Jim Kjelgaard will always have a place in the halls of Children’s Literature, with his many animal novels including Big Red (1945). But the author had to start somewhere and wrote for the Western Pulps as well as four stories for Weird Tales. It is these four tales we will look at now. Kjelgaard could have played it safe and wrote about vampires or ghosts but his interests weren’t really there. He liked animals and the country life and that’s what he chose to focus on.
The first story was “The Thing From the Barrens” (Weird Tales, September 1945). George Malory dwells in North City so he can stay close to the woman he loves, Marcia Davenport. Marcia’s father, Pug, is a trapper who has come back from the Barrens, haunted by a strange creature. The monster is invisible but as Pug tells George there are two signs it is near, a stick and a duckprint. George sees these for real when the creature comes to the city. Those who touch the stick seem to float into the air as if they were being drawn up by a giant invisible hand. In the snow there are footprints, shaped like a duck’s but hugely out of proportion. When Marcia is taken, George and Pug go after the invisible monster. Outside of the city they find the creature’s camp, where it has skinned three victims and discarded their corpses. The monster is a trapper, like the men who work from North City, using the stick to trap its prey. Pug faces off with the monster, shooting it to death with his 30-06. The bleeding beast kills Pug then crashes into the river to die. The trapper dies, saving his child, who finally becomes George’s girl. George theorizes the monster is invisible because it is a color humans can not see. Pug is the only man who could have shot the thing, for he is completely color-blind. Kjelgaard wrote about Arctic settings in other stories including Kalak of the Ice (1949) the story of a polar bear, and “Meeting on the Ice” (Adventure, May 1949) in which a criminal on the lam has a run-in with same.
“The Fangs of Tsan-Lo” (Weird Tales, November 1945) is a dog story with a twist. Clint Roberts is much like the character Danny Pickett from Big Red, working for others in a subordinate position as dog trainer. He is madly in love with Sally Evers and wants to win her. Tslan-Lo is a strange dog who comes to the kennel. He has been in the possession of a mad scientist named Dr. Ibellius Grut. The dog mutates into a gigantic fiend that pulls Clint out of his bed and it is up to him to destroy it. Tsan-Lo has an insane desire to kill Sally. Tsan-Lo sights the girl and goes mad with killing lust. Clint kills the beast that is pursuing the girl by leading the giant dog to a treacherous sink-hole. The romance and solution are reminiscent of “The Thing From the Barrens” and but doesn’t have the believability of that story. For a complete review of this story go to http://www.michaelmay.online/2015/10/the-fangs-of-tsan-lo-mans-best-monster.html
“Chanu” (Weird Tales, March 1946) changes direction entirely. George and Ann Roberts are newly-weds going to Africa. George, a specimen hunter, meets a strange man by the name of Chanu at the Africa Club in Mabari. The wizened old man gives off an alarming sense of evil but George speaks with him out of politeness. Chanu discusses genetics with George before ogling his attractive new wife and saying “A perfect specimen for breeding! Strength and beauty–who knows what a thousand years hence may see on the earth if that young woman were properly mated?”
Later we find out that Ann is a reporter and when George mentions Chanu she tells him that she was instructed to write about the missing man for her paper. She tells of a strange old legend about how Chanu was a man who came to Africa and was captured by savages. When the blacks tried to kill him, a tribe of gorillas attempted to rescue him. The biggest gorilla and Chanu died together, melding their spirits. Chanu rose again, having the ability to inhabit either body. The savages worshipped him as a god after that.
The couple begins their safari on the Zandel River. George has a strange premonition that they are being watched and asks Ann to return to the village. She laughs him off and they go on. That night they make camp and all seems well until the morning when Kip, the head Masai, tells George that a strange ape-like creature had been spying on the tents. The safari goes on and some of the mules are killed by cobras. During this event, an ape appears, ripping off Kip’s head and stealing away Ann. George is knocked unconscious.
When he wakes he finds himself in a cage in Chanu’s village. He sees the massive gorilla who attacked the safari, noticing how it reminds him of Chanu. The gorilla people take George from the cage so that he can fight the beast. They tell him that M’gunga will kill the woman’s mate then take her for his own. George is reminded of Chanu’s words back in Mabari. George is allowed one weapon as long as it is not a gun. He selects a specimen case to the derision of the watching blacks. When he faces off with the gorilla, George flings the contents at M’gunga. Inside is one of the deadly cobras he had collected earlier. The gorilla dies. George and Ann are lead to the dead body of Chanu, and George takes something from his hand.
George and Ann are returned to their camp. George immediately begins planning a second trip to the village, with armed fighters. Ann has a hazy recollection of events, thinking it a weird dream. George doesn’t try to enlighten her. In the floor of his tent he has buried the thing he took from Chanu’s hand, Ann’s hankerchief that Chanu had borrowed to clean his glasses back at the Africa Club.
The idea of a man who can inhabit another body reminds me of the popular Solomon Kane story “Red Shadows” (Weird Tales, September 1928) by Robert E. Howard. In that tale N’Longa the JuJu man can inhabit the bodies of dead men, and there is a savage ape that is important to the plot. The jungle adventure scenario doesn’t really agree with Kjelgaard. He makes fun of white men bossing around black men and other Kipling-like ideas. At one point he spends time describing the expeditions mules, giving them personalities. You can almost feel he’d rather be writing about them than the silly Robertses.
“The Man Who Told the Truth” (Weird Tales, July 1946) was written with Robert Bloch. This story doesn’t propose much of a monster, a weird, misty, green cone from another dimension that gives the protagonist, Hartwood, an amazing power: whatever he says will be. No explanation is given for this weird creature and it doesn’t appear again. Only one thing it says implies that it might be the Devil. “I do not take gifts…That is merely an unkind rumor. I prefer to bestow gifts…” Armed with this magic, Hartwood takes over his old employer’s business, then finally thinks to rule the world. It ends badly when a slip of the tongue says, “I’ll be damned!”. More intriguing than this simple power fantasy is the story’s history. The tale appeared under Kjelgaard’s name in the original magazine but in The Flowers of the Moon and Other Lunacies (1998) the credit is given solely to Robert Bloch “as Jim Kjelgaard”, implying Bloch ghosted the entire thing. According to the Allied-Authors, Bloch met Kjelgaard through the Milwaukee Fictioneers, and offered to edit or rewrite the stories. The facts are not known but I suspect Kjelgaard had the idea and Bloch penned the tale for the story’s style is not that of Jim Kjelgaard but Bloch’s. No matter the case, it is Kjelgaard’s only collaboration in the SF field.
Ultimately we can draw two conclusions about Jim Kjelgaard and his Weird Tales experience. Firstly, that he was a working writer in search of markets. He did not come to the horror genre out of love but commercial necessity. Jim Kjelgaard would rather have written about dogs than monsters. Secondly, that being said, he did not take the easy road and write about typical WT monsters but tried to do something of interest (at least to himself) in each story. Even if the experience didn’t lead to more than a year’s dalliance with the supernatural, it may have helped him a little when he came to write one of his best books, Fire Hunter (1950), featuring prehistoric animals like the saber tooth tiger, for in ages past even animals can be monsters.
