The Terror Garden has specimens by Carl Jacobi (1908-1997). They illustrate how long and productive Jacobi’s career was. Dating from 1932 to 1985, this Weird Tales second-stringer wrote in most genres, with plant monsters in Science Fiction and Horror magazines. He started with killer plants then worked his way to more subtle kinds of evil then back to the lurid.
The 1930s
“Moss Island” (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Winter 1932) was for T. O’Conor Sloane’s Quarterlies that he inherited from Hugo Gernsback. The narrator goes to a remote island off the New Brunswick coast to study its plant life. A strange chemical that he heard about at the university has infected the island’s moss, making it a killer. The speedy vegetation chases him to the beach, where he is rescued by the arriving boatman. This tale suffers from the typical 1930s predilection for ‘scientific’ talk. Still, it has a good chase scene though.
“The War of the Weeds” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1939) Reprinted in Fantastic Story (March 1953) was written for Mort Weisinger. Gage and Calthay encounter plants that make a weird music when the wind blows over it. The resulting music drives people to dance. When a foreign power learns of this, it is up to the scientists to save America with a war on weeds. This one has war-time elements, which were common before and during World War II. Even though the US had not entered the conflict yet, tales with “foreign powers” were not uncommon.
Interregnum
Decades passed. Jacobi wrote for adventure (Complete Stories, Thrilling Adventures), horror (Thrilling Mystery, Strange Stories) and SF magazines (Wonder Stories, Planet Stories, Science Fiction). The Pulps passed away in the mid-1950s but his work was collected by August Derleth and Arkham House. (Eventually four volumes). But Carl Jacobi wasn’t finished. Agent, Kirby McCauley, would pull Carl back into writing in 1973. During the 1980s he would produce some minor classics.
The 1980s
Lin Carter tried to revive “The Unique Magazine” as a series of paperbacks. He used material by surviving members of the old Weird Tales gang like Mary Elizabeth Counselman and Joseph Payne Brennan. He also got stories from Jacobi like “The Black Garden” (Weird Tales #3, 1981). Fraulein Tessler buys the old Hogarth place to plant a garden. Judge Harker soon hears weird stories about the new tenant, strange fires at night, and a photo of the woman from 1946, her appearance unchanged. When local virgins start disappearing he knows he must act.
“Woman of the Witch-Flowers” (Risque Stories #3, July 1985) has Steve and Mary McCall stopping for a night at a strange campground, each cabin named after a flower. They soon discover a dead man, his entire face devoured by some unknown animal. The old woman, Marie Conday, who runs the place is French. She dismisses the old man’s death as an accident. In Shudder Pulp style, the couple become enmeshed in Conday’s weird plant sacrifice. Mary, stripped naked will have blood-sucking vines forced into her body. Steve must act now! This story was published by Robert M. Price. The magazine’s title is meant to suggest the trashier Pulps of olden days.
Carl Jacobi wrote many different kinds of stories over the decades. His best were always his horror tales, with classics like “Revelation In Black”, “The Face in the Wind” and “The Spawn of Darkness”. Though never really a member of the Lovecraft Circle, he did hint at Mythos terrors in some of his later pieces like “A Quire of Foolscap” (Whispers, October 1987). He had the chops to make plants seem evil and dangerous. Ironically, he never did it in the original pages of Weird Tales.
