Tag Archives: Fiction

Robert E. Howard and Evolution

Having returned from Robert E. Howard Days up in Cross Plains, TX (where I was nominated for but did not win The Hyrkanian award, ah, c’est le awards), I find the ol’ skull is all a-swirl with a lot of REH/S&S these days. I’ll try and space it out (and maybe save some for my annual S&S celebration time around the Yule), but I think I’ve got to exorcise SOME of it now, so today I’d like to talk about a bit of science that undergirds Robert E. Howard’s fiction: evolution.

This was inspired by the 1998 REH biopic THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD, which was screened at REH Days, and which includes a very strange exchange between Howard (played extremely D’Onofriolly by Vincent D’Onofrio) and Novalyne Price (played extremely cute-as-a-buttonly by Renee Zellweger). The scene in question occurs at around the 53 minute mark or so (you can see it right here). The two lovebirds have just had a picnic where Howard tells Novalyne that his mom thinks she must have some “Indian blood” in her, maybe as much as “half Indian.” Novalyne, confused and amused, asks why Howard’s mom had thought that. There’s a cut and the two of them are in the car, with REH taking up the topic:

HOWARD: It’s the shape of your face. Do you know how much Indian blood you have?

PRICE: None that I know of –

HOWARD: I bet you got a drop or two. We are human because our ancestors were human. That’s the one thing that persuades me that the Bible was right. I can imagine a lot of things, but I can’t imagine Man was once a monkey.

Now, there’s a lot of bonkers-ass shit to unpack in that short exchange! Setting aside (for the moment) the weird interest in race and miscegenation (one of Howard’s favorite topics in his fiction), the fact that the movie has Howard say that a) he believes in a biblically informed divine origin for humanity and b) the he “can’t imagine Man was once a monkey” is absolutely crazy, something totally incommensurate with both his fiction as well as many statements in his letters to different people.

When I got back home, I broke out my copy of Novalyne Price Ellis’s One Who Walked Alone, her memoir of her couple-o-years-long relationship with REH, written in 1986 and the source for much of the movie. Perhaps, I thought, the movie had invented the exchange for some strange reason? Afterall, coming out in ’98, the movie would’ve been right smack in the middle of one of the big Creationist waves that periodically sweep this benighted nation – perhaps they’d felt the need to situate Howard, a southerner through and through, within a comfortable southern archetype? But, there on page 150 of my copy of the book (the edition w/ Renee Zellweger on the cover), was the exact lines:

Again: this is insane. There is no possible way to reconcile this statement, that REH was a bible-believin’ Creationist, with the fiction he wrote, where the centrality of evolution is key, not merely to the biological nature of individuals, but to whole civilizations and cultures! Similarly, it is contracted directly by his own words in his letters! So let’s take a look!

The first and most obvious counterexample in REH’s fiction is in the Conan story “Rogues in the House.” This was published in the January 1934 issue of Weird Tales, so it appeared not that far in time from when the weird exchange in the movie is supposed to have happened. In it, Conan is engaged by a patriotic rebel to help kill the vile Red Priest Nabonidus (who is, basically, the scheming and clever Cardinal Richelieu from “The Three Musketeers”). In the course of infiltrating his death-trap of a house, they learn that something is amiss – one of Nabonidus’s servants, an ape-man named Thak, has taken over the compound, dressing in his robes and using his crude but effective knowledge of the various death-dealing mechanisms in the house to kill all comers. When the heroes get their first good look at Thak (via a series of complex mirrors), we get introduced to Thak’s history by the Red Priest:

Later, when Murilo, the rebel instigator, gets a good, long look at Thak’s face, Howard takes the opportunity to further underline the proto-humaness of Thak:

Thak is explicitly portrayed as part of a chain of beings leading progressively towards a kind of archetypal humanity, one that furthermore (and most horribly) suggests to Murilo that humans themselves had experienced just such a stage of life in the distant past. Howard revisits Thak’s fundamental and evolutionarily-informed idea of “human-ness” in the climactic battle between Conan and the ape-man, making sure we understand that this is not merely an ape, but a sentient being close to our own “kind.”

Let us pause briefly to admire Frazetta’s portrayal of this fight in one of his inimitable paintings:

Badass.

The important thing about Thak is that he is explicitly positioned within an evolutionary context – Nabonidus, while certainly a villain, is also portrayed as a deeply and indeed uniquely profound thinker for his age, and we are meant to take his insights into the evolutionary history and potential of Thak at face value. Furthermore, Thak’s ambitions, his wearing of the robe, and his usurpation of Nabonidus in his own home are not mere apings; rather, Thak is possessed of a sense of self and of others that is human-like, a result of his heritage as a kind of developmentally and evolutionarily intermediate man-ape.

This interest in evolution and the deep history of humans in geological time isn’t anything new for lil’ Bobby Howard either – way back in 1925, his very first professionally published story in Weird Tales (“Spear and Fang”) was all about the conflict between Cro-Magnon and Neanderthals. There is no room within a strict, fundamentalist worldview for different members of the genus Homo to be waging war on one another. Interestingly, for all its eventual violence, the story begins with a Cro Magnon character making cave paintings of extinct animals, a scene placing art, an aesthetic sensibility, and an appreciation of beauty explicitly within an evolutionary framework. But, like so many of Howard’s ancient wildernesses, this is no Edenic garden; it’s a savage and brutal landscape where violence and survival are the engines of evolution.

Indeed, over and over again, Howard portrays the past as a grim evolutionary climb, calling out specifically the rise from apedom to semi-apedom and, eventually, full humanity. In fact, taking cues from both contemporary geological literature as well as esoteric theories of human history, Howard makes these events explicitly cyclical – Kull’s Atlanteans rise from apehood into their barbaric splendor, only to be hurled back again down the evolutionary ladder by their Age’s terminal cataclysm; slowly they rise to become fully human again in the fullness of geological time where, it is implied, they become the Cimmerians. Bran Mak Morn’s Picts are likewise a people with a long and troubled past that stretches into prehistory, and Atla, the were-woman of Dagon Moor, explicitly tells Bran that the Worms of the Earth could’ve been people, were very nearly human in fact, when the Picts drove them back into atavism and subterranean degeneracy. This sort of evolutionary thinking is integral to Howard’s fiction, both mechanically as part of plots as well as conceptually, as something key to his worldview.

Howard’s exposure to evolutionary thinking can be traced from two sources. The first is in the books he owned and which, on his death, were donated to the Howard Payne University library by his father. This collection, originally something approaching 300 books, was eventually taken out of special collections and put into general circulation, the result being that there are now less than 50 or so actual books left due to loss, theft, etc. However, a group of dedicated workers over the years have put together the original accession list and chased down references in Howard’s letters, meaning we now have a pretty decent idea of the books available to REH in his home. For more on this incredible work (including a handy history), and to peruse the book list, check out The Robert E. Howard Booklist!

To cut to the chase there’s one book in particular that is extremely relevant on the list: E. A. Allen’s The Prehistoric World or, Vanished Races originally published in 1885. It’s an odd and interesting book, actually; Allen, while an obscure writer now, was a prolific popularizer of natural history, with a particular interest in anthropology and ethnography. The book that Howard owned is a helluva doorstop, 800 pages or so, that begins in prehistory and moves through the iron age in Europe before leaping over to the Americas, with chapters on the Mound Builders, on the Nahua, on the Maya, etc. It’s a remarkably interesting historical document, a snapshot of both the broadly consensus natural history scholarship of the day as well as the then popular “stadial” version of anthropology (a decidedly progressivist and positivist framework that placed “civilizations” in a developmental hierarchy; guess what sort of people were on the top?). Honestly, I suspect this books is enormously important to a lot of Howard’s thinking and writing, but I want to focus on the second chapter “Early Geological Periods.”

This chapter is a kind of speed run through geology and paleontology, giving the reader a thumbnail of 1880s vintage earth science. There’s some great bits in there, especially if you’re interested in the history of geology – this is, after all, a pre plate tectonics world, and so there are some amusing gaps in both the interpretations and the detailed stories. However, this book IS firmly post Darwin (Origin of the Species was published in 1859). That means evolution is front and center:

Like I said, there’s some fun goofy stuff in there – the old-ass taxonomic term “Quadrumana,” a paleobiogeography that predates the Out of Africa model of human origins, and the to-us-now shocking attempts to extend the presence humans back to the Miocene! (just for context, Allen’s work of course predates radiometric dating [it predates the discovery of radiation, in fact] so they’re using a relative chronostratigraphic approach; even so, a Miocene origin is wild! The Miocene *ended* ~5 million years ago, and the oldest extant example of the genus Homo is 2 million years old!) But this section is interesting when compared to the “Rogues in the House” excerpt. Here, a Miocene primate is explicitly stated to have made “a nearer approach to man than any other monkey,” which sounds very much like what Nabonidus said of Thak. Later in the passage Allen refers to a “highly organized genus” (meaning “evolutionarily advanced”) of ape as living in the Edenic Europe of the Miocene. Non-humans “ascending” towards humanness in the fathomless depths of time – this is extremely REH’s bag, you know?

It’s a bit too much to get into now (though it’s a topic I’ll definitely be returning to in the future) but there’s another relevant library in the Howard household that bears on this discussion – his dad’s bonkers collection of esoterica! That Howard was familiar with at least a popular gloss of Theosophical concepts is obvious from his work; the ideas of cyclical catastrophes, of the struggle of “root races” to ascend the ladder of progress over and over again, these concepts out of Theosophy are probably just as important as his understanding of geology and biology. Of course, the reality is that the Theosophists were actually responding to the science of day, drawing their myths and mysticism out of the mid-19th century scientific milieu the same as Allen (and everyone else). Geological catastrophism, deep time, sinking and rising lands (like Lemuria!), comparative religion, all of these ideas were taken out of their scientific and scholarly context and massaged into a new mystical quasi-religion, one that Howard’s dad was EXTREMELY well read in. But that’s for another post!

Leaving the Howards’ libraries behind, there’s an even more direct source for REH’s views on evolution we can tap: his letters! Thanks to the tireless effort of a bunch of editors, we’ve got an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the letters of REH. And, given the voluminousness of his correspondence, there’s a lot to choose from! Let’s hit a big one right away:

Let us consider the insect Man. How many specimens of this creature are willing to believe that they came from the same root stem as the elephant, the garter snake and the leopard? No, they must have a special creative act, a special Divine process to account for their godlike beings – bah, either Haeckel’s right and there is no such thing as a “soul” in the accepted sense or else everything has a soul, whether organic or inorganic. Let the theologians seek to refute the theory of spontaneous generation all they wish – I admit it is rather difficult to grasp in a cosmological sense, but biologically speaking, the scientific world has as a whole, I think, accepted the unicellular theory as a positive fact. The facts boiled down are these: theology must accept evolution both in ontogeny and in phylogeny if it accepts geology.

REH to Tevis Clyde Smith, March 1928, The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, volume 1: 1923-1929, Rob Roehm and John Bullard (eds)

That’s a pretty definitive statement, and one completely antithetical to the quote from the movie. Howard is 100% rejecting a special creation for humanity (and, indeed, for all of life). The “spontaneous generation” he’s referencing is not the “flies from meat” thing you might’ve heard about, but rather the idea of life originating on its own from inorganic matter via natural processes in the deep past. This, in particular, was one of Haeckel’s (many) research interests – taking up a topic that Darwin himself had not dealt with, he posited that highly organized but inorganic matter (like crystals) may have given rise to simple organic life, the “unicellular theory” REH mentions later. Howard is also explicitly rejecting biblical authority on theological matters in this letter too – theologians have to reckon with Haeckel’s biogenic law as well as the reality of Deep Time, rather than the other way around!

The prominence of Haeckel in Howard’s thinking is fascinating, and it’s something I’d never appreciated until I read his letters. He’s easily the biologist most mentioned by REH, and he seems to have seriously engaged with ol’ Ernst pretty heavily at some point (though, in a later letter to Lovecraft, he admits that he’d forgotten a lot of about the details of his work). Presumably, his exposure to Haeckel was in school, where Howard was part of a “science course” which, presumably, operated as a kind of theme or special focus in his curricula. It’s striking the effect it must’ve had on Howard; Haeckel comes up a lot (alongside famous scientific racist Herbert Spencer), whereas Darwin is mentioned only once…in a list of people who have “grasped the cosmic” that also includes Haeckel and Spencer and Huxley. What’s interesting in particular is that in addition to Haeckel’s biological and evolutionary work (he was a major popularizer of Darwin), REH seems enamored of Haeckel’s strange brand of monism, which provides a kind of romantic and pantheistic underpinning to the natural world (in opposition to a strictly materialist view). This same kind of vaguely mystical biology is something also seen in Herbert Spencer, another of REH’s favorite thinkers – he in particular seems to enjoy Spencer’s ideas of the “Ultimate Unknowable,” which much like Haeckel leaves room for some sort of ineffable energy or drive behind the mechanical operation of the universe and life.

Of course, the other things that Howard undoubtably took from both Haeckel and Spencer were their scientific racism and polygenism. Both men were, like many people of the age, eugenicists; Spencer, who as mentioned above was name-checked by REH a lot in his letters, originated the term and idea of “Social Darwinism;” he also coined the term “survival of the fittest,” an obvious and important part of Howard’s philosophy and ethos. Additionally, Haeckel was a vocal and powerful proponent of scientific polygenism, the idea that the various human races arose separately from different ancestors and at different times. In fact, part of Haeckel’s theories about the origins of life, the “spontaneous generation” mentioned in the letter, was that life itself was potentially polygenetic, having arisen multiple times out of inorganic matter on earth. While REH never outright states his support for polygenist views in his letters, the idea is clearly present in his fiction – there are multiple examples of different “races” rising up out of semi-apedom into humanity in his essay “The Hyborian Age,” for example, and the idea is implicit in the way he writes about Thak and the Worms of the Earth. It’s probably also a part of his horror of miscegenation: Howard clearly believes that there is something fundamentally biologically wrong with race-mixing, in addition to the moral decadence that he felt it represented.

It’s worth taking a look at Haeckel’s visual representation of this idea, because it’s a subtle but important point that illustrates REH’s thinking. The below figure is a portion of a plate from the English translation of one of Haeckel’s books, his 1879 Evolution of Man:

A few things are worth noting here: first, the placement of MAN atop the tree, crowning the progressive hierarchy implicit in the history of life. More important, however, is the very subtle way Haeckel conveys his idea that the human races arise out of different ancestors. A forking branch proceeds from APE-MEN, with single branches leading to GIBBON, ORANG, etc. But then look at the MULTIPLE BRANCHES (six of them!) leading into MAN. Like I said, it’s a subtle but very important point with some extremely unpleasant implications, namely that the various races of humans represent distinct biological species arising out of a common ape-man ancestor. It’s foul stuff, but it’s also recognizable as a very common belief among people in Howard’s time, and within Howard’s work; put “Cimmerian,” “Stygian,” “Hyborian,” etc on each of those branches and you’ve got a good representation of Howard’s ideas.

Another letter, this one part of the interminable HPL-REH Civilization-vs-Barbarism running gun battle that they had for years and years, interestingly provides some insight into Howard’s opinion of religious anti-evolutionists. The context of this short excerpt from their (unending and tedious) argument focuses on HPL’s view that REH doesn’t hold artistic endeavors in as high of esteem as he should. Regardless, the relevant section is interesting as regards our topic here today:

Between the fundamental religionist who goes into foaming rages over the idea of evolution, because he can not stand the thought of kinship with a monkey, and the artists who strains his guts to prove his distance from the protozoa, I see no basic difference; both seem outcroppings of the idea concerning the divinity of man.
REH to HPL, September or October 1933, letter 259, The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard Volume 3: 1933-1936, Rob Roehm and John Bullard (eds)

It’s a pretty funny statement; I love to imagine a tortured poète maudit weeping over the need to distinguish themselves from protists in the eyes of the posterity. But it’s also a helluva rejoinder to the weird statement from Novalyne’s memoir and in the movie, isn’t it?

One last letter excerpt, because they’re fun and more people need to read ’em! This one is from a letter to August Derleth, and in addition to its relevance to our discussion here, it is also one of those great examples of REH really playing up rurality for his non-western interlocutors:

A friend of mine was trapping once […] He thought he had a muskrat and climbed carelessly up and stuck his head over the ledge, and there was a skunk in the trap and it let him have a full volley smack in the face […] My friend fell off the ledge with an ear-splitting shriek and rolled on the ground for some time after the exact fashion of a hound-dog […] Nobody could doubt evolution after watching the antics of a man who has just been slapped in the mush by a polecat.
REH to August Derleth, July 4 1935, letter 319, The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard Volume 3: 1933-1936, Rob Roehm and John Bullard (eds)

In addition to just being a funny story, it also shows how, even beyond the eugenicist background of his thinking, Howard’s worldview (and his fiction) was founded on an philosophical framework of what was “natural,” a view informed strongly by a belief in evolution. There’s also present the idea that this “naturalness” reflects the fundamental biological order of the world – a man, for all his sophistication, is no different than a dog when confronted with the same problem (of getting their shit rocked by a pissed-off skunk). There’s really no way to imagine Robert E. Howard without a belief in evolution – the idea is as central to his work and worldview as it is for Lovecraft, and having him question it in the movie (rejecting it in favor of the bible even!) is truly bizarre!

So what’s going in Novalyne Price Ellis’s memoir, One Who Walked Alone and the movie it inspired? Well, there’re a few options, I reckon:

1 – Novalyne Price made it up whole cloth. It’s a possibility, certainly – as described by Bobby Derie the creation of One Who Walked Alone remains opaque, with the author dead and her notes and materials unavailable, leaving us merely with the book. A key motive for Price writing it was to counter negative portrayals of Howard; perhaps she felt a definitive statement of belief in the Bible was important (including a statement of Creationist faith) and so inserted it into the narrative. As far as I can tell, we don’t know anything specific about Novalyne Price’s religious leanings, though she does write about attending church and believing in God (and in everyone’s right to worship God in whatever way they see fit) in the book. But who knows? An older Southern lady writing in the late 70s-80s, she very easily could’ve held Creationist beliefs, and decided to put REH in the camp of the angels. Without access to her diaries and journals, we’ll never know! But this is clearly the very darkest option – it puts her memoirs, as a source of sincere recollection, into *very* shaky, shady territory!

2 – Novalyne Price misunderstood/misinterpreted something REH had said. Reading Price suggests (to me at least) that she *thought* she understood REH better than she actually did. There’re numerous places in the book where she seems to be confused by what is, plainly, REH making a joke or poking fun or being ironical. Additionally, Howard could clearly be kind of a combative asshole, picking at people or arguing for argument’s sake. The exchange in the book is actually a good deal more contentious than is presented in the movie; Howard, at least to my reading, absolutely understands that his mother was talking shit about Novalyne, and he’s getting a kick needling her and watching her reaction (a very common thing in the book). If so, the odd statement about the bible and creationism becomes legible as just more of REH’s situational weirdness, where he’s trying to offer biblical support for his position, knowing that it’d annoy her.

