Thanks Dr. S. It's a long time since I read Brennan's, but seem to remember it had something of the Monster of Glamis legend about it?
Les Edwards Frank Belknap Long - Grab Bags Are Dangerous: (
Unknown Worlds, June 1942:
The Hounds of Tindalos, 1963).
It seems bitterly cruel on those writers from the pulp era who now languish unremembered that Frank Belknap Long isn't. For if there is another writer more deserving of having their entire output purged from the collective consciousness then I've never encountered them. His work - for want of a better expression - is characterized by an absence of logic, consistency and plausibility which needn't be necessarily fatal to its effectiveness if its horrors weren't so laughable and developed in such a cackhanded and inept fashion. He truly was the sort of talentless nobody who gives real hacks a bad name. The Lovecraft cult can be held accountable for all manner of literary crimes but few more heinous than preserving and propagating Long's absurd drivel.
This ghoul story - which somehow passed the editorial scrutiny of both John Campbell and August Derleth, thereby according black marks against the vaunted judgement of both - is a textbook example of Long's miserable ineptitude.
An angsty playwright called Satterly is roped in to play Friar Tuck at a kid's birthday party by his girlfriend. This necessitates the need to procure a burlap sack to act as the titular grab bag for the presents. Now I make no claim to be an expert on such matters but I would presume that wartime America had an abundance of legitimate sources for such a commonplace object. There certainly seems no legitimate reason for Satterly to turn to acknowledged "chisseler" Tony the Iceman as if he was in the market for something illicit. But wouldn't you know it Tony just happens to have such a sack which he seems awful keen to get rid of. And no wonder when every dog in the neighbourhood suddenly seems to take a hostile interest in it.
That night Satterly has "an ugly, mildeweed sort of dream. Cobwebs and spiders and everything not nice." ["not nice"? Belknapius was really giving the thesaurus a hammering when he came up with that.] In the midst of the not niceness Satterly is accosted by an invidious "cracked-record kind of voice, raucous, metallic, going round and round". And this is so funny that it just has to be quoted in full:
"This is how it went: 'Get up and get under the sack - sack - sack - get up and get under if you don't you won't - won't - won't - won't - ever sleep, get up and - get under the sack - sack - sack - sack.'"
Lo and behold when Satterly wakes up he finds himself wearing the sack [an image which has seered itself into my repository of the risible]. In spite of this, and the fact that the sack smells of dead flesh and damp mouldy earth, Satterly has no problem in putting it to its requisite use at the birthday party. As you do. Cue saccharine heavyweight Miss Constiner who thrusting her quivering forearm into the sack has her hand bitten by something which leaves eight indentured marks in her flesh. [Satterly wears the damn thing on his head for half the night without any physical effects but Constiner gets gnawed after a brief rummage among the gifts: see what I mean about no consistency].
Satterly then finds himself accosted once again by the disembodied voice, only now it has taken on a "deeper, more sepulchral intonation, as though someone had slipped a new record on a gramaphone." Clearly it is also now under instruction to elucidate the plot lest clarity has escaped the reader's attention amidst the glittering marvels of FBL's prose:
"Get up and get under the sack - sack - sack - get up and get under so that I may feast - feast - feast - and grow strong - strong -strong - and grow fat - fat - fat; get up and get under the sack - sack -sack." [Lloyd-Webber really should be setting this to music shouldn't he].
Satterly naturally does as he is bidden because "there was a compulsion in every syllable of the voice which he could not fight." Ah, compulsion, that ever reliable fallback of the true hack. As Carl Jacobi spent an entire career demonstrating there is nothing to match it for advancing a plot when one hasn't the meagrest grasp of coherent storytelling. The upshot of it all is that Tony the Iceman arrives in the nick of time to save the day. You see, that damn sack hadn't been his to sell in the first place; no, it belonged to his lodger (are you ready for this?) Hassin Ali from Damascus and he wanted it back. Because it was his coal sack and it had a coal in it. At least that's what the ditzy girlfriend thinks he said but then Tony the Iceman's grammar is pretty bad. Him being Italian and all.
But we'll let FBL put everyone straight on that score in his characteristically subtle and nuanced manner:
"Not his grammar. His pronunciation. He just can't pronounce goo as in
ghoul."
And there you have it one and all. A customary crock of clueless excrement from the ever dependable FBL. But should excrement be your bag - or even your grab bag - you'll be overjoyed to learn that there is a surplus of the stuff where that one came from.