Summary:
There are two good novelettes in this issue, Allison V. Harding’s Ride the El to Doom, which is set on an elevated railway in Chicago, and The Dweller in Darkness, a ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ story from August Derleth which eventually turns into a smackdown between Nyarlathotep and Cthugha. There is also interesting work from Ray Bradbury and Manly Wade Wellman.
Boris Dolgov provides an excellent illustration for Harding’s novelette.
[ISFDB link] [Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:
Robert Weinberg, The Weird Tales Story¹

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Editor, Dorothy McIlwraith; Associate Editor, Lamont Buchanan

Fiction:
The Dweller in Darkness • novelette by August Derleth ∗∗∗
A Gentleman from Prague • short story by August Derleth [as by Stephen Grendon] ∗
Ride the El to Doom • novelette by Allison V. Harding ∗∗∗
The Jar • short story by Ray Bradbury ∗∗+
The Bat Is My Brother • short story by Robert Bloch ∗∗
Dark Mummery • short story by Thorp McClusky ∗
The Dead Man’s Hand • short story by Manly Wade Wellman ∗∗
The Ghost Punch • short story by Hannes Bok ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Matt Fox
Interior artwork • by Boris Dolgov (x5), A. R. Tilburne (x2), Hannes Bok, Irwin J. Weill
The Shape of Thrills to Come
Superstitions and Taboos • essay by Irwin J. Weill
The Eyrie • essay by The Editor
Weird Tales Club • address listings

_____________________

The Dweller in Darkness by August Derleth is the first of two pieces in this issue by this writer (the second one is pseudonymous). This ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ story opens with an overlong (and slightly dull) introduction about Rick’s Lake, an area of forest where strange events occur (missing people, and rumours of large beasts such as Wendigoes, etc.). After a few pages of this the narrator, Jack, eventually surfaces in a conversation with a Laird Dorgan about a Professor Gardiner. The academic has gone missing in the area while doing research for a volume on American folklore.
During Jack and Laird’s discussion they not only read Gardiner’s letters, which mention Miskatonic University in Arkham and H. P. Lovecraft, but also discuss the recovered frozen body of a monk who disappeared in the area decades earlier. The pair eventually depart for a cabin near Rick’s Lake to start their search for the professor.
On arrival they discover a number of things: Pete, the local “half-breed” tells them (while an unimpressed sheriff looks on) that there is a strange carving on an altar in the woods; they also find Gardiner has left voluminous notes which includes mention of Old Ones. That night they hear high winds but see no visible signs and, later on, they hear unearthly music from the woods, accompanied by incantations and a guttural scream.
The next day Jack and Laird decide to go on an overnight trip to Wisconsin so they can visit a Professor Partier, an expert in the Cthulhu Mythos. Partier provides several interesting data-dumps (your view may vary):

“We know nothing,” he repeated from time to time. “We know nothing at all. But there are certain signs, certain shunned places. Rick’s Lake is one of them.” He spoke of beings whose very names were awesome—of the Elder Gods who live on Betelguese, remote in time and space, who had cast out into space the Great Old Ones, led by Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth, and numbering among them the primal spawn of the amphibious Cthulhu, the bat-like followers of Hastur the Unspeakable, of Lloigor, Zhar, and Ithaqua, who walked the winds and interstellar space, the earth beings, Nyarlathotep and Shub-Niggurath—the evil beings who sought always to triumph once more over the Elder Gods, who had shut them out or imprisoned them—as Cthulhu long ago slept in the ocean realm of R’lyeh, as Hastur was imprisoned upon a black star near Aldebaran in the Hyades. Long before human beings walked the earth, the conflict between the Elder Gods and the Great Old Ones had taken place; and from time to time the Old Ones had made a resurgence toward power, sometimes to be stopped by direct interference by the Elder Gods, but more often by the agency of human or non-human beings serving to bring about a conflict among the beings of the elements, for, as Gardner’s notes indicated, the evil Old Ones were elemental forces. And every time there had been a resurgence, the mark of it had been left deep upon man’s memory—though every attempt was made to eliminate the evidence and quiet survivors.
“What happened at Innsmouth, Massachusetts, for instance?” he asked tensely. “What took place at Dunwich? In the wilds of Vermont? At the old Tuttle house on the Aylesbury Pike What of the mysterious cult of Cthulhu, and the utterly strange voyage of exploration to the Mountains of Madness? What beings dwelt on the hidden and shunned Plateau of Leng? And what of Kadath in the Cold Waste? Lovecraft knew! Gardner and many another have sought to discover those secrets, to link the incredible happenings which have taken place here and there on the face of the planet—but it is not desired by the Old Ones that mere men shall know too much. Be warned!”  pp. 19-20

Partier suggests to Jack and Laird that they pressure Pete for more information when they get back the next day. They do this, feeding Pete liquor and getting him to take them to the carving in the forest. When they arrive, the pair threaten to tie him up and leave him there unless he tells them what he knows. A terrified Pete recounts a tale of alien creatures arriving from the sky.
The last part of the story (spoiler) is set up when Jack and Laird go back to the cabin and listen a recording made by one of their machines while they were away. They hear the voice of Professor Gardiner, who says he was taken and is now “between the stars”, before adding that the creature appearing at the altar is Nyarlathotep, “The Dweller in Darkness”. The only way to vanquish it is to summon Cthugha, and Gardiner provides the incantation required.
Overall, I quite liked this, even though it is a bit of a mixed bag. Its weaknesses are the dull start, and a second appearance of Gardiner (or something that looks like him) at the cabin at the end of the story (the idea of a god impersonating a human to remove written evidence seems a little silly). Its strengths are the Mythos backstory (which makes the series more of a proto-SF one than I remember from my sparse reading of Lovecraft), and some of the descriptive scenes, such as the arrival of Cthugha:

With shaking hands, Laird tore the paper from my grasp.
“Ph’nglui mgliv’nafh Cthugha Fomalhaut n’gha-ghaa naf’l thagn. la! Cthugha!” he said, running to the veranda, myself at his heels.
Out of the woods came the bestial voice of the dweller in the dark. “Ee-ya-ya-haahaahaaa! Y gnaiih! Ygnaiih!”
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthugha Fomalhaut n’gha-ghaa naf’l thagn! la! Cthugha!” repeated Laird for the second time.
Still the ghastly melee of sounds from the woods came on, in no way diminished, rising now to supreme heights of terror-fraught fury, with the bestial voice of the thing from the slab added to the wild, mad music of the pipes, and the sound as of wings.
And then, once more, Laird repeated the primal words of the chant.
On the instant that the final guttural sound had left his lips, there began a sequence of events no human eye was ever destined to witness. For suddenly the darkness was gone, giving way to a fearsome amber glow; simultaneously the flute-like music ceased, and in its place rose cries of rage and terror. Then, instantaneously, there appeared thousands of tiny points of light—not only on and among the trees, but on the earth itself, on the lodge and the car standing before it. For still a further moment we were rooted to the spot, and then it was borne in upon us that the myriad points of light were living entities of flame! For wherever they touched, fire sprang up, seeing which, Laird rushed into the lodge for such of our things as he could carry forth before the holocaust made it impossible for us to escape Rick’s Lake.
He came running out—our bags had been downstairs—gasping that it was too late to take the dictaphone or anything else, and together we dashed toward the car, shielding our eyes a little from the blinding light all around. But even though we had shielded our eyes, it was impossible not to see the great amorphous shapes streaming skyward from this accursed place, nor the equally great being hovering like a cloud of living fire above the trees. So much we saw, before the frightful struggle to escape the burning woods forced us to forget mercifully the other details of that terrible, maddened flight.  p. 29-30

A Gentleman from Prague by August Derleth is the writer’s second (pseudonymous and minor) piece in this issue, and it involves a man called Dekrugh arriving home in Britain after travelling on the continent. He calls his business associate, Abel Speers, and when the latter arrives they examine and discuss a gold chain that Dekrugh robbed from a grave in Europe. Then the occupant of the grave turns up. . . .
This is well enough done but is far too straightforward.

I didn’t much like Allison V. Harding’s The Unfriendly World, her debut in Weird Tales (July 1943), so I’m pleased to report her story in this issue is much better.² Ride the El to Doom has as its narrator Jack Larue, who regularly takes Chicago’s elevated railway to work; one day he sees a newspaper article reporting it is to be shut down and demolished.
On the train home that evening, Laure visits Pete the driver, an acquaintance of his:

“Pete, I see they’re going to pull down this el!”
The old man shook his head and then turned slightly to look at the foundry worker.
Jack went on, “That’s what they say. I saw it in the paper. They’re going to pull it down and we’ll be taking busses across.”
“They’ll never stop the el,” the old man rasped. “A thing like this, it ain’t like a dog you can shoot or an old car you can throw in a junk heap. It’s alive, I tell you! They can’t kill it!”
Jack started at the vehemence in the old motorman’s voice.
“Get out of here,” the engineer said suddenly. “Get out of here, ya—”
Larue, taken aback, stood in the front of the car for a moment.
“Why, you old devil!” he came back. “What’s got into you? You’re scared, eh?
You’re scared because they’re going to take down this rotten old el. Yeh, because you know when the el comes down, Nevers, you’re finished, too. You ain’t no good without it, are you? I know that. Nothing else you can do!” The laborer slammed the compartment door and departed.  p. 38

Larue later regrets his words and goes to Pete’s home to apologise. When he arrives—his first time there—he notes Pete’s spartan abode. Larue then apologises, saying that he can get Pete a watchman’s job at the foundry. Pete isn’t interested and, after a handshake “of steel”, Larue goes home. This latter act (spoiler) and the previous comment about the El being “alive” telegraph the rest of the story.
When Larue returns to Pete’s rooms the next day with a definite job offer, he meets a conductor called Philpot, Pete’s new roommate. Philpot is interested in the job offer but says that Pete won’t be, and adds a cryptic comment about how he doesn’t eat, and “will be staying with the El”. Philpott then picks the lock of Pete’s suitcase to show Larue the driver’s collection of scrap metal items—levers and bars and facings which Pete has stolen from the El. Pete unexpectedly returns and, when he sees what they have done, angrily throws them out.
Larue goes on the final trip of the El, during which he drinks steadily (it is the weekend and his day off), before going to see Pete in the driver’s compartment. Pete ignores him, so Larue punches him, but only succeeds in hurting his arm. Pete throws him out, and Larue gets off the El and to go and do more drinking. After he gets thrown out of a bar he goes to see Pete at home to have it out with him. Larue finds Philpot lying on the floor of Pete’s apartment, and he tells him to get the police before whispering something further in his ear. Larue leaves for the yards.
The final scene sees Pete taking the train out of the yard. Larue manages to board it as it leaves on its journey towards the partially dismantled river bridge:

The car grew brighter around him as the train thundered into a more brightly lit section. The Fender Street station loomed ahead. But desolate tonight. No persons watching, no lines of children with flags, no band, no dignitaries. Only loneliness. They flashed through the station and out. As the el thundered along in its cavern between buildings, here and there Larue fleetingly glimpsed a face at a tenement window or a person gesticulating.
These people knew the el. They had lived with it for years just as he had, lived with its noise and rattle and dirt, and they knew it had died at noon that day, died forevermore, and yet here was this monster ghost thundering again, this magic symbol of the railroad on stilts that refused to die. He could tell from some of the flash glances that they were startled, disbelieving what they saw—a yellow finger of light and then the rumbling clattering black train following the thin cone of brilliance, speeding through the night on the condemned el. And they knew as he knew that the train must stop, for men had killed the creature called the el. They had cut at it and torn at it and broken its structure.  p. 45

The supernatural gimmick at the heart of the story is probably its weakest part but, if you manage to suspend disbelief at this, you’ll be rewarded with a well written piece that is set in a convincingly described world.

