Howard Wandrei, "The Other"

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Howard Wandrei, "The Other."
ASTOUNDING STORIES, December 1934.

Although I've never had respect for Howard Wandrei (neither as artist nor as writer), I keep returning to this one short story.

The style is overblown, the story overlong, the characters not so much human as pulpoid:

"He jabbed the bell. He gave the knocker a boost for good measure and was pretty cocky about it. Then he yawned and blinked his eyes dopily, for it was morning, and Basil Sash's nights generally reeled....

[...]

"Then the door banged in again just as quickly as it had shut. A hand shot out, grasped him fiercely by the throat, yanked him inside.

"He swung his feet helplessly in the air. He plucked at an enormous hand which he found collaring his throat more and more tightly. Ingvaldssen had him off the floor and pinned to the door like one of his damned trophies. Sash's eyes bulged and darkened with blood.

"All at once the elephantine Ingvaldssen changed his mind. He gave the reporter a violent shake that came near to disarticulating the vertebrae and dropped him.

"'For a minute,' Sash choked out, 'I thought you were going to throttle me. Now, was that nice?'"

By this point, "The Other" has lurched beyond bad. I could forgive any reader for tossing the story aside and for moving on to something more believable.

Yet for all of its flaws, "The Other" develops into something interesting. Unlike so many pulp stories from the period that shared a Lovecraftian cosiness and offered a last minute reprieve to the human species, "The Other" leaps over the cliff. With a few well-chosen details, it implies that something terrible is free at last and will never be stopped.

I could never recommend so flawed a story to readers, but to writers, I would -- if only to give them a chance to see, for their own purposes and by their own standards, what does not work, and what does.