Introduction by Melanie R. Anderson
278 pages
Published 2020
Read from October 2 to October 5
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
I picked this one up from the same specialty bookshop where I got the Weird Woods anthology. This volume collects stories from four women who contributed to Weird Tales magazine. I’ve long been drawn to this 1920s through 1940s era of fantasy — it’s a fascinating, sometimes awkward time of growth and evolution in the genre, one often overlooked or at best summed up with a reprint or two from Unknown. I’m always hoping to read more, fully expecting that it won’t be very good, just interesting. Plus, the selections in this volume (so the introduction says) seem to trend toward weird pulpy horror, which fits the October vibe I want to cultivate.
“The Remorse of Professor Panebianco” by Greye La Spina (1925). Lurid stuff straight out of an early talkie mad-science thriller. Passionately Italian Professor Filippo Panebianco plots to trap a dying human’s soul in a crystal bell — for science! — while his passionately Italian bride Elena yearns for his approval (and his kisses). Elena harbors jealousy at the thought that anyone else’s soul could get trapped in Filippo’s precious crystal bell. You’ll never guess what happens next! Unintentionally amusing, in an MST3K sort of way, but otherwise meh.
“Leonora” by Everil Worrell (1927). I love when early automobiles are featured in genre pieces. (I know dieselpunk is already a thing, but I want to figure out how to make flivverpunk into its own thing.) This is a nicely atmospheric study in which teen girl Leonora meets a mysterious man in his beautiful silent car at the moonlit crossroads. The spell was broken for me when it was revealed what the stranger’s car looked like, but otherwise — for its time — this worked well enough.
“The Dead-Wagon” by Greye La Spina (1927). Virile American Kenneth has come to England all the way from New York because a girl smiled at him. Wanting to woo Arline, he hobnobs with her father, Lord Melverson. But there’s a curse over Melverson Abbey, and a spectral plague-cart that trundles up in the dead of night for the curse’s victims. Years later, married, with a firstborn of his own to save from the curse, Kenneth hears the dreaded wheels of the cart once more as midnight draws near. Picturesque gothic number, turgid and overwrought pulp — whichever way you want to phrase it, it’s exactly what I expected from this collection.
“The Canal” by Everil Worrell (1927). Aloof, morbid modern man Morton, numb to fear and love alike, enjoys long walks along the canal at midnight. He encounters an ethereal, heart-faced woman living on a decrepit old canal boat and immediately falls in love; inevitably, he also learns the meaning of fear when he figures out why his beloved can’t cross the flowing water of the canal. There are interesting hints of self-destructive eroticism here, amid the usual overheated fluff of this era.
“The Curse of a Song” by Eli Colter (1928). While the preceding stories have been goofy, lurid fun, this one is just kind of flat, narrated implausibly over after-dinner tobacco in a rusty turn-of-the-century style. The tale of Uncle Thad’s vengeful ghost punishing his young niece Rose to the tune of an old popular song is overlong, notable mainly for its Portland, Oregon setting, with a weekend roadster excursion up to Mount Hood and its summer cabins, and other little glimpses into bygone things. It does have some gothic charm toward the end, especially the climactic piano battle against the forces of darkness Uncle Thad.
“Vulture Crag” by Everil Worrell (1928). That title primed me to anticipate a weird western. Instead we start with a nicely atmospheric excursion to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, as the mysterious Count Zolani drives his roadster through piney backroads to the titular crag — which Zolani proposes to convert into a lab for his theories of ethereal vibration and space travel. The end goal is to literally vibe across the cosmos, because that’s the era of science fiction we’re dealing with here. (One is reminded of Olaf Stapledon’s “I traveled through space and time with the power of imagination!”) Manly POV Donald gets roped in by Zolani to supply the bankroll; Donald’s concerned love-interest Dorothy doesn’t understand all these big manly words, but fakes a romantic attachment to Zolani to get the Count to let her accompany her man. And oh dear, Zolani is unhappy about this! This story feels more dated than the others, in terms of shitty little touches of racism and sexism; the plot is a mix of appealingly hokey and eye-rollingly obvious, shading into just plain distasteful at the end. After all that buildup, we don’t even get to mind-trip across the universe. Disappointing.
