“The Black, Dead Thing” (1933)

Frank Belknap Long’s original title for this story, as published in the edition of Weird Tales pictured above, is a nice artifact of the H.P. Lovecraft era in horror, heaving up with many a gasping shudder “The Black, Dead Thing”—you can positively feel the quivering in that comma. Long was among Lovecraft’s best-known correspondents. “Second Night Out,” the way I found this story in an Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthology and the way it mostly appears in reprints now, is quite a bit more reserved, focused on a key point in an oceangoing journey as I understand it: getting one’s “sea legs” after a day or two of nausea from the pitching rolls of the deep sea. I like the ambiguity, which is in the story but not the original title, that the incident at hand could as well be a delusion while sick. On the other hand, in many ways the story does seem to be focused on erasing any possibility of mistake. Long’s story reminded me of F. Marion Crawford’s classic 1885 “The Upper Berth,” with its creepy corporeal ghost onboard a ship at sea. This thing, like that thing, smells bad. Coming into contact with it, in the dark of course, it feels like a writhing eel. That’s colorful. Our guy’s vacation probably never had a chance and we’re told he spent a long time saving the money for it. I will mention that the black, dead thing is thankfully not racism (you have to worry about that in 1933) but rather something more on the cosmic order, ancient and eternal. Long attacks with blunt instruments, shocking us with darkness and sensory details, attempting somewhat successfully to numb us by evoking a massive featureless face of evil. Whoever changed the title might have done Long and all of us a favor, more lulling us into what becomes a brutal inexplicable life-or-death confrontation. And this, whatever it is, we learn, always seems to happen to someone on the second night out of this voyage. I wouldn’t call this story a classic—so far Long looks to me like one of the more minor figures in Lovecraft’s personal coterie—but I must say I appreciated getting to the eel thing on my own within the story, rather than shrieked at me from the title.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories for Late at Night, ed. Robert Arthur
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