3 – REH said it because he thought it was something Novalyne wanted to hear. Like I said, the discussion around miscegenation that REH and Price are having is a bit of a strange, heated one. Maybe Howard wanted to change the subject, or in the moment felt like he was offering an olive branch by claiming to be a bible-believer (something clearly important to Price, from sections elsewhere in the book). It would mean he was straight up lying of course, since his letters seem to make his position very clear. Also, it’d be an odd moment of him backing down too; he seemed to love scrapin’ and arguin’ with Novalyne in particular!

4 – REH said it because he believed it. The weirdest and hardest-to-swallow option, but there it is. We contain multitudes, and maybe Howard had had a strange religious epiphany. I knew a devout Mormon paleontologist who described his life this way: six days of the week, he believed in evolution and geochronology and the fossil record, but on Sunday, he didn’t. Maybe Howard separated himself from his work like that, though that seems extremely unlikely given the whole “he put a bit of himself into everything he wrote” paean from Lovecraft and all. It’s again also a statement completely at odds with his own words, both fictional and in his letters!

As to which one it is, who the Hell knows? What I think is very certain, however, is that contrary to the statement reported by Price, Howard absolutely believed in evolution. In particular, the concept was central to his whole world view, both in his life and in his work. This is not to say that he had no religion; the scientists from whom he had drawn his understanding of evolution, Ernst Haeckel and Herbert Spencer, were themselves certainly not atheists; both of them believed in a kind of pantheistic drive that, while operating within the realm of the mundane and through the laws of biology and physics, nonetheless held something of wonder and, if not divine, then at least something more-than-mechanistic about it. Given his father’s own unusual religious milieu, something like that, a combination of Haeckelean monism with pop Theosophy, makes a lot of sense. Afterall, Jesus was an Ascended Master in a lot of New Age religious movements, so there’s even room for a (nondenominational) kind of appreciation for the Bible in there.

What there ISN’T room for is creationism – time and time again, the centrality of the concept to Howard’s writing is made abundantly clear. The battle between Cro Magnon and Neanderthal at the dawn of human history, the punctuated cataclysms of Howard’s Atlantis and Hyboria, the aspirational evolutionism of Thak and the thwarted phylogenetics of the Worms of the Earth, all of these are just as much evidence for Howard’s deep commitment to the reality of evolution as are his literal statements of the same in his letters.

The Pulp Carts #46: “The Milk Carts” by Violet A. Methley, Weird Tales, v.19 n.3, March 1932

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Spring has sprung, at least down here in Texas; in fact, there might not be much more of it, since we’re looking at some mid-90s later this week. Regardless, this is one of the lovelier times in these parts, with everything green and flowering, so I thought I’d take a break from work and write up a short, fun, outdoorsy and landscape-o-centric bit of Weird Fic from the March 1932 issue of Weird Tales. Our story today is “The Milk Carts” by Violet Methley!

Methley is an interesting if enigmatical figure. Not much in the way of biographical information on her out there, despite being a fairly prolific and apparently popular writer of children’s adventure novels. At least some of her output was what we’d now consider “weird” – in addition to a couple of short stories appearing in Weird Tales she also wrote a novel about a bunch of Australian schoolgirls hunting for Bunyips. But she must’ve been a fairly versatile writer with wide-ranging interests, because her first published book was a biography of the journalist, revolutionary, and friend-of-Robespierre Camille Desmoulins, which is kind of wild. She’s English, though, and was born in Kent in the late 1800s, a relevant bit of information for this story, I think.

As for this issue of Weird Tales:

Good ol’ C.C. Senf doing the cover, based on the Kirk Mashburn story “The Vengeance of Ixmal,” one of the countless Aztec/Mayan (they played fast and loose with the definition) stories that appeared during the great flowering of interest in Central and South American archeology/history in the 20s-50s. Good example of the lurid exoticism inherent in a lot of these stories, where well-meaning but stupid anglos end up getting menaced by swarthy religious zealots with a mania for liturgical heart extraction.

The ToC is kind of interesting this month:

Some CAS and Quinn on here, they’re what you’d call the Heavy Hitters, and some REH verse too. A solid if unspectacular offering, I’d say, perfectly middle-of-the-road. It’s always good to see the reprint series still going strong, though if you’ll indulge me a minute, I’d like to point out some kind of silly things about this version of Dumas’ werewolf novel. First off, check out this little footnote which has a remarkable density of incorrect things in it:

First off, Le Meneur de Loups was NOT written by Alexandre Dumas fils, but by Alexandre Dumas pere, he of Three Musketeers and Count of Monte Cristo fame (among others). Strange to see Weird Tales get that wrong, especially since the editor here is Farnsworth Wright, who spoke, read, and translated French fluently and was familiar with classic French literature. Another thing that’s wrong about it is the claim that this was the first English translation of the work – it was translated in the 1904 in England! In fact, despite some light editing by Wright himself (and the inclusion of the summaries), the version in Weird Tales IS that translation, by Alfred Allison, though of course the translator is never named or acknowledged! Makes me wonder if the errors aren’t some way to help elide the fact that Wright and Weird Tales almost certainly didn’t pay to publish this translation. Ah well, c’est le pulps!

Anyway, enough perfidy! On to “The Milk Carts!”

We’re well in the back of the magazine, without any illustrations or ornamentation for these (often shorter) stories. A decent summary too, without too much in the way of a spoiler or anything, so that’s good.

A nice, economical beginning – two guys in those baggy, classic golf pants are tromping around the great outdoors. One of them is Seton Croft, golf-course architect, and he’s busy writing notes and making measurements, all with an eye towards turning this stretch of green turf (owned by the bluff fellow who we’ll learn is named Scayles) into a premiere bit o’ golfing!

In particular, it seems like this spot, where these two have stopped and agreed to begin work, is ideal for what Croft is envisioning:

There’s a damn Roman encampment in the middle of these downs! I mentioned earlier that the author, Violet Methly, was born in Kent, and there’s clearly a bit o’ the Kentish countryside in this story, a place rich in Roman history; the initial Roman invasion of Britain started in Kent, and it was always one of the the strongest points of its far-flung colony. It’s a landscape with a deep history that is still visible today!

Anyway, Croft’s golf course musings are interrupted rudely!

I’m a sucker for landscape descriptions, and that’s a particularly nice bit of work about these wheel-track furrows, I think – “the soft skin of the turf” ripped down to “the flesh and bone of chalk and rock beneath” is really good. In particular, I think it really nicely captures Croft’s view of the situation – after all, it’s just some wheel-ruts in the downs, not exactly an open-pit mine or anything, you know? But for Croft, this landscape must be adhere to an ideal, a particularly managed and manicured vision of Golf, artificially and meticulously pristine, and this cart track has no part in it! It’s a fun bit of characterization, and really highlights the centrality of landscape AND land usage in this story.

Anyway, Scayles, the owner of the land, is likewise aghast at this brutalization of the grass, and vows to have it turfed and repaired immediately! After all, he wants this fairway done and opened for golfing by Easter, and Croft promises it will be done!

I really like the little sandbox he’s using to do a scale-model of the project, complete with teeny tiny little flags and everything. A fun glimpse of the way Croft is managing and shaping this land, I think.

But all is not well! Back at the 12th hole, those damned cart tracks have appeared…again!

Scayles vows to make enquiries among his neighbors, but all the various cart-owning locals deny having driven across the greens. After all, it’s not a short-cut to anywhere, so why would they? Still, SOMEONE is wrecking Croft’s beautiful fairway, because shortly after levelling and turfing the ruts…they’re back! Croft and his wife are out looking over the site, when they run across the ruts again!

How great is that, “they plaguey milk-carts” with all their cans a-jangling? Great bit of gnomic mutterings from a weird old guy, classic ghost story stuff. And the idea that the wheel-tracks will ALWAYS come back, that there’s nuthin’ to do about ’em, is a lot of fun. Croft, of course, is still trapped in the mundane world so beloved of golf architects – he and Scayles investigate if there’re any dairies near by, but no dice. So, Croft does the obvious thing – he’s going to stand guard out by the 12th hole and catch the mad cart drivers in the act!

Whisky and sandwiches in the moonlight it is!

Again, this is a very short story, but the writing is economically evocative, I think – love the squeaking critter and the feebly piping bird, really conveys the loneliness of the wide-open rough here. We get another gesture towards the hummock of the Roman earthworks, just to remind us that this landscape is not a primeval wilderness or anything – the Romans were here long before Croft, and they too had modified the landscape to fit their purposes.

Croft’s peaceful vigil is interrupted by a clanging and a clanking – the milk carts have arrived!

Croft is pissed! He hops up, intent on confronting these cart hooligans who keep running roughshod over his golf course!

Tweedy little golf architect Croft is ready to crack some skulls! He’s got a stick, and he yells at the figures, telling them to fuck off (not is so many words, of course)…but the off cart drivers don’t seem to be paying him ANY attention. Furious, Croft grabs at the bridle of the nearest horse…

Those aren’t milk carts at all! Why, they look like…

Roman ghost chariots! How rad is that? They’re still practicing, all these centuries later, in the same spot that they’d chosen for their recreation, the land they’d levelled and modified and built up, just the same as Croft was doing now! With this new realization, Croft heads home and meets his wife:

And that’s the end of “The Milk Carts!”

A short, placid little tale, and much more of a classic English ghost story than what I’d call a “weird tale,” but still, I like it – there’s a surprising amount of depth to it, I think, a kind of interesting meditation on landscapes and history that I really like. Plus, it’s extremely short, and that kind of efficient brevity is something worth studying too. And not everything needs to end in tentacular horror and madness either – I like Croft’s simple “they proved to me that they had a prior claim” and his later enigmatical justification for altering his design around the 12th hole. I like the way this story uses landscape and embedded history to good, spooky effect. And the idea of these spectral Roman charioteers circling their track night after night, especially in a spot that was being transformed into another location for sport and recreation, is a lot of fun!

The Man who Strained Pulp #45: “The Man who Collected Poe” by Robert Bloch, Famous Fantastic Mysteries v. 12, n. 6, Oct 1951

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January 19th, which was last Monday, was Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday, one of the high holy days for weird fiction! Poe, of course, is hugely important, not merely as an antecedent to what would coalesce into the genre of “Weird Fiction,” but also beyond it in the larger world of literature; for starters, just look at the huge impact his work had in other languages once it was translated – Baudelaire’s translations of (and essays on) Poe in the 1850s and 1860s were epochal in French (and Continental) literature, while Konstantin Balmont’s translation of Poe in 1895 ushered in the Russian Symbolist movement. Similarly, Arno Schmidt’s love of Poe, whom he (with Hans Wollschläger) translated and celebrated in his insanely fun (and insanely huge) novel Bottom’s Dream (which is, among other things, a novel about Poe), was an important part of mid-century German lit. There’s Edogawa Ranpo in Japan, Borges and Cortazar in 20th century Spanish lit (preceded by Landa and Alarcon who similarly revolutionized 19th century Spanish literature with Poe as a major factor), I mean, the list goes on and on! Poe was a big deal!

There’s even a fun bit of Poe-in-translation history in the story of Weird Tales – as a college student at the University of Nevada, Farnsworth Wright translated Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” into Esperanto and published it in the Esperantist magazine La Simbolo in the ‘teens! Wright, who would go on to become the single most powerful editor in the history of the genre of Weird Fiction, would often cite Poe as a foundational figure for the genre. And, of course, there’s Lovecraft, for whom Poe was a god; point is, Poe is hugely important to literature, both highfalutin’ AND pulpy, so how about we spend some time reading and enjoying and thinking about a very fun story by Robert Bloch about ol’ Ed A. Poe? It’s “The Man Who Collected Poe” from Famous Fantastic Mysteries 1951!

We’ve talked out little Bobby Bloch before, specifically while looking at “Notebook Found in a Deserted House,” his great Lovecraftian story and one of the few non-HPL mythos stories that rises above homage and pastiche to be something interesting, spooky, and good in itself. Interestingly, that story is also from 1951; in both of those it sort of feels like Bloch is looking back on the great influences of his writing career one last time, waving goodbye to them fondly as he begins to really develop his own voice and style.

What we haven’t talked about, though, is the magazine that this story was published in: Famous Fantastic Mysteries was one of the great sci-fi-ish mags that came around as the genre really got going, a major competitor to Weird Tales. It was first published in ’39, when it was owned by the Munsey company, who had a great backlog of weird- and science fictional stories from it’s older mags, like Argosy, that it decided to exploit. For the first few years of its existence, into the 40s, FFM was mostly a reprint magazine, focusing on classics, but it later got bought by another company (I wanna say Popular, but I’m not 100% sure of that right now, and checking would run counter to the spirit of these off-the-cuff essays!) which promptly changed the policy and began publishing new fiction. Some good writers showed up in its pages, Moore, Kuttner, Arthur C. Clarke, some big names. The editor for its entire run was Mary Gnaedinger, who was a HUGE name in sci-fi back then, famous for her deep knowledge of the field.

Oh, hey, it was “Popular” who bought ’em from Muncey then; you can see that on the ToC, above. Margaret Irwin is an interesting character – she was an English writer most famous for her historical novels, mostly set in Elizabethan times, but she (like so many writers from the UK) also wrote “ghost” stories (a term the brits use to cover both traditional spooky tales as well as what we’d call weird fic, too). You can see, though, that FFM focused on longer work with their reprints – that big ol’ “Rebirth,” originally from ’34, is a hefty un! But, luckily, they filled the nooks and crannies with shorter work, and that’s what we’re looking at today!

I love these little writer’s statements up front of the stories in FFM, fun little glimpses into the processes and how the author views their work. It’s a little odd because, as we’ll see, I don’t think this story really does address the question Bloch raises there (goofy and ahistorical as it is) – it’s not about whether Poe would’ve sold his work today at all, so it’s a little strange to see that point raised here. But what IS fun is that Bloch tells you, up front, that he’s grabbed a LOT of text straight from Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and, by God, he’s right! Here’s the first two paragraphs of this story:

And for comparison, here’s the opening of Poe’s story:

I mean, that’s super fun, isn’t it? What I really like is the way Bloch hangs a lampshade on the whole thing in the story by suggesting that our nameless narrator seems to recognize the whole scene – which of course he would, since he’s a Poe expert who happens to be entering into a Poe(esque) story about all things Poe! It’s fun and playful, which is one of the hallmarks of Bloch’s writing (and why he’s such a good horror writer).

Anyway, we do get a name here, and it’s another deep cut from Poe’s story: Launcelot Canning, who is the fictional author of the fake book (The Mad Trist) that Roderick Usher reads aloud while his sister, Madeleine, is clawing her way to freedom in the tomb beneath the house. As an aside, that part of “Usher” is a lot of fun and is an interesting earlier example of what would become a hallmark of Lovecraft and his circle of weird writers – the inclusion of a fake book in among a some real ancient texts.

Again, Bloch was very sincere in saying he was mining “Usher” directly here – the allusions come thick n’ fast in this story! It makes for a fun read after reading “Usher” honestly, and I’d recommend you do that too! But, anyway, back to the story:

A good weird intro to the character – ol’ Lance Canning here is the world’s greatest collector of Poe-mobilia, something that, while interesting enough to the narrator, isn’t the real hook that reels him into Canning’s orbit. Rather, it is Canning himself, who is just a straight-up oddball seemingly right our of a Poe tale:

I really like that little joke at the expense of people with obsessive interests – the bit about wanting to figure out EXACTLY when Poe first grew a mustache is a funny line!

Anyway, our narrator accepts Canning’s invite out to the ol’ home place in Maryland (the state where Poe died and is buried, an important point to this story). The house is, of course, the Usher mansion, though without moat and tarn, and the rooms are straight outta the story too. Canning is languidly reclining on a couch, and our narrator feels like there’s something forced, or maybe manic, about his greeting, but our guy here just chalks it up to his weirdness. Moreover, he comes to realize that Canning is, literally, a BORN collector:

As a brief interlude, here are the graves themselves in Baltimore, which I visited during a conference in Baltimore a few years ago. This first one is the original monument:

And here’s the newer one, which was indeed commissioned by notable and literary members of Baltimore’s citizenry in 1875 and which necessitated an exhumation and reburial of Poe’s remains:

In particular, it’s this grandfather, Christopher Canning, the one who helped fund the new monument, that built the bulk of the Canning collection. Lance shows off some of the insanely rare and insanely valuable pieces:

This is some fun bibliomania, and the “commingled pride and cupidity” is a great line that really conveys the very specific affect of Canning here. It’s not merely greed or snobbery – it’s a kind of all-consuming obsession, something Poe wrote about often. It’s also fun to see the long list of Poe works here, especially the weird Conchologist’s First Book, which is a real fun deep cut in Poe’s oeuvre. And this obsessiveness seems to run in the family too:

Some fun metacommentary on the kind of mania that can develop around a subject of study, as well as an important part of the story – we learn that ol’ Grandpappy Canning was not above rank thievery to get what he wanted for his Poe collection! Our narrator tries to explain Canning’s grandfather’s truly all-consuming obsession with Poe by asking if there wasn’t some deeper reason behind it? Perhaps the old man thought he’d been related to Poe in someway?

Canning then goes on to talk of his father who followed in Grandpa’s footsteps and became a reclusive scholar and collector of all things Poe, in particular focusing on letters either from, to, or about ol’ Edgard Allan Poe. While Lance gathers these particular pieces, he pours them some amontillado (natch), and the two of them proceed to get increasingly toasted as they look over the collection.

Aside from the fact that the above passages are just good writing, I like the kind of mounting (or, perhaps “deepening” is more appropriate here) intensity here – Canning began with his Grandfather’s collection, a remarkable but still very MATERIAL kind of thing, full of rare and valuable books. But now we’ve moved beyond the man’s work to the man himself. Canning’s father was obsessed with the letters, little glimpses into Poe the person, and that kind of voyeuristic and intimate examination of a person’s life is a very intoxicating thing, you know, just as much as the wine they’re drinking. It ALSO nicely sets up a kind of generational escalation to this Poe obsession that afflicts the family Canning, right? Grandpa was all about the material of the man, his son was getting into the psychology and life of Poe…so what does that leave for the grandson, Launcelot Canning?

A fun little nod in the text there to Arthur Quinn who wrote, in 1941, the excellent and still definitive biography of Poe (you can read the 1960 edition over on archive.org here, btw).

