Category Archives: Straining Pulp

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!

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 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!

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!

Five Strainers and a Pulp #25: “Revelations in Black” by Carl Jacobi, Weird Tales v. 21 n. 4, April 1933

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Roughly a quarter of the way through the Hallowe’en Season already, how the hell did that happen!? Ah, but let us forget the merciless march of time with some timeless Weird Fiction! And this time, we’re looking at Carl Jacobi’s “Revelations in Black” from the April 1933 issue of Weird Tales!

We’ve met Jacobi before, roughly around this same time last year, when we examined his weird forest/bug/hallucinations story “Mive,” another of ol’ Carl’s appearances in Weird Tales that I really liked. Today’s story is much more traditional and, frankly, staid in comparison to the out-and-out trippy action in “Mive,” but even so (and despite not having any geology or paleontology content) I think it IS a good example of Jacobi’s moody, atmospheric writing.

Jacobi had a VERY long writing career that stretched well into the 80s, and he had a longstanding relationship with August Derleth’s Arkham House that kept a lot of his work in circulation via collections. Interestingly, the Arkham House connection came about because of H.P. Lovecraft, who praised Jacobi’s “Mive” in a letter to ol’ Derleth as having the kind of real, vital weirdness that he (meaning Lovecraft) really dug. The feeling was obviously mutual, as Jacobi would often flit around the edge of the Lovecraft circle – he had been classmates in college with another of Lovecraft’s circle, Donald Wandrei, and as a fellow Midwesterner (Jacobi lived in Minneapolis his whole life) the two of them struck up quite the literary friendship.

With regards to the pulps, Jacobi was a pretty prominent figure – in addition to numerous appearances in Weird Tales, he also wrote detective fiction, adventure stories, and even a little sci-fi. He’s a good example of how a writer can be successful (artistically, at least – he was, like most pulpsters, crushingly poor for most of his life) and then kind of vanish from the scene. Honestly, for his weird fiction at least, I think he’s due for a revival.

Enough jibber-jabber! Onwards!

This month’s cover, by J. Allen St. John, isn’t particularly weird, unfortunately, although I like the snarl on that giant ass tiger’s face. Very orientalist, something that editor Farnsworth Wright (and the readership of Weird Tales) loved with a fierce undying passion, so it makes sense that Williamson’s “Arabian” style multi-part novel would be made the cover. Still, c’mon man – gimme a monster!

Still, some fun stuff in the ol’ ToC. I don’t remember the Price story, but I’d love a Perfect Strangers/Weird Tales bit of fanfiction about “The Return of Balki.” Hamilton, Smith, Kline, Counselman, all big names for the readers at the time, along with Jacobi of course. Solid issue, I feel like the reader is getting their twenty-five cents worth this month.

Now, on to “Revelations in Black!”

Classic “Jayem” Wilcox title illustration, down to the whole “we’re giving away most of the story to you right off the bat” aspect too. Yep, this here is a VAMPIRE story, specifically about a LADY VAMPIRE, one of the top tier kinds of Vampires out there. A nice, traditional approach to a Halloween staple, I think.

Our story opens with a narrator battling his seasonal affective disorder by going antiquing. What’s funny is that our dude exchanges a dreary rainy day for what is, apparently, an equally dreary shop – the description of the wine cabinet shrinking despondently into its corner is a good bit o’ writing that sets the tone for Larla’s shop, I think. Our guy’s not after anything in particular, of course, but Larla is COMMITTED to his pitch, and even after the narrator suggests he’d like to see some books, Larla makes him go through the whole shop, looking at furniture, paintings, a “muddle of yellowed statuettes,” all kinds of junk. But, eventually, they reach the Old Books in the back.

Carl lays it on a little thick here, I think – the whole “oh, if only I hadn’t done whatever, the horrors I could’ve avoided,” yadda yadda, it’s easily the weakest part of this story, although I DO think that it helps if you read this part (and the whole story) as something very FIRMALY within a certain stylistic tradition. Jacobi is writing a VAMPIRE STORY – he’s not interested in reinventing it or subverting anything, he’s just enjoying the languorous pleasure of playing in a very well-established sandbox, right? In that context, this kind of “ah, would that I hadn’t fucked up so badly back then” stuff is VERY MUCH a part of the genre. Take it for what it is, is what I’m telling you.

But anyway – our guy plucks an interesting book from a shelf, one that Larla the shop-owner says was placed there by mistake and isn’t for sale. In fact, the book was made (literally – we learn that he bound it himself) by his “poor” brother.

Am I a sucker for the “last ravings of lunatic” macguffin? Yes, and so is our narrator – when he learns it was written BY a guy IN an asylum, he wants it EVEN more badly. Larla explains the Sad Tale of his Brother, Alessandro:

We learn then that there are actually THREE volumes to the “Five Unicorns and a Pearl” series, books that Alessandro had filled with his mad scribblings in his time in the asylum. Now, his brother keeps them as a keepsake, trying to forget the tragedy of his death and remember happier times (something probably not helped by keeping the Black-bound and Skull-embossed Book of Horror he wrote while dying mysteriously, but then again the human mind is a labyrinth, right?).

Like I said, this sort of wild-ass story just makes our guy want these books even more. When he sees he can’t buy it, he ends up RENTING the book for a single night for TEN GODDAMN DOLLARS (that’s like $250 now). He has a single night, and he MUST return it the next day, in perfect condition. A crazy deal, huh?

So, having plunked down a pile of cash for a chance to examine the book, our hero settles in for the night in his apartment to do some readin’. First thing he notices is a weird inscription “in a feminine hand” on the inside of the front cover:

Shoulda signed it “XOXO – The Vampire” to make sure he got the point.

He reads on:

Our boy here is strangely moved by the kind of odd and obviously symbolism-rich language that poor Alessandro used when composing his last work. In fact, he’s so struck and, frankly, troubled by it that he decides to go for a midnight walk!

Indulging in this weird impulse, however, does little to alleviate his mania – in fact, if anything, it increases it. He feels like he’s looking for something, that he’s being drawn towards something, and there’s nothin’ fer it but to wander in search of whatever the hell it is.

Our guy pushes through the strangely unlocked gate and into the preternaturally alluring night garden.

Quelle horreur! Our guy suddenly, shockingly realizes that this garden is, IN FACT, what poor mad Alessandro was writing about in Volume One of his book “Five Unicorns and Pearl,” the very book HE HAD JUST BEEN READING (*thundercrash*)!!!!!1!

All kidding aside, I DO think that our guy’s entrance into the garden is an extremely well done bit of eerie writing – the scene perfectly captures, a dark, seemingly abandoned garden in the Fall, the plants dead or dormant, and full of odd architecture, ornamentation, and statuary. Gardens are strange places, after all, sites dedicated to specific ideas about aesthetics and nature, carefully curated and maintained, so seeing one at an “off” time (at night, in the autumn, and apparently not being “kept-up”) is automatically a disjointing and unsettling experience. I think Jacobi is one of the great landscape/scenery describers of the pulps, and this garden is a perfect example of his mastery.

While he’s musing about this place, and how perhaps Alessandro wasn’t the hopeless lunatic he’d been labeled as, a strange, pungent perfume assails his nostrils…it’s the scent of heliotrope, powerful and fulgent in the night air…and it’s comin’ from a goddamn LADY he hadn’t even noticed a minute again!

The way Jacobi describes this woman, all in black, veiled, and with only a pale white neck exposed, strikes me as very Arthur Rackham. I mean, everybody has probably guessed what’s happening here, right, but for me that doesn’t detract from the pleasure of the story – honestly, there’s a lot to be said for weird fic/horror that tips its hand early but keeps on heading steadily towards the already-spotted conclusion. You can’t get that kind of slow-burn consummation without letting the reader see the road ahead, and I think when it’s done well, like in Jacobi’s story here today, there’s a lot to appreciate.

Anyway, this crazy vulpine woman and her enormous dog don’t seem bothered by the fact that some guy has just busted into their garden. In fact, the lady asks him to stay; she’s lonely, and would like someone to talk to. With a curt “fort mit dir, Johann!” she sends her dog away and bids the interloper join her by the fountains. Then, she introduces herself:

I’ll just break in here to post this picture of Field Marshal August von Mackensen, a WWI Imperial German general, because his picture is wild as hell:

Germans, yeesh!

