Retro Review: "The Green Huntsman" by Dorothea Gibbons

If this cover seems familiar, that's because the artwork by Harold De Lay originally appeared on the cover of the January 1944 issue of Weird Tales.

"The Green Huntsman" is a gothic short story by Dorothea Gibbons, which was first published in the July 1954 issue of Weird Tales. The story may be found online here. This review will also be crossposted to Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

I came across this story, while I was reviewing "More Than Shadow" by Dorothy Quick and was intrigued that there were two other new stories as well as one new poem and a reprint by women writers in the same issue of Weird Tales, proving once again that Weird Tales was the most woman-friendly SFF magazine of the pulp era.

The name Dorothea Gibbons will not mean anything to most people. However, Dorothea Gibbons is a very well known author, probably one of the most famous mainstream authors ever to publish in Weird Tales next to Tennessee Williams as a sixteen-year-old debut author (and I should really review his debut story some day). For Dorothea Gibbons was none other than British novelist, poet and journalist Stella Gibbons, author of Cold Comfort Farm (which is absolutely genre, even if most people don't realise it). As Dorothea Gibbons (her full name was Stella Dorothea Gibbons), she published three stories in Weird Tales in 1953 and 1954. None have ever been reprinted.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following.

"The Green Huntsman" opens in the manor house of Scarth on a misty autumn morning dripping with gothic atmosphere. Here Richard Ayreton, lord of the manor, and his agent Nick Borrodale await the arrival of Ayreton's niece Francesca Newtownly, a penniless war widow with a seven-year-old son.

So we have the classic gothic set-up of a young woman coming to a creepy manor, from which she will eventually run clad only in her nightgown, at least if the covers of gothic romances from the 1960s are to be believed. But first, Nick has to pick up Francesca from the train station. He's instantly smitten with her, but also uneasy, because of something that haunts the nearby woods in autumn.

Nick warns Francesca and her son Paul not to go into the woods, so he won't say why, because the truth would either terrify Francesca or worse, she wouldn't believe it. So Nick males up a story about cutting down trees in the woods and that it's too dangerous to go there. Francesca, however, isn't having any of it. "If the men are felling trees, they're very quiet," she says.

Not long after, Nick gets a panicked message from Francesca that Paul and his dog Sebastian have gone missing and that Francesca fears they went into the woods. She also reveals that she knows that there was never any tree cutting work going on and begs Nick to tell her just what the matter is with those woods. Francesca also reveals that she's been in the woods and saw something green watching her from between the trees.

Paul and Sebastian eventually reappear at the manor safe and sound. Paul confesses that he went into the woods, even though Sebastian with his canine instincts for the supernatural tried to stop him. Paul also sees something green among the dead trees. When he investigates, he realises that it's a horseman clad all in green on a green horse. The horseman trains his hypnotic gaze on Paul and beckons him to come, but Sebastian, the heroic dog, intervenes and pulls Paul to the ground, saving the boy. When Paul looks up again, the green rider is gone.

Now Nick and Richard Ayreton finally share the story of the green huntsman with Francesca. It turns out that the huntsman was an evil man who hunted in those woods on a devilish horse hundreds of years ago and has been haunting the woods ever since, always appearing in autumn. According to legend, the only way to get rid of that evil spirit is when another four-legged creature will confront him to save a human life. And Sebastian, the faithful spaniel, saved Paul from the huntsman and thus exorcised the evil spirit for good.

This is a spooky gothic story that is dripping with atmosphere. The decaying manor and the misty, windswept woods are vividly described. The interior art by Virgil Finlay is also great.

I like that Francesca is not your average insipid gothic heroine who runs away from the spooky manor clad only in her nightgown. She never for a minute buys Nick's weak excuse about men felling trees in the woods and also confronts him about it.

My main criticism about "The Green Huntsman" is that it's way too short. After all the build-up, the confrontation with the evil huntsman is over in a few paragraphs. Furthermore, we don't see it happening on the page, but hear it recounted by Paul after the fact.

Also, I would have liked more details about the history of the huntsman and why he does what he does. He was an evil man and now he and his evil horse haunt the woods after his death is a weak explanation. Surely, there must be more to the story. Did the huntsman develop a taste for hunting "the most dangerous game" or was he himself hunted by villagers with pitchforks and swore vengeance from beyond the grave? Inquiring minds would like to know.

That said, I did like the solution that what broke the curse was the heroic act of a cocker spaniel. After Dorothy Quick's tale of an evil faery poodle, which appeared in the very same issue, this one makes a nice counterpoint.

The atmosphere and writing are great, but the story is flawed.

