1977 Sword and Sorcery stories by R Campbell, M W Wellman and A J Offutt

On my current road trip I stopped at The Book Rack in the Quad Cities and bought three paperbacks that I thought looked worthwhile.  Let's crack open one of them today, 1977's Swords Against Darkness II, edited by Andrew J. Offutt, an anthology of eight "original novelets."  Offutt pens intros to the book and to individual stories; the book intro is cheerful and enthusiastic about fantasy fiction of the Conan style, which he wants to call "heroic fantasy" and abbreviate as "hf."  I don't think "hf" caught on; I find people are much more likely to say "sword and sorcery."  

We've already read Tanith Lee's contribution to Swords Against Darkness II, "Odds Against the Gods" in a different book.  Let's check out the stories in the volume by famous British horror writer Ramsey Campbell, Weird Tales stalwart and scholar of the Old South Manly Wade Wellman, and Offutt himself.

"The Changer of Names" by Ramsey Campbell

"The Changer of Names" is one of Campbell's stories of Ryre, a mercenary swordsman.  Our friend tarbandu praised the Ryre stories in a late 2021 blogpost and suggested "The Changer of Names" was one of the best horror tales of the Me Decade, so let's check it out and see if tarbandu and I are on the same page.

Ryre lives in a world in which people have a passionate and superstitious attachment to names and reputations.

In his youth, like most men, he'd [Ryre] roamed seeking others whom fate and their parents had given his name, to challenge them to fight for it.  But now he and his name were one, secure in the deeds they'd shared; he had no need to defend it.

In this story, Ryre arrives at a depressed port town (its economy is going downhill due to competition from a newer port) and a maniac appears who claims his name is Ryre and even takes credit for some of Ryre's heroic exploits, killing a famous pirate, for example.  This loonie assaults Ryre, and is quickly slain.  Ryre learns that a "name-changer" called Lith is in this port town selling the names of heroes like Ryre himself, and Ryre goes out to deal with this Lith.  There follow good horror images and decent fight scenes, elevated by Campbell's name theme--men who steal another man's name via Lith's sorcery gain some of that man's strength, at the expense of the original of that name; similarly, if the reputation of a name is blackened with lies, the bearers of the name are weakened.

This whole name-changing business feels fresh and original, and Campbell does a good job with various metaphors (e. g., unhappy tavern patrons "seemed pinned to the benches by a lifetime of burdens") and other literary tactics, presenting striking images and effectively building a bleak and depressing atmosphere, so this is a good dark sword and sorcery story.  Thumbs up!

"The Changer of Names" has been reprinted in several anthologies like Lin Carter's The Year's Best Fantasy Stories:4 and E. L. de Marigny and Jaime Martijn's Nirwana.  The Ryre stories were collected in a book of Campbell's sword and sorcery (or as perhaps you have taken to calling it, hf) tales called Far Away and Never that was first published by Necronomicon Press in 1996; DMR Books reissued Far Away and Never in a expanded form in 2021--it was this recent edition tarbandu reviewed at the link above.

"The Dweller in the Temple" by Manly Wade Wellman

"The Dweller in the Temple" is one of Wellman's tales of Kardios, a man whose name sounds like that of a superhero heart surgeon but who is in fact a swordsman and musician and probably the sole survivor of the sinking of Atlantis.  The story has been reprinted in one of those Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles Waugh anthologies, the one in question called Atlantis, and in a 2019 DMR Books anthology, Heroes of Atlantis and Lemuria that reprints four Kardios tales, as well as stories by one of our faves Leigh Brackett and a guy I know nothing about, Frederic Arnold Kummer, Jr.

For his story, Ramsey Campbell developed a grim and oppressive sort of atmosphere, but Wellman's tale is light-hearted, jocular and jovial.  Wellman's most famous character is probably John the Balladeer, a guy who wanders about the 20th century American South playing a guitar, and like John, Kardios is an enthusiastic singer and "The Dweller in the Temple" is full of Kardios's sunny and optimistic lyrics.  There are little anachronistic jokes, like a reference to the Shakespearean saw about brevity being the soul of wit--the brevity under consideration being that of the attire of harem girls.

Kardios arrives at a city where they have a curious custom--they choose their king from among strangers who happen by, and Kardios is duly crowned and given a feast and access to a harem of gorgeous girls.  Instead of sporting with the harem girls, Kardios charms and has sex with--and even composes and performs love songs about!--a servant girl.  She reveals the thing we all have been expecting, that the town chooses its king from among strangers because it must regularly appease the local monster god by feeding a king to it.  Kardios slays the god with his sword and installs the servant girl on the throne and then leaves.       

A pleasant sort of diversion that lacks chills and thrills but is entertaining none the less.

"Last Quest" by Andrew J. Offutt

In his introduction to his own story, editor Offutt describes his life and career in a sort of self-deprecating woe-is-me imposter-syndrome tone.  He also tells us that he worked harder on "Last Quest" than any of his previous productions; unfortunately, his industry seems not to have been rewarded, as this story is pretty lame.  The style is bad, with odd word choices and many characters having irritating accents and pseudo-medieval vocabulary.  The pacing and structure are bad, with long expository digressions about the past exploits of the many characters, who all have needlessly complicated relationships.  It is as if Offutt outlined a large cast of characters, each with complexly interwoven life histories, for an epic novel of three or four hundred pages, and then, for whatever reason, crammed them all into this story, which is less than 35 pages long, so way too much of the text is just background stuff.  As for the actual action scenes, they feel slow because Offutt overexplains and overdescribes instead of conveying excitement or tension.  

As for plot and theme, the plot is pretty conventional, and the pervasive motif (not surprising when we recall that much of Offutt's career output consists of pornography) is difficult or coercive sexual relationships, often with the woman being the villain (women in the story suffer as well as men, and there are brave women as well as brave men, but it would be easy to argue that this story is essentially misogynistic.)  Offutt's ostensible theme is how Love and Chance rule our lives, driving us hither and yon to unescapable fates; in particular, love will lead you to a terrible doom.  Offutt's chosen plot and themes could certainly serve as the basis of a successful story, but in his execution he fails to make them entertaining or interesting.

