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Not Long Before the Pulp #44: Three Kings’ Day Edition! “Not Long Before the End” by Larry Niven, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, v. 36 n.4, April 1969

Well, with the Yule ended and the New Year begun, we prepare to say farewell to the annual Sword & Sorcery celebration on the ol’ blog. But, as in year’s past, we have one final S&S-focused post for this, the most Swordish & Sorcerous (at least by name) of Holidays…that’s right, it’s Three Kings’ Day! And, as is my prerogative, I’m leaping out of the pulps and into the fancy digests of the 60s in order to talk about an interesting moment in Sword & Sorcery’s history! The story in question: “Not Long Before the End” by famous prick Larry Niven, from the April issue of the 1969 volume of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction!

Why have we flexed our mighty thews to leap wildly into the late 60s, you ask? Well, previous recent entries in this ol’ blog have focused on S&S in the immediate aftermath of Howard’s death, an important and delicate phase in the growth of the genre. Characters like Henry Kuttner’s Elak of Atlantis and Clifford Ball’s Rald the Thief were major steps in defining the rough outlines of the then nameless genre that Howard had created; similarly, we’ve looked at Fritz Leiber’s work, and he’s the writer who actually coined the term “Sword & Sorcery,” fer Crom’s sake! All of these are important points in the early history of the genre, moments where readers and writers were negotiating about what was and wasn’t a swashbuckling weird adventure story with swords and monsters and mightily muscled heroes.

And while Fantasy (broadly constructed) was kept alive in the pages of Unknown Worlds, in important novels by Poul Andersen and Jack Vance, in the SAGA organization, and in the infamous Gnome Press Conan paperbacks, it wasn’t until the unauthorized Lord of the Rings Ace paperbacks in ’65 that things really changed. Publishers suddenly saw dollar-signs around these weirdo fantasy works, and so they sought out more, with editors like L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter digging deeply into the pulp archives to reissue old fantasy material in handy paperback format. In particular, Lancer’s Conan series, with the famous Frazetta cover that forever defined The Barbarian Archetype, was enormously important:

a collection of first edition Lancer paperbacks on display at the Frank Frazetta Museum in East Stroudsburg PA. The one on the far right, *Conan the Adventurer*, was the first of the series, published in 1966, and marks the beginning of a major Sword & Sorcery renaissance

What’s this got to do with our story today? Well, it’s striking (to me at least) at how quickly a backlash to Sword & Sorcery develops – we’ve got Conan exploding in popularity, and Howard’s muscular approach to the genre in particular suddenly becomes a major flavor in the genre landscape, all roughly in the later half of the 60s. And then by ’69 there’s ALREADY a story commenting on/satirizing some of the themes and styles and modes of the genre, and in one of the flagship publications of the day too! That’s remarkable, and speaks to the kind of wild expansion (and passionate fandom) that S&S (and Spec Fic in general) is capable of generating.

S&S literature would have something of a tumultuous 60s and 70s, with some exciting and interesting experimentation coming from people like Michael Moorcock, Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, Charles Saunders, and M. John Harrison, all of them writing if not against “classic” S&S then at least in conversation with it. That’s why today’s story, by Niven, is so important and interesting – it is a major part of a new sword & sorcery, breaking free (finally) or Howard pastiche and associated pulp reprints.

But, before we can get to the story, it’s important to address the fact that Larry Niven, in addition to being a hugely important science fiction author, is also a gigantic piece of shit and fascist scumbag. While people may fondly remember his “Known Space” setting (which he smuggled into Star Trek canon via the Animated Series), he was also an unrepentant reactionary and evil racist. With his buddy, arch-fascist Jerry Pournelle (a major figure in Sword & Sorcery fandom, btw) he cowrote a number of extremely vile novels, full of racism and dumbass rah-rah militarism; their collabs include what might be the single worst thing I’ve ever read, Lucifer’s Hammer, which is as truly deranged a race war fantasy as The Camp of the Saints or The Turner Diaries. But his bullshit goes beyond his own writing – he (with Pournelle and other assholes like David Brin) were members of a group called SIGMA, an association of sci fi dorks who offered pro bono consulting to the gov’t. Here’s one of Niven’s brilliant brain-waves, from 2008:

So yeah, Larry Niven is an enormous piece of shit, and his smugly moronic right-wing cryptofascist world view is a part of his fiction; in addition to his highly developed sycophancy towards power and authority, he’s also (like so many classical conservatives) blithely techno-positivist, which is something you’ll see in the story today! (yay!)

But, before we get to it, let’s look at the cover and ToC:

Now THAT is a damn cover, isn’t it? It’s by Bert Tanner, who did a number of great covers (and interiors) for the magazine, and who only died last year, if I recall correctly. The story this cover is for, Greg Benford’s “Deeper than the Darkness” is an interesting one, though there’s some uncomfortable (and very 60s) race relations stuff in it. It really goes for the whole “I am going to blow your mind: what if white people were on the bottom of the racial hierarchy!?” thing, and it can be a bit eye-rolly, honestly. I will say, though, that despite its somewhat clumsy framing, it DOES deserve some plaudits for at least engaging with the the unrest around the American Civil Rights struggle. The story has some interesting bits (and the alien menace in it *is* quite good), and it’s also a downer, too, which is always fun – this phase of sci-fi, knocking on the New Wave and therefore willing to take more chances, is exciting. It’s the kind of thing F&SF was famous for publishing, back in the Good Ol’ Days – provocative, literary stuff, often quite daring for its time, meant to demonstrate that spec fic was something to take seriously.