Retro Review: "Blue and Silver Brocade" by Dorothy Quick

This cover illustrates not "Blue and Silver Brocade", but the rather lacklustre novel "The Elder Gods" by Don A. Stuart a.k.a. John W. Campbell

 

I'm taking a bit of a break from Jirel of Joiry, because in my experience, those stories are best, when not read directly one after another. And so I decided to take a look at another underrated woman author of the golden age, Dorothy Quick.

Comrade-in-arms Steve J. Wright recently came across the gothic horror story "Blue and Silver Brocade" by Dorothy Quick in the October 1939 issue of Unknown. The premise sounded interesting, so I decided to review it myself. The story may be read online here. 

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point!

In true gothic fashion, "Blue and Silver Brocade" starts on a cold night in a spooky mansion on the Scottish moors. The narrator, a young woman named Alice, cannot sleep, because she's cold. Alice would love to have another blanket, but she is loath to wake her Aunt Annabel, owner of the mansion, or the servants.

So Alice searches her room for something that will keep her warm. In a closet, she finds several boxes and looks through them in search of a blanket. In the last box, finally, she finds a patchwork quilt and decides that this will do just fine to keep her warm for the night.

The quilt is quite unusual. For starters, the patches are quite large and made from vastly different materials – velvet, silk, brocade, wool, ancient linen, some kind of parchment that might also be human skin – whereas quilt patches are normally made of the same material, usually cotton, because otherwise the quilt won't properly fit together (ask me how I know). What is more, the edges of the squares are embroidered and the embroidery seems to spell out words in what looks like runes.

One square made from blue brocade with silver embroidery and tiny crowns particularly fascinates Alice, because the material is so beautiful. And so she falls asleep with her hand resting on the blue and silver brocade square. This turns out to be a big mistake.

Alice suddenly finds herself in an unfamiliar room and equally unfamiliar body, wearing a gown made from the same silver and blue brocade as the quilt square. It quickly becomes clear that Alice is now inhabiting the body of a young woman named Jeanne in seventeenth century France. Alice can see and feel everything Jeanne experiences, but she cannot influence events nor does she know anything about what's going on apart from what she directly witnesses.

Jeanne is quickly joined by a beautiful woman named Francoise with whom she is about to embark on some kind of dangerous venture, which will put Francoise ahead of her rival, a mysterious woman only known as "the lady". Jeanne is apparently an attendant of this mysterious lady and wears the lady's silver and blue brocade livery, though her loyalty is to Francoise. Jeanne and Francoise both put on black hooded cloaks and leave through a secret passage. Outside the passage, they are met by Jeanne's lover Raoul.

A carriage takes Jeanne, Francoise and Raoul to a shabby house, where a rat-faced, toothless woman awaits them. Alice knows that Jeanne is terrified, though she has no idea of what.

Inside the shabby house, Jeanne and Raoul are taken to a ritual chamber where other cloaked and hooded figures are already waiting. Alice finally realises that she is about to witness a black mass.

Francoise is lying naked on the altar, while the ritual goes on around her. Raoul supplies some helpful dialogue explaining that Francoise – though already beautiful like a Greek statue – is attending the black mass in search of even more beauty, because she wishes to regain the affection of the king – Louis XIV of France – who has transferred his attention from Francoise to the mysterious lady.

We are now treated to a graphic description of the black mass, complete with a blood sacrifice that is initially implied to be a baby, but thankfully turns out to be only a black rooster whose blood is splattered all over the naked Francoise.

Before the black mass can reach its climax and more blood sacrifices can be made, the cultists are interrupted by a patrol of the king's men who break down the door on the orders of the mysterious lady. The satanic priest commits suicide, Raoul throws his cloak over Francoise's head and tells her to play dead.

Then the guards break down the door. The guard captain recognises Raoul and is clearly surprised to see him attending a black mass (I can't even blame him, since I would be surprised to see any acquaintance of mine attending a black mass, particularly one with blood-splattering sacrifices). Raoul claims that it was just curiosity which brought him there. However, the guard captain informs Raoul that he has to arrest everybody present, including Raoul.

Raoul asks if the captain if he could at least let Jeanne go and sweeps aside her black cloak to reveal the silver and blue brocade livery of the lady. The captain, however, insists that he has to arrest everybody - king's orders and the lady's will – and that there will be no exceptions for anybody, not even an attendant of the lady.

So Raoul, Jeanne and the rest of the cultists are arrested. Jeanne is glad that at least Francoise will be able to escape, since the guard captain thought she was dead, because her naked body was covered in (chicken) blood, and left her behind.

The captain grants Raoul and Jeanne a few minutes alone in a cell. Raoul says that this is good-bye for both of them. For the lady will be furious that Francoise escaped the trap she set for her and will have everybody who was arrested at the black mass tortured. However, of all the cultists, only Jeanne and Raoul know Francoise's name. Raoul also casually drops Francoise's full name, so Alice is able to use her knowledge of history to piece everything together. Francoise is Madame de Montespan, mistress of Louis XIV. The "lady" is her successor, Madame Scarron a.k.a. the Marquise of Maintenon. So Francoise's attempts to regain the king's favour by satanic means were ultimately futile.