The Jar by Ray Bradbury starts with this:

It was one of those things they keep in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever dreaming and circling, with its peeled dead eyes staring out at you and never seeing you. It went with the noiselessness of late night, and only the crickets chirping, the frogs sobbing off in the moist swampland. One of those things in a big jar that makes your stomach jump like it does when you see an amputated arm in a laboratory vat.
Charlie stared back at it for a long time.  p. 49

Charlie wants to buy the thing in the jar because of the fascination it exerts—and also to encourage people to come and visit him and his wife—so he makes a deal with the carnival owner. When he takes the jar home the visitors soon start to arrive.
Looking at it encourages them to tell stories—one man tells a story about kittens he drowned, another woman thinks what is in the jar may be her lost child. A man called Tom Carmody has a more prosaic take, and says it’s a hoax, and that part of it is probably a jellyfish. He tells them they are all idiots and, when he leaves, Charlie’s wife follows him.
The denouement (spoiler) has the wife return to taunt Charlie—she and Carmody have been to the carnival owner to ask what was in the jar, and have found out it is just a mixture of random materials, liquid rubber, silk, papier-mache, etc. There is a beautiful line from this scene that describes the wife’s scorn:

Laughter bloomed in the dark, right out of her mouth, an awful kind of flower with her breath as its perfume.  p. 55

Charlie’s wife is missing when the neighbours reconvene the next day, and they comment that the contents of the jar seem to be different. . . .
The ending doesn’t really work—Carmody is there but says nothing, just shivers and stares. If he thought Charlie murdered his wife and put parts of her in the jar, why wouldn’t he say something?
This was a good piece otherwise (although probably not fantasy or SF).

The Bat Is My Brother by Robert Bloch gets off to a corny but fun start where a man called Graham Keene finds himself buried in a coffin. When he finally manages to dig himself out he meets a man at his graveside who tells him he has turned him into a vampire.
After this, the man takes Keene home and briefs him on his new situation (inconsistently—Keene is shown to have no reflection or mirror image, but is also told that the garlic and running water stories are myths because vampirism is a “disease”). Keene’s guardian also provides a rapey description of the feeding process:

“I want you to listen carefully now. Put aside your silly prejudices and hear me out. I will tell you that which needs be told regarding our nourishment.
“It isn’t easy, you know.
“There aren’t any schools you can attend to learn what to do. There are no correspondence courses or books of helpful information. You must learn everything through your own efforts. Everything.
“Even so simple and vital a matter as biting the neck—using the incisors properly—is entirely a matter of personal judgment.
“Take that little detail, just as an example. You must choose the classic trinity to begin with—the time, the place, and the girl.
“When you are ready, you must pretend that you are about to kiss her. Both hands go under her ears. That is important, to hold her neck steady, and at the proper angle.
“You must keep smiling all the while, without allowing a betrayal of intent to creep into your features or your eyes. Then you bend your head. You kiss her throat. If she relaxes, you turn your mouth to the base of her neck, open it swiftly and place the incisors in position.
“Simultaneously—it must be simultaneously—you bring your left hand up to cover her mouth. The right hand must find, seize, and pinion her hands behind her back. No need to hold her throat now. The teeth are doing that. Then, and only then, will instinct come to your aid. It must come then, because once you begin, all else is swept away in the red, swirling blur of fulfillment.”  p. 61

After this data-dump they go out for a snack—or a “waitress” as they are sometimes known.
Later, the guardian lays out his plans to raise a vampire army, but Keene has other ideas. The story ends (spoiler) with a biter-bit ending (boom, tish).

Dark Mummery by Thorp McClusky has a group of people leave a party after midnight to go to a nearby haunted house. There (spoiler), a couple of pranksters get mixed up with real ghosts. An unconvincing and slight piece.

The Dead Man’s Hand by Manly Wade Wellman is one of his ‘John Thunstone’ series, although that character only intermittently appears in the story before arriving at the climax. The bulk of the piece concerns a man and his young daughter, and a farm they have bought at auction. According to the locals it is haunted.
When the pair arrive at the farm after dark they find the farm locked, but a strange man arrives and greets them before producing a light and opening the locked door.
The next day the pair explore the farm separately and, as the girl looks around, the man who greeted them reappears with his light. She finds she cannot move, and the man starts talking, telling her that he is not human but a Shonokin, an ancient pre-Indian people, and that the land is theirs. However, if she and her father agree to serve his people in certain ways they will prosper like the previous owner. She refuses, and later talks to her father who relates a similar experience. They change the locks on the doors.
The climactic scene takes place that night when (spoiler) the Shonokin arrives bearing his light, which the father and daughter now see is a hand of glory (and which again paralyses them). The Shonokin says he will kill the girl’s father and that she will serve him but, before he manages to move a heavy table to crush the father, Thunstone arrives and extinguishes the hand of glory. Released, the father shoots the Shonokin with his shotgun. Thunstone states they will be safe if they bury the body at the entrance to the property.
This tale is quite well done for the most part, but the arrival of Thunstone to save the day (and give a lecture about Shonokins)—even though this is set up earlier—is contrived. How convenient he arrives at exactly the right moment!
A pity—this story could have been one of the stronger pieces in the issue.

The Ghost Punch by Hannes Bok opens with Terry the boxer getting ready for a big fight when the ghost of an old woman visits him. She tells him about a family curse, and how he will die in the third round.
The rest of the story describes the progress of the fight, and how the woman stops Terry from winning before the designated time for his death. Then (spoiler), Terry works out that he can use one of her limitations as a ghost to save himself: his “Indian” opponent’s name is “Running Water,” so she can’t pass over or through him—he keeps his opponent clinched in tight while he wins the fight. There’s a corny ending where we find out that his Native American girlfriend’s name, “Babbling Brook,” will give him continued protection.
Contrived but okay, I guess.

This issue’s Cover by Matt Fox is for the Derleth story: it is a bit too comic book for my taste.
The Interior artwork in this issue is mainly by Boris Dolgov, with him providing five out of the eight story illustrations. They are a bit of a mixed bag (the first of the Derleth illustrations is far too dark), but I liked the ones for the second Derleth and Bradbury stories, and his double-page spread for Harding’s tale is wonderful (he may not deserve a Retro Hugo Award for this piece, but he certainly deserves to be a finalist).
I’m not a fan of the two pieces by A. R. Tilburne, but Bok’s contribution is fine.
The Shape of Thrills to Come is a panel on p. 48 (see image above) that lists the titles of some of next month’s stories (including three from regulars Allison V. Harding, Manly Wade Wellman, and August Derleth).
The Eyrie is truncated this issue, and contains only two letter extracts from Manly Wade Wellman and Robert Bloch. These give background information about their stories. There is the usual Superstitions and Taboos by Irwin J. Weill, and the Weird Tales Club address listings.

This issue is worth reading for the Harding and Derleth novelettes (and the Bradbury and Wellman stories may be of interest too).  ●

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1. In Weinberg’s comments (The Weird Tales Story, p. 45) he mentions that Manly Wade Wellman’s ‘Thunstone’ stories “were to the 1940’s what de Grandin was to the 1930’s.” He adds:

One of the most interesting creations of the 1940’s Weird Tales was The Shonokins. The legend was created by Manly Wade Wellman [. . .] but within a few months, readers were writing in to The Eyrie about their knowledge of The Shonokins. Perhaps later, the same people wrote to Amazing Stories about deros.  pp. 45-46

Weinberg also mentions that an earlier ‘Mythos’ story by Derleth in the March issue, The Trail of Cthulhu, was part of a series that made up a novel of the same name. He adds that “the novelettes were undistinguished and read like parodies of Lovecraft’s work.” The Dweller in Darkness (which is not part of this series although it is a ‘Mythos’ story) isn’t specifically mentioned, but presumably Weinberg felt the same way about this piece.

2. Harding had ten consecutive stories in Weird Tales between July 1943 and January 1945: this was the ninth. ●

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

Other reviews:
Robert Weinberg, The Weird Tales Story¹

_____________________

Editor, Dorothy McIlwraith; Associate Editor, Lamont Buchanan

Fiction:
His Last Appearance • novelette by H. Bedford-Jones ∗∗+
The Street of Faces • short story by Frank Owen ∗∗
The Unfriendly World • novelette by Allison V. Harding –
Lost • short story by Alice-Mary Schnirring ∗
The Scythe • short story by Ray Bradbury ∗∗∗+
Return of the Undead • novelette by Otis Adelbert Kline & Frank Belknap Long ∗∗
Legacy in Crystal • short story by James Causey ∗
Yours Truly — Jack the Ripper • short story by Robert Bloch ∗∗∗
Tamara, the Georgian Queen • short story by Harold Lawlor –

Non-fiction:
Cover • by E. Franklin Wittmack
Interior artwork • by Boris Dolgov (x3), A. R. Tilburne (x2), Fred Humiston (x2), Hannes Bok, Irwin J. Weill, John Giunta, uncredited
The Shape of Thrills to Come
Strange Music • poem by Dorothy Quick
Desert Dweller • poem by Clark Ashton Smith
Superstitions and Taboos • essay by Irwin J. Weill
The Eyrie • essay by The Editor
Weird Tales Club • letters

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His Last Appearance by H. Bedford-Jones is labelled as a “Special Feature” and leads off the fiction in this issue. The story takes place in the near future, after the end of WWII, and opens with a man called Gordon, a tourist/passenger on a clipper that is refuelling at a coral island in the Pacific, talking to one of the ship’s officers. The latter mentions that the two gravestones Gordon is looking at belong to the pilots of a B-29 Flying Fortress that crash-landed during the war. He also mentions that their ghosts have been seen, information that Gordon receives with some incredulity. Later though, after the ship’s officer has departed, a man in flying uniform arrives and starts talking: it soon becomes obvious that the man is the ghost of one of the dead pilots. Gordon finds himself merging with the man, Magruder, and he goes back in time to relive the dead man’s final days on the island.
The tale then becomes essentially a war story covering the crew’s crash-landing and the subsequent fight with the Japanese on the island: after the crew have fought and killed the occupiers, and only Magruder and the other pilot Cox are left, they settle in and prepare the island’s meagre defences in case more Japanese attack before they are rescued. There then follows a middle section where the two pilots get on each other’s nerves, in between Cox musing about the island becoming US territory, and whether the ghosts of their comarades will haunt it.
The final section (spoiler) has them shoot down a Japanese spotter plane before sighting a distant battleship and freighter. When the battleship comes closer they open fire and manage to sink it. They die during a beach landing mounted by the troops on the freighter.
The coda has Gordon arranging to have a ton of Oregon soil taken to the island to cover their graves.
Overall, the story is fairly routine and has a perfunctory fantasy set-up, but it is a readable piece, and the last part (related to the part of the story about the island being part of the USA) gives it a bit of a lift.

This wartime vibe continues in The Street of Faces by Frank Owen, which is about a cruel Japanese general who goes to a Chinese doctor for an operation to improve facial disfigurements caused by shrapnel wounds. The doctor, unknown to the general, has been killing “Japs” on the side, and sees an opportunity to do the same to the general when he operates. However, that night the ghosts of his healer ancestors appear and forbid him to do so.
The next day the doctor operates and, days later, after the General has recovered and the bandages have been removed, he looks into a mirror and sees he has been given a Chinese face. When asked to name the price for the operation, the doctor says he wants all the paper in the General’s pockets. The General initially refuses as some of it is classified material, so they compromise and agree to burn it.
When the general then returns to his camp (spoiler) he is not recognised because of his Chinese features (even though he is wearing his uniform), and the guards and their officer bayonet him to death as he cannot prove his identity.
This has a rather slow beginning but a clever and ironic ending in tune with the times.

