If you missed the last one…
“Diary of Doom” is a strange Northern that appeared in Adventures Into the Unknown #12 (August-September 1950). The author is not known but the art was down by John Celardo. The story takes place in Canada’s Howling Creek.
The story begins in a Canadian court of law. Dr. George Fielding faces the charge of first degree murder. The murderer’s diary is key evidence in the story. The prosecutor, Stanton, reads it aloud.
George Fielding accepts the job of being the only doctor in the remote community of Howling Creek. He is informed that no one at Howling Creek ever gets sick. The local Cree avoid the place like the plague. George ignores the warning and goes to the settlement where the most abundant things are wolves.
When Fielding arrives he sees wolves hanging around the area. He kicks his way into the trading post to see the strange inhabitants there…
Fielding introduces himself as the new doctor. The odd folk of Howling Creek laugh at him. He notices their unusually long teeth. They warn him to leave while he can. The doctor thinks the people have gone insane from loneliness and the surrounding wolves.
We jump back to the trial where this is being read aloud from the diary. The howl of a dog interrupts the proceeding, angering the judge. The diary story continues. A beautiful woman enters the cabin. This is Mona, who says the doctor can stay.
Mona gets George a cabin. He asks her to help him solve the mystery of Howling Creek. Later, George awakens from sleep when he realizes that the only human tracks in the snow are his own. Mona and the others do not leave behind human tracks. Only wolf tracks surround the cabins.
A wolf comes into the cabin. George, wisely, keeps a pistol under his willow. He shoots the beast and it flees. George swears he heard a scream, not a howl, from the wounded animal.
George researches lycanthropy in his medical books. Later he finds Mona spying on him from the bushes. George confronts her with hard questions, like why doesn’t the town have a cemetery?
George demands to know about all the werewolves in Howling Creek. Mona tells him how lonely it is living with their kind. She wants love. They embrace. She bites him on the hand. Now he will have his answers…
George pulls a gun and shoots Mona point blank. In death, she turns into a wolf. George realizes he doesn’t have much time. He rushes to his cabin to write it all down before…
The reading of the journal ends there. George is arrested for Mona’s death. He is brought into court. The howling noises have been coming from the defendant. George breaks his handcuffs, turns into a wolf and jumps through the window. The judge wants to send men to recapture him. Stanton realizes that George is headed back to Howling Creek.
Werewolves in Northerns date back to Victorian times, with Clemence Housman’s “The Werewolf” and into Canadian fiction with Susan Carleton Jones’ “The Lame Priest”. The idea of telling the story in a diary dates back to Victorian ghost stories as well. A. Conan Doyle’s “The Captain of the Polestar” is another strange Northern that used this technique. H. P. Lovecraft would take this mode of communication to the extreme in the later Cthulhu Mythos tales, giving us the classic “The Diary of Alonzo Typer” (with William Lumley) (Weird Tales, February 1938), where the writer keeps writing as the monster pulls him out the window.
