Review: The Faceless God - Robert Bloch

Mentioning Robert Bloch put me in the mood to read something by him, and “The Faceless God”, originally published in the May 1936 issue of WEIRD TALES and also available in THE CTHULHU MYTHOS MEGAPACK, was handy.

There are SPOILERS BELOW, so beware.

This starts out with a very graphic and disturbing torture scene, as a smuggler and criminal tries to extract the location of a potentially valuable find in the Egyptian desert from an old man. The thing is the head of a statue that was buried in the sand sometime in ages past, but the constantly shifting dunes have uncovered it. Getting wind of the discovery, the crook wants the statue for himself, figuring that it’s bound to be worth a lot of money. The old man can’t hold up under the torture and finally reveals the statue’s location before dying.

This is basically the story’s prologue, and in the hands of, say, Robert E. Howard, “The Faceless God” would have been a corking yarn, as one of REH’s adventurer heroes would have gone after the statue, too, and clashed violently with the bad guy before the statue—which turns out to be that of an ancient Egyptian elder god—enters the fray in bloody and dramatic fashion.

But that’s not what happens. The bad guy goes after the statue, finds it, and terrible things ensue. Needless to say, it’s all very well-written. Bloch was a great storyteller. It’s just that he chooses not to tell much of a story here.

I’m a firm believer in reviewing the story the author wrote, not the one I wish he had written, so I feel bad saying I found “The Faceless God” to be a disappointment. As I said, the writing is excellent, and on that basis alone, I’m glad I read it, and it certainly won’t keep me from reading other stories by Bloch in the future. This one is a bit of a misfire for me, but it might not be for you. If you haven’t read it and want to give it a try, it’s been reprinted numerous times, most notably in the Bloch collections YOURS TRULY, JACK THE RIPPER, THE OPENER OF THE WAY, and MYSTERIES OF THE WORM.

Review: The Salem Horror - Henry Kuttner

Say you’re a writer, an author of very popular light romances, and your publisher is pressuring you to finish the new book, and you’re having trouble with it, so you need a nice quiet, peaceful place to work. What do you do?

You rent a house in Salem, Massachusetts, that once belonged to an evil witch who was hanged several hundred years earlier when the mob discovered that her body wouldn’t burn at the stake, and before she died she cursed the town and nobody’s been able to live in the house for very long ever since. Of course that’s what you do. Sure, why not?

That’s the set-up of Henry Kuttner’s story “The Salem Witch”, which appeared originally in the May 1937 issue of WEIRD TALES, which has a striking cover by Margaret Brundage, by the way. Kuttner is a long-time favorite of mine. He was one of those authors who could write in several different genres and handle them all extremely well. The stories of his from WEIRD TALES that I’ve read have all been excellent, and “The Salem Horror” is no exception. The protagonist of this yarn pursues a rat into the basement of the old house, where he proceeds to find a hidden room that has to be the old witch’s sanctum where she invoked dark rituals. Naturally, the guy decides this would be a fine place to write and finish his novel at last. Who cares if he starts having bizarre, disturbing dreams about a giant black blob rampaging through the town and slaughtering people?

This story also introduces occult detective Michael Leigh, who returns in the next issue of WEIRD TALES in a story that’s a collaboration between Kuttner and Robert Bloch. Unfortunately for him, that’s the end of his series. I may have to find that one and read it, too, since Bloch is another favorite of mine. In the meantime, I read “The Salem Horror” in the aptly named THE CTHULHU MYTHOS MEGAPACK from Wildside Press, which you can find in an e-book edition on Amazon. I really enjoyed this one, and I suspect I’ll be reading more from that collection very soon.

Review: Spawn of the Green Abyss - C. Hall Thompson

I once owned the November 1946 issue of WEIRD TALES. I remember that Boris Dolgov cover. However, I never got around to reading it. But continuing with my sudden and unexplainable interest in Cthulhu Mythos stories (gee, that sounds kind of sinister, doesn’t it?), I moved on in the anthology A MOUNTAIN WALKED to read the novelette “Spawn of the Green Abyss” by C. Hall Thompson.

C. Hall Thompson is best remembered, if he is at all, as a Western writer, but he published four well-regarded stories in WEIRD TALES. “Spawn of the Green Abyss” is narrated by Dr. James Arkwright, a former brain surgeon and now a convicted murderer who’s waiting for his execution. Thompson lets us know right away that Arkwright killed his wife and her unborn baby, but of course, there’s more to it than that, and slowly, in clearly Lovecraft-influenced prose, he peels back the layers of what really happened.

