peared in 1920 as The Story of Doctor Dolittle: Being
the History of His Peculiar Life and Astonishing Ad-
ventures in Foreign Parts.Seven additional titles had
appeared by 1928, with four more titles added at
irregular intervals afterward, ending with Doctor
Dolittle’s Puddleby Adventures, published posthu-
mously in 1952.
After driving away most of his human com-
panions, Doctor Dolittle learns from his parrot
that a wide variety of animals speak in their own
languages, which he eventually learns. The stories
they tell inspire him to indulge in a series of fabu-
lous journeys and adventures. A physician origi-
nally, he becomes a veterinarian, although later in
the series he is in charge of a circus, a zoo, and var-
ious services designed for animal rather than
human customers. Lofting sometimes overdoes his
message about being kind to animals as well as one
another, but his intentions are always good. He was
a skilled storyteller with a powerful imagination,
creating believable characters from familiar ani-
mals and even inventing entirely new animals such
as the pushmi-pullyu. One of the later adventures,
Doctor Dolittle and the Secret Lake(1948), is partic-
ularly good.
Lofting wrote very little fantasy outside the
Dolittle series. Gub Gub’s Book(1932) is related to
the main series, but The Twilight of Magic(1930) is
not. Although much of the content is now dated,
the Dolittle books have remained popular with
successive generations, and Lofting is ranked with
Mary Norton, L. Frank BAUM, Lewis CARROLL,
Kenneth Grahame, and other giants of children’s
literature.
“Logoda’s Heads”August Derleth(1939)
This very short horror story was first published
under the title “Lord of Evil.” African magic has
never been much of an influence on Western hor-
ror fiction, appearing only intermittently such as in
Roger Manvell’s THE DREAMERS(1958), Seth Pfef-
ferle’s Stickman(1987), and most recently in the
works of Tananarive Due. One of the rare early ex-
amples is this story of conflict between British
colonials and a local witch doctor, Logoda, who
makes a habit of shrinking the heads of his de-
feated enemies.
An unnamed officer and a civilian named
Henley enter Logoda’s hut following the disappear-
ance of an Englishman and notice that there is a
fresh shrunken head among the decorations. Hen-
ley believes that the new addition is the distorted
head of his missing brother. Although the officer is
inclined to doubt it and to avoid unnecessarily of-
fending Logoda, his companion is convinced that
the native magic is real, which opinion is sup-
ported when the heads seem to move of their own
volition whenever Logoda speaks to them. Henley
arranges to be alone in the hut for a few moments,
during which time he speaks to the heads in a local
tongue, then requests that he be tied to a bed and
guarded during the night. That night Logoda is
killed in his hut, discovered in the morning with
his throat torn out and his body mutilated. Henley
insists that he was responsible and that he in-
structed the heads to attack the witch doctor.
Many horror writers have described the fool-
ishness of questioning the beliefs of indigenes and
implied that magic might work if those employing
it are true believers. Unlike the officer, Henley
managed to cast aside the prejudices of his civilized
English upbringing and confronted Logoda with
the rules understood clearly by both parties. It was
Logoda who underestimated his enemy, never sus-
pecting that an Englishman could possibly know
how to influence his assembled heads. Derleth
wrote a large number of traditional horror stories
before turning to the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P.
LOVECRAFTfor his inspiration, and this is one of
the best of them.Long, Frank Belknap(1901–1994)
For most of his early career, Frank Belknap Long was
a close friend of H. P. LOVECRAFT. Long began sell-
ing short fiction in 1924 and became a regular con-
tributor to the magazines of weird fiction, producing
early classics such as “The Ocean Leech” (1924)
and “The Hounds of Tindalos” (1929). The latter in
particular is credited with having influenced Love-
craft’s own development of the Cthulhu Mythos,
which in turn helped shape the careers of later writ-
ers. Unlike Lovecraft, Long often turned to science
fiction, particularly during the 1940s, but the stories
in The Hounds of Tindalos(1946), The Horror fromLong, Frank Belknap 219