 This video is going to be a primer on how to read one of my favorite authors, Zena Henderson. I talked about her once before. I did a 30-second review of her two short story collections, Anything Box and Holding Wonder. And I recently sent a copy of each of those books to a Chad Pfeiffer at HPPodcraft because they're looking for authors, vintage science fiction and weird tales authors that they haven't heard of and I thought Zena Henderson was perfect. I have my copy of Anything Box here and I don't, I can't find my copy of Holding Wonder Chad. I think I sent you my only copy. I believed I had more than one but apparently I was wrong. Anyway, Zena Henderson published many weird tales in the 1950s and all the magazines that were familiar with astounding stories, amazing stories, weird tales, the magazine of fantasy and science fiction. She was one of the first female science fiction authors to use her own name. She never used a male pseudonym. One of the reasons I'm so interested in her, number one I just like her stories. I like her writing and I like her stories. But to me she represents a kind of anti-lovecraft. She's like an antidote to lovecraft. Whereas lovecraft, which we're all so familiar with these days, has this philosophy of an incomprehensible and indifferent universe that literally makes us insane the more we learn about it. Zena Henderson's stories very often start from a position of love. It sounds silly to say it that way but it's true. The thing that she's most known for is she created a series of connected stories called Simply the People about a race of aliens who crash-laned on Earth many generations ago and they become spread across the world almost disappearing into the human race. Kind of a diaspora. Those stories were the inspiration for Disney's Witch Mountain movies and I find those stories uninteresting. The two Zena Henderson books that you find most often in the bookstores are collections of the people stories and I'm not interested in those. The interesting stories come from anything box and holding wonder. There's a recurring theme in Henderson's work of young children having relationships with adults. The adults are usually mothers or teachers. The story often revolves around the child needing a relationship with a responsible and loving adult and that problem being resolved somehow. Two examples are stories called anything box and another one called Lou Rea. They are about a young teacher who has a young girl in her class who has something odd about her what seems to be unusual powers and the teacher establishing a relationship with the child and coming to the bottom of the problem. There's a variation on that that turns it on its head a story called a believing child in which the teacher sees that a certain little girl needs the attention of a responsible caring adult and it turns out to be a mistake to reach out. There's another recurring theme of alien contact or first contact in Zena Henderson's case. It never results in war like we're used to it seeing. There's always some sort of coming together because of unusual people involved in the process who see what needs to be done and then there are the typical weird tales stories like a small town that realizes the hill their homes are built on is a living thing. The story about a teenage girl babysitting a small boy she tells him to just make up a playmate and he comes back and says I did what you said and we have to hide now but there are two unusual stories in particular that I want to bring your attention to. One of them is called the closest school. It's about a little one-room school house in the desert somewhere a town that's just a scratch in the dirt and children from all over the county come to come to school and there's just a few of them. One day a couple shows up with their child and they are not human. They have been crash landed in the desert for some time and they announced that they understand that local law requires that the young ones attend school at the closest school. The superintendent who is a wiry old cowboy and a xenophobe and a racist he's angry he doesn't know what to do but he says to himself I have a job my personal opinions and prejudices are not involved in it let's get this done. It's an amazing story it's an amazingly perceptive story to have been written when it was and it's so relevant to today it's about public education it's about immigration it's about racism it's about law. Now the story that's my personal favorite and it's hard for me to pick a favorite here I've talked about this story briefly before I'm going to talk about it a little more in depth here it's called walking and date. Before I describe the story to you I'm going to describe the meaning of the title there's a double meaning here and it depends on how you pronounce the words in the title it's a stroke of genius if you ask me. Those of you who remember the Andy Griffith show and the Beverly Hillbillies you remember how Andy Griffith pronounces the name of his aunt Aunt B Aunt Beatrice he calls her Aunt B and in the Beverly Hillbillies Ellie May refers to Aunt Pearl as Aunt Pearl. Now where I grew up in the deep south of southeast Texas that is how we pronounced the word aunt it was Aunt and the word dead we pronounced almost with two syllables dead and we dropped the D at the end. So where I grew up and obviously where Zena Henderson grew up this phrase we pronounce walking dead that should give you an idea of what this story is about and how interesting it is. She invented the walking dead before anybody else but here's the thing there's another meaning to this title the story is about an animated corpse that occupies the home of a small family deep in the swamp. For generations the people who live in this rundown shack have been taking care of this dead body it's been so many generations that nobody remembers who this is or who she's actually related to if anybody but about once every generation Aunt Dade gets up and makes it clear that she wants to go for a walk and it falls to the youngest male in the family preferably one who was just past puberty and just becoming a man it falls to him to take Aunt Dade for a walk that's what walking ain't dead means. There are two double meanings in that title genius and if my description of the story just that description by itself doesn't scare the hell out of you. Anyway that's my guide to reading Zena Henderson if you've never done it you can find these books online eBay you can usually find some of these they're not dollar books you'll have to pay a little something for them but you can find them and Chad in particular I hope you've been listening and I hope you'll talk about Zena someday. See you next video. Please subscribe to my channel here on YouTube so you can come back to see more of the vintage science fiction that I have to talk about and remember to press that like button because that's how my videos get seen and please consider becoming a patron remember when you visit 30 second sci-fi at the 50th Street site the link is below you can make a one-time donation if you like thank you