sacred pearls from a native temple--he'll use these to finance a return to America with Irinea.  But islanders find him desecrating their holy grounds and he murders one of them.  The natives rise up, demanding revenge.  Irinea rejects Durbin's scheme of fleeing with the pearls, appalled by his thievery and worried that the uprising he has triggered may lead to the islanders killing her father.  Miss Salazar now realizes she should marry Red instead of this jerk.  Durbin makes a break for it on his own, but he can't navigate in the storm and his boat capsizes-- he drowns as the natives who were chasing him watch from the safety of the beach.  Seeing the malefactor meet his just deserts at the hands of the gods, the natives feel justice has been done and the uprising is over.  We are lead to believe that Red and Irinea will marry and spend a happy life together on the island.

"South Sea Justice," on a technical level, is substantially better than "Tailor Made Mummy."  The character's personalities, motivations and actions all make sense, though I feel Price committed a misstep in leaving the Vikahue subplot essentially unresolved.  There probably should have been a scene in which the tattooed girl made her peace with Irinea or found some other guy or whatever and resolved to stop chasing Red; or maybe an unsettling ending in which Red worried that Vikahue would try to break up his marriage and ha to resolve to be strong in the face of Viki's temptation.

"South Sea Justice" is also less exploitative than Price's bonkers fake mummy tale--nobody has sex, the violence is considerably toned down in volume and in vividness--and far less crazy; in fact, nothing that happens is crazy at all--everything that happens is pretty believable.  I'm afraid this makes the story less fun and less memorable, and suspect it probably doesn't scratch the itch that led a person to purchase Spicy-Adventures Stories in the first place.

"Tropic Hell" by Henry Kuttner (1941)  

Henry Kuttner's cover story from the August 1941 Spicy-Adventure Stories is so brief and straightforward it feels more like an anecdote than a story, but it does offer the sex and bloodshed readers were presumably looking for.

Joe Dawson is the second mate of a tramp steamer sitting in the lagoon of the little South Pacific island of Marava.  A dude named Kent owns the plantation on Marava, and Kent's sister, beautiful college grad Loretta, just disembarked from the steamer Dawson's ship to join him.  During the voyage from San Francisco, Dawson and Loretta had a little fling, but he assumes that is all over now.

Two native girls, frantic, paddle up to the ship--they ask for the captain, but Dawson tells them the captain and first mate are asleep.  The islanders, one of them a princess of the local tribe, Utota, beg Dawson to set sail with them aboard, offering him a bunch of pearls as payment.  Then another boat arrives, and on it are a bunch of native police and the brutish overseer of the Kent plantation, Rudy Storm.  They accuse the girls of stealing the pearls and seize them and the women; the princess tries to kill Storm with a knife, but he overpowers her--in the fracas her clothes come off and she gets knocked out with a punch in the face.  Before they are dragged off, Utota's companion tells Dawson that Kent is dead, a claim Storm denies.

After all these squabbling characters have left the ship, Dawson decides to sneak ashore and investigate.  He learns that Storm killed Kent some time ago and is ruling the island like a tyrant.  He, somehow, has been forging all of Kent's correspondence, fooling even Loretta.  There is a series of fights, captures and escapes on the island, Dawson, Loretta and the princess Utota at various times grappling with Storm, having their clothes ripped off, getting tied up, etc.  At one point Dawson and Loretta are hiding under some bushes and they have a passionate make out session--Loretta was hysterical with fear and about to scream and expose their hiding place and the best way to silence her and take her mind off her fears was to kiss her!  Later, they are Storm's captives and the brutal overseer gropes poor Loretta with one hand while he drinks booze with the other--suddenly the princess attacks him with a dagger, only to have Storm seize the blade and bury it in her chest.  Loretta bolts, and while Storm is chasing her, the dying Utota crawls, naked, "blood trickling down her swaying breasts," to where Dawson lies tied up.  With the dagger Dawson is able to free himself and then defeat Storm in a vicious fight.  

At the end of the story it is clear Dawson and Loretta are an item, but I don't think there is any indication of what is going to happen to the Kent plantation--it seems like Dawson and Loretta aren't made of the same stuff as Red and Irinea and won't be living on the plantation, but moving to America.  Well, Loretta probably couldn't use her degree on that island anyway.     

Maybe we should see "Tropic Hell" as the most successful of today's three stories, as it has characters whose behavior makes sense as well as horrific violence against women and fetishistic sex elements.  What it lacks compared to Price's "Tailor Made Mummy" and "South Sea Justice" is any kind of science or exotic or weird component.  

**********

We'll continue exploring this disreputable facet of the careers of the members of the Weird Tales gang in our next episode.

