A Rough Edges Rerun Review: A Soul in a Bottle - Tim Powers

For whatever reason, I’m not a big fan of ghost stories and seldom read them. But this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. I just read A SOUL IN A BOTTLE, a novella by Tim Powers that was published in a very nice limited edition by Subterranean Press, one of the best of the small-press publishers devoted to science fiction, fantasy, and horror. The illustrations are by J.K. Potter and are very, very good.

But what about the story itself? Well, it’s set in Hollywood and concerns a rare book dealer’s encounter with the ghost of a beautiful young poet who committed suicide nearly forty years earlier. Or was she murdered? That question gives this book a bit of a mystery feel, and the literary angle is appealing to me, too. I’d never read anything by Powers before (although I have quite a few of his books on my shelves), but I like his writing here. It’s lean and effective and zips right along. The twist ending isn’t really that much of a surprise, but it works pretty well anyway. Overall I enjoyed this book quite a bit, and I wouldn’t hesitate to read something else by Powers.

(Some years, I try to read at least one horror novel or some classic horror short stories for Halloween. Other years, I ignore it entirely. This year I'm rerunning my review of a novella about a ghost, so I guess that's kind of a middle ground. This post originally appeared on March 13, 2017. The book is still available in the same limited edition and doesn't appear to have been published otherwise. Despite my usual good intentions, I haven't read anything else by Tim Powers in the 18+ years since then.)

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Long Midnight - Daniel Ransom (Ed Gorman)

We all know that Daniel Ransom is really Ed Gorman. This novel was published originally by Dell in 1992 and went unreprinted for many years, but it's available now in e-book and trade paperback editions.

The prologue takes place in the 1940s, an era which Gorman recreates well, much as he does the Fifties and Sixties in some of his other books. Richard Candlemas is a lonely high school student with some sort of mysterious special powers that are vaguely sinister. Jump ahead to the Nineties, and Candlemas is the former director of the Perpetual Light Orphanage, an establishment that closed down years earlier after a tragic car wreck claimed the lives of one of its staffers and several students. I use the word “students” because Perpetual Light, ostensibly an orphanage, was actually a school where Richard Candlemas and the people who worked for him tried to find children with psychic powers and help them develop those powers.

When one of Perpetual Light’s instructors is murdered in Chicago, a former student (the sister of one of the girls killed in the car crash) is drawn into the investigation and develops a romance with the police detective handling the case. Someone starts stalking the woman, there are more murders, the scope of the case expands to include some shadowy operatives who claim to be working for the government, and the woman finds evidence that her sister may still be alive after all, as impossible as that seems.

Gorman weaves all these plot strands together with an expert hand, bringing in a number of surprising twists along the way, but as usual in one of his novels, the characters and the little touches of humanity are the real highlights. Everybody in THE LONG MIDNIGHT seems to be carrying his or her own load of melancholy, which is not to say that the book is without hope or even an occasional bit of humor. This is a novel that’s difficult to classify. It’s part thriller, part horror, part science fiction. Mainly, though, it’s a great yarn that races along, inhabited by characters the reader cares about. That makes it well worth seeking out and reading. Highly recommended.

(This post was published in a somewhat different form on January 15, 2010. My admiration for Ed Gorman and his work remain unchanged since that time. I miss the guy and always will.)

The Slaves of Cthulhu - Tony Richards

I was in the mood for something completely different from what I usually read, and I figured a novel that, from its description, sounded like a collaboration between F. Scott Fitzgerald and H.P. Lovecraft ought to do the trick.

As a matter of fact, the narrator of THE SLAVES OF CTHULHU mentions Fitzgerald and a couple of his novels, and Lovecraft makes an amusing cameo appearance as a character when the narrator pays a visit to Providence, Rhode Island.

THE SLAVES OF CTHULHU is set in the summer and fall of 1923. The narrator/protagonist is Jay Sinclair, heir to the Sinclair diamond fortune, who is tired of being a wealthy young playboy and wants to do something worthwhile with his life. So he decides to become a novelist (there’s the Fitzgerald connection) and rents an isolated house on a lonely island off the coast to have a place to write undisturbed. Only, as you might guess, he winds up being disturbed. Boy, does he.

