Today is July 10, the birthday of John Wyndham (1903 -1969) and Carl Jacobi (1908-1997). Both wrote some higly regarded stories. Wyndham wrote science fiction. Jacobi wrote fantasy and horror.
John Wyndham was a British writer who wrote at both novel lengtha nd short stories. His full name was John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Benyon Harris. He also published under the byline of John Benyon Harris. I recently (within the last six months or so) read his novel Chocky, in which a child’s “omagiinary playmate” turns out to not only be real but an alien that only the child can communicate with.
Wyndham’s two best know works were The Day of the Triffids and The Midqich Cuckoos. I’ve only seen the move version of the former, but I read The Midwich Cuckoos when I was in high school. The book has been filmed at least twice as Village of the Damned. I saw the original black and white version fromt he sixties after I read the book.
The book is creepier. The title comes from the cuckoo, which lays its eggs in another bird’s nest and lest the other bird raise its young.
Two small towns, one in Britain and the other in the Soviet Union, have impenetrable domes appear over them. Everyone inside the domes loses consciousness. Twenty-four hours later the domes disappear. Everyone regains consciousness. Except the guy who fell down the staris and broke his neck in the house of a woman who was not his wife.
Then every woman of child bearing age is found to be pregnant.
Whether they’ve done anything to get pregnant or not.
Between the time the women discover they are pregnant and the the children are born, wyndham really gets inside those people’s heads. It is some of the creepiest stuff I’ve ever read.
If you’ve not read this one, give it a try.
Subterranean Press published a collection of Wyndham’s short fiction a year or two ago, Logical Fantasybirthday. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet. It is availabe in electronic format for, as I write this, $6.99
Carl jacobi is probably more familiar to readers of this blog than Wyndham. That is hardly spruprising since he wrote weird fiction, much of it appearing in Weird Tales. Arkham House published his first three collections.
Jacobi also wrote adventure stories, some of which appeared in a pulp entitled The Skipper. This was a hero pulp that only ran for twelve issues. The main character was a Dco Savage knock-off who fought a number of fantastic eneimes. A common practice in many hero pulps or pulps focused aournd a central character is that the main story, called a novel but more llike what would be considerd a novellette or novella today, Backupp stories either featured seconddary heroes or were fiction of the same or similar genres, not necessarily featuring a recurring character. My understanding, which may be wrong, is that the stories Jacobi wrote were of this nature. They were collected in East of Samarinda in 1989, published by Bowling Green University Press. I’ve not read any of them, but I would like to.
If anyone knows more about these stories, please say so in the comments.
Centipede Press published a major collection of Jacobi’s work as part of its Masters of the Weird Tale series. It’s out of print and quite expesnive.
Fortunately, Valancourt recently reprinted Jacobi’s first collection, Revelations in Black, recently. There was a mass market paperback edition of that book years ago. I bought it from Scott Cupp at the first convention I ever attended. That was when I met Scott. *waves at Scott*. A quick search on the ‘Zon shows a collection of his best superantural stories from two years ago, Studies in Darkness.
But I digress.
Jacobi and Wyndham are both worth reading. Check them out. And if you have a favorite story by either man, please mention it in the comments.