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

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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. ●