Mary Elizabeth Counselman: "The Girl with the Green Eyes," "The Cat-Woman," "Mommy" and "The Web of Silence"

Let's check out four stories by Mary Elizabeth Counselman that appeared in Weird Tales in the 1930s; as you may recall, back in October of last year I read her 1937 story "The Black Stone Statue" and liked it, so there is hope I will also enjoy these.

"The Girl with the Green Eyes" (1933)

The narrator of "The Girl with the Green Eyes" is a self-described "grumpy old maid" and Sunday school teacher named Elizabeth who is raising her niece and nephew, the former 14, the latter 17, two well-behaved and happy kids.  A woman moves in next door, a tall pale-skinned black-haired beauty with green eyes who really catches the attention of nephew Don.  But, when the three Christians pay a visit to their new neighbor, niece Diane and our narrator find the decor a little disturbing--bats painted on the backs of chairs and images of goats' heads woven into curtains and tapestries are among the creepy highlights.  The woman herself wears a ring carved into the shape of a spider, and when she leans down to pet her unfriendly black cat (name: Diablo) a necklace slips out of her bosom and from it hangs a cross--upside down!

As the story proceeds, the narrator witnesses queer events in which the new neighbor wreaks unhealthy changes in Don and Dianne, though Liz doesn't connect the dots.  Don gets so bad his Aunt Liz calls over her best friend, the doctor who wants to marry her, to look at him.  Doc realizes Don is the victim of black sorcery and gives a long lecture to Liz about witches.  Liz scoffs at this, even though the doctor's description of a witch matches in every detail what Liz has already seen of the new neighbor.  Things get worse still with Don, who does all kinds of black magic stuff that Liz doesn't quite comprehend but we readers of course recognize.  When Don runs away from home, Liz finally summons the doctor, and doc hurries over to the witch's house and rescues Don and the baby the witch is about to sacrifice as part of a spell to murder Diane.  In an effort to escape the witch turns into a hare, but Liz's pet dog catches and kills the hare.  

"The Girl with the Green Eyes" is too long and too obvious, what with the lecture telling you how to spot a witch and then a witch who ticks all the boxes thus enumerated.  It also lacks strong characters and narrative drive.  Liz is a dopey protagonist who fails to interpret like twenty signs of what is going on, and ends up just being a spectator in the story as the doctor figures out what is going on and then saves the day.  A better story would have focused more on the psychology of the witch--her lust for a teenage boy or ambition to please Satan or desire for vengeance on the followers of Christ--or of Don--his unsuccessful efforts to resist the temptation of a seductive woman who promises sexual fulfillment or eternal life or whatever.  The characters most at risk--the baby who is to be sacrificed and her mother--and the characters who actually take the fight to the witch and defeat her--the doctor and the dog--get almost no "screen time," throwing away opportunities for tension and catharsis that could be generated if we knew and cared about these characters.  

With its overly obvious plot, its time out for a history lesson and its references to high literature (Macbeth and Coleridge's Christabel), its goody goody kids and its sterling authority figures, "The Girl with the Green Eyes" reads like a juvenile, and a bland one at that.  Gotta give it a thumbs down.    

I guess I'm not the only reader who has a dim view of "The Girl with the Green Eyes;" Counselman had two collections of fiction published in the 20th century (annoyingly, both are titled Half in Shadow but they have quite different contents) but this story appears in neither and as far as I can tell has never been reprinted.

"The Cat-Woman" (1933) 

Editors we have heard of seem to have liked "The Cat-Woman;" after its debut in a 1933 issue of Weird Tales with perhaps the most famous of all WT covers, the story was reprinted by Donald Wollheim in his Avon Fantasy Reader in 1948 and almost fifty years later Messrs. Dziemianowicz, Weinberg and Greenberg included it in their Barnes and Noble anthology 100 Fiendish Little Frightmares. 

This is an acceptable little filler piece that actually shares quite a few elements with "The Girl with the Green Eyes."  Our middle-class narrator moves into a boarding house.  Across the hall lives a tall sexy woman with green eyes.  Multiple episodes make it clear to us readers that this hot chick can transform into a cat.  The cat keeps making its way into the narrator's room to play with him.  The fat landlady hates cats and doesn't want any pets in her boarding house, and tries to drive out this cat--in turn the cat attacks her in her sleep.  The story ends when the cat is killed by a big dog in a scene reminiscent of the scene in "The Girl with the Green Eyes" in which the witch, in the form of a hare, is killed.

Not only does Counselman here keep her femme fatale story short and to the point, but does more to suggest the erotic temptation presented by the femme fatale, and makes her three characters more nuanced, believable and interesting than the half-dozen characters in "The Girl with the Green Eyes"--all three characters here have motivations we can understand and sympathize with as well as flaws that make them human and they each pursue their goals in a compelling way so that we are curious to find out what happens to them.

"Mommy" (1939)

Here we have another story that Wollheim thought worth reprinting, a story that also appeared in the 1978 Counselman collection Half in Shadow.  

