Formless, gelantinous, slimy monsters are one of the Pulps’ great creations. Weird Tales had its share, if not all the classics, such as H. P. Lovecraft’s shoggoth in “At the Mountains of Madness” that appeared in Astounding Stories. John W. Campbell’s chameleonic Thing in “Who Goes There?” appeared in Astounding Science Fiction. Lovecraft would be more famous for inspiring The Blob films with “A Colour Out of Space” (Amazing Stories, September 1927), which doesn’t actually have slime in it. The filmmakers changed the weird colour for a meteorite full of pink goo.
Weird Tales started right out of the gate with its very first tale and cover, the classic “Ooze” by Anthony M. Rud (March 1923). This Science Fiction tale has a scientist create a slime monster in the swamp then loses his family to the creature. Read an entire piece on it here.
“The Malignant Entity” by Otis Adelbert Kline (May-June-July 1924) is another mad scientist tale pretending to be an occult detective story with Dr. Dorp on the case. Dorp has to solve the mystery of the skeletons who appear out of nowhere. The answer is slime! Read about all the Doctor Dorp tales here.
“The Life-Masters” by Edmond Hamilton (Weird Tales, January 1930) has a scientist create a tidal wave of clear ooze that overwhelms the world in a flood of living slime. Two other scientists try to stop him. This was the classic Hamilton formula.
“The Flowing Death” by Arlton Eadie (March 1930) has another scientist making ooze in his lab. Dr. Owen Boyd-Phulger ScD., LL.D., F.R.S., F.S.A. makes a brilliant discovery. After three years he turns a plant cell into a carnivorous animal cell. And it is immortal. Harold, being a dope, drops the cell and allows it to escape.
… A moment’s reflection, however, convinced me that this could not be the explanation of the strange, grayish-white hue which covered everything. At the same moment I perceived that the ground itself seemed to be in motion. It was a slow, steady, billowing movement, slight but unmistakable–something like the flowing of the tide upon a river. As I looked the horrible truth burst upon me! It was my amebas increased and multiplied beyond measure!
Eadie tells a terror of mounting terror, as the slime invades the town, then pulls the rug out with a dream ending. You can literally see H. P. Lovecraft over there shaking his head in disappointment. (To make matters worse, C. C. Senf draws the scene from end of the story. No goo monsters for you!)
“The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” by Clark Ashton Smith (November 1931) has the thief Satampra Zeiros sneaking into the temple of Tsathaoggua in the ice-bound land of Commoria. Zeiros meets the guardian of the temple:
The basin, I have said, was very large; indeed, it was no less than six feet in diameter by three in depth, and its brim was the height of a tall man’s shoulder from the floor. The three legs that bore it were curved and massive and terminated in feline paws displaying their talons. When we approached and peered over the brim, we saw that the bowl was filled with a sort of viscous and semi-liquescent substance, quite opaque and of a sooty color. It was from this that the odor came—an odor which, though unsurpassably foul, was nevertheless not an odor of putrefaction, but resembled rather the smell of some vile and unclean creature of the marshes. The odor was almost beyond endurance, and we were about to turn away when we perceived a slight ebullition of the surface, as if the sooty liquid were being agitated from within by some submerged animal or other entity. This ebullition increased rapidly, the center swelled as if with the action of some powerful yeast, and we watched in utter horror, while an uncouth amorphous head with dull and bulging eyes arose gradually on an ever-lengthening neck, and stared us in the face with primordial malignity. Then two arms—if one could call them arms—likewise arose inch by inch, and we saw that the thing was not, as we had thought, a creature immersed in the liquid, but that the liquid itself had put forth this hideous neck and head, and was now forming these damnable arms, that groped toward us with tentacle-like appendages in lieu of claws or hands!
Another slimy Smith monster is “Ubbo-Sathla” by Clark Ashton Smith (July 1933) Smith tries to imagine the original matter evolving in the creation of the planet:
There, in the grey beginning of Earth, the formless mass that was Ubbo-Sathla reposed amid the slime and the vapors. Headless, without organs or members, it sloughed from its oozy sides, in a slow, ceaseless wave, the amoebic forms that were the archetypes of earthly life. Horrible it was, if there had been aught to apprehend the horror; and loathsome, if there had been any to feel loathing. About it, prone or tilted in the mire, there lay the mighty tablets of star-quarried stone that were writ with the inconceivable wisdom of the pre-mundane gods.
