Today, January 18, marks two birthdays of note. I’ve decided both people are of enough significance, and different enough, that I’ve done separate birthday posts rather than one. This one concerns C. M. Eddy, Jr (1896-1967). The post on Clare Winger Harris can be found here.
C. M. Eddy, Jr., circa the mid-1920s
“The Loved Dead”
C. M. Eddy, Jr.
First published in Weird Tales, May 1924.
Legend has it that Weird Tales almost didn’t make it through the first couple of years of publication. That story is told in The Thing’s Incredible! The Secret Origin of Weird Tales by John Locke. (No, not that John Locke.) I’ve not read this particular book, although it is in the pile. Furthermore, legend says that there was one story published early on that created enough notoriety that it helped The Unique Magazine survive.
I don’t know if any of that is true. I skimmed the passages in Locke’s book that related to Eddy and “The Loved Dead”, and they seem to, if not support that position, at least not contradict it.
The story, of course, is C. M. Eddy, Jr.’s “The Loved Dead”. It’s a disturbing tale of a necrophiliac serial killer. I’m not going to summarize it. You can read the story in The Horror in the Museum. Lovecraft revised the story and, according to his letters, rewrote the second half, but just how much is Lovecraft’s work is not something I can say with any certainty.
“The Loved Dead” attracted some unwanted attention for Weird Tales, and in future years Farnsworth Wright tried to steer away from stories that were in his opinion excessively grisly or morbid. John Locke speculates that it could have been someone from the PTA or an Indiana state senator who objected to the story. The editorial offices of Weird Tales were in Chicago, but the business offices were in Indianapolis in a building owned by a prominent local company that was the printing company of Weird Tales. This building was near the state capital.
Houdini, Lovecraft, and an older Eddy.
Whatever the case may have been, “The Loved Dead” brought attention to Weird Tales. Whether it helped to keep the magazine solvent by attracting new readers is subject to conjecture.
Eddy was a life-long resident of Providence. He and Lovecraft worked with Houdini for a time and may have ghost-written some of Houdini’s published works. Eddy also wrote popular songs in the 1920s and worked as a booking agent for many of the top vaudeville acts of the time.
“The Loved Dead” is by far Eddy’s best known work and has been reprinted multiple times. I first read it as either a high school student or an undergraduate. I can still remember reading it at my grandparents’ kitchen table in Weird Tales: 32 Uneartherd Terrors. It followed Anthony M. Rud’s “A Square of Canvas”. My reaction to both was “Woah, those were powerful.” My reaction on rereading the story now was “Woah, that was sick.”
Still, as distasteful as I find the story in places, it played an important role in the early history of Weird Tales. It’s well-written, with an atmosphere of dread that permeates much of the prose.