Pulp Solidarity Forever! #31, “A Gnome There Was” by Henry Kuttner (and C.L. Moore), Unknown Worlds, v.5, n.3, Oct 1941

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Moorevember is the cruelest month, at least this time around, so our posts have been a bit thin on the ground. Nonetheless, here we are on the eve of Thanksgiving to celebrate another great bit o’ pulp, this time a semi-silly story full about labor agitation, class struggle, and gnomes, by Henry Kuttner (and C.L. Moore – we’ll talk about the authorship below). It’s “A Gnome There Was” in the October 1941 issue of Unknown Worlds!

You might remember this issue, if you’ve been reading along – we’ve actually flipped through these very same pages when we talked about Fritz Leiber’s killer story “Smoke Ghost” last month. It’s an interesting pairing for a single issue of the magazine, given the subject matter; both stories are broadly concerned with industrial modernity and capitalist oppression, something on the minds of a lot of folks back in the late 30s-early 40s (twas ever thus…).

Anyway, since we’ve already been over the ToC and all that, let’s dive right in!

Great illustration on the title page by Edd Cartier, perfect little gnomish guys with great expressions and proportions. no notes! Cartier does some good illos in this one, and you really gotta appreciate Unknown Worlds art dept, just some top-notch talent all around.

First off, let’s talk authorship – right there on the title page, and on the ToC too, this story is attributed to Henry Kuttner solely and individually. The complication comes later, in 1950, when this story was included in a collection, “A Gnome There Was and Other Tales of Science Fiction and Fantasy” by Lewis Padgett.

The Padgett name, we know, was one of several noms de plume that Kuttner and Moore published under. Now, I’ve not read that collection – it’s entirely possible that Moore helped Kuttner revise the story in the intervening years, although that’s pure conjecture. More parsimoniously, I’ll just go with the idea that, given their incredibly close writing partnership and their self-admitted inability to tell who wrote what, this story was a Kuttner/Moore joint production that they just published under his name solely, for whatever reason.

Last time in discussing their collabs, I mentioned that I felt that, more often than not, you could spot the “Moore” parts and the “Kuttner” parts pretty easily; based on my gut-feelings-based-approach, I do think that there is a LOT of Kuttner in this one, particularly in the more slap-sticky bits. That being said, I think there’s plenty of (admittedly vibes-based) evidence for Moore in here too – the sense of menace, the alien-ness of the gnomic world, the oddly libidinal violence, and the sharper-edged social commentary are all just extremely Moore-esque, you know what I mean? But see for yourself and let me know what you think!

A scathing indictment right off the bat, of our main character specifically and a certain flavor of “activist” more generally, and damn if Kuttner and Moore don’t go for the throat right away! If you’ve ever spent any time inactivist spaces, you’ve definitely encountered someone like Tim Crockett – an entitled know-it-all bleeding heart with nothing but bottomless contempt for those they, ostensibly, are supposed to be helping. These sorts certainly know better than the workers what is needed and how to get it, and are bravely and selflessly willing to help these poor benighted souls out of the pit of their own oppression.

There’s a lot of very heavy-handed stuff in these first paragraphs, but there’s also a very nice, subtle dig in there too – the part where it’s mentioned that Crockett, a great giver of speeches and writer of articles, has chosen not to use his connections to get into law, a place where someone with real convictions and a drive could actually learn some stuff and do some good. It’s a good, sharp bit, and sets up Crockett right away a kind of feckless, spineless worm, more interested in the social capital gained from activism than from activism itself.

The mention of the “Kallikaks” deserves some explication, as it’s a fairly obscure but important bit of history. In the early 20th century, as the modern sciences of heredity and psychology were juuuuust starting to be teased out and explored, a fellow by the name of Henry Goddard published a seminal book titled The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. Goddard was a eugenicist, like a great many educated people at the time, and ran a hospital for “feeble-minded” people. One of his “patients” there was a woman named Deborah Kallikak, and Goddard claimed to have discovered a clear-cut genealogy in her family basically proving the tenets of eugenics and hereditary hygiene. Basically, according to Goddard’s book, the Kallikak family could be divided into two halves, one “good” and “healthy” and the other cursed with disease and “feeble-mindedness,” traced back to a Revolutionary War era grandsire who had a “dalliance” with a bar maid while returning home one night. Thus, two branches of the Kallikak’s sprung from his loins, the upright and healthy side from his lawful marriage and a tainted lineage from his impure relations with a social and moral inferior. It’s all bullshit, of course, with copious amounts of lies and fabrications from Goddard (explored and explained in Gould’s great book The Mismeasure of Man, which everyone should read immediately). But at the time, and well in the 50s and 60s, Goddard was one of the titans of eugenics in America, and his “study” of the inheritance of the Kallikaks featured in all sorts of textbooks and papers and monographs.

Now, the use of “Kallikak” here is basically just saying that our character Crockett, a self-deluded meddler, probably believed that the workers he was “helping” were congenitally “lower class” and “feeble-minded” and, therefore, incapable of organizing themselves. Moore and Kuttner, of course, were interested in questions of heredity and the family; check out our discussion of their “When the Bough Breaks” from earlier in the year to read about all that. While I’m certainly not calling Moore and Kuttner eugenicists, I think sometimes we have a hard time recognizing just how ingrained into the mainstream those ideas were (and are still). The idea of genetic hygiene, of bloodlines mingling and diluting and passing on undesirable traits, was simply taken for granted – I mean, consider the whole of gothic literature and its preoccupation with congenital madness, for instance. The eugenic idea that, through careful and selective “hygiene” (i.e., choices of breeding) the human species could be “improved” was something that, likewise, was taken for granted at the time, and Moore and Kuttner were embedded in that milieu, same as everyone else.

A long digression, but that’s to be expected here, I reckon! Anyway, on with it!

We learn that Crockett has been jetting around, trying to infiltrate various industries to get the scoop on labor oppression, with a healthy dash of tragedy tourism in there too. He’s currently snuck into a coal mine in Pennsylvania where he’s disguised himself as a miner and descended deep into the earth. However, while he’s bumbling around and generally making a nuisance of himself, he accidently stumbles into a disused shaft that gets demolished, trapping him!

Waking after who-knows-how-long, Crockett slowly gets his bearings – he thinks he sees some kind of weird figure, but it vanishes and he decides that he must’ve been hallucinating. Then he starts to wonder how the hell he’s seeing anything anyway (radium, he decides, stupidly) and then begins to panic! Digging madly, he suddenly notices his hands:

Shocked, he continues the self-examination:

It would appear that Crockett has turned into a Weird Little Guy! His assumption, that his dying brain is causing him to hallucinate, would be a good one, if he weren’t in a pulp science fantasy story. Because, of course, the reality is that he’s been transformed into a Gnome, which he soon comes to realize when he hears a voice talking to him.

Crockett gets lifted up and hustled on his way, escorted by Gru Magru, who somewhat condescendingly explains to Crockett what’s happening:

It’s breezy and light, but a lot of fun – I like that kind of straight-forward fantasy stuff too, just enough exposition to get you situated and with some vague gestures towards a larger world to keep you interested, solid fantasy writing in my opinion.

Anyway, ol Gru Magru is hurrying Crockett along because he’s heard a fight has started, and he desperately wants to join it. This is a fun and weird bit of the story, because it turns out the fight is between gnomes, and it’s basically a form of recreation – we learn later that its the one unsanctioned non-work activity that they’re allowed, and they relish it. In fact, it’s almost a sensual experience for them, apparently – walloping and clobbering one another is a real, vital activity for the gnomes, and while it’s played for laughs there’s also a kind of deep strangeness going on here, where the gnomes, basically slaves to their emperor, can only connect with one another via violence. There’s a lot going on in there, I think!

In the brawl Crockett meets a girl gnome, Brockle Bhun, and learns about the important place the Brawl has in gnomish society. Then, the fight ended, Gru Magru grabs Crockett and drags him off to meet the Emperor, who likes to meet the new gnomes before they get put to work. In the throne room, they meet a gnomish servant of the emperor, who explains to Crockett (and us) that the emperor is basically a lazy indolent slug who luxuriates in mud baths all day – your standard senior managment, really, a characterization that is underscored when Crockett meets him. At first, he seems an easy-going sort, jovial even, getting Crockett oriented and admonishing him to work hard, but he finds a worm in his mud bath he becomes a roaring, bloviating, insulting bully. Basically, he’s a CEO.

Crockett is put on anthracite mining detail (and he’s told NOT to eat it, just mine it), where he again meets Brockle Bhun, a troublemaker who DOES like to eat the anthracite. More good art around this part, with a gnome hard at work:

While working, his new pal Brockle Bhun fills him in on life as a gnome – everybody works for the emperor, who rules through his powerful magic. That’s it. You work, you sleep, you work some more, there’s an official break after hour ten although you can fight as much as you want. A grim life of toil, although it’s taken as the simple, gospel truth. In other words, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of mining, for a gnome.

Crockett, of course, finds the work difficult and exhausting, and so he begins to scheme a way out of it. If the emperor is a magician, perhaps he could transform Crockett back into a human and set him free? But how to convince him? The answer, of course, is a work strike.

Now, like a lot of this story, this solution is played for laughs, although I think it’s more than just a kind of shaggy-dog yuk-it-up sort of tale. Crockett was a labor organizer (of sorts…), so his mind turning in that direction is consistent with his character. Also keeping with his particular history is that he’s doing it solely to help himself. We know he’s actually kind of a snake and a parasite, unconcerned with the actual plight of the worker, so his plan for a strike that would force the emperor to negotiate is all in service of helping HIM, rather than the workers. Consistently satirical, a hallmark of Moore and Kuttner.

Anyway, that night there’s a secret planning committee meeting, where Crockett lays out the theoretical underpinnings of the labor strike and what they could get out of it. The other gnomes seem kind of half-hearted about it, until Crockett lies and says that the Emperor is planning on outlawing fighting; that makes them sit-up alright, since fighting is a cherished and beloved and, perhaps even vital, pastime for all gnomes. It’s that lie that convinces them to join in and agree to the strike. It’ll be dangerous, though:

The cockatrice eggs are the basis of the Emperor’s power – with them he can transform gnomes into all sorts of nasty things, including humans. Obviously, Crockett is very interested in the red human-transforming eggs. Everybody agrees to meet in the council chamber and declare a strike, and then the meeting devolves into a brawl.

Afterwards, and presumably in bed, Crockett engages in a bit of introspection:

An interesting bit of musing, on his part, and one that we, as readers, have to wrassle with. Is this alluding to the idea that, perhaps, there is a natural order to the universe, with some people being meant to be workers and others, naturally, bosses? Maybe Crockett’s dissatisfaction with his gnomish life is a left-over bit of his humanity that, given time, will be worn away? It seems possible:

Is Crockett simply struggling against being a worker, something that he secretly desires and, maybe, needs? There’re some complicating (and, honestly, reactionary) readings that could be made from this, although of course they are coming from Crockett, a character that we know is kinda dumb and untrustworthy. It’s a fun, complicated text, the sort of thing you expect from C.L. Moore (and Kuttner, when he’s working with her).

Anyway, after an exhausting day of work, Crockett and the rest of the gnomes assemble in the council chamber. The emperor barrels in, and Crockett declares the strike:

Crockett, laboring under the misapprehension that the cockatrice eggs are stored somewhere, tries to encourage his gnomish comrades to interpose themselves between the emperor and any doors that might lead to his stash. Gru Magru disabuses him of this notion – the emperor simply pulls the eggs out the ether, a kind of key tactical point that would’ve been nice to know about ahead of time.

The Mother of All Brawls erupts in the cavern, with all prole gnomes trying to wallop the emperor, who is just as scrappy as any of them, even without his magical weapons. Crockett tries to get everybody to sit down and negotiate, but the die has been cast and its a regular donnybrook in the council chamber. Finally, the emperor starts chuckin’ cockatrice eggs!