The Unfriendly World by Allison V. Harding has a psychologist called Dr Manning become involved in a hospital case that involves George Torey, a man who refuses to sleep without drugs. After a couple of pages of padding we finally get to the heart of the matter:

“No, Doctor, I am not troubled with claustrophobia. It’s something else. Something that seems, seems quite incredible. [. . . ] I’m afraid to go to sleep because, because of something that happens to me when I go to sleep. I—I can’t make anybody believe me—but if there is a Hell, I’ve been there—I’ve seen people there with harpoons—” He stopped abruptly. I said nothing.  p. 30

After being told this by the patient, Dr Manning and the hospital’s Dr Cobb then demonstrate their appalling bedside manner while later events unfold (the patient is variously ridiculed, told to “pull himself together,” and called a “drug fiend,” etc.).
One night, while Manning is sleeping beside Torey’s bed, he awakes to see him thrashing about on his bed, and goes for help:

I looked back once over my shoulder at Torey as I started to leave. I didn’t want my patient to strangle himself in the bedclothes. In the dimness of the room Torey was waving both arms now. Then he jerked several times, screwed himself up into a tight ball, his head and arms disappearing underneath the bedding.
And at this moment Torey screamed. At the same time I thought I caught the shadow of a black something over the bed, over Torey. I recalled this later, in the light of what happened, although at the time I dismissed it as preposterous and a figment of my imagination. But I caught a glimpse of a black shaft, a greater blackness against the semi-blackness of the room, shaped almost like . . . a spear!  p. 36

Manning then notices a ragged cut on Torey’s arm and summons help. That night Torey receives a sedative—but after that it’s back to the old regime, with the inevitable consequences (spoiler: the next time Torey sleeps he doesn’t wake up again due to a huge jagged hole through the bed and him).
There is some back story about Torey’s uncle, who is a psychical researcher, but most of the story is about the doctors acting like idiots while the supernatural events unfold. Oh yes: the medical and psychological terminology used in the story has all the verisimilitude available to a writer who has never had a day’s illness.

Lost by Alice-Mary Schnirring is a two page squib about a woman who finds a lost girl called Moira in the marshes and takes her home. The child asks for her friends, and specifically a boy called Tommy. The next day the child has vanished and the woman goes to town for help, only to find a mass of people on the pier (spoiler) looking at a lifeboat with the corpses of four children including Moira.
This is an idea, not a story.

The first of two notable stories in this issue is The Scythe by Ray Bradbury.² This tells of a destitute family that arrive at an apparently deserted farmhouse. When the father goes to ask for food he finds the owner dead:

He was an old man, lying out on a clean white bed. He hadn’t been dead long; not long enough to lose the last quiet look of peace. He must have known he was going to die, because he wore his grave clothes—an old black suit, brushed and neat, and a clean white shirt and a black tie.
A scythe leaned against the wall beside the bed. Between the old man’s hands there was a blade of wheat, still fresh. A ripe blade, golden and heavy in the tassel.
Joerg went into the bedroom, walking soft. There was a coldness on him. He took off his broken, dusty hat and stood by the bed, looking down.
The paper lay open on the pillow beside the old man’s head. It was meant to be read. Maybe a request for burial, or to call a relative. Joerg scowled over the words, moving his pale, dry lips.
“To him who stands beside me at my death bed: Being of sound mind, and alone in the world as it has been decreed, I, John Buhr, do give and bequeath this farm, with all pertaining to it, to the man who is to come. Whatever his name or origin shall be, it will not matter. The farm is his, and the wheat; the scythe, and the task ordained thereto. Let him take them, freely, and without question—and remember that I, John Buhr, am only the giver, not the ordainer. To which I set my hand and seal this third day of April, 1939.
(Signed)
John Buhr. Kyrie eleison”  p. 47-48

The family settle into the house and Tom Joerg starts cutting the wheat in the field—he feels compelled to cut it—but finds it is no ordinary crop:

Joerg roused himself at first gray smell of dawn and was out reaping grain each morn, forgetting to point out to Molly how unusual the field was. How it was too big for one man to tend, and yet one man had tended it. How it ripened only in separate clusters, each set off far from others. And, most important how when he cut the wheat it rotted within a few hours, and the next day dug in and come up with roots with green sprouts, born again.
Joerg rubbed his stubbled chin, worried a little, wondered what and why and how it acted that way. A couple of times he walked up to the grave on the far hill just to be sure the old man was there, maybe with some notion he might get an idea there about the field. But the grave was in the sun and wind and silence. The old man said nothing; there were a lot of stones and dirt in his face, now. So that didn’t solve anything. So Joerg went back to reaping, enjoying it because it seemed important. Very important. He didn’t know why, but it was. Very, very important.  p. 48

At one point he tries to give up but is compelled to continue:

He found the cow, milked it, but thought about other things. The wheat. The scythe.
The sun got in his head, wouldn’t leave.
It burned there, with a hot, blinding pain.
His appetite vanished. He sweated. Under his arms, down his back, splotches of perspiration soaked through his denim shirt.
His fingers itched. He couldn’t sit still. His head ached. His eyes stung. His stomach was sick. He couldn’t sit still. . . .
At one o’clock he was a caged animal, pacing in and out of the house, concentrating momentarily on digging an irrigation ditch but all the time thinking about—the scythe—the wheat.
“Damn!” He strode in to the bedroom, took the scythe down from its wall-pegs. His stomach steadied itself. His headache ran away. He felt cool, calm, his fingers didn’t itch.
It was instinct. Pure, illogical instinct. Each day the grain must be cut. It HAD to be cut. It had to be. Why? Well, it just DID, that’s all. Madness. Insanity. Heck, it was just an ordinary wheat-field.
Like hell!  p. 49

Later on in the story he cuts one particular patch and (spoiler) realises his mother has just died, and it then becomes apparent to him that the wheat represents the people of the world. When he cuts it he is reaping their lives.
The rest of the story tells of his unsuccessful efforts to leave the farm and job behind. Then one day he comes upon the ripened stalks of wheat that are his wife and two children. . . .
This story has a good idea that is well-developed, although you get a niggling feeling that Bradbury would have made a more polished piece of it in his prime.

Return of the Undead by Otis Adelbert Kline and Frank Belknap Long gets off to a pretty good, if ghoulish, start with four medical students digging up a body to prank a freshman called Freddy. They think that Freddy needs his spine stiffened, and coming home after a date to find a corpse in his bed will do the trick. After the foursome finish exhuming the body, they go back to the college and set it up in Freddy’s bed, and wait. In due course they hear a scream and a tearing sound, which summons one of the masters. The four follow the master on his investigation until they reach Freddy’s room. The corpse has vanished—and Freddy is lying on the bed with bites on his throat.
The rest of the story doesn’t really live up to its beginning but you get the sense that the writers are trying to have some fun with this old trope, and we get an early sense of that when they go back to the grave after finding Freddy injured in his room. There they find the vampire back in his coffin and decide to rebury the body. This starts a bit of a running gag in the story, as they shortly return to dig him up again after a second attack at the college, this time so they can stake the body, but are caught by an uncompromising sexton halfway through their second disinterral. The uncompromising churchman waves his sawn-off shotgun at them and makes the group fill in the grave again, to much grumbling.
Also involved in the story are two girlfriends, Nancy and Sally, the latter (spoiler) dispatching the monster when she arrives at Nancy’s room while the vampire is attacking. Fortunately Sally was in the process of returning a bow and arrow!
If you can put up with the semi-tongue-in-cheek plot and the unlikely ending, there is some amusement here.

Legacy in Crystal by James Causey starts with a man lying on his deathbed; he gives an old ring to a cousin, a greedy woman who can’t wait to inherit his estate. Shortly after his death the woman tours the house, insensitively telling her hen-pecked husband about the remodelling she will do. He, meanwhile, finds a book in the study about demonology, before a strange man (Satan) turns up at the door, saying the ring, the house, and everything else needs to be returned.
A short while later the house burns down, and the inherited money vanishes from the bank, etc.
Despite her husband’s warnings about what the woman has now found is a wish-granting ring, she eventually gets her comeuppance.
The stereotypical characters and hoary plot make this a weak and woefully unoriginal piece.

Yours Truly — Jack the Ripper by Robert Bloch is, apart from the Bradbury, the other highlight of the issue. This is an entertaining story of an Englishman, Sir Guy Hollis, who goes to America in search of Jack the Ripper, who the Englishman believes is immortal. Hollis’s theory is that the London murders, as well as others he suspects the killer has committed abroad, are sacrifices to a dark power in exchange for extended life (all the murders occur on significant astrological dates). Sir Guy tells all this to a local psychiatrist called John Carmody, and he asks for an introduction to his Bohemian friends—Hollis has deduced that is the kind of company among which Jack would hide.
Hollis later meets Carmody’s friends, but this yields nothing, and the pair later search one of the seedier parts of Chicago.
The ending is (spoiler) probably both predictable and unlikely (how convenient that the psychiatrist he approaches turns out to be the Ripper!) but it is an entertaining and atmospheric journey to get to that point:

I met Sir Guy the following evening as we agreed, on the corner of 29th and South Halsted.
After what had happened the night before, I was prepared for almost anything. But Sir Guy seemed matter-of-fact enough as he stood huddled against a grimy doorway and waited for me to appear.
“Boo!” I said, jumping out suddenly.
He smiled. Only the betraying gesture of his left hand indicated that he’d instinctively reached for his gun when I startled him.
“All ready for our wild goose chase?” I asked.
“Yes.” He nodded. “I’m glad that you agreed to meet me without asking questions,” he told me. “It shows you trust my judgment.” He took my arm and edged me along the street slowly.
“It’s foggy tonight, John,” said Sir Guy Hollis. “Like London.”
I nodded.
“Cold, too, for November.”
I nodded again and half-shivered my agreement.
“Curious,” mused Sir Guy. “London fog and November. The place and the time of the Ripper murders.”
I grinned through darkness. “Let me remind you, Sir Guy, that this isn’t London, but Chicago. And it isn’t November, 1888. It’s over fifty years later.”
Sir Guy returned my grin, but without mirth. “I’m not so sure, at that,” he murmured. “Look about you. These tangled alleys and twisted streets. They’re like the East End. Mitre Square. And surely they are as ancient as fifty years, at least.”
“You’re in the colored neighborhood off South Clark Street,” I said, shortly. “And why you dragged me down here I still don’t know.”
“It’s a hunch,” Sir Guy admitted. “Just a hunch on my part, John. I want to wander around down here. There’s the same geographical conformation in these streets as in those courts where the Ripper roamed and slew. That’s where we’ll find him, John. Not in the bright lights of the Bohemian neighborhood, but down here in the darkness. The darkness where he waits and crouches.”  p. 92

Tamara, the Georgian Queen by Harold Lawlor³ has a successful writer’s wife attend a séance with Madame Salhov, where she discovers she is the reincarnation of Tamara, a Georgian queen who had a different lover every night and who, in the morning, threw them off the castle parapet to their death. Cue a couple of later jumping suicides from the couple’s tower block. After the second suicide, the writer finds a missing button from the second man’s coat in the couple’s apartment, and later disposes of it beside the body after the police ask him downstairs to help identify the corpse. The writer also notes a change in his wife:

Presently Eve was at my side. “Thorne?”
I turned. Her face was washed in the moon’s radiance. Her red lips were parted, smiling, alluring. I caught her to me, and bent to press my mouth to hers. This wasn’t the comfortable love of eight years. This was something new and strange and exciting. We pressed close.
And then the shuttered eyes before mine opened narrowly. Their greenness was a lambent flame. I was looking deep into the eyes of someone—not Eve!
I pushed her away, and at my startled instinctive action her eyes grew strange and smoky, and a half-smile—inexpressibly evil!—played about her lips.
I turned away and covered my face with my shaking hands, as if to press from my vision the fantasies that my sickened thoughts were conjuring.  p. 102

The writer later tries to find Salhov, but fails. When he almost takes a header off the building himself during a scuffle with his wife, he consults a psychiatrist, and when this proves fruitless does some library research.
This is pretty poor stuff, but it is amusing how the psychologist breezily dismisses the wife’s two probable and one attempted murders:

Dr. Hadley shook his head. “It’s perfectly obvious what has happened. Madame Salkov planted a thought-suggestion in your wife’s subconscious mind. Your wife is evidently a woman of a highly impressionable type. The Tamara fixation built itself up until—”
“But why should Madame Salhov tell her such a thing!” I cried.
Again the doctor smiled. “It’s a fortune teller’s stock in trade to give her clients a thrill, you know. The woman, I think, never realized what mischief she was stirring up.”
I wasn’t quite satisfied. “Those two young men—”
The doctor spread his hands. “Coincidence. Purely coincidence, Mr. Wallace. If the truth could be known, you’d find the deaths of those young men had absolutely no connection with your wife.”
“But the button! The button from Perry Waite’s coat.”
Dr. Hadley looked a little annoyed. “You told me you threw it away without looking at it. Could you swear the button came from that particular coat? Of course not. You’ve had friends visiting you on your terrace who wear coats of that type, no doubt. You probably own a couple yourself. The button may have been there for days, weeks.”  p. 104

This one is pretty awful.

