Literary Slumming: August Derleth and Mark R Schorer [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Mark Schorer

It is easy for readers like myself to forget that Weird Tales writers and other pulpsters had literary ambitions. Dwelling in my fan-boy bubble, I (and many others as well) think that our favorite writers would be proud of their Weird Tales heritage. As remarks by Fritz Leiber in interviews clearly show, this was not the case. Weird Tales has a patina of nostalgia upon it these days. Back in the day, it was small potatoes, obscure, beneath notice.

To really drive this home we need look no further than two collaborators who sold twenty-one stories to Weird Tales and a few more to its better-paying rival, Strange Stories. These men were Mark R Schorer (1908-1977) and August Derleth (1909-1971). Both these men could have been simple footnote writers in "The Unique Magazine's" twenty-year run, but they were more. Much more.

First off, they were boyhood friends, growing up in Sauk City, Wisconsin. As time went on, Mark Schorer would become Chairman of the University of California; Berkeley, author of Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (1961). His work would appear in The New Yorker, Harpers, The Atlantic Monthly, and Esquire. Three Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright professorship at the University of Pisa, a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was played by Treat Williams in the movie Howl (2010). Is it any wonder his obituary did not mention Weird Tales?

August Derleth

August Derleth began his career as a regional author. He won a place on the O'Brien Roll for "Five Alone" in Place of Hawks (1935). In 1938, Derleth became a Guggenheim Fellow for his early work on his Sac Prairie Saga, sponsored by Sinclair Lewis and Edgar Lee Masters. Instead of taking the path into academia that Schorer did, Derleth created Arkham Press in 1939 with Donald Wandrei, and saved HP Lovecraft from pulp obscurity. This decision, as well as taking up the pen of Arthur Conan Doyle (unauthorized, of course) and creating the detective Solar Pons, sent him down another path entirely. He would carry a fairly large reputation amongst horror fans (many who love and many who hate him). This literary backwater required him to write volumes of horror fiction to survive (over a hundred tales in Weird Tales alone!)

ST Joshi, in The Modern Weird Tale (2001), sees Derleth's influence and that of the small press as a ghettoizing influence on horror. The lack of response from mainstream critics forced Derleth to seek only those who understood his particular love of the weird. To promote Lovecraft's work, Derleth was required to occasionally produce new material. Joshi calls Derleth's "posthumous collaborations" with Lovecraft "perhaps the most disreputable phase of Derleth's activities" in HP Lovecraft: A Life (1996). Love him or hate him, he remained a working writer and editor to the end of his days.

It is hard to imagine these two collaborating on stories. They shared a cabin in early 1926 in rural Wisconsin and banged out their stories, the first appearing in Weird Tales in July 1926. The publication record seems to suggest this continued until September 1928. After this, year-long gaps begin, suggesting Schorer was busy doing other things. During these gaps, Derleth continued to publish on his own. Most of Derleth's solo stories read like retreads of English ghost stories, often set in England, and deserve the obscurity they received. At what point Schorer walked away is not hard to say as their last collaboration is "The Evil Ones" (Strange Tales, October 1940). This is around the time that Arkham House was created and Derleth would become that guy who wrote posthumous collaborations with the dead HP Lovecraft. (There was one more, "The Occupant of the Crypt" (Weird Tales, September 1947) but it was likely a leftover, rather than a new story.)

Derleth has many modes in which he wrote. His horror tales written under his own name are not exactly the same as those he wrote as Stephen Grendon. His Mythos fiction was written in mock-Lovecraftian prose. His Solar Pons reads like mock-Doyle while his science fiction has a different style too. Is there a Derleth-Schorer style? We have no idea what part each writer did with these tales. Was Schorer an ideas man? Or is the prose 50-50? Looking at a few of the more often reprinted stories: "The Lair of the Star-Spawn," a Cthulhu Mythos tale, "The House in the Magnolias." a zombie tale, "Colonel Markesan" (chosen by Derleth to be the headliner for their collaboration collection, Colonel Markesan and Less Pleasant People, published by Arkham House in 1966), and "The Woman at Loon Point," a werewolf story, I can not detect much of a difference from the prose in Derleth's solo stuff, though many of their stories are written as letters or journal entries, a device widely used in Derleth's Mythos stories.

The August Derleth-Mark R. Schorer stories include:

"The Elixir of Life" (Weird Tales, July 1926) with Mark R. Schorer
"The Marmoset" (Weird Tales, September 1926) with Mark R. Schorer

“The River” (Weird Tales, February 1927) with Mark R. Schorer
"The Black Castle" (Weird Tales, May 1927) with Mark R. Schorer
“The Turret Room” (Weird Tales, September 1927) with Mark R. Schorer

"Riders in the Sky" (Weird Tales, May 1928) with Mark R. Schorer
"The Owl on the Moor" (Weird Tales, September 1928) with Mark R. Schorer

"The Pacer" (Weird Tales, March 1930) with Mark R. Schorer

"Laughter in the Night" (Weird Tales, March 1932) with Mark R. Schorer
"In the Left Wing" (Weird Tales, June 1932) with Mark R. Schorer
"The House in the Magnolias" (Strange Tales, June 1932)
"The Lair of the Star-Spawn" (Weird Tales, August 1932) with Mark R. Schorer
"Red Hands" (Weird Tales, October 1932) with Mark R. Schorer

"The Woman at Loon Point"

"The Carven Image" (Weird Tales, May 1933) with Mark R. Schorer
"The Return of Andrew Bentley" (Weird Tales, September 1933) with Mark R. Schorer

"Colonel Markesan" (Weird Tales, June 1934) with Mark R. Schorer
"A Matter of Faith" (Weird Tales, December 1934) with Mark R. Schorer

"They Shall Rise" (Weird Tales, April 1936) with Mark R. Schorer
"Death Holds the Post" (Weird Tales, August-September 1936) with Mark R. Schorer
"The Woman at Loon Point" (Weird Tales, December 1936) with Mark R. Schorer

"Eyes of the Serpent" (Strange Stories, February 1939) with Mark R. Schorer
"The Vengeance of Ai" (Strange Stories, April 1939) with Mark R. Schorer
"Spawn of the Maelstrom" (Weird Tales, September 1939) with Mark R. Schorer

"The Evil Ones" (Strange Tales, October 1940)
"The Horror From the Depths" (1940, published in Colonel Markesan and Less Pleasant People, 1966).
"The Occupant of the Crypt" (Weird Tales, September1947)

Four unsold collaborations appeared after Derleth's death in 1971. These were "The Figure with the Scythe" (Weird Tales, Winter 1973), "The Countries in the Seas" (1999), "A Visitor from Outside" (2000),  and "A Bottle For Corezzi" (That Is Not Dead, 2009).

