Legacy of Evil by Frank Belknap Long

"He must have loved me, despite what I always thought, and that means something to me."

After seeing how shoddy and lame was Frank Belknap Long's 1971 Magnum Gothic Original The Witch Tree just three or  four days ago, perhaps you are amazed that today we are talking about Long's 1973 Beagle Gothic Legacy of Evil.  Maybe I'm amazed myself!  Well, we can explain or at least rationalize this odd course of action: I am of course interested in the life and career of Long, a prolific author whose work appeared in many important magazines and anthologies and who was close to H. P. Lovecraft; I like reading stuff other people don't read or read and denigrate, as an act of independence or rebellion and because there may be a chance that I will actually like something others don't, something that does sometimes happen; and many writers' bodies of work are uneven, with both good and bad components, so just because Long wrote a terrible Gothic romance the year I was born doesn't mean he couldn't write an awesome one when I was two or three years old.

I own a copy of The Witch Tree, somewhat warped and adorned with price stickers from multiple stores, but to experience Legacy of Evil we have to take advantage of that invaluable resource for explorers of the popular culture of the 20th century, the internet archive.  Like The Witch Tree, Legacy of Evil is credited to Lyda Belknap Long, a pen name incorporating Long's middle and last name with his wife's first name.  The copy of Legacy of Evil scanned for the internet archive has a price sticker on it that says "HOOK'S," so maybe it was sold at the famous Midwestern drug store, and a handwritten note before the title page that reads "Read B P." I don't know who or what "B P." refers to, but we can be confident I will not be the first person to enjoy (or endure--we'll see!) this artifact of an early-Seventies intersection of women's popular literature and the circle of Weird Tales writers.

Susan Ravenor was a smart and mature child in those days when she was growing up in the clifftop mansion Ravenor Heights AKA Ravenor Towers with her kindly father, the mansion's kindly housekeeper Jenny Hallman, and her callous and antisocial Uncle Daniel, owner of the mansion.  Three times as a little girl she woke to behold a horrifying apparition, an animated corpse covered with seaweed!  Relations between the brothers Ravenor soured so badly that Dad and Susan moved out when she was eight, and Dad made enough money as an ad exec to buy a mansion of his own!  Awesome!  But then he took out mortgages to finance a risky investment and lost everything.  Oops!  Dad died almost two years ago, and now Susan is living in an apartment and working as a secretary and has lost all her friends because they, it seems, find her relative poverty embarrassing.  

A telegram arrives from a Boston lawyer!  Uncle Daniel is dead!  In the prologue we readers saw an old dude jump out the window of a mansion to the rocky seashore below--probably that was Uncle Daniel!  On the phone the lawyer tells Susan that she has inherited everything--his estate totals up to like a million bucks!  Susan is eager to get back to her ancestral home, which she misses dearly, despite some terrible memories.  Long's big theme in Legacy of Evil is that people often have mixed, equivocal, evolving and just plain inaccurate feelings and beliefs about people and places.  Susan gets in touch with the beloved housekeeper of her childhood Jenny Hallman, who agrees to come live at Ravenor Towers, even though Hallman has received some creepy messages warning her to stay away from the Towers--one such message is a voodoo doll of Daniel Ravenor!

Before Susan gets to Ravenor Towers we readers are presented with a creepy interlude.  A malformed freak with a muscular upper body, a stunted and asymmetrical lower body, and the vacant visage of a moron, approaches Susan's boarding house, only to be stopped by a woman in a black dress who recklessly drives up in her car just in time.  The developmentally disabled hulk wants to see Susan, but the woman insists Susan is a witch who will slay him with sorcery, and she drives him into her car using both violent and esoteric means of persuasion.

The first four Chapters (and Prologue) of Legacy of Evil are so much better than The Witch Tree that as I read I almost found it hard to believe they were written by the same guy, and wondered if some hardass editor at Beagle had forced Long to make a lot of revisions or had chopped away at Long's inadequate prose him- or herself or maybe given Long a plot outline to follow or something.  The characters all had personalities, back stories, and/or actual relationships with each other and the supernatural elements were exciting, while Long's extraneous digressions and superfluous descriptions, though still common, were somewhat shorter and somewhat less inappropriate.  I was actually enjoying the story and curious to see what happened next!  

