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Fan Slants, v. 1, issue 1, September 1943

Page 9

FAN SLATS                                                                  9
[title in large letters] THE UNDYING MONSTER 
A BOOK REVIEW by 
[author's name in cursive script] Samuel D. Russell

Last year there passed over fandom a wave of interest in Jessie Douglas Kerruish's weird novel, [title underlined] The Undying Monster; a tale of the fifth dimension (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1936, 256pp, $2.00). Art Widner started it, I believe, by querying after fellow enthusiasts over the book; Walt Leibscher sang its prai-ses and sold several remaindered copies to fan-friends; and Bob Tucker, the noted misanthrope, submitted an unflattering review of it to the ill-fated Chicago fan magazine [title underlined] Parsec. Some of this minor furore doubtless was stimulated by the news that RKO was planning to film the novel, with James Ellison, John Howard, Heather Angel, and Bramwell Fletcher in the cast (George Sanders withdrew from the lead-ing role ostensibly because of overwork but probably from an aversion to play-ing a "horror" role). Now that the movie has played throughout the country for most fans probably received from the bastardized Hollywood picturization. I read and was converted to the cause of [title underlined] The Undying Monster a couple of years ago, and after rereading it, although I find in it more faults than I remembered, I still think it is worthy of recommendation and discussion for having more elements of weirdness in it than almost any other modern story outside of Lovecraft.

The novel centers around the old English family of the Hammands in Sussex, who have been cursed for centuries with an unknown bane, the Undying Monster, which comes to rend and destroy whenever the head of the house is among pines and firs on a clear cold starlit night, and which is so horrible to look upon that all the Hammands who saw and escaped from it have subsequently committed suicide. Local superstitions have it that the monster is a thousand-year-old ancestor of the family who still lives in a secret room in the castle-like manor and comes forth two or three times a century to sacrifice a human life to prolong his own, or that it is a half-animal creature that is occasionally born in the Hammand line and is kept hidden except when it breaks loose, or that the Hammands have a vampire strain that evinces itself whenever one of the family is a rema-turely killed. Soon after the First World War the monster appears when Oliver Hammand is walking through the pines of Thunderbarrow Shaw with a village girl; his sister Swanhild finds them there--the girl and Oliver's dog hideously and fatally mutilated, and Oliver uncouscious from having struck his head on a rock in falling. This blow luckily destroys his memory of what he saw, and he is otherwise unharmed, but Swanhild and her fiance, Goddard Covert, call in Miss Luna Bartendale, a young but famous psychic expert and "white witch", to try to solve the mystery of what the monster really is. Miss Bartendale, who has the "supersensitive" power of sensing the presence of evil, violence, and the super-natural (which she calls the "fourth dimension"), investigates Thunderbarrow Shaw with a divining rod but finds no evidence of the supernatural and suggests that the monster may belong to the mysterious "fifth dimension" which surrounds the fourth. In the little church where the Hammand ancestors are buried she in-spects a carving of the monster as a doglike beast at the feet of Geoffrey Ham-mand of the 14th century, who turned Anchorite after seeking the monster, and a monument asking prayers for Sir Magnus Hammand the Warlock, who committed suicide after raising the monster during his black magical experiments in a certain hid-den room of the manor in 1526. Investigating this room (which has pines outside

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FAN SLATS 9 [title in large letters] THE UNDYING MONSTER A BOOK REVIEW by [author's name in cursive script] Samuel D. Russell Last year there passed over fandom a wave of interest in Jessie Douglas Kerruish's weird novel, [title underlined] The Undying Monster; a tale of the fifth dimension (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1936, 256pp, $2.00). Art Widner started it, I believe, by querying after fellow enthusiasts over the book; Walt Leibscher sang its prai-ses and sold several remaindered copies to fan-friends; and Bob Tucker, the noted misanthrope, submitted an unflattering review of it to the ill-fated Chicago fan magazine [title underlined] Parsec. Some of this minor furore doubtless was stimulated by the news that RKO was planning to film the novel, with James Ellison, John Howard, Heather Angel, and Bramwell Fletcher in the cast (George Sanders withdrew from the lead-ing role ostensibly because of overwork but probably from an aversion to play-ing a "horror" role). Now that the movie has played throughout the country for most fans probably received from the bastardized Hollywood picturization. I read and was converted to the cause of [title underlined] The Undying Monster a couple of years ago, and after rereading it, although I find in it more faults than I remembered, I still think it is worthy of recommendation and discussion for having more elements of weirdness in it than almost any other modern story outside of Lovecraft. The novel centers around the old English family of the Hammands in Sussex, who have been cursed for centuries with an unknown bane, the Undying Monster, which comes to rend and destroy whenever the head of the house is among pines and firs on a clear cold starlit night, and which is so horrible to look upon that all the Hammands who saw and escaped from it have subsequently committed suicide. Local superstitions have it that the monster is a thousand-year-old ancestor of the family who still lives in a secret room in the castle-like manor and comes forth two or three times a century to sacrifice a human life to prolong his own, or that it is a half-animal creature that is occasionally born in the Hammand line and is kept hidden except when it breaks loose, or that the Hammands have a vampire strain that evinces itself whenever one of the family is a rema-turely killed. Soon after the First World War the monster appears when Oliver Hammand is walking through the pines of Thunderbarrow Shaw with a village girl; his sister Swanhild finds them there--the girl and Oliver's dog hideously and fatally mutilated, and Oliver uncouscious from having struck his head on a rock in falling. This blow luckily destroys his memory of what he saw, and he is otherwise unharmed, but Swanhild and her fiance, Goddard Covert, call in Miss Luna Bartendale, a young but famous psychic expert and "white witch", to try to solve the mystery of what the monster really is. Miss Bartendale, who has the "supersensitive" power of sensing the presence of evil, violence, and the super-natural (which she calls the "fourth dimension"), investigates Thunderbarrow Shaw with a divining rod but finds no evidence of the supernatural and suggests that the monster may belong to the mysterious "fifth dimension" which surrounds the fourth. In the little church where the Hammand ancestors are buried she in-spects a carving of the monster as a doglike beast at the feet of Geoffrey Ham-mand of the 14th century, who turned Anchorite after seeking the monster, and a monument asking prayers for Sir Magnus Hammand the Warlock, who committed suicide after raising the monster during his black magical experiments in a certain hid-den room of the manor in 1526. Investigating this room (which has pines outside