“The Rays of the Moon” by Everil Worrell (1928). Here we reach the full sleaziness of 1920s pulp: our narrator, yet another Morton, is a callous, morphine-addicted medical student stealing fresh cadavers to further his reanimation experiments. It’s like a prototype of grimy 1980s horror. “Rays” reminds you that it’s very much of its time, however, when Morton — and the whole cemetery’s worth of bodies — gets “magnetized” upward by the full moon. He comes to, in fact, on the dusty, bone-white surface of the moon, and realizes he is a ghost. Was it possible that audiences ever took this pulpy stuff seriously, or was it always intended as campy and ridiculous entertainment? This story is basically Frankenstein meets A Christmas Carol in space. It might be the most gloriously absurd pulp mishmash I’ve ever read. Which isn’t to say that it’s good, of course, merely that this is exactly what I came here to read.
“The Gray Killer” by Everil Worrell (1929). Medical horror in which our narrator, Miss Wheaton, hospitalized for blood poisoning as a result of a nail through her foot, receives a nocturnal visit from a gray being who calls himself Dr. Zingler, who offers to take away her pain. Any patient who accepts his treatment is found brutally murdered, or else disappears. And the other doctors seem to be in cahoots with the sinister gray killer, gaslighting and sedating Miss Wheaton. There’s a subplot with another doctor trying to flirt with her, because of course there is. Way overlong for what it is, a tedious buildup to a bit of throwaway eldritch horror, without enough interest to sustain its length.
“The Black Stone Statue” by Mary Elizabeth Counselman (1937). Between the title and the first three paragraphs, I had this one pretty much sussed out: unscrupulous sculptor, tired of penury, finds some nefarious means to turn human beings into stone statues. The middle portion, which relates the experience of the cracked-up aviator who finds a petrified black forest in Brazil, and a large alien amoeba at its heart, is some fine pulp weirdness. It was more interesting than the venal sculptor’s predictable side of the tale. Still, for its time, this is a solid, self-contained little story.
“The Web of Silence” by Mary Elizabeth Counselman (1939). Mad scientist Dr. Ubique demands a ransom from the mayor of Blankville; ignored, he deadens all sound in the town (or does he??). A corny supervillainy caper (or is it??) related in quasi-journalistic style, this was mildly amusing but outlasted its welcome. The ending was silly.
“The Deadly Theory” by Greye La Spina (1942). Alchemy is worked in the Maine woods as a bereaved mystic uncle attempts to bring his niece back to life from her ashes. This one also didn’t grab me as a story, though I do like the idea of alchemical fantasy in the modern day.
“Great Pan Is Here” by Greye La Spina (1943). Early fantasists just loved Pan, didn’t they? This one begins memorably (and modernly) enough, with our narrator, driving five cocktails deep, spotting a set of seven-reed pipes on the side of the suburban road. Like any rich white man of the era, Craig wants time alone with his lovely cousin Cecily, but his new fixation on the Pan-pipes (which no one else saw) leads to exchange of words and a solitary evening for him, with only a cigarette and a couple highballs for company. But what is that shadowy figure playing the pipes in his garden? The rest of the story proceeds much like you’d expect a Pan story to go when you have a cast of bored young socialites suddenly awakened to the appetites of “nature.” Craig was an annoying narrator, and the story ends somewhat abruptly, as if a more graphic ending were edited away; otherwise it worked well enough.
“The Antimacassar” by Greye La Spina (1949). Bucks County gothic, with young lodger Lucy discovering what became of her disappeared colleague who vacationed at a Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse. Spoilers: the landlady’s daughter is a hungry hungry vampire, and the only thing protecting Lucy is a vase of fresh honeysuckle. This one was stiffly written in comparison to most of the other La Spina pieces here, cramming exposition in with overheard conversations and awkward amateur detective work. But I enjoyed the element of loom-weaving; the hidden message in the antimacassar was an interesting touch that deserved a better story.
That’s it! I’ve discovered an appetite for old Weird Tales stories thanks to this collection, and have been pricing other best-of volumes. (You can even buy reprints of individual issues, which is pretty cool.) However, given the preponderance of male writers, I’m not certain I’d enjoy them nearly as much.
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