Retro Review: "Hoofs" by Manly Wade Wellman

"Hoofs" is a horror short story in the John Thunstone series by Manly Wade Wellman. It was first published in the March 1944 issue of Weird Tales and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The story may be found online here.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following.

John Thunstone is an occult detective created by Manly Wade Wellman who appeared in fifteen stories in Weird Tales between 1943 and 1951 as well as one further short story and two novels in the 1980s. Six of the John Thunstone stories appeared in 1944 alone, that's a third of the entire series excluding the novels, so the character and series were clearly popular. Steve J. Wright reviewed all six of the 1944 John Thunstone stories on his blog.

However, "Hoofs" does not begin with John Thunstone himself, but with his love interest, Sharon Countess Monteseco, a recurring character in the series. In spite of her Italian surname, the Countess is American, a woman named Sharon Hill who married an Italian Count who – so the first paragraph informs us – "was a rank bad man, and the world and the Countess were better off for his death".

But is the Count truly dead? A plump little man named Hengist who visits the Countess in her hotel suite claims that the Count is not in fact dead, but alive in another body. Hengist also insists that the Count loves his wife, which Sharon vehemently denies. Hengist also drops a name, Rowley Thorne. It's a name Sharon – and the reader – knows, because Thorne appeared in the very first John Thunstone story "The Third Cry to Legba" in the November 1943 issue of Weird Tales and was a recurring antagonist of Thunstone.

The Countess is not impressed, especially since Hengist not just drops Thorne's name, but also hits on her. And so she slaps him and throws him out. Hengist, on the other hand, is quite satisfied with the meeting. He calls Thorne and informs him that he carried out his instructions and that the Countess believes.

Sharon indeed believes, if only because being the girlfriend of an occult detective means experiencing a lot of otherwise inexplicable phenomena. And so Sharon has personally witnessed Rowley Thorne raise evil spirits, a description which certainly fits her late husband.

It quickly occurs to Sharon that John Thunstone might be able to help her. But unfortunately, they had a quarrel. Therefore, Sharon blows him off with the old "I have a headache" line, when he calls her to apologise. Barely a second later, she curses herself for not confiding in John Thunstone. But Sharon has bigger problems, for Rowley Thorne comes calling.

The description of Rowley Thorne that Wellman gives us – tall, hawklike, bald, gunmetal eyes – match a familiar occultist of our own world, namely Aleister Crowley, whose nonfiction work The Book of Thoth: A Short Essay on the Tarot of the Egyptians is eligible for the 1944 Retro Hugos in the Best Related Work category, by the way. Even the names Rowley and Crowley are similar. Like Crowley, Thorne has a huge ego. "Some day," he informs the Countess, "the world will know me by a name of own choosing, a name of mastery." Thorne also assure Sharon that world domination is not what he's after, because that's a flat and outworn idea. I'm sure the world and its citizens will be very relieved.

In her first confrontation with Thorne, Sharon certainly holds her own. She tells Thorne that she's not afraid of him, for "Fear is folly, for people like you to feed on." She also accuses Thorne of lying about her husband. "If I lie, come and prove it," Thorne counters and so Sharon goes with him.

Thorne takes Sharon to an apartment where Hengist is already waiting. The apartment is empty except for a table on which there is a single object, a glowing glass horse. Thorne insists that the horse contains the spirit of the late Count. Sharon is understandably sceptical, but when she touches the glass, it feels warm. The glass horse also seems to nod in response to Thorne's questions. And when Thorne invites Sharon to ask the spirit a question that only the late Count could answer, the horse once more knows the answer.

Thorne's plan is to transfer the Count's spirit to Hengist and use the resurrected Count to subdue Sharon to get control of her money and also piss off John Thunstone in the bargain. Of course, Thorne assumes that Sharon will remain true to her marriage vows, even if the spirit of her husband – a husband she clearly despised – now resides in another body. It would certainly make an interesting court case to determine if a marriage is still valid, if one partner's spirit resides in a different body.

Meanwhile, Hengist – whose name is almost identical to "Hengst", the German word for "stallion" – isn't too keen on becoming a vessel for a dead Italian Count. And so he proposes to Sharon to throw away the potion he is supposed to drink and just fake that the transfer was successful. For certainly, a relationship with Hengist is preferable to having the Count back and being a slave to Rowley Thorne, he slimily proposes.

