The Witch Tree by Frank Belknap Long

There were five tall windows through which reddening sunlight was streaming, and about twenty articles of furniture, ranging from straight-backed chairs with ornately carved arms, upholstered in purple velvet, to wide-topped circular tables with dull walnut finishes, and settees which in spite of sturdy-looking legs still seemed about ready to collapse.  There was one large sofa, a highboy mounted on what looked like a revolving base and a baby grand piano, the top of which had seemingly gone undusted for all of the fifty years that the house had been boarded up.  

Shame on you, Professor Hilliard, Joan thought.  What kind of housekeeper are you?  Then she remembered how neat Barbara was and how, as a rule, she never allowed dust to accumulate anywhere and a wave of dismay swept over her.  If Barbara had let the piano remain as it was, it strongly suggested that the worst of her fears had been justified: Barbara must have been too frightened to give the piano a thought. 

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading Frank Belknap Long.  We just read three stories by Long that appeared in Weird Tales, one each from the decades of the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, and they were not bad.  Today we read a Magnum Gothic Original printed in 1971--the year of my birth!--in large type on non-glare paper, The Witch Tree, credited to Lyda Belknap Long, a transparent pseudonym presumably designed to attract the readers of Gothic romances: women.  Long's wife's name was Lyda Alco Long, but according to wikipedia there is no reason to believe Mrs. Long had any role in the writing this novel, one of nine Gothics that Long produced to help make ends meet.  I'm actually reading a physical book this time, having bought a copy of The Witch Tree at Wonder Book back in December of 2022.

I've found much of Long's output to be poor, including one of his most celebrated works, The Horror from the Hills, but there are some gems in there as well, and I am curious about the career of a man responsible for such a large body of work that spanned so long a period and who was so closely associated with H. P. Lovecraft.  So I went into this reading experience with the expectation that it would not be good but with the hope that it might be interesting.

What I found was that The Witch Tree is quite bad and not very interesting.  The novel is poorly written when it comes to pacing, style, and structure, with page after page of superfluous or irrelevant descriptions and philosophic or psychological musings and lots of annoying literary tics that make each sentence two or three times as long as it need be and each scene twice as many paragraphs long as it need be.  A guy doesn't say "You look like your sister!" he says, "There are some folks who would say you and your sister look enough alike to be identical twins.....But I won't, because the resemblance just isn't that close.  But if Henry hadn't told me I'd have known straight off you had to be closely related."  Long describes in painstaking but dust dry detail locations in which nothing happens and which the characters never visit again.  He introduces characters who never reappear.  He exhaustingly describes people's psychological states and thought processes, whether or not the decision they are trying to make or the puzzle they are trying to figure out is interesting or important, bogging the narrative down on totally extraneous matter.  

As for the plot, very little happens and the main character is a spectator to all of it, making no significant decisions and taking no consequential actions.  A young woman leaves New York City (nobody follows my advice that you should never leave New York City--even I didn't follow it) and goes to an island off the Carolinas to help a professor do research on witches in the island's only house.  When her sister, our main character, gets worried about her a few weeks later she goes to the island herself to investigate.  Our heroine spends her time on the island having boring conversations, stumbling upon dead bodies, and fainting.  She only ever speaks to each other character in the novel once, so there is no building of relationships.  Finally, in the last 30 pages of text (The Witch Tree's 174 page count consists of like 160 pages of text, what with all the blank pages between chapters and the fact the story begins on page 7) our heroine is tied up to sacrificed to the Devil, to join the Devil as one of his brides!  The police arrive and save her, and the story ends with our heroine having accomplished almost nothing--it wasn't she who found her sister, she didn't figure out who the lead Satanist was, nor did she play any contributory role in the destruction of the Satanic cult.  Well, she did make a new boyfriend, which is I guess what counts.   

So, thumbs down for The Witch Tree, which has nothing to recommend it.  But don't think this terrible specimen of Long's work is going to put me off reading more fiction by Long--hell, it is not even going to put me off reading more of Long's gothic romances!  See you next time, gluttons for punishment!

If you are truly curious about The Witch Tree, read on for my blow by blow description of this sad piece of work, including examples of the problems I cite above and another sample of Long's regrettable prose.

**********    

Off the coast of the Carolinas lies Hawk Island, upon which sits an eighteenth century house.  We readers soon learn that this island and house are considered cursed, that everyone who has lived there has suffered death from a strange disease or simply disappeared.

The Witch Tree has sixteen chapters and a prologue.  In the prologue a beautiful woman, fear-stricken, her clothes plastered to her slender body, is passing through a seaside village at night, having swum from Hawk Island to the mainland.  She then inexplicably turns around, heading back towards the sea, and is met by a man in a cloak carrying a five-foot high cross with a small animal crucified on it.  He grabs the girl and drags her off; he drops the cross but his assistant, a little hunchback, picks it up.