Derleth and Schorer certainly weren't unusual in appearing in a pulp magazine. Such literary giants as F Scott Fitzgerald, O Henry, Upton Sinclair, Tennessee Williams, Conrad Richter, and CS Forester all started with popular fiction. The difference is they all moved from the poorer paying pulps to the higher paying slicks, then onto the vaunted glory of hard cover book sales. These two friends allow us to see each path taken; Derleth perhaps on the "the road less traveled." From my perch here in the fan-boy bubble, August Derleth is a name charged with history and excitement (read: fame!), while the author of such scholarly works as Sinclair Lewis: An American Life interests me very little. Granted this is a matter of taste (or lack thereof), but it is a sobering reality from the world of science fiction and fantasy that our heroes were often penny-poor, paying a high price to write what they wanted. Fan-boy fame versus academic laurels. Had Derleth ever thought, "I made the wrong choice!"?

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Wait Here While I Describe the Eldritch Horror: Weird Tales Radio? [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

You learn the strangest things when you read "The Eyrie," the old letter column in Weird Tales. Like that a boyish Julius Schwartz was a big Robert E Howard fan back in 1933. Or that the readership was split 50-50 over the interplanetary fiction of Otis Adelbert Kline. Or that Weird Tales tried to spawn its own radio show. "A radio show?" you ask.

This should be no surprise as many of the pulps either had radio counterparts or even started as radio shows. The classic example of this is The Shadow, which began with Orson Welles as the mysterious voice and narrator. This, in turn, spawned the pulp adventures of Lamont Cranston that went on to become Street & Smith's best selling magazine. Usually, it worked the other way around. Pulp characters such as Tarzan, the Saint, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and Zorro began as magazine characters, then got radio and eventually film counterparts.

One of the popular formats was the anthology show, with programs such as Suspense, Escape, Lights Out! and X-Minus One. Whether mysteries, horror or science fiction, the audience expected a new tale each week in a manner we have come to think of as The Twilight Zone format. Though Rod Serling certainly borrowed the idea from radio. The anthology shows often took their material from magazines, allowing the publications to plug their content. X-Minus One partnered with Galaxy and Astounding. Suspense tried it the other way, spawning a short-lived magazine edited by Leslie Charteris in 1946. Why should Weird Tales be any different?

The recordings are very rare and there isn't much solid information. Was it a show or just a proposed show that never caught on? The promotional flyer says that the producers planned to do 52 episodes. The company that did the recordings was Hollywood Radio Attractions (4376 Sunset Drive, Hollywood, CA.) Actors included William Farnum, Jason Robards Sr, Richard Carle, Viola Dana, Richard Tucker, and Priscilla Dean. All the episodes were adapted by Oliver Drake and produced by Irving Fogel .

There were three initial episodes done on a demo record. These were recorded in two lengths, as half-hour programs or they could be played in two 15-minute shows. Some radio stations were not part of the larger networks and could determine their own content. Shows like the Weird Tales programs or the earliest adventures of Tarzan could be played as station managers saw fit. There is some evidence that the Weird Tales shows played at midnight on certain local stations.

The three episodes that were recorded for sure were:

1. "The Living Dead" by Kirk Mashburn (based on "De Brignac's Lady," February 1933). I haven't been able to locate this piece, but in The Monster With a Thousand Faces: Guises of the Vampire in Myth and Literature (1989), author Brian J Frost writes of this story: "Of the latter was captained: 'A story of baby vampires: infant marauders belonging to the Undead!' It's just as ludicrous as it sounds..." Weird Tales featured many vampire and werewolf stories, so this is a natural subject matter. Why they picked Mashburn when they could have gone with Greye LaSpina, H Warner Munn, or Seabury Quinn, I have no idea? I do know that Carl Jacobi's much better vampire tale, "Revelations in Black" was one of the proposed 52 stories.

2. "The Curse of Nagana" by Hugh B Cave (original title "The Ghoul Gallery." June 1932) is the story of Doctor Briggs who goes to the haunted mansion of Lord Ramsey, along with his beautiful fiancée, Lady Ravenal. In the best gothic tradition, the lords of Ramsey have been killed in the upper galleries of the house by a strangling phantom. The villain proves to be a vengeful ghost in the form of a painting. Cave's style is typical of his Shudder Pulp stories with the setting and psychic doctor character harkening back to the English ghost writers. (Not everyone agrees with me on that. In "The Eyrie," reader Harold Dunbar of Chatham, Massachusetts wrote: "...This author has a fine rolling style and a depth which few writers of weird fiction can rival...")

Fortunately, thanks to Rand's Esoteric OTR, we can listen to a portion of this show and see how the original material was treated. The story's original cast of four is expanded to include a maid (cannon fodder), but more importantly the character of Nagana, a stranger from the Orient who turns out to be the villain of the piece instead of a real ghost. The final scene in the gallery is the same but instead of finding the coffin of Sir Ravenel, the doorway behind the painting leads to the roof where Nagana plans to sacrifice Sir Guy, having hypnotized him. All this is narrated by Parker, the butler who acts as the doctor's side-kick. What Hugh B Cave thought of this I'm not sure, replacing his admittedly well-worn ideas for different well-worn ideas.

3. "Three From the Tomb" by Edmond Hamilton (February 1932) is a typical what-if story from that author. Hamilton wrote many interesting SF tales by asking that question. What if humans all reverted to cavemen ("World Atavism" in Amazing Stories, August 1930)? What if a man evolved centuries into the future ("The Man Who Evolved" in Wonder Stories, April 1931)? What if everyone fell asleep at the same time ("When the World Slept" in Weird Tales, July 1936)? And on and on...

I suppose the company presenting the first shows would not want to confuse potential consumers with too wide a genre selection, so they selected one of Hamilton's stories with a more morbid angle. In the original story, we follow reporter Jerry Farley and county detective Peter Todd as they unravel the mystery of how Dr. Charles Curtlin resurrects three rich men who had been dead for six months. Todd interviews each man, asking him if he remembers being threatened by unknown parties before their deaths. Each answered that he did. The final solution to the mystery is presented at the moment Dr. Curtlin reveals his final specimen, before he will supposedly destroy the resurrection ray machine and his notes. Todd knows the whole thing is a con and proves it by admitting that none of the dead had ever been threatened at all. Curtlin is a famed plastic surgeon and created false millionaires so he could control their money. This kind of fake science fiction tale would prove more popular in magazines like The Saint with stories by Cleve Cartmill, or in the tales of Ed Hoch in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, though the tradition runs back to Ann Radcliffe and her explained away horrors.