Raoul now asks Jeanne if she is strong enough to withstand torture. Jeanne says that she hopes she will be strong enough, but she is afraid. However, Jeanne also declares that she would rather die than betray Francoise. So she begs Raoul to kill her. Raoul kisses Jeanne and strangles her. We get another quite graphic description of Jeanne being throttled to death, while a desperate Alice wonders what will happen to her, when Jeanne dies.

However, Alice does not die. Instead, she wakes up screaming, while her Aunt Annabel and Annabel's maid Hester stand over her bed. Both Annabel and Hester are horrified to see that Alice has found the quilt. Hester says that the quilt should have been burned long ago, while Aunt Annabel finally tells Alice the story of the quilt.

The quilt, it turns out, was made by an old witch who collected scraps of fabric with terrible histories connected to them. She pieced the scraps together with her magic, so that if someone falls asleep with their hand touching one of the squares, they will relive whatever terrible memory has been encoded in the square.

The quilt ended up with an ancestor of Aunt Annabel's late husband who put it in a guestroom and then waited for his guests to tell him about their nightmares. But then, one guest went mad and another died and the quilt was packed away. Aunt Annabel's husband showed her the quilt and Annabel slept with it for two nights, until she could not stand it anymore. However, she could never bring herself to destroy the quilt either.

Aunt Annabel wants to destroy the quilt now, but Alice won't let her. She wants to try sleeping under it again and she also has just the square picked out that she wants to try, the one which looks like parchment or human skin…

 

A portrait of the historical Madame de Montespan by an unknown artist.

"Blue and Silver Brocade" is a highly effective and – by the standards of the time – remarkably graphic story of gothic horror. It's yet another example of the "tale within a tale" stories that were popular during the golden age and that particularly Dorothy Quick was clearly fond of. But unlike other "tale within a tale" stories, here we don't have people sitting around a fireplace or dinner table telling a spooky story. Instead, there is a unique delivery vehicle, a haunted patchwork quilt that transports those who sleep under it into other eras and lives.

I have to admit that I love the idea of a haunted patchwork quilt that contains spooky stories and not just because I have been known to make quilts myself (not haunted, though). And making a real world replica of Dorothy Quick's fictional quilt – hopefully not haunted – sounds like a great craft project. Maybe an idea for a future Worldcon.

However, the haunted quilt is simply a great premise for a series of interconnected stories, though keeping the quilt in a box in a room where guests can stumble upon it unaware of the danger does strike me as very negligent. And indeed, Dorothy Quick wrote two more stories about the haunted patchwork quilt, which I will eventually review, if only because I love the premise.

While the framing story offers a standard gothic spooky mansion on the moors set-up, the dream story takes us into a completely different genre, namely that of historical fiction. Francoise de Montespan and her romantic rival, Francoise, Marquise de Maintenon a.k.a. "the lady" (probably because Luis XIV going for two women with such similar names would have been very confusing for readers) are both actual historical figures, though Jeanne and Raoul are fictional. There even is a portrait of Madame de Montespan wearing a dress of golden brocade like the one she wears in the story.

Madame de Montespan really was rumoured to have been involved in black masses where a rogue priest named Étienne Guiborg pouring blood over her naked body. She was also rumoured to have been a client of Catherine Monvoisin a.k.a. La Voisin (implied to be the rat-faced woman mentioned in the story), poisoner, abortionist and sorceress to the French aristocracy, who implicated Madame de Montespan after her arrest. Historical fiction generally is not kind to Madame de Montespan and tends to portray her as a villainess of the worst kind, even though we cannot be sure how many of the terrible stories told about her are really true and how many are the result of people arrested in connection with Catherine Monvoisin during the so-called affaire des poisons in 1677 (the story is implied to be set during this time) giving false confessions under torture. Interestingly, both history and fiction are much kinder to the Marquise de Maintenon who is generally considered to have been a good influence on Louis XIV, to have treated his legitimate wife well (unlike Madame de Montespan) and who founded a school for impoverished aristocratic girls.

So it's interesting that Dorothy Quick turns Francoise de Montespan into a semi-sympathetic character who commands loyalty unto death from Raoul and Jeanne, though it's never clear just why these two would be willing to die for her, while Madame de Maintenon is portrayed as the villainess of the story.

