MPorcius Fiction Log

Tuesday, November 9, 2021

Weird Tales Aug '34: R E Howard, H B Cave and F B Long

Let's read three stories from the August 1934 issue of one of our favorite magazines, Weird Tales. Now, we've already read one of this issue's highlights, the fourth of C. L. Moore's Northwest Smith stories, "Dust of Gods," but tales by Robert E. Howard, Hugh B. Cave and Frank Belknap Long await us. We all know what to expect with Conan, and I've read "The Devil in Iron" before, albeit over a decade ago, but, in my experience, at least, Cave and Long are all over the place and often disappointing, so I still feel like I'm exploring uncharted territory here!

"The Devil in Iron" by Robert E. Howard

I could have read "The Devil in Iron" in my copy of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, but according to the notes in that 2003 book the version therein is unchanged from the Weird Tales text, so I just read the story online at the internet archive as I did the Cave and Long stories.

Conan, the Northern barbarian, has made himself leader of a tribe of bandits living in the wild steppes on the border of a major empire. As usual, Howard describes the ethnic and cultural make up of this empire and of the bandits, contrasting them with Conan. We are assured that even though Conan is a dangerous criminal, he is not as bad as some of the nobles of the empire, for example, Jelal Khan, "a monster such as only an overly opulent civilization can produce." Howard is fascinated by racial and ethnic distinctions and demographic history, the movements and interminglings of peoples, and of course with the comparative virtues of barbarism and civilization, as we can see in his correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft, in which they discuss and opine at length upon all sorts of different ethnic and cultural groups, their characters, their potential, what economic niches they tend to inhabit, etc., as well as debate the superiority of urban or rural life.

Jehungir is the lord of the border province Conan's band keeps raiding, and is getting a lot of pressure from his monarch to put a stop to the Cimmerian's depredations. So, Jehungir and his right hand man Ghaznavi devise a somewhat complicated scheme to trap Conan, alone, on an uninhabited island that rises steeply out of the ocean just across from the swampy shore of the mainland. This island, Xupar, is the site of some mysterious ancient ruins, where, as we witnessed in a first chapter that acts as a sort of prologue, a fisherman (don't worry, we learn the demographic history and characteristics of this fisherman's people as well over the course of the story) has recently awakened some kind of ancient fighting man who stands like seven or eight feet tall and has impenetrable skin.

The bait used by the border lord to get Conan alone and vulnerable on this island is a fair blonde girl with a curvaceous body, a young noblewoman from the West who had the misfortune to become a slave of Jehungir's. Octavia is tough, brave, and resourceful, and when the border lord gave her to the aforementioned Jelal Khan, to escape his abuse she busted out of his castle and, looking for a place to hide, made her way to Xupar herself. On Xupar she is quickly captured by some mysterious individual.

When Conan gets to the island, having been fooled by Jehungir's agents into thinking Octavia is there (which, ironically enough, she is), he is astounded by what he finds. He's been to this island before, but last time the ruins were a pile of rubble--today the ruins appear to have been built back up into an intact city with a solid circular wall! The prospect of such diabolical sorcery has Conan all ready to leave, but he then spots clues suggesting that Octavia is nearby, captive of some man, so he puts aside his fear and follows their trail into the town.

Conan explores the city and through inexplicable occult means learns its history. (Characters in stories by Howard and Lovecraft and those they have influenced are always finding ancient lost cities and then, through means that exercise the reader's ability to suspend disbelief, learning their histories.) A demon thousands of years ago took the form of an oversized man, one made of impenetrable metal, and stalked the earth as a cruel god. It came to this island and built this city--Dagonia--and raised the natives to a level of cultural sophistication. Dagonia thrived for "many ages," but then a tribe of people they had enslaved rose up against them, their leader armed with a magic dagger made of metal from a meteor--this dagger is the only weapon that can injure the demon! The city dwellers who had worshipped the demon were exterminated, and the demon was paralyzed and laid to rest with the dagger on its chest.

For centuries the descendants of the slaves who won their freedom lived in the city, but eventually under the stress of famine and plague and war their civilization fell and they dispersed to become tribal fishermen, and Dagonia went to ruin. But just recently (as we saw in that first chapter) a fisherman--a descendent of those liberated slaves--accidentally freed the demon by moving the dagger, his people having forgotten the details of their own history. The demon rebuilt the city and resurrected his worshippers, but, as Conan noticed when he interacted with them (including a woman who wanted Conan to have sex with her) these revenants are a scatterbrained and addlepated lot, who, haunted by their memories of being killed during the slave uprising and the knowledge that they are dead, sleep all day and only stir at night.

