Study 174 - The Crawling Horror

Now this story, The Crawling Horror, how did you find it? Like many other recent stories we've covered, I pulled this tale from The Century's Best Horror, which is an anthology, a two volume anthology edited by author and horror genre historian John Pellen.

In the anthology, there is one story for each year of the 20th century.

And this was the selection for 1936.

And I'll read what Mr. Pellen had to say about it at the beginning.

And this is what attracted me to the story.

In a year that saw the stunning debut collection of stories by Charles Birkin, The Graveyard Rats by Henry Kuttner, work by the Weird Tales Big Three, Howard Lovecraft and Smith, as well as notable work by Manly Wade Wellman and Paul Ernst, the November issue of Weird Tales featured a story by a writer that's been all but forgotten today.

The Crawling Horror by Thorpe McCluskey, a tale that predates John W. Campbell's memorable Who Goes There and may have served as an inspiration for Ted Kline's The Events at Poreth Farm.

McCluskey's tale was an instant classic.

You know, I love all those other tales that Pellan mentions there, so I had to give this one a shot and I liked it.

Robin, have you ever heard of this author before? I heard of him when you assigned this to me as

homework.

So I went and did my homework.

So Thorpe McCluskey, little is known of him because second and third tier Weird Tales or pulp writers have not been adequately researched.

I think it's pretty clear he's from Arkansas.

His life...

Other than his publications, it's kind of vague.

You will hear references to him having a day job, which is extremely credible given that short stories alone do not pay the bills now or then.

And since he didn't have a novel career per se, that checks out what exactly the day job is.

Sources differ.

We do know that he wrote for a bunch of other adventure mags and for the U.S. Army and for the Reader's Digest later on.

He also wrote an alternative health book.

This was his bestseller, Your Health and Chiropractic, which is very appropriate for a horror writer, given that chiropractic medicine was invented by a ghost.

What? Yes.

So briefly, the person who invented chiropractic originally said that he was instructed in this by the ghost of a dead doctor.

And since that's a giant digression, if anybody wants to hear the whole story on how chiropractic is total ghost woo, listen to Ken and Robin talk about stuff number 535 and you'll get the