SFTB 5.5: "The Black Stone Statue" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman

The frontispiece by artist Virgil Finlay for “The Black Stone Statue” in its first appearance in Weird Tales (1937).

One goal of Stories from the Borderland is to establish a parallel—or supplementary—canon of Weird Fiction, with the primary canon consisting of those writers and their work collectively recognized by the consensus of decades of fan scholarship (and reprints) and/or their inclusion in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s seminal 2011 anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. Thus many of the stories we have covered here belong to writers whose output was either very small to start—such as Mildred Johnson and Linda Thornton, each of whom is only known to have published two stories—or who generally worked outside Weird Fiction, especially in science fiction or the literary mainstream.

In this regard, Mary Elizabeth Counselman presents an unusual, even liminal, case study: She published primarily—but not exclusively—in Weird Tales, her work bridging the magazine’s Farnsworth Wright and Dorothy McIlwraith editorial eras. Given that for most fan scholars, the magazine’s Farnsworth Wright era, from 1924–1940, represents the core period of Weird Fiction, and a third of Counselman’s fiction appeared during this time—including “The Black Stone Statue (or listen to it on PseudoPod),” the focus of this installment, which Weird Tales published in its December 1937 issue, this alone ought to provide her with entrance into the most exclusive—if least academic—version of the canon. Moreover, the publisher for the primary collection of her short fiction, 1978’s Half in Shadow, was Arkham House, the press de rigueur of the Lovecraft-o-sphere.[1]

These badges ought to gain her admission to the club, yet despite them, one rarely finds her work mentioned by the usual gang of critics; nor did the VanderMeers include her in their meaty, weighty tome. Therefore, Mary Elizabeth Counselman’s literary legacy appears to hover at the edge of Weird Fiction canonicity, marked by the conventional core requirements for entry, yet somehow lagging in comparative obscurity behind her male counterparts. We are indebted again to author and investigative journalist Ian McDowell, as we already were with Jane Rice, with whose story “The Idol of the Flies” we began this series of Stories from the Borderland. McDowell encouraged us to consider both these authors back before our hiatus and the days of the plague.

Arkham House edition of Counselman story collection Half in Shadow (1978). Cover artist: Tim Kirk,

One possible factor in Counselman’s relative neglect comes from her brief preface to the 1978 edition of Half in Shadow, in which she writes that “The Hallowe’en scariness of the bumbling but kindly Wizard of Oz has always appealed to me more than the gruesome, morbid fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and those later authors who were influenced by their doom philosophies.” Frankly, it surprises me that the editors of Arkham House published that jab at their beloved bread-and-butter authors, and I can see how it potentially perturbed any members of the good ol’ boy network who actually deigned to read her book.

Counselman’s work not only incorporates varying degrees of humor: it also represents an intersection of Weird Fiction and the Southern Gothic. Although this is not particularly the case with “The Black Stone Statue,” the connection is very clear with other popular examples from her oeuvre, such as “The Three Marked Pennies” (1934), “The Tree’s Wife” (1950), and especially “Parasite Mansion” (1942; and adapted for a 1961 episode of the Thriller anthology TV series featuring Boris Karloff). Overall, her stories hark back to an earlier, more formative era of short fiction: that of O. Henry (William Sydney Porter 1862–1910), with its emphasis on plot twists and surprise endings. This is especially true of “The Black Stone Statue” and “The Three Marked Pennies,” though in neither of these stories is the ending so much of a surprise as in O. Henry’s most famous tales.

“The Black Stone Statue” likely also exists in the shadow of Robert E. Howard’s titularly similar but otherwise distinct tale “The Black Stone,” first published in the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales. As this story is considered an essential part of Howard’s contribution to the “Cthulhu Mythos,” its popularity far outstrips that of anything by Counselman—even “The Three Marked Pennies,” and it has been reprinted dozens of times. I won’t criticize Howard’s story here, but I am not much enamored of that one (give me “Pigeons from Hell” instead). Nonetheless, Cthulhu. Or at least, Tsathoggua... And so it goes.

Counselman’s tale is a tight little work of fiction nonetheless, genuinely Weird but also invoking a wide variety of tropes from both inside and outside the canon, such as it is: the South American jungle as the repository of unearthly things (see for instance Gerald Kersh’s creepy little classic “Men Without Bones,” which Michael and I covered in the sixth installment of Stories from the Borderland), the artist whose work is overly lifelike (has anyone else read “The Ohio Love Sculpture” by James Moss Cardwell [aka Adobe James]?), the classic suitcase MacGuffin, so well-known now from Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Pulp Fiction (1994), and one of my favorites, the decrepit boarding house with its miserly landlady. In “The Black Stone Statue,” the suitcase contains the creature, and its incessant buzzing recalls the differently monstrous but equally destructive contents of the case in Kiss Me Deadly, though I suspect this is likely coincidence.

If humor was Counselman’s goal, I would find anyone very unfortunate to have her appointed their guardian angel from the afterlife, as her humor was of the darkly ironic variety that turns people away from religion, the kind where success leads to suicide and great gifts are distributed in such a way as to make the received bewail their lot. Sweet little old Mary Elizabeth Counselman. One wonders what Christmas was like at her house…

The 1964 paperback edition of Half in Shadow from UK’s Consul Books predated the Arkham House collection of the same name but the contents did not exactly match.

