Monster, She Wrote

by Lisa Kröger

  Worrell wrote at least twenty-four stories, nineteen of which appeared in Weird Tales between 1926 and 1954. She also had two tales published in Ghost Stories, written under the name Everil W. Murphy, between 1926 and 1932. But these are just the ones we know about; she is believed to have been quite prolific, and more of her work may have been lost to time. According to the historian Eric Leif Davin, “The Bird of Space”—a 1926 Weird Tales cover story—was voted by readers one of the most popular stories to appear in the magazine.

  One of Worrell’s best-known works is her female vampire tale “The Canal” (1927), which is in the public domain. The story has shades of Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla (serialized in the magazine The Dark Blue, 1871–72), in that the female vampire is seductive—that’s her power and her danger. But the setting is unique: a riverbank at night, where fishermen make the perfect prey. The story was adapted for television in 1973 as the episode “Death on a Barge,” appearing on Rod Serling’s show Night Gallery (which—attention, Star Trek fans—was Leonard Nimoy’s directorial debut). The vampire protagonist is played by Lesley Ann Warren.

  “Leonora” (Weird Tales, November 1938) is another standout. Described as an “eldritch tale,” the eponymous heroine meets a handsome but mysterious stranger by the light of the full moon on the night of her sixteenth birthday. Leonora’s heart swells with the giddying emotion of first love, but things turn strange when she realizes she can only meet the stranger when the moon is full. (If you seek it out, be sure to read the entire story. There’s a fun twist at the end.)

  In addition to her fiction, Worrell wrote the lyrics to the song “Come to Me Dear,” composed by Leo Friedman, who is best known for the tune to “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” She played the violin and was reportedly a talented painter as well. Through it all, she kept her day job, not retiring from her government position until 1957, when she was awarded the Albert Gallatin Award for her years of service.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: Search the Weird Tales archive on the Pulp Magazine Archive website for “The Canal,” “Leonora,” “The Elemental Law” (June 1928), and “Deadlock” (September 1931). Worrell’s mystery “The Gray Killer” (Startling Mystery Stories, 1969) can also be found in the Pulp Magazine Archive. She was one of the more popular Weird Tales writers—her stories made the cover three times—but Worrell did not find widespread fame. As a result, her fiction is not often anthologized, and to date no collection of her work has been published.

  Also try: A biography by Worrell’s daughter, Jeanne Eileen Murphy, was included in the first volume of Robert Weinberg’s series The Weird Tales Collector, reprinted by Borgo Press in 1999.

  Related work: If Worrell’s version of a vampire story sounds enticing, then “The Antimacassar” by Greye La Spina (Weird Tales, May 1949) may be worth your time. You can find it in older WT anthologies, though it’s not in the public domain. La Spina divorces her vampires from the typical Gothic types seen in Bram Stoker knockoffs. With its child vampire protagonist, “The Antimacassar” is a standout among pulp vampire stories. Also look for “My Dear Emily” by Joanna Russ, published in Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1962.

  Keeping the Wild West Weird

  Eli Colter

  1890–1984

  Eli Colter begins “The Last Horror” with questions: “You wonder what happened to Bleeker? And to Remington? They aren’t the same men any more, are they?” She doesn’t tell us who these men are or what happened to them; instead she lets her ominous words work on our imaginations. And when her rich, evocative prose starts filling in the details, the true horror begins. Consider this next passage in the story:

  “Bleeker: who once stood straight-limbed, straight-backed and full-fleshed, walked with high-carried head, clear-glowing eyes and ruddy blond skin; Bleeker, who now walks with a bent shuffle, whose cuticle is so tightly drawn over his emaciated features that it looks like dirty white rubber stretched over a skull; Bleeker, whose eyes have gone blank and sunken in their sockets, whose mouth is tightened in the middle and loose at the corners, whose nose is pinched, whose hands tremble when he isn’t taking care to hold himself in.”

  Whatever happened to poor Bleeker is terrible indeed. He’s gone from being the quintessential picture of health, the everyman’s cowboy, a John Wayne prototype to…a walking skeleton. Few writers could describe a character so effectively.

