Weird Crimes by Seabury Quinn

You could say that in its first two years in print, Weird Tales was actually three magazines overseen by three different editors: Edwin Baird from March 1923 to April 1924; an uncredited Otis Adelbert Kline for just one issue, May/June/July 1924; and Farnsworth Wright from November 1924 onward. (There weren't any issues in August through October 1924.) Seabury Quinn had the second feature to appear in Weird Tales, not counting "The Eyrie," the regular letters column. That feature, called "Weird Crimes," was in all three versions of Weird Tales and was published under all three editors.

Seabury Quinn (1889-1969) wrote more stories than anyone in Weird Tales. He also wrote fourteen non-fiction articles for the magazine. Half of those were in the series "Weird Crimes." The entries in this series are partly documentary and partly dramatic. You might describe them as historical reenactments, like what you would see today on TV.

The subjects of "Weird Crimes" are mostly serial killers, before serial killer was a term. That makes me wonder whether Quinn was the first author in Weird Tales to write about the serial killer. There is also necrophilia in the seventh and last installment of "Weird Crimes," but by the time it was published in November 1924, that very lurid and sensationalistic subject had already been treated in the magazine, in C.M. Eddy's short story "The Loved Dead," in May/June/July 1924.

The sixth installment of "Weird Crimes" is called "The Werewolf of St. Bonnot." I believe that was the first use of the word werewolf in the title of a story or article in Weird Tales. The subject is a serial killer, not an actual werewolf, but I wonder whether Quinn introduced the concept of the werewolf into Weird Tales as well. (Historically, serial killers were often called werewolves or vampires, before the term serial killer was coined.)

Quinn was already in his early thirties when "Weird Crimes" appeared. His career writing stories for popular magazines had begun in 1918 with two entries in Detective Story Magazine. But even by 1923, he had had only five published stories to his credit, this according to the list in The FictionMags Index. Writing "Weird Crimes" must have been a good exercise for him.

Like H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), Seabury Quinn seems to have been waiting for a magazine like Weird Tales to come along. He had his first story in the magazine in October 1923, the same issue in which "Weird Crimes" made its debut. Entitled "The Phantom Farmhouse," it proved popular and enduring and was even adapted to a second-season episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery in 1971-1972. October 1923, one hundred years past, must have been a good month for Quinn in his budding career as a published author.

"Weird Crimes" by Seabury Quinn, Weird Tales, October 1923 through November 1924:

• "No. 1--Bluebeard" (Oct. 1923)--In the first installment of "Weird Crimes," Quinn wrote of Gilles de Laval (ca. 1405-1440), who is supposed by some to have been the inspiration for the fairy tale character Bluebeard. Quinn's account runs to nearly six pages in the magazine and closes with a note associating Gilles de Laval with Jack the Ripper as victims of "that form of insanity known to modern scientists as algolagnia."

• "No. 2  The Grave Robbers" (Nov. 1923)--The second installment of "Weird Crimes" is a little less than two pages long. Its subjects are Benjamin Shermerkey of Chicago; Samuel Deutsch of New York; and Samuel F. Ware of Atlanta. I did a quick search for these names in newspapers and came up empty on all counts.

• "No. 3  The Magic Mirror Murders" (Jan. 1924)--Andrew Bichel (ca. 1760-1809), an nineteenth-century Bavarian killer, is the subject of the third installment, which runs to a little more than four pages. The title refers to a crystal ball or looking glass that Bichel used to entice his victims. 

• "No. 4  Swiatek, the Beggar" (Feb. 1924)--The subject of the fourth installment of "Weird Crimes" is referred to only by the name Swiatek. Like Andrew Bichel, he was a serial killer, also of the nineteenth century, in his case in Galicia. His story fills almost three pages.

• "No. 5  Mary Blandy" (Apr. 1924)--Mary Blandy (1720-1752) knowingly or unknowingly poisoned her father, and for that she was hanged on Easter Monday, April 6, 1752. Seabury Quinn told her story in four pages and more of the April 1924 issue of Weird Tales.

• "No. 6  The Werewolf of St. Bonnot" (May/June/July 1924)--The sixth installment of "Weird Crimes" appeared in the jumbo-sized triple issue of May/June/July 1924. Its subject is Gilles Garnier (d. 1573), another serial killer, whom Quinn categorized yet again as "a victim," in this case of zoomania, or loupomania. It looks as though Seabury Quinn took a scientific view of murder and psychopathy. The explanation seems to be that serial killers are not responsible for their actions, as they are afflicted with mental illness. Quinn's account runs to three pages, plus his closing note.

• "No. 7  The Human Hyena" (Nov. 1924)--The November 1924 issue, the first after a hiatus of half a year, was also a jumbo-sized issue. It ran to 194 pages in all. "The Human Hyena" was the last installment of "Weird Crimes." I suspect it had been ready for publication earlier in the year and was simply held over during the months that Weird Tales was not in print. The case of the Human Hyena--François Bertrand (1823-1878)--was one of the most sensationalistic in the series. In 1924, Quinn could not have gone into detail very much regarding Bertrand's crimes. Suffice it to say, the term necrophilia was coined because of what Bertrand had done in the cemeteries of Paris. I wonder if Bertrand's story could have been an influence on C.M. Eddy in his writing of "The Loved Dead."

An illustration of François Bertrand reproduced in the French magazine Détective, Number 410 (Sept. 3, 1936). I swiped this image from Wikipedia, who swiped it from somebody else. Here's the caption as it appears in Wikipedia:

Le Vampire, gravure extraite des Mémoires de M. Claude, chef de la police de sûreté sous le second Empire (Paris, Jules Rouff, vers 1880) et reproduite dans la revue Détective, n° 410 (3 septembre 1936).

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Dr. Dorp by Otis Adelbert Kline

As far as I can tell, Dr. Dorp was the first series character to appear in Weird Tales magazine. Created by Otis Adelbert Kline, Dr. Dorp was in three stories all together, two in Weird Tales and one in Amazing Stories. Those three stories are:

• "The Phantom Wolfhound" in Weird Tales, June 1923

• "The Malignant Entity" in Weird Tales, May/June/July 1924 (Kline was editor of that issue.)

