CHAPTER 86. 1959-1960
influenced my own writing: Henry Gregor Felson, Jack London, Evan Hunter, Charles Beaumont and H. P. Lovecraft. I had been buying everything I saw offered by Henry Gregor Felson in high school through the Scholastic Book Club. Students could buy paperbacks at a very low rate. The young girl in the picture on the right is Holly Felsen Welch, who was his daughter. I wrote a Blog about Henry Felsen some years ago and Holly wrote to me after reading it. She did not give me the most glowing picture of her father as a parent.
I have not spoken too much about my writing, which was generally something I was doing every night after work. By the end of 1959 I had written enough pieces, which I kept in a small filing cabinet, to begin gathering alike things into collections or anthologies, if you please. Some were stand-alone books such as the manuscript for my play Ya-Ha-Whoey! I had also drawn enough one-panel cartoons for a volume as well. I titled this Hector’s Hectic Life, even though many had not been drawn with a single character in mind. As I collected them I couldn’t decide whether Hector was dog or maybe the long-nosed guy who seemed to pop up in several. This kind of jumped back and forth for dominance between this long-nosed guy and his dog. Maybe his dog was Hector or maybe the long-nosed guy was, I don’t know.
rejected class poem into a volume, Early in the Mourning. I also pulled all the song lyrics written for Ya-Ha-Whoey!” and made a separate volume as a book of poetry that I labeled, Besotted
Ballads. Even though he only contributed to one lyric, I did credit Stuart on the cover and frontispiece as “with Stuart R. Meisel.
Later I began including a picture of my wife on the covers.
I had written three short novels since 1957. At first I just kept these separate, but early in 1960 decided they were slim enough volumes to simply combine into one book. One of the novellas was an extended and expanded reworking of my very first first short story back when I was 12. Remember, “It”. I completely restructured that Frankenstein meets Treasure Island meets Doc Sa vagefantasy and after flirting with various new titles, such as “It, From Quicksand Island”, to “Horror of Quicksand Island” to “Dream of Horror”, I settled on just Dream.
The other two were Smoke, a science fiction story of a future society controlled by a governing elite, where even sex was only allowed to the upper class. Sex, for all my Pirate Girl Fantasies and obsessiveness never did play a great role in my fiction. However, the driving force for the hero of Smoke was sex as he realized the unfairness of the society in which non-upper class men had their genitalia surgically removed. Woman were not so mutilated because the poorer population of females could serve as sex slaves to the elite men.
The third item was originally called Rodder Road, but then shorted to simply Road. It was a tale about a dead hot rodder’s ghost seeking revenge against a rich entrepreneur he blamed for his fatal accident. The main character and all the ghosts he met when dead were naked. It never made sense to me why ghosts always appeared in the clothes they died wearing. Clothes didn’t have souls. I didn’t think ghosts would be walking about in sheets either. Who was handing out the sheets? I put the three stories together in a volume I called Smoke Dream Road. Sorry, but it had nothing to do with drugs.
I had started an apocalyptic novel about the end of the world called Breadth of the Earth when I was 15, but I stopped working on it in 1958. It was a microcosmic view of what would become of the Earth if Revelation played out. Everything centered around a farm family in this rural area. I did nearly 200 pages, but that was it.
What a red glow to the East. It was hard on his eyes; hard on his heart. He had to turn away and face the day beyond the fire. Below a spire caught the rising sun, his little country church. The tall steeple shadowed the fields .
“I can’t accept this. No, I can’t. Maybe I never heard a call. Perhaps it was the wind rustling the tops of the corn stalks, as my father said.”
In those days when he was a child the sun rose quickly and stayed long. The Iowa land was flat and gave the sun nowhere to hide.
Excerpt from Breadth of the Earth, (1958)
It would be a few more years before I wrote a complete novel, unless you count Attention Teacher! or Frank March’s School Daze. To be honest, I’m not certain I ever even finished those two opuses.
I certainly had enough short stories by the time I was 18 to create a collection. I kind of wanted to keep the genres together as one set and I had a mixed bag, science fiction, horror, crime, humor and I suppose what could pass as mainstream. In the early part of 1960 I did put together a volume of horror, more or less, called Never-Contented Things! (The title came from a line in a poem by Edgar Allan Poe.)
Of which those butterflies
Of Earth, who seek the skies,
And so come down again
[Never-contented things!]
from Fairy-Land
I took the cover photograph.
I made two momentous decisions around this time. Call them gimmicks, if you wish. First, I would never do a collection of works containing a poem or story or essay with the same name as the collection. There was not to ever be a Crypt and Other Stories.
My other desire was never to use the indefinite article as the first word in the title. I have written thousands of pieces since I made my fateful pledge to be a writer at age 12, and I have escaped using the dreaded, “The” in all titles save one. That one was called, “The Ravin’” and since it was making a direct reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s, “The Raven”, I had to use the indefinite.
