by Jack Williamson
1948 (expanded from a 1940 shorter version)
Drunken reporter Will Barbee falls under the spell of witch reporter April Bell after an elderly explorer dies after announcing a mysterious box contains the means to fight an ancient evil.
Bell and Barbee have the genes of an ancient exterminated race of witches, and as such can kind of astrally project themselves in animal forms to cause fatal accidents by manipulating probabilities, exactly like the Scarlet Witch. Yes, April is a redhead.
April is trying to get Barbee to kill those protecting the box, while Barbee spends way too many pages wondering if it's all a dream or an hallucination, which is especially ineffective given that there is no dream-like atmosphere at all, what with April talking (while in wolf form) about carbon atoms and Duke University studies.
Near the end things pick up a little, with some paranoia about how a race of half-witches may be secretly controlling the world's institutions, but that goodwill is immediately wasted by the rushed, goofy ending.
Not sure what the big deal is with the contents of the box, seeing how the half-witches can be killed by conventional means. Barbee dies, and hangs around in astral form in a sequence that makes no sense, is now a vampire, the kind of vampires that are really ghost pterodactyls that don't drink blood, and he can grab the box and throw it into the sea. Something a human thug could have done for like $20.
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| Urania always has deceptively honest covers |
I haven't read the original magazine version, but this felt padded out to novel length with incessant adjectives. Other than the paranoia section this doesn't approach horror, and spends a scifi length of time explaining away the supernatural.
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