Monster, She Wrote

by Lisa Kröger

  “Mimsy,” the better of the two, takes its title from Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” and depicts futuristic toys that travel back in time to the year 1942. A brother and sister find some of the toys, which teach them how to build a portal to another dimension. One character, a nineteenth-century girl, shares her name with Alice Liddell, the inspiration behind Lewis Carroll’s classic novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Like “The Twonky,” this story was adapted to film, as 2007’s The Last Mimzy, starring Joely Richardson and Timothy Hutton.

  Sadly, Kuttner died of a heart attack in 1958, just a few years after the couple moved to California to write screenplays. After her husband’s death, Moore gave up writing short stories but, using her married name Catherine Kuttner, wrote for several television shows, including the detective series 77 Sunset Strip and the Western Sugarfoot.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: Without question, fans of Star Wars and Indiana Jones should read Moore’s Northwest Smith stories; paperback collections are readily available. The series follows the space hero as he travels the universe, helping damsels in distress and bedding them before escaping a fate worse than death. That sounds like standard science-fiction adventure fare (even his name evokes Indiana Jones, as many reviewers have pointed out), but Moore imbues her fiction with a good dose of horror. In “The Cold Gray God” (Weird Tales, July 1936), for instance, Smith takes on a heist job for a mysterious (and, yes, beautiful) woman but quickly discovers that she wants to take over his body—and destroy his soul. Smith finds himself in danger once again in “The Tree of Life” (Weird Tales, October 1936) when a gorgeous woman seduces him in order to feed him to her ruler. These plot elements make Moore’s short fiction wonderfully unexpected. (“The Tree of Life” was recorded and produced as an episode of the fantasy fiction podcast PodCastle in 2013, read by Dave Robinson.) Planet Stories Library collected the entire Northwest Smith story collection in Northwest of Earth in 2008.

  Also try: Moore’s earlier weird fiction shines through in some of her television writing after her husband’s death. Several episodes of Sugarfoot involve supernatural plot elements, like a reportedly haunted house and a medium who makes a foreboding prediction at a séance.

  Related work: If space adventures are your favorite, treat yourself to the work of Moore’s contemporary Leigh Brackett. Her hero is Eric John Stark, a kind of wild man from Mercury who’s imprisoned by colonizers and taken on adventures through space. Many have compared Stark to Tarzan and even John Carter of Mars. Brackett also wrote novels, including Shadow over Mars (published in Startling Stories in 1944), about the conflict between Martians and colonizing Earthmen, and the postapocalyptic The Long Tomorrow (Phoenix Pick, 1955), for which she was nominated for a Hugo Award. Brackett tended to weave more than a few mystery/noir elements into her science fiction. She worked on screenplays for the iconic 1946 noir film The Big Sleep and The Empire Strikes Back, which won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1981. Some of Brackett’s stories and Shadow over Mars are available in Kindle editions.

  “It was like a nest of blind, restless red worms…it was—it was like naked entrails endowed with an unnatural aliveness, terrible beyond words.”

  —“Shambleau”

  Deep South Storyteller

  Mary Elizabeth Counselman

  1911–1995

  What does the term “Southern belle” bring to mind? Perhaps a young woman dressed in Sunday best with white gloves, fanning herself on a grand porch, speaking demurely while sipping on iced tea (sweet, of course)?

  Mary Elizabeth Counselman and her version of the South, which was at times horrifying and beautiful, just may challenge that idea.

  Counselman was born in 1911 on a plantation in Birmingham, Alabama, a setting that informed her particular brand of horror story. Sometimes called “the Stephen King of Alabama,” she wrote eight novels and numerous short stories for pulp magazines, including Weird Tales (she was one of their most prolific contributors). Her short stories and poetry also appeared in national publications like the Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping.

