Lost Tale: “The Kiss of Madagascar” (1924) by Seabury Quinn

Historical Racism

This story contains racist historical stereotypes and language.
Reader discretion advised.

Seabury Grandin Quinn was the most prolific contributor to Weird Tales during its initial run (1923-1954); especially remembered for his occult detective character Jules de Grandin, whose adventures ran to a whopping 93 stories in WT over a period of 25 years. Readers might well ask how Quinn was able to keep things fresh and not repeat himself…and, well, he did. Just not always in obvious ways.

Like Robert E. Howard and other prolific pulpsters, Quinn wasn’t above recycling themes or even cannibalizing entire plots into new stories as the situation required it. While folks who only read his stories in Weird Tales will pick up on the structural similarities between the de Grandin tales—which are structured a bit like a murder mystery, starting out with a victim or inciting incident and ending with an expository explanation and the villain dead or in custody—to really see how much Quinn borrowed from himself, you have to look at what he wrote outside Weird Tales.

One such series was the Washington Nights’ Entertainment, a series of 24 detective/mystery stories starring his character Major Sturdevant that ran in Detective Tales and Real Detective Tales, and reprinted in various newspapers. Many of the Sturdevant tales have a weird element, and Quinn borrowed from several of them heavily for later de Grandin stories; in particular, “The Kiss of Madagascar” (Sturdevant, Real Detective Tales Dec 1924) became the basis for “The Black Orchid” (de Grandin, Weird Tales Aug 1935).

“The Kiss of Madagascar” was reprinted in various newspapers (such as the Muncie Evening Press, 7 Mar 1929 (12)), and also appeared under the title “The Blood Thief” in Detective Book Magazine (Sep 1931). However, like the other Sturdevant tales, it has never been collected and remains obscure.

※

The Kiss of Madagascar

by Seabury Quinn

“Hey, somebody lend me twenty-five bucks?” Bailey, who represented the Post-Intelligencer at Washington, peered through the Record’s office door, glancing hopefully from Williams, the Record’s correspondent, to Loomis, of the Clarion-Call.

“Kind o’ original in your needs, ain’t you?” Loomis asked. “Most of us don’t need more than ten, or fifteen bucks, anyhow.”

“Aw, fellers,” Bailey pleaded, “don’t throw me down; I need this dough, I tell you. Gotta get my sweetie some flowers. She’s goin’ to a doings up at the Highlands tomorrow, and I want to knock her dead with an orchid corsage. I’ll pay you back when my check comes next week, honest—”

“Orchid,” Loomis cut in again. “Gosh, he’d actually give her orchids.”

“Hey, what’s biting on you?” Bailing asked angrily. “You talk as if I was fixin’ to present the dam with a lovers’ knot of rattlesnakes, or something.”

“You might as well, according to my way of thinking,” Loomis returned. “Listen: Do you remember when the French Madagascar Commercial Mission was over here last year?”

“Yes,” Bailey agreed sulkily, “I remember, all right. But what’s that got to do with your disliking orchids?”

“Everything,” Loomis answered. “When that aggregation hit Washington last year they looked like a constellation of bright stars of hope to me. I’d slipped up on important matters three times hand-running, and it looked as if I’d soon be hunting a Government clerkship when the Frenchmen came along.

“‘Here’s where I get in solid,’ I dolt myself. ‘I’ll just run up and cop off a red-hot story and square myself with the old man.’

“Did I? I did not. The Frenchies were occupying the Bushnell residence, in Sheridan Circle, and they’d had time to dig in by the time I rang the front doorbell. A tenth-assistant secretary, who smelled like a ladies’ hairdressing emporium, gave me a supercilious look anda sheet of mimeographed legal cap. ‘Zat ees all ze Commeesion haff for pooblication,’ he said, and nodded to the doorkeeper to give me the gate.

I started down Massachusetts Avenue toward DuPont Circle, when someone hit me a crack on the shoulder.

“‘Hello, Frank,’ my assailant said, ‘what’s the trouble? You look as if you were taking a guilt conscience out for an airing.’

“It was Major Sturdevant, of the Secret Service, and he’d been responsible for my scoring more beats than all the luck I’d have since coming to Washington.

“‘No: it’s the job,’ I said. ‘Those Frenchmen back there gave me a raw deal.’

✾

“‘WELL, well. I reckon I can give you a lift. I know La Peruse, the director of the Commission, slightly—was on my way to see him when I bumped into you. I’ll take you back with me.’

“‘Next time you want ten or a dozen guys murdered, call on me, Major.” I asked as we mounted the Bushnell steps and Sturdevant rang the bell.

“‘Ze Commeessionaire, he air not to see ze journaleests,’ the overgrown porter announced.

“Sturdevant thrust his card foward, adding the oral explanation. ‘Service de Surete.’

“‘Oh, mais oi, M’sieur, certainment,’ the porter agreed, his hostility evaporating before Sturdevant’s announcement.

“We rode up two floors in the automatic electric elevator, and entered a large parlor on the third floor which seemed to combine the duties of lounging room and office.

“‘Ah, Monsieur Sturdevant,’ a big, blond man greeted as we followed the porter through the tapestry lambrequins at the door.

“The Major shook hands cordially and presented me to the Frenchman. He was well over six feet tall and proportionately broad, with the prominent nose and cheekbones that bespoke Basque ancestry and the fair skin and light eyes that told of descent from the Northmen who overran Brittany in the days before Hastings.

“‘Mister Loomis,’ he acknowledged Sturdevant’s introduction in excellent English. ‘I had not thought to give anything but a formal statement to the press at this time; but I make an exception of you. Here are some memoranda you may find of interest. Copy what you wish and announce your dispatches as coming from the Commission.’

“I thanked him and dug into the papers, getting enough live stuff to fill two columns comfortably.

✾

“STURDEVANT and La Peruse talked of adventures in far places as I worked, and it was not till the library clock struck midnight that I realized how long we had been there.

“‘But, gentlemen, you will surely remain the night, certainly,’ La Peruse insisted as we rose to go. ‘It is past twelve, and the snow is deep. I can make you most comfortable.’

“I looked out the window and saw he was correct. Both Sturdevant and I hastened to accept the invitation.

“‘Queer chap, La Peruse,’ the Major told me as he snapped off the light. ‘He could have retired twenty years ago, if he’d wished, but colonial administration seems a sort of passion with him. Africa, Polynesia, Madagascar—wherever the French have possessions, he’s given the best years of his life and a lot of his own money to carrying on their work. This commissionership he holds now is only an honorary position: he doesn’t get a cent out of it. Why— Good Lord! What’s that?”

“We leaped out of bed and rushed into the darkened hall as a second blood-chilling cry echoed through the house.

“‘Down there!’ Sturdevant shouted, running headlong toward a room at the turn of the corridor. In a moment we were at the door.

“‘La Peruse!’ he called. ‘La Peruse, what’s wrong; are you ill?”

“We pressed our ears to the wood, waiting a reply, but no word came from the bedroom. Only a gurgling noise, like water escaping through a drain, or a man fighting desperately for breath. Then we burst open the door.

✾

“FEELING his way along the wall, Sturdevant located the electric switch and snapped on the light. La Peruse lay on his bed, the covers kicked to the floor, his hands flexed in a rigidity lie that of death, fingers digging into the yielding mattress. His pajama jacket was open at the neck, and on the white skin of his throat, below the line of tan, was a ruby disc where warm blood welled up from a tiny wound. His eyes were wide open, staring, and on his sunburned face was such a look of mortal terror as it seldom seen outside the phantasies of nightmare.

“‘La Peruse,’ the Major called, hurrying to the bedside and laying a hand over the Frenchman’s heart.

“His warm touch seemed to revive the stricken man. He rose unsteadily on his elbow, staring at us in pathetic bewilderment. ‘Where is it?’ he asked in a shaking voice. ‘Did you see it, Sturdevant, mon ami?’

“‘See what?’ Sturdevant asked. ‘What hurt you, La Peruse?’

“The other passed a trembling hand across his forehead. ‘The vampire,’ he answered with a shudder. ‘The demon un-dead, Major. It was here. I tell you, sitting on my breast, sucking the life-blood from my veins—’ he crossed himself awkwardly. ‘I saw it, flicking like a flame of hell-fire over me——”

“‘Rats!’ Sturdevant interrupted. ‘My dear fellow, you’ve had a bad dream. A vampire! You’ll be seeing old Mother Hubbard and her dog, next!’

“The Frenchman smiled wanly. ‘So?’ he said. ‘Look,’ he touched the wound at his throat and held his blood-stained fingertips up for inspection. ‘Is this blood or not blood, my friend? And if it be blood, how comes it there? You, yourself, can testify my door was locked; there is no other entrance to the room. Yet when you broke in what did you find, hein? If it were no vampire, then, pour l’amour de Dieu, what was it?”

✾

“SERVANTS and attaches of the Commission, in varying stages of dishabille, were crowding into the room. La Peruse waved them away and turned to Sturdevant.

“‘My friend,’ he said, ‘I am afraid. And my fear is the greater because I know not what it is I fear. How long I slept before It came I cannot tell, but I remember waking with a feeling of suffocation—no pain, but weakness and utter impotence—to see a red, fiery thing waving like a flame above me and to smell the odor of a charnel house. At first I knew not where I was, but realization came slowly. The thing that seemed to burn above me I cannot describe, for the darkness of the room and its very nearness obscured my vision. How long I lay wondering I have no idea; but suddenly I became aware of a feeling like a pulling at my throat. Then I knew: The thing was sucking my blood.

“‘Rubbish!’ Sturdevant replied. ‘I don’t doubt you think you saw this thing, but you couldn’t have. No one ever saw a vampire, or anything like one, outside a book or a bad dream.’

“‘You do not know the things I have seen, my friend,’ the other returned. ‘Here in what we call civilization we have forgotten the ancient things of nature, so we say they do not exist. But the people who live in the silent places have not forgotten, they remember, and they know. Listen, my friend:

“‘I was in Gallieni’s army of pacification when we put down the rebellion. One day word came by a convert Andevo that Hova insurrectionists had captured a missionary priest. We hurried inland to the rescue, and arrived to find the mission a smoldering ruin. Two days forced marching brought us to the Hova camp fires’ ashes, still warm. Another day our scouts surprised the war party dancing about something white on the ground. One volley of musketry sent them into the jungle, and when we charged their camp we found a skull and several bones in the center of their dancing circle.’

“‘Cannibalism?’ Sturdevant asked.

“‘Non, non,’ La Peruse denied. “The skull and bones were clean, clean as though scraped with sandpaper: there was no evidence of fire upon them, but something more we found: their surfaces had been eaten away—how do you say? eroded?—as though by acid.’

✾

“‘H’M,’ Sturdevant commented. ‘Whose skull was it?’

“‘The skull was that of a white man, and in the front of the mouth was a gold tooth—what you call a crown—the priest had set in by an American dentist in Paris. Our guide, the convert, recognized it at once, for that golden tooth had been the marvel of the mission settlement.’

“‘Still, I don’t see any evidence of your man-eating tree,’ Sturdevant objected. ‘The Hova might have used an acid substance to pickle their victim’s skeleton. Such things are no uncommon among barbarous peoples.’

“‘Yes, yes, you are right to be skeptical,’ the Frenchman admitted, ‘but wait. The guide told us the Hova made sacrifices to “The Fragrant One” by placing the victim (preferably a Christian) in the tree’s branches. It is supposed to be a sort of vegetable octopus, with tentacles to catch and hold its prey. When the tree had eaten the offering, the bones were collected and kept as souvenirs by the devotees.

“‘Now I, myself, had always scouted these stories: but when I saw the murdered priest’s skeleton I reconsidered. Do you know the Benus [sic] flytrap?”

“‘You mean the insect-catching plant of Carolina?’ Sturdevant asked.

“‘Yes,’ La Peruse answered, ‘the same. That plant, as you know, has a flower so delicately sensitive that the slightest touch by an insect closes the petals like the leaves of a book. Once imprisoned, the unfortunate insect is slowly dissolved by a powerful acidulous liquid excreted by the plant. As you would say, he is digested.

“‘Now consider: in tropical lands the flora of the temperate zone attains much greater size. If American and south Europe produce “flytrap” plants large enough to digest the humble bee, why should not a tropic island like Madagascar develop a tree large enough and fierce enough to devour a man? Eh?’

“‘H’m, possibly,’ Sturdevent tugged at his beard, ‘you may be right. At any rate, we’re still in the dark regarding the cause of your wound. It’s nearly morning; lie down and try to sleep. I’ll stay with you the rest of the night.’

“I left them together and crawled back in my own bed, but did precious little sleeping. The echo of the Frenchman’s ghastly cry and the sight of his still, horror-drawn face stayed with me till daylight.

✾

“WE had a Continental breakfast—coffee and rolls—in our bedroom, and I turned my overcoat collar up against the storm as I plunged my way toward Connecticut Avenue. La Peruse begged Sturdevant to stay with him so piteously that the Major consented to remain an hour or so.

“I knocked the information I’d gotten into shape and sent it off to the home office. The job was moderately safe for while longer, anyhow.

“I hadn’t been in the office fifteen minutes next morning when a call came from Sturdevant. ‘Hello, Loomis,’ he said, ‘there’s something dam’ queer going on up here.’

“‘What’s the trouble?’

“‘I don’t know: that’s where the difficulty comes in. La Peruse is worse. I stayed her again last night, and ran in to see how he was getting on about every half hour till five o’clock this morning. Everything seemed O. K., and I’d turned in for a couple of hours’ sleep when he gave another one of those war whoops, and when I got to his room he was lying just as we found him yesterday morning. I had more trouble in bringing him to this time, and he’s so weak from loss of blood we’ve had a physician up to look him over.’

