"The rich are his clients.  Rich people, governments—they're all rich, never let anybody tell you different—and rich corporations.  Nobody else can afford his fees.  He takes the money and does what they want.  Sometimes it's good.  Sometimes it isn't.  He's a wizard.  I'll give him that."

Back when it was pretty new, I read 2008's An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe, a man whose knowledge of genre literature, high literature, and science and technology, as well as his deep philosophical, emotional and intellectual commitments, prolificity and abilities as a wordsmith probably make him the greatest or the ultimate speculative fiction writer, and I have to admit it didn't make much of an impression on me.  As I recall, its relatively simple style (compared to something like The Book of the New Sun, which is full of hard words and elaborate images and difficult to follow passages) underwhelmed me and the fact that much of it was set in the world of the Broadway-style musical theatre and dealt with detective genre goop didn't grab me. But today I am a more mature and more patient reader and somewhat less dismissive of mystery writing conventions and a little less dismissive of Broadway, so this month, a month in which a lot of my time has been taken up with the pursuit of the almighty dollar and dealing with my family, I gave An Evil Guest another shot.  I read a scan of a first edition.    

An Evil Guest is set in an alternate/future Earth where mind-reading and necromancy are real, cancer was cured a year and a half ago, and the human race has developed a warp drive, with the result that rich people own private "hoppers" the size of automobiles and can explore the universe on their own and the United States is in diplomatic contact with an alien civilization on planet Woldercan.  We readers don't learn all this stuff immediately from the omniscient third-person narrator or in blocks of exposition, but in dribs and drabs in the conversation of our characters.  The text of An Evil Guest consists largely of dialogue, snappy repartee made up of brief and clever sentences in which characters offer the reader and each other info in an ofttimes oblique manner, and often involuntarily--again and again characters do that Sherlock Holmes thing in which they intuit something from clues within another character's speech.  

An Evil Guest has three principal characters, and they form a love triangle.  As with the setting, we learn about these people's personalities and lives through dialogue, in bits and pieces, sometimes learning very important things about them quite late in the game, and, since our info comes from the spoken words of people who are all experts in art of deception who are trying to manipulate each other we have every reason to doubt the truth of everything we learn.  We've got our protagonist, Cassie Casey, an attractive stage actress based in some northern American city.  (We eventually learn it is the New England town of Kingsport from H. P. Lovecraft's oeuvre.)  We've got Gideon Chase, a famous college professor, a philosopher who is also known among the elite as "a wizard" who can solve almost any problem for those willing to pay his astronomical prices.  In the first of An Evil Guest's chapters the President of the United States hires Chase to help the Feds deal with our third lead character, Bill Reis.  The President considers Reis terribly evil, and so elusive that the federal government can't seem to keep track of him or figure out just what he is up to.  Or so the Commander-in-Chief and his chief lackey say.  Reis is like the richest man in the world and owns many businesses of all types--banks, restaurants, you name it--often under assumed names, and he is in close contact with the aliens on Woldercan, people who have a large supply of gold, which they can apparently create via molecular manipulation.  (This novel is all about taking something and changing it into something else, or at least making it look like something else.)  Cassie is almost always "on screen," but Chase and Reis just show up occasionally, though their actions drive the plot more than Cassie's, and Cassie and minor characters are always talking about and acting in response to these two mega-rich operators.

What unites Cassie, Chase and Reis is that they are all famous important people whose names, identities, and appearances are constantly changing, Cassie must mundanely, she being an actress whose assumption of other names and identities is (initially, at least) overt and expected by those around her.  False names, shape shifting and people assuming multiple identities are a major theme of An Evil Guest, with even the many minor characters often pulling such shenanigans--a cop looks like one of Cassie's two ex-husbands; two people with the same name show up, one impersonating the other; people whom we have been led to believe are good turn out to be evil or vice versa; and on and on.  A werewolf even makes an appearance.   

I won't go into all the twists and turns of the plot, which includes in its first two thirds lots of detective story elements like minor characters getting kidnapped and murdered, leaving Cassie and us readers wondering who committed these foul deeds and why, and then science fiction stuff like hyperdrive travel and interaction with alien; in the final third the scene shifts into Weird Tales territory and Cassie finds herself on a tropical island near R'lyeh where she must contend with worshippers of Cthulhu.

Early in the book, Chase, wanting to use Cassie to help him get a hold of Reis, takes the actress to the top of a mountain and performs some manner of eldritch ceremony there--afterwards Cassie is irresistibly beautiful and charismatic, and attracts Reis to her like a moth to a flame.  Both Chase and Reis quickly fall in love with Cassie, and compete for her at the same time they are trying to use her to learn about each other and perhaps control or destroy each other.  Though the Lovecraftian elements of An Evil Guest are in-your-face obvious, we might also see Wolfe's novel as having a plot much like an A. E. van Vogt production--the main character gains special powers and becomes embroiled in the conflicts and machinations of the superpowered elites who run the world behind the scenes and things get crazier and crazier as the story proceeds.  But as I have already suggested, Cassie, in contrast to many of the Canadian madman's heroes, is closer to a puppet or a victim than to a genius who masters the omni-science of Nexialism or prepares mankind to rule the sevagram or otherwise willfully launches a paradigm shift.   

In the second third of the novel Cassie is the star of a musical financed by Reis to be a vehicle for her--thanks to Chase's sorcery, Cassie is a brilliant singer and a top-class dancer and makes a success of the show, which I think Wolfe intends us to think is silly and stupid, though at the same time its tropical island and volcano god content foreshadows the final third of the novel.  New players, significantly government entities, stride on to the scene and themselves try to manipulate Cassie--the aforementioned kidnapping and murdering are part of this manipulation.  This portion of the novel makes explicit that this America is one in which federal agencies are totally corrupt, ignoring the elected political leadership and acting independently as they compete with each other for power; these agencies are not above murdering innocent people.  Gideon Chase and Bill Reis, fabulously wealthy and ultracompetent businessmen, swim with the government entities in this same pool of jockeying elites who ignore the law, where alliances are ever-shifting and the economy of which is based on exchanging favors.  A local police official tells Cassie, referring to Chase, that 

"Our friend helps me out sometimes, and I repay him whenever I can. There's a lot of that in my business."

