Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946) was a man of a dozen talents, a hundred friends, and a million words. He was an old-fashioned wordsmith who cranked out story after story over the years. As a manuscript reader, editor, and literary agent, he also helped other writers in their work. According to what I have found in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database and The FictionMags Index, Kline's two-part serial "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" was his first published genre work. It was likely his first published story of any kind. It was also the first serial in Weird Tales, even if its two parts, taken together, still come out at only short-story length.
Along with Farnsworth Wright, who was also represented in the first issue of Weird Tales, Kline acted as a manuscript reader, helping editor Edwin Baird wade through myriads of submissions during that first year in print. After Baird's departure, Kline edited the first-anniversary, jumbo-sized issue of May-June-July 1924. He also wrote, anonymously, the Weird Tales manifesto in that issue, called "Why Weird Tales?" The first-anniversary issue of Weird Tales was the only one edited by Kline.
Kline's output declined in his later years, no doubt in part because of his work as a literary agent, including for Robert E. Howard. Like Howard and Lovecraft, he died prematurely, in his case at age fifty-five. I have written about Otis Adelbert Kline before. For his biography, click here. For that and other articles about him and his family, click on the label "Otis Adelbert Kline" on the right. (1)
Otis Adelbert Kline's Story:
"The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" begins with a letter summoning young William Ansley, the narrator of the story, to his uncle's farm outside of Peoria, Illinois. The summons, whether it be a letter, a telephone call, or some other kind of message, is a good and common way to kick off a story, especially a weird fiction story. In Kline's story, it gets the narrator out of the city and into an isolated rural setting, very often a necessity if weird events are going to unfold properly. Peoria might not be Arkham or Innsmouth, but at least it's not Chicago.
The setting is made definite not only by the mention of Peoria but also by the narrator's letting us know that he works as a bookkeeper on South Water Street in Chicago, also that his parents were killed in the Iroquois Theatre fire when he was twelve years old. That fire was a real and terrible event that took place in Chicago on December 30, 1903. My own family has a connection to the fire, as do many, I'm sure, in Illinois and Indiana. Like his protagonist, Kline was twelve years old at the time that it happened. At the time the events in the story take place, the protagonist Ansley is a young man. Presumably, then, "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" is set in the 1910s or early 1920s.
Ansley travels to Peoria where his uncle and benefactor, James Braddock, lived and died on his 320-acre farm. That's a sizable piece of land, half a square mile, or half a section. Maybe the idea is that this is the equivalent of an English estate. Anyway, Ansley lets us know that Braddock was "a scientist and dreamer," adding: "His hobby was psychic phenomena." So maybe he was the equivalent of an eccentric English gentleman, too. The story takes place when scary stories should, in October. (October is the month in which Edgar Allan Poe died mysteriously.) Once at his uncle's house, Ansley begins experiencing and witnessing occult occurrences. He resolves to investigate these occurrences in a scientific manner. When a Professor Albert Randall and his beautiful daughter show up (what do genre fiction writers have against the mothers of beautiful daughters?), Ansley becomes assistant investigator. It is Professor Randall who solves the mystery at hand.
In its two parts, "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" becomes a potpourri of psychic phenomena, complete with ectoplasmic manifestations, mental telepathy, automatic writing, mediums, trances, and hypnosis. There is talk of vampires and an onset of mass hysteria because of it. (Because this is America, the locals arm themselves with rifles, pistols, and shotguns rather than pitchforks and torches as they would in a European setting. Thank God for America.) There are also dream-visions and dream-regressions through time.
"The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" is not an especially good story, although I think we should give Kline a break. After all, this was his first published story. There's no real problem with his prose, nor with his plot or the mechanics of his story, although the scheme at the climax is convoluted beyond necessity. There's also a fair amount of melodrama and a pat, everything-turned-out-okay and they-lived-happily-ever-after Hollywood-scenario-type ending. I think the real problem with "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" is that it came at the beginning of one hundred years of weird fiction. Its only material had come before it either by way of ancient folklore--i.e., the vampire myth--or from the nineteenth-century, mostly American hoax/pseudoscience of Spiritualism. In its sentimentality and somewhat melodramatic events, the story is also more or less from the nineteenth century. In short, Kline had only worn-out conventions with which to work. He wasn't ready yet for innovation and not yet developed well enough as a writer to come up with something very new. Put another way, Kline and writers like him had not yet figured out what weird fiction is, and there were not yet powerful, convincing, and vibrant substitutes for those old and worn-out conventions that came before it, Spiritualism of course being the most obvious example. Kline may have been onto something by taking a science-fictional approach to his story. He simply went down the wrong path in chasing after ectoplasm.