Twenty or so years ago the Emperor married the daughter of a wizard--this woman dominates him and is the real power in the Empire.  The wizard has just kidnapped his granddaughter, Shariya, and taken the girl to his keep in a hideous swamp inhabited by monsters.  The Emperor and Empress want their daughter Shariya back, as does Shariya's fiancé, an adventurer named Haj.  Haj, it seems, has rescued Shariya from various perils in the past, including an attempted rape by some king.  The Empress, who in the past tried to seduce Haj, gives Haj a whistle with which to enlist the aid of monsters and half-humans, and Haj and his friends go off to rescue Shariya.  These friends include a Prince to whom Shariya was betrothed before she was affianced to Haj--this prince fell in love with an amazon on an earlier adventure and had no objections to breaking off his engagement to Shariya; on this same adventure Haj was held captive and forced to have sex with many amazons, and then captured by a tribe of "lovemen," whom it is hinted are homosexual rapists.    

On the way to the swamp our heroes fight some giant lizards.  Then Haj uses the whistle to summon some winged men to fly himself and two friends--another adventurer and the adventurer's girlfriend, who insisted on going on the mission despite being told many times it was too dangerous--the rest of the way to the swamp.  The Prince stays behind, making the reader wonder why the Prince is in the story at all.  The bird men fly the three warriors to the swamp, and then at the edge of the swamp Haj uses the whistle to summon some giant spiders to carry the heroes through the trees to the wizard's keep.  

On the way the three spider-riders encounter a female giant spider.  This creature has an hypnotic sexuality that makes it irresistible to male spider and male human alike!  Haj's friend and his girlfriend are killed in the fracas that ensues; the she-spider mates with and paralyzes one of the he-spiders--she will soon lay her eggs in the still-living but motionless body.  The she-spider then turns off her allure magic, allowing Haj and his mount to proceed.  

At the keep Haj finds the old wizard dead; Shariya has taken his place.  Haj implores her to join him and return to civilization, but she explains that a wizard (or wizardress!) must reign in the swamp keep, or the various monsters and beast men that inhabit the Empire--giant spiders, flying men, giant lizards, et al--will be totally unrestrained and exterminate the human race.  When Haj persists in trying to win her back anyway, it turns out that she now has the same magic as the female spiders, and we are lead to believe she kills or imprisons Haj forever in the keep. 

I am a fan of the traditional quest theme and of femme fatale stories in which guys make dumb decisions because of lust or love and get destroyed, but Offutt fails to cultivate anything valuable out of this fertile ground.  Thumbs down!  

Unsurprisingly, it looks like "Last Quest" has never been reprinted.

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There are four pages of ads at the back of Swords Against Darkness II.  The first page is for Zebra's editions of books of Robert E. Howard stories and pastiches.  I have seen some of these in real life and they are pretty awesome; The Sowers of the Thunder, for example, has a Jeff Jones cover and interior illustrations by Roy Krenkel.   I'm a thousand miles from my bookshelves and my scanner, but I am pretty sure I own The Sword of the Gael, written by Offutt and with a wraparound Jones cover.  

The next page is an ad for books about the occult and paranormal, like one on the Bermuda Triangle, one about the Loch Ness Monster, and one about the secret powers of pyramids.  A page of ads for sensationalist books about the murder of JFK, the finances of John D. Rockefeller, and the trial of Charles Manson follows.  The fourth and final page touts two more Kennedy assassination books, but if that's not your kind of meat it starts out with an ad for a book of peanut recipes.  Who wouldn't want to try Peanut Baked Flounder?  My research on ebay indicates this book is actually shaped like a peanut and has as its subtitle "From Carver to Carter," which is pretty hilarious.

Weird Tales Project: 1936

Another milestone has been reached in my quest to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales printed in the 1930s.  The year 1936 has now been dealt with!  Below find a list of all the WT stories I have read and blogged about from 1936, including links to said blog posts.  If I should happen to return to a 1936 issue of Weird Tales and blog about an additional story from it, I will add it to the list with a parenthetical note.

Lastly, before the actual list, here are links to the other posts covering this project, one for each year from 1930 to 1939.

1930  1931 1932 1933  1934  1935  ----  1937  1938  1939  

January

August Derleth:                           "The Satin Mask"

C. L. Moore:                               "The Dark Land"

H. P. Lovecraft:                           "Dagon"

February

C. L. Moore:                                "Yvala"

H. P. Lovecraft:                            "The Temple"

March

Edmond Hamilton:            "In The World's Dusk"

Henry Kuttner:                   "The Graveyard Rats"

Clark Ashton Smith:           "The Black Abbot of Puthuum" (added 1/23/2024)

April

Carl Jacobi:                                   "The Face in the Wind"

August Derleth & Mark Schorer: "They Shall Rise"

Robert Bloch:                                "The Druidic Doom"

May

Edmond Hamilton:                "Child of the Winds"

Robert Bloch:                        "The Faceless God"

Manly Wade Wellman:          "The Horror Undying"

June

Robert E. Howard:                "Black Canaan"

Robert Bloch:                        "The Grinning Ghoul"

Edmond Hamilton:                "The House of the Evil Eye"

July

Edmond Hamilton:                   "When the World Slept"

Manly Wade Wellman:             "The Kelpie"

C. L. Moore:                             "Lost Paradise"

Clark Ashton Smith:                 "Necromancy in Naat" (added 1/24/2024)

August-September

August Derleth & Mark Schorer:     "Death Holds the Post"

Edmond Hamilton:                           "The Door Into Infinity"

                                 

October

Robert Bloch:                                 "The Opener of the Way"

Henry Kutner:                                "The Secret of Kralitz"

C. L. Moore:                                  "The Tree of Life"  (added Dec 31, 2022)

November

Robert E. Howard:                             "Black Hound of Death"

Thorp McClusky:                               "The Crawling Horror"

Robert Bloch:                                     "The Dark Demon"

December

Robert Bloch:                                                "Mother of Serpents"

Henry Kuttner:                                              "It Walks By Night"

(added 12/25/2025:)

Robert E. Howard:                                        "The Fire of Asshurbinpal"

John Russell Fearn:                                      "Portrait of a Murderer"

Otis Adelbert Kline & E. Hoffmann Price:  "The Cyclops of Xoatl"

August Derleth & Mark Schorer:                 "The Woman at Loon Point"

(added 12/30/2025:)

Manly Wade Wellman:                                                                       "The Theater Upstairs" 

Astounding, Dec. 1934: Donald Wandrei and John W. Campbell, Jr.

