On March 1, 1972, one of the most frightening episodes in television history aired on Rod Serling’s anthology horror program, The Night Gallery. “The Caterpillar,” directed by Jeannot Szwarc (Jaws 2, Somewhere in Time, Enigma) and written for the screen by Serling himself, “The Caterpillar” tells the gruesome story of Stephen Macy (played by Laurence Harvey) and his failed quest for revenge. Macy is a recent settler in British Borneo at the turn of the 20th century. Amidst the nonstop rain, he manages to find work on a rubber plantation run by fellow Englishman, John Warwick (played by Tom Helmore). There, Macy meets and falls in love with Rhona Warwick (played by Joanna Pettet), John’s much younger and beautiful wife.
While the Warwicks seem happy and cheerful with their lot in life, which includes endless hours of listening to records and knitting, Macy is sullen and resentful of Borneo’s climate. He escaped England because of its stuffy conventions. Now, trapped among a small minority of settlers housed in sprawling plantations, Macy feels more trapped than ever. He seeks excitement in the arms of Mrs. Warwick, but she refuses. She loves her elderly husband, and her faith will not allow her to betray him. Enraged, Macy finds the company of a seedy English peddler named Robinson (played by Don Knight), who was originally exiled to Borneo by the British courts.
One night, as the pair discuss things at a dive bar somewhere along the port, Robinson informs Macy about a local caterpillar called an earwig. Earwigs, if left in an unsuspecting person’s ear canal, are known to eat through the gray matter until the victim is a gibbering idiot. Macy crafts his plan and purchases an earwig from Robinson. Robinson agrees to leave the creature in a pillow at the Warwick residence. He informs Macy that the excruciating pain will take two to three weeks to resolve. Macy is gleeful. Well, that is until he begins to relentlessly scratch at his own ear a few days later.
Before “The Caterpillar” horrified American audiences with its gut-churning conclusion, it was a short story entitled “Boomerang.” Its author, Richard Martin Oscar Cook, was born in Greater London on March 7, 1888. Cook was the son of an athletics goods manufacturer who attended St. Catherine’s School while the family lived in Broxbourne. By 1912, young Oscar lived far away from London in Borneo. After leaving his job at a rubber plantation following a disagreement with the owner, Cook joined the North Borneo Civil Service. Cook would perform his role as a British civil servant in the far-flung colony until 1920.
It would appear that Cook took his role quite seriously. And as a civil servant, he studied the attitudes, habits, customs, and language of the local peoples. This culminated in several manuscripts, including an entire dictionary of Sama-Bajau words. Upon his return to London, friends encouraged Cook to write down his memories. The result was the book, Borneo: Stealer of Hearts. The book did moderately well in the United Kingdom and America. This success was replicated in Cook’s personal life, as he began a relationship with Christine Campbell Thomson, his agent at Curtis Brown. The pair married on September 30, 1924. Soon thereafter, the couple became a literary powerhouse. Under Christine’s tutelage, Cook began publishing short stories in magazines such as The Blue Magazine and Hutchinson’s Mystery-Story Magazine. The pair also collaborated in publishing a series of horror anthologies called Not at Night. By this time, the couple controlled the publishing house of Selwyn & Blount.
Unfortunately for Cook, his novel The Seventh Wave (1926) and Christine’s His Excellency (1927) failed to be bestsellers. A struggling Selwyn & Blount did not benefit from a reprinting of Borneo: Stealer of Hearts either. Around this same time, Cook became a father, with son Gervis Hugh Frere Cook coming into the world in 1928. (Gervis would later become a literary editor in the 1960s and 1970s.)
The Cook family fortunes began to turn in the late 1920s thanks to an informal partnership with Weird Tales magazine. Of the 170 stories published in the Not at Night series, 100 were originally published in Weird Tales. In return, five of Cook’s stories would appear in the famous American pulp magazine—“Si Urag of the Tail” (reprinted in July 1926), “On the Highway” (January 1925), “The Creature of Man” (reprinted in November 1926), “The Sacred Jars” (March 1927), and “Piecemeal” (reprinted in February 1930). Most of these sinister stories are set in Borneo and concern wicked acts of revenge. Cook, a type of tropical Poe, found his niche.
This niche came to full fruition with the publication of “Boomerang” in 1931. A short and punchy story that relies on an ingenious inversion, “Boomerang” is the type of tale worthy of contemporary emulation. Cook’s prose may not be memorable, but his colorful stories certainly are. In many ways, Cook wrote like a Victorian or Edwardian, which befitted his experiences as a British imperialist abroad. If George Orwell got his spurs as a policeman in Burma, then Cook did the same in Borneo.
Oscar’s marriage dissolved in the late 1930s. By that time, Cook’s literary output had more or less dried up. He passed away at age sixty-three on February 23, 1952. Cook left behind only a handful of short stories and out-of-print novels. His name is nowhere near legendary status. And yet, Cook’s tropical horror stories are as good as anything that appeared in Weird Tales in the late 1920s. You can read them for yourself and see their exoticism, regional flavor, and heightened sense of strange adventure. Like the American E. Hoffmann Price, Cook specialized in weird Asian stories for an Anglophone audience that lapped them up. It is not known for sure what influence he had (if at all) on fellow contemporaries like Price and Robert E. Howard. Ultimately, it is not important. What is important is the fact that Cook wrote and wrote well, and his select few horror stories should be admired for what they are—time capsules from a man and age that is now a distant memory.