As you know, we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are trying to read at least one story from each 1930s issue of Weird Tales, the iconic, influential and much beloved magazine edited by Farnsworth Wright.  Having completed nine stages of this ten-stage journey--links below--today we continue working our way through the final stage, exploring further the May 1939 issue of the unique magazine.

The May 1939 issue of Weird Tales includes the first installment of the serialized version of Robert E. Howard's Almuric, a fun novel I read while living in Iowa, shortly before I started this blog.  There is also a story by Henry Kuttner, "The Watcher at the Door," which I thought was just OK when I read it back in 2021.  There's a poem by H. P. Lovecraft, "Harbor Whistles," which isn't bad, invoking the feeling we might have when we hear the characteristic sound of a ship and reflect that people from the other side of the world whom we will never meet and could likely never understand have heard the same sound and so we have a sort of phantom connection to foreign peoples and strange cultures from all over the globe--when we look upon the stars, who can imagine what unfathomably alien beings have also beheld light from those very same stars?  In the letters columns we see correspondence from E. Hoffman Price and Clark Ashton Smith praising the March '39 ish of WT; Hoffman Price in particular seems to like August Derleth's "The Return of Hastur," to which I gave a mixed review back in 2022.  Virgil Finlay offers some illustrations with strong design elements and shirtless musclemen, and both Harry Ferman and Harold S. De Lay contribute effectively creepy drawings of hideous old witches.  De Lay also has a very good picture of a swarm of monsters in some hellish subterranean landscape.  So, a fun issue overall, and we haven't even read the stories by Robert Bloch, Merle Prout and Lester del Rey yet!

"The Dark Isle" by Robert Bloch

Here we have a competent sword and sorcery story from the creator of Psycho.  "The Dark Isle" consists of fifteen pages split into five chapters.  Chapter 1 sets the stage--the Welsh island of Anglesey is the home of diabolical Druids and the Romans are about to try to take the island.  In Chapter 2 it is night and the reanimated corpse of a Druid who drowned years ago climbs over the side of a Roman ship to kill the lone sentry on duty--our hero, Roman soldier Vincius, known as The Reaper, seizes the monster and destroys it, but not before it prophesies Roman defeat on the morrow.  In Chapter 3 the Roman soldiers land on the island and are ambushed--envenomed native arrows slay men by the hundreds, leaving the field littered with grotesquely twisted, hideously blue corpses.  Vincius is lucky to be knocked unconscious in hand-to-hand combat and left for dead.

In Chapter 4 Vincius awakens and meets a fellow Roman, a man whose skin is painted blue like that of so many of the Druids.  This guy, Lupus, has been a captive of the Druids for months.  He tells Vincius about a secret passage under an altar in a clearing--the passage leads to the shore, and maybe they can use the passage to get to the Roman ships.  Lupus warns that that while the Druids have no boats, they will tonight use their magic to sink the Roman vessels.  The men sneak over to the clearing of the altar, where they witness a major Druid ceremony.  The Druids have constructed giant representatives of men out of tree branches, and in the wicker torsos of the giant figures are crammed Roman captives.  The wicker men are set alight and the captives are burned alive while the natives dance about the clearing.

In Chapter 5 the druids have retired and Lupus guides Vincius into the secret passage under the altar.  Down there the two Romans have to fight a swarm of Druid-summoned serpents.  They finally come to a seaside chamber where a bunch of Druids are conducting a ceremony.  On their altar is the severed tongue of a giant beast--Vincius realizes this is the tongue of a sea dragon, and it is the source of the venom the Druids have been putting on their arrows.  Vincius and Lupus fight the Druids; Lupus is killed, but so are all the Druids.  The sea dragon, summoned to sink the Roman flotilla, shows up, and Vincius kills it by piercing the inside of its tongueless mouth with his sword, which he has envenomed on the monster's own disembodied tongue.  (I guess the monster is vulnerable to its own venom.)  Vincius then swims to the ships, confident that now that he has slain the Druids' leadership and their top monster, the Romans will be able to conquer the island.

Bloch describes the slimy revolting passage and its monstrous denizens, the murder of the prisoners, and the living dead Druid assassin, with an infectious enthusiasm.  The action scenes are kind of questionable, but not too bad.  Perhaps most importantly, the story moves at a fast pace from horror to horror, and there aren't any distracting dumb jokes.  I can moderately recommend "The Dark Isle," which would be reprinted in some anthologies and in the Bloch collection Flowers From the Moon and Other Lunacies. 

"Witch's Hair" by Merle Prout 

It looks like "Witch's Hair" has never been reprinted.  Do we have a hidden gem here?

