“The House on the Marsh” by Fredrick Cowles is a good Mythos mimic. I found it while spending some time with Michel Parry’s excellent Mayflower Book of Black Magic Stories anthologies. The story originally appeared in Cowles’ first collection The Horror of Abbot’s Grange (1936). Parry was the first to anthologize the tale in the fifth volume (1976). Now I got about half way through the story and I had to stop and wonder: is this a Mythos story? The first half of the story was a weird mimic of many August Derleth stories, in particular his “The Return of Hastur” (Weird Tales, March 1939).
Let’s stop here for a second and recall a couple of significant facts. One, H. P. Lovecraft was a huge M. R. James fan. I wrote a previous piece called “The Handy-Dandy Mythos Plot” about how the basic Mythos tale is based on the shape of James’ “Count Magnus”. I also wrote another piece called “The Bio of a Mythos Sorcerer” in which I described a typical Mythos pastiche plot, one in which an unwitting heir is drawn into a life of Mythos sorcery. Both of these pieces came screaming back to me as I read Cowles.
Okay, let’s talk about “The House on the Marsh” itself here before I swing back to HPL and the Cthulhu Mythos. The plot has a man, Slade, inherit three thousand pounds and a house from his uncle Richard, a strange man the nephew disliked because of his weird appearance and behavior. Still, who looks a gift horse in the mouth? From the solicitor he learns that his uncle cut his own throat in the attic. After the inquest, the fly-covered coffin was buried in a hurry, the vicar unable to finish the service.
Slade goes to King’s Lynn and finds the house a ramshackle old building next to a deep pond. The spot upstairs where his uncle died is a gruesome stain covered in more flies. The house is remodeled and Slade moves in. The next day the maid quits. Only Jenkins, his valet of many years service remains. He, too, suggests they leave. The narrator refuses, even though he has experienced terrible dreams himself, like the shapes of three young men standing over him while he slept. His uncle’s specter shows up in the attic window. He discovers a diary written by his uncle, but doesn’t have time to read it.
The house has a large library, all books on witchcraft and sorcery. Slade learns that his uncle was hated by the locals, partly because he never seemed to grow any older. Only at his death did he appear to be an elderly man. From the local vicar he learns why he didn’t finish the service. In the grave, on the coffin lid, flies collected, forming a heart. The organ explodes in gouts of blood. After this, Slade reads the diary. It outlines how Uncle Richard learned of a spell that gives long-lasting youth. He goes to Germany and steals the secret from the grave of the sorcerer who wrote it.
Now in possession of the spell, Richard Slade needs a victim. He kills a homeless man, feeds the blood to the flies, and for five years he looks not a day older. The dead man’s body is sunk in the pond outside the house. But after that time Uncle Richard had to renew the spell. Two more times, young, unconnected men are killed for their blood, drunk by the black flies. Ten more years past, but no easy sacrifice falls into Slade’s hands. He is unable to feed the flies, who creep closer and closer for him. In desperation, he must have killed himself.
Slade and Jenkins decide to leave. They set the house on fire before they go. The next day the pond is dragged, and the skeletons of three men are found.
Now that story is not so much different than a Mythos tale like “The Return of Hastur” (and many of those found in The Lurker on the Threshold and Other Posthumous Collaborations (1962). Well, half of it. Because Slade and his man don’t read the books, they don’t follow Richard into a life of evil. They are good men who will not suffer darkness to survive. The standard Mythos tale is about men of lesser stuff. They read the books, become sorcerers and usually get eaten by a monster for their troubles. (Some turn into fish-men if they live near the sea and their last name is Marsh.)
Derleth himself actually used the Mythos sorcerer plot long before he wrote any Lovecraft-flavored pastiches. His very first story was “Bat’s Belfry” (Weird Tales, May 1926). A man inherits a house, some books, and a diary. In the basement is a chamber filled with skeletons, victims of sacrifice. The man doesn’t follow in the footsteps but does have terrors like ghouls and vampires hunting him. Derleth even used the infamous “write-it-down-as-it-happens” ending: “My God…it is– ……” These eldritch hyperboles are usually blamed on Lovecraft, but Derleth used them too from the beginning. Of course, by 1926, Derleth would have read a number of HPL stories in Weird Tales including “Dagon”, “The Outsider”, “The Tomb”, “The Rats in the Walls” and others.
So, I must return to M. R. James. I don’t know a lot about Cowles. He was an English writer. He didn’t sell to Weird Tales or other Pulps. Like James, he collected his stories in books. There is no reason to think he was a big Lovecraft fan. Writing in 1936, he could have read him in the Not At Night Series but Arkham House‘s The Outsider and Others was still three years away and in America. I think Cowles was a Jamesian. It’s that handy-dandy plot again. If Cowles had added a bummer ending to his story it would have been a Weird Tales story. If he had added a squidgy with a name ending in “oth” it would have been a Mythos story. But since the plot stays in the ghost story track, it’s a Jamesian story. And a particularly good one. Frederick Cowles is a Mythos mimic, something he probably wasn’t even aware of.