There’s some fun writing here – the image of this king hurling crystals into gnomes, and then the gnomes getting instantly turned into weird little critters by them, is a lot of fun. We get a good scene where some gnomes, caught on the edge of an explosion, are only partially transformed; one gets a mole head, another a worm’s lower half, and yet another gets turning into something unrecognizable, causing Crockett to realize that the cockatrice eggs aren’t restricted to the zoology he knows alone. It’s fun, and there’s a great illustration:

There’s also a fun bit where the emperor pulls out a red cockatrice egg; that, according to what Crockett has heard, turns gnomes into humans, as foul a fate as can be imagined. The emperor agrees apparently, because he thinks twice about throwing it and then, very carefully, sets it down behind him, rather than using it. Crockett, seeing his chance, darts forward and grabs it! Maybe he’s got his ticket back to humanity? Looking back on last time, Crockett sees a total bedlam in the council chamber:

Crockett wonders where it went wrong as he flees. Podrang should’ve negotiated, should’ve sat down and, recognizing that it was in his best interest, agreed to a compromise between himself and his workers. It’s an interesting bit of commentary, and you can read it how you like – maybe it’s a scathing indictment of Crockett and an organized labor movement that cannot see beyond its immediate needs and its relationship to management? Or maybe it’s saying that the bosses, and the system they serve, is not rational at all, that it would destroy itself and everything else rather than cede any power or control? At the very least, it’s clear that Crockett has misjudged the power of the gnomish proletariat and the determination of the gnomish emperor, because the latter has squashed the former and is now chasing after him! Crockett sprints through the earth, spots daylight, and runs hard, but he realizes that the emperor is RIGHT behind him – he won’t make it! So, he turns, and lifts the red egg over his head!

He wakes eventually, and is pleased to realize that he’s seeing the sunlight not as a dazzling and poisonous glare, but as a pleasant and healthful glow, like a human would. The emperor pulls himself out of the rubble, takes a look, and then flees back into the earth with a scream! Of course, Crockett remembers, gnomes are afraid of humans, that must be it. He’s free! He’s escaped!

And that’s the end of the IWW pamphlet “There was a Gnome” by Henry Kuttner (and C.L. Moore)!

There’re two ways you can read the ending, I guess. One is that he’s a weird mixed up monster, right? That the half-dozen or so spheres all interacted and left him some kind of chimera. The other interpretation, and the one that I prefer, is that the red one DID work first, but it’s just that red doesn’t make humans, but rather something else alien and horrible (like the thing he saw in the council chamber). Doesn’t really matter, of course – Crockett comes out, thinks he’s escaped, but he’s actually been transformed into something horrible and scary and weird.

It’s a fun and silly fantasy story, and even if that ISN’T your thing I think you can agree that it’s written well; the pace is brisk, there’s plenty of weirdness, and the gnome world and lifestyle is presented well and interestingly, without any superfluous nonsense and a lot of solid, good strangeness. The labor organizing aspect of it is interesting – it’s certainly making fun of that era of kinda dumb, feckless activists, people obviously more loyal to the aesthetics of organization than organization itself. There’s ambiguity there, of course – is Crockett meant to be a stand in for a particular kind of labor aristocrat organizer, or is he meant to indict the whole movement? Are the workers/gnomes actually happier in there “place,” or are they blinded by habituation to their own exploitation? It’s an interesting story because it doesn’t really come down on one side or the other, but I feel like the fact that it engages with these ideas and makes us think about them is, actually, a much better purpose for fiction (no one wants a didactic story, you know what I mean?)

It’s interesting that this issue of Unknown Worlds had “Smoke Ghost” and this story in it together – they both come off as pretty radical, honestly. “Smoke Ghost” of course is a bit harder edged; it explicitly evokes a decaying world prey to monsters as the direct result of capitalism and its handmaiden, fascism. But this one is clearly capturing a moment too. Obviously the depression had seen a lot of labor organizing, but with the build up to world war II (raging in europe at the time, though America wouldn’t join in until December of the year) there had been a substantial bit of tension in the country’s industrial base; there had been a huge steel worker strike earlier in the year, and the idea of social justice and unrest had been bubbling away. In that light, it’s interesting to see the ways pulp fiction reflected these ideas and concerns, and I think “There was a Gnome” makes for not only a fun story, but also an interesting historical document.

Anyway, that’s it for now! Hope ya’ll have a good holiday, if you’re in the states, or a good thursday if you’re not! Take ‘er easy, and see ya’ll next time!

Clarissa Pulps it All #30: Moorevember already!? “The Children’s Hour” by Lawrence O’Donnell (Nom de Plume of C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner) Astouding, v.33 n.1, March 1944

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More than half-way through November, and though things have conspired to bum everybody out, I think there’s still some merit to spitting the blood from our mouths, telling the bastards to go fuck themselves, and then getting on with it all. So, in that spirit, let me welcome one and all to yet ANOTHER Moorevember!

Last year, following Halloween, I spent November discussing some of my favorite stories from one of my favorite writers, C.L. Moore. You can read those older editions here, here, here, and…here, if you want to – it was a lot of fun to go back and revisit the work of a remarkable writer like’ ol’ Cathy Moore, a towering and formidable talent that everyone should be reading and appreciating. So why not do it again? So this, our first Moorevember entry for ’24, is a fun one: The Children’s Hour by Moore and Kuttner, writing under the pseudonym Lawrence O’Donnell.

The collaboration between Moore and Kuttner (introduced to each other through the letter-writing circle of H.P. Lovecraft) is the stuff of legend – the two of them really, truly seemed to mostly mesh together perfectly, so much so that they said that they often couldn’t even tell who had written what after a story was done. That may very well be the case, though in my opinion, I think you can get a hint of who was doin’ what in their stories – Moore, to me, is the better, more cerebral writer, interested in complexity and ambiguity and “big” topics (like violence, or love, or whatnot), whereas Kuttner is more action-oriented, plot-focuses, jokey, and often more mechanically- or technically-interested, particularly where they’re writing sci-fi. But, even if you think you can parse out Cathy vs Hank in these stories, I think you can admit that they are remarkably well-done collaborations, without any of the obvious and unsightly seams that often mar multi-author works.

Moore and Kuttner, both singly and together, were a good fit for ol’ John W. Campbell Jr.’s Astounding, which had definitely positioned itself as the Thinking Man’s pulp magazine – they wanted brainy stories, eschewing outright science fantasy and space opera type stuff, with a clear preference for imaginative interrogation of science fictional concepts, particularly as they pertained to “social” concepts (I mean, within reason – Campbell, an inveterate and proud racist, was not interested in stories having black main characters, for instance). This was in contrast to ol’ Hugo’s whiz-bang kind of science fiction, and actually led to a number of running-gun battles between the two camps of fans in something very similar to dumb “sick puppies” controversy of a decade ago. Anyway, that kind of commitment to contemplative, strange, and often experimental work was custom made for Moore and Kuttner, and today’s story is a prime example of that! So let’s get to it!

Nice moody cover – the dark scenery and the ambush of the mutant there setting one hell of a scene. The art in Astounding is always good, very genre-y without getting kitschy, something that can’t be said for all the mags! Anyway, I like this one. A lot of fun and a good color scheme, and it’s telling a little story, very imaginatively engaging.

An interesting ToC this time around too, with van Vogt by far the most recognizable “big” name on here. “Wesley Long” is another pseudonym, this time for George O. Smith (who wrote the article here) and who we’ve mentioned before, a real “hard sf” type whose wife left him for editor John Campbell in the late 40s! Drama among the pulps!

Anyway, ON TO THE STORY ALREADY, yeesh!

I’d once again strongly suggest everybody go read this one, though, before diving into the spoilers ahead – it’s a very long one, but it’s a great story, very strange and atmospheric and with some psychedelic scenes and a good punchline, so you don’t wanna ruin it by reading by ramblings ahead of time. Here, I’ll even post a link to the pdf again: READ IT!

Some good abstract illustrations in this story, which makes sense, since so much of the “action” is phantasmagoric and weird and almost surrealist in its description. Also, a good, solid hook there – you’ve really got no fuckin’ clue about what this story is about, but the little info you do have makes it seem very mysterious, really pulls you in. Well done, I say, and, as always, I appreciate Astounding‘s restraint with these title pages – very VERY rare to find one of those “here’s the CLIMAX!!!” scenes right off the bat, like you often do in Weird Tales, for instance.

Our story starts by introducing us to an enlisted man, sitting in a waiting room, cooling his heels until an appointment with a Lt. Dyke who, we soon learn, is some kinda Army psychologist/hypnotist specialist. There’s some fun world building in, background stuff that provides a necessary-to-the-plot mechanism for all the mind-bending that’s about to happen, but it’s also kind of fun and a little menacing in its own right, isn’t it? Our enlisted fella, Lessing, is described as a perfect candidate for the apparently wide-spread use of “psychonamics,” some kind of First Earth Battalion-style mind-over-matter stuff that lets soldiers ignore bodily hardship (and who knows what else…) in pursuit of The Mission. It’s grim stuff, very science fictional, and its preoccupation with Building a Better Soldier reminds you when Moore and Kuttner were writing it.

But, in terms of the story, it serves to introduce the Problem and the Method of Addressing it. It turns out, that in all this MKUltra hypno stuff, they’ve discovered something. When Lessing is put under, there’s a gap in his memory, three months total…but when he’s AWAKE, there is no gap; he’s got a perfectly bland and banal memory of living a perfectly normal life during the SAME interval. It’s only when he’s hypnotized that there appears evidence of some kind of brain block or tampering. It’s very weird, and a great intro to the story.

What’s ALSO interesting is that, reading through this, there’s kind of an assumption that this must be taking place in the future…hypno-soldiers capable of transforming themselves into superbeings via mind powers is very science fictional, after all. BUT, we soon learn that this mind block in Lessing’s brain is from five years in his past, some time shortly BEFORE Pearl Harbor! So this story, published in ’44, takes place in ’47, basically modern times (for then, I mean). Very interesting, in that it posits a world remade by the needs of the world war and the military-psychological complex.

But, anyway, the background provided us, we soon move into the meeting proper:

There’s some chitchat, but we VERY quickly move directly into Lessing getting hypno’d by Dyke – it’s very clear that this sort of rapid-fire hypnotism is the norm, and that Lessing has been prepared for it by his training as a soldier. Again, it’s not really a part of the story, but it is evocative and menacing.

The regression begins, and Lessing is instructed to travel back to the blockage, back to the summer of ’41:

The poem quoted here is the first chunk of Longfellow’s “The Children’s Hour.” Taken as a whole, the poem is super maudlin and sentimental (I mean, it’s Longfellow, so of course it is), but here in this context, it is made menacing – the idea of this liminal, spooky state, between day and night, where the normal functioning of the world ceases. We’ve seen Moore use these older works as inspiration before, of course; she was very allusive in “No Woman Born,” for example, and this story today has a LOT of that in it.

In fact, we get some immediately, when Lessing’s memory coalesces itself around a summer walk in the park with…Clarissa!

Bit of Shakespeare for you, and an interesting one at that – it’s Mercutio making fun of Romeo for pining over Rosaline, a tragedy that Romeo will soon completely forget about when he sees Juliet. So this is what’s at the core of his excised memory – he had completely forgotten about Clarissa, a girl he’d met in the park and fallen deeply, madly in love with back in ’41. How is that possible!? He’d been obsessed with Clarissa, so much so that he even uses the word glamour to describe the effect she had on him, like an elf princesses or some fey creature of the forest, enchanting and otherworldly. And there was something weird about her, and about their relationship, but he can’t quite put his finger on it. And yet, somehow, she’d been snipped out of his memory totally…by some strange, shadowy force, it seems…

Lessing continues to mine his suddenly discovered memories, realizing that there was a presence that had seemed to have been dedicated to keeping him apart from Clarissa, some, a threatening and antagonistic presence…Clarissa’s aunt! Strangely, he can’t remember her face, or anything about her, not really, just a sense of her being a darkness behind Clarissa, an obstacle between their love.

Dyke, the hypnotist, tries to get Lessing to organize his thinking – it’s all a muddle, a broad wash of experiences and sensations and the knowledge that his memories had been taken from him by something. Dyke wants him to concentrate on the first time he’d noticed something strange about Clarissa. And boy, does he!

They witness a bad car accident while they’re walking, and at the noise Clarissa slips out of his hand and into…somewhere else!

Yeah, Clarissa walks into some kinda weird light portal and vanishes, only to reappear down the path a little later, after the accident has occurred and whatever danger there was had passed. It’s weird, and the imprecise and impressionistic way its described really conveys how Lessing’s mind can’t really comprehend what’s he’s witnessed – he’s trying his best, but its something totally alien and beyond his experience or conception, so he’s really incapable of describing it in any real, sensible detail. There’s also another fun bit of art on this page:

Kind of captures the otherworldiness even better than the words do, doesn’t it?

Importantly, it seems like Clarissa herself didn’t recognize what was happening, that maybe something outside of her had intervened?