"Witch's Hair" is the story of old man Benedict, the rich guy who owns a factory and a big house on a hill and lots of property, the guy who everybody in town hates because they think he charges his tenants too much and doesn't pay his employees enough.  (Everybody's a critic!)  "Witch's Hair" is also a story of "gipsies."  I know you call them "the Roma" or "the Romani," but Prout in 1939 is calling them "gipsies;" what can I say?  

Our narrator is middle-class guy John Wainright.  He starts the story by telling us that his wife is in the loony bin, and this story, he hopes, will facilitate her release.  She has been incarcerated for quite a while, and it has taken him a long time to piece together the story he is about to tell, but to the relief of us dimwits who prefer being given a straight narrative to a bunch of puzzle pieces we have to assemble, Wainright is just going to tell the story in chronological order and not relate how he figured it all out.  

A few years ago there was a blizzard and a band of gipsies broke into Benedict's house to keep warm.  When Benedict comes home to find these trespassers having a party in his crib, he tells them they have 15 minutes to leave before he calls "the Law."  The leader of the home invaders protests that his pregnant daughter is sick, but Benedict will not relent.  That night, out in the snow, the pregnant young woman dies, and her mother, an old crone, curses Benedict, saying he should suffer a night of torment for each hair on her daughter's head!

In the spring, the narrator, who loves visiting pawn shops, finds in such a shop what I would call a wig but which Prout calls "an artificial hair-dress" of great beauty.  Wearing such "hair-dresses" is currently in fashion, and Mrs. Wainright is always looking for attire and accessories for her amateur theatricals, so Wainright buys it for her.  Buyer's remorse follows immediately, as the beautiful black hair gives him an uneasy feeling.  The first time Mrs. Wainright wears it the narrator is amazed at how if makes his wife seem so much more beautiful and so much more determined; soon he is disturbed by how his wife starts uncharacteristically complaining about Benedict, and about having a headache.  He gets her to agree to stop wearing it, but over the course of some days, days during which his wife is listless, as if she has some unfinished but forgotten business she knows she must attend to, and becomes sort of ill, Wainright comes to realize that his wife is wearing the wig behind his back and hiding it when he is home so he can't find it and destroy it.

We all know where this is going, but the story still is pretty effective.  Benedict's house burns down, and Mrs. Wainright is found at the scene of the crime--she tells her husband she no longer feels anxious about any unfinished business--killing Benedict was that business!  Found around the neck of the charred body of Benedict is an inexplicably unburned mass of woman's hair--the authorities figure it is a memento of Benedict's long dead wife, but Wainright recognizes it for what it is, and eventually tracks down its history so he can relate it in this document.

This is a solid black magic story that exploits not only the suspicions of foreigners and their creepy customs of readers but also their resentment and envy of rich people; Prout also offers an engaging depiction of addiction.  There are lots of stories in which magic items exercise power over innocent people, rings and swords and amulets and cloaks and on and on, but I find the casting of human hair in this role particularly effective.  For one thing, wearing some stranger's hair is kind of disgusting (I am aware of rumors that women in 21st-century America are buying hair from China and Brazil and having it by some uncanny esoteric process integrated into their own hair, but this has gotta be that disinformation I am always hearing about, right?)  For another, the idea that a cast off portion of a person's body carries a portion of his or her consciousness is more believable on a visceral level than that an inanimate object like a ring or cloak might do so.

Thumbs up for "Witch's Hair"!  Prout only has four stories listed at isfdb, and "Witch's Hair" is the last one.  In January I read his 1938 story "Guarded" and found it "acceptable filler."  Maybe I should go back and read his 1933 and 1937 stories.  

"Cross of Fire" by Lester del Rey 

I don't think of del Rey as a Weird Tales guy, but here he is!  

"Cross of Fire" is a first-person stream-of-consciousness thing.  The narrator wakes up with little memory of how he came to be laying outside on the ground with an injury, and when he returns to his house he finds it boarded up and decrepit--it seems he has lost his memory of the last several years!  The narrator spends the brief story in his house and in the village, collecting clues as to what is going on.  It turns out that some years ago a sinister woman turned him into a vampire and he has been committing various outrages ever since, but a lightning bolt, perhaps the work of God, liberated his body from the evil entity that was possessing it.  Among his crimes was turning into vampires his closest friends, and he sets out to free them from this tyranny and usher them, and himself, to a final rest.

Del Rey's style is good, and he makes effective use of Christian symbolism and lays out his own theory of vampirism, producing an idiosyncratic and compelling vampire story here.  Thumbs up for "Cross of Fire."

"Cross of Fire" has been reprinted quite a few times in del Rey collections and anthologies of horror stories.  Its appearance in Early Del Rey is accompanied by an autobiographical account of how del Rey came to submit it to Weird Tales, Farnsworth Wright's response to the story, and why del Rey didn't submit more often to Wright.  Early Del Rey looks to be an entertaining source for info about the 1930s and 1940s SF world; maybe I should read more from it.