Nearby is the sinister-looking mansion of notorious libertine and poetess Anastasia Gorsting, who dropped out of public view several years earlier. Anastasia has an occasional party at which the dull, reclusive, and odd-looking inhabitants of the local village gather and carry on in crazed fashion. Strange lights also emanate from Anastasia’s mansion, and Jay hears indecipherable shouts coming from these gatherings. An old friend of Jay’s comes to visit him and seemingly falls under Anastasia’s spell. Jay also meets Anastasia’s beautiful but strange daughter.

Look, I’m no Lovecraft expert, as I’ve mentioned many times in the past, but it seems pretty obvious what’s going on here. And for the most part, it is. However, author Tony Richards does spring a nice twist about three-fourths of the way through the book that I didn’t see coming. It worked well for me, and do did the book overall, although I do have a few quibbles.

The first of those is that some of the words and phrases Richards uses just seem too modern for a tale set in 1923. There aren’t very many of these, but when they cropped up, they knocked me out of the story for a moment. There’s also a continuity glitch where a character has one eye, then two, then one again. That’s a pretty minor deal, too, and it’s a mistake I’ve made myself, but again, it disrupted the flow of things.

My obsessive carping aside, I really enjoyed THE SLAVES OF CTHULHU. Richards keeps things moving along at a very nice pace, the writing does a fine job of capturing the Jazz Age feel (with those minor exceptions mentioned above), and Jay Sinclair is a likable protagonist who at least tries to battle against overwhelming odds. No, this isn’t quite the Gatsby vs. Cthulhu mash-up I thought it might be, but that’s probably a good thing. If you’re in the mood for an entertaining horror yarn, I can certainly recommend this one. It’s available in e-book and trade paperback editions on Amazon. I intend to read more by Tony Richards.

Now, somebody needs to write THE ELDER GODS ALSO RISE. Jake Barnes vs. Cthulhu in Paris. The running of the shoggoths in Pamplona. I can see it now . . .

Solomon Kane: The Hound of God - Jonathan Maberry

SOLOMON KANE: THE HOUND OF GOD by Jonathan Maberry is the latest e-book in the Heroic Legends series of stories based on characters created by Robert E. Howard. As it begins, the Puritan adventurer/avenger Solomon Kane is traveling through Germany when he finds the remains of a whole village of farmers slaughtered by a band of brigands. If the tracks the villains left can be believed, they’re being led by a werewolf! Kane sets out to track down the monster and his henchmen, of course . . . but things don’t work out exactly the way he expects. The plot twist that Maberry springs is a good one, very effective even if it’s not entirely unexpected. The writing is good for the most part, and Solomon Kane rings true to Howard’s character. Maberry does something at the end that’s a fairly common technique, but it happens to be one that I don’t care for. Despite that, I enjoyed the story overall and would be happy to read more Solomon Kane stories by Maberry.

The Curse of the Harcourts - Chandler H. Whipple

Since today is Halloween, I want to post about a classic horror yarn that not all that many people are familiar with. But a lot of pulp fans are. I’m speaking, of course, of THE CURSE OF THE HARCOURTS by Chandler Whipple, a collection of six grisly, bone-chilling novelettes originally published in the Weird Menace pulp DIME MYSTERY MAGAZINE in 1935 that fit together to form one compelling narrative. These stories were reprinted several years ago by Altus Press in handsome trade paperback and e-book editions.

As John Pelan points out in his excellent introduction, despite being published in DIME MYSTERY, these are not traditional Weird Menace stories. They have historical settings, blatantly supernatural plot elements, and a high degree of graphic violence that isn’t explained away in the end by some logical resolution. No, these are straight out, full speed, blood and thunder horror yarns . . . which happens to be the kind I like best.

The first story, “The Son of Darkness”, appeared in the February 1935 issue of DIME MYSTERY. Set in Normandy, it tells of the visit of an Italian nobleman, Count Pirelli, to the castle of Baron d’Harcourt and his family in the year 1000 (approximately). The baron welcomes Pirelli and even throws a party to celebrate his visit, but when the count tries to seduce d’Harcourt’s daughter, the baron whips him, humiliates him, and throws him out. That causes Pirelli to curse d’Harcourt and all his family and vow to exterminate them from the face of the earth, no matter how long it takes. Since it turns out that Pirelli is in league with Satan and probably can’t be killed, that’s liable to take a while, but he gets a good start on his bloody vengeance in this story.