Arkwright, you see, suffering from the stress of his medical career, takes a break from it by renting a cottage in a small town on a peninsula extending into the Atlantic from the New Jersey shore. Out at the point of that peninsula is a creepy old house where a creepy old man lives, along with his beautiful daughter. Naturally, Arkwright becomes obsessed with the house and the old man, and he falls in love with the daughter, as we all knew he would. She is, in fact, the wife he’s in prison for murdering.

I’m sure a lot of you have already read this story, and those of you who haven’t won’t have any trouble figuring out what’s going to happen in it, but the fun is in getting there and Thompson clearly relished the journey. Along the way, the reader gets a lot of chilling, haunting images and a bit of sea-going adventure, to boot.

“Spawn of the Green Abyss” is another excellent story, and I’m glad I got on this little binge. I’m intrigued by the idea that the same guy who wrote this dense, atmospheric yarn was primarily a Western writer. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything else by Thompson, but I may have to remedy that.

Review: Far Below - Robert Barbour Johnson

Reading Mearle Prout’s “The House of the Worm” the other day put me in the mood to read more like that, so I dug out my copy of the S.T. Joshi-edited anthology A MOUNTAIN WALKED: GREAT TALES OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS and read “Far Below” by Robert Barbour Johnson, which appeared originally in the June/July 1939 issue of WEIRD TALES.

In Joshi’s introduction, he says that in 1953, readers of WEIRD TALES voted “Far Below” as the best story ever published in the magazine. Well, no, not hardly, in my opinion, for reasons I’ll get to. But it is a very good story in some ways.

The whole thing is some nameless narrator who’s a writer talking to a friend of his, a former doctor and scientist, in some sort of bizarre control room buried deep below the streets of New York in the subway system. It seems that, unknown to the general public, monsters roam through a certain section of the subway in the middle of the night, and the New York Police Department has set up special squads and listening posts (of which this is one) to monitor their activities and protect the subway riders from them.

That’s a great concept, and as the doctor-turned-cop explains all the background to his friend, there are some wonderfully creepy bits, so vivid that they linger in the mind. But when you get right down to it, other than a little twist at the end, that’s all “Far Below” is: a concept. Very well written, to be sure, but nothing happens. That’s why it’s far from the best story ever published in WEIRD TALES as far as I’m concerned.

But am I glad that I read it? Absolutely! As I said, it’s very well-written, and I enjoy being creeped out from time to time. This’ll do it, that’s for sure. You can find used copies of A MOUNTAIN WALKED on-line, but they’re pretty pricey. Or you can hunt up a PDF of that issue of WEIRD TALES. Either way, I recommend “Far Below”, and I figure I might just delve a little deeper into the Mythos this week.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, September 13, 1930

I always enjoy seeing a good-looking redhead on a pulp cover, and Paul Stahr supplies one on the cover of this issue of ARGOSY. There are some fine writers inside this issue, too, including Erle Stanley Gardner, Theodore Roscoe, Eustace L. Adams, J. Allan Dunn, J.E. Grinstead, Harold de Polo, R.F. Starzl, Art J. Purcell, and Joseph Ivers Lawrence. Some of those names are considerably more familiar than others, of course, but they had to be pretty good to sell to ARGOSY.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Wild West Weekly, August 7, 1937

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. The beautifully painted and rather sedate (by WILD WEST WEEKLY standards) cover is by Tom Lovell. That’s Sonny Tabor, long-running series protagonist and the hero of the lead novelette in this issue.

Sonny Tabor, for those of you who don’t remember, is a young outlaw who was unjustly forced onto the owlhoot trail, but now he’s the most wanted man in Arizona Territory. In “Sonny Tabor’s Oregon Boot”, he’s captured by the law after suffering minor wounds in a shootout. To insure that he doesn’t escape, he’s locked into the Oregon Boot of the title, a special shackle that makes walking very difficult. But does that stop Sonny for very long? What do you think? Of course he gets away, but then he finds himself smack-dab in the middle of a scheme by outlaws to take over a couple of ranches owned by a pair of brothers. Sonny, despite being on the wrong side of the law, is really a good guy, so naturally he risks his own freedom to protect the innocent and deal out justice to the real evildoers. Author Paul S. Powers, who wrote this series and others under the pseudonym Ward M. Stevens, was great at spinning these fast-moving, action-packed yarns, and I always thoroughly enjoy them. Sonny really has problems piled up on him in this one, but he comes through, of course. I also found myself wondering if Stan Lee ever read WILD WEST WEEKLY, because Kid Colt seems very much influenced by Sonny Tabor.

