The Beasts Plants always appear in monstrous adventures. It is part of the formula from the beginning. And it makes sense. Giant, man-eating plants don’t grow in your neighborhood, devouring noisy children on their way to school. The hungry flora, by necessity, dwell in remote places. Which in turn means your hero has to go to such remote places. We see this at the very origin point of the plant monster: “The Madagascar Tree” by Edmund Spenser (South Australian Register, October 27, 1874) This supposed newspaper article was born of the finding of flesh-eating plants in South America. From such humble discoveries grew the vines and savage jaws of the giant plant. After such pseudo-journalistic pieces, the fiction writers took over with men such as Arthur Conan Doyle writing “The American’s Tale”, H. G. Wells’ “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid”, “The Purple Terror” by Fred M. White and most important of all, The Devil-Tree of El Dorado by Frank Aubry.
These were all Victorian tales. The soft weeklies, the first Pulps, were not to be denied the glorious adventure that ends in plant terror. Argosy was a big provider of such tales like Murray Leinster’s forgotten planet that produces “The Red Dust”. Being a generalist magazine, they could appeal to the part of their audience that liked adventure and those who liked horror at the same time. They often did this in their adventure fiction, though ending with the horror elements explained away as native superstition. Not so here! All the tales below contain actual plant monsters, making them more Science Fictional if you like. Magazines like All-Story and Argosy referred to tales of this sort as “off-trail”. An apt term since we are going off trail into strange and mysterious places…
Seeds From Space
“Spawn of Infinitude” by Edward S. Pilsworth (The All-Story, 1913) (reprinted in Fantastic Novels, September 1940). This tale has explorers in the Andes Mountains when a meteorite lands and spreads strange space seeds. One of their party, Towers, goes missing. When he is found he raves about the “red devils”. He warns them not to go to the flatland at the bottom of the valley. Which, of course, they do. There they find:
The little twigs and branches that stuck upward from the horizontal ropes were, I believe, but so many alarms to the center fiend, and as Haggerty walked through them the plant I was looking at shot loose into an amazing whirl of long, sinister-looking cords. The wind-cup shape vanished on the second, and a multitude of waving tentacles took its place.
At the end of each was a strange flexible, and working disk, that I think was a sucker; for we found later that wherever they fastened, our skin would stretch, and, if the hold was left too long, break into a myriad of little blood-oozing holes.
The plant from space devours poor Haggerty:
From all the plants around, the long greedy arms had caught him, pulling, tugging, and straining at his screaming body; jerking and rending till he fell to bits; when each of the devilish things pulled home its bloody portion.
The men take their machetes to the vines but there are too many of them to kill easily. Early on Pilsworth hints the solution to their plant problem. The snows of the mountain hang ready for an avalanche.
Hodgsonian Fungus Monsters
“Fungus Isle” by Philip M. Fisher (Argosy All-Story, October 27, 1923) (reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, October 1940). A group of sailors, after finding a fortune in Australia, are lost at sea. They end up on a strange island where they instinctively fear touching the black ring of mold that surrounds the beach:
The lower hedgelike mass of the stuff, stretching from one curve of the upper beach to the other, had been a black wall under the shadows cast by the moon. Now it showed itself the edge of an earth-covering bloat, consistently of one hideous painted purple, a purple that seemed slowly to pulsate, to watch the three of us human beings as we stiffened on the sands and stared.
Just above the oily looking smoothness of its upper line it was spined and folded and serrated with masses of splotched vermillion and poison orange, slick surfaced crimsons, and dull brick reds. And above this soared greasy coated trunks of leprous, gray spotted yellows. These trunks rose to various heights, the greatest of them arising to perhaps three times the height of the tallest man of us. And they terminated in the nodular caps we had seen silhouetted against the moon the night before.
The entire island is infested by fungus. Any sailor who eats or drinks the spores will become a living mass. Only sea water is anathema to the infections. The sailors must escape. In desperation for food and water the men are ready to eat tainted food. They are attacked by weed men, sailors who have succumbed to the fungus. They know they too will become such horrors. Only the finding an old boat saves them.
Fisher became a latter-day William Hope Hodgson with his sea-related horror tales. “A Voice in the Night” (Blue Book, November 1907, and reprinted many times) has a couple trapped on an island filled with infectious mold. This story would inspire the Japanese monster movie, Matango (Attack of the Mushroom People). In Hodgson’s novel, The Boats of ‘Glen-Carrig’ (1907) he has another ship wrecked on an island filled with strange plant monsters including Weed Men. These elements are clearly seen here again in Fisher’s tale.
Albertan Tree Monsters
“The Sunken Land” by George W. Bayly (Weird Tales, May-June-July 1924) was reprinted in Weird Tales, March 1930. This excellent tale had the unfortunate luck to appear in the final Edwin Baird issue of Weird Tales. The triple month date signaled the difficulty Jacob Henneberger was having keeping the magazine going. This issue is famous for H. P. Lovecraft’s ghost-writing for Harry Houdini in “Imprisoned With the Pharaohs” as well as Otis Adelbert Kline’s editorial “Why Weird Tales?” but it should be also remembered for “The Sunken Land”.