• "The Radio Ghost" in Amazing Stories, September 1927

"The Malignant Entity" was reprinted four times, in Amazing Stories, June 1926; Amazing Stories Quarterly, Fall 1934; Strange Offspring (American Fiction #10), edited by Benson Herbert and published in 1946 by Utopian Publications Ltd.; and Amazing Stories, February 1966. Although it's a little derivative, "The Malignant Entity" is the best in the series, I think. If any one of them was going to be reprinted, this one was it.

Dr. Dorp is an occult detective. His identifying characteristic is his gray van dyke beard. He might have a personality. If he does, it doesn't show very well in the stories, which include a lot of exposition. Kline's investigator was probably based on a combination of Sherlock Holmes and William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder.

* * *

"The Phantom Wolfhound" was in the issue of June 1923. It opens like "The Weaving Shadows" by W.H. Holmes, which was in Weird Tales in March 1923, with the investigator in his home being visited by a detective and the detective's client. The detective is named Hoyne, whereas Holmes' detective is named Rhyne. So Hoyne in Kline and Rhyne in Holmes. The client is named Ritzky. He is an older man who shares his household with his twelve-year-old orphaned niece. In other words, this is something of an Uncle story. And in other words, the girl is of the right age to bring on some poltergeist activity. (There is a girl in "The Weaving Shadows," too.) Dr. Dorp and Detective Hoyne witness ectoplasm, called "psychoplasm," issuing from her mouth as she sleeps. Dorp takes a sample of the stuff, which is an actual material substance, just as in "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," Kline's serial from the March and April issues of "The Unique Magazine."

Dr. Dorp is called a "psychologist" in this story. He is the author of a book called Investigations of Materialization Phenomena. Like Carnacki, he uses mechanical equipment to detect ghosts. Again, as in "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," ghosts or spirits are treated as material phenomena. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is referred to in the story, as is Baron Von Schrenk, also known as Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing (1862-1929), a real-life investigator and author of Phenomena of Materialization: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics (1923). Dr. Dorp's title is similar to Baron Von Schrenk's. Both "The Phantom Wolfhound" and Von Schrenk's book were published in 1923.

Professor James Braddock, the uncle in "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," is Dr. Dorp's friend and colleague, although he doesn't make an appearance in the story. Like that earlier story, "The Phantom Wolfhound" is set in Chicago. ("The Thing of  Thousand Shapes" is also set near Peoria, Illinois.) There are detailed descriptions of a complex physical environment within the Ritzky home. That's okay, I guess, in a detective story, but descriptions of complex environments don't really make for good prose or good storytelling. James Agee was able to pull it off in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, but then that was a documentary work.

"The Phantom Wolfhound" is, like I said, an Uncle story. As it turns out, the uncle was slowly poisoning his niece so that he could get her fortune. She kills him off with her psychoplasmic hound, which Uncle had shot in life. The hound comes back in death and the niece thereby exacts her revenge and defends herself against impending murder at Uncle's hands. The story ends in all italics.

Dr. Dorp is not like Sherlock Holmes in that he doesn't have a discernible personality. Hoyne acts as his Watson, and the dead Russian wolfhound as something like the Hound of the Baskervilles.

* * *

"The Malignant Entity" was in the triple-sized anniversary issue of May/June/July 1924, edited by Otis Adelbert Kline. It's definitely the better of the two stories. And like the first Dr. Dorp story, it's connected to an earlier story, for "The Malignant Entity" is essentially "Ooze" in the city. (As you know by now, "Ooze," by Anthony M. Rud, was the cover story of the first issue of Weird Tales, March 1923.)

Mr. Evans, a writer, is the narrator of the story. ("The Phantom Wolfhound" is told in the third person.) Chief McGraw is a detective, and there are two Irish police officers, Rooney and Burke. Other characters include a fingerprint expert named Hirsch and the coroner, named Haynes. Haynes was in Kline's earlier story "The Corpse on the Third Slab" (Weird Tales, Aug./Sept. 1923). There is also mention of a dead man named Immune Benny, who "is alleged to have committed numerous crimes, among which were several revolting murders, without ever having been convicted." We don't know it yet, but Benny appears to have been a psychopath. His face shows up at the end of "The Malignant Entity," and the story itself ends, once again, in all italics.

There is another dead man. He was Professor Albert Townsend, who, although he was a professor and although he was named Albert, was not the same man as Professor Albert Randall in "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes." And his daughter, named Dorothy, is not the same daughter as in Kline's previous story. Her name is Ruth. Both Dorothy's mother and Ruth's mother are missing in action. Note to all women: never marry a scientist or pseudoscientist engaged in research on the fringes. Yes, you will have a beautiful daughter, but then you will die.

Dr. Dorp says of Professor Albert Townsend: "Who hasn’t heard of him and his queer theories about creating life from inert matter?" After a while, Dorp adds, "He has been working day and night in his effort to prove his theory that a living organism can be created from inorganic matter." Townsend's subject was protoplasm, the stuff that was supposed to have been in the primordial ooze from which all life spontaneously arose. In other words, Townsend was pursuing a pseudoscientific idea held by supposed scientists and science-minded people from the 1800s even unto today. Look where it got him.

In "Ooze," the giant amoeba lives in a pond on the grounds of a backwoods Alabama estate. In "The Malignant Entity," it's in a vat of "heavy albuminous or gelatinous solution" in Townsend's laboratory. In a long and interesting passage, Dr. Dorp postulates:

     "What is life? Broadly defined as we recognize it on this earth, it is a temporary union of mind and matter. There may be, and probably is another kind of life which is simply mind without matter, but we of the material world know it not. To us, mind without matter or matter without mind are equally dead. The moneron [sic] has a mind--a soul--a something that makes it a living individual. Call it what you will. The professor's cell of man-made protoplasm has not. Can you conceive of any possible way in which he could, having reached this stage, create an individual mind or soul, an essence of life that, once united with his cell of protoplasm would form an entity?"

     "It seems impossible," I admitted.

     "So it seems," he replied, "yet it is only on such an hypothesis that I can account for the mysterious deaths of the professor and Officer Rooney."

     "But I don't see how a moneron [sic] or a creature remotely resembling one could kill and completely devour a man in less than two hours," I objected.

     "Nor I," agreed the doctor. "In fact I am of the opinion that, if the professor did succeed in creating life, the result was unlike any creature large or small, now inhabiting the earth--a hideous monster, perhaps, with undreamed of powers and possibilities--an alien organism among billions of other organisms, hating them all because it has nothing in common with them--a malignant entity governed solely by the primitive desire for food and growth with only hatred of and envy for the more fortunate natural creatures around it."

