THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #36: A review of "The Crawling Horror" by Thorp McClusky

At first, it seems like a crime that Pelan thought ANY story other than Henry Kuttner’s “The Graveyard Rats” should have been the choice for 1936. It is one of the most well-known horror stories in history, not to mention that it would have been nice to have at least one husband-and-wife team represented in this volume (he was married to C.L. Moore).



Here’s the thing, though: “The Crawling Horror” is really fucking good. Amazingly good. McClusky comes at his reader with guns blazing, all hands on deck. Check it out.


This story is narrated by Dr. Kurt, a country doctor who has an odd patient in farmer Hans Brubaker. One day, Hans comes to him with a story about how something has been killing first his rats, then his cats, and finally his dogs. Well, he doesn’t say they’re being killed, but he implies it. From his perspective, they’re just disappearing, and just before they do, they are visited by a very strange member of their species. But the creepiest of these incidents is when he falls asleep while smoking a pipe, his dog at his feet. He wakes up and decides to pet his dog without looking down. Instead of the expected fur, his hand encounters something very, very slimy, and he knows right away that he’s not touching his dog.


When he looks, he sees a blob covering his dog like a blanket. He attacks the creature, and it retreats, but his dog just . . . isn’t right anymore. When his other dog comes home, it very obviously fears the first dog. Yet it attacks its companion with the intent of killing it, as if it knows this task is necessary, maybe even merciful.


Hans takes his dog out in the yard and shoots it. However, the next day when he’s going to bury the dog, its body is gone. Later, a dog he knows is dead comes for a visit, looking for its surviving companion.


Notice a pattern? Oh yeah. Still later, a strange child wanders by Hans’s farm . . . .


Creepy, no? That’s just McClusky warming up. Hans needs the doctor’s help, so Dr. Kurt decides to investigate a little himself. Just after Hans marries Dr. Kurt’s nurse, Hilda, the doctor himself comes for a visit only to find that Hans has been so desperately afraid that he hasn’t slept in days. Hilda has not encountered anything, so she kind of thinks he’s a kook, but Hans explains that he’s learned a few things about the blob. First of all, when it attacks its prey, its prey becomes a part of it to the point that it can imitate the dead creature. Also, it can get into any room, even through the tiniest crack. Lastly, it only comes when you’re asleep, or if you invite it while awake.


The doctor is still skeptical, but he offers to keep watch while Hans catches some shut-eye. Hans hermetically seals the room he’s in with wax and then takes the doctor up on his offer. And here’s where McClusky really shines: he describes the doctor’s ordeal in such a bone-chilling way. The isolation of the farm is perfectly depicted as snow starts drifting down, and the reader realizes that just about anything can happen out here in the middle of nowhere. Unlike someone like, say, Blackwood, McClusky knows exactly when to stop, when maximum creepiness has been achieved. Any reader whose blood doesn’t run cold after spending some time out at Hans’s farm may have a blob of their own on their back.


Long story short, Dr. Kurt sees the blob running down the window, and when he goes outside to investigate further, he sees a very clear trail through the snow, as if a large ball had been rolled through there, which suddenly turns into very human tracks . . . . Now that he believes his patient, they come up with a plan to defeat the creature.


SPOILER ALERT: While Hilda sleeps in her room, and Hans sleeps elsewhere, Dr. Kurt stands vigil over the house. He hears a knock on the door and sees a neighbor who has been missing for a few days. She begs to spend the night with them because she’s very much afraid of something back home. Dr. Kurt thinks he knows what she’s afraid of, so he lets her in. While he’s fetching her coffee, he comes back to see that she’s crawled into bed with Hilda. When he turns on the light, he sees that she’s turned into the blob and has attached herself to Hilda’s back.


Horrified, he attacks the blob, but it doesn’t retreat. He changes his tactics and pulls Hilda away from her attacker. Remember the ‘Eighties remake of THE BLOB? There was a scene in which the titular monster drops down on a character, covering his entire body except for his arm. He’s reaching out for help, and his girlfriend tries to pull him out of the mess. Instead, his arm comes off in a rather gory fashion.


So . . . guess what happens to Hilda. Oh yeah. In a very gruesome scene, only half of her body comes away. Her spine and ribs are laid bare, and her skull is open in the back.