While Hengist is hitting on Sharon, Thorne is preparing his ritual, when he is interrupted by none other than John Thunstone himself. Thunstone had come to visit Sharon to make up with her, when he saw Hengist leaving. Recognising Hengist, Thunstone followed him to the apartment building, let himself in and hid behind the drapes, while Thorne explained his grand plan.

Once Hengist took Sharon away, Thunstone emerges to stop Thorne's ritual. In the resulting fight, Thorne grabs a swordcane and draws the blade – which is interesting, because a swordcane with a blade of silver inscribed with "Thus perish all your enemies" in Latin is John Thunstone's signature weapon. Alas, Thunstone did not bring his own swordcane, though he does manage to disarm Thorne. The glass horse also shatters during the fight.

"Do you realise what this means?" Thorne exclaims.

Thunstone calmly informs Thorne that the reincarnation of the late Count has been called off, because there is nowhere else for the trapped spirit to go. Thorne points out that he had already began the ritual and pointed the spirit at Hengist. Whereupon Thunstone replies that if Hengist isn't prepared, that's his misfortune and also Thorne's, because the results will be quite embarrassing.

Meanwhile, Hengist is still oozing slime all over Sharon who keeps insisting that there's someone or rather something outside the door. Hengist tries to draw her attention back to himself, when cloud of glowing vapour passes through the door, takes the shape of a horse and attacks Hengist. It's the spirit of the Count, looking for a new body, but finding no entrance, because Hengist hasn't taken the potion he was supposed to take. Sharon flees and stumbles right into the arms of John Thunstone who takes her home.

Thunstone and Sharon never discuss the incident directly, but the next day at lunch, Thunstone tells Sharon that the papers are reporting that a dead body was found in an empty apartment, seemingly trampled to death by horses, although there were no horses anywhere in the vicinity.

This was my first encounter with Manly Wade Wellman's occult detective John Thunstone. Based on this story, I certainly wouldn't mind learning more about the character. Because "Hoofs" doesn't give us much of a chance to get to know John Thunstone. The story is short, only seven pages long, and Thunstone himself only appears on the second-to-last page after a brief appearance of a only few paragraphs earlier. Instead, the bulk of the story is given over to Sharon, Countess Monteseco. As a result, we also learn a lot more about Sharon – that she is American, that her marriage was ill-advised and unhappy, that she is brave and used to solving her problems on her own, what she looks like ("compactly, blondely handsome, neither doll nor siren") – then we ever learn about John Thunstone himself.

Stories with female protagonists were rare during the golden age. So far I have reviewed only two stories with female protagonists for the Retro Reviews project, "Undersea Guardians" by Ray Bradbury and "The Gothic Window" by Dorothy Quick. "Hoofs" is the third story with a female protagonist, even though John Thunstone is nominally the hero of the series.

The shortness of the story also makes it difficult to get an idea of what the relationship between John Thunstone and Sharon is like. We learn that they've quarrelled, "a disagreement over trifles which wound up a quarrel", and that they are both proud and are having a hard time apologising to each other. In a move that's probably uncommon for the 1940s, John Thunstone takes the first step, though he does begin what he hopes will be their reconciliation with "Aren't we being childish?", which does feel condescending, particularly viewed from a 2020 point of view.

The brief phone conversation early in the story is the only time that John and Sharon actually talk, so these two certainly have a communication problem. And indeed, I had hoped for a somewhat more romantic reunion of the pair than just Sharon stumbling into John's arms during her flight from the ghostly horse and he taking her home in silence. But then the briefness of the story doesn't leave a whole lot of room for romantic interludes. In fact, if there is one complaint I have about "Hoofs", it's that the story is too short.

Rowley Thorne makes a suitably sneerworthy antagonist and his henchman Hengist is sufficiently slimy that I at least did not feel the slightest bit sorry that he got trampled to death by a ghost horse. The supernatural threat du jour in the form of an evil occultist and his slimy henchman, the risen spirit of someone the characters would very much prefer to stay dead and finally a murderous ghost horse is certainly menacing enough.