I have speculated before that the psychopathic killer is a blank, that is, a man without a soul. In Dr. Dorp's theorizing, maybe that killer is matter without mind, i.e., without spirit or a soul. The psychopath kills, and so does the giant amoeba or murderous cell in "The Malignant Entity." Being without a soul, it envies and hates those beings that have souls, or an animating spirit. (Remember that anima means "soul" or "spirit.") One of my ideas is that the psychopathic killer wants to know what makes us go, and so he cuts us apart in order to get at what he can only believe is the mechanism beneath the skin. Knowing that he lacks something but not knowing what it is, he is murderously envious and full of hatred for the rest of humanity.

There is a memorable sequence in "The Malignant Entity" in which Dorp and his associates chase the nucleus of the cell around the laboratory like in the old sing-along activity of following the bouncing ball. The nucleus escapes but remains within the building. Described as "plasmic jelly," it consumes a mouse in the basement, and that's where it is finally caught. The nucleus is also described as putting out pseudopods, and at one point it is said to look like a cuttlefish, which is of course a tentacled creature. Now we're back to earlier themes in this series on one hundred years of Weird Tales. In his diary, discovered in a hidden safe, Townsend wrote that his giant amoeba was made of "syntheplasm." Townsend finally brought it to life on September 23 of an unknown year. Maybe that was one hundred and one years ago this month.

In "The Malignant Entity," Otis Adelbert Kline continued in his habit of mixing real people and fictional characters in his stories. In this case, the real-life psychic investigator was Sir Oliver Lodge (1851-1940). That leads to a broader point, namely, that Kline seemed to have been building a universe of interconnected characters, themes, and concepts, drawing from his own stories but also seemingly inspired by other authors published in Weird Tales. He even has his own grimoires in books written by real-life investigators. If this had been Lovecraft, we might call it a mythos.

* * *

Published in Amazing Stories in September 1927, "The Radio Ghost" takes place in the Chicago area, just like its predecessors. Once again, Evans is narrator. There's another niece, Greta Van Loan, and her uncle, the late Gordon Van Loan, who like other uncles in Kline's stories is an investigator of psychic phenomena. Her cousin is Ernest Hegel, who turns out in the end to be a Scooby-Doo-type villain. There is mention of the Society for Psychical Research, also of real-life psychic and medium Eusapia Palladino (1854-1918). (She was real-life. Being a psychic and a medium is of course not real-life.) Fictional characters are Easton, a civil engineer; Brandon, an electrical engineer; and detectives Hogan and Rafferty. Hogan has an Irish accent. Among the words in his vocabulary is shenanigans.

Radio figures pretty prominently in "The Radio Ghost." The title tells you as much. Remember that the last of these Dr. Dorp stories was in a magazine published by radio and television pioneer Hugo Gernsback. Gernsback's book Radio for All, published in 1922, is mentioned in "The Radio Ghost." I would call that an early example of product placement in a work of fiction. In fact, I detect in the whole story a strong odor of commercial promotion of Gernsback, his products, and his ideas. There are detailed descriptions of technology in "The Radio Ghost," as was so common in early science fiction. It's no wonder Gernsback published this story, although you might consider that "The Radio Ghost" is not even really a story but a how-to and a speculation on radio and the uses of radio, then and into the future.

* * *

Otis Adelbert Kline was an interesting case. He wasn't the best or most imaginative author. He was entirely too caught up in the nineteenth-century hoax/fraud of Spiritualism, mediumship, and ectoplasm. And yet he was capable of formulating interesting ideas as a basis for his stories. The passage quoted above about mind and matter suggests an insight into a human problem, that is, of the man who hates his fellow creatures because he cannot understand them, coming as he does from the outside, and lacking as he does a soul or spirit, or what makes a man a human being after all. Sometimes you feel like giving up on a writer after you have read a little of what he wrote. I'm not ready to do that yet with Otis Adelbert Kline. However, if a body of fiction is a coat, a writer should avoid hanging his on the hook of a shabby and pathetic belief system such as Spiritualism, Theosophy, Marxism, or Scientology. It will only end up on the floor, dusty and rumpled, trod upon and ruined.

William F. Heitman's illustration for "The Malignant Entity" by Otis Adelbert Kline in Weird Tales, May/June/July 1924. The character in the middle is Kline's occult detective, Doctor Dorp. That's poor Professor Townsend on the floor.

And an illustration by Frank R. Paul for Hugo Gernsback's Radio for All, published in 1922. The view is of an office worker fifty years into the future. Many of the things in this fanciful illustration have actually come about, though not necessarily by 1972 and not only by way of radio technology.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Earl Peirce, Jr. (1917-1983)-Part Six

Peirce After 1940

Following is a list of published stories and letters by Earl Peirce, Jr., taken from The FictionMags Index. I have broken the list down by decade. Peirce's contributions to Weird Tales--seven stories and four letters--are indicated by boldface type.

1935-1939

• Letter in "The Eyrie," Weird Tales (Nov. 1935)
• Letter in "The Eyrie," Weird Tales (June 1936)
• "Doom of the House of Duryea" in Weird Tales (Oct. 1936)
• Letter in "The Eyrie," Weird Tales (Nov. 1936)
• "The Last Archer" in Weird Tales (Mar. 1937)
• "The Death Mask" in Weird Tales (Apr. 1937)
• "My Grave Awaits Me" in Dime Mystery Magazine (July 1937)
• Letter in "The Eyrie," Weird Tales (July 1937)
• "The Homicidal Diary" in Weird Tales (Oct. 1937)
• "The Cat" in Fantasmagoria (Winter 1937)
• "The White Rat," with Bruce Bryan, in Weird Tales (Sept. 1938)
• "Satan Fills the Morgue" in Strange Detective Mysteries (Nov./Dec. 1938)
• "Mum’s the Word for Murder" in Dime Detective Magazine (Feb. 1939)
• "The Stroke of Twelve" in Weird Tales (June/July 1939)
• "A Killer and His Brother" in Detective Tales (Aug. 1939)

1940-1949

• "Portrait of a Bride" in Weird Tales (Jan. 1940)
• "Legacy of the Dead" in Terror Tales (July 1940)
• "Tailor-Made Shroud" in Detective Tales (Dec. 1940)
• "The Shadow of Nirvana" in Strange Stories (Feb. 1941)
• "Bluecoat’s Birthright" in Detective Tales (May 1941)
• "Greetings from the Grave" in Detective Tales (Mar. 1943)
• "Murdertime Gal" in Detective Tales (Dec. 1946) [Randolph Barron--presumably Peirce's detective character]
• "Crazy to Kill" in Detective Tales (Jan. 1947) [Randolph Barron]
• "Escape" in Detective Tales (Oct. 1949)

I see two patterns in this list. First, Peirce's contributions to Weird Tales came to an end in January 1940. Second, Peirce began shifting away from weird fiction and towards detective fiction in the late 1930s. By mid 1941, the shift was complete: his last five published stories were for Detective Tales, and in 1949, after just thirteen years, his career as a pulp writer and published author seems to have ended.

