August Derleth - Dark Mind, Dark Heart

[dem bones]

August Derleth (ed.) - Dark Mind, Dark Heart (Mayflower-Dell, 1963, June 1966)

Foreword - August Derleth

Robert Bloch - Under The Horns
Joseph Payne Brennan - Come Back, Uncle Ben!
J. Ramsey Campbell - The Church In High Street
Mary E. Counselman - Hargrave's Fore-edge Book
Stephen Grendon (August Derleth) - Miss Esperson
William Hope Hodgson - The Habitants Of Middle Isle
Robert E. Howard - The Grey God Passes
Carl Jacobi - The Aquarium
John Jakes - The Man Who Wanted To Be In The Movies
David H. Keller - In Memoriam
H. P. Lovecraft - Witches' Hollow
Frank Mace - The Ideal Type
John Metcalfe - The Firing Chamber
Dennis Roidt - The Green Vase
M. P. Shiel - Xelucha
H. Russell Wakefield - The Animals In The Case
George Wetzel - Caer Sidhi


In Keller's In Memoriam, Dr. Brown interviews the reclusive Prof. Moyers, a man with a very peculiar tobacco bowl. Brown is greatly relieved to leave in one piece. "Only once before I had known such a pall of horror to depress me - after a visit to an asylum for the hopelessly insane." Metcalfe's The Firing-Chamber finds him in rare all-out-horror mode, and it suits him; the Rev. Noah Scallard is tormented by a terrible accident at the Double Dyker potteries - he just can't stop thinking about the dreadful way that unfortunate man died. It seems to awaken a dormant sado-masochistic streak in him... Hargrave's Fore-edge Book should strike a chord with everybody on this board. John Hargrave covets his dead uncle's library which, inexplicably, the old fool has willed to Aunt Jessica! Bloch settles for an unpretentious tale of revenge involving a bull-fighter who kills his love-rival. Less successful, The Man Who Wanted To Be In The Movies gets his wish and Witches' Hollow is another of the stories attributed to Lovecraft which are 90% the work of Derleth. The Church In High Street is one of Ramsey Campbell's early HPL/ Cthulhu Mythos pastiches before he found his own voice (in a big way).

Too many books, not enough time ...

Mary E. Counselman - Hargraves Fore-Edge Book : "I'll teach you to mutilate a book! You - woman!"

Bibliophile Jonathan Hargraves, Patron Saint of Vault, isn't the least concerned that his Uncle and Guardian should leave his mansion and fortune to second wife Jessica, but how could he will his book collection to the over-sexed gold-digger? And now, true to form, she's going to auction them off and he'll never see them again! To top it all, his poor uncle's not cold in his grave and she's already chasing Jonathan around the doomed library! Well, he's seen what goes on between immoral men and loose women in some of the more exclusive volumes and it disgusts him. So he breaks her neck with a carefully aimed copy of Les Miserables.

Somehow he gets away with it. The death is recorded as accidental and now he's free to bask in the pleasures of his collection .... until Miss Tresser, his local book-dealer's glamorous assistant gets to look over his mansion and likes what she sees. What's a misogynistic psychopath to do other than what he always does in such circumstances?

Books, multiple murders and supernatural retribution. It really doesn't get much better than this.

John Jakes - The Man Who Wanted To Be In The Movies: George Rollo is in love with perfume clerk Mabel Fry, but she only has eyes for hunky Hollywood stars like Todd St. Bartholemew. Distraught that he’s lost her when a local schmuck gets a screen test, George turns to a witchy friend, Yolanda, blurts out his love for Mabel, and, can she perform some ritual that will put him on the silver screen? Beware of what you wish for, etc.

Dennis Roidt - The Green Vase: The hideous ornament is the work of the disturbed young Matthew Hargrove who was inordinately proud of his creation and forbade anyone to move it. Since his death two men have defied him and been torn to pieces for their trouble. Now Vince has bought Lanceford House, he respects and fears Hargrove's wish. His friend Edward, however ....

Frank Mace - The Ideal Type: Carson picks up drunken stranger, Smith, in a pub and drives him across town to meet his friends. As Smith sobers he realises he might be in a spot here: what if the guy's some kind of mugger or sex-pervert? Carson assures him he's neither of these, it just so happens that there's something about Smith's face that marks him out as the ideal type. So that's all right then.

Far from placated, Smith allows himself to be led into a dark chamber where a disembodied hand dances on a pedestal ...

[dem bones]

Robert Bloch - Under the Horns: Ricardo the Matador engages hopelessly ill-suited Pepe Rios as his understudy, When, inevitably, Pepe is gored to death in the arena, Ricardo moves in on his beautiful widow, Marie.

John Metcalfe - The Firing Chamber: The Reverend Noah 'Noddy' Scallard obsesses over the agonising death of parishioner Bert Winsham, charred to cinders in the firing chamber at Double Diker Potteries. His wife, Esme, correctly admonishes him that his seriously unhealthy fixation on Bert's thoughts and sensations as he burned is "a form of gloating," and she is not wrong. Rev. Scallard is both closet Selwynist and masochist, and these perversions inform the sermon he delivers an appalled congregation.