✾

“I REPORTED at the Bushnell House about seven that evening, and Sturdevant took me to La Peruse’s room at once. The Frenchman was like a wraith of his former self. Violet half-moons under his eyes, a waxen pallor beneath his sunburn and a queer, pinched look about the nostrils testified eloquently to sudden and overwhelming weakness. The hand he extended unsteadily in greeting was as thin and bloodless as a fever patient’s.

“‘Now, Frank,’ the major said, ‘I want you to act as relief guard tonight. I’ll sit with La Peruse while you sleep; then you take your turn at sentry-go.’

‘We sat talking till I began to feel drowsy, and the Major took up his vigil by the sick man’s bed.

“He shook me awake shortly after two o’clock, and I slumped down in an easy chair beside the night light, a copy of the Clarion-Call in my hand.

“‘Do you wish coffee, sir?’ someone asked in a strong English accent. I looked up and saw a small and exceedingly black man with regular features and wire-straight hair, standing in the doorway, a tray containing a coffee pot and cup in his hands.

“‘Yes, thank you,’ I answered. ‘Pour it black, please.’

“‘Very good, sir,’ he replied, filling my cup. I swallowed a mouthful of the steaming black beverage and turned back to my paper.

“The old man had a riproaring editorial in that issue, lambasting the tar out of the administration about the coal strike, but, somehow, the words seemed to have lost their punch as I sipped my coffee. Presently the lines of type began to run together before my eyes. I nodded, shook my head to clear my vision, and—

✾

“LOOMIS, Loomis, wake up. Give me a hand here!”

“‘Eh, wha—what?’ I asked stupidly, half-rising from my chair, then sinking down again as the room commenced whirling like a Coney Island carousel.

“Gradually I began to see thing. Sturdevant, his white hair and beard bristling with anger and excitement, bent about La Peruse. La Peruse lay half out of the bed, head downward, eyes staring glassily, the bandage on his throat displaced, and a thin trickle of blood oozing from his reopened wound.

“‘Good Lord!’ I exclaimed, bracing myself against the arms of my chair. ‘What’s happened, Major?’

“‘La Peruse has been murdered while you sat there snoring.’

“‘But I wasn’t asleep,’ I protested. ‘I felt a little queer after I drank that coffee, but—’

“‘Eh? What’s that?” he asked sharply. ‘You drank coffee? Where? When? Who gave it to you?”

“‘Why, the boy!’ I answered.

“‘H’m,’ the Major lifted La Peruse to the bed, and glared at me. ‘Go find that servant and have someone ‘phone the doctor. There’s still a flutter in this poor chap’s pulse. No thanks to you, though.’

“I roused a secretary and asked him to call a physician, then inquired my way to the servants’ quarters. Three minutes’ search sufficed to find the man who served me, peacefully sleeping.

“I brought him, still in his pajamas, to Sturdevant.

“‘Did you serve coffee to this gentleman?’ the Major asked, eyeing him sternly.

“‘Yes, sir,’ the black man answered. ‘I thought some black coffee might help him stay awake.’

“‘H’m,’ Sturdevant looked him over from head to feet. ‘Pretty bold, doping him right under my eyes, aren’t you?’

“‘Doping him?’ the man’s assumption of horrified incredulity was masterly. ‘You surely don’t think that, sir.’

“He turned to me. ‘How much coffee did you drink, sir?’ he asked.

“‘Not more than half a cup,’ I answered.

“‘Ah,’ his insolence was superb as he stretched out his hand, lifted the cup, and drained it at a single gulp.

“He looked at Sturdevant. ‘If the coffee is drugged, sir,’ he announced, ‘it surely should act on me.’

“‘H’m, all right; you may go.’

“‘Thank you, very much, sir,’ the other replied, as he bowed his way from the room.

“The physician came bustling in. ‘What’s all this?’ he asked testily, making a hasty examination of this patient.

“‘Why, the man’s almost dead from exhaustion. Every indication of severe hemorrhage. Where’s the blood?’

“Sturdevant shrugged in annoyance. ‘We know no more about it than you do, doctor,’ he replied.

“‘Then you’re dam’ ignorant,’ the physician blurted. ‘There’ll have to be an immediate transfusion of blood if we’re going to save this man’s life.’

“Hurried telephone calls to the doctor’s office for paraphernalia, an examination of half a dozen of the Commission’s personnel for a suitable blood count, and the big porter was chosen to supply the vital fluid.

“When morning came La Peruse was resting easily, his body refreshed with new blood.

“‘We saved him this time,’ the doctor said as he struggled into his ulster, ‘but I’ll not answer for the consequences if he has another hemorrhage. See that he’s watched every moment.’

“‘He’ll be watched, all right, doctor, you may depend on it,’ Sturdevant assured him.

“As I was leaving he whispered, ‘Come up again tonight, Loomis. We’ll find out what’s what this evening, or know the reason why.’

✾

“LA PERUSE was slightly improved, though still very weak, when I arrived at the Bushnell house about eleven o’clock that evening.

“‘Hello, Frank,’ Sturdevant greeted as I was divesting myself of hat, muffler and overcoat.

“He led me to the room assigned us, shut the door carefully and lighted one of his long, black cheroots. ‘Been doing some visiting and exploring today,’ he announced. ‘Had quite a conference with Professor Stockton, of the Smithsonian Institute. He’s the foremost authority on tropical flora in the country.’

“‘What’s the idea?’ I asked. ‘Did you want to check up on La Peruse’s theory of the man-eating tree?’

“‘Partly,’ he replied. ‘Stocktown says La Peruse may not be far wrong. He gave me a lot of interesting data on Madagascar, too.’

“‘Shall I take the first trick?’ I asked as we walked toward La Peruse’s room.

“‘Not much; we’ll handle this business together,’ he answered. ‘I can’t risk having you sleep at the switch a second time.’

“We tiptoed across the room, and I was about to take a chair when the Major put out his hand, giving me a slight push. ‘Under the day bed, Loomis,’ he ordered.

“‘What?’ I whispered incredulously.

“‘Get under the day bed there,’ he repeated. ‘You’re going to be the silent partner in our little game tonight, and the invisible one, too. Crawl under that couch and keep your mouth shut and your eyes open. Go on.’

“I slipped to the floor beneath the couch.

“THE Major pressed the bell communicating with the servants’ rooms. In a few moments the little black man who had waited on me the previous night entered. ‘You rang, sir?’ he asked.

“‘Yes,’ Sturdevant replied without looking up from his book. ‘Bring me some coffee at midnight, please.’

“‘Very good, sir.’

“The time crawled by like a frostbitten snake. The servant entered with the coffee, set the tray on the table and stood waiting Sturdevant’s orders.

“‘That’s all, thank you,’ the major said as he resumed his chair and picked up the cup. He took a swallow of the drink, then resumed his reading. Five, ten, fifteen minutes ticked off on my wrist watch, nothing happened. Then the room’s quiet was disturbed by a low guttural sound. I looked at Sturdevant in fascinated horror. His head had fallen on his chest, the book had dropped from his head. He was asleep—snoring.

✾

“I WRIGGLED a few inches on the floor, intent on crawling from under the couch and waking him, then froze where I lay.

“Stepping softly as a panther, the colored servant came into the room, followed by another. The second one carried a tray with coffee pot and cups, the first bore a bundle of some sort carefully between his outstretched hands.

“Pausing beside the Major a moment, they smiled at each other, then placed another cup exactly like that from which Sturdevant had drunk on the table, pouring an mount of coffee equal to that he had left into the substituted cup. Quietly the fellow with the coffee turned and walked quickly down the hall.

“The trick by which I’d been drugged the night before, and which had enabled the suspected black to demonstrate his innocence and my dereliction of duty, was so simple as to be childish, yet Sturdevant and I had been fooled by it.

“I lave where I was, watching the man’s movements.

“Quickly he leaned over the sleeping Frenchman, unfastening the bandage at his throat with a deftness the most experienced pickpocket might envy. A moment more and he produced a jar of oil, touched the sleeping man’s wound with the unguent, then, with a tiny scalpel, removed the softened scab.

“I saw a spot of blood form and grow larger as the wound was opened, and fixed my muscles for a spring when his next move struck me stone-still with mystification.

“Something like a ball of coarse moss, doubled upon itself like a giant, sleeping spider, dangled from a thread as the man drew his hand from the bundle he carried. I saw him swing the thing through the air several times, slowly t first, then faster and faster, till it whirled round his head like a wheel of light. Carefully he slackened the swinging thing’s speed, finally dangling it at arm’s length from him above La Peruse. The rapid motion through the air had opened the thing he held till its parts were fully displayed.

“Leaning forward, he dropped the knot of moss upon the Frenchman’s open wound.

“My eyes almost started from my head in horror. While I watched, the thing upon the sleeper’s throat began to live, putting out tiny tendrils like the fronds of an asparagus fern, but red as rusted iron in color. Like a living animal, the thing’s leaves waved and swayed in the air. Gradually, like a toy balloon slowly inflated, a great, tri-petaled, blood-red flower began unfolding.

“La Peruse moaned and stirred uneasily in his sleep.

“‘AT him, Loomis!’ With a bound Sturdevant was out of his chair. He leaped across the room, hands outstretched to seize the black.

“With a snarl of bestial ferocity, the little man dodged, hurling himself toward the door.

“I squirmed from my hiding place and leaped in his path, driving my fist at the point of his jaw.

“He fought like a wildcat. Shorter than I by almost a foot and under-weighing me by at least forty pounds, he was all I could handle, and more.

“‘Ah! Got him!’ Sturdevant dropped on the follow’s shoulders, seized his elbows in an iron grip and pressed them into his sides.

“‘Now, you little hellion,’ he rasped, ‘take that accursed thing off La Peruse and see you don’t leave any roots in his wound.’

“‘Ha! You think to make me?’ the other answered with a snarl. ‘You cannot. Your friend will die. You may kill me, cut me in pieces, if you like, but the cursed Frenchman dies. I’ll make no move to save him from his judgment.’

“‘No?’ Sturdevant replied, seizing the man’s left wrist in his right hand and slowly forcing it upward in a hammer-lock. ‘No? We’ll see about that.’

“Perspiration glistened on the fellow’s forehead, his eyes started in their sockets like a frog’s, his mouth drew taut with agony as Sturdevant slowly increased his pressure.

“Step by step the Major forced his captive toward the bed. At last the other dropped to his knees beside La Peruse. ‘Let me go,’ he begged. ‘Let me go, you white beast, and I’ll take “the Kiss” from him.’

“The captive reached out, seized the waving, red thing at the Frenchman’s throat, and lifted it carefully from his wound. Like an inflated bladder pricked with a pin, the infernal plant began wilting as its terrible nourishment was cut off.

“‘Now we’ll gather in the other one,’ Sturdevant announced as he snapped a pair of handcuffs over the prisoner’s wrists.

“The other black was lying in bed, apparently sound asleep, when we reached his room; but it required our combined efforts to subdue and shackle him when he leaped up as we entered the door.

✾

“‘HOW’D you dope it all out, Major’ I asked when La Peruse, rebandaged and soothed with a strong sedative, had fallen asleep once more.

“He bit the end from a cigar as he replied: ‘Just adding a few facts together, Loomis. A knowledge of Madagascar, plus a knowledge of the West Indies, plus a little thought—and there you are.’

“‘Take Madagascar, for instance. We know the difficulties the French had subduing the place and every effort the natives made to get back autonomy.

“‘When Gallieni and his forces defeated the Hova in 1896 they overthrew one of the most corrupt governments in the world. Ranavalona III had come to the throne by the simple expedient of murdering her predecessor with slow poison. The island’s inhabitants consisted of three classes, Andriana, or nobility, the Hova freemen, and the Andevo, or slaves. But actually there were no freemen but the Andriana. They had a custom called fanampoona which meant simply forced labor. The government would notify a man he was “honored” by being selected to work for it, and work he had to, without compensation.

“‘The natural result was the impoverishment of the people and the enrichment of the nobility. The French changed all this. They freed the slaves, forbade fanampoona, and made the nobles go to work. You can imagine how popular such a policy was with the ruling classes.

“‘La Peruse was one of the leaders in perfecting the new order of things, and he’s had more attempts made on his life than any man in the island, I suppose.

“‘A little conference with our historical experts and a talk with the French embassy revealed the existence of a well-developed, though unsuccessful, organization among descendants of Malagsy nobility to assassinate the directors of the colonial administration and restore the old regime.

✾

“NOW, when I talked with Professor Stockton yesterday he not only agreed La Peruse’s theory concerning the man-eating tree might be correct: but he told me something that furnished a definite working hypothesis for the cause of La Peruse’s illness. It seems there is a beautiful orchid of the epiphyte variety known as Angraecum, which grows on the west coast of Madagascar. But the natives whisper strange stories of a vampire plant, a sort of vegetable leech, which infests the interior. Stockton searched for the thing for months, but never found anything like it. Everywhere he heard of “the Kiss,” as they call it—a red, terrible plant that fastened on travelers as they slept and sucked their lives away, but no specimens could be found. He finally abandoned the hunt and decided the strange orchid was only a native myth. However, when he mentioned it, I saw where such a thing—provided it actually existed—could easily account for La Peruse’s strange sickness.

“‘The next question was: ‘Who is the logical suspect?’ The natives of Madagascar aren’t negroes in the generally accepted sense, though their skins are black when they happen to be pure-bloods, unmixed with Malay, Chinese or Hindu stock. These small, straight-haired regular featured black boys we captured tonight didn’t look like ordinary negroes, nor did they talk like them.

“‘The fact that you went to sleep after drinking his coffee was even a stronger clue, and the insolent manner in which he alibied himself only served to make my suspicions stronger.

“‘I took the precaution to search his room today, and got into every box he had, excepted on. That was iron and fastened with two Yale locks. If it hadn’t been for two things I’d have thought he had ordinary valuables in it; but I found a box of gold coin in his bureau drawer secured by an ordinary lock, and in another drawer I found a dagger about ten inches long with a waved, razor-edged blade—a Malay kris.