 

The tragic adventures of the doomed lovers Jeanne and Raoul in seventeenth century France reminded me very much of the Angélique series by Serge and Anne Golon, which my teenaged self devoured with great glee. Not just because of the setting – seventeenth century France during the reign of Louis XIV – but also because of the quite graphic violence and bloody happenings. And trust me, the Angélique series has a lot of that and is full of torture, executions, murders, sexual violence, pirates, harems, the inquisition, etc... Madame de Montespan actually does appear as a supporting character in some of the Angelique novels (as does Louis XIV), once again engaged in black masses, poisonings and other mischief. Though the first Angelique novel, Angélique, the Marquise of the Angels, did not appear until 1957, eighteen years after "Blue and Silver Brocade" was published, so it can't possibly have inspired this story.

Which begets the question, what did inspire this story? For while there are a lot of historical sagas full of romance and quite graphic violence with female protagonists, the examples that come to mind – the Angelique novels, the Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett, the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor – all postdate "Blue and Silver Brocade". And the historical fiction of the era, works by writers like Raphael Sabatini, Georgette Heyer, Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb, Margaret Mitchell, Hervey Allen, etc… is quite different from the historical scenes in "Blue and Silver Brocade". The rivalry between Madame de Montespan and the Marquise de Maintenon and the affaire des poisons has been frequently chronicled, often in a quite sensational manner, so Dorothy Quick may well have come across the story. The graphic violence may have been inspired by the Theatre du Grand-Guignol, but the blood-drenched horror plays presented at that famous Paris theatre were usually not historical. So was Dorothy Quick the first to merge romantic historical drama with graphic violence? This is certainly a mystery to be explored further.

Steve J. Wright was quite shocked at how graphic the violence in "Blue and Silver Brocade" was. And indeed, the story is remarkably graphic by 1930s standards. We not only get a graphic description of a blood-drenched black mass and an equally graphic description of a woman being strangled to death from the POV of the victim, we also have nudity and several passionate and thrilling kisses, including one kiss which happens as Jeanne is strangled to death (which hints at erotic asphyxiation). By 1930s standards, this is strong stuff.

What makes this even more remarkable is that "Blue and Silver Brocade" was not published in the fairly liberal Weird Tales, where graphic violence, satanic rituals, passionate kisses and hints of sex all showed up more or less frequently, but in John W. Campbell's much more prudish Unknown, which was focussed more on proto-urban fantasy, humorous fantasy and Arabian Nights type adventures than on gothic horror. I'm not surprised that Dorothy Quick chose to submit this story to Unknown. After all, Campbell paid better and much more promptly than Weird Tales, which was notoriously slow to pay, particularly under Farnsworth Wright. However, I'm surprised that Campbell bought it, because "Blue and Silver Brocade" is so very much not a John W. Campbell type story and would seem much more at home in Weird Tales or even the likes of Spicy Mystery or Spicy Adventure.

"Blue and Silver Brocade" is also a depressing story, because the actions of the characters in the historical flashback are ultimately futile. Jeanne dies by the hand of Raoul, it is strongly implied that Raoul will be executed for his part in the conspiracy (and for killing Jeanne) and Francoise does not regain the affections of the King, but will be banished from court. It's very much a downer ending, which also heightens the impact of the graphic violence.

"Blue and Silver Brocade" passes the Bechdel test with flying colours, something which is exceedingly rare for golden age SFF stories. What's even more remarkable is that except for Raoul, all named characters are female. The other Dorothy Quick story I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project also passed the Bechdel test, which shows that Quick centered women characters and their experiences in her fiction.

Next to Fritz Leiber's justly beloved Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, Dorothy Quick's Patchwork Quilt series is certainly one of the most interesting and unusual works to appear in Unknown. Dorothy Quick is vastly underrated and I for one will be very interested to read the other two stories in this series.

Retro Review: "The Werewolf's Howl" by Brooke Byrne

I'm continuing my quest to review stories by obscure women authors of the golden age with "The Werewolf's Howl" by Brooke Byrne, a gothic horror short story which appeared in the December 1934 issue of Weird Tales. I came across the story, while reviewing "Black God's Shadow" by C.L. Moore. The story may be read online here.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point!

The story starts in full gothic manner with young Doctor Gradnov walking through a dark and sinister forest on a cold night, making his way to the equally sinister Castle Martheim, which is located on a cliff overlooking a nameless river. It's obvious that this errand will not end well.

The reason that has brought Doctor Gradnov to Castle Martheim is that the last Baron Martheim lies dying. Doctor Gradnov is troubled by this, because the Baron is not just a patient, he was also a friend with whom the Doctor played chess and talked about vintage wines.

Doctor Gradnov finds the Baron near death and clearly terrified of something. However, the Baron refuses a sedative – though not the brandy the Doctor gives him – and insists that he has to share his secret with the Doctor.

And so, the Baron tells his story. Some forty years before, the Baron – we now learn that his first name is Konrad – went to university and would hold forth about his grand theories about the nature of existence in the local coffeehouses, where he also fell for a waitress named Hilda. However, he had a rival for Hilda's affections, an older student named Ivan. Hilda preferred the young Baron, whereas Ivan was left stewing with jealousy.

One night, Ivan confronts Konrad in a tavern near closing time. The Baron knows that Ivan hates him and so he is very surprised that Ivan sits down to share a drink with him. Once the innkeeper has withdrawn, Ivan leans close to Konrad and asks if he still denies the existence of the soul. Konrad answer in the affirmative and declares that no, he has no returned to superstition. Next, Ivan asks if Konrad believes that one can sell one's soul. Konrad declares that this is nonsense. I guess we can all see where this is going by now.

Ivan now tells Konrad that he has sold his soul in exchange for great wisdom and the secrets of the old ones. Ivan also offers to show Konrad ghosts, werewolves and the undead. Konrad still doesn't believe Ivan, but agrees to go with him, when Ivan taunts him that he is just scared.

Ivan takes Konrad to a ruined castle in the deep dark woods. There, Ivan opens his bag, pulls out all sorts of ritual implements, which he had wisely brought along, and sets them up. He also has an old pistol and a blessed silver bullet marked with a cross, which is the only thing that can slay a werewolf. Ivan hands the pistol to Konrad and tells him to load it. He also tells Konrad that if he fires the bullet at a werewolf and misses, his soul shall forever be forfeit to the undead.

Then Ivan begins his ritual, which generates a lot of smoke. Outside the ruin, the wolves are howling. One appears inside the castle and attacks Konrad. Konrad fires, misses and gets bitten.

The next morning, Konrad flees the university town. He travels the world, looking for a cure, but finds none. For forty years, the Baron has lived in fear of the werewolves who will take his soul once he dies. And now that he is about to die, he is utterly terrified.

Doctor Gradnov tries to calm down the old Baron and tells him that he is safe and that there is no such thing as werewolves. The Baron claims that he can already hear them howling, that he know Ivan is waiting for him. However, Doctor Gradnov and the Baron's lone servant Hans can't hear anything.

The Baron finally expires, his face a twisted mask of horror, and now the young Doctor finally does hear something. Outside the castle, a wolf is howling. Three times the wolf howls, a long bitter howl of inhuman despair. Hans, the servant, and even the otherwise atheistic Doctor Gradnov both pray.

This is a typical example of the filler stories often found in Weird Tales. There are no real surprises here and it's clear from the beginning where the story is going. Not to mention that the title is a spoiler, which was a common problem during the pulp era. Like many other filler stories, "The Werewolf’s Howl" is also an example of a "tale within a tale" story. I have reviewed a couple of other stories of this type, including two from Weird Tales.

However, "The Werewolf's Howl" is nicely written and dripping with gothic atmosphere. It's set in the vaguely German, vaguely Slavic never-neverland of gothic fiction, where every dark forest is full of vampires and every castle is home to a vampire and a couple of ghosts.

Unsurprisingly, there is no German or formerly German town called Martheim nor is there a castle by that name. The university town where much of the tale within a tale takes place is never named. It might be Heidelberg, it might be Leipzig (I can't be the only one who got distinct Faust vibes from this story about university students hanging out in wine bars and coffeehouses and making deals with dark powers), it might be Göttingen, it might be completely fictional.

The mix of German and Slavic names is also typical for this sort of story. And so the Baron and his servant and the Baron's university paramour have solidly German names, while the young Doctor and the villainous Ivan both have Slavic names. Now you do find plenty of people with Slavic names particularly in the eastern parts of the former German Empire and universities have always attracted students from abroad anyway. Nonetheless, the coexistence of German and Slavic names in gothic fiction is a strange convention, especially since you never find German and French names existing side by side in this sort of story, even though this common in the areas along the French-German border.

Hilda, the waitress, with whom both Ivan and the Baron are infatuated, vanishes from the story once the rivalry between Konrad and Ivan has been established. I hope she found herself a nice solid student who did not dabble with dark powers.

The depiction of the werewolf legend in this story is certainly interesting, especially regarding the details which differ from the most common modern version of the legend. For example, I was surprised to see silver bullets mentioned as the sole weapon that can slay a werewolf, since I always assumed that this particular detail was invented (along with a big chunk of the modern werewolf legend) by Curt Siodmak for The Wolf Man, a film which did not come out until 1941, more than six years after "The Werewolf's Howl" appeared in Weird Tales.

Meanwhile, the fact that the Baron is doomed to become a werewolf after death reminds me of the legend of Lambert Sprengepiel, a German Imperial cavalry officer and guerrilla leader fighting the Swedish occupation during the Thirty Years War. Sprengepiel really did exist and lived on an estate just outside the town of Vechta, where he built a grain mill that still exists today and is still operational.