The ToC is interesting:

The only really BIG names that most people recognize today are Niven, Russ, and Asimov, and only one of them is in here for fiction. I think that reflects the extreme importance that fandom played in Sci Fi – there’s a lot of ink given over to criticism and articles and discussions of the field, right alongside the stories themselves, and its one of the key strengths that genre lit has going for it – it’s very organic and vital, forcing people reading (and writing) the stuff to be in constant conversation with each other within a curated space (something missing from today’s internet-poisoned fandom, I’d argue).

But enough! On to today’s tale!

No art here, of course, but the little italicized intro makes it clear that this story is going to invert the usual order of antagonism here, something Niven underlines right off the bat in the very first paragraph:

1969, but we’re already playing around with the well-established sword versus sorcery aspect of the genre! It’s kind of remarkable, really, that the genre, which didn’t really have a name until 1961 (coined by Fritz Leiber in the pages of the fan magazines Ancalagon and Amra), was already stimulating comment and experimentation (much to the chagrin of people of Lin Carter, actually). Of course, the inimical nature of magic and the uncanny is a HUGE part of the genre, an inheritance from its progenitor genre, Weird Fiction. It’s also why the Barbarian in particular came to be such a strong and semiotically potent figure – the barbarian’s Natural strength, inherent in their powerful Body, versus the otherworldly and inhuman power of Magic. The triumph of Conan over foes like undead wizard Xaltotun is about restoring the dominance of the physical and the natural over the insubstantial and the perverse, and that becomes one of the defining themes of the whole genre.

But for people like Niven, that kind of message was antithetical to what they saw as the REAL narrative of human progress – the Barbarian, representative of brute physicality, triumphing over the specialist/technologist/intellectual was intolerable, the sort of dirt-kicked-in-the-nerd’s face bullshit that had hindered the cultural and technological advancement of the species. Niven is very explicit about this, even making a eugenicist and social Darwinist argument – swordsmen being removed from the gene pool was a net win for the species, and wizards who couldn’t kill a swordsman likewise benefited the population by being removed from it.

The kind of elemental nature of this struggle is further made clear for us by Niven’s choice of name for his sorcerer:

Swordsman vs. Sorcerer. Very clear, very straightforward.

Our sorcerer is introduced as a conscientious and competent wizard, a kind of idealized technocrat, powerful but largely benevolent. In addition, we learn that Warlock moves around a lot, because he’s discovered something:

And this diminution of potency isn’t relegated to individual sorcerers alone, mind you:

Niven, connecting the loss of magical power to civilizational collapse, is laying the groundwork for what this story is going to be about. Indeed, you might have already guessed his punchline, but we’ll get there in good time!

Anyway, like it says up there, Warlock is a particularly curious sort, even for a wizard, so he sticks around and seeks, through the scientific method, some answer as to what this phenomenon of magical loss is, exactly.

Credit where credit is due, Niven is setting this story up very nicely here. Our Warlock has discovered something absolutely fundamental to magic and, therefore, civilization, a fact that is terrible and final and immutable. Warlock doesn’t share this information with anyone, apparently our of compassion – there’s nothing to be done, so why bother anyone with it? We also learn that, a half-century or so later, Warlock has someone reconsidered his position – he’s manufactured another of his experimental magical spinning discs, keeping it in readiness, just in case.

And then we’re introduced to the second-most important character in the story. Not the swordsman, who is of course a meathead beneath contempt, but his sword:

The name of the barbarian swordsman here, in addition to the satirical grandiosity of having such a long soubriquet, is also obviously chockfull of injokes and puns (Niven loved that kind of stuff, and cowrote a novel The Flying Sourcerer that is basically devoted to that sort of thing, characters whose names are injokes among the sci-fi community). The most important part of the name, though, is last apparently patronym – Cononson, Son of Conan; this brutish barbarian is, for Niven, a stand-in for all of the swaggering and powerfully violent descendants of Howard’s work.

We’re also given an oblique and suggestive view of ol’ Hap the Barbarian’s character and history – he killed a sleeping woman to get this sword, which is itself a dangerous and potent magical artifact.

Anyway, with Warlock and Hap and Glirendree all introduced, we get into the story proper. Warlock is hangin’ out in his cave/laboratory with his wife/apprentice (yikes!) Sharla when a magical alarm goes off, indicating that someone is on the way. Warlock scrys on the interlopers…and the news ain’t good!

Sharla, like many of Niven’s characters who are women, doesn’t get to do much or have much agency. She’s vaguely important to the plot, but only as an object, not a person. Oh well! What’s ALSO interesting is Niven’s use of “mana” here, setting in motion a very important stream of magical terminology/theory that will run through a lot of fantasy lit AND role playing games. We’ll talk a bit more about that a little later, but this is an important story for that reason, too.

Anyway, Glirendree is a dangerous and powerful magical artefact, as we’ve already mentioned, and as a sorcerer Warlock has some responsibility to deal with it. He and Sharla leave the cave, with her running to safety and him grabbing some gear before heading off to confront the sword and its swordsman.

