Gorgons, Medusan Madness, petrification & Co.

[dem bones]

Gertrude Bacon - The Gorgon (aka 'The Gorgon´s Head') (The Strand, Dec. 1899)
Phil Robinson - Medusa (Tales By Three Brothers,1889)
Royal W. Jimerson - Medusa (Weird Tales, Apr. 1928)
Clark Ashton Smith – The Gorgon (Weird Tales, Apr. 1932)

C. L. Moore - Shambleau (Weird Tales, Nov. 1933)
E. H. Visiak - Medusan Madness (New Tales of Horror by Eminent Authors, 1934)

Josh Kirby

Nelson Bond - The Mask Of Medusa (The Blue Book, Dec. 1945)
Sir Andrew Caldecott - A Victim of Medusa (Not Exactly Ghosts, 1946)

Joe Tillotson (Fantastic Adventures,Oct 1951)

William Tenn - Medusa Was A Lady! (aka The Lamp Of Medusa, Fantastic Adventures,Oct 1951)
Viola Bowker Ririe - House Of Evil (London Mystery #31, Dec. 1956)
William Sambrot - Island Of Fear (Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 18, 1958)

Emsh

Robert Silverberg - Fight With A Gorgon (Super-Science Fiction, Oct. 1958)

Peter McGinn / Uncredited

John Burke - The Gorgon (The Hammer Horror Film Omnibus, Pan 1966)

Chris Achilleos

R. Chetwynd-Hayes - Crowning Glory (The Unbidden, 1971)
Sydney J. Bounds - An Eye For Beauty (Mary Danby [ed.] Frighteners 2, 1976.
Tanith Lee - The Gorgon (Charles L. Grant [ed.] Shadows 5, 1982)
Thomas Ligotti - The Medusa (Fantasy Tales, Winter 1991)
Gemma Files - Some Kind Of Light Shines From Your Face (Stephen Jones [ed.] Mammoth Best New Horror 23, 2012)


As always, corrections, additions, etc very welcome.

[helrunar]

Very impressive work, Dem!!

cheers, H.

[dem bones]

Dragons & Nightmares: Photographer and model scandalously uncredited.

Z. B. Bishop (Zealia Bishop & H. P. Lovecraft) - Medusa’s coil (Weird Tales, Jan. 1939)

Robert Bloch - Nursemaid To Nightmares (Weird Tales, Nov. 1942)

Charles Creighton - Eye Of Medusa (Fantastic Adventures, Dec. 1952)

Lord Dunsany - The Shield Of Athene (Little Tales Of Smethers, Jarrolds, 1952)

Clark Ashton Smith - Symposium Of The Gorgon (Fantastic Universe Oct. 1958)

Ramsey Campbell - Medusa (Strange Things And Stranger Places, Tor 1993)

Brian Hodge - Gorgon (Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg & Martin H. Greenberg [eds.] Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, Barnes & Noble 1998)

Anthony Horowitz - The Gorgon's Head (Beasts And Monsters, Kingfisher, 2010)

Novels

E. H. Visiak - Medusa: A Story Of Mystery (Gollancz, 1929)

Gerald Biss - The Gorgon's Head (Sampson Low, 1932)

Florence Hurd - Gorgon's Head (Macfadden, 1971) Gothic Romance. "Inside the walls of the strange old house, she would know fear, pain - and terror."

Nancy Howland

Back cover of Jessica A. Salmonson [ed.], The Haunted Wherry & Other Rare Ghost Stories, (Miskatonic University Press, 1985). Not sure it relates to a particular story.

[dem bones]

Many thanks to Mr. Paperback Fanatic/ Sleazy Reader/ Pulp Horror Man of Violence Mr. Justin Marriott for providing these three beauties.

Rudolph Belarski

Ford Smith [Oscar J. Friend] - Venusian Nightmare (Thrilling Wonder Stories, Winter 1944)

Virgil Finlay

Clark Ashton Smith - Symposium Of The Gorgon (Fantastic Universe Oct. 1958)

Barye Phillips & Leo Ramon Summers (Fantastic, Summer 1952)

[cromagnonman]

Lest we forget: Alan Dean Foster - "By the Gods!"

The Watt-Evans book is a hugely enjoyable exercise in logistical fantasy. Just how do you capture a creature whose very breath is lethal, whose touch is poison and which you cant even look at without being turned to stone. The Lords of Dus sequence had a great premise to it and referenced everything from Robert W Chambers to Marvel Conan comics. Regrettably it rather ran out of steam after the terrific second book.

And speaking of Marvel comics: also worthy of an honourable mention in dispatches is the character the Grey Gargoyle whose touch is, quite literally, petrifying. 