The December 1934 issue of Astounding, edited by F. Orlin Tremaine, seems to have been a particularly impressive one.  We've already read Raymond Z. Gallun's "Old Faithful" (back at the dawn of time, 2013) and Howard Wandrei's "The Other" and given them passing grades.  The issue also includes a story by Howard's brother Donald, future co-founder of Arkham House, and three pieces of fiction and a letter from future Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr.  One of Campbell's contributions is the first installment of the five-part serial The Mightiest Machine; we'll maybe look at The Mightiest Machine some day, but not today.  What we will be talking about is D. Wandrei's piece, "Colossus Eternalm" and then Campbell's two pseudonymous stories, "Atomic Power" and "The Irrelevant."

"Colossus Eternal" by Donald Wandrei 

This is a sequel to "Colossus," the cover story of the January 1934 ish of Astounding; we read it a few years ago.  At the end of "Colossus," Earthman Duane Sharon, who had travelled to a different universe (a "superuniverse" of which our universe was just a single atom!) and been captured by the giant inhabitants of planet Qythyalos, whom he called the Titans, was sent to planet Valadom to investigate the people there, who look quite human.  "Colossus Eternal" describes what happens to Sharon on Valadom.

The people of Valadom have amazing electromagnetic powers--Shyrna, the gorgeous woman Sharon meets after he steps out of his space ship, is able to examine the molecules in Sharon's brain and thus learn all about him, his life, and our universe, because inscribed upon the eternal sub-particles that make up every atom is its history from the beginning of time.  With ease she can project her thoughts into Sharon's mind.

Sharon of course falls in love with this superwoman immediately, and is upset to learn she is slated to be married to her planet's current ruler, Nrm 17'1, the "race-being-entity" of whom Shyrna says "he is as real as I am, but he is also the symbol of our race, the most perfect expression of our physical and mental traits.  He controls all our lives."  Of all the women of Valadom, Shyrna has been chosen to be the ruler's bride and mother of the next race-being-entity--she is a perfect specimen.  Every woman on Valadom would be thrilled to be chosen, but now that she has met Duane Sharon, Shyrna refuses to cooperate--she wants to marry her fortunes with Sharon's, not those of her monarch and her people.

The Shyrna-Nrm 17'1 plot element of "Colossus Eternal" is surprisingly similar to that the plot of C. L. Moore's "The Dark Land," which we just read.  Nrm 17'1 has astonishing powers--for example, he teleports himself and other people with ease--but he won't just rape an unwilling Shyrna; rather, he tries to win her consent, first in a sort of psychic battle.  Shyrna's resistance is fierce, so Nrm 17'1 imprisons her in his palace-citadel-museum, the repository of all knowledge of the Valadomian race, thinking she will eventually change her mind.  Meanwhile, the ruler incarcerates an unwitting Sharon in a "space-bend island" in which time does not pass.

Marrying Shyrna isn't Nrm 17'1's only ambition--he also hopes to figure out how to predict the future.  The Titans of Qythyalos, the only people in the superuniverse with more knowledge and power than the Valadomians, have this wisdom, and the dictator of Valadom seeks to get them to share it through threats of violence or conquest.  Nrm 17'1 has been using his powers to uplift the million inferior intelligent species in this superuniverse so they are powerful enough to help him take on the Titans.  A space navy of millions of ships with an array of planet- and star- and civilization-busting weapons converges on Qythyalos while a captive Shyrna watches from within Nrm 17'1's citadel.  (Wandrei gleefully lists all these super weapons over several paragraphs--"diseases contagious with the speed of light," "heat rays with a maximum of twenty million degrees," "a poison that caused blood to vaporize," and on and on.)  

Months pass as the space armada masses and Shyrna explores the vast museum, looking at records that remind the 21st-century reader of floppy disks or flash drives:  

...the recording of literature in pin-point electronic structures which, inserted in transcription machines, simultaneously presented audible sounds, visual picture meanings, and visible words.

(This is just one of a number of advanced technologies Wandrei describes in this story; another, more creepy one, is a computer made up of the dead brains of all the many Nrms that preceded Nrm 17'1 on the throne--this computer achieves consciousness and rebels against Nrm 17'1.)

One of Nrm 17'1's assistants falls in love with Shyrna, and Nrm 17'1 teleports this rival to a desert; while the ruler is thus distracted Shyrna liberates Sharon from the bubble of timelessness, but Nrm 17'1 just teleports Earthman to the same desert, thinking he'll get killed there.  Instead the two men, human and Valadomian, join forces, return to the palace, and, protected by forces projected from Qythyalos by the all-knowing Titans, rescue Shyrna (in the fight, the ruler's treacherous assistant is killed.)  Sharon and Shyrna go to Qythyalos in Sharon's ship, and then after conferring with the Titans, blast out of this superuniverse altogether, just before the war between Valadom and Qythyalos destroys the entire superuniverse.  (The Titans, in theory, could win the war with their superpowers or just surrender and thus preserve themselves and the superuniverse, but since they can see the future and have foreseen the superuniverse's destruction, they don't wipe out Nrm 17'1's space armada, just clear a path through it for Sharon and Shyrna.)

Sharon and Shyrna arrive in the next universe, of which the Titans' superuniverse was but a single atom, just after its big bang.  The lovers know they must die here soon, as no habitable planets have yet formed, but they are happy to die together and be onlookers at the beginning of all things.      

In "Colossus Eternal" Wandrei seems to be trying to inspire a sense of wonder with his time paradoxes and descriptions of entire universes being destroyed and created, and his lists of high technologies, psychic powers, alien races, and subatomic particle phenomena; he offers the reader an encyclopedic catalog of the diverse glories of the natural universe and the innumerable accomplishments possible to human intelligence.  At times the lists and descriptions and explanations feel a little long, but the individual ideas are all good, and Wandrei enumerates his marvels with a gusto that is contagious, so I enjoyed "Colossus Eternal."

"Colossus Eternal" did not set the SF world on fire, it seems; it wasn't reprinted until 1989 in Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei.  The "Notes" section at isfdb for "Colossus Eternal" says it is "not a close sequel" to "Colossus," which I do not understand--the protagonist is the same, the narrative picks up where "Colossus" left off, and the plot of "Colossus Eternal" has some of the same beats as its predecessor--in both a guy leaves a place that is being destroyed by war to explore a radically wider environment, and in both he leaves one universe for another.