  A born writer, Counselman reportedly was penning poetry by the age of six. In her teenage years, she wrote “The Three Marked Pennies,” which was published in Weird Tales in August 1934 and was reprinted seventeen times in nine languages, making it one of the most popular stories in the magazine’s history. Counselman continued to write while studying at the University of Alabama and what is now Montevallo University. Following graduation, Counselman worked as a reporter for the local Birmingham newspaper and occasionally taught creative writing at Gadsden State Junior College, but her passion remained producing her own fiction.

  Her first professional sale was “The Devil Himself” to Myself: The Occult Fiction Magazine in November 1931. She married Horace Vinyard in 1941, and the two lived on a houseboat (a paddle-wheel steamboat, in fact, the Leota) in Gadsden, Alabama. One imagines her happily writing weird fiction as the Leota lolled lazily down the river.

  “The Three Marked Pennies” is her most famous tale; the title refers to three coins that are circulated in a small town in the South. One coin is said to bring wealth, one travel, and one death. Each of the three bears a mysterious mark (a cross, a circle, and a square) but no one knows which coin grants which fate. Should one of the coins find its way to your pocket, would you dare to keep it and hope for a good result? The story was published in Weird Tales as filler material, but readers responded overwhelmingly with positive letters. It was adapted for the radio program General Electric Theater.

  “Seventh Sister,” published in Weird Tales in January 1943 and later collected in various anthologies, is another Counselman story that garnered effusive praise from readers and critics alike. It stands out both for its focus on voodoo, a subject typically taken on by male writers of the weird, and for its protagonist, a young albino African American girl who is ostracized by everyone, her family included, because of her appearance and her occult powers. Counselman treats the character with remarkable and careful attention. Stories that depicted racial minorities with such empathy were rare, especially from writers in the 1940s Deep South, but Counselman was never one to shy away from the taboo. Another example is her story “The Unwanted,” which deals with a childless woman who becomes mother to a group of ghosts of aborted children.

  Before her death in 1995, Counselman was recognized for her talent and her contribution to the weird fiction canon. In 1976, the National Endowment for the Arts presented her with a $6,000 grant. And in 1981, she received a lifetime achievement award from the Southern Fandom Confederation.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: Counselman’s collection Half in Shadow (Arkham House, 1978) contains some of her best stories, like “Three Marked Pennies,” “Parasite Mansion,” and “Seventh Sister.” A newer edition is long overdue, but inexpensive used copies are available. Several of her stories have also been anthologized in various Weird Tales collections. Her more popular stories are available online and in digital-only formats as well.

  Also try: Counselman’s story “Parasite Mansion,” which was first published in January 1942, was adapted for an episode of the television series Thriller that debuted on April 25, 1961. The episode starred horror legend Boris Karloff, and it is well worth tracking down. “The Three Marked Pennies” was adapted for an episode of the show The Unforeseen, but as it does not feature Karloff, we cannot say that it is the better adaptation.

  Related work: Writing nearly a century earlier than Counselman, Mary Noailles Murfree (pen name Charles Egbert Craddock) also crafted unforgettable Southern-style ghostly tales. A major name in Appalachian literature, Murfree is particularly known for her local-color fiction, descriptive of the mountain regions of eastern Tennessee. Murfree was often stereotypical in her character depictions; this was a common tactic of regional writers attempting to catalogue special details of the locatio
ns and people they wrote about. Plus, she framed her narratives from a privileged outsider’s perspective, although she was native to the area. But like her contemporaries Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Murfree was adept at using regional folklore to describe people and history. She used ghosts as markers for traumatic history, not unlike Counselman in “The Unwanted.” Murfree’s most ghostly tales appear in The Phantoms of the Footbridge and Other Stories (Harper and Brother, 1895); reprints of the text are relatively easy to find.

  WHO WAS G. G. PENDARVES?