The rather lacklustre Cover for this issue is by E. Franklin Wittmack (his one for the March issue is better). This was his second and last cover for the magazine.
The best of the Interior artwork is, again, by Boris Dolgov, in particular his piece for Robert Bloch’s story. There is also a Hannes Bok illustration, and passable work by John Giunta. Some of the rest is rather amateurish looking (A. R. Tilburne and Fred Humiston’s) or comic book-ish (the uncredited piece for Tamara).

The Shape of Thrills to Come is a page of art which advertises next month’s stories.
Strange Music is another slight, rhyming poem by Dorothy Quick; Desert Dweller by Clark Ashton Smith is a more substantial piece:

Superstitions and Taboos by Irwin J. Weill dishes up more superstitious (although well illustrated) nonsense:

The Eyrie has some autobiographical information from Mr Lawlor:

It was during the depression that I once again felt the desire to write. Escape, probably—increasing deafness made jobs hard for me to get. And then, too, writing seemed such an easy way to make some money. (Ah, Youth and its lost illusions!) I didn’t learn any better until I’d written many love stories and confessions, igniting no rivers the while. When I’d been thoroughly humbled I went to work as secretary to Don Wilcox, one of the well-known writers of science and fantasy fiction.
He had faith, when I had little myself, in my future as a writer. It was at his suggestion that I tried a fantasy, and I sold the first one I wrote. Proof perhaps that those midnight hours spent with Weird Tales and Poe and Sax Rohmer, instead of homework, weren’t wasted after all. There have been other sales since then, and I hope some not too distant day to be as good as the top-notchers in the field.  p. 107-108

After the Editor mentions that Robert Bloch’s story in the next issue is a sequel to his Nursemaid to Nightmares in the November issue, they publish a letter from an early contributor to the magazine:

From Phoenix, Arizona, Mr. Richard Tooker, who had a story of his own in one of the first issues of Weird Tales, writes:
I have been a reader of Weird Tales over a period of many years. . . . Personally, I am not a weird story writer, which may be the reason why I like weird stories so well. Anyone who can make the supernatural sound real to me is worth reading.
But I must put in a complaint against the numbers of “humorous” weird stories appearing in Weird Tales. Humor does not belong in a weird story, nor extravaganza, nor the usual brand of satire. . . .
We want the real, unadulterated article in Weird Tales. Let the boys do their playing around in the fantasy magazines; make them give us plenty of blood and mystery and inexplicability in our weird stories on the principle that the supernatural can never be fully explained by mortals.  p. 109

I can’t say I agree: the more of a mix of material there is in the magazine the better.
The Weird Tales Club is somewhat truncated this issue, and there is an apology about not including all new members—pity they didn’t leave out the letter from the writer, V. Edward, which flogs his new book on Egyptology.

An issue worth checking out for the Ray Bradbury and Robert Bloch stories.  ●

_____________________

1. In Weinberg’s comments for 1943 (The Weird Tales Story, p. 45) he mentions Ray Bradbury’s The Wind from the January issue (“a stirring piece of fantasy fiction”) and The Crowd in the May (which is apparently similar to Poe’s The Man in the Crowd), but says nothing of The Scythe.
Bloch’s story is “a classic of horror fiction and one of [his] all-time best stories,” and Weinberg notes it was soon adapted to radio when the writer started scripting such shows.
There is mention elsewhere about Allison V. Harding contributing “a long list of stories to Weird Tales in the 1940s, most of them undistinguished works that filled up space and were soon forgotten.”
Weinberg also states that “one of Dolgov’s most successful drawings was his splendid evocation of Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper.” Elsewhere he says that Dolgov was one of the best artists to work for Weird Tales, and points to his late 1940’s work in particular.

2. Bradbury’s story presumably inspired this lovely painting by Josh Kirby:

3. According to Tellers of Weird Tales this was the second of over two dozen stories that Lawlor wrote for the magazine. I hope they improve.  ●

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

_____________________

Editor, Dorothy McIlwraith; Associate Editor, Lamont Buchanan

Fiction:
Quest of a Noble Tiger • short story by Frank Owen ∗
The Statue • short story by James Causey ∗
One-Man Boat • short story by Alice-Mary Schnirring ∗∗∗
The Two Moons of Tranquillia • novelette by Arthur Leo Zagat ∗
Say a Prayer for Harvey • short story by John J. Wallace ∗
Bindings Deluxe • short story by David H. Keller ∗∗+
Seventh Sister • short story by Mary Elizabeth Counselman ∗∗+
The Eager Dragon • novelette by Robert Bloch ∗∗+
McElwin’s Glass • short story by August Derleth ∗
Repayment • short story by Seabury Quinn ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by A. R. Tilburne
Interior artwork • by A. R. Tilburne (x2), Boris Dolgov (x4), uncredited (x2), John Giunta (x2), Damon Knight, Irwin J. Weill, Andrew Brosnatch, column headings by Hannes Bok
The Shape of Thrills to Come
After an Air Raid • poem by Dorothy Quick
Superstitions and Taboos • essay by Irwin J. Weill
The Eyrie • essay by The Editor, Arthur Leo Zagat, and by Seabury Quinn
Weird Tales Club • letters and listings

_____________________

The last Weird Tales I read was the March 1940 issue—the final one with Farnsworth Wright as editor. This number sees us almost three years into Dorothy McIlwraith’s reign, another leg of the magazine’s long decline.¹

The fiction leads off with Quest of a Noble Tiger by Frank Owen. This starts with Richard Trent, one of the “Flying Tigers” baling out of his fighter over China.² Initially he is unconscious as he falls but recovers and deploys his parachute. He floats with the wind, and the stars fade from sight. Eventually, he lands in a rocky blackness and hears a repeated phrase, “This is the hour of mistfeeding”, which eventually lulls him to sleep.
Trent later wakes in a bed and meets a Chinese man called Mu Lin, who tells him that he has parachuted into a secret land and he must die, but not before being honoured for fighting for China. After this bombshell there is a lot of chatter about various subjects (Mu Lin talks about his people and their history, and conducts a verbal sparring match with Trent, all of which slows the story down dreadfully).
Later on Mu Lin speaks about flies in amber, and how his beloved underwent a similar process. They go to see her, and Mu Lin states that one day he will set the amber on fire and set her free. Needless to say (spoiler), Trent has become infatuated, and shortly returns to do just that. The girl comes alive and kisses Trent. Mu Lin discovers them and attacks him; the girl flees to the river and dives in. Trent escapes and dives in after her, but while swimming underwater passes out.
The story ends with him coming back to consciousness in the normal world thinking it had all been a dream, but he finds her kingfisher hair pin in his hand.
There is no real story here, just over much description and an arbitrary series of events (some of which are not explained: why was she in the amber, and why did she run?) It is also too slow-moving, and a strange choice of story with which to start the issue.

The Statue by James Causey starts with a loan shark called Winters putting the squeeze on an indebted artist. The latter has given Winters the unfinished statue of a young child as security and he asks to see it once more before it is sold. Winters agrees. However, when the artist asks if he can finish the sculpture, Winters refuses. The artist ominously replies that, nevertheless, it will be finished in a week. He leaves, and dies in a vehicle accident shortly afterwards.
Thereafter Winters hears scratching noises at night, and notices changes to the hands of the statue. Once these are fully formed (spoiler) they provide a predictable conclusion.

One-Man Boat by Alice-Mary Schnirring³ tells of a man called Chambers who buys a boat with an unhappy history—the original owner committed suicide, and a subsequent owner drowned. Nevertheless Chambers completes the purchase and then talks to the last owner, who warns him about strange goings on and specifically tells him not to sail the boat alone. But one night Chambers sets off sets off on a solo voyage. . . .
This is a very straightforward story with a predictable end but I found it an engaging and well done piece—the setting and nautical stuff is convincing, and it is well paced. It also has a good last line.

The Two Moons of Tranquillia by Arthur Leo Zagat starts with a military man called George Carson visiting his old newspaperman boss “Pop.” Carson is a widower and has placed his child Pete (for the duration of the war) with a couple he found from a newspaper advertisement so he could serve in the war. However, he points out to Pop that the ad has appeared again, and he doesn’t understand why as he knows the couple do not have room for more children. The pair examine Pete’s letters to his father and note various similarities—it is as if parts of the letters have been copied from earlier ones. The two decide to go to the couple’s house to investigate, and a female reporter called Helen Clark is roped in (she is Pop’s divorcee daughter and has a daughter Kay that they can use in their cover story).
On the journey out George and Helen are in the back of the car and the Kay is in the front. George and Helen do not get on and they argue about the war, and what can be said in front of the children:

[George] laughed, shortly, bitterly. “What have I now to show my son, to bring home to him? ‘Congratulate your old man, Pete. Today I dropped a depthbomb and blasted a submarine—’”
“Gee!” Kay broke in, wide-eyed. “Gee, did you? That’s swell. Was it a German one?”
“Kay! You—”
“No, Mrs. Clark. It’s no use.” George came around to her daughter, his lips—only his lips—smiling. “Yes, it was a German, Kay. We know, because some things came up to the top of the water, splintered wood, shattered— Well, things that float.
“One was a kit box that must have belonged to one of the sailors. It was watertight and among the other things in it there was a picture of a blonde little girl, about your age only she had a little button of a nose and pigtails. On the picture was written, ‘Komm bald demem Elsa zuruck, Vater,’ which in English means, ‘Come back soon to your Elsa, father,’ but Elsa’s father won’t ever come back to her because I killed him. Isn’t that a pity?”
Kay nodded, speechless for once. “Oh,”
George exclaimed. “I forgot! We’re certain it was that very submarine which torpedoed the ship that had almost brought the little boy I was talking about safe to America. It might even have been Elsa’s father who aimed the torpedo.”
“That’s different. I’m glad you killed him. I’m awful glad.”
There was an incoherent sound in Helen’s throat, then— “You— You’re despicable, George Carson!”
He swung back to her. “Of course I am. So are we all. We’re all trapped in a despicable, brutal world and there’s no escape, no longer the slightest possibility of escape for me or you or Kay or Pete—Pete,” he repeated, the name a groan, and he sank back into his corner, hands closing into tight fists on his thighs.  p. 40-41

When they get near to the house they stop, and the two men go to reconnoitre. On the way there they see Pete’s abandoned model plane, and note it has been there for some time.
When they finally get to the house the three adults meet the Barretts, an elderly and kindly couple it seems, and what appears like a normal house, albeit one with the inventor husband’s high tech kitchen. As they are leaving at the end of their visit, Pop challenges the husband, John Barratt, about Peter when they are interrupted by rumbling noises and vibrations. It turns out that Kay has triggered a mechanism in one of the house’s small rooms and vanished. John Barrett passes out in the confusion.
The three go back into the house and find the mechanism that caused Kay to vanish. They flick the switch—and find themselves transported to what seems like a dark cave, where they find Kay. When they try to operate the mechanism to return they find it doesn’t work, and so they make their way out of the cave to find it is night outside. The sky is filled with strange constellations.
Up until this point the story isn’t bad but the second half isn’t as good. In this part they hear singing, which leads them to a village full of children where they find Pete. When they question him they find out that the village, called Tranquillia, appears to be a utopian experiment set up by the elderly couple. John Barrett turns up at the end of the chapter and we get a lot of talking heads about the invention that brought them here, and the non-violent utopia they are trying to set up. There are one or two more gimmicks and twists, and some preaching/changing of hearts before the end. These latter events are not really credible and smack of wishful thinking.
It is an interesting piece for its utopian/pacifistic viewpoint, but not a great story.

