1gwendetenebre
"Vine Terror" by Howard Wandrei.
Discussion opens February 14, 2024.
First published in the September 1934 issue of Weird Tales
BIBLIOGRAPHY
https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?86945
SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS
The Eerie Mr. Murphy: The Collected Fantasy Tales of Howard Wandrei, Volume II
ONLINE VERSIONS
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Weird_Tales/Volume_24/Issue_3/Vine_Terror
ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS
No online audio versions found to date.
MISCELLANY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Wandrei
https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/11/howard-wandrei-time-haven-vine-terror.html
http://tinyurl.com/34dv4uj7
Discussion opens February 14, 2024.
First published in the September 1934 issue of Weird Tales
BIBLIOGRAPHY
https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?86945
SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS
The Eerie Mr. Murphy: The Collected Fantasy Tales of Howard Wandrei, Volume II
ONLINE VERSIONS
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Weird_Tales/Volume_24/Issue_3/Vine_Terror
ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS
No online audio versions found to date.
MISCELLANY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Wandrei
https://mporcius.blogspot.com/2021/11/howard-wandrei-time-haven-vine-terror.html
http://tinyurl.com/34dv4uj7
2AndreasJ
Can't say I appreciated the writing, but the story wasn't too bad. You could no doubt make a decent horror movie out of it.
The setting struck me as curiously undefined. Set approximately at the time of writing? At first I vaguely assumed, for no very concrete reason, that it was intended up be set in the (then) future, but nothing really turned up to confirm that. No hint what the laboratory was researching.
The setting struck me as curiously undefined. Set approximately at the time of writing? At first I vaguely assumed, for no very concrete reason, that it was intended up be set in the (then) future, but nothing really turned up to confirm that. No hint what the laboratory was researching.
3RandyStafford
>2 AndreasJ: Given that Wandrei was from St. Paul, MN, I kind of assumed the vague setting was someplace in northern Minnesota. There were a great many Finn immigrants in Minnesota, especially in the north part of the state.
While I like tales of vegetable terror, I didn't like this one much. The humor of the opening scene fell flat, and I thought it and the closing scene too long. If Wandrei wanted to push an anti-science theme, it didn't really work.
Like the setting, what Keene was working on is annoyingly ill-defined, and Wandrei doesn't even make an attempt to provide a scientific rationale, jargon, or techno mumbo-jumbo. Rather he goes for the mystical.
Haverland is an implausibly resolute sceptic given what he's seen. That climactic scene where he considers everything that's happened seems to me Wandrei taking an element of his friend H. P. Lovecraft's aesthetic criteria on the weird story -- a violation of the natural order -- and laying it on too thick.
Not a bad conceit at the center of the story, but, for me, it needed a rewrite.
While I like tales of vegetable terror, I didn't like this one much. The humor of the opening scene fell flat, and I thought it and the closing scene too long. If Wandrei wanted to push an anti-science theme, it didn't really work.
Like the setting, what Keene was working on is annoyingly ill-defined, and Wandrei doesn't even make an attempt to provide a scientific rationale, jargon, or techno mumbo-jumbo. Rather he goes for the mystical.
Haverland is an implausibly resolute sceptic given what he's seen. That climactic scene where he considers everything that's happened seems to me Wandrei taking an element of his friend H. P. Lovecraft's aesthetic criteria on the weird story -- a violation of the natural order -- and laying it on too thick.
Not a bad conceit at the center of the story, but, for me, it needed a rewrite.