Another of the players among these corrupt elites is the news media.  One of the things that makes Wolfe an exciting and unusual writer is that in a genre full of atheists who are libertarians and atheists who are commies, Wolfe is a committed Catholic and a conservative, and in An Evil Guest Wolfe takes some swipes at that perennial punching bag of all right wingers, the mainstream media.  Cassie has a friend who is a reporter who (like just about everybody) seems more interested in using Cassie to further her career or other desires than being her friend.  Early in the book Gideon Chase remarks that "Newspapers are not notorious for their painstaking accuracy."  One of the starkest but also subtle ways in which Wolfe suggests the world he is depicting, in particular its government and the media, is corrupt and reprehensible is through a TV news report that indicates that in this alternate USA women who regret their pregnancies are allowed to kill their children up to one year after birth and left-wing activists are pushing for the right to kill children up to age five.  A TV news reader presents this little tidbit this way:

"In an unrelated story, the Supreme Court has extended the period for post-parturition terminations to one year. Civil rights organizations continue to press for five for defectives."

This news story comes after a commercial in which a bottle of ketchup uncaps itself and pours out its own contents in a "crimson fountain," perhaps Wolfe priming us to think of blood and perhaps even self-destruction (a society that murders its children is one that is killing itself) and a report about the collision of a train and a school bus.  (Putting "In an unrelated story" between two different stories about dead children is one of Wolfe's little jokes.)  This news program, delivered dead pan and casually by the talking head but gruesome to us readers, also includes notice that famous philosopher Gideon Chase was injured in an assassination attempt.  (One of An Evil Guest's many instances of shape-changing is Chase having to have a limb amputated after he is shot and getting a battery of prostheses for use in different circumstances.) 

The euphemistic references to the murder of children is one of the grimmer examples of wordplay in An Evil Guest, which includes some lame puns and plenty of jokes and clues within people's names.  Cassie's agent has the last name "Youmans;" one woman's first name is "India," a source of jokes, and her assistant's full name is "Ebony White;" Cassie calls Gideon Chase "Gid" which of course looks a lot like "God," and another man is named "Gil" which is only one letter away from "Gid"--is it Chase in disguise?  One of the more clever pieces of wordplay is an adage Cassie whips out during a one-sided discussion of religion and good and evil with her perplexed journalist friend: "add nothing to God and you get good."  Did Wolfe come up with this or is it famous?  Are we supposed to think Cassie, who is often portrayed as ignorant, came up with this, or that she got it from Chase, the philosopher who has proclaimed that good and evil do not exist?

The final third An Evil Guest is more fantastical and has more of the flavor of horror fiction than detective fiction, and is less dialogue-oriented, with more images and more action.  Reis has Cassie brought to a Polynesian archipelago of which he is king--Cassie is considered queen by the inhabitants, Reis's subjects, whom we hear again and again are tall and fat.  Also among these islands we find that among the secret elites always negotiating or fighting a shadow war with each other behind the scenes and determining Earth's fate are various monster gods, including a shape-shifting shark god and Great Cthulhu himself, whose sunken city R'lyeh rests nearby.  Wolfe delivers a good horror sequence involving a woman killed by a shark and two very good horror sequences involving, first, a female Cthulhu worshipper who tries to get Cassie to betray Reis, and, second, a female private investigator hired by Reis to infiltrate the Cthulhu cult.  This poor P.I. becomes a living dead tool of Cthulhu and has horrifying experiences down in R'lyeh and back on the surface; her adventures are probably the most immediately effective scenes/or in the novel.

Who will live and who will die in the cataclysmic battle that erupts when Reis manipulates the US Navy into attacking R'lyeh?  Who is a Cthulhu worshipper and who is willing to die to save humanity?  Will Cassie end up with either of the two powerful men who love her?  Will the reader be able to figure out the significance of all the vague complicated hints in the Afterword about time travel and cloning?  Can it be that people who have died are going to reappear, and/or that some of the characters we have met are in fact clones or younger or older versions of other characters?  

What else can we say about An Evil Guest?  Well, there is a theme that wealth and gold are perhaps more trouble than they are worth (the quote from which the novel's title is taken and which serves as its epigraph suggests as much) but then there is also the suggestion that businesspeople are more honest and better stewards of society than politicians and other government bastards.  Is the world depicted in the novel, one in which infanticide is the norm and, apparently, Cthulhu is the real ruler of the Earth, some kind of satire of our real world where abortion is common and dictatorship and terrorism are rife? 

Then we have the fact that our main character is an attractive woman who has been victimized and exploited her entire life and who has two failed marriages behind her.  Like all the novel's characters, our feelings about Cassie must be ambiguous.  Is she a heroine, or just a pawn, a victim, of others?  Does Cassie ever really make a decision, ever accomplish a goal, or is she just pushed hither and thither by others, used by others and rescued by others?  The difficult experiences she endures after the battle between Cthulhu and the US Navy change her looks, but do they teach her how to be self-sufficient?  At the end of the novel Cassie is about to start a new phase of life; can we safely hope she will be happy and/or the mistress of her own fate, or is this new phase of life just the product of her being rescued by others yet again and should we expect Cassie to pull another blunder and enter into a third unhappy marriage?

An Evil Guest is a novel about dangerous space aliens, dangerous technologies and dangerous supernatural powers, but at its core it is a story about sexual relationships (and, after all, what could be more dangerous than sex?)  Wolfe offers theories of sexual relationships that I assume are pretty mainstream among regular people but perhaps not the kinds of theories that would be voiced among the educated, as Cassie and Wolfe acknowledge.  Why do Reis and Chase fall in love with Cassie?  Because she is good looking!  And what inspires Cassie's love for them in return?  It seems like she likes them because they are wealthy, successful, big and strong, and offer her gifts and attention.  Cassie seems fascinated by Chase's hi-tech automobile, and as for Reis, Cassie says to another character (referring to Reis by using one of the man's numerous aliases, "Wallace")

"Wally's strong, really strong.  We're not supposed to like strong men, but we do.  Or most of us do.  I do.  I know too many wimps already.  Wally says he loves me, and he means it.  I can tell.  It's hard not to like somebody who loves you."

An Evil Guest is a (take your pick) realistic or cynical book that tells you the world and people are the way you fear they are, not the way you hope they are.  Yikes!

Finally, can I recommend An Evil Guest?  Well, I like it, but I don't love it.  The style is smooth and easy to enjoy even if you have trouble keeping track of what is going on with all the detective parts in the first half or so and with all the time distortion and clone elements in the ending.  The horror stuff in the islands section is remarkably good.  And Wolfe gives us quite a bit to think over on the level of philosophy and when it comes to what actually happens in the story--some will embrace all the mystery and ambiguity, while others will complain that there is no real resolution of some of the plot elements and that we don't really find out what happens to many of the characters.  We don't even know if Cthulhu is OK! 

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are fulfilling a pledge to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales that has a 1930s cover date.  We've already sampled something from every issue published from 1930 through 1938, as the lists at the following links will attest, and we are currently in the closing stages of the 1939 leg of our journey, today reading three stories from the October issue of that year.  

