It is hard to imagine how big a writer Elliott O’Donnell was in his day. He is practically forgotten today outside of scholarly circles. This surprises me since his acumen, his sheer love of all things horrific and creepy hasn’t tarnished one bit. I guess he may seem a little old-fashioned to some. In The Sorcery Club one character says: “After today you shall have your share of the pretty ones-anything to keep the peace. Only- remember-no falling in love.” This cold, sexual predation must have seemed unspeakable in 1912 when the book was published, but if you think about it in more modern terms, that could just as easily sum up James Bond’s sexual agenda, a character idolized by millions of men world-wide. Times change. The days of Free Love shocking the masses are long behind us. Despite this, The Sorcery Club remains a fascinating read.
Elliott O’Donnell (1874-1965) was a prolific journalist, writer and lecturer on the occult. He wrote four novels but dozens of non-fiction books and story collections, containing some actual experiences as a ghostbreaker. Like many of the horror writers of his day, he was a believer. He writes of magic and evil with the belief that some-or-all of it is true. Arthur Machen, Arthur Conan Doyle, Algernon Blackwood are just some of the men who shared similar convictions. It is his conviction and his masses of information that he brings to The Sorcery Club. Like Sax Rohmer (who wrote about the same time), O’Donnell doesn’t have to fake it. He knows where to borrow from to tell his tale of the slow descent into evil.
“The Ghost Table” (Weird Tales, February 1928) was one of three of his many pieces to find its way into a Pulp magazine. It even got the cover! That’s surprising when you think how hard it is to make furniture look evil. C. C. Senf tries but… (Good thing I have a gun!) Weird Tales also published “The Haunted Woods of Adoure” (July 1930 issue) and “One Christmas Eve” (July 1934), brilliantly presented in the middle of summer. If the Pulps didn’t become his bread-and-butter, the anthologies certainly did. O’Donnell appears several times in the classic Creeps anthology, and many times in the 1960s British boom that gave us the Pan, Mayflower, Fontana, etc. series.
Gerald Biss, who wrote the werewolf classic The Door of the Unreal acknowledges O’Donnell in that book: “Amongst the many works consulted and made use of by the author in studying the lore of lycanthropy, he wishes to make special acknowledgment of his indebtedness to Mr. Elliott O’Donnell’s Werewolves, the most comprehensive work upon the subject-in the English language, at any rate.” Many other writers owe a similar debt to O’Donnell. Many pulp writers had little or no knowledge of the occult outside of O’Donnell’s many books.
Why then has he become one of the neglected authors of horror? Lovecraft does not mention O’Donnell in his essay “The Supernatural Horror in Literature” which strikes me as odd, since O’Donnell had been publishing since 1912. Perhaps he saw O’Donnell as a non-fiction writer alone, and outside the scope of his essay? As too new and popular? He does mention S. Baring-Gould, a British author who also wrote werewolf non-fiction as well as horror tales. Another possibility is that since O’Donnell was more popular in England than the US he might not have had much access to him. (This seems the case with J. Sheridan Le Fanu if not Baring-Gould.) O’Donnell outlived Lovecraft by over twenty years.
Dennis Wheatley in his Library of Horror series places O’Donnell clearly in the front ranks, but Wheatley was also British and a believer. More likely, O’Donnell’s fame ebbed with the interest in the occult after World War II. His ideas on certain subjects will make modern readers cringe, such as those he claims about the mentally handicapped. Like Sax Rohmer, his brand of esoterica is set in the turn-of-century frame of mind, though he found a short revival in the weird and wild 1960s, where his many books were cut up and repackaged. There are jewels to be found among his works though I caution readers that they are subject to the prejudices of another time.
Some Haunted Houses of England & Wales (1908)
Twenty Years Experience as a Ghost Hunter (1917)
The Menace of Spirtualism (1920)
The Screaming Skull and Other Ghosts (1964)
The Midnight Hearse and More Ghosts (1965)
