They Bite

by Anthony Boucher

Relato sobre la historia de Hugh Tallant, un espía independiente que encuentra en el desierto a una familia de vampiros con habilidades realmente sorprendentes.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1943

About the author

William Anthony Parker White, better known by his pen name Anthony Boucher, was an American author, critic, and editor who wrote several classic mystery novels, short stories, science fiction, and radio dramas. Between 1942 and 1947, he acted as reviewer of mostly mystery fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle. In addition to "Anthony Boucher", White also employed the pseudonym "H. H. Holmes", which was the pseudonym of a late-19th-century American serial killer; Boucher would also write light verse and sign it " Herman W. Mudgett" (the murderer's real name).
In a 1981 poll of 17 detective story writers and reviewers, his novel Nine Times Nine was voted as the ninth best locked room mystery of all time.

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid folk horror offering from 1943 by the prolific and wide-ranging pulp fiction writer Anthony Boucher that manages to bring elements of Machen's 'White People' into alignment with a genre of Wild West occult horror of which a master exponent was Robert Howard.

There is a bit of a mystery about the 'hero' of the story. He is definitely not one of the good guys but it is unclear exactly what he is - perhaps engaged in espionage and certainly prepared to murder to cover his tracks. The off beat militarised desert location sets the scene well.

The critters are also imaginatively drawn being presumed to be the dessicated remnants of cannibal low life humans who have learned occult survival from the desert Indians. These cannibals have their ancestry traced back (in spirit at least) to old European, certainly Scottish, legend.

Desert Indians as a threat (now, of course, a trope seen as irredeemably racist and imperialist) that can visit an indirect revenge on the settlers who ousted them and who are linked to dark blood rites of some sort are a common and morally evasive element in much Western folk horror.

The debt to Machen is there again (and obviously so for Howard) since his 'white people' (there is an irony in the terminology) are also an evil remnant population pushed to the margins by 'civilising' settlers in ancient Britain. Moral degeneracy (not 'Christian') is taken as read.

In the same period (the 1940s), science fiction stories would repeat a variant of this anxious story line, applying them to Martians whose civilisations had degenerated but who perhaps were still present in the landscape and able to do harm to the space settlers.

Obviously the process of settlement was creating something uncomfortable in the American psyche at this time - old fears and greed in a dialectic with nostalgia and sometimes (though not in this story) of regret,

A form of neurotic blood guilt surged through American pulp fiction until more thoughtful writers like Ray Bradbury started to ask some appropriate questions of the moral and psychological costs of the settler process while still not quite getting around to condemning it.

We have had a tendency to sentimentalise the indigenous Indians as eco-warriors and victims but the history of the settlement was not one sided in terms of brutality. A fair history of the Cherokee (whatever their defensive 'rights') will disabuse you of that. Scalping and rape are not spiritual.

Westerners like Howard were writing well within the parameters of a very live folk memory, far closer in time to the Indian Wars than anything Machen might write in relation to the arrival of the neolithic peoples of Britain. Machen and others were just providing a tool for expression of anxiety.

And this was an era that would last until the arrival of the cynical Westerns of the Italians and the 'correcting the story' films of the liberal 1970s when the cowboy film, cowboy music, cowboy culture in general, gave the West a lustre for young males that reached its peak a decade later.

Although we may ahistorically condemn this story as a creature of an unthinking imperialist mind-set, within its framework it is a fine example of the genre. Such stories should be understood on their contemporary merits rather than treated as exemplars of later morality or ideology.

That may be uncomfortable to people under 40 whose education has been guided by liberal bien-pensants but you cannot understand the past by imposing on it the values of the present and sticking your fingers in your ears and going 'lalalalala' when it gets uncomfortable.

This was their world. It had to be displaced eventually (just as the current liberal mythologies will one day be displaced) but it had its authenticity and its historical just cause if only we have the imagination to go back and sit where they sat as well as sit where the indigenous peoples sat.

[Forked Radish · Rating 3 out of 5]

A big buildup with a tropey denouement.

[Alejandroro Isa · Rating 3 out of 5]

No entendi em finak

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25⭐

[Madi Funk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really loved the way what is happening in the story creeps up on you, who the protagonist is, that lovely creeping horror I love so much that leaves you a little panicked.