Lance cracks open a chest and shows our narrator the intimate objects of Poe’s life, a helluva collection. And while he’s doing so, Lance seems to be afflicted with a mounting panic or dread, like he’s juuuuuuust barely tamping down some kinda freak-out.

His reserve almost cracks when our narrator asks about a small box in the chest.

So now we’re getting to the details of the hinted-at mysterious death of ol’ Grandpappy Canning. The two of them take a trip (with more wine) into the weird Poe-themed fun-house mansion that is Canning Manor, wandering down a dark hallway and dismal stairs into the bowels of the castle-like edifice before coming to a huge, copper-lined door:

I mean, that’s excellent stuff right there. Love the wildly Poe-flavored rantings of the madman, for one thing – it’s fun to see ’em purely as allusions, but within the text it’s interesting because we, as the readers, can’t be sure WHAT exactly is happening here – did ol’ Christopher’s Poe-obsessed brain break, and THAT’S why his rantings are all Poe-flavored…or is something else happening, something darker and much weirder? We don’t get an answer immediately, but we do get a nice reveal of Christopher Canning’s ghoulishness:

Just wonderful! It’s really fun to use the Real Life exhumation and movement of Poe’s body as the seed for a story of body theft, isn’t it? It also suggests the joke (or a joke, as we’ll see…) behind the title of this piece. Christopher Canning did, indeed quite literally, Collect Poe.

And what of the little box, which he was clutching when they found him mad and raving before the door of the secret tomb of Edgar Allan Poe?

If you’re a fan of Lovecraft (as Bloch was), you might have an inkling of where this story is heading, but if not, we’ll come back to it shortly.

Lance leads the narrator back to the study, where he continues his tale – his Father kept secret the fact that Poe’s corpse lay in the tomb beneath the house, and only told Lance about it as he lay dying. Even so, it was several years before Lance even found the key that would unlock the door to the secret, shameful tomb. And yet, with that key, somehow, Launcelot Canning is confident in stating that now HE, more than his grandfather or father, is in fact the Greatest Collector of Poe! Wait, what’s that now?

The storm builds in fury, and Lance takes up Poe’s childhood flute and begins to play madly on it, in a scene reminiscent of Roderick Usher’s guitar-playin’ while the storm (and his sister) creep upon the doomed house. Seems like a weird scene, but I guess the wine must be good because, rather than gettin’ the Hell out of Dodge, our narrator decides to peruse the bookshelves of his obviously mad host (as you do when you’re in a weird tale):

Oh hell yes. That’s right – this is Bloch before he’d shed himself entirely of his Lovecraftianisms, so of course there’re forbidden books of dark lore and evil magic here…and they’ve been well-thumbed too!

“…what can be summoned forth if one but hold the key.” hmm…

Anyway, THIS is apparently enough for the narrator, who refuses his ninth glass of wine and says he must, at last, be on his way. This panics poor ol Lance, who seems to desperately want to have someone there with him, particularly on this stormy night. Our narrator demands that Canning admit that all this stuff about the stolen body and the tomb and all is a hoax, but Canning says its all real. And, in fact, he can PROVE it:

A very fun reveal – secret Poe stories that no one has ever read! But how can this be?

Super fun, isn’t it? And if it weren’t for those magical Lovecraftian tomes mentioned earlier, you might think that the Narrator has hit on the solution here, right? That Lance Canning, a la Norman Bates (who hasn’t been written about yet) has monomaniacally BECOME the dead person who is the focus of their obsession. Maybe Canning has so steeped himself in Poe that he has, in some mad way, convinced himself that he IS Poe, right?

Well, surely that IS what has happened, right? New paper, one of the stories is dated 1949…clearly Canning is just nuts and thinks he Poe. MYSTERY SOLVED!

But Canning persists in his denial:

A boxful of dust, you say…what does that sound like…

That’s right – this IS a Lovecraftian mythos tale after all! Canning, like Charles Dexter Ward, has used the essential salts of the corpse to REANIMATE the dead!

It’s a pretty fun little twist, and one you might not have seen coming – after all, even knowing that Bloch began his writing life as a Lovecraft acolyte, you might assume that, by ’51, he’d transformed himself into the writer who was more interested in the twists and turns of a fucked-up mind than in weird gibbering cosmic entities from behind. And it’s fun to see him set that up here – the idea that this family, so obsessed with Poe, would eventually produce a deranged member that believed himself to actually BE Poe is a perfectly good bit of weird horror, you know what I mean? But in many ways this is not merely a story ABOUT Poe…rather, it’s a story about the influence of Poe, of the way an older writer can still impact people from beyond the grave. And, of course, Bloch is also thinking about how that influence was felt by Lovecraft, and how he was, in many ways, the grandson of Poe and the son of Lovecraft, at least from a writing perspective. It’s a neat, weird mediation on influence and writerly genealogies!

AND it’s got an undead Poe writing impossibly horrific stories from beyond the grave!

We’re rapidly approaching the end, so of course we start hearing the metallic pounding on the tomb door below echoing through the house!

A chilling image, and a great, horrific concept too: Poe’s new material is informed by concrete knowledge of what he could only have imagined in life. His old published work is merest preamble to the true horror of his undead writings! It’s all so huge and over the top that it really can’t be beat, it’s so much fun!

Of course, Poe has escaped the Tomb and has been making his way up the stairs and through the house towards the study. Our narrator pushes aside the panicking Canning (knocking over a flaming candelabra) and flings open the door!

And that’s the end of Robert Bloch’s “The Man Who Collected Poe!”

This story has some great art with it that sorta kinda gives away the plot, so I’ve saved it for last:

A wonderful piece by the great Lawrence Stevens showing the moment of the revivified Poe’s appearance. I really like the border there, full of little allusions to Poe’s works. A great piece all around!

Obviously, I love this story. It’s just a blast, and you can really see Bloch is having fun writing it, playing with the original text from “Usher,” really relishing the language and vivacity of Poe’s words. But beyond that, I think it’s a really interesting example of a writer very explicitly exploring both their genre in general and those in it who influenced them very specifically. And, not to be schmaltzy, but I think there’s a real affection and appreciation on display here, both for Poe and Lovecraft, writers who were very important to Bloch at one time but whose work he’s moved (and will continue to move) away from as he develops and grows and ages.

And, like I said above, it is interesting to see Bloch musing on his changing interests in his writing – there’s still the Lovecraftian weirdness here, of course, but there’s also a preoccupation with minds and psychology, highlighted both in his own writing as well as in the sections of “Usher” he chose to use. It’s also reflective of Bloch’s deeply Freudian impulse to look his progenitors square in the face and, if not reject them, at least put them to bed. Poe is the grandfather of all horror writers, and for Bloch Lovecraft was a sort of literary father – for Bloch to grow he has to step out of the shadows, otherwise he’d be in the shoes of Launcelot Canning, brooding over his collection, unable to live his own life and write his own work.

Poe is a writer who often suffers from peoples’ assumptions – the idea that he wrote only horrible, macabre, freaky shit is a common one, and tends to color most peoples’ views of his work. But a careful reading of Poe shows, I think, that he’s deeply interested in consolation after the horror, in looking for solace in the face of unimaginable terror and tragedy. And while he’s mostly just a Monster in this story, I think that there is a kind of catharsis here – Poe is, of course, freed at last, but so too is Canning. The conflagration that consumes him and his collection (and its centerpiece, Poe himself) is a cleansing fire, in more ways than one!

The Death of Robert E. Howard in the Pages of Weird Tales

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In the “Thief of Forthe” discussion, I posted Clifford Ball’s brief encomium to REH from The Eyrie, Weird Tales‘s enormously important and incredibly interesting letter section, where readers, writers, and editors wrangled with Weird Fiction and discussed the stories, characters, and aesthetics of the genre. It’s an interesting little letter, mostly because it explicitly couches Howard’s death in terms of the loss of stories that readers would never see (one of the most gratifying types of mourning a writer can imagine, honestly). And ol’ Ball wasn’t alone – Howard’s death really rocked the Weird Tales readership, and elicited a lot of shocked and saddened letters from a lot of fans.

What’s fun about ’em, though, is that these letters offer a really interesting ground-level view of both fandom and the way it mediates genre-ification – in a lot of ways, the death of Howard is a crisis that forces people to reckon not only with his work as it was, but the future of both it and writing allied with it. It’s a fascinating archive!

But, before we dive in, here’s a pic of the Big Man himself, enjoying a refreshing big ass beer:

Howard died on June 11th, 1936, and the announcement was made in Weird Tales in the v 28, n. 2 Aug/Sept issue’s Eyrie:

A short but heartfelt tribute from Wright and the Weird Tales staff, highlighting both his imagination as well as his dedication to his craft (something that would get lost in certain later reevaluations of his work; much like what happened with Lovecraft, there were certain parties later on interested in portraying both of them as being weirdo savants who, by accident rather than careful work, produced important and interesting fiction). I’d also point out that, right away, we begin to see certain inaccuracies creeping into the Official Biography – REH did not attend the University of Texas. He took business courses at Howard Payne College, a private Baptist college in Brownwood, TX. By the way, one of those posthumous stories promised in forthcoming issues of Weird Tales included what many consider to be his very best horror story, “Pigeons from Hell.”

The next issue of Weird Tales, v 28, n.3 October 1936, had further semi-official remembrances of Howard’s life and work published in the Eyrie, this time from his friend and voluminous correspondent HPL, as well as E. Hoffmann Price, who actually met him in person:

The Lovecraft excerpt is a pretty important one, I think, and sort of sets the tone for the way Howard has entered the annals of weird literature. His line about Howard having “put himself into everything he wrote” is key, and a point HPL would make over and over (it forms the center of the long in memorium he wrote for the fanzine Fantasy in their Sept 1936 issue too). The idea that Howard was deeply engaged with his writing, producing art even in spite of the commercial conditions, is high praise from someone like HPL. Too, I think both he and REH shared a deep appreciation for their roles as REGIONAL authors, people interested in their specific environments and backgrounds and what it meant for them as both people and writers. And there’s certainly something to HPL statement that Howard had a “unique inner force and sincerity” in his work – read Kuttner’s Elak story or Ball’s Rald stories and you have to admit that, no matter how fun and possibly good they are, there IS certainly something missing from them.

Also interesting is the appearance (and misattribution) of REH’s death poem there. It’s a bit of a convoluted story, and I’d point you towards Todd Vick’s biography of REH “Renegades & Rogues” for more detail, but it became a major part of REH’s mythology, a suitably literary (and barbaric) poem to mark his passing.

Even more interesting, though, is that the Eyrie is still working through fan letters from people who had written them before they’d known of REH. Take, for example, this letter from Irvin Gould of PA, asking about a map of Conan’s world:

An interesting letter that sheds some light on the way people were reading and enjoying Conan – they love the hints and callbacks and history peppered throughout the stories, suggestive details about the larger world and deeper lore that imbued Howard’s writing with such vitality and sincerity, and want to know more about it! Specifically, they want a damn fantasy world map! While something like that is de rigueur in fantastic fiction now, back then it was a pretty novel request, I think. I know that there were maps in Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mine novel, for instance, and the Oz books famously had fantastic maps, but it’s fun to see people yearning for fantasy cartography because of the stories themselves and the sense of the scale and sweep of Howard’s vision. And maybe even MORE interesting is Mr. Gould’s recognition that asking for such concrete canonicity from weird fiction might not be appropriate! It’s a fun glimpse into the way READERS were engaging with both weird fiction AND Howard’s work particularly, navigating new genre conventions.

In this same issue there’s also a letter from the famously idiosyncratic fan, Gertrude Hemken. These letters from “Trudy” would become a beloved part of the Eyrie, mostly because she wrote in an absolutely delightful and totally fannish style – they’re a lot of fun, and it’s always fun to run into her in the pages of Weird Tales. Anyway, in the midst of a longer letter, she has this to say about Howard (unaware of his death, of course):

“So-o-o happy. I could gurgle!” should be the blurb they use on any and all Howard books henceforth. But it again speaks the clarity with which Howard presented Conan to the readers – he’s instantly and clearly defined, and folks like what they see!

The November 1936 issue (v. 28 n.4) includes the first fans letter reacting to the death announcement from a few issues back.

This letter’s request for a reprinting of his “best stories” as selected by the WT readership isn’t a bad one, honestly, and shows that, while the pulps were an ephemeral medium, there was a real desire to ensure that their contents lived on and were accessible to readers new and old alike. Later, in the same letter, Hopkins has an interesting thing to say:

It’s an interesting daydream: “The Death of Conan the Cimmerian!” And this musing about what could’ve been, and the extension of the character’s adventures beyond the pen of the creator, is an interesting seed that we’ll see explored more in later letters.

But the desire for a collection of Howard’s work was a common one:

I wonder if Clark’s personally bound collection of Conan stories exists in some attic somewhere?

The December ’36 issues (v. 28, n.5) is mostly dedicated to wranglin’ about the covers and whether they’re too risqué or not, but that leads into an interesting letter from Robert Lowndes about the artistic representations of Conan in The Unique Magazine:

It’d be worthwhile collecting these all together and doing a careful interrogation of each, but there’s no room (or time!) here for it…maybe later. I will grab the Rankin piece that Lowndes speaks so highly of, though, from the Jan 34 issue:

I find the sexualization of Conan by readers (and, to be fair, by Howard) hugely interesting, so the way this letter-writer highlights what it was the women found so damn hot about Conan in the stories is pretty fascinating!

I’ll just highlight one more prescient letter about REH from this issue, by the great Clark Ashton Smith:

The next issue, Jan 1937 v. 29 n.1, opens with Wright reflecting on the “necrology” of Weird Tales:

It’s a sad editorial, particularly in the way Wright’s hopes that no one else will die are pretty quickly about to be dashed. But, as he said, they’ve been getting a lot of letters about REH, and this issue includes some very fascinating ones!

I mean, that’s fascinating, isn’t it? Can’t Weird Tales find someone else to keep writing Conan for them? What a wild question, and I can’t think of any precedent for it at all, can you? On the one hand, there must’ve been fairly widespread knowledge that some “writers” in the pulps were house names with lots of different individuals contributing stories under them (a fairly common practice in particular in the western pulps), but the idea that a writer as singular as REH could be replaced is a wild one. On the OTHER hand, though, weird fiction DID have shared universes, if not shared characters – what is Lovecraft’s Mythos but a shared world with the same gods and aliens and dark books showing up in different stories by different authors? Is that the model this letter writer is drawing from when they talk about Conan continuing without REH? I think you have to give credit to Wright here, who very clearly and definitively answers that no one can write a Conan story except Howard…something later paperback authors should’ve kept in mind, in my opinion!

This same issue includes the Ball letter that we talked about in the last Pulp Strainer blog post, and while Ball certainly isn’t asking for someone else to write Conan stories, as we discussed there is a clear expression of the desire for more stories LIKE Conan’s.

Skipping ahead a couple of issues to March ’37 (v. 29 n.3) we get another plea for a book-length collection of Howard’s work:

These calls for a collection of Howard’s work to be published are pretty insistent, and it’s a shame that Weird Tales got so brutally burned on their one and only book publishing adventure (The Moon Terror) that they couldn’t do something with Howard’s work. Derleth’s Arkham House would, in ’46, put out Skull-Face and Others in 1946, complete with a badass Hannes Bok cover:

This book included some good Conan stories, but it wouldn’t be until the Gnome Press paperbacks of the mid-50s that you’d see a dedicated Conan series. Interestingly, those same Gnome Press editions would see just the sort of “Continuing Adventures of Conan” pastiche stories that (some) people were DEMANDING in there letters:

People LOVED Conan man, and that’s all there is to it. Howard had made something new and exciting, had carved out a real niche for himself in weird fiction, and the idea that there wouldn’t be any more Conan stories was a hard pill for some people to swallow. It’s interesting that everyone is explicitly couching these as more CONAN stories…they don’t want imitations, they don’t want other characters by other people, they want CONAN doing CONAN things. In some ways, then, it’s actually quite laudable that people like Kuttner tried to do SOMETHING a little different, even while trying to reverse engineer REH’s own unique approaches to his stories. Also, again, I think you have to salute Wright’s firm “nope” here too – he has a very clear aesthetic vision for weird fiction, and it doesn’t include the bloodless imitators of an inimitable writer like Robert E. Howard.

In the next issue of the Eyrie (v29 n.4) Wright publishes a letter from H. Warner Munn, a Weird Tales author famous for his “Werewolf of Ponkert” story, which was a favorite with readers, that really offers the Last Word on whether Conan should have further adventures written by other people:

Pretty succinctly and strongly put, I’d say, and a position I support. Wright obviously thought so too, and even seems to have used Munn’s letter as the punctuation on the chapter of Official Mourning for Howard. In the next issue (May 1937, v. 29 n.5), there’s only a single, passing mention of “the late Robert E. Howard” in one of the letters, and it’s clear that they’re turning the page on the sorrowful demise of a beloved author…

…and then, in v.29 n.6, the June ’37 issue of Weird Tales:

Goddammit!

With regards to REH, I think there’s something really interesting in getting to read these letters from readers of his stories; you can see the huge enthusiasm for his work and his creations, Conan in particular, a real glimpse into the phenomenon that would become fantasy literature in general and sword & sorcery in particular. There’s a little tinge of sadness here, though – you can only hope that Howard had a sense of just how beloved his work was while he was still alive. Writers are a touchy, morose lot in general, given much to self-recrimination and disappointment, often absolutely certain that they’ve wasted their time and largely failed to achieve what they wanted to with their work. It’s something REH certainly struggled with – his letters include many gloomy reflections on his work and the struggle of writing, even when he’s arguably at the height of his career. It’s something people always talk about, but it bears repeating: if there’s someone out there whose work you like, tell ’em! Even something as simple as a nice note can mean a lot to someone, and you never know when it’ll be too late to tell them!

There’s also something extremely valuable to be had by reading these letters in the Eyrie, I think – they’re such a rich archive of READERS and their reactions to/thoughts about the stories and authors and genre as a whole. In the wake of REH’s death you really start to see the way they were ENGAGING with his work, and with Conan in particular, and it’s a real granular way to interrogate the formation of what would, eventually, become “Sword & Sorcery.” There’s ALSO a really interesting tension between what people want (more Conan!) and what they would eventually get (some pastiche-y early attempts by Kuttner, for example, and then Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser – but not in Weird Tales, of course…).

Some other stray observations – it’s interesting how CONAN focused the readers’ letters generally are, isn’t it? I mean, there’s other stuff mentioned for sure, but the Cimmerian is front-and-center, and it’s his adventures that people are clamoring for more of. Partly that’s got to be simple chronology – after all, Howard’s death is announced with “Red Nails,” one of the best Conan stories of all time, and there’d been a lot of Conan recently too, while his other characters like Solomon Kane and Bran Mak Morn hadn’t appeared for years. But there’s something about Conan’s special alchemy at work there, I think, and particularly the sense of a real, lived in, vital WORLD around him that just grabbed readers.