Perle von Mauren continues her tale of woe:

“…found him…no longer living” is one of those “I don’t drink…wine” statements that vampires just love – technically true but omitting certain key information. Fun stuff!

Fun bit of subtle weirdness here – she’s obviously the author of the “feminine hand” that our narrator spotted on the frontpiece of the book, but there’s an implication here that, somehow, the book and she are intimately and causally connected. It could just be dissembling on her part, of course, but it really seems like our guy reading the book has summoned both Him and Her to the garden, together, some kind of weird link being forged between them by the reading of the story. It’s good and interesting, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it with regards to vampires – the idea that they’re associated with some kind of cursed object like that is neat!

Anyway, our dude spends the whole night talking to this lady in the garden. He’s obviously enchanted by her, even if he has a mounting sense of unease the whole time…why won’t she remove her veil, for instance. Then, just as the night gives way to dawn, something weird (well, weirder) happens!

They call that a “Vampire’s Goodbye.”

The next day finds out guy increasingly preoccupied with Perle and the garden and the books of Larla. He describes himself as addicted to the mystery of the thing, and can’t help but go back to the shop where, despite not returning the first book, he procures the second volume at another ridiculous price. He rushes home, reads it, but the mystery merely deeps for him, and his weird craving to return to the garden grows stronger and stronger. He tries to resist it, to ignore it, but then, in a flash he has the sudden idea that the garden scene and her and all that moonlight would make one hell of a picture, something he could even submit to the International Camera Contest in Geneva next month! Is that a delusion on his part, or an excuse? Regardless, our shutterbug grabs his fancy camera with its newfangled flashbulb and hustles on out to the garden again.

She’s there, of course, and they chat for a long while – she seems weirdly reticent to talk about her brother, and yet simultaneously compelled to tell our narrator about him. There’s an interesting section of his time as a student in Vienna where, as is traditional, he’s considered a weird and potentially dangerous avant garde philosophy student with odd and offputting ideas. His experiences in the war, and in digging graves as a prisoner of war, seem to be a particular focus of her morbid interest. It feels like this is Jacobi gesturing towards an underutilized bit of Vampire Lore here, the idea that a vampire rises out of the grave of a sorcerer. Her brother’s background as a “weird philosophy” student matches that, and she also seems to be suggesting that his terrible experiences in the war somehow “tainted” his soul.

The sky clears and the moon comes out; a perfect time to take a picture. Our guy tells her not to move, hops up, and then snaps a pic.

Lady, I get it – I don’t like to have my picture taken either. But she’s REALLY pissed, because she vanishes into the house and sic’s her big ass dog on our guy! This huge hounds comes hurtling out at him and attacks! It’s only with the greatest difficulty and a bit of luck that our guy survives – he chokes the dog while it’s trying to kill him, then remembers the German Perle had used when ordering the dog to go in. “Fort mit dir, Johann!” he manages to croak out, and it’s enough to confuse the dog that he’s able to escape.

Our guys calls in sick to work the next day, and decides to develop the picture he took. I wonder how it turned out?

Get a clue dude!

Anyway, he’s so shaken by the experience of the picture that he goes to bed. He wakes hours later, seemingly out of some kind of a vague yet terrible nightmare, and he notices that the drapes are fluttering in the breeze from a window that he had thought he’d shut before going to bed. He grows weaker, and ends up staying there for THREE DAYS, worn out, weak, and sick. A doctor visits and tells him he needs to rest and recuperate and, oh, by the way, where’d those two marks on your neck come from?

But even this isn’t enough to curb his NEED to read the third book. He’s been through the first two, and as he lays there in bed a kind of feverish desire builds and builds until he is forced to head to the shop. He, of course, has not returned the first two volumes, and so Larla refuses to “rent” him the third. It’s like, dude, take them off the shelf if you don’t want to sell ’em, right? But our guy’s NEED for the book is too great and, when Larla’s back is turned, he steals it and runs.

He reads through the mad yet damningly suggestive text of Alessandro Larla’s FINAL book, troubled and unnerved, until he reaches THE FINAL PAGE:

Yeah no shit man, jesus christ. I do like that the dog is her brother though, that’s neat.

He realizes that Alessandro had been ensnared by these things in some way and, although unable himself to escape, had written these books in hope of exposing and destroying them. Then our guy remembers the odd frontpiece…didn’t it say something about “stakes” in there…

He won’t be a victim, not like Larla! He smashes the legs of his tripod to make two sharp stakes and takes a taxi IN THE DAYTIME over to the house. Inside, he finds a room with coffins and the cloying, masking odor of Heliotrope…and does what needs to be done.

And then there’s a classic Hammer Horror style reveal:

And then, a final coda:

And that’s the end! Hope ol’ Larla the shop keeper had some other stuff of his brother’s to remember him by, because this dude just burns those books.

This story, while very *classical* in format and execution, is still awfully evocative and atmospheric; Jacobi is great at scenes and environments, and I like the way in particular he describes the moonlit garden and the fountain. Apparently, this was a view shared by the editor of Weird Tales Farnsworth Wright – he originally and very firmly rejected this story, only to contact Jacobi a few weeks later to ask if he could publish it! Our narrator discovering the garden had stuck with ol’ Wright, so much so that he’d found himself thinking about that scene long after he’d rejected the story.

And, you know, for all the “seen it” stuff in here, I think there’s some interesting little glimmers of weirdness – the book aspect is inventive and cool, for instance, and I really like the way it seems to summon them ALL to the garden. And would they have returned if he *hadn’t* burned the books? And, of course, some things are a classic for a reason, you know, and damned if a straightforward Vampire Tale isn’t one of ’em! And I mean, c’mon, Jacobi does a GOOD job here with the genre.

Anyway, I hope ya’ll enjoyed a classic bit of Vampire fic fer Halloween. I know I did, but maybe next time around we’ll dig into some weirder stuff, eh? Until then!

Straining the swampy pulp #24: “Frogfather” by Manly Wade Wellman, Weird Tales, v. 39 n.8, November 1946

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We recently put in a stocktank water feature in the backyard, got a pump to circulate water and a bunch of pretty good rocks to make a little cascade, and we’ve got grand designs regarding water plants – there’s some good Texas native pond flora out there, including a native pitcher plant from east Texas, that I want – but the real hope is that we’ll have a good habitat for frogs and toads. When we first moved to the neighborhood in 2019, the warm summer nights were FULL of frogsong at every house with a water feature, and we’ve seen plenty of toads and such hanging out in our garden. Big fan of frogs, is what I’m saying here, so HOPEFULLY that will put me in good with the subject of today’s story, “Frogfather” from Weird Tales, November 1946, by the one and only Manly Wade Wellman.

Wellman is, if not obscure, then at least of specialist interest these days – if you’ve ever played Dungeons & Dragons, then you owe him more than you probably realize, since Gygax and Arneson pulled a number of monsters directly from his stories, as well as using his “John the Balladeer” character as the basis for the “Bard” class in the game. In his heyday, however, Wellman was a prolific pulp writer, and in the 40s and 50s was one of Weird Tales’ major talents. He’s an interesting guy with an interesting biography, although it *may* have been a little embellished and romanticized.

Briefly, Wellman was born in 1903 in a port city in what is now Angola. His father, Frederick Creighton Wellman, was stationed there as a medical officer for a British charity, and seems to have been quite a weird and colorful character himself. A specialist in tropical medicine, Wellman pere was famous in the international press for having “gone native” while in Africa, whatever that means. He helped build railroads and ran medical centers while there, and while he was doing missionary work he also apparently took the time to learn local languages and record local stories and beliefs. Old Man Wellman was one of those tropic-lovin’ anglos; he ended up working for United Fruit in central America, and became quite an authority of tropical diseases.

