Review: Spawn of the Green Abyss - C. Hall Thompson

I once owned the November 1946 issue of WEIRD TALES. I remember that Boris Dolgov cover. However, I never got around to reading it. But continuing with my sudden and unexplainable interest in Cthulhu Mythos stories (gee, that sounds kind of sinister, doesn’t it?), I moved on in the anthology A MOUNTAIN WALKED to read the novelette “Spawn of the Green Abyss” by C. Hall Thompson.

C. Hall Thompson is best remembered, if he is at all, as a Western writer, but he published four well-regarded stories in WEIRD TALES. “Spawn of the Green Abyss” is narrated by Dr. James Arkwright, a former brain surgeon and now a convicted murderer who’s waiting for his execution. Thompson lets us know right away that Arkwright killed his wife and her unborn baby, but of course, there’s more to it than that, and slowly, in clearly Lovecraft-influenced prose, he peels back the layers of what really happened.

Arkwright, you see, suffering from the stress of his medical career, takes a break from it by renting a cottage in a small town on a peninsula extending into the Atlantic from the New Jersey shore. Out at the point of that peninsula is a creepy old house where a creepy old man lives, along with his beautiful daughter. Naturally, Arkwright becomes obsessed with the house and the old man, and he falls in love with the daughter, as we all knew he would. She is, in fact, the wife he’s in prison for murdering.

I’m sure a lot of you have already read this story, and those of you who haven’t won’t have any trouble figuring out what’s going to happen in it, but the fun is in getting there and Thompson clearly relished the journey. Along the way, the reader gets a lot of chilling, haunting images and a bit of sea-going adventure, to boot.

“Spawn of the Green Abyss” is another excellent story, and I’m glad I got on this little binge. I’m intrigued by the idea that the same guy who wrote this dense, atmospheric yarn was primarily a Western writer. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything else by Thompson, but I may have to remedy that.