Episode 557 - Farnsworth Wright Stories

Two Farnsworth? Not furious. 😛

Oops. My bad. I was getting Chad confused with a guy on another podcast I like.

Tara Murphy

Also, I liked The Snake Fiend. It felt current. The bad guy was a total incel.

Tara Murphy

I am sooo behind. Sorry, a family health situation is keeping me from my usual routines. I just had to jump in here and say Chad! Don't you have Newfoundland relatives? How come you mispronounce the island's name? To remember the correct pronunciation, say "understand Newfoundland." We teach this to all new visitors. It is the first thing mainlanders learn when they come here.

Tara Murphy

From one Phil to another...OMG, right?

Can you imagine HP reading Farnswprth’s notes and thinking back to Wright’s own writings? Like “Who is this hack to edit MY work?!”

"Humans can lick, too" is an unremarkable phrase. It should have been, "Mmm... delicious."

feedergoldfish

My main takeaway from “The Snake Fiend”: Wow! Finally, some of that anti-Italian racism from the 1920s I’ve always heard about!

Jason Thompson

HOLD UP Did we just go through July without meeting any panther-like thews?

Thunk

The story takes place in Northern California, but I notice it never says where Crimi and his victims grew up before they moved there. I'm pretty sure we can assume that it was Florida, because "Florida Man Attempts Rattle Snake Murder, Fails, Assumes His Victims Are Ghosts, Goes Insane" would be a pretty normal newspaper headline.

Ethan Cordray

Kevin clearly read this story in an old issue of Weird Tales, and decided, "I'm not gonna go out like those chumps!"

Ethan Cordray

Children can be an extremely effective anti-burglary measure, as shown in the fine documentary “Home Alone”. Unfortunately, these girls ain’t no Kevin McCallister!

There is even a movie episode on this urban legend in a https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0115813/. I was amazed to hear this like something novel while I know this since childhood.

Chad was extra spicy on this one.

When Listening I was stuck by the similarities between the end of "The Snake Fiend" and that of the "The Curse of Yig" - I then had the thought that really "The Curse of Yig" is these two stories third acts smashed together. A couple attacked by snakes in their bed, but here it happens in the dark where one person mistakes their loved one for a monster and the twist is the reveal of the body in the daylight. I am choosing to believe this not cooincidence but Lovecraft making a literary jab at his adversarial editor.

"Juvenilia" is the perfect word for "The Closing Hand" — it's exactly the kind of story that would be told at a sleepover by a kid holding a flashlight under their chin. "The Snake Fiend," though ultimately ridiculous, does paint a vivid portrait of a vindictive sadist. Take the scene where Jack Crimi reads Marjorie's letter: it starts out silly, with him drawing snakes in the margins, but then he obliterates her signature with acid before burning the pages, an act that's both a callback to the killing of his pet snake and a small-scale rehearsal of the violence he has planned for the Jimersons. I find this moment as chilling as anything in one of Jim Thompson's crime novels.

TWO turns of the screw.

The Snake Fiend feels like a Poe revenge tale tried to pirouette into a subversion of A Christmas Carol's ending and the results were about what you'd expect.

These were terrible as straight prose, but under the right hand they could've made for entertainingly lurid 8 page horror comics.

Richard Horsman

I just hit some episodes about Farnsworth Wright while catching up on Voluminous- the timing was so perfect that I forgot that I was getting his bio from two separate sources, and got confused when you started “repeating” facts. Anyway, thanks for covering these! The stories themselves may fall short of the mark, but you were absolutely indulging my curiosity at the same time you were indulging your own.

"The Curse of Yig" aka "Farnsworth, this is how you write a rattlesnake story, your obedient servant, HPL"

Could have gone my whole life without hearing the phrase "masturbating furiously" on the podcraft

I do hope for more from my fiction. Reality, I'm afraid, often falls into the Crimi school of scheming with criminal masterminds contained between the pages of books or the frames of films. Events over the past few years seem to indicate this is even more true in politics...

I'm mildly amazed that Chris hadn't heard the "humans can lick too" urban legend!

Well, Wright certainly helped fill out the pages of those first issues of WT, though I imagine readers experienced some whiplash between his work and some of the others in those first issues. It truly is sad that Wright’s writing is so sophomoric, even though it’s entertainingly so. And there aren’t any hidden gems of his waiting to be found either; his stories are very forgettable. Given all of the tragedy and real horror he experienced, one would think he would have practiced one of the first rules of writing—from what you know. Or ultimately that he learned something from the tales he edited in later years. But you two are awesome for covering them nonetheless.

Ben A

The literary world breaths a sigh of relief that Farnsworth was a better editor than writer. I don’t have anything remotely intelligent to add to the discussion, so I’ll just leave this here instead: “Snakes…why did it have to be snakes?”

Crimi is the kind of guy whose "extensive research" consists of 20 minutes of googling. Or, in the time perido, reading a couple of lurid pulps featuring snakes. "Look, it says here that rattlesnakes are completely attracted to bosoms! Checks out. Now for my plan!"

Peter Larsen

Heh. Replying to myself to add the caveat that my comment above is only a theory, based entirely upon "lurid stories in magazines" + "snake attacks." I don't want to come off as having knowledge I don't have: that's for my day job.

Jennifer DeFord

Great episode, if not great stories. I'm sorry to say that Wright probably got the idea to (bolt? nail? tie?) down the happy couple's bed in "The Snake Fiend" from the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Speckled Band." I knew I'd heard that before somewhere!

Jennifer DeFord

Two terrible stories! Saved by TWO returns of the terrible Turn of the Screw joke! Poor Farnsworth. One of the unspoken tragedies of his youth was being told he should get into writing.