Say a Prayer for Harvey by John J. Wallace is a short squib that tells of a psychologist’s patient who can mentally transport himself anywhere he can imagine. After the psychologist receives a couple of demonstrations (the patient vanishes and later reappears with evidence), he provides a suggestion to deal with the patient’s dominating wife. Pleasant enough but very slight.

Bindings Deluxe by David H. Keller is the first of two pieces in the magazine that are somewhat problematical. The story starts with two men in a Turkish bathhouse where, during the course of their conversation, we find that both are bookbinders and that the older man deeply dislikes women. As they are talking the narrator sees something odd on the older man’s back (see the illustration above) and decides to pursue his acquaintance after they leave the baths to discover the story behind it.
When the narrator later visits the older man at his home we get more misogynistic comments before he tells the story of how he got the tattoo on his back. He begins with an account of an international bookbinding association he founded in his younger years which, at one point and against his will, admitted a female member who later became an object of mockery when she delivered a talk on bookbinding using citations from Encyclopaedia Britannica. In subsequent years fewer and fewer of the bookbinders appear at the annual meetings. . . .
After doing some detective work, the older man later discovers they all went to Spain before disappearing—and then gets a letter inviting him there too! He soon finds himself being seduced in the home of the female bookbinder.
This is all rather ridiculous, but if you can ignore is flaws you will be rewarded with an entertainingly grisly ending and a nice last line. I’ll be interested to see what Weird Tales’ many female readers have to say about this one in future letter columns.

The other problematical piece is Seventh Sister by Mary Elizabeth Counselman, which depicts a poor black family in the Deep South. The mother is in labour with the seventh sister of the tale, while the father is passed out drunk on the kitchen floor. There are multiple references in the story to “pickaninnies,” “darkies,” “negroes,” and a couple of “niggers” thrown in as well. That said, the latter epithet is used between the black family and friends in reference to themselves, and Counselman’s tale is, apart from its racist language and stereotypical viewpoint, not unsympathetic to the family or the albino seventh sister (who, ironically, is the outcast of the piece).
The tale itself has a spooky beginning:

That night a squinch-owl hollered. And somewhere beyond the state highway, a dog howled three times. More than that, one of the martins, nesting in the gourd-pole in front of the cabin, got into the house and beat its brains out against the walls before anyone could set it free.
Three Signs! Small wonder that at sundown Mattie Sue was writhing in agony of premature childbirth. Not even the two greased axes, which Ressie and Clarabelle—her oldest unmarried daughters, aged fifteen and seventeen—had placed under her bed to cut the pain, did any good.
“Oh, Lawsy—Mammy done took bad!” Ressie whimpered.
She hovered over the fat groaning black woman on the bed, eyewhites large and frightened in her pretty negro face. Ressie had seen many of her brothers and sisters come into the world. But always before, Mattie Sue had borne as easily and naturally as a cat.  p. 77

During the birth the mother dies and the child is shunned, not only because of the death of the mother but because the daughter is also albino, and a seventh sister, which latter supposedly gives it conjure magic powers. The midwives tell the elder sister to hide the baby in the corn crib and feed it goat’s milk. This state of affairs persists until the white landowner Cap’n Jim intervenes, and then the child is at least partially included in the family.
This state of affairs persists throughout her early years, but her situation worsens one day when she points at a bird while playing a shooting game with the other children: the bird plummets to the ground, bloodied. Later, as word of her powers gets around, a trade in mojos (charms) develops, but this later backfires when her father hears of one sold to an acquaintance without him seeing the money. He pursues her, and tries to beat her, which causes him to double over in pain. Cap’n Jim arrives and reckons Dody has appendicitis, and rushes him to the hospital.
The rest of the story (spoiler) pivots around an act of kindness by Cap’n Jim, when he quiets the girl’s nervousness on Dody’s return from hospital and also gives her a toy doll. Later she attempts to repay the favour (unknown to Cap’n Jim) by creating a conjure/voodoo doll of his troublesome mother-in-law, whose interference will upset Jim’s life and lead to the eviction of seventh sister’s family.
The story has a doubly tragic ending.
I rather liked some parts of this colourful tale—sections reminded me of Manly Wade Wellman’s later fantasy work—but some may struggle to get past its language and viewpoint.

The Eager Dragon by Robert Bloch starts with the narrator in a bar getting drunk:

Now I am not the type of personality who pries into other people’s affairs. Particularly in a place like this, where it is not safe to shake hands with strangers unless you have heavy insurance on your fingers.
So after gulping my sixth anti-freeze, I slide off the stool to go home. I do not intend to speak to these jerks, but one of them turns around and gabbles at me.
“I beg your pardon,” he says, very polite. “But you have your foot caught in a cuspidor.”
If there is anything I’m a sucker for, it’s politeness. Besides, when I look down I see that I have indeed stuck my left foot into one of Thin Tommy’s finger-bowls.
“Thank you for the information,” I tell the stranger. “I hardly notice such a thing because I expect to walk a little funny after drinking the stuff they serve here.”
“It is vile, isn’t it?” says the first stranger. “Won’t you have another one with me?”
Well, who can refuse such a courteous invitation? I sit down again and manage to get my Thom McCan out of the cigarpond, and the two strangers pour me a shot, and before you can say Jack Robinson I am too stinko to pronounce it.
That is how it happens I get so gabby, I guess.  p. 89

After the two strangers (who are travelling book salesmen) complain about how boring the town is, the narrator takes offence and tells the men about a recent visit to his farm by a time-travelling knight who left his war-horse behind. When he takes the pair home to see it they find a huge egg instead. In their alcoholic stupor it seems like a good idea to sleep on the egg to hatch it. A dragon subsequently emerges and, after the threesome concludes a deal to exploit the commercial opportunities of the creature, the two salesmen leave to contact circus owners in the city.
The rest of this admittedly corny but entertaining story involves a precocious runaway child called Edgar, and the care and feeding of dragons, which requires massive quantities of beer and thus involves Tommy, the local gangster barman, who makes many deliveries and becomes increasingly suspicious. The child is kept around as he may reveal the secret, and the gangster barman may decide to acquire the dragon for himself if he finds out about it:

Thin Tommy just grunts. It is a normal sound, because he is built like a hog, with a strain of wild boar. He is called Thin Tommy because he weighs in at 300 pounds on the latest police blotter. Besides being a very unpleasant hunk of lard to look at, he is also an unpleasant personality to do business with. He runs his tavern, but also throws the scare into local yokels so they pay him protection money in these parts. In fact, Thin Tommy is what is vulgarly termed a hoodlum. My own term for him would be about twenty years.  p. 97

Meanwhile, the dragon gets bigger and bigger, and produces proportionally more flames.
Matters develop to a climactic scene which (spoiler) involves the child’s identity and his subsequent kidnap by Thin Tommy, and the narrator and Herman the dragon going to the rescue. The fate of the dragon provides a weak ending to what was, until that point, quite a good story.

McElwin’s Glass by August Derleth is about a man called McElwin who buys a telescope from a curio shop and discovers that it lets him look forward and backward in time. He gives up his stage show as a magician and becomes a fortune-teller. However, McElwin soon notices that he cannot foretell everyone’s future, and some of the scenes show a missing figure (there is only the bride visible in one marriage scene for instance). Cue an elderly distant relative who visits and explains to McElwin that the telescope will only show the futures of people related or connected to him in some way. Moreover the old man cautions that McElwin should give up the telescope and take another path in life. When the old man is rebuffed, he asks that McElwin leave the telescope to him in his will. You’d think that this latter request would raise a red flag for McElwin but he blunders on.
The rest of the story (spoiler) involves his marriage to a wealthy heiress who quickly turns into the bane of his life. One day she badgers him when he has just finished cleaning his target pistol (bad timing). McElwin flees the crime scene, and a police pursuit and a terminal leap from a train follow.
This is a contrived piece with an idiot protagonist.

Repayment by Seabury Quinn has an unnecessary set-up page where Gans Field, his wife, and a friend are having dinner in New York during an evening in the Fall. Field launches into a story about an entitled and vaguely unpleasant ex-pat in Algiers who invites a snake charmer into his house to perform. After the performance the ex-pat grabs the snake charmer’s instrument and plays a tune to make the snakes dance. The snake charmer tells him the snakes resent “wrong charming” and (spoiler) will repay him with death—and so they do.
This is a short and too straightforward setup/resolution story, but some of the parts are not bad:

At college it was pretty much the same. If Dirk didn’t make Phi Beta Kappa he did make Rho Tau Epsilon, which had a lot more social significance, and to whose chapter house his father gave a completely equipped indoor squash court. When several of the boys blind-dated chorus girls and Dirk found that the femme he’d drawn possessed less charm and beauty than the belle his roommate had he calmly exchanged partners, and his roommate, mindful of the loans he’d made and those he hoped to make in future, registered no complaint. Neither did the girl. She knew which side her bread was buttered on and had the not unusual feminine desire to spread some sugar on the butter.  p. 114

Above the basket’s open top something had risen like a nervous jack-in-the-box that jerked from sight almost as soon as it inhaled the outside air. Yet in the fleeting fraction of a second that it showed Vanlderstein had seen the glimmer of a pair of little bead-bright eyes, the outlines of a cone-shaped head and the quick flicker of a forked tongue. A chill of sudden vague, indefinite fear went rippling up his spine, beginning at the small of his back and continuing until he felt the short hair on his neck commence to rise and bristle like the hackles of a startled dog. There was a chilled sensation in his forearms, and little pits of goose-flesh dimpled in his skin. The age-old fear of every mammal for the serpent had laid hold on him.  p. 116

The eye-catching Cover is by A. R. Tilburne, who also contributes a couple of interior illustrations (the first is merely okay but the one for the Quinn story is quite good). I liked nearly all the other Interior artwork, the best of which is by Boris Dolgov. His illustration for the Derleth is probably the best, but I also liked his double spread for the Bloch (it’s the first humorous piece of his I can remember seeing, and it strikes me that this could have happily appeared alongside Edd Cartier’s in Unknown). His piece for the Zagat story would have been better without drawing John Barrett as a KKK member (not in the story). I note in passing that Dolgov’s work in this issue was what made me pick up this number and read it, and he is now one of my 1944 Retro Hugo nominations.
Of the others, I particularly liked both the Knight piece for the Counselman story, and the uncredited piece for the Wallace.
The Shape of Thrills to Come is a better attempt than usual of a “Coming Soon” feature (usually a couple of hurriedly written paragraphs):

After an Air Raid by Dorothy Quick is a short verse about the death of two lovers and how they meet up in the afterlife.