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The March 1938 has two of our favorite things on its cover--a fleshless human skull and a topless human lady!--and if the lure of death and sex isn't enough to make you part with your hard-earned two bits, the cover also lets you know the interior contains work by four big names in the worlds of the weird and of science fiction: H. P. Lovecraft, Henry Kuttner, Thorp McClusky and Jack Williamson.  A regular murderers' row of speculative fiction!

We talked about this issue's Lovecraft reprint ("Beyond the Wall of Sleep") when we read selections from a 1949 August Derleth anthology, and about the Kuttner contribution ("The Shadow on the Screen") in one of our many Kuttner-centric blog posts.  The Williamson, part one of the serial "Dreadful Sleep," I'll perhaps look at in the future.  Today we'll examine the story by McClusky, plus three stories by men whose names don't appear above the death's head on the cover, Mearle (AKA "Merle") Prout, Wilhelm von Scholz and E. Hoffmann Price.

"The Thing on the Floor" by Thorp McClusky (1938)

In 2020 we read McClusky's "The Crawling Horror," which reminded me of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s "Who Goes There?"  Two years later we read McClusky's story about how beautiful women can rob you of your soul, "The Woman in Room 607."  The heroes from "The Woman in Room 607," police commissioner Charles Ethredge and detective Peters, reappear here in "The Thing on the Floor;" it looks like there are five Ethredge and Peters stories, four of which (including today's specimen) were collected in the 1975 volume Loot of the Vampire.  

There's a new sensation among the rich people of the city--Dmitri Vassilievitch Tulin, a hypnotist said to be able to cure people's ailments, including cancer and hemophilia--for a price!  Top cop Charles Ethredge thinks Dmitri is a mere charlatan, of course, and is a little annoyed when his fiancé, Mary Roberts, can't attend a concert with him because her friend Helen Stacy-Forbes has invited her to one of Dmitri's Thursday evening performances at his brownstone.

Sitting in the Tulin household, among two dozen of the city's wealthiest people, most of them women, half of them desperately sick and the other half mere thrill seekers, Mary gets her first glimpse of the hypnotist who has the society crowd all in a flutter.  Dmitri turns out to be an "obscene" "monstrosity," a pale and ugly man over six feet tall, bald and immensely obese.  (If you were wondering how Virgil Finlay might draw a fat guy, his illustration to "The Thing on the Floor" here in Weird Tales will go some distance to satisfying your curiosity.)  After explaining his philosophy (matter and energy are not real, but only "temporary conceptions of an infinite, timeless Mind" with a capital "M") and demonstrating to the assembled upper-middle class ladies his powers to preserve his clients' health by shooting his servant, who is unharmed, Dmitri holds court at a party with the amazed witnesses to his feats.  Apparently impressed by Mary's beauty, he ushers her and her pal Helen into a private room where, ostensibly, Helen will be hypnotized to determine if she, like her brother, is a hemophiliac.

The scene shifts to two weeks later, and the second half of the 18-page story relates how Mary's cousin's jewels turn up missing and the cuz and Charles figure out Dmitri hypnotized Mary into lifting them, and then how Ethredge and heroic detective Peters confront Dmitri and force him to free Mary from hypnotic slavery.  In the final struggle we get a gruesome scene of sexualized violence as Mary is tortured via hypnotism, her body contorted in agony, and then two little ironic twists at the ending: Dmitri himself is undone via psychological trickery, and his servant, after having survived being shot and otherwise wounded scores of times, upon Dmitri's demise suddenly suffers the effects of all those bullets and other forms of abuse--it is the devastated body of this man that is the "thing" of the title.  

This story is alright; while the step-by-step descriptions of Dmitri's demonstrations feel kind of long, the entertainment value of the body horror ending help to redeem the tale.

"Guarded" by Mearle Prout (1938)

I don't think I've ever read anything by Prout, who has four fiction entries at isfdb, all of them for stories that were printed by Farnsworth Wright in Weird Tales.  "Guarded" was chosen by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert A. Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg for reprinting in 1993's 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories, and takes up four pages here in the magazine of the bizarre and unusual.

"Guarded" is a pedestrian story, though competently told, about feuding hillbillies in Tennessee who chew tobacco and have names like "Jed" and "Ezekiel."  Jed Tolliver hates the Simmons family, whom he thinks of as "foreigners" because they moved to TN from VA or some such place.  Jed shoots down Abner Simmons from ambush, and when he goes to gloat over the dying "foreigner," Abner uses his last breaths to tell his murderer that he won't let him kill the last of the Simmons, his brother Ezekiel.  And, sure enough, some days later, when Jed tries to ambush Ezekial, some mysterious force throws off his aim; some months later Jed tries to sneak up on Ezekial and stab him in the back, but somehow ends up cutting his own throat!  As Jed dies, he hears "a light mocking laugh."