Finally, I’d point out how often people with talent and knowledge would point out just how inimitable Howard was as a writer. Wright is very firm in his explanations about why there’d be no more Conan stories by other people – he was a singular talent writing singular tales, and no one else could do them. Similarly, I think HPL’s oft-cited “there’s a piece of Howard in every one of his stories” is a perfect way to capture the kind of ineffable qualities of his work (and HPL’s, for that matter). It’s easiest recognized by its absence in, for instance, Kuttner’s S&S work, and really underlines the absolutely necessary quality of a writer finding their authentic voice if they want to produce art. For all the problems with Howard’s work (and there’re a lot!), the one thing you can absolutely say is that they are the products of a writer who was absolutely sincere in his efforts at communicating the things he thought were important and interesting. That he succeeded is shown by the many heartfelt letters we see in The Eyrie.

Straining the Folk Horror Pulp #39: “The Wishing-Well” by E.F. Benson, Weird Tales v14, n.1, 1929

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Hallowe’en eve, so why not take a break from building your wicker men or hanging thorny wreaths from the old Druid Oak to read some more pulp weird fic! And it’s a fun, haunting one today: “The Wishing-Well” by E.F. Benson, from the July 1929 issue of Weird Tales!

Looking back at the previous Hallowe’en flavored Pulp Strainers this time around, it kind of seems like I’ve been on a Classic Monsters kick, for the most part. Ghosts and Vampires and scary Subway Ghouls; it’s been a regular mash, or perhaps bash, around here. And who am I to buck against the momentum we’ve been building up? So, having reflected on the previous stories, I decided I wanted to do a witchy one today, and after careful consideration (’cause there’s a LOT of ’em out there!) I landed on this story by E.F. Benson, a particular favorite story from a particularly good writer.

Now, I’m a weird fiction guy – I love it strange, I love it confusing, I love the peek through the crack in reality that the genre strives for. So what the heck are we doin’ focusing on TradMonsters like ghosts and witches, you may be asking? I mean, didn’t Lovecraft chuck all the tired old cliches out the window? After all, as the Old Gent said, Weird fiction is “more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule.” So where do these matinee monsters fit in?

Well, Lovecraft actually kind of answers that in the very next sentence in his “Supernatural Horror in Literature” essay: successful weird fiction is characterized by a “certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces.” In other words, the problem isn’t yer wolfmans and draculas per se…it’s the hackneyed and trite conventions around them that turn a horror story into a dull, rote recitation of banal familiarity. Even the most overused horror mook has SOME kind of vein of weirdness that can be mined – take Lovecraft’s own “The Dreams in the Witch House,” complete with a cackling crone and satanic pacts and sabbaths, and you’ll see that it is possible to take a stock Halloween character and turn them into something interesting and strange and truly weird. And I think that’s the case in today’s story too, which takes a very thoughtful and modern approach to witchcraft.

Which is par for the course for our author today. E.F. Benson was a writer not only of spook-em-ups, but of “society” literature, essays, and biographies as well – he was extremely prolific, with hundreds of short stories to this name. He was also gay, a fact that is relevant when reading his work, which often have either subtextual gay relationships in them or, more broadly, deal with themes of romantic and social alienation. There’re a lot of outsiders in his stories, particularly in his ghost/horror/weird stories, as we’ll see shortly.

While he’s fairly well represented in anthologies, particularly those published in England, he’s probably most well known today among weird fictioneers because Lovecraft singled him out for specific praise in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature:”

That’s high praise, and well deserved, I think; Benson could, when he wanted to, get pretty weird, occasionally producing some truly otherworldly and alien monsters. The weird Hell Slug in “Negotium Perambulans” would be a worthy addition to the mythos, I’ve always said (and it seems like it was a huge influence on Brian Lumley, who had a darkness generating extradimensional slug in some of his Titus Crow stories).

But, even when ol’ Benson WASN’T going all cosmic, I think he still had a streak of the Outside about him, you know? Even in his most conventional ghost story, there’s always a hint that there were deep shadows both within people and outside in the wider world, and I think that’s what I like about the story we’re going to talk about today.

But first, lets take a peep at the cover and the ToC!

An excellent Senf this time, very weird and menacing. Love the corpse-white lady contrasted with the riot of colors, and the sneaky lil’ feller on the left, leering and with dagger drawn, is fun – it’s all very lurid and decadent, a perfect Weird Tales cover in my opinion. As for the ToC:

Quinn and Whitehead are probably the Big Names on here if you were a fan in ’29 reading the magazine – both of them were popular, though they can be tough reading these days (Whitehead because of the uncomfortable paternalism and exoticism of his “voodoo tales,” Quinn because the Jules de Grandin stories are just not that good). There are some interesting oddities in here, though! Hamilton writing a “planet story,” the sort of thing that would eventually get shifted over to the science fiction pulps once they get a little more firmly established. There’s the poems, including some vintage REH, but there’s also a very strange little story by Lt. Edgar Gardiner, “The Cruise of the Vega,” which is an enjoyable little bit of metafictive fun, ostensibly an essay written by Gardiner about his hugely lucrative and wildly popular novel “The Cruise of the Vega” (which isn’t real, of course) and the REAL story of how he came by the tale. It’s fun, and speaks both the inventiveness of writers at the time and the fact that the genre has always been playful about itself and the writing profession.

But enough! On to the story!!

A great title illustration by the inimitable Hugh “Doak” Rankin! It’s a great, atmospheric piece, beautiful shadows and light, and the slightly translucent specter getting smooched, coupled with the creepy line from the story, is basically perfect. Points also for not giving anything away in the story! Rankin was one of the big interior illustrators, and did important work on Lovecraft and Howard stories, among others, so it’s fun to see him here too!

Our story opens with a very Dunwich-ian geographic summary, situating us on the Cornish Moors and in the tiny, out-of-the-way, remote little village of St. Gervase. People don’t come to the town, and those in the town seldom leave it. It’s mostly cut off from the world, and the people of St. Gervase like it that way:

Yes indeed, it seems there was, and perhaps still are, followers of The Old Ways in town here, hedge witches and wise women, part of a long matrilineal tradition of secret knowledge. Of course, every light casts its shadow, and for all the healing and wisdom, there’s also a darker cast to these powers, a tradition of affliction and evil that is, apparently spoken of only in one house in St. Gervase. And what house is that?

That’s right, St. Gervase has a very M.R. Jamesean vicar, a bookish and independently wealthy scholar who, in between some light preaching and bake sales, has become an academic authority on magic and folklore and witchcraft.

What’s fun about this character is that, while he’s this vaunted authority on witches who lives in a town with a vibrant and apparently thriving witch scene, he’s curiously removed from the living tradition in St. Gervase. He knows of the history of the town, and even apparently has some reports from locals on older traditions, but (as we’ll see) he is one of those academically informed types who can’t seem to see the forest for the trees. His patriarchal (and paternalistic) view of the world has cut him off from the cultural underground that is, quite literally, all around him.

But you know who IS making use of all of the Good Reverend’s research? His spinster daughter (she’s 40, and unmarried) and unpaid research assistant, Judith!

There’s some fun writing, just above this except, where Benson is taking pains to really situate Judith in the Cornish landscape of St. Gervase. He’s also interested in taking pains to explicate her complicated relationship to the town and the people and her own life – she has been isolated “from her own class” and, therefore, never had any serious prospects for marriage or a life outside of her Father’s home, and while that has (and does) engender some bitterness in her, for all that she IS in love with the town and the land and the strange undercurrents of older, matriarchal traditions and knowledge (as we’ll see).

The bitterness in Judith might be stronger than even she realizes, however – without putting too fine a point on it, Benson takes some pains to really show how Judith is absolutely fascinated by the darker, more retributive side of the magical lore that her old dad is researching. And now, down through the months and months, she was taking dictation from him on his researches about wishing-wells, and in particular, the famous Well of St. Gervase!

Rev. Euster’s helpfully expository declamations tell us that the best and most famous of these strange, satanic wells is in St. Gervase and that its power is still respected, though of course no one in town actually uses it these days. With regards to this, however, Judith knows better:

The shift from the landscape to the Reverend and then, finally, to his daughter Judith as the main character of the story is a neat little trick, a very fun way to sink the reader deeper and deeper into the story, as well as providing a sense of nice, comfortable disorientation, which of course is one of the pleasurable aspects of weird fiction. The uncertainty of the direction of the story, even as we begin to get little glimmers of familiar witchy-ness here and there, is an extremely masterful touch, part of Benson’s strength as a writer.

Judith, her head full of her father’s research of wishing-wells, heads on out into the countryside to visit a particular acquaintance, a Mrs. Penarth, who we quickly learn is something of a wise woman, indeed may have been The Wise Woman in St. Gervase, because in addition to her fame as a healer, also seems to have been the only person in town not afraid of Old Sally Trenair, the spooky witch we were introduced to earlier. In fact:

We also learn that Mrs. Penarth has a strapping son named Steven who has just returned from overseas. Judith remembers him as a boy, and is interested to see the kind of man he’s become, though the main reason for her visit is to pick the brain of Mrs. Penarth about the scholarly materials she’s been learning about at her father’s side.

On her walk there, Benson gives us some good description of Judith who, for lack of a better word, sounds hot as hell:

I call out this particular bit of description for a couple of reasons. First, it’s interesting to see Benson making sure we’re not thinking of Judith as mousy or shabby or a shrinking violet – she’s tall, she’s robust, she’s vital and active and sharp. That’s important to the story because otherwise, if she were this drab little thing, the tale becomes rather conventional and uninteresting. Instead, there’s a real sense of Judith as a forceful personality with an, if not imposing, then at least vibrant presence. Also interesting is the bit about the eyes – the slight inward turning as both a physical AND mental aspect, and not as a disfigurement, but rather as simply a part of who Judith is, warts and all.

The second reason I bring it up is because, as a writer myself, I generally eschew descriptions of characters (except for my villains, who are almost uniformly towheaded aryans) because as a reader I usually find them boring and pointless. Here’s a good example of a description used well, though – Benson is DOING something in the story with Judith’s physical description, in the same way as he was DOING something with the shift from the landscape of St. Gervase to the Reverend to, finally, Judith. It’s a very neat writerly trick, and speaks to Benson’s mastery.

Anyway, Judith arrives at the Penarth’s and find Mrs. Penarth knitting (a perfectly witchy activity, putting together the threads of fate and all) on her front steps.

Good bit of Cornish cadence, I reckon, and an immediate sense that Mrs. Penarth is as wily and cunning as we’ve been lead to believe – the bit about being hatless and making friends of the sun and wind is just perfect. And then, to really hammer home Judith’s somewhat protean nature (and her need to belong), we get the next bit:

It’s already been mentioned that Judith is of a different class than the native St. Gervasers; it’s why she never married, after all, and you can bet that the Ol’ Rev never slips into a Cornish accent around the house.

Judith’s mentioning of the death of Old Sally Trenair brings up a sly remark from Mrs. Penarth:

Perfect, perfect, perfect; just such a smooth and unobtrusive way to paint Mrs. Penarth as knowing certain things and secrets, and seeing in Judith a similar yearning. It’s really great. And, of course, it also efficiently serves the interests of the story, for we get another bit of exposition about the Well, though unlike the removed and scholarly musing of her father, Mrs. Penarth knows of which she speaks:

Mrs. Penarth’s quick-n-dirty user’s guide to wishing-wells is interrupted by the arrival of Steven, and goddamn if he didn’t grow up hunky as hell. Judith is immediately smitten with this big blonde slab of corned beef. Between her learning some pretty startling things about the Wishing-Well in town and meeting Steven Penarth, her brain is all a-bubblin’ like a witch’s cauldron.

After an evening of dictation, she takes a nighttime walk through the village, the air sultry and the sky overcast. She gets a little thrill when she catches sight of Steven walking into town. When he’s out of sight, she turns into the churchyard where the wishing-well yawns in the dark. Beyond it, she catches sight of Sally Trenair’s freshly filled grave:

The spirit of the old witch IS there, “friendly and sisterly and altogether evil.” I mean, how is that for a turn of phrase, huh? Helluva writer, ol E.F. Benson, and the way he’s building this atmosphere of mystery and deep, earthy magic, it’s just really incredible, isn’t it? Judith drinks from the occult well, and is granted a glimpse of the ghost of Sally:

Judith’s fear seems to banish the ghost, and the horror of her vision of the dead haunts her for a few days – she seems to be both annoyed that she, perhaps, squandered her chance to commune with something powerful, and also a bit trepidatious about her glimpse beyond the veil.

She throws herself into the banalities of day to day life in order to find some respite, and in particular begins to make subtle efforts to come into contact with Steven Penarth, making sure she’s out gardening when he delivers milk, for instance. As music director of her father’s church choir she starts singling out Steven for praise, and also seems to have taken a jealous dislike to a pretty young villager by the name of Nance. Judith takes to calling on the Penarth farm more and more, no more merely seeking Mrs. Penarth’s witchy wisdom but also hoping to catch Steven at home. It’s clear that Judith thinks she’s being very clever and discrete, but Benson makes sure we get the hint with a phrase rich with double meaning: “In a hundred infinitesimal ways she betrayed herself.” Because not only is she being insanely obvious with her infatuation, but she is also, step by step, moving towards Doing Something about it:

Judith makes her way to the churchyard and the Well, but just as she arrives she comes across something Fateful:

Oof, right? Sad stuff, and embarrassing as hell too, to find out that all your clever dissembling was seen through immediately. The part about Mrs. Penarth laughing at her is particularly bitter, isn’t it? And then, to hear Steven propose marriage to Nance after all that? Well, it’s a grim moment for poor ol’ Judith.

Grim and spooky stuff! Judith takes the slip of paper to the churchyard and the wishing-well, and feels the tide of her power rising:

I mean, what a great bit of writing, murky and grim and just freighted with occult power, isn’t it? The ghost that appears before her now is a rotting, decayed thing, appropriate for the use to which Judith plans to put its power. And how about that smooch that seals the deal? Honestly an incredible image!

Say what you will about the dark powers of the earth, but they fuckin’ deliver, man! Right away, next morning, it’s not Steven who delivers the fresh produce to the vicarage, but his mother, Mrs. Penarth. Seems poor lil Stevey is feeling a bit under the weather, real shame that, what with his marriage to Nance coming up and all.

Judith had leaned into her Evil Sorceress phase, but we the reader see the fatal flaw in her plan – as we learned, there were Two witches in town, and the stronger of them is not only still around, but also the mother of Judith’s victim. Oh, and also, SHE WAS THE ONE WHO TAUGHT YOU ABOUT THE POWER OF THE WELL!!! So, of course, as a canny and wise witch, Mrs. Penarth lies in wait in the churchyard, to see if someone hasn’t been screwing around with forces they can’t comprehend.

Steven is almost immediately better, while Judith, with similar alacrity, starts wasting away. She feels the dark power that had filled her being drained away too, taking her life with it. Even the ghost of Old Sally is taken from her, leaving her weak and alone and dying. Steven is back to delivering the milk, and asking after Judith’s health on behalf of his mother. Judith doesn’t understand what’s happening – has she missed some important step in the spell, or failed to fulfil some expected action, and that is why she is now being afflicted by the curse she had laid on Steven. Only one thing for it – gotta check on the well, and the slip of paper she had put there. Stumblingly, she makes her way to well, and when she gets there, she finds Mrs. Penarth!

And that’s the end of “The Wishing-Well” by E.F. Benson!

Potent stuff, huh? Mrs. Penarth’s vengeance is swift and terrible, something poor ol’ Judith might’ve expected given the well known history between her and Ol’ Sally. And while sure, she DID try to kill someone through dark sorcery, you can’t help but feel a little bad about Judith’s end, you know? The solitude and longing and shame of her life – Benson makes us see all that, makes it a deep part of Judith’s being, and there’s a real pitiful quality to it. Particularly so, now that I think about it, because as was established at the beginning of the story, witchcraft was a passed down mother to daughter, a tradition of secret knowledge held by women; Mrs. Penarth had a son, though, so to whom was she expecting to pass on the wisdom and power of the strongest witch in St. Gervase? Sure does seem like she was maybe sounding out poor Judith for the role, doesn’t it, the way she was quick to spot something intriguing in her questioning and the way her mind worked, as well as her willingness to share the lore and traditions with her. It kind of explains her obvious anger at Judith – not only has she attacked her son, but she also has betrayed her, trying to use the little knowledge she had been given in such an irresponsible and dangerous way.

The view of witchcraft in fiction today is almost uniformly a feminist one, and there’s a strong thread of that in this story from 1929: witchcraft as a tradition of women of course, but also in the way Judith, though seemingly content, has been denied a full life by the patriarchal class-based rigidity of society. Furthermore, the breakdown of the relationship between Judith and Mrs. Penarth, one that would have had full consummation in the sharing of witchy tradition, is brought about by the advent of a conventional marriage, with Judith trying to corrupt it and Mrs. Penarth trying to preserve it.

This feminist reading of witchcraft is one taken up by a lot of modern “folk horror” (a term I’m not enamored with, but oh well), which makes for an interesting tension because, of course, the other major axis in folk horror is almost always something along the line of Deep Tradition. That kind of battle between empowerment and traditional gender roles makes for some unique frisson in works of that sort, and I think that’s something at work here – Judith’s desire for liberation undone by her rage at the most conventional expression of heteronormativity.

Benson’s interest in women and their role in society is well documented; his novel “Dodo” (and its sequels) is all about an Edwardian proto-flapper spitfire and the ways one can twist and wiggle through society’s hoops to get what one wants. There is some biographical aspect to this, I reckon; as mentioned above, Benson was gay, but ALSO of a social and economic class that, while not necessarily allowing him to live openly, did give him a certain freedom to quietly and politely live his life without being arrested. In other words, he wasn’t exactly closeted – it was more of a don’t ask, don’t tell kind of gentlemen’s agreement where everybody (within that stratum of society) knew he was gay but had the good taste not to mention it, and he reciprocated by not wearing it on his sleeve.

This kind of fluidity and ambiguity is something that Benson explores in a lot of his fiction, and it makes this particular story an interesting one – he’s really captured something in Judith’s lonely outsider status, a woman seemingly resigned to her life rather than liberated by it. There’s also a simple parable about the destructive nature of both sexual inexperience and infatuation here – in a lot of ways, Judith is an incel, isn’t she? She’s been forced (by society) into spinsterhood, and then when her affection isn’t reciprocated, she fuckin’ tries to kill the guy with evil magic!