A business letter dated February 14, 1933 - included in Lost in the Rentharpian Hills: Spanning the Decades with Carl Jacobi (1985) - written by Farnsworth Wright to Carl Jacobi states that any money the radio broadcasts might make would be given to the authors as Weird Tales was not using the show to make money, but to increase sales of the magazine. The fact that the personal correspondence between WT authors don't include lengthy discussions of radio income suggests that the radio show never took off. This is too bad for several reasons. First off, writers like HP Lovecraft could have used that dough. But more for us today, I would love to have heard a radio dramatization of Jules de Grandin, filled with exclamations of “Sacré nom d’un fromage vert!” Now there's an acting job only an old-time radio star could pull off.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

The Fangs of Tsan-Lo: Man's Best Monster [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Jim Kjelgaard always had one theme that was closest to his heart: training dogs. It should be no surprise then that he made the big time with a book about that very theme: Big Red (1945). In the book, Danny Pickett is a poor country boy who gets the job of training Big Red for a wealthy neighbor, Mr. Haggin. The plot follows Danny's struggles with teaching Red to be a bird dog as well as a show winner. Red and Danny face off against a rogue grizzly, mean employees, and even the big city. The story is a tribute to simple living and an affection for animals. The novel did so well that it became part of the Library of Childhood, alongside Black Beauty, Beautiful Joe, and Bambi. Again, no surprise, when the Disney Company made the book into a film in 1962.

Kjelgaard did so well with Big Red that he made a regular business of writing dog books with two sequels, Irish Red (1951) and Outlaw Red (1953), as well as Snow Dog (1948), Kalak of the Ice (1949), Lion Hound (1955), Desert Dog (1956), Trading Jeff and His Dog (1956), Rescue Dog of the High Pass (1958), The Duck-Footed Hound (1960), and Dave and His Dog, Mulligan (1966), all of which look at that special relationship between a dog and his master.

But Kjelgaard didn't start there. Like most writers of the 1940s, he began in the pulps. Writing frontier stories for Argosy, Adventure, and even the occasional comic book story such as "Outpost Peril" in Calling All Boys #s 3 and 4 (April-May 1945), Kjelgaard learned how to write an exciting tale before launching his career as a dog book writer. It should be no surprise that this writer who sold to Western Story and Black Mask, also sold to Weird Tales. And it should be no shock either that he sold WT at least one dog story.

Kjelgaard appeared in 'the Unique Magazine' four times between September 1945 and July 1946. His second appearance was with a tale called "The Fangs of Tsan-Lo" (November 1945) and it begins with a familiar ring. Clint Roberts, a dog trainer, is about to meet his newest charge, the Chesapeake terrier, Tsan-Lo. Clint has a shine for the wealthy Sally Evers, introducing Kjelgaard's second familiar theme: poor versus rich. Tsan-Lo, who has been sent by a strange and mysterious customer, Dr. Ibellius Grut, turns out to be something different. The small dog radiates a feeling of hatred and repulsion. Clint, being a rational person, ignores these sensations. When the beast attacks him, going for his throat, Clint is forced to tame it with a baseball bat.

Sally finds a book by Dr. Grut and Clint learns of the crazy experiments the mad scientist may have performed on the small dog. He knows that dogs were once larger, more ferocious creatures before humans bred them for their own purposes. This becomes directly apparent when Tsan-Lo grows to the size of a Shetland pony and pulls Clint right out of his bed, stripping him of his pajamas. (This is the scene the Canadian artist chose to illustrate in the Toronto based version of the story seen here. I would love to know what Lee Brown Coye did with it for the American edition.)

Tsan-Lo with his meal in tow heads for the woods and then the lake. He only drops Clint when the monster spies Sally, whom he has had an instinctive hatred for. The dog heads for shore. Clint wants to save his love, but he is too beaten up. He only survives drowning because his faithful dog, Buck, pulls him from the lake. When he wakes, he finds Sally nursing him and declaring her love for him. She survived the monster's attack when the gigantic dog tried to cross a dugout filled with quicksand (Kjelgaard mentioned this earlier, a rather clumsy device and you know it will come into the story at some point.) Even the monstrous Tsan-Lo can't escape the sucking mud and its three thousand pound skeleton is dredged up later, fascinating scientists. Clint doesn't care. He has what he wants: dogs to train and the love of Sally Evers, and later a little Sally too.

"The Fangs of Tsan-Lo" is not a high water mark for Kjelgaard. In November 1945, he would have published Big Red already, so he may have seen this story as a way to promote the book. He may have simply written it with money in mind. Or, I like to think, he used it as a way of writing Big Red out of his system. It's classic Kjelgaard with the dog training, the rich-poor conflict, and the happy ending with a positive family in the making. What it is not is great horror fiction. The images are not convincing and the ideas too pulpy. Kjelgaard would write two more stories for Weird Tales, but it was a limited market for him. He was more comfortable with the American frontier or dog kennels and birch forests.

Kjelgaard wasn't quite done with prehistoric dogs though. One of my favorite books of his is called Fire-Hunter (1960). In it, he follows the innovations of a group of cavemen. One of those adaptations is the first raising of wolf pups that would lead to the future breeds we know so well. Kjelgaard really had a love for dogs and their breeding that filtered into most everything he wrote, even the goofy little horror tale that is "The Fangs of Tsan-Lo". It makes for an odd little footnote in a much better saga, the Big Red trilogy.

You can enjoy this story at Wikisource.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

"The Eyes of the Panther": A Weird Tales Mystery [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Weird Tales, September 1942

The Jules de Grandins, the Conans, the Edmond Hamilton blockbusters were always prominently placed at the beginning of any issue of Weird Tales. Lurking in the last pages are the filler; stuff by also-rans who supplied regular, if not spectacular stories. It is interesting what you will find buried in these forgotten pages. Amongst them are to be found the first stories. Sometimes these initial sales prove to be a wonderful find like Tennessee Williams' "The Vengeance of Nitocris" (August 1928) under his real name of Thomas Lanier Williams. More often, they are obscure stories by authors nobody remembers. The one-offs. Writers who penned a single outing, were able to sell it to Farnsworth Wright or Dorothy McWraith, then disappeared into the dust of the past. "Off the Map" by Rex Dolphin in the final issue (July 1954) is one such tale that has been reprinted several times. But most never see the light of day again.