Dyke and Lessing continue the therapy session, with Lessing digging deeper into his memories, which seem to be flooding back over him with greater clarity and insistence, now that the mental dam has broken. There’s another memory, of a house vanishing during a storm; they had been running to it to seek shelter from the rain, but it had been taken away from them and then they’d been soaked and Clarissa had gotten a terrible fever. This leads Lessing to articulate the thought that something had been guiding Clarissa, that it had protected her from the car accident but then had wanted her to get soaked and get sick – again, Moore and Kuttner do a really good job of having Lessing very naturally sifting through these memories as they come and extracting his sensations and surmises as they arise. It’s some good, strange writing too, all very dream-like and unusual.

Clarissa’s fever, from when the house vanished and they’d been caught in the storm, necessitated some time apart, and the fairy-like quality of their interactions is highlighted again since, when he can’t be near her, he feels like the color is draining out of the world. Clarissa too experiences something like this – she’s almost deliriously happy to see him again when he can visit, as if she also needed him in her life, desperately. Although that’s a weird scene too – he goes to her apartment, and it’s a windowless room full of mirrors.

It’s really great writing, isn’t it – hard to do justice in this kind of jumpy summation way I’m doing, because it’s really building on the sense of Lessing’s memories of these things, and the way he’s now retrospectively evaluating them. Good sense of weirdness and, honestly, melancholy in all this, a glimpse into a strange world that seems, oddly, constructed for Clarissa. Lessing becomes convinced that Clarissa’s experiences in the world are being curated for her, that nothing happens to her without a plan and, in some weird way, purpose. It’s honestly deeply paranoid, but the strange glamour effect that Clarissa has seems to be keeping Lessing from questioning it too much, in the moment.

Besides, for Lessing, life is otherwise great; his love for Clarissa is some kind of furious ecstasy. He almost seems drunk with it, and it seems like it’s something shared with Clarissa. She too seems to be full to the brim with life and some kind of nameless, indescribable sense of the future, of becoming…something. So giddy are they that Lessing and Clarissa even begin to discuss marriage, which suddenly everything changes.

Again, we get a sense that Lessing is trying to put into human terms and human words concepts of ideas that’re simply beyond him. The apartment full of mirrors, the dark faceless aunt whose name he can’t remember…these all have a kind of weird archetype flavor to them, as if he’s groping after some way to make sensical his glimpses into a different, alien world. It’s fun stuff, and in the reading of it, without knowing what exactly is going on, it’s very compelling and weird, isn’t it?

Convinced that he’s being kept from Clarissa, Lessing goes to the apartment unannounced and, enraged, forces his way into the room. And then things get weird!

Lessing is strangely non nonplussed by this, as if his mind and perceptions are being manipulated – he finds himself, suddenly, in some kind of a weird fantasy world, with an armored knight and a strange guy with a whip…and Clarissa, who simultaneously seems to be both “his” Clarissa and a different Clarissa…it’s all very strange, and you get the feeling that Lessing’s brain would overheat, if he’d been allowed to perceive it all pure and uncut in the moment. Then, just as things in the Fantasy World are getting a little hairy, he suddenly gets vertigo!

Really kind of funny to imagine Lessing in Dyke’s office, trying to convey all this absolutely bonkers shit to his Officer-Hypnotist without getting kicked out of the army for being insane.

Lessing becomes convinced that Clarissa, some kind of perfect woman, has become the obsession of, basically, a god of some sort. Like Zeus jealously guarding his crushes, this omnipotent being has been keeping Clarissa apart from Lessing, micromanaging her life and keeping her in the odd mirror prison of the apartment. Lessing figures that all the weirdness around Clarissa, and the unknown thing that she seems, in some dim way, to expect to happen to her is some kind of apotheosis, a way for the jealous god to uplift Clarissa into a new plane of existence so they can be together. Lessing decides he must fight against this god, and so goes to the apartment to try and convince Clarissa not to discard her humanity for divinity…but he gets brain whammied and leaves.

Lessing takes Clarissa dancing and, drunk and all crazied-up, they try and run off, speeding through the city…but the strange forces “protecting” Clarissa intervene, and even Clarissa can’t seem to resist their strange effect. There’s some fun, obviously interposed traffic jams and suchlike that force their car to make detours that keep from leaving, until finally there’s a deus ex machina that simply spins the streets around under them. They end up back outside the apartment and Clarissa leaves him again, drawn back into the weird mirror apartment again, and Lessing is left alone. Again.

Lessing tries one last time to go to Clarissa and confront whatever the hell is going on, at which point Clarissa seems to have some sudden realizations, both about the way her life has been “shepherded” and her role in it, a kind of sudden maturation. At this point, the god-like “aunt” intervenes, telling him that he’s served his purpose and that he’s gotta go now, at which point the memory block is put on him and Lessing is sent on his way.

Now, there’s still a LOT of this story still to go, but we’re gonna skip along pretty quickly here. Basically, Dyke tries to rationalize (in a weird way) what has happened, pish-poshing Lessing’s ideas about jealous gods. I think this must be a Kuttner part, because it gets really oddly “technical” in its explanations, which is something that Campbell might’ve required, since he always wanted to have some kind of “science-y” part, even in a weird, dreamlike mythopoetic fantasy like this story.

Dyke first, by way of humoring Lessing, suggests that Clarissa is some kind of Homo superior (like the weird baby from “When the Bough Breaks”), a kind of super-human child who needed some time among the knuckleheads on earth to develop properly; Dyke uses the example of a precocious kid who, while very smart and advanced, still needs to be socialized among children, otherwise it grows up into a weird asshole. Thus, the “aunt” had tossed Clarissa in among humans, watched over her, and then, when she’d reached a certain maturity, had taken her back and mind-wiped Lessing. Simple as!

Of course, Dyke dismisses this, and posits that really the two of them had just gotten bad fevers from the storm, and that everything odd and weird and strange afterwards had been residual brain problems from that. Lessing decides that if he’s going to figure this out, he’s just going to have to got back to the apartment and see if he can’t get some answers directly! So he goes to the apartment (which he last saw like 5 years ago!) and:

It gets trippy again, but the upshot of it is that “Clarissa” is a fragment of a transcendent being, one that is recapitulated across time and space many zillions of times over, each one an individual part of a larger whole, like cells in a single body.

Basically, all these “Clarissas” out there had to develop and grow until they could recognize one another, in that way becoming the crazy ultracosmic thing that they really were. The other weird visions of alien worlds and other Clarissas were brief glimpses that Lessing had had of this process. Total transcendence, man – and, as Lessing realizes that he was a small, strange part of this process, a kind of universe-beholding-itself sort of thing, he’s hit with one final mind-whammy:

And that’s the end of “The Children’s Hour!”

It’s a long story for sure, and I’m not really certain that we need the long Dyke part about Homo superior kids needing acclimatization – honestly much better if he’d just been like “uh, remember that fever you talked about? That’s gotta be the problem here.” But, that aside, I think the story is really great, full of weird imagery and based on a really original idea. As mentioned, both Moore and Kuttner had been Lovecraft circle people, and so the idea of truly alien beings was something they were very familiar with. Moore in particular is very proficient at writing about truly weird landscapes and beings – just go read the weird hellworld in “The Black God’s Kiss” – and I think she really has a lot of fun here talking about a limited human trying to make sense of the unlimited cosmic being he’s interacting with. There’s just some good writing in here to that effect, and it’s a fun read.

I also like to see Moore returning to the themes that interest her – much like in “Shambleau” there’s a destructive edge to the love shared between this human and alien being, something beautiful and moving but also incomprehensible and, maybe, cruel, if not intentionally so then at least inadvertently. I think that’s what I like most about Moore’s writing (and it’s Moore, exclusively, doing this – Kuttner is a lot of things, but he never dips into that well of introspection, not like Moore does), this ambiguous and often merciless examination of love and memory and the way people relate to one another. It’s good, subtle, beautiful stuff, and I like it a lot!

I was also struck by just how wild it is that this story was published in ’44. If you’d handed it to me blind I’d have sword in was New Wave, something from the 60s. There’s some real interesting resonances here between Moore and the later New Wave folks, in terms of themes, approach, and style, and I really think Moore needs to be talked about in terms of a real early, foundational part of the later (and best) expression of the science fiction genre.

Anyway, even for me this one feels long and rambly, so I’ll wrap it up, but I hope everybody takes the time to read this story – I really think it’s worth it, even if it is pretty damn long and the Dyke rationalization part is boring and unnecessary. Anyway, Happy Moorevember everybody!

What is to be done?

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Well, here we are, at the end of all things. Trump, moron, rapist, fascist, has returned to power. More to the point, he’s the first Republican to win the “popular” vote (a bit of a misnomer, because of course for the 47th consecutive time, the actual winner of the presidential race was “did not/can not vote” in a landslide). There’s a whole lot of stuff already written about the utter fucking catastrophe of the 2024 election, and I don’t want to be repetitive, but sufficed to say: fuck all fascists, and fuck the corporate soulless monsters of the official “opposition” who lost to one of the stupidest, vilest pieces of shit in history.

Trying to elaborate for myself what exactly Trump’s victory means helps explain it, in part. For example, Harris, VP to a president who oversaw the largest expansion in domestic hydrocarbon production in history (something her boss’s old boss, Obama, bragged about back when HE held the previous record), explicitly refused to follow through on an older promise to ban fracking, promising that oil and gas “had a place” in the “clean energy transition.” It’s hard to see how Trump could do any worse than Biden did and Harris promised to do, honestly; the only real difference between them is that Trump won’t try and hoodwink people with a greenwashing “Infrastructure Renewal Act” like the previous bosses did. Hell, Biden didn’t even lift a finger on one of Trump’s previous oil giveaway cornerstones, the ANWR drilling scheme, until literally hours AFTER Trump won reelection (guaranteeing that he’ll just reverse it after Jan).

You can go down the list and do the same with almost every position: Border Security? Well, Harris was flabbergasted at how the Republicans had the crass gall to REFUSE to vote for the Dem’s hard right anti-migrant bill, so now we get worse than that with the addition of nonstop cruelty theater alongside it. FDA is tanked, so the listeria outbreaks that happened under Biden/Harris will just accelerate and expand, plus we get vaccine denialism!

And, of course, there’s Gaza, which just sums up the whole fucking thing really. Smugly dismissing peace protestors, refusing to even appear to be considering arms reductions let alone embargos to the israelis while giving carte blanche to their well documented genocide and ethnic cleansing, and then being shocked when the good little boys and girls don’t line up to vote for them anyway. Grim, ugly stuff, and now it’ll be grimmer and uglier.

Hell, the Dem’s had a slamdunk in the immensely unpopular overturning of Roe and subsequent surge in abortion bans and resultant fatalities and misery. But, of course, Biden has a well-documented history of anti-abortion sentiments and statements, so he didn’t do shit when he could, and beyond some dolorous platitudes and solemn declarations of vague support, what, exactly, was Harris et al.’s plan? The conspiracist on my shoulder whispers stuff about “a perpetual fund-raising grift” while the grim realist, who is pretty loud these days, shouts “they’re just dumb as hell!”

The big story, of course, is the rightward shift of the “working class” electorate, at least at the national level – we get another four years of navel-gazey punditry about “the working class” and what “they” want. Now, there’re very real material concerns in this country – housing is an insane pipedream for most, rents eat up half or people’s monthly income, and the cost of food is through the roof; only an idiot or a flak would tell you differently. But the idea that the Republican trickle-down bootstrappers in general and Trump and his billionaire buddies in particular are going to do shit about it is maybe one of the darkest jokes I’ve ever heard.

Which brings us to Lenin.

I titled this one “What is to be done?” because, in addition to it being my favorite bit of ol’ Vlad’s writing, it seems pretty goddamn relevant today. If you’ve read it (which you should, it’s good and important), then it’s no surprise why I’m talking about it – the whole point of Lenin’s essay is to clarify that the workers are not going to just spontaneously achieve real class consciousness sittin’ under the Bodhi tree and worrying about wages and the cost of living and their trouble with the bosses. Unconnected, uneducated, and uncoordinated, they’re ripe for the plucking by parasites like Trump and Musk and Thiel, who have a million “explanations” for why the workers are struggling; pointy-headed profs worried about land acknowledgements, perfidious and ambiguously-gendered people that make you feel funny, scary immigrants with their weird customs, alien languages, and willingness to work for less, anyone and everyone but capitalism and the vampires empowered by it. Not even unionism helps here, according to Lenin: you might get concessions and better conditions, but ultimately trade-unionism is just more sectionalism and rank self-interest embedded in capitalist structures of exploitation.

