They Bite by Anthony Boucher

Anthony Boucher Anthony Boucher known as was the pen name of William Anthony Parker White and he was known at Tony. He was born in 1911 in Oakland California and died aged only 56 in Oakland of lung cancer. I guess he liked it there.   He graduated from Pasadena High in 1928 and went to the University of Southern California and did his masters at University of California, Berkely. Boucher is to rhyme with Voucher rather than the French bouche.  Boucher was close to his grandfather who had been a steel worker in Glasgow and got free passage to America after signing up to fight in the Civil War. He couldn’t have afforded the passage otherwise. It’s said that the grandfather who made a big impression on Boucher was a rake and a rogue.  He was a sickly child with asthma and other illnesses and this made him a voracious reader and later writer.  Boucher was a professional writer of fiction who wrote mystery novels, short stories, science fiction and radio dramas. His story Nine Times Nine was voted the best locked room master of all time. He edited anthologies of science fiction and was a translator from Spanish, being the first to translate Jorge Luis Borges (I must do one of his stories).  Boucher founded the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and edited it from 1949 to 1958.  He was a friend and mentor of Philip K. Dick. In addition to other things he was a keen poker player, a sports fan and a big fan of Sherlock Holmes. He collected records of early operatic singers. Apparently he was a friend of the occultist Jack Parsons who also lived in Pasadena His first story was published in 1927 in Weird Tales when he was 15. It was entitled “Ye Good Olde Ghost Storie”.  They Bite This story was suggested by many many people. I watched a couple of videos on how to do Western accents, but I think I have not succeeded very well and hope that doesn’t detract from the story. This is a classic folk horror story albeit set in the American West, though it references Sweeny Bean a