SFTB 6.5: “Mop-Head” by Leah Bodine Drake

By Scott Nicolay; see also Illustration by Michael Bukowski (here)

Leah Bodine Drake’s poetry collection (Arkham House, 1950). Cover art by Frank Utpatel.

We conclude this sixth series of Stories from the Borderland—and our 31st episode overall—with one of the genuine “Women of Weird Tales.” However, unlike Allison V. Harding (Jean Milligan), Mary Elizabeth Counselman, or Mildred Johnson, all of whom we have featured here before, Leah Bodine Drake (1904–1964) made her primary contributions to the unique magazine, not with fiction, but with poetry. Only the three three-letter bigshots published more poems in Weird Tales, leaving Drake tied for fourth with her contemporary Dorothy Quick (1896–1962).1 Quick did publish significantly more fiction than Drake, however, including half a dozen novels (all but the first of these were mysteries). Drake published only four stories, of which only two originally appeared in Weird Tales. Her 1954 story “Mop-Head” was the second and last of these, and the one most deserving of our attention.

I should mention that it was artist Michael Bukowski, my collaborator in this project, who first suggested this story, based on its titular creature. The creature in “Mop-Head” is a muck-monster, or at least muck-monster-adjacent, and this category of midcentury monsters consistently interests me, having grown up on Swamp Thing and Man-Thing and reprints of the 1953 MAD comic book parody of The Heap, a comic book character that first appeared in 1942. Obviously, Michael loves a good muck-monster, too, and at the end of this essay, we will of course include a link to his drawing of Mop-Head itself.

Joseph Eberle’s interior art for “Mop-Head” in the January 1954 issue of Weird Tales is simultaneously cartoonish and disturbing, and it sprawls across the first two pages of the story.

We have previously examined muck-monsters at least once in Stories from the Borderland, most notably in Margaret St. Clair’s 1954 story “Brenda” and Theodore Sturgeon’s 1940 “It”. The muck-monster and its cousin, the slime monster/giant amoeba/chicken heart/blob—both amorphous creatures without discrete organs and thus impervious to gunfire—are genuine denizens of both the swamp and The Weird, and Drake’s take on the former is unique enough to deserve our attention. This sinister little work of fiction would sit comfortably in an anthology not only alongside “Brenda” and “It,” but also with Jane Rice’s “The Idol of the Flies” and Thorp McClusky’s “The Crawling Horror.” It shares DNA with all of them, and is kissing cousins with H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space,” although DNA might not be the right metaphor in any of these cases, given that Mop-Head’s core components seem to be something altogether different.

Weird Tales editor Dorothy McIlwraith made an interesting decision to show the monster right up front in great and gruesome detail.[2 ] Joseph Eberle’s interior art for “Mop-Head” is simultaneously cartoonish and disturbing, and it sprawls across the first two pages of the story. Although not a household name, Eberle later designed the original poster for George Romero’s 1978 film Dawn of the Dead. He also provided both the cover and the interior art for Drake’s one other Weird Tales story, “Whisper Water” (1953). Eberle’s style remains hard to pin down overall: one can point to similarities with the work of both Virgil Finlay and Lee Brown Coye, but the image he drew of Leah Bodine Drake’s Mop-Head more distinctly echoes the ultra-grotesque style of Basil Wolverton (1909–1978), with perhaps a hint of early Ed Emshwiller (1922–1990). Wolverton’s “spaghetti and meatballs” style had already achieved widespread recognition by then with his character “Lena the Hyena,” who appeared in Al Capp’s Li'l Abner newspaper comic strip in the 1940s as “The Ugliest Woman in the World.” Wolverton reprised this character in 1954 as the “Beautiful Girl of the Month” for MAD #10—only a few months after Eberle’s art appeared in Weird Tales. This was, of course, the heyday of the Bug-Eyed Monster in science fiction art and the “weirdo” characters of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth (1932–2001). However, what makes the editorial decision to present such a detailed imaged of the monster on the opening page so interesting is that it does not at all give away the real horrors of the story’s climax and denouement. If anything, Eberle’s illustration, which presents the monster in all its crab-legged tentacled glory, in what might today be mistaken as concept art for John Carpenter’s The Thing, was much more a red herring than a reveal.

Basil Wolverton’s reprised his “Lena the Hyena,” who appeared in Al Capp’s Li'l Abner newspaper comic strip in the 1940s as “The Ugliest Woman in the World,” in 1954 as the “Beautiful Girl of the Month” for MAD #10—only a few months after Eberle’s art appeared in Weird Tales.