There’s some fun magic-as-a-technical-discipline bits in this part, an interesting and very sci-fi take on the concept of sorcery. It’s interesting to note how, in Howard’s stories, a fair bit of “sorcery” was just hypnotism and trickery and alchemy (but not all of it, of course – there’s plenty of hellish, outre spell casters in his work who draw on dark and unnatural power). But for Howard, this stuff was all wrapped up in mummery and obfuscation; the magic that Conan faced was always secret knowledge pursed by half-mad sorcerer-priests. Niven here is following a different trend in fantastic literature, one that has very strict, very technical rules-based magic, a kind of hyper-rationalized supernaturalism, which is an important distinction – there’s no NATURAL explanation for Warlock’s powers, but there are Logical rules to its operation. In other words, it’s not hidden or forbidden knowledge; rather, it’s a technical discipline, akin to science of engineering. This is something that Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp pioneered in their Harold Shea stories, and it’s obvious why Niven, doyen of “hard” sci-fi at the time, would take it up in his fantasy story. Again, it turns the wizards into ultrarationalists, even if their rationalism hinges around supernaturalism. It’s important to Niven and the story that this be the case, because he’s already established that Magic = Civilization.

Importantly, in his magical observations of Hap, Warlock lets us know that the Sword protects its wielder and makes them invulnerable to everything but the sword itself. A key plot point! Warlock, unable to enchant Hap or even prognosticate the outcome of a battle, gets out two important pieces of equipment – a metal disc and a rune-covered dagger.

And then, finally, the swordsman and the sorcerer face each other.

An important highlighting of Hap’s scarred and formidable body here, highlighting his barbarism and the supremacy of physicality that he represents. What’s odd, though, is that just a few paragraphs later, we learn that Warlock is ALSO a slab of beefcake, through his magic. It’s an interesting inversion of the more usual sword & sorcery & bodies – Hap’s body, earned through labor and effort and with ample evidence of it having been used, is a sign of atavism and barbarity, whereas Warlock’s magically maintained pleasingly aesthetic form is a symbol of refinement and technical sophistication.

Anyway, we learn that Hap is here to free Sharla…who is there willingly, married to Warlock and learning magic. Hap apparently believes Sharla to be the victim of a love spell or something, and he’s here to free her by killing Warlock.

Warlock cuts him off with another attempted spell, which does nothing, of course. Similar failures occur when he tries to smash Hap with a magical meteor, or when he unleashes a demon from his magical back tattoo (which is very cool). And then Warlock tries one last time to reason with Hap.

There’s gotta be a bit of Moorcock’s Stormbringer in Glirendree, though there’s probably more of Andersen’s Tyrfing (which comes from the sagas) in there. Still, a solid fantasy macguffin, a sword that’s actually an evil demon. We go on to learn a bit more about the sword:

Another fun bit of Nivenesque name jokery there with “Jeery.” There’s possibly an interesting commentary of the sexual charms of barbarians there too, although it’s kind of lost under the vaguely misogynistic banter about the Rainbow Witch… really feels like the story is saying the Dumb Broad got stupid horny and that’s why the sword escaped. I dunno, I can’t help but look for the worst in Niven, because he was worst, basically.

Anyway, as Hap leaps in for the kill, Warlock tosses up the metal disc and says the word “four.” This, of course is the disc that had been integral to his epiphany in the introduction, the experiment that he kept in readiness after learning that dark truth about magic.

The disc spins and spins, glowing and getting hotter, while Warlock goes over in greater detail what we already know – magic gets used up in places, and there’re places where magic doesn’t work because all the mana is gone.

There’s some fun writing here; the part about the fallen cities and the dragon bones is good, solid stuff in my opinion. This is also a good spot to pause and discuss mana!

If you’ve ever played a JRPG or anything like that, you’ve encountered the concept of mana – a nice numerical value that defines the amount of magic a character can use. If you’ve ever looked into its origins, you might’ve been surprised to run across discussions of Polynesian religious, spiritual, and magical practices; Mana, it turns out, is a kind of spiritual property that things or people or places had, and it could be cultivated and developed. For Victorian-era anthropologists, it was an enormously fascinating concept because it seemed to have a kind of universality to it that was suggestive of ancient, interconnected humanity. It’s a lot more complicated, of course, but this pop anthro understanding came to be the general status quo understanding of the concept: mana was a kind of magical, spiritual energy. A number of Early 20th century occultists latched onto the concept, but it really took off in U.S. Pop Culture alongside all the broader Polynesian/Island craze of the 40s/50s – think Hawaiian shirts (and statehood), atomic atoll tests, and tiki bar culture.

There were a number of semi-popular and technical books on the concepts at the same time, and both the word and idea of mana was out there; Jack Vance used it in work in the 50s, though with a sense slightly closer to the “real” meaning, as a kind of mystical essence that famous objects or places could accumulate through veneration, a kind of magical force that came about as they (or people) became SYMBOLS of something. What’s interesting here is that Niven, who said he’d come across the word in a book on Polynesian culture, has slightly tweaked its meaning in this story – mana is now a quantum of magic, and more importantly, a natural resource that can be depleted.

And that, it turns out, is the great secret that Warlock has discovered.

The disc keeps spinning, using up all the magic in the area, depleting the magical effects in the area: Warlock’s anti-aging spell fails, revealing him to be an ancient and decrepit old man, and Glirendree’s true form in unveiled:

Things look grim for ol’ Hap…but then the Demon begins to experience the mana-less nature of the area they’re in:

The exploding disc in the sign that the very last of the mana in the area has been drained; Warlock is rapidly withering, the magical spring and the cavern’s furnishing and the mansion have vanished, everything has become mundane and magicless.