  Eli Colter certainly sounds like a fitting name for someone who writes Western fiction. The moniker evokes the image of a cowboy, muscular, with sunburned cheeks and strong features peeking out from beneath a weather-worn Stetson. But Eli Colter is a woman, of course, the pen name of May Eliza Frost, born and raised in Portland, Oregon. As a thirteen-year-old girl, Colter went blind. Though she eventually regained her sight, the temporary disability seems to have fueled her ambition. She set out to educate herself and began a career as a writer; to support herself while she followed her dream, she played piano and organ in movie theaters.

  Colter published her first story around age thirty-two, in 1922, in Black Mask magazine, known for mystery and crime fiction. Tracing her career is difficult because not much has been written about her, save for her later standard Western stories. We do know that Colter had a productive writing career that included fifteen stories for Weird Tales magazine and several for Strange Stories. Among her Weird Tales work was a four-part serial that ran from January to April 1926, called “On the Dead Man’s Chest.” Readers voted it one of the most popular stories of the April issue. Other favorites are “The Crawling Corpse” (Strange Stories, December 1939), the aforementioned “The Last Horror,” “The Man in the Green Coat” (Weird Tales, August 1928), and “The Golden Whistle” (Weird Tales, January 1928).

  Colter’s non-horror adventure publications include “The Pearl of Hahn” which appeared in Super-Detective (February 1945), “The Hell Cat” in Detective Action Stories (March 1931), “Not in the Evidence” in Hutchison’s Adventure-Story Magazine (September 1925), and “Ozark Justice” in the Liberty Quarterly anthology 19 Tales of Intrigue, Mystery, and Adventure (1950).

  To return to Bleeker: “The Last Horror” is a great example of both Colter’s mastery of language and her knack for sinking a hook of suspense into her readers…then pulling it tauter and tauter until the very last page. We won’t disclose the story’s secrets here. But we will say that Colter is a master of writing body horror. “The Last Horror” was ranked the second most popular story of January 1927 by Weird Tales readers and was reprinted in February 1939.

  Weird Trails

  Colter’s stories were published frequently in Weird Tales, including “weird Westerns,” which are just as they sound: supernatural stories set against a Wild West backdrop. It’s interesting to look at the development of this subgenre. Writers like Robert E. Howard and Charles G. Finney are largely credited with writing the earliest such stories in the 1930s, publishing in magazines like Weird Tales and Argosy. Colter’s weird Westerns predated them, and whether or not she was the very first, she certainly was one of the earliest pulp writers working the trend. The category started to gather steam in the 1970s with the success of the 1977 DC comic Jonah Hex, and its popularity continues today.

  Following her foray into weird fiction and weird Westerns, Colter switched to writing straight-up Westerns as well as a few detective stories. “Something to Brag About” (originally published in the Saturday Evening Post) was adapted to film in 1948 as The Untamed Breed, directed by Charles Lamont (the man credited with “discovering” young Shirley Temple). After the 1950s, Colter seemed to largely stop writing; details from this part of her life are especially spotty; we don’t know if she switched pen names or even careers.

  Colter met her first husband, John Irving Hawkins, when she advertised for cowboys in order to do research for her writing. He was a ranch hand and aspiring writer with stories to share, and she was a writer in need of inspiration. Later s
he wrote stories in collaboration with another writer, Don Alviso, the pseudonym for Glenn FaGalde—who became her second husband. They were together until FaGalde’s death in 1957. It would seem from her marriages that Colter’s writing life and personal life were nearly inseparable.

  Colter died in Los Angeles in 1984. Despite her successes, she was completely unknown at the time of her passing. Some fans still refer to her on websites and blogs devoted to classic Western novels as “he.”

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: Eli Colter is one of the once-popular writers of weird fiction who have nearly been lost to obscurity. Her stories are listed in catalogues of pulp writers, but reprints are becoming increasingly difficult to locate. Her work deserves to be republished, reread, reloved.

  “The Last Horror” (1927), “The Greatest Gift” (1927), “The Curse of a Song” (1928), and parts of her serials “The Dark Chrysalis” (1927) and “On the Dead Man’s Chest” (1926) are available online in the Weird Tales magazine archive.