The sheer amount of off-the-cuff musing going on here just speaks to how great of a writer Benson is, I think – his stories are always full of interesting little threads and diversions, stuff you can mull over and pick at and think about long after you’ve finished reading, the sign of great fiction. And on a mechanical level, he’s worthy of emulation too, I think – the deftness of his characterizations, the structure of his plotting, the way he sets a scene and efficiently cuts through to the heart of the matter with a short, sharp line, all of it is just spot on. Too, his ability to construct legitimate bit of witchcraftiness without getting bogged down in detail is admirable. He’s one of my favorite writers, and I think this witchy little tale is a great bit of weird fiction, and a good way to celebrate Hallowe’en!

Sowing the Pulp, Straining the Whirlwind #38! “The Scythe” by Ray Bradbury, Weird Tales v.36 n.12, 1943

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We’re in the home stretch for Hallowe’en now, so lets try and get some good chilling pulp fiction discussions going on, shall we? It’s nice here in Austin now, too – we finally got some rain, our first in like forty days, and in addition to filling up the rain tanks (we’ve got about 950 gallons of water storage now, which we put in right as the drought started, so it’s nice to finally have it full!) it has also gotten almost seasonable – low 70s as I write this, with overnight temps promising to hit crisp 60s and 50s. Not really what most people think of when we start talkin’ October country and all, but by Satan, I’ll take it!

The sudden shift to Fall(ish) weather and thoughts of The Season inspired the choice of stories today: it’s from the Mayor of October Country himself, Ray Bradbury, and his fun, mythopoetical story “The Scythe” from the July 1943 issue of Weird Tales!

Bradbury, of course, needs no introduction – a truly major figure in sci-fi, and he’s one of the rare genre guys it’s ok for your Very Serious Literary Types to praise, fer chrissake, someone who gets a pass for writing imaginative fiction because it’s got such heart and verve and style. And it’s all very justified; Bradbury is one of the greats (though Fahrenheit 451 sucks), and he’d be rightly numbered among the Titans for The Martian Chronicles, easily one of the greatest short story collections in history, a true masterpiece. And, while he’s often remembered mostly as a sci-fi guy, he’s also got some serious Weird Fic chops too (I’d argue that’s why his sci-fi was so successful, actually; there’s a vital strain of weirdness, and all that implies, when he’s writing about Martians, for instance)!

In fact, Bradbury got his start in the pages of Weird Tales, writing something like 20 or 25 stories between 1942 and 1948, if I remember correctly. This is all post-Wright, of course, and I think Bradbury benefited from Dorothy McIllwraith’s tenure as Editor; his weird fic seems to fit nicely into her vision of the genre, I think, a slightly sentimental (though rarely sappy) atmosphere shot through with real glimmers of coal-black darkness. And, of course, Bradbury’s first collection, Dark Carnival, was published by August Derleth’s Arkham House in 1947. That’s what you call a serious Weird pedigree!

(As an aside, if you’re interested in a great and extremely granular biography of ol’ Ray, I’d highly recommend John Eller’s THREE VOLUME biography from University of Illinois Press, Becoming Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury Unbound, and Bradbury Beyond Apollo. They’re great, very interesting and with considerable attention to the details of his papers, correspondence, and archives, as well as putting his work and life in important historical contexts. I will say, though, that you should be prepared for Bradbury’s extremely bad politics, particularly later in life – he was a Reagan fan and was extremely anti-affirmative action, basically your bog standard boot-straps-and-elbow-grease small gov’t libertarian, not as ugly or as bad as, say Niven, but still dumb as hell! It’s shocking, until you start thinking about his deep nostalgia for midwestern childhood. Oh well!)

Anyway, let’s look at this issues cover and ToC:

A quiet, contemplative cover for this July 1943 issue, particularly interesting given the date that this issue came out. The cover is for the Bedford-Jones story, “His Last Appearance,” and it posits an old soldier returning to the Pacific theater after the end of World War II. Of course, in 1943, WWII was still raging, with the siege of Stalingrad finally coming to an end, the beginning of the long brutal retreat of the Nazis westward, and the start of Allied plans for the invasion of Europe at the Casablanca conference. For Americans, WWII didn’t start until the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in Dec 1941, and the war in the Pacific had been a long and brutal one in ’42, with the Fall of Manila and rapid Japanese advances in a number of places, including the Aleutians. But here we are, in 1943, with a story that is already imagining the war over!

It’s interesting to see the way the war was being interrogated in the public sphere and within the pages of the speculative fiction magazines at the time, imagining an end to the war and return to a more “normal” status quo in the near future. What’s missing from all these stories, of course, are the horrific specificities of future history, death camps and the Holocaust, V2 rockets and the Atomic Bomb, and the global detente of the Cold War. It makes for fascinating reading, glimpses into how people are grappling with such dramatic and profound events and changes. The Pulps give you a chance to really see the world and the people at very specific times, and they’re just fascinating!

As for the ToC:

The big story here is Bloch’s “Yours Truly – Jack the Ripper,” probably one of his best and most famous stories. Bloch by this point in his career has basically exorcised Lovecraft from his work, having found his own style, tone, and topics of interest outside of the shadow of the Old Gent. Bloch’s “Ripperverse” work is an important part in his career, both because it laid the groundwork for his intensely psychological interest in murderers/serial killers, but also because it would lead his to write “A Toy for Juliette” in Harlan Ellison’s epochal anthology Dangerous Visions; so taken with the story was Ellison that he would write a sequel, “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World,” which he put in right after Bloch’s story in the collection. Anyway, it’s fun to see the beginnings of all that right here in Weird Tales!

Enough jibber-jabber, on to our story today, “The Scythe” by Ray Bradbury!

Look, the art in WT at this time…it ain’t what it used to be, okay? This is a perfectly evocative image, a little rough maybe, but it gets the job done I suppose. Still, makes you dream of the days of Finlay, don’t it? Also, I’ll just point out, that this is yet another example of the art giving too much away from the story; combined with the little blurb thing at the top of the pic, you definitely start this story with far too much information, in my opinion. Oh well! We’re used to it by now, but it’s still annoying as hell!

There’s no denying it – Bradbury knows what he’s doing. Great sudden in medias res opening here, and the short, percussive first sentence (“Quite suddenly there was no more road.”) is nigh on a perfect way to start the story, evocative and sharp and perfect, and a great lonely image. A road winding on through farmland, leading past trees and the stones and then a farmhouse and a wheatfield and then, as if it’s job were done, the road dies. Great, great stuff!

We’re introduced to some characters who might’ve escaped from the “Grapes of Wrath,” or maybe they’re just off-broad versions. “Tom Joerg” seems awfully close to “Tom Joad,” doesn’t it? And, like their Oakie comrades in Steinbeck’s book, they’re having a rough time of it, having followed this road that goes nowhere and running out of gas. A long-suffering wife and some hungry kids – that’s what you call prairie pathos, man.

What’s also interesting is that section there in the middle, where Tom starts looking at his hands. The writing is great of course (“farm blown out from under them” is a gem), but it also very specifically evokes the image of the dust bowl, doesn’t it? Now, while the droughts and soil loss and economic collapses continued into the 40s, it was even then very strongly associated with the 30s. Bradbury is priming us for the fact that, while this story was published in ’43, it probably took place earlier. The timeline is very important to this story, indeed is one of it’s major points, so we’re being prepped here. A neat bit of mechanical work, is my point, that Bradbury is doing here.

Starved, lost, and without anything else to do, Molly suggests to Tom that he head on up to the little farmhouse and see if they couldn’t spare a bite for the travelers. Tom swallows his pride and stumps on up to the house:

The knocking three times has some kind of mystical resonances, doesn’t it? There’s the trifold symmetry of time, Past-Present-Future, there, but there’s also a sense of “asking three times” being the amount that signifies contractual obligation in magical relationships. Anyway, Tom enters the house and his spidey-senses start tingling immediately. Sure enough, he finds a dead body, an old man clutching a single blade of ripe wheat and a scythe leaning against the wall. Weird as that is, Tom finds that the old man apparently anticipated his death, and left behind what amounts to a will:

A lot here! First, and of most immediate importance, is the fact that the Joerg’s are now landowners – the old man has bequeathed the house and land to whoever has found him. What would give me pause, of course, is the next bit, which comes off as a little weird: take the farm AND THE TASK ORDAINED THERETO, and take ’em freely and unquestioningly. That’s a magical compact right there, a binding of Joerg to the land and some unspecified job that has to be done.

Also, we get a date here – April 1939. Note it!

Tom seems a bit spooked, but he and Molly quickly accept this lucky twist of fate. They take the farm as offered, and plan to start living the good life there in the middle of nowhere.

Not quite sure what the economic benefit of growing a fast-dying/fast-sprouting variety of wheat is! Also, it’s planted on a vast scale, and it seems to ripen in weird, localized clusters or zones. But he seems driven to cut it!

It’s strange, and it makes me wonder how exactly the farm is supporting this family, but after a while Tom decides that this preternatural wheat can go fuck itself, and he decides to stop cutting it. How’s that work out for him, you ask? Well:

He took the farm, and with it the APPOINTED TASK which, apparently, is to cut the weird wheat, day in and day out, unceasingly. Or else! The details of the task elude him, save for the necessity of it, the necessity of cutting the grain down when and where it is ripe in this strange stretch of field, not harvesting, not tilling, not planting, just cutting it down as it comes up, over and over again, letting it sprout and grow where and when it does. Extremely strange and mythic, isn’t it? And then, when he’s harvesting, he suddenly has a very strange, very mysterious reveleation:

Great writing, the sudden vertiginous sense of disorder and confusion that Tom feels is very ably conveyed to the reader – what is going on? Why’s he freaking out now? Tom runs into the house, half-panicked, but eventually he can get the words out to Molly:

Pretty spectacularly weird isn’t it – he’s literally a grim reaper, ending a thousand lives every time he cuts a single stalk of wheat in that uncanny field. It seems like maybe his exposure to the work has, slowly, given him insight into its nature, or maybe the fact that he had some relationship to one of the lives he just cut down has triggered his illumination, but it doesn’t matter – Molly thinks he’s nuts, and Tom knows he’s not. Molly tells him to shut up, that they’ve got a good thing going with this farm (I guess there must be other food crops, and a cow or two, so that’s how they’re eating?). And she reads the Bible at him all week, I guess trying to get him to settling down, until of course a telegram arrives letting Tom know his Mom DID die, on the very day that he had his wheat-based freak out.

Tom wants to leave, but Molly is made of sterner stuff. She shoots his California plan down and tells him that by God they’re staying right there, where they’ve got a home and food and future! And, realistically, what can Tom do – we (and he) must know that he’s made the deal, he’s accepted the job, and the job HAS to be done.

With a certain mid-western pragmatism, Tom begins to accept the inevitability of his task. He communes with the grave of his predecessor and contemplates the long-line of harvesters that must’ve come before him, down to prehistory. (As and aside, the idea of the Cro-Magnon harvester is funny and strange – so like, before agriculture there were cavemen forced to chop down the Magic Sheaves of Life and Death? It’s an odd, incongruous image, but one we’ll just have to forgive Bradbury for).

Now we’re getting into the real interesting part of the story – there’s a little musing here about what Tom’s relation to the Work is. He’s not KILLING the people, not maliciously – he’s just doing a job, taking care of his family. An interesting bit of ethics to consider, maybe, though Tom abandons it when he has the brain flash that, if he could find his and his family’s wheat stalks, why, could they live forever? I’m sure this magical wheat never considered that loophole before!

No sooner thought than answered – Molly and his kids’ time HAS come, he HAS to cut them down…and he can’t! He decides to fight fate!

Over supper Molly asks some questions about the wheat, even suggesting that Tom oughta call in the Extension boys from the local Ag Dept to have a look – what the hell good is this weird wheat that rots immediately, anyway? Tom is horrified – what might the GOV’T do with the Grain of Life and Death, after all? It’s a neat little part of the story, another of those little asides that Bradbury raises and which run a chill up and down the ol’ spine as you regard them in the story. It’s fun! Of course Tom is having no part of it. Molly doesn’t think the Wheat of Fate is real, but Tom KNOWS it is.

Grim stuff, and Tom again tries to abandon the work, locking up the Scythe and choosing to ignore the wheat…but then Molly begins to suffer from a strange kind of lassitude, and his kids seem to whither and fade a bit too, afflicted with a kind of odd malaise. He doesn’t know what will happen to them, or to the countless thousands he has refused to reap, but he’s going to wait and see…

…and of course he wakes in the middle of the night out in the field, with the scythe in his hand, being driven by a mad compulsion to DO THE JOB. He fights it, struggles mightily…

…and then the house fuckin’ blows up!

Horribly, Molly and Susie and Tom Junior AREN’T dead…they’re trapped behind horrible walls of flame a smoke between life and death, unresponsive, unaware, undying. It’s a horrible scene, and there’s some very fine writing here as Tom is forced to confront the implacable nature of Life and Death. He brings his family out onto the lawn, cold and sleeping beyond death, and realizes that he cannot abandon the task, that he cannot have a life anymore – he is the grim reaper.

Pretty horrible scene, isn’t it, the image of his family just out of sight screaming and dying as Tom, chained to the merciless scythe, cuts through the wheat in the night. Grim as hell!

There’s the significance of the date of the story coming around: 1939, and the beginning of the Second World War.

Is Tom *causing* it, do you think? Is he heedlessly cutting, maybe cutting more than he should, causing a horrible war and its aftermath out of his grief? Or is he simply, heedlessly, heeding the wheat, cutting madly because that is what has been Fated? It’s not clear, and that ambiguity is troubling and, of course, probably the point.

And as for Tom?

And that’s the end of “The Scythe” by Ray Bradbury!

Tom keeps on cutting – again, is he causing the accelerating deaths, the horror of modern warfare and conflict and imperialism and transnational capitalism, or is he merely the instrument of it, his feverish monomania and ceaseless toil a product of OUR horrible times?

It’s a nice little story, I think, and it really captures a very pure strain of myth that Bradbury often mined in his work. It’s also an interesting time capsule, a writer watching the world around him ending and reflecting on it, what it meant to him and society. A good reminder of the power and possibility of pulp literature!

ACAB Includes Strained Pulp #37: “Far Below” by Robert Barbour Johnson, Weird Tales v 34 n 1, 1939

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Trying to do these little free writing essay/dissections a bit more frequently because a) it is Hallowe’en season, after all, and b) it seems like we’re in another round of “social media death throes.” This time it’s over on Bluesky where the CEO appears to be following the Elon Musk playbook of going insane to protect the rights of fascists and TERF scum. It’s not like anyone reads blogs either (I know, I’ve got the stats for this little project right here), but we shan’t let that discourage us! So, with our hearts blazing and our eyes open, let us once again enter the mysterious, pathless wilderness that is the Pulps! And for today we have a fun (and interesting!) story: Robert Barbour Johnson’s homage to Lovecraft, “Far Below” from the 1939 June-July megaissue of Weird Tales!

Ol’ Bob Barbour Johnson seems to have been a bit of an odd duck. While a fairly prolific writer, particularly of circus tales later in life, his footprint in Weird Tales is small but deep, if that makes sense; I mean he didn’t actually write a lot for the magazine, publishing I think only six stories between ’35 – ’41, with a couple more weird stories published in other magazines later. But, despite that, readers apparently thought fairly highly of his writing, particularly of today’s story, “Far Below.” Depending on where you’re getting your info, it was either voted by the readers as the single best story published in Weird Tales OR editor Dorothy McIllwraith said it was the best story the magazine ever published.

Both statements are incorrect, although this is a good and fairly interesting story. But that kind of odd indeterminacy around Johnson seems to be fairly typical. For instance, he’s clearly a fan of Lovecraft (as we’ll see when we dive into the story today) but, with great grandiosity, Johnson says that Lovecraft wrote HIM a fan letter after reading Johnson’s 1935 story “Lead Soldiers.” It’s possible that this is true; Lovecraft was both a voluminous letter writer and the sort of person who would certainly praise work he thought good and interesting…but it just doesn’t feel correct, particularly because the story this “fan letter” is supposedly about doesn’t seem like the sort of thing Lovecraft would’ve liked! “Lead Soldiers” is about a tinpot fascist dictator whose delusions of grandeur are leading the world towards another World War, but he ends up getting killed by a bunch of toy soldiers. It’s VERY timely (then and now, sadly), EXTREMELY didactic, and BLUDGEONINGLY allegorical – not really the sort of work Lovecraft generally praised! It seems like this claim of a fan letter from Lovecraft comes out of some memoir/reminiscences type essays Johnson wrote later in life, and while I haven’t chased them down to read them in full, I gather that there’s a general Derlethian tone to them with respect to Johnson’s view of himself.

(As an aside, it appears there was a Joshi-edited-and-introduced collection of Johnson’s work that, in addition to the weird fiction, also included a few of these biographical essays. It was titled Far Below and Other Weird Stories and was published in 2021 by Weird House Press, though it’s out of print and seems like it must’ve been an extremely small run, since I can’t find a copy for sale anywhere. If you know about it or have one, hit me up!)

What is certainly true, however, is that Johnson thought a great deal of Lovecraft, and the story we’re going to be looking at today is, basically, an homage to the Old Gent and a spiritual sequel to his (great) story “Pickman’s Model,” as well as maybe the earliest example of the metafictional appearance of Lovecraft as a Lovecraftian character! But, before we can get to all that, let’s check out the cover and ToC of this big ass issue of Weird Tales!

An incredible cover by the inimitable Virgil Finlay, representing a cavalier of some sort exploring a mysterious and ghoul-ridden cavern. Absolute perfection, just a blast all around. No idea what story it’s supposed to be illustrative of, and it’s entirely possible Finlay only had the broadest of scenic outlines provided to him. But who cares! Let Finlay paint up whatever weird shit he wants, he’s one of the best to ever have graced the covers of the pulps with his talents!

ToC-wise, it’s a heavy-hitter, lots of Lovecraft and Howard on here, some CAS. We’re VERY late in the Farnsworth Wright run here, and the magazine is facing some challenges, but you can see they’re still putting up the good fight here, and there’s some fun weirdness in this big ol’ issue. Also, it’s always worthy pointing out the magazine’s commitment to poetry – it’s such a huge part of weird fiction’s history and lineage, and it’s nice that the premier magazine (that, I would argue, actually created the genre by doing the necessary boundary definition work) both recognized and encouraged poetical weirdness within its pages!

Now, on to the story!