In regards to the first pattern, I think it's useful to know that Weird Tales also went through a transition at about the same time. In 1938, Short Stories, Inc., purchased the property and moved its offices to New York City. Although Farnsworth Wright remained as editor, he was eased out in early 1940. The March issue was the last credited to him as editor. (By the end of the year he was in his grave.) Dorothy McIlwraith took over in May 1940. I don't know that she cleaned house exactly, but that began a new era in Weird Tales. An analysis of contributors before and after May 1940 might prove worthwhile in cases like this. The point is that Peirce's contributions to Weird Tales ended with the end of Wright's tenure as editor.

The second pattern shows another parallel with the writing career of Robert Bloch. In an interview with Darrell Schweitzer, conducted in 1982, Bloch talked about the changes he made in his writing in the late 1930s and early 1940s:

I found that there was a greater market for humor in the science fiction field at that time than there was in the fantasy field, and I liked to write humor, so I just went on from there. I would say that it may very well have helped to broaden my writing, but I had already begun to change my style. I had departed from the Lovecraft thing in 1939 or 1940. It wasn't just in science fiction, because my fantasy was also changing style. I had been experimenting with writing style. I got into mystery and suspense because I admire the work of people like Raymond Chandler. (1)

So it looks like Peirce made the same kind of switch as Bloch, and at about the same time. But if there was any direct connection between the actions of these two men, it has probably been lost in time. By the way, Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) had his first detective story in Black Mask in 1933. In 1939-1940, his first two novels, both starring Philip Marlowe, were published. These were The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940), which were not as well liked by critics as they were by readers and writers, including John Steinbeck and S.J. Perelman. (2) Despite what the critics might have thought, mystery, detective, and crime stories were wildly popular at the time. According to Chandler's biographer, Tom Hiney, "one in every four books lent by American libraries in the 1940s was a mystery story." (3) Maybe Peirce, Bloch, and writers were leading while at the same time following a trend.

* * *

There were also big changes in the life of Earl Peirce during the early 1940s. On May 7, 1941, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. On December 26, 1941, with the United States at war with Japan and Germany, he married nineteen-year-old Gloria Hallett Grimm (1922-1999). He was then just twenty-four. Peirce and his three brothers served in the U.S. Navy or Naval Reserve during the war. His older brother Beach was killed in action in the Pacific in June 1942, at about the time as or shortly after the Battle of Midway. That left Earl Peirce as the oldest of the Peirce boys. He served four and a half years all together, including as a pharmacist's mate on board the hospital ship USS Benevolence. Peirce separated from the Navy on October 13, 1945.

By then or shortly thereafter, young Peirces had begun arriving. There were about eight all together from one or two marriages. I won't name them. I hope some are still living. It's nice to think, too, that Peirce had some unpublished stories among his papers and that they are still in existence. In any case, Robert Bloch remembered:

In late '41 I visited him there with my friend Harold Gauer: he had married and was (I seem to recall) working for the Navy Department. That was the last I saw or heard of him for at least twenty-five years [i.e., until the mid 1960s]. Then he showed up here, with a different wife, and spent a day with me. He had changed so much that I'd never have recognized him, and there wasn't a trace of the rather intense and imaginative fantasy devotee who had once dreamed of starting an organization to rule the world--the "Si-Fan," modeled on Sax Rohmer's secret society in the Fu Manchu series. (4)

If that was in the mid 1960s, then Earl Peirce was only then approaching fifty--still young, but on the other hand, times change. In 1965, he was in Silver Spring, Maryland, where other members of his family lived. (His father died there in 1978.) Earl Stanley Peirce, Jr., died on June 6, 1983, in Newton, New Jersey. He was just sixty-six years old.

* * *

I sense one more possibility or pattern in the writing careers of Peirce, Bloch, and others like them of the 1930s and '40s. This is my own hypostulatin', as a friend of mine puts it. See what you think of it. It begins with Scooby-Doo.

The Scooby-Doo-style plot begins with happenings that are interpreted as being supernatural. There is creaking and clanking, moaning and other frights. Everybody panics, but once all of the running around is done, the mysterious happenings are revealed to have a merely mundane explanation. I haven't read the early gothic romances, but I think they follow the same kind of plot line, that what at first appears to be supernatural is in actuality not. Only later did the gothic romance expand to include stories of the supernatural, or as in the case of Frankenstein, the super-scientific.

The line leading from the gothic romance to weird fiction isn't exactly straight or unbroken. I think it's fair to say, though, that one comes more or less from the other. The twentieth century writer of weird fiction was confronted with a problem, though. I have written about it before. The problem is this: how do you write a story about supernatural happenings in an age in which science and reason are supreme? That problem was compounded as the century progressed and especially as World War II approached and then raged. What is writer of essentially romantic or gothic sensibilities to do when this is the way the world has turned?

Here's my hypostulatin': one solution was to transform the gothic romance into the hard-boiled detective story of the 1930s and '40s. Instead of setting his or her story in the dark, forbidding, and (physically) isolated rural place, such as a castle or an abbey, the writer moves it to the equally dark, forbidding, and (psychologically) isolated city. The hard-boiled detective remains as the story's romantic hero, exemplified by Chandler's latter-day knight-errant, Philip Marlowe. Unlike the supernatural gothic romance, the detective story plays it straight, but the supernatural element remains in a way, in the form of a stalking evil or depravity afoot in the city. Often in this new brand of romance, the gothic or medieval monster is transformed into the scientific monster of twentieth century, either the psychopath or sociopath, as in I Wake Up Screaming (1941) or He Walked by Night (1948), or the representative of the fanatic totalitarian mass movement, as in Pickup on South Street (1953). There might even be a super-scientific element as in Kiss Me Deadly (1955), which might better be described as science fiction (in the end of apocalyptic intensity) than a detective story. In all of this, we should remember that film noir (a label coined in French theorizing), which is essentially the hard-boiled detective story converted to film, grew out of and was influenced by German Expressionism and the horror movies of the 1920s through the 1940s: The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Frankenstein (1931), The Wolfman (1941), or I Walked with a Zombie (1943) as proto- or peri-film noir. The whole thing seems to have come full circle in the television show Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-1975), in which the detective, in this case a reporter, investigates supernatural happenings in the city at night, things that the police would rather just have ended in Scooby-Doo fashion. That's how they explain them, too. (5)

The upshot is that it might only have been a natural development for writers like Peirce and Bloch to have turned to detective stories once America had: a) become pretty thoroughly urbanized and industrialized, at least in popular culture; b) Science or at least quasi-science had slain God and religion; and c) perhaps most importantly, World War II came along and wiped out the romantic fantasies of previous ages.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) "Robert Bloch Interviewed by Darrell Schweitzer" in Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle (Centipede Press, 2009), pages 236-237.

(2) Raymond Chandler: A Biography by Tom Hiney (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997), page 114.

(3) Ditto, page 119.

(4) Interview with Graeme Flanagan, presumably in Robert Bloch: A Bio-Bibliography by Graeme Flanagan (Canberra City, Australia: Author, July 1979).

(5) Although H.P. Lovecraft claimed not to be able to write a detective story, what else is "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928) but a tale of detection (and a good one at that)?

"The Stroke of Twelve," in Weird Tales, June 1939, was Earl Peirce's sixth story for the magazine. It looks to be his shortest to date. It's a modest story, one of those "he got what he deserved" kind of tales. I see it as a step down from his previous entries. By the time he wrote it, Peirce had definitely been afflicted by adverbitis. Here's a sample: "His eyes stared incredulously, fearfully stupidly." That's three -ly words in one short sentence, which can sometimes be three too many in a story, let alone in a sentence. Worse still is another of Peirce's supposed adverbs, "stone-facedly." (Supposed because it's not even a word.) And that bit of his eyes staring. Eyes don't stare. People stare. It's like saying, "His hand picked up a cup of coffee" or "His legs walked across the room." His hand didn't do it. His legs didn't do it. He did it. These are the kinds of things that keep pulp fiction, or genre fiction in general, from being taken seriously. It's why pulp writers and readers continue to be seen as essentially sub-literate.

A gallery of covers with Earl Peirce's byline, from top to bottom: Strange Stories (Feb. 1941), Detective Tales (Mar. 1943), Detective Tales (Dec. 1946), and Detective Tales (Jan. 1947). At least one of those looks like an Earl Peirce cover story; he seems to have been getting some traction in these detective magazines as the 1940s went on. Then it all came to an end in 1949. Was Peirce too busy with babies, children, and work by then? I just don't know.

Thanks to The FictionMags Index and to Randal A. Everts.
Text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Earl Peirce, Jr. (1917-1983)-Part Four

Peirce & Bloch

Last week I wrote about how Robert Bloch came to know Weird Tales and H.P. Lovecraft. This time it's Earl Peirce's turn.

We know a whole lot less about Earl Peirce, Jr., than we do about Bloch or Lovecraft. That's one of the reasons I misidentified him so badly at the outset. The evidence was there all along. However, it was locked away in objects formerly known as books. These were and are unseen by the very nearly blind eyes of the Internet.

The first quote below is from an interview that Bloch did with Graeme Flanagan. I presume this to be from a booklet entitled Robert Bloch: A Bio-Bibliography by Graeme Flanagan (Canberra City, Australia: Author, July 1979). The second is from the book Once Around the Bloch: An Unauthorized Autobiography by who else but Robert Bloch (Tor, 1993). I don't have either of these books and I'm not the one who came up with the quotes. They're actually on a message board on the website Ancestry.com, put there by J.M. Rajala, who co-edited Lovecraftian Voyages by Kenneth W. Faig, Jr. (Hippocampus Press, 2007). Here is the URL and link to Mr. or Ms. Rajala's posting:

https://www.ancestry.com/boards/localities.northam.usa.states.connecticut.unknown/4905.1.1.2

Here is the first quote, from Mr. Flanagan's interview with Bloch:

I knew Earl Peirce Jr. in Milwaukee as a fan in 1935-37. He was a bright personable young man, about my age, whose father was in the U.S. Forestry Department [sic]. He contacted me, expressing an interest in writing, and I encouraged it--introducing him to my circle of friend and (via mail) to various writers I knew. He wrote and sold several stories--"Doom of the House of Duryea," a vampire yarn, was his best--then moved to Washington with his family. In late '41 I visited him there with my friend Harold Gauer: he had married and was (I seem to recall) working for the Navy Department. That was the last I saw or heard of him for at least twenty-five years. Then he showed up here, with a different wife, and spent a day with me. He had changed so much that I'd never have recognized him, and there wasn't a trace of the rather intense and imaginative fantasy devotee who had once dreamed of starting an organization to rule the world--the "Si-Fan," modeled on Sax Rohmer's secret society in the Fu Manchu series.

So at last we have something firsthand and personal about Peirce. We know or can be pretty sure that he lived in Laramie, Wyoming, from his birth in 1917 until 1921. From then until 1933 he was with his family in Syracuse, New York. That means that he turned twelve--the Golden Age of Science Fiction--in Syracuse in 1929, the same year in which the term science fiction was first used in print. It was around that time, too, that science fiction and fantasy pulp magazines began to proliferate:

• Amazing Stories, 1926
• Amazing Stories Annual, 1927
• Tales of Magic and Mystery, 1927
• Ghost Stories, 1928
• Amazing Stories Quarterly, 1928
• Air Wonder Stories, 1929
• Science Wonder Stories, 1929
• Wonder Stories Quarterly, 1929
• Astounding Stories (later Astounding Science-Fiction), 1930
• Scientific Detective Monthly, 1930
• Wonder Stories, 1930

We don't have a discovery story for Peirce like that of Bloch, who found Weird Tales at a Chicago train station in 1927. But as Rage Against the Machine sang, what better place than here? What better time than now? It seems pretty likely to me that Peirce discovered science fiction and fantasy in the mid to late 1920s and certainly no later than the early to mid 1930s. (1)

Peirce arrived in Wisconsin in 1933, first in the north woods, then in late 1933 or early 1934 in Milwaukee. If Bloch's memory was still good forty years after the fact, then Peirce would have been in Milwaukee for a couple of years before he and Bloch met in 1935. Like I said, it seems pretty likely that Peirce was already a fan by then. As Bloch recalled, he was a "rather intense and imaginative fantasy devotee." It sounds like that's how Bloch found him and not how he made him.