Weird Tales Project: 1933

As you may be aware, I have pledged to read and blog about at least one story from each 1930s issue of Weird Tales, the famous magazine known for its association with H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Ray Bradbury, C. L. Moore, Robert Bloch, and other major figures in the world of fantasy and horror literature.  Today I can report that I have tackled at least one story from each issue of the unique magazine printed in the year 1933--find below a list of these stories and a link to my semi-coherent musings about them.  

Should I return to these magazines to blog about any additional stories therein, I will add them to the list with a parenthetical note.

Finally, in the following space, I will include links to those blog posts cataloging the WT stories that have come under my doting or scathing eye from each of the other nine years under scrutiny.

1930  1931 1932  ----  1934  1935  1936  1937  1938  1939  

January

Edmond Hamilton:     "Snake-Man" 

Robert E. Howard:      "The Scarlet Citadel"

February

Donald Wandrei:        "The Fire Vampires"

Hugh B. Cave:            "The Cult of the White Ape" 

Clark Ashton Smith:   "The Mandrakes"

H. P. Lovecraft:           "The Cats of Ulthar" 

August Derleth:          "The Vanishing of Simmons"

March

Clark Ashton Smith:    "The Isle of the Torturers"

April

Clark Ashton Smith:    "The Ice Demon"

Carl Jacobi:                 "Revelations in Black"

Edmond Hamilton:     "The Star-Roamers" 

May

Donald Wandrei:                     "Spawn of the Sea"

Mary Elizabeth Counselman: "The Girl with the Green Eyes"

June

Robert E. Howard:        "Black Colossus"

Hugh B. Cave:              "The Crawling Curse" 

Clark Ashton Smith:     "Genius Loci" 

August Derleth:            "Nellie Foster" 

July

Edmond Hamilton:                          "The Fire Creatures"

Hazel Heald and H. P. Lovecraft:    "The Horror in the Museum"

H. P. Lovecraft:                                "The Dreams in the Witch House"

Clark Ashton Smith:                        "Ubbo-Sathla"

Robert E. Howard:                           "The Man on the Ground" 

August

Carl Jacobi:        "A Pair of Swords"

September

Robert E. Howard:                       "The Slithering Shadow" (AKA: Xuthal of the Dusk")

Edmond Hamilton:                       "The Horror on the Asteroid"

Frank Belknap Long:                    "Death-Waters"

Clark Ashton Smith:                      "A Vintage from Atlantis"

August Derleth & Mark Schorer:  "The Return of Andrew Bentley"  (added March 2022)

Hugh B. Cave:                               "The Watcher in the Green Room" (added 01/31/2024) 

October

Edmond Hamilton:                "The Vampire Master"

Robert E. Howard:                 "The Pool of the Black One"

Jack Williamson:                    "The Plutonian Terror"

Clark Ashton Smith:               "The Seed from the Sepulcher"

Frank Belknap Long:              "The Black Dead Thing"

Mary Elizabeth Counselman: "The Cat-Woman" (added Aug 9, 2024)

November

C. L. Moore:                 "Shambleau"

Clark Ashton Smith:     "The Holiness of Alzedarac"

Edmond Hamilton:       "The War of the Sexes"

December

Robert E. Howard:     "Old Garfield's Heart"

Donald Wandrei:        "The Lady in Gray" (added 01/31/2024)

Weird Tales November 1934: E. Hoffmann Price, August Derleth and H. P. Lovecraft

As you may be aware, here at MPorcius Fiction Log we have become committed, Ahab-like, to reading at least one story from every issue of Weird Tales published in the 1930s.  Today we fill in a gap in our WT blogging catalog: I have yet to blog about anything from the November 1934 issue* and so today we tackle three pieces from that number, new stories by E. Hoffmann Price and August Derleth, and a reprinted 1922 story by H. P. Lovecraft.

*Yeah, I blogged about Robert E. Howard's four part serial "People of the Black Circle," the third part of which appears in this issue, but for the purposes of my quest a serial only counts for the issue that presents its first episode.

"Queen of the Lilin" by E. Hoffmann Price (1934)

Price is an important member of the Weird Tales circle whose work I have very little familiarity with.  Today seems like as good a day as any to broaden my weird horizons and read Price's Weird Tales cover story that, we are promised, is about "a gloriously beautiful" woman who, sadly, is an evil ghost!  isfdb tells us "Queen of the Lilin" is a novelette, and the last of the eight stories in the Pierre D'Artois series; apparently it is also a component of the Glenn Farrell series.

I am reading "Queen of the Lilin" at the internet archive scan of the Nov. '34 issue of Weird Tales; the story would be reprinted in 1975 in the Price collection Far Lands, Other Days.

Glenn Farrell is an American (I think) who got to southern France a few weeks ago and is visiting his buddy Pierre D'Artois, a Frenchman who lives in a refurbished 13th-century tower in Bayonne.  D'Artois is a scholar and former soldier.  Both D'Artois and Farrell are detectives, and again and again in the story demonstrate the ability to learn all about a person's character and mood just by taking a quick glance at his or her face, to the point of knowing what he or she is thinking and being able to predict what a person is about to do.

Farrell has made a new friend in France, a pretty girl, Diane Livaudais.  Diane has a problem--the last few days heavy items, like a bust of Bonaparte and a sword hung on a wall, have been mysterious falling from their perches and almost hitting her in the head.  Diane also has the feeling that some evil entity is following her!  Farrell, a logical Yank, of course thinks poor Diane is suffering some kind of psychological problem, but not scholar of the occult D'Artois!  The Frenchman hypnotizes Diane and this causes the being haunting her to manifest itself so he and Farrell can see it--its a misty apparition of a beautiful woman with a haughty and evil face!  

That bust of the Little Corporal that almost brained Diane was given to her by some dude she has been hanging with, Graf Erich, a German count.  D'Artois knows about this guy--he is some kind of wizard!  (The word D'Artois uses is "thaumaturgist.")  D'Artois has Diane finagle an invite for all three of them to Erich's place; they leave almost immediately after arriving because yet again some antique weapons fall off a wall and almost kill Diane.

I had expected that every scene of "Queen of the Lilin" would feature D'Artois and/or Farrell, that we readers wouldn't get any clues to the mystery that they didn't have, so I was surprised when the third of the novelette's six chapters had us watching Graf Erich, after the departure of his guests, sneaking down a secret staircase to a subterranean vault in which five silent robed men are seated around a pentacle.  We learn that D'Artois and his five students summoned from the ancient past the spirit of Lilith, Demon Queen of Zemargad, AKA Agrat bat Mahlat, the very epitome of feminine beauty and feminine jealousy.  Lilith demands that the Count only have eyes for her, which is why she is trying to murder Diane.  Graf Erich is unable to convince Lilith to spare Diane. 

Lilith is getting stronger and stronger, and luckily Farrell and D'Artois are at Diane's house when the demonic queen tries the direct approach, materializing at Diane's front door and trying to stab her with a dagger when she answers the doorbell.  Farrell wrestles briefly with Lilith, finding her skin cold, and then D'Artois whips out an ankh (he calls it a "crux ansata") and dispels the gorgeous demon by yelling Semitic phrases at her.  Lilith vanishes into mist but Farrell and D'Artois, not wanting to scare Diane, manage to convince her the woman who just attacked her was merely a nutcase who ran away.

D'Artois and Farrell go to Graf Erich's place and the Count unburdens himself, explaining regretfully how he summoned Lilith, why she is after Diane, and why he can't easily send her back to where she came from.  D'Artois convinces him to resort to a horrible expedient--Graf Erich takes a sword and decapitates his five disciples, hoping to deny Lilith their life energy and concentration, which is what brought her to our world.  But Lilith has already gathered enough of their power to remain here indefinitely, and she animates the five headless corpses and they tear the Count limb from limb.  

When Lilith tries to murder Diane with her bare hands, D'Artois tries some more magic on her, but she is too strong to be dispelled thusly, and is now so physically strong the two men can't wrestle her hands off of Diane's throat.  Just as Diane is about to expire, D'Artois realizes that the five junior wizards concentrated on a statuette of Lilith when they summoned her--he smashes the statuette and Lilith fades away.  I don't really understand why this dispelled Lilith, even though after her disappearance we get a scene of  D'Artois explaining to Farrell and Diane the pseudoscience behind all the magic we witnessed in the story (thoughts are like radio waves and never really go away and can be amplified blah blah blah....)

Diane just survived two murder attempts and Farrell just saw five animated headless cadavers rip apart a living man, but nothing stops true love--the next day the two young people start flirting and the final scene of the story suggests they will soon be married.

I like the basic premise of the story (wizard summons jealous female demon who wants to kill other women) and the magic and undead scenes are all good.  And it is sort of interesting to see a story that leans heavily on Jewish mythology.  But many of the mundane elements of the story are distracting and lame.  The happy ending feels a little out of place and undermines what should be a tragic tale about how six people's ambition led to their deaths.  And the structure of the story is also a little weak--I find it annoying in a story when there are three different houses and the characters are always shuttling back and forth between them unnecessarily; the author should figure out a way to minimize that sort of thing, like having all the main characters staying in the same house for the weekend or something.