Mana is a finite resource, depleted by the casting of spell. The disc, Warlock explains, operates simply as a perpetual motion machine, fueled by magic…until the magic runs out, a microcosm of what will happen to the whole world, eventually.

Regardless, Hap, even with his severed hand, is still going to kill Warlock.

A clever bit of problem solving, and you’ve got to give Niven credit; “A knife always works” is a pretty badass line.

Warlock is fading fast – he’s like two hundred years old, after all, but then Sharla appears. She lifts the frail and dying Warlock in her arms and carries him down the hill towards a source of mana.

I like the little descriptions of Warlock’s failing body here – the fluttering pulse, the lose of his senses, and the way Sharla, who intellectually knew that Warlock was ancient, is still being confronted with the existential horror of decay and decrepitude. I also like her asking what color Hap’s eyes where, though not for the reason Niven has put it in – like I said, I always assume the worse with Niven, and I’m pretty sure he meant (at least partially) for this bit to be further evidence of the fickle and oversexed nature of womankind (the same thing that struck down the Rainbow Witch). Instead, I like to read this as the ambivalence of people confronted with illusion; once you know it’s not REALLY real, there’s a little bit of the magic that’s gone forever (which is the theme of this story, of course).

And that’s The End of “Not Long Before the End,” by Larry Niven!

Niven himself apparently referred to this story as science fiction rather than fantasy, pointing specifically to his rationalist mana system, contrasting it with the purely supernatural sorcery of other stories. Whether you think that counts or not (I don’t, this story is fantasy) isn’t important, though, because the real interest in it is the way he’s commenting on and writing against the fantasy of the day. Like I said, he’s explicitly rejecting the framing of traditional sword & sorcery stories, denigrating the barbarian (and, by extension, the celebration of physicality and bodily strength) as a force of social retrogression. Conversely, the sorcerer here is a paragon of rational investigation and judicious use of power, a symbol of the intellect and discipline.

What’s fun about this is that it’s happening only a few years after the explosion of fantasy and S&S; in fact, it’s in direct response to it that Niven, a proponent of rationalist and technologically triumphalist stories, wrote it. Niven’s story is a part of the larger 60s trend interrogating the fantasy genre and what it means, right alongside Moorcock and Vance and Leiber and all the rest. From the standpoint of genre studies, that period is very interesting – unsatisfied with what was, workers in the disciple are trying out new things, cutting trail into the wilderness on the edges of the stable and well-trod center.

Beyond that, it’s interesting to place Niven’s declensionist narrative, one based on resource scarcity, in the larger context of the period’s social history. The Erlichs’s book The Population Bomb had just come out in 1968, and was a humongous best-seller that had dramatically changed the way people talked about society, resources, and human population (it’s also important because the framing is one of a surging third world outbreeding the first world, a classically racist fear finding new expression in world systems theory and macroeconomic jargon). The idea of finite resources and hard limits to growth and progress were starting to occupy people’s minds in this era, and it’s interesting to see Niven take that and apply it to fantasy. He actually ends up going farther with the idea in the 70s, by the way – the Oil Embargo inspires him to explore the idea of mana depletion in more stories and, eventually, a fix-up novel based on this setting.

The 60s and 70s have been described as a period of backlash against “classic” S&S, and that’s true enough – the pages of the fan magazines are full of conservatives like Carter and Jakes defending red-blooded conan-esque tales of mighty adventurers. But the “backlash” is actually a sign of the vibrancy of the genre – people were exploring new territory through the genre, right alongside the New Wave in science fiction; in fact, I think there’s definitely a “New Wave” style of S&S being written, in some cases by the same authors (Delany’s work in the late 70s in particular represents this). And while Niven certainly had more in common politically with Carter and the conservatives in sword & sorcery, there is value in digging into this story and reading it not merely as a takedown of the genre, but as a commentary expanding on the strengths of the genre to produce more than a simple Conan pastiche.

The Pulp of Yondo #43: “The Abominations of Yondo” by Clark Ashton Smith (Overland Monthly, v. 84, n. 4, April 1926)

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A very merry Solstice to you and yours! On this, the darkest day of the year, let us enjoy some deep, indulgent fiction, the work of an author who was an important antecedent to Sword-and-Sorcery, the rich and evocative Clark Ashton Smith! Today’s story is maybe my favorite thing he ever wrote: The Abominations of Yondo, originally published in the April 1926 issue of the Overland Monthly!

For some reason or another, this S&Smas I’ve been focusing on the genre after Howard’s death; this has included a story by the great Fritz Leiber and the not-so-great but still interesting work of Henry Kuttner and Clifford Ball. Important points in the genre’s evolution all, of course, but no genre springs ab nihlio! There’s stuff before it, points of reference or experimentation that are pushing at (or solidifying) boundaries! And while I do think Howard’s work is uniquely important and an epochal invention, he was but part of a milieu that was exploring the newly created genre of Weird Fiction. Clark Ashton Smith was an important figure in that group, helping to define the aesthetic and move the genre in new and interesting directions, an important bridge between pre-genre writers like Dunsany and Howard’s eventual creation of Sword-and-Sorcery.