Two hundred years have passed by the time of “Curse of the Harcourts” from the March 1935 issue. The d’Harcourt family is now English, and the current head of the family, Sir Henry d’Harcourt is in charge of a castle on the border between England and Wales which is besieged by an army of Welsh rebels. Then the castle is infiltrated by Druid sorcerers bent on revenge against the family for disrespecting their gods, revenge that involves human sacrifice and a literal trip to Hell for Henry.

Two hundred years after that, in “Shadow of the Plague” (April 1935), the Harcourt family now lives in London during the time of the Black Plague, and the evil entity that has stalked them through time takes advantage of that deadly disease to further his vengeance.

By the time of “White Lady of Hell” (June 1935), the Harcourt family has shrunk to three—a brother and sister and their mother—and has been exiled to Florence because of political intrigue in England. More than a hundred years has passed since the previous story, but you can bet that the evil Pirelli, who was Florence originally and made his deal with the Devil there, will show up again, and so he does, with the Harcourt siblings barely surviving to carry on the line. Not with each other, mind you. These stories are pretty lurid, but they don’t go quite that far.

In “A Child for Satan”, which originally appeared in the September 1935 issue of DIME MYSTERY, we learn that there were Harcourts living in Salem at the time of the witch trials, because, well, sure, why not? This is the only story in the series with a female protagonist, a young woman who is married to a Harcourt and has an infant son with him. But the evil Count Pirelli wants the child for Satan and will resort to any evil means to get him. In some respects, despite the supernatural menace of the Count, this one does bear more of a resemblance to a typical Weird Menace yarn.

The series concludes with “The Last Harcourt” (October 1935), which takes place in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts in 1932 and features the final showdown between the Harcourts and the satanic Count Pirelli. That showdown has a pretty epic feel to it, too, and then Whipple gives us a nice little twist in the ending.

I enjoyed this series, but I have to give it a qualified recommendation, that qualification being that if you want to read it for Halloween, start at the beginning of October and space out the stories over the entire month, rather than reading the whole thing in less than a week like I did. The sameness of the plots tends to weaken them, and the relentless parade of torture, misery, and death is just overwhelming. I think the series would be more effective with plenty of time between installments, the way the readers of DIME MYSTERY encountered it back in 1935. That said, if you’re a pulp fan, I really think you ought to read THE CURSE OF THE HARCOURTS, because I’ve never run across anything else exactly like it in the pulps. (The art on all those issues of DIME MYSTERY MAGAZINE is by Walter M. Baumhofer, by the way.)

The Soft Whisper of the Dead - Charles L. Grant

I haven’t forgotten that Halloween is coming up and that I usually read at least a little horror fiction at this time of year. I’ve read a few novels by Charles L. Grant over the years and enjoyed them. He wrote mostly what some people call “quiet horror”, which is generally a little too slow-paced for my taste, so I’ve never considered him a favorite of mine. However, I was intrigued by a trilogy he wrote as a tribute to the great Universal and Hammer horror films of the past and recently read the first one in that series, THE SOFT WHISPER OF THE DEAD.

A lot of Grant’s fiction is set in the small Connecticut town of Oxrun Station, but in the modern day. This novel is the first Oxrun Station book set in historical times, 1881, to be precise. The daughter of one of the town’s richest men is expecting a visit from a childhood friend, but when the young woman arrives, she brings some unexpected companions: a giant wolf, some mysterious flying thing, and a tall, dark, sinister European count named Brastov. Our heroine has to cope not only with these vague threats but also a romantic triangle that includes a dashing young businessman and a police detective whose father is the chief of the local force.

Grant isn’t trying to break any new ground here. He’s just having fun writing an old-fashioned horror yarn, complete with some bloody murders, a lot of lurking around, and an action-packed finale. Well, actually, that finale could have used a little more action. I found it to be not as dramatic and over-the-top as I would have liked. Also, Grant has a habit in this book of skipping over important scenes and then summarizing them later. I think it would have been more effective to have some of that on-screen, so to speak. It’s been long enough since I read any of his other work that I don’t know if that’s a regular technique of his, but it happens enough in this book that I found it distracting.

That said, I enjoyed THE SOFT WHISPER OF THE DEAD. It has a nice, playful sense of fun about it, a feeling that Grant is winking at the reader and expecting the reader to wink back. I believe his heart was in the right place when he wrote this, and I certainly had a good enough time reading it that I intend to read the other two books in the trilogy.