An example of such a forgotten tale is "The Eyes of the Panther" by Kuke Nichols (September 1942). Nichols is a complete mystery. Is this person a man or woman? Was the name a pseudonym, meant to sound like "kooky"? A little joke like Edgar Rice Burroughs' Normal Bean? Nobody knows. Kuke wrote this one story and it is all we have to go by. Let the detective work begin...

The title "Eyes of the Panther" is shared with a famous horror tale by Ambrose Bierce (October 17, 1897, The Examiner). Bierce's story within a story follows a family who suffered tragedy because of a panther that comes into the house by an open window. Bierce suggests that this incident causes the offspring of the victim to become a were-panther that is shot by her lover in the end. This story was filmed in 1989 with C Thomas Howell as the young man. He got to flip roles on Grimm, where he played a shapeshifting FBI agent named Weston Stewart.

C Thomas Howell in "The Eyes of the Panther"

Kuke Nichols' story has no real bearing on Bierce. It begins with an obscure quote from James Branch Cabell. The plot concerns a man who is tired of the city and returns to his ancestral home to live a quiet life. Becoming bored, he goes to the attic and discovers a trunk that was said to be cursed by his grandfather to keep anyone from opening it. Inside the rotting box is an ancient book, also falling to pieces. From this book, the narrator performs an old rite involving wooden poles that opens the gates to Hell. The familiar that lures him on is a panther with golden eyes, the source of our title.

But once the man has begun to open the door he sees what terrors he will unleash on the Earth and recants. He destroys the spell then flees for his house as trees all around him try to claw him and pull him down. Once inside he burns the book. The panther stares evilly at him before it disappears in the burning house. The narrator survives the fire and ends up in an asylum for a while. After that he chooses to set sail for the South Seas, though he knows he can't escape his fate, for at night, sea creatures stare up at him with the same eyes as the panther. He feels he is doomed, but holds a small hope that God will forgive him in the end.

The end result is that "The Eyes of the Panther" is not a terrible tale. It certainly is better than the many Cthulhu Mythos pastiches by August Derleth that follow a similar plot arc. The first person narrative is quick-paced and free of obvious defect. That being said, it never really rises above any of this either. There are a few interesting bits, like how their version of the Necronomicon "was wrapped three times each way by a tarnished silver chain, and that the chain was made of tiny crucifixes, linked end to end." Still, Nichols has all the denizens of Hell, but describes none besides the panther, first seen on the cover of the book: "Above the circle was stretched a great cat, a panther, perhaps; stained black in contrast with the rest of the carving, which was pale brown. The cat's face was turned outward from the book, and in its eyes were set tiny specks of gold."

Illustration by Boris Dolgov

Another odd fact about this story is the illustration by Boris Dolgov. Dolgov was responsible for some of the very best artwork in Weird Tales, a master alongside Virgil Finlay, Hannes Bok, and Lee Brown Coye. His soft, fantastic figures are elegant at the same time they are haunting. The illustration for "The Eyes of the Panther" is crude, asymmetrical, and extremely disappointing. I would not have known it was a Dolgov except it is signed at the bottom. In a tale with all the denizens of Hell to choose from - or the panther with the shining eyes - Dolgov draws a tree. And not even an interesting one. I have to assume he got the assignment very late or possibly even without a copy of the story. Even though there are trees that attack the narrator, this illo deserves to be buried at the back of the issue.

In the end, "The Eyes of the Panther" provides no real answers, only more questions. Was Kuke Nichols a pseudonym? If so it would mostly likely be for an author already in the issue, as avoiding duplicate bylines was the most common reason for using them. If so, the tale had to be penned by Manly Banister, Seabury Quinn, Greye la Spina, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, David H Keller, Clark Ashton Smith, HP Lovecraft, or Nelson S Bond. Most of these are immediately dismissed: (stylistically) Lovecraft and Smith; (too big a name to waste) Quinn, La Spina, Keller; (never used pseudonyms) Leiber and Banister. Of those who did use pseudonyms, Robert Bloch used Tarleton Fiske and Nathan Hindin in Weird Tales. Nelson S Bond also used them in other magazines, but there is no record of his using Kuke Nichols. Most likely, Kuke was a fan of the magazine and wrote the one story, basing it on familiar themes and authors.

Could it have originally been a Cthulhu Mythos tale? August Derleth would clamp down on the Mythos properties as he was building Arkham House. (Shutting down authors like C Hall Thompson who wrote "The Spawn of the Green Abyss" and "The Will of Claude Ashur" four year later.) This story appears a little too early for that to be likely. The quote by James Branch Cabell suggests another inspiration than Lovecraft. Kuke Nichols was a fantasy fan more than a Mythos one, I suspect. The story feels almost more like an A Merritt story with its panther and gateway than something Poesque or Lovecraftian. Ultimately, we'll never know. Could Kuke have gone on and written even better stories? It never happened. The mystery remains, as does this minor tale for those who want to dig it up for some autumnal reading. Enjoy.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Fritz Leiber's "Spider Mansion" and the Old Hand [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Fritz Leiber was an innovator. If he wrote in a genre, he always tried to do something to improve that type of storytelling. This desire to do more than the same old thing won him many awards (five Hugos, a Nebula, and a World Fantasy Award, as well as the Gandalf for Lifetime Achievement) and accolades in the decades after the old pulps had crumbled to dust. But during the 1940s and '50s, originality had a price.

Take Weird Tales for example. Leiber's most famous early horror story did not appear in "The Unique Magazine." "Smoke Ghost," which featured a spirit of evil created by a modern city, appeared in Unknown Worlds (October 1941) where John W Campbell pushed the definition of modern fantasy. Leiber wanted to write horror fiction using some of the same ideas as HP Lovecraft (though never in a slavish pastiche kind of way), taking the boogie men out of the haunted castles and European forests and bringing them to the streets of America. There was only one problem. Innovation courts rejection.

This was the simple economic truth of the pulp era. Fritz Leiber was not some wealthy heir, despite his father being the famous actor Fritz Leiber Sr. He needed the money the pulps provided. So do you innovate or imitate? This question drove Fritz to talk to other pulpsters. In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, Michael E Stamm explains:

"...At the time Leiber was having trouble finding a metier that would guarantee consistent sales to Weird Tales, then the best and certainly most famous market for horror fiction. In talking to an Old Hand who'd been selling to WT for years, Leiber got a list of the sort of things the magazine could be expected to like in weird fiction: giant spiders, mad scientists, lonely haunted houses, giant dwarfs, innocent bystanders, etc. As an experiment - with definite humorous overtones - Fritz Leiber put all of these disparate elements into one story - "Spider Mansion" - and submitted it to Weird Tales - which bought it immediately."