Absolutely incredible art from the great Harold DeLay here – those old school NYPD uniforms, on a weird little rail cart, emptying a machine gun into a horde of hellish C.H.U.D.s…truly a classic! Excellent little atmospheric touches here too; the smoke, the beam of light, the expressions, and the way the horrible ghoulish horde recedes into the background of the tunnel. Just incredible, action-packed stuff, immediately eye-catching and exactly the sort of thing that gets people to actually sit down and read the story! DeLay was a great artist, and it shows. He did some excellent Conan illustrations for Weird Tales, including some for “Red Nails,” and would go on to a career in comics, something he’s obviously well suited for, given the compact and propulsive nature of his artwork.

The little italicized summary under the title is evocative and tells you everything you know, nice and succinct without giving anything away from the story. That, and the spoiler-free art, is a nice surprise!

A great, powerful start to the story; the reader is immediately drawn into whatever the hell is happening, and the quick transition from the “roar and the howl” into the revelation that the “thing” is a subway train is really nicely executed. Johnson is a good writer, and there’s some real craft in this story!

It is also, of course, a story of its time, which is why the next part has some eye-rolling White Nonsense™ in it:

Johnson wants to highlight the big, heterogeneous nature of New York with a tableau of society, specifically calling out the presence of the minorities in the subway car to give us a kind of population sample that is (unknowingly) under threat in this story. It’s cringe-worthy language, of course, and the description of the two black people as “grinning” is particularly unpleasant, an image straight out of minstrel show. It’s something you have to confront in these older stories, but I think a modern reader, acknowledging the racism, can then focus on the narrative function of the scene like we just discussed: the way Johnson is giving us a thumbnail sketch of the civilian population of NYC, dull businessmen, smoochin’ folks, and a substantial proportion of non-WASPs. Very urban and very modern subway commuters!

The medias res beginning opens up and we realize we’re in some kind of little room, where our narrator is hanging out with someone who, apparently, knows the subway system in detail. We learn that the room is actually some kind of command center, with state-of-the-art ultra-modern technology that lets them monitor the passage of the subway cars:

The Mayor Walker here is a real person, good ol’ Jimmy Walker, the mayor of New York City from 1926 to his resignation in disgrace (and at the behest of FDR) in ’36. He had been a Tammany Hall boy, and become a sort of poster child for bribery and corruption at the time; Weird Tales readers, even those not from NYC, would absolutely have recognized the name, as well as the context of his getting this super expensive and super complex monitoring system installed in the subway as he was resigning. It’s an interesting historical, but it functions in the story to really GROUND us in a very specific time and place – this is no Lovecraft country invented landscape, or even a quasi-mythic NYC. This is New York City, 1939, exactly as you know it; it’s an important part of the power of the story, this very precise, very real grounding.

It also offers a convenient date for the Subway Expert to use to explode the ridiculous conception of just how long whatever it is they’re talking about has been going on:

So we get a sense that there’s something old and frightful going on, and that there’s a concerted, directed conspiracy to keep it under wraps because the truth is so terrible, so horrible, that it would destroy civilization (or at least NYC) to know what was happening. The evocation of Chateau-Thierry and Verdun, famously bloody battlefields in WWI, is interesting; this story is a sequel of sorts to Lovecraft’s own “Pickman’s Model,” and in it the narrator mentions how he’d seen some rough stuff in France, but even that hadn’t been enough to prepare him for the horror he encountered (in the story). Here’s Johnson making sure to hit that exact same point – the horrors of modern, mechanized warfare are nothing to the horror down in these tunnels, AND it’s something with a long, deep history.

An interesting meditation from the Subway Expert on what it means to be in contact with Horror, day in and day out, and the ways the mind shifts and adapts to survive.

The story shifts into a multiple-page long monolog from the Subway Expert, another stylistic choice in imitation (or homage) of Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model,” which is entirely told as the first person dialog of a character. It’s a very effective narrative trick because in addition to letting the writer give a LOT of exposition very naturally, it also anchors the reader in the very personal, very visceral experiences of the view point character, something that can only help a horror story.

We learn that the Horrible Things that our Subway Expert has been tasked with fighting are seemingly restricted to a very small segment of the subway system, for reasons unknown. This is lucky, because its evident that successful containment of this threat is costly and complicated – there’re a bunch of militarized police stationed down here, with multiple command-and-control centers spaced along the line, and lots of careful, attentive monitoring for signs of “Them!” And it takes it’s toll on these members of the NYPD’s “Special Detail:”

Grim stuff indeed, both from the perspective of people in danger of being transformed by the work of combatting these horrors, as well as from the obvious extrajudiciality of the whole apparatus! We learn that these subway-patrollin’ Special Detail Boys are paid handsomely for their work, and that why they are *technically* part of the NYPD, and wear the uniform, they are outside of the hierarchy, free from usual discipline, and apparently answerable only to themselves. Wild, fascist shit! We also get a little bit more about out interlocuter here:

So our guy used to be a Professor who worked at the AMNH, a specialist in gorillas. He mentions that he’d been on Carl Akeley’s first African expedition when he was recruited for this subway hell job. Incidentally, although the “Akeley” name would seem to be another example of Lovecraftian hat-tipping (Henry Akeley was the rural hermit menaced by the Mi-Go in “The Whisperer in Darkness”), Carl Akeley was a real guy, a hugely important figure in museum display technology and taxidermy, perfecting and advocating a method of “life-like” presentation of specimens for museums; the Hall of African Mammals at the AMNH is named after him. Akeley’s first professional visit to Africa was in 1896, but since the NYC subway didn’t open until 1904, I reckon Craig here is referring to Akeley’s first expedition for the AMNH, which would be around 1921 or so. Incidentally, that trip was a turning point for Akeley, who had undertaken it as part of an attempt to learn more about LIVING gorillas and determine whether it was “okay” to kill and stuff them for museums back home – he came to the conclusion that it was not, and was instrumental in starting one of the first Gorilla preserves in Africa.

ANYWAY our guy Craig gets recruited by ~~Delta Green~~ the NYPD Special Detail because he’s an expert in comparative anatomy. He dissects a specimen of the Things (losing 1d10 SAN, presumably), and submits a report detailing the mad truth of the thing:

It turns out that much of what he’d discovered was already known, or at least suspected, by the shadowy cabal of the NYC Transit Authority or whoever it is; they had extensive reports about the subway accident, showing that it was a deliberate, planned attack by horrible anthropophagus mole-men…which sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

That’s from Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” from 1927, and yeah, sure, it’s a subway PLATFORM in Boston, but it’s very clearly the inspiring image for this story!

The “accident” as described by Craig is pretty gruesome – men, women, children, all getting munched on in the dark. It’s some grisly shit! Seems like something that’d be difficult to cover up, doesn’t it?

More brutal authoritarian actions by the Special Detail of the NYPD! It’s wild stuff!

Craig goes into the history of their anti-ghoul actions, and how hard the work was at first, before all the modern technology and approaches had been figured out. There’s some great, spooky writing in this section; Craig remembrances of hunting the Things through the dark tunnels, of glinting eyes in the dark, half-seen white forms flitting into the shadows, tittering mirthless laughter…it’s phenomenal, really atmospheric and legitimately unsettling.

Then we get a long section about the historical and geographical distribution of the ghouls – they’ve been here for a long time, there’s evidence that the Indians knew about them and had taken steps to nullify their danger, and there’s even a kind of funny (if tasteless) retconning of the reason for the cheap price the Dutch got for Manhattan. It’s honestly some very good Lovecraftian history, suggestive fictions woven through history and folklore and things like references to darker meanings behind certain passages in the real book “History of the City of New York” by Mary Booth; it’s not easy to do, and you’ll often run across clumsy attempts in the pastiches of Lovecraft, but here it’s pretty adroitly handled, I’d say! And then we get to a real fun bit:

I mean, c’mon – that’s just good plain fun, isn’t it? Lovecraft, presumably while living in the city, took Craig’s Grand Tour of NYC’s Subway from Hell, and much like Pickman’s practice of painting from life, those experiences are what gave Lovecraft’s story a certain hellish “authenticity.” A delightful bit of metafiction, I think!

Craig goes into the details of their work a bit; the Things seem restricted to a certain stretch of the subway, perhaps for some underlying geological reason, he muses. They also seem to restrict their activity to night-time, even though it’s always dark under the earth, which seems to make the NYPD’s Special Detail’s job a whole lot easier, at least. Craig even seems to let slip a hint of bloodlust here:

“We run them down howling with terror” is a bit grim, isn’t it, and then of course there’s Craig admission that they sometimes CAPTURE the things, imprisoning them in some kind of insane Hell Zoo. These specimens are used to illustrate the seriousness of the horrors and the need for a ruthless extrajudicial police force to recalcitrate officials, but of course they are stored in Craig’s laboratory…what’s he doin’ in there, you have to wonder. There’s a very unpleasant suggestion of experimentation, vivisections and such like. And, of course, they can’t keep any individual Thing around for very long – they’re too horrible, too alien, so they end up exterminating them eventually. It’s dark stuff:

Craig’s discourse on the Things is interrupted by a buzzing from The Big Board – there’s activity in the tunnels, movement and sounds picked up by the vast subterranean panopticon that they’ve built up down in the subway tunnel. Our narrator sees something whirr by the window, and Craig proudly explains that it’s a souped-up electric hand cart, chock full o’ cops w/ heavy artillery, dispatched to take care of the Things in the tunnel. Another one is also coming from the opposite direction; they’ll pin the Things between ’em and gun ’em down.

Because there’re microphones all over the tunnels, Craig and the narrator can hear everything that’s happening:

And then we get to the real meat of the story – in a brilliant bit of writing, Johnson has the characters (and us) overhear the action, narrated by Craig, which builds great tension and forces us to confront what, exactly, Craig has become, down here in the dark, hunting monsters:

Just in case you don’t get it, Johnson spells it out in the next section:

Craig is becoming a ghoul; in fact, all the NYPD Special Detail officers are becoming ghoulish, to a greater or lesser extent, but it’s worse and more pronounced for Craig because he’s been down here the longest. And it’s not just a physical transformation, either!

Even in the midst of his horrible decline, Craig can’t help but be scientifically intrigued by the transformation, however. He muses that perhaps the transformation is the explanation for the origins of the Things, and also why they’ll never be able to exterminate Them fully. He suggests that, while there’s some suggestion of cosmic horror chicanery going on, the transformation is simply atavistic retrogradation, something about being driven underground, being made abject in the dark.

We’re nearing the end of the story; Johnson recapitulates his opening line, the “roar and a howl” bit, as another commuter subway train comes roaring by:

And that’s the end of “Far Below” by Robert Barbour Johnson!

It’s not a long story, and it’s pretty simple structurally, built around a long expository monologue and relying on the neat trick of a character’s second-hand exposure to horror and weirdness. But there’s a lot to unpack, I think!

First off, in our current times (Oct ’25, as of this writing) it’s hard not to read this story as having something to say about both the long history of policing and prisons as well as our very current fascist U.S. government’s use of a militarized, extrajudicial police force to terrorize those it has deemed undesirable. The NYPD Special Detail’s powers are unchecked, their funding unlimited, their remit unrestricted; they are heavily armed, are capable of apparently ignoring any and all oversight, and consider themselves absolutely essential to the continuity of human civilization. And, more importantly, they are completely dehumanized by their task, transforming into literal monsters because of the work they do. It’s pretty on the nose!

Of course, that reading is a little undercut by the fact that, within the text, the Things are ontogenically capital-E Evil, right? They sabotage a subway train and devour the survivors alive, fer chrissake. That complicates the Nietzschean “Beware lest ye become monsters” reading, because these are of course literal monsters; in this way, the horrible degradation Craig and his brave Mole Cops are facing is actually heroically tragic, a sad but necessary sacrifice that must be made for the good of all.

I kind of suspect that, for Johnson, it’s the second one, about brave men sacrificing body and souls, that he wanted us to take away from it. Of course, Johnson was politically-minded; his story “Lead Soldiers,” for all it being a Moral Fable, shows that he was aware of current events and Had Opinions about them, so it is possible that he was thinking about, say, WWI era interment camps or even the crisis in protests and violent police actions post-WWI, and wanted to talk about that. But the way this story is written, and the climax that it’s building to, suggests that he wants us mostly to focus on the horror these cops are facing, and not trying to get us to think about how dehumanizing the Other dehumanizes Us, you know what I mean? That doesn’t mean we have to adhere to that reading, of course; death of the author and all that (literally, in this case; Johnson died in ’87).

As a piece of weird fiction, I think it’s awfully successful. It’s probably in my mind one of the most successful “inspired by Lovecraft” stories I’ve ever written, right up there with Bloch’s “Notebook Found in a Deserted House” or anything by Michael Shea, for example. Obviously based on that little bit of “Pickman’s Model” I excerpted above (which is super evocative, very brief but very striking in the original story), and I think Johnson does it justice, captures the fun and weirdness and horror of a subway being attacked by monsters.

It’s also neat to see Johnson really taking the conspiracy-ball and running with it. Lovecraft creates what is probably the first “widespread gov’t paranormal conspiracy” in his story “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (written in ’31 and published in ’36) – there, the u.s. gov’t comes in (off screen) and raids the town, blows up devil’s reef, sends a submarine against the Deep One’s city, and then sets up concertation camps for the fish-human hybrid survivors. There’s even a mention that the gov’t brings in “liberal activists” and shows them the horrors they’ve imprisoned, which makes the various civil rights organizations shut up about the camps, something echoed in this story by Johnson. It’s a very striking part of Innsmouth, and Johnson does it honor here, establishing a plausible and powerful conspiracy built around directly combatting the mythos menaces out there! Has anybody ever done anything with the story in the Delta Green (a cthulhu ttrpg) setting, I wonder? Craig is even a Call of Cthulhu character, in the way he had an expertise that got him plugged into the darker mythos world (and that he’s going insane and will inevitably die horribly).

Anyway, it’s a fun and interesting story, two things that you can’t always say about work with such clear (and acknowledged) connection to Lovecraft. It’s probably the best thing Johnson ever wrote, at least for Weird Tales, and I think it deserves to be read and remembered for more than just “the sequel to Pickman” that it sometimes seems to be cast as. It’s an inventive story with some good, scary imagery, it uses its source material well, and it’s a fascinating glimpse into the immediate post-HPL world of weird fiction!

Pulp Strained…from Beyond the Grave! #36 “The Vyrkolakas” by Robert C. Sandison, Weird Tales v. 19, n. 4, 1932

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October dawns, and by Satan and all his Devils, we’re going to get into the goddamn MOOD, you hear me!? I don’t care that it’s 96 degrees outside and the dumbest fascists in history are in the ascendancy here! Fuck ’em! It’s Halloween! Time to get spooky as hell, and the best way to do that is to read weird fiction! And we’ve got a fun-as-hell one today, a two-fisted and bullet-riddled tale of vampiric horror: “The Vyrkolakas” by the enigmatical Robert C. Sandison!

But first, as is our custom in these parts: the cover!

*BONK*

Good ol’ caveman action by C.C. Senf on the cover of this issue of Weird Tales, meant to represent the thrilling ice age action you’ll get in Nictzin Dyalhis’s past-life/recovered memory tale “The Red Witch!” Dyalhis is one of those absolute world class oddballs who always reminds me of that Hunter S. Thompson quote: “One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.” He wrote some of the flat-out most idiosyncratic stuff to appear in The Unique Magazine, a lot of it what you’d call Space Opera, though always with a hint of crankery/crackpottery in it (alongside some unusual language/grammar choices too). A very weird person who, nonetheless, was a huge (if sometimes divisive) figure in the early Weird Tales era. Not really my cup of tea, but might be worth a look, one o’ these days. Anyway, onto the TOC:

Probably the best thing on here is Smith’s “The Gorgon,” some typically dreamy CAS work that’s purple and ridiculous and an absolute blast. Got some Kline, some Whitehead, some Hamilton, all decent enough tales, if a little creaky, but the lowlight here is Lovecraft’s “In the Vault,” a very middling bit of work that shows the Old Gent at his most dully conventional. There’s almost nothing interesting in the story at all, beyond the obvious fact that Lovecraft tried to write something a bit more grounded and folksy. It was, apparently, inspired by a suggestion from his ol’ amateur press pal “Tryout” Smith, and it’s really only worth the effort if you’re a Lovecraft completist.

But we’re here to talk about Robert C. Sandison! Who is Robert C. Sandison? Well, I don’t know. As far as I can tell, as an author he only appeared in Weird Tales three times; twice in 1930 with the stories “River of Lost Souls” and “Burnt Things” and again in 1932, with today’s story, “The Vyrkolakas.” There’s some interesting connections between these stories in terms of similar themes, suggesting that ol’ Sandison was interested in some very specific aspects of weird fic, but beyond that, there’s nothing more I can tell you about him! One of those mysterious figures who flit into the literature briefly and, other than their stories, left no trace.

Anyway, onto the story!

Gangsters and Vampires! Two great tastes that go great together!

I love these kinds of genre mashups, taking weirdness and applying it to some other class of popular fiction, something you see a fair bit in Weird Tales. Ol’ Robert E. Howard was probably it’s greatest practitioner, welding weirdness onto westerns to create the “weird western” and then, much more famously, forging the mighty genre of Sword & Sorcery by combining orientalist adventure stories with weird fic. With regards to weird crime, there’s a fair amount out there; we looked at a great example by Fritz Leiber a couple Halloweens ago in his story “The Automatic Pistol“. Probably the most famous example is Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook,” which he originally wrote hoping to break into the crime pulps. It’s one of those infamous stories that prominently displays the author’s racism (though by no means is it the worst example) and which a lot of people seem to hate (though, frankly, I actually like it and think it largely succeeds in developing some interesting weirdness).

But, anyway! Our thrilling tale of gangsters opens with a yellow taxi pulling up to the corner on a quiet city street. Inside it are three hard cases: a driver (with the racist nickname of “Spick,” a jittery, pale fellow called “Dink,” and an icy, murderous cat known as “Jinx.” These three are introduced in classic hard-boiled fashioned by their actions – they’ve pulled up in the taxi and are keeping themselves out of view, obviously waiting for something. But, while they’re hanging out, with the taxi curtains drawn, one of the men, Dink, spots someone else who also appears to be waiting for something…

This odd, spooky figure causes Dink (who is a bit high-strung) some consternation.

Coke-snortin’ in the pages of Weird Tales! Won’t somebody think of the children! But yeah, these three in the taxi are definitely gangsters – they got crazy nicknames, they talk in slang, and they’ve got a serious arsenal! And they’re about to use it!

Grim stuff afoot, obviously, and since this is definitely a grim-n-gritty tale of gangsters…well, ol’ Sandison delivers:

First thing to note: this is a Greek Orthodox church, overseen by a Greek Orthodox priest, and these folks are, with a name like “Kyrie,” these are all obviously Greek immigrants. As an aside, there’s no real textual evidence, but I wonder if we’re in San Francisco, partly because in this era it’s a classic crime and gangster town, and partly because of the history of Greek immigration to the city, which was fairly substantial following the 1906 Earthquake and fire.