  Also try: Compared to Colter’s weird work, her not-so-weird Western novels are easier to find as used paperbacks. Check out Blood on the Range (Dodge Publishing, 1939), which was released in 2018 from Wildside Press in both paperback and Kindle editions. The Outcast of Lazy S (Grosset & Dunlap, 1933) and Bad Man’s Trail (Mills & Boon, 1933) are available as reprints from Gunsmoke Westerns (1998) and Sagebrush Westerns (2005), respectively.

  Related work: Since Eli Colter’s Weird Tales days, popular culture has seen an explosion in the weird West subgenre. Standout examples include the work of Seanan McGuire and Nancy A. Collins. McGuire contributed to a series of books published by Tor based on the Deadlands role-playing games. Her Deadlands: Boneyard (2017) pits a traveling circus against the Clearing, a secretive community deep within the woods. In several books, Collins spins yarns about werewolves in a Western backdrop; we recommend Walking Wolf: A Weird Western (Mark V. Ziesing, 1995). Seek out the anthology Dead Man’s Hands (Titan Books, 2014), which includes stories by McGuire, Beth Revis, and Elizabeth Bear. Also of note is Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. Valente (reprint Saga Press, 2015), which reimagines the fairy tale princess as a Wild West gunslinger.

  It’s nighttime. You are home, tucked into bed, and you feel safe. But are you? You hear a creaking outside your door. Bumps in the walls. A low keening wail. Is it coming from down the hall? No, it’s in the attic. What’s that scratching the window? Did that shadow move?

  Domestic spaces have long been the preferred setting for horror fiction. Nothing screams creepy like an old, isolated house in a desolate landscape, especially on a dark and stormy night. The haunted house is the epitome of the uncanny—the familiar and safe becoming strange and dangerous. Homes should be places of comfort and family, where we and our loved ones are sheltered from the world’s pressures. Owning a home is a signal of financial security; losing it is the biggest threat in a sour economy.

  Beginning in the Gothic period of the eighteenth century, horror storytellers gave us lonely haunted castles on moors or in foreign lands, complete with secret passageways, animated portraits whose eyes seem to follow the viewer, clanking chains, and the requisite dungeon (and if it’s constructed as a maze, so much the better).

  When writers in pre- and post-revolutionary America turned their hands to fiction, the stage was changed slightly. Writers like Washington Irving, Charles Brockden Brown, and Nathaniel Hawthorne added uniquely American elements to their horror stories, informed by the early settlers’ Puritan faith and fears of indigenous peoples: eerie woods, the devil, and witches. Even today, much of American horror fiction reckons to varying degrees with fears that are tied up in the nation’s history, fears of supernatural evil, of the racial other, and of the frightful consequences of the violent past coming home to roost.

  American horror fiction transforms the home into a battleground for these phobias and hauntings. Homes can be sites of intimate family violence, trauma, and painful secrets. Homes can imprison people. Homes can be besieged by invaders. Homes can become twisted mimics of their owner’s or builder’s minds, like Edgar Allan Poe’s House of Usher and Shirley Jackson’s Hill House.

  As weird fiction moved away from Gothic castles and crumbling mansions, writers—many of them women—evolved this subgenre in a few important ways. They showed readers that domestic horror needn’t be isolated in the countryside or off the beaten path. A prime example of this phenomenon is Anne Rivers Siddons’s The House Next Door (Simon and Schuster, 1978), set in an upper-middle-class suburb of Atlanta, Georgia.

  And these writers used the image of the haunted house to represent internal as well as external horror. From the 1930s through the 1960s, in the United States and across the pond, Dorothy Macardle, Shirley Jackson, and Daphne du Maurier developed haunted house fiction that presented the supernatural as a psychological effect.

  Historically, women have been consigned to the domestic realm, running the household and caring for children. Even today, when many families have two parents working outside the home, we are socialized to associate women with nurturing and housework. Another cultural belief exists that women can “have it all,” meaning a joyous family life and a rewarding profession. Many of the women profiled in this book struggled with that dichotomy: the pressure to care for home and family, and the need to tend their writing career. Haunted house fictions play upon the complex fears and concerns about domestic issues that women have long grappled with.

