THE MONSTER-MAKER aka THE SURGEON’S EXPERIMENT (1897) – As Halloween Month hurtles toward its conclusion, Balladeer’s Blog takes a look at one of the overlooked horror tales of one of America’s most overlooked writers – W.C. Morrow. This story depicts a mad doctor dabbling in unspeakable experiments.
NOTE: The movies titled The Monster Maker (1944) and The Surgeon’s Experiment (1914) were not based on this short story.
The Monster-Maker is not the most original horror/ sci fi story in the world, but it has that certain appeal common to all such neglected items. Morrow was a writer living in – and largely published in – California, and his early work was praised by the one and only Ambrose Bierce.
This tale’s setting in 1800s San Francisco gives a nice American touch to what would otherwise have been yet another story set in a creepy castle somewhere in Europe. An annoying factor is that, like some of Jack London’s early short stories like A Thousand Deaths, The Monster-Maker does not provide names for any of its characters.
The horror begins as a perfectly healthy yet pathologically melancholy young man from a wealthy family seeks a meeting with a VERY reclusive surgeon. The physician is considered brilliant and emerges periodically to perform skilled surgery for such high fees that he can devote the rest of his time to his bizarre experiments. Continue reading
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