What is to be done is this: active, energetic, and aggressive education about socialism. Strident and uncompressing anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, and anti-imperialism. A clear enunciation of not only economic themes, but also the theoretical underpinnings of capitalist oppression and socialist liberation. Armchair (or, these days, Gaming Chair) Marxists aren’t enough – actual people have to be enrolled in their own liberation, have to be given the opportunity to learn and understand where their alienation and immiseration is coming from in order to fight it.

Now, I’m no vanguardist – I’m right there with El Sup and the Zapatistas in saying that I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards on this planet. The idea of a permanent vanguard is both theoretically loathsome and historically dubious. But no one can deny that americans are enormously and disastrously ignorant – their votes for Trump, a conman whose economic policies are explicitly constructed to help capitalists maximally exploit workers, proves it. The idea that the workers of america are capable of arising to some sort of actually informed understanding of political economy is just patently false, because american society, institutions, and education have been built around actively suppressing that possibility. They can’t even identify their own self interest, so successfully have they been propagandized to by capitalists, instead blaming imaginary immigrant hordes and fictionalized trans student athletes for getting lavish gov’t funding while they can’t feed their families or own a home. The only way to combat that deep-seated bullshit is to make people recognize that truth – that they’ve been lied to their whole damn lives, all in service of shoring up and securing capitalist domination. And only by making it clear how capitalists have used division, prejudice, and hate to cement their own rule and wealth can we hope for any actual liberation.

Now, what that looks like in actual practice is something I don’t know, and I’d guess no one does really, or they’d be doing it. I mean, we remember the debacles of the DSA in the shadow of the first Trump term and how that all turned out, so there’s no easy organizational checklist we can just run down. But with everybody kind of waving their hands and telling us all to “build community,” I feel like this at least offers a little more structure, you know? Like, sure, build community with your neighbors, but you gotta wear your socialism on your sleeve when you’re doing it (and socialism of whatever stripe, mind you – that’s why I keep using the lower-case “s” in socialism [I myself am an anarcho-communist, a fan of Kropotkin and Zapatismo] but, honestly, I don’t give a shit about our cute little internecine theoretical conflicts; so long as we’re all devoutly and sincerely anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, I will call you comrade).

I’d also say that, as important as building community is, sometimes destroying them is just as important. I cannot emphasize it enough – you absolutely cannot be committed to change and liberation and improvement while ALSO maintaining relationships with Trumpists, fascists, vile “respectable” right-wingers, and mealy-mouthed Liberals – if they will not change their minds and denounce their old beliefs, you must break community with those people immediately. Now, I understand that there might be safety or survival issues here, and if you cannot safely escape, then do what you must (but at least piss in their coffee or something). Otherwise, if you can, you must disengage from these people totally. No Holidays, no “can’t we just have a nice family dinner,” no “stop making things awkward,” all of that is why we’re where we’re at today. By all means, give ’em the ol’ socialist pitch, but if they remain unmoved, there has to be consequences, you know? Tell these people to go fuck themselves, loudly and in no uncertain terms, and then move on with your life. There is no other way forward, because these people have already shown that they are immoral, cruel, uncaring monsters who do not respect or love you in any way. Cut them out of your lives like they cancer they are, permanently.

Anyway, that’s about it – just doin’ my usual thing and using this blog to muse via the ol’ “writing is thinking” approach. Not much in the way of catharsis or hope, and I’m sorry about that, but if we can’t live for hope, then let’s live for revenge. And part of that is living well! Get in with your people and stand together, we’re definitely in for some dark times ahead. Oh and buy some damn dried beans and rice and stuff – very easily see the U.S. shifting into mega-ultra-hyperinflation under Secretary of the Treasury Musk very VERY quickly, so you’ll wanna be prepared.

Stay strong, Comrades!

The Pulp (of Capitalism) Strainer #29: “Smoke Ghost” by Fritz Leiber, Unknown Worlds, V. 5, n. 3, Oct 1941

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The Big Day is here: All Hallow’s Eve; Samhain; Satan’s Birthday(?); Pumpkinmas. Yes, it’s Halloween, and as is good and right, we’re celebrating the day with a particularly excellent story dissection/discussion/ramble – Fritz Leiber’s “Smoke Ghost” from the October 1941 issue of Unknown Worlds!

We’ve hit Leiber before, of course, discussing his very first story in Weird Tales (“The Automatic Pistol“) as well as the first Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser story in Unknown Worlds (“Two Sought Adventure“) so, obviously, we’re all huge Leiberheads around these parts, just absolutely Fritzpilled. He’s a great writer who had a huge impact across multiple genres – weird fiction, sci-fi, and especially in the genre he named, sword & sorcery. Immensely important figure, and a helluva writer too boot! And man, lemme tell ya – this story today is a killer!

Pretty rad ToC in this issue – the de Camp and Pratt Novel up front is great, one of their “Mathematics of Magic” series that is, I think, criminally underappreciated among fantasy folks. There’s a good Kuttner story in here, a lesser (but still fun) Bloch effort too, as well as some of Hubbard’s usual hackwork. Anyway, a solid issue of the magazine, made more interesting by the editorial (“Of Things Beyond,” on page 6) where Campbell and Tarrant are trying to couch their style of fantasy as something more urbane and, frankly, science fictional than the traditional (i.e., Weird Tales) stuff. It’s always interesting to see the genre discussions going on in the pulps – we tend to take the labels for granted these days, but there was a real tension about what exactly was, say, sci-fi or horror, and the only place to hash them out was in the magazines!

But, anyway, enough! Let’s get down to business with one of my favorite weird stories of all time, “Smoke Ghost” by Fritz Leiber, Jr!

Good, almost “EC Comics” ghastly ghoul there, huh? Cartier is among the top of the heap, especially in the sci-fi magazines, and had a long and storied career as an illustrator, with a fun and playful style that I like. Also really appreciate that this bit o’ art doesn’t give anything away at all, a rarity in the pulps sometimes!

A fantastic opening, isn’t it? A secretary is wondering what the hell is up with her boss, and who can blame her when he’s spouting off truly wild, apocalyptic ideas about the kind of ghosts born into a world of steam and smoke and capitalism. “The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings…” I mean, holy smokes, great stuff! And there’s more! Miss Millick is taking dictation from him when he has another odd interlude:

Absolutely killer stuff here, and a good overview of not only the theme of this story but of a lot of Leiber’s fiction, where myths and beliefs and monsters are a dark reflection of the material conditions of life, a kind of instantiation of collective fear and pain whose form and expression comes from the specific types of sordid miseries visited on people. And here, in this story, written at the tale end of the Depression (though who was to know that) and while Europe was engulfed in World War II (with America watching from the sidelines, as yet), Leiber is evoking a particular flavor of modern, industrialized hauntings.

I hope Miss Millick is stealing office supplies, because goddamn that is one grim diatribe to be enduring for thirty-five cents an hour or whatever the going rate for secretarial work was in 1941. She objects that, of course, there’re no such things as ghosts, but this seems to only send Mr. Wran further ’round the bend. With a huge, tight, unnatural smile, he spouts some boilerplate about how of course there’s no such things as ghosts, modern science assures us of this very fact yadda yadda. It’s all very strange for Miss Millick, who nervously runs her hands across the edge of Wran’s desk…and discovered that it’s covered in some kind of weird black smudge or gunk.

Strange how the sight of that dark grime seems to affect him so, huh? When Millick is gone, Wran runs over and examines the black gunk – he’s obviously troubled, because not only does he furiously scrub the stuff off the desk, we also learn that the trash basket is full of similarly inky rags…this weird grimy shit seems to be part of some kind of regularly occurring phenomenon, tied in with other things that Wran, attempted to convince himself, calls “hallucinations.”

And what are the things he’s been “hallucinating?”

I gotta watch out, Leiber is such a good writer I’m in real danger of just copy-pasting the whole damn story onto here. But I mean, c’mon, how evocative and moody and moving is that passage? This bleak, almost nihilistic scenery is as terrifying and as existentially threatening as any of Lovecraft’s Cyclopean ruins, and the psychogeographical connection between it and the troubled times (specifically the “Fascist wars”) is really phenomenal. Also, neat writerly trick of Leiber’s, tying Wran’s observation of this scenery to dusk and twilight only, doubling down on the sense of fading light and ending cycles.

It’s during these Blakean reveries that Wran captures sight of something – it’s nothing at first, just some windswept garbage…and yet…

That’s a real lived-in moment, isn’t it? One summer, when I was doing field work out in Wyoming, I watched the same same pile of antelope bones slowly disarticulate and scatter down hill. It was on the path I would hike to get to some outcrops, and for like two weeks I saw the steady movement of vertebrae and ribs and long bones, starting up near the ridgeline and, as a result of time and curious coyotes and intermittent rain storms, ending up at the foot of the hill in a little dry creek bed. It’s an interesting thing, getting to “know” a bit of ephemeral stuff in the landscape, and Leiber beautifully describes Wran’s fascination with this weird, oddly behaving bag of trash. And of course, the fun part is that Wran doesn’t know he’s in a weird tale (yet), but we do, so we know that the strange peripatetic movement day by day of this horrible bag thing is much more portentous and threatening than poor ol’ Wran does.

Wran finds himself obsessing over the weird bag thing – when it’s not visible one day, he’s oddly relieved, and then becomes annoyed with himself for, apparently, having been worried about seeing the thing. The next evening, he tries to ignore it, but the desire to look out the train window at the thing’s usual spot proves too strong, and he does indeed see something: it looks like there was a head of some sort, peering over the parapet of the roof.

At this point Wran really is justified in his assumption that he’s developing some kind of psychosis – the things is dominating his thoughts, and he develops a weird compulsion about grime and dust and inky grit that he suddenly is noticing everywhere in the office. Similarly, he decides that this is something he has to confront, and so, one evening on the train, he strains his eyes looking out over the grim cityscape.

And so Wran decides to visit a psychotherapist.

Leiber was, like a lot of people, intensely interested in psychiatry/psychology – we now tend to not really appreciate how HUGE and REVOLUTIONARY the idea that the brain was “fixable” had on people in the early 20th century. In our modern world of commodified and wide-spread therapy, it’s kind of taken for granted, but back then there’s a real sense that not only is it possible to interrogate and adjust the human mind, but it could be done scientifically. There’s a reason why people like Sturgeon, Campbell (the editor of the Unknown Worlds), and Philip K. Dick were such devoted believers in PSI/psychic stuff, and why it shows up so often in the science fiction of the day – it was bleeding edge science, doing for the mind what medicine was doing for the body and what physics and chemistry promised to do for the external world. Leiber, who received undergrad degrees in both psychology and biology, was uniquely equipped to integrate these concerns into his fiction.

Wran’s visit to the head-shrinker allows him to relive and explore the “unfortunate incident” that Miss Millick had alluded to earlier in the story. It turns out that ol’ Wran was, apparently, a psychic kid, although that’s really the least important part of the story – what TRULY matters here is the Wran, while apparently clairvoyant, continuously disappointed his mother because he could NOT communicate with the dead. The fact that this “sensory prodigy” could only see real, physical objects and NOT spiritual ones is interesting, in the context of this story.

Childhood Wran’s life as a psychic oddity is interesting – it seems like he mostly hated it, but he desperately wanted to please his mother and other adults, all of whom paid attention to him because of his gifts. This need to please is so great that it maybe ends up sabotaging him; his first public test at a university elicits such anxiety that he ends up psyching himself out and, apparently, loosing the ability totally.

At this point, we have been told a few things about Wran that’re important to the story – he’s a needy little guy, he had a brush with the occult world as a child that has resulted in him turning away from the unknown and towards placid rationality (see, in particular, all his talk about science and his desire for an expert to tell him everything is okay) and, most interestingly, his psychic power ONLY worked on real, physical objects…he never spoke to the ghost a dead person, no matter how hard his mother pushed him.

All this is very interesting, and Wran is even apparently feeling a little better from having taken the talking cure when, suddenly…

Don’t be bothered by the uncomfortable usage of the age here – it’s unfortunate phraseology, but the needs of the story justify it I think and, besides, trust me; in hands other than Leiber’s it could be waaaaay worse. Anyway, the bag thing has obviously followed Wran to the doctor’s office, which is freaky as fuck. Also interesting is that the doctor sees it too – this isn’t something only the “sensitive” can see, it’s a real physical presence in the world!