1930  1931 1932 1933  1934  1935  1936  1937  1938  

This October 1939 issue of Weird Tales includes a reprint of a good Robert E. Howard story, "Worms of the Earth," which I blogged about back in ancient times--late 2013--as well as an interesting letters column, in which people, including Robert Bloch, Henry Kuttner, and E. Hoffman Price, opine about P. Schuyler Miller's memorably crazy story "Spawn," about which we recently penned a pretty hostile mixed review.  But our focus today will be three stories altogether new to me.

"Mystery of the Missing Magnate" by Ralph Milne Farley

This will be the sixth story we've read by Farley--earlier this year we read "The House of Ecstasy," "Time for Sale," "Liquid Life," "Horror's Head" and "The Stratosphere Menace."  I thought those five not bad (though Isaac Asimov would beg to differ) so have reason to hope "Mystery of the Missing Magnate" will be a winner, even though it looks like this story has never been reprinted.

As it turns out, "Mystery of the Missing Magnate" is a mediocre Twilight Zone-style story in which something impossible happens to a guy but it doesn't affect his life long term.  Farley's story might, however, offer some limited interest (or limitless offence) with its depictions of various demographics of Americans and South Asians.

A "dignified Milwaukee financier" is in Mobile and has just inked a deal with some Southerners to buy a large quantity of cotton; this deal is very important to the Northerner's firm.  To relax after a long morning of negotiations he goes to the cinema, where a travel film presents feats of magic performed by a "Hindoo swami;" one such feat consists of making a young man disappear and then reappear.  The financier declares this "hooey" but when he steps out of the theatre he finds he is not in Mobile, but back home in Wisconsin!  He spends a few pages running around Milwaukee, wondering it he is insane.  Did he hallucinate his trip to Mobile?  Will his firm lose a chance at all that cotton because he missed the meeting with the Alabamans (even though he recalls meeting them?)  He doesn't run into anybody he knows, his colleagues being out to lunch and his wife being off visiting relatives.  Our rattled financier gets a ticket for the next train down to Alabama and then goes into a movie theatre to kill time waiting for it.  He sees the reel about the Indian magician again, and when the businessman emerges from the cinema he doesn't recognize the street.  He asks a "Negro policeman" to direct him ti the train station is, and the man's response (Farley writes the black cop's dialogue phonetically--"The o'ny two stations hiah ah de L. an' Ain, and de So'thun") realizes he is now in Mobile!  The cotton deal, and with it the man's career and company, are secure and safe, but he'll have a different view of Hindu swamis for the rest of his life.

An acceptable filler piece.

"The Witch's Cat" by Manly Wade Wellman (as by Gans T. Field)

Here we have a much more entertaining and better-written story than Farley's, one with vivid descriptions and characters with strong motivations.  Thumbs up for "The Witch's Cat," an impressive piece of work by Manly Wade Wellman.

Jael Bettiss is an incredibly ugly old woman who hates everybody and lives in hollow among cypresses in a house that is falling apart.  She endeavors to give the local villagers the impression she is a witch, even rubbing soot onto her cat so it will be the appropriate black, and supports herself by selling charms and philtres and by demanding protection money of farmers whose cows, she hints, just might go dry.

One Jael Bettiss acquires a book of spells and gains the ability to work real black magic!  One of her first works as a real witch is to give her much-put-upon cat the ability to speak!  Then she masters a spell that  gives her the appearance of a mesmerizingly beautiful young woman!  Changing her looks was just the first step in Jael Bettiss's campaign to steal away from the prettiest girl in the village the heart of the village's most handsome young man in the village, a campaign that involves a voodoo doll, among other sorceries--the witch even coerces her cat into acting as her thief.  But the cat feels more kindly to Jael Bettiss's rival for that young man's affection, who pets him when she has the chance, than he does to the cruel witch.  Will the feline foil Jael Bettiss's schemes to murder the pretty girl and win the love of the young man?

A great black magic story, with well-described sorcery and well-wrought characters whose behavior is wholly believable and compelling and whose personalities drive the plot.  Recommended to all fans of witchcraft stories as well as cat lovers.

Besides Wellman collections, "The Witch's Cat," which first appeared under the pseudonym "Gans T. Field," has been reprinted in cat-themed SF anthologies, of which there are quite a few--SF people love cats.

"In the Walls of Eryx" by H. P. Lovecraft and Kenneth Sterling

"In the Walls of Eryx" debuted here in Weird Tales, where it shares honors as cover story with Wellman's "The Witch's Cat."  Like all Lovecraft productions, "In the Walls of Eryx" has been reprinted a million times, reappearing not only in a stack of Lovecraft collections but in Donald Wollheim's Avon Science Fiction Reader in 1952 and in Spanish translation in a 1972 issue of Nueva Dimension.  I'm not at home so I don't have access to my own copy of Arkham House's Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, so I am reading the story in the Corrected Seventh Printing of that collection available at the internet archive.

Somewhat to my surprise, here we have a classic-style science fiction story with ray guns and forcefields starring an Earthman who tries to solve a mystery on Venus using logic, set against a background of racism and imperialism.

It is the spacefaring future.  Decades ago humans arrived on Venus and discovered some remarkable crystals, crystals smaller than your hand but which store tremendous energy, enough energy to power a city for months!  The Crystal Company makes its profits by bringing these crystals back to Earth, but there are obstacles, like the natives of Venus, tentacled reptile men who wield swords and fling poison darts, and were more or less innocuous until humans started taking away the crystals, which the Venusians hold to be sacred and like to install in their temples.

The bulk of "On the Walls of Eryx" consists of a long journal or diary penned by an employee of the Crystal Company while on a one-man expedition.  In his account of the first day of his expedition, our narrator opines that even though these Venusians have cities and some think they communicate with each other via their tentacles they don't count as people and should be exterminated so as to facilitate the collection of the crystals.

Somehow the big interplanetary corporation which employs him hasn't provided this guy with a helicopter or something, so on day one he trudges through jungles and swamps, hacking down carnivorous plants with a knife and gunning down reptile men he encounters with his "flame pistol."  There is a lot of talk about his equipment--his leather clothes, his oxygen mask, etc.  He spots a remarkably brilliant crystal off in the distance, and tries to get to it, but finds it is on the other side of an invisible wall, in the dead hand of a fellow employee of the Crystal Company, killed in some mysterious way.  Our guy finds an opening in the wall, retrieves the crystal--the biggest he has ever seen--and then proceeds to explore the maze-like building of unscalable, unbreakable, invisible walls.