Which is not to say that this story in particular was a key influence on anything; hell, I’m not even sure that Howard ever read this one. It’s entirely possible he did – he and Smith were correspondents, of course, and there’s a chance he got a copy from him or HPL or something like that, but I don’t have any evidence at hand about that (remember – I’m writing these things off-the-cuff and straight-from-the-hip, with no time for looking things up in the multi-volume letter collections of these people). Like I said up top, this is just one of my favorite of Smith’s, and I’m allowed to indulge myself every now and then! BUT I do think this story is incredibly illustrative of one of the very important parts of both the creation of weird fiction AND the sub-genre that would come to be S&S, which we’ll get to later.

Now, you’ll also note that this story is not, per se, from a pulp…it’s from what was very much a storied literary magazine, The Overland Monthly, a magazine founded in the 1860s to advance the literary culture of the West broadly and California in particular. It included famous writers as Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and Willa Cather, and ALSO published work by early nature writing by people like Muir and the famous geologist Clarence King, which makes Smith’s bonkers little story an interesting addition to its body of work. I think there’s plenty of reasons for why it was published here, HOWEVER it is important to note that “The Abominations of Yondo” was originally submitted to Weird Tales, representing as it did Smith’s first foray into weird fic. Farnsworth Wright rejected it, doubtless because it’s not really a “story” as such. Which is fair! This is, as I hope you’ll see when you read it (it’s quite short!) very much more of a vignette, moody and evocative (and trippy) but without much of a plot or character. Doesn’t mean it’s not rad as hell, of course, and I’m sure Wright liked it – it just wasn’t a comfortable fit as a story. So, while “The Abominations of Yondo” ended up in a high-falutin’ hoity-toity literature mag, it was absolutely and unequivocally written within the tradition of the weird tale as created in the magazine, Weird Tales. Also, it’s Clark Ashton Smith, gimme a break! He’s one of the Big Three! It counts!

Anyway, let’s dive in:

Much like Weird Tales, you can see that this magazine was not cheap! Twenty-five cents in 1926 was no joke – that’s like $5 now, a decently priced bit o’ culture! It’s also very clearly positioning itself as a Western magazine of culture and literature too, isn’t it, a very solemn bit of romantic appropriation on its cover and all. As for the ToC:

You can see George Sterling, CAS’s mentor and friend, is on here too, both as a contributor AND as an editor (explaining how “Yondo” endued up here, in part). But the best part, in my opinion, is the brief little author’s bios on the side. Take a closer at Smith’s:

I mean, that’s pretty funny, isn’t it? Smith is absolutely a California Poet, of course; this story today is only his third piece of prose ever published, and his first bit of outré fiction too. Prior to that he’d had several collections of his poetry collected, so this IS the beginning of a new phase for him, artistically (and economically – he took to weird fic largely as a way to make money). But it’s also a fun, oblique way to acknowledge that this is a bit of a departure content-wise for ol’ Overland Monthly.

You can tell this is a Serious Magazine because there’s no art. No buxom ladies being menaced here, no sirree, just cold hard text!

Smith is even more purple and rich than Lovecraft, but I’ll be goddamned if it doesn’t work! His background as a romantic poet, and particularly someone interested in the decadents, really shows through in his over-the-top, hyperbolic language, but (like Lovecraft) he comes by it honestly – there’s no affectation here, it’s all a deeply considered and hard-wrung aesthetic that he’s employing, one which is sumptuous and suggestive and decadent, and it works! Come on! Yondo (which we learn immediately is a place, which means that the title is about Abominations in Yondo, or perhaps from there) is a desert on the edge of reality, covered in the dust and ash of dead planets and rotting suns. I love the orb-like mountains, which Smith tells us are asteroids plunked down in the sands, a wonderfully outre image. Also wonderful is the menace and terror of the fact that this borderland on the edge of the world is open to incursions from all sorts of things from Outside, a wonderful bit of Lovecraftian horror derived from discussions and readings of HPLs work with the Old Gent himself.

Great, smoothly efficient introduction of both the narrator and the world we’re reading about. Our nameless dude, a heretic, has been tortured by the Inquisitors of the Lion-Headed Ong and, his punishment done, he’s been “freed” on the edge of the vast, hellish wilderness of Yondo. There’s great descriptions of both cacti- and fungi-forests (suggesting a very strange hydrologic regime at work here), and wonderful landscape writing too, lichen-mottled soils and grimy tarns, all evocative of real, hostile, untouched wilderness.

We get very sparse background on our heretic – he pissed off the Priests and Magicians of Ong, and as punishment he faced tortures both physical (stretched on adamant-dusted dragon-gut racks) and psychological (oublietted in a dark hole with huge fat corpse worms dropping in on him). But, eventually, they finish with him:

Now, we’re told that Yondo is a terrifying, mysterious, and all together evil place – very few people have gone there, and even fewer have returned. Those who have? Driven mad of course, palsied with the horrors they encountered there! Fantastic stuff! And our guy is a little trepidatious about entering Yondo…but what else can he do? So, ignoring the horrible insects that seem to be following him, he marches into the Wastes of Yondo, hoping to get through it and fall in with some nomads who live on its northern borders.

Again, wonderful weird landscape writing here. Smith is highlighting the sheer alienness of this landscape, and also wants us to think about its vast, incomprehensible age, and the way time has ground down whole civilizations:

The “fat chameleons” creeping with “royal pearls” in there mouths are nice inversions of the “dragons with pearls” motifs of a Chinese imperial art, and the endless ruins given over to hyenas and snakes makes for a wonderfully rich sense of decay and collapse. Also, great geology terms, even if they are extremely archaic – no one has used psammite for sandstone (or, possibly, metamorphic rock with a sand rich protolith) since the 1850s, man! Porphyry is also a rock name freighted with meaning – “imperial porphyry” was the term for the rock used in a lot of Pharaonic monuments.