"Atomic Power" by John W. Campbell, Jr.  

This story appears under the name Don A. Stuart and has been anthologized by Groff Conklin and by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.  In fact, I am going to read it in Hartwell and Cramer's The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF because the scan of the December 1934 Astounding at the internet archive is kind of hard on my 51-year-old eyes.

In their intro to "Atomic Power," the editors of The Ascent of Wonder suggest that, as editor of Astounding from 1937, Campbell was reluctant to print disaster stories, a mainstay of speculative fiction from its early days and a form that would be embraced by the New Wave, and this sets up the reader for an experience of irony because "Atomic Power" is in fact a gruesome and apocalyptic disaster story!

"Atomic Power" starts with a little sort of prologue about students visiting a nuclear power plant, and while their professor tries to convey to them the "grandeur" of the plant, Campbell seems to be undermining the prof by describing the installation as looking like a "mighty temple to an unknown, evil, god" and saying the blue light from the "tubes" makes the faces of students look "distorted and ghastly."

In the story proper we meet some scientists who have made a reality-defying discovery--the power of gravity and of "intermolecular bonds" is steadily decreasing!  So everything is losing weight (but not mass) all across the universe, and solid objects are becoming less durable.  The Earth begins to spiral away from the sun, so that temperatures drop rapidly and New York is buried under many yards of snow.  Buildings, bridges and machines fail as their metal components weaken and break.  Campbell throws lots of science at us, but also horrific vignettes of panicked crowds boarding the last ocean liner out of New York and causing it to capsize, and individuals whose limbs come off and whose hearts burst because they have exerted themselves and "the chemical power of muscles remained undiminished, while their tensile strength declined...people tore themselves apart by the violence of their struggles."

As the Earth becomes a frozen Hell and people die in droves, the scientists struggle to figure out why this is happening and how to fix it.  They invent a nuclear reactor and propagate a "counterfield" throughout the universe that restores gravity and intermolecular bonds to normal.  The day is saved, but more amazing yet is the sense of wonder ending we get which was foreshadowed in that prologue about the students: our universe is a molecule of a superuniverse, in which atomic reactors power a civilization by breaking down molecules--the diminution of intermolecular bonds was the start of the process of that superuniverse reactor breaking down our universe!  (A year in our universe is a millionth of a second in that superuniverse.)  Our universe was saved by building a nuclear reactor that operates by annihilating other universes!  Our own civilization's survival is predicated on committing mass genocide of other universes!  Mind blown!

This is a pretty good example of a hard SF story in which scientists save the day and the text of which tries to teach you science concepts.  "Atomic Power" also exhibits the propensity we see throughout Campbell's career to challenge the reader by contriving situations in which doing something dreadful is necessary or has beneficial consequences--we've read Campbell stories like "The Invaders" in which we are invited to consider the positive effects of aliens enslaving us and selectively breeding us, and of course Campbell is responsible for the ending of Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations," in which a young woman has to be sacrificed to save a large number of people.  "Atomic Power" also shares with "The Invaders" and "The Cold Equations" the use of violence against women to add drama to a story--one of the people whose body, having lost its tensile strength, comes apart is a girl on that ocean liner!

"The Irrelevant" by John W. Campbell, Jr.

Campbell committed this caper while undercover as "Karl van Campen."  It looks like it has never been reprinted. 

Kent Barrett wants to be the first man to see the far side of the moon, and he builds Earth's first rocket ship to achieve this dream.  His ship won't have enough fuel to get him back to Earth, but he doesn't care--some things are more valuable than life itself, he tells those who question his suicidal venture, and I guess one of those things is knowledge.  Once he has blasted off we get lots of talk about how the astronaut and ship respond to Earth's atmosphere, the cold of space, weightlessness, and other conditions, which is entertaining enough.  The main point of the story, however, is how the ship's fuel turns out to be more efficient than expected and Barrett actually gets back to Earth alive.  This phenomena is explained in passages which I found essentially incomprehensible.

Acceptable.

**********

Very sciency stories that, in the case of Wandrei's "Colossus Eternal" and Campbell's "Atomic Power,"  are enlivened by apocalypticism, sense-of-wonder stuff about our universe being no more than an atom of a higher universe and individuals confronting death.  Campbell's "The Irrelevant" is set on a smaller scale and its appeal is limited because the science it focuses on is not quite so mind-blowing and it largely dispenses with the appeals to reader interest in sex and violence that "Colossus Eternal" and "Atomic Power" indulge.

More short stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log; next time some things from the 1970s that will likely be a lot less sciency.

Weird Tales, January 1936: August Derleth, C. L. Moore, and H. P. Lovecraft

The January 1936 issue of Weird Tales must have been a thrill for fans of the weird back in 1936, seeing as it contains an installment of Robert E. Howard's Conan novel The Hour of the Dragon, a new story by fan favorite C. L. Moore, and a reprint of a great H. P. Lovecraft story.  Let's take a look!

(We've already blogged about The Hour of the Dragon, you know, almost a decade ago.)  

I was keen on the art in the last issue of Weird Tales we talked about, the March 1939 number, but I can't be as enthusiastic about the illustrations in this one.  The cover by Margaret Brundage is kind of weak, though that red outfit does remind us 2022 readers of Vampirella's traditional attire.  August Derleth's "The Satin Mask" is illustrated by Derleth's friend Frank Utpatel; Lovecraft's correspondence is full of praise for Utpatel's work*, but the picture here is unremarkable.  Moore illustrates her own story, "The Dark Land," but while I loved her illustration for "Julhi," this one is leaving me cold.  

Let's read three stories from this issue, though, in the interest of getting the best possible texts, not necessarily the versions available to 1936 readers.

*See e.g., HPL to Donald A. Wollheim, April 19, 1936 and HPL to Henry Kuttner, May 18, 1936 in Volumes 7 and 10 of Hippocampus Press' Letters of H. P. Lovecraft, eds. Schultz and Joshi. 