However, no one would remember a 17^th century cavalry officer if not for a local legend which claims that Sprengepiel made a deal with the devil, allowing him and his men to turn into bushes at will to confuse and ambush the Swedish forces. However, in return Sprengepiel was cursed to turn into a hellhound with glowing red eyes after death and roam the moors around Vechta (more on the Sprengepiel legend may be found on the website of the Museum im Zeughaus in Vechta). There even is a statue of Sprengepiel in Vechta – in hellhound form. Little children love riding on him.

I've been fascinated by the story of Lambert Sprengepiel, ever since I stumbled across him while teaching at the University of Vechta. He even shows up as a supporting character in one of my stories.

Was Brooke Byrne familiar with the legend of Lambert Sprengepiel? It's not completely impossible, since the story has appeared in collections of local myths and legends several times, including Elisabeth Reinke's collection of myths and legends from the Oldenburger Land, which was published in 1922. However, it's not all that likely either, since the Sprengepiel story is an intensely local legend, little known outside the immediate area where it's set. And there might well be similar legends elsewhere.

So who was Brooke Byrne, author of "The Werewolf's Howl"? Unfortunately, Brooke Byrne is one of those golden age authors who are a complete enigma. According to ISFDB, she had this one story as well as a poem named "Sic Transit Gloria" published in Weird Tales in 1933/34 and then never appeared again under that name in the SFF genre anywhere. Did she find greener pastures elsewhere in the pulps?

It's impossible to say, because unfortunately Brooke Byrne shares a name with an Instagram influencer who makes videos reviewing eyelash extensions as well as a class action lawyer, a softball player and a dozen other people, none of whom are the person who sold a story and a poem to Weird Tales in the 1930s. There is a Brooke Byrne who penned Mending Books Is Fun, a non-fiction book about bookbinding and book repair, in 1957. Is this the same woman as the Weird Tales author? Goodreads seems to think so, but we all know that Goodreads is not exactly reliable.

Interestingly, there is also a young writer from San Diego named Brooke Byrne whose story "Wolves at Twilight" was selected for an anthology of fiction by middle grade students. This Brooke Byrne is very obviously not the same person, but I still found it fascinating that two writers called Brooke Byrne would both write werewolf stories eighty-six years apart.

Considering how obscure Brooke Byrne is, I was surprised that "The Werewolf's Howl" has been reprinted in a 1994 horror anthology called 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories, edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Weinberg. This anthology was part of a series of anthologies that the bookseller Barnes & Noble published in the 1990s. Those anthologies drew heavily from the pulps, particularly Weird Tales. Considering that Stefan R. Dziemianowicz and Robert Weinberg are both Weird Tales specialists, this isn't surprising.

A neat if predictable gothic horror story that is very typical of the bread and butter fiction published in Weird Tales.

Retro Review: "The Gothic Window" by Dorothy Quick

"The Gothic Window" is a short story by Dorothy Quick, which was first published in the May 1944 issue of Weird Tales and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The story may be found online here.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following.

"The Gothic Window" starts off, like so many horror stories and murder mysteries, with four couples or prospective couples spending a rainy weekend at a secluded country mansion. Anne, the protagonist and POV character, has arranged the house party to further her romance with Sheridan "Sherry" Crawford and to fix up her friends Bob and Nancy. However, another friend of Anne's, Claire Rowley, throws a spanner into the works, when she invites herself and her husband Jim along. Anne isn't happy about this, for not only does Jim cheat at bridge, he's also a cad and potential abuser and Claire is clearly afraid of her husband. To make matters even more complicated, Nancy is infatuated with Jim, which endangers her budding romance with Bob. And though Jim is married to Claire, he pursues Nancy as well. There is another couple as well, Lou and Gib Silvers, who are not involved in the romantic polygon developing at the country manor and are only there, because bridge requires four players in two pairs, so they need eight people.

During yet another round of bridge, Jim suddenly becomes fascinated by a stained glass gothic window that doesn't match any of the other windows in the house. He says that the window makes it difficult for him to concentrate, whereupon Anne offers to tell the story behind the window.

Anne explains that she first saw window during the requisite grand tour of Europe with her parents. Anne and her family stayed at a monastery in Spain, where they admired the gothic architecture and the beautiful stained glass windows. All of the windows are regularly opened except for one. And when Anne or her parents ask about that window, the normally so jolly monks fall silent.

One day, when Anne and her mother are walking along the cloister, they notice that the always closed window stands wide open and that a monk is lying on the floor in front of the window. Initially Anne and her mother assume that the monk is just unconscious, but upon closer examination, he turns out to be dead, an expression of unearthly bliss frozen on his face.