“‘NOW what would a servant have more valuable than a box of gold? If the man were an ordinary servant, as he assumed to be, there was no explanation for his possession of so much gold; but if he were the agent of a conspiracy, well supplied with ready cash from the conspiracy’s war chest, it was simply enough. Also, if he were a West Indian, as he claimed, why should he have a Malay kris concealed among his clothes?

“‘That’s the way I figured it, and I staged our little party last night on those assumptions. I knew he’d hardly try the drugged coffee again unless I gave him an opening, so I pretended to trust him, and everything worked out exactly as I’d figured. Pretending to drink his coffee was one of the hardest things. My shirt from is still sticky where I poured the villainous stuff down my collar.

“‘What are you going to do with “the Kiss”? I asked.

“‘Give it to Stockton,’ Sturdevant answered with a grin. ‘He spent six months looking for a specimen in its native habitat, and now I’ve got him one right here in Washington.'”

✾

LOOMIS drew a deep breath and stared hard at Bailey. “Now you see why I can’t abide the sight or thought of an orchid,” he explained. “Do you wonder I was horrified when you said you wanted to give your girl some of the awful things? Why, they’re all first cousins to ‘The Kiss of Madagascar.'”

“Gosh,” Bailey commented, “lend me ten dollars, will you? That’ll just pay for the violets.”

※

In 1874, journalist Edmund Spencer wrote an article about a man-eating tree in Madagascar, an idea that has inspired a number of pulp authors for decades thereafter; readers might compare the tree as described by Quinn and “The Plant-Thing” (1925) by R. G. Macready, or check out Plant Monsters in Weird Tales from Dark Corners Quarterly for more examples.

The mythology of “the Fragrant One,” however, was unique to Quinn, and something shared by both “The Kiss of Madagascar” and its weird counterpart, “The Black Orchid.”

“‘The revolt of Hova in 1898, which led ultimately to the exile of Queen Ranavalona, was not particularly anti-European. The Malagasy government had long employed English and French army officers and engineers, and found Europeans quite tolerable. But there is no question the Hova were violently opposed to Christianity. Travelers say the Hova had no definite religion of their own. That is not so. They worshiped a goddess known as “The Fragrant One,” whose manifestation was said to be a man-eating tree.’

[…]

“NOW, when I talked with Professor Stockton yesterday he not only agreed La Peruse’s theory concerning the man-eating tree might be correct: but he told me something that furnished a definite working hypothesis for the cause of La Peruse’s illness. It seems there is a beautiful orchid of the epiphyte variety known as Angraecum, which grows on the west coast of Madagascar. But the natives whisper strange stories of a vampire plant, a sort of vegetable leech, which infests the interior. Stockton searched for the thing for months, but never found anything like it. Everywhere he heard of “the Kiss,” as they call it—a red, terrible plant that fastened on travelers as they slept and sucked their lives away, but no specimens could be found. He finally abandoned the hunt and decided the strange orchid was only a native myth. However, when he mentioned it, I saw where such a thing—provided it actually existed—could easily account for La Peruse’s strange sickness.

“I was there with Gallieni in 1895, serving as sous-lieutenant of chasseurs, later as commandant of a detail of native guides. It was while serving with my detachment that I met Mamba. She was the daughter of an Andriana, or noble, family, distantly related to Ranavalona, the native queen just deposed by the French. Her skin was black as a minorca’s wing, with a blue, almost iridescent sheen; her features were small and delicate, her body as beautiful as anything ever chiseled out of marble in the Peridean age. She had tremendous influence not only with the Hova, or middle-class natives, but with the Andriana as well; for she was reputedly a witch and priestess of ‘the Fragrant One’, and a word from her would bring any native, noble or commoner, from miles around crawling on his belly to lick her tiny, coal-black feet, or send him charging down upon French infantry, though he knew sure death awaited from our chassepots and Gatling guns.

[…]

“You will recall Monsieur Sorensen referred to his native wife as Mamba, and called her a priestess of ‘the Fragrant One’? Very good. Mamba, my friends, is a native term for a terrible, strange black orchid said to infest the jungles of inland Madagascar. It is supposed to be a kind of vampire plant, or vegetable leech, and if it be placed upon an open wound it blossoms in the likeness of a human figure and nourishes itself upon the blood of its unfortunate host till he or she is dead. According to the stories I was told in Madagascar, the habitat of this strange plant is strictly guarded by the priesthood which serves ‘the Fragrant One,’ which is the native name for the more or less mythical man-eating tree of which such dreadful tales are told.

Real Detective Tales Dec 1924

Weird Tales Aug 1935

“The Black Orchid,” though it shares much with “The Kiss of Madagascar”—including the essential plot, a colonialist-friendly approach to French colonial history, some racial stereotyping, and a grasp of the French language which which can charitably be described as workmanlike—is not simply a redressing of a Sturdevant story in de Grandin’s clothes. Quinn took the opportunity in revisiting this idea to expand on the mythology, and “The Fragrant One” stands out as one of those odd bits of fakelore that mark Quinn as a mythmaker, much as his peers H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith were, albeit in a much more limited fashion.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Lost Tale: “Something from Beyond” (1941) by Paul Dennis LaVond

In 1941, Robert A. W. Lowndes became editor of a science-fiction pulp magazine titled Future, which had been merged with another magazine titled Science Fiction Quarterly, and over the next few years would go by such titles as Future Combined with Science Fiction, Future Fiction, Future Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Stories over the next few years. Future, under whatever title, contained a great deal of work by Lowndes and his friends, sometimes under their own names and sometimes under pseudonyms, often joint pseudonyms for collaborations. One such pseudonym was Paul Dennis LaVond.

Lowndes had been a minor correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft, and like several of HPL’s friends, had carved out his own corner of the Mythos, starting with “The Abyss” (Stirring Science Stories Feb 1941), which introduced a new eldritch tome: The Song of Yste. Lowndes would revisit and expand this personal Mythos in stories like “The Mantle of Graag” as by Paul Dennis LaVond (The Unique Magazine Oct 1941), “The Long Wall” as by Wilfred Owen Morley (Stirring Science Stories Mar 1942), “The Leapers” as by Carol Grey (Future Fantasy and Science Fiction Dec 1942), and the poem “Nyaghoggua” (Phantasmagoria 1939 / Famous Fantastic Mysteries Apr 1941). All of these stories were reprinted, sometimes in revised form and under slightly different titles, in later years…except one.

“Something from Beyond” (Future Dec 1941) by Paul Dennis LaVond is a story in the Song of Yste cycle that somehow fell through the cracks. Lowndes never republished or revised it; nor did Robert M. Price, who was studiously collecting early Mythos fiction in Crypt of Cthulhu and various anthologies like The Necronomicon: Selected Stories and Essays Concerning the Blasphemous Tome of the Mad Arab (1996, Chaosium) and Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos (1992, Fredogan & Bremer / 2002, Del Rey). Other authors associated with Paul Dennis LaVond include C. M. Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl, and Dirk Wylie; Mike Ashley in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Weird Fiction Magazines (1985) credits “Something from Beyond” to Lowndes, Pohl, and Wylie (279). Perhaps that was why Lowndes never reprinted it.

※

Something from Beyond

by Paul Dennis LaVond

Foreword

WALLACE GREY was born in 2009, some thirty years after Harley Graeme made his first moon flight, in Norwich, and was schooled in Laurie Hall nearby, later attending Norwich University.

Although not nationally known, Norwich University has a fine, solid reputation for turning out acute, liberally-minded men, men who are neither too idealistic to adjust themselves to the harsh practicalities, nor yet too cut and dried to see beyond their noses. There are compulsory courses in subjects the mere mention of which would bring ridicule in other schools; they teach the occult and delve into what is known as Black Magic. Yet never do they permit their students thus to lose their grip on a world which denies and derides these things. The purpose of these courses is to instil into the student a love of truth and the unknown; they seek to make them like those sturdy scholars of a distant past who were willing to search through innumerable haystacks of falsehood for the needle of truth therein. Norwich men have always been the last to snort and cry “impossible” when the unknown occurs.

Shortly after graduating, Grey turned to anthropology for his vocation, but found the recognized authorities in the field to be grey-headed dodderers with a distaste for unorthodox views. In a fit of despair, he joined the Space Patrol, then popularly thought to be a glorified suicide club, nothing more. After a few months, his state of mind improved; but instead of buying his way out, as easily he could have done, he set about forging ahead in the Patrol. He was the first commissioned officer to rise from the ranks and there is no doubt but that he would have gone far, made a name both for himself and for the Patrol had not his career abruptly been terminated.

Grey was found dead, along with two other members of the crew, in the Patrol ship he commanded. The circumstances of his death were unusual inasmuch as the bodies of the three men were frozen, although the ship was quite warm. These bodies could not be thawed, yet gained heat rapidly upon arrival at Earth until the temperature was almost that of living men. An investigation brought no light upon the incident; there remains only Wallace Grey’s journal, extracts from which we give below.

From the Journal of Wallace Grey

“WHATEVER our scientists may say about the lifelessness of space, I cannot help believing that the void is indeed a harbor of life, even though it may not resemble the life we know. Perhaps such life is so alien that the very word itself cannot be applied, so different that by no stretch could the most plastic imagination conceive it. Yet, we have this word, and it signifies anything which possesses consciousness of being; to that we add growth, power of ingestion, reproduction, motion, and thought. Perhaps there are vortices of pure thought here in space. . . . But there is something out here which we cannot see, hear, taste, touch or smell. Yet we do sense its presence; we know it is here.

“It…. I cannot call the thing by any term more definite than ‘it’…. is watching us, or, should I say, it is aware of us; it may not possess what we know as sight. It is aware of us and has been following us for the last few days…. perhaps longer: we cannot tell how long it may have been hovering over us before we became aware of it. Perhaps a considerable length of time in its presence is necessary before any suggestion of its being can permeate us; Awareness has come, but not through the customary channels of perception. I wonder, though: is it conscious of us?…. Are trees conscious of the birds and animals that nest therein, of the little boys that climb them, of the men who come at last to hew them down?…. No, trees are still strange to men, even though men have known and dealt with trees as far back as our racial memories go. Even yet we do not know whether or not the tree has a consciousness of being, an awareness of other life-forms about it…. Imagination, psychological delusion, wishes that father thought…. we cannot be certain about anything; our greatest positivism can only be relative. Yet, I say that I can feel that this is a living, malevolent entity; but how do I know it is not my own emotions telling me this, my emotions which color my every act no matter how diligently I try to whitewash? It is only natural that we distrust what we do not know: all that we know is full of danger, pain, disaster, and death for us. We cannot trust ourselves: how, then, can the unknown bring other than apprehension to us?….

“I think that I am aware of this…. phenomenon…. more than Orloff or Jac; yet Orloff has been acting queerly for a number of days. He always was more than a little absent-minded; now he seems completely dazed. Ever since he and Jac repaired the blast-tube, Orloff has been…. different. He speaks very little, and, when he does, it is almost with an effort, as if he did not know the language he was trying to use. His voice, too, seems to have changed and the inflection is weird. I can see that Jac is puzzled; he asked me a few hours ago whether I thought Orloff might be developing some form of space-dementia. That is possible. I have tried to speak to Orloff several times, to see if he is in pain or feeling sick; he evades me and does not seem to understand what I am saying. There is, however, no fault to be found with his work; he does, true, perform his duties a trifle more slowly than before, but his efficiency has increased noticeably. He was always somewhat timid at the controls, fearful lest he make a blunder which would be disastrous to us all; now he handles them with confidence, does so well that I need not oversee him. He spends nearly all of his spare time staring out the portholes into space, although he does not appear to be watching anything. His eyes, I have noticed, are somewhat glazed as he stands there and, after he has finally turned away, his movements, for a few seconds, are incongruously stiff and awkward. Can there be any relationship between Orloff’s eccentricity and it? I must look into the Song of Yste again…. How out of place that ancient book seems aboard this ship, on the dark side of Luna, some quarter-million miles from Earth. Did those olden probers into the unknown, I wonder, ever dream of the day when men would leave the Earth physically?…. Yet, there is a vast amount of truth in this volume! I am told, by friends, that it was once declared pernicious, blasphemous, accursed, and to be destroyed on sight. A few copies were handed secretly from generation to generation lest they be discovered and burnt. (I wonder sometimes just how grandfather obtained it. Did he find it in a tomb, as he claimed, or was it obtained by other methods?)”

Later:

“Something has happened to my copy of the Song of Yste. I am positive that it was packed among other, more orthodox, volumes when we left Earth; yet it is not there now. I am sure Jac would not be rummaging around my things; even if he were, what possible Interest could a book like that hold for him. And Orloff…. but how could the lock on my chest be tampered with without traces being left? Moreover, of what value could a copy of this book be to other than myself? It is in cipher, most ingenious cipher. It took grandfather ten years to work it out, and another five to prepare the volume I now possess. But the mere possession of the key would be of little value, for even then one uninitiate could not read it. Each page holds a different variation of the cipher, the clue to which lies in the little sketch heading the page. Grandfather told me before he died. I mention this to point out the difficulty of reading a volume like my special copy of the Song of Yste and to draw attention to the high improbability that two people on the same ship, two members of the Space Patrol, further, would have the required abilities. Yet, Orloff’s condition leaves him open to grave suspicion.”

Later:

“Orloff has taken a change for the worse. He is unconscious now: Jac found him lying on the floor when he went below to see why Orloff did not respond to his signals. For a moment, he appeared to revive; his eyes opened yet I would swear that it was not Orloff who looked at us. He is lying on the couch in the next room; Jac and I are sharing his duties. I took advantage of the emergency to search Orloff’s room. Of course, it is within my authority to demand search at any time but I had been reluctant to use my power in this case as I was not sure that perhaps the blame was not mine. But the search proved my initial suspicions to be correct; it was in his room, and he had been reading it. Found figures on a sheet of paper in his desk which prove conclusively that he knew the cipher, was computing the variations for specific pages. When I am free, I shall determine just what he was reading; perhaps it will shed some light upon this gruesome state of affairs.”

