If you missed the last one…
“The Cosmic Horror” by Richard F. Seabright appeared in Hugo Gernsback’s Wonder Stories, August 1933. (Richard F. Seabright was one of Lovecraft’s circle, though he never shone like the more prolific writers like Robert Bloch and August Derleth. He wrote seven stories (mostly for Weird Tales) and eleven poems for the Pulps. I think he thought of himself as a poet primarily.) As the title implies, this is Science Fiction and Horror blended into a tale of a rampaging monster. I say that because the story starts with a meteorite landing in the woods. Two scientists, Professor Elton and his friend, Creighton, fetch it and it breaks open. A stream of gaseous energy pours out and another man is both burned to death and exsanguinated. The alien terror grows red with blood.
Now you might be thinking I’m describing The Blob (1958) with its similar opener. Both Searight and those film producers cribbed that from H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” (Amazing Stories, September 1927). Searight was a friend of HPL and this was intentional. He is writing a B-Movie twenty-plus years before such a thing exists. (The big Horror film of 1933 was Claude Rains’ The Invisible Man.)
The men flee the horror by running into a dead end in their shop. They slam the door but the monster soon warms that up as it is gives off immense heat. They drive it away with water. The liquid doesn’t destroy it, but hurts the creature.
The Horror now begins a campaign of nightly feedings. The government sends men to destroy it but they can’t find it. Elton and his friends search, too, using a small plane. The creature attacks them in the air, sucking the blood out of their pilot. This time, machine gun bullets, grenades, dynamite and water fail to drive the thing away. (They came prepared!) In the end, it leaves because it is full of blood. The men desperately grab the controls before the plane can crash.
The whole night seems like a failure except both Elton and Creighton discover an important thing: where the beast is hiding. Dinosaur Cave, a version of Mammoth Cave, is the spot where the blood-sucker fled after its meal. The men will go there and destroy the beast in its lair. (At this point in the story I was surprised to realize that Stephen King used the same finale for The Outsider. Had ol’ Uncle Stevie read this one long ago? That book sounds like its based on Lovecraft but isn’t really.)
The scientists go into the cave armed with a wax flask of hydroflouric acid and a new TNT gun from the military. They find the Horror resting along with its babies.
It was a great flat shape, porous and leathery, lying on the rocky floor on the far side of the chamber, and pulsating slowly and evenly. Even as we watched, it stirred slightly and the dry rustle sounded, startlingly loud in this place of silence. It was the Horror at rest! Around it clustered a group of similar flat shapes, but only a fraction of its size. All palpitated slowly, rhythmically; all emitted the same dim radiance. Dried excreta, very like the droppings of birds, littered the floor, and a nameless odor joined the overpowering magnetic emanation.
The heroes blow up the aliens by shooting the wax cylinder with the dyna-gun Jaws style.) The ceiling collapses, burying all the monsters. Our narrator cheers to have saved humanity the coming invasion of vampiric energy monsters. That final scene can’t help but remind me of Alien (19179) with its eggs and face-huggers.
Hugo Gernsback, who liked a good SF/Horror tale ruins everything with his stupid intro:
Lest you think the science contained in this story is entirely imaginary, let us point out that one of most mysterious electrical phenomenon of which practically nothing is known is ball lightning. Here we have a phenomenon where electricity, for reasons not clearly understood, forms itself into a six to eight inch fiery globe which sometimes moves slowly, other times with terrific speed.
Way to go, Hugo! You just ruined all the surprises in the story by giving away most of the details. Always the science lecturer first, Horror fan second. I wish I hadn’t read that at the beginning. As an afterword, it would do no harm. Obviously he was worried about more cross fan letters like he got with “The Tomb From Beyond”.
Of the letters of comment, Jack Darrow, who didn’t like “The Tomb From Beyond” did like this story. As did J. Stanley Dixon. That’s about it. The story wasn’t commented on at length. No one said it belonged in Weird Tales (as they did with Clark Ashton Smith’s work), nor did they compare it to Frank Belknap Long’s “The Horror From the Hills” (Weird Tales, January February-March 1931), which has a similar plot: monster is released, is explained with a combination of magic and science, goes on a killing spree, is chased, is defeated.
Conclusion
The title of this story should be all it needs to be seen in context as a Lovecraftian piece. Lovecraft was the primary writer of what has been called “Cosmic Horror” as opposed to vampire and werewolf type stories. These are sometimes labeled “supernatural stories”, which doesn’t really work for me. The big difference is that Lovecraft moved away from “Look, it’s a ghost!” and other ideas couched in religious lore and said, “Hey! Science tells me that the universe is a big, scary place and we are so insignificant!”
Searight’s tale does this by suggesting there are rocks out there, ready to fall to earth, containing unknown aliens. He has the brood of babies in the cavern. The rest is all too familiar from the drive-in. (And H. G. Wells.) I try to imagine this tale in the context of 1933, to see it as readers then might have. It’s hard from distant 2023. I admit, I can’t really do it. “The Cosmic Horror” wouldn’t seem all that new to those who had read Lovecraft, Frank Belknap Long or H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898).
The other half of this is that Searight isn’t a particularly good writer. Like the writers over at the Clayton Astounding, he doesn’t make us think that the humans might fail. He doesn’t really push the Cosmic Horror angle much at all. You get some atmosphere in the cavern but that part of the story is shorter than it might have been. You know, since the narrator is talking after the events, that the humans will win. (Wells more than HPL there.) The narrator never has any kind of brain melt-down (or SAN loss), just a feeling of responsibility to vanquish this invader from space. Perhaps the title would have been more accurate as “The Energy From Space” or “The Clinton Country Terror”. By a quirk of history, the term “Cosmic Horror” has gained a stronger meaning since the 1970s that Searight may not have meant at all. The readers of Wonder Stories found it acceptable so I have to think the Horror elements were not as effective as the title suggests.
Next time…“Dweller in the Gulf” by Clark Ashton Smith…
