Late Reviews Read online

  Gibson, Eva Katharine. Zauberlinda: the Wise Witch (Chicago: Robert Smith Printing Company, 1901). Pictures by Mabel Tibbitts.

  A children’s fairy-tale, apparently the very first conscious imitation of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, first published in Chicago in June 1900. Visually this book is stunning, with illustrations sometimes underlying or framing the text on facing pages. Each illustration is printed in a single color of ink but these colors (ranging from red, yellow, blue, orange, purple, gray, etc.) vary from one illustration to the next. The effect is striking, and it compares not unfavorably with W.W. Denslow’s similar work in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

  The story itself tells of a young girl, Annie, who lives on a South Dakota farm with her father and grandmother. Annie is mostly left on her own, as her father is away all of the time prospecting for gold in the hills. Annie is enchanted by the hired hand, Pete Pumpernickel, who tells her stories of the “Hill Folks” (gnomes) of the Hartz mountains in his native Germany. Of course Annie encounters Gnomes that are very similar to their German counterparts, and this is the story of her adventure.

  In the very short “Introduction,” the author states her purpose to be “an attempt to unite the rich Legend of Older Lands with the Fact and Fancy of the New World. An opportunity for this has been offered by the Mystery and Romance associated with the Black Hills in the imagination of the Dakota Indians.” While the visual appeal of the book is great, the quality of the story is not up to the same level. Gibson’s prose is at times rather long-winded, and the pacing of her story suffers from this prolixity beyond the fact that it is rambling and episodic to begin with. However, her ambition to meld old world mythology with that of the new world (particularly with the Native American elements) is admirable and (for its time) original, and her work is certainly worth reading even though her success at realizing her ambition is questionable.

  Goddard, Richard E. The Whistling Ancestors (London: Stanley Smith, 1936).

  A thriller, involving voodoo, in which Patrick Worthing, down on his luck and plying the trade of a street-artist in London, crosses paths with Dr. Caspar Pettifranc, a mulatto voodoo master, who with his mamaloi Maman Constance has kidnapped a young girl. Pettifranc aims to sacrifice the girl to the devil in aid of his plans for the rise of the black race and the overthrow of the white. Worthing, along with the girl’s friend, seeks to foil Pettifranc’s plans, and a romance develops. The Whistling Ancestors are some spirits (who make chirruping noises when present) that Maman Constance consults, and there are some other occult elements, like zombies, which appear but are under-utilized. There are also vivisection patients, who are (à la Dr. Moreau) being surgically transformed into satyrs and fauns. The writing is pedestrian, and the story is marred by being told predominately in the first person, with several lurches into a third person omniscient narrator when the action passes out of the range of the main character’s view.

  Little is known about the author. His first book was General Cargo: An Introduction to Salesmanship (1916), but he also published three other novels: Bamboosa (1922); Forward Young Ladies (1923); and Obsession (1925). The Whistling Ancestors is left open-ended, with the escape of Caspar Pettifranc, but no sequel appeared.

  Grant, Alan. It Walks the Woods (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1936).

  This is essentially a thriller, in which there is a primary intensity in developing the mystery of the plot, but virtually no interest in literary atmosphere. The story centers on the ancestral Charlieu Forest (near Reading), which has been recently sold by the financially strained Charlieu family to a Canadian businessman, Stephen Ellerton, who learned early of a planned nearby development, so he acquired the forest in order to supply the new development with ready lumber and thereby make a considerable profit. Associated with the forest is the haunting figure of a Charlieu ancestor, Sir Guy Charlieu, who appears wearing a long black coat and a wide hat, carrying a silver trumpet. Competing business interests attempt to use the legend to rile up the local workers, but it quickly becomes apparent that more than mere scare tactics are involved in the various murders which disrupt the harvesting of lumber. Meanwhile Ellerton develops a love interest with the Lena Charlieu, which complicates the whole situation, but sets up a typical ending once the mystery is solved.

  Alan Grant was the pseudonym used only on this one novel by Gilbert Alan Kennington (1906-1986), who wrote around thirty novels and plays as Alan Kennington, including The Night Has Eyes (1939), which sold extremely well and was later made into a movie with James Mason in his first starring role. Kennington also taught classics at St. Aubyns Preparatory School in Rottingdean from 1929 to 1970, when his failing eyesight forced his retirement.