Robert E. Howard got in on the slime monster business with Thog, “The Slithering Shadow” (September 1933). Conan goes to the lost city Xuthal, where the inhabitants lie around stoned. They are waiting for that terrible shadow to come and devour them:
It towered above him like a clinging black cloud. It seemed to flow about him in almost liquid waves, to envelop and engulf him. His madly slashing saber sheared through it again and again, his ripping poniard tore and rent it; he was deluged with a slimy liquid that must have been its sluggish blood. Yet its fury was nowise abated. He could not tell whether he was slashing off its members or whether he was cleaving its bulk, which knit behind the slicing blade. He was tossed to and fro in the violence of that awful battle, and had a dazed feeling that he was fighting not one, but an aggregation of lethal creatures. The thing seemed to be biting, clawing, crushing and clubbing him all at the same time. He felt fangs and talons rend his flesh; flabby cables that were yet hard as iron encircled his limbs and body, and worse than all, something like a whip of scorpions fell again and again across his shoulders, back and breast, tearing the skin and filling his veins with a poison that was like liquid fire.
“The Seven Geases” by Clark Ashton Smith (October 1934) gives us just a taste of another monstrous slime in Abhoth:
Here, it seemed, was the ultimate source of all miscreation and abomination. For the gray mass quobbed and quivered, and swelled perpetually; and from it, in manifold fission, were spawned the anatomies that crept away on every side through the grotto. There were things like bodiless legs or arms that flailed in the slime, or heads that rolled, or floundering bellies with fishes’ fins; and all manner of things malformed and monstrous, that grew in size as they departed from the neighborhood of Abhoth. And those that swam not swiftly ashore when they fell into the pool from Abhoth, were devoured by mouths that gaped in the parent bulk.
“The Crawling Horror” by Thorp McClusky (November 1936) is a tale told to a psychiatrist, Dr. Kurt. Hans Brubruker tells what happened at his farm. First he notices the mice disappearing then the rats. He can hear something devour them inside the walls. Later he falls a sleep by the stove and wakes to pet his dog, Nan. Only he feels a slimy sensation. Looking, he sees Nan has a large slimy patch on her neck and head. Hans tries to kill it with a poker but it leaks through the holes in the floor. Nan is still alive but her eyes are strangely blank. Hans’ other dog, Peg, tries to kill her. Hans shoots Nan, then goes to do the milking. When he returns with a shovel the body is gone. He keeps seeing the weirdly undead dog several times until Peg disappears too.
Later a runaway kid shows up on a frosty morning. At first Hans wants to help but his sixth sense warns him off. He watches the kid walking bare foot in the slush. His body seems very heavy, breaking the ice there. Hans hears later that the Peterson kid has disappears and he knows. The thing has come back, feeling like Hans’ farm is home. He asks the doctor what to do? Dr. Kurt tells him to get some rest and come back tomorrow.
Doctor Kurt sends Hans away the next day. Kurt’s secretary, Hilda, is concerned for Hans. She asks if Hans is insane? She plans to marry him. The doctor assures her Hans is sane. The doctor visits the farm after Hilda and Hans tie the knot. He sees Hans looks very tired. He hasn’t been able to sleep from fear of the slime. Doctor Kurt promises to come back that night. He does and watches Hans seal the room with wax. He sleeps while Doctor Kurt watches. It is snowing outside. The doctor sees something outside the window and investigates. He sees tracks that look like a ball being rolled in the snow. These turn into human footprints. Now he knows. Later a neighbor, Brandt, comes by looking for his daughter, Bertha. Hans and the doctor suspect what happened to her.