Our heretic spots a bitter lake fringed with salt bars below him, and hustles down for a refreshing dip…unfortunately the water stings his hand, and he realizes this puddle is the last remnants of a sea! And ideal picnic spot! He sits down and rests, eating some bread and sipping some water, gathering his strength.

Man, c’mon…the MINUTE you start thinking like that, you KNOW some shit is going to go down!

Told ya, dummy!

The unearthly chuckling (like the “mirth of an idiotic demon”) goes on and on, and out heretic realizes its coming from the speleothem-fanged mouth of a cave he hadn’t noticed before.

I mean THAT’S a damn monster, isn’t it? Pale, hairless, egg-shaped body, NINE goddamn legs, but fer my money the weirdest thing is the things Bat-ness, a hint of Smith’s horrible elder god Tsathoggua, maybe? Like both HPL (sea-life/fungi) and REH (reptiles but especially snakes), CAS often uses bats (or a furry bat-ishness) as a kind of signifier of deep, outer evil. I love the thing’s blindness, and the suggestion that the thing’s “eternal chuckle” might be some kind of echolocation. But the Big Fella is just thirsty!

He runs as far and as long as he can until, exhausted, he reaches a boulder field in a vast sandy sea. But he doesn’t get much of a chance to rest:

The fuck is going on here!? Some kind of figure screaming in horror, but when he approaches it, it becomes a statue, the terror-widened eyes now closed, the outstretched plaintive hands now hidden in the sand…extremely, beautifully weird stuff! Of course he runs, and takes particular care NOT to look back behind him when he hears the terror-filled shriek again.

He runs deeper into Yondo, but eventually notices that he’s picked up a strange shadow that is keeping pace with his own! It’s an odd, inhuman shape, this second shadow, with an elongated head and maybe five limbs, but it is also relentless, neither gaining nor losing ground, but always following him as he runs into the wastes.

I love it! The smell building around him as the pursuit continues, the fact that he (and we) have no idea what this thing is – is it a monster invisible save for its shadow, or is it some of shadow monster? Is the threat physical or spiritual? What will happen if the shadow CATCHES his shadow? It’s great, scary stuff never answered, and even its eventual departure is menacing and weird:

He waits in the weird circle, exhausted and terrified, but eventually he rises. Night is threatening, but he has to go on – his only hope is to push on northward. If he can get to the border country he can leave this unearthly place behind him…but that’s a helluva “if!” He gets up and heads out! The powdered dust of millennia-dead civilizations makes for pretty sunsets, apparently: the horizon is ablaze with miasmal scarlet, lending the already bizarre landscape of Yondo a particularly phantasmagoric cast. And then:

Very Nazgûl-ly, huh? Faceless, with an empty helmet and ancient rotting armor, apparently just going out for a walk. I love the way it clanks “dismally” as it goes, too, a wonderful bit of description. But our heretic can’t spend much time considering this Witch King of Angmar lookin’ motherfucker, because there’s a second, even more horrible apparition!

A perfect monster, in my opinion – a huge figure, the monstrous mummy of some ancient king, and the way he describes its face as being ruined by MORE than time or the worm is wonderful. What the fuck is this thing! And then it’s got another little monster in its crown! The way the ape-headed serpent thing is introduced as first a shape, only for its eyes to open and reveal it as another being, is perfectly done, a flawless bit of weird writing. And then it whispers in the giant lich’s ear! It’s so horrible! And then, like in a nightmare, the huge mummy closes the distance between them SUDDENLY, reaching out for the heretic’s throat!

And that’s the end of “The Abominations of Yondo!”

The Inquisitors waiting for him, knowing that he’ll be back, is great; this whole ridiculous thing has been another bit of psychological torture, something straight from Orwell’s Room 101. Smith’s stories often have a sadistic streak to them, sometimes too much so, but here it’s the perfect capper to this little fable, a real nice bit o’ meanness on top of the weird monsters and landscape of Yondo.

In addition to this being full of great monsters, it’s also an important bit of fantasy-flavored weird fiction, very much part and parcel with Lovecraft’s Sarnath or the Cats of Ulthar; while Lovecraft would leave that sort of writing behind him in a year or two, Smith would keep it alive, pushing the boundaries of weird fantasy with his Hyperborean stories or his Zothique tales. I also think this is a fun one because it’s got some fun hints of things to come – the bat monster, the second shadow, the horrible liches. There’re some fun “first draft” kinds of things in here, Smith finding ideas that he would polish and refine over time in its writing.

Maybe more importantly, though, and the real valuable thing in this story, is what it illustrates about one (of the many) underappreciated parts of Sword & Sorcery – namely, S&S as a literature of landscape and environment!

Smith was a Californian through and through, in the same way HPL was a New Englander and REH was a Texan – regional writers whose backgrounds and environments shaped them fundamentally! And Smith lived in a particularly striking landscape, surrounded by the Sierra Mountains and, in particular, the spectacular scenery (and geology) of the Long Valley caldera!

