THE WOMEN OF WEIRD TALES 04: “A LURID PHOSPHORENCE OF THEIR OWN”

The next few posts should be fun. We are almost at a bunch of Everil Worrell stories, and as we saw in “Leonora”, she is great for delivering that weirdly modern creepy sensationalism. This week’s story is no exception.

The Canal by Everil Worrell (December 1927)

Our narrator is a joe-everyman sort of guy, a young and single office worker, prone to driving aimlessly around his already starting to decay industrial city. He feels vague and alienated, beset by a mood of dissatisfaction he does not understand. One night while driving he finds himself in the edge-lands by the river where a dilapidated boat lies beached offshore. And there on the boat just across a narrow gap of running water, our narrator meets a girl.

Now people, this is a weird tale and we know nothing good can come of this. But it’s the ride we are here for, and before long our poor Joe Everyman is obsessed with this girl who sits on a ruined boat at night chatting across the gap with his lonesomeness. She forbids him to cross and mentions a guardian, and our Everyman is annoyed and frustrated at the games the girl is playing with him. Meanwhile he hears a vague story at work about some plague of deaths a few years back down in the bad part of town where immigrants and social undesirables live. Something about a girl and her father/guardian being blamed. But that’s no matter because the river’s changing and soon that gap of running water will dry down to a trickle and the girl will be able to cross with a bit of help from Joe Everyman. Poor sap.

Of course, she’s a vampire and responsible for all those deaths, and Joe Everyman’s really sorry he helped her get free, and he really wants to warn people that there’s a vampire on the loose, especially after he drives the girl to a cave where she frees all her sealed away brethren, and they descend on a vacation site and begin killing campers. Yet, at the same time he’s no longer lonely and plagued by that sense of purposelessness. So, why not throw in with the vampires? They’re the people you belong with after all.

Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!

And to be clear, I am intentionally referencing “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” because the endings echo each other, and “The Canal” preceded the Lovecraft story by four years. This echoing is a feature not a bug in my opinion, and it is fun to witness. Worrell’s later story “The Gray Killer”, one we’ll eventually get to here, definitely nods towards “The Call of Cthulhu” while being wholly her own.

Those pings are what I am looking for when reading forgotten writers who were as good as their better-known contemporaries. Encountering Worrell’s work very quickly made me glad I took on this project. Her work is lurid and overblown, full of first-person narrators writing feverishly of the horrors they have witnessed, but they are also about dark obsessions and monsters hidden behind the everyday. In “Leonora”, there’s that sinister car waiting at a country crossroads at midnight. In “The Canal”, there’s the industrial city with its smoking chimneys and abandoned edge-lands that hide monsters. There is none of that antiqueness you find in Lovecraft, no gambrel roofed brownstones harkening to an inescapable past. Instead, Worrell gives us very contemporary characters at odds with their surroundings: the farm girl yearning for the larger world, the young office worker alienated from his peers. There is no “white ape” in the family tree to blame for your problems. Desire and obsession are all you need.    

Next week, an oddly American English ghost story about a haunting song that drives a person to murderous rages. Best of all, the song’s one you can find on Youtube.

See you then!

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