The plot of "Spider Mansion" (Weird Tales, September 1942) is familiar to anyone who has seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A man and his mate end up in a creepy mansion, wanting to do nothing more than leave. The inhabitants of the house are weird and creepy. Secrets eventually unveil a terrible truth that the couple discover, then flee. The owner of the house is not Frankenfurter but Malcolm Orne, a famed midget who has mysteriously grown into a giant. With Orne is his beautiful wife, Cynthia, a figure right out of an Ann Radcliffe gothic novel.

The narrator and his wife Helen come to the house during a storm, eat a mysterious dinner during which Orne explains how his dead brother Martin had created a formula that controls size. Their host leaves the table to deal with his mastiff, though the sounds the listeners hear are those of shuffling and skittering. During the absence Cynthia gives the couple a secret message written on her hankie in lipstick. It says "Get out. For your lives."

Intending to rescue Cynthia, the narrator discovers the secret of Orne House. The woman has been placed in a giant spider's web, which also contains Martin Orne, not dead but twisted by his ordeal in the web. Using grease and a sword from the mansion's hallway, the narrator frees the captives but Malcolm Orne appears. He has the unconscious Helen. The narrator engages Orne's pet giant spider while the two brothers fight. Malcolm crushes his brother's skull with his giant strength but dies when the wounded spider attacks him. The room catches on fire and the visitors and Cynthia Orne flee.

This scenario contains so many gothic props that the reader suspects the author of a touch of parody. As Stamm puts it, it has "definite humorous overtones." Stamm also points out the story doesn't read like Leiber at all. John Pelan counters this in the introduction to The Black Gondolier and Other Stories (2001). "Spider Mansion" despite its gothic trappings is still a story of science gone wrong, a theme Leiber would use again.

I've tried to discover who the Old Hand is but haven't found any thing definite. Looking at the excellent stats in "Who Wrote the Most?" by Terence E. Hanley at Tellers of Weird Tales and thinking about the publication date, September 1942, this eliminates HP Lovecraft, Robert E Howard (who had died), and Clark Ashton Smith (who had retired and certainly wouldn't have made those suggestions anyway. He too struggled with innovation vs imitation.) In 1942, Henry Kuttner, Paul Ernst and Manly Wade Wellman had sold to WT but wouldn't be considered "old hands." Ray Bradbury, Allison V Harding, and Frank Owen all came after or started about the same time as Leiber.

This leaves some likelier suspects, starting with Seabury Quinn. He wrote the most stories for WT, at 145. The author of the most popular series, the Jules de Grandin occult detective stories, there is a good chance that he was the old hand. De Grandin and Dr. Trowbridge meet many mad scientists and misshapen freaks in Harrisonville, New Jersey. But would Quinn have been so kind to his competition? Unlike many of the "Lovecraft Circle" he wasn't involved in literary games of Cthulhu Mythos, sharing and swapping ideas, but was a hard working editor for the funeral industry.

The second most prolific writer was August Derleth (101 stories). He would have been more likely, also being a correspondent of HP Lovecraft. Derleth would publish Leiber's first book, Night's Black Agents in 1947. But Auggie wrote ghost stories like the classic "Mr. George" under his pseudonym, Stephen Grendon. The list of weird topics doesn't sound like his work. I think Derleth would have been more likely to direct Leiber towards Lovecraftian pastiche or English ghost stories in the MR James mode.

Edmond Hamilton, at number three, with 76 stories, is another good possibility. Hamilton's very first story at WT featured a giant invisible spider in "The Monster-God of Mamurth." Ed also wrote the most and best science fiction in the magazine, which would have appealed to Leiber. The advice doesn't sound like the ideas Hamilton would have promoted though. He didn't write gothic retread, but liked to explore sf and fantasy ideas. His "The Metal Giants" (December 1926) was one of the first killer robot stories. "He That Hath Wings" (July 1938) invented the idea of a mutant with wings (not Stan Lee). Hamilton was an innovator who found a home at Weird Tales, but even he would leave the pulps four years later to write Superman comics.

Robert Bloch, HP Lovecraft's protege, wrote 66 stories for Weird Tales. He started out doing Lovecraft pastiche, but slowly found his own thing. By 1942, Bloch was writing in his famous style of black humor with "A Sorcerer Runs For Sheriff" and "The Eager Dragon." He was also writing longer, more advanced pieces like "Hell on Earth." Again, I doubt he would have handed Fritz such antiquated advice as mad scientists and giant dwarfs. He was moving away from this type of tale and could only have applauded stories like "Smoke Ghost."

After Seabury Quinn, the most likely candidate for the Old Hand is Arthur J Burks at 29 stories. His score isn't that high, but Burks was one of the million-words-a-year men, writing for many different pulps. He bragged that he could generate a new plot from any ordinary household object. ("Oh no, the Egg Whisk of Doom!") The advice given Fritz sounds more like a recipe for the shudder pulps and Burks knew them well, having written a couple dozens tales for magazines like Horror Stories and Thrilling Mystery. The plot of an average shudder pulp story involved a supernatural-appearing situation that would be revealed at the end to be the work of a crazed dwarf.

No matter who the Old Hand was, Fritz Leiber only published eight stories with Weird Tales. After "Spider Mansion," Leiber wrote a few gems like "The Hound" (November 1942) in which he used Lovecraftian themes (along with the same title as a Lovecraft story), but in an urban setting. "The Dead Man" (November 1950) was the last of his WT stories. Editorial inflexibility at WT lost them one Leiber classic written in these years, the novel Conjure Wife (1943), setting the standard for modern urban horror. It appeared in John W Campbell's Unknown Worlds. Like with the sword-and-sorcery team of Fafhrd and Grey Mouser, Weird Tales had their chance, but passed on what would in retrospect be some of Leiber's best early work.

[UPDATE: GW Thomas solves the mystery of the Old Hand in the comments below.]

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

The Adventures of Santa Claus [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Kris Kringle, Pere Noel. Whatever you call him, he is a busy guy. Every year he has to make billions of toys and deliver them all in one night. When would Santa have time to have any adventures? Well, he gets around more than you'd think.

In 1901, L Frank Baum who had recently seen his book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz sell well was looking around for another idea. Why not the story of Santa Claus? What child could resist a tale of Old St. Nick? What Baum produced was The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1902), a minor Fantasy classic in its own right, though it wasn't followed by multiple sequels like Dorothy's adventures in Oz.