This tale is a strange Northern set at Athabasca Landing, Alberta when the area was still called “The Northwest Territories”. Two Mounties are joined by a doctor when they discover the body of a white man. He is one of three criminals the N. W. M. P. are looking for. On his body is a paper note that leads to the Sunken Land. There are also diamonds.
The three take the long, dangerous journey to the Sunken Land. As the terrain sinks the weather becomes almost tropical. They see no game after descending into the region, but hear strange whispering among the trees. One of the Mounties, Tom, disappears in the night to be found the next morning torn apart. The two survivors discover the secret of the Sunken Land:
…Suddenly without any warning the whole tree seemed to spring into life. The giant branches curved down and swept the ground, and every twig and leaf seemed to be stretching out towards us. And at that moment as if aroused by the clamor of the tree, every plant and shrub began to stir with life, violently agitating their long tentacle-like stems, the edges of which, rasping upon each other, produced a whispering or hissing noise.
The trees and plants seek to crush and rend their prey to drink up every available drop of blood. To save themselves, the duo flee to Blue Clay Island, the site of the diamond mine. This extinct volcanic cone is denuded of vegetation so a safe haven. But starvation is quickly approaching. In the end, out of desperation, the narrator, Gerald, comes up with a plan to burn the forest and escape. He never finds any trace of the fugitives, who must have been eaten by the trees like poor Tom.
Many years later, Clive Barker would set a horror novel in the same location, Athabasca, Alberta. The novel was called Cabal. (The film version was Night Breed.) This was not a conscious decision, since Barker chose his locale with the literal pin-a-map method.
The Beast Plants
“The Beast Plants” by H. Thompson Rich (Argosy, July 26, 1930) (reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, April 1940). Rich’s tale comes latest of these selections and it shows. He opens with a full explanation of where the giant plants came from. He doesn’t bother to start with a mystery and slowly reveal the secrets behind it (a pretty standard approach to such stories) but tells us right at the beginning that the narrator knows who has created the giant plants that are eating people in Okefenokee Swamp.
As soon as Neil arrives at the swamp he encounters people fleeing the monsters. After this he finds a specimen of the giant Venus Flytrap:
It was a plant,undoubtedly a Dionoea, but a prodigious size, its mighty circlet of trap-ended leaves measuring fully forty feet across. From the center rose a great shaggy stalk some twenty feet high, with a huge pendulous bud at its crest, like giant head.
He is surrounded by several of them and thinks he is about to die. Instead the monsters converse intelligently and he is taken elsewhere. He is brought to Doris Mortimer, now the captive queen of the Beast Plants. Doris is the daughter of the mad scientist who created the fiends. Professor Mortimer was worshiped like a god but has died, leaving Doris prisoner.
Neil and Doris try to escape but the plants are too smart. The young man studies Mortimer’s work and uses his giantism research to create a gigantic version of slime mold. Neil has to hurry because his captors will soon go to seed and fill the world with monsters. The Beast Plants get suspicious and attack him. Neil throws the mold at them and by the next day they are dying. A day later the Beast Plants are all gone. Doris and Neil are free to get married and forget all about the plants.
Now it is interesting to compare this story with Edmond Hamilton’s “The Plant Revolt” that appeared the same year in Weird Tales, April 1930. In that story, Hamilton has all the plants of the world lose their roots and go on a meat-driven rampage. He doesn’t include a remote location but goes global. Rich doesn’t do that, he takes his protagonist to the swamp, much in the manner that Anthony M. Rud did in “Ooze” (Weird Tales, March 1923). Rich’s plant monsters do resemble a different Hamilton story though, “Evolution Island” (Weird Tales, March 1927). Another scientist evolves trees until they become mobile tree soldiers. The mad scientist who runs off to the swamp to do his research in private will become a cliche as is the beautiful daughter.
Frank R. Paul
I should give a shout-out to old Frank R. Paul for most of the artwork in this post. Argosy used the master of SF art for all three of their plant monster reprints here. And why not? Paul had lots of practice with Hugo Gernsback’s magazines.
Conclusion
The Beast Plants in the Pulps, Weird Tales in particular, used the remote location in stories like “The Devil-Plant” by John Murray Reynolds, “The Tree-Men of M’Bwa” by Donald Wandrei and “Isle of the Abominations” by Kadra Maysi. Some authors like Edmond Hamilton and David H. Keller upped the scale to global disasters, taking a page from H. G. Wells’s playbook. Wherever plant monsters strike you can be sure there will be a nice dollop of adventure to go with it. These earlier adventure tales continue the tradition from the Victorian Age, into the actual Pulps of the 1930-1950s, leading us to that great classic, The Day of the Triffids (1951) by John Wyndham. After 1951 (and later 1962 and the first film version), the triffid will be the dominate plant monster in the minds of the public, honoring John Wyndham, but forgetting the many authors who paved the way.