The narrator gets hopelessly lost, as if the walls are silently shifting or the doorways noiselessly closing behind him, and spends days trying to chart a way out, noting his progress (or lack thereof) in his journal.  While he wracks his brain and employs all his equipment trying to find a way out, the narrator witnesses the corpse of his predecessor being devoured by native scavengers, and then an army of lizard men arrives to watch his increasingly desperate struggles and, apparently, mock him.  When he realizes he is doomed, that his food and water and oxygen are going to run out, he becomes woke and decides that the human race should stop collecting the crystals and theorizes that the Venusian lizard people are perhaps a race superior to mankind, more in touch with the cosmic order and its rules.  If the human race keeps bothering the natives maybe the forces that control the universe will punish us!

At the end of the story is printed a Crystal Company report describing how the body of the narrator was discovered and the maze destroyed.  The report suggests that the Crystal Company is going to try to wipe out the native Venusians and maybe bring down upon the Earth the wrath of higher powers.  

Like a lot of Lovecraft's stories, "In the Walls of Eryx" feels long because of all the detailed description of the setting and of every little step the narrator takes and every little stratagem he experiments with in his efforts to figure out the puzzle which faces him.  Still, it is pretty entertaining.  "In the Walls of Eryx" is also notable for its anti-racist and anti-imperialist message.  There is a commonly-held stereotype that old SF is all sexist and racist and always depicts women as the weaker sex and aliens as evil and so forth.  My reading of 1930s SF over the course of this blog's life has uncovered many examples of SF that prove this to be hogwash, and here is another one.  SF was written by a diverse group of personalities with a wide array of interests and a broad spectrum of attitudes and opinions, and even individual writers' bodies of work can offer a variety of viewpoints--Lovecraft is famously (and justifiably) considered a racist, and yet here we see a story with his name on it that is all about how primitive natives should be respected.

A few years ago we read Frank Belknap Long's "The Robot Empire" under its original title, "The Vapor Death"

**********

I'm happier with this October issue of Weird Tales than I was with the September one.  Wellman delivers a very fun black magic witch story, and the Lovecraft and Sterling piece is a solid traditional SF tale with strong weird horror elements.  And Farley's story is not bad, just trifling.  

More Weird Tales await us in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.  Stick around!  

Weird Tales only published 11 issues in 1939, and the one we look at today is dated June-July 1939 on its contents page.  This issue has quite a lot of reprints in it, and the stories we'll be reading by Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft appeared earlier in WT or in other venues, but we'll also tackle a piece by Hugh B. Cave which debuted here in this issue of Farnsworth Wright's unique magazine.

"The Willow Landscape" by Clark Ashton Smith (1931)

isfdb tells us that Clark Ashton Smith's "The Willow Landscape" first saw print in Philippine Magazine, and then was included in the 1933 small press collection The Double Shadow.  After its inclusion in Weird Tales in 1939, here it was promoted as an "ingenious Chinese fantasy" on the contents page, it would resurface in several Smith collections.  If you are scoring at home, be aware I am reading the Weird Tales version.

"The Willow Landscape" is a creditable little fantasy, one with a happy ending, something we don't necessarily expect from California's chief weirdie, who kills off protagonists at a pretty alarming rate.

Shih Liang is a lonely man, a scholar with a clerical job at the imperial court, but no friends or family save his younger brother, who is studying to become a scholar himself.  His ancestors left Shih Liang a bunch of art treasures but also a pile of debts, and most of Shih Liang's salary goes to paying off these debts and financing his little brother's education.  The man's only real recreation is staring at his favorite painting, which depicts a beautiful landscape with willows and a bamboo bridge, and, on the bridge, a pretty young woman.  Admiring this painting refreshes Shih Liang as would a walk in the country.

Disaster strikes!  Thanks to the maneuvers of some jerk off at the imperial court, Shih Liang loses his job!  Disgraced, no other job is open to him.  To survive, and to complete payment on his brother's schooling, Shih Liang has to start selling the art collection.  He leaves his favorite painting until last.  As he takes one final look at the painting, he is magically transported to the world of the painting, where he lives happily ever after with the young woman--in the last line of the story Smith hints that if anybody watched the painting carefully they'd notice Shih Liang having sex with her.  Cheeky!

Not bad, though you can see the ending (entering the painting) a mile away (the sex joke is a surprise, at least.)  

"The Death Watch" by Hugh B. Cave (1939)

Here we have a quite good Lovecraftian story written in a more direct and accessible style than that which we associate with Lovecraft himself.  Thumbs up!

Our narrator, Harry Crandall, works at a radio station, but the station doesn't broadcast the 1939 equivalents of Led Zeppelin, Rush Limbaugh, U2 and Howard Stern--this station sends and receives important business and safety messages for ships and their owners and that sort of thing.  Our story is set in Florida, and there are lots of references to spiders and swamps and insects as well as what those so inclined might consider opportunities for "Florida Man" jokes.  

An attractive young woman of Harry's acquaintance, Elaine, was very close with her brother, Mark, and they lived together in a big house set far from any other building, on the edge of a swamp.  Elaine moved out when she married Peter, a writer who, like so many of us nowadays, works at home.  Mark died recently--Harry was at his bedside as he expired.  Elaine and Mark have moved into Mark's big house, and Peter often comes to hang out with Harry at night at the radio station, when Harry is on watch at the radio set--Peter seems pretty interested in radio and learns a lot during his time at the station.  While hanging out there, Peter reports on the horrible effect Mark's death has had on Elaine--she has started reading occult books and has hired a Seminole Indian to work at the big house and she spends a lot of time with this taciturn, creepy drunk and barely talks to Peter.  Most disturbing of all is how Elaine keeps saying Mark told her he would come back to her from the grave, and how she actually seems to believe he will.

Harry suggests that Peter read some of Elaine's crazy books so he can better refute their stupidities and convince his wife to abandon the insane idea her brother can return from the dead.  Peter stops coming by the radio station, and a curious Harry goes to visit the big house on the swamp.  These visits offer Harry some disturbing revelations: Elaine and that Indian, in furtherance of their quest to bring Mark back from the grave, are trying to contact alien gods Nyarlathotep and Hastur via traditional black sorcery means, while Peter--who has read Elaine's books and found them not stupid but pretty damn persuasive--has set up an elaborate radio apparatus in an upstairs room and is himself trying to communicate with N and H via cutting-edge 20th-century means.  Peter has let Elaine think he is doing his writing up there--he wants to the good news to be a surprise to her should he actually ever get through to the other side and summon back her beloved brother.  Imagine her surprise when it turns out Mark wanted to return from the grave not because he loved Elaine but because he felt Elaine betrayed him by marrying Peter and wanted to exact on her a gruesome vengeance!

I really like "The Death Watch"--the love triangle aspect, the use of modern technology, the Native American element, the critter-haunted swamp, all of it works, and Cave's style here is effective.  Recommended to all Yog-Sothery aficionados!  In 1977 "The Death Watch" was reprinted in the Cave collection Murgunstrumm and Others and in 1994 it appeared in the Chaosium volume Cthulhu's Heirs alongside a bunch of brand new Mythos fiction.

"Celephais" by H. P. Lovecraft (1922)

"Celephais" first appeared in The Rainbow, the elaborate and professional-looking fanzine of H. P. Lovecraft's wife, Sonia Greene.  (Lovecraft was Greene's second husband, and after their marriage collapsed she married a third time, erroneously thinking Lovecraft had finalized their divorce--oops.)  "Celephais" was printed a second time in another fanzine, Marvel Tales, a dozen years after its debut in The Rainbow and five years before its posthumous appearance in Weird Tales.  Of course, it has been reprinted a gazillion times since then.  I'm reading "Celephais" in my copy of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (the corrected Ninth Printing.) 

"Celephais" bears considerable similarities to Smith's "The Willow Landscape," but is more dreamy, long-winded, bitter and sad, in part because it is set not in some vague fantasy version of the Mysterious Orient but rather in something like real life in the West.

An Englishman's once-wealthy family has decayed and he is the last of his line, living a lonely life in a London garret, the country estate where he grew up lost.  He has abandoned his writing because anyone who saw it considered it ridiculous, and the comfort and joy of his existence is to be found in his dreams in which he travels to other universes where different laws of physics apply and to other lands, among them the valley of Oorth-Nargai, where people do not grow old and where ships can fly from the city of minarets Celephais up into the clouds to other cities stranger still.  Once having visited Celephais, the Englishman strives to return to it, taking drugs he hopes will facilitate sleep until he runs out of money and is thrown out of his garret.  The final lines of the story indicate that the failed writer dies after falling off a seaside cliff and bitterly suggest a fat businessman now lives in his ancestral home, but before we get that we hear all about how the writer meets a party of knights who carry him off to Oorth-Nargai, where he reigns as a god over the people whom he created in his dreams.  I guess we can choose to think the writer's soul really is enjoying life in a better world, or that he was just a nut, .

I don't have to tell you that the young Englishman in the story is based on Anglophile Lovecraft himself, also a writer who, during his life, was little appreciated and also a man who came from a formerly wealthy line then in financial decline but who didn't quite feel up to getting a regular job and earning a respectable income, and that "Celephais" is part bitter plaint and part wish-fulfillment.  "Celephais" is OK; the long passages describing the worlds the Englishman sees, and where he actually does very little, can feel a little tedious, and a story in which a guy doesn't do anything but is just acted upon by others, for good or for ill, is sort of a hard sell.  

"Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" AKA "Under the Pyramids" by H. P. Lovecraft and Harry Houdini (1924)  

The "Weird Story Reprint" in this issue is "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs," which was attributed to Harry Houdini when it first appeared in WT in 1924, during the time of Edwin Baird's editorship.  This 1939 reprinting of the story is prefaced by a notice that while Houdini provided the "facts" of the narrative and "O.K.'d" the "printer's proofs," the "actual writing" was done by Lovecraft.  I am reading the tale in my aforementioned copy of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, where it appears under the title "Under the Pyramids."

This is a pretty long story, and much of the start of it is like a travelogue, our narrator Houdini describing his trip with his wife across Europe to Egypt, en route to Australia.  We get his opinions of various sights in Port Said, Cairo and Giza, and trivia on who is said to have built which pyramid, how tall this pyramid is, etc.  This is sort of entertaining, I guess.  I am always of mixed mind whether this sort of realistic material is a waste of the reader's time or is useful for making the alien and weird aspects later in the story stand out in sharper relief.  

Houdini hires a guide and this joker gets into a fight with some other local, and the two solemnly declare their intention to duel atop the Great Pyramid after midnight.  Houdini is eager to witness this bit of local color, and he accompanies the duelists and their two dozen seconds up to the peak of the pyramid only to find it is all a trap--the Arabs tie Houdini up and gag and blindfold him and then lower him by rope down a stone shaft into a cavern deep below the surface; the sides of the narrow shaft tear his clothes and draw blood from many small wounds, and Houdini loses consciousness and has wild dreams that hint that his treacherous guide is the descendant or reincarnation of the pharaoh who built one of the pyramids and is a sort of representation of Ancient Egypt, a land of evil and sorcery, a civilization preoccupied by death.

Houdini escapes his bonds and starts crawling around the stygian black cavern--he can see nothing, as there is no light, but can smell something horrible, and then he hears something horrible--the sound of a marching party, the footsteps of many types, as if animals are walking in time with men.  Houdini connects these queer sounds with the rumors he has heard that the ancient Egyptians constructed composite mummies--mummies part human and part animal--and with the Egyptian belief that the life force of a dead person might fly around and sometimes enter the body of a dead creature and animate it.

The members of the hideous and disgusting procession of half-human and half-animal mummies, and of half-eaten and half-torn corpses, carry torches, and so provide the hiding Houdini light with which to spot the staircase out of this prehistoric subterranean temple dedicated to a god of death.  The magician escapes, but not before getting a mind-reeling eyeful--the evil priests and their congregation of living dead freaks and cripples offering worship and sacrifices to the giant multi-headed monster god that  emerges from a huge aperture.  

"Under the Pyramids" is a pretty good Lovecraftian story, even though the behavior of the monster-worshipers may not make much sense--they go to a lot of trouble to capture Houdini and lower him down to the evil temple, but then they leave him alone?  Didn't they capture him in order to feed him to their monster god?  Isn't Houdini, as a European-American magician whose "magic" is like a mockery of their legit sorcery and whose ethnicity and civilization constitute their age-old enemies, an extremely important captive to them?  Houdini sees the treacherous guide among the leaders of the worshipers--why didn't this villain go to the place to which he had lowered Houdini and have his crocodile-headed and hippo-bodied congregants seize the American and lug him over to the orifice from which the monster emerges?  And if the guide walked down a set of stairs to the underground temple, why didn't the Arabs just carry Houdini down the stairs with him?  There's also the idea that a small monster was pecking away at Houdini while he was unconscious, a mystery which is never really resolved.

I like "Under the Pyramids," but there are problems, as you can see.  Besides in the pages of many of the component volumes of the vast mountain of available Lovecraft collections, you can find the story in a handful of anthologies with an ancient Egyptian theme, including a tie-in to a British TV series that explores the cultural impact of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen.

**********

None of these stories is bad, which is nice; here we have a comfortable leg of our long journey through the 1930s issues of Weird Tales.  A leg which offers an interesting surprise: the best of the stories we have read today is by Hugh B. Cave and not the iconic H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith who doth bestride the weird world like cyclopean colossi.  Maybe I'm a simple-minded man, but I prefer stories about tangible things in which people set goals and pursue them to stories about dreams in which the characters are buffeted by forces beyond comprehension.

More short stories await us in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log. 

The October 1938 issue of Farnsworth Wright's influential magazine Weird Tales is full of fiction by people we like here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  We've already read the Manly Wade Wellman story in the issue, "Up Under the Roof."  We are going to skip for now the Elak story by Henry Kuttner and the serial by Edmond Hamilton--barring sudden death, the time will come when we produce an entire blog post devoted to Kuttner's Elak series and another to Hamilton's serial "The Fire Princess."  Today our focus will be three stories from this issue, those by California's Clark Ashton Smith, the man from Providence Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and Virginia's Murray Leinster.  By some kind of coincidence, all three of these stories are reprints.

"The Maze of Maal Dweb" by Clark Ashton Smith (1933)

"The Maze of Maal Dweb" first appeared as "The Maze of the Enchanter" in the 1933 self-published Smith collection The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies.  It seems the text of the version appearing in this issue of WT was altered in some way, so I am going to read it in the 1972 Smith collection edited by Lin Carter, Xiccarph; in his intro to the story and its companion piece, "The Flower Women," which we read in 2020, Carter says of "The Maze of Maal Dweb," "In this present printing, I have restored the text to its original form."

Back in January of 2021 I set myself the sacred duty of reading and blogging about at least one story from each of the 115 or so issues of Weird Tales published in the 1930s.  Great strides have been made in this quest; in fact, I have covered at least one story from each issue published from January 1930 to January 1938!  And I can prove it at the links below!

1930  1931  1932  1933  1934  1935  1936  1937  JAN 1938

Today we wrangle some stories from the February 1938 issue, including works by the premier Weird Tales writer, New England's Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and one of our favorite scribblers, Henry Kuttner, the young man from California.  And in the spirit of exploration which I like to think characterizes this journey, we'll read two stories by individuals we've never read before, one by Clifford Ball and one by M. G. Moretti.  I chose these two stories because I liked their titles, a perfectly legitimate means of discriminating, I'm sure you will agree.

"The Diary of Alonzo Typer" by H. P. Lovecraft and William Lumley 

"The Diary of Alonzo Typer" appears under William Lumley's name in Weird Tales, but it is one of the many stories which H. P. Lovecraft revised for others.  In the introductory matter to my copy of Arkham House's The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, scholar S. T. Joshi tells us he has seen Lumley's draft for this story as well as Lovecraft's revision, and HPL "preserved only the nucleus of the story...all the prose is his."  I am reading "The Diary of Alonzo Typer" in my hardcover edition of that collection, unlike the Kuttner, Ball and Moretti stories, which I am reading in the internet archive scan of the original 1938 magazine.

The title character of "The Diary of Alonzo Typer" is a specimen of the type of person we meet all the time here at MPorcius Fiction Log, the student of the occult who travels the world investigating weird phenomena.  Typer's diary takes up the lion's share of the story (like 16 pages in the edition I am reading), which the preceding frame (like three pages) tells us was discovered in the 1930s in a ruined 18th-century house near a mysterious circle of stones (a "cromlech" of "menhirs"); this long-abandoned house was home back in the 18th and 19th centuries to a family reputed to be deeply involved in witchcraft, the van der Heyls.

Typer's diary chronicles his 1908 exploration of the van der Heyl house, from which he finds that, once having entered, he cannot escape.  Lovecraft rehearses many of the themes and elements characteristic of his work, like degeneracy and miscegenation, the horror of learning one's own identity, and the reading of a pile of documents that reveal forbidden lore and esoteric history.  The portraits on the walls in the house indicate the van der Heyls had ophidian and swine-like features, suggesting they interbred with aliens, and the local villagers who supply Typer with food are described as "degraded idiots" of "singular hereditary strains."  In the house, Typer discovers such books as The Necronomicon as well as an elaborate drawing of a statue of Cthulhu or some similar monster, plus plenty of alien hieroglyphs.  Among other amazing tidbits, Typer learns about how millions of years ago the Earth was colonized by spacefaring Venusians.

What stands out to me as distinctive about "The Diary of Alonzo Typer" is how Typer sees many ghosts of long dead van der Heyls as well as visions or hallucinations of clawed alien monsters--I feel like this is a device Lovecraft doesn't regularly employ.    

Finally, on Walpurgis night, Typer, having put together all the many clues in the house and prepared his protective spells, unlocks the vault in the cellar behind which he has been hearing the slitherings of a titanic monster.  He also realizes that he is himself a van der Heyl, and has been fated to open the vault whether he wants to or not.

"The Diary of Alonzo Typer" is a decent slice of Yog-Sothery, though not as good as, say, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," which deals with much the same themes and elements.  Besides a multitude of Lovecraft collections, the story has been anthologized by Peter Haining, Robert M. Price and Franklyn Searight. 

Way back in 2014 I read a sequel to "The Diary of Alonzo Typer" penned by Brian Lumley, and I didn't like it; at the link I say it had a good plot but was full of extraneous material.

"World's End" by Henry Kuttner

"World's End" is a time travel story that doesn't really hold together--in particular, the plot resolution didn't satisfy this reader.

Young Blake and his senior citizen colleague Norwood have spent seven years building a time machine, and today Blake is strapping on his vacuum suit and gathering together his books, binoculars, rifles and other essential equipment for his maiden voyage to the future!  He throws the bakelite switch and finds himself in the first of a series of bizarre locations tens of thousands of years in the future.  One such setting is a snowy plain from which he sees on the horizon a vast black form, like a wall or glacier or something, rushing towards him.

Blake is then transported to the lab of a man of the future, a dwarf with a huge head!  Future brainiac explains that centuries ago a meteor landed on Earth from which sprang an alien life form, a sort of black void, that has slowly been devouring the Earth.  By the time the people of Earth had developed a disintegrator ray effective against the monster it had reduced most of the Earth to an uninhabitable waste, and today there are only a few hundred human beings left alive.  With their disintegrator ray artillery they can hold off the black void, but the survivors are running out of fuel to power the ray projectors and so will soon succumb to extinction.

The big-brained dwarf is excited to learn of Blake's time machine; his people have teleporters (that is how he brought Blake here to the last little bit of inhabitable Earth) but have never developed time travel.  Future man says that if Blake can carry him and a pistol-sized disintegrator ray projector back in time to the moment the meteor carrying the black void first arrived on Earth, he can neutralize the menace and save the human race!