"We may be spared a direct call to the supremest suffering, but we should not construe that as a dispensation, a permission to indulge and spare ourselves, too let ourselves off too lightly. What God may spare us let us, for our souls' profit, seek of our free sake ... "

For Noddy, the agony is indeed the ecstasy.

The Bloch is routine by his standards, but Metcalfe's is superb.

[helrunar]

Interesting review of Metcalfe's 1920s collection The Smoking Leg here:

darkling-tales.dreamwidth.org/112222.html

Excerpt from the review:

After you've read a few of his stories, a definite Metcalfe "type" begins to emerge. About half of the stories are set in and around London, in down-at-heel areas and docklands, and are peopled by a rather seedy cast of sailors, criminals, clerks and so on. These stories are psychologically subtle and suffused with a mist of melancholy and even despair that clings to the characters like London smog. They can also be highly disorienting ("The Double Admiral" is a particularly mischievous example of this.) I found this type of story faintly oppressive after a while , and some of them ("Nightmare Jack" and "Paper Windmills") are at times rather hard to understand, so steeped are they in the dialect and customs of a bygone age. By the time I'd reached the last story of the collection (a particularly grim tale called "The Backslider"), the unending misery of Metcalfe's working-class characters had become predictable, and all the more depressing because thoroughly realistic!



There is a less dour side to Metcalfe though. A good few of the tales are set in rural locations or by the sea, and these are all graced with economical yet beautiful descriptions of the featured landscape. Metcalfe's world is clearly a place where, in the words of the hymn, "every prospect pleases and only man is vile" (or at least behaves a bit shabbily!) In "The Picnic", new lovers get lost in a deep forest beneath a raging thunderstorm, which acts as a perfect counterpoint to their sexual, social and ultimately existential anxieties (nature is seldom a mere passive backdrop in these stories). "The Glamour Hunter" and especially "Lure" are both wistful paeans to nostalgia and unfulfilled longings which benefit greatly from an off-season setting of fretful seas, lonely beaches and windswept expanses of moorland. But my favourite story in terms of pagan atmosphere is "Crowcastle", a terrific tale of romantic intrigue, intra-familial suspicion and murder all happening in a coppice of wind-blasted beech trees.

A friend of mine who unfortunately died in his early thirties as a result of pernicious insomnia was looking for this book, as I recall. The friend was a big fan of T. F. Powys (whose work is "weird" in a sense of the word rather different from the usual connotation) and Metcalfe's work was sometimes compared with both Powys and Machen.

H.

[Jojo Lapin X]

Feb 13, 2020 16:29:19 GMT helrunar said:

pernicious insomnia

Pernicious anemia, surely.

[helrunar]

No. He was awake for the last 2 weeks of his life. At that point he was completely out of his mind and he drove to a bridge, parked his car there and jumped.

H.

[𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr]

Feb 13, 2020 16:29:19 GMT helrunar said:

Interesting review of Metcalfe's 1920s collection The Smoking Leg here:

darkling-tales.dreamwidth.org/112222.html

Excerpt from the review:

After you've read a few of his stories, a definite Metcalfe "type" begins to emerge. About half of the stories are set in and around London, in down-at-heel areas and docklands, and are peopled by a rather seedy cast of sailors, criminals, clerks and so on. These stories are psychologically subtle and suffused with a mist of melancholy and even despair that clings to the characters like London smog. They can also be highly disorienting ("The Double Admiral" is a particularly mischievous example of this.) I found this type of story faintly oppressive after a while , and some of them ("Nightmare Jack" and "Paper Windmills") are at times rather hard to understand, so steeped are they in the dialect and customs of a bygone age. By the time I'd reached the last story of the collection (a particularly grim tale called "The Backslider"), the unending misery of Metcalfe's working-class characters had become predictable, and all the more depressing because thoroughly realistic!



There is a less dour side to Metcalfe though. A good few of the tales are set in rural locations or by the sea, and these are all graced with economical yet beautiful descriptions of the featured landscape. Metcalfe's world is clearly a place where, in the words of the hymn, "every prospect pleases and only man is vile" (or at least behaves a bit shabbily!) In "The Picnic", new lovers get lost in a deep forest beneath a raging thunderstorm, which acts as a perfect counterpoint to their sexual, social and ultimately existential anxieties (nature is seldom a mere passive backdrop in these stories). "The Glamour Hunter" and especially "Lure" are both wistful paeans to nostalgia and unfulfilled longings which benefit greatly from an off-season setting of fretful seas, lonely beaches and windswept expanses of moorland. But my favourite story in terms of pagan atmosphere is "Crowcastle", a terrific tale of romantic intrigue, intra-familial suspicion and murder all happening in a coppice of wind-blasted beech trees.

A friend of mine who unfortunately died in his early thirties as a result of pernicious insomnia was looking for this book, as I recall. The friend was a big fan of T. F. Powys (whose work is "weird" in a sense of the word rather different from the usual connotation) and Metcalfe's work was sometimes compared with both Powys and Machen.