Acceptable filler.   

"The Head in the Window" by Wilhelm von Scholz (1938)

This story, we are told, was "adapted from the German" by Roy Temple House, a well-respected linguist and editor of a scholarly journal.  Wilhelm von Scholz was a German writer who during the Second World War edited a Nazi periodical and wrote verse praising Hitler.  The German wikipedia page on von Scholz lists over two dozen works by him (I can't find an English wikipedia page on the man, but Terence E. Hanley has put up a blog post about Scholz based on that German wikipedia page at the cool blog Tellers of Weird Tales) but von Scholz has only two entries at isfdb, and the other one is a story printed only in German.  (If you were wondering, House has only one fiction entry of his own at isfdb.)  It seems this English version of "The Head in the Window" has only ever appeared here in Weird Tales, and is five and a half pages in length.

Von Scholz and House may not have made extensive contributions to the canon of English language speculative fiction, but this story here is a good one; with its effective pacing, vivid descriptions and well-drawn characters with real personality, "The Head in the Window" makes the McClusky and Prout efforts which appear alongside it, with their boilerplate plots and cardboard characters, look poor in comparison.  

A nervous German painter and his nervous little dog are living in Italy alone in a relatively remote house.  On a walk home late at night after spending the evening drinking with fellow artists, this dude has some disquieting encounters but also receives inspiration for his next canvas.  Using a man he saw on his creepy night walk as a model, he sketches out the composition for this next painting, but is stumped because he can't quite come up with an appropriate face for the central figure of the painting--in the dark he didn't get a good look at this guy's face.  In the middle of the night he awakes to find the man he saw, his inspiration, pressed up against the glass of one of his windows, his face clearly visible and displaying unmistakable marks of horrible abuse, as if the man has been beaten or even murdered!  Then the gruesome figure vanishes!

The next morning the astonishing truth is revealed to the German painter--the man he saw on his walk and then at his window was a peasant reputed to have psychic powers who, having sensed that the painter would be attacked by robbers, sacrificed his own life to preserve the German's!

I like it.   

"The Girl from Samarcand" by E. Hoffmann Price (1929)   

Here we have a "Weird Story Reprint."  "The Girl from Samarcand" first appeared in a 1929 issue of Weird Tales, and would reappear in the Price collection Strange Gateways in 1967 and in 1986 in an Italian anthology with a titillating Boris Vallejo cover.  The decision to reprint it here, almost ten years after its debut, was a good one, as it is a solid tale based on believable human personalities and relationships as well as compelling descriptions of art and magic.

Three years ago, Diane, an attractive society girl of New Orleans, married Hammersmith Clarke, a sort of adventurer guy who made his fortune in the East acquiring Oriental rugs for sale in the West.  (Samarcand, AKA "Samarkand," is a town in Uzbekistan, as my globe-trotting readers already know.)  Diane and "Ham," as she calls him, have had a difficult relationship because hubby seems more interested in sitting around at home looking at his world class collection of centuries-old rugs than going out on the town with Diane, or even talking to Diane.  "The Girl of Samarcand" can be seen as a story about how jealous women can get of their husbands' hobbies or work; we might even see it as a sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy for men whose wives demand more attention than they want to give them.

Price does a good job of making his descriptions of the dynamics of the Clarkes' relationship and of all the exotic rugs entertaining, and the final revelations and resolution of the plot are not bad.  A new rug arrives from Ham's primary contact with the East, a rug he didn't order but which is so astoundingly beautiful he doesn't even consider refusing.  Engrossed in staring at this rug, he devotes even less attention to Diane, driving her to leave him.  Then, one night, as the light of the moon lands on the new rug, a gorgeous "Yellow Girl" appears--it is a girl Ham met in the East twenty years ago and spent but a single night with.  The woman explains that he and she were forbidden lovers centuries ago, and were both executed for their illicit affair, but, before she was killed, she wove her soul into this rug.  By contriving to get the rug into Ham's hands, she has travelled from beyond death to be with him again, but can only remain for as long as the moonlight lay upon the rug.  Even worse, she can do this trick but once!  So Ham agrees to return with her to the next world.

Pretty good.         

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I'm satisfied with all four of these stories, two of which are actually good and deserving of recommendation to fans of the uncanny.  The March 1938 issue has been an easy step in the long journey that is my quest to have read at least one story from every issue of Weird Tales with a 1930s cover date.