Stories about Manly Wade Wellman’s childhood in Africa are romantic (and suspect in my opinion); he supposedly spoke a native dialect before he learned English, and had been adopted by a “native chief” after his father had cured the potentate of his blindness; to me that sounds like the usual kind of nonsense expats like to brag about. What is true, though, is that his time as a child in Africa was very foundational to his outlook on life – a love of wilderness and a certain (though paternalistic) regard for people of different races, creeds, and backgrounds is evident in his work. He was also one of those people from Old South stock that liked to talk up their Native American ancestry, something that will have relevance in the story today, I think. He was an inveterate Confederate apologist, especially when around “Yankees,” apparently; you get the feeling that he was one of those romantic Lost Cause-ers who felt that there was, shall we say, a certain “order” to the world that those outside of the antebellum South could never truly appreciate or understand. His stories with black American characters clearly reflect this world-view; reminds me a little of Flannery O’Connor’s racism, honestly.

The Wellman family would move back to the U.S. when Manly was a kid; he did his schoolin’ here in the States, got a degree in Literature and Journalism, and went to work as a reporter in the 20s. It was during this time that he toyed around with fiction, selling a few stories to Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales here and there, mostly based on childhood tales of Africa. He met and became friends with some of the early sci-fi and fantasy writers of that era, like Al Bester and Henry Kuttner, when he moved to New York. He also knew and travelled with the famous Ozark folklorist Vance Randolph, visiting Appalachia and getting a strong sense of the traditions and folklore of the area, something that would loom large over his career, as we’ll see in this story.

A hugely prolific writer, in the 30s and 40s he was also a major contributor to Weird Tales, producing a number of very popular “occult detective” style stories, as well as a lot of straight horror tales, usually set in either Africa or Appalachia. As mentioned above, later in his career, in the 60s, he’d invent his most famous character, “Silver John,” a wandering troubadour country boy who faced eldritch evil and dark magic in the hills and hollers of Appalachia with only his wits and his silver-stringed guitar. They’re good stories and worth hunting up – there was a recently republished collection from Valancourt, “John the Balladeer,” that I’d recommend, if that sort of thing sounds interesting to you.

One last little anecdote that I find hilarious – in 1946 Wellman won the Ellery Queen Mystery Award for a story of his (“A Star for a Warrior”), beating William Faulkner, who was apparently absolutely furious that he’d taken second place to a “mere science fiction” writer. Faulkner was apparently so pissed off that he wrote a long angry letter to the editors of the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, wherein he explained that he was, simply, the greatest living American Writer and they could all go to hell. Pretty funny!

Enough of these maunderings! Lets get down to business!

Lookit that cover, hot damn! Spectacular pic from Boris Dolgov, another one of those Maxfield Parrish influenced artists producing some of the best, most vivid work that ever appeared on the cover of a magazine. Dolgov, about whom almost nothing is known, did some spectacular work for Weird Tales in this era – I love the weightlessness of his figures, and the sharp, dangerous feyness that he invested in his otherworldly figures – that nereid or siren or whatever, the naked blue-green lady…she’s delicate and cute, sure, but there’s also a feral otherness to her that is just unbeatable. Spectacular stuff! Between Dolgov, Bok, and Coye, the 40s and 50s editions of The Unique Magazine are some of the best lookin’ ever made.

ToC’s pretty good this time around, too – Quinn is still out there, fightin’ the good fight, and you’ve got the enigmatical Allison V. Harding up there too, a mysterious woman about whom almost nothing is known (there’s some suggestion that she was, actually, Jean Milligan, the wife of Lamont Buchanan, the associate editor of the magazine). Bradbury, Derleth, Bloch, and Wellman – this is a relatively heavy-hitter of an issue for this late 40s era! Anyway, on to our story!

A.R. Tilburne again doin’ great work…guy in a coffin boat bein’ menaced by a Big Frog. Solid, fun piece.

Our story starts with the narrator explainin’ how he never liked frogs’ legs, but he sure as shit wouldn’t eat ’em now, not after what happened. A good, snappy little entry into the story, and one that preserves what I think is the key *tale* part of the genre of the weird tale. This is some guy tellin’ us a tale, and there’s an intimacy and immediacy to that kind of framing device that I think helps us step right into the proper frame of mind to enjoy what is sure to be a weird-ass story. Anyway, our narrator introduces us briefly to Ranson Cuff, a moneyed asshole who, through his financial clout, basically rules the Swamps.

Good, efficient characterization, with the unmistakable “backwoods” voice of Wellman here, setting up a petty tyrant asshole that nobody likes. But what’s Cuff got to do with frogs’ legs?

Not only is Cuff a bastard, he’s flat-out evil too! Cruel, sadistic, and he’s keeping our narrator as an indentured servant. We are quickly establishing the fact that Cuff is the guy who absolutely deserves to die, one of the most important aspects of a horror story. He’s an evil guy in a boat he’s repossessed out huntin’ for frog legs with his slave and an oppressed minority. The frog legs are a nice touch, too – they’re almost automatically a very special kind of prey, you know what I mean? Like they’re a symbol of explicit cruelty already, way more so than if this guy was out fishing or hunting ducks, right? The fact of their dismemberment is right there in the name, and Cuff enjoys that aspect maybe even more than the eating of them. Solid stuff, and again, very efficient.

Cuff and his unfortunate cronies are out paddling around the swamp, looking for frogs to gig and havin’ a hell of a time of it – there doesn’t seem to be any frogs along the banks. Cuff, angry and frustrated, orders his men to paddle him up to a secluded neck of the swamp that he’s never been in before, but where he can hear the frogs calling. Our narrator starts paddling, but his comrade pulls his paddle from the water and stops the boat.

And there he is, the titular Frogfather himself. This old, nameless, stereotyped Indian, who speaks better than either Cuff or the narrator, tries to stop Cuff from heading into that particular stretch of the Swamp, on account of it being home to, basically, a big ol’ Frog God. Wellman has given it a suitably “exotic” sounding name, one he made up whole clothe, and it’s basically the only real misstep in the story, in my opinion. “Frogfather” is, simply, way cooler and way more menacing a name than this fake Native American word that he’s invented. I mean, christ, I wanna start a speed metal band called “Frogfather” right now, don’t you? It’s a rad name!

Of course, Cuff can’t believe what he’s hearing – he don’t give a shit about Frogfathers, he wants some extra-cruelty supper, and he wants it now! He tells the nameless Indian to shut up and get paddling, which, of course, the nameless Indian refuses to do.

Wellman underlining once again what a fuckin’ piece of shit Cuff is for us. He makes the nameless Indian *swim* to shore! No question: Cuff is DEFINITLEY going to die now. One of the fun parts of weird fiction, for me, is the sense of the shape of the story coming along as you read it – we know that Cuff is in trouble, and Wellman WANTS us to know that, which is part of the pleasure – Cuff, that asshole, has no clue what’s about to happen to him!

Johnny, our narrator, paddles them to the distant neck, and they see a strange sight. The water here is phosphorescent, glowing faintly and eerily as they slip silently into this forbidden corner of the swamp. Cuff can’t be bothered with it though, since there’re frogs to kill!

Pretty brutal frog murder there, isn’t it? The gaping mouth, the smacking it alongside the boat to make it stop its squirming, grim stuff. Cuff’s bloodlust is up now – he sees another one and wants more! But, as they’re trying to maneuver towards it, the boat starts to wobble and tip. Cuff curses Johnny, and tells him to hold the boat steady. Johnny says he IS holding the boat steady, it’s Cuff in the prow that’s causing the imbalance, which, of course, Cuff denies. Must be a snag, Johnny figures; he takes the lantern and peers over the side of the boat, trying to spot whatever it is they’re caught up on.

Hell yeah, it’s the Frogfather!

The story wastes NO time – Cuff goes into The Forbidden Swamp, kills a frog, and BAM! Frogfather is on the scene! No lurking about or skulking or haunting – you piss of Frogdaddy, you get walloped.