Before we get to any reveal of our own here however, let’s talk back-story. I mentioned above that Leah Bodine Drake was best-known to Weird Tales readers as a poet, but her poetry career was not by any means limited to that venue. She won numerous awards and published her poetry extensively in her day, including in such prestige venues as The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, The Saturday Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker. To be sure, as respectable as these journals were, they were largely not where the defining poetry of that era was appearing—and hers was an era that redefined American poetry. Although Drake wrote with considerable skill in conventional poetic forms, her poetry is memorable today more for its subject matter than for its language. Her poem “They Run Again” illustrates this rather well:

Beyond the black and naked wood
In frosty gold has set the sun,
And dusk glides forth in cobweb hood. . .
Sister, tonight the werewolves run!

With white teeth gleaming and eyes aflame
The werewolves gather upon the howe!
Country churl and village dame,
They have forgotten the wheel and plow.

They have forgotten the speech of men;
Their throats are dry with a dreadful thirst;
And woe to the traveler in the glen
Who meets tonight with that band accurst!

Now from the hollows creeps the dark;
The moon like a yellow owl takes flight;
Good people on their house-doors mark
A cross, and hug their hearths in fright.

Sister, listen! . . . The King-Wolf howls!
The pack is running! . . . Drink down the brew,
Don the unearthly, shaggy cowls, —
We must be running too!

"Whisper Water" by Leah Bodine Drake was the cover story in May 1953 issue of Weird Tales. Art was again by Joseph Eberle.

Originally published in June–July 1939 issue of Weird Tales, this is altogether competent work, but it even then it would have sounded outdated compared to the work of such contemporaries as Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, or Mina Loy (let alone the poets of the Black Mountain School, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Beats, who transformed the postwar poetic economy. It does stand out for its subject matter though. Nonetheless, it is hardly Weird, dealing instead with lycanthropy, a more conventional motif of the supernatural and macabre. This is the case with the majority of Drake’s work, which is what makes “Mop-Head” so notable amongst the rest of her writing, whether poetry or prose.

This is not to say that Drake’s poetry does not deserve to be remembered, or that it will not reward the contemporary reader, but if not for two historical quirks, her work might be far less well-remembered than it is today, if not totally forgotten. The first of these is that Arkham House published her 1950 debut poetry collection, A Hornbook for Witches: Poems of Fantasy in an edition of only 553 copies, of which Drake received more than half. Due to the extreme appeal to collectors of Arkham House books, the subsequent scarcity of her book has made it one of the rarest and most difficult to obtain volumes for completists, with copies in decent condition easily commanding four-figure prices.

The second reason that upholds the memory of Leah Bodine Drake’s poetry somewhat above that of so many of her contemporaries comes from an album recorded in 1976 by none other than Vincent Price: A Hornbook for Witches: Stories and Poems for Halloween. Obviously, the main title is the same as Drake’s book, and Price recorded four of her poems on this album: “A Hornbook for Witches,” “Witches on the Heath,” “All Saints Eve,” and “The Ballad of the Jabberwock,” alongside stories and poems by Maria Leech, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Kingsley, John Collier, and John Kendrick Bangs. For Collier, Price recorded the entirety of his 1940 gem of a story “Thus I Refute Beelzy,” which we previously mentioned in Stories from the Borderland 5.1. That oft-anthologized story first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, which was also one of Drake’s bread-and-butters. You can listen to the entirety of Price’s album here.

Sadly for Drake, the release of Price’s album came more than a decade after her death. However, she almost certainly must have heard George Abbe’s recording of one of her finest poems, “Precarious Ground,” on his 1961 Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry.

The selection of Arkham House as the press for her first poetry collection also shows that Drake clearly did not consider her contributions to Weird Tales as slumming; rather, she must have felt herself fully invested in the project of The Weird, even if her version of it was mostly a kind of Weird “light” that emphasized more conventional supernatural tropes over cosmic horror. This further points out the significance of “Mop-Head” in her oeuvre, as it is in this story that she dives most deeply into The Weird as we understand it today.

“A Hornbook for Witches: Stories and Poems for Halloween” LP (Caedmon Records, 1976), narrated by Vincent Price and including four poems by Leah Bodine Drake. Cover art by Leo and Diane Dillon.

