THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #37: A review of "The Eerie Mr. Murphy" by Howard Wandrei

Even though we were robbed of a husband/wife team in this anthology, there are a couple of brothers featured here. We already encountered Donald Wandrei’s “The Red Brain.” Here, we have a tale from his brother, Howard.



Sadly, he doesn’t match the power of his sibling. Despite the Twilight Zone-ish title, it packs very little punch.


It concerns Timothy Murphy, a small and oddly shaped man, who appears one day out of nowhere and starts out by stopping people’s clocks. Then their cars. And by the time he stalls out an airplane’s engine, killing everyone on board, he knows something is wrong with him. He turns himself in to the cops, who at first are skeptical, but when he magically causes the bullets in a gun to disappear and reappear in the cop’s pocket, they know he’s a menace that has to be dealt with.


Here’s the problem, though: even if Murphy popped into existence the very second the story begins, he acts like he has a past. So . . . has he always been doing these things? Does he have a long history of that kind of thing? If so, then why is he just now trying to figure out what’s going on?


He comes to the conclusion that he knows when something is about to happen, not that he causes these things to happen. Yet if that were true, then there are a lot of coincidences in this story, more than you could find in a dozen Charles Dickens novels.


SPOILER ALERT: When he turns himself in to the authorities, they shove him in a box, hoping that’ll get him to stop messing up the world. They hear him say, from inside the box, that he’s gone, and sure enough, when they open it up, he’s nowhere to be seen. The head cop then worries that anyone who dies in the future as a result of Murphy’s odd power would be on his own head. END OF SPOILERS.


That’s right. There are no answers to glaring problems in the story. Is it a fanciful tale? Sure, but it’s not worth bothering with.


[This story first appeared in ESQUIRE (yeah, that ESQUIRE!) and cannot be read online at this time.  Sorry about the small picture up there, but it was the only one of him I could find.]