"The Satin Mask"  (1936)

OK, we are actually reading this one from the scan of the January 1936 issue of Weird Tales that is available at the internet archive, world's greatest webs site.  "The Satin Mask" would be reprinted in book form en ingles in Something Near in 1945 and August Derleth's Eerie Creatures in 2009, and in Spanish in a 1951 Argentinian Derleth collection, but I don't have access to any of those.  (Something Near is going for $250 on ebay, so if you have a copy, take care of it--it can be a significant component of your retirement plan!)

At the center of "The Satin Mask" is a good fun element, an Italian mask with strange and terrible properties.  Cursed and given to his enemies by some Italian way back when, the thing is so beautiful that women adore it and can't help but don it, but, essentially alive, the thing sucks out your life force after you wear it, and before you die you are haunted by visions of the women who wore it and were slain by it before. 

So I like the mask, but Derleth does a poor job of coming up with a plot and characters to showcase the thing--the characters are totally flat and act in ways that don't make sense, and the plot is too long and convoluted.

A young woman, Monica, is living with her Aunt Susan and Uncle Henry and their daughter Alice.  Her hosts know all about the dangerous evil of the mask--it killed Susan's siter Julie--and want to keep it from Monica, but they stupidly do things that make it more likely that Monice will get her hands on the living death trap.  For example, the mask is hanging up on the wall in a room like a decoration; now, you may object that the room's door is locked, but I will respond, "true, but the key is right there above the door on the lintel and everybody knows it is there!"  Monica's relatives have never mentioned the mask, but then Susan encourages Monica to read Aunt Julie's letters to Monica's mother, which describe the mask and how beautiful it is.

The story of how Julie got the mask in the first place is equally hard to credit.  Julie met a guy in Italy, Bellini, while on a trip to Europe, and they fell in love.  While they were separated by the Atlantic, Bellini kept sending gifts to her from Italy.  He sent the mask, because it was so beautiful, but warned Julie not to wear the mask--he believed in the story of the mask's vampiric life, and knew it had killed women already.  So why was he sending it to the woman he loved?  (When he heard the mask had killed Julie, Bellini committed suicide, so we can't speculate that he was trying to murder Julie, and it is too bad Derleth didn't take that tack, which would have been more believable, more scary, and built more interesting and more sympathetic characters--it is easy to feel for a woman who is being abused by a man, and it is even possible to feel for a man who gets stuck in a relationship he wishes he wasn't in, but it is hard to understand a bunch of dopes who know they have an unexploded bomb in their midst and instead of trying to get rid of it, share it with their loved ones.)

Disappointing.  August Derleth was a founder and manager of Arkham House, the small publisher that did so much to keep the work of H. P. Lovecraft available and to publish early work by authors like Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley who went on to stellar success.  Despite its heroic work in the interest of the weird community, Arkham House never ran at a profit, and apparently was only kept afloat by Derleth subsidizing it from his own earnings, which it seems lead to him producing stories at a furious pace--the result of such a pace is stories like "The Satin Mask" that are kind of half-baked.  

We'll call this one barely acceptable.  

An interesting facet of "The Satin Mask" that we might think about is its portrayal of Italian people.  We have seen in the work of H. P. Lovecraft (I'm thinking of "The Haunter of the Dark" here) and Carl Jacobi and Edmond Hamilton this idea that Italians are superstitious and even primitive; you could probably write a master's thesis that compares and contrasts the treatment of Italians and Africans/African-Americans in weird fiction--both demographics are commonly portrayed as a community that is subordinate and inferior to Anglo-Saxon- and German-Americans, but also possesses occult knowledge that can threaten or aid America's dominant classes.

Nice socks!

"The Dark Land" (1936)

"The Dark Land" is the fourth story of aristocratic swordsperson Jirel of Joiry, a baroness or something who commonly leads soldiers into battle, has a habit of getting transported to alien worlds, and tragically killed the man she loved.  Witness my opinions about the first three Jirel tales, "Black God's Kiss," "Black God's Shadow" and "Jirel Meets Magic" at the links; the first three Jirel stories are full of big emotions, bizarre images and unhealthy sexual relationships.  Let's see how #4 stacks up.  (I'm reading it in my copy of Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams, Gollancz's 2002 Moore collection.)

As our story begins, Jirel lies in bed, near death!  While Jirel was innocently participating in one of the wars that seem to be her primary occupation, some foeman had the temerity to stab her with a pike, and now it looks like she is not long for this world.  Literally--when the priest comes to perform her last rites, her body is gone!  The cleric thinks Jirel must have spent too much time defying the natural order and travelling to other universes and has been taken directly to hell, body as well as soul, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 sous!

Jirel wakes up in another world, fully healed.  The very first Jirel story, "Black God's Kiss," started off with some hunky warlord trying to kiss Jirel against her will, and "The Dark Land" has a similar theme.  King Pav of Romne, who has "heavy shoulders" and an "arrogant, majestic face," has used his magic to preserve her from death and summon her to his dimension, intent that she, the most savage woman in the known universes, be his bride!  

"...there is in you a hot and savage strength which no other woman in any land I know possesses....None but you is fit to be my queen.  So I have taken you for my own."

Hubba hubba!

Pav, an alien being of tremendous power, and red-haired and yellow-eyed Jirel have a sort of test of wills.  (Moore's Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith stories always seem to involve some kind of psychic struggle.)  Pav could just use his sorcery to compel Jirel's submission, but he wants a willing woman, so agrees to a bargain--he gives Jirel a chance to figure out how to escape his dimension or outfight him, and she agrees to surrender to his desires if she should fail in this presumably hopeless endeavor.  Then he teleports away in a "swirl of rainbow dazzle."

Jirel travels around the surreal and untenanted landscape of Romne, where everything is black and no matter how far away something is, your view of it is perfectly clear, making it hard to judge distances, and where you can travel instantaneously by just willing it.  Jirel encounters just one person, an emaciated old witch who sees Jirel as a rival for the number 2 spot in this Dark Land and initially wants to kill Jirel, but whom Jirel convinces to reveal Pav's weakness by suggesting that, if they work together, old skull-face can be #1 and Jirel can get back to Earth and get back to hitting people with swords.  