  According to Terence E. Hanley, writer of the blog Tellers of Weird Tales, and the historian Eric Leif Davin, Mary Elizabeth Counselman was the second most prolific writer for Weird Tales. In fact, the top three names on the list are female…but number one, Allison V. Harding, is suspected to be the pen name of a male writer. Third place goes to English writer G. G. Pendarves, who’s a bit of mystery; we know her real name, Gladys Gordon Trenery, but not much else. She was born in England, though no one can say for sure where (Cornwall, Liverpool, and Lancashire are frequent guesses). A census record has her living in Birkenhead, Cheshire, as a sixteen-year-old girl. She played piano, apparently—there’s a record of a music exam. What’s certain is that Pendarves wrote prolifically for the pulps. Fans of Counselman’s brand of supernatural occult pulp might enjoy Pendarves’s stories, which are sometimes anthologized. (A word of warning: Pendarves was not always as sensitive as Counselman in her depiction of characters of color.)

  Seer of the Unseen

  Gertrude Barrows Bennett

  1883–1948

  Gertrude Barrows Bennett, who published under the pseudonym Francis Stevens, was a pioneering woman writer of science fiction and fantasy in the United States. In his introduction to The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy (Bison Books, 2004), a collection of Bennett’s work, the editor Gary Hoppenstand admits to previously arguing that H. P. Lovecraft invented modern American dark fantasy, but he now believes that Gertrude Barrows Bennett deserves credit. Unfortunately, we have little documentation about Bennett’s life and work, other than the stories that have survived in archives and collections, along with her two novels, Claimed! and Avalon, published in a single volume by Black Dog Books in 2018. What we know of her life and publication record is largely thanks to the work of literary critics like Hoppenstand and the historian Eric Leif Davin’s book Partners in Wonder (Lexington Books, 2005).

  Born in Minneapolis in 1883, Bennett attended school through eighth grade and went to night school to study art. She had dreams of becoming an illustrator but instead took a job as a stenographer. She married the British journalist and explorer Stewart Bennett, who died a year into their marriage in a tropical storm while searching for treasure. Bennett worked in offices for the rest of her life to support herself, her daughter, and her ill mother. Although she published most of her stories and novels between 1917 and 1923, she started writing much earlier, publishing her first science-fiction story at age seventeen, while working as a department store secretary. In 1904, her story “The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar” appeared in the magazine Argosy (under Bennett’s real name); about a week later, the children’s magazine Youth’s Companion accepted some of her poems for publication.

  The first story she published as Francis Stevens was “The Nightmare,” for All-Story Weekly, in 1917. Curiously, she had submitted the story under a different pen name, but the editor used Francis Stevens instead (why, we don’t know) and her career was cemented. Her novel The Citadel of Fear, published serially in Argosy Weekly in 1918, garnered high reviews, including a fan letter from one Augustus T. Swift, who was revealed to be the great H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft wrote this of the story: “If written by Sir Walter Scott or Ibanez, that wonderful and tragic allegory, would have been praised to the sky…. Stevens, to my mind, is the highest grade of your writers.”

  Although Bennett was a contemporary of Lovecraft and the weird-fiction writer A. Merritt, who also was a fan of her writing, she seems to have written in isolation, unconnected to Lovecraft’s circle of writer friends. (Some critics have speculated that Lovecraft and Merritt were influenced by her work.) Bennett’s stories, in particular “Unseen—Unfeared” (People’s Favorite Magazine, February 10, 1919), imply that other dreadful universes, with physics different from ours and peopled by fearsome creatures, exist next to us all the time. Like Lovecraft, Bennett implied that certain shades of lighting, or sounds, or chemicals could make these worlds, separated from us by a thin barrier, visible in all their terrifying glory—and danger.

  The similarities led to rumors that Francis Stevens’s true identity was A. Merritt, until the critic Lloyd Arthur Eshbach set the record straight in his biographical sketch of Bennett in the 1952 reprint of The Heads of Cerberus. The false attribution of Bennett’s pen name to a male writer is not the only instance in which her talent was overlooked. Another is related to a prize for alternate-reality fiction, the Sidewise Award, given by the website Uchronia. The award is named for the story “Sidewise in Time” by Murray Leinster (the pen name of William F. Jenkins), published in June 1934 by Astounding Stories. However, two of Bennett’s works—the story “Friend Island” (All-Story Weekly, September 7, 1918), set in a world where strict gender roles have been abandoned, and the novel The Heads of Cerberus (Thrill Book, 1919; published by Polaris Press in 1952)—feature earlier, and perhaps the earliest, examples of parallel universes.

