After reading "The Dead Man's Tale" in the first issue of Weird Tales, I checked out the next story, which was a bit longer, so I thought I'd do a short review, rather than a full reading.
The story in question is called OOZE, and it was written by Anthony M. Rud. I think it first appeared here in Weird Tales in 1923, but it's possible that it's a reprint that I'm not aware of.
In any case, the first thing I thought of as I read this story was something like, "This is a LOT like The Dunwich Horror." Of course, Lovecraft's story would be published six years later in 1929. And calling OOZE like The Dunwich Horror perhaps doesn't give it enough credit.
The story is much more scientific than occult, and follows much more of a human interest plot, rather than Lovecraft's development of a fairly obvious antagonist. The Dunwich Horror tells the tale of a decadent family in a rural New England town. OOZE is about a scientist surrounded by decadent people and the untamed wilderness of Alabama.
Rud's style is solidly descriptive, judgmental of the local peoples and customs, and of normal complexity. There are no huge Lovecraftian (in both senses) paragraphs, but also none of the short, clipped style common to some authors. There are lots of sensory words in the descriptions, and a bit of fairly reasonable dialogue, but primarily the story is written in the form of a report by the main character. It's functional, but not poetic.
The pace and flow are good, and there is plenty of italicization and dashes for emphasis.
The basic plot is that an independently-wealthy scientist named John Corliss Cranmer built a manor in the swamps of Alabama, and after a few years, he suddenly went mad and killed his son Lee and Lee's wife Peggy. At least, that's what the unnamed main character has been told at the start of the story. Lee and Peggy's daughter Elsie was thankfully spared from the madness of John, and the main character leaves her with her grandparents in order to investigate this strange occurrence.
What unfolds is that things are not exactly as the news reports said. The main character gradually figures out the sequence of events that led to John's madness, enlisting various local sources to help understand what happened.
The ending is not particularly hard to predict, given the title and my reference to The Dunwich Horror, but there is plenty of colorful description of things and events to get you there.
It's a fun story.
Read it here:
https://archive.org/details/WeirdTalesV01n01192303/page/n19/mode/2up
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