Overall, “The Black Stone Statue” displays the characteristics of most of Counselman’s best work: prose both concise and precise, brutal irony, and a surprise ending (though one a bit easier to anticipate than any of the more famous zingers delivered by O. Henry or Gerald Kersh). The entire story cleverly takes the form of an extended suicide note, and the ostensible author of that note leaves no loose ends beyond those that remain unknowable on this side of the great divide—and he points even to those. If Counselman missed anything, it was the opportunity for an “Ice Nine” moment, as in the climax of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle. Counselman was only writing a short story, however, not a novel, and the implications of such an additional twist would have required a very different and probably much longer narrative to support them. And so it goes…

What we have here is, in the end, a unique little beastie, extremely deadly but not in any way comparable to the myriad other aliens and protoplasmic entities that stalked the pages of Weird Tales and the other pulps. The closest model for Counselman’s creature, or at least for its effects, appears to be the golden touch of King Midas from Greek myth, the best-known version of which derives from Book XI of the Metamorphoses by Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 BC–AD 17/18). The intentions of the secondary protagonist, Paul Kennicott, a sort of Charles Lindbergh stand-in who provides most of the exposition, are far more Midas-like than those of the primary narrator, a supposed sculptor. Kennicott’s intentions for the buzzing creature from the jungle, which involved both the accumulation of personal wealth and the advancement of humanity, do not survive long however. Nor does Kennicott.

Despite the differences in their prose styles, the work of Mary Elizabeth Counselman and Jane Rice is arguably more alike than different. Both favored tightly plotted short stories, with characterization as important as the paranormal elements. Rice arguably expanded certain elements to a greater degree, but between them the proportions are relatively consistent. In both cases, their fiction output consists entirely of short stories, although she also penned a bit of poetry and a few essays. Neither author published any novels, which likely also contributes to their relative obscurity, audiences being what they are. Although approximate contemporaries, and both southerners publishing in—but not exclusively in—Weird Tales, no specific evidence exists to suggest any interaction between them, and their styles are distinct, with Rice presenting as somewhat of a maximalist in her work compared to Counselman’s spare and economical prose. Both invested heavily in irony, however, and irony rules supreme in both “The Black Stone Statue” and Rice’s “The Idol of the Flies.” Perhaps irony is the greatest of the elder gods.

The third volume in Armchair Fiction’s Master of Horror short story collection series features Mary Elizabeth Counselman.

No ancient deities appear in “The Black Stone Statue,” however; no cyclopean monstrosities, no mountains that walk. Counselman’s creature is one of the smallest in Weird Fiction, and ultimately, it is the creature, not the statue, that makes this story so wonderfully weird. I call it a creature rather than a monster not only because it is so small, but also because it demonstrates less intent than a starfish or even a slime mold. It’s just doing its thing—and Counselman never tells us what that thing is. I doubt she knew herself. Why should she have spent any time trying to figure that out? The story is a perfect gem without any of that information, an impenetrable black cabochon that gleams brightly without revealing anything beneath its surface. We know roughly where the creature ends up—full fathom five, Davy Jones’ locker—but of its ontogeny and ontology, or the nature of its effect on all things terrestrial and solid: nothing, nada, nil. In the afterword to a story in her 2005 collection To Charles Fort, With Love, Caitlin R. Kiernan wrote “dark fiction dealing with the inexplicable should, itself, present to the reader a certain inexplicability.”[2] By such standards, Counselman achieved in this story a perfect Weird Tale, and she did so without the addition of forbidden tomes, secret cultists, or ancient gods. I could invoke Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Jack Spicer, but I hope I have made my point.

Michael Bukowski has drawn the creepy and incomprehensible little alien (?) invertebrate from this story HERE. And now, with Mary Elizabeth Counselman’s “The Black Stone Statue,” we have completed our presentation of five tales and five creatures in this fifth series of Stories from the Borderland (don’t ask me why we proceed in groups of five; I have no real answer—mainly we started the first set with five particular stories in mind, and we had such a good time with those that we decided to carry on). Our goal is to return the first Thursday of December with the first story in a prospective sixth series. This opener is the debut story of an author who went on to write prolifically in science fiction, but this tale comes from when he was still green. Most importantly, it’s something entirely other than standard science fiction, and that something is deeply Weird. Guess it if you can (email us at theouterdarkpodcast@gmail.com if you do, and you might win a prize (tell us what you would like—perhaps a jellyfish kiss?). However, if you have been reading the work of this week’s author, you will hardly want to play any games, especially if they involve any specially-marked coins…

Notes

[1]The edition from Arkham House actually marked the second appearance of Counselman’s collection under this title, as the UK’s Consul Books published an edition in 1964. The two editions only have six stories in common however, although both versions include “The Three Marked Pennies” and “The Black Stone Statue.”

[2]This note appears on page 232 of Kiernan’s book, following the story “Nor the Demons Down Under the Sea,” which is the third story in her Dandridge Cycle, arguably one of her core works, at least from the early part of her career. I cited it as the tenth and final tenet of my own “Dogme 2011 for Weird Fiction.”