Great monster stories you may have missed are lurking out there in old anthologies and magazines. I’ve been feeling autumnal early this year. That means reading tons of old collections and reveling in the approach of fall. Here are some good ones I hope you have never heard of….
“The Ghoul” by Sir Hugh Clifford, from The Further Side of Silence, (1916), which also includes “The Were Tiger”, surprised me. I suppose I had Edward Lucas White”s “Amina” in mind. This tale is not set in an Arab country but in the jungles of Malaysia. Middleton is trekking in the land of the Sakai with his friend, Juggins. A heavy rainstorm has them take refuge in some huts inhabited by a half-mad woman who won’t give up her dead baby. Later the baby is buried. Juggins wants to steal it. He is an amateur ethnologist and he wants it as a cultural sample. Middleton is reluctant and horrified by the idea. Juggins can’t be stopped, so the men go to the grave in the night. They aren’t the first to get there. A ghoul woman has already dug up the baby. As per legend, she resurrects the dead child, biting off its tongue. The ghoul abandons the body. The men rebury it and leave the country the next day.
Clifford preloads the story by describing different monster beliefs of the Sakai at the beginning. He mentions the penanggal or “Undone One”, the spirit of a woman who has died in childbirth and now preys on children. This creature has a ghastly face and a tail of entrails. He also tells of the polong, or familiars created from stillborn children. The biting off of the tongue to control these humonculi is mentioned. As with “the Were Tiger”, Clifford has culled the creepiest legends for use in his stories.
“Out of the Earth” by Flavia Richardson (Weird Tales, April 1927) was actually written by Christine Campbell Thomson. She was famous as the editor of the Not at Night anthologies, which used a large number of Weird Tales reprints. This story appear in You’ll Need a Night Light (1927) and More Not at Night (1961). I believe these are the anthologies that Paul S. Power griped about when he complained that Weird Tales bought all rights then sold them for huge profits to books. In Pulp Writer (2007) he attributes this to Herbert Asbury, not Thomson. (I believe Asbury was the godfather of the series, but not editor.) Thomson as editor couldn’t use her own name for stories so she created the Richardson pseudonym.
“Out of the Earth” is a good, old-fashioned ghost story. Anthony and Sylvia Wayre move into a lovely country cottage called “Romans”. The house is build on an old Roman hill fort. The farmers in the area occasionally dig up old relics by accident. On his way home from visiting a neighbor, Anthony feels like someone is watching him. When he gets inside, he finds Sylvia in a state. Slowly the outside presence comes inside as a weird, thick-green mist. Only when Anthony throws Sylvia’s crucifix at it does it leave. They move out that night. Thomson does a good job of building the suspense but the ending is a far cry from any M. R. James tale.
“The Grey Killer” by Everil Worrell (Weird Tales, November 1929) is a hospital tale, with Marion Wheaton in for a foot injury. Worrell does a great job of describing the comings and goings of the nurses. A strange gray-faced doctor named Zingler tries to inject her with a yellow-gray liquid. She refuses. He does use the hypo on a woman dying of cancer and a man with a busted spine from a railroad accident. Both make miraculous recoveries. Later a small boy in for tonsils is taken from his room and gruesomely sacrificed on the roof. A baby also disappears. Finally the gray doctor, as Marion calls him, comes for her. She is rescued at the last second.
Dr. Rountree (who is sweet on Marion) manages to get a confession from the gray doctor. He admits he is a being from the planet Horil, where cannibalism is the norm. He was a priest who sacrificed victims to the Space-God, an ultra-dimensional being resembling a devil-fish. When he saves a woman from sacrifice, he is banished to Earth as punishment. The inhabitants of Horil can only eat leprous flesh, so he must pose as a doctor and inject his intended victims with the pathogen.