He crept from place to place and all living things fled from him. He was alive, yet no heart pulsated within and he took no air through his nostrils. He ate nothing nor drank anything. Yet he lived.
He knew nothing of love.
He saw two like beings, although there was a difference between the two. They were together when he first saw them and he thought it was one creature. Then it broke in half and he saw there were two. They did not flee from each other. They made noises between each other. They held each other’s paws and sometimes they pressed their mouths together. He watched and wondered.
He discovered they repeated these practices day after day. He would watch from his hiding place. He watched and hated. He couldn’t help it; all he understood was hate and anything he didn’t understand he hated.
One day the two beings didn’t come. He waited for a week and they still did not return. He wondered.
One day a bird flew down and sat upon a log in the clearing. It was a large bird and very black. Its eyes flashed green in the sun. He looked at the bird and didn’t feel hate. He felt fear.
He moved from his hiding place and walked toward the bird. The wind stopped. Silence stilled the air. The bird looked at him. It didn’t fly away as all other birds did when he approached them. It sat and looked at him. He was afraid. The bird was sleek and shiny. It had an icy stare.
He stared into the bird’s eyes and reflected within was the softer being he had been watching during the past weeks. Her hair hung upon her shoulders. Her lips were chalky and no longer moist. He understood.
The bird blinked and the vision was gone.
“I know not life, yet I live. Can I die?”
The black bird gazed at him and made a sound almost like a word.
Excerpt from “The Ravin’”, (1959)
Published 2004
Creative Writers
Barnes & Nobles
Tracey Landmann, Editor
Wilmington, DE
CONTENT
TITLE _______ PAGE
.1. Crypt 9
2. Don’t Walk in the West Wood 25
3. Last Letter From Norman Underwood 35
4. Marlowe the Great 48
5. Night’s End 52
6. Twelfth Seconds 59
7. The Ravin’ 65
8. Think! 70
9. Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves 78
10. Aftermath 90
11. Last Cold Spring 96
12. Make Tracks 101
Most of these stories were eventually published in such magazines as Magazine of Horror, Creative Writers and Funny Bunny Fridays, between 1968 and 2011.
One not ever published I think was the best of the lot. It was called “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolves.” It was closer to a Jack London inspired piece than the others.
I went back inside and shook George.
“Wha…what?” His hand flashed out to grasp the rifle he kept close.
“Don’t know if it’s anything. Fire’s ‘bout dead and I don’t see Lyle.”
George sat up. “You see anything?”
“I saw a shadow in the trees. Didn’t look like a man walking.”
“How so?”
“Too short.”
“Y’say the fire’s out?”
“Almost.”
“Maybe ‘twere Lyle bent down lookin’ for wood.”
“Could be. We oughta check.”
George grunted. The two of us went outside and searched around the camp. We found a pile of branches stacked near the fire pit, plenty enough to last the night. We walked together toward the trees where I saw the shadow. As we neared I noticed the ground cover was disturbed with long smooth lines in the snow as if something of weight had been dragged. This trail led into the woods. We followed into the brush, but here the ground turned rocky and rough and it was hard to tell if the lines continued or not. It was useless trying to search more in the night. We returned to camp, built up the fire and sat in its glow until morning.
“If Lyle don’t get back by dawn,” said George, “I say we strike camp and keep going. We get to town we can send out search parties, but if he ain’t back I don’t give him much odds.”
George was right. If Lyle had wandered off into these mountains without gear he wouldn’t stand much chance.
Come what passed for dawn in these parts, we reloaded the sleds and struck out in what we thought was the direction to the sea. We traveled a good distance before we realized we were moving out of the mountains onto the ice cap that covers the inner heart of the country. This wasn’t a welcome discovery. This time of year daylight is only a brief haze and the sky was already turning a plum purple. We were going to have to camp again and firewood would be sparse on the ice cap. We loaded on any sticks we came across as we tried to make our way back to the mountain ridge, but dark overtook us and forced us to make camp.
It was that night they came.
Excerpt from “Who;s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves”, (1959)
In my collection, Never-Contented Things
With Sonja quickly fading from the picture, I returned to Pamela Wilson. We picked up dating as winter set in. We went to Sunnybrook Ballroom on double dates with Ronald while he was still a civilian. Although my relationship with Sonja had went south, Ronald and Ginny Mowrer appeared to be getting along just fine.
Ronald was very awkward on dates. I would see how he acted around a girl like Ginny and went home thinking he was even shyer than I. He would be in the back seat with Ginny looking as if he didn’t know where to put his hands. He might stiffly put an arm about her. I didn’t think there was any danger of Ginny biting his thumb.
I could see it in her eyes that she really liked him.
One day in the parking lot at Sunnybrook Ronald was talking. He pointed at something in the distance, but just as he stuck his index finger out Ginny, who had her back to him, turned around. His pointing finger went right into her breast. He turned bright red and began stuttering an apology. She simply accepted it as the accident it was. I again went home thinking I had never seen a guy so backward around girls.
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