Manly Wade Wellman was a folklorist and worked on a project to collect local American folklore for the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. His knowledge of folklore certainly shines through in his stories, more so in the later Silver John a.k.a. John the Balladeer stories than in the John Thunstone stories

Stories about occult detectives were a popular hybrid genre in the first half of the twentieth century and go back to Algernon Blackwood's John Silence and William Hope Hodgson's Thomas Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder. In the US, occult detectives quickly found a home in Weird Tales, which published the adventures of Seabury Quinn's Jules de Grandin (who is eligible for Best Series for the 1945 Retro Hugos), Manly Wade Wellman's Judge Pursuivant and of course John Thunstone himself. Indeed, there are plenty of hints that the adventures of Jules de Grandin, Judge Pursuivant, John Thunstone and Wellman's later character Silver John a.k.a. John the Balladeer take place in the same universe and that the characters all know each other. Indeed, Judge Pursuivant is namechecked in "Hoofs", when Thunstone mentions that he is planning to get on a plane with Judge Pursuivant for some investigation far away, before he cancels his plans, once he realises Thorne is in town.

These characters are the ancestors of today's urban fantasy heroes. Their literary descendants include John Constantine, Harry Dresden, John Taylor (John is certainly a popular first name for occult detectives), Jack Winter, the Leandros brothers, the Winchester brothers and many others. And while Sharon, Countess Monteseco had to content herself with being the hero's love interest, today's occult detectives not just have formidable romantic partners like John Taylor's girlfriend/bride Suzie Shooter (nomen est omen) – no, there are also plenty of female occult detectives such as Anita Blake, Kate Daniels, Mercy Thompson, Rachel Morgan, Dante Valentine and others.

But while today's occult detectives usually narrate their adventures in the first person in hardboiled/noir mode, older characters like John Silence, Carnacki, Jules de Grandin or Judge Pursuivant are closer to Sherlock Holmes than to Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. John Thunstone is a bit of a transitional character here. He is a younger and more physically active hero than the likes of Jules de Grandin and Judge Pursuivant, a wealthy playboy with a penchant for fighting evil who is also reminiscent of Richard Wentworth a.k.a. The Spider and Bruce Wayne a.k.a. Batman.

However, the character that John Thunstone most reminds me of – at least based on this story – is Lee Falk's Mandrake the Magician. For Mandrake is also a handsome moustachioed playboy who fights supernatural as well as false supernatural enemies with the help of his plucky aristocratic girlfriend Narda (and best friend Lothar, who has no equivalent in the John Thunstone stories). And indeed, it's interesting that all of these characters were operating at the same time.

Furthermore, the John Thunstone stories also show how the occult detective genre has changed and developed over the past seventy-five years. Early occult detectives mainly appeared in short fiction – the two John Thunstone novels only appeared in the 1980s, some forty years after the bulk of the series – whereas their modern brethren mainly appear in novels. The adventures of early occult detectives are also more episodic. Characters may reappear, see recurring antagonist Rowley Thorne, but there is little in the way of internal continuity and the stories can often be read in any order. Meanwhile, modern series, whether it’s the Dresden Files, the Nightside series, the Leandros Brothers, Kate Daniels or Mercy Thompson series, have a definite series arc.

Finally, modern series place way more emphasis on the occult detective's social and romantic life and the occult detective is usually surrounded by a network of friends, family and loved ones, often assembled across several books. Meanwhile, the occult detectives of the golden age tended to be loners with few connections aside from the occasional faithful Watson figure such as Jules de Grandin's friend/partner (and maybe more, since several folks claim to have detected homoerotic vibes between the two) Dr. Trowbridge. John Thunstone is actually something of an exception here, because he has a friend/mentor in Judge Pursuivant and a recurring love interest in Sharon Countess Monteseco. Nonetheless, their relationship takes a backseat to the supernatural mystery of the month, which is probably why the romance aspects of "Hoofs" feel a little unsatisfying from a modern POV.

That probably sounds more critical than it should, because I enjoyed "Hoofs" quite a bit and would certainly like to read more about John Thunstone's adventures. And if I had a nice print collection of the Thunstone stories rather than being forced to read them in scanned copies of vintage issues of Weird Tales on archive.org, I might well have ended up reading the whole series, which is what happened last year when I planned to reread just the one Retro Hugo nominated Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story and wound up rereading the entire series.

"Hoofs" is a neat occult detective tale in a series I would certainly like to read more of.

Retro Review: "Ride the El to Doom" by Allison V. Harding

"Ride the El to Doom" is a horror novelette by Allison V. Harding, which was first published in the November 1944 issue of Weird Tales and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The story may be found online here.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following.