Obviously, Wran decides it’s time to wrap it up, and he heads out – he’d been hoping modern psychiatry would be enough to solve his delusion, but now he knows that’s all done with. There was no delusion; the bag thing was real. He wanders around the city, taking comfort in crowds and lights, only to find himself wandering back to his office. He realizes that, subconsciously, he’s recognized that he can’t lead the bag thing back to his home, where his wife and child are. Dejected and without a plan, he heads up to the office, mulling over his newfound enlightenment:

His thoughts are interrupted by a sudden phone call! It’s his wife, with some troubling news!

The bag thing is at his house anyway! He hurries out the office and calls the elevator, looking through the grate and down the shaft…

…where he sees the bag thing…

Wran is looking down the elevator shaft, and the thing is three stories below, looking up the shaft, directly at him. I mean, that is some killer, chilling stuff, isn’t it? Just spectacular, and it’s only going to get better – we’re entering the home stretch of the story, and Leiber is just about ready to let us have it.

Wran flees back into the office, locking the door and retreating to his desk, terrified out of his mind. He hears the elevator come up to his floor, and then a silhouette appears in the glass of the office door. Why, no worries! It’s just Miss Millick!

Yeah…poor ol’ Miss Millick has been possessed. This begins one of the scariest sections in basically all of literature. Leiber has made Millick into this terrifying avatar of something inhuman and alien, and it’s just some spectacular stuff:

The tittering, the weird playfulness, the way it starts every sentence with “Why, Mr. Wran…” and then the horrific alteration of Miss Millick’s body, followed by the implacableness of the thing…it’s absolutely spectacular, and the last line of the section (“I’m coming after you”), I mean, it doesn’t get any better than this. Absolute top notch weird horror.

Wran flees to the roof, but of course the thing follows him.

Chilling fucking stuff. There’s even a fun, spooky illustration of Wran’s abjectification:

The thing titters, demanding total abasement from Wran:

The thing, pleased with Wran’s submission, releases its hold on Miss Millick, and Wran is left alone, having pledged himself totally to his new god, The Smoke Ghost. He helps Miss Millick, who for the life of her can’t understand how she ended up on the roof, and then the story closes:

I mean, goddamn, am I right? A hell of a story, and such a rich text, with so much going on. The big picture, at least for me, is Leiber very much recognizing the dark truth of his (and, now, our) times: the age of “rationality” is an illusion. Rather, we live in a haunted world, one stalked by the phantoms of fascism, of capitalism, of industrial gigantism, of smoke and soot and abjection. Wran, confronted by the implicit threat of this world, breaks immediately, begging for his life at the feet of the oppressor and promising to serve and worship it utterly. It’s dark stuff! And kind of a bummer! Sorry!

Setting aside the crushing existentialist horror of the story, though, I think we can all agree that it’s also a homerun in terms of being a technically perfect piece of weird fiction. Not a sour note there, the pacing is great, the build-up is spectacular, the weirdness is solid, and when the horror starts up it gets really good, really fast. It’s also such a great, original take – the Smoke Ghost is a specter of modernity, a being called into existence by a world of rampant, soulless capitalism and wracked by fascist war. There’s even a bit of early environmental critique here – the ghost is a thing of garbage and soot; it’s physical presence is one fundamentally of pollution and corruption.

Obviously, I love this story; it’s definitely one of my favorites, a great example of Leiber’s mastery of weird fiction. A perfect way to celebrate Halloween!

The Audient Void #4: Modern Day HPL readings!?

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Hallowe’en Eve, how the hell did that happen already! Yeesh, time flies like an arrow (but fruit flies like a banana). Anyway, I’ve got one last tranche of halloween audio for you today, and they’re some good uns! Years and years ago, the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast (now renamed the Strange Studies of Strange Stories podcast) did some truly excellent readings of some classic Lovecraft stories. Professional sound, with great effects and music, and with some really phenomenal readers, I think these are some of the best audio versions of lil’ Howie Lovecraft’s spook-em-ups. Plus they’re all FREE! You’ll have to follow the links for each to the website, but you can download ’em there. I highly recommend them all, but their “From Beyond,” “Cool Air,” and “The Picture in the House” are particular treats, in my opinion! Enjoy!

The Haunter in the Dark

From Beyond

The Picture in the House

The Cats of Ulthar

Cool Air

The Call of Cthulhu

The Hound

The Temple

Pickman’s Model

The Statement of Randolph Carter

The Audient Void #3: Yet More radio spook-em-ups!

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We’re on the cusp of Halloween itself, a scant handful of days before The Big Day itself, and goddamn if I’m not still struggling manfully against the catastrophic summer warmth and general horribleness of the World to get Into the Mood for the Season. It’ ain’t easy, but the good things in life rarely are, so BY GOD I’m going to continue on with sharing some extremely excellent Halloween audio content that I absolutely adore. We’ve had some good ones already, I think; last time we had some fun old time radio adaptations of classic H.P. Lovecraft stories, while the time prior was devoted to some of the best old time radio ever made, in case you missed em.

This time around is more of the same – three classic old time radio shows that I enjoy, and one much more recent reading of the greatest Shirley Jackson story (and possibly the greatest weird fiction) of all time! Good spooky season listening, if that’s your thing! So let’s get to ’em!

1 – Ghost Hunt (Suspense, 1949) – this is a fun one that wrings some real chills out of the medium of radio. The actor manages to convey a real mounting sense of dread and slipping sanity as the story proceeds. Good use of silences too, and by god I’m a sucker for “War of the Worlds” style meta-radio! It’s good! Enjoy!

2 – The Signalman (Suspense, 1953) – I love Dickens’ ghostly short stories, and the Signalman is an all time great of his of course, but the real treat with this one is that it’s got Agnes Moorehead in it, one of the best actors in history.

3 – Ancient Sorceries (Escape, 1948) – A classic Algernon Blackwood story adapted by the masterful players of Escape? Of course it’s good!

4 – The Summer People (Selected Shorts, 2011?) – Shirley Jackson was a genius and this is not only my favorite thing she ever wrote, but it is also possibly the pinnacle of weird fiction, a story laced with dread and menace that builds and builds and builds. PLUS it was read by René Auberjonois. Basically perfect!

The Pulp…Entombed! “The Tomb from Beyond” by Carl Jacobi, Wonder Stories, Vol.5 No.4, November 1933

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Despite a general lack of Halloweenishness in Austin right now (summer is lingering here, dry and hot and miserable) I refuse to let it deter me. I SHALL fulfil my sacred vow of rambling interminably about pulp stories I like! And today is a fun one, a Lovecraftian story from Carl Jacobi: “The Tomb from Beyond” in Wonder Stories, Nov 1933! Archive.org remains down, so that link takes you to a google drive address where you’ll probably have to download the whole issue.

I’ve been on a Jacobi kick lately – you can read some of my previous musings on his stories “Mive” and, more recently, his vampire story “Revelations in Black.” Obviously I like his paleontologically- and geologically-informed approaches to horror and weird fiction, but I also think he has an interesting take on Lovecraftian-style cosmic horror. Unlike, say, Frank Belknap Long or Robert Bloch, he’s not just aping ol’ HPL’s stuff – he’s inspired by a lot of it, of course, and appreciates both Lovecraft’s fascination with science and Deep Time, but Jacobi does so in his own way, and without the kind of “pastiche-y” quality that a lot of the HPL Imitators seems to fall into. In some ways he’s more of a fellow traveler with regards to Lovecraft’s cosmicism, rather than just another acolyte, someone whose approaches and style are his own, even when the subject matter is inspired by Lovecraft’s work. Also, I frankly think he’s a good writer – his scenes and impressions and descriptions are fun to read and interesting to think about, and that’s worth a lot, in my book.

Today’s story is interesting because it really reads like a Weird Tales rejection that ol’ Hugo Gernsback caught on the rebound for his sci-fi magazine, Wonder Stories. There’s very little “science” in Jacobi’s story, and I even wonder if Gernsbeck didn’t insert some of the rambling bits about “the Fourth Dimension” that are in there.

Gernsback, of course, is the Grand Old Man of Sci-Fi (or “Scientifiction” as he preferred), an enormously influential figure in the field who, basically, shepherded the genre into being in the pages of his magazines. His first endeavor, Amazing Stories, was one of the first real competitors of Weird Tales, siphoning off both its more science-flavored stories as well as the “planet stories” that had been so contentious among Weird Tales‘ readers. Gernsback also had the great luck/foresight to publish what is probably Lovecraft’s single best story, “The Colour out of Space” in Amazing Stories in 1927, during one of Lovecraft’s many attempts to get our from under Wright and Weird Tales. Of course, it kind of backfired, in that Gernsback only paid him only $25 (~$500 in 2024 money, which I’d kill for btw) for a truly remarkable story, and extremely late at that – Lovecraft soured pretty quickly on the dude he dubbed “Hugo the Rat” in his letters, and never published with him again.

What’s fun is that, even in 1933, you can see that the sci-fi and weird tales fandoms are in the process of peeling off, but haven’t quite separated yet; check out this kind of funny message Gernsback sticks up at the front of the story, using his usual pseudo-technical jargon (“story interest is highly developed”) and also his somewhat backbreaking attempts to reassure the readers that this IS a sci-fi story.

Yes, “plausible science” indeed! It’s a funny bit of genre boundary work, an important but understudied aspect of the pulp magazine era.

We’ll forgo the ToC this week because there’s very little of interest there (although Hamilton’s “The Man With X-Ray Eyes” is in this issue, which would later be turned into a pretty great movie with Ray Milland that you all should go watch). So we’ll get into our story right away with a quick look at the climax-spoiling illustration that accompanied the first page!

Feels like this one is a particularly egregious example of the spoiler genre of illustrations these mags like to do, since it commits the cardinal sin of Showing the Monster before the story is ready for you to see it – as you read, you’ll quickly be annoyed that this fucking picture just goes and gives away the weird monster right off the bat. Very stupid and very frustrating, especially when there are much more atmospheric and strange images in the story that would’ve been way more effective. Infuriating stuff! But, we march onward.

Our story starts with some poor real estate agent type fellow, who we’ll learn later is named John Arnold, out in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere, heading towards some place called Opal Lake. I really like the sense of abandonment and decay that Jacobi evokes in these opening paragraphs – the difficulty in actually getting to this town, Flume, makes it clear that it’s out in the sticks, and the omnipresence of the collapsed timber business makes for a fun, spooky atmosphere…I mean, even the name of the town, Flume, harkens back to a formerly prosperous and industrious time. It’s very much in keeping with that “decayed new england” so popular in weird fiction. And not only is Flume decaying…it’s actually a ghost town!

That’s some good, atmospheric writing here, evoking long, dreary, tiring miles and general abandonment and collapse, the infrastructure rotting in place, the road bad and the trip exhausting. Arnold has hired a car for this last leg, and he’s being driven by a taciturn old Finn, a further bit of alienation – even with another person, Arnold is alone in this landscape, long gone from human company or civilization. As he’s staring out the window, he tries for a bit of conversation:

Gotta pause here to call out Jacobi, who’d studied geology and paleontology at the University of Minnesota, calling out the terminal morraine! Always a treat with him, these little glimmers of earth science!

Anyway, the driver grunts the affirmative – this is indeed Opal Lake, and they’re getting close to Flume. But, as Arnold continues to look out over the rain-spattered countryside, he spots something odd – there’s a second, smaller lake, a kind of half-crescent, not far off of Opal Lake proper. What, pray tell, is the name of that lake, he asks, but the question seems to trouble the driver, who only answers gruffly “that isn’t a lake.” Arnold finds it odd, and is a little annoyed that this guy is being so grim and gnomic, but there’s a bad patch of road and in all the jostling he decides to let it go.

Night falls and they turn a curve and, voila, they’re in the abandoned lumber town of Flume. The car creeps slowly through the silent streets – at first it seems like the man has come to meet isn’t there, but then:

Arnold is a bit taken aback that Trenard neither greets nor thanks him for coming all the way out to the middle of nowhere, but what are you gonna do? The driver is dismissed, and he gets the hell out of Dodge with a quickness, leaving just Arnold and Trenard alone in the ghost town. Trenard offers two paths to his house, one through the woods and one by…the lake!

Well, I mean, how are you supposed to respond to that? Arnold choses not to, and they walk out of town and start heading down a logging road to the house. Trenard lapses immediately back into moody, meditative silence, which gives Arnold a chance to give us some exposition.

Oh hell yes – sunken city? scientific expedition? lost civilizations? undecipherable hieroglyphs? QUEER ARTIFACTS BROUGHT BACK TO NEW YORK?

