This post is brought to you by Monster 3 by G. W. Thomas. Enjoy reading about old Horror fiction, Sci-Fi or Fantasy? Then the Monster series is for you. Posts from Dark Worlds Quarterly are collected in these volumes with Monster 3 out last month. Plant monsters include “The Green Splotches” and “The Vines of Tarzan, A Mystery”. You will find other posts about occult detectives, Doc Savage, Keith Laumer and much, much more. These different nonfiction pieces are no longer available on the blog.
I listed Hugo Gernsback’s plant monster stories in a previous post but didn’t really delve into them. Let’s do that a little now. The stories in question are “Through the Crater’s Rim” by A. Hyatt Verrill (Amazing Stories, December 1926) and “The Malignant Flower” by Anthos (Amazing Stories, September 1927). This is the early days of Hugo Gernsback’s Scientifiction magazine, with many reprints from H. G. Wells and Jules Verne but increasingly more new material. Much of the SF published at this time is not particularly sophisticated as we will see with these two killer plant tales.
“Through the Crater’s Rim” was the Verrill’s second sale to Gernsback. It is a lost city jungle tale with one scene involving killer trees. The protagonists, two scientists looking for a lost city spotted by air, are fleeing the local hostile tribe, the Kunas. These pursuers abandon the chase when the white men come to a certain line of trees:
…And then, as I drew near, my senses reeled, I felt that was I was in some awful nightmare. The object, so surely, relentlessly, silently encircling and crushing him was no serpent but a huge liana drooping from the lofty branches of a great tree! 
It seemed absolutely incredible, impossible, unbelievable. But even as I gazed, transfixed with horror, paralyzed by the sight, the vine threw its last coil about the dying man and before my eyes drew the quivering body into the trees above.
Then something touched my leg. With a wild yell of terror I leaped aside. A second vine was writhing and twisting over the ground towards me!
Crazed with unspeakable fear I struck at the thing with my machete. At the blow the vine drew sharply back while from the gash a thick, yellowish, stinking juice oozed forth. Turning, I started to rush from the accursed spot but as I passed the first tree another liana writhed forward in my path.
The man hacks his way out of the line of killer trees to find a precipice waiting for him beyond their reach. He looks back and sees that the killer vines are not some creature hanging from the trees but part of those plants. They are also moving closer. Jump or climb!
Having survived the evil forest, the hero goes on to find the lost city and other things that don’t include more killer flora. (You can bet when all is said and done, the lost city will be destroyed and an entire people wiped off the planet.) The tree episode is included to provide a logical reason why the lost city has existed for so long without discovery. The long tradition of South American killer plants make this one a natural.
“The Malignant Flower”offers even less plot than this earlier tale. The story is a German translation. (Anthos was Leonard Langheinrich.) Sir William Armstrong and his right hand man, Bannister, go off to the jungle after hearing about a giant man-eating plant from a yogi, Daulat Ras, despite Sir William’s upcoming nuptials. They find a valley covered in blossoms, orchids and many others along with this killer:
…In the middle of the glade a colossal flower rose up to a height of almost 10 feet, the stem nearly a foot thick, looking like an immense hemlock cone. From the top five or six great leaves, resembling leather, reached down to the ground. From the blooms there dropped a liquid of overcoming strength of scent…Something had moved. The pair of blooms of this great flower which had hitherto hung down, stiffened themselves visibly…
Not surprising, it eats Sir William. Bannister bravely cuts him free with knife and ax. Armstrong is never the same after this, refusing to marry his fiancee. Daulat Ras says only, “You had your warning.”
While the tale doesn’t divert into other plot elements like Verrill’s tale, this one feels too short somehow. Anthos should have built up the ordeal to find the valley or something. Perhaps his real intention wasn’t plant monsters so much as a commentary on marriage. Gernsback made it the cover story, despite its length, with that classic Frank R. Paul cover that he would repeat in 1930 for Clark Ashton Smith’s space adventure “Marooned in Andromeda”.
Conclusion
I chose these two stories to compare out of the dozen or so that Hugo Gernsback used over his different magazines for two reasons: 1) they are close in age. Gernsback kept publishing until 1936. The stories ten years later have a more sophisticated feel, and 2) most of his plant monster stories are set in space or on other worlds. These two nasties are quite earthly even if they are strange. I should think this trend happened in all the Pulps. Tales of jungle explorers felt old-fashioned when you could have Captain Excitement zap an alien tree on Venus or Mars. Many of the earthbound plant monsters became seeds from space, a sort of middle position. It would take John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (1951) to restart the terrestrial variety. Unlike the first film version of that novel, the Triffids are man-made.
From space or homegrown, plant monsters are part of the Science Fiction tapestry. Whether an alien eating extras in an island laboratory (Alien: Earth) or terrestrial in nature (The Ruins), the plant monster is a natural rather than a supernatural killer. This marks it as Science Fiction territory rather than Horror, though Horror elements are part of the fun, too. As SF, they were within Gernsback’s scope for his Pulps. Clare Winger Harris would include plant monsters as one of her entries in her famous final letter to Gernsback in Wonder Stories, August 1931 where she identifies sixteen topics for writers.
More strangeness from RAGE m a c h i n e
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