"Ride the El to Doom" begins with a ride on an elevated train, the titular El, in what is implied to be New York City (though the names of streets, stops and bridges don't match any real places), as viewed through the eyes of steelworker Jack Larue. The descriptions are highly atmospheric, from the "dingy squalor" and "three and four-storey uniformity" of what has to be either Brooklyn or Queens via a bridge across muddy water to the shining towers of Manhattan in which Jack feels some ownership, because he cast the steel used to build them. We also learn that the El is rundown, the steel components without lustre and streaked with rust, and half-empty, too. I have never ridden the El, because it was gone long before I was born, but nonetheless I could picture the trip and the vistas only too clearly. Harding, who most likely was a native New Yorker, paints a great word picture here that is matched by Boris Dolgov's striking interior art.

As the El approaches his stop, Jack gets up and exchanges a few words with the driver, a grumpy old man named Pete Nevers who has been working for the El seemingly forever. Jack idly muses that Pete is so connected to the El that if the city authorities were ever to demolish the El, they would have to take down Pete along with it. But that won't ever happy, because the city cannot do without the El. Anybody who knows a little bit about the history of public transport in New York City (it's remarkable what you pick up when researching the Silencer stories) knows that those are famous last words.

And indeed a few weeks later, Jack chances to glimpse an article in a co-worker's newspaper that the El and the bridge which Jack crosses to get to work will be demolished. The bridge will be rebuilt, but the El won't. Instead, it will be replaced by busses. Jack is bothered by this, so much that he gets drunk after work. When he talks to Pete on the trip home that night, Pete insists that they'll never stop the El, that it's alive and they can't kill it. Jack counters that Pete is just scared, because he's nothing without the El.

Later that night, Jack wakes up, feeling hungover, not to mention a little guilty about his confrontation with Pete. After all, the old man has always been good to him, has even lent Jack money on occasion. And so Jack decides to pay Pete a visit to apologise.

It turns out that Pete lives in a barren apartment in a rundown building near the El trainyard. Because Jack feels sorry for old Pete, he offers to find him a job at the steel foundry, perhaps as a watchman. But Pete declines. He can't just change jobs, he declares. He can never leave the El. Jack tries to persuade him, but Pete won't hear anything about it. "Thanks lad", he tells Jack, but he needn't worry about Pete or the El. He shakes Jack's hand and Jack can't help but notice that Pete's handshake is hard and cold as steel.

But of course Jack worries about Pete anyway and even secures him a job as a watchman at the steel foundry. When he visits Pete again a few days later, the man who opens the door is not Pete, but his roommate, an El conductor named Philpot. Philpot tells Jack that Pete is taking the impending end of the El very hard. He doesn't eat and spends most of his time after hours in the empty El car.

When Jack tells Philpot about the job offer, Philpot says that Pete won't take it, because he isn't leaving the El. However, Philpot is interested. Jack tells Philpot that the job offer is only good for Pete, no one else, whereupon Philpot opens an old trunk in the apartment, revealing a tangle of rusty steel parts. Pete has been swiping parts from the El for years, Philpot tells Jack, and is hardly trustworthy as a watchman. "But why?" Jack wonders, when the door opens and Pete comes in.

Pete is understandably furious and throws Jack and Philpot out. He also tells Jack in no uncertain terms that he doesn't want or need a new job, because he's staying with the El. Philpot, on the other hand, would very much like the job, but Jack tells him to find one for himself.

On the final day of the El, Jack boards the train for its last ride, disgusted at all the reporters and local dignitaries, flag-waving school children and an off-key marching band and at the demolition crews who stand by to start their work as soon as the last train has passed by. Jack has a bottle of whiskey in his pocket and empties it on his way to the front of the train. Already drunk, he tries to talk to Pete, but all Pete says is "Get out!" That makes Jack angry and he takes a swing at Pete. But even though his fist feels as if he'd just hit a steel wall, Pete doesn't even feel the punch. But Jack certainly feels it when Pete throws him across the car.

Jack gets drunk some more, falls asleep on a bench and wakes up sorely hungover. Furious, he decides to confront Pete, but only find Philpot wounded and bleeding on the floor. Philpot claims that Pete attacked him and that he isn't human. He also warns Jack against going after Pete.

But of course, Jack does after Pete anyway. He enters the darkened El railyard and soon comes across the body of a night watchman, bludgeoned to death. He sees a train starting up, driven undoubtedly by Pete. Jack sprints after train and jumps aboard, realising too late that the demolition crews have already started to take down the tracks. Worse, the train is going very fast, too fast to jump off.