[dem bones]

Eventually somebody had to feature this on a cover;

Prof. Leonard Wolf - Horror: A Connoisseur's Guide (FactsOnFile, 1989)

Rubens The Head of the Medusa

[helrunar]

As a kind of footnote, I just stumbled upon a horror comics tale, "Head of the Medusa," from Tomb of Terror #5 (Oct. 1952), on this site:

comicbookplus.com/?dlid=33564

Four saw the legendary face of unutterable doom--and each one met a fate too horrible to describe!  But one among them was the true ghoul from the Beyond! Who was it?  Who alone obeyed... HEAD OF THE MEDUSA

Fun for the whole family!  The same issue includes such diverting yarns as The Rat-Man, Marriage of the Monsters, and The Living Slime.

cheers, H.

[helrunar]

Some cool Medusa depictions here:


www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2007/03/12/the-masks-of-medusa/

cheers, H.

[Swampirella]

Always Keep A Mirror Nigh - Raymond Whetsone (London Mystery Magazine #36 March 1958)

Bank clerk John Everett is fascinated by a weathered grey stone house. Despite it's outmoded style, he finds it compelling. After going past it night after night on his evening walks, one summer night he enters it. The hall smells mouldy, the furniture and walls are dilapidated yet there's a source of light that he can't help following to find a once-splendid drawing room "furnished in the style of a hundred years ago or more." A woman is sitting in a far corner of the room, with her back to him. "She wore a long flowing dress that looked like it was made of spun gold, but was so sheer her flesh gleamed through it. her arms and shoulders were bare and were the colour of old ivory. She sat so still that she herself might have been an ivory statue. Only her hair seemed to move and ripple, as though stirred by a wind. But there was no wind! The air in the room was perfectly motionless. "I have been waiting for you," the woman said". Although "there was something metallic and unnatural about her voice", she begs him to not be afraid. She tells him of all the men she had known and who had found what they sought through her. But his scepticism gets the better of him. Thinking it's just a prank and she can't fulfill his wish, he asks to remain the age he is now, 25. Furious that he would not listen or believe, that he scorned and reviled her, she turns around with predictable results.

[dem bones]

Tim Stout - Not Rubber Mice: (The Doomsdeath Chronicles, 1980). Community-minded Sir Sir Basil Lomax and Blantyre the jeweller gift three half-blind pensioners three ugly potted plants. The snake-haired, man-hating flowers are the offspring of Medusa, genetically modified to transform human flesh to precious mineral.

[Shrink Proof]

Shamus Frazer - Khorassim (from his collection Where Human Pathways End, compiled by Richard Dalby, 2001). A pair of archaeologists travel to the abandoned city of Khorassim in the remote Sahara to solve the riddle of the disappearance there of Edward Monsell's second expedition of 1881. 99% of their colleagues think that Monsell was simply fabricating his reports of the fabulous place after his first expedition and, since a relief party found no trace of him after the second one, his ideas have become a footnote in the history books. The whole idea of a ruined city is considered to be nothing more than one of Monsell's self-publicising stories. Decades later our intrepid pair organise an aerial survey and the photographs show evidence that maybe Monsell was right. Setting off on their own expedition with little more than the traditional recalcitrant Arab porters and British pluck and pith helmets, they eventually reach the wretched place, now half buried in sand. They begin to explore, finding proof that Monsell did indeed pass the same way back in 1881. They are amazed at the incredibly realistic statues they see everywhere, especially in the forum. They find more of them as they explore the labyrinths of the ruins. The first undeniable inkling that there is something horribly wrong in Khorassim comes when they notice that, not only are the statues very, very realistic human figures, but so is their clothing. In fact, the clothing is faded, tattered but completely real...

[dem bones]

Brian Stableford - Beyond Repair: (Simon Gosden [ed], Out of the Woodwork #2, 1987). A lovely yarn in the Weird Tales mould, of a man and a woman. Dorset, 2031. The narrator returns to England after ten years working on reforestation projects in Australia and Central Africa to find his brilliant brother, James, in charge of an Isolation Unit, the contemporary euphemism for what would once have been referred to as a madhouse. Narrator is disappointed that James has settled for so pointless a position, psychochemistry having advanced to a stage where incurable cases are a thing of the past. James begs to differ and takes him to the room of one particular patient, a brilliant surgeon, seventy years of age, who is demonstrably beyond repair. The same goes for the wilfully spiteful wife he murdered, reconstructed and returned to life, albeit one she is entirely oblivious to. Her new hairdo is quite the most distracting either brother has ever seen.

[helrunar]

I came here to write about "Khorassim" by Shamus Frazer but stalwart mountaineer and weird enthusiast Dr Shrink Proof got here before me. I finished the Frazer collection today on my commute. Wonderful tales, and we have Richard Dalby of much-celebrated memory to thank for the fact that they saw the light of day.

One minor correction--the narrator of "Khorassim" is Pierre, and his partner in exploration is Jules, so what they have in spades is French audacity rather than British pluck. Pierre also does have an excellent intuition for lurking, insidious, ancient evil which, alas, Jules utterly lacks, and that proves most unfortunate for him.

cheers, Hel.