The second quote posted by J.M. Rajala is from Bloch's autobiography:

[U]pon becoming a professional writer I began to receive communications from readers with aspirations of their own. One such was Milwaukee resident Earl Peirce, Jr.; I encouraged his successful submission of stories to Weird Tales." (p. 204) 

So maybe Peirce saw Bloch's name and address in an issue of Weird Tales and that's how the two met. Anyway, Peirce had his first letter in "The Eyrie" in November 1935, then two more the following year, in June and November 1936. His first story, "Doom of the House of Duryea," was published in between, in October 1936.

Peirce & Lovecraft

According to J.M Rajala, "H. P. Lovecraft had remarked in a letter in June 1935 that 'Young Peirce seems to be a very interesting character, & I surely wouldn't mind hearing from him some day'." Lovecraft soon got his wish. I don't know the dates of Peirce's missives to Lovecraft, but there were two that went in the opposite direction. Both were published in Lovecraft's Selected Letters, volumes in which Lovecraft's letters are numbered and dated. In this case, they are Number 900 from November 28, 1936, and Number 925 from February 17, 1937. The second came just two months before Lovecraft's death and is one of the last of Lovecraft's letters reprinted in Selected Letters.

So, during two years in the life of Earl Peirce, Jr., from 1935 to 1937, he met Robert Bloch, wrote four letters printed in Weird Tales (the fourth is transcribed below), wrote two letters to H.P. Lovecraft and received two in return, and had four stories published in Weird Tales. At ages eighteen to twenty, he must have been thrilled beyond belief--he must have felt that he really would rule the world.

But then things began to change. The shadow of Lovecraft's death passed over Weird Tales and his circle. World war approached. And perhaps most importantly, Earl Peirce, Jr., began to grow up.

Two years came and went, and the Peirce family moved again, this time to Washington, D.C., where Peirce's father was appointed chief of the Division of Co-operative Forest Protection within the U.S. Forest Service. (2) We don't know when that move happened, but Peirce's last letter in Weird Tales (July 1937), in which he noted the death of H.P. Lovecraft in March 1937, was dispatched from the nation's capital:

The news of Lovecraft's passing, although not the shock of surprize, [sic] is nevertheless the shock of an irreparable loss, not alone to WT, but to his admirers and acquaintances the world over. I shall always regret that I never had the good fortune of meeting him personally, but I am truly grateful for the impulse which prompted me to write to him a few months ago, and that I have two letters in his own hand. What most impressed me were his sincerity and genuineness, which qualities were not alone in making him unique among modern writers. You have my sympathy, for this must be a hard time, but I imagine it is a feeling of pride for you to know that so many of his stories originally appeared in WEIRD TALES. Unlike many other men of genius, Lovecraft was fortunate enough to be living at a time when his work was recognized as outstanding. With the passing of time this recognition will become more universal and his work will take its proper place in the world's great literature. (p. 124) (3)

Lovecraft's work hasn't quite assumed a place "in the world's great literature," as Peirce prophesied, but Lovecraft and his stories are now known all over. His young admirer may have been filled with a fannish kind of enthusiasm, but at age twenty, Peirce briefly saw the future when he wrote, With the passing of time this recognition will become more universal . . .

To be continued . . .

Notes
(1) In 1924, at about age seven, Peirce's name was mentioned in the Roll of Honor in St. Nicholas magazine for a drawing he had submitted. That may have been the first time his name was in print, and though his drawing wasn't shown, he could only have been thrilled at what he had accomplished. 
(2) In 1938, Earl S. Peirce, Sr., was assigned to the timber salvage project in New England after the hurricane of 1938. Given his penchant for incorporating real events in his stories, Lovecraft might have written about the hurricane had he lived.
(3) Peirce wrote that Lovecraft's death was "not the shock of surprize" (sic). Did he know something that most of the rest of Lovecraft's circle didn't know? I guess we need that last letter from Lovecraft to Peirce, dated February 17, 1937.

Earl Peirce's fourth published story, "The Homicidal Diary," was in Weird Tales in October 1937, right after "The Shunned House" by H.P. Lovecraft. The illustration for Peirce's story was by Virgil Finlay. It's pretty lurid. In the early 1950s, comic books would be condemned for publishing images like this one.

"The Homicidal Diary" is the also the fourth of Earl Peirce's stories I have read. It might be my favorite among them, despite the subject matter. As in his previous story, "The Death Mask" (Apr. 1937), there is a proposed scientific or pseudoscientific explanation for the events described in the story. However, when this one wraps up, we can't be sure that the explanation is a good one.

There is talk of hypnotism in "The Homicidal Diary." There is also a subtext of what we recognize now as psychopathy or sociopathy. The eponymous diary was written by a fictional serial killer, Emil Drukker of Cologne, Germany, who has been executed for his crimes. I imagine that Peirce was inspired (if that's the word for it) by news stories of real-life German serial killers such as Johann Mayer or Peter Kürten, the so-called Vampire of Düsseldorf. The twist is that the diary seems to have a life and influence of its own. An out-of-place touch in the story is in the mention of Drukker Castle. It may have been 1937, and the story may have some grounding in science or pseudoscience, but the old gothic castle still stands.

I won't give things away, but reading this story made me think of "Yours Truly--Jack the Ripper" by Robert Bloch. That story wasn't in Weird Tales until July 1943. That makes me wonder, in the literary association of Bloch and Peirce, just who influenced whom? Had Bloch already started to move towards telling tales of psychos and killers by the late 1930s when Peirce's story appeared? Again, my lack of knowledge of Bloch's career is showing. 

One more thing: there is a scene in "The Homicidal Diary" that makes me think of "The Tell-Tale Heart" by that first (or second, if Thomas De Quincey was the first) chronicler of the torments of the Abbie Normal brain, Edgar Allan Poe. I wonder if Earl Peirce ever realized that his first and last initials were the same as Poe's, or if he ever in his childhood combined Poe's and Ambrose Bierce's surnames to arrive at an approximation of his own.