Somehow, Jack makes his way to the front of the train, where Pete is in his compartment. Jack yells at the old man to stop the train, because the tracks on the bridge are already gone, but Pete doesn't react. So Jack tries to grip the controls and stop the train himself, but he cannot, because Pete is too strong for him. In desperation, he tries to pummel Pete, but once again it is like hitting a steel wall.
Jack realises that the train is going up the ramp to the bridge and that he and Pete have to jump off now or die. But Pete isn't going to jump. He'll go down with the El and he has Jack's wrist in a death grip. At the very last second, Jack manages to yank himself free, tearing off Pete's arm in the process. He jumps and watches as the train derails and falls into the East River (imaginatively called West River in this story).

Jack staggers home, dumps the severed arm in a corner of his room and covers it with newspapers (like you do). He watches the rescue efforts, watches as the battered cars of the El are brought up again. The official story is that Pete went crazy, murdered Philpot and the night watchman and stole the train to commit suicide. But his body is never found and Jack suspects it never will be.
One night, he takes Pete's severed arm, still wrapped in newspapers, and takes it down to the riverfront. Now Jack finally removes the newspaper and finds not a severed arm, but a steel throttle lever. He realises that Pete truly hadn't been human and throws the lever into the river to join the rest of "Pete".

"Ride the El to Doom" is an atmospheric and highly effective horror story. Particularly, the two El rides that bookend the story, one a regular daytime ride and the second a feverish nightmare suicide ride, are very atmospheric. Ditto for the El's last trip, complete with dignitaries, off-key marching band and flag waving school children. Writingwise, this story is considerably better than "Guard in the Dark", the other Allison V. Harding story I reviewed. Native New Yorker Allison V. Harding was obviously writing what she knew here and it shows.

In fact, the thing I liked most about "Ride the El to Doom" is that it offers a glimpse into a vanished New York City. This is a New York where elevated trains still clatter through the city on stilts, though they are on their way out, where steelworkers and other bluecollar folks can still afford to live in Manhattan, where Brooklyn and Queens are monotonous working class neighbourhoods rather than hipster central. This is the New York City of old movies, the New York City that King Kong trashed and also the New York City of the Silencer. In fact, the city descriptions alone were well worth reading the story.

And yes, the city described is absolutely New York, even if Harding changes the names of places and turns East River into West River and 110^th Street station, a suicide hotspot in the days of the El, into 109^th Street station. I'm not sure which bridge the fictional West River Bridge is supposed to be, for while bridges in New York City have been demolished, none of them seem to have been demolished in the 1940s.

The historical background of the story is the end of the elevated railway a.k.a. El in New York City. The El had been introduced as a solution to New York City's rampant traffic problem in 1867 and quickly caught on after a few false starts, because unlike trams and trolleys, the El did not occupy valuable street space, but instead ran one level above. However, the El was also noisy. It cast streets and sidewalks into permanent shadow – already a persistent problem with New York City's many highrise buildings anyway - and covered the neighbourhood in smoke, soot and dirt. Owners of buildings and shops along the El lines complained and property values fell, even as El access developed previously underdeveloped areas. And once subways and busses could handle the same passenger volume cheaper and faster with less noise and pollution, it spelled the end for the El. The first elevated train line ceased operation in 1938 and others followed throughout the early to mid 1940s, i.e. at the time the story is set, though the last line in the Bronx held on until 1973. For more on the history and end of the New York City El, see here and here. As for why most elevated trainlines came down during the 1940s, at least part of the reason was that the steel used to build them was needed for the war effort. The quick demolition of the tracks in "Ride the El to Doom" alludes to this.

Allison V. Harding is a somewhat mysterious figure, as I explained in my review of "Guard in the Dark". But all evidence points at her having lived in New York City and therefore witnessing the El tracks come down all over the city around the time that she wrote this story. And because the El was so ubiquitous until it disappeared, Allison V. Harding very likely rode it at least occasionally, even though she was of a different social class than her characters. Is the last ride of the El in the story with its potbellied dignitaries and flag-waving school children and off-key marching band something Harding personally witnessed? The description is so on point that it almost seems as if Harding described a real event. And now I am tempted to search the New York Times archives for reports about the ends of the various El lines to see if something matches Harding's description.