I regret to say I cannot tell you that Legacy of Evil is good, however.  Long's style is still weak--for example, Long has an odd tic that gets on my nerves in which instead of saying "she was frail" or "she was familiar with the house" he says "she was the opposite of robust" or "the house was the opposite of new to her"--why oh why?  Dialogue is unnatural, with characters talking about inane nonsense instead of blurting out critical news like that some guy just got murdered.  Pacing is slow, even in scenes which should convey urgency, like when someone is trying to escape a death trap or pursuing a murderer.  And Long fails to live up to the promise of the first four chapters, almost totally dropping the cool stuff he presents in the start of the novel--there is no payoff or explanation for Susan's childhood nightmares of a seaweed covered corpse, and Jenny Hallman and the threatening messages, and the retarded freak and the woman who browbeats him, vanish from the narrative for like 100 pages and when they do resurface in the last ten or so pages of the novel they do so in an anticlimactic way. 

Before I started Chapter Five, I was expecting to be able to say that Legacy of Evil was acceptable, that the style was mediocre but the plot worked.  But things went downhill precipitously as I read Chapter Five and succeeding chapters, and I am duty bound to report that Legacy of Evil is a poor production I am giving it a thumbs down, though it is considerably easier to swallow than The Witch Tree.  An "F" may be an "F," but there is a difference between a 50 and a 25.

All you masochists, Long obsessives and MPorcius Fiction Log completists can read on for the rest of the plot and more analysis, but others should feel free to resume real life, climbing mountains or performing heart surgeries or restoring Greek vases or whatever worthy pursuits my readers, exemplary citizens all, are customarily engaged in.  

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In the village over which looms her childhood home, Susan meets the sheriff, Henry Goves, and the sheriff's cousin, John Goves, who is helping handyman Fred Ransome and current housekeeper Mrs. Ridgeway--Uncle Daniel fired sweet Jenny Hallman a few years ago--to look after the clifftop mansion.  

The road to remote Ravenor Heights is so narrow and impassable that a car can't reach it--people have to ride a cart drawn by a pony to get there!  While Susan is riding up to the house on a windy night the pony goes berserk and starts running out of control all over the road.  Susan has a terrible vision of a phantom face that glows like fire and is floating towards her and the out of control cart!  Susan is thrown and knocked unconscious.  She wakes up in a sea cave, where somebody has somehow wedged her between two boulders.  This scene is not very convincing--how would you wedge a thin young woman between two boulders so she was held fast without ripping her clothes and mangling her flesh?  Susan is none the worse for wear after this episode, so Long should have just done the conventional thing and had Susan's mysterious kidnapper just tie her wrists together or something.  Anyway, the cave is filling with the rising tide, threatening to drown her, so Susan extricates herself from between the boulders, strips to her undies (hubba hubba) and swims out of the cave.   

On the beach Susan meets handsome local business man and horse racing enthusiast Richard Kilmore, who is out for a swim on this dark and windy night.  Uncle Daniel was a major investor in Kilmore's shipbuilding firm, and now Susan owns those shares.  Kilmore knows all about Susan, Uncle Daniel having talked fondly about her all the time--one of the few memorable things about Legacy of Evil is Long's theme that as a child Susan thought Uncle Daniel a total jerk (and Daniel Ravenor was in fact a real piece of crap when dealing with many people), but after his death Susan encounters evidence he loved her and was kind to Kilmore.  Kilmore identifies with Susan, he also having been a lonely child, he have grown up in an orphanage.  I guess Kilmore is Long's idea of what women consider a dreamboat--a good-looking self-made wealthy man with no family to get between him and a girlfriend or wife--but affixed to him that Dickensian name to make us wonder if Kilmore isn't a wolf in sheep's clothing.  Adding to the tension, Susan doesn't tell Kilmore somebody tried to murder her, instead claiming she is also out for a swim and the wind carried off her dress.  These scenes with Kilmore, a rich sensitive good-looking man Susan has never met before who already seems to be in love with her, deliver the "romance" in "Gothic romance," something that was almost entirely absent from The Witch Tree.  

Chapter Seven found Susan waking up in an unexpected place--the sea cave--and Chapter Nine, the novel's halfway point, finds her doing the same.  But then she remembers how hunky Kilmore helped her ascend the cliff to the mansion and Mrs. Ridgeway showed her to her childhood room, little changed since she left fifteen years ago as an eight-year-old.  And how from the front door she saw the pony cart--the pony nowhere in sight and the cart mysteriously scorched!  A terrible scream ends her long ruminations over the day's events and in Chapter Ten she goes out into the dark hall to investigate and again is confronted by the burning phantom face!  Susan flees outside and in Chapter Eleven is chased and seized by handyman Fred Ransome, whom she hasn't met before.  Ransome is only grabbing her because he's afraid she's about to fall off the cliff.  Fred Ransome and John Goves are both handymen who talk about working on roofs, a misstep by Long in his characterizations, perhaps--why have two handymen hanging around the mansion in your story instead of a handyman and a gardener or a handyman and an accountant or something?

