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.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Payne Brennan
Famous quotes containing the words work, modern and/or influence:
“Working women today are trying to achieve in the work world what men have achieved all along—but men have always had the help of a woman at home who took care of all the other details of living! Today the working woman is also that woman at home, and without support services in the workplace and a respect for the work women do within and outside the home, the attempt to do both is taking its toll—on women, on men, and on our children.”
—Jeanne Elium (20th century)
“Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes.”
—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924)
“Exhaust them, wrestle with them, let them not go until their blessing be won, and, after a short season, the dismay will be overpast, the excess of influence withdrawn, and they will be no longer an alarming meteor, but one more brighter star shining serenely in your heaven, and blending its light with all your day.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)