But, anyway, that staccato rattle rains on the wedding party something dire:

I mean wowzers, that is some SERIOUS melodramatics, huh? “Is I hurted bad, Papa?” Holy smokes, hard not to laugh honestly it’s SO over the top. But Jinx and Dink have killed at least three people: the groom, the bride, and a little girl. Bad dudes all around, obviously? But remember that weird goth who Dink saw standing and waiting on the street corner? Well, apparently he tried to blast him too…and it didn’t go so well.

The taxi revs its engine and prepares to pull out, but the black clad figure is, insanely, already in pursuit! And nothin’ they throw at him has any effect!

He’s on the running board, taking full blasts of gunfire to the chest with no ill effect, ripping doors open, tearing throats…he’s one bad hombre, for sure!

That’s some pulse-pounding action, huh? And after the kind of over-the-top murder of the little lisping flower girl, it kind of comes of as pretty intense. The detail of the drum-like noise Dink’s gun makes as he hammers against the thing’s taut, hard, dry skin is absolutely great, and something we’ll talk about again when we get a name for this thing. The sense descriptions are really great here, aren’t they? The musty smell, that drumming, and then the crash, which is conveyed almost entirely by sounds. And, of course, the end of this section is quite chilling – the icy, evil Jinx reduced to a babbling mess. It’s fun!

The next section opens up that most useful of exposition characters, The Plucky Reporter. Kip Hollister, of the Clarion, is interviewing the Priest and a blonde young Greek guy named Angelos Spiridon, but he’s particularly interested in the strange black-clad figure that attacked the car and caused the wreck, especially because…the black-clad man…has vanished!!!! In fact, in the course of the ~~exposition~~ interview, we learn that ol Jinx Santell has ALSO vanished, leaving just Spick, the driver, with a broken neck and Dink, the coked-up gunman, with an unpleasantly chewed up throat…

Wise old men with beards start looking pensively out windows, you KNOW something serious is about to be dropped on you. Boy reported Kip enthuses about the importance of shutting down all the racketeering going on, which causes the Priest to tell him that, if he wants to find the black-clad man, he should watch Angelos here. Why?

Bitter reflections on racism from the Priest, Papa Metro here. But, the Priest believes that this black-clad avenger had been hunting Jinx, and in someway knew that he would be there to kill Kyrie. So, it stands to reason that Spiridon, as the obvious next target of the apparently still alive Jinx, will probably also be used as bait by the blad-clad thing.

But who IS the black-clad man, anyway?

That’s right…a dead man, killed by Santell, and now stalking his murderers from beyond the grave! Is there some quaint, ethnic sobriquet by which such a thing may be known?

Fun little throwaway acknowledgement of the then recent (it only came out in 1931) hit movie Dracula, isn’t it? But Papa Metro is quick to disabuse poor dumb Kip of his movie derived knowledge. For this is not make-believe…it is the horror of the vrykolakes! And it’s here that we see that ol Sandison has done some kind of research into the subject. First, there’s the Priest’s rundown of the Greek Vampire’s powers and weaknesses, and then a bit more of their folklore.

Sandison makes some clear distinctions between Bela Lugosi and the monster he’s put in his story – they don’t fear daylight, they’re the product of an evil will persisting in the corpse of a dead man, they’re strong as hell and only killable with fire, and, rather than drinking blood, they chow down on the flesh of their victims, a particularly gruesome difference from the suave and dainty nip-n-slurp of your standard vamp, I think. What’s also neat, and Sandison doesn’t explicitly call it out, is that these vrykolakes are, in Greek folklore, said to be characterized by their taut, drum-like skin, even to the point of them making drum-like sounds when they move or are struck. It’s a fun little bit of folklore worked into the story, and shows that Sandison has done some research on these very specific topics.

From a plot perspective, it’s fun to have this undead horror, a former bootlegger/criminal/gangster himself, returning from the grave for revenge against his murderers, and using the knowledge of gangland activities that he (it?) knew in life so well as the means to track his wily prey. Taking that horror logic and weaving it into a bit of crime fic is a lot of fun, a very aesthetically pleasing approach to the story, I think.

Anyway, with some background exposition out of the way and our horror threat ID’d, the story cuts back to Jinx and the aftermath of the car crash/vrykolakes attack.

It’s very fun to have this icy villainous gangboss reduced to quivering jelly, isn’t it? The “fingers plucked aimlessly at his lips” bit is particularly good, a nice bit of visual business that really underscores the way ol’ Jinx here has been completely undone by the experience. I also love the “overcoat” being revealed as a black burial shroud – the iconography of death is such an important part of these sorts of monsters, and it’s always so pleasing to have it highlighted. It also speaks to the single-mindedness of this vamp, doesn’t it? It’s clawed its way out of the tomb and is just hanging around on street corners in its mouldering shroud with grave clay dropping off of it. I always love a monster that just does not give a fuck about social conventions or propriety like that, you know what I mean?

Also, that bit about chewing and gnawing is gruesome as hell! A truly monstrous monster!

Anyway, Jink is stumbling around, dazed and scared and lost in the city. But the fresh air does him some good, apparently, because his comes out of his funk and realizes he’s near one of his speakeasies, where he can find some of his well-armed and very dangerous boys. He hurries upstairs and finds a gaggle of his goons hangin’ out, and we get a little intro into the red-in-tooth-and-claw nature of gang life.

The knife’s edge chance of violence that seems to rule Jinx’s fate is interesting, particularly in respect to the undead horror’s actions in the story. Bouboli, our Greek-style Vampire (Nosferatu w/ Tzatziki sauce?) is, in many ways, merely fulfilling the code that ruled his life – meting out brutal violence on anyone and everyone that crossed him. Santell is under threat not only from Bouboli, but his own men too; any “goofiness” and he knows he’ll get a knife in his back. It’s an interesting aspect of “vampirism” you don’t see as much discussed these days, their existential relationship to violence.

This need to reassert control, both for his own mental wellbeing as well as his physical safety amongst all these killers, explains why Jinx shifts back into mob boss mode. He may have seen an undead horror that has totally upended everything he thought he knew about how the world works, but he’s on the clock, dammit, and it’s time to get to work!

He hatches a scheme to kidnap Spiridon’s wife and use here as a threat to get him to cave to their demands, a nefarious scheme that his murderous underlings both understand and heartily approve of. Then, because this story is so steeped in the crime fiction genre, we’re introduced to another great gangster character, Ritzy.

It’s a throwaway line, but the characteristic of Ritzy as this dapper if not down-right pretty murderer is a lot of fun, the sort of thing that absolutely makes hardboiled crime pulps so great.

Spiridon has told Ritzy to tell Jinx to go fuck himself, so the kidnapping caper is on. Jinx brings killer fop Ritzy and some guy named Mick with him, though before they leave there’s some business with Jinx trying to buy a crucifix off a little girl, as a bit of foreshadowing. The three gangsters make their way to Spiridon’s house; he’s at his restaurant and his wife is home alone, so Jinx, relieved that the hellish man-in-black isn’t around, sends Ritzy to grab her. But, as Ritzy is dragging the woman down the stairs…

First off: the bit with the black-clas man’s “stiff-kneed” stride is great. He’s dead, a corpse animated by evil and hate, so he’s got a bit of rigor mortis in his joints; it makes for a very evocative scene, with a touch of weirdness coming from that odd gait that really makes it vivid.

Jinx freaks out; he hurls the woman from the car, perhaps hoping that that will placate the hell-spawned avenger. Of course it doesn’t; we shift to Kip the Reporter’s perspective briefly who, lurking around and hoping to catch a story, witnesses the black-clad man’s attack on the car:

Action vampire, leaping like a bird of prey after the car! It’s fun, and the way Sandison kind of elides the specifics of the monster’s movement while conveying the impression of its velocity and aggression is worthy of emulating, I think. Ritzy tries to shoot the black-clad man, but Jinx knocks his gun arm down, screaming about how it can’t be killed. This is enough for Ritzy, who decides that Jinx is no longer capable of fulfilling his duties as Gang Boss.

Lotta staff turnover in the underworld, I guess; Jinx ices Ritzy, plugs Mick, and leaps into the front seat of the car, peeling out. But the black-clad man follows him, pursuing with preternatural speed. Kip follows too, in a commandeered car, eager for a news story (“Vampire Naruto Runs After Gangster”).

Undead Boubolis is keeping up with the speeding car, however, in fact seems poised to leap onto it, when Jinx has a pulp-inspired brainwave:

It’s an interesting moment. Vampires, in a lot of ways, are the most folkloric monsters (though werewolves are close too, I reckon); they’ve got all these complicated rules and tricks and work-arounds and (un)life hacks associated with them, and often times the defeat of the vampire in a given work hinges on a character knowing or exploiting the vampire’s wiki entry. As we saw above, Sandison has certainly plumbed the depths of Vampire Lore for this story, so it’s fun to see him put a character who tries to use some half-remembered popular fiction knowledge to defeat this monster. Jinx tosses the corpse of Mick out, and briefly it seems like maybe it worked – the monster stops to sniff the body, even takes a bite…but it refuses the easy meal and resumes its pursuit of Jinx.

Jinx crashes the car and darts into an old warehouse, slamming and locking a heavy door behind him, hoping that it’ll be enough to keep the SUPERNATURAL UNDEAD HORROR from killing him.

Reader, it isn’t.

I fuckin’ LOVE when a vampire just kinda steps through a barrier mysteriously, like in Dracula when Lucy slips through, like, a tiny crack in the door of her tomb. It’s really a fun part of their whole deal, this hyperspatial ability to ignore the constraints of physical space, easily their weirdest ability.

Bouboli advances of Santell, intent on killing him, and Jinx shrinks back, pushing himself against the wall, raising his arms…and…

That’s fun! His outstretched arms, pushed back against the wall, has turned his own body into the cross, and it’s stopped the horror dead in its tracks! It’s fun, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it. Lots of guys scrambling around for two sticks of wood, sure, but never just like “hey, lookit me, I’M the cross!” It’s a fun bit, particularly because it has the inherent drama of “how long can I hold this pose.”

Related, there is some art for this story, way back on the second page, that illustrates this scene. I saved it for now, though, because it’s such a bummer to see where the story is going before you get there. Also, the little caption text has a bit that about to come up, so it kind of double spoils the story, in my opinion. But, anyway, here’s the pic:

It’s good art; I like the translucent vampire there, and the stark shadow of Santell is nice and gothic too.

Anyway, like I said, the cross-pose that Santell is striking has, inherently, a weakness: how long can he keep it up?

Confronted with implacable death, Santell is forced to confront his own history as a killer of men. How the worm turns, eh Jinx? His revere is broken by the faint sound of voices…the car that had been following him has arrived! Shouting for help, Santell begs them to break the door down and rescue him. He hears them yelling, sees the door rattle as they try it, but the bolt is too strong. The voices recede, presumably to get help, but is there enough time? Santell’s arms are weakening already, beginning to sag, and once the cross is broken, the thing’ll be on him in no time.

More movie-derived knowledge bubbles up in Santell’s head, and we know (based on the Priest’s words earlier in the story) that he’s on the right track – FIRE is indeed the one weakness that can threaten this horror from the grave. His hand darts to his pocket – he gets the lighter out – flicks the flame on – the horror shrinks back from the fire – and –

Santell burns his hand and drops the lighter!

We cut to Kip’s perspective:

And that’s the end of “The Vyrkolakas” by Robert C. Sandison!

It’s a fun, action-packed vampire story, but there’s some interesting depth in there too, particularly about the lore and folk knowledge about the monster. It’s particularly interesting to see Jinks drawing on the NEW folk knowledge, derived from pulp fiction or the movies, as he confronts a horror from The Old World. It’s interesting to see a story from 1932 confronting popular culture (from within!) with questions about older knowledge, and doing it in such a fun way.

I also am just a sucker for such broad, striking characters as all the gangsters in here. I mean, it’s such a short story that you don’t get any chance to get to know anybody, not really, so it’s just delightful to have “coked-up gunman” and “effete killer” thrown at you. It’s painting with big bold strokes in bright colors, but it works here, and shows the way genre conventions can be strengths, I think. And the big, violent conventions of crime fiction become even more fun when a coating of weirdness is painted over them, I think.

Sandison, the author, is obviously interested in all this. I mentioned that he’d previously published a couple of stories in Weird Tales. One of them, “The River of Lost Souls” from 1930 is also a vampire story and, in many ways is a direct response to Dracula (the book, obviously, since the movie hadn’t come out yet). In this one, Sandison is also deeply interested in the ways vampires are presented as a having these long lists of rules they must follows. It’s also a western story, set in gold rush times. His other story, “Burnt Things” while not a vampire story IS a story of supernatural revenge, something we saw here in the story today.

It’s fun to see how, even in the early days of the genre, weird fiction writers were interested in tweaking and playing with the conventions and traditions of the raw material that they were drawing from. A good start to Halloween Month, I think!

Psychically Strained Tourist Pulp #35: “Chinese Processional” by Arthur J. Burks, Weird Tales, 1933, number 1, vol 21

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The shittiest, dumbest fascists in all of history may be crowing (for now) about their reactionary censorship, but we shan’t let their weepy, whining bullshit deter us – fuck them and fuck all fascists forever! And so, pushing them out of our minds and into the dustbins of history, we shall instead turn our attention to fun, useful, and interesting topics; namely, WEIRD FICTION.

Been a good couple of months since the last of these posts, but we always come back to the topic of classic weird fiction here at the ol’ blog. And, as the most Hallowed of all Eves looms in our future (a scant month-and-a-half away!) it’s time to get down to brass tacks and dive back into the pages of the Unique Magazine, Weird Tales. And this story today is an interesting one, though not without some problematic content, of course. It’s Arthur Burks’ “Chinese Processional” from the 1933!

Burks is an interesting guy, one of the absolute machines of the pulp era who came to be known as a “million-words-a-year” guy for his insane productivity. He wrote something like 800 short stories in his long career, and was famous for his methodical approach to his fiction. That being said, I think there’s actually some fairly nice writing in some of his work (today’s story included), a vibrancy and thoughtfulness to the descriptions and mood he’s trying to invoke.

Doubtless, this is because ol’ Burks actually lived in China. Most of the biographies of Burks focus on his time stationed in the Dominican Republic during the brutal occupation there, a period of his life that inspired him to write some (often shockingly racist) “voodoo” stories that were immensely popular with pulp readers of the day. However, in 1927 he resigned his commission while in China and ended up living there for a while, a period of his life that was an equally strong influence on his writing; I think it gave him a bit more depth and insight into the period and place at least, which we’ll talk about below. His deep connection to China, and specifically to the Manchu dynasts who oversaw the collapse of the Empire in the face of European Imperialism, is evident in the fact that he wrote the preface for a memoir by one of the Dowager Empress’s Ladies-in-Waiting (“Old Buddha” by Princess Der Ling).

But, before we dive in, let’s take a look at the cover and the ToC!

A nice painterly action scene curtesy of ol’ J. Allen St. John. It’s a nice one; I like the shocked look of the goon getting shanked there, and the Venusian beast has a nice sense of motion and heft to it. The only problem with it is that it’s an illustration of one of ol’ Kline’s pretty cash-grabby and pastiche-y “Venus” stories. As far as sword-n-planet fiction, it’s not *bad* per se; you’ll just be unable to shake the feeling that you’ve read basically all this same stuff about another guy, Carter was it? And didn’t it take place of Mars? Oh well; c’est les pulps, after all!

The ToC has some fun stuff here – a work-a-day Leinster story with some Big Ass Bugs, which is always fun, as well as what’s probably my favorite Conan-the-King story, “The Scarlet Citadel.” Also neat to see them reprinting “The Night Wire” again! That’s absolutely one of my favorite weird stories of all time; we talked about it a couple of years ago, if you remember.

But enough of this! On to the story: “Chinese Processional” by Arthur J. Burks!

A pretty brutal title illustration by ol’ “Jay Em” Wilcox here! Also notable in that it’s not *particularly* racist, although of course it is definitely grounded in the pulp orientalism of the day, trading in the brutish menace and cruel savagery of a racialized other. Interestingly, I don’t think you can say the same about the story, and even the tone of the violence, which in this illustration seems to be of a particularly barbaric nature, is different in Burks’ writing. But we’ll get to that!

Our story opens with our narrator musing upon his subtle, innate psychic abilities, something that it seems like Burks also thought – his later life, in the 50s and 60s, included a fair bit of writing about psychic phenomena and supernaturalism. But, our narrator is quick to assure us, even his psychic gifts cannot FULLY explain what we’re about to read!

Right of the bat, we’re introduced to some history about the Summer Palace outside of Peking, a royal retreat where the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi (known more commonly as Cixi today) went into retirement. Cixi is, of course, a real person, a powerful and fascinating figure who, through a combination of political acumen, ruthless realpolitik, and versatile diplomacy, ruled China for fifty something years, pitting European powers against one another while brutally suppressing reform and dissent. Here’s a picture of her, btw, from 1904:

Burks’ familiarity with the history of the Manchu court is on display in this short but sweet first section; it provides a nice sense of the power of the Chinese Empire and the monumental weightiness of the Summer Palace, I think, particularly where Burks’ points out to us the artificial, engineered nature of the landscape – the hill is human made, as is the vast Kun Ming Lake, speaking to the power of the Emperors who can reorder the surface of the Earth to fit their whims:

It also introduces a major theme that will run through this story: tourism, and in particular the way a we interact with the past when visiting these places. The little aside about a guide showing you where the (much reviled) “Emperor” Piyu was locked away in the Summer Palace, for instance, orients us within a framework of tourism and exploitation.

There’s a real sensuous delight that our narrator is taking from the Summer Palace; indeed it seems like he’s really just fascinated by Imperial China, and particularly of the grand palatial complexes that represented both the temporal power AND spiritual centrality of the Emperors. This yearning to steep himself in this history is such that our dude here wants to spend the night in the Summer Palace, just like he did in the Forbidden City, a very intimate connection to history, don’t you think? Our revere is interrupted, however, by the reminder that he (and us, by extension) are tourists here, and can’t just wander about and do as we please.

Our guy, unable to duck off and hide away in the Palace during the day, sneaks back in after hours and ends up swimming through the lake towards the boathouse he visited earlier. I think there’s some nice writing here, the way the lake is made into this mysterious, mythical place that our “hero” must cross:

We get great sensory writing here, the moonlight like glaring eyes, the fish and the lotus roots, a real “spell of the past” sort of thing…that is AGAIN broken by the reminder that there’s a thriving tourist industry here, that our guy first encountered these stories and images as a tourist being told these things. It’s a great little writerly trick, a very conscious and effective stylistic flourish that produces a marvelous mood; as weird fiction readers, we’re quite familiar with ruins and decay and the hoary tales of the past, but then to have them all contextualized as part of a modern tourist complex transforms the “mythic” landscape in a remarkable way – there’s even an explicit mention of the crass commodification of these cultural/historical/mythic tales, with anyone who can afford to being able to engage in what had previously been the sole privledge of royalty! It’s good stuff!