  Green, Julian. Christine and Other Stories, translated from the French by Courtney Bruerton (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1930).

  This is a collection of four stories—two very short ones, and two much longer novellas. There is also a translator’s introduction, and a useful (if brief) bibliography of Green’s work in French and English up to the time of publication. Julian Green (1900-1998) was born in Paris of American parents proud of their southern associations, who were loyal to the America of the south before the Civil War. A prolific writer (who later—and confusingly—used “Julien” as his first name), Green wrote mostly in French, and he is probably best remembered for the nineteen volumes of his journals published from 1938 through 1991.

  Of the two short stories, “Leviathan” tells of the boredom and isolation of a young man on a trans-Atlantic voyage (it ends very abruptly and unsatisfactorily), while “Christine” is about the presence of a strange girl cousin that disrupts the household of a teenage boy.

  “The Keys of Death” is the first of the two novellas. It uses the trope of a found manuscript that is later completed by another hand. It concerns a boy who has resolved to kill an interloper into his small household, but who is prevented doing so by his cousin, a young girl with some kind of powers. In “The Pilgrim of the Earth” an adolescent escapes the spirit-crushing household of his childhood by going off to school, only to meet death, possibly as a result of a supernatural haunting.

  “Christine” and “The Pilgrim of the Earth” are the best things in this collection, but Green’s overuse of neurasthenic, isolated and lonely young men can pall very quickly. The supernatural occurs almost tangentially. Green’s primary interest is in presenting the abnormal psychology of self-doomed young men, often conflicted with religion and bearing a repression of sexuality.

  Green, Roger Lancelyn. The Castle in Lyonesse: A Tale of Yesterday and Tomorrow (unpublished typescript, circa 30,000 words).

  This is one of a number of completed but unpublished writings by Roger Lancelyn Green (1918-1987). This juvenile fantasy was written first in 1950, and revised in 1956. It shares some characters with, and is set after, Green’s earlier unpublished children’s book, The Wood That Time Forgot, written in 1944 and revised in 1949.

  It concerns two children in Cornwall, Godfrey Trelaun and Barbara Arnold, who one night observe a huge bubble rise from the ocean, and they find that Lyonesse has resurfaced. In the Castle in Lyonesse they find a long struggle playing out between Morgawse, Nimue and the duplicitous Queen Morgana le Fay on the one side, and the frightening Dragon Knight on the other. Godfrey and Barbara are accompanied by a white cat named Peredur. Their adventures are prefigured symbolically soon after their arrival in the Castle by Godfrey’s chess match with an unseen opponent. There are elements for a good story here, but unfortunately they never come together into a compelling tale. The reader is left mostly with disappointment.

  Green, Roger Lancelyn. The Land of the Lord High Tiger (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1958).

  A children’s novel, telling the story of the dream-adventures of a boy named Roger and his toys, along with his sister Priscilla, in land ruled over by a tiger. Green’s prose-style is turgid and unengaging. Upon publication in 1958, the reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement accused Green of p
oaching on the stories of Narnia by Green’s close friend C.S. Lewis, but the truth, as Lewis himself quickly admitted, is that Green’s book was written earlier but was published afterwards.

  A curiosity at best; a bore at worst. At the request of his daughter, Priscilla, Green wrote a sequel called The City of the Tiger, but it has never been published.

  Green, Roger Lancelyn. The Wood That Time Forgot: A Midsummer Night’s Tale (unpublished typescript, circa 36,000 words).

  Roger Lancelyn Green’s unpublished children’s novel has the honor of inspiring C.S. Lewis to write The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), the first of his Chronicles of Narnia. Green had come to know Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien at Oxford in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and was a member of their writer’s group The Inklings while he was deputy librarian at Merton College from 1945 to 1950. Green wrote the first version of The Wood That Time Forgot in 1944, and shared the manuscript with Lewis the following year. Lewis was enthusiastic, but suggested a number of revisions. Green reworked the book in 1949, but it remained unpublished. It nearly came out around 1972, in a planned series by Lin Carter of children’s fantasies to have been called The Magic Kingdom—it would have been a companion series to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series for which Carter served as the primary editorial consultant. But the children’s series came to naught. The only section of The Wood That Time Forgot that has ever been published is chapter 2, “The Enchanted Wood,” which I included in my anthology Tales Before Narnia (2008).