Pav reappears and we get more S&M undertones as Pav physically dominates Jirel and she kneels before him in submission--but it is all sham!  Guided by telepathic messages from the witch, Jirel focuses her indomitable will in such a way that hunkalicious Pav and the entire Dark Land, which were merely illusions masking Pav's true nature, are whisked away to reveal endless darkness, a blackness relieved only by the whiteness of the skeletal witch.  The perfidious witch is about to destroy Jirel when but Pav musters enough power to save our heroine, transporting her back to castle Joiry.

As I have suggested, "The Dark Land" is of a piece with the other Jirel stories we have read.  The story relies for its effects on its depiction of Jirel's expansive emotions and heroic will power, its strange images and its themes of sexual domination and submission.  Perhaps we should see it as a sort of wish fulfillment fantasy for women--Jirel competes with a woman of a superior social strata for a hot guy of similarly exalted status and beats her, winning the man's heart and receiving valuable gifts from him without even having to put out!  Jirel has her cake and eats it too, getting the guy without giving of herself or making any sort of compromise. 

"The Dark Land" has of course appeared in various Moore collections, but also a few anthologies, including an anthology of SF stories written by women (among them Agatha Christie) edited by Vic Ghidalia and Roger Elwood and a German anthology edited by Hugh Walker.

"Dagon" (1919)

I've read "Dagon" multiple times, but I guess that was before an earthquake triggered the arising of this blog from the black depths of my febrile mind.  "Dagon" is a great little story that exhibits many of the stereotypical characteristics of Lovecraft's work: the discovery of a hidden civilization, shocking revelations gleaned from studying pictographic carvings, the terror from the deep, a memoir or testimonial, a guy who goes insane.  "Dagon" first appeared in The Vagrant, and has been reprinted innumerable times in the mountain of Lovecraft collections out there; I am reading it my copy of Arkham House's Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, the Corrected Ninth Printing.  "Dagon" would be reprinted in Weird Tales three times under three different editors, in 1923 (Edwin Baird), 1936 (Farnsworth Wright), and 1951 (D. McIlwraith), and in anthologies such as James Gunn's 1979 From Wells to Heinlein and Jacques Sadoul's Une historie de la science fiction.

Many of Lovecraft's famous works are vulnerable to the charge that they are too long and include superfluous detail as they depict the process or actually reproduce the products of exploration and research ("At the Mountains of Madness," "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and "The Shadow Out of Time" are good examples.)  "Dagon," in contrast, is very short.  The memoir of a sailor who is about to commit suicide, he tells us that he can no longer bear living because he saw something so horrible he would rather die than continue remembering it.  Alone in the middle of the ocean on a little boat after his ship was captured by Germans during the Great War, this guy wakes up one day to find that a large section of ocean floor has somehow risen to the water's surface and his boat is marooned in the middle of a slimy landscape littered with the dead bodies of fish and more exotic aquatic life that extends to both horizons.  Exploring this risen continent, he discovers a towering monument or religious stele covered in creepy carvings that indicate that, for thousands of years, giant fish people have been living on the ocean floor.  When he spots one of these fish people in the flesh he goes insane.  This mariner doesn't even remember being rescued and brought to a California hospital, and since his release from the hospital he has been finding relief from his obsessive memories with drugs, but the drugs have run out and now he plans to throw himself out a high window.  But wait, what is that at the door?  Will the sailor be able to destroy himself, or will he be murdered by a monster, or will something even worse befall him?

A classic of genre literature; it makes sense for people like Gunn and Sadoul to include "Dagon" in their "history of SF" surveys because it is a great representative of the Weird and provides readers a good idea of what Lovecraft is all about in a tight little package.

**********

"Dagon" is of course an enduring classic.  Derleth's "The Satin Mask" feels like a filler piece that more work could have turned into something more impressive.  You can't call Moore's "The Dark Land" a mere filler piece because she packs so much emotion and strangeness into it, but unfortunately it is more of the same from her, and lacking compared to some of the proceeding Jirel stories (for example,  the first two Jirel stories are about Jirel's relationship with Guillaume and in them we witness evolutions in Jirel's personality and milestones in her life, but here in "The Dark Land" Jirel's character seems static and the episode seems self-contained.)

Thanks for stopping by, and for more explorations of magazines from 90-something years ago, stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log!

MPorcius on the air!

Munchie and The Bearman invited me on to their Spotify podcast What's Your Issue? to talk about my blog and competing conceptions of what SF should be; click the link below to listen to me spend an hour learning how to use a microphone and struggling to remember the name of my favorite Gene Wolfe story.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4asuY4JHFiVtn9VBq0L71z?si=vbqG7qNESpKV-2OQ00DBHw

NB: In this podcast I recommend not only Gene Wolfe's 1978 "The Doctor of Death Island," which made its debut in Jack Dann's Immortal and would be reprinted in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, but the original magazine version of A. E. van Vogt's "The Rull."  Click this link to be transported to the May 1948 issue of Astounding wherein the MPorcius-approved version of "The Rull" can be found, and accept no substitutes!

[UPDATE OCTOBER 6, 2022:  Munchie tells me the episode in which I appeared is now one of their most listened-to; thanks to everybody who tuned in, and if you haven't yet and are curious to hear me tell the origin story of MPorcius Fiction Log and talk about John W. Campbell, Jr. and Barry N. Malzberg, or hear what Munchie has to say about Star Trek and The Bearman's take on recent marvel movies, check it out at the link above!]

Weird Tales, March 1939: Duane W. Rimel, August Derleth, Edmond Hamilton, and H. P. Lovecraft

You may recall that some time ago I set myself the questionable goal of reading and blogging about at least one story from every single issue of Weird Tales published in the 1930s.  This sacred quest has been on hold for a while, but today, let us renew our commitment to our black destiny and take another stride in this epic journey by examining the March 1939 issue of the magazine of unusual fiction.  We won't be reading all 160 pages, though, just around 50, but on those two score and ten we will be reacquainting ourselves with some of our old friends--August Derleth, Edmond Hamilton, and H. P. Lovecraft--and getting to know somebody we don't really know yet, Duane W. Rimel.  This issue of Weird Tales also includes part of a serial by Manly Wade Wellman, which we won't be tackling today, but which we may look at in the future, Wellman being one of the authors I plan to read more of, time permitting. 

