Evil Idols in the Pulps

This post is brought to you by Strange Detectives, a collection of occult detective stories by G. W. Thomas featuring a few strange idols like the stone in “Whose Whiteness So Became Them”, a Mystery with Richard Delamare and his Watson, Bainbridge, going to the country to discover why a man has disappeared. If you like stories of severed hands, this one is for you, for it has not only one but a swarm of them. You get an ancient temple as well and the thing that was once worshiped there. Strange Adventures, the companion volume, has some similar tales of ancient evil and those who much face off against it.

Victorian tales featuring idols include the Mystery “How Siva Spoke” (Cassell’s Family Magazine, October 1897) by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace, which features a fake idol that was used to con someone with a speaking tube. “Sredni Vashtar” (Westminster Gazette, May 28, 1910) by Saki is perhaps a better example of an Edwardian story featuring someone who worships a terrible idol (in this case a living ferret) but is still within the realm of psychology. The Pulps have plenty of examples to work from, creating nothing really new but perpetuating standard tropes. What you won’t find here are any Cthulhu Mythos tales after H. P. Lovecraft since the idols of the Mythos will get their own post.

The first good tale with an evil idol was “The Stone Image” (The Thrill Book, May 1, 1919) by Seabury Quinn. The Thrill Book was an experiment with a Weird Tales type magazine that didn’t catch on. “The Stone Image” features an evil idol that takes control of the wife, making her worship it in the nude. Quinn would recycle the plot and the nudity for a Jules de Grandin Horror-Mystery nine years later, “Gods of East and West” (Weird Tales, January 1928). The same scenario happens in both stories, but de Grandin fights the Indian god with an “Indian” (Native American) spirit. I compared these two tales here.

“In Terror of Laughing Clay” (Ghost Stories, October 1926) by Robert W. Sneddon was one of the Mark Shadow occult detective tales. This tale has an earth elemental and a control idol in it. For more, go here. Ghost Stories was a Weird Tales competitor that used photographic illustrations at the start of its run.

“In the Clutches of the Black Idol” (Ghost Stories, February 1927) by Vera Darrell has the writer as the protagonist. Vera meets Major Bassett at a party then visits him in his home along with chaperone, Billy Dane. Bassett offers her any item from his large collection of idols and weird items from around the world. Vera, despite the Major’s advice, takes the black idol that must never be tipped over or bad things will happen. The idol belongs to a tribe in Borneo from where Bassett’s man-servant, Azzim, comes from.

As can be predicted, the idol gets tipped over and Major Bassett dies, being attacked and killed while riding his horse at night. The evil idol is stolen that night by an intruder. The thief is Azzim, who is never seen again. We can assume he has returned home with the idol that he worships as a god. Shades of Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone and Arthur Conan Doyle. I liked Agatha Christie’s riff on the trope, “The Western Star” better.

“The People of Pan” (Weird Tales, March 1929) by Henry S.Whitehead has Grosvenor discover a lost civilization of Pan worshipers down the Great Cylinder of Saona. He witnesses them praying around an idol of a giant goat (used on the cover) and ultimately sees their destruction by poisonous gas. The People of Pan are led by the priestess, Clytemnestra. Whitehead was the archdeacon of the Virgin Islands, and his characters are usually religious men. Grosvenor is no exception. Most of his stories feature Voodoo but this one is different, using a lost world element he will repeat in “The Great Circle” (Strange Tales, June 1932).

“The Idol-Chaser” (Weird Tales, August 1929) by Barry Scobee has a local guide who conducts Americans through the jungle. Each customer is seeking a different idol: gold and wealth, rare insects, and in the case of Dobra, the ultimate mystical connection to the afterlife. Dobra buys an idol from his guide that shows a person submerging themselves in a puddle.  The guide puts up with the man’s rudeness and leads him to the village of the People of the Mud. These turn out to be sub-human crocodilian men. Dobra follows their ways, trying to lessen his thinking brain and jumps into the mud hole after all the others. Those who jump in don’t come back up. The guide follows the hole down to the rapids and finds Dobra alive. The man has been changed by his ordeal, switching from seeking the ultimate illumination to a desire to brag about surviving his ordeal. Barry Scobee is best remembered for adventure and Western fiction. The slight weird element in this tale made it a Weird Tales purchase rather than an Adventure one.

“The Idol of Death” (At Dead of Night, 1931) by Arthur Edwards Chapman and Richard Jackson appeared in a British anthology by Christine Campbell Thomson. Most of Thomson’s contents are Weird Tales reprints but some were originals like this story. (The author did write four others for Farnsworth Wright.) Chapman, our protagonist, is a collector of fine Japanese prints and other art objects. He invites Beauclare, a Frenchman, to see a clay idol that is supposed to curse the seventh owner. Chapman laughs at the curse. Beauclare offers to buy the piece but is refused. Later someone breaks in and steals both the prints and the idol. Chapman and his agent gets them back when they find a French nobleman, who had posed as Beauclare, dead. The agent informs Chapman he was in fact the sixth owner, and the dead man the seventh.