The blob moves down to finish off its meal, and Dr.Kurt decides to try to hermetically seal it in this room, hoping that if it’s trapped long enough, it will starve and die. Hans has other ideas. Instead, he offers it himself, thinking that if he’s strong enough to dominate it, it will die (seeing as how it only goes after sleeping prey, it’s a pretty sound idea). Sure enough, he defeats it, but he feels it inside of himself, lurking. He decides to run away, hoping that he never weakens enough to let it out. END OF SPOILERS.


Remember a while ago when Pelan called “The Willows” the perfect horror story? Nope, so far in this book, “The Crawling Horror” deserves that title. As powerful and awesome as Kutter’s “The Graveyard Rats” is, McClusky kicks the shit out of him with this one. Easily the best in the anthology so far.

[This story first appeared in WEIRD TALES (check out that steaming hot cover above!), but sadly, it cannot be read online at this time.  That's a fucking crime.]

THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #35: A review of "The Dark Eidolon" by Clark Ashton Smith

Here we have one of the bigger members of the Lovecraft Circle with a story that, at first, seems like it doesn’t belong in the book. It’s from his Zothique cycle, which is firmly set in the realm of fantasy. And sure enough, we have a lot of swords (okay, one sword) and sorcery, but there are plenty of horror elements to justify Pelan’s choice.



Once upon a time (or rather, sometime in the far, far, far distant future), on Zothique (“the last continent of Earth”) illuminated by a dying sun, there was a young beggar boy named Narthos. While approaching the kingdom’s prince, a bastard by the name of Zotulla, in order to beg for alms, the boy is very purposely trampled by the prince’s horse. Narthos lives, but he’s stuck with a limp the rest of his life. Eventually tired of this place, he wanders off and becomes an apprentice to a great sorcerer. In turn, Narthos becomes a great sorcerer, and he changes his name to Namirrha. In the meantime, Zotulla is sick of waiting to inherit the throne. He tosses an asp in his father’s bed, and when the king subsequently dies, Zotulla is crowned.


Getting trampled by a snotty prince kind of stuck in Namirrha’s craw, and he’s had a lot of time to plot his revenge. He sneaks back to his hometown while everyone is stark raving drunk at a party thrown by Zotulla, and Namirrha takes up residence as Zotulla’s neighbor. Zotulla is infuriated by this, so he sends soldiers out to learn who this asshole is and have him executed forthwith. However, when they return with information that his new neighbor is a widely feared sorcerer, he thinks twice about starting anything he might not be able to finish. Zotulla then tries to ignore the guy.


Namirrha sets in motion his revenge by sending spirits to haunt Zotulla’s palace with the loud, overwhelming sound of the tramping of charging horses. Plagued by these noises, he asks the resident sorcerer for advice; Namirrha suggests the haunting is a direct result of a wrong the king has no recollection of committing (and surely enough, Zotulla doesn’t recognize the wizard). He invites Zotulla to a party.


Zotulla shows up with his favorite woman, and here’s where the true horrors come in. Not since the Crowley story earlier in this volume have such intimidating, vile imagery paraded on these pages. Namirrha summons the mummies of once-great kings as their table servants . . . and one of them turns out to be the king’s recently deceased father. Lamias and satyrs and skeletons and hairy-shanked she-ghouls are their singing and dancing entertainers, the servants all have worms writhing in their empty eye sockets, and their meal is the “well-minced leavings of [torturers’] wheels and racks; and moreover, my cooks have spiced it with the powerful balsams of the tomb, and have farced it with the hearts of adders and the tongues of black cobras.” The musicians play on lyres made from bones and stringed with sinews taken from cannibals, they play hautboys made from the leg bones of young witches, and they play bagpipes made from the tit-skin of “Negro queens.” Holy shit, that is a fucking party.


At the height of the festivities, Namirrha summons the spirits of giant horses, and they trample the entirety of Zotulla’s kingdom until nothing is left but the giant shards of buildings. The sorcerer then reveals his true identity just before he forces the king out of his body, possesses it, and transforms his legs to those of a horse, which he then uses to trample Zotulla’s favorite woman.


SPOILER ALERT: Namirrha has a problem, because he betrayed a very powerful god in order to get all of this to happen. That god, Thasaidon, comes to Zotulla after he’s been imprisoned in a statue and forced to watch as his woman is trampled. The god explains what’s going on, and then he gives Zotulla the power to fight the sorcerer. As they do battle, and as the woman, still alive, is driven to mad laughter by the sight of this, the giant horses return and trample Namirrha’s house, thereby killing EVERYONE.