  The book is comprised of thirteen chapters, and takes place on a few weekends in June. Joanna and Barbara are two girls sent to stay with their uncle, Sir Malcolm Arnold, while their parents go on a lecture tour in Canada. The two girls, along with their weekend friend from Oxford, Diana, explore the surrounding Wood Arnold Manor, which they discover to be enchanted. On the first weekend, the girls hear a piping music in the woods, and later discover a tunnel into the deeper woods, where they find a runic inscription. Back in Oxford, Diana visits their mutual friend Randal, a young bookish student at Merton College, and he deciphers the runic inscription as reading “Elena” and he accepts the invitation to visit Wood Arnold Manor with the girls the next weekend. The rest of the story takes place on this visit.

  Basically, they discover that the Wood is outside of time where an age-old story is being enacted between Elena and a man called Agares the Wood-dweller. Randal recognizes Agares as a fiend who is named in Sir Reginald Scott’s writings, and at the same time he begins to view as a missing part of his own life story the woman Elena, whom he feels he has been seeking all his bookish years. Green uses the medieval French romance of Aucassin and Nicolette as reference point for the relationship between Randal and Elena. Gradually we learn that Elena has a remarkable past. In the beginning of time, she was Lilith, and she sided with the powers of evil and attempted to corrupt innocent children of men. Later she found the power of Good at work behind the Evil, and she turned towards the Good. But her situation left her trapped in the Wood with Agares as her master, until a final struggle which would bring Elena peace or desolation. Randal is thus left with an important choice—take Elena out of the Wood, thereby making her a normal mortal; or stay within the Wood with her forever, but subjugated to Agares. Randal impulsively makes the wrong choice initially, but with the help of the girls both Elena and Randal are rescued and escape the Wood.

  The story as it unfolds is a bit more complicated as well as somewhat more confusing than I have described here. A few details (such as the temptation of the children with candies, and the overarching spiritual and Christian trappings) are recalled in Lewis’s later book, but this is predominately Green’s own story and his own personal vision, even if it is a much lesser book when compared to Lewis’s classic story. Green’s unpublished The Castle in Lyonesse is a further story of Barbara Arnold, in which Randal and his wife Elena appear.

  Gregory, Franklin. The White Wolf (New York: Random House, 1941).

  A tale of lycanthropy, set in a rural Pennsylvania valley, where Pierre de Camp-d’Avesnes watches his daughter Sara grow more and more distant, as she is taken with long late night walks. Pierre’s neighbor and friend is the newspaper magnate Manning Trent, whose son David accompanies Sara on these late night excursions. Gruesome murders are accompanied by sightings of a large white wolf, together with a smaller wolf. Evidence of the pair’s unwitting involvement mounts, as it is observed that they cast no shadows, and when a flash photograph is taken at night of the two wolves, the print shows only Sara and David. Pierre discovers evidence of an old family curse, which afflicts the firstborn of every seventh generation, and Sara marks the seventh generation since the last occurrence. Pierre, Manning Trent, and their psychologist friend Dr. Hardt attempt to discern a way to save the souls of Sara and David.

  The White Wolf is one of the better, older werewolf novels, considerably superior to Gerald Biss’s The Door of the Unreal (1919), or Alfred H. Bill’s The Wolf in the Garden (1931). Additionally, one can’t help but admire a novel from 1941 in which a psychiatrist makes a level-headed assessment of Sigmund Freud, as follows: “Freud was wrong on many counts. He laid far too much emphasis on the sexual origin of both the neuroses and the psychoneuroses. I much prefer to regard him as, rather than the founder of psychoanalysis, an advertising man who aroused popular interest in the mind.”