That is some solid, classic weird fiction stuff right there. The only thing it’s missing is if something strange and mysterious and tragic had happened during the expedition, something…horrific…

Rumors of fuckin’ sea monster attack? Check, check, and check, baby!

Now, me personally, as a writer of weird fic, I’d have left out “sea monster,” just stuck to rumors of a weird death, but nonetheless, it’s fun. Trenard and his partner ran afoul of something off the coast of Borneo it seems, and whatever it was has left Trenard…changed.

Now that’s some Rockefeller/Cloisters shit right there, disassembling, raising, shipping, and then reassembling an ancient tomb from Sunken Dras right there in the backwoods of old timbercountry upstate New York! Weird, huh? People speculate that he’d had a touch of the ol’ fever when he’d been inspired to do it, and then again maybe he’d been driven off the deep end by the sudden death of his sister while he was out adventurin’ there in Borneo too. Either way, he gets good use of this tomb – when he installs it in Flume, he puts his sister’s body in there, among the grand architecture of a lost civilization. You’d think something like that might be a boon for Flume going on, but, nope:

Good solid scene-setting. Jacobi is bringing in his own ancient civilization stuff, with all the attendant weirdness of deep archeological time and hidden branches of human history. I love it!

Anyway, they get up to the house, finally, and its big and weird and full of odd stuff. Trenard goes to get some refreshments for his guest, leaving Arnold to look around and do a bit more scene setting. There’s a fun passage where Jacobi does the classic Lovecraftian move of inserting real stuff (Wallace’s famous book The Malay Peninsula), but the real highlight is when he gets a chance to really look as a framed picture on the wall:

Jacobi knockin’ it out of the park here, in my opinion. You can see this weird, blotchy picture, the view distorted by the water, strange ruins getting picked out by the beam of the submarine’s light. It’s very evocative, very strange, and would’ve made for a much better and more interesting title illustration too!

Arnold’s strange revery is broken by Trenard’s return with “a tray of china.” Arnold eats, Trenard smokes a ridiculous meerschaum, and then Arnold tries to get down to brass tacks – he’s here because the company is willing to sell Trenard’s property for him, but he’s got to be realistic about the price he’s going to get, what with it being way the fuck out in the middle of nowhere and all. Trenard understands that, and just needs to recover the costs he sunk into it so he can get the hell out of there. Something is clearly troubling him, and he is desperate to escape from this place.

You’ve probably already noticed that this first part is, at least spiritually, cribbing a lot from “Dracula.” The real estate stuff, the Finn driver dumping him and then driving off, the wild and ruined countryside. I don’t think Jacobi is doing more than simply nodding at it, enjoying the resonance and taking advantage of one of the greatest bits of horror writing in the canon, although there might be a little bit more to it, which we’ll talk about when we get there.

Like I said, Trenard quickly dismisses Arnold’s concerns and basically agrees to accept whatever price they get first, and fast. Definitely seems like one of those “this meeting could’ve been a telegram” sort of things, especially since Trenard says he’s going to bed and they can finalize the paperwork in the morning. He leaves Arnold on his own in the study and, refreshed by his repast, he decides to pull a book from the shelf and do some reading. The book he chooses? Why, it’s Trenard’s own “The Mysteries of Sunken Dras.” He notices some underlined passages:

Two things here: did Trenard underline his own writing here? If so, that’s hilarious…I imagine him penciling in, like “Good Point!” or “Genius” with like a couple of stars. Funny thing to do to your OWN writing, is my point. The second point comes after we get Arnold’s reaction to these insane statements about an ancient civilization’s knowledge of hyperdimensional physics and alternate planes teeming with unimaginable horrors:

Dry and bookish!? Tough crowd, yikes!

Arnold ALSO finds a scrap of paper with, apparently, Trenard’s own notes on it – perhaps he had been going through his book, with its dry and bookish description of ancient ultrascience and transcosmic monsters, and reexamining them in light of more recent developments? The note reads thusly:

Oddly specific thing to be musing about and, not to spoil it, but he ends up being 100% correct. The mausoleum is, basically, a fourth-dimensional portal, and it wasn’t broken by moving the building – he’s brought a portal to hell all the way from the coastal shelf of Borneo to upstate New York! Neat! I really like the hint of another story in here too – what was it that drove out the villagers who had been living in Flume? What kind of weirdness were they dealing with while this weird transdimensional architecture was being installed in their town? Trenard seems little concerned with that, though – he’s more troubled by the thought of his sister’s body being trapped in there with something from…beyond.

As an aside, it’s interesting to me how, up to the early 20th century grave desecration and particularly troubling the remains of the dead was such a huge part of horror literature. I mean, for us today, I don’t think it elicits the same kind of seemingly existential horror that it did for folks back then, you know? I mean it’s gross, sure, but the way people viewed it back then, there’s really some deeper meaning attached to it, you know? It’s interesting, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen, like, a paper on it or anything.

Anyway, back to the story! We also get a hint about the origin of the smaller, secondary crescentic lake that Arnold had spotted from the car. There’s a leak in the dike bounding Opal Lake, which, uh, doesn’t seem to bother Arnold as much as it should. Like, he’s a real estate agent trying to sell this land, and it’s getting flooded by a faulty dike?

In fact, Arnold just shrugs and goes for a night-time stroll on the balcony overlooking this ~~flood hazard~~ scenic pond…and then it hits him!

Not only is Opal Lake leaking, but it’s flooded Flume’s graveyard, including the mysterious tomb that Trenard brought back from mysterious Sunken Dras. All kidding aside, it’s an evocative image, isn’t it, and the description of Arnold’s epiphany about what those small, regular white shapes are in the water is just fantastic, a real shivery moment in the story, very visceral. Jacobi has a real affinity for moonlit scenes, as we saw in “Revelations in Black.”

So fascinated by this realization, Arnold decides he simply must take a boat ride out to the drowned cemetery IMMEDIATELY. He hops in a little row boat that’s moored to the shore below the house, and paddles on out there. Setting aside the mysterious tomb and the cemetery aspect, a solitary night-time row while the only other person for miles is konked out seems like a bad idea, but oh well!

There’s some more great environmental descriptions of the lake and the environs and the house receding into the night as he rows away, and then Arnold reaches the drowned graveyard:

Great spooky stuff, and I can’t blame him for wanting a peek in the weird Dras tomb; I mean, if I’d just read something insane about their dark sciences, I’d wanna get a look too. And what does he see?

Nothin’ but darkness, then a bad stink, and then a hiss, a splash, and, oh, my hands have been gashed to the fuckin’ bone! Jesus Christ man! Bloody hands be damned, Arnold leans into the obvious shock he’s experiencing and power rows back to shore. Back in his room, he iodines and tapes up his wounds and, finally, exhausted, drifts off to sleep.

Bad weather greets him in the morning – if he thought he was going to get out of Flume early, he was mistaken. In fact, given the state of the roads, he might be stuck there for a while, a grim thing given what he’d experienced last night. And, aside from the fact that something uncanny is definitely happening out on ol’ graveyard lake, it also quickly becomes clear that Trenard is kinda off his rocker too.

It’s kind of odd that we’re reiterating the “fourth dimension” stuff here again – I wonder if that was in the original work, of if Gernsback had it inserted (or even, possibly, wrote it himself – he was famous for a heavy-handed editorial approach). It doesn’t really give us much new information, not after the note in the book, although it does give Trenard a chance to be weird and talk a lot of crazy shit, while also being oblivious to his guest’s wounded hands.

Arnold spends a dismal day with Trenard, doin’ up the paperwork and then just kinda hangin’ out, listenin’ to the storm, watchin’ Trenard get more and more freaked out. And then, in the late afternoon, the storm dies, and with the clear weather Trenard seems to reach some kind of sudden decision!

Arnold runs after him, and finds Trenard down by the shore rolling a bunch of huge barrels onto a weird barge like boat. Arnold realizes that Trenard is obviously in the throws of some kind of delirious state, working madly, sweat steaming off him and a wild energy to all his movements. Finally, with the barrels loaded, he pushes off from the shore; Arnold follows in the little duck boat, and sees that Trenard, while generally making towards the tomb, is doing so fairly circuitously, taking the time to pause and dump the barrels into the water – they’re full of oil, and soon the whole surface of the cemetery lake is a vast, flammable slick. When the barrels are all empited, Trenard paddles over to the tomb and opens the vault!

He’s haulin’ out his sister’s body, rescuing it from this weird-ass tomb, and he’s obviously concerned that he’ll need to set everything on fire…it’s a weird scene for sure! Here’s the part where that illustration at the beginning really sucks, because otherwise you might not know what’s happening…hell, you might think, given his preoccupation with his sister’s body, that there’s something going on there, that SHE’S somehow been weirded-up by the tomb and is the danger here! But, no, we already KNOW there’s a weird monster attack coming up (of course, there’s the “sea monster” attack from the expositionary dump earlier, but still…)

Anyway, Trenard is trying to haul out a coffin AND hold the door closed against some kind of implacable force pushing from within…but it’s too strong, and Trenard has to leap back, undoing the mooring and paddling furiously away, while, from out of the black crypt, comes…something…

A spider-mosasaur-thing erupts from the tomb, it’s jaws slavering, ravening with delight. I love the image of a weird hairy, jointed legged reptile thing, it’s a good, solid monster, a little more Robert E. Howard than H.P. Lovecraft – this isn’t weird mass of bubbling protoplasm from beyond the stars, it’s a fuckin’ beast, albeit one of very alien evolution and history…but still, you could see Conan takin’ a swing at this thing, couldn’t you?

The little aside about the critter looking like something “from the canvas of the mas August Schlegel” is a fun bit of Yog-Sothory, I think. Now, there was a real August Schlegel – he’s kinda famous for having translated Shakespeare into German in the 19th century, but this is obviously a different guy (he’s a painter, for one thing). This is Jacobi inventing and alluding to a crazed artist of the past whose work captures something of the preternatural or cosmic beyond our mundane understanding, a trick Jacobi probably picked up from the Weird Tales crowd for sure (Robert E. Howard’s mad poet Justin Geoffrey comes to mind, as does Lovecraft’s Wilcox in The Call of Cthulhu or, more famously, Pickman in Pickman’s Model). This stuff’s like popcorn to me – I’ll eat it up by the fistful.

Anyway, this horror surges out of the tomb and after Trenard and the barge. There’s some good, fairly suspenseful “death race” kind of stuff, with Trenard working the oar on the barge while this big weird monster chases after him. There’s also a fun part where Arnold, watching all this from his boat, realizes what Trenard was afraid of:

That bit is great, and pushes it beyond the simple “grave desecration” point I made earlier. And it makes sense to – I mean, I’m a strict materialist, but if confronted by the existence of other weird dimensions full of crazy-ass monsters, maybe there is some reason to be worried about the body of a loved one being in close proximity to door to another fuckin’ universe, you know!? It’s good weird stuff!

The critter eventually catches up with him, of course, and just as it is leaping up to chomp Trenard, he lights some matches and sets the fuckin’ lake on fire!

Our boy Arnold paddles to shore, leaps out, and in some kind of fugue state, stumbles off down the road, walking back towards civilization. He remembers little of the trek, but form a high point, perhaps the terminal morraine from the beginning, he catches a final glimpse of the lake:

And that’s the end of “The Tomb from Beyond” by Carl Jacobi!

I think it’s a fun story, and while the conclusion is kind of forced (dude thinks he might have to set the lake on fire in case of monster attack, is attacked by a monster and sets the lake on fire) I think Jacobi’s descriptions of the scenery and environment and atmosphere more than make up for it – he’s an evocative writer with an eye for weird, oppressive settings, and the storm, the abandoned landscape, the cemetery lake, all of these are excellently realized here.

Now, perhaps the weirdest part of the story is a bit underdeveloped – I think the idea that there’s some kind of intrinsic transdimensional portal in the tomb that is so fundamental to its architecture that it can be broken down and reconstituted elsewhere, no problem, is a lot of fun, and it’s a shame Jacobi doesn’t do MORE with it than let there be a monster in there. But, even so, the suggestion of the weirdness is fun, and I enjoy what little glimpse we get of it.

I also enjoy the obvious inspirations behind this work too; there’s Dracula, sure, but there’s also “The Fall of the House of Usher” here, and it’s neat to see these being reworked with such a light touch – Jacobi never beats you over the head with them, I mean. He’s just been inspired by some classics to write a story, and he’s turning them into something new and interesting while doing it.

