"The Thing in the Woods" and "The Velveteen Rabbit"

A podcast that I co-recorded on June 5, 2022, will never be released. It was an SFF Audio discussion of The Thing in The Woods, a 1914 horror novel by Harper Williams, a pen name of Margery Williams Bianco, who then went on to write the beloved children's classic, The Velveteen Rabbit, published in 1922.

Unfortunately, the SFF Audio host, Jesse Willis, has lost the audiofile, as part of some massive problems with his massive website (977 pages of blog posts to date, with multiple posts per page), which has been around since 2003 -- wow! The listed guests were Cora Buhlert, Evan Lampert and me, and none of us kept a copy. I used to make all-voices recordings of all my podcasts with Call Recorder when I had an old Dell, but then it effectively died (incompatible with cameras, can't Zoom, etc.). A friend kindly gave me a Linux system, but I never got around to getting a Linux-compatible substitute for Call Recorder. Suggestions welcome!

The basic plot of The Thing in the Woods is that a new young doctor is asked to substitute for a small-town doctor who wants a vacation. It turns out that there have been reports of animal attacks, and a mystery slowly unfolds. 

Parts of the book are slow compared to modern pacing, and parts seem needlessly complicated, or now-hackneyed to today's eyes, although they were probably fresher back then. Also, there's a bit of racist language and stereotyping in the early sections of the book, but it turns out that the Black servant (referred to less politely in the book, alas) is perfectly justified in his "superstitious" fears of driving a buggy through the woods late at night. So there!

But I thought it was reasonably good for books of that time, as early Weird Fiction goes. Things happen, although subject to various interpretations, and the plot moves along, and threads end up being mostly tied off. If you want to check out an early minor horror work, you could do a lot worse. 

Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft enjoyed the book after his friend Frank Belknap Long bought it 10 years later, as I heard on the "Voluminous: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft" podcast by the HPL Historical Society. Some scholars have claimed TTITW influenced Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror" story. (HPL was presumably one of the many people who looked no further than the Harper Williams pseudonym, and didn't know TTITW was written by a woman.)

Neither Project Gutenberg nor archive.org seems to have a text copy, but Librivox has a free audiobook here in case you want to listen.

One of the most interesting things about this minor early horror novel, of course, is the contrast with the next book by its author, The Velveteen Rabbit, a toy whose boy loves it so much that a fairy is able to turn it into a real rabbit, when the toy is due to be burned due to fears of spreading scarlet fever. It's poignant and well-written and deserves its great fame.

I don't know whether MWB got significantly better as a writer in the intervening years or if she just found children's books better suited to her skills. But after the huge success of The Velveteen Rabbit, she mostly stuck with children's books and a few young adult books. One of those, Winterbound (1936), was a runner-up for the 1937 Newbery Medal and won a retroactive Newbery Honor in 1971.

According to Wikipedia, MWB's "final book, 1944's Forward Commandos!, was an inspirational story of wartime heroism, which included as one of its characters a black soldier. Acknowledging the contribution of African-Americans to the war effort was extremely rare in literary output of the time and that fact was noted in the book's reviews."

So whatever MWB's views may have been in 1914 when she wrote The Thing in the Woods, I'm very happy to learn of the progressive attitudes she apparently held and fostered 30 years later.