Anthony Boucher – Lee Duigon

I watched this just before bedtime last night, and I’ll say it’s just about the rummest thing I’ve ever seen–“the Little People of Wyoming.” (The video is 20 minutes and change.)

It reminds me of a classic short story, They Bite, by science-fiction great Anthony Boucher. He must have followed this “Little People” enigma in the 1930s and 40s.

Are there, or were there ever, “little people” Out West, only two feet high or even less, who came to populate Native American legends… and left behind several mummified bodies? And who could sometimes prove to be rather nasty neighbors. Were the legends true?

Beats me!

While you’re waiting for my next book to come out (I can dream), here’s a little feast of some of the finest science fiction and fantasy short stories ever written.

Anthony Boucher–writer, editor, Sherlock Holmes expert, radio scriptwriter, critic, equally at home in fantasy, science fiction, and mystery–wrote these stories in the 1940s and they’re still great today. The Compleat Werewolf leads the contents, a novelette not quick like anything you’ve ever read before: what if you really could be a werewolf? What problems might you encounter that you never, ever thought of?

Then there’s They Bite, one of the scariest short stories you’ll ever read; and Mr. Lupescu, which packs not one but two surprise endings.

We’re talking here about a guy who could write a story about Martian archaeologists digging up Earth’s distant past (in The Greatest Tertian) and trying to reconstruct human history… with Sherlock Holmes as its central figure. This one’s not in this anthology, but just think about it and you’ll have an idea of what Anthony Boucher could do.