Vintage Treasures: The Shapes of Midnight by Joseph Payne Brennan
Joseph Payne Brennan isn’t discussed much these days. He died over twenty years ago, in 1990, the same year his last book was released, The Adventures of Lucius Leffing, the fourth volume featuring his Carnacki-like occult detective.
Brennan wrote only two novels. But he is mostly remembered for his classic horror stories, published in Weird Tales, Whispers, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and over 200 horror anthologies. His most famous story, “Slime,” featuring a sinister new form of protoplasmic life which emerges from the ocean, was originally published in the March 1953 issue of Weird Tales and has been reprinted more than fifty times. It has influenced countless horror stories ever since, from the Steve McQueen film The Blob (which Brennan successfully sued for copyright infringement) to Stephen King’s famous short story, “The Raft,” which also features a horrific killer protoplasm in a lake.
Brennan’s imagination wasn’t limited to primordial monsters, however. One of his most acclaimed short stories, “Canavan’s Back Yard,” imagines an overgrown lot so twisted and mazelike that most who venture into it never return.
Brennan isn’t someone I discovered in the magazines. In fact, up until this week, I was pretty sure I’d never read anything by him at all. He’s been mentioned a few times here on the Black Gate blog, most recently in Douglas Draa’s review of Hauntings: Tales of the Supernatural, and in the discussion surrounding Robert E. Howard’s The People of the Black Circle.
But I’d been curious about his 1980 paperback collection, The Shapes of Midnight, containing both “Slime” and “Canavan’s Back Yard,” and my interest was heightened by the comments Doug Draa made on my People of the Black Circle article. So I became determined to get a copy, and in June I finally succeeded.
It’s a slender volume, just 176 pages, containing a dozen stories. The enthusiastic introduction is by a young horror writer who burst on the scene just six years earlier, with a successful horror novel titled Carrie. Here’s what Stephen King had to say about Joseph Payne Brennan, taken from his introduction to The Shapes of Midnight.