Who Goes There?

One of the unsung heroes of ’50s SFF, Margaret St. Clair got her start in the latter half of the ’40s and spent the next fifteen years writing short fiction at a mile a minute. Unfortunately by the ’60s she turned mostly to writing novels, and not very prolifically at that. Still, St. Clair’s best short fiction still reads as fresh, ferocious, subversive, witty, and rather concise today. I tackled her urban fantasy story “The Goddess on the Street Corner” a few months ago, so it hasn’t been very long since our last encounter. St. Clair is no stranger to weird fiction and today’s story, “Brenda,” is definitely a weird story. I was surprised to learn that while it didn’t get turned into a Twilight Zone episode, it did become a segment of Night Gallery. Is it horror, as one would expect of source material for a show that’s mainly horror-themed? Hmmmm. I’ll try to explain in the body of this review, because I’m not totally sure what to make of the story.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1954 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in the anthology Twisted (ed. Groff Conklin) and later Rod Serling’s Night Gallery Reader (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Carol Serling, Charles G. Waugh). Then there are the St. Clair collections The Best of Margaret St. Clair and The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales; thankfully the latter is recent and still in print.

Enhancing Image

Brenda is a preteen living on an island… somewhere. It’s implied to be a tourist attraction, what with the mentioning of summer people, but it’s unclear if this is off the coast of, say, New England, or the British Isles. It’s a small island with an even smaller population, with only six families currently staying. Everybody knows each other, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that Brenda feels alienated from other kids. We’re not told exactly what’s wrong with her; she seems, on the face of it, like a normal girl (although in the Night Gallery adaptation she’s coded as having some kind of mental didability), but we’ll soon learn that Brenda does not take to strange or dangerous situations like other girls.

While playing by herself in the forest one day she comes across a strange man—one who is probably not entirely human. The man doesn’t have any lines, but just going by how he’s described it’s easy to get that he’s the “weird” element of the story.

He was not a tramp, he was not one of the summer people. Brenda knew at once that he was not like any other man she had ever seen. His skin was not black, or brown, but of an inky grayness; his body was blobbish and irregular, as if it had been shaped out of the clots of soap and grease that stop up kitchen sinks. He held a dead bird in one crude hand. The rotten smell was welling out from him.

A sludgy humanoid creature with a strong rotten smell. Where he came from is never given. If not for a later event it’s easy to think the man is merely a figment of Brenda’s imagination, and for the story’s purposes he might well be. What’s unusual, though, is that Brenda isn’t threatened by this creature—not really. She runs away, sure, but more like she’s playing a game than if she was in mortal peril. She then tricks the creature into falling into a deep quarry, whose purpose itself is a mystery and whose deliberate lack of explanation might be the only “scary” moment in the story; otherwise this is a rather whimsical narrative.

St. Clair can say a lot with few words, but I have to admit this is the most abstract story of hers I’ve read thus far. We don’t know where we are, we don’t get much about Brenda’s backstory and nothing that would explain her behavior, and not helping things is that the third-person narrative is totally divorced from Brenda’s state of mind. The result is that we’re only able to understand what’s going on through action and dialogue, with Brenda’s train of thought being locked off for the reader. This makes it hard to rationalize the strange relationship she takes on with the sludgy creature, whom she seems to think of as both like a sideshow attraction and a kindred spirit—something to mock but also relate with.

There Be Spoilers Here

The creature eventually gets out of the quarry and the men of the island (all five of them) band together to get it back in the pit; what’s curious is that they don’t kill it, but instead entrap it and build up a mound of stones around it. “The men of Moss Island must have worked hard all day to pile up so much rock.” Even curiouser: the creature doesn’t die—not even after being stuck under that mound for a year. We discover this following a one-year time skip, wherein Brenda matures into a teen girl and becomes a lot more charismatic, although still a troublemaker and what we would call an odd duck.

The blurb at the start of the story says something about “waiting to be born,” and it’s a phrase Brenda uses at the end when reuniting with the creature, a mound of rock between them but the creature’s presence still being discernible. I don’t know what the fuck this phrase means. It has to do something with coming of age, but I’m not sure what the connection between Brenda and the creature is supposed to be. The fantastical element at the heart of this story blurs rather than illumines what should be a straightforward tale about a girl coming to maturity. Please let me know in the comments if I’m a dumb piece of shit who couldn’t understand this story’s subtext.

A Step Farther Out

Between the time I started this review and finishing it I decided to check out the Night Gallery segment that adapted this story, out of curiosity. Was not good, would not recommend. It’s a reasonably faithful adaptation but the acting is atrocious, and even at 25 minutes it’s a bit overlong. More importantly, I thought the story being translated to visuals would make the central theme more clear, but that was not the case. “Brenda” is a coming-of-age narrative, that much is obvious, but the symbolism of the sludgy creature and the phrase “waiting to be born” is surprisingly obtuse. It’s also a weird tale that I would not describe as horror. St. Clair can be a chameleon when it comes to genre but I have to admit this one went over my head; if only I could figure out what she was up to.

See you next time.