FRIGHT FEST #2: Veils of Fear - Vivian Meik

The "Creeps" series of books published by Phillip Allan during the 1930s are legendary books among supernatural fiction collectors, all are highly elusive and consequently exorbitantly priced if one is lucky to come across one in the antiquarian book trade. Comprised of short story anthologies by lesser known pulp magazine writers, sporting one word titles like Nightmares, Shudders and Terrors to name a few, they were compiled mostly by Charles Birkin who included his own work under the pseudonym Charles Lloyd in nearly every volume. A select few supernatural novels published by Philip Allan have also come to be included in the "Creeps" series as they were published contemporaneously with the short story collections.  Three novels by Vivian Meik have been deemed to be part of this series among them Veils of Fear (1934), a sequel of sorts to his first novel (actually a series of linked short stories) Devils' Drums.

Meik's second novel like Devils' Drums features Colonel Geoffrey Aylett and Father Jan Vaneken who have done battle with other worldly forces having teamed together in Africa where they learned the superstitions and primitive rituals of the local people.  In Veils of Fear reporter Neil Martyn is sent to Aylett to capture a story that will increase circulation in his struggling newspaper.  When Martyn reports back to his editor he is told the story cannot be published because it is too fantastic to be believed as fact. Martyn then produces a photograph of the subject of the story, an Indian mystic called Ashraf Daiye, and the sinister visage within the photograph begins to animate. The photograph shivers and shudders and the face seems to bulge out of the film as if the subject was trying to escape from a photographic prison.  Martyn's editor succumbs to a fatal hypnotic force and within minutes is dead.

The reporter feels compelled to return to Aylett and demands an explanation.  Soon he finds himself recruited in a international adventure that will take him from England to India to remote regions of Java and Bali. Accompanying him are a trio of occult detectives of sorts -- Aylett, his wife Joan, and the Dutch priest Vaneken. Together all four try to break through the three veils that separate this world from a demonic world controlled by a superhuman force personified as an evil Portuguese mage.

The novel is an odd mix of macabre incidents incorporating a vividly macabre imagination and intellectual lectures on everything from religion to the history of prehistoric weapons.  The supernatural incidents of course are the highlights of the novel and consist of weird manifestations, inter-dimensional travel, astral projection, and terrifying encounters with powerful mind controlling entities both human and non-human.  All of these adventures culminate in a climax of horribly tortuous murder, dismemberment and cannibalism. Meik uses his knowledge (gathered from his many world travels) of Indian, Tibetan and South Pacific Island cults that practice black magic rites to give the novel a verisimilitude not often found in similar supernatural works of this era.

Detail from a Balinese folk painting
showing mythic figures

I did find some comparisons with the work of Sax Rohmer whose fascination with the sinister Orient of pre- and post-WW1 eras turns up repeatedly in his supernatural fiction. Many of Rohmer's villains are powerful sorcerers whose greatest talent is the ability to control human minds, a recurrent motif in Veils of Fear.

Also worth mentioning are similarities to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos tales populated with fastastical non-human beings from the Elder World and other dimensions that invade our reality with the intent to replace mankind with their own presence.  In one sequence an amorphous non-human thing attacks the quartet of adventurers drawn to some spilled blood but bizarrely ends up caught in mosquito netting and miraculously is trapped within its mesh.  Previous to this scene Father Vaneken had delivered a lecture of the superiority of nets as one of the finest inventions of weaponry and entrapment.  It beggars belief, but is done with such conviction it is almost convincing.

Father Vaneken, the most skilled in doing battle with these forces and creatures, has one final weapon at his disposal which he saves for their ultimate battle with Da Souza, the superhuman demonic force.  Ironically, it is a simple sliver of wood with which he managed to capture the spirit of Khalil Pasha, an evil dwarf who turns out to be one the guardians of the veils.  It is the source of the wood that gives the sliver its power over all the entities they encounter.  For the sliver has come from the cross upon which Jesus Christ was crucified. 

Vivian Meik, circa 1940s

Thus, the novel reminds us of the perennial battle between the forces of good and evil. In fact, at one point Father Vaneken says: "But listen we are not interested in [generic immorality].  That is a symptom -- we seek the cause. Greater than this immorality--mostly drink-sodden animalism grossly misapplied--is the real evil. [...] Intrinsic evil as opposed to inherent good." Also we are reminded that sacrifices must be made in these life or death battles. Someone pays the ultimate price, of course.  Because someone must always pay.

Veils of Fear is a notoriously scarce book though remarkably there are currently three copies for sale from various online bookselling sites. None of them come with the ultra rare dust jacket shown at the top of this post.  I owned a copy of this book (with a fully intact DJ) for over two decades and finally read it three days ago.  Then I sold it over this past weekend and was amazed that the individual paid the full asking price without making an offer for a lower priced deal. I have a feeling it may soon be reprinted based on the information I culled about the purchaser.  There's hope for fans of long lost supernatural fiction. Soon you all may be able to read this unique and thoroughly nightmarish work. 

FRIGHT FEST #1: The Death Fire - Lilian Bennet-Thompson & George Hubbard

This month I'll be reviewing a small batch of supernatural mysteries and thrillers as part of this Halloween season. Usually I do one single post tagged Halloween Special (sometimes two), but I pulled a bunch of books to sell, read them prior to listing them, and coincidentally they all had Halloween themes of sorts. To start this Fright Fest off I've chosen what I think is the epitome of the weird menace mystery novel.

"Was there to be no end to the fantastic horror of this thing? Like those of some giant octopus, the tentacles of mystery kept whipping out first in one direction, then in another, clinging and tightening their hold with every effort that was made to loosen them!" - from Chapter 24,"The Fiend"

The Death Fire (1929) not only is the earliest of this small batch of thrillers it also exemplifies a type of story that became a staple of pulp magazines in the 1930s. In fact, there were a slew of magazines that specialized in the "weird menace" story like Dime Detective, Ten Detective Aces and Strange Detective Stories. Weird menace stories deal with ostensibly supernatural events and bizarre crimes that may or may not also feature supernatural creatures and legends. Excessive violence and scenes of torture often were also conventions of these stories. Almost always the supernatural events and creatures will turn out to be rationalized. Many of these stories can be likened to the ghostbusting tales and novels about occult detectives who do battle with otherworldly phenomena and creatures who often have a knowledge of arcane lore. I guess you might also draw analogies to the popular Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? cartoons of the 1970s in which the ghosts and weird creatures always turn out to be elaborate fakes with mechanical ingenuity accompanying the supposed hauntings. Real estate greed or fraud almost always turned out to be the motive of the haunting in the Scooby-Doo cartoons.

Bennet & Thompson, a writing duo who mostly specialized in westerns and western romances, wrote three weird menace detective serials (The Beak of Death and The Golden Ball are the other two) for Detective Story Magazine in the late 1920s which eventually were all published as books by Chelsea House, the book publishing arm of Street & Smith magazines. The Death Fire, originally serialized in 1927, became a book in 1929. It's the grandest of Grand Guignol novels they wrote and features a house haunted by a ghostly presence known as The Lady of the Mist.  She appears on the grounds of a cliffside home near the eastern coast of New York and her manifestations occur just after the appearance of an eerie blue light emanating from the foggy coastline.  Jimmy Clyde, a detective, and his friend Dr. Meredith travel to Cragwood to investigate. Cragwood is the mansion built by David Courtney, a psychic researcher who spent his lifetime investigating real and fraudulent supernatural events. Though long dead Courtney's influence and fascination with psychic phenomena have infected the household. Even the butler has become a true believer for he has seen things he cannot explain.

At the start of the novel Courtney's son Douglas is bedridden with a strange ulcer on his throat. Dr. Meredith has been consulted as he has an expertise in cancers, though everyone hopes that Douglas' wound is not so serious. Douglas refuses to leave his bedroom or the estate as he is fearful for his life and that of his sister Alice, who he bears a close resemblance to. Alice has also grown fearful of the weird events surrounding their home. Her fiance Tony was distracted by the vision of the Lady of the Mist one evening weeks ago and ended up driving his car off the cliff and died in a fiery crash. So already there is one death ascribed to the haunting.

The book is filled with incidents, they pile up on one another quickly until Clyde and Meredith are practically swimming in strange and eerie events. All of the dogs kept in a kennel for hunting have mysteriously died, a swarm of rats invaded Douglas' bedroom (the possible cause of his throat injury), a pool of blood weirdly manifests itself on the floor at the base of the grand staircase though no one seems to have been anywhere around, a black cat that was harassing Alice is poisoned but suddenly reappears after it was killed and buried, and finally Alice has been attacked in her sleep. Two puncture marks are found on her throat. Uh oh...  Everyone knows what that means.

The sheer number of manifestations and weird phenomena is to be marveled at.  Clyde and Meredith may initially be puzzled, but each of them is determined to discover what human agency is responsible for the haunting of Cragwood.  Meredith with his medical science background learns that Douglas' wound despite routine treatment with antibiotics and careful dressing is getting worse and seems to be a horrible skin cancer not the result of an animal attack.  Clyde refuses to accept ghosts and manifestations and suspects only human hands at work.  That is, until one night when the peculiar secretary Varlam, a Russian immigrant known to wander the grounds at night even during a thunderstorm, is discovered in a tomb with an apparently sleepwalking Douglas.  The two of them are armed with a pickaxe, wooden mallets and a sharpened stake, even a gun with silver tipped bullets. Clyde tells Meredith that the two truly believed that a vampire was after Alice. The word nosferatu is tossed around puzzling everyone but Clyde. He has knowledge of Eastern European legends which I'm sure he learned by going to the silent cinema. Or at least the authors must have been silent movie fans. No coincidence that Murnau's movie with its English translated intertitles was popular in theaters around the time this story was first published. 

Eventually all is explained in a very lengthy revelation scene. It should come as no surprise that Cragwood is riddled with secret passages. After all, the owner and builder David Courtney needed special hidden rooms in which to spy on the mediums he invited to his home in order to unmask them as frauds.  After discovering a secret panel the detective team follow some labyrinthine corridors into the basement of Cragwood where they discover all the machinery and equipment that created each and every manifestation.  At this point I got a major Scooby-Doo vibe. Still, this was the template for weird menace decades before that cartoon was even a figment in the animators' minds. Bennet-Thomspon and Hubbard get gold stars for their elaborately designed ghostly machinery. 

Even now The Death Fire with its abundance of incident dominated by freakishly weird events make for a helluva read. Clearly inspired by 19th century sensation fiction and Gothic masterpieces of the same era Bennet-Thompson and Hubbard have left us with the quintessential weird menace thriller of the 20th century.  It's definitely worth seeking out. For if you read this novel as an example of weird menace, then I guarantee that you've read them all.

Anyone interested in savoring this phantasmagorical pulp novel can buy my copy which is listed here.  Three other copies are for sale at other online bookselling sites and all of them are extremely affordable ranging in price from $15 - $25.