The confession is regarded as the ravings of a mad man but the coroner can not reconcile the fact that the gray doctor has feet like snakes that can walk up walls and that his body is of a “physiologic norm of no known species of Earth”. Worrell is clearly working in the tradition of H. P. Lovecraft but over-explaining makes things clearer but less scary. Worrell was one of the women writers of Weird Tales, also publishing under the names Lireve Monet and Everil W. Murphy.
“The Accursed Isle” by Mary Elizabeth Counselman (Weird Tales, November 1933) is a story that flies in the face of Counselman’s reputation as a “soft horror writer”. Seven men are stranded on an atoll, surviving on oysters and two slowing diminishing jugs of water. After a few nights of watching for passing ships, one of the men is murdered, his throat torn out. As the number of living drops, the survivors realize that one of them is the killer. Only no one can remember killing anyone. Dr. Kenshaw can’t take it any longer when there are only two of them. He neither wants to be the last victim or turn out to be the killer. He cuts his wrists, leaving Landers alone. A ship arrives but Landers can’t risk being the killer, his wife and child waiting for him back home. He, too, cuts his wrist….
Two things struck me about this story: first, that here is John Carpenter’s ending to The Thing, with McCready and Nauls, the last two men, willing to freeze to death to make sure the shape-shifting thing never reaches civilization.
The second thing is that Counselman describes herself in This Is a Thriller (2004) thus:
“The Hallowe’en scariness of the bumbling but kindly Wizard of Oz has always appealed to me more than the gruesome, morbid fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and those later authors who were influenced by their doom philosophies. My eerie shades bubble with an irrepressible sense of humour, ready to laugh with (never at) those earth-bound mortals whose fears they once shared.
“The Accursed Isle” is every bit as “gruesome and morbid” as anything CAS, HPL and other Weirdies wrote. This is a masterful story. It was only her fifth.
Another story with a creepy island is H. T. W. Bousfield’s “The Unknown Island” (Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, May 1935). I found it in Dennis Wheatley’s A Century of Horror Stories (1935). The narrator is on his way to India to plant tea when he falls in with an old friend, Gerald Askew. Ol’ Ger has a yacht and the two go off to have adventures around Greece. Askew is an amateur expert on Greek literature and culture. With some research he finds the island of Argos, the supposed location of where Perseus left the Medusa’s head. Askew goes ashore alone, his ship’s crew on the verge of mutiny. When he doesn’t return the narrator goes to find him. He does, turned to stone, and in a mirror on the ground he sees a terror inside a cave. He returns to the ship and is quickly set ashore by the crew.
Bousfield’s tale is pretty much predictable, and if he had told it with just a bit more suggestion and mystery it might have been better. Still fun. Bousfield spends half the story establishing the two men’s friendship, then goes to Argos.
Another tale of a poor friend hanging out with a wealthy one is “The House on Stillcroft Street” by Joseph Payne Brennan. It first appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, June 1975. It was chosen for The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series IV (1976). A nice little plant horror story from an underrated master. (One of the reasons he is underrated is he appeared in AHMM rather than a horror magazine (even a poor-paying one.) Brennan as the writer-narrator tells how he comes to Amley to spend the summer with a wealthy friend, Corvington. In the sleepy town, Brennan becomes fascinated by an ivy-covered house. The house on Stillcroft Street belongs to Millward Frander, Corvington’s distant relative. Frander is a retired biologist who once kept the garden well. Now it has overtaken his whole yard. Corvington finally uses his key to open the door and the two go upstairs. After breaking in the door they find Frander, his body entirely covered in ivy. He lunges then screams. Corvington gets an axe from the garage and cuts the root of the ivy. It gushes red. Later Corvington tells Brennan he had the blood chemically examined. It is human blood.
I was surprised this wasn’t a Lucius Leffing story. That old ghost buster could have handled a plant monster, no problem.
Well, there they are. Great monster stories. I will be reading more tales of autumnal creepiness as the season finally gets here. That’s one of the benefits of living in Canada. The leaves turn in September and by Halloween snow is on its way. Good thing I like Christmas ghosts too…