Wow. That’s kind of a downer ending. It’s also kind of odd considering how, even though we are meant to feel sympathy for Namirrha and to root him on (even though it takes a pretty big son of a bitch to do what Namirrha does to Zotulla), that Smith turns the tables and makes a kinda-sorta hero out of an asshole like Zotulla. All of this could have been avoided if Zotulla had done what most of us do when a bum asks us for change: we keep walking without ever acknowledging the fellow. But still, it’s a nice statement on the typical revenge story: none of it matters in the end. END OF SPOILERS.


There are some flaws. For example, it’s one of those stories where alien terminology is just thrown at you, and a lot of it is unnecessary information and therefore is hard to retain. The story also suffers because of the tell-don’t-show style. It sounds like a fantasy story with very stiff language, kind of like the way Hollywood thinks all Native Americans sound like when they’re speaking English. As a result, the going is hard, at first. Stick it out. This story is definitely worth it.

[This story first appeared in WEIRD TALES and can be read here.]

THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #34: A review of "The Tower of Moab" by L.A. Lewis

Here we have another misstep from Pelan. By the time a reader gets to the end of this story, one can’t help but wonder . . . what the hell was the point of that?!



An unnamed narrator, a salesman, is making his rounds and being absolutely destroyed by rejection. He then stumbles upon a gigantic building which the locals call the Tower of Moab. Some cultists decided, about a hundred years ago, to make the Tower of Babel a reality, and so they built this thing in their attempt to break through the sky and into Heaven. They also put murals on the sides depicting popular scenes from the Bible, in particular the Book of Revelation.


The narrator becomes obsessed with the Tower. He gives up selling and takes up drinking while staring out the window of the pub at this thing. He then quits his job and takes up residence at the inn above him so he can contemplate this thing while getting completely smashed on bottle after bottle of whiskey. This guy puts it away like Jim Thompson, who had a habit of polishing off six pints of the stuff every day.


Before long, he starts noticing a light within this building, and he sees ghosts floating around it at night. He comes to the conclusion that the builders succeeded, and that the top of this building resides in Heaven. These spirits are actually angels.


SPOILER ALERT: Well, this isn’t really a spoiler alert because NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS IN THIS STORY. There is no action, just some lousy drunk observing a really tall tower. In the end, he gets dragged away to the loony bin, and . . . that’s it.


Every piece of fiction must have a point. Otherwise, why write it? What exactly was Lewis’s purpose in publishing this tale? There doesn’t seem to be one. If you really want to stretch it, maybe he’s making a statement on how soul-crushing a sales job is, that it turns people into hallucinating drunkards. Not a bad thought, but still. Come on, now. END OF KINDA-SORTA SPOILERS.


Not only is there very little reward in reading this one, but there is also a lot of loose writing. This story would be best served streamlined, with a lot of the useless information cut out. The beginning, for example, is such an awful slog that most readers would give up on it right off the bat.


Not that the story is without merits. A lot of the useless parts are pretty funny, and it’s interesting to witness his ever-increasing whiskey habit. Aside from that, this story is kind of on the useless side. Pass.

[This story first appeared in TALES OF THE GROTESQUE, THE WEIRD, AND HORRIBLE, and it cannot be read online at this time.]

THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #33: A review of "Shambleau" by C.L. Moore

Here we have yet another very unconventional choice from Pelan. Moore’s story very clearly fits into SF, rather than horror, and yet . . . it’s a vampire tale. Granted, an unusual one, but a vampire tale nonetheless.



The improbably named Northwest Smith is an Earthman on Mars who is engaged in a top secret mission regarding a Venusian fellow. It is never fully explained, but in the long run, it doesn’t matter. He comes upon a young, cat-like woman being chased by a group of Martians bent on destroying her. His Earthman sensibilities kick in, and he protects her, inadvertently calling her “his.” As soon as the Martians hear this, they are incredulous but understanding. They let her go.


Smith keeps her at his hotel room while he drinks up a storm on Mars, waiting for his Venusian contact, someone named Yarol. When Smith returns to his room, he feels kind of lustful toward the woman, who calls herself Shambleau. He kisses her and feels an odd sense of deep loathing as soon as he does.