Later:

“We are functioning under automatic controls, such as they are…. I have been reading that portion of the Song of Yste which seemed to be of so much interest to Orloff; it is damnable. Now I know what it is which has come out of space to dog our heels; I know why we feel so cold and the reason for Orloff’s curious condition…. We are completely helpless…. If I seem a bit reluctant to state what I know, it is because of the stark, objective closeness of the thing which stuns me. It is one thing to delve into the unknown and learn of hideous and alien secrets with which the cosmos is filled. That is one thing, I say, and it is a thing more than many minds can endure. But to face the actuality of these things is another matter. To those not afraid of thought, the Song of Yste is not so utterly horrible…. bizarre, grotesque…. words, words, words, but what can they mean, what can they mean when the reader has nothing in his own experience to approximate them?…. Imagination always paints a fascinating picture, albeit how gruesome, attaching glamor to the unknown and alien…. but the reality… Ia, Nyagghogua! Shub-Niggurath! Nyarlathotep! Nyartathotep!…. Nyagghogua, dissolver of space…. K’halkru!….

“Orloff’s condition is unchanged. He is still in a coma, apparently. But there are no wounds, no concussion, fractures or symptoms of shock. Jac does not suspect his true condition… but I know…. I know!”

“This is my last entry. It has come out of space…. for us. A short time ago I heard the call…. within. Weird piping sound ending in a piercing shriek. We…. felt it rather than heard it. Jac did not know what it was…. I tried to explain something natural….

“Orloff has arisen…. at the call. He stood in the doorway for a moment, looking at us, and, in his eyes a blackness, a vast shape of inconceivable power, malevolent power, that glared out at us. We are rooted to our seats…. though I cannot see what manner of resistance we could make were we free. I suppose it prefers us alive…. though could I reach the wall, none of us would go to it alive.

“We both feel very cold, although the instruments show that the temperature has not dropped a single degree. The cold comes from…. within. Orloff is moving slowly toward the space-lock; I sit here frozen to my seat, writing furiously…. Must try to put down what I read in that accursed book last night….

“‘Let not the hearts of men dwell too pleasantly upon escape from this earth to worlds of strangeness and glamor beyond the veil of night for without lies horror and madness and that which no human tongue or pen can describe. Vaster by far than the might and malevolence of those demons that plague and befoul the earth is that which comes out of space to feast upon the souls of men; yet, indeed, it is but a lesser manifestation of the evil which dwells beyond the stars. This out of space may be known by the coldness it brings, a coldness which no fire can abate, and by its unholy piping by which it summons its victims to sacrifice. For of old is it known to send itself into the living bodies of certain creatures so that they appear bewitched and know not themselves, shunning the day and the radiance of the sun which is hateful to it. Many and multiform are the prodigies it performs, for it may enter a city and blast all within into frozen corpses, yet, when these are discovered, there will have been no sign either of cold or of its point of entrance. Many and multiform are the prodigies it performs for its own amusement and contempt for men. And the crowning foulness of all….’

“I may write no more. The space lock is opening…. Orloff…”

“ENTRY in the log of the Space- Liner Majestic, Earth-Mars voyage EM 206: (From File .0078, Derelicts, Report of, for the year 2027, Record Rooms, Interplanetary Transit Building, N’York, Terra.)

“December 9, 2027. Discovered derelict space-patrol cruiser. #SP-070 R3, reported missing August 24, 2027, drifting in and parallel to Band 5. Found bodies of three men in cabin. Two in their official places; a third lying on the floor in such a position as to assume he had been placed there after death. Although ship was entirely warm and instruments showed no variation in room temperature, the corpses were frozen. Ship’s log, found in cabin, was dated August 5, 2027, no entries after that date being found. Journal of Commanding Officer, Wallace Grey, Lieutenant, Space-Patrol, hereby forwarded without comment. Lt. Grey was found, pen in hand, in the act of making entries in aforementioned journal.’’

The End

※

“Something from Beyond” is pure Lovecraftian pastiche, albeit in an uncommon space opera setting, which gives it the feel of a very stripped-down prototype of Event Horizon. Aside from the direct mentions to Lovecraft’s Mythos, the mention of Khalk’ru is a nod toward A. Merritt’s Dwellers in the Mirage (1932), where Khalk’ru is an extradimensional kraken worshipped by a cult in Alaska—sometimes seen as Merritt’s nod toward Lovecraft. Whether Lowndes intended any connection between Wallace Grey and Carol Grey (or simply liked the name) is unknown.

The original publication of “Something from Beyond” can be read on the Internet Archive.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Deeper Cut: Who is Clara in Lovecraft’s Letters?

In the letters of H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow compiled by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz in O Fortunate Floridian! an individual named “Clara” is mentioned five times:

I see by the paper that your friend Clara has just lost a brother—not the one in Providence, but another dwelling in Mass.
—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 26 September 1935, OFF 296

My aunt vows she is going to shew Clara your binding of the “Shunned House” . . . . . Which reminds me that both Loveman & Brobst have seen this job & praised it to the skies.
—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 21 October 1935, OFF 299

My aunt ran into your friend Clara the other day, & they talked considerably about you. Clara is very anxious to see your job on The Shunned House, & I think my aunt will show her the book very shortly.
—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 25 October 1935, OFF 303

Meanwhile my aunt & Clara Buffner send you their best regards—the former having an intention of writing you ere long.
—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 30 November 1936, OFF 377-378

Here’s something about Aunt Clara (who always enquires admiringly about you) which you can keep for Yoh-Vombis.
—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 27 January 1937, OFF 397

Taken together, the overall impression is that Clara is a friend or associate of Lovecraft’s surviving aunt Annie E. P. Gamwell, that she was a resident of Providence c.1935 with a brother in the city, and that she had some interest in Barlow’s job of binding a set of sheets for Lovecraft’s The Shunned House. This book had been printed by W. Paul Cook in 1928, but never bound or widely distributed during Lovecraft’s lifetime. Barlow and Lovecraft prevailed on Cook to send the sheets to Barlow in De Land, Florida, which eventually happened. While in Washington, D.C. in early 1935, Barlow had bound the sheets in full leather, hand-tooled with raised bands, which was presented to his friend when Lovecraft had visited De Land in June (Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 618; Lovecraft’s Library 106).

The only difficulty with these letters is the identity of Clara Buffner, who does not appear in any census or city directory for Providence in the 1930s. However, a close reading of a scan of the original letter shows that Clara’s last name is not Buffner but Buffum—an easy misreading, given Lovecraft’s sometimes cramped handwriting—and this makes a great deal more sense.

Clara Buffum was born 24 January 1873 to Joshua and Clara Maria Southwick Buffum in New York City. Census data and gravestones sketch a life: In the 1900 census she is listed as a secretary in the household of John C. Brown in Manhattan, which included nine servants. Joshua Buffum died in Providence on 10 July 1906. By the time of the 1910 census, Clara was living with her mother, aunt (Annie K. Southwick), and brothers Harrison (b. 7 March 1866) and Frederick (b. 20 July 1871) in Providence, Rhode Island and working as an artist at “book building.” Around 1915, brother Harrison (“Buff”) became a parole patient at Brattleboro Retreat in Vermont; his death certificate says he suffered from dementia praecox. Clara M. Buffum died on 3 January 1921. Another brother, Albert (b. 17 Sep 1870), was in business in Blackinton, Massachusetts, where he died on 4 August 1935—this would be the brother in Massachusetts Lovecraft mentioned in his first letter (OFF 296), with the other brother being Frederick. Harrison would die in Vermont on 13 September 1935. Clara Buffum passed away on 6 July 1938, and was buried in Swan Point Cemetery in Providence, where she had lived most of her life.

What the raw data doesn’t mention is that Clara Buffum was a skilled bookbinder that traveled to the United Kingdom to expand her skills, operated her own private business in a studio in Providence, consulted with universities, lectured, exhibited her work at the Rhode Island School of Design, and in 1935 published a book: Hand-Bound Books: A Guide for Amateur Bookbinders, in a limited edition of 500 copies. Her preface to that work declares:

It was my good fortune to learn the arts of book-binding and gilding from two men who belonged to the old type of craftsman. They were thorough, conscientious, and skilful [sic] workmen who never lowered their standards. My first teacher was Mr. F. P. Hathaway, for twenty years binder at the Boston Athenaeum, and later in charge of the bindery at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, R. I. The teacher who instructed me in the art of decorative tooling and lettering with gold leaf was Mr. Charles McLeish of London, who was at one time connected with the famous Doves Bindery of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson at Hammersmith. It seems advisable to record the knowledge gained from them, to which has been added over twenty years’ experience in my own bindery in Providence.

Clara Buffum’s obituary expanded on this a little more:

Miss Buffum, who made a wide circle of friends during her residence here, was long recognied as one of the leading master craftsmen in the art of fine bookbinding in the East. She maintianed for many years a studio in Providence, where she bound many famous and valuable books, including a first edition fo Chaucer and the original Bible of John Bunyon, author of Pilgrim’s Progress. […] Miss Buffum studied under the leading masters of her craft in this country and in London. Every year for a long period, she exhibited with the Guild of Bookworkers of New York and also held occasional exhibitions at the Rhode Island School of Design where she taught bookbinding.

Other articles in newspapers and journals give evidence of Buffum’s lectures to various groups in Providence, including the New England Historic Genealogical Society (“Miss Buffum Talks Here of Bookbinding”). Given how active Annie Gamwell was in Providence society, including the Providence Art Club and attending public lectures and art exhibitions, it seems likely that was how Annie and Clara met—and probably continued to meet periodically, hence the latter occasional references in Lovecraft’s letters of 1936 and 1937. The article that Lovecraft mentions to Barlow in the 27 Jan 1937 letter is probably this article that ran in the Providence Sunday Journal 10 Jan 1937 (46):

It would be speculation at this point to try to sketch out any more of the relationships Clara had with Annie Gamwell, H. P. Lovecraft, and R. H. Barlow, but the confirmation of the few facts of her identity with the specific points in Lovecraft’s letters connects several dots. Barlow and Buffum’s shared interest in bookbinding, and the shared connection of Annie and Clara through Providence’s social circles, forged the brief connection accounted for in Lovecraft’s letters to Barlow.

Additional Reading

“Albert J. Buffum Succumbs To Sudden Heart Weakness” (5 August 1935). North Adams Transcript. Page 3. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-north-adams-transcript-albert-j-buf/128473557/

“Funeral Services for Miss Buffum” (11 July 1938). North Adams Transcript. Page 3. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-north-adams-transcript-clara-buffum/129506445/

“Harrison Buffum” (14 September 1935). The Burlington Free Press. Page 2. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-burlington-free-press-obituary-for-h/129511598/

“Miss Buffum Talks Here of Bookbinding” (13 November 1930). The Boston Globe. Page 25. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-boston-globe-miss-buffum-talks-here/128476580/

Dave Goudsward has also written about Clara Buffum, H. P. Lovecraft, and R. H. Barlow in Adventurous Liberation: H. P. Lovecraft in Florida.

Thanks and appreciation to Donovan Loucks for his help.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Hormone Therapy & Sexism: H. O. Dickinson’s “The Sex Serum” (1935) by Lor Gislason

When I read older stories, I try to have a bit of leeway for the general attitudes and goings-on of the times. What my grandfather felt and thought about is completely different from what I do in 2026.

I’d like to think we’ve grown a bit since “The Sex Serum” was published in 1935—it’s almost cartoonish in its gender stereotypes. The concept is something I think many queer people would agree is pretty sick, and I would like that to exist right now, thank you.

The story begins with a note that “It is the first time that this subject has been used in science fiction.” I find this hard to believe; more likely, it was the first time American fans of the genre had seen it.

Our narrator explains they have knowledge of a crime involving the disappearance of a professor and his daughter, with the fiancé, a man named Gilmour, the only witness. The corpse of an older woman and a young wounded man were at the scene. It’s baffled police and investigators for ages!

Gilmour goes to visit Jeanette, who he loves deeply but has a great distaste for her father, Professor Neville. He describes him as “stone-mad” and possessive of his daughter, but at the same time laments how awful it is that she was born a girl. His plan is to badger the man once again for Jeanette’s hand in marriage, using his poverty as a woe-is-me. I already hate him.

When he arrives, the professor says alright, I’ll hear you out. But first… “I must give you a brief idea of the workings of the sex machine.” Incredible opener. He goes into great detail about how embryos develop sexual characteristics and has discovered the secret “switch”, isolating it into a so-called Seventh Serum. After injection, and a few days time, you’re magically Trans-formed (my own pun, sorry) into the opposite sex. Don’t think about the mechanics too hard because we won’t be seeing any cool body horror. He does mention it happens “without pain or consciousness,” so that’s nice, I suppose.

You can probably guess who Neville has tested this Serum on—Jeanette.

Gilmour deals with this as well as one would expect. His emotional outburst is described as “sobbing like a child,” and he collapses on the floor, among other things. It’s interesting that when Jean—who is all regards, still the same person—caresses Gilmour’s face, it’s disgusting. How can a man show such tenderness to another of the same sex? When I was in high school, the trend was to follow a vulnerable moment with “no homo,” so everyone knew, “Well, I can do this, but don’t ever mistake that for being gay.”

The idea of being with another man is treated as an impossibility. Of course, to Gilmour, this is just something that would never work. As a man, Jean is not the person he loved anymore. He says that she’s dead, that “She had been swallowed in frightful inaccessible nothingness!” It’s no different from parents who describe their children as deceased when they’ve just…come out as trans. It feels selfish; to only understand the issue with how it affects yourself and not the person going through it.

Jean, for his part, seems pretty chill about the whole ordeal. He’s “enraptured with the novelty and the possibilities of his new life”. Masculinity has awoken an interest in science, in following his father’s work and exploring the world. It’s so close to having a nice message about coming out being a freeing experience—only to be ruined when the story describes what would happen in the other direction.

Gilmour flipflops from rage to sorrow and decides to give Professor Neville a taste of his own serum, locking him in a room during the process. I really wish we got any suggestion of what’s happening, even if it’s only in Gilmour’s imagination. He just stomps around the house for a few days until the transformation is complete. How boring!

This is where my biggest issues lie: While masculinity is applauded, with how charming and bright-eyed and wonderful it can be, there are no positive words used for femininity at all. Neville’s a “mannish old woman”, she spits and wails like a cat and has zero interest in science anymore. She whines about wanting to go out and look at roses instead. It’s a double whammy of the “man in a dress” trope and “old women are disgusting” rolled into one.

Realizing there’s no saving his lover, Gilmour beats Neville to death and throws a microscope at Jean before fleeing. A final note reveals Jean as the one recounting this tale, and that he is happily married with two children. So there’s that at least?

Admittedly, I found the story less interesting than an article inserted halfway through: “Manhood for Girl Dwarf Sought in Surgical Test.” The extremely dehumanising language—she’s a creature, not a girl that they hope can be turned into a normal being. Intersex individuals have been treated horribly throughout history, and here is a perfect example.

I wanted to know more about Clara. Who was she? Were there any records of her besides this?

After searching her name and some keywords, it turns out that not two months ago, a forum user had the same thought. “I really want to believe this person found some peace and contentment in their life,” they wrote. There are few records about her besides another article reflecting on the surgery. I have no doubts that her life was difficult, and I’m sickened by the way Clara was treated like an experiment and would have been better off dead. People are not projects to be tinkered with.

We have no way of knowing how she really felt. But there’s a bit of solace. A potential obituary reads “Clara W. Schreckengost died at age 69 in 1985 in Niagara Falls, unmarried, survived by several of her siblings.” I hope she was surrounded by love. I hope there was joy in her life, that she found happiness. We all deserve that.

“The Sex Serum” by H. O. Dickinson can be read for free at the Internet Archive.

Lor Gislason (they/he) is a sentient pile of worms from Vancouver Island, Canada, known for their goopy gross body horror. Find them at lormaggot.ca

Ultimately and Irrevocably Tragic: Robert Aickman’s “Choice of Weapons” (1964) by Stina Patton

“I was wondering about my eyes; one of my eyes—the left—saw everything golden and yellow and orange, and the other eye saw shades of blue and grey and green; perhaps one eye was for daylight and the other was for night. If everyone in the world saw different colors from different eyes there might be a great many new colors still to be invented.
—Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

The power of Aickman’s stories, to me, lies in their VIBE: how does one analyze that? I can relay the known facts, characters, plot points (and assume that these facts, as relayed, are reliable)—this does little to explain the atmosphere you find yourself in, upon reading this story. Without reading his specific words, phrasing, etc—without ingesting how the words are arranged—it’s a bit akin to me explaining a particularly disturbing dream I had: I can relay the pertinent details, but the mood and feel are impossible to convey.

It is the accumulation of myriad things and personal symbols, arranged just so, that provides the unique distress of our dreams, and they seem rather nonsensical as a whole, or incredibly banal when relayed. This is what I am reminded of when I delve into this story. I can read you the lyrics of a song- without the music, it is an incomplete encapsulation. To try to fully analyze or interpret Aickman does his Art and Words a tremendous disservice because it is fundamentally the MYSTERY that contains the magic of his storytelling.

Many readers may be frustrated by the ambiguity inherent in his stories, or baffled by their cryptic nature; others may find them to contain exactly what they were looking for, scratching an itch that they hadn’t even known they had.

As a queer woman, I am instinctively drawn to such ambiguity. Unless we are lucky enough to be surrounded by other queer people, we usually live our lives in—and surrounded by—a constant, perpetual state of ambiguity. We still exist on the outskirts and fringes of society, and whether we’re trying to interpret another’s romantic affections (or interest), their intentions, our human rights, or whether our queerness is embraced or even acknowledged, we are usually unable to take anything for granted or as a given.

My perspective has a queer lens, but this also applies universally. Aickman’s stories reflect the ambiguity, uncertainty, and peculiarity of Life in all its glory. They take the utter weirdness of Reality and skew it just enough to say something profound about what we can interpret from “the left unspoken,” the truly unknowable; the cracks in the spaces of things.

Most horror, especially cosmic horror, relies on its implications; I feel that Aickman’s horror is very much of a cosmic nature, but deviates from the definition as we ascribe it traditionally. Aickman, according to Ramsey Campbell, was not a fan of Lovecraft OR horror. He preferred the term “strange stories.” They certainly are strange, but many are also definitely horror. (They are also simultaneously comforting to me in a way, because of this peculiar ambiguity, but that’s another essay.)

The horror of an Aickman story does not lie in the implications because by definition, implications are implied by undisputed facts, concrete knowledge we assume within the confined reality of a story. Yet in the nightmare logic of an Aickman story, everything is called into question because much of what comes across as “peculiar” are typically things and situations we would think of as mundane, benign, ordinary, on their own—it is how and where these things are placed within the confines of his stories, and their accumulation, that allows the uncanny feel to increase. The true “why” remains undetermined. The abject horror I feel inherent in most of Aickman’s stories is in the immense possibilities and implications of the implications themselves: ALL bets are off. If most horror shows us pieces of the shadowy Things hiding in the shadows, Aickman’s shows us that those shadows have cracks of their own where other Things hide.

Coming to the end of an Aickman story is to amass a giant jigsaw puzzle, realizing as you snap the last piece into place that there are actually still several fundamental pieces missing, and that it is only with the addition of these pieces that it is possible to comprehend exactly what it is that the puzzle is of. Aickman may have had the pieces, but he’s not sharing.

I feel a summary of the story is helpful:

In “Choice of Weapons” the prickly, stuffy, dissatisfied, somewhat unsympathetic Malcolm is dining with his hapless fiancée Ann when he becomes suddenly, intensely enamored with a woman sitting by herself. He flees his date, follows the woman, and sees a man in fancy dress leaving a house he thinks may be hers. A concerned doctor, Dr. Bermuda, hypnotizes him to determine the address (telling him “the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it”) and also provides her name.

He visits her and discovers Dorabelle is a peculiar woman with peculiar thoughts living in a peculiar house. She is quite possibly unbalanced, erratic, and may be having hallucinations. It also appears, although she claims she is poor and the house is in a state of disrepair, that the house is stuffed with money—until her butler makes off with it and never returns.

After several visits, Dorabelle tells him she is in love with another man—the fancy-dressed man he saw previously. She confides that this man appeared to her one day in her mirror after her reflection disappeared; they will be married. After a disastrous encounter where Malcolm attempts to kiss her and she responds with fury, he is surprised when Dr. Bermuda arrives at the house with his son and takes him home. There, he is informed that after being “prescribed” to by the sympathetic Dr. Bermuda, Ann has overdosed on pills.

Malcolm goes to sleep, dreams of Dorabelle, then awakens to discover a note that reads, ‘I want you’ with no signature. He assumes it’s from her and races to her house, where he is accosted by the man in fancy dress who accuses him of stealing Dorabelle’s money and challenges him to a duel: “There are rapiers behind the clock. Or pistols in my bedroom.” Malcolm chooses the swords—they duel. He throws a candlestick in the man’s face while piercing him with his weapon, then falls unconscious. When he awakes, Dr. Bermuda is there and leads him to Dorabelle, who is gravely wounded; he realizes that Dorabelle was the fancy-dressed man. She proclaims her love, they kiss, and she dies. The police arrive; Dr. Bermuda is again sympathetic, telling Malcolm that although modern science has failed to cure him, he will not leave him to suffer consequences from the law. He instructs his son to look behind the mirror in the bedroom and bring them what he finds, at which point the story ends.

I share this summary to relay the salient points of this story for anyone unfamiliar, but it does not begin to convey the myriad ways in which this story meanders and weaves in and out of itself and defies an easy explanation. Almost everything of import that happens can be read in different ways, and even insignificant details are odd. The things Aickman does not explain feel as important as what he does. The entire thing is an enigma wrapped inside a riddle of near inscrutability. Going for a logical explanation of the whole sends you into unfathomable possibilities and interpretations. No one is a reliable narrator, including the Reality of the story.

Ultimately, the doctor can be seen as being a benevolent helper or a malevolent manipulator. His hypnosis and specific advice help fuel Malcolm’s trajectory when his obsession would have likely petered out on its own. He may have innocently prescribed the fiancée sleeping pills; he may have hypnotized and/or manipulated her; he may have murdered her due to an unknown motivation, then used his medical credentials to cover it up. It also appears that he may have been the one responsible for writing the anonymous note that Malcolm finds by his bedside. Is he orchestrating all these deaths for his own selfish reasons? What is the something that the doctor asks his son to fetch from behind the mirror—the pistols? Is he going to kill Mlacolm or convince him to kill himself? Was it all an elaborate plan to steal Dorabelle’s money—the money the butler already made off with?

The meaning of the title “Choice of Weapons” literally refers to the rapiers and pistols, and the story implies that no matter which Malcolm chose, one of these weapons would be responsible for his undoing, even upon winning the duel. Yet another interpretation is: will science or emotion win out? Will rationality, or delusions? These choices also determine his and Dorabelle’s outcome.

What was Dorabelle’s motivation for dressing up as a man? To make Malcolm jealous? Did she even impersonate a man? For there is a supernatural interpretation one can make: that in this world, there really IS a man living inside her mirror, either existing already or conjured up by Dorabelle’s desire/longing, and that he took possession of her body during the duel, only to be banished back to his realm once he is grievously injured.

The only things I can say with certainty about “Choice of Weapons” are that in this story, unrequited or unproclaimed love ultimately brings ruin to the two main characters, with one of them causing the death of the other and also having a hand in the death of his fiancée. Even if Malcolm was manipulated, it’s of note how easily he was influenced when in a vulnerable state, and it illustrates how subjective our reality is when perception and perspective are colored by our own desires. The other lesson it proffers is that it is not wise to put all of your faith in a doctor (or anyone in authority) and assume that they’re working in your best interests.

It’s interesting to note that in most of the accounts I’ve read about him, Aickman himself could be described similarly to Malcolm: prickly, stuffy, discontented. This story ultimately speaks to the dangers of obsession and jealousy, which may have been his ultimate intention; Aickman may have been purging personal demons. It may or may not be relevant that he knew firsthand of being madly in love and then rejected: he was deeply wounded/offended when his affair with the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard ended and she chose instead to marry another. It’s a theme that comes up in more than one of his stories.

A strong sense of alienation frequently infuses his work, and his characters are often outsiders. Even when not sympathetic, they retain an inherent sadness and dissatisfaction within the reality of the worlds they inhabit, and this is something that resonates deeply with me, particularly in this story. I often feel a bit sad about, or pity, his characters and the frustrations they must feel navigating a world that often seems unfamiliar or unwelcoming to them. It may be my queerness or my neuro-divergence but I feel a kinship with and empathy for these two main characters who find themselves adrift, lost, as they make their way through their lives. Both the man and Dorabelle are each looking for someone who accepts and loves them—each of them thinks they find it—but neither is ready to accept the reality of their surroundings and situations, and the results for both are ultimately and irrevocably tragic.

This story provides ample puzzling material for analysis and attempting to determine meaning. I don’t presume to have any “right” answers- I don’t think there ARE any. That’s the joy for me of an Aickman story, and each time I read this, or any of his stories, I have new and different thoughts and opinions about what they may mean. He remains a unique, memorable storyteller of a very particular type of magic: one that sometimes leads me to believe that he may have been seeing the REAL world all around us, but that WE only have the right kind of eyes some of the time.

Stina Patton is an artist, writer, reviewer, and lover of the strange, surreal, and unsettling. She currently resides in Hell where she is kept sane by her many, many books and not as many cats. Find her creepy (and not-so-creepy) Art at stinasdemons.bigcartel.com/ and see her thoughts on life and Horror on Bluesky @stinasdemons.com

“Roberta” (1962) by Margaret St. Clair: Transition and the Weird by Catherine Lundoff

Writer Margaret St. Clair (1911-1995) was often described as a writer ahead of her time, as well as one whose work was, in Ramsey Campbell’s words “startlingly original.” Her work is often characterized as ‘weird fiction,’ as that term has evolved, with her characters finding the weird and disturbing in the relatively ordinary. During the course of her career, she authored eight published novels and over one hundred published short stories, several of which were adapted for television.

Of that body of work, “Roberta” (Galaxy, October 1962) was the last of her published short stories. After this, she turned her full attention to writing novels. This story is not included in any of the collections of her work and can only be read in copies of the original magazine. “Roberta” is a science fiction story set in a future where interstellar travel exists via starliner (details unspecified). There is a man from another planet, seemingly humanoid, as well as two other male human characters in a setting that suggests Earth in the late 1950s. Gender reassignment/alignment surgery for transsexual people is possible and effective, but illegal, for reasons that are also not explained within the scope of this tale.

The titular Roberta is a trans woman who has had this illegal operation in order to transition. My research suggests that this story is one of the earliest depictions of male-to-female medical transition in science fiction, possibly the earliest. Ursula Le Guin’s ground-breaking Left Hand of Darkness (1969), which includes a main character who transitions from male characteristics to female ones as part of an alien reproductive cycle, is still seven years away.

For historical context, Christine Jorgensen, probably the best known trans woman of her time in the U.S., returned from Europe after gender reassignment surgery in Denmark and was front page news in December of 1952, a decade before “Roberta” appeared in Galaxy and seventeen years before the Stonewall Riots. Trans people had no legal standing or protections in the United States or elsewhere, and gender reassignment/reaffirming surgery was rare and hard to access, perforce limiting it to a tiny minority. But enough of that minority, like Jorgensen in the U.S., would have been visible to St. Clair so that she would, based on this story, have been aware that medical transition was possible and to have read something of the mechanics involved.

