Campbell skips on a lot of detail, boiling some of the fights to the death with the Thing down to a few quick sentences which lessens the threat a bit for the reader. The description of the creature’s default or “real” form and it’s “red eyes blazing with hate” is simple but evocative.
Other passages are not so quaint and still retain sinister power even after all these years. Some of the descriptions are also amusing, such as the repeated description of McReady as a “bronze god”.
While some of the men are described as breaking down in to hysterics the story is presented with little emotion so the story is conveyed more like an incident report than a novel. It even follows similar story beats, including the ending when it is revealed one of the men has really been a Thing for quite some time and a test McReady devises to test blood samples with a hot needle to incite a reaction.īecause it was written in 1938 some of the science in Who Goes There? is anachronistic and the writing is muted. The character names are nearly all the same, most of the roles they serve are the same, and the gruesome way the Thing assimilates is much closer to Carpenter’s gory version than the 1951 adaptation. What is most revealing about the story is how closely Carpenter hewed to the source material. Copper, Commander Garry, and the rest of the men fight for survival and to stop The Thing from escaping the station at all costs and dooming the world. Of course, the alien is not dead and it quickly escapes and begins assimilating the men creating a perfect copy that can fool the others. They bring the body back to their camp and after some discussion decide to thaw it out to conduct testing on the corpse.
While investigating a magnetic anomaly the team discovers an alien ship and a frozen body. The novella was published in 1938 and tells the story of American men stationed at Big Magnet research station in Antarctica.
The basis for both the 1951 movie The Thing From Another World and John Carpenter’s much more faithful adaptation, 1982’s The Thing, (the less said about the 2011 remake/prequel the better) the novella Who Goes There? is still a relevant chiller that proves surprisingly effective. Drew Struzan’s iconic poster image for John Carpenter’s The Thing.
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