Peirce's story wasn't in Startling Mystery Stories in the issue Fall 1967, but Virgil Finlay's illustration was. For some reason, though, the designer or engraver flipped it. I don't know what story it illustrates in that issue.

Acknowledgment is made to J.M. Rajala for quotes and other information.
Original text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Religions of Weird Fiction

I'll get right to the point: there aren't any, as far as I know--religions of weird fiction, that is. If you look to the right, you'll see a label, "The Religions of Science Fiction." You'll see also that I have written a lot on this topic, and when you read what I have written, you'll understand that when I refer to the religions of science fiction, I'm talking about religious, pseudo-religious, and quasi-religious beliefs that have arisen from science fiction and its precursors. Chief among these are flying saucers, dating from 1947, and Dianetics/Scientology, from 1950. There are also what you might call proto-science-fictional religions in Theosophy and "I AM" Activity, and there are similar beliefs that have come along since the 1940s and '50s. Shaverism came from that era, too, and though it doesn't reach the level of a science-fictional religion, it has its own religious, pseudo-religious, or quasi-religious characteristics.

At first you might think that religion and science fiction don't go together. After all, science brooks nothing when it comes to unreason, superstition, or claims for the existence of anything supernatural. The other side of that, though, is that science clearly doesn't satisfy certain basic human needs. Believers leave religion and a belief in God behind them, but because they are believers, they need a replacement, and so they search endlessly for something to stand in the place of God. (More on that in a while.) Scientists and science-minded people, then, too easily fall into belief in the religions of science--Scientism, Darwinism (alternatively, Lysenkoism), materialism, atheism, Utopianism, Marxism or "scientific socialism," environmentalism, the cult of global warming, etc. Likewise, readers, writers, and fans of science fiction also fall too easily for the religions of science fiction. At least one of those religions--flying saucers--is pretty well harmless. Another, which shall remain nameless, has done great harm and has even brought about the deaths of some of its current or former adherents.

Weird fiction doesn't have that problem. Writers of weird fiction (notwithstanding Lovecraft's materialism--more on him in a while, too) concede the existence of the supernatural even before they begin. They seem to have their heads on straight and don't fall for pseudo-religious nonsense. They don't suffer the fate of their materialistic characters, who, because they can't bend, break. And so, as far as I know, no author of weird fiction has ever spawned a real-world religion or cult. Likewise, as far as I know, no reader or fan of weird fiction has ever followed his or her favorite author down the rabbit hole of a made-up religion. So my title, "The Religions of Weird Fiction," is about nothing at all. If anyone has a suggestion or assertion that there is or might be an actual religion, pseudo-religion, or quasi-religion of weird fiction, I'm happy to listen.

* * *

In doing research for my series on Harold S. Farnese, I ran across this passage in Lovecraft: A Biography by L. Sprague de Camp (Ballantine, 1976):

He [Lovecraft] argued science and religion with his correspondents. [. . . ] With Catholic Derleth he was polite about religion. But when, in early 1931, Frank [Belknap] Long flirted with Catholicism, Lovecraft went after him hammer and tongs: "that incredible & anti-social anachronism (1) called the Popish church . . . . Popery fosters everything effeminate & repugnant." Although on other occasions he admitted religion to have some practical social value, he now declared: "I hate & despise religion" because, he said, it lied about basic, scientifically established facts. (p. 372)

I have wondered before whether Lovecraft was anti-Catholic. (I wrote on this topic in "Lovecraft and the Mass Rock" on October 21, 2015, here.) Well, if de Camp described the situation accurately, now we know that he was. Lovecraft's comments here seem to me unsophisticated and noncritical, his tone overwrought. I suspect that his hostility towards Catholicism was a kind of knee-jerk reaction that would have come naturally to an old-fashioned Yankee Protestant or Puritan. We should remember that he was also a nativist and that he lived during a high water mark of the very anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan in America. Only recently (1928) had there been a presidential campaign in which very strong anti-Catholic sentiment showed itself, not only in the United States at large but also in Lovecraft's home state of Rhode Island. (1)

There's more to that passage from de Camp's book, though. Here is another passage:

When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! This, for a jew [sic], crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God's son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed--whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining pretensions--is perhaps the most ancient piece of this heritage. A god who begets children with a mortal woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more courts, but look for the signs of the impending end of the world; a justice that accepts the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone who orders his disciples to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of a beyond to which death is the portal; the form of the cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and ignominy of the cross--how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed? (2)

That's not from Lovecraft--it was actually written by Friedrich Nietzsche, and it comes from his Human, All too Human (1878). Note the same hostility and incredulity as in Lovecraft. Note the similar words or phrases, too, Catholicism as an "anachronism" and Christianity as "an antiquity projected into our own times from remote prehistory." In addition, Lovecraft sensed what Nietzsche articulated when the former wrote, "Popery fosters everything effeminate & repugnant," for Nietzsche famously criticized Christianity as a religion that feminizes men, or at least unmans them, for example:

Christianity [. . .] has waged a deadly war against this higher type of man; it has placed all the basic instincts of this type under the ban; and out of these instincts it has distilled evil and the Evil One: the strong man as the typically reprehensible man, the "reprobate." Christianity has sided with all that is weak and base, with all failures; it has made an ideal of whatever contradicts the instinct of the strong life to preserve itself. [Emphasis in the original, from The Antichrist (1888).] (3)

There are of course lots of other quotes like this from Nietzsche. Unlike Lovecraft, however, Nietzsche was not so keen on science. Both, however, were conservative and aristocratic. Anyway, I wonder, was Lovecraft familiar with the writings of Nietzsche? Or did he arrive at some of the same conclusions and for some of the same reasons (at whatever intellectual or philosophical level he may have occupied) as did Nietzsche?

* * *

It seems to me that human beings have a need to believe in things that are infinite, eternal, and absolute, and that when we give up on a belief in God as the source of these things, we are faced with one of two choices: we can either try to find a replacement for God, or we can can try to live without them. Both paths lead to the same destination, for it seems to me also that we have a drive in us towards annihilation, especially self-annihilation, as well as self-defeat and self-destruction. Both paths are blocked, I think, by belief, but if there is no belief and no block, we generally proceed towards self-destruction. Whether Lovecraft would have been saved by a different belief system than the one he held, and whether we would now have his art as he created it if he had believed in something different, we can't really say. But he was certainly lost in the end by believing in what I guess was essentially nothing.

