E. Hoffman Price

Pulpster E. Hoffman Price (1898-1998) was born on this date, July 3. Hoffman wrote in multiple genres. Wildside Press has published multiple Megapacks of his work. We’ll look at two stories from The 11th Golden Age of Weird Fiction Megapack: E. Hoffman Price.

Before I get to the stories, I want to gloat for a bit. Price was one of the authors published by Carcosa Press back in the 1970s.  Far Lands, Other Days was one of four published before Carcosa folded.

L. Sprague de Camp moved to Plano, a suburb of Dallas, a few years before he died. Upon his death, many of his books ended up in a the flagship location of Half Price Books. This was a big deal that was promoted by the bookstore.

Of course I went.  Most of the really desirable items were locked under glass, such as volumes inscribed to de Camp by people like Heinlein. Others, books that de Camp had owned, many with a signed bookplate, were on a set of shelves. Among them was a copy of Far Lands, Other Days. I had been wanting a copy and grabbed it.

After I got it home (I paid for it.), I was looking through it a bit more carefully than I had in the store and saw something I’d missed. The employee who had processed and priced the book had missed it, too. Understandable since it wasn’t on the title page. But there was a full page inscription to de Camp signed by Price.

“Pale Hands” was published in the October 1933 issue of The Magic Carpet Magazine.  It’s the story of a man, Lawton, who is working as an agent for a sheik in Morocco who is trying to overthrow the French. He’s sitting in a cafe when he is approached by a French Secret Service agent whose life he had saved during the Great War.

The French agent warns him that within 24 hours he will have a warrant to arrest Lawton. Lawton will surely face a firing squad. He’s giving Lawton warning so Lawton can flee. Someone has snitched.

Lawton thinks he’s been betrayed by his lover. To confirm this, he consults with the Gray Goddess, an apparition only he can see when he drinks absinthe. So he goes to the market and gets teh ingredients for his lover’s favorite meal. He takes these items to her apartment, where she begins to cook and he begins to imbibe and listen to the goddess whisper in his ear.

This story is arguably not fantasy. It’s an open question whether the Gray Goddess is real and only Lawton can see her, or if she is a figment of his absinthe addled mind.

The next story is “Tarbis of the Lake”, first published in the February 1934 issue of Weird Tales. I liked it a lot better than “Pale Hands”, to a large degree because of its reliance on the fascination with Egypt that was popular at the time. This one is included in an anthology of Lovecraft’s collaborations and ghost writings. The ISFDB lists it as by Price only, whereas most of the stories in that book are listed as by Lovecraft and a collaborator. Someone with more knowledge of Lovecraft’s collaborative work will have to comment on to what extent Lovecraft contributed to this story.

Like I said, though, I liked this one. Rankin is in the town of Lourdes. He’s heard a legend of Tarbis, who was queen of Ethiopia, which at the time was Upper Egypt. Supposedly she proposed marriage to Moses, who turned her down. So she left and came to what would later become Lourdes, France. In those days a group of necromancers lived in the area before being destroyed by God in a localized flood

Rankin is in love with a woman named Tarbis, and he’s begun to suspect she is the Tarbis of legend. He thinks she has found a way to be eternally youthful.

The truth, it turns out, is far worse.

This was very much a vintage Weird Tales type of story. As I said, I enjoyed it a lot.

E. Hoffman Price has been pretty much forgotten today, which is a shame. He wasn’t always a top tier writer. But was prolific as he was, he definitely left a body of pulp fiction that is very much worth reading.

Kudos to Wildside Press for making his work available in inexpensive electronic editions. The 11th Golden Age of Weird Fiction Megapack is on sale for $0.45 as of this writing. That’s a tough price to beat.