From Bailey 1989, Geologic Map of Long Valley Caldera

I told you I was going to be indulgent! Now, if you’re not familiar with geologic maps, no worries – what you’re seeing here is the underlying geology of CAS’s ol’ stomping grounds, a vast and complex terrain of extensive volcanics squished up and extruded out onto a region of heavily extended Basin-and-Range mountains. It’s chock full of huge craters, thick ash tuffs, and weird hydrothermal systems, mountainous and broken and wild! Here’s a simplified map:

Craters, lava flows, ashfall tuff, faults…it’s a busy landscape! In fact, here’s what it LOOKS like on the ground (all these pics were grabbed from the USGS’s Long Valley Caldera Field Guide):

That’s a hydrothermally fed creek, full of weird plants, strange precipitated minerals, and weird geochemistry…you can just imagine a strange bat-headed nine-legged hellbeast creeping down for a sip on the banks there, can’t you?

Above is a pic of the famous “Devil’s Postpile,” a basaltic lava flow that fractured into the columnar patterns you see while cooling. Real “ancient ruins of a lost civilization” vibe too, dontcha think?

The whole area is volcanically active and pocked with weird craters. These are explosions from within the earth, but you can imaginatively reinterpret them as asteroid craters, if you were a weird fiction writer!

The volcanism is expressed on the surface by a lot of raw, fresh looking rock, the product of active eruptions, that often contrast markedly with the surrounding landscape. Remember the weird monster-backed mountains from the story? Well, I mean, these are them:

There’s even a deadly aspect to this landscape – the active volcanism means there’s a lot of volcanic gases leaking out here and there, with CO2 plumes killing plants and people over the years. It’s a wild, woolly landscape, visually and psychically striking, a clear influence on both this story and the way Smith approaches his weird fiction. Whereas HPL was often focused on decay and decadence in the landscape, the environment reflecting rottenness and perversion, I think Smith’s use of the environment highlights its alienness and inhumanity. There’s surely ancient decay in Yondo, but it’s sort of ancillary, the product of humans trying to live in this place at one time, a place fundamentally and existentially antagonistic to the vanities and illusions of mayfly-like people and their temporary civilizations. For Smith Nature is both Red in Tooth and Claw, but it’s also Purply and Green and Ultraviolet in Tentacles and Too-Many-Jointed Legs and Weird Minerals.

What I think is important about this story is that Smith is showing us a key part of weird fiction – twisting and skewing and finding strangeness in the world around us. Interestingly, Smith is always playing with that idea, too, suggesting that perhaps our idea of weirdness is a result of our limited perspective. For weird nine-legged bat monsters, Yondo might be a perfectly nice place to live – it’s just not so for us humans! That glancing contact with outer realms is what makes weird fiction work, and really anchors Smith’s fiction in a very visceral, very strange world.

And importantly, Sword & Sorcery is a sub-genre of WEIRD FICTION! Which is why this Smith-ian approach to landscape, one that Howard would also pursue, is so important – S&S confront its heroes with weirdness, first and foremost, for them to conquer (or at least survive). The immersion of a characters (and readers) in a weird landscape, one where there is alien agency and alien rules, is such an important, fundamental part of the genre, and Smith is a master of it! His poetical aesthetic is important, but so is his having lived in a truly stunning landscape, one dynamic and alive and strangely active beyond anything a human can really grasp. “The Abominations of Yondo” is weird fiction, but the way it centers not the human, but rather the human experience of the unhuman, is a perfect crystallization of both weird fic AND S&S’s power and scope!

PLUS, goddamn but those are some great monsters!!!!

The Death of Robert E. Howard in the Pages of Weird Tales

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In the “Thief of Forthe” discussion, I posted Clifford Ball’s brief encomium to REH from The Eyrie, Weird Tales‘s enormously important and incredibly interesting letter section, where readers, writers, and editors wrangled with Weird Fiction and discussed the stories, characters, and aesthetics of the genre. It’s an interesting little letter, mostly because it explicitly couches Howard’s death in terms of the loss of stories that readers would never see (one of the most gratifying types of mourning a writer can imagine, honestly). And ol’ Ball wasn’t alone – Howard’s death really rocked the Weird Tales readership, and elicited a lot of shocked and saddened letters from a lot of fans.

What’s fun about ’em, though, is that these letters offer a really interesting ground-level view of both fandom and the way it mediates genre-ification – in a lot of ways, the death of Howard is a crisis that forces people to reckon not only with his work as it was, but the future of both it and writing allied with it. It’s a fascinating archive!

But, before we dive in, here’s a pic of the Big Man himself, enjoying a refreshing big ass beer:

Howard died on June 11th, 1936, and the announcement was made in Weird Tales in the v 28, n. 2 Aug/Sept issue’s Eyrie:

A short but heartfelt tribute from Wright and the Weird Tales staff, highlighting both his imagination as well as his dedication to his craft (something that would get lost in certain later reevaluations of his work; much like what happened with Lovecraft, there were certain parties later on interested in portraying both of them as being weirdo savants who, by accident rather than careful work, produced important and interesting fiction). I’d also point out that, right away, we begin to see certain inaccuracies creeping into the Official Biography – REH did not attend the University of Texas. He took business courses at Howard Payne College, a private Baptist college in Brownwood, TX. By the way, one of those posthumous stories promised in forthcoming issues of Weird Tales included what many consider to be his very best horror story, “Pigeons from Hell.”

