“The Plant-Thing” (1925) by R. G. Macready

R. G. Macready, of Durant, Oklahoma, writes to the editor: “You are to be commended on the determined stand you, as well as the great majority of WEIRD TALES readers, have taken against those who protest at the weird quality of the stories printed in your periodical. Why do not these people, who are trying to wipe out of existence the only magazine of its kind, turn their artillery upon the sex-exploiting magazines that are crowding the best magazines out of place on our news stands? Anyway, a mind that can go undiseased through that so-called literature should be able to survive the pleasantly exhilarating ‘kick’ of a good horror tale. There can be no question as to the literary status of WEIRD TALES. In it have appeared stories worthy of Kipling himself, to say nothing of Poe.”
—Weird Tales June 1925

The cover of the July 1925 issue of Weird Tales was dedicated to “The Werewolf of Ponkert” by H. Warner Munn, a story that had spun out of Lovecraft’s suggestion that no story had yet been written from the perspective of a werewolf. Lovecraft himself was present in the issue with “The Unnamable.” E. Hoffmann Price’s “The Stranger from Kurdistan,” which Lovecraft later lauded, also graced the issue; another entry in Seabury Quinn’s series “Servants of Satan,” Henry S. Whitehead’s “The Wonderful Thing,” a classic translation/reprint in “The Three Low Masses” by Alphonse Daudet—and a story from a bright newcomer, “Spear and Fang” by Robert E. Howard, his first story in the magazine.

Against all these well-known names are a handful of other stories, but readers may be forgiven for overlooking “The Plant-Thing” by R. G. Macready. It is a minor effort, as weird tales go, and Farnsworth Wright did Macready no favors by announcing at the start “A Frightful Tale of a Carnivorous Tree,” because that quite gives the game away. In other ways, the story is too short, too full of stereotypes. Of course the Doctor has a beautiful daughter. Of course things end with one bloody and violent clash.

There are some other curious parallels with other weird stories: the Malay employees of Doctor Carter echo a certain trend of doctors or scientists having exotic servants; Lovecraft used an identical tactic in “The Last Test” (Weird Tales Nov 1928), which also coincidentally involved the sacrifice to science of a large number of animal specimens. The inhuman appetite and emphasis on farm stock to feed it was also a feature of “The Dunwich Horror” and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Whether Lovecraft ever took any inspiration from “The Plant-Thing” must remain speculation, however; there are no mentions of the story or author in Lovecraft’s letters or notes.

It was, as it turns out, to be the only story that Macready would ever publish in Weird Tales. That wasn’t unusual either; Weird Tales had a higher percentage of writers whose only credit was a single story in its pages than nearly any other pulp magazine. Editors Edwin Baird, Farnsworth Wright, and Dorothy McIlwraith might have their quirks and shortcomings, but they were all of them open to new talent.

So too, the British editor Christine Campbell Thomson must have thought it a good shocker, for she bought the reprint rights for the 1925 Not at Night anthology. When editor Herbert Ashbury brought out the American Not at Night anthology in 1928, Macready again found himself reprinted—and sharing a table of contents with H. P. Lovecraft again, as well as August Derleth, Seabury Quinn, and Frank Belknap Long, Jr., among others. Macready could honestly claim that he had rubbed shoulders with some of the giants of weird fiction.

There is one thing that makes Macready himself stand out from most of the other authors of Weird Tales, though you would have to go beyond the pages of that magazine to know it:

R. G. Macready was deaf.

Reginald Goode Macready was born 18 April 1905 in Silo, Oklahoma, and grew up (according to census reports) as part of a large family; his father a teacher and newspaper publisher. At the age of 7, R. G. Macready suffered an attack of meningitis; and though he survived, it left him “hopelessly” deaf (the exact degree of deafness is never specified, and may have been total). The young Macready thereafter attended the Oklahoma School for the Deaf, which had been founded in 1908, and did very well scholastically, graduating as class president and valedictorian. He was offered a scholarship to attend Gallaudet  College (now Gallaudet University), a private university that specialized in higher education for the hearing-impared. (Durant Daily Democrat 3 Oct 1922).

It isn’t entirely clear if Macready attended Gaudelet, or if he did attend whether he graduated. The dates fall in between the federal census. In 1927, his father died, which may have interrupted his studies; by the 1930 census he was back in Durant, Oklahoma, working as a printer (according to the census; more likely a linotype operator), and probably helped to support his mother. In the 1940s he enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, from which he graduated with a B.A. in Journalism in 1944, and a M.A. in 1945. A newspaper article on his achievement proudly notes his publication in Weird Tales.

If Macready taught at the Oklahoma School for the Deaf in Sulphur, Oklahoma, it wasn’t for long; by 1946 he was the telegraph editor at the Galveston Daily News. Numerous bylines attest to Macready’s career as a journalist, which continued until his death in Texas in 1977 (Findagrave).

The ableness, race, gender, and sexuality of a writer, can all be invisible to the reader. They know only as much as the writer chooses to reveal. Macready made no point of it, and his last contribution to the Unique Magazine was a letter in the July 1925 issue. The average reader would have no idea that Macready had any disability at all—and many writers with disability pass through history, without leaving any trace of the difficulties they had faced and overcome in their life. How many other writers at Weird Tales might have been part of this oft-underrepresented group?

“The Plant-Thing” by R. G. Macready may be read online for free.

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Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

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