  The hauntings in these houses are bound to families and their attendant tensions. Secrets and broken relationships fuel the supernatural activity. The focus is on mothers and daughters for Macardle and Jackson and on marriage in du Maurier’s Rebecca. Intimate spaces within the larger homes also play important roles: nurseries in Macardle’s Cliff End and Jackson’s Hill House (and, later, Susan Hill’s Eel Marsh House in The Woman in Black); the second Mrs. de Winter’s bedroom, boudoir, and writing room in du Maurier’s Manderley.

  Just as every home and its past are different, every domestic horror story approaches haunting via a different angle. Toni Morrison’s Beloved focuses on mother-and-daughter relationships and a secret, painful past, compounded by the profound trauma her characters, formerly enslaved African Americans, live with in post–Civil War Ohio and Kentucky. Elizabeth Engstrom used the home as a place to explore the monstrous nature of domesticity itself. She masterfully examines the connection between mother and child, a bond that is unbreakable even in the most horrific circumstances.

  Let’s enter some of these houses of the damned. No need to knock, the doors are always open…at least, until you’re inside.

  Chronicler of Pain and Loss

  Dorothy Macardle

  1889–1958

  In his introduction to the Tramp Press Recovered Voices Series 2015 edition of The Uninvited, scholar Luke Gibbons calls the Irish writer Dorothy Macardle a woman of contradictions. She was a feminist and humanitarian who also was an ardent nationalist and republican. She supported Irish neutrality during World War II, only to move to London to fight the spread of fascism. She was fascinated by history and psychology but loved a good ghost story. But she was steadfast in standing up for her political beliefs. For her republicanism and antitreaty stance in the Irish Civil War, Macardle was fired from her teaching post at Alexandra College in Dublin and jailed. While imprisoned, she participated in a hunger strike to oppose the poor conditions the inmates lived in. She was also an investigative journalist, and after serving her sentence, she wrote powerful exposés about the harsh treatment of prisoners, especially women.

  Macardle was born in 1889 in Dundalk, Ireland, to a family that enjoyed financial security from their well-known brewery business. She grew into a woman with diverse interests, all of which played a role in her fiction and nonfiction writing. Macardle wrote plays and was a theater and film critic. She worked with the prominent psychoanalyst Anna Freud to chronicle the horrific effects of the
Holocaust on Jewish orphans and other children liberated from World War II concentration camps, documenting their stories in her book Children of Europe (Victor Gollancz, 1949). Macardle’s journalism reveals her empathy for others and her awareness of the effects of poverty and violence on families. It’s not surprising that she wrote fiction concerned with a yearning for home (usually Ireland) and with trauma and loss. And she used the supernatural to represent such scars.

  Today Macardle is known by historians for her huge tome The Irish Republic (Victor Gollancz, 1937; Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1965 reprint), a history of the Irish War of Independence. But she also wrote two uncanny supernatural novels: The Unforeseen (Doubleday, 1946) and Uneasy Freehold (Peter Davies, 1941). The latter, which was released in the United States as The Uninvited (Doubleday, Doran, 1942), follows Stella Meredith, a young woman who is simultaneously haunted by a traumatic childhood and the loss of her mother and dealing with a domineering grandfather in the present day. Both the book and the film adaptation, released in 1944 under the book’s American title, were compared to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which Alfred Hitchcock had adapted to the silver screen in 1940. Both films focus on homes haunted by a dead woman who is seemingly an icon of perfection and control.

  Wife after Death

  Macardle was a feminist, and her writing doesn’t shy away from the dark sides of friendship, marriage, and parenthood. She delves into the psychological depths of twisted love and loss, the horrors of obsession and neglect, the vagaries of memory, the dangers of misperception, and the damage women suffer at the hands of the men they love. In Uneasy Freehold, Stella’s father, the artist Lyn Meredith, exhibits a near-demonic narcissism and cruelty and is drawn to extremes. Macardle creates a kind of Dorian Gray situation, in which the male artist vampirically sucks the life out of the two women he’s put in competition for his love—his wife Mary and his mistress Carmel, who lives with the family. He paints various portraits of the two women, slowly wearing them down until they are merely objects of his gaze.