Joseph Payne Brennan - Best-known Work and Modern Influence

Best-known Work and Modern Influence

Brennan's stories, though scarce and mostly out-of-print today, are widely considered by horror fiction enthusiasts to be classics. His best-known story, "Slime", follows a protoplasmic life form as it ascends from its home deep within the ocean and begins to prey upon coastal residents of a small New England town. Not only has this story been re-published more than any other Brennan story, many modern horror authors seem to have borrowed heavily from it, authors such as Dean Koontz in his novel Phantoms, which features a remarkably similar creature, and Stephen King in his short novellette "The Raft", which also features a blob-like, water-dwelling organism.

Probably the book that borrows most heavily from "Slime", possibly to the point of plagiarism, is Night of the Black Horror (1962) by Victor Norwood (U.K., 1920–1983). This is a novel-length work; but for its first few chapters, the events and many of the descriptions parallel Brennan's work almost paragraph by paragraph, although the precise wording is often changed. After that it follows its own plot-line, separate from Brennan's work. Another work featuring a similar creature is Slimer (1983) by Harry Adam Knight (a pseudonym for John Brosnan and Leroy Kettle). In this case, a group of four people are stranded on an abandoned oil rig where scientific experiments appear to have taken place, creating the blob-like creature that can consume people, whose personalities continue to remain alive inside it. This creature can change shape, and appear as any person it has consumed - which, while borrowing a similar type of creature from "Slime", goes well beyond the scope of the earlier work.

Brennan brought a lawsuit against Paramount for copyright infringement in regards to their release of the film, The Blob (starring Steve McQueen), and apparently received a minor settlement; however, according to a watered-down version of the court proceedings, since the pulp magazine Weird Tales was not named in the suit, Brennan's claims lacked a substantive weight. Les Daniels stated in his book, Living in Fear, that since "Weird Tales was legally defunct, the author has gone virtually unrewarded".

Another acclaimed story by Brennan, "Canavan's Back Yard", deals with a weedy back yard that seems small and unremarkable from the outside, but is found to be so extensive by anyone unfortunate to venture in, that they soon get lost and may never find their way out.

Other famous Brennan stories include "The Calamander Chest" and "Levitation".

Acclaimed weird writer Thomas Ligotti revealed in an interview with Erik Angegrauber that when in his twenties he had written Brennan some fan letters (to which Brennan replied) praising his "unabashedly pessimistic" poetry.