Today’s Countdown to Hallowe’en is another neglected classic from a master of Horror reviewed by Randy.
Any way you look at it, the story has to begin with Kesserich.
George Kramer, John Ellis and Daniel Kesserich were college friends. After college Ellis and his wife, Mary, moved to Smithville, California, a small town on the edge of the desert, and Kesserich followed. But Mary died and from the moment Kramer arrives in Smithville to check on Ellis odd things happen: Peebles appear out of nowhere defining a path to the tree from which Mary had eaten an orange dosed with a pesticide that killed her, when Kramer approaches Keserich’s home it explodes, and perhaps even more disturbing, the townspeople behave irrationally, nearly panicking, suddenly afraid they buried Mary alive.
Somewhere behind everything happening in Smithville lurks Kesserich’s investigations and experiments. But what has he done and where has he gone? And where has Ellis disappeared to? And why, when exhumed, is Mary’s casket empty?
A cover blurb indicates the manuscript of The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich had been written in 1936 and stored away until Leiber’s death. In 1936 Leiber was corresponding with H. P. Lovecraft (see, Fritz Leiber & H.P. Lovecraft: Writers of the Dark) and this story initially feels Lovecraftian but becomes more Wellsian as it progresses. Leiber’s story-telling skill and the imagination that propelled his later successes are already evident. He marshals and deploys his materials, building suspense toward an explanation that doesn’t diminish the disconcerting and macabre features of the novel‘s events, and creating a sense of the unknown and of knowledge that may not be inimical but can be harmful.
Kesserich also feels like an early attempt to wrestle with a recurring Leiber theme that there are people and forces outside consensus reality that influence it. In different forms it appears in Gather Darkness, Conjure Wife and Our Lady of Darkness and shorter work like “A Bit of the Dark World” and “You’re All Alone” (a shorter version of The Sinful Ones). Honestly, I’m surprised this was not published in Leiber’s lifetime. The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich displays a compelling story and accomplished story-telling and if, like me, you’ve had it on your shelf, actual or electronic, without getting to it, you’ve waited long enough.
The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich by Fritz Leiber (Tor, 1997)
128 pages
ISBN: 978-0312866228
