Review: Horror: "Vampires of the Desert" by A. Hyatt Verrill

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The narrator of this longish horror tale is a paleontologist, who admits his profession is generally not exciting. Fossils are not dangerous game or particularly elusive. He is employed in Peru, looking for the “diatoms and foraminifers,” which signal the presence of oil. He goes on (and on) describing the desert of Peru where he works hunting for these fossils until there is an earthquake and warming in the ocean currents off the coast. Following the change in ocean currents, it rains hard and steadily for days. (Ringing a bell yet?) Not the earthquake, of course, but the warm currents and the rain form a weather pattern on the West Coast of the Western hemisphere we now refer to as El Niño. The desert, fertile enough but dry blooms. Some of the plants are the ancestors of present day beans and corn, for example. Strange things start happening. It appears two Indians have been murdered, drained of blood. And then death strikes within the oil compound itself. No one goes out at night. One survivor describes the attack as a having a sack thrown over him. He heard no one. This is an adventure story with a surprising solution, but it is long on explanation and short on action. Author Alpheus Hyatt Verrill was an American zoologist and an archaeologist apparently from the Indiana Jones school. His father, Addison Emery Verrill (1839-1926), was the first professor of zoology at Yale. According to Alpheus. Hyatt Verrill’s autobiography: He re-discovered the almost mythical Solonodon paradoxus in the Dominican Republic. He was in charge of an expedition that partly salvaged a Spanish galleon sunk in the West Indies in 1637. He discovered and excavated the remains of a previously unknown pre-historic culture in Panama and has excavated countless tombs and ruins in South America and has lived among more than one hundred Indian tribes in South, Central and North America. He has made ninety-nine trips to the West Indies and Latin America, has crossed the Atlantic eleven times and has devoted nearly forty years to jungle and desert explorations in Central and South America. …yeah. That’s only two paragraphs. I could not find a trustworthy online copy of this story. _____ Title: “Vampires of the Desert” Author: A Hyatt Verrill (1871-1954) First published: Amazing Stories, December 1929 Source: ISFDB