Santa begins life as a foundling in the mythical forest of Burzee, home to Fairies, Knooks, Ryls and Nymphs. There, Ak the Master Woodsman rules and he allows the baby to be raised by the nymph Necile. He is given the name Claus, which means "little one", and "Ne" is added when he is adopted, "Ne-Claus" or Nicholas. In this way, Baum explains Christmas tradition after tradition, making up new and intriguing ways to explain everything from toys to mistletoe.

Now the plot could be pretty dull if Claus didn't have enemies to face. These are the Awgwas, creatures halfway between the fairy immortals and humans. They are giant in size and able to go from one place to another with magical speed. Their only agenda is to cause pain and suffering wherever they can. So, of course, they plan to steal Claus's toys that he makes to please the suffering masses of humanity.

This leads to a fantastic battle between Good and Evil (that Santa misses) with fire-breathing dragons, Goozle-Goblins, the Giants of Tartary, and many other fantastic monsters against Ak and his amazing ax. Baum doesn't give us Robert E Howard style blow-by-blow (the pity), but Good wins and Claus can go about his business of making toys.

The rest of the novel falls short of that great battle scene but Santa slowly figures out how to deliver the toys all in one night. When he reaches old age, Ak gives him immortality so he can go on lightening the hearts of humankind forever. The episodic tale does a good job of blending a new myth with an old holiday.

Baum had one last chance with Santa when the Jolly Old Elf made an appearance, accompanied by his friends, in The Road to Oz (1909). In this odd volume, Baum ties all of his series together in a multiverse worthy of Michael Moorcock. Children's books would now feature Santa on a more regular basis, since Baum had opened the door, but CS Lewis's The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1951) is probably the most memorable. His Father Christmas gives out swords and bows, not just tea cakes. Lewis's battle scene between Good and Evil is much more detailed, though St. Nick doesn't take part.

But the kids weren't having all the fun. In January 1938, Weird Tales' popular author who usually wrote of the occult detective Jules de Grandin, presented what many consider his masterpiece, "Roads." Seabury Quinn builds his story slowly, beginning at the birth of Christ and ends in the 16th century. The story was illustrated by Virgil Finlay, and these drawings were used in the 1948 Arkham House edition.

Quinn tells the story of Claus in three parts. In the first section, "The Road to Bethlehem," we meet Claudius, a gladiator in the time of King Herod, a blond giant of a warrior. He wins his freedom in the ring and then wishes to return home. Before he can do this, he saves a baby from the purge that Herod's men are making. This is the baby Jesus, who makes Klaus immortal and sets him on a road to a great destiny.

In the second section, "The Road to Calvary," Claus, now a Roman Centurian, witnesses the death of the baby, now grown to a man. At the passing of Christ there is an earthquake, and Claus rescues the love interest of the tale, a girl named Unna. Quinn's action sequences take a page from Robert E Howard's prose style and spirit. Howard had been dead just eighteen months when Quinn wrote "Roads" and his red-dipped pen was sorely missed.

In the last part of the tale, "The Long, Long Road," we follow Claus and Unna, both immortal, as they move through history. Fleeing humanity's ills, Claus finds the elves and begins the last transition to becoming Santa Claus. As the baby Jesus tells him, his fate is not to die in battle but to become a person whom all children love and adore. Like Baum before him, Quinn peppers his tale with explanations on how certain Christmas traditions came about. Sam Moskowitz said that "Roads" was  “the greatest adult Christmas story written by an American.” Quinn had achieved for adults what Baum had done for children.

The idea of an heroic Santa, sword-swinging and powerful, a Hyborian Claus if you will, appeals to me on so many levels. And I'm not alone. Sony Studios is producing a new version of Baum's novel (now in the public domain) called Winter's Knight, featuring an ax-wielding Santa like you've never seen. This isn't the quiet Rankin-Bass adaptation from 1985, nor the less interesting Robbie Benson cartoon of 2000. It's not even the boisterous Santa of William Joyces's Rise of the Guardians (which borrows the spirit of Baum). It's a Roadsian version, a Howardian version, filled with violence and magic and blood. I can't wait.

Viking Santa art above is by Caio Monteiro. Art below is by Jakob Eirich.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Manly Banister's Werewolves [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

At the age of 13, Manly Banister (March 9, 1914 - June 1986) like many Science Fiction writers began in the fanzines. In the 1950s he wrote for Science Fiction standards like Astounding and Thrilling Wonder, but a decade earlier his output was exclusively for Weird Tales. Manly wrote seven stories for WT from September 1942 to May 1954. Of these seven tales one theme dominates: werewolves.

Pulp werewolves are a strange lot. Unlike in earlier fiction, the werewolf was no longer bracketed with solid rules. Pulp writers wanted to explore their boundaries. So, a traditional lycanthrope might appear in Manly Wade Wellman's "The Werewolf Snarls," but the same rules might not apply in a Seabury Quinn story like "The Blood Flower." The movie The Wolf Man in 1941 might have curtailed this experimenting, but writers like Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, and GG Pendaves put the shape-changers to their own purposes.

"Satan's Bondage" (September 1942) is an unusual debut for Weird Tales. The story got the cover but instead of the title and author by-line it bore the words "New - Utterly Different - A Werewolf Western." This is a bit of a misnomer if you are expecting a High Noon-ish tale. The story is set in cattle country, but in the present. (Perhaps more surprising, Banister has a scene with a very naked werewolf girl, but she does not appear on the cover, though this was after Margaret Brundage's day.)

Kenneth Mulvaney comes to the town of Wereville because he finds his mother's diary. He discovers a community under siege, for the ranchers outside the valley war with the town. Mulvaney also meets Joan Jordan, attractive but possessing the same weird quality as the other inhabitants of Wereville: strangely flat colored eyes. Mulvaney goes to his family's old home and soon learns the secret. It is the full moon and Joan comes to him naked. Taking him to a pond close by she shows him how to transform himself into a wolf. In wolf form, Kenneth attempts to defeat Bock Martin, the black wolf who rules the valley. He learns that Martin is no man-become-a-wolf but a demon from Hell, who holds all the inhabitants in bondage because of an ancient deal between the demon and their witch ancestors. Martin has summoned Mulvaney back to Wereville to lead the wolf people to greater evil.