Now the monks finally do spill the beans about what is going on. For when the monastery was first built, a man was immured alive in its walls according to medieval custom. The unfortunate fellow had been sentenced to death for sorcery. Soon after he was immured, he started to haunt the monastery and who can blame him? The focus point of the hauntings was the window closest to the spot where he had been immured.

Soon mysterious accidents began to happen near the window. Furthermore, the monks discovered that passing through the window gave them wonderful visions. By now we realise that this particular window appears to be a French window, which also doubles as a door. Never mind that this makes no sense, because there were no French windows during gothic times. Nor can gothic windows be opened – they are fixed.

Because the visions bestowed by the window were so amazing, the monks kept passing through it, until one by one they were found dead, an expression of unearthly bliss frozen onto their faces.

The abbot did everything he could to keep the monks from using the window, but the monks kept findings ways around his measures and they kept dying. So in the end, the abbot walked through the window himself and promptly died, only that the expression on his face was not one of bliss, but of unbelievable horror.

You're think that this story, plus the physical evidence in the form of a dead monk lying on the ground in front of the window, would be enough to warn anybody with any shred of sense to keep the hell away from the haunted window. However, Anne's mother apparently does not possess a shred of sense and so she offers to buy the window from the monks who are only too glad to be rid of it. They also kindly offer to exorcise the window, before it is shipped to its new home.

Once the window has been installed in the house, strange accidents start to happen there as well. Anne sprains her ankle, her mother breaks her arm and her father breaks his leg, all after passing through the window. So Anne's family locks the window, but they stupidly leave the key in the lock and so it eventually kills a friend of the family. A sudden heart attack, the doctor says, but Anne and her family know better and finally keep the bloody window locked, though they still don't have enough sense to just tear it out.

After Anne has told her story, everybody gradually retires to their rooms, while the romantic drama continues. Claire confesses to Anne that Jim abuses her, that she knows he is stalking Nancy and that she is afraid of her husband, but that she cannot leave him, because Jim knows certain dark secrets about her. Nancy chances to overhear all this and confesses that she is terrified of Jim, too, but also feels inexorably drawn to him and there is absolutely nothing she can do about it.

Once Nancy and Claire have finally gone to bed, Sheridan finally proposes to Anne and they discuss their future life together until the wee hours. When they finally retire – to separate rooms, of course – they once more pass the haunted window and Anne realises that the key is still in the lock.

"But I thought you said that your father kept it in his desk," Sheridan points out, whereupon Anne confesses that she made the whole story up to interrupt the bridge game and keep Jim away from Nancy. Anne's mother really did buy the window in Spain, that much is true, but everything else was pure fiction.

Sheridan praises Anne's imagination, but he also worries about the psychological effects of Anne's tale. After all, what if one of the guests accidentally hurts themselves near the window? So Anne promises that she will clear up the whole ruse in the morning. But it never comes to that, for the next morning they find Jim Rowley dead in front of the open window, his face a mix of horror and bliss.

"The Gothic Window" is yet another example of the tale within a tale, usually told in appropriately spooky surroundings, that was very common in Weird Tales. "The Man Who Wouldn't Hang" by Stanton A. Coblentz from the same year is another example of the type.

Nonetheless, "The Gothic Window" isn't a typical Weird Tales horror story. In many ways, it is reminiscent of the gothic romance genre that was only just beginning to take off with the great success of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca six year prior. All the elements of the gothic romance are here. We have the secluded country house, we have the Byronic hero who may or may not want to harm the heroine, we have the innocent ingenue he is pursuing, we have the good guy love interest and we have a malicious ghost, seeking revenge for an evil done to him centuries ago.

The romantic entanglements at the house are quite complicated and it took me some effort to remember who was in love with whom, who was married to whom and who was cheating on whom. The fact that all the characters have bland, if period appropriate names like Anne, Nancy, Claire, Bob and Jim doesn't help either. There also are more characters in the story than are necessary. Okay, so the number of bridge players must be dividable by four, but isn't there anything else they could have done over the weekend rather than play bridge?

That said, even if "The Gothic Window" has more characters than are strictly necessary, it is also the story with the highest number of named female characters, four in all, I have reviewed so far. Furthermore, "The Gothic Window" is also one of only two stories I have reviewed for the Retro Reviews project so far which passes the Bechdel test, the other being Ray Bradbury's "Undersea Guardians". Finally, "The Gothic Window" is also one of only two stories with a female POV character, the other being once again "Undersea Guardians".

As soon as Anne tells the story about the murderous haunted window, it's pretty obvious that someone will succumb to its spell and that that someone will be Jim, the villain of the piece. Nonetheless, Dorothy Quick did manage to surprise me, when Anne confessed that the entire story of the haunted window was fake. Coincidentally, this also explains why neither the monks nor Anne and her family ever did the sensible thing and just tore out the window and/or smashed it.