"It is but a step," I reflected, "from the natural to the supernatural."
This observation started a new line of thought. After all, could anything be supernatural--above nature? Nature, according to my belief, was only another name for God, eternal mind, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient ruler of the universe. If He were omnipotent, could anything take place contrary to His laws? Obviously not.
The word "supernatural" was, after all, only an expression invented by man, in his finite ignorance, to define those things which he did not understand. Telegraphy, telephony, the phonograph, the moving picture--all would have been regarded with superstition by an age less advanced than ours. Man had only to become familiar with the laws governing them, in order to discard the word "supernatural" as applied to their manifestation. (2)
What right, then, had I to term the phenomena, which I had just witnessed, supernatural? I might call them supernormal, but to think of them as supernatural would be to believe the impossible: namely, that that which is all-powerful had been overpowered.
I resolved, then and there, that if further phenomena manifested themselves that night. I would, as far as it were possible, curb my superstition and fear, regard them with the eye of a philosopher, and endeavor to learn their cause, which must necessarily be governed by natural law.
With that passage, Kline placed the supernatural back under nature, thereby making it explicable by way of scientific investigation. The effect seems to be that this story of the supernatural, at the very least, can actually be seen as a kind of "pseudo-scientific story," similar in its way to "Ooze." In "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," hypnosis and mental telepathy are accepted as valid, presumably scientific phenomena. There is also a scientific explanation offered for the existence of ectoplasm. As for the current state of Braddock in his casket and the tragedies that have befallen the local people, prompting their vampire hysteria, there is a medical, i.e., scientific, explanation for that, too. These events aren't so weird after all, meaning, they all have a scientific explanation, as long as you can accept Spiritualism as being based in science.
Unfortunately, Kline's transformation of one type of story--the supernatural story or ghost story--into another--the pseudo-scientific story--isn't very convincing, the reason being that he threw into "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" so many of the ragged and decrepit remains of nineteenth-century Spiritualism that it isn't able to take off very well. By 1923, discerning readers, writers, and thinkers would have known that there is nothing to Spiritualism. Harry Houdini was famously skeptical, but he wasn't alone. (Ambrose Bierce was also a skeptic.) Writing about Spiritualism at such a late date was like writing about the luminiferous ether after Albert Einstein had proposed his special theory of relativity in 1905, except that the existence of the ether was proposed in earnest, while séances, knocking, and ectoplasm are all frauds. You can differ with me if you'd like, but Kline was right when he wrote that there isn't anything above God. There is plenty worth exploring under God in his and our very mysterious universe, it's just that ectoplasm isn't one of them. What's missing from "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" is an awareness of and apprehension of weird.
Speaking of God, both "Ooze" and "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" mention him. If I had to guess, I would say that these things were offered in assurance to observers, readers, and critics that Weird Tales was not and would not be profane, godless, atheistic, or otherwise a bad influence on anybody. These stories are offered for fun, entertainment, and momentary distraction and not at all to subvert or corrupt anyone or anything.
"The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" is like Willard E. Hawkins' story "The Dead Man's Tale" in that automatic writing and the psychic or occult investigator make their appearance. The text of "The Dead Man's Tale" is presumed to have been composed entirely from automatic writing. The psychic investigator is mentioned only in the introduction to the story. In Kline's story, there is less automatic writing, but it comes at a turning point in the story. The role of the psychic investigator is far more prominent, and it is that investigator, Professor Randall, who figures it all out. By the way, Randall is dean of the local college. He and his daughter had gone to Indianapolis, only to return to Peoria when they heard of Braddock's death. So the two cities where Weird Tales was born, Chicago and Indianapolis, receive mention here.