H.

The Powys siblings were very gifted. Theodore's brother John Cowper Powys wrote four of the greatest novels in the English language. They are great and also huge; his masterpiece A Glastonbury Romance is over 1000 pages. The Grail legend is central to it.
What happened to your friend was so sad.

[dem bones]

Stephen Grendon [August Derleth] - Miss Esperson: Louisiana, 1940s. Despite her kindly disposition, the black folk fear Miss Esperson as an 'Obi woman.' She was born in the West Indies, the daughter of a British diplomat, and local belief has it she is a powerful voodoo Priestess. She and our narrator, Stephen, at the time a child himself, look out for a six year old boy, Jamie, who has suffered a prolonged period of mental and physical abuse at the fists of his appalling stepmother, Mrs. Fallon. Desperate to be rid of the boy, Mrs. Fallon resorts to poison — whereupon Miss Esperson proves the blacks were right all along.

Carl Jacobi - The Aquarium: Miss Emily Rhodes, a professional artist, leases a Knightsbridge mansion and moves in an old friend, Edith Halbin, to share costs. The property comes complete with occult library and a huge stone aquarium. Former owner, the late Horatio Lear, was a noted conchologist and, less well known to his public, a student of black magic and demonology. Lear shared the house with brother Edmund until they fell out over Horatio's crackpot theory that certain molluscs take on the characteristics of those they devour, after which Edmund disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Much to Emily's distress, Edith's behaviour takes a turn for the worse as she immerses herself in Lear's research ...

[ramseycampbell]

Both Roidt and Jacobi were edited by Derleth in this book (as I was, of course).

[andydecker]

I read the cut-down edition of this for the first time last year around this time, and I was mostly pleasently surprised. This has been celebrated as one or even the starting point of the Lovecraft renaissance, and mostly those "important" books disappoint.

I expected much more Mythos stuff, and it was quite nice to read a lot of others. Mot of it, anyway. Witches Hollow may be one of the worst Lovecraft pastiches ever written, which unfortunatly became the blueprint of tons of pastiches. But thankfully there were stories like In Memoriam or Caer Sidhi or The Church in High Street.

I was surprised how much I liked Jacobi's story. I never understood what people see in the maintenance of aquariums, it is an expensive and time-consuming hobby just to watch some fish, but whatever. So it was nice to read about it in this context. As a story it still works today. Of course the subtext would be text and it would be a few victims more.

[dem bones]

Sept 16, 2021 17:05:13 GMT andydecker said:

I expected much more Mythos stuff, and it was quite nice to read a lot of others. Mot of it, anyway. Witches Hollow may be one of the worst Lovecraft pastiches ever written, which unfortunatly became the blueprint of tons of pastiches. But thankfully there were stories like In Memoriam or Caer Sidhi or The Church in High Street.

Likely in a minority of one, but I prefer that Dark Mind, Dark Heart is sparing on the Mythos stuff. I love Metcalfe's contribution. Horror stories don't get to me so often - read too many, you can become numb - but The Firing Chamber most certainly did its job.

[helrunar]

Odd coincidence--I read Caer Sidhi yesterday on my lunch break in this kindle Cthulhu Mythos megaback I recently added to my device. I can't recall the author's name; I had never heard of him. The story did not do much for me. It was supposed to consist of some diary entries from the 1790s and it obviously wasn't remotely of that time; patently the work of a 20th century writer (and not a terribly imaginative one).

Nevertheless, some of the images reminded me of the beautiful Robert Eggers film The Lighthouse, and I wondered if this short snippet had been one of the sources for the material Eggers crafted together for his screenplay. I left that so much was left unexplained in the Eggers film. That seldom works for me, but this time, it did.

H.

[andydecker]

Sept 16, 2021 18:37:42 GMT helrunar said:

Odd coincidence--I read Caer Sidhi yesterday on my lunch break in this kindle Cthulhu Mythos megaback I recently added to my device. I can't recall the author's name; I had never heard of him. The story did not do much for me. It was supposed to consist of some diary entries from the 1790s and it obviously wasn't remotely of that time; patently the work of a 20th century writer (and not a terribly imaginative one).

Nevertheless, some of the images reminded me of the beautiful Robert Eggers film The Lighthouse, and I wondered if this short snippet had been one of the sources for the material Eggers crafted together for his screenplay. I left that so much was left unexplained in the Eggers film. That seldom works for me, but this time, it did.

H.

Yes, the bit with 1790 didn't sit right. Also it didn't made a difference for the plot. But I liked the idea and the ending.

[ramseycampbell]

I hadn't realised the author had written so much:

www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?11237

[Middoth]

Wetzel is the guy who rummaged through Lovecraft's correspondence in the 1950s before S. T. Joshi took over the enterprise.

An amateur writer. As everyone can see.

But his only collection was beautifully designed by Tim Kirk.

fantlab.ru/edition156389

[helrunar]

Those are really gorgeous drawings by Kirk. Beautiful to see.

Thanks, Middoth!

H.