  We may not be able to establish Bennett’s influence on Lovecraft and his circle, but we know that she was popular with readers of her day. Mary Gnaedinger, editor of the pulp magazines Famous Fantastic Mysteries and Fantastic Novels, reprinted stories by Bennett in the 1940s, while Bennett was still alive. And praise for her writing has continued long past the end of her career. The science-fiction critic Sam Moskowitz called Bennett “the greatest woman writer of science fantasy in the period between Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and C. L. Moore.”

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: The Heads of Cerberus was first serialized in 1919 in the pulp magazine Thrill Book; it was published by Fantasy Press in 1952 as a complete novel and is now available in a Kindle edition. It begins with Robert Drayton returning to Philadelphia a ruined man after being framed for a crime in Cincinnati. Drayton reunites with his friend, Irishman Terry Trenmore, and the two embark on a bizarre adventure with Trenmore’s sister Viola. Their wild ride—which involves parallel universes and a look at the authoritarian dystopia that Philadelphia apparently will become in the year 2118—results from Trenmore procuring an old vial of strange dust sealed with concrete and bearing the image of the three heads of Cerberus, the mythical hell hound. Despite numerous warnings to leave it sealed, Drayton convinces Trenmore to open the bottle. What else would one do with a vial of mystery dust that had been associated with Dante and the netherworld?

  Also try: “Unseen—Unfeared,” published in 1919, is reprinted in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (Tor, 2012). That’s an appropriate place for this bizzarre tale that out-Lovecrafts Lovecraft and first appeared around the time the latter was debuting his tales of dreadful horror. Bennett’s narrator wanders around a working-class neighborhood, feeling abhorrence for the people who live there, when he is disturbed by an awareness of an “impending evil.” He stumbles upon a sign above a doorway: “SEE THE GREAT UNSEEN! Come in! This means you! FREE TO ALL!” We’ll just stop there and let you find out for yourself what he discovers.

  Another strange artifact appears in Bennett’s novel Claimed! (first published in 1920; later edition, Carrol & Graf, 1985). This time it’s a green box found after a volcanic eruption in the Azores that brings nightmares and death to anyone who comes in contact with it. According to the VanderMeers, Lovecraft called the book “one of the strangest and most compelling science fantasy novels you will ever read.”

  Her novel The Citade
l of Fear (Argosy, 1918) involves a lost world, and possible possession by the gods is involved, too. Look for the Kindle edition or the 2015 paperback reprint from CreateSpace Independent Publishing.

  Related work: The best modern-day heirs to Bennett’s work are dark fantasy graphic novels. Monstress (Image Comics, 2016), written by Marjorie Liu and illustrated by Sana Takeda, follows a “monster underground,” similar to the mythos Bennett depicted so well.

  Night Writer

  Everil Worrell

  1893–1969

  Many women who wrote for the pulp magazines in the mid-twentieth century lived a dual existence: by day, they worked in an office, typing memos for the boss and then rushing home in time to kiss their husbands as they come through the door; by night, they sat at their own typewriters, releasing their worlds of imagination onto paper. Everil Worrell was one of those women.

  According to legend (or at least the internet), Worrell was born one minute after midnight on November 3, 1893, in Loop City, Nebraska. After a childhood of moving around the country, she settled in Washington, D.C. In 1926, she married Joseph Charles Murphy and began her publishing career. She worked as a stenographer and secretary for the U.S. Department of the Treasury; at night, she penned weird, fantasy, speculative, and supernatural stories. Worrell and her husband had fun with her writing career. A playful couple, they would often describe the mundane household chores using Lovecraftian terms. For instance, if food burned on the stove, they would call it a “foul mephitic vapor.”