I like the description of the Big Frog here – the line about the eyes being “every jewel-flashing color known to the vainest woman” is both fun and shows Wellman’s ear for backwoods eloquence. The neat thing, too, about the Frogfather is that it’s purely the size and bulk of the thing that’s alien; other than that it is, simply, a Big Frog, and honestly that’s something I appreciate. There’s no reason for this thing to be some kind of eldritch abomination, or even something “frog-like” akin to Clark Ashton Smith’s Tsathoggua – this thing, which has some mythic, folkloric, primal linkage to frogs and their lives, appears as a truly big frog, simple as. I think that makes the weirdness of its actions, in the section above and what we’ll see in a bit down below, all that much weirder, too. It heaves itself up onto the boat, casually snaps Cuff’s iron gig, and then tips the boat, grabbing Cuff by the head and neck – the monstrousness of the Frogfather is in the incongruity of its very deliberate, almost human-like, actions.

Johnny sees all this and just starts swimming. He’s in the water, which is all lit up from the phosphorescence in the water. This enables him to see something even stranger than just a Big Frog:

“…tucked like a stolen baby” is a a phenomenal line, isn’t it? The whole scene is really strange and evocative – the Frogfather has built a little house down there out of tree trunks, and the weird glow is coming from inside his lair. And, rather than simply gulping down Cuff, he’s swimming away with him into that glow, towards a fate that is implied to much weirder and worse than simple death. That’s great stuff, man, real weirdness here that you might not have expected from a simple Big Frog monster.

Johnny is swimming to safety when he hears a strange whistle, and something dark and swift suddenly bears down on him as he’s treading water…it’s the nameless old Indian, this time in a canoe. He helps Johnny into the boat and lets him gather his thoughts before they talk.

Another nice little glimpse of weirdness there: Frogfather would “have a way to deal with” a lot of people, if they were to go in there and try and do something about him, and buddy, you don’t wanna see what that would be! It’s another well-executed classic bit of weird fiction, where there’s a *hint* or something much stranger at work. Some dude comes in and starts killing frogs where he isn’t supposed to, well, that calls for the Frogfather just comin’ up and grabbing the guy. But a more complicated kind of incursion, with more people and boats and suchlike…well, that would mean the Frogfather would be forced to do something a bit more dire. Great, great stuff.

And that’s the end of Manly Wade Wellman’s “Frogfather!”

I love a good comeuppance story, and Wellman sets Cuff up as the perfect asshole – vindictive, cruel, sadistic, and totally uncaring. This is also a VERY short story, an efficient weirdness delivery system that sets up the scenario, executes its monster, and gets it done, all in a handful of pages.

It’s also interesting as a bit of eco-horror. Cuff is an exploiter of nature – he leads hunting and fishing trips for rich out-of-towners, explicitly the sorts of people who don’t need or appreciate the wilderness, but rather just use it for their own entertainment. Hand-in-hand with this is Cuff’s exploitation of his neighbors and fellow swamp folk – Johnny is an indentured servant, working to pay of his aunt’s debt to Cuff, and the nameless Indian is the definition of exploited labor, an oppressed minority barely scraping by on whatever pittance Cuff is paying him. All of this is in play when the Frogfather makes an accounting of Cuff’s many sins.

Now, speaking of the “nameless Indian,” I do think we have to unpack the racism going on here. This is 100% the kind of “mystical Indian in tune with the rhythms of nature” bullshit that is, unfortunately, still really common to see today. I mean, this guy doesn’t even get a name, he’s so primal and wise and mystical. He’s also just “an Indian,” a kind of undifferentiated and vague “other” that belongs to a different age. Combine that generic bullshit with the honestly very bad fake Indian name of the Frogfather, you end up with a sort of icky paternalism that just feels bad. I mean, at least he can use pronouns and doesn’t talk like Tonto, right? But even there, the fact that he’s better spoken than either of these (presumably) white characters is another part of that myth-making, part-and-parcel with his humble mien and deep-seated wisdom.

That said of course, the ending is great and fairly radical for the era – the idea that these stupid white people can’t handle themselves in the wilderness, even when told to their face what dangers there are out there, is satisfying, as is the explanation that they’ll have to come up with a lie that the white people will believe with regards to Cuff’s disappearance. This is a fairly common thread in a lot of Wellman’s fiction, the idea of indigenous or folkloric knowledge as fundamentally valid and valuable and deserving of respect.

I also like the setting – there’s plenty of backwoods, southern stories in Weird Tales, but the majority of them are honestly just using it as an “exotic” or (morally and geographically) remote locales, or, worse still, as a chance to indulge in some chicken-fried dialog. But Wellman, similar to REH and his Texas tales, has both experiences with the setting and a real affection for it, and that shows in his stories. Cuff isn’t just some dumb hick we’re supposed to laugh at; he’s an evil bastard, and it’s for that, his EVILNESS, that he’s punished.

Anyway, I like this story. Wellman, like I said, was a PROLIFIC writer and worth chasing down if you’re interested in this era of weird fiction and fantasy. He was an influential figure too, with a long shadow on the shadow, and he’s worth reading for that fact too. I’d stay away from the Africa stories; frankly, they’re a little rough, and while he DOES have an affection for the setting and history of the continent, he’s not equipped to really dig into it or approach it correctly. It’s his Appalachian stuff that’s most worth reading, both because he’s a better writer by the time he gets around to it AS WELL AS because he really DOES approach it in a way and with a style that you don’t see much of. Read the Silver John stories, at least; you won’t be disappointed!

Improvised Contraband Prison Pulp Strainer #23: “Cellmate” by Theodore Sturgeon, Weird Tales v. 39, n.9, January 1947

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Break out the pumpkins and skulls and eldritch horrors, it’s October, which means it’s fuckin’ spooky season again, baby! And, as is common ’round these parts (i.e., Austin Texas) it’s still in the goddamn mid 90s during the day time, temperatures that are not particularly conducive to the traditional Halloween spirit. So, as in years past, I’m gonna try and get into the spookemup mood by focusing on some particular favorite weird stories of mine, and we got a fun lil’ one this week: it’s “Cellmate” by the great Theodore Sturgeon, from the January 1947 issue of Weird Tales!

Now, we’ve talked about ol Ted Sturgeon just a few pulp strainers ago in the “The World Well Lost” post (number 21 in this series), so we don’t have to spend too much time on him here, biographically – he’s great, one of the absolute top-o-the-heap sci-fi writers of the 20th century, but much like Bradbury, he flit around stylistically (and financially), placing stories where he could. He appeared in the cross-genre pages of Weird Tales with eight of his stories, and this one, Cellmate, is his first appearance in the magazine. It’s also, I think, probably his absolute “weirdest” of the bunch – a lot of the other Weird Tales sturgeon work is very much more science fictional, but this one is basically a straight up weird monster story.

Before we dive in, though, we should take a moment to reflect on Weird Tales. This is a particularly unique iteration of the venerable ol’ mag, and one from much later than I usually sample from. We’re in 1947, a remarkable time in the history of the pulps (in general) and Weird Tales (in particular). The great (and enormously important) editor Farnsworth Wright was long gone, having handed the reins of editorship over to Dorothy McIlwraith in 1940 (and then promptly dying of complications from his Parkinson’s disease). Now, we’ve also talked a little bit about Dorothy McIllwraith before (most thoroughly in last years’ discussion of Fritz Lieber’s “The Automatic Pistol“), so we won’t spend too much time on her here, but, sufficed to say – Dorothy McIllwraith is a hugely important figure in the history of weird fic, someone who was able to navigate a pulp magazine through not only the paper shortages of WWII but ALSO the rise of television (for a while, at least). No mean feat!

How about that fuckin’ cover, huh? Great, wild stuff from A.R. Tilburne, one of the stand-outs from Weird Tales covers, in my humblest of opinions. This is a perfect example of real weirdness – some kinda weird sea monster? In a storm? Who the hell knows what’s going on, but the mastery of linework and style here is c’est magnifique, n’est-ce pas? I love it, 10/10, nice work A.R.!

A quick glance at the ToC shows us some things:

First off, this is a *much* slimmer Weird Tales than we’ve ever seen – we’re well into the sub-100 page issue era, something unheard of in the glory days before the war. It’s also worth noting that this is now a bi-monthly mag (by which I mean it’s only six issues a year), so you’re getting a lot less weirdness over the course of the year. I mean, it’s lean times in the magazine world, and only getting leaner. Of course, the magazine is also cheaper than it had ever been – fifteen cents in 1947, when it was a quarter a decade ago!