The creature is gone for a while but Dr. Kurt eventually gets a note saying , “It has come back.” The doctor returns and explains to Hans two ways to kill the thing. First, like the vampire hunters of old, was to seal it in a prison like a sealed coffin. The second way is more dangerous. A person could accept the monster into them then defeat it by sheer will. The doctor tells Hans and Hilda to sleep since they haven’t for days. While he is reading a book there is a knock at the door. It is Bertha Brandt, cold and dirty. Doctor Kurt allows her in. She crawls into bed with Hilda while the doctor makes coffee. It is then that the doctor notices that the two women have become joined. Bertha is the monster and is consuming Hilda!
Here is where Thorp McClusky proves his mettle as one of the great Weird Tales writers and why Donald A. Wolheim reprinted the story in Avon Fantasy Reader #6 (1948):
Then the thing was only a mass of jelly, still clinging like some loathsome, colorless leech to Hilda’s back and shoulders. My body shrinking, I crawled over it and through it, seized Hilda’s arms, and pulled her off the bed onto the floor.
And then I screamed again, for of Hilda there was left only half a body; her spine lay bare, her ribs curved nakedly, her skull gaped, her entrails dropped across the dingy carpet; it was like a slaughterhouse in hell.
Where other writers have told of people consumed only McClusky gives an actual description.
Hans sees his wife is dead and tries to shoot the slime. The fragments reform, flow into her clothing. Hilda reborn stands before him, telling him to open the door. It is now that Hans decides to try method two. He accepts the woman into his arms. She turns into slime and tries to take him. Only she fails. Hans wins and the monster is trapped inside. Hans knows that none of this is explainable so he tells the doctor to tell everyone he was insane. That he killed Hilda and Berta and the Peterson kid. Only Doctor Kurt knows the truth. “Meanwhile I wonder: where, and what, is Hans?”
“The Salem Horror” (May 1937) by Henry Kuttner borrows Lovecraft’s shoggoth and brings it to America. Carson discovers a witch room in his house in Salem and begins to study Mythos magic. In the course of his experiments he dreams about then sees a black, formless monster:
How long he slumbered he did not know. He dreamed of Salem, and of a dimly glimpsed, gelatinous black thing that hurtled with frightful speed through the streets, a thing like an incredibly huge, jet-black amoeba that pursued and engulfed men and women who shrieked and fled vainly. He dreamed of a skullface peering into his own, a withered and shrunken countenance in which only the eyes seemed alive, and they shone with a hellish and evil light.
“Green Horror” by H. Thompson Rich (Weird Tales, August 1938) has a grey slime that devours humans. This greenhouse horror is a form of ghost from a hidden corpse.
“Giant Plasm” by Donald Wandrei (February 1939) has a lifeboat full of people discover an island that was thrown up by a seaquake. Six people survive the sinking of the Reva. The narrator is writing down this adventure in his diary. One man becomes angry with him when he denied seeing land. Santos hits him in the head with an oar before fighting with another man, Dave Anderson. Both fall over board but only Anderson survives the sharks.
The only woman in the boat is Wanda Hall, an adventuress. She tends to the narrator’s head. That night the boat does find land, a small islet with a peak and fruit trees. The castaways explore the place. There is a gigantic statue of some hideous but indefinable nature. At the top of the mount is a plateau with a temple. It is covered in a weird gray mass. There the narrator notices strange things: when Glenk, the second mate, kicks the temple in disappointment at finding no gold, the surface is untouched at first. Eventually a hole forms. Physics seems to work on different rules here.
The party goes back down the hill. The narrator and Wanda notice something strange about the mounds dotting the plateau but don’t say anything. The narrator and Dave Anderson return later and dig up the mounds. Each contains a piece of armor, but armor for a non-human life form of great size. No matter how hard they try they can not scratch the metal. The narrator reveals what his thoughts are: that there is a spaceship buried on the hill, once owned by the armor-wearing aliens.
That night Dave Anderson disappears. The island shakes with another quake. The narrator heads up the hill, while Glenk goes in the direction of the lagoon. At the hill top the castaway makes two startling discoveries. One of the three mounds has disappeared. Second, a red carpet that is all that remains of Dave Anderson. He returns to the boat in time to find Glenk trying to rape Wanda. The narrator dives at the second mate but is not strong enough to beat him. Glenk begins to strangle him when someone else hits him in the head with a rock. Pete Lapous, the ship’s cook and no fan of Glenk, knocks him out and takes his revolver.
