Galen C. Colin (1890-1973) wrote for the early Weird Tales. He later went onto write dozens of Westerns, mostly for Wild West Weekly. Those early days writing for Edwin Baird and WT were a good starter for a long and fecund Pulp career.
“Snake” (Weird Tales, January 1924) has wife-beater, Ben Tibbitts, earn the nickname “The Snake”. He does this partly because of his trafficking in Chinese workers, partly because of his craven, back-biting behavior, but mostly for the violence done to his wife, Jean. When Tibbitts finally kills her he hightails it to his trapping cabin with the secret room beneath the floor. It is here he finds a rattler coiled in the corner of the basement. The snake kills him, though if you found that cabin, you would only discover a skeleton and a coil of rope.
“Eyes” (Weird Tales, May-June-July 1924) stars medical student “Happy” Bill Ransom, a man on the verge of insanity. He spills to his friend, Jim, the narrator, how he had always wanted a perfect skeleton for his office. He snuck into a graveyard and dug up an old body. Looking into the grave, he saw a pair of starring blue eyes burning at him. The eyes haunt Ransom, ruining his sleep, his meals, everything. Jim puts him at rest by reading him the newspaper account of the grave robbery. There is one detail that ends Ransom’s guilty-ridden misery. The dead man had been blind, owning a pair of false blue eyes.
“The Eternal Song” (Weird Tales, December 1924) is Colin’s magnum opus. It is subtitled “A Mystic Tale”. Instead of the small chill of mundane horror, he moves into territory that Robert E. Howard would fill in later issues. Explorers in the Cafe le Bon Homme in West Africa meet a man who has been searching for a woman. He only has two places left to look. The narrator tells how his friend, Dick Restouer, helps him to find the source of a song that has haunted him since childhood. The answer lies in the mystic arts. Dick sends him back in time and space to when he was Ro-Moarin of the Moabians. He is a warrior of a people who worship Chrios, the sun-god.
Colin spends paragraphs describing the beautiful of the city and the high priestess of Chrios, Eldres. She is the source of the narrator’s music. The two fall in love but it is forbidden for the high priestess must be a virgin. Zurin, Ro-Moarin’s right-hand man, arranges a way for them to be together. They are discovered and the priests and their armed slave come to kill the man who dared such sacrilege. Eldres gives Ro-Moarin a small leaf, which he eats, sending him back in time. Once home, the narrator realizes that Zurin and Dick Restouer are the same person, that Chrios has reincarnated them both, and why not Eldres too. The narrator begins his long search for his time-cross love. The men listening at the Cafe remember a white priestess in one of the two locations he has left. They wait to see if the lovers are reunited.
“Teeth” (Weird Tales, April 1926 and reprinted in Not at Night (1926) is a torture story. Tales of Asian torture methods were later made popular in Weird Tales with writers like George Fielding Eliot who wrote the notorious “The Copper Bowl” (Weird Tales, December 1928). Colin tells of how a Westerner named Paul Vermain falls afoul of dentist, Ling Foo, when he takes an interest in his daughter, Ti Ling. Vermain wakes from a drugged sleep to find himself in a dark cell. He is offered water to drink. He passes out again, his body taken to a chamber with a teakwood table made to hold a human body. Ling Foo and his dental students pull Vermain’s teeth out without painkillers.
Over six days, they remove all his teeth. The last time, Vermain refuses the drugged water and is hauled away by jailers. In the dental chamber Vermain sees all of his teeth lined up. Ling Foo plans to kill both of the lovers, sickened at his daughter’s love for the American. When Ling Foo trips, he impales his brain on an incisor taken from Vermain’s mouth. The two lovers go to America and marry. Vermain has his old teeth set in new dental plates.
The Weird Tales of Galen C. Colin’s stories are short, though most of the early tales were. The days of serials and long 20,000 worders was yet to come under Farnsworth Wright. As a horror writer, Colin stays well within the real, drawing on a psychological explanation for most terrors. No monsters dwell here, no Cthulhu Mythos sized terrors. The one time he ventures into the fantastic he doesn’t include any creatures. If he had, we might have thought him a pre-Howard Sword & Sorcery writer.
Galen C. Colin moved on from the slow paying Weird Tales for the better paying Western Pulps. One that appeared in an unusual place for Colin was “The Howler of the Hills” Rather than his familiar Street & Smith Wild West Weekly, it appeared in Thrilling Adventures, October 1940. This may have been because of the slight “supernatural” feel of the villain. The bad guy has an eerie howl that he uses to terrorize the local ranchers. At no time does he turn into a werewolf. More’s the pity…