The opening sentence-paragraph of “Mop-Head” is pure mid-century Weird Fiction, with an element of cosmic horror:

In abandoned cisterns and old wells, in moldy heaps of straw forgotten in the corners of deserted barns, in reedy pools deep in the woods, in fungied hollows of dead trees, in all such secret places apart from man, strange life engenders, drifts in and takes root and form.

One can detect possible echoes in this of the opening paragraphs of Theodore Sturgeon’s earlier and far more famous story “It” in this passage, but whether or not these are intentional is a secret long since sealed by the grave. Drake, however, quickly shifts to a broken and poorly-repaired family, the Lovelesses, consisting of farmer Jeff, his two young children Dorothy (age 7) and Harry Todd (age 5), and his new bride, his second wife, Aline, née Trevyllian. Drake wastes no time in showing that the children, Dorothy in particular, have not accepted Aline. And they have found something in an old well on a neighboring abandoned property that can speak—and that promises to bring their mother Reba Loveless back, in exchange for . . . food. A special kind of food.

This emphasis on family dynamics is what sets Drake’s story apart from many similar works. Certainly nothing in Lovecraft’s oeuvre, so infamously devoid of female characters, exhibits such an emphasis, and this is true for many of his colleagues. But this is 1954, and women, in the wake of World War II, have begun to flex their social and political power. “Mop-Head” is far from a feminist tale, however. Its two primary characters are a seven-year-old girl and an adult (but still young) woman, and the story’s primary conflict is between them. “Human vs. the Supernatural” comes second in “Mop-Head.” This means that most of the story’s denouement focuses on the relationship between Dorothy and Aline, which is drastically altered by the horrific and disgusting events of the climax.

Back cover of A Hornbook for Witches LP with a list of the poems (poets) read by Vincent Price and a warning to listeners.

The penultimate kicker that ends this story remains potent, disturbing, and effective, shifting the reader’s sympathy from Aline to Dorothy. The latter develops a trauma response comparable to that of Babe in “It,” which means that Drake’s tale parallels Sturgeon’s in both its beginning and its end. This also offers an interesting comparison to Lovecraft’s work, wherein some profound but often temporary and rarely defined form of insanity occurs as the result of contact with the truly “other.” The cumulative effect of these narrative incidents chez Lovecraft eventually becomes cartoonish. Chez Sturgeon and Drake, the reader receives something of a reality correction: the results of the most horrific encounters produce very realistic, measurable, and extreme symptoms, in both cases, affecting a young girl. In this way, both of these notable muck-monster stories register their horrors in the psychological responses of a child, a brutal but effective way to fix their endings in the reader’s memory. So it is that “Mop-Head” deserves a place not only on the elite list of great muck-monster stories, but also in the appropriately amorphous canon of Weird Fiction overall.

Do not neglect to visit Michael Bukowski’s blog, where you can view his rendering of the titular Mop-Head in full color: our literary-artistic collaboration was the basis of this project a decade ago, and it continues to drive our enthusiasm. We hope that your enthusiasm has also received at least a tiny spark from our efforts, one that might, perhaps, take on a life of its own. We plan to return before too long with another five installments, all of which we have already selected. The first of these is a tale we have long wanted to tackle, and it comes from the same issue of the same pulp magazine as one of the stories we presented in our fifth series (what a banger that slim little tale was, eh?). Can you guess what it is? If so, please leave a comment, and if you are the first to get it right, we offer you a mysterious prize.

This installment of Stories from the Borderlands concludes our sixth series. Michael Bukowski, producer Anya Martin, and I all hope that you have enjoyed our return. As always, we welcome suggestions from readers, but please review our past selections first so as not to propose repeats, and remember that we eschew such fully canonical tales as “Mimic” and “The Quest for ‘Blank Claverengi,” both of which have been recommended to use multiple times.

Notes

1We are indebted to Terence E. Hanley’s excellent blog, Tellers of Weird Tales, for this information; see link here. Hanley’s site has been an invaluable resource for Stories from the Borderland more than once.

2McIlwraith’s assistant editor, Lamont Buchanan, also served as her art director (he discovered Lee Brown Coye), but his name no longer appears with hers at the bottom of the magazine’s table of contents after the September 1949 issue—even though the next issue contained “The Underbody,” one of the very best stories by his partner and future wife, Jean Milligan, who wrote under the nom de plume of Allison V. Harding.