Superstitions and Taboos by Irwin J. Weill comprises of two pages of illustrations and a few paragraphs of folklore (or superstitious nonsense, depending on your view of this kind of thing).
The Eyrie leads off with Arthur Leo Zagat’s short afterword to his story, which includes this:

There is nothing mystic in the way Two Moons came to be written. It is the way all the hundreds of yarns that have come from my typewriter have created themselves. I find my characters among people I know, people like you, your neighbors and friends. Real people. I invent a situation for them, involve them in it, and then I sit back and watch what happens. To the persons of my stories I am demigod, creator, only in so far as I confront them with the necessity for decision and action, for all the rest I am no less aloof an observer than you, my readers.  p. 120

After this there is an explanation by Seabury Quinn about why there are no witches in Ireland (in response to a reader enquiry), and a short bio of new writer James Causey. There is a reader poll at bottom, but sadly no letters of comment about the content of previous issues.

The Weird Tales Club prints three letters (two are a little flaky, being concerned with supernatural phenomena), and a list of new members which includes Hugh Hefner (Playboy) and Arthur Saha (Donald Wollheim’s Best of the Year co-editor).

I thought that this issue felt a bit musty and old-fashioned, but it has a handful of stories that are of interest.
PS I see that there are four Ray Bradbury stories in the next five issues, as well as Robert Bloch’s Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper, so that is something to look forward to.  ●

_____________________

1. Robert Weinberg, The Weird Tales Story, Wildside Press, 1977, p. 43.

2. Wikipedia says the “Flying Tigers” were “The First American Volunteer Group (AVG) of the Chinese Air Force in 1941–1942 [. . .] composed of pilots from the United States Army Air Corps (USAAC), Navy (USN), and Marine Corps (USMC), recruited under presidential authority and commanded by Claire Lee Chennault.”

3. There is little or no information on the web about Alice-Mary Schnirring beyond her ISFDB entry, and a page on Google Books showing that Robert L. Fish dedicated his book A Gross Carriage of Justice to her: “This book is affectionately dedicated to the memory of Alice-Mary Schnirring The Mouse That Roared.”
This was the fourth out of six stories she contributed to Weird Tales in the early forties.  ●

Fiction:
The Horror in the Glen • short story by Clyde Irvine ♥♥
Train for Flushing • short story by Malcolm Jameson ♥♥♥
The Song of the Slaves • short story by Manly Wade Wellman ♥♥
The Golden Spider • novelette by Seabury Quinn ♥♥♥
Slaves of the Gray Mold • novelette by Thorp McClusky
A Million Years in the Future (Part 2 of 4) • serial by Thomas P. Kelley ♥♥
Bramwell’s Guardian • short story by August Derleth ♥
The Specter of Virginia • short story by Clive Leonard ♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • Hannes Bok
Interior artwork • Hannes Bok, Harry Ferman, Andrew Brosnatch, Margaret Brundage
The Dweller • reprint poem by H. P. Lovecraft
“Broken is the Golden Bowl” • poetry artwork by Virgil Finlay
The Centurion’s Prisoner • essay by Lindsay Nisbet
The Eyrie • reader’s letters
Coming Next Issue

This issue was the last to have Farnsworth Wright listed as editor. During his time at Weird Tales, according to SFE, ‘more than anyone else, [he] helped establish the reputations of Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, and (rather daringly) used the work of Margaret Brundage.’ ¹ After being at the helm for 177 issues he left from what sounds like a mixture of economic reasons and health problems²—for most of the time he was at the magazine he had suffered badly from Parkinson’s disease. By the middle of 1940 he was dead aged 51, a sad loss to the field.

The fiction in this issue starts with the first of three short stories, The Horror in the Glen by Clyde Irvine, which is about one Scottish clan murdering another, except for one young boy who escapes:

For I am Malcolm Dhu Glas, who is known better just as plain Malcolm Douglas, and the name of me is the way it is said in the tongue we have, the Gaelic, and it means “Malcolm of the Black Water,” for it was beside the dark waters of Loch Dhu itself that I was taken into the country of Boadellen, Queen of the Borderland and Ruler of the Underworld, and there held prisoner for seven years by the time of man, but only an hour by the sun-dial that is cut around the pillar in the Court of the Seven Circles.
First you must know that I was born in Benallerton. I had the “second sight,” for I was the seventh son of a seventh son and the height of me was six feet and the half of it, and I weighed one-third the meat on a stallion’s bones. p.8

After surviving for some time in the wild he is taken to Queen Boadellen in the Borderland. There he witnesses his murdered kinfolk in purgatory, and he is tempted for seven years with the opportunity to live in luxury, while his kinfolk suffer. After resisting these temptations (spoiler) the Queen returns him to the glen where the murdering McGreggans live and he pretends to be a wealthy visiting Englishman. Just before they set upon him at a feast he summons the Queen’s spirits and murders them all. There is no real plot complication here, and I’m not sure what the motivation of the Queen of the Borderland is. That said it has some narrative drive if you don’t think too much about what is going on.
The Scottish details seem accurate, but ‘Clyde Irvine’ sounds like pseudonym created from a map of the Glasgow area: the writer’s only other publications, according to ISFDB,³ were a dozen or so tales in Jungle Stories.
The second short story is Train for Flushing, quite a good fantasy by Malcolm Jameson. This is an intriguing variant of the ‘Flying Dutchman’ myth that has an elderly man and woman trapped on a subway coach with an insane Dutchman. After the latter separates the coach from the rest of the train they travel all around the network and frequently pass through the other trains on the tracks.
After a decade of this the man, who is writing an account of what is happening to them, realises he is growing younger…. Later, they end up above ground and see troops mobilising for the Cuban War and then, later still, end up on a stagecoach and hear of Custer’s death. This is presented partially in the form of a journal found by police and given to a psychiatric clinic.
Next is The Song of the Slaves by Manly Wade Wellman. This gets off to quite a good if grim start with its tale of Gender, a slave owner, who has hired a ship and men to go to Africa to capture his own slaves. On the way back to the ship the slaves sing about killing Gender, regardless of how much he attempts to beat them into silence. Once on board he leaves them shackled as a punishment, and they are subsequently pursued by a British naval vessel. If the slaves are still on board by the time the British catch up it will go very badly for Gender and the captain….
The second part of the story is a bit too much by the numbers but there is quite a good final scene.

The Golden Spider by Seabury Quinn is the first and best of the two novelettes that follow. It is an account of Fourchette and her husband, who are serfs to the seigneur. One day men from the castle come to her cottage while she is alone and demand a drink of milk. When she protests that the goat is suckling the kid and there is none to spare, they kill the kid, then the goat, and finally rape Fourchette. Needless to say the first two actions are grimly described while the third is implied.
Fourchette subsequently makes a pact with the devil and the rest of the story details her and her husband’s rise in the world. Until, that is, the seigneur’s wife decides to settle a few scores by imprisoning her to make her confess to witchcraft. The ending wasn’t what I was expecting, and although I thought it worked after a fashion I am not sure everyone will think the same.
Unfortunately, the second novelette, Slaves of the Gray Mold by Thorp McClusky,⁴ is the poorest story in the issue. It is a potboiler about an alien mould that can take over humans and then hypnotically control others. After a number of standard pulp scenes, a police lieutenant spotting possible financial irregularities, a down-and-out winning big at the races, a marital engagement being broken off, etc., it slowly wends its way (spoiler) to an ending with sub-Lovecraftian aliens coming through a portal.

The next part of Thomas P. Kelley’s serial, A Million Years in the Future, is a pulp potboiler for the first two thirds or so of this instalment. After escaping Jan and Abel find out the female captive in the spaceship is called Vonna. Then the alarm is raised so they wake the pilot and force him to launch the ship, but it materialises they only have enough fuel to reach the forbidden Moon of Madness.
When they land there they discover it seems to be made of ancient black rock. They hear drums coming towards them.… A certain amount of filler later they have fought off a flying serpent and discovered and befriended dwarf men who live in an extensive underground cave. They are told that a nearby altar is used by vampire woman who live in a distant castle—and who will be coming for one his people tonight.
About this point the story starts becoming a bit more interesting and strange. Having been in a sword and spaceship story our hero is now convincing a race of subterranean dwarves to fight the vampire women! When one of them arrives that night, Jan tells her to leave. There are some ill-natured exchanges before she realises it would be wise to depart:

“I go, I go,” she spoke hurriedly, for it was evident that in another minute the fast-mounting rage of the little men would hurl them upon her. “I go to tell the Sisters your answer, but remember what happened ages ago when a chief of your tribe sought to defy us. Again we will send the black wolf to the inner world to summon his cloven-footed brethren. Again they will come from the volcano in the great number that will sweep all before them. And tomorrow at sundown I and my sisters will wing from the castle, and lead them straight here to devour you all.
“Then we will see if this man can save you!” she cried. “Then we will see if the defiance he now flaunts can protect the tribe of Shebak from the dripping maws and rending teeth of the cruel Wolves of Worra!”
And with a wild scream that ended in a high, terrible laugh, the Vampire-Woman leaped into the air, and flapped dismally away into the night. p.96

The Wolves of Worra start assembling during the day beside the inactive volcano in the distance, and they end up numbering five thousand or so. Just as Jan and the leader of the dwarves are resigning themselves to being killed Vonna suggests rousing the five hundred Black Raiders on the ship. Jan does this and the men follow him towards the fight and the battle commences. Just as they seem to be getting the upper hand a second wave of wolves appear. Jan is knocked unconscious.
When Jan wakes he surmises he is in the castle of the vampire women. They return as night is ending and are about to kill him when dawn breaks. They quickly retreat to their tomb below. Jan frees himself, follows them down, and dispatches them.
The dwarf leader has previously told Jan that the Vampire Woman were there to protect the Black Tower, which contains the great god Time and the secret that can destroy Tara, the Queen of the Raiders. Jan starts a perilous climb up the outside of the tower and, after nearly plummeting to his death, makes it to the room at the top:

The only furniture consisted of the great, throne-like chair that faced me, all black-stone as was the thick pedestal that rose before it, on which glowed and sparkled a golden, crystal-like ball, the size of a man’s head.
But what had at once caught my eye was the huge, statue-like figure which sat so majestically upon that age-old throne—a figure apparently carved from the black rock of the mighty seat itself, as also seemed the flowing robes that adorned his massive seven-foot frame, and the two large hands that held a weighty scepter in his lap. The great beard of that aged monarch, whitened by the snow of centuries and reaching to an amazing length, had grown around and around the throne upon which he sat, lost in deep revery, and buried in dreams. p.106

This starts an almost hallucinogenic section where the god Time telepathically communicates to Jan that he and Queen Tara existed before creation and after creating the universe she imprisoned him here so she could rule alone. Time then tells Jan to take his ring to Queen Tara’s quarters and touch it to the Ball of Life she possesses. This will draw her and Time’s Balls of Life together destroying the planet and the moons.
At this point, Tara senses their conversation and blocks any further communication. Jan escapes the tower by climbing down Time’s long beard in some weird kind of anti-Rapunzel scene.
In conclusion, this part of the serial starts out as a not particularly good pulp potboiler before it gets into some entertaining vampire silliness, finally climaxing with transcendent last scenes. It also highlights the inadequacies of a star rating system given I didn’t think this part particularly good overall but found it occasionally fascinating. I’ll be interested to see what the next instalment holds.