Now, there’ still some excellent and exciting writing going on here – you’ve got Sturgeon and Bradbury, and Hamilton is still slugging away, one of the last of the old generation still writing. Charles King there is an interesting figure, another sci-fi heavy guy who bled over into Weird Tales, and the story in this issue from him is likewise a good one. But it’s interesting to me that the big center piece story this issue is a reprint from William Hope Hodgson, maybe a cost saving measure but also, maybe, indicative that Weird Tales was definitely having a hard time competing against the flashier (and better paying) sci-fi mags out there. That’s also probably why they publish two chunks of Lovecraft’s longer poem “The Fungi from Yuggoth.” In fact, they’re tiny, so I’ll just give you a bonus and reproduce ’em here:

Like I said, these are two smaller sonnets from a larger work. Lovecraft always thought of himself as a poet first and foremost, and in these I think he does actually end up transcending that affectation. I think they’re good, and taken together in the whole singular piece (which is 36 sonnets long, in total) it’s a pretty phenomenal piece of weird poetry. I also think it’s Lovecraft directly responding to T.S. Eliot, but that’s a subject for another day!

But enough! On to…CELLMATE, by THEODORE STURGEON:

Lookit that title illo – that’s weird right there, yessir! On first past, you can’t really even tell what’s going on here, although by the end of the story this’ll make more sense. But for now, it’s a good bit o’ visual weirdness, and I also think it nicely captures the lonely grimness of prison too – the inky black walls, the high narrow-barred window, even the institutional-lookin’ bed frame thing in the foreground. Nicely executed work from the inimitable Lee Brown Coye!

The beginning of this (pretty short) story wastes no time:

We’re introduced to our narrator, a fairly run-of-the-mill hard boiled criminal who, we’ll learn, is a basic low-level thug, a violent guy who spends a lot of time in and out of jails for various offenses. He’s doing 60 days for some kinda crime (he tells us not to worry about it, which is a surefire way to make you worry about it, right?) when he gets saddled with a cellmate…Crawley.

How about that for a description, huh? It’s very strange. Average height sorta guy, but with spindly limbs, a long stringy neck, and a humongous chest. And the narrator makes it very clear that he’s not merely barrel-chested or anything – he’s abnormally, even freakishly proportioned, a “humpback with the hump in front.” A very strange figure, and with the personality to boot – weird voice, weird breathing, something off-putting and unnerving about him. Our narrator takes an immediate dislike to him.

Crawley ain’t been in this cell thirty minutes, and he’s already acting weird. Again, Sturgeon has a real pen for this kind of stuff, these extremely odd little details – the weird, echoey, resonating scratching, and the way he’s described as “burrowing his fingers into his chest” (emphasis mine) is very, very odd. But, anyway, our narrator has informed Crawley that he gets the top bunk (the worst), but Crawley just keeps standing there, lookin’ dumb and scratching, while everybody listens to a radio soap opera that one of the guards is playing loudly. As an aside, it’s those little touches that make Sturgeon so great – the section about these prisoners having nothing else to do but listen to some dumb shit on a radio, night after night, is good writin’ for sure, really captures the banality of jailhouse life.

The radio show ends, and it’ll be lights out soon enough. The narrator is wondering why Crawley hasn’t gotten into his bunk yet. He’ll get in trouble if he’s not in when the guards come by for the final check, not that HE cares. Hell, he doesn’t even like Crawley!

Strange! Maybe our narrator is just a big softy after all?

In the morning, our narrator hops down out of the top bunk, and immediately sees something weird:

Understandably put out by what he’s seen, our narrator decides he truly, sincerely, does not like his new cellmate. When the food cart comes around, he hatches a scheme that he’s going to take Crawley’s food as well, chortling about how he’ll starve him out until, eventually, the guards will be forced to take him away to the hospital and he’ll be left along. But while he’s chortling about this scheme to himself, he starts to feel some eyes on his back…like Crawley is staring and staring and staring…and then he get the idea that he feels TWO sets of eyes…four eyes, looking at him…but it’s only him and Crawley in the cell…!

His panic builds, as does his belief that he’s got two pairs of eyes on him, but his horrific reverie is broken by the food cart coming by. He gets his own food, then grabs Crawley’s, just like he’d planned…but he still feels the horror of the eyes, and the loathing that they elicit. He briefly contemplates beating Crawley to death, but then:

Aww…another nice thing! Rather than squashing his weird cellmate like a bug, or even stealing his food liked he’d been planning, he gives him some food, and even shows him how to improve its quality, lets him eat on the bunk, everything all nice and sweat and domestic!

Later that day, our narrator hits on another plan to get Crawley in trouble and out of his hair. The prisoners have to keep their cells and their messkit clean, see, but of course Crawley doesn’t know that and, even if he did, doesn’t seem capable of doing it anyway. So our narrator is going to scrub half the cell, and clean his own messkit – the guards, familiar with his habits, will recognize that Crawley isn’t cleaning, and keeping a dirty a messkit is a punishable offense, so he’ll get sent down to solitary. Yes, a sterling plan! So our narrator commences to clean, gets right up to the half-way point of the cell, and then…

AGAIN our violent criminal ends up doing something nice for Crawley, basically unbidden and, of course, unthanked. Weird how that keeps happening, huh? Especially since, after each incident, our narrator seems to be more and more convinced that he hates Crawley, that he wants nothing to do with him at all. And yet, he keeps on bending over backwards for him, helping him out at every turn.

This kind of wild, crazy level of helpfulness from out narrator towards Crawley continues later when, during an outdoor period, Crawley just straight up tells our narrator to buy him four candy bars (“two marshmallow, one coconut, and one fudge”). And that’s WITH our narrator’s carefully shepherded tobacco money too, mind you. At first our narrator laughs in his face; why the fuck would he do that, spend his own money on candy for a guy he absolutely hates…but he does. In fact, he goes out of his way to make sure he gets the candy. He also seems unable to talk about Crawley to anyone, either – he thinks he’ll get some good laughs telling his buddies in the yard about this freak he’s bunking with, but for some reason he just never can get around to talking about him.

Later that night, after helping Crawley with his blankets (effectively tucking him in), our narrator hops up into the top bunk and tells Crawley he shouldn’t talk to himself in his sleep, which results in a truly weird scene:

I mean, that’s weird, huh? A really strange and unearthly scene, this insane, grating, screaming laughter, and when he looks, Crawley’s mouth is shut, the laughter coming from somewhere deep inside his chest, an unearthly sound that doesn’t make any sense. Our narrator feels himself losing his grip, the laughter is driving him crazy, and it only stops when he, apparently, passes the fuck out.

He comes to sometime in the very early morning, three or four he thinks; he feels like he’s been slugged, groggy and strange, and he hears Crawley talking in his bunk.

And someone else answering!

You might have guessed where this is going, though I think it’s weird enough that it kept me guessing, right up until the reveal. It’s very weird, and honestly spooky, especially after the weird hollow laughing from earlier – imagine being this thuggish narrator, waking up from something and hearing two voices where you only expected one…spooky shit! Our narrator carefully, quietly tries to investigate…

Crawley’s weird clamshell chest is some kinda kangaroo pouch for his weird stunted conjoined twin brother! And whatta twin! It’s the size of baby, but with a shaggy head of hair and a long, lean face and a fanged mouth. It’s a legit monster. And, moreover, our narrator intuits what this thing is, and what it’s been doing:

It’s some kinda psychic dominator stunted twin, living inside of Crawley! If you go back to the picture at the beginning of the story, you’ll recognize the scene it’s depicting now, and see that it’s actually pretty faithful to the story. It’s pretty wild and, like all great reveals in weird fic, it makes you go back into the story and think about the strangeness you’ve read in a slightly different way – clearly this little monster twin has been controlling our narrator from the get-go, getting him to give up the bunk, give big Crawley the food, etc. It also seems to imply that our narrator has probably seen this thing before – it’s why he knew about the four eyes he felt, but he’d probably been ordered to forget it. So, why does little Crawley let him remember now?

Because it’s jail break time, baby!

Little Crawley has put our narrator into berserker mode – he kills two guards with his bare hands, uses a third as a human shield, and causes the death of at least one prisoner from a ricochet round. He’s a one man riot, impervious to pain and utterly fearless, doing everything he can to cause chaos and attract attention.

And that’s the end of “Cellmate” by Theodore Sturgeon!

First thing first: is this the earliest example of the “evil secret conjoined twin” trope in fiction? There’s the movie Basket Case from the 80s, a real goopy gory (and funny) monster movie about an evil conjoined twin that has been removed and is being cared for by his more normal brother, and then there’s that X-Files episode, or that recent movie Malignant. Are there earlier examples though? The interesting thing in all of those, of course, is that the tiny twin is almost all monstrous id, right, a kind of primal and murderous atavism that is either autonomous or takes control of its sibling to do evil, whereas here in this story, the twin and the larger brother have a working relationship, and in fact the littler evil twin is by far the smarter of the two.

Honestly, for me, Crawley’s creepiness come more from the weird hinged chest cavity than from the tiny guy living in it…I mean, yeesh, that’s just plain weird you know? Like big Crawley is a straight up mutant! Oh, there’s another example, Kuato from Total Recall, who is also an example of the little guy being the “boss” (although Kuato, of course, is a good guy).

In fact, in terms of “evil conjoined twin,” the only earlier example that I can think of is the apocryphal and almost certainly fictional story of Edward Mordake, who supposedly had an evil (and female) second face on the back of his head that whispered horrible suggestions to the otherwise morally upright Edward. It was originally published in The Boston Post in 1895 (you can see it here), and there’s lots of obviously made up stuff in the whole article, but it is a weird and interesting precursor to Crawley here.

But, aside from that, I think this is some great weird fiction – the prison setting is fun, spare and claustrophobic, but the narrator’s familiarity with it makes it all seem drab and kind of humdrum. Sturgeon, who is a master at getting into a character’s head and finding their voice, does a great job with the narrator – he’s a violent but somewhat jaded thug. He’s got his routine and he’s used to coming and going from jail all the time, so the imposition of weirdness in the form of Crawley on his “normal” life is really stark and unmooring.

And man, Crawley is just WEIRD right off the bat – the physical description is very strange, with his odd proportions, and then his behavior is just very odd and kind of alien. Like I said, it all makes sense in hindsight – why bother to even try to behave normally if you’ve got a psychic dominator twin living in your weird chest pouch, after all?

Now, you don’t wanna get all Freudian psychoanalytical about this stuff BUT as mentioned in the last Sturgeon write-up I did (here!), ol’ Ted DID spend a fair amount of his time interrogating queer relationships between men. As mentioned, he himself was what we’d call “bisexual” (he certainly would not have used that term, however), and had a number of sexual and romantic relationships with men (while being married with a family to a woman). In “The World Well Lost” we have a kind of interesting mirror-universe version of Crawley and our Narrator, although one not so freakish. Still, there’re some similarities between the two couples; there’re both confined together, there’s a disparity between their physical attributes, etc., and the themes of homosocial male relationships undergirded by “something else” are present in both. Why does the Narrator keep doing so many generous kindnesses for someone he also simultaneously feels repulsion for? You don’t want to read too much into these things; Sturgeon, a working writer, liked to eat hot meals indoors, and so he wrote stories that he could sell, and sometimes that means adhering to certain narrative conventions and such. But he was also an artist, and finding a topic or theme that interests you is a key to making good work, so the thread of his own experiences is certainly worth keeping in mind when reading his stories.

It is a fairly short story, and while I would say that the weirdness is on simmer for most of it, there length means that there’s not much of the slow, mounting dread that I normally like in a weird story. But it works here, particularly because the reveal really puts all the previous actions of the narrator in a different light, kind of retroactively imposing weirdness on them. Speaks to Sturgeon’s skill as a writer that it works so well, that he’s willing to let the scenes just play out fairly straight because he knows that what is coming will force you to look back at them and recognize what was going on.

And, while the slow burn isn’t really there, the creep factor IS high; I think this story is flat out scary, especially the weird laughter scene that builds to the climactic reveal of little Crawley in the chest cavity. The narrator’s murderous fugue is well done too, and the idea that Crawley has escaped and is back out there amongst us is good, classic Weird Tales stuff.

Anyway, I think it’s a good start to this Halloween season, an inventive, weird, and sometimes scary story that will, hopefully, get us all in an appropriately spooky mood!

Straining the Pulp (with forgotten super-science) #22: “Keepersmith” by Randall Garrett & Vicki Ann Heydron, Asimov’s SF Adventure Magazine v.1 n.2 1979

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(I jump right into my musing on the history of sci-fi mags in this one, so, just for ease, here’s the link to a pdf of the the issue that includes the story we’re talkin’ ’bout today!)

Leapfrogging out of the early 20th century (the GOLDEN age of the short story) and into the rusty iron-age of the almost-80s might *seem* like a mistake, but there’s still some fun to be had examining these late-era descendants of the pulps. Now, for sure, gone are the wild, heady days of a newsstand loaded with magazines of any and every genre imaginable (and a few you wouldn’t ever have dreamt up). The pulps’ decline began in the 40s when they were brutalized by WWII paper rationing, but the era really truly ended in the 50s when television rose to supplant reading as a primary popular leisure time activity. But a few mags held on somehow, and, much like their ancestors in the good ol’ days, they often record some interesting changes in the ol’ zeitgeist.

In particular, science fiction (which, antecedents aside, had been truly invented in the magazines) had developed a thriving enough fan culture that, here and there, a few prestige magazines had managed to survive and even thrive. These are, of course, Analog (formerly Astounding Science Fiction back in the good ol’ days) and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (founded in the 50s, and hugely important to the history of sf), both of which you can get a rejection from today, if you wanted. These (along with Galaxy) had become in some ways *the* flagship publications of the genre, a kind of “professional journal” for the convention and fan societies that had evolved out of the original pulp magazine letter pages and fandom.

And that fandom had entered a new phase of growth, especially in the shadow of Star Trek. Following its cancelation in ’69, there was a real hunger for sci-fi out there – Trek conventions had exploded, and there was a general paperback renaissance in genre fiction going on. There was also a flowering of the sort of amateur press that had led people like Lovecraft and Ray Palmer into writing/editing careers, this time in the form of Zines. Simultaneously there was, in the 60s and 70s, *also* an explosion in Fantasy literature, largely ushered in by the unauthorized Ace paperbacks of The Lord of the Rings trilogy in ’65. A similar Sword & Sorcery revival followed, fed by publishers trolling the pulp catalogs for fantasy stories and rediscovering Robert E. Howard and his many imitators.

The point of all this is to say that, by the mid 70s, there was a major genre fiction revival going on, such that the publisher of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (two other magazines you can ALSO get rejections from today!) felt that there was room for another sf mag out there. This publisher, Joel Davis, approached Isaac Asimov about possibly lending his name to the endeavor, which, after some wrangling, resulted in the creation of Asimov’s Science Fiction (which you can…etc, etc).

Now, like I said, simultaneous to the sci-fi revival of the 60s/70s, there was *also* a revival in interest in fantasy around the same time, lead by figures with feet in both camps, like Poul Anderson, Andre Norton, the evil Jerry Pournelle, and the truly vile Larry Niven – these folks wrote both science fiction as well as fantasy/S&S, and were important figures in the Society for Creative Anachronism and those scenes. And, of course, there’s the 800-lb Wookie in the room: Star Wars (1977), the foundational text of modern science fantasy adventure, had completely revolutionized science fiction and popular culture. What this meant was that there was both a readership for and people writing in a kind of two-fisted, adventurous style, often combining overt fantasy with science fictional elements (and vice versa). Recognizing that this was an underserved market niche, Davis went about creating a magazine to fill it, and thus in 1978 was born the extremely short-lived magazine, Asimov’s SF Adventure, a sister publication to the heady, somewhat New Wave-ish Asimov’s Science Fiction.

That ol’ Isaac himself was a little ambivalent about this turn of events seems evident from the introductory editorials he wrote for the magazine. In the first issue, he gives a broad history of the “adventure” story, tying it back to the Iliad and the Odyssey, before leaping into the pulps of the 30s and 40s, trying to make an argument that *actually* that kind of red-blooded storytelling is an important and deep-rooted part of fiction. Later, in this the second issue, he argues that SCIENCE itself is the greatest adventure of them all…it’s all very unconvincing, and you’re left feeling like ol’ Asimov is mostly trying to make a purse out of a sow’s ear, at least from his perspective. That said, they did at least give him a rad illustration for his pieces:

I mean, that does look cool

It’s possible (even probable) that Asimov might not have even known what stories were going to appear in the magazine when he wrote these pieces, so he can maybe be forgiven for his poorly disguised distaste of the “adventure” tale. After all, most of his career had been spent advocating for a very “hard” approach to sci-fi, and his more “adventure” style writing (like his Lucky Starr books) had been published under a pseudonym and clearly aimed at younger audiences, a kind of entry-level sf meant to introduce the genre, rather than typify it.

But, all things told, I think the stories in Asimov’s SF Adventure are pretty decent, some good even, all mostly done by good (and occasionally great) writers. If anything, I’d say some of the offerings are actually too conservative. Most are very conventional examples of science fiction – they’re often very staid in their mingling of adventure writing with sci fi, adding a drop of fantasy or derring-do here and there into what are for the most part extremely traditional science fiction plots. It feels like they kinda throw the baby out with the bathwater in their attempt to avoid become TOO space operatic, you know what I mean? But, like I said, there’re some fun ones in here, AND I also think they reflect a kind of interesting moment in the genre, and are worth examination for that reason too.

Anyway, yeesh, let’s get to it already: “Keepersmith” by Randall Garrett & Vicki Ann Heydron, from 1979! And look at this cover!

He-Man duel wielding a sword and blaster, some kinda fish guy warrior, a winsome lass, all in a chaotic wild landscape with rocks and ash/sparks flyin’, thrilling stuff huh? Honestly wouldn’t mind the full color cover poster that was, apparently, included with this mag. And the rad illustrations keep on coming in the story itself! Check out the two-page spread the title-page gets:

I like it – the stark black figures and landscape, with detail obscured, really conveys the power and brilliance of the explosion, and sword stuck in the ground while the obvious barbarian-type blasts away with some kinda superscience ray gun is a great dichotomy, really economical visual storytelling – the illos in this story are all by the great Karl Kofoed, perhaps most famous for his “Galactic Geographic” pages that appeared in Heavy Metal magazine, really wonderful work that you oughta hunt up if yer unfamiliar with it. He’s a great artist, and does some nice work here in this story!

The story starts with that odd, italicized entry, like something out of an encyclopedia, describing obvious sci-fi stuff and giving us a glimpse into a world of militarized space warfare between human space navies and spooky evil “Snal-things.” It’s interesting how, at first blush, this basically gives away the game with regards to the story’s plot, especially once you hop into the obvious fantasy-flavored stuff that follows – now we’ve got a weird-named guy with a big muscular body, the obvious product of physical hardship, all written with the kind of portentous tone reserved for fantasy adventures (particularly the capitalized “Man,” obviously meant as a species or racial designation). This is done very deliberately, of course, and I’ll have more to say about it later.

But lets move on! Keepersmith, our big Man, meets some people outside of his Keepershome where, presumably, he forges his Smithswords…stay with me, we get most of this Capital-Letter Noun Fantasy stuff out of the way early on here, I promise. Anyway, Keepersmith is goin’ on a trip, and not merely one of his usual jaunts – he “may be some time” as it were:

The three people Keepersmith has summoned are obviously troubled – this guy is clearly their leader, or at least in a position of authority, symbolized most strikingly by him being allowed to wield what is clearly a sci-fi ray gun, something that lets them “draw iron from stone,” an obviously useful trick in their otherwise barbaric world. They even ask him to leave Ironblaster behind – there’s just the one of it, after all, and without it they’d be unable to get more iron. But Keepersmith is adamant – he’ll need it on his journey. With his stern eyes slitted against the sun, he bids his friends farewell and begins his mysterious journey. It’s all very much the sort of barbarian heroics you’d expect from a sword & sorcery protagonist, isn’t it?

He travels all day and into the night, and we get some more world-building – there’re weird trees we’ve never heard of, and we’re told this place has a double moon, all background flavor that lets us know we’re on an alien world as well as getting us in the right mood for the story. Later, around midnight, he comes across a flickering fire, and sees the strange creature that kindled it:

Every good fantasy adventure needs a Weird Little Guy, and this is ours – Liss, who we quickly learn is a scaly semi-aquatic being called a “Razoi,” natives to this world who have a contentious relationship with the Men (meaning humans; again, we’re in Fantasy Adventure Mode, so you capitalize it for the whole species, like in Tolkien).

We’ll learn more about Liss and the Razoi later on – right now we’ve been shown that it was the humans who taught them the use of fire, and that Liss knows Keepersmith personally. It is, in fact, Liss who has caused Keepersmith to begin this adventure, because he’s found something truly portentous…

The thing that’s summoned Keepersmith southward is the discovery of another, though slightly different, ray gun, stamped (we learn) with “I.S.S. Hawk” on its butt. It was Liss who found this gun; we’ll soon learn he picked up from the body of an enemy Razoi from the south. Liss is excited about this because he absolutely knows what Ironblaster does, how it’s used, and the importance of it to the Men. Keepersmith is also nonplussed by the weapon, although his expertise lets him see that it is actually different, perhaps most strikingly in that this blaster has those two weapon settings on it.

It’s a fun, sci-fi reveal, and it leads into a long block of exposition as Keepersmith and Liss both discuss this new, second blaster, and what it means. But, more importantly, there’s a bit of exposition here that fills out the very important relationship between Liss and Keepersmith, something fairly atypical between the humans and the Rozoi.

This is the heart of the story, and we’ll be coming back to it later. As a boy, and with no inkling of his future, Keepersmith was approached by Liss, who made a semi-prophecy about them and then, basically, proceeds to suggest what amounts to a secret treaty of exchange for peace between the Rozoi and Men in the mountains. Liss wants to learn, and he knows that the secret knowledge kept by the Keepersmiths would vastly improve his people’s lives. And, aside from the political/diplomatic connection that Keepersmith enjoys by having a rapport with Liss, there’s something else deeper there too:

This friendship between Keepersmith and Liss is the heart of the story, and is what makes this an interesting piece. It also provides a prompt for a fun bit of art of the young Keepersmith and Liss:

This background of companionship and alliance explains why Liss 1) recognized the gun as important and 2) brought it to Keepersmith. And it provides a chance for Keepersmith to explain to Liss (and us) the history of Men on this world, and what the gun means.

We learn that the humans have a long and violent history with the Rozoi, first with the southern “dusteater” tribe, and then with Liss’s own northern tribes – there was, basically, a war, where the humans displaced the Razoi and forced them into new valleys up in the mountains – this much is remembered by the Razoi, who have an oral tradition of it, but Keepersmith proceeds to fill in the blanks.

Among the humans, there’re multiple traditions of what the “Hawk” is, but Keepersmith knows the truth – a long-ass time ago, and for mysterious reasons, the Hawk, a spaceship, landed on this world and left a bunch of humans behind, promising to return at an indeterminate time. There would be a signal from the ship when they were to return, and everybody had to be ready to go when it was received. Perhaps this gun is the signal?

Liss leads Keepersmith south, and while they travel for days and days and days, we get a little more exposition that fills in the history of humans and Razoi; we learn about the early trade networks that allowed the humans to survive, and the fact that Ironblaster has allowed them to not only defeat the southern Razoi but also dominate the northern ones. Here we learn a little bit more about what Ironblaster is: it’s a long-range weapon, too dangerous to use up close, that has been adapted by the humans for use in iron extraction. It is also the only remaining example of the Hawk‘s technology, which is (again) why Keepersmith is so interested in this new, second blaster.