"Mommy" is a somewhat sappy filler story about an orphaned little girl whose dead mother, as a ghost, looks after her.  

Mrs. Ellison is a childless widow who goes to the orphanage thinking to adopt a little girl.  She meets Martha, 7, a skinny ugly child whom the other kids find unnerving.  The fat matron explains why they think her odd.  You see, on her death bed, Mom said she would never leave Martha's side, and Martha is convinced she has conversations with Mom and even sees her.  And whenever Martha has some problem, some wacky coincidence resolves her issue.  For example, Martha swallowed a pin during an ice storm which kept the orphanage staff from rushing her to the hospital.  Fortuitously, a bus carrying doctors home from a convention broke down right in front of the orphanage.  Similarly, Martha is always finding coins and old toys and so forth, and saying her mother gave them to her.  

Mrs. Ellison adopts Martha and tries to get Martha to stop prattling nonsense about her Mother being there with her.  But then a wacky coincidence saves Mrs. Ellison and Martha's lives from certain death in a collision with a runaway truck, and from then on Mrs. Ellison believes in the ghost.

This story is competent, and I guess I shouldn't hold against it its sappiness.  We'll call it acceptable, even while recognizing that its topic and themes do not interest me as much as those of "The Cat-Woman," which I also judged acceptable filler.  I want to read about sex and violence, or political and sociological theories, not a romanticization of the love of a mother.

"The Web of Silence" (1939)

In late June we read a 1958 story by James Gunn about the dangerous effects of silence, and here we have a story on a similar theme written like 20 years earlier.  Unfortunately, "The Web of Silence" is totally unconvincing in its science and in the behavior of its characters, has an uneven tone, a plot that consists of a bunch of stupid coincidences, and an incoherent and idiotic "message."  Thumbs down!

Our tale is laid in an American town of 30,000 people which the author refers to by the pseudonym "Blankville" for some reason.  Maybe this is a joke.  (Maybe these Counselman stories are all jokes, parodies of weird elements rather than what I am taking them to be, mediocre or bad rehashes of weird elements.)  The mayor of Blankville receives a letter demanding a quarter million dollars in ransom or suffer something terrible happening to the town on such and such a date.  The editor of the local paper receives a letter in the same hand informing him of the extortion scheme.  Both of these civic leaders think this is a hoax and ignore the letters.

Just as predicted by the letters, right on schedule, a bizarre phenomena strikes the town.  Nobody in the town can hear any sound whatsoever.  This leads to many problems, including at least one accident in which someone is killed because he couldn't hear an oncoming motor vehicle.  We witness the mayor and the editor reacting to this disaster and get a list of the problems silence is causing and a list of citizens' theories of how the letter writer has inflicted silence on the town.  

Eventually the mayor and the local bank get the $250,000 together and put it in the apparently inaccessible place specified by the extortionist.  As soon as the container with the money vanishes beneath the water, the silence ends and everybody can hear everything again.  

A short time later the money is returned and with it a long note.  The letter writer explains that he is an astronomer from some country "halfway across the world" and he realized a newly discovered nova was going to send radiation to the Earth on such and such a date and this radiation might, if the humidity level was just right, cause a certain mineral to vibrate in such a way that it would negatively affect the operation of the human ear.  Somehow this mastermind figured out where there were concentrations of this mineral, and Blankville was just such a place.  As a joke, and to teach Americans, whom he considers "a rather stodgy and unimaginative lot, who place more value on money than on truth," that "he who has truth at his fingertips has little regard for material things," he sent the threatening letter with the demand of money.  It was just dumb luck that there was just the right amount of rainfall to start the period of silence when he predicted it would start and end the period when the money was submerged.  

None of this is believable or interesting or funny--none of it even makes sense.  This arrogant self-satisfied jerk claims he doesn't care about money and isn't rich, but he also claims he has a private observatory "somewhat larger than the largest now in public use."  How does lying to the people of the town teach them to respect the truth?  Wouldn't a guy who respected truth contact American scientists and make a sincere effort to convince them to prepare for the coming disaster?  Isn't this foreign bastard morally responsible for the death in the motor vehicle accident as well as lots of other damages?  

Compounding the stupidity and lack of credibility that afflicts the story already, Counselman doesn't portray the mayor or the editor as outraged by the deadly fraud perpetrated upon their fellow citizens, but as laughing at finding themselves the butt of this elaborate joke.  Counselman approves of the foreign scientist's life-imperiling hoax!

Bad.  "The Web of Silence" went unreprinted until our own 21st century, when its one virtue, its fulfilling of a diversity criterion, got it included in a book of stories from Weird Tales by women.

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These stories are pretty hacky; when they work they are obvious and derivative, and when Counselman gets ambitious and creative a disaster results.  Are these stories a SF equivalent of the Sokal hoax?  Counselman published a bunch of stories in Weird Tales, and maybe I accidentally picked an unrepresentative sample of weak ones, but it may be a while before you see the name "Mary Elizabeth Counselman" here at MPorcius Fiction Log again.