Before we get to the fiction I have to point out that Farnsworth Wright seems to have had Virgil Finlay working overtime for this issue because not only does Finlay contribute the cover but eight or nine new interior illos, and it is a fine collection of lovely ladies, shirtless dudes, studies of human physiognomy, and hideous monsters.  I don't recognize them, so I guess they are not famous, so all you Finlay fans out there are encouraged to flip through this issue, as several of the drawings are pretty good and maybe you haven't seen them yet either.

"The Metal Chamber" by Duane W. Rimel (1939)

The ninth volume of Hippocampus Press's Letters of H. P. Lovecraft includes like 200 pages of correspondence by Lovecraft addressed to Duane W. Rimel, and I haven't read hardly any of them yet.  According to David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi's introduction to the volume, Rimel wrote over 200 novels, most of them apparently detective, western, or pornographic fiction, many published under pseudonyms.  I'm getting the impression from a few minutes of looking around online that Rimel's books are mostly forgotten and hard to find, though somebody at the goodreads website made me laugh with a comment on Rimel's Carnal Psycho: "Even Frank Belknap Long never stooped this low."

"The Metal Chamber" comes to us as a manuscript hand-written on scratch paper by a misanthropic scientist.  He tells us he has woken up with partial amnesia in a strange metal room; he retains fragmented memories of conducting experiments in telepathy on his Chinese cook.  As the story progresses through later entries of this impromptu diary, the narrator has dreams and begins recovering memories so that he and we learn that after perfecting a drug that strengthened his telepathic abilities he contacted some space aliens, and said E. T.s sent a ship to Earth to pick him up and bring him to their planet.  He didn't bring his drugs with him, however, and can't communicate with the aliens.  (I can sympathize--how many times have I stepped into a hotel room to realize I forgot toothbrush, comb or cell phone charger?)  The Earthman can't see his hosts either; they are a color his brain cannot recognize, and he is in fact glad they are not visible to him, because he is certain they look so hideous that the sight of them would drive him insane.

We leave the story with every reason to doubt the narrator's sanity, whether or not he saw the aliens' true form.  After a brief look around the aliens' vast and symmetrical city, which is sheltered under a dome, the narrator becomes convinced that humans should stay on Earth and suffers such terrible fears that he tries to commit suicide.  A post script written by a police officer indicates that the aliens brought him back to Earth and he probably failed to kill himself, and instead died from psychological stress or maybe from something the aliens did to him.  I guess the point of the story is that the human mind is not ready to face the reality of alien worlds and alien beings, that contact with them will drive us insane.

Mildly good.  The "Hallowmas" 1991 issue of Crypt of Cthulhu was a special Duane W. Rimel tribute issue and it included "The Metal Chamber" as well as six other Rimel stories; this thing is available for like $25.00 on ebay--tempting!

"The Return of Hastur" by August Derleth (1939)

"The Return of Hastur" has been reprinted many times behind many cool covers, some by people you have heard of like Frank Utpatel, Bruce Pennington, Stephen Fabian and Boris Vallejo (wow, sexy) and some by unknown hands (at least unknown to isfdb), in the pages of Derleth collections and of anthologies of Yog Sothery edited by people like Lin Carter and Richard M. Price.    

"The Return of Hastur" is a Lovecraft pastiche set in the environs of HPL's fictional towns of Arkham and Innsmouth and it is full of references to the Necromicon, Cthulhu and other of the fictional books of eldritch lore and alien monster gods invented by HPL and his friends.  In its style and structure, and in some of its clever and creepy little elements, it isn't bad.  Our narrator is a lawyer.  One of his clients, a rich old geezer named Amos Tuttle, is on his deathbed at the start of the story.  He stresses to our narrator that the unusual clause in his will instructing that his house and a bunch of his queer old foreign language books be totally destroyed be followed to the letter.  But after A. Tuttle dies, the narrator and the late Tuttle's nephew and heir, Paul Tuttle, see fit to ignore those instructions on the grounds that A. Tuttle was likely insane when he wrote the will and, besides, the house and books are extremely valuable--one of those books was purchased from a dude in Tibet for $100,000, which was real money in the late Twenties!  In the months that follow Paul Tuttle conducts research in and about his uncle's library and he and the narrator see, hear and smell some scary stuff, and are finally witnesses to--and participants in!--a mind-shattering, norm-defying, reality-warping event of horror.  It seems that Amos Tuttle agreed to have his body, after death, become a vessel for the return from outer space of the alien monster god Hastur, but some other weird being is contesting this return!

Most of that stuff is pretty good.  But Derleth missteps by doing things in the story that seem silly, like making Lovecraft a minor character in the story and indicating that Weird Tales and the story "The Call of Cthulhu" are real in the universe of "The Return of Hastur," or incongruent with Lovecraft's attitudes, like trying to cram like a square peg into a round hole all the alien beings of the Cthulhu Mythos--Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Yog Sothoth, et al--into a conventional good vs evil framework, and categorize them into a scheme based on the four traditional elements--for example, Paul Tuttle's researches indicate Cthulhu is a "Water Being."  When the lawyer and the younger Tuttle hear fearsome noises emanating from below the Tuttle estate, the narrator nervously asks,  "Is it Hastur?" and P. Tuttle says "It cannot be he, because the passage below leads only to the sea and is doubtless partly full of water...it can only be one of the Water Beings...."  On the final page of the story it appears that Cthulhu and Hastur are going to wrestle right there on the New England seashore, but then the power of good in the form of lightning casts the former into the ocean and the latter back into space.  Mapping ordinary conceptions of good and evil and elemental affinities onto the Cthulhu Mythos entities robs them of their alienness and their ability to inspire cosmic horror--one of the distinguishing characteristics of this material is that it argues that the universe cannot be understood, cannot be mapped or its components categorized--and is a mistake.

I'm not crazy about where Derleth tries to take Yog Sothery in this story, but it is competently produced and has some good bits, so I guess I'll average it all out to "acceptable."

"Comrades of Time" by Edmond Hamilton (1939)

"Comrades of Time" hasn't enjoyed the enduring popularity that "The Return of Hastur" has, though it was reprinted by Robert Weinberg in the 1977 collection Lost Fantasies #5 and by DMR Books here in this crazy 21st century of ours in the Hamilton collection The Avenger from Atlantis.