Conan meets up with Octavia (the sun having risen, the revenant who captured her is asleep) and they are pursued by the demon. Cornered, it looks like they are doomed, but just then Jehungir and a squad of soldiers come to the island hunting for Conan. While the demon is distracted by the task of killing the soldiers, Conan finds the magic dagger, though to secure the blade he has to fight a giant snake Octavia stupidly wakes up. Jehungir, having eluded the demon, attacks Conan and is slain by our hero. Then the demon attacks Conan, but the Cimmerian uses the magic dagger to kill it. As the demon expires it reverts to its natural alien form; Dagonia--and its living dead inhabitants--return to ruin.

Conan grabs the beautiful Octavia--she initially resists his attentions but Conan doesn't know that "no" means "no" and she quickly succumbs to the charms of the irresistible he-man. Oh Conan, you ladykiller!

This story isn't bad, though there are problems. Having Conan learn the secret history of the city by telepathic leakage or whatever, as he does here in "The Devil in Iron," is even more absurd than learning the secret history of a city by finding an old scroll or looking at wall decorations like he did in "Servants of Bit-Yakin." Maybe the living dead woman who wanted to have sex with him could have told him that stuff, like the princess who wanted to have sex with him in "Xuthal of the Dusk" told him the history of the lost city in that story? I also wanted to see more of Jelal Kahn; we hear how much of a jerk he is, how he mistreated or was going to mistreat Octavia, and how his civilized perversity compares poorly to Conan's barbaric elemental vitality, so I expected him to accompany Jehungir to the island to be destroyed by Conan, but no dice.

Among the many Conan collections in which "The Devil in Iron" has appeared is Conan the Wanderer, one of the Lancer/Ace Conan paperbacks which included pastiches by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp.

"The Isle of Dark Magic" by Hugh B. Cave

Before I tell you all about this story that you could just as well read yourself for free (what is the point of this website again?), I'm going to lay some Hugh B. Cave trivia on you, gossip from the world of the weird culled from my flipping through volumes of the correspondence of H. P. Lovecraft in books published by Hippocampus Press. In his correspondence, H. P. Lovecraft often harps on the distinction between popular writing done for money, and genuine literature, and argues that by writing for the pulps, talented people like Edmond Hamilton and E. Hoffmann Price threw away their gifts, getting into bad habits that inhibited their ability to produce the good work of which they were capable early in their careers. (A good example of such a letter is Lovecraft's March 1935 letter to C. L. Moore in which he warns her against allowing this to happen to her--Moore, in an April 1935 response, says she "gets a tremendous lot of pleasure out of dealing in a slap-dash, wild-western manner with just the basics of cheap fiction you so dislike," and that besides, she needs the money.) Hugh B. Cave is one of those people Lovecraft considered to have "sold out to commercialism" (letter to August Derleth of October 28, 1932) and HPL tells Derleth in an August 1932 letter that he got into "quite a fight with Hugh B. Cave on the subject of literary motivation;" Cave arguing a writer shouldn't get upset if an editor altered his work because writing is merely a business. In a March 25, 1933 letter to Robert E. Howard, Lovecraft says "I simply can't read the crap [Otis Adelbert] Kline and Cave grind out...." Ouch!

Well, "The Isle of Dark Magic" appears to be a relatively well-respected piece (of crap?) by Cave--at least it was translated into French (the language of love!) and chosen as the title story for a French Cave collection--the hubba hubba sextastic cover even portrays one of the characters from "The Isle of Dark Magic!" The story was also included in the American collection Murgumstrumm and Others.

The narrator of this longish story (isfdb calls it a "novelette" and it takes up like 18 pages in WT) is a missionary, the only white man on a little South Pacific island. Well, the only white man until the arrival of Peter Mace. Mace is a skinny and nervous 25-year old who brings to the island with him a "large wooden packing-case;" he has come to the island to live the life of a hermit, having a house thrown together far from the missionary's house, on the other side of a jungle. Mace acts strangely, exciting the curiosity of the native islanders, and he really lets himself go, giving up on shaving and hitting the bottle harder and harder until he's basically a drunk. It takes a while, as Cave tries to build suspense, but eventually we learn what Mace's story is as he breaks down and relates it to the narrator.

As a medical student living in New York, Mace fell in love with a pretty girl, Mureen Kennedy, "a creature of the streets." Mace was already an odd character, the kind of guy who is interested in forbidden books and conducts experiments that the medical establishment frowns upon, and in fact eventually got expelled from school, and when the impoverished Mureen died he went bonkers and began working on ways of "keeping her with me forever." Mace had been hanging around with a sculptor in the Village, and he and this artiste took up thievery and got together enough money to buy a chunk of marble that the sculptor carved into an ultra-lifelike statue of a nude Mureen. So that was what was in the packing-case!

Now, on the island, far from interference, Mace has been engaging in the rituals and casting the spells that his forbidden books tell him will bring the statue to life! Mentally unbalanced and inebriated, he dares the narrator to come witness one of his rituals, apparently eager to show the missionary how irrevocably he has rejected the God of Abraham that is worshipped by squares, the God he blames for Mureen's death, and demonstrate how powerful are the diabolical alien gods he now worships. During the ritual Mace calls upon Nyarlathotep and Hastur and name checks the Yellow Sign and the Black King and Yuggoth. As the narrator watches in horror, the marble statue of the young woman stirs briefly, its face contorted in agony, but then goes still--bringing it to life will require seven such rituals, and this is only the fifth.

The narrator hears about the sixth ritual from a terrified native. Then comes the day of the seventh and final ritual! A veiled woman dressed in black, a woman who moves and speaks stiffly, arrives on the island, only the second person to come to the island in four years, Mace being the first. The narrator leads this taciturn figure through the jungle to Mace's house, thinking it some relative of Mace's who can, the missionary hopes, bring the young man to his senses. When they arrive, Mace has just finished the ritual and "the unnamable horrors of the world of darkness" Mace contacted have given the statue life! He is embracing the stone woman and calling it his beloved! But then the woman in black raises her veil--it is Mureen, risen from the grave! Somehow she heard Mace calling to her and has crossed half the world to be with him. Now Mace embraces this rickety corpse, and the stone woman, excited to homicidal jealousy, strangles first Mureen and then Mace to death, and then walks off into the jungle.

The narrator proceeds to gather the island's small native population and they all flee the island in their canoes.

This story isn't bad, though perhaps too long, and I was kind of wondering about the logistics of moving a life-sized marble statue to Polynesia from New York (I guess sailors and natives helped this skinny wretch lug it), and of a living corpse making the same trip. It is also unclear if Mace was trying to call Mureen's soul from the afterlife to bring life to the statue (which is what I, perhaps wrongfully, had assumed) or just asking Nyarlathotep et al to animate a statue that looked just like Mureen but wouldn't have her personality or memories. Cave also doesn't do anything with the fact that Mace was a medical student (Mace doesn't use medical knowledge to animate the statue--probably Cave should have made Mace the sculptor) and doesn't exploit the South Sea Island setting--any remote location would have sufficed (it might have been better if Mace had come to Polynesia seeking a particular witch doctor or some specific material spell component, or maybe some spot on the globe where a specific conjunction of stars could be seen or something like that.)

"The Beast-Helper" by Frank Belknap Long

I hope you enjoyed the Hugh B. Cave trivia, because there is Frank Belknap Long trivia where that came from. (If you didn't enjoy it, um, maybe skip to the fourth paragraph?) It seems that in the early 1930s Long was a hardcore supporter of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or at least that is the way H. P. Lovecraft tells it in letters to August Derleth and Robert E. Howard. In a letter to Derleth from November 1932, Lovecraft, in the midst of a discussion of newspaper accounts claiming that Ivan Pavlov was not persecuted by Lenin's government, even though the famed scientist did not disguise his low opinion of the Communist Party's rule, says of Long, who was born in 1901 (HPL was born in 1890):

That young scamp (who has gone bolshevik in the past year) was quoting the case (whatever it was) only a couple of months ago in an effort to prove the liberality of his beloved soviets.

In a December 1932 letter to Derleth, Lovecraft suggests that Long has aligned himself with Moscow merely in response to fashion, following the example of famous critic Edmund Wilson, Jr., but by October 1936, Lovecraft was himself singing the praises of the Soviet Union and government control of resources and allocation of jobs in a letter to C. L. Moore. In one italicized and caps-heavy passage he explains to her that he once admired aristocracy because of the kind of culture it fosters, and that he has now come to see that socialism could deliver that culture of "non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage & generosity...." Oh, brother!

Anyway, in an early 1935 letter to Lovecraft from Howard we find the paragraph:

I hope you enjoyed your trip to see Long in New York. I learn with interest that Long is now a Communist. But I suspected it when I read his story in Weird Tales some months ago--the one about the dictator and the ape.

That story, my friends, is the very story we are about to read, "The Beast-Helper."

Thompson is a thin man, "a profound skeptic and scientific humanist," and an American journalist. Across from him sits a fat man, the dictator Kerriling, who took over the European nation of Trivania in "the November Revolution." Thompson is in Trivania to interview the dictator, who tells him that in pursuit of his revolutionary cause he is going to crush all dissent. During the interview, Thompson briefly sees a strange shadow on the wall, its shape much like a man's, but somehow distorted.

Later, at a restaurant, a man approaches Thompson. It is one of Trivania's top scientists! This joker invokes the name of Jung, and indulges in a lot of mumbo-jumbo about how beneath the human surface of our brains lurks an ape-mind, and beneath that a reptile-mind, and beneath that a fish-mind, etc. Then he tells the story of how Kerriling compelled him with threats of execution to perform a terrible surgical procedure on him--and on a gorilla! By implanting devices into Kerriling's brain and into the great ape's brain, and then connecting these devices for a brief period with a wire, he enabled Kerriling's ape-brain to talk to the gorilla's brain. The gorilla gained some human discipline, but Kerriling became more beast-like! Since then, Kerriling has used the gorilla as an assassin to knock off government officials like the Minister of War, the Minister of Finance, etc. The prof warns Thompson that soon the gorilla will probably come after him!

Sure enough, as Thompson is walking back to his hotel, taking the short route through a slum, the gorilla attacks! But Thompson has a revolver, and he shoots the gorilla dead! The dictator, I guess because he has a telepathic connection to the gorilla, suffers wounds similar to the gorilla's and also dies, liberating Trivania.

There are dramatic possibilities in the idea of a dictator in tune with a gorilla who uses the primate to kill people and is himself somehow altered by his communion with a beast. But setting such a story in a 20th-century European dictatorship instead of a Conan or Grey Mouser fantasy world seems like a mistake. Doesn't the dictator have an NKVD or Gestapo to kill his rivals and crush dissent? Long doesn't do a good job of explaining the whole relationship between Kerriling and the gorilla; it wasn't made clear (to me at least) if Kerriling had a psychic/telepathic connection to the beast, or if he was just giving it orders verbally. And during the first scene, the dictator's response to the shadow strongly hints he is losing control over the gorilla or is somehow scared of the gorilla, but Long never does anything with that idea.

I recall complaining that Long's famous story "The Horror From the Hills" was full of non-sequiturs and superfluous matter that didn't add to the plot. Even though "The Beast-Helper" is only seven and a half pages, it is similarly burdened with extraneous stuff, like that Jung "reptile-mind" lecture. The suggestion that the brain connection between man and gorilla has made Kerriling more beastly is sterile, because Kerriling was already a ruthless and murderous dictator before the operation, and he doesn't do anything in the story that suggests he has changed--the scientist says, in italics, that "something from the beast flowed into him," but the effects of this change are never demonstrated. Similarly, in that first scene, Long just comes out and tells us that Thompson has "more iron in him" than does the dictator, but Thompson doesn't do anything particularly courageous--when the gorilla attacks him the journalist is running to the hotel to pack and leave the country--and Kerriling never demonstrates cowardice--in fact, when the scientist talks about the operation, he specifically says that Kerriling was "fearless."

Gotta give "The Beast-Helper" a thumbs down. All that foreshadowing that never bears fruit makes the story feel shoddy--did Long just write this story in one sitting, as he started the story laying the foundations for developments that he just abandoned as he approached the word count he had set for himself? Lovecraft comes off as a jerk when he is bitching about the practices of pulp writers, but probably he has something there--maybe if Long had spent a few extra hours eliminating some of the dead ends in this story and fostering the blossoming of other of the seeds he planted early in the tale I could have given a positive review to this thing.

Finally, Howard's claim that reading this story led him to suspect that Long had become a communist is a little dubious, as Long does not use the story to attack capitalism or extol socialism or revolutionism. The hero of the story is an American and the villain is a dictator who came to power in a revolution, so one would be forgiven for thinking it actually an attack on Lenin or Stalin.

"The Beast-Helper" would have to wait until 2010 and Centipede Press's $450.00, 1100-page volume on Long in its Masters of the Weird Tale series to see republication.

**********

Well, I think we squeezed a lot of juice out of the August 1934 issue of Farnsworth Wright's magazine of the bizarre and unusual. Stay tuned for more spelunking in the pages of Weird Tales.

Vladimir Nabokov: "Revenge," "Beneficence," & "Details of a Sunset"

Driving down to Myrtle Beach to see some of my in-laws, the wife and I stopped at various antique stores and pottery shops. At one antique store I bought a 1997 Vintage International paperback edition of 1995's The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov for just a few bucks. Last week I read three of the sixty-five stories in the volume, stories I chose because the titles were interesting and because they were short. "Revenge" and "Beneficence" first appeared in English in this collection, translated by Nabokov's son Dimitri; "Details of a Sunset" was the title story of a 1976 collection, translated by father and son.

"Revenge" (1924)

A big wide-shouldered biology professor is returning to England from a conference on the Continent. He has been consumed with the suspicion that his skinny young wife is cheating on him, and now that the private eye he hired has shown him a note in his wife's hand that expresses love for some other man he has decided that his suspicions are justified and he must murder his wife. But he has yet to determine the most appropriate way to destroy her.

The prof carries with him a suitcase with something mysterious and strange within it--when the customs inspector asks him to open it people in line gasp. But what is in there Nabokov does not tell us 'til the end of the story.

In the second part of the story we meet the wife. She believes in ghosts and all that sort of bunk, and we learn she is innocent of adultery--she wrote that love note to an old friend, now dead, whom she saw in a dream. In the final portion of the story we witness the biologist's creative use of the thing he brought back from Europe to slay his poor sensitive wife.

"Beneficence" (1924)

A sculptor in Berlin narrates this story, addressing himself to his unfaithful girlfriend. He hasn't seen her for two weeks after discovering she has been seeing some other guy, but he loves her painfully, and calls her and arranges a meeting at the Brandenburg Gate. He waits there for a long time, sure she will not show. As he waits he observes some small acts of kindness among ordinary people, and realizes that the world is not a terrible place after all, that the "joy" he sought within the faithless woman is all around him in the decency of people and the beauty of nature. "I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed on us and unappreciated." He heads back to his studio, eager to get back to work.

"Details of a Sunset" (1924)

Mark works behind a counter in a store, selling ties. He is deliriously happy--he will soon be married to the beautiful red-headed Klara! But his mother is worried--Klara was just recently going around with some foreign adventurer.

Mom's fears are realized! While Mark is at work, his mind full of his happiness and his love for Klara, Klara's mother comes to visit Mark's mother--that foreigner has returned and Kalra wants nothing to do any longer with Mark!

Mark never gets to read the letter for him from Klara that her mother has brought. Clumsily stepping off a streetcar he is hit by a bus and fatally injured. As he dies he deliriously dreams of Klara and the happy life he expects they will have.

**********

These are effective stories about our favorite topic: how difficult sexual relationships are. They also offer--perhaps horrendously costly or morally repugnant--means of escaping the unhappiness sexual relationships can cause men.

"Beneficence" and "Details of a Sunset" are characterized by vivid descriptions of quotidian details of daily life in the city--waiting on a corner or riding mass transit, observing the crowds of people--as well as descriptions of light and its behavior: sources of light, like the moon, the sun, the sparks from a cigarette thrown to the ground or the wires above a streetcar; and reflections and shadows. I miss city life and these images struck me.

Another thing that jumped out at me was how Nabokov doesn't bother to cultivate the illusion that the story is anything other than a story, directly talking to the reader and even consciously playing with readers' efforts to suspend disbelief. "Revenge," for example, includes the paradoxical line "Whereupon, I regret to say, she drops out of my story" after a minor character's last piece of dialogue.

Friday, November 5, 2021

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.

Wednesday, November 3, 2021

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.

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

Tuesday, November 2, 2021

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