Brennan's Weird Fiction in Print & on Film
Joseph Payne Brennan wrote about 500 short stories and more than 2,000 poems. His earliest short story listed in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb) is "The Green Parrot," from 1952. That was also his first story in Weird Tales. Brennan's late arrival in the magazine is just one bit of evidence that he was something of an anachronism. He knew that about himself and admitted as much about himself. Born in 1918, Brennan was old enough to have corresponded with H.P. Lovecraft and others in Lovecraft's circle. Living in Connecticut, he could easily have made a trip by train to visit with that gentleman of Providence. Instead Brennan seems to have been alone in his youth and in his early writing and work, at least in terms of his weird fiction. (1) A contemporary or near contemporary of Henry Kuttner (1915-1958), Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985), Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), and others, Brennan was accepted into the pages of Weird Tales only after they had gone. In his introduction to "Levitation" in Dying of Fright: Masterpieces of the Macabre (1976), Les Daniels wrote: "Joseph Payne Brennan is the last major author of supernatural stories to have been associated with Weird Tales." (p. 267). John Pelan called him "the last of the great Weird Tales authors." (2) Yes, an anachronism, and maybe great, too, and one of the last. Brennan considered himself a failure. (3)
There is a very Irish sense of doom or fate in Brennan's stories. His lack of self-esteem--that feeling that one is special, even if one is especially bad--is very Irish, too. (We have been dealing with the same kinds of feelings in our very Irish family for years.) Brennan was a nature poet. His stories are often about the encroachment of the natural--or supernatural--world or forces upon civilization, conversely about people becoming bewildered, engulfed by, or overpowered by natural or supernatural forces after going beyond the edge of town or away from the road, into swamps or hemlock woods, or even into the overgrown backyard of a suburban home. Doom or fate await them--men die not for anything they might do but because they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. We should remember that Brennan was admirer of Maurice Level (1875-1926) and the conte cruel.
Brennan had at least three of his stories adapted to film, four if you count "Slime" as the original source for the 1958 theatrical release The Blob. Two of his stories were adapted to the television series Thriller, hosted by Boris Karloff and broadcast on April 16, 1962. "The Lethal Ladies" was the overall title for two stories with the same theme, "Murder on the Rocks" (originally "The Pool" in The Dark Returners, 1959) and "Goodbye, Dr. Bliss" (originally "Goodbye, Mr. Bliss" in The Dark Returners). Brennan's story "Levitation" (originally in Nine Horrors and a Dream, Arkham House, 1958) was adapted to an episode of the same name in Tales from the Dark Side in 1985.
Most of Brennan's stories were printed or reprinted in small-press collections or in small magazines, in his own Macabre (from 1957 to 1976) or in similar titles such as The Arkham Collector (from 1967 to 1971), Weirdbook (from 1968 to 1990), and Whispers (from 1973 to 1997). One prominent exception to all of that is "The Feaster from Afar," published in the paperbound anthology The Disciples of Cthulhu (DAW Books, 1976). But then tales of the Cthulhu Mythos often find their way into print without much problem. The last of his works that I have found to have been published in Brennan's own lifetime is the poem "Necrophiliac," from Grue #10, Fall 1989. What a terrible and ironic title for a final poem.
To be continued . . .
Notes
(1) Brennan was fortunate enough early on to know and work with Jack Schaefer (1907-1991), but Schaefer was a writer of Westerns, not of supernatural horror and fantasy stories.
(2) From Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle, Centipede Press, p. 329.
(3) "I'm attracted to the Victorian period [. . . ]. I also have a feeling that probably as an individual I would have been less of a failure then than I am now." From "Etchings & Odysseys Interview: Joseph Payne Brennan," Etchings & Odysseys #7 (1985), page 58.
Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley
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