“When Dead Gods Wake” (Strange Tales, November 1931) by Victor Rousseau has a group of scientists gathering to see the collection of Francis Maitland, a collector of South American relics. Our narrator is a scientist named Kent. During a seance in the dark with Maitland’s Mayan youth, Pophonoc is almost sacrificed by Maitland. The statue of a nameless Mayan god of earthquakes from Xoctli features two stone snakes, each gaining a lump in its belly after a child and a chicken disappear. The group becomes alarmed when they read in the papers about local black children disappearing. They rush to Maitland’s to find the man under the mental control of the evil Pophonoc. Another seance takes place, this time with Maitland cutting out Pophonoc’s heart. The serpents animate and try to kill Kent and his friends but they have come armed with iron hatchets. Iron is a ward against magic, and they cut up the serpents. The nameless god causes an earthquake and Maitland is killed in the collapse. Rousseau mentions Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and the priest who must kill his predecessor.

“The Carven Image” (Weird Tales, May 1933) by August Derleth and Mark Schorer is one of the pair’s early collaborations. (For more than that, go here.) This tale involves the sea goddess Helsa and an idol of her. The story begins with the narrator, Emmanuel Speers, telling us of a wooden carving of a Norse goddess, Hesla, that haunts him through the years. When he is about to marry Elissa Hardy, he hears a voice warn him not to.Later, while boating, the vessel is tipped over and Elissa is dragged to her death. The haunted man seeks help from Doctor Stengler but ends up deciding to burn the carving. A newspaper article tells us how the statue was burned and Speers was found strangled to death beside the fire. The two wooden arms of the statue end up on his grave. One is burned but the other is mysteriously still at large. A pretty typical Weird Tales story. Derleth and Schorer used the letters from Hesla in a sort of anagram in Elissa Hardy’s name. This plot will show up again in Derleth’s own tales for The Unique Magazine.

“The Disinterment of Venus” (Weird Tales, July 1934) by Clark Ashton Smith is set in his version of medieval France, Averoigne. Some of the Averoigne tales are part of the Cthulhu Mythos but this one isn’t. CAS will have several more stories in our Cthulhu Mythos idol post though these are set in Commoria and Zothique. This tale is about a monastery where three monks dig up an idol of Roman make, a Venus figure so beautiful she inspires them to sin. The Abbott is reluctant to destroy or sell it. A zealot monk tries to smash the idol with a sledge hammer but he is found dead in the pit with the statue, its arms wrapped around his neck.

“The Idol and the Rajah” (Weird Tales, August 1935) by Claude Farerre has an Indian named Churah Sungh who is the future Rajah and a descendant of the goddess of Kali, and a newspaperman named Harold Furth. Furth sees an idol of Kali with her multiple arms each bearing a severed head. Later the duo are captured by Bulgarians who plan to kill them. Sungh calls upon his “grandmother” to save them. The Rajah grows phantom arms that kill the attackers.

“The Toad Idol” (Weird Tales, September 1935) by Kirk W. Mashburn is a truly weird tale with a man taking a stone frog idol from a temple. He tries to get rid of the thing because it feels like the sculpture is waiting for something. This proves to be a time when the frog will fire pellets into the man’s brain. The closest thing I can think of that is similar is “Green Tea” by J. Sheridan Le Fanu with its terrible green money.

“The Leopard’s Paw” (Popular Detective, March 1936) by Edmond Hamilton is a typical Moonstone type tale with a stolen voodoo idol that allows a criminal to fake attacks by leopard men. Hamilton wrote detective/adventure fiction in the late 1930s when SF markets proved too few. (At least he never had to write Westerns.) For more, go here.

“The Idol of the Flies” (Unknown, June 1942) by Jane Rice builds from the “Sredni Vashtar” ideas of Saki.The story stars Pruitt, an evil little boy who torments the adults in his life. He builds an idol of a fly and worships it. Rice flips the script by the end of the tale, with Pruitt’s biggest victim proving to be the real horror in the tale. “The Idol of the Flies” is one of the first Pulp stories to feature a child as monster, before Ray Bradbury’s “The Small Assassin” (Dime Mystery Magazine, November 1946), before Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life” (Star Science Fiction Stories No. 2, 1953) of Twilight Zone fame, and decades before the numerous 1980s Horror paperbacks.

If you don’t think this story is one of Rice’s best consider it was the lead tale for The Idol of the Flies and Other Stories (2003) and John Pelan chose it for The Century’s Best Horror Fiction: 1901-1950. For a wonderful look at this story and all its inspirations, go here.

“Old Black Magic” (Short Stories, May 10, 1945) by Bert David Ross has a Native American totem that acts like it is magic but ultimately is not. Ross wrote for Dorothy McIlwraith at both Short Stories and the 1940s Weird Tales. For more on this strange Northern go here. For more on totem pole comic stories and Robert Bloch’s Weird Tales story “The Totem Pole”, go here.

“The Vengeance of Kali Mai” (Weird Tales, May 1953) by Garnett Radcliffe has a man seeking a necklace from a goddess-idol’s throat. The statue attacks him but proves to be a mechanical device which breaks before it can kill him. Despite this, the goddess gets her revenge. For more on this tale, go here.

Conclusion

The Horror trope of the evil idol is strongly influenced by Christian anti-sentiments. It’s right there in the Ten Commandments. The idea that a carven image could become a living god or goddess is quite a natural one. As children we feel our toys are alive, so why not other artificial things? I’m sure I haven’t found all the evil idol stories, especially in Weird Tales. There is quite a sideline in animated gargoyles and statues that are similar. Tales inspired by Pygmalion, being slightly different in that no one worships them, at least not intentionally. The trope of the living idol or statue is strong in the tales of the Cthuhu Mythos and those stories are coming up next.

Mythos Horror & Ghostbreakers at RAGE m a c h i n e