In Chapter One we meet Joan Rondon, who has arrived in the Carolinas with the intention of seeing her sister, Barbara, who is staying on Hawk Island.  Chapter One is occupied by Joan's conversation with the village pharmacist, who tells her all about the rumors of the island and how a friend of his just recently disappeared there.  Chapter Two flashes back some three weeks to New York City, Frank Belknap Long's lifelong home and the home of your humble blogger for over ten years.  Joan and Barbara live in a brownstone they inherited, and Barbara is packing to go to Hawk Island to do research on witchcraft with her boyfriend Richard.  Barbara and Richard's professor, the wealthy Dr. Hilliard, just bought the house on Hawk Island and B&R will be his assistants.  Over the following three weeks, a series of letters and brief phone calls convince Joan that Barbara is in some kind of trouble she won't or can't specify, and that is why Joan is now trying to get to Hawk Island.  

Chapter Two also includes a section headed "INTERMEZZO" in which we witness the start of a Satanic ritual involving a crucified black calf and a beautiful bound woman in white--Satan's bride!  I thought it an odd choice for Long to tell us right out that these were Satanists instead of letting us figure it out ourselves or letting a sympathetic character discover it in a shocking moment.  This overabundance of information is particularly surprising because, in the Prologue and Intermezzo, Long doesn't tell us the name of the woman, allowing us to believe it is Barbara but leaving open the possibility the scenes depict the fate of some other woman or are foreshadowing Joan's own fate.  

Chapter Three covers Joan's ferry ride to the island.  The guy operating the ferry tells her a little about the seven people living on the island--Hilliard; Barbara; Richard; the man Hilliard bought the island from, Winston; a second professor, old, famous and impecunious, Dr. Reyher; and two servants, a mysterious young woman and her taciturn uncle.  Long provides lots of descriptions of the ferry (which does not figure in the story again) and the island and musings about the sea ("...the sea was so vast and boundless that it dwarfed all human tribulations....Human tragedies passed, but the sea remained generation after generation....") that I guess are intended to build atmosphere or maybe to just run up the word count.

In Chapter Four we get more long romantic descriptions of natural phenomena and some bizarre metaphors as Joan walks along the beach of Hawk Island, looking for the stairway up the cliff to the house and getting distracted by seaside caves Long repeatedly likens to pagodas.  (How a cave is like a pagoda, I don't know, and I just looked at like a hundred images of pagodas online--metaphors are supposed to give you a sharper, more clear understanding of an image or phenomena, but Long's, way too often, obscure rather than enhance a reader's understanding.)  Drawn by some irresistible compulsion, Joan enters a cave and spots a mysterious light; investigating it, she finds deep inside the cave the mangled corpse of a man with a mark on his chest she recognizes as "the brand of Satan himself!"

Joan runs out of the cave, meets a mysterious man, and faints.  In Chapter Five she wakes up in a room she assumes is inside the only house on Hawk Island, and wonders if the mysterious man was the ghost of the dead man she had just discovered.  We get a multi-page description of the room and the house and its furniture, including quotes from Hilliard recorded in Barbara's letters to Joan, as well as discussions of Joan's fear and determination to overcome it, including some groan-inducing psychobabble expressed with mixed metaphors:

There were hidden reserves of courage in everyone, unsuspected until some terrible inward shattering took place and there was only one road to survival left.  The fragments must be pieced together and formed into a shield.

A chronic problem in Long's writing is the lack of a unity of purpose in a paragraph or section--if you want us to think Joan is scared, and if you want us to share her fear, don't tell us she is thinking about a boring letter from her sister about furniture and then spend two paragraphs quoting the letter.  If she was really scared she wouldn't be thinking about furniture, and if you want to instill fear in your readers, spend a single line saying some crap like "in the shadows of the dark room the chairs and wardrobe took on the aspect of grim specters," don't spend a page itemizing the furniture and explaining why in the 20th century an 18th-century house has 19th-century furniture.

Chapter Six covers Joan's conversation with John Winston, the previous owner of the Island and house, the man who rescued her when she fled from the cave, totally out of her mind.  Joan thinks he's as handsome as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, which I guess is a sort of urtext for readers of Gothic romances, the way "Tower of the Elephant" and Lord of the Rings are touchstones for Dungeons and Dragons kids.  Winston doesn't believe in the supernatural and says Joan must have hallucinated the Devil's Mark on the corpse she found, and also mentions for the first time in the novel the tree, mentioned in the title, that the house was built around and whose dead trunk can be seen in one of the rooms.  After spending time on such small talk, Winston says that Barbara has been missing since last night and the sheriff and thirty men from the village have been looking for her.  I groaned anew when I read this because if such an event was taking place why didn't the pharmacist or the ferry boatman mention it?

