I’ve looked a little bit at Robert Barbour Johnson’s writings---his mainstream work for Blue Book, his first short story for Weird Tales.  As far as I can tell, still no one has punctured the pseudonym(s?) he used for the shudder pulps.

Now, I want to take a closer look at some of his weird stories, which presumably reflected the influence of Fort most of all.  I’ve already noted that his first story (although published second), “They” probably grew out of a Fortean understanding of a weird stretch of land on the Monterey Peninsula.

After “They,” Johnson wrote “Lead Soldiers” and “Mice.”  I have not seen either of these.  As far as I can tell, neither was ever reprinted, although Johnson noted that “Lead Soldiers” provoked Lovecraft to write him a fan letter.  That story was about Mussolini’s threatening to invade Ethiopia.  “Mice,” according to Johnson,” was based on an old French legend he had heard about a curse ending in a nobleman being consumed by mice.  He set it in Louisiana, since he had lived there, and based the main character on the detective writer (and friend) Roman MacDougald.

Thereafter came a couple year gap, which Johnson blames on the editor of Weird Tales unaccountable animosity.   In the late 1930s, he wrote three more stories for Weird Tales.  The first published was “The Silver Coffin.”

Tame by today’s standards, “The Silver Coffin” is about a scion of a Southern family who is turned into a vampire; he sets himself up in a silver coffin, which he cannot escape, and sets up a trust fund so that the coffin will always be watched over—until, eventually, he dies of starvation.  One day, there develops a crack, and he slips out to feast upon local children.  The coffin is reinforced with steel.  The climax of the story comes when the narrator and visitor see the coffin begin to rattle and hear the screams inside; they are afraid the vampire will escape, but he only tips over the coffin, which is enough to have the visitor faint.

The story is told in much the same way as “They”: a visitor meets someone whose job it is to guard a horrible secret; this narrator tells the story of how he came to be in the position to the visitor, who hardly says a word.  Very little action occurs in the course of the story.  The whole point seems to be the creation of a feeling of foreboding.

Johnson’s next story, “Far Below,” is told in much the same way.  A man visits the New York subway—although Johnson notes he based it on “Forest Hill Tunnel” in San Francisco—where he meets what amounts to an occult police: a former zoologist who has been tasked to guard a stretch of subway tunnel that is constantly attacked by some bizarre creatures, part ape, part mole.  These Johnson borrowed from Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model,” although the idea of an occult police may have come from Fort, who wrote about such a force in Book of the Damned.  At the end of the story, the visitor notes that the former zoologist is himself turning into one of the creatures.

The story was well-received, and continues to be.  It was chosen as the best story ever to appear in Weird Tales, received encomiums from critic S. T. Joshi, and was widely reprinted.  Again, though, the story is tame by modern standards, lacks action—opting instead to create mood—and distances the reader through Johnson’s narrative device.  Nonetheless, it does manage to make subways feel weird—uncanny.

Johnson’s final story for Weird Tales was “Lupa.”  Like “The Silver Coffin,” “Lupa” was written while Johnson was in San Diego—which he said had a weird vibe in those days just before the war.  It, however, has not been reprinted, and so I have not seen it: original copies of Weird Tales are much too expensive. 

For the most part, Johnson seems to have focused on his writing for Blue Book in the years after World War II.  He did write a weird tale for Ray Palmer’s Mystic, which was something of a spin-off of the very Fortean Fate, at least as best as I can tell.  The story appeared in the second issue.  (Johnson complained he was never paid for it, which, if true, was not unusual.)  The story was called “The Strange Case of Monica Lilith.”

Johnson varied his narrative technique in this story, at least from what I’ve read of his other material.  The story is reported as if from the books of Charles Fort, which again distances the reader and sometimes can lapse into monologue, but also allows for more action.  Monica Lilith is hardly in the story at all.  She is described as a typical celebrity diva who maintains a suite at a prestigious resort in Tahoe.  She has only three quirks that make her stand out from the mass of others of her ilk: her fear of water, refusal to show her shoulders, and an odd pet that no one has ever seen.  Lilith dies one day merely by coming in contact with the Lake; her autopsy reveals that she had a third nipple on her shoulder.  After that, events get really weird: there are mysterious fires and wrecked rooms.  Staff and guests are driven away.  It comes to pass that her pet is angered at Lilith’s death and is wreaking vengeance.  And the pet is no normal pet, but something out of a Bosch painting, a demon familiar that apparently suckled at Lilith’s breath.  Eventually, it is caught and killed . . . and the story forgotten.

After this story, Johnson seems to  publish almost nothing.  His run at Blue Book ended.  Weird Tales was no more, as were the shudder pulps.  He did do an article for a fanzine on the death of fantastic fiction, and his essay on the Fortean society was reprinted.  But then, in 1964, The Magazine of Horror published his “The Life-After-Death of Thaddeus Warde.”  It was reprinted two years later in America, and also was translated into the French.

In this story, Thaddeus Warde, a member of the idle rich, seems to die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.  He is embalmed and buried—but crawls back to the surface to hunt down the man who killed and cuckolded him.

The story itself lacks drama, and the surprise ending is no surprise.  It is an attempt, again, to evoke a feeling of oddness.  It is told as a case report, just as his previous story had been, like something out of Fort: this story proving that death is not the end, although what drives one into the afterlife is not the happy thoughts of spiritualism or religion.