  Franklin Long Gregory (1905-1985) earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism at the University of Iowa. He worked for the Philadelphia Record from 1936-1947, after which time he was a reporter and columnist at the Newark Star-Ledger for twenty-five years. His first novel was a mystery, The Cipher of Death (1934). The White Wolf was his last published book, though he contributed a number of stories to the mystery and fantasy magazines of the 1940s-50s.

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  Hall, Leland. Sinister House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919).

  Sinister House is one of the first of a series of horror novels published in the literary mainstream in the United States between the wars, before weird fiction was virtually displaced by modernism. It is an adequate if unexceptional ghost story in the psychological mode of Henry James. The narrator is Pierre Smith, who with his wife and children live in the town of Forsby. The Smiths’s friends are the devoted couple Eric and Julia Grier, whose house is haunted, due (it is later revealed) to a crime in Eric’s past, with regard to the previous owners of the house. The haunting wreaks havoc on Julia’s health in particular. Suspense builds gradually until the revelations come near the end.

  Leland Boyleston Hall (1883-1957) was born in Malden, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard University (A.B. 1905) and the University of Wisconsin (A.M. 1912). He specialized in music and taught at Columbia University before serving with the American Red Cross in World War I. From 1920 to 1922 he taught at Harvard and Radcliffe College, and in 1930 he joined the faculty of Smith College, where he was professor of music until his retirement in 1952. Sinister House was the first of two novels, the other being They Seldom Speak (1935), a generational novel about a New England family. His nonfiction titles include a book of travel impressions of the native life near the southern edge of the Sahara, Timbuctoo (1927); an account of Hall’s relationship with a former slave who served as his servant in Marrakesh, Salah and His American (1933); and a book to help the layman appreciate music, Listener’s Music (1937).

  Hamel, Frank. Tiger Wolves (London: Grafton and Co., 1916).

  Tiger Wolves is the second of four novels, all scarce, by Frank Hamel, who was born Florence Hamel (1869-1957). She is best remembered for her biographies of aristocratic women, mostly French but also including Englishwoman Lady Hester Stanhope. Hamel’s Human Animals (1915) is a study of the folklore and beliefs of men and women who could transform into animals. She owned and edited the monthly serial The Library World for about fifty years, and in 1912 founded the publishing firm, Grafton and Co., the publisher of her two novels with fantasy and folkloristic content, comprising Tiger Wolves and The Luminous Pearl (1919).
r />   In Tiger Wolves, a young Englishwoman Grace Harrow has moved to southern Africa to take care of her older bachelor brother Leonard. She quickly ends up with two rival suitors, both lawyers, Jim Morgan and Ralph Anderson. Though friends, they are now on opposing sides of some nebulous law case, in which Morgan is partnered with Leonard Harrow. Grace of course falls in love with the lawyer on the other side, Ralph Anderson, who has occasional periods of weird illness, during one of which he is glimpsed by Grace acting like a wild animal, white-faced and running around on all fours. Grace gradually learns that there is some curse upon his family, going back to his grandfather, to do with tiger wolves (hyaenas), and suspicions of lycanthropy. Ralph’s father and brother still live at the family sheep farm in eastern south Africa, where they are facing ruin, from the curse and the superstitions of the kaffirs. Grace visits the family homestead, where she witnesses an animistic astral projection standing near Ralph’s father. Events later come to a head, as there are deaths and a subsequent trial for murder of Ralph's brother (his father, a co-defendant, has disappeared). Grace gains the assistance of Ralph's materialist physician, Dr. Brigaud, who discovers some secret kaffir society that has used a totem paw with steel blades in it as the murder weapon. Thus, the secret society is supposedly responsible for the recent deaths as well as the curse and its long-term effects. Yet the astral projection is left unexplained, as are the physical symptoms occasionally exhibited by Ralph, even when he is hundreds of miles away from the sheep farm. Some of the supernaturalism in Tiger Wolves is left ambiguous, and not entirely rationalized. As a novel mixing supernaturalism with the beliefs of native Africans, it is similar to the two near contemporary novels of Vere D. Shortt, The Lost Sheep (1915) and the posthumous The Rod of the Snake (1917, completed by Shortt’s sister, Frances H. Mathews).