The next night, he sees her untie her hair, which flows around her head like Medusa’s snakes. He feels suddenly compelled to be very close to her, and when he embraces her, her hair wraps him up and begins feeding off of his life force.


For a story written in 1933, it is extremely erotic. Moore’s descriptions of Shambleau are definitely intended to sexually arouse her readers. The scene where Smith enters her embrace practically pants off the page, and that’s where the true horror comes from. Readers of the time, predominantly male, would undoubtedly be sporting pretty thick hard-ons while reading this story. Any one of them would have given in to Shambleau’s seduction were they Smith.


SPOILER ALERT: Yarol shows up the next day and finds a pile of slime which turns out to be poor Northwest Smith, still wrapped up in Shambleau. After considerable struggle (and the aid of a mirror), Yarol manages to kill Shambleau and free his friend. In the discussion they have afterward, Yarol very clearly uses the word “vampire,” and he says Shambleau is not a person but a race. It hearkens back to the introductory piece, in which Moore speculates that maybe in the ancient world, human beings had already made it into space, we just haven’t found their technology. Yarol very heavily suggests that Medusa, the most famous of Gorgons, was a Shambleau who had made it to Earth back in the ancient Greek times. Whoever started the Perseus myth, in which Perseus defeats Medusa with a mirror, has saved the lives of Smith and Yarol three thousand years later, which is kind of an interesting concept. END OF SPOILERS.


Easily the most modern of these stories so far, it’s an absolute breeze to get through, despite being one of the longer tales present. It’s generally considered more of an SF classic, but one way or the other, it’s a fantastic read and should be appreciated by any genre’s fan.

[This story, among others featuring Northwest Smith, first appeared in WEIRD TALES and can be read here.]

THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #32: A review of "The Thing in the Cellar" by David H. Keller

So far we’ve had quite a few staples of the horror genre. There have been many ghosts, a vampire, a zombie, and almost a werewolf. Now we come to something else, something that arguably every child has been afraid of at some point. Yes, the title leaves very little to the imagination as to what we’ll be facing in this little tale.



The Tucker family lives in a house where the cellar very obviously doesn’t match the rest of the house. It is too large, so they surmise that another house had once been here, and perhaps it had burned down. We never get any answers, but we’re suspicious enough already. When it’s revealed that their child, Tommy, has a phobia regarding the cellar, we’re not too surprised. Even as a child, he yearns to be away from the kitchen which is the only access point to the cellar. Maybe he can handle himself if the door is firmly locked, but if the door is open, even if just a crack, he loses his shit and won’t be calm until out of the room.


It doesn’t help that the Tuckers don’t know much about the cellar, to the point where they don’t even know what’s in it. All the junk from previous owners has built up so much that it forms a wall pretty much separating the stairs from the rest of the cellar. Not to mention the very ominous, heavily reinforced door . . . .


Tommy’s father is a man’s man, and he is ashamed of his own son’s fear. He’s not very quiet about it; he lets Tommy know directly to his face that he’s ashamed of him. It’s not like Tommy’s a bad boy; he’s very attentive in school, and he handles everything else in his life very well. It’s just . . . this . . . one . . . thing.


The Tuckers take him to the doctor, who gives them advice only an early 20th Century doctor would give them: “. . . [O]pen that cellar door and make him stay by himself in the kitchen. Nail the door open so he cannot close it. Leave him alone there for an hour and then go and laugh at him and show him how silly it was for him to be afraid of an empty cellar.” Yes, the doctor tells them to laugh at their son’s fear.


SPOILER ALERT: Big surprise: there’s something in the cellar. Keller’s genius, however, is in not bringing it out onstage. Also, he’s not afraid to absolutely ravage a kid in the end of his story. Yes, Tommy is torn to pieces by a creature never witnessed by anyone else in the tale. The story hits kind of a clunk and clatter, however, when the doctor declares the boy dead: “Tommy—Tommy has been hurt—I guess he is dead!” It’s like listening to a badly dubbed foreign film. END OF SPOILERS.


There isn’t a lot to this one. It’s very simple, something even a child could find enjoyment in. There’s not much substance, though; while it’s fun, that’s all there is to it.

[This story first appeared in WEIRD TALES and can be read here after scrolling past the intro.]

THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #31: A review of "Cassius" by Henry S. Whitehead

Here we have another turning point in the history of the horror story, and it bears mentioning that this time out, we have perhaps the first clear influence on Stephen King.



Canevin is the master of a house in the West Indies, and he has just acquired a new house boy, a native by the name of Brutus. After the fellow has some quick surgery to remove a tiny lump from his leg, he goes right to work . . . and then, strange things start happening.


For example, while wandering his own property, he comes upon a tiny makeshift hut made of straw and other small objects, like pencils and toothbrush handles. He finds this curious until he decides it must be a plaything of one of his servants’ children. Yet when he reaches inside to plant a little present for the kid—a ten-cent piece—something bites him from within. He doesn’t want to investigate further, but he makes a mental note to warn the kids about a possible rat in the playhouse.


And then some odd creature starts attacking Brutus while he tries to sleep, leaving horrible stab wounds on his body. He claims it looks like a little toad, but there is no way such a creature can scale the wall outside his window to get into his room. Even when they search his room for possible ways for the monster to get in, they come up with nothing.


At least until the night Brutus takes a shot at the beast and wings it, leaving a drop of blood on the window sill. Yet, when Canevin brings the blood to be examined by a scientist, it turns out to be human blood.


A modern horror reader can’t help but think of King’s “The General” segment of CAT’S EYE, yet there’s another of his work that bears a stronger resemblance to Whitehead’s tale. SPOILER ALERT: Not only does this have a pretty modern feel to it, it also has a remarkable twist, the first example of such storytelling so far in the book. In all honesty, it’s a very good twist, and even modern readers would find a surprise in it. It turns out that the doctor didn’t just cut a lump out of Brutus’s leg; it was the poor fellow’s undeveloped twin. Being surgically removed like that must have awoken it, and seeing its plight, it demanded revenge on its bigger brother. THE DARK HALF, anyone?


It doesn’t end there, though. Canevin, who knows Brutus was baptized, can’t help but think that this means that his newfound twin brother also was, meaning the creature he sought to destroy was not only a human being but also a Christian. This bothers him to the point of giving the miniature twin a decent burial after a cat mauls it. Very amusing stuff. END OF SPOILERS.


The one real problem with the story, however, is it takes too long to get going. Whitehead loses himself in an attempt to needlessly build suspense. He wastes so much time talking about how weird the events of this story are going to be that he risks boasting and thus turns a reader off. Once you slog through the first two or three sections, things pick up pretty quickly. Don’t let it put you off. This one is beyond question worth a bit of effort.

[This story first appeared in STRANGE TALES OF MYSTERY AND TERROR, and sadly cannot be read online at this time.]

THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #30: A review of "The Spirit of Stonehenge" by Rosalie Muspratt

Pelan fumbles a bit with this choice. In his own introduction to the tale, he admits that the strongest competition for this year came from “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner. However, he should have chosen Faulkner, as this tiny tale offers very little.



Once more, we have a frame story, in which the narrator turns the story over to another narrator, Ronald Dalton, right away. Dalton describes what happened when a scholar by the name of Gavin Thomson stayed with him and his brother while researching Stonehenge. The young man clearly had thoughts that the place was haunted by elementals, spirits without form who seek out human beings to possess.


Naturally, Gavin starts acting strangely, and Dalton, accompanied by his brother, investigates what is happening to their friend, only to find him on the center stone with a dagger in his chest.


SPOILER ALERT: Gavin has left a letter to absolve his friends of his death, which he had foreseen. He knew he was acting strangely (once, he sacrificed a dog to the spirits of Stonehenge, which was a pretty good indication), but he started wanting to kill his friends to appease whatever lived within the stones. Instead, he chose to offer himself, thus saving Dalton’s life. This letter was sufficient enough to convince authorities that Gavin had lost his shit and offed himself. END OF SPOILERS.


There is embarrassingly little to this story, so much so that it’s barely worth the time reading. Whatever we do have amounts to hacky crap.  That Faulkner lost out to this trifle should haunt Pelan to the end of his days. Granted, just about everyone has read “A Rose for Emily,” and it can be found in countless pages, but it is clearly the winner of 1930.

[This story first appeared in SINISTER STORIES (oddly enough, under the pen name Jasper John), and it cannot be read online at this time.  This is probably for the best.]