The last two pieces of fiction are short stories. Bramwell’s Guardian by August Derleth, is a rather too straightforward story about a man who finds a Druidic ring on Salisbury Plain. There seems to be a shadowy guardian following the ring, and the man subsequently ignores advice to put it back where he found it….
The Specter of Virginia by Clive Leonard tells of two military men called Graham who meet in the American War of Independence. One of them is a Scotsman paroled to a member of Washington’s forces. The tale recounted by one to the other is about a haunted and bloody skean dhu that is a family heirloom. Not so much a story but a supernatural occurrence that is relatively undeveloped.

The non-fiction is this issue includes a new ‘It Happened to Me’ true story column. The first, The Centurion’s Prisoner by Lindsay Nisbet, is a short Roman piece and reads like an undeveloped story synopsis. Hannes Bok contributes the cover and a few of the internal illustrations too. The latter were not as good as I expected: a couple are quite dark and it is hard to make out what is going on in them.⁵ None of the other artwork grabbed me either.
This issue’s The Eyrie has letters by Ray Bradbury (praising Hannes Bok’s work) and Robert A. Lowndes amongst others. There is talk about the Weird Tales club and one letter about an LA meeting in particular (from a pseudonymous Forrest J. Ackerman), more comment about Seabury Quinn’s work (praise for Uncanonized this time), and comment about various other stories.

Quite an interesting issue.

1. Farnsworth Wright at SFE.
2. Robert Weinberg, The Weird Tales Story, p.43
   I was also told that E. Hoffman Price states in his Book of the Dead, ‘he was dismissed because of physical disabilities‘. Nice.
3. Clyde Irvine at ISFDB.
4. This is the fifth and last of Thorp McClusky’s ‘Peters and Ethredge‘ series.
5. This one of Hannes Bok’s, and looks like some kind of Rorschach test:
   But this one is better:
   

Fiction:
Spotted Satan • novelette by Otis Adelbert Kline and E. Hoffmann Price ♥
Mortmain • novelette by Seabury Quinn ♥
A Million Years in the Future (Part 1 of 4) • serial by Thomas P. Kelley ♥
Twister • short story by Mary Elizabeth Counselman ♥
Portrait of a Bride • short story by Earl Peirce, Jr.
Forbidden Cupboard • short story by Frances Garfield ♥
The Unveiling • short story by Alfred I. Tooke ♥♥
Lips of the Dead • reprint short story by W. J. Stamper ♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • Virgil Finlay
Internal artwork • Virgil Finlay, Harry Ferman, Hannes Bok, Andrew Brosnatch
Realization • poem by Harry Warner, Jr.
Up from Earth’s Center • poem extract by Omar Khayyam
The Eyrie • letters
Coming Next Month

This issue of Weird Tales came out at a time of big changes for the magazine: there was a move from monthly to bimonthly publication with this number; it was also the penultimate issue to be edited by Farnsworth Wright, editor since the November 1924 issue—more on him next time around.

The cover is provided by Virgil Finlay and is not one of his stronger works. I was also lukewarm about the couple of internal illustrations he also provides. Most of the artwork is competently provided by Harry Ferman, but the best is by Hannes Bok.¹

As to the fiction, it is a fairly disappointing selection despite a few familiar names (one of the reasons I started on this issue apart from the fact that I fancied a change). So with that in mind I’ll try and keep this brief. The fiction leads off with Spotted Satan by Otis Adelbert Kline and E. Hoffmann Price. This gets off to a fairly promising start with its story about Steele, an American commissioned to hunt a leopard in Burma. It is well enough written and has some good local colour:

Steele kicked the dying fire, shivered in the penetrating chill, and told himself that he had listened to too many whispers concerning Thagya Min, King of Tawadeintha—the land of demons, nats who haunted every stream, every grove and forest, lurking by night to slip up on unwary Burmese. From afar he heard the excruciating creak-creak of a cart-wheel. The ungreased axle did not betoken laziness on the part of the driver; it was a studied effort to frighten away night-roving nats that contribute to terror of darkness.
He began to sense that the pwé itself was more than festivity: it was to discourage with light and noise and a concentration of humans the nats who must have followed Steele to the village.
The demon subjects of Thagya Min would have a hearty interest in anyone setting out to kill the ghost leopard of Kokogon. p.11

Unfortunately, it is obvious about a third of the way through that a were-leopard is responsible for the killings in the logging camp. It is also obvious who the were-leopard is, yet the story thrashes on for another 16pp. or so.

Mortmain, the novelette by Seabury Quinn, has similar problems. The writing and characterisation are fine but the story idea is old hat—partial and full vampires—and structurally it is awful.
An undertaker, Steadman, has a customer, Ranleigh, come to buy a casket from him but he specifies it must be delivered by sunset tomorrow! Cue a drive to mansion and a lot of backstory about Ranleigh’s strange Russian wife who the undertaker buried previously, as he did her mother. When Steadman arrives at Ranleigh’s house with the casket he sees the wife again, apparently alive. Cue more backstory, this time from Ranleigh, about what has happened to his wife (spoiler):

In China and Mongolia the ch’ing shih may be an animated corpse, like Dracula, or an evil spirit which is sometimes disembodied, sometimes as substantial as a natural person. Generally they’re the souls or corpses of black sorcerers, or their victims. For instance, a ch’ing shih may be a person who has met his death by sorcery and had a spell put on him by the magician, so that while he seems dead he revives occasionally, issues from his tomb, and nourishes himself on the blood he sucks from the living. Sometimes he doesn’t seem to die at all, but leads a normal life, eating and drinking like everyone else; only he has to have a dose of human blood occasionally.
Failing this he starves. In this form the ch’ing shih is relatively harmless, but if he dies what seems to be a natural death, or if he’s killed, he comes back as a fullfledged vampire, savage as a tiger and wicked as a snake. Also, in this second state, he’s capable of shape-shifting, and can take whatever form he pleases, though generally he assumes the shape of a tiger or jackal, or sometimes just a domestic cat. p.42

Ranleigh makes Steadman promise to dispose of his wife’s body and his own by burning after he is no longer able to attend to her. The mother (don’t ask) then appears to the undertaker in a vision saying Ranleigh has died, so off Steadman goes to torch the house.

A Million Years in the Future is the first part of a four part serial by Thomas P. Kelley.² Presumably this was scheduled before the publishing frequency changed, and it is the last serial the magazine published.
This is a sword and spaceship epic about a far future Earth that has lost its oceans and whose population has been severely reduced by repeated raids by the Black Raiders, so-called because they are black men. The first few pages pretty much summarises what is going to happen, a narrative technique I’ve never really understood: why would you put a huge plot-spoiler at the start of the story?
Whatever. Jan is one of the local princes and the story starts with him and his men chasing ‘kang’ rustlers (kangs are a super-horse analogue introduced by the raiders). This sub-plot occupies a couple of chapters until the Black Raiders turn up, at which point Jan attempts to sneak aboard one of the spaceships that have landed. He listens to two guards speaking:

“What else could you expect of these primitive Earth folk?” asked the other; “an uncouth, fast-dwindling race of barbarians, fighting constantly among themselves, who have not even a written language of their own. And yet I suppose we are as much to blame as any of the other worlds who invaded it in the past,” he went on, “for our history shows that Earth once boasted a mighty civilization, and was well able to hold its own with any planet in warfare.”
“Yes, yes,” admitted the other impatiently. “I know all that, but it was ages ago. Surely they would have made some progress since then, had they not sunk to the mental level of the beasts they ride. No; I have no patience with them, nor are they numerous enough to give us an interesting fight. The sooner we release the Vapors of Vengeance and kill the lot of them, the better.”
“Till then let us hope no wandering tribe comes this way,” added his companion. “The fleet may not return for several hours, and there are only the four of us to guard the ship. In the meantime, perhaps it would be just as well if—” p.62

Subsequently he kills the guards, gets aboard the ship, is himself captured and then transported to a moon where he is used as slave labour. Towards the end of this part he escapes and makes it to a spaceship….
As you have probably gathered, this is pretty dreadful, and I haven’t even touched on the casual racism. That said, it is quite readable, and at times is actually OK in a guilty pleasure kind of way. This part is from when he arrives on the Moon of Lost Souls:

With the guards clutching me on either side I was hustled out onto the hot, dusty plains, where a million prisoners from a thousand planets lived and died and labored, humans of every conceivable shape and color who were to be my associates in the following days; sturdy, thick-set little men of a standard thirty inches, who were the dwarfs of Panthra; frail and timid twenty-foot giants from an unnamed world of mist; the dogmen of Zaxona, whose speech consisted of various gestures, barks and whines; the beast-men of Yat; the skull people of Canaxis; weird and serpent-like men from a distant star who hissed and wiggled their rapid ways up and down the fields; all those and a thousand others, some so grotesque that even a description would be revolting. p.72

I’m not sure I’ll manage to read this straight through but I’ll continue dipping into it and see how I get on.

Following the novelettes and the serial are five short stories including one reprint. Twister by Mary Elizabeth Counselman is about a newlywed couple arrive at a strange unlit town and are refused a room. They fill up with gas and continue on as they have been warned that a twister is headed for the town. Five miles later they run out of fuel and a sheriff’s deputy finds them threatens to arrest them as he thinks they are drunk. There is no town where the couple say they have been or warnings of a twister. Next day (spoiler) they return with the deputy and find the ruin of a town destroyed by a twister seventeen years previously.
Portrait of a Bride by Earl Peirce, Jr. has a man called John Kenyon visiting Richman, a dying friend, and his new wife Elizabeth. After Stephan the servant picks him up from the bus station he informs the Kenyon that the new wife he has been told about does not really exist but is a delusion that Richman suffers from. Stephan and Richman’s Doctor, Bronson, have been playing along with him given his poor health.
There then follows several pages of completely unconvincing shenanigans involving the Stephan the servant, Kenyon and latterly Bronson the doctor. There is also a painting of his wife that Richman is in the process of painting that gets wheeled on part of the way through the story and again at the end.
Forbidden Cupboard by Frances Garfield,³ is a quite well told but ultimately daft story about a young woman arriving at a house where she plans to rent a room. Unusually it is a priest renting the room, and there is some backstory about a previous inhabitant. She notices a closet door that is blocked by furniture and the priest tells her it is to be plastered up and that she is not to open it. Needless to say, after the priest has left….
The Unveiling by Alfred I. Tooke is probably the best story in the issue. It is about a group of people going to see a new painting by a man who survived the Russian revolution but has been traumatised by the experience. Hence his paintings are violent, primal works with titles like Beezlebub, Greed, Hate, War, and the newest one, Death….
Lips of the Dead by W. J. Stamper is the reprint story (Weird Tales, June 1925). A Haitian president and general hold Papillon and other senators hostage as the mobs riot outside. Papillon refuses to cooperate and so is decapitated and his head tossed to the mob. The president and general flee. Later, the mob finds them in the French legation and breaks in to seize them. The general is killed; the president is dragged through the streets, crucified and then decapitated.
The only fantasy content is that the severed heads of Papillon and the president make brief comments after their decapitation. Quite well described and visceral but this is ultimately the pulp story equivalent of a snuff movie, and I wonder if it is typical of early stories in the magazine.

There are also a couple of poems and a half page notice stating the start of a new column, It Happened to Me, for which supernatural accounts are solicited from readers.
This month’s The Eyrie has letters from Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith and Edmond Hamilton among others: Bloch defends his story The Dark Isle and his use of druidry therein. There is praise for H. Warner Munn’s King of the World’s Edge, Henry Kuttner’s Towers of Death, Seabury Quinn’s Uncanonized and a reprint of one of Robert E. Howard’s Brak Mak Morn stories. Only four of the correspondents are women but they contribute about a third or so of the wordage.
Finally, Donald Jafelice from Toronto says ‘I have not written before, due to my lack of expression-power.’ I know how you feel Mr Jafelice, but I don’t let it stop me….

