At least that's what Richard S. Shaver believed and who cares that he was a raving lunatic? He had a good editor, who happened to be a hunchbacked midget, who turned Shaver's demented screeds into some of the most popular pulp magazine stories of the 1940s.
I'm not making this up. It's way too weird to be fiction. The whole strange story is recounted in the current issue of Outre magazine, a smart, fun, profusely illustrated quarterly devoted to the history of B-movies, pulp magazines and classic pinup girls. Outre is six years old, but I'd never seen it until I stumbled upon the latest issue at a newsstand. As I read Bruce Wright's "Fear Down Below: The Curious History of the Shaver Mystery," my jaw dropped and I stood transfixed. It's the most bizarre nonfiction story I've read in years and a delightful look into the hidden history of American magazines.
The story begins with Raymond A. Palmer, a four-foot-tall hunchback from Milwaukee who spent his sickly childhood reading science fiction. He founded a sci-fi fan club and published a sci-fi fanzine and in 1938, at age 28, was hired to edit a dying Chicago pulp sci-fi mag called Amazing Stories.
One day in 1943, one of Palmer's assistants tossed a letter from a reader into the wastebasket, muttering about "crackpots." Curious, Palmer picked the epistle out of the trash. It was from Shaver, a then-unknown ex-hobo and construction worker who wrote that he'd discovered "Mantong," the lost language of Atlantis, which he claimed was the basis of all earthly tongues. Palmer printed the letter and it drew a considerable response from readers who said they recognized Mantong phraseology in various foreign languages.
When Palmer wrote to Shaver, asking how he'd discovered Mantong, Shaver bombarded the editor with long, semi-coherent letters, explaining that he'd been working at a Detroit auto plant when his welding gun began suddenly picking up the thoughts of his co-workers. That was weird enough, but then the welding gun started broadcasting the sounds of a secret torture session held in a cavern deep in the earth.
Shaver also sent Palmer "A Warning to Future Man," a 10,000-word manuscript detailing the secret history of our planet. Thousands of years ago, Earth, then called Lemuria, was occupied by a race of immortal giants, Shaver wrote. But then the sun began emitting poison particles that drove the giants underground, where they mutated into ugly, evil beings called Dero, who kidnap, rape and devour humans.
Your average editor would have tossed Shaver's ravings. Not Palmer. He rewrote the manuscript into a piece called "I Remember Lemuria!," which he billed as fact and published in the March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories.
The issue sold out and drew hundreds of letters from readers. For the next four years, Palmer kept rewriting Shaver's sadistic fantasies, illustrating them with wonderfully lurid covers that featured scantily clad women menaced by Shaver's Dero demons.
"The result," writes Wright, "is an unforgettable blend of high-flying imagination with curiously homely touches, as when we encounter a highly intelligent snail-centaur named Hank."
Shaver's stories helped boost Amazing Stories' circulation from 27,000 to 185,000. Soon there was a Shaver cult, complete with a fan club and monthly fanzine. The Atlantic Monthly and Life published stories on the strange phenomenon.
Shaver, who was probably a paranoid schizophrenic, believed that his writings were simple fact. It's hard to tell what Palmer thought. At one point, he claimed that Shaver's stuff might be "at least 25 percent true."
In the '50s, the two men parted ways. Palmer left Amazing Stories to publish Fate, which achieved fame by touting the existence of flying saucers. (Fate is still publishing and still touting UFOs; Amazing Stories lasted in various incarnations until last year.)
Meanwhile, Shaver published his own mag, Shaver Mystery Magazine, which appeared only sporadically. Later, he claimed he'd discovered detailed written records of Lemuria inside rocks he found on the Wisconsin prairie, but for some reason scientists didn't believe him. In the '60s, the two teamed up on a magazine called the Hidden World but it never caught on, possibly because it published Shaver's writings unedited. America apparently wasn't ready for prose like this: "Life is a scream in the face of a bright madness, then! Life is a silly sound like a death rattle from an insane clown dying in the night, then!"
Both men died in the '70s, and we'll no doubt never see their like again. But in an era when magazines are edited by timid souls who make editorial decisions based on demographic data and focus groups, it's pleasing to recall that at least one editor once achieved success by rewriting the ravings of a madman.
One final note: If you are receiving messages from welding guns (or dental fillings) please don't send your writings to me. These days, as far as I can tell, the main print market for demented screeds is the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Try them.
Magazine Resurrects 'The Shaver Mystery'
Deep in the bowels of the earth, a mutant race of malevolent beings keeps thousands of kidnapped humans as slaves and sex toys before ultimately eating them.[Original headline: The Madman, The Midget And the Giants ]
Washington Post | By Peter Carlson - February 12 2001
