Who Goes There?

Occasionally looking up an author through ISFDB can be misleading, if what that author wrote was mostly not SFF; such is the case with Dorothy Salisbury Davis, who over her extremely long life (she was born in 1916 and died in 1914) wrote almost too many mystery and crime novels to count. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of these novels in the wild, but in the ’50s Davis was apparently big enough of a deal to be President of the Mystery Writers of America at the time when today’s story was published. Going off of her ISFDB profile, though, you’d think she wrote practically nothing, which is why you should always consult a second source for these things. “The Muted Horn” is very much an outlier in Davis’s body of work, in that while there’s a sense of mystery it’s ultimately a tale of supernatural horror. How it found its way into the predominantly SFnal Fantastic Universe is itself a mystery, but I assume this has to do with the lack of markets for short horror in the latter half of the ’50s.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1957 issue of Fantastic Universe. It’s actually been reprinted more times than I would’ve thought, appearing in The Fantastic Universe Omnibus (ed. Hans Stefan Santesson), The Dark of the Soul (ed. Don Ward), and Ladies of Fantasy: Two Centuries of Sinister Stories by the Gentle Sex (ed. Gogo Lewis and Seon Manley).

Enhancing Image

Jeb Sayer is a young man tending the same farm that his family has kept for generations, somewhere in New England in what was probably then the present day, in a cozy little town called Tinton. Nathan Wilkinson, “town moderator, deacon of the church, and publisher of the oldest weekly in the state,” has stopped by the Sayer home in the hopes of making Jeb an elder in Tinton Church, but Jeb declines the offer. (It’s unclear what sect of Christianity this is.) The reason for Jeb declining is that he’s unsatisfied with being just another upstanding New England redneck in a dead-end town, and he has other plans, namely that he wants to marry Ellen, who he’s been dating for some time and who works in a record store. (Jeb understands that any woman who works in a record store is probably wife material.) He’s even thought about leaving Tinton before, and it doesn’t help that the town has, allegedly, supposedly, a dark history going back to the Puritan days, when it was a den full of scum and villainy, “so wicked that once the church elders had gone among the citizens in chains lest one of them fall into temptation.” Said chains have survived into the modern day, first in the church belfry and then moved to the cemetery by a younger Jeb, the chains being wrapped around the tombstones of dead vicars. Those chains will eventually come back, so put a pin in that.

This does raise a question, though: What does this have to do with a horn? Not much, actually. One problem I realized I had with this story, looking back on it, is that Salisbury introduces two supernatural horror elements which, at least on a surface level, don’t have anything to do with each other. We get the impression that there’s something off about Tinton, but then we’re introduced to this other, tangential thing in the form of an ancient horn that’s supposed to be golden but which has been covered so thickly with dust and gunk that it’s been “tarnished black.” It and a few other old instruments have been moved to the record store, and Ellen asks Jeb to clean to the horn. Fine. This ends up being a mistake, though. Of course a curiosity shop is involved, which even in the 1950s would’ve been a tired old horror trope. So how does Salisbury differentiate “The Muted Horn” from other similar stories that came before it?

Well…

The other problem, and this could be because while Salisbury was a professional when it came to crime fiction but inexperienced with writing supernatural horror, is that “The Muted Horn” doesn’t really stand out other than the conspicuousness of its being published where and when it was. Had Salisbury written “The Muted Horn” just five years earlier it would’ve appeared in Weird Tales without issue; unfortunately for Salisbury, and really for everyone writing horror at the time, Weird Tales was dead at this point. The market for short genre fiction in the late ’50s was not great generally (the shutdown of American News Company in 1957 was one reason for the magazine market all but imploding), but it was especially bad for short horror fiction. There was basically nothing specializing in horror or dark fantasy in the US at this time. Fantastic Universe occasionally published fantasy and horror but was primarily an SF magazine, and not a first-rate one at that. “The Muted Horn” stuck out to me when I was scrounging for ’50s stories written by lady authors, because it’s a rarity for the magazine it appeared in, but if it had appeared in Weird Tales in the early ’50s it probably would not have been on my radar. And really, if for some reason you do read this one, it’s for the novelty of the thing.

There Be Spoilers Here

Once Jeb cleans off the horn he started playing it, and well, some weird stuff happens. A hurricane blows through Tinton, except not really. Nobody has died, or at least not yet. The animals are acting weird, though. And lo, the chains in the cemetery are gone! SpOoOoOoKy. What could this mean? Does the horn have the power to quite literally raise the dead? Has Jeb inadvertently brought about the apocalypse? We don’t get a straight answer, the story just kinda ends there. Yeah, if you wanted to see the consequences of Jeb’s actions, you’ll be disappointed.

A Step Farther Out

It took me longer to write a review than I would’ve liked, not because I struggled to get through “The Muted Horn” but because when I finished it I realized I didn’t have much to say about it. It’s fine. It’s a perfectly average rural horror yarn that really anybody could’ve written, except it happened to be written by someone who was a pretty respected crime writer at the time. This did give me an idea, though, since Salisbury was by no means the only crime writer who occasionally dipped their toes in SFF. I don’t cover crime fiction here unless it’s also SFF in some way, but I can cover SFF works by crime fiction writers.

See you next time.