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).

Story Tellers' Circle: "Jim Kjelgaard" (Short Stories, Nov. 10, 1945)

An interview, of a sort mostly about fishing and outdoor fun, with Jim Kjelgaard that appeared in the Nov. 10, 1945 issue of the pulp magazine Short Stories with Kjelgaard’s short-short, “Cheena”; a clever story about a Filipino accused of collaborating with the Japanese. 

The Story Tellers’ Circle

From Milwaukee come these words from Jim Kjelgaard. Jim has something to say on ‘‘Cheena” and a good deal more to talk about on northern pike and ducks:

“I really haven’t very much to say about ‘Cheena’ except that I met and talked with a Filipino, and he impressed me as being a great little guy. He told me one thing and another, and ‘Cheena’ grew out of the mass of information. That’s the way it is with stories, you hear something you just can’t forget and by and by—you write the yarn. I will say, though, that I wouldn’t want any Filipinos mad at me. The one I met was tough as whalebone and strong as an ox as well as being a great little guy. And he himself told me that he was just a blushing daisy compared to some of the other fellows he knew!

“ ‘Cheena’; except for that, is a wholly imaginative story and I used the character as is just because I thought he’d fit in better than any other. He’s strictly my own invention.”

So much for business. Now about pleasure—the fishin’ and huntin’ kind.

“The weather’s already turned cold out in this neck of the woods—on the 14^th of September a fire doesn’t feel bad and we’ve kept one for the past four days. But, from one angle, that’s exactly the right way to bring in this time of year. ‘There ain’t no gas rationin’ no mo’,’ and you can really get around to all the places that you thought you’d like to get around to while you couldn’t. Well, maybe not all of ’em. The old jaloppy distinctly is not what she used to be and maybe she never was. But she still rolls when you want her to, and next week I expect to start for one of the nicest places I ever saw.

“It’s a stretch of river, and probably there isn’t another one exactly like it in the whole world. I never measured it, but at a guess it’s three hundred feet wide. Cattails and rushes, a thick mat that you couldn’t even pole a skiff through, extend about forty feet out from the east bank. Then you run into weeds, all sorts of water weeds, everything from lily pads to those long, mossy streamers that catch on the oars and keep your speed down almost to nothing an hour. But there’s a knack to rowing through ’em, and after floundering around in the darn’ things for two hours one day a fourteen-year-old kid told me how to work the oars. You take a long stroke, stop your oars a second on the back stroke, and the weeds roll off. But the center of the river— Ah and double ah!

“Theres an open channel there about twenty feet wide, and the last time I was there I saw at least a hundred and fifty pounds of great northern pike and wall-eyes come out of that channel. Some of those fish weren’t any babies either. One fellow snagged a wall-eye on a four-ounce fly rod, and fought it around for forty-five minutes before he got it even close to the boat. Then he made a stab, missed with the gaff, and the fish went away from there as though nothing was holding him. Anyhow, the cold weather should inspire those pike to strike soon—and thus my remark about ideal weather. You do a lot of shivering, but you have a lot of fun. Some day some smart bird will invent a lure with which you can fish those weeds—and that day you’d better be along.

“Besides, its handy to have a shotgun when you go up there. Possibly there won’t be any flight ducks down, but a lot of natives nest around there. All this—and mallards too!”

 

Jim Kjelgaard

 

“Cheena” is included in the Jim Kjelgaard collection, The Spell of the White Sturgeon / Dusky & Other Tales.

 

Story Tellers Circle © 1945 Short Stories, Inc. / No renewal