Карл Ричард Якоби: Қорқыныш пен фантастика шебері

American journalist and author

Carl Richard Jacobi (10 July 1908 – 25 August 1997) was an American journalist and writer. He wrote short stories in the horror and fantasy genres for the pulp magazine market, appearing in such pulps of the bizarre and uncanny as Thrilling, Ghost Stories, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Strange Stories. He also wrote stories crime and adventure which appeared in such pulps as Thrilling Adventures, Complete Stories, Top Notch, Short Stories, The Skipper, Doc Savage and Dime Adventures Magazine. Jacobi also produced some science fiction, mainly space opera, published in such magazines as Planet Stories. He was one of the last surviving pulp fictioneers to have contributed to the legendary American horror magazine Weird Tales during its "glory days" (the 1920s and 1930s). His stories have been translated into French, Swedish, Danish and Dutch.

In 1940 41, Jacobi served as editor of Midwest Media, an advertising and radio trade journal. He then spent some years as a reporter, and reviewer of books and plays, for the Minneapolis Star. He worked for them for many years, writing fiction on the side. Following this, he "travelled a spell; fooled about with telegraphy, both wireless and Morse for another spell; then turned to writing fiction full time." At the time of the compilation of Revelations in Black (1947), Jacobi's first collection, Jacobi was at work on a novel, but it is unknown whether this was completed. Jacobi continued to sell stories to Weird Tales up through the 1950s, with that market taking eighteen of his stories in all. When the pulp markets collapsed, Jacobi took regular employment with one of the Honeywell defense plants as an electronics inspector, a job he had through WWII and beyond, while writing part time. He worked the night shift at Honeywell seven days a week, which had a severe effect on both his writing schedule and his health, leading to heart problems.

1964 saw the publication of Jacobi's second collection of weird fiction, Portraits in Moonlight, and several short stories published in magazines.

In 1972, Arkham House published Jacobi's third collection of weird fiction, Disclosures in Scarlet. Don Herron, writing in Jack Sullivan's Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, calls Jacobi's 1972 story "The Unpleasantness at Carver House" his masterpiece "a ghoulish tale of horror and madness that may rank with the best work of Robert Aickman and Walter de la Mare in its brilliant use of suggestion. A feeling of unease pervades the story, and its many macabre implications prey on the imagination long after the last sentence is read." In 1973, Jacobi attended the science fiction convention Torcon II 31st World Science Fiction Convention, held in Canada, having been persuaded to attend by literary agent Kirby McCauley. There he met such figures as J. Vernon Shea and Robert Bloch. In the same year, Etchings and Odysseys magazine was launched in Minneapolis by Kirby McCauley, John Koblas, Eric Carlson, Joe West and others. Jacobi attended the launch, along with Mary Elizabeth Counselman, who had frequently appeared in the pages of the same magazines as Jacobi. Jacobi also met E. Hoffman Price (visiting from the West) at both Donald Wandrei's home and at Etchings and Odysseys 'headquarters'. Koblas had come to know Jacobi much earlier, and received encouraging criticism from Jacobi on his manuscripts. Jacobi also came much in contact with poet and novelist Richard L. Tierney, a Twin Cities resident for nine years during the 1970s. During this period, however, Jacobi had suffered a stroke which left one side of his body paralysed and gave him a speech impediment. 1980 saw a collection of Jacobi's stories published in French, under the title Les ecarlates. In 1989 appeared a collection of all reprint adventure stories from the pulps, East of Samarinda. In the late 1980s, Robert M. Price's Cryptic Publications published a number of obscure Jacobi stories in such magazines as Astro Adventures, Pulp Stories, Pulse Pounding Adventure Stories and Shudder Stories. Jacobi continued to write macabre stories in the 1970s and 1980s. Many are collected in his final volume, The Smoke of the Snake (1994). His last published story, "A Quire of Foolscap" (Whispers, Oct 1987) contains an in joke: an unfaithful wife and her lover check into a motel "out on Carcosa", an obvious reference to both Ambrose Bierce's "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" and Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow, as well as affectionate praise for Karl Edward Wagner's newly established publishing firm (see Carcosa). Writer Don Herron has stated "Jacobi has a genuine bent for original, gruesome invention equal to the best writers who emerged from Weird Tales." Herron also said "Jacobi's finest stories have an exquisitely creepy quality from first paragraph to last" and described the story "The Unpleasantness at Carver House" as "Jacobi's masterpiece".