Frank Belknap Long's "The Space-Eaters" *ack!*
Egads, what a story! The actual writing style is a little wooden
and clumsy, the dialogue stiff and the characters unconvincing. But the
premise is so powerful and the imagery so bizarre that this crude little
tale has haunted me since I first read it as a preteen kid staying up at
night to scare myself with a paperback and a flashlight under the
covers. (In fact, finding that same copy all these decades later, I see
that I underlined the title of this story alone on the table of
contents.)
From the July 1928 issue of WEIRD TALES, this is one of Frank
Belknap's Long's best stories (I also was struck by "The Hounds of
Tindalos"). Writing for fifty years, Long had some importance in the
history of the modern horror story and his early connection with the
vast tangled maze of H.P. Lovecraft-related fiction guarantees he will
not be immediately forgotten. Yet, despite some strong points, Long
seems to have always been a second-tier pulp writer whose style never
really became polished or subtle. (Which is alright with me, there's
room for all types in my authors' pantheon.)
The tale is narrated by a guy named Frank, whose best friend is Howard,
a writer of weird fiction. ("In profile his face was impressive. He had
an extremely broad forehead, long nose and slightly protuberant
chin...") He is obsessed with bringing new insight to horror stories,
going beyond the prosaic themes of Poe and Hawthorne to try and
introduce new concepts of cosmic terrors barely comprehensible to the
human mind. All right, yes, this is obviously meant to be H.P. Lovecraft
himself more or less, and Frank is therefore Long himself.
It's worth noting that "Howard" is not portrayed as a particularly nice
guy. He's snobbish and pretentious, referring to his readers as "absurd
and unworthy fools" (Hey! I resent that.) When a neighbor named Henry (a
man in severe distress, with an actual hole deep in his head which
should have killed him), staggers into the house to tell a grotesque
story, Howard is first furious that this "lying yokel" has dared to come
up with the kind of surreal horror story he himself has not been able to
achieve... and then he dismisses the suffering fellow, who is clutching
his head and screaming about how his brain is freezing. Howard scoffs,
"Don't expect me to believe such nonsense," and lets Henry reel out into
the night without calling for a doctor or the police. Instead, he starts
immediately writing down the yarn the poor guy babbled out. (Kind of a
jerk, eh?)
Hearing wailing screams from the nearby Mulligan Wood, Frank and Howard
at last put on raincoats and go out into the densest, most ominous fog
in WEIRD TALES history. Out on the nearby bay, they hear dismal foghorns
and the two friends quickly start going to pieces. They drag the man
back to the house in complete panic themselves as they realize that
there IS something out there... something high above the trees which is
reaching down to enter their consciousness and then literally suck out
their brains through holes it bores through the skull.
Here is the idea that impressed me and gave me severe Creeps as a kid.
This awful Thing in the sky starts to manifest itself in your awareness
very vaguely and tentatively. Then, as it gets a firm hold, you start to
become more aware of it and by the time you begin to visualize what the
Thing is like, it's too late... it's already started entering your mind
and digging at your brain. The man they are trying to save first saw it
as an immensely long white arm thin as a rope reaching down from the
stars and groping for him. Because he got as far as actually visualizing
the Thing, he's doomed and can't be saved.
So you can understand why Frank and Howard desperately try to convince
themselves that the manifestations they are beginning to see are not
becoming clearer. ("It has no form! We should not - we must not see it!
It is our little brains which gives it a form. When it enters our
brains, it becomes clothed in a form. If it enters our brains we are
lost.") All the time they are starting to picture a shape above the
trees like an immense black bat with yellow wings materializing, while
they scream to each other that they don't see anything.
Eeek. What a concept. This is one of those stories, like SINISTER
BARRIER, that someone with borderline paranoid tendencies might be
better off not reading. After some more agita and babbling, things seem
to settle down a bit. A doctor arrives to operate on poor Henry and is
so shaken by what he sees that he turns all white and shaky, closes up
the wound in the man's head and leaves hastily, muttering about "the
old, hideous secret that man has forgotten about".
Then, weeks later, Howard has managed to get all the details of the
experience down into a narrative in excruciating detail. That's just
asking for it. Somehow, because he has put it all down on paper, the
Thing comes looking specifically for him. Howard himself realizes that
by writing the story, he has become "a priest of the devil" and lost all
defenses.
After Howard calls the narrator, shrieking over the phone about his
brain freezing and the shapeless form growing clearer, Frank rushes to
his friend's house and finds what you might expect if you've read a few
horror stories. But the killer detail is that the shaft of unholy
"liquid light that dripped and dripped, like spittle" which is
reconstructing Howard's brain in mid-air is also swirling the pages of
the manuscript around. The Thing is not only eating Howard's mind, it's
reading the story about itself! I don't know if this is more hilarious
or frightening, but talk about the ultimate critic...!
Frank Belknap Long caught an essential component of what makes
Lovecraft's stories so unsettling. You don't have to be experimenting
with forbidden rituals or translating cursed books to be attacked by
nameless horrors; it's an existential universe without moral meaning, in
which terrible things happen to innocent people for no reason... they
just happen. (On the other hand, Howard seems to be inviting this
nightmare on himself, first by desperately longing to find a way to
write about extra-dimensional horror, and then by putting it all down on
paper and giving it more solidity. You could say he was just picking up
on the Thing's presence, but it's hard not to feel that he has somehow
drawn this disaster on himself.)
On a more traditional note, Long gives humans a defense against these
bins which Lovecraft never really did. In this story, the Cross (whether
as the familiar gesture or as the symbol itself marked in flames) has
great power to push back and banish these Things. Long specifically
doesn't use Christian imagery, but notes the cross symbol is very
ancient and resonates in human awareness because it is "the primal
symbol" used to repel these creatures millenia ago. It's odd, too, that
Howard seems to have forfeited the protection of the Cross by writing
his weird fiction. It explains why so many of the authors of the books
of forbidden knowledge were supposed to have come to dreadful ends.