Anne's revelation also casts some doubt on whether "The Gothic Window" really is SFF. After all, there is no malicious ghost of an executed sorcerer haunting the window – Anne just made the whole story up. As for what killed Jim, that was most likely the power of psychological suggestion rather than a vengeful ghost.

There is some historical evidence that humans were immured as a method of execution throughout history and occasionally, the remains of immured humans have been found. There are also plenty of legends about people – often young women or children – being immured in the walls of new buildings as a sacrifice found all over Europe. On the Balkan, there is a legend about a young bride being immured. And in Theodor Storm's famous novella Der Schimmelreiter (The Rider on the White Horse, 1888), protagonist Hauke Haien not only has some unacceptably modern ideas about flood protection and the proper way to build dykes, he also refuses to immure a living being (a dog in this case, because there is no child handy) into the new dyke. As a result, the superstitious locals believe the dyke to be cursed and when it breaks during a particularly vicious winter storm, Hauke's wife and daughter drown and Hauke sacrifices himself to save the village. Come to think of it, The Rider on the White Horse would not have felt out of place in an issue of Weird Tales.

There is no concrete evidence that human beings were ever immured as sacrifices during the Middle Ages or in modern times in Europe, but there is plenty of evidence of animals being immured or buried inside old buildings and yes, dykes. In the 1960s, my parents and some of their friends restored a 17^th century farmhouse as a weekend getaway. During the restoration work, they found the remains of an animal, probably a cat or dog, buried under the threshold. A historian carted the remains away and told them it was a building sacrifice and an important find.

I have no idea if Dorothy Quick has ever read The Rider on the White Horse, though it's not impossible, since the novella was first translated into English in 1914. And she was certainly familiar with the various legends about people immured as sacrifices. Though the choice of Spain as the origin of the haunted window is a bit strange, since Spain is one of the places in Europe, which does not have such legends.

Dorothy Quick is another woman SFF author who was clearly popular in her time, but is nearly forgotten these days. She published a science fiction novel entitled Strange Awakening in 1938, though she mainly seems to have specialised in horror fiction. She published twenty-three stories and twenty-seven poems between 1932 and 1954, mostly in Weird Tales, but also in Unknown, Oriental Stories, Strange Stories and Fantastic Adventures. Dorothy Quick was clearly popular and even contributed the cover story to the March 1937 issue of Weird Tales, illustrated by one of Margaret Brundage's striking covers.

However, Dorothy Quick rapidly fell into obscurity. As with her fellow Weird Tales contributor Allison V. Harding, very little of her work has ever been reprinted. Nowadays, she is remembered not so much for her writing but for striking up a friendship with Samuel Clements a.k.a. Mark Twain in 1907, when Quick was eleven and Twain was seventy-two and both were passengers aboard the SS Minnetonka. Dorothy Quick frequently talked about her youthful friendship with Mark Twain, who encouraged her to write, and even penned a memoir entitled Mark Twain and Me.

The only place where I found some biographical information about Dorothy Quick was Sisters of Tomorrow – The First Women of Science Fiction, edited by Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharp, which reprints Dorothy Quick's 1937 story "Strange Orchids". In their introduction to the story, Yaszek and Sharp note that Dorothy Quick was strongly influenced by domestic fiction and the gothic romance and that her stories frequently have female POV characters at a time when this was exceedingly rare in SFF. These observations certainly fit "The Gothic Window".

Mark Twin and Dorothy Quick in 1907

"The Gothic Window" is well written and Dorothy Quick was clearly a talented writer, but then she did impress the great Mark Twain himself as a precocious girl of eleven. The question is why has she been almost completely forgotten in spite of a twenty-two year career of writing SFF. Is it because her brand of domestic gothics fell out of fashion? But then, Dorothy Quick's work wasn't even reprinted when the domestic gothic romance was at the height of its popularity in the 1960s. Is it because Weird Tales is mainly associated with Lovecraftian horror and sword and sorcery these days, even though the magazine's bread and butter were far more traditional tales of gothic horror as well as proto urban fantasy?

Nonetheless, it is notable that even though Weird Tales was clearly a good market for women (the May 1944 issue alone contains stories by three women writers and both the cover artist and the editor were female as well), the male authors who penned more traditional horror stories for the magazine, writers like Seabury Quinn, Robert Bloch and Manly Wade Wellman, are still much better remembered than their female counterparts like Dorothy Quick, Allison V. Harding, Greye La Spina, Alice-Mary Schnirring or Mary Elizabeth Counselman, who penned "The Three Marked Pennies", one of the most popular stories in Weird Tales history and kept writing and publishing horror right up to her death in 1995.

An effective gothic horror story by an unjustly forgotten woman writer of the golden age. Well worth checking out.