This book was published originally in hardcover in 1982 by Donald M. Grant (no relation, as Charles Grant points out in his foreword), reprinted in paperback by Berkley in 1987, and is currently available from Amazon in an e-book edition published by Crossroad Press.

Dark Harvest - Norman Partridge

(This post originally appeared in slightly different form on October 31, 2011, also a Monday.)

Since today is Halloween, it seemed appropriate to post about a Halloween novel. I decided to read Norman Partridge's DARK HARVEST for two reasons: he has a reputation as a very good writer, and it was handy, sitting in a stack just a couple of feet from my computer. It was a good choice.

DARK HARVEST is one of those novels that takes place in only a few hours of time, something I always like. Set in 1963 in a quiet Midwestern town, it's about a strange ritual called the Run. It seems that every Halloween, a pumpkin-headed monster known as the October Boy rise from the cornfields outside of town and for reasons unknown tries to reach the church in the middle of town. Opposing him are all the boys from the ages of sixteen to nineteen, who compete to see who can kill the October Boy (or Sawtooth Jack or Ol' Hacksaw Face, as the monster is sometimes called).

To be honest, I wasn't too impressed with that setup. It seemed like something out of a low-budget horror movie (not that there's anything wrong with that). But Partridge turns it into something else with a number of nice plot twists and some excellent writing. I usually don't care much for books written in present tense, but if an author can make it work, I don't mind, and Partridge does. A little more sense of the time period might have been nice, but the story hurtles along so well, that's not a real problem.

DARK HARVEST is well worth reading, and if you're in the mood for a Halloween novel tonight and have a copy on your shelves, you should definitely give it a try.

The Wild Adventures of Cthulhu - Will Murray

I’m sure I encountered mentions of H.P. Lovecraft in reading about Robert E. Howard in the introductions to the Lancer editions of the Conan stories during the Sixties. But I don’t think I ever read any fiction related to what we now call the Cthulhu Mythos until some of Lovecraft’s creations popped up in issues of Marvel’s DOCTOR STRANGE during the Seventies. I didn’t read any of Lovecraft’s original stories until much later.

While I’m only a lukewarm Lovecraft fan, I do find the Mythos pretty interesting, and I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve ever read by Will Murray, so I was happy to discover that Murray has published THE WILD ADVENTURES OF CTHULHU, a collection of ten Lovecraftian stories he wrote for various anthologies. Thankfully, he doesn’t try to recreate Lovecraft’s style in these stories, although after reading his novels written in the styles of Lester Dent, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Norvell Page, I don’t doubt for a second that he could have written Lovecraft-like prose if he’d wanted to.

No, these are more straight-ahead tales, some with a good deal of action, and most of them involve agents of the Cryptic Events Evaluation Section, which is part of the National Reconnaissance Office (both fictional creations by Murray). As a result, what we get isn’t exactly U.N.C.L.E. vs. Cthulhu, but there’s a hint of that, as Murray acknowledges in his introduction.

The stories have an epic scope, ranging from the Arctic to the Antarctic to the depths of the Pacific Ocean, and they usually end badly for humanity. Despite that, some of them manage to achieve a considerable amount of dry humor, as well as being appropriately creepy and downright terrifying at times.

The overall outlook in THE WILD ADVENTURES OF CTHULHU may be pretty bleak, but I enjoyed it. The stories are well-written and move right along, and Murray obviously knows his stuff when it comes to Lovecraft’s work. If you’re a Lovecraft fan or a Will Murray fan, or both, I give it a high recommendation. It's available in both e-book and paperback editions.

Cold as Hell - Rhett C. Bruno and Jaime Castle

The Weird Western is an odd subgenre, and I don’t just mean the subject matter. Robert E. Howard invented what we think of as the Weird Western in stories such as “The Horror From the Mound”, “Old Garfield’s Heart”, “For the Love of Barbara Allan”, and “The Man on the Ground”. Adding horror elements to traditional Western tales can be very appealing to writers. You’re getting to play in two different sandboxes at the same time. However, they’re tough sells to many Western readers, who don’t want even a hint of the supernatural in what they read. That’s why a lot of Westerns that seem to have supernatural elements wind up explaining all that away in Scooby-Doo endings. I’ve done that several times myself. My hunch is that Weird Westerns are more likely, overall, to find their audience among horror and fantasy readers . . . who, in turn, may be put off by the Western stuff.

