G.A. Wells (?-?)-The First Story of the Far North

Author, Traveler
Born ?, Ohio
Died ?

As far as I know, nobody has identified the author G.A. Wells, although The FictionMags Index lets us know that he or she was from Ohio and was also a traveler. Wells had several dozen stories published from 1917 until 1938. Titles include Ace-High Magazine, Adventure, The Black Cat, Detective Story Magazine, The Frontier, North•West Stories, People's Favorite Magazine, Short Stories, Telling Tales, Thrilling Stories, Top-Notch Magazine, and Western Story Magazine. Wells had one story in Weird Tales, "The Ghoul and the Corpse," from March 1923. The dates of Wells' stories suggest that he or she was of the same generation of several other authors from that first issue, perhaps born in the 1880s or 1890s. A lot of authors in Weird Tales used only their initials, but I wonder if G.A. Wells got something out of the similarity between his or her name and that of H.G. Wells.

G.A. Wells' Story in Weird Tales
"The Ghoul and the Corpse" (Mar. 1923)

Further Reading
None known.

G.A. Wells' Story:

"The Ghoul and the Corpse" is misnamed and that diminishes the story, making it sound like a conventional horror story rather than what it is, for "The Ghoul and the Corpse" is set not in some dark and musty graveyard but in the far north of Alaska. There is a framing device in the story. One man, McNeal, recounts a tale told him by another, named Chris Bonner. I'm not sure why authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries felt compelled to distance themselves from their own stories. Could there have been some kind of stigma attached to the writing of fiction? Did people--authors and their readers alike--consider fiction to be a kind of lie? I'm not sure. I remember the secretary at the first forestry office where I worked said that she didn't read novels "because they're not true." I liked her and got along with her, but that didn't stop me from wanting to slap her down. Her feeling gets to a lack of understanding in so many people as to the difference between truth and fact. Fiction is not factual. We can all agree on that. That doesn't stop the best of it from containing real truth.

McNeal, a fur trapper, is settling in for the winter in a place called Aurora Bay, on the Arctic Sea, when into his igloo comes Chris Bonner. Bonner has been alone in the boondocks and has a story to tell now that he's back among his fellow men. He begins by recalling the theory that, long ago, the earth turned sideways, with the tropics becoming polar regions and vice versa. Why would he talk about such a thing? Because he's trying to explain how he found a prehistoric apeman frozen in an Alaskan glacier.

"The Ghoul and the Corpse" is a tale told around a fire in a remote place. As a tale--a very old type to be sure--it's fairly short, not well developed, and concerns itself only with a single episode in the experience of a single character. It could have been so much more, as the concept at its core has such great potential. But we have to give the author Wells some slack. This was only 1923 and only the first issue of Weird Tales. It would fall on later authors to carry the concept along of the creature frozen in ice and to develop it further.

So in "The Ghoul and The Corpse" there is talk of suspended animation (as in "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" by Otis Adelbert Kline); what Wikipedia calls "the Cataclysmic Pole Shift Hypothesis"; and prehistory, apemen, and Darwinian evolution. (There is a recapitulation of evolution in Kline's story, too.) Also in "The Ghoul and the Corpse" there is an early example (I think early) of a creature frozen in ice and then revived. Ice doesn't kill. It only preserves. (1)

In reading Wells' story, I couldn't help but think of Sasquatch or Bigfoot. I also couldn't help but think of the Minnesota Iceman. Again, before these things can be seen (or made), they must be imagined, and it is artists and writers who very often do the imagining.

Note
(1) When it comes to monsters, ice is good for two things: one, preserving creatures such as Frankenstein's monster and the Thing from Another World so that they can be revived and used to tell a scary story; and two, immobilizing creatures such as the Damp Man and the T-1000 so that the main characters can make their escape. Then, of course, the creature is revived so that another scary story can be told, and the cycle repeats itself.

Argosy, May 1969, with a cover story "The Missing Link" by Ivan T. Sanderson. The cover blurb says that he was found in Wisconsin. That may or may not be true. Now, though, he's called "the Minnesota Iceman," and I believe he's living in suspended animation in Texas. Anyway, could Frank Hansen, the huckster behind the monster, have read "The Ghoul and the Corpse"? Or did he get his idea from Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943), better yet, from The Thing from Another World (1951)?

Text and caption copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley