I began this piece with one goal in mind, to find a latter day Lovecraftian tribute, preferably one that others had missed. That’s not what I found in the end but what I did find is almost as good. You can decide.
Malcolm M. Ferguson wrote five stories for Weird Tales. The name is not a household word, even among WT fans. He was no Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber or Ted Sturgeon. He didn’t leave the pages of WT to go onto write bigger and better things. Once a year, for five years, he’d pen a tale. The first was “The Polar Vortex” (Weird Tales, September 1946). Appropriately it is buried at the back but it did get a cool illustration by Lee Brown Coye. The plot is scanty for such a long story. A mad millionaire builds an observatory on the exact spot of the South Pole then traps a young man there for a month. He eventually kills himself because he can’t stand the revolving of the planet. I suspect the influence here is Wells or M. P. Shiel but the results are dissatisfying.
The second was “The House of Cards” (Weird Tales, September 1947), the first in a two story series about Thomas Chadwick, who seems like a poor man’s Carnacki, telling his friends of supernatural cases. Chadwick has the diary of Mme. Jumal, a spiritualist who takes in boarders out of necessity. The men who come to her are all murderers, who draw a card from Jumal’s tarot deck and meet their deaths that night, victims of guilt or retribution? Madame Jumal follows them to hell, drawing her own card, The House of Destruction.
“Croatan” (Weird Tales, July 1948) is Ferguson’s masterpiece. Using the historical tale of the doomed Roanoke colony, he explains the mysterious “Croatan” carved in a tree. A brown snow falls near Virginia and artist John Saunders investigates. He falls ill and inducing himself into a trance he narrates the tale of Amos Martin, sole survivor of the plague that wiped out the settlers at Roanoke. Through dreams and the appearance of Charles
Swain, a mysterious figure, Martin learns that the brown snow was sent by creatures dwelling in a cloud of particles in space. These aliens have been abducting humans to study before an invasion of earth. Before the end, Amos sees what the creatures really look like, leathery things with tentacles. He kills himself with fire. John Saunders wakes. He and the narrator discuss how they will immunize the human race against the invaders. Saunders ask for the window to be open. A water jug knocks the narrator out. When he wakes John Saunders is gone, abducted. The Lovecraftian influence is evident throughout the story, but unlike most of Ferguson’s work, this story is well-paced and effective. Harlan Ellison would use the Roanoke incident in his own story “Croatoan” (F&SF, May 1975) almost thirty years later.
“Terror Under Eridu”(Weird Tales, November 1949) was actually the story I thought might be a Lovecraftian homage. Upon reading it I was struck by some obvious Lovecraftianisms, the main character’s name is Samuel Wheelcraft Chard. There is a floor that eats people as well as a number of weird encounters, the best with Ehpor, the god of the temple, who looks like a T. rex. There is one creature that looks like a head covered in hair. This is what Lee Brown Coye chose to draw in what is probably the worst illustration he ever did. This jumble of a story is wordy but moody, reminiscent of HPL’s “Imprisoned With the Pharoahs” more than any Cthulhu Mythos tale. As a horror tale, it deserves to be buried on page 88.
The only sequel Ferguson would write appeared three years after “The House of Cards” called “Mr. Hyde-and Seek” (Weird Tales, May 1950). It would be his last appearance. We learn more about Thomas Chadwick’s Watson, a country doctor named Huntley. Chadwick is invited to stay in a home where Poltergeist activity has been occurring. He confronts the evil using a candlestick that becomes a cross when boiled in water, a gimmick worthy of Jules de Grandin, the most likely inspiration for the story, “The Poltergeist” (Weird Tales, October 1927).
So to this point Malcolm M. Ferguson was just one of those obscure writers like Malcolm Kenneth Murchie or Yves Theriault that you see in the Table of Contents and you wonder. Are they interesting like Dorothy Quick, who knew Mark Twain when she was a child? Or is he just a B-writer like Allison V. Harding or Carl Jacobi? As with so many Pulp writers, nobody remembers.
I was glad to find out in this case, Malcolm Ferguson was not forgotten. I dug deeper and found he had published a letter to Famous Fantastic Mysteries (August 1943), and his only other piece of fiction was “A Damsel with a Dulcimer” in the Arkham Sampler 1948. And here is where things get really interesting. MMF wrote many pieces for Derleth and was a friend. In “L’Abril” Ferguson describes a visit with M. P. Shiel in England during WWII. On Derleth’s recommendations, Ferguson was trying to find English correspondents during his furloughs from the army.
A picture of MMF solidifies: friend of Derleth, a veteran, it turns out he also graduated from Harvard and ran an antiquarian bookshop for some years, all the while writing fan stuff for Derleth like “Arkham House and Its English Visitants” or “Literature With a Capital Hell”. Malcolm M. Ferguson was a fan, a supporter and part of weird fiction history. Ferguson died in 2011. His obituary mentions his many accomplishments including his writing.
