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Study 073 - The Thing of a Thousand Shapes - Part 1 (Patreon)

Published:
2024-01-04 14:00:02
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

We're celebrating 101 years of Weird Tales with a look at The Thing of a Thousand Shapes by Otis Adelbert Kline - straight outta the first issue!

Special thanks to reader Andrew Leman - grab up The Temple of Jupiter Ammon now!

Enjoy Kline's essay "Why Weird Tales?" in full!

Non-Fifer musical selection: Gnossienne: No. 1 by Erik Satie

Next up: more shapes!

Comments

Its Mr Bat Man To You

Yet another, seemingly personal attack. This time with fire tongs, my hated enemy…

TenTimesTeeth

"Catalepsy, you say?" {CUE DANDELO SOUND}

Cole Caron

The electric piano comment is pretty common throughout history. People were afraid of synthesizers for a long time. There’s even a passage in Brave New World about the dystopian nature of the hollow synthesized music in their society.

Saint Fu

Electric pianos sound dope.

REO Jackwagon

Wow. If you want a story to leave you screamin', just call on the voice of Andrew Lehman. Is that new music over that reading? Great stuff. Really looking forward to part 2!

Bob Sharp

I know it's off topic and a bit late, but I just I just finished reading "Wasp" by Eric Frank Russell (previous mentioned in Study 058 - Allamagoosa) and I can't recommend it enough. For a piece of genre fiction that old, I think it still holds up for the most part . I know that some will say that it's just a space opera, swapping the OSS with their Terran Forces equivalent, but it was a real page turner with a lot a of nifty world-building. I can only imagine how delighted I would have been if I had stumbled across the book in 1957, without having read all the SF stories (especially military SF) that have come in its wake.

Jim Cannon

Oh wow, all the ghost bat stories I've read and I never realized that this is where the tongs thing comes from. Like Long Chaney, jr. and silver bullets! So weird. Glad you guys are around to teach us this stuff.

Andrew Leman

What the heck, you guys!? You picked a story with a character who speaks in terrible fake German, but you didn't let me read any of that? Mein hertz ist gebrochen!

Rafe Ball

The vampire case Glitch references, of Arnold Paul (or rather Arnold Paole), was an actual recorded event in Serbia, one of the first two 'vampire outbreaks' to be officially documented (the other being another Serbian, a peasant named Petar Blagojević), credited with kicking off the spread of vampire belief across Western Europe in the 18th Century. Paole was a Serbian infantryman who died in the village of Meduegna in 1726 when he fell from a haywagon and broke his neck. Paole had previously bragged about being attacked by a vampire before moving to the village, but claimed to have cured himself by eating dirt from the vampire’s grave and smearing himself with its blood. But within a few weeks of his death, several townspeople reported having been plagued by Paole and all died shortly after. The townspeople dug Paole up and of course found the body undecayed and his veins full of blood, so Paole got the old stake through the heart (at which he reportedly let out a frightful scream), decapitation and burning treatment, as did his victims. But that wasn’t the end of it - the same village had another outbreak of vampire deaths five years later. Austrian authorities investigated, and determined that Paole had also killed several oxen, which had then been eaten, and those who partook of the meat had then also risen as vampires when they died. Hmm, I’m sure there’s something for a modern take there - vampire burgers, anyone?

It's a Ghost.

I also thought a conger eel was an odd choice and had to look up exactly what one was. Yet, I did already know what an eel was, and I think if you asked Americans today, pretty much everyone would know what an eel was, even if they weren’t familiar with conger eels specifically. On the other hand, I thought the inclusion of a trilobite was interesting and somewhat obscure. I don’t expect most Americans today know what trilobites are. But then maybe Americans of the early 1900s knew all about the Iroquois Theatre fire, conger eels, and trilobites. Or maybe Kline was simply doing his Weird Tales thing, writing what he wanted, and not trying to appeal to everyone.

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

I have got to start writing cryptic instructions about the care of my body with many references to the occult, catalepsy, and moving between worlds. I'm sure my children will laugh and laugh at my final goof.

Anne Ominous

Vaporous emanations of shifting shapes? Mysteriously livid corpes and superstitious Peorians? I'm on the case!

Science Doctor, PhD

Hi all, long time no post :) I am deep into my PhD (Nursing, but think more public health rather than cool stuff like restarting hearts with the wires from a lamp or something) and a side-effect that sometimes happens (and did in my case) is a near inability to read for pleasure. I just wanted to say how great this podcast is in helping me feel some connection to literature, stories, and of course Manimal. Hopefully I have some more interesting comments down the road.

The Aaron Campbell Studio

So what you’re saying, Chris, is, if something started shuffling around under your bed and continued to shuffle forever then that would just become your life. You’d live in bed. You know, fact often overlooked, that’s actually the reason why the grandparents in Charlie and the chocolate factory never got out of bed. It’s all detailed in Roald Dahl’s unpublished manuscript, “Grampa Joe and the Conger Eel”

Jourik De Vetter

Erik Satie as the background readinghmusic?! Is this the first instance or have I just missed the previous ones..