Mulvaney wishes to find some way to save the souls of his kin, but is powerless. He takes the werewolves out into the nearby cattle herds to feast. Unfortunately for the lycanthropes, Sam Carver and the other ranchers have taken up with a French Canadian priest who has armed them with holy water and silver bullets. The ranchers block the wolves from the creek where they must transform before daylight. Mulvaney sees his chance and leads the werewolves to their doom.

In his debut, Banister is offering up some pretty familiar werewolfery. The man who returns to the old homestead was a good, mysterious start but the name Wereville is much too obvious. A town full of lycanthropes is not new. Algernon Blackwood had a town full of were-cats in the John Silence tale, "Ancient Sorceries" (1908). H Warner Munn had written his tales of a clan of werewolves lead by a dark demoniac figure in "The Werewolf of Ponkert" (Weird Tales, July 1925) and this must have been familiar to long-time readers of WT. But Banister's biggest problem is that the story is structurally weak. He brings Mulvaney to Wereville, sets him up as leader quickly, has him go on his first adventure, then kills him off almost as the story feels like it is beginning.

On the plus side, Banister combines much of the folklore of vampires with the werewolves. They cast no shadows in the light of the full moon; in a silver mirror, the wolves appear as their human selves; and last, they can not endure sunlight in their enchanted forms. To a stickler on previous werewolf lore these might seem like transgressions, but they actually make the story more interesting because they are novel and less predictable. Banister also has the werewolves transform using water which is different and a key element of the story.

"Devil Dog" (July 1945) is very much a tale of its time, which was the end of WWII. Set in the Pacific theater, it follows soldiers who use dogs to sniff out Japanese traps and machine gun nests. But something is killing the dogs, ripping their throats out. Lieutenant Barkis is in charge of the dog squad and goes to investigate one of the dead animals. He is attacked by a large, black, wolf-like beast and receives a bite in the arm. He knows he shot the creature point-blank four or five times but there is no blood at the scene. Later, while recuperating from his wound he finds that the dogs whimper and cringe in his presence. He receives the army chaplain, Father Murphy, with a sudden, new hatred.

Meanwhile Sargent Stranger approaches the priest and they make preparations to deal with the werewolves. Barkis goes to a pool at night and transforms. The original werewolf, probably a shipwrecked sailor long ago, comes and Barkis and he have a duel to the death, with Barkis winning. The Sargent and the priest lie in wait and put holy water in the pool. This traps Barkis in wolf form as the sun rises. Stranger kills his officer with a silver bullet and the two men cook up a tale of a Japanese patrol to explain the two corpses.

Like "Satan's Bondage," Banister has his werewolf requiring a pool of water to transform and again the light of morning is lethal to the creature. Better written that the previous story, "Devil Dog" has as its central conflict the same idea, that of werewolves being trapped away from water. This time Banister sets it up better and plays it for all the emotional value it deserves. As with "Wereville," calling his main character "Barkis" is an unfortunate giveaway. Banister's tale may have influenced later war-werewolf tales such as "Best of Luck" (1978) by David Drake or The Wolf's Hour (1989) by Robert R McCammon. Like Drake (who served in Vietnam), Banister saw real warfare in Guam during WWII. He wrote this story shortly after his return. I had hoped that Barkis would become a good werewolf (as Michael Gallatin does in McCammon's novel) and use his powers to fight the Japanese, but in Banister's world lycanthropes are always intensely evil.

"Loup-Garou" (May 1947) changes tone entirely. A men's club has a visitor who regales them with an ancient tale of a French governor who is faced with the problem of the loup-garou. Hubert du Montreuill is a man of power and his passion turns to a beautiful woman named Clarisse, whom he finds naked in the road. She spurns his advances until Hubert discovers her secret. She is the lycanthrope that is savaging the countryside. He arranges with the commissioner of police to ambush her then falters and tells her that he saw her change form in the fountain. She bites his lip when they kiss, infecting him with lycanthropy. Now they can be lovers for all eternity. They transform then set off into the night. Hubert has forgotten his ambush and Clarisse is shot with silver bullets. He will have to endure eternal life alone. The stranger leaves and the club members think his tale is a fiction, but the narrator sees a wolf leave the building.

This tale is perhaps Banister's least interesting and is certainly his most predictable. The club frame is traditional and the tale of old France is pretty standard stuff. Unlike the jungle, which he knew from his service in the Pacific, there is nothing about this setting that makes it special. Hubert is unlikeable and Clarisse only become fascinating moments before her death, as we see her loneliness within her curse. Like the previous two stories, Clarisse has to use the water to transform, but no one traps her away from it this time.

"Eena" (September 1947, only five years after "Satan's Bondage") is without doubt Banister's most famous tale, often anthologized. The story portrays a werewolf sympathetically which was not usual in the Pulps. It is also filled with other unconventional ideas. Eena begins life as white wolf (Banister's female werewolves are always white). She is a foundling pup raised by Joel Cameron, who comes to the woods in the summer to write and hunt for bounty money. Eena escapes into the woods when he leaves to go back to the city. She becomes the scourge of the area, leading the wolf pack with an almost human cunning. Cameron is cursed out for allowing her to live.

When he returns the next summer, he feels obliged to spend his time trying to hunt down the she-wolf, which he fails to do. But Eena returns to him, for she remembers him kindly, coming back in the form of a beautiful, naked woman (like Joan and Clarissa before her), and becomes a woman by the power of desire and moonlight. While Cameron hunts the she-wolf, he is also falling in love with the wild woman of the woods. The tale ends when a thousand dollar bounty brings hunters to the area. Hunters dog her every step and she only wants the man who has finally taken her in. Wounded, she flees across Wolf Lake back to Cameron's cabin. Joel, not quite understanding, takes up his gun and kills the white wolf. She transforms into her human self just as night falls and Joel is devastated to see the truth.

"Eena" does several things the three earlier tales did not. Banister reverses the wolf-human relationship, making it a tale of a wolf that becomes a woman. Bruce Elliott would use this idea seven years later in "Wolves Don't Cry" (Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1954). Banister also eschews the folklore of lycanthropy, the need for water to transform, the silver bullets, etc. Instead he focuses on the powerful emotions of the two lovers: Eena wanting the man she was raised by, and Cameron falling for the beauty from the woods. He makes Eena's transformation by moonlight into a woman feel orgasmic while her return to wolfishness is painful. Like Peter Beagle's "Lila the Werewolf" (New Worlds of Fantasy #3, July 1971) twenty-four years later, Banister shows the emotional power of the human-wolf conflict. It most likely took Banister's writing of "Loup-Garou" to show him the way to "Eena", for we have a small, tantalizing glimpse of the werewolf experience just before the death of Clarisse. The two stories were only three months apart and it is not hard to imagine Banister jumping from one tale to the other with a flash of inspiration.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

The Door to Infinity: Mythos without Lovecraft [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

I got my start in the Mythos business by playing Call of Cthulhu, a role-playing game in which private detectives, soldiers, dilettantes and hobos face off against cultists with one goal: to return the Great Old Ones to the earth. This fun blend of adventure and horror was created by Sandy Petersen and Gene Day and based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft.