All that said, it is indeed possible to write a novel that’s both an excellent horror/fantasy story and a solid Western yarn. That’s exactly what Rhett C. Bruno and Jaime Castle have done in COLD AS HELL, the first novel in their new Black Badge series, that mixes truly creepy horror and fantasy elements with a well-done, believable Western setting and characters.

Former outlaw and gunfighter James Crowley is a Black Badge, an undead avenger working for Heaven with an angel who sends him on missions to battle demons and monsters plaguing the frontier. As COLD AS HELL opens, he takes up the trail of a trio of bank robbers who seemingly have supernatural abilities. He runs into plenty of other dangers before he tracks them down, and there’s no Scooby-Doo ending to any of this. Crowley and his enemies and allies are the real deal.

He’s also a very good protagonist, tough and smart and not without flaws even though he’s basically unkillable, already being dead and all. Bruno and Castle aren’t afraid to pile up trouble on him, and then, in the end . . . there’s a very nice twist that sets up the next book in the series, which I’m already looking forward to. If you’re a Weird Western fan, COLD AS HELL is one of the best I’ve read in a long time, and if you’ve never tried one before, I think it would be a fine place to start. It's available in ebook and hardback editions. Highly recommended.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Ghost Stories, March 1930

One Halloween when I was a kid, I went trick or treating in a ghost costume my mother made out of an old sheet. It had been raining a lot that week and may have rained earlier in the day on Halloween, I don't recall. But by the time I got home that evening with my bag of candy, my ghost costume was soaked with mud up to the knees. That sheet went in the trash. I always thought it was one of my best costumes, though, and a very enjoyable Halloween. Thinking about that reminded me of the pulp GHOST STORIES. This issue has a cover by Dalton Stevens and a lot of stories by authors whose names are completely unfamiliar to me. The only ones I recognize are Arthur Conan Doyle, Roy Vickers, and Ben Conlon. GHOST STORIES tried to make its contents look like true stories, but most of them were pure fiction.

I normally try to do more horror and supernatural-related posts in October, especially the week of Halloween, but this October has been like none other. At least I was able to get this one in. With luck, I'll have more time next October. In the meantime, Happy Halloween!

Forgotten Books: Lost in the Rentharpian Hills: Spanning the Decades With Carl Jacobi - R. Dixon Smith

As I mentioned that I might, prompted by reading Hugh B. Cave’s memoir MAGAZINES I REMEMBER, I dug out my copy of LOST IN THE RENTHARPIAN HILLS: SPANNING THE DECADIES WITH CARL JACOBI and read it. This volume by R. Dixon Smith is part biography and part bibliography, and now that I’ve read it, I think it’s safe to say that between it and the Cave book, I’ve read more about Carl Jacobi and his work than I’ve read of Jacobi’s actual fiction.

The biography section, while not exhaustive, provides a good background on Jacobi’s personal life but focuses primarily on his career as a writer, which isn’t surprising that Jacobi’s life really centered on that aspect. He was a reasonably successful author of pulp stories in several different genres—horror, science fiction, mystery, and adventure—but was never very prolific because of the time he spent researching and revising his stories. As a result, he never made his living as a full-time writer except for brief stretches, but his stories are well-regarded and I have several collections of them on hand to read. He was persistent, too, staying with the writing game, off and on, from the Twenties up into the Eighties, when he sold a few stories to Chuck Fritch at MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE during the same era when I was writing for MSMM. I probably read those yarns, although I have no memory of them, and if I did, it’s unlikely I would have connected that Carl Jacobi with the same one who wrote for the pulps.

Smith rounds out this volume with an excellent bibliography of Jacobi’s work and a section of letters to Jacobi from various writers and editors, including Cave, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, and Farnsworth Wright. Overall, LOST IN THE RENTHARPIAN HILLS is an excellent book, probably more so if you’re already a fan of Jacobi’s work, but I found it very entertaining, as well.

Of course, “entertaining” is a relative term. This book left me with the same feeling about Jacobi that Cave’s memoir did, a mixture of admiration and sympathy. He doesn’t really seem to have been cut out to be a pulp writer, and yet that was where he found his most success, and then only for a relatively short amount of time. Never married, spending a big chunk of his adult years taking care of his parents, unable to adjust to changing markets, beset by physical ills and a variety of mishaps, but still trying to write even though he had limited success at it in his later years . . . I have to give him credit for his determination. I wish he’d had more luck.