George C. Henderson was a pretty good but now completely forgotten Western pulpster. He has two stories in this issue, the first being “The Jail Break at Big Horse” under the house-name Andrew A. Griffin. In it, two outlaws escape from custody. One of them is a hardened rustler and killer, the other a young man new to the owlhoot trail. The older man takes the younger one into his gang, but eventually the law is bound to catch up to them. This one has a twist ending and I saw part of it coming, but not all of it, and any surprise is a welcome bonus. Other than a slightly rushed ending, this is an entertaining yarn with some well-written action.

The Whistlin’ Kid is actually range detective Pete Prentiss, and he stars in a very long-running series in WILD WEST WEEKLY published under the house-name Emery Jackson. J. Allan Dunn wrote more of them than anyone else, although Guy L. Maynard and Ronald Oliphant contributed to the series, too. Dunn wrote this issue’s “The Whistlin’ Kid Plays Injun”, in which Prentiss, who hunts rustlers, is mistaken for one himself and almost strung up, and when he gets out of that mess, he disguises himself as an Indian to track down the real outlaws. Dunn was an old pro who always turned in a competently written story with some nice action, but there’s really not much to this one and I’d say it’s one of the weaker stories by him that I’ve read.

I’m a fan of T.W. Ford’s work, but I’ve also known for a long time that he could be inconsistent. His novelette in this issue, “Vengeance of the Peacemaker”, reads like it’s part of a series, but as far as I can tell, this is the only appearance of drifting adventurers Ben Hobbs, known as the Peacemaker, and his sidekick Poison Hellson. The two of them save a young cowboy from being gunned down by a crooked gambler who’s an old enemy of the Peacemaker’s, and that catapults them into a Save the Ranch story in which circumstance makes them wind up working with the rustlers, at least for a while. But you know they’ll straighten everything out eventually. I wasn’t sure I was going to like this one at first. The writing seemed a little rushed, to the point that I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I stuck with it and wound up liking it okay, although I wouldn’t rate it as high as most of Ford’s Silver Kid stories, the series for which he’s best remembered.

I’ve become a fan of the Shorty Masters series by Allan R. Bosworth, who was one of the best writers to contribute to WILD WEST WEEKLY. Mule driver Shorty, along with his gunslinging partner Willie Weatherbee, also known as the Sonora Kid, also run afoul of cattle thieves in “Rustlers on Wheels” and are mistaken for outlaws themselves, which seems to be kind of a probably unintended theme of this issue. Naturally, they figure out a way to clear their names and corral the real rustlers. It’s a well-written tale with touches of humor and plenty of action, another good entry in a consistently good series.

George C. Henderson makes his second appearance in this issue, this time under his name, with the novelette “Crazy Q’s Gunpowder Jamboree”. Unfortunately, this is part of a series of linked novelettes that amounts to a serialized novel, and so much of it depends on what has gone before that I never could get into it and wound up not finishing it. Henderson was pretty good, as I mentioned above, and I’m sure if I had all six parts, I would enjoy reading about the adventures of Buckaroo Boone and the other cowboys from the Crazy Q ranch. I’ll pass for now, though.

There are some features and a comic strip, all of which I just glanced at, as usual. For the most part, I’m just interested in the stories, and this issue, none of them rise above the level of pretty good and some are fairly weak, making this a slightly below average issue of WILD WEST WEEKLY in my opinion. The stories by Paul S. Powers and Allan R. Bosworth are well worth reading, though.

Review: The House of the Worm - Mearle Prout (Weird Tales, October 1933)

Since I read and reviewed Edmond Hamilton’s “The Vampire Master” earlier this week, my friend Fred Blosser suggested I read “The House of the Worm” by Mearle Prout, which appears in the same issue of WEIRD TALES as the opening installment of Hamilton’s serial. That sounded like a good idea to me.

