Review: The House of the Worm - Mearle Prout (Weird Tales, October 1933)

Since I read and reviewed Edmond Hamilton’s “The Vampire Master” earlier this week, my friend Fred Blosser suggested I read “The House of the Worm” by Mearle Prout, which appears in the same issue of WEIRD TALES as the opening installment of Hamilton’s serial. That sounded like a good idea to me.

We don’t know much about Mearle Prout. He was born in 1911, possibly in Texas, died in 1964, and apparently spent most of his life in Oklahoma. He published four stories in WEIRD TALES, starting with “The House of the Worm” in the October 1933 issue and then three more, one each in 1937, 1938, and 1939. “The House of the Worm” was the most successful, going on to be reprinted six times in various magazines and anthologies. I had never run across it until now, though.

The narrator of this story is a young man named Art. He’s a writer, possibly a pulp writer, although that’s never specified. His roommate and best friend is a bank clerk named Fred. We never learn any more about these two young fellows than that. They take a break from their jobs to go on a hunting trip to a secluded valley in the Ozark Mountains (not far from Prout’s home in Oklahoma), but when they reach their destination, they find that all the vegetation in the valley is dying and the place has a loathsome stench about it. (You know you’re reading a WEIRD TALES story when there’s a loathsome stench involved somewhere.) They camp there anyway, and both guys have terrible nightmares involving worms and decaying corpses. Or were they nightmares?

Well, things go from bad to worse, as they have a habit of doing. Some sort of unearthly death and decay begins to spread out from the Ozarks. The army and a horde of scientists seem powerless to stop it. We’ll see what a couple of good old boys with a tractor, some barrels of kerosene, and a few cases of dynamite can do, by golly!

All kidding aside, this is an absolutely terrific story. It’s considered part of the Cthulhu Mythos, but that connection is pretty tenuous. Prout’s style is definitely Lovecraft-inspired, but his prose isn’t as dense as Lovecraft’s and there’s considerably more dialogue and action. Nor do his protagonists sit around and stare at the scary stuff until they go insane. Like Robert E. Howard’s heroes in his Mythos stories, Art and Fred may gaze in horror at first, but then they haul off and kick some Elder God ass.

If you want to read this story, you can find a PDF of that issue on the Luminist Archives, and it’s probably available on various other sites, as well. I really enjoyed “The House of the Worm”, and I’m going to see if I can find Mearle Prout’s other stories.