Most of Chapters Eleven and Twelve consist of forgettable conversations and descriptions of the mansion.  Long does throw in what feel like gratuitous mentions of Lizzie Borden and Marcel Proust, and in Chapter Thirteen we see what the Lizzie Borden reference was foreshadowing when Susan finds in the scorched pony cart the hacked body of John Goves and the axe with which he was whacked!  Sheriff Henry Goves appears a moment later and Susan tells him her story.  He sends her back to the mansion and begins his investigation in the sea cave.  But, before Susan can get into the house, she hears shots from the beach, and rushes over to investigate--the Sheriff is dead, killed by a thrown dagger!  We learn that Ravenor Towers is full of decorative weapons, something Long maybe should have told us earlier when he was describing a piano or a chair or a tapestry or how there were this many lights in the mansion when Susan was a kid but now there were this many lights etc.  We also learn that Susan is an expert marksman who often used the shooting range at the mansion her father bought and then lost--maybe Long should have told us that earlier as well.  Anyway, Susan picks up the dead Sheriff's pistol and looks for the Sheriff's killer.  She comes upon the culprit almost at once--it is the retarded freak!  Susan has never met this guy before, but he knows all about Susan, and goes on and on about how he has to kill Susan because Susan is a witch but how he regrets it because Susan is so beautiful.  (If they have never met, how does he know how beautiful she is?)  He approaches Susan, Susan shoots at him, misses, and he seizes Susan.  Susan falls unconscious and wakes up to find she has been rescued by Kilmore, who knocked out the imbecile by beating him with the pistol Susan dropped.

Kilmore has not only saved Susan and knocked out the killer off screen but solved all the crimes without Susan's help--without Susan even knowing it.  Maybe Kilmore should have been the main character of this story.  He mansplains everything to Susan, and we find Long has undercut all possible tension and excitement of his story.  The evil woman who convinced the idiot Susan was a witch and must not be suffered to live is none other than Jenny Hallman!  You see, back in the day, Uncle Daniel banged Hallman, and she gave birth to their son, a physically and mentally malformed wretch!  Daniel refused to acknowledge the freak as his own flesh and blood, wanting to leave everything to Susan, and this drove Hallman insane and she pursued a course of revenge which consisted of trying to drive Daniel to suicide (here she succeeded) and drive Susan insane by using a film projector to scare her with images of a burning face.  Kilmore has already apprehended Hallman off screen.  When Susan asks what burned the pony cart if the face was not really on fire, he tells her it must have just been a coincidence, that the pony pulled the cart so fast that the friction generated started the cart on fire.

This less than convincing explanation for the burned cart is on the final page of the novel and is followed by a passage assuring us that Kilmore and Susan are going to be happy as lovers living in the mansion, visited by the friends who abandoned Susan when she lost her other mansion to Dad's incompetent financial management.

I'm not the target audience for a Gothic romance, perhaps, but I think Long has committed malpractice in his plotting.  The seaweed-covered corpse is a much better motif than a glowing phantom face, and Long should have integrated that nautical horror image into the second half of the story instead of introducing the idea that Jenny Hallman is using a movie projector to make people think a burning face is flying after them, an idea which is impossible to take seriously; she should have dressed up her limping dullard son in seaweed to scare Susan.  The relationships between Susan and Hallman and between Hallman and her idiot son have the potential to be interesting and those characters should have gotten more screen time.  And Susan, the main character, should have solved the crime and/or defeated the villains----it is especially galling that Long, out of nowhere, tells us Susan is a good shot and then a page later we see that under pressure she isn't so hot a shot after all.  Long could have at least had Susan witness the hero figuring the mystery out and triumphing over the killers so we readers didn't have to experience these climactic moments through expository dialogue!  In having Susan not solve her own problems but rather inherit wealth from a guy she wasn't even nice to, enjoy rescue by men who defeat the villains offscreen, and hook up with a wealthy hunk who loves her before she even meets him, is Long appealing to some element of women's fantasies, a feminine desire to be protected, loved and provided for without any corresponding obligation to work or persuade?  Are Gothic romances generally plotted this way?  Is Long here pushing an anti-feminist message, arguing that even women who think they have the stuff to fight really do not and for all of our sakes women should leave the fighting to the boys?  Even if that is good advice or "realistic," it doesn't make for compelling fiction--at least not for me!

So, thumbs down for Legacy of Evil.  There is another Long Gothic romance at internet archive, 1969's To the Dark Tower, but I'll need a break before I scale that cliff.  We will be hearing more from the man H. P. Lovecraft called "my young grandchild Francis, Lord Belknap," "Little Belknap" and "Sonny" in our next episode, however, so Long fans stay tuned!