* * *

I came across a really interesting idea recently, but I can't say where I found it. The idea is that there are those among us who are convinced that the Creation is flawed and that it must be corrected. We see this on a small scale in popular culture when we go to a Batman or Superman movie and are treated yet again to the character's origin story, now overhauled by the newest moviemaker. We see it also in the Star Wars saga, in which George Lucas, who is the creator, goes back and alters the original form of his own creation, moreover, when the makers of every new Star Wars movie lay waste to what was done by those who came before them.

Anyway, the problem with the idea that the Creation is flawed comes about when we as human beings believe that we can make it right, that we are smart enough, wise enough, and visionary enough to remake it all according to our own ideas, schemes, and systems. This goes beyond the concept in tragedy of hubris and into the territory of an extraordinary arrogance and rebellion. People who dream up these things--intellectual ideas, intellectualized schemes or systems for living, prescriptions on how the rest of us must live--are in love with their own minds and their own ideas. They are possessed of a pride so extreme that the word "pride" no longer applies. We might ask, what is the source of this extreme pride and arrogance? How did your ideas and schemes and systems get to be so fine? How do you know these things so well and with such conviction? The answer that seems to come back is this: I know because I know. This is a Gnosticism for the modern age. Marx is a perfect example of this kind of thinking, but Madame Blavatsky, Richard Shaver, and L. Ron Hubbard also fit the bill to one degree or another.

In any case, last week in the U.S. Senate, we saw this phenomenon at work. We saw a group of people who appear to be in love with the fineness of their own minds, their own ideas, their own schemes, their own systems, their own innovations. Their pride is in themselves. They seem convinced that they are in possession of the knowledge and wisdom necessary to correct the perceived flaws in the Creation. They know because they know. There need not be any other explanation or justification, and nothing must stand in their way in the deadly serious business of remaking it. Their belief seems to be that they are God or gods and that they possess God-like or god-like qualities. Their quest is for power, as one of their company so easily saw and diagnosed as the condition running like an epidemic among them. What they don't realize is that they can never and will never have that kind of power. They will never be able to remake the Creation, for it is what it is intended to be. It is unalterable by human effort. They cannot bend reality to their wills, and, falling well short of their imagined godhood, they will all die in the end. Weak, frail, crippled--bed-bound, failing, necessarily mortal--they will one day, we can only hope, be chastened and disabused of their notions of themselves and the fineness of their own minds and ideas. Yes, they will all surely die in the end and the unaltered Creation will go on without them.

* * *

Finally, I have written before about weird fiction against the materialist (see here). Well, I have found another example in a writer who should have been in Weird Tales but never was. His name was Stefan Grabiński, and he was a Polish author active during the pulp-fiction era in America, from 1906 to about 1930. Born in 1887, he was a rough contemporary of H.P. Lovecraft. Like Lovecraft, he died young, in 1936 at age forty-nine. (Nietzsche also died fairly young, at age fifty-five, five days after Lovecraft's tenth birthday.) In our weird fiction book club last week, we read Grabiński's story "The Frenzied Farmhouse," from 1908. The narrator of the story is a man, once a husband and father. Near the beginning of his tale, he tells us, "I am not sick, nor was I ever sick," likewise, "I am not, nor was I ever, a psychopath." We learn not to trust him very well in these claims by what he relates later on. One significant thing about these reverse confessions is that the narrator appears to head off a scientific or medical explanation for what he has done: "I am not sick, I am not a psychopath." He continues:

Instead, I was a complete skeptic. I did not adhere to any principle or doctrine; my temperament was not a suggestible one. In this respect, my friend K., whom I had always considered to be extremely superstitious, stood at the opposite extreme. His strange, at times crazy views and theories constantly raised strong opposition on my part, and we quarrelled [sic] continually, which resulted in us frequently severing contact with each other for long periods of time. And yet, it appears, he was not mistaken in everything.

So here is the former skeptic (note the past tense), now speaking (in the present tense) and telling us that he is not sick or a psychopath, implying that in and by his skepticism he was wrong, conceding that his friend K. (shades of Kafka), who is "extremely superstitious," is right, at least in some small way. In other words, as the materialist usually does in weird fiction, the narrator comes in contact with something that he cannot explain in purely scientific or materialistic terms, and he receives his comeuppance because of it. But this is a strange and not a simple story. It can't easily be categorized, explicated, or explained away. In the inexorableness of the narrator's actions, it puts me in mind of The Stranger by Albert Camus, which is a strange thing to do for a tale of weird fiction.

Note

(1) "Finally, the early 1920s saw the first great 'Red Scare,' the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in Rhode Island, and the bitter Al Smith campaign in 1928, all of which produced a new level of anti-Catholic bigotry and heightened tensions between faltering Republicans and the rising Democrats." From "Ten Turning Points in Rhode Island History" by William G. McLoughlin, Rhode Island History, May 1986 (Vol. 45, No. 2), quote from pp. 48-49.

(2) Note the elements of the tale of supernatural horror or weird fiction: things still living out of antiquity or prehistory, a "god," a "sage," Christ as a fortuneteller, human sacrifice, the drinking of human blood (so that we might live forever, like vampires), prayers, miracles, "a beyond," death as "a portal"--"how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past!" [Emphasis added.] Might we say that Christianity, or religion in general, is the religion of weird fiction? Or is it actually the other way around, that the genres of weird fiction and supernatural horror are actually protrusions of an internal religious impulse, however primitive it might be, into the very secular and outward world of books, commerce, and pulp magazines?

(3) If Nietzsche's criticism is accurate and Christianity sees "the strong man as the typically reprehensible man, the 'reprobate'," and if our current president is by some measure this kind of "strong man" (thus a "reprobate"), then the reaction to him, especially considering that it comes from so many who are themselves so deeply anti-Christian, is curiously Christian. But then I think that we live in a world teeming with non-believers and atheists who have been set up in their beliefs by two thousand years of Christianity. I guess you could call them "secular Christians," even "atheized Christians," in any case Christians of one kind or another who are ignorant or unaware of their very origins or what ultimately lies behind their beliefs and actions.

Original text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley