"The Space-Eaters"
(Oct 17, 2004)
Egads, what a story! The actual writing style is a little wooden and clumsy, the dialogue stiff and the characters vague. But the premise is so powerful and the imagery so bizarre that this crude little tale has haunted me since I first read it as a preteen kid staying up at night scaring myself with a paperback and a flashlight under the covers.
From the July 1928 issue of WEIRD TALES, this is one of Frank Belknap's Long's best stories (I also was struck by "The Hounds of Tindalos"). Writing for over fifty years, Long had some importance in the history of the modern horror story and his connection with the vast tangled maze of H.P. Lovecraft-related fiction guarantees he will not be immediately forgotten. Yet, despite some strong points, Long seems to have always been a second-tier pulp writer whose style never really became polished or subtle. (Which is alright with me, there's room for all types in my authors pantheon.)
The tale is narrated by a guy named Frank, whose best friend is Howard, a writer of weird fiction. ("In profile his face was impressive. He had an extremely broad forehead, long nose and slightly protruberant chin...") He is obssesed with bringing new insight to horror stories, going beyond the prosaic themes of Poe and Hawthorne to try and introduce new concepts of cosmic terrors barely comprehensible to the human mind. All right, yes, this is obviously meant to be H.P. Lovecraft himself more or less, and Frank is therefore Long himself.
It's worth noting that "Howard" is not portrayed as a particularly nice guy. He's snobbish and pretentious, referring to his readers as "absurd and unworthy fools" (Hey! I resent that.) When a neighbor named Henry (a man in severe distress, with an actual hole deep in his head which should have killed him), staggers into the house to tell a grotesque story, Howard is first furious that this "lying yokel" has dared to come up with the kind of surreal horror story he himself has not been able to achieve... and then he dismisses the suffering fellow, who is clutching his head and screaming about how his brain is freezing. Howard scoffs, "Don't expect me to believe such nonsense," and lets Henry reel out into the night without calling for a doctor or the police. Instead, he starts immediately writing down the yarn the poor guy babbled out. (Kind of a jerk, eh?)
Hearing wailing screams from the nearby Mulligan Wood, Frank and Howard at last put on raincoats and go out into the densest, most ominous fog in WEIRD TALES history. Out on the nearby bay, they hear dismal foghorns and the two friends quickly start going to pieces. They drag the man back to the house in complete panic themselves as they realize that there IS something out there... something high above the trees which is reaching down to enter their consciousness and then literally suck out their brains through holes it bores through the skull.
Here is the idea that impressed me and gave me severe Creeps as a kid. This awful Thing in the sky starts to manifest itself in your awareness very vaguely and tentatively. Then, as it gets a firm hold, you start to become more aware of it and by the time you begin to visualize what the Thing is like, it's too late... it's already started entering your mind and digging at your brain. The man they are trying to save first saw it as an immensely long white arm thin as a rope reaching down from the stars and groping for him. Because he got as far as actually visualizing the Thing, he's doomed and can't be saved.
So you can understand why Frank and Howard desperately try to convince themselves that the manifestations they are beginning to see are not becoming clearer. ("It has no form! We should not - we must not see it! It is our little brains which gives it a form. When it enters our brains, it becomes clothed in a form. If it enters our brains we are lost.") All the time they are starting to picture a shape above the trees like an immense black bat with yellow wings materializing, while they scream to each other that they don't see anything.
Eeek. What a concept. This is one of those stories, like SINISTER BARRIER, that someone with borderline paranoid tendencies might be better off not reading. After some more agita and babbling, things seem to settle down a bit. A doctor arrives to operate on poor Henry and is so shaken by what he sees that he turns all white and shaky, closes up the wound in the man's head and leaves hastily, muttering about "the old, hideous secret that man has forgotten about".
Then, weeks later, Howard has managed to get all the details of the experience down into a narrative in excrutiating detail. That's just asking for it. Somehow, because he has put it all down on paper, the Thing comes looking specifically for him. Howard himself realizes that by writing the story, he has become "a priest of the devil" and lost all defenses.
After Howard calls the narrator, shrieking over the phone about his brain freezing and the shapeless form growing clearer, Frank rushes to his friend's house and finds what you might expect if you've read a few horror stories. But the killer detail is that the shaft of unholy "liquid light that dripped and dripped, like spittle" which is reconstructing Howard's brain in mid-air is also swirling the pages of the manuscript around. The Thing is not only eating Howard's mind, it's reading the story about itself! I don't know if this is more hilarious or frightening, but talk about the ultimate critic...!
Frank Belknap Long caught an essential component of what makes Lovecraft's stories so unsettling. You don't have to be experimenting with forbidden rituals or translating cursed books to be attacked by nameless horrors; it's an existential universe without moral meaning, in which terrible things happen to innocent people for no reason... they just happen. (On the other hand, Howard seems to be inviting this nightmare on himself, first by desperately longing to find a way to write about extra-dimensional horror, and then by putting it all down on paper and giving it more solidity. You could say he was just picking up on theThing's presence, but it's hard not to feel that he has somehow drawn this disaster on himself.)
On a more traditional note, Long gives humans a defense against these beings which Lovecraft never really did. In this story, the Cross (whether as the familiar gesture or as the symbol itself marked in flames) has great power to push back and banish these Things. Long specifically doesn't use Christian imagery, but notes the cross symbol is very ancient and resonates in human awareness because it is "the primal symbol" used to repel these creatures millenia ago. It's odd, too, that Howard seems to have somehow forfeited the protection of the Cross by writing his weird fiction. It explains why so many of the authors of the books of forbidden knowledge were supposed to have come to dreadful ends.
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