The game led me to read virtually every story Lovecraft wrote. And what you don't find are adventures featuring private detectives, soldiers, dillentes and hobos facing off against cultists with one goal: to return the Great Old Ones to the earth. Lovecraft's protagonists are usually people much the same as Lovecraft himself: New England gentlemen, librarians and writers. A few stories - such as "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Dunwich Horror" - feature "cultists," but usually in the background.

So what gives? Some of this is the gamification of the Cthulhu Mythos by Petersen. To make the game fun to play, you have to DO something. He included the 1920s Private Eye and other historical professions such as the Hobo and former veterans of WWI. But this was all the way in 1982. Did anyone ever try the Mythos adventure back in the day? Plenty of people wrote pseudo-Lovecraft including August Derleth, Robert Bloch, C Hall Thompson, Henry Kuttner, and Frank Belknap Long. And these were just the ones in Weird Tales. But did anyone ever write a Call of Cthulhu (referred to as CoC from now on) style story to inspire Petersen fifty years later?

Just one writer, a contemporary of HPL with a long list of credits all his own, Edmond Hamilton. The story was "The Door to Infinity" and of course it appeared in Weird Tales (August-September 1936), six months before HPL's death. Hamilton got his start in WT in August 1926 with "The Monster-God of Mamurth", a tale of an invisible temple and its giant spider god. Most of Hamilton's reputation in 1936 rested on his Science Fiction which included gigantic space battles, giving him the sobriquet of "World Wrecker Hamilton". So why would he write a CoC style tale?

The reason is simple. Hamilton was versatile. He wrote all kinds of Science Fiction and Fantasy for WT. He wrote Heroic Fantasy in "Lost Elysium" and "Twilight of the Gods", monster SF in "The Metal Giants" and "The Star-Stealers", lyrical Fantasy like "He That Hath Wings" (inspiring Angel of the X-Men), Animal SF in "Day of Judgment" (Kamandi before Jack Kirby), horror tales like "The Vampire Master" as Hugh Davidson, space opera in "Corsairs of the Cosmos", and every kind of fantastic story you can think of. Hamilton was a writer up for anything, even a Mythos romp.

"Door to Infinity" has two heroes, Inspector Pierce Campbell of Scotland Yard and handsome, young American, Paul Innis. Campbell and Innis have to track down the dangerous Brotherhood of the Door when they steal Innis' wife, Ruth. The agent of the Brotherhood is Chandra Dass, an evil Malay with plenty of henchmen. The two heroes are captured and sent to their deaths down a trap door to the Thames. Only Campbell's resourcefulness saves them, allowing the duo to chase Dass along the river and discover the secret headquarters of the cult in a limestone cliff. Once inside, posing as cultists, the two men find that the Brotherhood has several sacrificial victims, including Ruth, who will supply the energy to open a dimensional door. Paul Innis sees:

The spherical web of wires pulsed up madly with shining force. And up at the center of the gleaming black oval facet on the wall, there appeared a spark of unearthly green light. It blossomed outward, expanded, an awful viridescent flower blooming quickly outward farther and farther. And as it expanded, Ennis saw that he could look through that green light! He looked through into another universe, a universe lying infinitely far across alien dimensions from our own, yet one that could be reached through this door between dimensions. It was a green universe, flooded with an awful green light that was somehow more akin to darkness than to light, a throbbing, baleful luminescence.

Ennis saw dimly through green-lit spaces a city in the near distance, an unholy city of emerald hue whose unsymmetrical, twisted towers and minarets aspired into heavens of hellish viridity. The towers of that city swayed to and fro and writhed in the air. And Ennis saw that here and there in the soft green substance of that restless city were circles of lurid light that were like yellow eyes.

In ghastly, soul-shaking apprehension of the utterly alien, Ennis knew that the yellow circles were eyes—that that hell-spawned city of another universe was living—that its unfamiliar life was single yet multiple, that its lurid eyes looked now through the Door! 

Sax Rohmer

Out from the insane living metropolis glided pseudopods of its green substance, glided toward the Door. Ennis saw that in the end of each pseudopod was one of the lurid eyes. He saw those eyed pseudopods come questing through the Door, onto the dais.

The yellow eyes of light seemed fixed on the row of stiff victims, and the pseudopods glided toward them. Through the open door was beating wave on wave of unfamiliar, tingling forces that Ennis felt even through the protective robe. 

Campbell's trusty revolver takes out the web-wires and the door closes. A big shoot out and a fiery escape and there you have it. One quality CoC adventure.

Was this Hamilton's best work? No, CoC aside, the whole set-up reeks of Sax Rohmer and Fu Manchu. Campbell is Weyland Smith-fantastic and Paul Innis is too handsome and too American. Weird Tales readers in 1936 would have been quite familiar with Fu Manchu, since Rohmer had resurrected his 1917 character and had been writing new Fu's all through the 1930s: Daughter of Fu Manchu (1931), The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), The Bride of Fu Manchu (1933), The Trail of Fu Manhcu (1934), and President Fu Manchu (1936). Rohmer's racism is also evidenced by the dastardly Chandra Dass.

What I find so interesting about this story is how close Hamilton comes to Lovecraft but does not cross over into the Mythos. Was this because Lovecraft hadn't invited him to join his circle? (I wonder what HPL's reaction to the tale was?) Was it because Hamilton had had no real interest in the Cthulhu Mythos? Did Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales request this tale? Perhaps Hamilton just got there on his own, for Wright never rejected any story by Hamilton in their twenty-four years of working together. Wright allowed Hamilton great freedom and the rewards were many. The tentactular beasties are squamous and eldritch enough for Lovecraft but in the end they are aliens coming from another dimension. The Mythos magic just isn't there. For us time-traveling back to the days of the Pulps, "The Door to Eternity" makes a great "what could have been". Who knows, I just might get that old box set out and chase some cultists around London or Arkham or even Hamilton's own Ohio.

Read "The Door to Infinity" at Project Gutenberg.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

The Cranmers hate cephalopods

I think it was actually a giant amoeba in the story, but that's not how R.R. Epperly painted it. [Pulp Covers]