As I read “Roberta,” it’s not entirely clear to me how St. Clair wanted her readers to interpret it. Roberta has a very fraught relationship with Robert, her pre-transition self, coming to view him as her nemesis over the course of the story. But he also refers to them as “married” at one point and sometimes behaves more as a confidant than a foe. The story’s conflicts, however, hinge on her efforts to get rid of him, thus fulfilling her dream of being “Roberta,” free of a judgmental and undermining male alter ego.

The scene is set entirely in an apartment that Roberta thinks of as hers; she claims to have no memory of her life before the operation, though she thinks she “used to be happier.” There are two other characters that we get to meet (the receptionist/door person appears only on screen). Rodvorello Diag is the Vegan who financed Roberta’s operation, and Clement Thomas is the human who performed the operation. Diag visits Roberta’s apartment first and gives her a starliner ticket for a (nonoptional) trip to the Vegan homeworld. He announces that he has come to add her to his collection of “imitation things,” that being the deal that Robert reached with him in order to get his financial assistance.

Roberta murders Diag with a sliver gun and stuffs his body in a trunk in her room. She then treats her right hand (the one firing the gun) as if it is separate from the rest of her and can be punished by slapping it. Clement Thomas arrives during this scene and attempts to blackmail her about her operation. Roberta shoots him as well and adds him to the trunk. Robert then appears in the cloud, as she pictures him, near the ceiling, to admonish her.

Since Roberta has no memory of anything before the operation, she doesn’t recognize Diag or Thomas. Instead, she conflates them into aspects of Robert, while recognizing that it is Robert who she really wants to destroy. By the end of the story, she has committed two murders, attempted suicide, and is well on her way to planning more murders because each death makes Robert “go away” for a time. She displays a childlike understanding of the potential consequences for these actions, ignoring Robert’s dire warnings about needing to flee from the apartment and the two bodies in the trunk. It’s also not completely clear that Robert didn’t anticipate something like this happening—he puts an illegal sliver gun in her bag for her to find. Is it intended for self-defense? To prevent herself from being whisked off to Vega? Either or both seem possible.

How is the reader meant to feel about Roberta as a character after all this? It’s hard to say. On the one hand, Diag and Thomas are insulting, hurtful, and aggressive toward her, calling into question whether or not she can ever be a “real” woman from their perspective. Robert is more subtle about it, but he leans down from his perch in the clouds to remind her that her voice and movements are “too aggressive” and that it “spoils the illusion.” He also makes the comment that her hormone injection helps her to be “what she is trying to be,” along with similar comments that undermine her self-confidence.

So this could be read as justification for Roberta’s actions if you are inclined to read the story that way. Roberta accepts Diag and Thomas as guests in her apartment, where she wants to remain, untroubled and dancing around in her pretty pink dress. And both he and Thomas betray that hospitality. Robert can certainly be seen as betraying her as well, in everything from not warning her about what to expect after the operation to undermining her afterwards. That is, if you accept Roberta’s belief that Robert is an entity separate from her.

One thing that stood out sharply to me, reading this as an out queer cis (not trans) woman in 2026, is Roberta’s total and complete isolation. She does not seem to have a family or a job or friends of any kind, just the receptionist on the intercom when visitors arrive and three male characters who do not have her best interests at heart. The illegality of her status only adds to that profound loneliness: she cannot trust the men who helped her to become herself, nor can she trust her own perceptions of the small world that she inhabits.

But she is still willing to kill to protect herself because she perceives the threats against her as leading to her erasure, in one form or the other. There is no sense of how Robert thought life would go for Roberta after transitioning. Perhaps, living in a “collection” on Vega seemed like a reasonable alternative to living on an Earth where Roberta would be treated like a freak and under constant threat of imprisonment in the bargain.

It’s tempting to project contemporary attitudes back in time and assume that St. Clair, a cis woman who was presumably heterosexual based on her biography, had negative attitudes toward trans women. Her biographical details include a marriage to writer Eric St. Clair that was deliberately childless (not an easy thing to achieve given both the mores of the time and the absence of reliable birth control), embracing Wicca and, occasionally, nudism, as well as a number of unusual jobs. It is safe to say that she was unconventional and might have sympathized with Roberta to some degree as another unconventional woman under threat from forces that want her to be something else.

And yet, there is a comment about Roberta’s Adam’s apple displaying when she looks up, as well as the last line of this story: ‘“I’ll kill you yet,” Roberta said, between his teeth.’ Up to this point, St. Clair always uses “she” to refer to Roberta so why change here? In fact, Roberta gets no positive reinforcement for her transition throughout this story, relying on her own belief that she is now as she wants herself to be. But Roberta is also clearly unstable and an unreliable narrator.

My takeaway from all of this is that St. Clair most likely thought that a trans woman could never be a “real” woman, a regrettably common opinion. “Roberta” reads as a story about a mind at war with itself, in which Roberta is unstable and dangerous because she has convinced herself to act as if she has achieved something that is impossible. The weird elements are entirely in Roberta’s head, shaped by her derangement rather than by external or supernatural forces.

That said, “Roberta” is a fascinating historical artifact: a first in a genre with many firsts. I am somewhat surprised to have not seen it cited in sources on the history of queer sf and f, such as Garber and Paleo’s Uranian Worlds. I suspect that is due to the story not being included in the various collections of St. Clair work and consequently not as visible. I think it is certainly worth including going forward as a heretofore unrecognized first in the field.

“Roberta” by Margaret St. Clair may be read for free at the Internet Archive.

Catherine started writing professionally in 1996 while in law school. She sold the first story she ever wrote and quit law school a week later; she has not looked back since. In addition to writing and editing, Catherine is also the publisher at Queen of Swords Press. Most recently, she is the winner of a 2025 Alice B. Award and a finalist for the 2024 Innovative Voices Award from the Independent Book Publisher’s Association. To find out more about Catherine, please visit her blog, like her Facebook Author Page or follow her on Mastodon.

Ancestors Are Just People—Robert Heinlein’s “‘All You Zombies—’” (1959) by O. F. Cieri

Does the sun still exist at night, or does it die every day? This is the question at the heart of Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies—”, where a time traveler experiences his entire life in one work shift before settling down in his cot for a well-earned rest.

This story is one of the greats of the golden age of science fiction that moves huge ideas through a few short pages. It has a relatively slow start, with two guys in a bar talking about their jobs and their lives. One guy is the bartender; the other is an advice columnist who specializes in answering questions from Unmarried Mothers. It doesn’t spoil anything to reveal that the columnist was himself an Unmarried Mother once, which explains how easily he can describe their point of view.

At the core of the story is a question of whether the individual has a concrete value in an ever-shifting universe. Heinlein’s answer, hinted at in the title, is both No, and Yes. “All You Zombies—”’s central premise is that the individual experience is the only one we can have, and yet the self is so malleable that it can be completely transformed by external forces. War, employment, sex and gender are all interchangeable, meaningless and foundational. And yet despite the baseless nature of the self in an uncaring universe, the central figure ends his shift believing only in himself.

“The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail, Forever and Ever . . . I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?”
—Robert Heinlein, “All You Zombies—” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Mar 1959) 15

In an uncaring universe where the individual is self-creating and permanently fluctuating, who is the Other? Does anything exist outside the Self? If I die, does the whole world? The lonely conclusion of this logic is addressed even within the text, where the protagonist signs off his narrative with: “I miss you.”

“All You Zombies—” is complex enough to survive spoilers, but to enjoy the full experience, it is best to go in blind. Talking about it requires delving into the meat of time travel and paradox, so the rest of the review will feature spoilers.

You’ve been warned!!!

The story doesn’t fall apart at the worldbuilding level, but the inciting incident of the story is superfluous. The premise is that time travel became possible not long after interstellar travel, leading to many different necessary support teams for fifth-dimensional servicemembers. The protagonist, the one true individual we can prove, is one such servicemember of the Time and Space Corps. His story is littered with the acronyms of made-up military organizations and their support structures. There’s the Women’s Emergency National Corps, Hospitality & Entertainment Section (W.E.N.C.H.E.S), a.k.a the Auxiliary Nursing Group, Extraterrestrial Legions (A.N.G.E.L) or Women’s Hospitality Order Refortifying & Encouraging Spacemen, probably the most honest acronym (W.H.O.R.E.S). Space can be lonely, and women are enlisted wholesale in the war effort to prop up male servicemembers psychologically and sexually. Technology is sufficiently advanced that natural beauty is not as important as being fit to endure the stress of the job, but not so much that the work is not gender segregated. Despite the heavy lifting that the phrase ‘women’s work’ does in context, there is an emphasis on the dignity of the work, as a necessity for morale, and as spacers in their own right.

Long before any of this is revealed, the Unwed Mother reveals that he used to be a woman who was interested in taking on one of these roles. He’d never felt beautiful as a woman, but the Time and Space Corps could change anything about him. He would be thrown into the vast frontier of space, rewritten as a different person, and emerge as successful by feminine standards, with a husband in a stable professional career. Before he can apply, a handsome man with ‘a fat wad of hundreds’ takes him out on a few dates, knocks him up, and disappears.

The bartender knows all this already, because he is the Unwed Mother after many long years in the Service, and as he listens to the Unwed Mother he casually organizes the circumstances for his own conception and birth by offering to introduce the Unwed Mother to the cad who left him alone and pregnant. Slipping him a fat wad of hundreds, he sends him through time to meet his pre-transition self, then skips ahead nine months to collect his infant self and dump the child off at an orphanage. Meanwhile, the doctors wake the Unwed Mother up post-labor to inform him of an undescended set of testicles nestled inside his groin. Due to birth complications, they have decided to advance the development of the testes and help him adjust to life in a new gender.

With this one act, the Unwed Mother’s life is destroyed. His original plans to take night classes and join the WENCHES are out of his grasp. The doctors pressure him to put the child up for adoption, a superfluous decision when his future self snatches the baby and dumps it at an orphanage. After his transition, he wanders aimlessly for years, struggling to feel at home in his body, before ambling into a bar for a drink. There, his bartender sets him up with a few dates with his former self before dragging him to the Sub-Rockies Base in 1985 for recruitment. As his shift ends, the bartender closes up for the night, hops to the same Sub Rockies Annex in 1999, downs a bottle of whiskey, and types up his report.

The crux of the story is to create a time paradox scenario where a man could conceive and birth himself, and all the references to military life are trappings to provide a sliver of justification for these actions. The recruiter knows to recruit himself for his own role, and as a bonus, he gets to ensure his own birth, too. To create the effect he wanted, Heinlein ad-libbed from older material and left some of their debris behind.

“All You Zombies—” bristles with the anxieties of post-war America, full of acronymic federal bureaus, new medical treatments for sleep, headaches, moods, and birth control. Medical advances make the body transparent through better anesthesia and X-rays, increasing the availability of plastic surgery. The Space Race punctures the horizon, condoms roll back generational fears of unplanned pregnancies. The story’s heart is a deeply anxious question about the nature of personhood in the face of scientific progress, and included on this list is the question of what makes a man.

When the story is viewed as a question on the nature of identity, it makes sense that Christine Jorgensen’s name would be used to illustrate the protagonist’s intersex condition. Otherwise, the protagonists’ sex organs are the only part of him left to nature. At birth, he just so happened to have both sex organs. His condition is used to form a window through which medical science can dictate his gender, but science itself plays no role in his self-identity. The protagonist is characterised as being remarkably easy-going and level-headed. While he is clearly aimless and depressed after the loss of his daughter-self, he’s quite comfortable in his masculinity. He makes a few jokes about sympathising with women as someone who used to be one, but doesn’t show any regret for his transition. In fact, he balks at threats to his masculinity.

Clearly, these are circumstances that create a cohesive image for Heinlein, who might have struggled to understand news stories about pre-liberation gender transition. Heinlein’s perspective is very normative in centering gender identity in the genitals, with a brief, hand-waved period of months in which the protagonist learns their new social role. In-universe, the protagonist is characterised as being an excellent field agent for his even temperament, implying that anomalies require a degree of gender fluidity. On the other hand, the setup established that girls aren’t allowed in space except as sexual accessories.

This contradiction seems to have crossed Heinlein’s mind long enough for him to envision a space future in Starship Troopers with a fully integrated infantry unit. If it’s supposed that Starship Troopers takes place along the same spacetime continuum, long enough for America to find an enemy amongst the stars, then the mood stabilizers, plastic surgery, and birth control have crafted a society with gender equality that conforms neatly to heterosexual standards.

For Heinlein, gender equality is something that needs to be forged in flesh, cut and synthesized into a physical ideal. That wasn’t unique to him. The golden age of science fiction delighted in using the mind as a tool to shape the world in a playground with practically no friction between a problem and its solution. Science fiction acted as the drafting stage for a design patent and its practical application.

Heinlein, as the story’s ultimate authority, in the story asserts himself a few times, most notably in the central premise that the space frontier will immediately lead to exploring time. Or that the United States would be the leader of that technological revolution, though in Heinlein’s defense, Americans who didn’t believe that were put on a list. More unique to Heinlein is the proud assertion that anyone would sleep with themselves if given the chance. There’s no way to be sure about that, but it’s necessary for the story, and Heinlein seems to believe it. Therefore, it is true. But would Heinlein’s protagonist sleep with himself as a man, or only a woman? If not, why not?

Heinlein’s use of an intersex person with an incredibly rare case of chimerism interrogates the limits of heterosexual expectations without abandoning them, like an astronaut tethered to a ship through his oxygen tank.

But Heinlein’s vision still centers a biological assignment that can be made by doctors on an operating table without the patient’s input. That someone’s sense of self can be altered for life in just a few months of training, given our current political climate, seems unsettling. Heinlein’s use of an intersex person with an incredibly rare case of chimerism interrogates the limits of heterosexual expectations without abandoning them, like an astronaut tethered to a ship through his oxygen tank. The umbilical cord of binary sex and gender lashes the story to simplistic modes of social graces even while it threatens to strike out on its own. The real question “All You Zombies—” asks: is anybody out there on the other end of this leash? Who are you people? Will you still be there in the morning?

“All You Zombies—” (1959) by Robert Heinlein may be read for free at the Internet Archive.

O. F. Cieri is based out of NYC. In 2013 she won first place in BMCC’s Poetry Competition. In 2016 she won an Honourable Mention in LaborArts Make Work Visible Competition. Her non-fiction has been carried by Hyperallergic and the Invisible Oranges. She published her first book, Lord of Thundertown, with Ninestar Press in 2020. In February of 2023 she published her second book, Lockdown Laureate, with Castaigne Publishing. Her third book, Backmask, was published by Malarkey in June of 2023. https://ofcieri.com/

In Defense Of Transgender Mermaids: George Sterling’s Strange Waters (1926) by Joe Koch

Strange Waters is a narrative poem by George Sterling released in a small chapbook edition in 1926, the same year Sterling died by suicide. As his last published poem, the language is more economical than the “things of tinsel and fustian, the frippery of a by-gone fashion” that drew criticism earlier in his career when his “brilliant but too facile craftsmanship was tempted by the worst excesses of the Tennysonian tradition,” according to Harriet Monroe of Poetry Magazine.

Sterling’s lyrical intemperance had, however, attracted praise from Ambrose Bierce, who for nearly a decade mentored him and enthusiastically publicized his poems, most notably in an effusive afterword for “A Wine of Wizardry,” a decadent and hallucinatory horror-fantasy poem published in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1907. Controversy over Bierce’s claims of greatness for Sterling went viral across US print media, and arguments over Sterling’s talent—or lack of it—made him famous. Clark Ashton Smith credited “A Wine of Wizardry” with inspiring him to write poetry at age fifteen and soon became Sterling’s protégé and a lifelong correspondent.

Aside from connections with weird fiction, Sterling—as a Bohemian figure, perhaps more than as a writer—influenced many contemporaries whose work has fared better than his. He shared an intense friendship with Jack London, critiquing and polishing London’s novels The Call of The Wild and The Sea-Wolf. He was a founding member of the West Coast artist’s colony Carmel-by-the-Sea, an early twentieth-century self-styled pagan commune of sorts populated by writers, artists, musicians, theater people, and other nonconformists.

Biographical information matters to me when reading Strange Waters, because the poem’s glaringly offensive flaw—the twist ending that I’ll spoil for you momentarily—is the sort of thing too easily dismissed as lazy writing, or a product of olden times, as if everyone in the vaguely defined past suffered from debilitating sexual repression and unexamined prejudices.

This simply isn’t true.

Nor is the potential accusation of lazy writing. Every choice in the poem, including what is not said, feels precise and deliberate. The plot twist could easily play as slapstick. But rather than presenting this potentially titillating “tale of forbidden love” in a saucy manner, our narrator opens with brooding insomniac musings, a compulsion born of gulls crying out and storm gales brewing over the nighttime sea. Mournful framing sets the stage for a tragedy rather than a farce.

Our narrator introduces Ralph and Mary, a fairly average and averagely happy heterosexual couple living on the California coast. Their equanimity is interrupted by a letter from Mary’s estranged brother in Ireland. Physically reacting to the letter “as tho it were a snake,” Mary throws it on the floor. Of her brother, Mary will only say he is a “monster.”

From his deathbed, the brother has sent his eighteen-year-old twin daughters to live with Mary. They’ll be arriving soon to “avenge me for a distant hour, your nails along my cheek, your virtuous words.” Mary suggests the girls might be better off sent “to some good school,” but Ralph shuts down the conversation, insensitive to the implications of assault in the letter, and Mary’s obvious misgivings.

The girls arrive. Intrusively, our narrator describes them, and continues re-describing them—one might even say fetishizing them—as the poem goes on. We hear they’re beautiful and tall, like “twin eaglets, fierce of eye and orange-crowned.” Of the two, Deidre is “more girlish” while Callirhoe is “an inch taller, and shouldered like a boy.” Deidre isn’t mentioned again until the end of the story, whereas Callirhoe is granted an assertive personality. She winces gruffly when Mary kisses her in greeting, trounces Ralph’s philosophical arguments in conversation, and makes a habit of staring him down. With wounded pride, Ralph’s anger and suspicion fester.

You see where this is leading, don’t you?

The transmisogynist tropes are all there, except for a prominent Adam’s apple and five o’clock shadow.

Callirhoe is going to die, though not directly by Ralph’s hand. His spying, harassment, and threats drive the girls to flee, resulting in Callirhoe’s fall from a sea cliff “clad scantily in her scarlet bathing suit.” Found thus bared, she’s subjected to an unfortunate and cheap twist ending I’m all too familiar with. I call it “Dead Gender Reveal Party.” While handling her corpse, Ralph exclaims, “Christ, Mary! Christ! Callirhoe’s a boy!”

Not only is Callirhoe portrayed as an absurd caricature of supposedly masculine traits, she’s murdered, manhandled, and misgendered for shock value. She’s literally referred to after death as “the other.” Before the big shock, though, there’s another shock; two, in fact. Ralph discovers, by snooping at their bedroom door, that the twins are incestuous lesbians.

The brother’s letter has suggested he passed down his incestuous leanings to his children, and Mary’s behavior confirms some family dysfunction, but the idea of homosexuality is what most outrages Ralph. The plot moves according to Ralph’s growing rage step by step toward greater perceived perversities, positioning transness as the greatest perversion of all.

While there’s no excuse to write a transgender character in such an objectifying and cartoonish way in 2026 (although contemporary authors I won’t name have proudly done so and somehow evaded censure), what about one-hundred years ago? Can we dismiss Strange Waters as an antiquated product of its time?

Even if the correct scholarly answer is yes, dismissal doesn’t satisfy me. Dismissal is too close to denial. The fascist claim that being transgender is a new fad unheard of in the past is a deliberate lie. Erasing records of our existence, destroying research on our medical care, and eradicating language that names our legacy help perpetuate that lie, tactics most famously practiced in Nazi Germany and widely used in the US today. Cutting out the parts of history you don’t like and repackaging the past for a new and newly ignorant generation has become streamlined by modern techno-fascists; through our personal devices, information is simultaneously ephemeral and ubiquitous, while our attention spans are weary, waning, and overtaxed.

Denial is a spell that’s easy to fall under. Denial is a tool of oppressors and abusers. Dismissing human hatred and misogyny as things of the past represents a form of cultural denial that allows that which is denied to flourish.

Hatred does the most harm in disguise. In the deepest waters, the parts of our being that have yet to be explored, the tendrils of hatred find fertile conditions for growth. We may wish to see ourselves as having overcome all prejudices and biases at some point in our personal or societal histories, but overcoming is cyclical, part of a meaningful life’s ongoing work. We enable hatred when we pretend it’s behind us.

We might say George Sterling mistreated and exploited Callirhoe as you’d expect for a man of his time, but since he lived, worked, and performed with nonconformists, was openly polyamorous, and was far too popular and active as a socialite in artsy circles not to know plenty of queers and a few transgender people, I wonder how much blame lies with the poem’s patriarch Ralph rather than the author. In trying to sort out prejudice from portrayal, I’m drawn into a darker, weirder story lurking beneath the surface of the story in Strange Waters.

Maybe this is my compulsive habit as a fiction writer, re-making art that’s failed me. Maybe I’m telling myself a different story because the plot of the poem is offensive. Or maybe I’m rebelling against writing nonfiction because it collapses possibilities into fact, and writing, to me, is about expanding—or exploding—the possible.

With two patriarchs in Strange Waters, Ralph in the present and Mary’s brother in the past, we open with an insomniac narrator musing about the stormy sea. Their mournful voice is soon subsumed by Ralph, whose hostile dialogue and action moves the plot forward. These dual voices remain somewhat in opposition throughout the poem, as do the double patriarchs, and other doublings and couplings that build both ambiguity and tension.

In Gothic fashion, the past violates the present, doubling time when first the letter and then the twins (themselves doubles) arrive from Ireland. Mary’s brother implies some horrific or cruel parallel when he writes of his daughters, “Ha! We are of the same blood, they and I! There’s more in that than you’ve a notion of.” Does this mean that they are, to use Mary’s word for her brother, monsters?

Resonances, ripples, waves; we might wonder how much Mary, who is utterly un-shocked by Callirhoe (both alive and dead), recognizes in the twins. Is her brother really her sister? The narrator never swerves from calling this a “tale of forbidden love” rather than a tale of perversion or abuse. And how exactly do monsters reproduce?

“Like sea-born things,” the girls go swimming three times a day, every day, eschewing the company of chaperones. They’re strong swimmers, described as feral or mythological creatures: “twin eaglets,” “stranded stars,” “wild things,” “gorgeous snakes about to strike,” and “amorous reptiles.” Song-like interludes in their voices punctuate the narrative, and it’s not clear if these are their thoughts, their actual words, or some psychic, siren-like intrusion. Perhaps these are the sad, desperate, and rebellious songs of a dying species; of mermaids.

Who hears these songs? Is it Mary, who has no children, despite a marriage with “love-hunger long to satisfy” in which she and Ralph “longed…often for dear children”? Mary’s silence is pivotal, holding certain mysteries below the surface of the plot. Instead of a drowning (an ending), things unknown perpetuate doubts that keep the plot alive after the story is over.

Likewise, instead of resolving reader uncertainty by showing the drowned maiden of Gothic tradition, Deidre swims away, neither definitively alive nor dead, but becoming (narratively) something Other. Just before they find Callirhoe’s body, a fisherman tells Ralph and Mary that he saw Deidre from a distance “take the surf at yonder beach, alone, and watched her head on every wave until she faded in the distance. Say—she’ll be in China in a week or two!”

Mary makes her single decisive statement to Ralph about Deidre’s missing body: “No—you’ll look in vain. She’s gone forever.” We don’t know how she feels or what motivates her; only that Mary forbids a search party.

The story I’m left with is fanciful. It’s about a family of cryptids separated by the flight of their matriarch, who has rejected her sea-born powers in favor of domestic normalcy. Drawing parallels between the strange waters of the subconscious mind and the actual sea, I’m reminded that what we know of marine biology includes more complex reproductive processes and gender flexibility than the mere idea of transgender mermaids, or of an estranged brother who somehow impregnates himself, or of a not-mother who protects a child’s gambit toward freedom that might mirror her own past. The deepest parts of the ocean remain subject only to scientific speculation, not exploration. Maybe they’re like the psychological depths of our being, the places where poetry originates.

I’m also left thinking about the poet composing the tale near the Pacific Ocean, perhaps gazing out into the darkness, disturbed by stirring waves and crying gulls on yet another sleepless, hungover night. He would have been about two years younger than me at the time. I wonder how often Sterling’s fingers strayed to the vial of cyanide labeled “Peace” that he was known to have kept with him for nearly the last twenty years of his life.

Is Sterling’s sympathy lacking, or did he intend to critique Ralph’s petty cruelty? Did he intend to show a system where women have no power and morals are upside-down? He might have treated the mermaids better in death and not made Callirhoe a punchline, but I realize there’s only so much empathy you can expect from certain men, especially those cheated by toxic fame and feeling past their prime. Sometimes, as he may or may not have meant to imply, the best option is to take to the surf and see where it leads you; to take flight, and become what you never imagined possible.

Strange Waters (1926) by George Sterling may be read for free at the Internet Archive.

Resources:

Harriet Monroe “Review: The Poetry of George Sterling” Poetry Vol. 7 No. 6 March, 1916

Harriet Monroe “Two Poets Say Farewell” Poetry Vol. 29 No. 4 January, 1927

Joy Lanzendorfer “Bohemian Tragedy: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of George Sterling’s California Arts Colony” Poetry Foundation, February 26, 2018

Gary Kamiya “S.F.’s Unofficial Poet Laureate Thrived In ‘Cool, Grey City of Love’ —For a Time” San Francisco Chronicle, October 15, 2020

Jim Fisher “George Sterling: Historical Essay” FoundSF.org (digital historical archive managed by Shaping San Francisco)

Peter Kratzke “The Man Who Would Have It All: George Sterling and The American Dream” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, 1900 to Present June, 2005

Joe Koch writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Their books include The Wingspan of Severed Hands, Invaginies, Convulsive, and The Couvade, which received a 2019 Shirley Jackson Award nomination. His short work appears in The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Southwest Review, Nightmare, Vastarien, and many others. Joe co-edited the art horror anthology Stories of the Eye and has collaborated with other authors and poets on several speculative writing projects. Find Joe (he/they) online at horrorsong.blog.

“Teoquitla the Golden” (1924) by Ramon de las Cuevas: A Review by Luana Saitta

A hunched-over white man, limbs chained, is being led by two jaguar warriors brandishing war club and shield across a crowded square. Great Aztec idols survey the tableau of what is surely the prelude to bloody sacrifice neath.

This is the cover of the November 1924 issue of Weird Tales magazine, boasting a “complete novelette by Ramon de las Cuevas.”

A few pages later, the banner image of this novelette titled “Teoquitla the Golden” shows the reader what appears to be a white woman bedecked in jewelry (with a particularly notable septum ring) staring determinedly into the distance, gossamer veils blowing in the breeze against a backdrop of Mesoamerican pyramids.

One could then perhaps reasonably have expected the tale of an explorer encountering a lost city and falling under the spell of a white jungle queen in the manner of H. Rider Haggard’s Ayesha, or Edgar Rice Burroughs’ La of Opar.

However, de las Cuevas—a pseudonym of early 20th century archaeologist Mark Raymond Harrington—had rather a different turn in store.

“Teoquitla” opens on an ocean steamer around the Eastern cape of Cuba, carrying two American academics: Branson, a medical doctor, and Lewis. The sight of a cave system sends them to musing on indigenous rituals. Lewis reveals himself to be en route to Guatemala to study the Mayan pyramids there, and will soon be joined by his wife (though her focus is on Aztec rather than Mayan culture). They exchange tall tales of indigenous magic: spurned women slipping white lovers a potion turning their skin black, sorcerers who could change men into women…

This causes Branson to reveal an incident that befell him and his wife some years ago when they were living in Veracruz. The doctor’s tale begins with an old mendicant wrapped in filthy rags, collapsing on the Bransons’ porch in search of “the white doctor”. This turns out to be the beautiful woman from the story’s image banner. Confused and desperate, she stumblingly introduces herself as Maria Dorada de Rey, and relays that she’s been on the run for days, since her husband Juan was murdered shortly after their wedding.

Maria claims to be an American who has lived among the Aztecs in the jungle for years after a mysterious illness robbed her of her identity—Maria is a name she chose herself, “Teoquitla” (or “la Dorada” in Spanish, the golden one) being a nickname she was given due to her complexion. She is loath to recount her story, but assures the couple she has it all written down in a diary among her meager belongings.

She inquires about Robert Sanderson, a name Branson recalls: a young American adventurer who stayed at his house years before. Sanderson hid a cache of gold nearby before he set off into the jungle, the location of which Maria is privy to. It is here that Branson notices Maria might very well be Sanderson’s twin sister.

They retrieve the cache and make ready for Maria’s repatriation stateside. During these preparations, Maria writes down the final part of her story, impressing upon the Bransons only to read it after she’s left.

Simultaneously, Mrs. Branson takes Maria under her wing as, despite her lovely looks, the poor dear seems to have forgotten how to clothe and groom herself in the fashionable mid-10s manner, having spent so many years in the jungle.

After Maria’s departure, the Bransons set upon the two-fold narrative of Teoquitla the Golden—one part painted with a brush on native maguey paper, the second on stationery provided by Mrs. Branson.

Any pretense at ambiguity is instantly dropped: the author is Teoquitla, once Robert Sanderson. Playboy adventurer Sanderson used to despise women, embarking upon affairs willy nilly, ghosting them once he got bored.

Upon one fact university-sponsored expedition in the Mexican jungle, trying to ascertain the whereabouts of a rumored settlement of Nahua, Aztecs of old, he strikes up with Conchita, daughter of the couple where he is boarding. After telling her he is absolutely not planning to take her with him back to America, Conchita hangs herself.

Fleeing the village under cover of night, he is set upon by men dressed as warriors of Montezuma, who shackle him with the ancient fetters of the conquistadors. After days in a solitary jungle hut, Sanderson is brought to the lost city of Nahuatlan.

There, he is given a choice by the king Montezuma: he can be sacrificed to the goddess Centeotl for the dishonoring of an Aztec woman, or to the war god Huitzilopochtli for causing the death of an Aztec. From descriptions given, Sanderson deduces that the sacrifice to Centeotl does not end in death, so that is his choice.

After being garbed in the dress of the goddess, Sanderson is told his word will be law until the ritual. For a solid month, the American is an incarnation of Centeotl on earth, advising citizens who seek Centeotl’s audience on agricultural and even legal matters. During this period, Sanderson witnesses a gruesome sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli and notices a select group of white-clad women who bear golden septum rings that arouse a particular disgust in the prisoner.

When the trial period is up, Sanderson is brought to an altar in front of the steps of Centeotl’s pyramid and subjected to an elaborate ritual where strange liquids are injected into him via gourds and cane tubes, wielded by temple women, causing the prisoner to faint in agony.

The recuperative period is one of fevers and dolors, sloughed skin and wild deliriums. When the American wakes up, she finds herself transformed and given the name Teoquitla. To her great disgust, the temple woman’s nose ring is forced upon her. While she briefly ponders the possibility of being changed back, she is told this is impossible. Giving in to life as a temple woman, she finds it is actually quite gratifying. Over time, she comes to the conclusion that this punishment is hardly one at all.

Time passes—in the frame story, we learn it’s been four years in total— and Montezuma falls in love with her. While initially reluctant to become romantically entangled with a man, Teoquitla returns his affections.

It is here that the narrative jumps to Mrs. Branson’s stationery. Teoquitla demands Montezuma wed her in a white man’s ceremony to keep her an upright woman, and they sneak out of the valley to fulfill her request. They are married by a Protestant minister, under the names Juan de Rey and Maria Dorada. Their marital bliss is short-lived, however, as a bandit raid claims the life of “Juan.”

Dissuaded by her dying husband from returning to the valley, as the Nahuatl will blame her for his death, she strikes out as a beggar until one day she hears of an American doctor near Veracruz. Signing off, thanking the Bransons, Maria ends her tale by confiding in the reader she wishes she had the nerve to call herself Roberta Sanderson de Montezuma, Queen of Mexico—her rightful title.

A deathly pale Lewis confides to Branson that he has realized that Maria Rey is none other than his Aztec specialist wife. He tosses the bundle with her story into the ocean, and the two men shake hands.

“Teoquitla the Golden” is a surprisingly open-minded and accepting version of what we would today call a trans narrative.

Published only a few years after the earliest medical gender affirmation procedures at Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, “Teoquitla” is surprisingly sympathetic to its heroine, and indeed the very concept of transitioning.

While a darkly ironic punishment is hubristically visited upon the protagonist, the behavior that requires such vengeance is misogyny, not gender nonconformity. Once she’s accepted her lot in life, Teoquitla muses that this isn’t much of a punishment at all: she is content, but poor Conchita is still dead. The transition itself is seen as a form of restorative justice.

Instead of a rotting corpse, we have a useful and good-looking human being as ready to take on life as before, just in a different capacity.

In fact, there’s a bit of the old romance novel to this: a sexy vampire or fae lord or billionaire CEO forces our heroine into all these kinky scenarios, so that our intended reader can maintain plausible deniability for enjoying them. Here too, our heroine simply hates all of this:

Most boys have masqueraded in their sister’s petticoats, at some time or other, but I had always so disliked women that this kind of fun never appealed to me. To be obliged to wear woman’s dress was a bitter pill.

This layer of “lady protesting too much” might have been useful in 1924 (and possibly even necessary to get past the Weird Tales editors), it did serve to push me away a bit. The first unqualified instance of gender euphoria comes very near the end:

We had been married under the names, assumed on a moment’s notice, of Juan Rey and Maria Dorada, so as I rode my heart was singing, “Now I am Señora Maria Dorada de Rey! Or, if I only dared tell it, I am Roberta de Montezuma, Queen of Nahuatlan and rightful Queen of Mexico!”

Still, the fact that we do get this turn in her is nothing to sniff at. Even with the tragedy that would soon befall this happy couple, Maria still gets a happy ending. On top of that, when her second husband finds out, he simply decides to bury the truth. Considering it was only meant for the Bransons, what’s the harm?

Teoquitla’s instant and deep revulsion over the nose rings is somewhat inexplicable. In fact, she is portrayed during her captivity as Sanderson to be amazed and fascinated at artifacts she is confronted with, even in her terror. After the transformation ritual, she is horrified at having become the thing she hates most—a woman. The ultimate degradation is the fastening of the septum ring, the one thing she had witnessed in Nahuatl that disgusted her.

And yet, this is a different form of bondage than the conquistador fetters placed on Sanderson upon first capture:

The first white men that came to this country bound our chiefs with such things; and we give every white man who falls a prisoner in our hands a dose of his own medicine. But these chains are the only works of the invader you will see in this valley, for here we live our own life, free in the last unconquered domain of the Montezumas.

Maria is entirely sympathetic to this, seeing as in the opening paragraph of her missive, she writes:

I could tell exactly where [the lost city of Nahuatl] lies, but I dare not, for fear that this manuscript may find its way outside someday, and might lead strangers into the happy valley to the destruction of this splendid people, whose only outstanding fault, so far as I can discover, is their addiction to human sacrifice.

It reads as a dark joke, but she had just recently learned about the Great War being ongoing, so the occasional human sacrifice may indeed have sounded like a minor peccadillo compared to what was going on at the Somme.

The nose ring is a perfect microcosm of the text’s ambiguity towards Aztec culture: a general sense of admiration and respect, which must instantly be subordinated to personal preferences. Take, for instance, the fact that, though Teoquitla is happy to marry an indigenous man, she demands a Christian wedding—religiosity at no point having been part of her character up until then. Montezuma indeed even acquiesces, so taken is he with this white woman’s beauty, to his doom.

Was Harrington, scholar of pre-Columbian civilizations, publishing anonymously, exorcising some personal demons? Or was he merely being a prurient exploitation artist? Either way, I’m glad Maria Lewis got into academia. Pretty rough for a woman in the 20s.

“Teoquitla the Golden” may be read for free at the Internet Archive.

Luana Saitta (she/her) is a Belgian-Italian pulp enthusiast and sword and sorcery author. You can find her short stories of dashing adventure, including the popular “Zeynep & Kawtar” series, at https://luanawrites.carrd.co/ . She is also the co-host of Defend Your Trash Movie, wherever you find your podcasts.

Cuntess EP (2025) by Necronomicunt

[…] the lyrics for this song were written 19 years ago when the first face transplant was performed. It is about a serial killer who hates his face and makes a face of his own, sewn together out of the dried, skinned faces of his victims. The music was written this year, 2024 {Age of Cunt} and is technically a tryptych with an intro and outro. This is how it shall be recorded professionally[.]
—Steph Bathory, 18 Sep 2024 Facebook post to the Necronomicunt page

The influence of H. P. Lovecraft in music can be chronicled in lyrics, individual songs and tracks, albums, and band names. Writers like Gary Hill (The Strange Sound of Cthulhu) and Sébastien Baert (Cthulhu Metal: l’Influence de Mythe) have traced the literary DNA from the early psychedelic rock of the band H. P. Lovecraft through the earliest heavy metal influences in “Behind the Wall of Sleep” (1970) by Black Sabbath to the time of publication. The list is never complete; new generations discover Lovecraft’s mythos, new artists create new bands, compose and perform new pieces. It is all so wonderfully weird.

Necronomicunt is a relatively recent example. Band members include vocalist/lyricist Steph Bathory/Cuntess Dracula (former vocalist of Bathom and SpitRoast Sluts Not Dead); guitarist Tommy/Cutrifiend Punt; drummer Matt Hills/Omzferatu, and bassist Aaron Richmond/Yeti (all information from Encyclopedia Metallum). As for the style:

Necronomicunt merges the commandment of Doom with the speed of D-Beat Punk Rock. From the black-tar-filth, cud of decay; the satanic riffs primordially ripple through, oscillating faster than the speed of light, from the bottom of a black hole. (Bandcamp)

“D-beat” is a hardcore punk style named after a characteristic drumbeat; “Doom” metal is a descendant of heavy metal that typically uses a slower tempo and down-tuned guitars. Put the two together, and you have a sound that is heavier than your typical punk band but more frantic and energetic than a typical doom album. Very atmospheric, but it’s got a beat you can mosh to. Steph Bathory’s vocal style contains the fast pace of punk singing with death metal growls. Not unintelligible to the trained ear, although it might take new listeners a few listens to pick out the lyrics (I tried to find the lyrics, but they’re not on Bandcamp or Spotify, although there are a few on the band’s Facebook page). Necronomicunt is often categorized as sludge metal, and not without reason, but don’t focus too heavily on labels; that way lies madness.

In terms of content and aesthetics, Necronomicunt clearly takes inspiration from black metal (a heavy metal variant with Satanic themes/content/trappings) and horror, with songs about vampirism, serial killers, Satanism, etc. Despite the name, Lovecraft doesn’t appear to be a major lyrical influence per se, although the Facebook page includes the lyrics for an eponymous song titled “Necronomicunt” (Facebook, 14 Jan 2023):

…and given the name of the band is an obscene homage, and its musical descent from Black Sabbath, we can definitely say they’re somewhere in the Lovecraftian musical family tree.

Cuntess (2025) is Necronomicunt’s first EP, available on Bandcamp and for promotional purposes on Youtube and Spotify, and consists of four songs:

Face Transplanter (05:44)
Pyramid of Death (04:06)
Cuntess Dracula (04:58)
Green Phlegm (05:06)

“Face Transplanter” was the standout and also appeared in The 100 Best Releases of 2025; “Green Phlegm” also appeared on Pest Records Online Compilation vol. 18, although personally I think “Cuntess Dracula” and “Pyramid of Death” are better fits for horror fans. There are far worse ways to spend 20 minutes or £6.66, and I’ll bet their live shows are loud and energetic, if that’s their studio performance. One live video from the 2023 Easton Punk Fest suggests the distortion gets pretty extreme, but people are moving to the beat.

Real question: why Necromicunt?

Because it’s fun. It’s transgressive to the point of almost being silly, but it communicates forbidden, occult, dark, nasty, obscene, and in-your-face. Which is perfect because that’s exactly the kind of sound the band has. So it fits, it works, it is appropriate in context. It may offend a few prudes, but that’s rather the point. Take it like the bright markings on a toxic frog: experience at your own discretion.

The weird thing is is, they’re not the only ones. There’s a Canadian band called Necronomikunt; and at least three different bands have released songs titled “Necronomicunt”: Alastor in 2000, Ghoulmancer in 2014, and Reanimator in 2022. That’s a lot of Necronomicunts! And there are undoubtedly more. The coincidental combination of consonants has inspired many different creators to fuse Lovecraft’s epic title with an expletive, and the juxtaposition and the mouth feel both work. There have been plenty of variations in this line over the years: the Necronomicum ex Mortis in the porn film Evil Head (2012) and the four-issue run of Necronomicum: The Magazine of Weird Erotica (2014) being two examples; readers might also compare “Necrophallus” by Makino Osamu (牧野修), which also takes Lovecraft’s basic concept in strange and deliberately taboo-defying new directions.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

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