Another thing that's notable is that "Ride the El to Doom" features only working class characters. Protagonist Jack Larue is a steelworker with an alcohol problem, Pete Nevers is an El motorman and Philpot is a conductor. These are not the kind of people you often see in science fiction, fantasy or horror stories as anything other than walk-ons or side characters, neither during golden age nor today.

"Ride the El to Doom" is also an early example of  contemporary horror and what we now call urban fantasy. According to received wisdom, horror was found mainly in gothic and historical settings before Rosemary's Baby and the works of Stephen King dragged it into the present and urban fantasy flat out did not exist before the 1980s. However, all of the Weird Tales stories I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project have had contemporary/near contemporary settings. Furthermore, Weird Tales was a hotbed of proto-urban fantasy and popular Weird Tales series characters like Seabury's Quinn's occult detective Jules de Grandin and Manly Wade Wellman's occult detective John Thunstone are the direct ancestors of Harry Dresden, Peter Grant, Kate Daniels, Mercy Thompson, October Daye and Anita Blake.

If there's one thing that has become amply clear to me during my extended sojourn in the golden age it's that fantasy was a hugely varied genre pre-Lord of the Rings. There was gothic horror, modern horror, sword and sorcery, proto-urban fantasy, weird fiction, children's fantasy, humorous fantasy, etc… Nor did this variety vanish overnight, when the popularity of Lord of the Rings exploded. Quite the contrary, a lot of pulp era fantasy was reprinted in the wake of the success of Lord of the Rings and sword and sorcery experienced its second boom during the 1960s, though of the protagonists of the first boom in the 1930s/early 1940s, only Fritz Leiber was still alive and active to see it. It was only when horror split off as a separate genre in the 1970s and what remained was overtaken by Tolkien clones and big fat quest fantasy that fantasy contracted for the next twenty to thirty years.

"Ride the El to Doom" is urban fantasy in the most literal sense of the word, because the monster to be slain is not a vampire or werewolf but a crucial feature of the city. If public transport horror were a thing, "Ride the El to Doom" would be one of its founding texts. And indeed, it's worth remembering that railroad fiction was its own genre during the pulp era and that Railroad Stories was one of the longest running pulp magazines of all time. Railroad Stories began publication as The Railroad Man's Magazine in 1906 and is still around 114 years later, though they stopped publishing fiction in 1979. So Railroad Stories has been in business longer than Astounding/Analog, Amazing Stories and Weird Tales, the three longest running (with interruptions in the case of Amazing Stories and Weird Tales) SFF magazines.

Possessed or otherwise malicious machines are a common feature of the golden age and beyond. "The Twonky" by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, winner of the 1943 Retro Hugo for Best Short Story, as well as “Etaoin Shrdlu” by Fredric Brown, a Retro Hugo finalist in the same category and year, are two examples, respectively featuring a sentient radio-phonograph console and a sentient linotype machine. The novella "Killdozer!" by Theodore Sturgeon, published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1944 and therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos, featured a possessed bulldozer murdering a construction crew. Isaac Asimov's 1953 story "Sally" is an early tale about autonomous cars who have minds and personalities of their own and conspire to commit murder. Stephen King's 1983 horror novel Christine is another take on the same subject, only that the explanation for Christine's sentience is supernatural rather than technological. "Rise the El to Doom" certainly fits into this pattern, only that the sentient machine has a human face here in the form of Pete Nevers.

Allison V. Harding drops hints regarding the true nature of "Pete" throughout the story. We get comparatively few physical descriptions of the characters – we don't even know what race they are, though personally I imagine Pete as an old black man. But what few physical descriptions of Pete there are usually compare him to steel, iron, metal or coal, all materials associated with the El.

Considering how good this story is, it's a shame that it has never been reprinted. Maybe the fact that it is tied to a very particular time and place counted against it. Or maybe it's yet another case of the women writers of Weird Tales being ignored and dismissed as "useless filler that only takes up pages", while every single utterance ever made by H.P. Lovecraft is analysed to death. Indeed, one thing I have learned during this project is that Weird Tales was so much more than just Lovecraft and Howard, Cthulhu and Conan, and that a lot of it was very good indeed, even if it has never received even a fraction of the attention that Lovecraft and Howard received.

A great atmospheric tale of urban horror that has been unjustly forgotten. Highly recommended.