However crazy the 21st century might be, the 12,437th century seems like it is going to be even crazier!  This is what we learn in 
"Comrades in Time," which has one of Edmond Hamilton's typical Edgar Rice Burroughs-style plots, featuring a fighting man who finds himself in another world and gets involved in the local war, joining the side represented by an attractive woman, of course.  Hamilton uses the same gag here in "Comrades in Time" that he employed in 1935's "The Six Sleepers"--six soldiers from different eras of history, each with a different comic relief personality (the veteran of Cromwell's army is a religious fanatic, the buckskin-clad frontiersman has a goofy backwoods accent, the conquistador brags about his close relationship with Cortez, etc.) join forces to fight the bad guys.  Maybe we shouldn't be surprised that Hamilton is reusing that gimmick here, because readers voted "The Six Sleepers" the best story in the issue of Weird Tales in which is appeared.

(We read "The Six Sleepers" back in 2017 for a blog post about three Hamilton stories that won the best in issue vote, including "The Avenger from Atlantis."  "Comrades in Time" didn't win best in issue--that honor went to "The Return of Hastur.")

Ethan Drew is an American in the French Foreign Legion whose patrol gets wiped out by Tuaregs.  He loses consciousness a moment before one of the Muslim swordsmen strikes him down, and wakes up in a room with five other men, five fighting men from the past!  Working together, they escape from the room, encounter a beautiful woman and rescue her from some sword swinging thugs.  (The six comrades have their weapons with them--four swords, an axe--the Viking's--and the frontiersman's muzzle-loading rifle.)  The woman, Chiri, explains that her father, Kim Idim, has used his time travel device to transport the six soldiers here to the year 1,243,665!  She briefs them on the crises facing the world of 1.24 million years in our future!

The seas have been rising for centuries, and most of what is land in the 20th century is now underwater--soon the entire globe will be submerged.  Knowledge of this doom has lead to widespread psychological and sociological decline, and concomitant technological decline--that is why the thugs are armed with swords and ride horses instead of shooting people with ray guns from the comfort of aircars, as we might have expected.  Kim Idim is one of the world's few remaining scientists, and he invented the time ray that summoned the six comrades; when tyrant king Thorold, the only living man to have access to this society's mysterious living god, the Wise One, learned of the device he seized it and its maker; hoping to use it to travel to some more salubrious epoch.  

Chiri (not to be confused with Chili, Millie the Model's red-headed rival) leads the soldiers whom her father has shanghaied from across the eons through a jungle to Tzar, the Earth's last city, a walled metropolis of ziggurats where Thorold holds Kim Idim and his invention.  Earthquakes herald Tzar's imminent descent beneath the waves.  Ethan Drew and company creep through the storm drains to the cellars beneath the Citadel of the Wise One, steal uniforms and in disguise make their way up the pyramid's ten levels.  They stumble into the chamber of the Wise One, who turns out to be the disembodied head of a mad scientist, kept alive for thousands of years by mechanical apparatus so he can serve as a repository of knowledge.  He tells our heroes where they can find Thorold and Kim Idim after they promise to euthanize him.

Ethan Drew and the others rescue Kim Idim from the torture chamber (as I have pointed out in the past, Hamilton's Weird Tales stories often feature a torture scene) and outfight Thorold and his guards; then, as the water rises and the Citadel of the Wise One begins to collapse, Kim Idim sends the warriors back to their proper times and places.         

Acceptable.  We'll be seeing Ethan Drew again in the April, 1939 issue of Weird Tales.

"The Quest of Iranon" by H. P. Lovecraft (1935)

"The Quest of Iranon" is part of Lovecraft's Dream Cycle and was first printed in The Galleon ("A Journal of Literary Achievement") and of course has since been reprinted a billion times in Lovecraft collections as well as in a few anthologies.  I am reading it in my Corrected Ninth Printing of Arkham House's Dagon and Other Macabre Tales.  

The men of Teloth are sober and practical, and so they are not very impressed when Iranon, the exiled prince of beautiful Aira, comes to their city to sing his songs of his dreams of his own city, which he is having trouble getting back to.  They tell him to get a job or leave, so he departs, but a kid who is equally uninterested in working comes along with him.  For years these two wander the forests in search of Aira, living on berries, the kid growing older while Iranon seems to stay the same age.  They finally come to a city where people enjoy Iranon's songs, Oonai, but in a shallow, not a sophisticated way; whereas the men of Teloth were cold and unfeeling, those of Oonai are frivolous and drunken.  Iranon's companion is infected with Oonai's decadence, grows old and dies, and the ageless Iranon departs alone.  

In the surprise ending Iranon is reminded that he is not in fact a prince and that Aira is merely a fiction he himself fabricated, and he kills himself by walking into quicksand.  (This is the third quicksand reference here at MPorcius Fiction Log in the space of a month.)

"The Quest of Iranon" is the kind of fairy tale a sad teenager who thinks of himself as an artist might write, a tragic melodrama about how nobody understands him and the world sucks because you have to work.  (It kind of reminds me of Harlan Ellison's famous "Repent etc.")  The pretentiousness and self-indulgence of Lovecraft's tale are as silly in their own way as the contrivances and coincidences of Edmond Hamilton's swashbuckling melodrama here in the same ish of WT.         

"The Quest of Iranon" is well-written and achieves its goals, but I'm not exactly impressed with what those goals are.  Like all these stories we are reading today, it has its virtues and ends up in the acceptable-mildly good range.

***********                  

    

Of these four stories from the March 1939 Weird Tales, Hamilton's story is the most pedestrian, a sort of filler piece, though entertaining.  Personally I would have been happier if he had ditched the gimmick of the other five soldiers and spent more time on the Wise One and on the themes of decadence and decline--in the same way Robert E. Howard uses Conan to dramatize the differences between the barbarian and the civilized man, Hamilton could have used Ethan Drew to throw into relief the differences between young and vital and democratic America and an old and sclerotic and tyrannical civilization represented by Tzar.  

Rimel's story is a little more "weird" than Hamilton's, in that it tries to portray alienness, but one could argue it is standard issue WT fodder.  Derleth's story is a Lovecraft pastiche which more or less succeeds, but is also an ambitious but quixotic effort to make the Cthulhu Mythos conform to optimistic mainstream thinking.  The Lovecraft reprint is the most literary, heartfelt and personal of the four stories we have looked at today, but perhaps the least fun.

None of these stories is great, but none is a waste of time; a decent issue of The Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual.