The September 1941 issue of
Weird Tales is full of material of interest to us here at MPorcius Fiction Log. We've got multiple great illustrations by Hannes Bok as well as good ones from Boris Dolgov and Andrew Brosnatch. In the letters column we find that a guy, prompted by Robert Bloch's story
"Beauty's Beast," wrote in to explain aspects of Hindu philosophy; Bloch responds in warm-hearted but jocular fashion. And we've got the fiction. Highlighted on the cover is August Derleth's
"Beyond the Threshold," which we read back in 2023, and thought was not bad. But there's also work by Bloch, Thorp McClusky, Manly Wade Wellman, and Dorothy Quick which we haven't read yet, stories which after today will be woven into the fabric of the long winding history of MPorcius Fiction Log.
(We're skipping the Nelson S. Bond story, which I think is part of a long series of joke stories. For my health I need to limit my intake of joke stories and I'm already running considerable risk by reading the Bloch story.)
"A Sorcerer Runs for Sheriff" by Robert Bloch
We might consider this a minor Bloch story; it looks like it has not been anthologized in English, and has only appeared in one Bloch collection, 1974's
Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies. You can find "A Sorcerer Runs for Sheriff" in the 1974 German anthology
Exklusive Alpträume alongside works by, among others, H. G. Wells, Richard Matheson, and Dorothy Quick, whose "The Lost Gods," which we will soon read, appeared in both the September 1941 ish of
WT and that German volume.
"A Sorcerer Runs for Sheriff" appeals to the reader's supposed disgust at obese people and envy of businesspeople. Our narrator, a writer named Bob, hates Allan Wando, a factory owner who is fat and pays his workers low wages but is nevertheless "one of the most popular men in town." I guess Bloch also means to appeal to WT readers' supposed alienation from society as a whole. And their alienation from politics--Wando is going to run for public office and asks the narrator to write some speeches for him. Bob refuses.
In a recursive inside-joke bit, Wando has a copy of the May 1941 issue of Weird Tales, and it has apparently inspired him to practice, or play at practicing, black magic. One reason Wando is popular despite his obesity and sharp business practices is that he throws unusual, memorable, parties. The narrator attends a party where Wando provides the dozen attendees wax voodoo dolls (he calls them "poppets" and ties them to European, not African, tradition) and paper and fabric with which to fashion hair and clothes so the dolls resemble Adolf Hitler--the party-goers will try to kill Hitler from the safety of this side of the Atlantic Ocean via black magic! At once Wando and his twelve guests stab their dolls in the head, but it isn't der Fuehrer who dies, but one of the party goers, a sort of vapid and vain woman. A doctor among the attendees declares it a cerebral hemorrhage, but our narrator notices one of the woman's hairs is stuck in the wax of the doll that their host Wando stabbed! Hmmm...Wando doesn't seem to have made much effort to make his doll look like Hitler! Is Wando a real sorcerer using black magic to destroy his enemies?
Sure enough, as the election gets going--Bob is writing speeches for a rival candidate of Wando's and the incumbent in this three man race--Wando is often seen in the company of three dark hook-nosed foreigners (Bob compares them to "mulattoes" and "Cab Calloway's orchestra"), and Bob discovers evidence that Wando has been trying to acquire some of the incumbent's hair!
After the incumbent keels over, Wando begins making dolls of Bob and the candidate Bob is working for. In a way I didn't quite find credible, Bob manages to switch the doll of himself made by Wando with a doll of Wando made by him (Bob), so when fat Wando, who I guess doesn't look at the doll closely, stabs it he himself, not thin Bob, dies. Then Bob tosses the Wando doll in the fire and Wando's body melts as if it itself is wax.
This story is OK; maybe I would like it more if it was told from the point of view of the fat wizard or one of the dark hook-nosed foreigners and not a wisecracking scribbler who tells us ahead of time that we should hate Wando--in a better story we readers would learn to hate Wando by observing his actions. (I'll note here that Bloch in real life in 1939 worked on a mayoral campaign in Milwaukee.)
"The Music from Infinity" by Thorp McClusky
In September of 1777, after Boswell had explained to him how "musick" "agitate[s] my nerves painfully, producing in my mind alternate sensations of pathetick dejection...and of daring resolution," Dr. Johnson responded that "I should never hear it, if it made me such a fool." I feel like we have read quite a few stories here at MPorcius Fiction Log that attest to the power of music to affect people, among them Carl Jacobi's "The Satanic Piano," Maria Moravsky's "The Soul of the Cello," Bloch's "The Fiddler's Fee," Charles Beaumont's "Night Ride," Barry Malzberg's "Concerto Academico," and no doubt a stack of others I am forgetting. Well, here's another one, this one by Thorp McClusky.
Among anthologists, only Kurt Singer seems to have favored "The Music from Infinity," but he got it into a British book in 1974 and a German one in 1975, so he seems to have been doing his level best to expose McClusky's tale to the SF world. And understandably so; "The Music from Infinity" is a moderately good story, McClusky successfully developing settings and moods and the story moving along at a good pace, presenting situations which are compelling to the reader. The ending is likely an overreach, but the bulk of the piece is solid.
We've got a bunch of interlocking frame stories, which often bothers me but isn't so bad here. Our narrator is a musician who visits a friend who lives in a boarding house occupied by middle-class bachelors, junior executives and guys like that. The friend tells a story of a man who recently died, a nervous man he met here in the boarding house with whom he was briefly chummy. This nervous dude hated hearing live piano music, and eventually explained why. You see, he was married to a famous pianist who died suddenly, and she was haunting him! Whenever he was within earshot of a piano, but couldn't actually see the instrument, he heard his wife's most famous song being performed in her signature style. Nobody else could hear the ghost music, even though the music assumed the idiosyncratic nature of the instrument upon which it was being played (if the piano was out of tune, for example, the music he heard was out of tune in just that way.) The city is full of bars and hotels and private homes with pianos, and the widower was hard pressed to find a place where he was far enough from a piano to escape this haunting. Eventually this nervous wreck was confronted by a piano in a place he was not expecting to find one, and cracked up, admitting he murdered his wife because he was envious of her fame and shamed by her ability to make more money than he.
McClusky does a good job with all this material, but pushes a little too far, trying to add some additional supernatural oomph to his story, an effort that, in my opinion, actually weakens the story, undermining some of its best elements. The narrator, a musician, and his friend, who has some minor psychic ability, are able to hear the music of the ghost at the moment when the murderer is executed, either because the ghost is celebrating her revenge or because at the moment of death the murderer's brain emits a psychic eruption. Personally I think having other people hear the ghost music undermines the eeriness of the music element, and the idea that the wife is gloating to men she never met over her husband's execution makes little sense and renders her less sympathetic.
Still, a commendable effort.
"The Lost Gods" by Dorothy Quick
I've already mentioned that "The Lost Gods" was reprinted in the German anthology
Exklusive Alpträume; Quick's story saw print again in its original language in the 2024 collection edited by S. T. Joshi,
The Witch's Mark and Others.
I feel like we've read quite a few stories about ancient lovers trying to reincarnate in the bodies of modern people and reunite,* and "The Lost Gods" is another of those. Luckily, Quick's style is good, the emotions of the narrator feel real, there are cool images, the plot doesn't have any glaring holes, and the heroine is more than a victim of fate or destiny, making decisions and pursuing her own goals, goals founded on natural human desires--this is a legitimately good story, so thumbs up for "The Lost Gods."
Our narrator is a woman writer, Irene, interested in Cortez and the conquest of Mexico and related topics. She gets engaged to Harvey, a handsome rich guy, but he is kind of a weirdo, and all Irene's family and social set are doubtful they should marry. You see, this joker has dreams, all the time, of an impossibly beautiful woman, and is more or less in love with this dream woman. Can he really love Irene if he has this mystery woman on his mind all the time? Irene and Harvey do wed, but Irene has many a rough moment of doubt, in particular when she sees her husband's face one night while he dreams of the dream woman--his mug bears an expression of happiness that Irene has never seen before, a level of happiness she is not able to inspire in him! Ouch!
The newlyweds go on their honeymoon to the jungles of Mexico to look at remote and ancient temples very few white people have ever seen. In a sudden downpour they take refuge in a cave. A landslide traps them in there, compelling them to explore deeper, and they discover a subterranean chamber with an altar built by a race of redheaded white people who predate the Mayans and Aztecs and have been almost entirety forgotten. A painting of a handsome man and a beautiful woman adorns the wall--these are ancient gods and Harvey recognizes the goddess as the woman from his dreams!
Another landslide destroys the wall that bears this painting but offers our main characters a way out, and the visages of the lost gods are permanently etched in Irene and Harvey's minds, anyway. The cave-in also exposes ancient jewelry of astronomical value. Our heroes don this jewelry, putting Harvey in psychic contact with the lost god! Back in America, the lost god directs Harvey to build in the Hamptons a modernistic mansion with glass walls and roof, and then coaches him on how to summon the god and goddess back to Earth! What will be the outcome of the ancient ceremony Harvey and Irene perform in the mansion under the stars and above the sea? Will the gods rise to the stars after thanking our heroes? Or possess their bodies and exploit them? Can our heroes survive the direct contact of mortal and divine? And if they can, will their love endure?
A solid story I can definitely recommend. One might see it as a traditional pre- or un-feminist women's romance story, with a plot centered on a woman's pursuit of a man's true love in the face of a battery of obstacles, but feminists might appreciate that the villain is male, the sympathetic lead male is a dupe, and a woman saves the day and achieves happiness through her own willpower and courage. Also, because all the characters' actions seem totally logical based on their personalities and goals, "The Lost Gods" doesn't feel like it is trying to make an argument about sex roles or gender roles or any of that, but merely depicting how real people might act in an unlikely situation. Contrast this with the Bloch and McClusky stories, which I like but are full of characters whose actions I found questionable--why did the fat businessman in Bloch's story kill the woman at the party, and why did he ask Bob to be his speech writer even though Bob hated him? Why did the pianist in McClusky's story want the narrator, a man she had never met, to hear her celebrating her husband's execution? We already have a hundred reasons to disbelieve stories that are full of ghosts and psychic powers and other ridiculous nonsense, so it is incumbent on the author of such stories to portray people acting in a natural manner if he or she wants us to take his or her story seriously at all, and Quick succeeds here where Bloch and McClusky come up a little short.
"The Half-Haunted" by Manly Wade Wellman
"The Half-Haunted" is one of Wellman's stories about Judge Keith Hilary Pursuivant, and appears here in
Weird Tales under the Gans. T. Fields penname. I wasn't crazy about the Pursuivant tale
"The Dreadful Rabbits," but
heyeah come da judge to MPorcius a second time regardless.
This is a pretty good supernatural terror story that seeks to take advantage of readers' interest in early American history (Wellman is of course a history buff and published historian) and, perhaps, early 1940s hostility to Germany. And it takes place in the state where I was born, grew up, and attended university!
Judge Pursuivant (whom Wellman reminds us is friends with Seabury Quinn's Jules de Grandin and Dr. Troubridge) wants to visit a purportedly haunted colonial house in New Jersey, greatest state in the Union. He arrives at the house's remote address in early evening to find it has been demolished and sitting on the site is a modern home. It is starting to snow, so the owner, a retired country newspaper editor, suggests the Judge stay the night.
The house owner and Pursuivant discuss the haunt and its origin. During the War of Independence, one particularly ferocious Hessian mercenary, one of the most skilled of German hunters, served in the area. According to legend, this psycho stripped naked and fought the colonists like a guerilla, murdering civilians as well as ambushing and sneak attacking uniformed rebel soldiers. Two women who owned the house then sitting on this site conspired to destroy this Teutonic menace; posing as Loyalists, they invited the Hessian to dinner one day and stabbed him in the back as he sat at their table. But the Hessian's ghost terrorized them, scaring one of the women into jumping out a window to her death; the other just died of fright on the spot. Ever since, the ghost of the Hessian has haunted the place. Destroying the house hasn't exorcized the spirit--most recently it has scared the retired newspaperman's servants away.
The Judge, using his wits and muscles and knowledge of exorcism spells you can say in English (convenient for those of us who lack Latin, Aramaic, and all those languages from before the sinking of Atlantis), battles the Hessian, whose spirit lives in the basement and can only haunt the half of the 20th-century house that lies over the colonial cellar. (Hence the title.) Wellman does a good job with all the supernatural images and the fighting--the ghost of the Hessian and the ghosts of the two women all behave appropriately and exhibit real emotion the reader can identify with. Thumbs up for "The Half-Haunted."
Kurt Singer, apparently a big fan of this issue of WT, included "The Half-Haunted" in his Ghost Omnibus, and you can also find it in the 2001 Wellman collection Fearful Rock and Other Precarious Locales.
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An issue with at least five stories worth reading and lots of memorable illustrations--kudos to Dorothy Stevens McIlwraith and all the contributors.
Only one more issue stands between us and our goal of reading at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales with a 1941 cover date. Stay tuned as we approach another milestone in our ambitious speculative fiction project! And feel free to reminisce about all the years of Weird Tales we have already explored at the links below!