Weird Wednesdays: Malcolm M. Ferguson (1919-2011)

I began this piece with one goal in mind, to find a latter day Lovecraftian tribute, preferably one that others had missed. That’s not what I found in the end but what I did find is almost as good. You can decide.

Malcolm M. Ferguson wrote five stories for Weird Tales. The name is not a household word, even among WT fans. He was no Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber or Ted Sturgeon. He didn’t leave the pages of WT to go onto write bigger and better things. Once a year, for five years, he’d pen a tale. The first was “The Polar Vortex” (Weird Tales, September 1946). Appropriately it is buried at the back but it did get a cool illustration by Lee Brown Coye. The plot is scanty for such a long story. A mad millionaire builds an observatory on the exact spot of the South Pole then traps a young man there for a month. He eventually kills himself because he can’t stand the revolving of the planet. I suspect the influence here is Wells or M. P. Shiel but the results are dissatisfying.

The second was “The House of Cards” (Weird Tales, September 1947), the first in a two story series about Thomas Chadwick, who seems like a poor man’s Carnacki, telling his friends of supernatural cases. Chadwick has the diary of Mme. Jumal, a spiritualist who takes in boarders out of necessity. The men who come to her are all murderers, who draw a card from Jumal’s tarot deck and meet their deaths that night, victims of guilt or retribution? Madame Jumal follows them to hell, drawing her own card, The House of Destruction.

“Croatan” (Weird Tales, July 1948) is Ferguson’s masterpiece. Using the historical tale of the doomed Roanoke colony, he explains the mysterious “Croatan” carved in a tree. A brown snow falls near Virginia and artist John Saunders investigates. He falls ill and inducing himself into a trance he narrates the tale of Amos Martin, sole survivor of the plague that wiped out the settlers at Roanoke. Through dreams and the appearance of Charles