Tales of the Macabre by Jim Kjelgaard & Robert Bloch

 

Introduction to Tales of the Macabre by Jim Kjelgaard

[now available from Vintage Lists in the Tales of the Macabre / The Black Fawn collection]

 Jim Kjelgaard was a regular contributor of short stories to pulp magazines in the late-1930s and throughout the 1940s. His first known published fictional tale, “River Man,” appeared in the November 5, 1938 issue of Argosy, and his byline regularly popped-up in diverse magazines like Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine, Black Mask, 10 Story Western, The Phantom Detective, Thrilling Adventure, Argosy, Adventure, and others. It wasn’t unusual for 20 or more of Kjelgaard’s stories to reach print each year; his best annual output was in 1946, which saw an astonishing 36 of his tales hit newsstands across the country.
     While the genre Kjelgaard was writing for changed—Western, romance, mystery, adventure—his stories were charmingly consistent and familiar to his regular readers. They often featured animals and thoughtful protagonists living in wild places. A genre Kjelgaard rarely visited was horror, but that changed when a tale of the supernatural, “The Thing from the Barrens,” appeared in the September 1945 issue of Weird Tales. This story, and the three others published by Weird Tales over the next ten months—“The Fangs of Tsan-Lo” (Nov. 1945), “Chanu” (Mar. 1946), and “The Man Who Told the Truth” (July 1946) —had Kjelgaard’s traditional hallmarks, but were also dependent on their supernatural elements: a stalking creature from the wastelands of the Arctic, an ancient dog, a sinister hybrid ape-man, and…
     While the stories all appeared under Jim Kjelgaard’s name, a young Robert Bloch—the writer that gave us Psycho (1963)—revised the stories for publication. Both Bloch and Kjelgaard belonged to a writing group, the Milwaukee Fictioneers, which included the Western writer Lawrence A. Keating, the golden age science fiction writer, Ralph Milne Farley, and the cult-favorite science fiction writer Stanley G. Weinbaum. In Bloch’s 1994 autobiography, Once Around the Bloch, he mentioned his work with Kjelgaard and another of the group’s members: “I rewrote and sold stories which appeared under the bylines of Ralph Milne Farley and another member, Jim Kjelgaard.”
     Robert Bloch was a supernatural horror specialist and his participation in the stories can be seen from the eerie descriptions— “I seemed to hear the rustle of leaves, to see snarling, man-beast faces” —but the concepts and plotting are in the classical vein of Jim Kjelgaard. Things changed a bit for the fourth tale, “The Man Who Told the Truth,” which is less Kjelgaard and more Robert Bloch. In fact, this story was included in Bloch’s posthumous collection, Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies (1998). These collaborations often appeared alongside stories under Bloch’s own name. “The Thing from the Barrens” appeared with Bloch’s “The Skull of the Marquis de Sade”; “The Fangs of Tsan-Lo” with “Soul Proprietor”; and “Chanu” with “Bogy Man Will Get You.”
     For the first time in more than 70 years, Jim Kjelgaard’s first three tales of the macabre are back in print. And we’re betting you’ll enjoy them as much today as their original readers did so long ago.

Got to Amazon for the paperback version (here) or Kindle version (here).