Say you’re a writer, an author of very popular light romances, and your publisher is pressuring you to finish the new book, and you’re having trouble with it, so you need a nice quiet, peaceful place to work. What do you do?
You rent a house in Salem, Massachusetts, that once belonged to an evil witch who was hanged several hundred years earlier when the mob discovered that her body wouldn’t burn at the stake, and before she died she cursed the town and nobody’s been able to live in the house for very long ever since. Of course that’s what you do. Sure, why not?
That’s the set-up of Henry Kuttner’s story “The Salem Witch”, which appeared originally in the May 1937 issue of WEIRD TALES, which has a striking cover by Margaret Brundage, by the way. Kuttner is a long-time favorite of mine. He was one of those authors who could write in several different genres and handle them all extremely well. The stories of his from WEIRD TALES that I’ve read have all been excellent, and “The Salem Horror” is no exception. The protagonist of this yarn pursues a rat into the basement of the old house, where he proceeds to find a hidden room that has to be the old witch’s sanctum where she invoked dark rituals. Naturally, the guy decides this would be a fine place to write and finish his novel at last. Who cares if he starts having bizarre, disturbing dreams about a giant black blob rampaging through the town and slaughtering people?
This story also introduces occult detective Michael Leigh, who returns in the next issue of WEIRD TALES in a story that’s a collaboration between Kuttner and Robert Bloch. Unfortunately for him, that’s the end of his series. I may have to find that one and read it, too, since Bloch is another favorite of mine. In the meantime, I read “The Salem Horror” in the aptly named THE CTHULHU MYTHOS MEGAPACK from Wildside Press, which you can find in an e-book edition on Amazon. I really enjoyed this one, and I suspect I’ll be reading more from that collection very soon.
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