In Chapter Seven we get a detailed description of Joan's thought processes as she tries to figure out when Winston, who has gone to find the sheriff to report the body Joan found, will return, and then weighs whether or not to leave the guest room she is in.  She eventually leaves the room and we get lots of description of the layout of the house and of its furniture.  Finally, Joan searches Barbara's room and finds a clue--hidden documents--and Long lays a joke on us that made me laugh--Joan wonders if the documents are "an application to be enrolled in Satan's service."

Richard appears and talks to Joan in Chapter Eight; this conversation raises the possibility that Joan has a crush on Richard, but otherwise the two just reiterate stuff we already know.  After embracing Richard with relief in Chapter Eight, in Chapter Nine Joan finds reasons to suspect him, but still hands over the documents she found.  He tells her it is a psychiatric diagnosis--that of an incurable madman!  And the madman's name has been obscured!  Richard tells Joan reading the document will just upset her, and she decides to not read it, and then when he hears a signal from the sheriff outside he tells her not to come with him as he goes to see the sheriff, and she agrees to that, too.  What can you say about a book in which the main character deliberately avoids doing things that might be interesting for the reader?

Joan falls asleep in Barbara's room but wakes in Chapter Ten up to hear two men whom she thinks must be Hilliard and Reyher (even though she hasn't seen either of them yet) have some argument just outside the door.  Reyher wants to tell the sheriff something and Hilliard doesn't want him to do so and it sounds like Prof H beats up Prof R and drags him off.  In Chapter Eleven Joan, looking for Reyher and Hilliard, stumbles on the room in which one can see the Witch Tree that the house was built around two hundred years ago.  Hanging from the tree is Reyher, a noose around his neck!  Long on the one hand tries to convince us that Joan is terrified, but on the other details her thought processes as she tries to figure out if that was really Reyher's voice she heard, if maybe Hilliard was putting on an act for her benefit, and how the two men could have vanished from the corridor so quickly.

In Chapter Twelve the servants mentioned way back in Chapter Three make their first appearance on stage as they burst into the Witch Tree room, accompanied by a third figure, a man in hooded cloak that conceals his face.  A theme of the next few chapters is Joan's pondering the identity of the cloaked man; presumably it is Hilliard, Winston or Richard.   The young woman, who is 22 but looks 16 (hubba hubba), is wearing a French maid's outfit (hubba hubba.)  She and her uncle snatch Joan, and our heroine has horrifying visions, and then her captors prick her with a miniature pitchfork; the venom on this odd item knocks Joan unconscious, and she is carried off.

Chapter Thirteen starts with Joan's nightmare of being back home in NYC with Barbara and finding Barbara dead, her head crushed by a falling chandelier.  Joan wakes up to find herself bound, on the ground, outside beneath the stars.  She can hear the three Satanists who caught her in the Witch tree room having a petty squabble about whether the sexy French maid should go back to the house to make sure they didn't leave any clues behind and then a discussion of various facets of their scheme to fake Reyher's suicide and frame him for a murder, among them an argument over whether it had been wise to hang Reyher from the Witch Tree instead of a tree out in the woods.  When they realize Joan is awake the Satanists drug her.

Chapters Five, Ten and Thirteen saw Joan waking up in some unexpected place, and Chapter Fourteen continues the tradition.  After a three-page nightmare of being on a sailing ship in a storm, Joan wakes up to find she is still bound and now laying on a stone altar in a cave.  There is some discussion among the Satanists about whether they should put Joan in some fancy outfit, but they decide to keep her in what she wore to the island.  In Chapter Fifteen the ceremony begins, featuring over a dozen extras clad in animals skins, dancing away to flute music.  The uncle of the French maid is mere seconds from plunging a knife into Joan and making her one of Satan's brides when the sheriff, Winston, and a bunch of guys burst into the cave, shoot several Satanists, and capture the rest.  Among the dead are the uncle guy and the man in the hooded cloak, who Joan is shocked to find is Richard, Barbara's boyfriend!

Chapter Sixteen does some explaining and ties up some loose ends.  Barbara is dead--some other character found her body, we are not told who did this or where the body was or what condition it was in or anything potentially interesting like that.  Winston does some psychoanalyzing of Richard, who it turns out was the real legitimate heir to the house, and of Hilliard, who was manipulated by Richard.  We learn the truth of the document and of the conversation Joan heard through Barbara's door (a recording played to scare Joan.)  It is made clear that the supernatural is not real, though we don't get a rational explanation for Barbara's turning around after having escaped in the prologue nor for the light in the cave that directed Joan to the body.  As the story ends we can see that Joan and Winston are an item.  The End.