Plus, what makes this a good bit o’ weird fic for me is the fact that there’s lost of strange, unanswered questions in it. Is the flooding of the cemetery just an accident, or is the tomb somehow responsible for this inundation? Remember, it’s a sea monster, basically, so maybe IT is remaking its environment, much in the same way Trenard tried to remake his in Flume. What happened to make the villagers leave? Was Sylvia’s “soul” somehow endangered by being in the weird ass tomb? It’s all good, fun, weird stuff, and I like it! And, while it’s certainly a “fourth-dimensional” story, it never really treads over Lovecraftian crowd; Jacobi is an original writer, with his own ideas and very much his own style, and it’s fun to see a Lovecraft contemporary doing his own thing on the same themes.

Pulp Beyond the Strainer #27: “From Beyond” by H.P. Lovecraft, Weird Tales, v.31 n.2, February 1938

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Now, look, I’m not gonna apologize here. Everyone knows Lovecraft, he doesn’t need any exposure or anything, so you might be asking why I’m covering his stories in these little free-writing exercises I’m doing here? Well, first off, he’s without a doubt the single most important horror/weird fic writer of the past 100 years, bar none. In terms of influence, he’s everywhere, with his tentacles extending into sci-fi, fantasy, comics, pop culture, and even modern occultism. His particular brand of cosmicism, a world where alien forces and laws operate in ways we simply cannot understand, has come to DOMINATE weird fiction (for good or ill), and while he didn’t INVENT the idea, I think you can argue he did PERFECT it. So it would be disingenuous to preclude him from discussion here merely for being well known.

A second good reason to read Lovecraft is that he is, simply put, the Best to Ever Do It. I mean, artistically, he’s top-tier – his refinement of and commitment to his particular aesthetic of weirdness is unparalleled, and it lends his writing a real force that you simply aren’t going to find in yer Seabury Quinns or yer Edmond Hamiltons. His writing, while elaborate, isn’t affected or purple – he comes by his vocabulary and style organically through Dunsany, Poe, Bierce, and Blackwood, and his appreciation for both their approach and technique is evident.

Finally, I think a lot of people have some serious misconceptions about Lovecraft – I’ve seen a lot of people online say shit like “oh, Lovecraft, all his stories are the same, like: ‘Look, an old weirdo tells me a story and then it turns out he’s right about a big tentacle monster!'” which is extremely annoying and factually inaccurate. He’s enormously inventive, and all the cliche bullshit you think he did he DIDN’T ACTUALLY DO, you’re thinking about the bullshit pastiches that came AFTER him by OTHER people! It’s very frustrating, because, like I said, for all that his DNA is in so much genre literature, his actual stories remain fresh and strange and unique and GOOD, fer fucksake! It’s the same thing that keeps people from reading, like, Jane Austen or Melville or Sterne! Don’t deny yourself the pleasure of reading them out of some misplaced hipsterish misapprehensions!

So, with that goal in mind, we’re going to talk about his very short and very good story “From Beyond,” published posthumously in Weird Tales in Feb, 1938! As I’m writing this, archive.org remains down, so that link takes you to the whole issue that you’ll probably have to download (it’s ~150 MB or so), fyi.

Anyway, the Cover:

Virgil Finley channeling some horny Margaret Brundage vibes here. As an aside, that lady has some long ass hair, doesn’t she? Like, down to her knees! When they thaw her out that’s gonna be one hell of a soggy mess, huh?

An interesting ToC this time around. “Gans T. Field” is Manly Wade Wellman, and “The Passing of Van Mitten” is one of Roy Temple House’s great translation efforts for the magazine. But, perhaps more importantly: lotta dead guys on here! Lovecraft, who died in ’37, is on here twice, actually; he wrote “The Diary of Alonzo Typer” for crazy ol’ William Lumley, one of his “collaborations” were someone paid him to take a teeny tiny kernel of a story idea and turn it into a story that they then slapped their name on. What’s funny about those is that Lovecraft is such a stylist that there’s no real way to miss it when he’s the one behind the pen, it’s so obviously Lovecraft. This one is a particularly middling effort, an obvious vulgar job for filthy lucre, but it’s got some funny bits in it. Worth a read if you got nothin’ else to do, but don’t expect greatness! Whitehead and Howard, both also dead of course, round out this somewhat macabre ToC.

All these dead guys showing up in Weird Tales reflects a bit of a slow-moving crisis in the magazine. The titans who strode through the pages of the magazine in its glory days are, for the most part, all gone – REH in ’36, HPL in ’37. These two deaths in particular come at a tough time, when Weird Tales is facing some particularly stiff competition, from both weird fiction magazines as well as from the burgeoning sci-fi pulps – the field is crowded, and the sf magazines in particular are able to pay MUCH better than Weird Tales, which further cut into their ability to find and publish good work. As such, and in the shadow of these difficulties, Weird Tales began to mine whatever they could from the back catalog of their heavy-hitters. With REH, that ended up being a lot of his verse (for what that’s worth…), but with Lovecraft, there was a whole world of amateur press publications of his.

And that’s where today’s story, “From Beyond,” comes from! It was originally published in 1934 in The Fantasy Fan, the very first weird fic fan magazine, but he’d written it waaaay back in 1920, which is pretty clear from the work itself – it’s obviously one of his earlier efforts, with a style and pacing very similar to stories like “The Terrible Old Man” or “The Tomb.” But, there’s an important difference here, one that marks a key development for ol’ Howie Lovecraft! So let’s get into it!

No illustrations for this one, which is a damn shame, given the wild visuals we’re going to encounter her. Weird Tales was on a very tight budget, and probably figured that the name itself would be enough to ensure people would read this one, so why bother. Still, it’s too bad!

Really dig that first sentence – grabs you and throws you right into the scene, focusing on the terrible transformation that has overtaken Crawford Tillinghast. We learn that Tillinghast, who the narrator considers his BEST FRIEND(!), has become a gaunt, harried shadow of his former stout and vibrant self. Even worse, this transformation occurred over the shockingly short span of ten weeks, following a tremendous argument between the two of them that ended with Crawford chucking our narrator out of the house. What was this argument about, you ask?

Just a fantastic mad scientist speech, isn’t it? Tillinghast has (correctly) identified that fact that our human sensory apparatuses are limited, the product of a messy and lazy evolution that has equipped us well for the mundane world, but which leaves us in the lurch when it comes to deeper and more fundamental layers of reality. Just like the microscope or the spectrograph, Tillinghast has built a machine that will expand human perception into these hidden realms!

Well, this freaked out our narrator, because he knew Tillinghast well enough that he could see this going one of two ways – either he’d fuck it up and be crushed and desolate, OR he’d succeed and discover something horrible, terrible, and overwhelming. Reader, guess which one happened.

So, after balking at his ideas, Tillinghast had thrown our narrator out of the house ten weeks ago, raging and fanatical. Now, he’s suddenly summoned our narrator back again and, despite the row, our dude can’t help but wonder what has happened. So now he’s back, shocked at the change that has come over Tillinghast, and also somewhat perturbed by the fact that the huge old house appears to be utterly empty, except for Tillinghast. Where have all his servants gone?

But our narrator pushes all this aside, because he’s just so danged curious about what Tillinghast hath wrought in those ten weeks. They creep through the dark house with only the lamp for light – Tillinghast seems afraid to turn on the light for some reason – and eventually reach the attic laboratory…and The Machine.

Again, excellent mad science work here – a weird glowing machine, the whine settling into a soft yet pervasive droning, and then, finally, the weird instantiation of an invisible color…ultraviolet made visible.

I mean, crazy cool wave machine weird fiction aside, this is also a remarkable early 20th C. document regarding the popular view of science and the mind, isn’t it? The “shallow endocrinologist, felloe-dupe and fellow parvenu of the Freudian” is just amazing stuff, using the cutting-edge brain science of the day to make weird fiction in 1920. When talking about Lovecraft and science most people reflexively (and not incorrectly) point towards his love of astronomy and physics, both obviously cosmic-scale and important to his world view, but you also run across geology and, here, some great biology (and what we’d now call neuro-psych). That the brain (and, therefore, one’s mind) is a biochemical organ is really just then beginning to be understand, but Lovecraft is putting a weird twist on here – it retains a certain sleeping evolutionary heritage that, properly awoken, allows humans to access the more fundamentally “real” (and terrifying) reality around them!

It can be hard for us, in 2024, to really appreciate how weird the world had been recently made for people back in the early 1900s. I mean, an entirely unknown, totally new, and otherwise INVISIBLE world of rays and mysterious energies had only recently been made manifest! Röntgen had discovered and named X-rays in 1895 and the Curies and Becquerel had been awarded the Nobel in 1903 for their work on radiation; that we were surrounded by processes and waves and things that were mostly invisible was, relatively, a pretty new and newsworthy thing. Likewise, the idea of science as inevitably pushing farther and further into these new invisible worlds was likewise a kind of cultural background noise to daily life. This is one of the KEYS to Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, and this story is where he first articulates it. It’s amazing stuff!

As the machine drones on, our narrator begins to, perhaps, hallucinate…or is he beginning to really see for the first time? The attic laboratory seems to him to become a strange, alien temple of cyclopean black masonry, but then this gives was to an even more unsettling sensation:

This sense of drifting in illimitable space so startles our narrator that he involuntarily draws the revolver that he’s been carrying, a habit that started after he’d been held up in East Providence (as an aside, when I attended the NecronomiCon this past summer, I stayed in East Providence, a lovely little end of the city with some great Portuguese restaurants/bakeries). Tillinghast watches this with sardonic amusement, and it’s clear that as much as our narrator is experiencing, ol’ Crawford is seeing and hearing even more.

I mean, c’mon – “we are able to be seen as well as to see” is just fantastic, isn’t it! And the revelation that something from beyond got the servants when they turned on the lights downstairs…creepy, wonderful stuff. And it gets better!

Kaleidoscopic impressions fill our narrators mind; there’s a great image of him staring at a starry sky and seeing the leering, gloating face of Tillinghast in the constellations. And he somehow senses animate things brushing invisibly past him as the machine continues to work. He also notices that Tillinghast seems be able to see these things with his better tuned third eye…something that begins to awaken in our narrator.

Just an absolute blast, and the effect of these overlapping visions, the weird invisible world (now becoming visible) overlaying the mundane laboratory…great stuff!

And once again, Tillinghast goes full Mad Scientist:

I mean, how incredible is that! Tillinghast, in his mad questing after knowledge has transgressed some cosmic boundary – now things are hunting him, but he’s got a plan! He’ll sacrifice our narrator to them to escape, the narrator who hurt his feelings and refused to encourage him when he needed all the support he could get! A great little revenge plan in among the ultracosmic horror! And how about the description of the things, huh? “Shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness…” is unbelievably great, isn’t it?

And then there’s a mini-cliffhanger, where the action breaks and we leap forward a bit in the narrative…

What a twist! Our dude fires the revolver…not at Tillinghast, but at the Machine!!!! Of course, Tillinghast has died, apoplectically struck down by either the noise of the shot, the sudden and jarring destruction of the machine, or perhaps even by the things that he’d been summoning to get our narrator, who knows! Everybody figures that Tillinghast must’ve killed the servants himself and hidden the bodies, and had planned to do the same to our guy here; a doctor even suggest that he’d been hypnotized by Tillinghast, and that the weird shit he’d seen had been the result of suggestion and illusion. How does our guy take that?

And that’s The End!

I mean, really, what more do you want? Short, straightforward, and full of amazing weird ideas and imagery, AND it’s also a major turning point for Lovecraft’s thinking and approach to weird fiction. The things that Tillinghast’s machine make visible are basically at the core of all of Lovecraft’s stories: strange, mysterious presences that lurk just behind the placid delusion that we call “reality.” They’re truly alien, made of different matter and obeying different laws; it’s basically a brief summary of Lovecraft’s entire worldview and approach to weird fiction, all in one short, sweet little package!

The Audient Void #2: HPL OTR Edition

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While we’re waiting on poor ol’ archive.org to get back up and running, I thought I’d do a follow up to the previous post about classic old time radio horror shows. Hope ya’ll had a chance to listen to ’em, they’re some of my favorites, but this week’s audient void holds a special place in my heart, because they’re largely the reason why I got into H.P. Lovecraft and Weird Fiction in the first place.

Growin’ up, I was a pretty voracious reader, but my preference was always sci-fi and fantasy. This was due, mostly, to a extremely nice collection of vintage paperbacks that had been my dad’s back when he was a kid in 60s…Heinlein, PKD, Harlan Ellison, Le Guin, really a phenomenal collection that was very important to little Eric’s reading development. With a solid underpinning in the classics, I’d often make a bee-line for the SF and Fantasy section of the bookstore where, more often then not, I’d have a glance at the generally smaller HORROR section that neighbored them.