We get some techno-exposition too, with Keepersmith secretly dismantling the guns to compare their inner workings, showing that the traditions of his barbarian people run pretty damn deep, actually. But his Sally Struthers’ Gun Repair course is interrupted by a scream!

There’s a fight, and the outcome in anything but certain for Keepersmith – this woman is tall, tough, and clearly skilled in swordplay, and he has a very hard time defeating her. She expects to be killed and meets her fate with defiance and bravery, but of course ol’ Keepersmith merely tells her to sit down and not move while he checks on his friend.

We learn that this woman, Marna, has suffered a recent tragedy. A band of southern Razoi attacked her homestead, killing her husband and little child while she was out; there’s a particularly tragic scene where her kid, six-years old, is found in the dead in the doorway, with his wooden practice sword in his hand. Grim stuff! And it’s why Marna went a little crazy, hoping to get some revenge by killing as many Razoi as she could. Liss is incensed that he was mistaken for a southern dusteater, his own peoples’ ancient enemy. Marna seems unsure of Liss, but her reverence for the Keepersmith, who speaks for the Hawk, leads her to promise to never to harm Liss.

She accepts some food from them and goes to bathe in the stream, and while that’s happening Liss is dismayed to see the “broken” blaster that Keepersmith has disassembled.

What follows is a pivotal scene, a key development that makes this story interesting and worthwhile, and which will be built on later. Briefly, Liss is finally fed-up enough to call Keepersmith on his bullshit. He wants to learn stuff, but the crumbs that his friend Keepersmith has been handing out aren’t enough – fire is nice, but goddammit they want pottery and steel and, even more fundamentally, Writing, which would let them pass down their knowledge in the same way as the humans have done. Keepersmith, who we’ve seen is aware of all this, feels bad and, truthfully, doesn’t have an answer to the accusation, because that is exactly what he’s been doing. Humans have been hording their knowledge as a means of maintaining their power on their home world. Now, confronted with the fundamental unfairness of this disparity, Keepersmith is forced to make a decision.

Importantly, Liss keeps pushing. What if the humans DON’T end up leaving – will Keepersmith STILL keep the knowledge Liss wants for his people secret? Keepersmith squirms a bit – he feels like he can’t make this decision for all humans, that the riddle of steel is one he must consult with the others about, but he vows to teach Liss the secret of Writing, at the very least.

Keepersmith and Liss are joined in their quest by Marna, and they trio continue southwards. While journeying, Marna has some character growth and realizes that Liss isn’t the monster she thought he was, seeing him for the first time as a person, like her (the dusteaters, of course, remain monsters to be slaughtered by both of them…baby steps, right?). Later, there’s a thrilling battle scene where the three of them are ambushed by a bunch of dusteaters; this one is likewise a close battle, with Keepersmith coming close to being killed, saved only at the last minutes by the intervention of Liss and Marna. When the dusteaters try to escape, Liss pursues them into the river, bringing back a captive, which, it turns out, was his plan all along:

Solid fantasy badassery from Liss here, for sure!

The three are led to a rocky series of cliffs and valleys by their prisoner (who is promptly killed by Liss), and the three realize they’ve come across a major village of the southern Razoi. There’re caves and ridges full of ’em, and Keepersmith reckons there’s hundreds of them living here. Some good art, too!

Some good, creepy cave-dweller shit in that illustration, huh? Really makes the Razoi look great and menacing, too. Anyway, Liss points up to a particular cave, high up on the ridge, and explains that, according to his information, there’s an entrance to an “iron room” where the smaller second blaster was found. I’m sure by now you’ve figured out where all this is going, but it’s still fun, nonetheless, and besides, we’re not given much time to think about it, because the trio have been discovered! Marna takes a sling bullet to the noggin and is knocked out! Keepersmith draws his sword and Ironblaster, and Liss carries Marna to safety. The scene is captured in some fun art too, although I wish Marna hadn’t been taken out of the fight so soon – as established, she’s a badass too, and it would’ve been fun to see her chops some heads with the boys, you know?

BUT, what we do get is Liss upgrading his weapon with Marna’s sword, and it IS pretty rad. He’s been studying the way of the blade on his own, it seems, in preparation for one day actually getting to hold a steel weapon.

As established, Ironblaster is no close-combat weapon – it’s too powerful, and at short range would be just as dangerous to the wielder as to the target. Keepersmith puts some distance between him and the southern Razoi, pops the goggles on, and then decides on a desperate and terrible action. Rather than blasting the fighters, he aims up towards where the iron room is, blasting away with the super weapon at the very walls of the valley itself. The terrible power of Ironblaster is on display, some kind of high energy atomic ray that, with blinding ferocity, destroys the cliffs and buries the southern Razoi beneath a zillion tons of exploded rock. The reveal of the blaster results in some good writing here too – the description of the “black sun” crawling up the surface of the rock is great, very evocative of unfathomable atomic power, you know?

And what (besides mass murder of the Razoi) is the result of this awesome display of super science power?

That’s right – exposed by the weapon is a huge metallic surface, the outer edge of some vast structure that was hidden beneath the rocks. Keepersmith knows that this was the mystery he had been sent to solve, and he proceeds alone up the cliff and into the metal thing, the door snapping shut behind him with terrible, grim finality. Liss and Marna know that they can only wait, and watch…

Three days later…

dun Dun DUN!!

I mean, it was pretty obvious, wasn’t it? Not that I mind, of course, especially since that’s not the point of the story at all. But we learn that, of course, this warship came to this world, some soldiers debauched, and while they were away on recon or whatever, a landslide buried the ship. The survivors of the expedition, those who had been on walkabout, just assumed that the ship had left and would, eventually, return, and so they passed down their knowledge and the story of the Hawk, in hopes that their ancestors would one day be saved.

And that’s the end of Keepersmith!

It’s a fun SF Adventure tale for sure, with all the fun super-science+barbarian stuff the genre promises, of course, and the characters a pretty good too – I like Liss, I like Marna, I even like the unflappable Keepersmith, honestly. And sure, the plot itself is telegraphed right from the get-go, but who cares? Because that’s not what the story is about!

I think Keepersmith is a really well-done narrative of decolonization that, importantly, moves beyond the very simple (and fairly common) “oppressor vs colonized” stories. Often, decolonization is portrayed as a simple and outright rejection of everything that the colonizer has brought. You often see this in “decolonize the sciences” movements, where nothing less than the total rejection of western scientific knowledge and practice is to be accepted; this, of course is stupid and destructive. Decolonization is not a return to something old. It is the creation of something NEW, a rejection of bias and oppression and unfairness in favor of partnership and alliance and cooperation, and that’s something very hard and much more necessary than a what a lot of these sorts of stories tend to portray (or people in the real world pursue, honestly).

Keepersmith’s journey to this understanding is really interesting and satisfying, I think – he begins with a sympathy and affection for Liss, after all, but he’s still not internalized the desperate desire of Liss to learn more, not does he understand *why* Liss needs to know more. When he’s later confronted with that (after the fight with Marna), his resolute and hide-bound beliefs begin to crack, and he realizes that there is a reciprocity that he needs to honor. But then, at the end, when he realizes the truth, that Man (as a species) is NOT leaving, that they are now going to LIVE on this planet and are a part of it, he comes to the much greater conclusion that the isolationism and hording that his people have been engaged in is not only wrong, but counter-productive. Liss and the Razoi (at least the northern ones…) have to come together to make the world a better place, as brothers (and sisters).

Now, of course, there’s plenty to be critical of here – certainly a bit of saviorship on display here, and similarly, you can ding the story for the fact that it is only the “right type” of Razoi that Keepersmith is extending the grip of comradeship to…but still, for a story from 1979, it’s a fairly sophisticated and nuanced approach to the subject, and one that rejects supremacy for equality, since it is EVERYONE who will have to learn new and difficult things. In particular, I’ve come across a lot of modern sci-fi where this kind of difficult, complicated conclusion would never be reached; for instance, how many “solarpunk” stories are just brutal eco-fascist fantasies of violent retribution? Here, Keepersmith realizes that Liss was right, that he and his people were wrong, and that CHANGE and equal partnership is the ONLY way forward. Pretty good stuff in my opinion!