The Centenary of 'God Head' by Leonard Cline

Leonard Cline's first novel, God Head, appeared on 10 October 1925, on the first list of books published by the newly founded Viking Press of New York. God Head is not fantastical but it is mythopoeic. It is set in northern Michigan on the shores of Lake Superior, vaguely during the First World War. Cline’s narrator, Paulus Kempf, is a labor agitator, and after the police break up a strike he was fomenting, Kempf flees into the woods for his life. There, at length, he comes to a small settlement of Finns, who take him in and help him regain his health. During his recovery, Kempf is told tales from the Kalevala, of Kullervo, Lemminkainen, and Väinämöinen, and these stories shape the narrative and influence Kempf’s developing ideas. Thereby he comes to think of an immortality of the flesh through the masterdom of humanity, and Kempf tests out his ideas on the Finns, lusting after the wife of his host, playing on the superstitions of the old people, and creating of the frowning face on the cliff a chanting god head to symbolize his dominance. This bald précis does not convey the majesty of this work, nor the brilliance of its style. On original publication Laurence W. Stallings wrote of it in The New York World: “It would be eminently fair to believe that Leonard Cline could write rings around half a dozen of our ten best novelists” (21 October 1925); and Donald Douglas wrote in The Nation: “More than anything else it is Mr. Cline’s prose holding light like a steel net which transmutes a wild melodrama into an ordered and thrilling rhythm of word and scene and folklore” (6 January 1926). An English edition was published by Jarrolds in 1927, under the title Ahead the Thunder. God Head was translated into Finnish by Juri Nummelin as Jumalan Pää (2020). 

God Head is the single-best forgotten novel that I have ever encountered.*

A special Centennial edition God Head, with extra content, is forthcoming.

*Most of this piece is adapted from my entry on the book in Late Reviews (2018). 

My New Leonard Cline Blog

Just a quick note here to call attention to my new blog on Leonard Cline (1893-1929), author of God Head (1925) and The Dark Chamber (1927).  I have studied and collected information on Cline for over thirty years now, and the blog is designed to be a way to share some of this information as I re-sort my relevant books and files. This week there are scheduled to be three posts on Cline's third novel, The Dark Chamber, which H.P. Lovecraft called "an absolutely magnificent work of art."

The blog can be found here.

If you wonder why I think Cline is worth reading and studying, check out this piece I've written here.  And if you're wondering who on earth Leonard Cline was, try this other piece here.

GHOST STORIES: The Magazine and Its Makers

 John Locke, with his Off-Trail Publications, has quietly been producing some excellent books for anyone interested in the pulp magazines, and especially for those of us who, in particular, are also interested in the men and women behind the stories—the authors, editors, and artists. One recent release deserves special attention for the exemplary coverage of one particular pulp magazine, Ghost Stories.  It ran for a total of 64 issues, from July 1926 through the December 1931/January 1932 number.  There has been one previous anthology centered on this pulp: Phantom Perfumes and Other Shades: Memories of Ghost Stories Magazine (2000), edited by Mike Ashley.  It contains seventeen stories, along with a history of the magazine by Mike Ashley, a short Foreword by Hugh B. Cave (who contributed two stories to the magazine in 1931), and two appendices: the first a checklist of issues of the magazine, the second an index to the contributors.

John Locke’s new project brings us not one but two books:  twenty stories in volume one, and another fifteen in volume two, with no overlap of stories from Mike Ashley’s anthology and with plenty of extras.  These volumes are formatted the same size as the original pulp magazine, so you get some neat extras like a sprinkling of facsimile ads, a bunch of the original illustrations to the stories, and full page reproductions of all sixty-four covers to the magazine.

Ghost Stories: The Magazine and Its Makers, Volume 1 (9781935031093  $24.00 trade paperback) additionally includes a lengthy history of the magazine, putting it in the context of other magazines of the time, particularly those published by MacFadden Publications, who were responsible for nearly four years of the run of Ghost Stories before it was sold. Other lengthy sections give biographies of all of the editors, and all of the authors who are represented in volume one.  And these are not the usual short one-paragraph biographies, but often a couple of pages, giving the results of original research on these people.  There are also some statistical analyses of that magazine, showing that it paid 2 cents a word under MacFadden, but slipped to 1 cent (and up) under later owners.  Over its run, Ghost Stories published 517 short stories, 12 novelettes, 47 serials (of various installments), 148 nonfiction items, 44 editorials, and one poem.

Ghost Stories: The Magazine and Its Makers, Volume 2 (9781935031130  $24.00 trade paperback) continues on in the same comprehensive manner, with biographies of the authors who appear in volume two, a section on the artists, and the cover gallery of all sixty-four of the covers.  (Each volume also has an index.) 

To mention only a few of the stories reprinted in these two volumes, H.P. Lovecraft’s friend, Muriel Eddy, is represented with a short “True Ghost Experience” from the April 1926 issue.  Nictzin Dyalhis's single contribution to Ghost Stories, “He Refused to Stay Dead” (April 1927) which had been announced in the previous issue as “My Encounter with Osric, the Troll”, is also reprinted.  And Leonard Cline, author of God Head (1925) and The Dark Chamber (1927), is represented with his pseudonymous story “Sweetheart of the Snows” (August 1928), as by Alan Forsyth.  It’s is a tale reminiscent of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Glamour of the Snow”.  Cline’s title for the story had been “The Lady of Frozen Death”, and his typescript version under that title can be found in the booklet The Lady of Frozen Death and Other Weird Tales (Necronomicon Press, 1992).  Comparing the texts, one can see that the editor at Ghost Stories made numerous minor changes and additions, ones which tend to lessen Cline’s distinctive style and to add more pulpish sentimentalities.

This two-volume history and anthology brings the pulp magazine Ghost Stories, defunct now for almost seventy years, vividly back to new life.  I recommend it highly.

"Late Reviews"

Aiken, Conrad. Punch: The Immortal Liar: Documents in His History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921)

I read this short book because I had seen someone refer to it as “an astonishingly creepy foretaste of Ligotti.” So I was expecting it to be in prose, but actually it is a narrative poem, reworking the folklore of Punch from seventeenth century English puppet-shows. Certainly there are Thomas Ligotti-like ideas and elements, but the tone of the whole is entirely unlike anything of Ligotti’s, being both colloquial and jovial in its manner. It is a development from Aiken’s earlier poem “Senlin: A Biography,” in his volume The Charnel Rose (1918), which is demonstrably a influence on another great writer of weird fiction, Leonard Cline. Cline was in 1918 a reviewer for the Detroit News, and Aiken sent him an inscribed copy of The Charnel Rose on 19 November 1918. “Senlin” seems to have been the inspiration for Cline’s poem “Mad Jacob” (first published in Midland in January 1924, and collected in After-Walker (1930)). There is no evidence that Cline read Punch, but the book, interesting though it is, doesn’t really belong on the shelf next to Cline or to Ligotti. Aiken’s work has its own integrity and interest.

Robbins, Tod [Clarence Aaron Robbins, 1888-1949]. Close Their Eyes Tenderly, illustrated by Paule de Nize (Monaco: Editions Inter-Pub, [no date, but circa January 1947]).

Tod Robbins’s last novel is another curious piece of work, reworking the familiar Robbins theme of a man pursuing murder as a creative form of art. The twist this time is that the man—the wealthy, young Maxwell Jenks—finds a soulmate in Elaine Verez, with whom he plans and executes murders. Written with Robbins’s usual misanthopy and wry humor, this novel may be merely a curiosity, but it is an entertaining one.