A disappointing issue.

1. The title page by Hannes Bok for the serial:
2. Kelley was the self-proclaimed ‘King of the Canadian Pulps’. There is more information about this colourful writer at Tellers of Weird Tales.
3. According to ISFDB, a revised version of Frances Garfield’s story was published as Don’t Open That Door (Fantasy Tales, Winter 1979). She published four stories in 1939-40 and half a dozen more after that revised version appeared almost forty years later. Her husband was Manly Wade Wellman.

Fiction:
The Vampire Master (Part 1 of 4) • serial by Edmond Hamilton [as by Hugh Davidson ] ♥♥
The Mansion of Unholy Magic • novelette by Seabury Quinn ♥♥♥
The Pool of the Black One • novelette by Robert E. Howard ♥♥♥
The House of the Worm • novelette by Mearle Prout ♥♥
The Plutonian Terror • short story by Jack Williamson
The Seed from the Sepulcher • short story by Clark Ashton Smith ♥♥
The Black, Dead Thing • short story by Frank Belknap Long ♥
The Cat-Woman • short story by Mary Elizabeth Counselman ♥♥
The Festival • reprint short story by H. P. Lovecraft ♥♥

Non-fiction:
The Vampire Master • M. Brundage
Interior artwork by Jayem Wilcox, Hugo Rankin
The Ultimate Word • poem by Marion Doyle
The Eyrie • letter column by the Editor and readers
Coming Next Month • essay by uncredited

This issue of Weird Tales sports the famous bat-girl cover by Margaret Brundage, who was renowned for her risqué covers for this magazine. This strange, one might say fetishistic, cover reportedly makes this one of the hardest issues for collectors to obtain (a recent near-fine copy sold for $4500 at Heritage Auctions).¹ It is quite a peculiar piece: the eyes, fingers and breasts are all larger than real life, the unusual pose, the bat-mask, etc. It isn’t my favourite Brundage² but it is very striking, and I bet this issue sold by the bucket load.

Further to my comments about the price this issue can sell for it is probably fairly obvious that I am reading this from a scanned copy. However, there are a number of facsimile editions available of the early issues so this needn’t be your only option.³

As it happens this is the first issue of the old Weird Tales I have ever read although I have a few issues upstairs. The standard pulp size (about 10 inches by 7 inches) means there is a plenty of reading even in a 132 pp. issue, and that fiction starts off with Edmond Hamilton’s four-part serial The Vampire Master. I should say that Weird Tales of this era has a nasty habit of not labelling these as such and you won’t find out it is a serial until the last line:

Don’t miss next month’s thrilling instalment, about bodies that walked and carried their coffins with them. p.243

And no mention of how many parts are in the serial either.

As to the story itself (I didn’t have the other parts to hand so only read this instalment) this is a bog-standard vampire pot-boiler. Dr Dale and his assistant Harley Owen travel to the affected village with the messenger sent to summon them, Dr Henderson, and matters proceed. Absolutely nothing novel—or unpredictable—in this first part but an OK read for all that. There is some padding though: a page or so of the vampire expert Dr Dale explaining what vampires are to his visitor: I’m pretty sure everyone would have known this even in 1933.

Next up is a Jules de Grandin novelette by Seabury Quinn. I’ve heard of the Jules de Grandin stories but have never read any. The Mansion of Unholy Magic starts at a railway station where de Grandin and his sidekick Trowbridge engage a woman driver to take them to their cabin. As they travel there she drives very quickly and this is explained when they are pursued by a fast running figure who disappears when fired at.
She stays overnight in the cabin with the two men as it is too late to return and gives the backstory of a local Colonel who has resurrected three Egyptian mummies who have been killing locals.
After a perilous night in the cabin they set off the next day to check on her father and then deal with the mummies.
It’s rather straightforward plot but is told in a fairly light vein which makes it quite entertaining actually. It also helps that there are one or two good lines in this as well:

A man’s gray felt hat which had seen better days, though not recently… p.424

(he) favoured the solicitor with a look denoting compound interest p.425

Corny maybe, but I look forward to reading more of the de Grandin tales.

One of the major successes in Weird Tales were Robert E. Howard’s popular tales of Conan the Barbarian. The Pool of the Black One has him climbing aboard a ship called ‘The Wastrel’ after sailing and swimming out from the Baracha Islands. After an interrogation by Zaporavo, the captain, he is taken on as a sailor but is only accepted by the crew after fighting one of them and breaking the other’s neck.
Some time later on they make landfall at an island where the main action takes place. There is narcotic fruit, a fight with the captain, and inhumanly large black natives who capture members of the crew and take them to their grisly inland temple. There is also some love interest in the form of Sancha, the captain’s concubine.
I found this rather straightforward. It is also a bit unpalatable at times (Conan wants command of the ship and so the captain is murdered in the fight they have) and there are passages like these:

She, who had been the spoiled and petted daughter of the Duke of Kordava, learned what it was to be a buccaneer’s plaything; and because she was supple enough to bend without breaking, she lived where other women had died, and because she was young and vibrant with life, she came to find pleasure in the existence.⁴ p.451

The superb symmetry of body and limbs was more impressive at close range. Under the ebon skin long, rounded muscles rippled, and Conan did not doubt that the monster could rend an ordinary man limb from limb. The nails of the fingers provided further weapons, for they were grown like the talons of a wild beast. The face was a carven ebony mask. The eyes were tawny, a vibrant gold that glowed and glittered. But the face was inhuman; each line, each feature was stamped with evil—evil transcending the mere evil of humanity. The thing was not a human—it could not be; it was a growth of Life from the pits of blasphemous creation—a perversion of evolutionary development. p.458

However, if you can put aside your squeamishness. as well as the possible misogyny and racism, it does have a certain narrative verve, and I think I see why Howard was so popular with some.

Mearle Prout’s The House of the Worm is a weird fantasy about two men who end up hunting in a wood where everything seems to have died, including the trees, and where a putrefying atmosphere pervades everything.
One of the men wakes up in the middle of the evening to a vision of his partner decaying and riddled with worms. They discover lighted torches keep the evil at bay and retreat the next day. Subsequently, the sphere of influence of this malign force spreads outward and many are killed before they return to the wood to destroy it.
It is rather unnecessarily bookended with material about the power of thought controlling reality.

Jack Williamson’s The Plutonian Terror is the issue’s SF story (a contentious issue that comes up in the letter column) and is a dreadful piece. Two male space explorers are returning to Earth, one of whom is heavily bandaged all over due to:

Incurable burns, resulting from injudicious experimenting with “hard” or high frequency X-rays, had eaten his face away, destroyed his voice. Life meant nothing to him. p.484

En-route they observe a huge cuboid spaceship that crosses their path. Once on Earth they find the population vanished and soon deduce that the cuboid spaceship has taken them to Pluto. They pursue the ship to its destination and have a showdown with (drum-roll) a ‘red vampire brain’, the end result of Pluto’s decadent civilisation. They subsequently discover that all Earth’s population has died.
The final twist is that one of the two explorers is actually a woman—the real male character had not realised that there was a woman he desired hiding behind the bandages ‘he’ wore to cover his supposed dreadful X-Ray burns.
Actually, for the first half this is actually OK, if terribly dated—some of the deserted Earth description is fine:

Earth swam before them, a swelling green-blue sphere, swathed indistinctly in the misty radiance of its atmosphere. Soft and warm and bright it shone, against the startling, frozen, eternal blackness of the star-set universal void. p.481

This story proves, in comparison to the other material in this issue, how badly SF can date compared with fantasy or horror.

The Seed from the Sepulcher by regular contributor Clark Ashton Smith is another average fantasy about two orchid hunters in the jungle and how one of them is infected by a plant. A good deal of the final third is taken up with a description of this process.

The Black, Dead Thing by Frank Belknap Long opens with a passenger on a cruise having a supernatural vision on the deck of the ship. After summoning the steward he discovers that a strange monkey-like beast was seen on the second night of the last cruise and, subsequently, a doctor-passenger was ‘mangled, clawed to death’. Our passenger has a subsequent encounter with the beast in his cabin. Unfortunately, all this description and atmosphere, like a lot of horror stories, does not really amount to anything.

The Cat-Woman by Mary Elizabeth Counselman is a straightforward tale about a man in a boarding house whose female neighbour opposite is a were-cat. Pretty much by the numbers up until the ending which is rather unpleasant, or (spoiler) very unpleasant if you have a cat currently living with you.⁵

The final piece of fiction, The Festival, is an atmospheric Lovecraft Cthulhu reprint from the sixteenth issue of Weird Tales (January 1925) that tells of a man who visits Kingsport for a strange Yuletide ritual and who ends up in a subterranean chamber under the church where weird creatures lurk by an underground river. The last paragraph, quoted from the Necrominion, doesn’t conclude matters.

Most of the illustrations in this issue are by Jayem Wilcox and are quite uninspiring, crude stuff. There is also some verse by Marion Doyle of an equivalent standard.

There is an Interesting letter column, The Eyrie, which has a different format to most magazines in that it quotes only parts of letters rather than the whole and groups them according to subject. Comments in this issue concern Jack Williamson’s six-part serial Golden Blood and Margaret Brundage’s covers (at that time she was referred to as M. Brundage, so the fact that it was a female artist was unknown). Her nude covers raise complaints from Lionel Dilbeck, of Wichita, Kansas:

But whatever you do, do not continue to disgrace the magazine with naked women as you did in the June and July issues… And I really hate to tear the covers off the magazine, as that also spoils the looks of them. p.516

He must have been driven to apoplexy by this month’s cover, but for slightly different reasons. Robert E. Howard’s work is mentioned in a letter from Sylvia Bennett of Detroit :

I am becoming weary of his continuous butchery and slaughter. After I finish reading one of his gory stories I feel as if I am soaked with blood. p.518

The subject of ‘scientific stories’ is also touched on.

In conclusion, there are a couple of stories of interest in this issue, the de Grandin and Conan tales, but much of the rest is forgettable. I will be interested to see if this is typical of other issues of the era. If it is I can’t really see myself reading that many more: even setting your expectations accordingly for material of this age it would be too much of a slog.

1. 1. This one. Copies in poorer condition will only cost you several hundred dollars…
   2. My favourite Brundage covers would probably be:
      The Chosen of Vishnu, Weird Tales August 1933
      The Red Knife of Hassan, Weird Tales January 1934
      Wizard’s Isle, Weird Tales June 1934
      The Black God’s Kiss, Weird Tales October 1934
      Black Bagheela, Weird Tales January 1935
      Dr Satan, Weird Tales August 1935
      Shadows in Zamboula, Weird Tales November 1935
      Living Budhess, Weird Tales November 1937
      Incense of Abomination, Weird Tales March 1938
      Suicide Chapel, Weird Tales June 1938 (and there was me thinking I would get away without any bondage ones…)
   3. Girasol Press do facsimile copies at $35 or so. Pricey, and it’ll cost quite a bit more to get them sent over the Pond to the UK: I wish they would sell digital copies. While I am talking about facsimile copies, I might as well mention that Wildside Press do a similar thing forWeird Tales short lived companion magazine Oriental Tales. These go on Amazon for seven or eight quid, and I’ve picked up a couple cheaper than that.
   4. For those that actually like this kind of thing you should check out John Norman’s Gor novels…
   5. I was going to write ‘own a cat’: how foolish.