The narrator tells the survivors they need to get off the island immediately. Glenk, angry at losing his gun, storms off for the hilltop, still craving golden treasures. The others prep the boat with food and water. The narrator is tempted to leave Glenk to his fate but goes back up with Pete. They find Glenk trying to dig up one of the metal armor pieces. Peter stupidly shoots the gray mass on the temple. It comes to life, a great plasmic blob:
The puddle had formed a foot thick, a perfect disc. The disc put forth two pincers like the claws of a crab. Those arms curved far forward, inward, and met, at the feet of Pete Lapous. The main body of the pool sloughed up to close the gap to the pincerlike arms… Again the plasmic mold issued the pincers—and those arcing tentacles closed around Pete, lapped near the mound where Glenk and I were rooted. The main mass surged up, closed the intervening space. As it swept across the spot where Pete raced, the foot-thick mass hit his heels with the force of a pile-driver, spurted him high into the air.
Leaving the temple, it reveals what lies underneath, a fascinating superstructure built by the dead aliens. Having killed Peter, it chases the other two. Glenk, armed with his gun again, shoots at it, only to be mowed down into a carpet of gore like Anderson. The narrator runs for the beach. He leaps into the boat that Wanda has launched and passes out.
When he wakes he is in a seaplane. The owners of the Reva had been searching for days. Rescued, the narrator wonders if he will return to the island and solve its mysteries. “I was content with the darkness that fell.”
“Giant-Plasm” proves to be that very special blend of Science Fiction and Horror that is found best in Donald Wandrei. The beginning of the story is pure Lovecraft. How easily the island could have been R’yleh or some suburb of it like in “Dagon”. The presence of aliens and UFOs (before such a term has been invented) is closer to “Who Goes There?” (Astounding Science Fiction, August 1938) by John Campbell, published only six months earlier. The final result is a story that fits perfectly in Weird Tales.
“The Spirits of the Lake” by Alonso Deen Cole (November 1941) was based on the Radio show, Witch’s Tale. Roger Benton regrets moving to the country where his wife embraces the local Indian lore and way of life. The Neebanawbaigs are supposedly spirits that live in the lake. Roger falls for Hilda, a local girl, who spurns his advances. He drowns his wife, Berenice, to have Hilda. The spirits of the lake take their terrible vengeance.
Nahma, the old Indian woman, found their bodies days later where the lake had cast them out. The green slime which had long since disappeared from the surface of the waters, its season past, sheathed Hilda and Roger Benton in its viscous embrace. She looked for a time out of her expressionless dark face at the grisly sight, then waddled heavily away.
The slimy bog monster seems to take a hiatus under Dorothy McIlwraith’s editorship until almost the end of the magazine when she published one of the best and the last, “Slime” by Joseph Payne Brennan (March 1953). A creature of the ocean comes to land to feed on the inhabitants of a seaside town. Only fire can destroy this nightmare killer:
It was a great gray-black hood of horror moving over the floor of the sea. It slid through the soft ooze like a monstrous mantle of slime obscenely animated with questing life. It was by turns viscid and fluid. At times it flattened out and flowed through the carpet of mud like an inky pool; occasionally it paused, seeming to shrink in upon itself, and reared up out of the ooze until it resembled an irregular cone or a gigantic hood. Although it possessed no eyes, it had a marvelously developed sense of touch, and it possessed a sensitivity to minute vibrations which was almost akin to telepathy. It was plastic, essentially shapeless. It could shoot out long tentacles, until it bore a resemblance to a nightmare squid or a huge starfish; it could retract itself into a round flattened disk, or squeeze into an irregular hunched shape so that it looked like a black boulder sunk on the bottom of the sea.
For more on Brennan and his Weird Tales stories go here.
Weird Tales ended in 1954 but slime monsters did not. R. Chetwynd-Hayes would pen “Looking For Something To Suck” fifteen years later in 1969 (The 4th Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories) and Stephen King would revive the whole thing again with “The Raft” (Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, May-June 1983) and its adaptation in Creepshow 2 (1987). Slime monsters are part of our monster heritage, thanks in large part to Weird Tales.