But his stories remain, and I hope to get to some of them soon.

Classic Horror Stories: The Dunwich Horror - H.P. Lovecraft

I know when I'm beaten. After reading "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and now this story, I have to take hat in hand and humbly say that yes, yes, I am an H.P. Lovecraft fan. I have been won over.

"The Dunwich Horror", which appeared originally in the April 1929 issue of WEIRD TALES, takes place around a farming community in Massachusetts, in an area where the hills have ancient stone circles atop them and some of the folks who live thereabouts have strange habits, like the Whately family, especially young Wilbur Whately, who is born and grows up in the course of this story but grows up to be something other than human . . . and that's just the beginning of the weird, potentially cataclysmic things that happen.

Once again, Lovecraft injects some dialogue and action into this yarn to go along with the all the richly detailed creepy stuff. The climax is downright thrilling. Not only that, but there are also a few unexpected (at least by me) touches of humor in this story. Granted, the lines are more droll than they are laugh-out-loud funny, but still, I'll give Lovecraft credit for making me smile.

I know I said I might continue with this series after Halloween, but I believe I've changed my mind. Honestly, as much as I've enjoyed the tales, I'm about Cthulhu-ed out. I'm sure I'll return to the series, and to other horror stories, in the future, and right now I'm planning to make a whole month of it again for Halloween next year. I'll have one more horror-related post tomorrow (not Lovecraft or Cthulhu), and after that I plan to go back to reading Westerns and mysteries for a while.  

Classic Adventure/Horror Stories: The Fire of Asshurbanipal - Robert E. Howard

Now this is a yarn! One of my favorite Robert E. Howard stories, and one of my favorite WEIRD TALES covers, with art by the great J. Allen St. John. This story is considered part of the Cthulhu Mythos, and rightly so, but for most of its length it's a classic adventure tale with one of Howard's two-fisted American adventurers in the Middle East, Steve Clarney, who, along with his Afghan sidekick Yar Ali, ventures into the desert to find a lost city where a fantastic, mysterious gem known as the Fire of Asshurbanipal rests in the skeletal hand of a long-dead emperor. Along the way they have to battle Bedouin bandits and an Arab outlaw and slave-trader.

Well, even if you've never read this story (and I'll bet most of you have, some multiple times like me), you can guess that Steve and Yar Ali will find what they're looking for, and more besides, and it's that more that ties this yarn in with Cthulhu and his outfit. If I have one quibble with the story, it's that our heroes act more like Lovecraft protagonists in the end, rather Howard protagonists, but I can accept that in exchange for all the great stuff along the way. I reread this in the Del Rey edition THE HORROR STORIES OF ROBERT E. HOWARD and thought it held up just fine. 

Dracula's Ghost - Charles R. Rutledge

DRACULA'S GHOST is a worthy sequel to DRACULA'S REVENGE, the first book in this excellent series by Charles R. Rutledge. Once again, police detective Jennifer Grail and occult detective Carter Decamp team up to tackle an eldritch menace, as well as Romanian gangsters. This short novel is a very effective combination of horror fiction and police procedural. I especially like the way that Grail keeps discovering so-called fictional monsters have a basis in reality. Rutledge does an excellent job of balancing these elements. I've really enjoyed the first two books in this series and look forward to seeing where Rutledge goes with it from here. Highly recommended.

Classic Horror Stories: The Space Eaters - Frank Belknap Long

I was surprised when I started reading this story from the July 1928 issue of WEIRD TALES to discover that the protagonists are none other than Frank Belknap Long (who wrote it) and his buddy H.P. Lovecraft (here just called Howard) their own selves. It starts with them discussing horror fiction and Howard complaining that he can’t really achieve the effect he’s going for with his stories, because the real depths of true horror can’t be described, only suggested.

Then one of Frank’s neighbors shows up at the door, walking around with a hole bored in his head that ought to have killed him, and tells them about a strange encounter he just had in some nearby woods. And just like that, hellity-blip, as Robert Leslie Bellem would say, we’re off on a wild adventure as the two writers battle cosmic monsters from outer space.

Having Long and Lovecraft starring in this story gives it something of a goofy, contemporary feel, as if it might have been written today. I don’t know of any other pulp stories in which the author appears so openly as a character. And yet it has some really creepy moments, too, and the menace it presents is certainly Lovecraftian. An odd mix, to be sure, but Long makes it work. I really enjoyed “The Space Eaters”. (The entire issue, including a story by August Derleth and poems by Robert E. Howard and Donald Wandrei, is available to read on-line.)