We don’t know much about Mearle Prout. He was born in 1911, possibly in Texas, died in 1964, and apparently spent most of his life in Oklahoma. He published four stories in WEIRD TALES, starting with “The House of the Worm” in the October 1933 issue and then three more, one each in 1937, 1938, and 1939. “The House of the Worm” was the most successful, going on to be reprinted six times in various magazines and anthologies. I had never run across it until now, though.

The narrator of this story is a young man named Art. He’s a writer, possibly a pulp writer, although that’s never specified. His roommate and best friend is a bank clerk named Fred. We never learn any more about these two young fellows than that. They take a break from their jobs to go on a hunting trip to a secluded valley in the Ozark Mountains (not far from Prout’s home in Oklahoma), but when they reach their destination, they find that all the vegetation in the valley is dying and the place has a loathsome stench about it. (You know you’re reading a WEIRD TALES story when there’s a loathsome stench involved somewhere.) They camp there anyway, and both guys have terrible nightmares involving worms and decaying corpses. Or were they nightmares?

Well, things go from bad to worse, as they have a habit of doing. Some sort of unearthly death and decay begins to spread out from the Ozarks. The army and a horde of scientists seem powerless to stop it. We’ll see what a couple of good old boys with a tractor, some barrels of kerosene, and a few cases of dynamite can do, by golly!

All kidding aside, this is an absolutely terrific story. It’s considered part of the Cthulhu Mythos, but that connection is pretty tenuous. Prout’s style is definitely Lovecraft-inspired, but his prose isn’t as dense as Lovecraft’s and there’s considerably more dialogue and action. Nor do his protagonists sit around and stare at the scary stuff until they go insane. Like Robert E. Howard’s heroes in his Mythos stories, Art and Fred may gaze in horror at first, but then they haul off and kick some Elder God ass.

If you want to read this story, you can find a PDF of that issue on the Luminist Archives, and it’s probably available on various other sites, as well. I really enjoyed “The House of the Worm”, and I’m going to see if I can find Mearle Prout’s other stories.

UPDATE: Thanks to Deuce Richardson for pointing out that "The House of the Worm" can also be found in TALES OF THE LOVECRAFT MYTHOS, edited by Robert M. Price, pictured above, which is available in e-book, paperback, and hardcover editions on Amazon.

Review: Mort Künstler: Covered, Volume 1 - Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle, eds.

The men’s adventure magazines are very well remembered for their great covers, and for my money, no artist was ever better at painting those covers than Mort Künstler, who produced scores of them, usually signing his own name to them but occasionally using the pseudonym Emmett Kaye. Künstler’s absolute mastery of the genre is amply demonstrated in MORT KÜNSTLER: COVERED, VOLUME 1, the latest beautiful volume from the Men’s Adventure Library and #new texture.

Editors Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle lead off with a lengthy, informative, and very entertaining interview with Künstler before diving into the meat of the book, more than 100 full-page, full-color reproductions of covers Künstler did for various men’s adventure magazines, mostly FOR MEN ONLY but other magazines, too. These are just gorgeous and prove that Künstler could paint almost any kind of action and adventure scene, from war to Western, from jungle thrills and man against nature to hardboiled crime. Interspersed with these covers are sidebars about the history of the men’s adventure genre and background about each of the magazines featured.

I’ve mentioned before how I used to see those magazines on the racks at the drugstores and grocery stores where I bought comic books and paperbacks, and I always wanted to buy some of them. I was especially drawn to FOR MEN ONLY for some reason, so I’m very happy to see it featured in this volume. In looking through the covers Künstler did in the late Sixties, some of them looked familiar to me, but I honestly don’t know if I was actually recalling them from those days or if nostalgia was just kicking in. I do know that I love looking at them now and remembering those times.

For what it’s worth, I never bought an issue of FOR MEN ONLY or any of those magazines until I was in college in the Seventies, and by that time, they were a mere shadow of what they had been in earlier days. I was an expert at smuggling paperbacks with racy covers into my house, but a full-sized magazine was more of a challenge than I wanted to take on.

But I digress, as I often do. MORT KÜNSTLER: COVERED, VOLUME 1 is a terrific book, and if you’re interested in men’s adventure magazines or just in great artwork, I give it a very high recommendation. The best way to buy it is directly from Bob Deis. The softcover edition and the deluxe hardcover edition are both available. You can get them on Amazon as well. Wherever you buy them, you’re getting some great artwork, I can guarantee that.

Review: The Vampire Master - Edmond Hamilton

I’m a long-time fan of Edmond Hamilton’s science fiction, and I do mean long-time since I was reading the paperback reprints of his Captain Future novels almost sixty years ago. But I knew he wrote some horror stories as well, and since I’m trying to read a little horror fiction this month, I opened my copy of THE VAMPIRE MASTER AND OTHER TALES OF HORROR to read the title yarn, the novel-length “The Vampire Master”, which was serialized in WEIRD TALES from October 1933 to January 1934 under the pseudonym Hugh Davidson.

“The Vampire Master” is an occult detective story, with the protagonist being Doctor John Dale, a noted investigator into the eerie and strange. The narrator is his secretary and assistant Harley Owens. Doctor Dale is headquartered in New York City, and as the story opens, he and Owens are being visited by a physician from a town in upstate New York, in the Hudson River valley, concerning a woman who has recently died from a strange malady resembling extreme anemia. Now the woman’s daughter seems to have come down with the same condition. Why, it’s almost like something is draining the blood from their bodies!

Well, we all know where this is going. Doctor Dale doesn’t beat around the bush. A vampire is to blame for what’s happening, and before you know it, they’re all off to the small town to wage war against the evil of vampirism.

Please don’t mistake those comments for snark. Is “The Vampire Master” a very traditional story? Yes, it is. Every bit of vampire lore in it comes straight from DRACULA, both the book and the movie, the latter of which had come out only two years earlier. Of course, Hamilton was influenced by it. This is a very straightforward tale, and like a traditional Western, it rises or falls depending on how well the author makes use of those familiar elements.

I’m happy to report that for the most part, Hamilton does a pretty good job. As the menace of the vampires widens and claims more and more victims, there are some genuinely creepy scenes. The Vampire Master, who has returned to the Hudson River valley after being run out two hundred years earlier, is a suitably despicable villain. There are no sympathetic vampires here. They’re all thoroughly evil, although some through no fault of their own.

There are two flaws in this story, starting with the fact that it’s too long. Stretching the plot out to novel length means that events start to get a little repetitious before it’s over. And the second problem is that for a famous occult detective, Doctor John Dale is strangely ineffective. His plans to combat the vampires never work and he and his allies suffer defeat after defeat until they finally triumph. Maybe Hamilton was just trying to show how dangerous the Vampire Master is, but I kept thinking, dang, Jules de Grandin would have wrapped this up a lot quicker, before quite so many people died.

And speaking of Jules de Grandin, the issue of WEIRD TALES in which the first installment of the serialized version appears sports one of the most iconic, instantly recognizable covers in pulp history, the Bat-Woman by Margaret Brundage. Also in that issue are a Conan story by Robert E. Howard (“The Pool of the Black One”), a Jules de Grandin story by Seabury Quinn (“The Mansion of Unholy Magic”), stories by H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Jack Williamson, and Mary Elizabeth Counselman, and a Cthulhu Mythos story by an author I’d never heard of, Merle Prout. Yep, just another day at the newsstand for WEIRD TALES.

Don’t let my mild criticism scare you off from reading “The Vampire Master”. Hamilton’s fast-moving prose is a pleasure to read, as always, and as I mentioned, there are some really nice creepy scenes and a sense of gathering doom. He wrote another story featuring Doctor John Dale, “The House of the Evil Eye”, and I intend to read it before the month is over. In the meantime, the collection THE VAMPIRE MASTER AND OTHER TALES OF HORROR, published by Haffner Press, seems to be out of print, but used copies can be found for a reasonable price. If you want an e-book edition of “The Vampire Master” without the other stories, that can be had on Amazon.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Street & Smith's Complete Stories, July 15, 1932

I don't know what's going on in this cover by Edgar F. Wittmack, and I'm not sure I want to know. But I know there are some good authors in this issue of STREET & SMITH'S COMPLETE STORIES, including T.T. Flynn, a White Wolf story by Frederick C. Davis, writing under the name of the series creator Hal Dunning, Nels Leroy Jorgensen, inconsistent but often very good, C.S. Montanye, likewise, and an author unknown to me, Jack Hulick. Unusual it may be, but that cover is certainly eye-catching, and Flynn and Davis are enough to make an issue worthwhile by themselves.