Future man boards the time machine and he and Blake try to go back in time, and we get our disappointing twist ending.  Blake reappears in his 20th-century lab, having totally forgotten his future adventures.  Norwood doesn't even realize Blake ever left--Blake reappeared the same moment he departed, as if throwing the bakelite lever did nothing.  It seems that the universe forbids that you travel backwards in time to a moment before your birth, and also prohibits retention of memories of events yet to happen, so Blake's trip has been fruitless--he has no recall of anything that occurred in the future, and we readers must assume the future man's effort to save the world of the far future was a failure.

I don't like the way time travel works in the story, but putting that aside, "World's End" suffers a bigger, literary, failing.  The fact that the scientists' seven years of work on the machine, and Blake's and the dwarf's adventures, yield absolutely zero result is pretty annoying--it makes reading the story feel like a waste of time.  We expect something to happen in a story, that the characters or their environment will change, and when that doesn't happen, it is frustrating.  I suppose that some will appreciate how Kuttner "subverts reader expectations" of an Edgar Rice Burroughs-style ending in which the hero who visits an alien milieu proves to be the savior of the sympathetic natives and the undoing of their enemies, but I have to say I found this subversion more irritating than refreshing.  

I'm going to grade "World's End" barely acceptable; I like the menace in the story, the future brainiac and the vacuum suit, and can forgive the problems with the time travel; my real gripe is with the resolution (or, perhaps I should say, lack thereof.)

"World's End" would not be reprinted until our 21st century, when the good people at both Haffner Press and Centipede Press put out huge Henry Kuttner collections within a year of each other.

"The Goddess Awakes" by Clifford Ball  

"The Goddess Awakes" is a sort of long (26 pages here in WT) and pedestrian Conan-style story.  Two thieves who have taken up careers as mercenary soldiers flee the battlefield upon which the army of which they were members has been routed and climb a mountain only to be captured by the women soldiers of a remote kingdom whose citizens are all women.  These women have a queen but she is dominated by a centuries-old wizard and his giant black panther; this creep has decreed, for generations, that the nation's men toil out of view, slaves whose minds are dulled to insensibility by drugs.  Our heroes get thrown unarmed into the arena with the panther, but the queen and one of the soldiers have fallen in love with them and toss them the weapons they need to defeat the Brobdingnagian feline.  Then the queen kills the wizard, the kingdom's men are freed and our heroes are acclaimed the new leaders of the country.    

Ball's basic plot outline (two hunks arrive in a nation of women under the thumb of an evil wizard and his monster and trigger a reassertion of the women's natural heterosexuality and the overthrow of the wiz and monster) is good but his execution is poor.  The text of a good Conan story focuses on heroic feats, creepy magic and scary monsters, building up a weird and/or horrible atmosphere and advancing a plot in which there are high stakes.  Unfortunately, Ball here in "The Goddess Awakes" expends a lot of ink on mildly humorous dialogue between the two main characters, so his story feels more like a light-hearted buddy movie than a tale of uncanny horror or thrilling sword-and-sorcery; his bargain-basement efforts to produce witty banter are distracting and undermine any possibility of fear or excitement.

(It is hard to successfully integrate sword-and-sorcery thrills and humor in an adventure story; the biggest success I can think of is Jack Vance's two Cugel books.)   

We are generously grading "The Goddess Awakes" barely tolerable.

"The Goddess Awakes" would see print again in 1976 in Lin Carter's anthology Realms of Wizardry (in his intro to the tale, Carter calls "The Goddess Awakes" "superbly rousing;" I beg to differ.)  The Weird Tales devotees at DMR books in 2018 published a volume containing all of Ball's stories under the title The Thief of Forthe.

"The Strangling Hands" by M. G. Moretti

Moretti only has one story listed at isfdb, and this story has never been reprinted--we are really peering into the dim corners today at MPorcius Fiction Log.

In our last episode we read a story by David H. Keller in which black Africans unleash a supernatural vengeance on a white man who mistreated them, and "The Strangling Hands," which is adorned with a good drawing of a witch doctor by fan favorite Virgil Finlay, has a similar theme.  

Our narrator is a professional writer who got scooped by an amateur writer!  You see, our guy was one of five men on a dangerous expedition in Africa, and everybody sorta kinda agreed he would chronicle the adventure and publish a book on it.  But narrator's best friend, also on the trip, published his own account as soon as they got back to New York, rendering narrator's book unsalable!  Hilarious!

The narrator hasn't spoken to his frenemy since, and some years have gone by, but out of the blue he hears from the guy, and grudgingly goes to see him.  It turns out that the other three men who accompanied them on the African expedition have died under mysterious circumstances.  One of the capers the five adventurers indulged in while on the Dark Continent was stealing the eye from a statue in a temple of Death, an institution whose regularly scheduled festivities include human sacrifice by strangulation.  The three men who have all turned up dead these last few months all had this eye in their possession (each having inherited it from the previous victim.)  Now the amateur writer has custody of the eye, and he tells our narrator that every night he sees the horrifying image of black hands creeping closer and closer to his white throat!  Obviously the priest of Death is performing decolonization activities via long distance magic!  The narrator of course thinks the deaths are just a coincidence and his backstabbing buddy is just lying, or maybe the target of an elaborate prank.

Still, he is persuaded to spend the night with his friend, a night of terror in which he learns the astonishing truth!

This is a good black magic story.  I groused that Clifford Ball rendered "The Goddess Awakes" a drag with his emphasis on totally lame jocular dialogue between his two main characters, but M. G. Moretti here does caustic dialogue between two buddies right--via their speech Moretti develops an interesting relationship between the two men, and the stuff they say, instead of seeming incongruous and distracting from the horror/adventure aspects of the story, actually helps build an atmosphere of tension and uncanny wonder.  

Thumbs up!  It is too bad there is only one Moretti story out there!  

"From Beyond" by H. P. Lovecraft (1934)

This February 1938 issue of Weird Tales reprints "From Beyond," one of H. P. Lovecraft's Dream Cycle stories, a piece which made its debut in 1934 in the fanzine The Fantasy Fan.  I am reading it in my copy of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales.

Short and to the point, this is an effective story.  Lovecraft adds interest to the tale by doing more than he usually does to develop his character's personalities and human relationships.

Our narrator has a fat and emotional friend who is conducting some crazy research leveraging his knowledge of both electronics and metaphysics.  The narrator warned him that this might be dangerous, and the researcher, a real sensitive sort, threw a fit and broke off their friendship.