Classic Horror Stories: The Shadow Over Innsmouth - H.P. Lovecraft

Okay, now, this is a terrific story. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is the best Lovecraft yarn I’ve read so far, by far. It’s the tale of a bookish young man who’s making a tour of New England towns between his junior and senior years in college, so he can study their history and architecture. He winds up in the decaying fishing town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, even though he’s been warned against going there because the inhabitants are, well, strange. Turns out, that’s putting it mildly.

After complaining about the slow pace and lack of dialogue in other Lovecraft stories, this one is much different. It still doesn’t just race along, but it moves fairly well, there’s a lot of dialogue, and Lovecraft actually shows us most of the action instead of just summarizing it, achieving some real suspense along the way. And then at the end, there’s a twist that’s a real gut punch.

“The Shadow Over Innsmouth” was published originally as a stand-alone novella by some outfit called Visionary Press in 1936, then reprinted in the January 1942 issue of WEIRD TALES. I’m sure those of you who are more familiar with Lovecraft and his career than I am know a lot more about the origins of this tale than I do, and if you’d like to weigh in in the comments, please do. I’m going to settle for saying that this is a wonderful yarn, and I have a feeling it’s going to stick with me. I kind of wish I’d read this sitting on my parents’ front porch in the summer of 1967 or ’68 . . . 

Classic Horror Fiction: No Light for Uncle Henry - August Derleth

August Derleth’s short story “No Light for Uncle Henry” appeared in the March 1943 issue of WEIRD TALES. It was reprinted in a couple of Derleth collections, one from Arkham House and one from Battered Silicon Dispatch Box. It’s the first thing I’ve read by Derleth in quite a while, but I enjoyed it. It’s the story of a young man who goes to live with a bachelor uncle in a small Midwestern town. Another uncle had lived in the same house until recently, when he died. The surviving uncle gives the young protagonist strict instructions that no light is to be taken into the dead uncle’s former bedroom . . . but we wouldn’t have a story if the guy didn’t do exactly that, would we? What does he find when he steps into that deserted room and lights a match?

A sinister shadow cast on the wall, even though there’s nothing there.

I’m about as far from a scholar of Derleth’s work as you could find, but even without being that familiar with it, I get the feeling this is a pretty minor tale. The plot is fairly predictable, with the “twist” at the end not coming as much of a surprise. And yet, it’s a pretty entertaining yarn, a nice little slice of mild, rustic, Americana horror. I enjoyed it enough that I wouldn’t mind reading more by Derleth.

Classic Horror Stories: The Call of Cthulhu - H.P. Lovecraft

I decided to go ahead and read more of the Cthulhu Mythos stories, so why not go right to the source? H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” was published in the February 1928 issue of WEIRD TALES and reprinted many times since. It’s a very impressive piece of inventiveness. In this one story, Lovecraft lays out the basis for a huge number of stories by many different authors: the Great Old Ones, vast cosmic beings that come from beyond the stars, landed on Earth in the planet’s infancy and are still alive, although dormant and hidden away in vanished cities, waiting to be called back to life by a cult of their devoted followers, at which time they will lay waste to humanity, or at least try to. Although not necessarily evil by their own standards—they’re beyond the concept of good and evil—to humans they represent the greatest horrors imaginable, or, in some cases, unimaginable.

“The Call of Cthulhu” itself is a good story, fast-moving by Lovecraft’s standards, in which the narrator investigates several related series of events that gradually reveal the terrible truth to him. One section of the story set in the Louisiana swamps and another on a mysterious South Seas island could have been really good adventure yarns if Lovecraft had done more than summarize them. Even at that, they’re pretty exciting, especially the climactic battle between a ship and the reborn Cthulhu.

This is a good example of why so many authors latched on to the Cthulhu Mythos and wrote their own stories set against that background. It’s such an epic concept, filled with the potential for drama, conflict, and action, that born yarn-spinners such as Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Henry Kuttner, and many others, naturally would see the possibilities. From what I’ve read so far, it seems to me that Lovecraft’s stories function more as a series bible than as satisfying stories of their own (although I’m warming up to his style and see its appeal).