NOW, I liked spooky shit as a kid – in elementary school I’d been a big fan of John Bellairs, for instance, and I loved a collection of ghost stories or werewolf “histories,” stuff like that, but I’d never been a big reader of horror fiction – I remember trying King and deciding it wasn’t really my cup o’ tea. This opinion was further bolstered by the horror section in the bookstore, and IN PARTICULAR those very gruesome Del Ray Lovecraft paperback covers. You know the one’s I mean, with like flayed torsos hanging on hooks, shit like that? For me, they were simply too disgusting. You gotta remember, at that time, my favorite monster movies were absolutely classic Universal movies, right? Yer Mummies and yer Draculas, nothing to intense and certainly nothing gory, and those Del Ray covers made it seem like this Lovecraft clown’s stories must’ve been nonstop chop-em-ups!

Anyway, skip forward to college, I’m in Gainesville FL listening to the UF public radio station while I’m doing fossil prep work (I was assembling an Aphelops jaw bone). It’s late Oct, they’re doing special Halloween programming, and one night they put on a special Old Time Radio horror block that STARTS with some Lovecraft adaptations, including “The Dunwich Horror” from the 40s, the “Rats in the Walls” and “The Outsider” from the 60s. And I’ll be damned if they’re not an absolute blast, fun and interesting and spooky, nothing at all like what I imagined what they were like based on those ol’ Del Ray covers! After that I spent a lot of time in the library’s Special Collections, reading a bunch of old original Weird Tales that they had.

So, anyway, these three Lovecraft adaptations hold a special place in my heart, and I hope you’ll give ’em a chance!

The Dunwich Horror – Suspense, 1945 – a true classic that takes a fairly long Lovecraft tale and somehow smoothly gets it down to under 30 minutes. Great voice acting in this one, particularly in the case of Wilbur Whatley’s strange horrible voice. Well done, and it’s fun to think about people in the 40s hearing someone shouting “Yog-Sothoth! Yog-Sothoth!” on their radios!

The Rats in the Walls – Black Mass, 1964 – this is one of my favorite Lovecraft stories of all time (terrible racist name of the cat notwithstanding), and this is a great radio adaptation, extremely faithful and with a real sense of building dread. The final descent into madness is really well done, too; not too surprising, but the secret to good audio horror is good voice work, and I feel like this show has some talent in that regard!

The Outsider – Black Mass, 1964 – one of Lovecraft’s lesser stories, but this is still a good, atmospheric adaptation that is a lot of fun. Ganked this one off an old time radio website years ago, so it’s got a modern intro, just fyi.

Anyway, it’s fun stuff, and if you, like me, enjoy Lovecraft, these are some real treats. Enough for now, happy listening!

Pulp Strainer #26: Special Coming-of-age Edition! “Brenda” by Margaret St. Clair, Weird Tales, V.46, n.1, March 1954

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After last time’s fairly straightforward Vampire Story, I promised something weirder, and I think I’m gonna deliver. This time around we’ve got a very enigmatical, very thoughtful, very weird short story from a writer famous for her enigmatical, thoughtful, weird writing…it’s Brenda, by the great Margaret St. Clair, from the very last year that Weird Tales saw print (in it’s original incarnation…the later revivals don’t count!).

Before we go any farther, you’ve probably noticed that the link to the story I’ve provided you doesn’t go to the Internet Archive. That’s because, as I’m writing this, some assholes have taken it down with a DDoS, so you’ll have to navigate your way through that pdf to the story on your own. When the Archive is back up I’ll come in an add a link directly to the story, but as always: go read it now! This is a great one!

Margaret St. Clair is one of my favorite writers, endlessly inventive, marvelously talented, and deeply incisive – everything she wrote is worth reading, and in a just world she’d be remembered right alongside Issac Asimov and PKD and Harlan Ellison as one of the great authors of fantasy and science fiction from that era. Like C.L. Moore, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr., and Samuel R. Delany, she recognized that imaginative genre fiction provided a startlingly robust toolset with which a writer could break down and rebuild the world around them.

In addition to her skills as a writer, I ALSO love Margaret St. Clair because she was UNABASHADLY a pulp magazine writer. She began her career in the late 40s, at the tale end of the era, but she never had any ambitions for the “slicks” and, luckily, her interest in science fiction short stories coincided nicely with the growth in 50s and 60s sff mag culture. She wrote a LOT of short fiction, something like a 100+ stories easy over her life, as well as some novels (which are good, but, of course, I prefer her shorter work). She was also a card-carrying and practicing Wiccan (along w/ her husband), something that becomes a large influence on her later work, in particular. All in all, a fascinating woman and a great writer.

And her she is, the dawn of her writing life coinciding with the death of Weird Tales. Yes, we’re in 1946, that dolorous year when The Unique Magazine ceased to Be, and merely Had Been. It’d been a helluva run, of course – March 1923, v.1.n.1, through the Depression and WWII and the rise of Television, but The Reaper comes for us all in the end. The final issue of Weird Tales would be September of 1946, volume 46, number 4. Ask not for whom the bell tolls…

Generic ass cover, as was usual for the time. Gone are the heady days of Margaret Brundage! Nothing special here, sorry Evan Singer, whoever the hell you were.

The ToC is interesting though, not least for the fact that there’s an awful lotta women on it. For sure, there had always been women writing (and reading) Weird Tales, but you gotta think that Dorothy McIlwraith, editor of the mag and a lover of the genre, must’ve been interested in cultivating more gender equity in the pages of her magazine. Anyway, she’s got some heavy hitters here – Elizabeth Sheldon, Suzanne Pickett, and good ol’ G.G. Pendarves making a posthumous appearance. But we’re here for the star of this issue – Margaret St. Clair! So let’s get on with it already, yeesh!

An odd little title illo, especially since is has nothing to do with the story and, arguably, doesn’t even portray the eponymous Brenda, a tomboyish blonde. Oh well! It’s 1954, what the hell do you want!? It’s entirely possible that they weren’t even paying for specific art at this point, and were just running through the catalog.

Great job of character introduction here – Brenda, poor child, is on vacation on Moss Island with her parents who, if not cruel, are certainly not kind either. She’s an outsider, tall and gangly and without any friends among the children on the island, largely left to her own devices. Good standard protagonist kid for a genre story – a loner, misunderstood, left to themselves. And, since there’s not much to do on the island and no kids to play with, she spends a lot of time in the woods, like you do. But on that particular Monday, there’s something else in the woods with her:

I mean, that “Sometimes she liked to smell and look at rotten things” is a fantastic line, more of St. Clair’s genius, little knives she sticks in the reader to make sure they’re paying attention to the characters in the story. It’s such a great bit of characterization for Brenda too – there’s a sense of rebellion to it, but also a bit of secretiveness there, a sense that Brenda knows it’s something morbid about her that others might look down on.

Anyway, Brenda hound dogs her way through the woods, following the odd stink as best she can, until she finds “the man.”

I mean, what the fuck!? A weird blobby, greasy, disgusting muddy gray man-thing in the woods, holding a dead bird, all clotted up and sloppy? Brenda stops and stares, but then the gray man extends a blobby arm towards her and she fuckin’ books it.

At first, driven by panic, she’s running flat out, trying to escape. The grey man is following her, too – she can hear it and smell it pursuing her. But, when she chances a look backwards, she sees that he’s much farther back than she hoped he would be. In fact, while he IS chasing her, he’s doing it very clumsily and slowly. Implacable, sure, but she realizes she doesn’t have to run full tilt to get away from it. With that realization, comes a plan. Brenda, rather than running home, turns and goes through the woods, leading the stumbling, shambling grey man thing towards a deep, steep-walled quarry on the island.

She tricks the thing into the quarry where it stumbles around, searching, until finally it gives up. But, when it tries to escape, it can’t – the walls are too steep, and its weird blobby arms aren’t strong or dexterous enough for it to actually climb up, out of the pit. She’s trapped it there!

The flash of teeth is a great image, this weird blob man thing trapped in a quarry and grinning/snarling/??? up at her, very spooky and unsettling.

Brenda “hug[s] her secret to herself for the rest of the day,” another fun bit of characterization for this kid. She’s got a goo man trapped in a quarry, and that fact is HERS and HERS alone. But what fun is a secret if you can’t share it?

An interesting dynamic going on here, isn’t it? Ol’ Chuck is the closest thing to a friend that Brenda has on (and, possibly, off) the island, and it is to him that Brenda goes with this new, strange thing that has entered her life. Interestingly, it’s that touch though that convinces him not to go – something about the way she touches him is upsetting to Charles, and he tells her to, basically, fuck off.

She helps her dad with a barbecue pit out back, but the whole time she can only think about the gray man in the quarry. Unable to share her secret, she decides on a rather dramatic course of action; she’s going to set him free. She uses some planks to build a kind of ramp that lets the gray man clamber on up out of the quarry.

Great, chilling stuff – imagine being on an island with a Weird Thing that YOU released and YOU know is out there, but no one else does? Spooky and paranoiac, all while being a plausible action from a frustrated and probably petulant child. Nobody wants to see this thing that I captured? Fine, they can see it when it comes to THEM!

Brenda chooses not to head out to the woods the next day, a wise choice given that she overhears her parents discussing a rather disturbing event:

Brenda is sent to her room for eavesdropping, where she mulls over the gray man, trying to figure out what it could be, and where it could have come from, inventing some answers and writing them down, then deciding to tear them up and flush the pieces down the drain.

And then, before bed, she slips into her parents’ room and unlatches their windows. Yikes!

The blob man is in the house, and her parents are (quietly) trying to confront it. Her dad has it trapped in a beam of light from a flashlight, which is apparently enough to dazzle and confuse it while her mother, giggling nervously, is calling a neighbor to bring his gun over and shoot this thing. It’s pretty comical, par for the course for Margaret St. Clair, who often wrote about the absurdities of petit bourgeois suburbanites in her fiction.

The neighbor brings his gun over, but it really do much to the gray man – he’s made of goop, after all. Instead, the neighbor and Brenda’s father use a torch to drive it out of the house and, in a bit of synchronicity, through the woods and into the quarry where they trap and, eventually, bury the thing under a huge cairn of loose stone, which Brenda discovers when she is able to slip away the next afternoon.

And this signals a major change in Brenda’s life. For starters, no one on the island seems to want to talk about the thing under the cairn. Secondly, the children that had previously avoided her start showing up and following her around. Brenda becomes something of a leader to them, in fact, and they end up getting into all sorts of trouble.

Brenda eventually comes back to the island the next summer, having been left on the mainland after the school term by her exhausted and annoyed parents. She has continued to change, however, and it seems that, perhaps, she has finally started to grow into something more acceptable to her parents.

She waits until nearly the end of the summer before making a trip to the quarry and the cairn.

And that’s the end of “Brenda” by Margaret St. Clair!

Honestly, it’s kind of a masterpiece. It avoids the crude, stereotypical pitfalls of a “coming of age” story, instead relying on the weirdness of the gray man and Brenda’s relationship to it to arrive at something altogether stranger and more poignant. There’s obviously a puberty aspect to this tale – the interaction between Brenda and Charles is fraught, like all early adolescent encounters, but then there’s also the question of Brenda and her parents. Clearly there’s tension there, her parents obviously not understanding her in any way. The trapping of the gray man under the rocks by her father is ripe for a Freud Reaction meme, you know what I mean?

St. Clair, a student of Greek mythology, is also evoking the myth of Theseus here; the thing trapped under the rocks, which “one day” she’ll move to set it free, echoes Theseus having to wait until he comes of age and is strong enough to move the boulders that hide the symbols of his manhood (his sandals and sword). Both Brenda and Theseus know that their destinies lie under their respective rocks, and they know that they’ll have to wait to get strong enough to free them.

And, as weird fiction, I think it’s a blast too – the sense of the uncanny is strong all through this story, from Brenda’s own oddity, to the gray man (of course), and persisting in the weird mythic way Brenda changes after the gray man is trapped. It’s not a very long story, but there’s a lot of subtext and complexity at work here, but St. Clair is a good enough writer that she never lets either that OR the need for weirdness come into conflict; rather, they reinforce each other, like all great speculative fiction.

Anyway, Margaret St. Clair is a great writer, and there’re a few other works of hers that we’ll certainly be looking at in the future. There’s a pretty good collection of some of her short stories out there that you can get, easily and cheaply, from Dover Books, titled “The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales.” I’d highly recommend it!