The magic stuff and the catastrophic violence (six dead wizards!) are good enough that I can give "Queen of the Lilin" a mild recommendation.  Maybe I'll start reading more stories by Price, in Weird Tales and maybe in other wacky magazines of the '30s and '40s like Spicy Adventure and Spicy Mystery.  

"Feigman's Beard" by August Derleth (1934)

The frail little widow Klopp, everybody in the farming community knows, is a witch!  So when Martha Feigman has had it up to here with her violent and abusive half-brother Eb, she goes to visit Klopp, telling the old woman that Eb just sold their hogs without consulting her and has refused to hand over her share of the money.  Martha wants occult aid in getting the money she is owed...and maybe Klopp can make Eb's beard fall out--Eb is inordinately proud of his long red beard, and spends a lot of time sitting with a mirror in one hand and a comb in the other, grooming that beard of his.

The widow Klopp has her own reason to want vengeance on Eb--when Mr. Klopp died, Eb managed to steal much of the Klopps' land.  She has Martha bring to her Eb's mirror and some hairs from his beard, and puts a spell on the mirror--in the morning when Eb looks in the mirror he dies of a heart attack!  Martha can't resist looking in the mirror herself, and disaster occurs.  

This is an acceptable little black magic story that warns you against greed, vanity, and the lust for revenge, and advises you that under no circumstances should you look to the devil or his agents for help.  Good advice! 

"Feigman's Beard" would reappear in the 1948 Derleth collection Not Long for This World and its abridged 1961 paperback edition.

"The Music of Erich Zann" by H. P. Lovecraft (1922)

"The Music of Erich Zann" first appeared in The National Amateur, and later in Weird Tales in 1925, and was included in the November '34 Weird Tales under the reprint banner.  When I read "The Music of Erich Zann" in my youth I was underwhelmed, but the critics think this one of Lovecraft's best stories and Lovecraft himself considered it one of his favorites: in a letter to C. L. Moore dated April 27, 1935, Lovecraft lists the stories of his own which he likes and "Erich Zann" is second on the list after "Colour Out of Space" and in a February 16, 1936 letter to Henry Kuttner Lovecraft tells Kuttner "I like 'The Colour out of Space' best of all my stuff, & 'The Music of Erich Zann' second."  So today I give the tale a reread in my copy of The Dunwich Horror and Others (Corrected Eleventh Printing.)

The narrator, apparently a Frenchman, tells us he once lived in an ugly rundown neighborhood inhabited by taciturn old geezers, in a decrepit boarding house at the top of a steep street impassable by any vehicle.  On the top floor of this boarding house lived a mute German who played the viol, Erich Zann.  The narrator could hear Zann's playing at night--the man played songs the narrator has never heard before made up of strange notes.  The narrator convinced the hermitish Zann to let him come visit so he could hear him play.  Zann played for him ordinary popular songs, and when asked to play his unique weird pieces, became alarmed and refused, even requesting that the narrator take a different room in the house so that he would be too far from Zann's attic apartment to hear his nightly playing.  Zann also refused to allow the narrator to look out his window, the highest window on this queer street.

The narrator took to sneaking upstairs so he could sit near Zann's door to listen to his bizarre music, and one night heard even more unusual sounds than usual and joined Zann.  A night of fear and drama ensued, and it become clear that that window did not look out upon the city, but on to another universe, and that Zann played that weird music every night as a means of communicating with or influencing dangerous alien entities.  When it seemed the aliens were perhaps about to invade our universe, the narrator fled the boarding house, and when later he made to return, found himself unable, even with maps, to find that rundown neighborhood and that steep street. 

I have to agree with everybody that this is a very good story, more literary and more economical, and less plot-driven than most of Lovecraft's work.  In a September 28, 1935 letter to Duane W. Rimel, Lovecraft argued that "A really serious weird story does not depend on plot or incident at all, but puts all its emphasis on mood or atmosphere."  And Lovecraft here, by describing the strange street and leaving us wondering what exactly is up with Zann and his window (the mute Zann writes down an account of many pages about his relationship with whatever is on the other side of the window but before he can hand it to the narrator a wind sucks the papers irretrievably out the window) builds an unsettling and mysterious mood without offering much by way of conventional narrative.  

"The Music of Erich Zann" was included in Dashiell Hammet's anthology Creeps By Night, which would go on to be reprinted in both America and Britain in multiple volumes; "The Music of Erich Zann" was in the second volume of Belmont's edition, which is titled after Donald Wandrei's "The Red Brain."

**********

My Weird Tales project creeps forward.  More stories by correspondents of H. P. Lovecraft in our next episode!