Again, "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" is like "Ooze" in that it lets the reader know that the writer and editor know that God is still above everything. Both are also pseudo-scientific stories, although "Ooze" is far more convincing in that respect. Kline's story is unlike "Ooze" in that the scientist (the elder Cranmer in "Ooze") and the dreamer (the younger Cranmer) are combined in the same person, James Braddock in "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes." The narrators in both stories take on the role of investigator, Rud's narrator well after the fact, Ansley in the middle of things. Both take a scientific approach to their investigations.
By Charles Fort's theorizing, all phenomena are continuous, even if science has excluded and damned certain kinds. In his own theorizing on things natural versus supernatural, Kline seems to have followed Fort's lead. It seems likely that Kline, like many well-known and prominent tellers of weird tales, had read and would continue to read the works of Charles Fort. Fort himself wrote about psychic and paranormal phenomena in his last book, Wild Talents (1932), which you might say issued from his grave.
The "Thing" in Kline's title is ectoplasm, a kind of ooze that issues from Braddock's inert body in every shape and form. Ectoplasm is equated in the story with protoplasm. (There's even an amoeba!) In his investigations and theorizing, Professor Randall has postulated the existence of what he calls psychoplasm, a material substance that emanates from the bodies of people in a state of catalepsy. Ansley has unwittingly secured a residue of psychoplasm from a book he used to crush an ectoplasmic bat. (Could the book have been by Ernest Lawrence Thayer?) It is Randall's first sample of this substance. He examines it, concluding, "While it is undoubtedly organic, it is nevertheless remarkably different, in structure and composition, from anything heretofore classified, either by biologists or chemists." (From Part II of "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," Weird Tales, April 1923, page 146.) Again, in "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," supernatural things are reduced to merely natural ones, and all is explained by science.
Two more things about ectoplasm. First, it is sometimes supposed to be a fabric-like or fibrous substance. That's what made me think of cotton candy and Barbapapa. In Kline's story, it's more gelatinous. Second, in ufology, there is a substance called "angel hair." Its resemblance to ectoplasm is undeniable. UFOs or flying saucers are like the ghosts of the twentieth century, a technological manifestation of what was previously supposedly supernatural. Every encounter with a ghost and every sighting of a flying saucer turns out the same: "I saw something and then it went away (without leaving any evidence)."
I have covered both parts of "The Thing of Thousand Shapes" here. Most of the action takes place in Part II, including a sequence in which Ansley dreams himself into the prehistoric past. He rushes from his dream into the path of a car. Professor Randall and his daughter Ruth are in the car, returning from Indianapolis (where Weird Tales came about and where C.L. Moore had just turned, in January 1923, the Golden Age of Twelve). It is Ruth that nurses him after he has been struck, and the three of them together save poor Uncle Jim.
One last thing: a distinction is made in Kline's story between urbane and well-educated people versus local farmers and other bucolic types. As always, there is an awareness of and a resorting to class distinctions in the popular fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Arthur Conan Doyle did it in his Sherlock Holmes stories. So did George Barr McCutcheon in Graustark. Anthony M. Rud and Otis Adelbert Kline did it in Weird Tales. (Rud's bucolic character is a backwoods Cajun.) And of course H.P. Lovecraft did it in so much of what he wrote. In these stories, main characters are high characters and they speak in perfect, unaccented English. Low characters can never be main characters. They speak in imperfect, accented English, for example, in Kline's story, a German man named Glitch, who sounds like the Captain from The Katzenjammer Kids, and another local yokel who talks like Jed Clampett. It's an annoying characteristic of fiction from that period. You wish that writers had had more imagination.
Notes
(1) Otis Adelbert Kline was the author of several non-fiction fillers published in Detective Tales in September and October 1923. The first many issues of Weird Tales also had non-fiction fillers. I wonder if Kline was also the author of at least some of those short features.
(2) This anticipates Arthur C. Clarke's famous adage, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Other authors have written variations on the idea. More wondering: was Kline first among them?
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| Holmes, Houdini, and ectoplasm, all in the same book. What more can you ask for? The Adventure of the Ectoplasmic Man by Daniel Stashower (1986). |
Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley
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