I’m going to continue reading these stories, including some of the other authors who wrote Mythos stories, and even though this started as a Halloween-related project, it’ll probably take me longer than that. So bear with me, even though many of you probably read all these stories years or even decades ago. They’re new to me.

Classic Horror Stories: The Hounds of Tindalos - Frank Belknap Long

I’ve seen Frank Belknap Long’s name in books and magazines countless times over the decades, but I’ve read very little by him. The title of his story “The Hounds of Tindalos” sounded familiar to me, so I decided to give it a try. It was published originally in the March 1929 issue of WEIRD TALES, reprinted in the July 1937 issue of WT, in AVON FANTASY READER #16 in 1951, and in many collections and anthologies since then. I read it in THE CTHULHU MYTHOS MEGAPACK, an e-book anthology published by Wildside Press.

I’m not well versed enough in all the Mythos stuff to know exactly how “The Hounds of Tindalos” is connected to Lovecraft’s work, so I read it as I would any other yarn, looking to be entertained. And I was. It’s the tale of Frank Chalmers, a student of the occult who is convinced that through a combination of drugs and mathematics that he can see into both the past and the future. He enlists the aid of a friend of his, the narrator of the story, who is supposed to pull him out of his drug-induced trance if things start to go wrong.

Well, don’t things always go wrong in stories like this? There are things man was not meant to know, after all, and when you stare into the abyss, be careful that the abyss doesn’t stare back at you. (Hint: It always does.) So when Chalmers discovers cosmic horrors beyon his ken, those horrors discover him, as well, and decide to follow him back to our earth.

I can see where this is a Lovecraftian story, but Long spins his yarn with a lot more dialogue and narrative drive than the Lovecraft stories I’ve read so far, but also without the really creepy style at which Lovecraft was so skilled. As a result, “The Hounds of Tindalos” is faster and more fun but lacks some of the impact of Lovecraft’s tales. I enjoyed it quite a bit anyway and am glad I read it.

I do have a very indirect connection with Frank Belknap Long. In the Sixties and Seventies, he worked for Leo Margulies’ Renown Publications and was the associate editor of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE for quite a while. Not while I was selling to MSMM, however. Sam Merwin Jr. came in to run the magazine a few years before I started submitting stories there, but if I’d gotten around to it a little earlier, I might have gotten rejection slips from Long, too.

Classic Horror Stories: The Colour Out of Space - H.P. Lovecraft

 As Halloween approaches each year, I generally try to read more horror fiction. I’m getting an earlier start than usual this year by delving into the work of H.P. Lovecraft. Longtime readers of this blog may recall that I’m not a big Lovecraft fan, but I read something by him now and then. Recently, on pretty much of a whim while waiting in a doctor’s office, I read one of his most famous stories, “The Colour Out of Space”, which appeared originally in the September 1927 issue of AMAZING STORIES and was reprinted in the October 1941 issue of FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES, as well as in countless Lovecraft collections over the years. (Neither of the pulp covers have anything to do with Lovecraft’s story, but at least it rates a mention on the issue of FFM.)

I have a hunch most of you have read this story already, some of you probably more than once. The plot is a simple one: a mysterious meteorite plunges from space, lands on the farm belonging to Nahum Gardner near the town of Arkham, time passes, evil things happen. The Gardner family descends into madness. The well is ruined and nothing will grow on the land. Eventually everybody else in the area shuns the farm where all this creepy stuff happened, until an engineer comes along to conduct a survey for a dam-building project and hears the story from one of the locals.

I have to say, I still have some problems with Lovecraft’s work. As with almost everything I’ve read by him, I got to the end and thought, “Wait. That’s it?” Robert E. Howard has spoiled me. I would have much preferred if the engineer was a two-fisted scrapper and the evil entity from space crawled out of the well and the two of them whaled away at each other with the plucky human emerging triumphant over the cosmic horror. Now that’s a story! But . . . it’s not the story that Lovecraft chose to write, is it?

However, for the first time I got a real glimpse of why Lovecraft’s work remains so popular nearly a hundred years later. The long paragraphs and the scarcity of dialogue take some getting used to, but I’ll admit, in this one I got caught up in the style and the sheer creepiness of the whole thing was very effective. For once, Lovecraft actually had me flipping the pages to see what was going to happen. There’s some actual storytelling going on in this yarn, and I can honestly say that I enjoyed it. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more of these Lovecraft story posts here on the blog before the month is over.