Where the Slime Lives

An Appreciation of Joseph Payne Brennan

Joseph Payne Brennan (1918-1990) is not one of the better-known names in weird literature. Befitting of his life, which was quiet and mostly spent working at Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library as an acquisitions librarian, Brennan’s legacy is small(ish) and only appreciated by a select few. For several decades, Brennan penned short tales and poetry for the declining pulps. He was one of the last stars of Weird Tales, and, when the legendary magazine folded, Brennan had a nice run writing for Derleth and Wandrei at Arkham House. Although he transitioned from the mag-rags to paperbacks, Brennan remained a short story specialist, and never once did he make the leap to novels. A consummate craftsman who wrote a handful of exquisite yarns, Brennan deserves to be recognized and re-appreciated for his contribution to this weird thing of ours’.

Brennan was born and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut. After a stint in the U.S. Army during World War II (where Brennan served as an infantryman in the famous Third Army under General Patton), Brennan returned to his beloved New England and settled down in New Haven. He was a career librarian, generally soft-spoken, and intensely private. Few in his day-to-day life suspected that he was the author of ghastly tales. After first publishing western stories for magazines such as Masked Rider Western and Western Short Stories, Brennan transitioned to writing chillers for Weird Tales.

As bad luck would have it, Brennan’s first sale to the magazine, 1952’s “The Green Parrot,” was published less than two years before the magazine folded. Like the rest of the pulps, Weird Tales found it impossible to compete with comic books, movies, and television. The pulps mostly dried up in the early 1950s. However, writers like Brennan still churned out classic stories during pulp’s twilight. Once such yarn, “Slime,” first appeared in the March 1953 edition of Weird Tales.

“Slime” recounts the story of a small town (presumably in New England) that is overrun by a primordial ooze from the sea. The animated and very black slime quickly consumes not just animals, but people as well. Brennan’s most famous story may have influenced the classic 1958 film, The Blob, which is also about a voracious liquid hellbent on devouring an entire town. The difference between the two is outer space.

Following “Slime,” Brennan continued to publish horror tales in other magazines and anthologies. Standout stories include “The Calamander Chest,” “Diary of a Werewolf,” and “The Horror at Chilton Castle.” The latter tale, which was first published in 1963, is widely considered one of the best gothic horror tales of the 20th century. Brennan, much like the similarly underrated Ray Russell, did much to keep traditional horror storytelling alive during the 1960s and 1970s. One of the knocks on Brennan is that unlike other Weird Tales greats, he did not innovate much within the genre. This is true to an extent, as Brennan’s villains are mostly familiar foes like ghosts, witches, and vampires. However, Brennan was not afraid to get weird, and even as late as 1987, the elderly scribe was capable of writing immaculate stories within the Cthulhu Mythos.

Brennan was still a young writer when Arkham House published his collection, Nine Horrors and a Dream, in 1958. This volume was followed by several more collections of both fiction and poetry, with the best received being 1963’s Scream at Midnight. Besides writing, Brennan was also a publisher, having formed Macabre House in 1955. The goal was to replace Weird Tales as the premiere destination for horror and weird fiction. Macabre House ran for almost twenty years, but these days much of its catalog remains lost or exceedingly rare. However, a Macabre House original, the occult detective Lucius Leffing, did enjoy a rare moment of popularity, or at least popularity among a small set of serious pulp enthusiasts. These tales, which were penned by Brennan, conformed to the rich tradition of occult investigators, with the New Haven-based Leffing using the powers of study and ratiocination to do battle against the creatures of the night.

While Brennan’s work has been praised by the likes of Stephen King and Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, the Connecticut author remains one of the lesser-known and least respected of the weird oddfathers. If ever there was an author in need of a reevaluation, it is Brennan. Sure, his stories are not going to surprise you. But, Brennan was a master of dread, and his best stories should rank right up there with the likes of Robert Bloch, August Derleth, and the other sons of Lovecraft. Brennan penned simple, but elegant prose-poems about small town ghosts and the natural darkness that comes with living in a world eviler than you could ever imagine.