Over two months later, fatso summons the narrator to his lab in his big attic.  Shockingly, this dude is now skinny and haggard, his hands trembling, his formerly clean shaven face covered in whiskers.  Even more shockingly, the mad scientist has plotted an elaborate revenge on the narrator, whom he says "discouraged me when I needed every drop of encouragement I could get...."  The complicated electrical machine he has finally completed generates radiation which revivifies vestigial and atrophied senses that we humans don't even realize we have; under the influence of the machine, people can "see" into and "listen" in on parallel worlds that coexist with our own--when the vengeful inventor turns the machine on, the narrator can sense all kinds of extradimensional monsters floating through the attic walls and even his own body.

The horrifying twist is that the radiation from the machine also enables some of the alien monsters to sense and interact with our own world!  In fact, the researcher's own servants have all vanished without trace, carried off or devoured by alien entities!  And the mad scientist gloats that the narrator is next!  Can the narrator escape?

Thumbs up!  Lovecraft can be long-winded and repetitive, and his stories often lack human feeling, so it is fun to see him producing in "From Beyond" a brisk and economical tale with a human relationship and an exciting personality at its center.  

Like most of Lovecraft's work, "From Beyond" has been reprinted a billion times, including in anthologies like Jack C. Wolf and Barbara H. Wolf's Ghosts, Castles and Victims: Tales of Gothic Horror and Xavier Aldana Reyes' Promethean Horrors: Classic Tales of Mad Science.

**********

A mixed bag, but the Lovecraft stories go to show that the man from Providence deserves his high reputation, and I really liked one-hit-wonder M. G. Moretti's "The Strangling Hands."  So, a satisfying step in our long march through the pages of the unique magazine.  We may return to this issue one day, as it contains (under a pen name) part of a werewolf serial by Manly Wade Wellman that has been reprinted multiple times and so perhaps is worth checking out.  Time will tell.     

Back in March of 2022, we read some stories from a 1941 book that some people consider the first ever science fiction anthology.  One of those stories was Manly Wade Wellman's "School for the Unspeakable," which first appeared in a 1937 issue of Weird Tales.  Let's crack open that September '37 issue of the magazine of the bizarre and unusual, as it includes three more pieces of fiction from people we are interested in here at MPorcius Fiction Log, Weird Tales regulars Edmond Hamilton, Clark Ashton Smith, and August Derleth.  Hamilton's contribution is the first part of a three-part serial, which we'll read next time; today let's focus on the stories by Californian Smith and Wisconian Derleth.   

But first--weird poetry!  This issue of Weird Tales has lots of verse in it by some of the greatest writers to ever appear in the pages of the No. 1 Magazine of Strange and Unusual Stories.  There's Robert E. Howard's 14-line poem about a guy who has a nightmare in which he is killed by a giant animate statue, "The Dream and the Shadow."  Henry Kuttner contributes "H. P. L.," sixteen lines about the dreams only a few men can ever experience, dreams of strange alien worlds.  And from Howard Phillips Lovecraft himself, the seven-page "tale in rime" "Psychopompus," which is about a creepy medieval nobleman--apparently a werewolf--and his creepy wife--a witch who can change into a serpent--and the gruesome end they meet when they seek to work their evil on a Christian couple who are good at swinging an axe.  God helps those who can chop the head off a monster themselves!

Of these poems, the Kuttner is the hardest to get, as it is just a bunch of vague images and mythological references.  Howard's is better, as it tells a little story, and the images are better, too.  Lovecraft's is the least ambitious poetically, and the easiest to read--as its subtitle suggests, it is just a horror story in simple rhyming verse.  "Psychopompus" is actually a pretty effective horror tale, and I recommend it to all fans of the weird, even those who have little interest in poetry. 

"The Death of Ilalotha" by Clark Ashton Smith

"The Death of Ilalotha" is set in the decadent court of Queen Xantlicha, where days-long drunken sex orgies are the norm.  Queen Xantlicha murdered her husband and since has taken a series of lovers; these lovers also end up murdered when the Queen tires of them.  Her current lover, the nobleman Thulos, returns from a week away at his estate to find one of the wild parties winding down after three days.  This shindig was held to commemorate the death of the Queen's lady-in-waiting, Ilalotha--the deceased lies in the middle of the site of the festivities.  Ilalotha was one of notorious womanizer Thulos' favorite lovers before he took up with the Queen, and seeing her lying there dead reminds him of one of his and Ilalotha's little sex games--she would pretend to be asleep or dead while he made love to her.

Is Thulos hallucinating, or has he just heard Ilalotha's voice, requesting that he meet her at midnight in her tomb?  Could it be that via infernal sorceries she has faked her death--or that she might in fact be one of the undead?  The Queen, burning with jealousy, sees Thulos leaning over the corpse of Ilalotha, and requests that the nobleman meet her at midnight in the garden.  

Which rendezvous will Thulos keep?  Of our three cruel, selfish, and passionate characters, which if any will live to see the morning?  

Thumbs up for this great little story of murder, sex and sorcery.  Smith offers not only a solid eerie suspense plot but striking images, effective metaphors, and generally skillful wordsmithery.  

One of Smith's tales of the far future continent of Zothique, "The Death of Ilalotha" can be found in many languages in a stack of Smith collections as well as horror and science fiction anthologies.  

"McGovern's Obsession" by August Derleth  

Derleth has laid some clunkers on us over the years of this blog's existence, but here we have a successful little piece I can sincerely recommend.

One of these middle-class British guys who has a manservant and spends time at a club, name of McGovern, moves into a new house; it is a comfortable place, but has a strange, disturbing, atmosphere.  One day Mac is doing some mundane paperwork and his hand suddenly writes out, automatically, indifferent to his will, a long passage in a woman's handwriting, a sort of fragment of a wife's account of a disastrous marriage full of adultery and abuse.  

Some investigations and another episode of automatic writing follow.  Big revelations as the story draws to a close include Mac's arm seizing a hammer and bashing a hole in the wall to reveal a gruesome clue, and in the climax Mac's arm is again possessed by the abused wife as he fights the abusive husband, her spirit pursuing justice and revenge.

Much better than Derleth's average; "McGovern's Obsession" is not nearly as well-written as Smith's "The Death of Ilalotha," but the style doesn't get in the way of the plot or waste your time (remember how Derleth hamstrung himself with unnecessary scenes and plot complications in "The Wind from the River"?--he doesn't commit those blunders this time, thank the Elder Gods), and that plot is actually pretty good.  Finding yourself writing something in someone else's voice, totally unbidden, is a pretty cool horror story idea.  So, kudos to Derleth.

"McGovern's Obsession" would be reprinted in a few Derleth collections and a 1970 French anthology.

**********

One very good and one quite good story today, both with a little something something for you sex fetishists and gorehounds out there.  Let's hope when we read Hamilton's contribution to this issue next time we find it lives up to the standard set by Smith and Derleth!