Our guy makes his way across the lake and up a canal towards the boathouse:

Good spectral writing in this section as our narrator investigates the forbidden boathouse. Invisible pigeons cooing overhead, the ancient boats (one half-sunk in the water), the sense of age and the weight of memory…it’s good environmental writing, real pleasurable. Burks, as mentioned above, was famous for his prolific output, but I do think you can tell when a writer is *into* what they’re writing, and this is such a clearly envisioned scene with such sharp emotional resonance that it’s impossible for me to think he was ONLY adding words up for money here. It’s honestly good stuff!

Anyway, our guy hangs out in the boathouse, musing upon history and the Emperors of China deeply and profoundly and, possibly, a little psychically? He feels like that, if he just puts his mind to it, he can summon up, in some misty, numinous way, a shadow of that glorious age…

Who could’ve foreseen such a weird turn of events!

Yes, our guy seems gripped by some vision…but is it an internal expression of his desire to imagine the past, or is it something more, something external to him? Regardless, and luckily blessed with the ability to understand Mandarin, he slips into one of the barges (the one still afloat) and watches a strange scene unfold before him!

First, and very nicely described in the prose, there wrecked barge rising from the water, mended and restored to its original glory. Then, a marvelous procession of people enter the boathouse:

A lot to unpack here – first off, the spectral figures are a stately procession of an Imperial Chinese household led, we can safely assume, by the shade of the powerful Empress Dowager Cixi herself. Alongside her is a powerfully built man armed with a beheading knife, an example of Chekov’s Executioner. But even MORE interesting is the way the narrators attempts to justify this scene transforms into a commentary of Ugly American Tourists. Perhaps these are but actors, hired by crass Americans to enact some kind of historical play for their delight and amusement.

It’s incredible how bitter this idea is expressed here, isn’t it? Our guy expects these Americans to appear any minute now “to pay their money, and watch, and laugh over” the show they paid for. “Tourists had no sentiment” is a remarkably condemning statement, and one apparently very strongly felt by the narrator. “The aura of heart-ache which shrouded this old place,” all the old “sorrows and tears” would mean nothing to a bunch of loud, rowdy Americans come to gawk and consume and generally disrespect history and the dead.

Our narrator is, presumably, also an American; only an American can have such sharply specific contempt for their countrymen, after all. It is interesting though that our guy here, of course, is also acting somewhat disrespectfully though, isn’t it? He swam the lake and broke into the boathouse after all – is the fact that he has reverence for the history (or so he claims) enough to absolve of, basically, doing exactly the same thing he’s cursing the hypothetical American tourists for doing?

It is a somewhat moot point however, because of course no tourists come in – this is not a reenactment at all. The Imperial entourage continues to pack into the boathouse, with the Empress and her favorites taking their place in the restored boat, while the rest of the crew piles into the boat in which our narrator is hiding (though they take no notice of him at all…). Then, in a very ghostly fashion, the chains slip from the boathouse doors, the gate opens, and the Imperial Barges sail once again the surface of Kun Ming lake.

There’s some very dreamlike writing here as they glide across the lake, whispers of mysterious conversation, the dilapidated ruins of the Summer Palace restored to their former glory, lights in windows and so forth. Our guy has clearly entered into another time, a spectral memory of China at its Imperial height, but even so he persists in thinking “any moment those crass American tourists will show up.” It’s a little funny, but perhaps the resilience of belief in the face of the mysterious is stronger than we can imagine.

Anyway, something happens which brings all this to a head for our narrator:

A man has been found within the grounds of the Summer Palace, and he’s in some serious trouble. The Empress, regal and terrible, steps from the barge to the shore, and confronts the man, who trembles before her. He’s beaten with bamboo rods, his blood mingling with the earth and staining the grass, and then, having confessed to his crime, the Empress orders him executed.

Now, before we go on, let’s take a moment to interrogate the usage of the offensive slur “coolie.” It’s a definitely racialized (and class-based) term, used to refer to laborers, particularly “unskilled” manual laborers, from south east Asia (generally India or China). The origins of the term go as far back as the 16th century, a Europeanized spelling of a Tamil word “kūli” which means “wages” or “hire.” It came into prominence and achieved its deeply racist connotation with the abolition of slavery by the British in the 1800s; needing a replacement for the vast labor needed to prop up the Empire and their colonial holdings, they took to hiring huge amounts of cheap workers and shipping them across the world from China or India to places like the Caribbean. These were, ostensibly, free people (mostly men) who had been contracted for their work, though in practice they were often little more than indentured servants, having signed contracts that basically enslaved them for a period of time. The labor trade was a major commercial enterprise of the era, both for the British and China, and is a hugely important part of the brutal exploitation of the age. It also carried over into the English language, and became a catch all term meant to convey a particular racial and class-based identity for the people being referred to. Interestingly, there is some relatively recent reclamation of the term, with working class heroes proudly proclaiming their identity as such in more recent movies and books. One of those things you have to be aware of and confront when reading old literature.

Anyway, our guy is troubled by what he sees – a brutal beating is one thing, but is seems clear that they’re going to kill this guy. He runs around trying to get them to stop, but he can’t actually interact with anybody – just like on the boat, they don’t seem able to see him, and when he tries to grab the Empress’s sleeve he simply can’t; it’s as if she’s incorporeal.

A grisly scene indeed!

Everybody, including our narrator, clambers back into the boats and continues their sailing around the lake, though it has become a decidedly weird experience for our guy.

The barges wheel about and make for the boathouse…and as they travel, everything seems to subtly begin to change:

Everything is returning to its ruined, dark, abandoned state as they travel the lake – whatever spell had restored the Summer Palace to its previous glory has vanished, apparently. There’s a wonderful line about the lights on the shore extinguishing as the boats sail by, a great and very spooky image, and when they arrive at the dock of the boat house there’s a shadow waiting for them, a kind of presence that seems to swallow up one by one the figures of the night’s haunting. When the shadow touches our guy, he feels a terrible coldness…and suddenly everything was as it was before in the boathouse; a barge sunk, everything dirty and dusty and abandoned.

He doesn’t swim back; he runs.

The coda to the story is a newspaper story that he comes across later:

And that’s THE END of “Chinese Processional” by Arthur Burks!

Now, as weird fiction, the ending is, admittedly, a little lackluster – the Empress returned to punish the guy who had tried to loot her tomb in the Summer Palace, simple supernatural vengeance story, pretty standard ghost fare. And the scene of the beheading is fine, though I wish it had been a bit more nightmarish, given the dreamlike quality of the prose that characterized the scenes on the lake.

But, all things considered, I like it. There’s good writing in here, like I said, and the fact that it’s a story set in China by a white guy and it’s not MORE racist or MORE “exotic” is actually pretty remarkable – Weird Tales, readers, writers, and editors alike, all LOVED a good ol’ “Mysterious Inscrutable Orient!” story, which can be quite rough going these days. But the tone that the author takes here is, shockingly, respectful, at least of the Imperial past of China. And the way he attacks tourism, and AMERICAN tourists at that, is very interesting and, honestly, fairly atypical for the era. Just goes to show you that there’s often SOMETHING interesting in the stories that showed up in these magazines!

Straining pulp…and souls! “Soul-Catcher” by Robert S. Carr, Weird Tales v. 9, n. 3, 1927!

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Generally, when I pick a story to muse about here, I go for one that I really love, a story that I feel like has really got something going on or does something interesting or provocative. Alternatively, I sometimes pick stories that I think are historically interesting, or that represent a facet of the genre, beyond just the fiction in itself. But sometimes I just like to indulge in a little bit of gawking, pointing out something odd or strange or interesting (at least to me), and that’s what today’s (hopefully short – I free write these things stream of consciousness style, so who the hell knows!?) lil’ essay thing is. The story in question is “Soul-Catcher” by Robert S. Carr, from the March 1927 issue of Weird Tales!

Now, I actually DO like this story; it’s got some fun weirdness, and I’m a sucker for a first person narrative with a good voice, and it’s also very short and to-the-point. It’s an example of perfectly fine weird fiction from the 20s, not anything VITAL to your understanding of the genre or anything, and I’d never argue it should be anthologized or anything; it’s a decent little bit of weird writing. But what struck me when I found it, during a recent re-perusal of The Unique Magazine’s ToCs, was the author, Robert S. Carr.

It’s a deep cut, but if you’re interested in creaky old UFO lore, particularly the history of it as a social phenomenon, you might recognize that name. You see, in the 70s, long after his Weird Tales days, lil’ Bobby Carr got into the Saucer Scene in a big way, as evidenced by this little newspaper story in the Tampa Tribune, Wed Jan 16, 1974:

I think this is the first mention of Hangar 18, a place that, along with Area 51 and Roswell, would have to be one of those geographical locales that basically underpins all of modern UFO mythology. And Weird Fiction author Robert S. Carr created it! He’s the one who turned a secret hangar at Wright Patterson Air Force Base into one of the shadowy foundations of modern saucer conspiracism!!! And that’s not all! Here’s Carr again, this time from the Nov 1, 1974 issue of the Ann Arbor Sun:

That’s right, not only did Carr create Hangar 18, but he also appears to have created the modern Alien Autopsy plot that would, in the 90s, explode among UFOlogy! It’s also interesting to see that Carr, saucerizing in the 70s before Roswell had become a thing, leans into the Aztec New Mexico crash as the origin of the Saucer and its crewsicles. It’s a unique moment in paranoid outre american history.

Carr isn’t unique in that regard, of course. You might notice, in the first news clipping above there, the name of Donald Keyhoe. Even a dilletante of Saucerology would recognize that name – he, and his book “The Flying Saucers are Real” are one of the biggest reasons for the explosion in Saucer interest in 1947, tying together a new Nuts-n-Bolts approach (which treated the saucers as machines from alien worlds, in contrast to the more spiritualist Contactee movement that had dominated saucer fandom to that point) with grim suggestions of a conspiracy of silence from the u.s. gov’t about them. But what’s interesting is that, like Carr, Keyhoe was ALSO a Weird Tales writer! He’d had four stories published in the magazine in the 20s, before moving on to specialize in air adventure stories. Eventually he’d transition into a fairly lucrative article writing and “journalism” career, focusing especially on pilots and aeronautics, which is how he ended up connecting with Kenneth Arnold and the early Saucer community. Funny to see two major legs of the many-legged hydra(?) that is modern UFOlogy coming out of Weird Tales, isn’t it?

Just to wrap up the Saucer portion of the show, here’s a link to a Skeptical Inquirer article written about Carr by his son, giving some very important context to his dad, who sounds like a complex, conflicted individual. It’s kind of sad reading, but it sounds like Carr pere was, basically, one of those weird pathological liars who had a hard time distinguishing reality from his lies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he found a home in UFO circles. Anyway, a fascinating guy, and a very weird connection!

But what about his fiction, you ask? Ah, let us dive in!

A nice little title illustration from an artist I don’t immediately recognize, “G.O.Olimick” maybe? Anyway, it’s good, competently done…but doesn’t that profile look familiar? I swear it’s copied from a Renaissance portrait of some some venetian doge or evil cardinal, a Medici or Borgia or someone like that. Doesn’t it look familiar? If you have any ideas, let me know, I can see the portrait in profile in my mind very clearly, but I can’t find it! (EDIT: I reached out to Adam McPhee, all around Renaissance Man and a Writer of Note, and asked him if, in his extensive studies of Renaissance Italy, he’d seen this visage before, and he thinks it IS Cosimo de Medici! As thanks, I now insist everybody subscribe to Adam’s substack, Adam’s Notes!)

A quick, efficient intro – it’s a hospital story, and right away we’re introduced to ol’ Doc Dorsey, a quiet fellow who seems to specialize in emergency work. We learn that he’s a diligent enough doctor, trying hard to help these case even though, of course, it’s not always possible. Yet there are a couple of oddities about his practice. First off, he works alone, ALWAYS.

So there you go, Doc Dorsey would leap into action with every new case, but he never had an assistant and did all his doctorin’ behind closed doors. The narrator lets us know that that’s not too strange, when you think about it – I mean, these emergency cases are either straight forward or the person dies, not a lot of room for consultation or consideration or discussion. So of course the doctor likes to work alone, it’s just the efficient choice. But it kind of strange; for instance, sometimes they bring in a case that’s obviously hopeless, the person is 100% dead or dying with no hope for any other outcome, and still Dorsey has ’em brought in, shoos everybody out, and then spends time behind closed doors with them. And what’s even odder is that, while the interns and orderlies standing outside his room will hear him bustling around and working, they’ll sometimes see that, when he comes out, its obvious that he wasn’t doing any sort of examination or whatever – no gloves, no mess. So, what the hell was he doin’ in there?

Ah, who cares, says our narrator:

Dorsey does his best, after all, so a bit of eccentricity is to be excused!

Anyway, one day, our narrator, who is an orderly, is asked by Doc Dorsey to head down to supply and get him some surgical gloves, which he does. But while he’s doing this, a car wreck victim is brought in and Dorsey goes to work. Our narrator doesn’t know this, however, and without thinking, enters into Dorsey’s operating room, apparently the first person ever to do so while he’s with a patient. And what does he see?

I mean, that’s pretty good, isn’t it? For one thing, Dorsey has, apparently, decided that this guy is a goner – he ain’t doin’ shit for him at all. Instead, he’s got some kind of weird device, a web-filled frame with what sounds like a grounding wire running into a big glass jar. That’s an evocative scene, isn’t it? And then it gets better!

Good weird shit, in my opinion, and I love the little self-satisfied “got ’em!” from Dorsey there. But it’s all too much for our narrator, who must’ve moaned or made some sort of noise.

It’s good tension here, I think – the narrator (and we) don’t know what the hell is happening here, but it’s obviously something weird and occult. I mean, he’s got a weird net that funnels smokey essence from corpses into jars…that’s a helluva thing to just walk in on. And the look in Dorsey’s eyes when he realizes he’s been caught is concerning, to say the least! But then it all settles down, and Dorsey explains:

Dude’s been jarring souls for a while, apparently – he’s got a big ol’ cabinet full of smoky jars. And he explains that, if he can’t help ’em survive whatever accident or trouble their body is in, he at least tries to save their souls. Literally. In jars.

There’s some good writing on Carr’s part here, where our narrator explains that, upon seeing the jars, he gets a very strange, very distinct sensation of being observed, like what he used to experience when he worked backstage at a theater and would, sometimes, have to step out in front of an audience to do something. It conveys the creepiness of the situation well, I think, and also really captures the weird way our brains work when they’re confronted with something odd – we grope around in our memories for some kind of analogous situation to make sense of what we’re experiencing, and the results are often equal parts illuminating and confounding. Anyway, it’s good.

Dorsey doesn’t seem troubled by his soul collection, however. He accepts that he’s been found out, and even seems to come around to the idea that it’s a good thing; it was bound to happen eventually, and Dorsey is glad that it wasn’t a prissy, smug internist, at least. In fact, Dorsey seems to come to the decision that he might need some help after all, and he asks our narrator if he’s interested in the job.

No time for discussion or thought – an ambulance is bringing in a new victim right away! Talk about on the job training!

Another hint that something not all together copacetic is going on here – that glimmer in Dorsey’s eyes is, to put it simply, menacing. But our narrator can’t do anything about it, barely has time to reflect, as Dorsey calls him over to help with the weird net thing. They catch another soul, and the narrator notices that, briefly, the body weight of the corpse decrees by a few ounces when they snag the smoke. Dorsey explains that there is a physical aspect to the smoke; it weighs about four ounces or so, and the weight discrepancy is compensated for by air filling in the soul vacuum left behind in the corpse. It’s weird and I love it.

The next day, the narrator comes across Dorsey seemingly in a kind of weird trance in his rooms. Eventually he wakes up and explains to the narrator that he was “astralizing,” basically projecting his own consciousness out of his body? Where to, and to what ends, we’re never told…just more weirdness from Doc Dorsey!

And then, sometimes later…Dorsey is found dead:

A mechanical fault in the elevators had made the hospital shake, and as a result all those jars had fallen and shattered and, presumably, all those souls had…gotten out. Our narrator goes over to the body and pulls the cloth off the face, and gets a bit of fright…

I mean, damn…that’s gruesome! His head, and especially his face, had ruptured, as if it had sudden been full of some very argumentative critters.

Well, our orderly puts it together, same way as we did:

And that’s the end of “Soul-Catcher” by Robert S. Carr!

Freaky shit, huh? Dorsey had left his body behind, and when those souls got out, they poured into his vacant corpus, filled it up, maybe fought for control, and it was too much, physically, for the body to withstand. After all, there is some kind of weight and substance to the souls…four ounces of soul stuff, and how many souls had Dorsey been jarring up over the years. Just straight up Scanners-ed his head! And what happened to Dorsey’s astralized soul, anyway?

The key to weird fiction is the unanswered question, you know what I mean? The way a story creates a framework where the characters can, plausibly, come to conclusions based on hints within their own story, a kind of semi-certainty about the events that they’ve experienced; meanwhile, we, the reader, have to have just a little bit MORE certainty, shared with us by the author, that yeah, for sure, 100% some weird stuff had been going down. But what makes it all work is the unanswered parts of the story. What was Dorsey doing here? He’d been collecting a bunch of souls, but why? Was he doing it out of some twisted altruism, the idea that he was preserving something of these people that would’ve vanished otherwise? Or did he have sinister motives afterall? His “astralizing” seems to suggest an occult knowledge and interest that could imply that there’s more to Dorsey’s work, that those flashes of mad, manic glee at the chance to get a soul were about more than we realize. Was he doing something with these souls? And was his death an accident, a sudden influx of souls looking for a new body, or was it a deliberate thing, an act of revenge on their jailor?

Who knows? That’s the sort of stuff that makes great weird fiction! I also really love that last line…the OTHER key to weird fiction is the imposition of these weird events and unanswered question on the otherwise banal, everyday life of a normal person. This poor orderly has had a brief glimpse behind the curtain, and they don’t know what the hell it all means beyond the very real fact that it is unsettling and upsetting. So they’ll just have to start looking at the want ads again. Great stuff!

Anyway, fairly quick little story, and even my long-winded thoughts got put down fairly quick. A fun little tale, I think, with a bonus interest factor brought about by the weird connections the author would have much later in life to the big, unanswered questions about UFOs.