The next issue of Weird Tales, v 28, n.3 October 1936, had further semi-official remembrances of Howard’s life and work published in the Eyrie, this time from his friend and voluminous correspondent HPL, as well as E. Hoffmann Price, who actually met him in person:

The Lovecraft excerpt is a pretty important one, I think, and sort of sets the tone for the way Howard has entered the annals of weird literature. His line about Howard having “put himself into everything he wrote” is key, and a point HPL would make over and over (it forms the center of the long in memorium he wrote for the fanzine Fantasy in their Sept 1936 issue too). The idea that Howard was deeply engaged with his writing, producing art even in spite of the commercial conditions, is high praise from someone like HPL. Too, I think both he and REH shared a deep appreciation for their roles as REGIONAL authors, people interested in their specific environments and backgrounds and what it meant for them as both people and writers. And there’s certainly something to HPL statement that Howard had a “unique inner force and sincerity” in his work – read Kuttner’s Elak story or Ball’s Rald stories and you have to admit that, no matter how fun and possibly good they are, there IS certainly something missing from them.

Also interesting is the appearance (and misattribution) of REH’s death poem there. It’s a bit of a convoluted story, and I’d point you towards Todd Vick’s biography of REH “Renegades & Rogues” for more detail, but it became a major part of REH’s mythology, a suitably literary (and barbaric) poem to mark his passing.

Even more interesting, though, is that the Eyrie is still working through fan letters from people who had written them before they’d known of REH. Take, for example, this letter from Irvin Gould of PA, asking about a map of Conan’s world:

An interesting letter that sheds some light on the way people were reading and enjoying Conan – they love the hints and callbacks and history peppered throughout the stories, suggestive details about the larger world and deeper lore that imbued Howard’s writing with such vitality and sincerity, and want to know more about it! Specifically, they want a damn fantasy world map! While something like that is de rigueur in fantastic fiction now, back then it was a pretty novel request, I think. I know that there were maps in Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mine novel, for instance, and the Oz books famously had fantastic maps, but it’s fun to see people yearning for fantasy cartography because of the stories themselves and the sense of the scale and sweep of Howard’s vision. And maybe even MORE interesting is Mr. Gould’s recognition that asking for such concrete canonicity from weird fiction might not be appropriate! It’s a fun glimpse into the way READERS were engaging with both weird fiction AND Howard’s work particularly, navigating new genre conventions.

In this same issue there’s also a letter from the famously idiosyncratic fan, Gertrude Hemken. These letters from “Trudy” would become a beloved part of the Eyrie, mostly because she wrote in an absolutely delightful and totally fannish style – they’re a lot of fun, and it’s always fun to run into her in the pages of Weird Tales. Anyway, in the midst of a longer letter, she has this to say about Howard (unaware of his death, of course):

“So-o-o happy. I could gurgle!” should be the blurb they use on any and all Howard books henceforth. But it again speaks the clarity with which Howard presented Conan to the readers – he’s instantly and clearly defined, and folks like what they see!

The November 1936 issue (v. 28 n.4) includes the first fans letter reacting to the death announcement from a few issues back.

This letter’s request for a reprinting of his “best stories” as selected by the WT readership isn’t a bad one, honestly, and shows that, while the pulps were an ephemeral medium, there was a real desire to ensure that their contents lived on and were accessible to readers new and old alike. Later, in the same letter, Hopkins has an interesting thing to say:

It’s an interesting daydream: “The Death of Conan the Cimmerian!” And this musing about what could’ve been, and the extension of the character’s adventures beyond the pen of the creator, is an interesting seed that we’ll see explored more in later letters.

But the desire for a collection of Howard’s work was a common one:

I wonder if Clark’s personally bound collection of Conan stories exists in some attic somewhere?

The December ’36 issues (v. 28, n.5) is mostly dedicated to wranglin’ about the covers and whether they’re too risqué or not, but that leads into an interesting letter from Robert Lowndes about the artistic representations of Conan in The Unique Magazine:

It’d be worthwhile collecting these all together and doing a careful interrogation of each, but there’s no room (or time!) here for it…maybe later. I will grab the Rankin piece that Lowndes speaks so highly of, though, from the Jan 34 issue:

I find the sexualization of Conan by readers (and, to be fair, by Howard) hugely interesting, so the way this letter-writer highlights what it was the women found so damn hot about Conan in the stories is pretty fascinating!

I’ll just highlight one more prescient letter about REH from this issue, by the great Clark Ashton Smith:

The next issue, Jan 1937 v. 29 n.1, opens with Wright reflecting on the “necrology” of Weird Tales:

It’s a sad editorial, particularly in the way Wright’s hopes that no one else will die are pretty quickly about to be dashed. But, as he said, they’ve been getting a lot of letters about REH, and this issue includes some very fascinating ones!

I mean, that’s fascinating, isn’t it? Can’t Weird Tales find someone else to keep writing Conan for them? What a wild question, and I can’t think of any precedent for it at all, can you? On the one hand, there must’ve been fairly widespread knowledge that some “writers” in the pulps were house names with lots of different individuals contributing stories under them (a fairly common practice in particular in the western pulps), but the idea that a writer as singular as REH could be replaced is a wild one. On the OTHER hand, though, weird fiction DID have shared universes, if not shared characters – what is Lovecraft’s Mythos but a shared world with the same gods and aliens and dark books showing up in different stories by different authors? Is that the model this letter writer is drawing from when they talk about Conan continuing without REH? I think you have to give credit to Wright here, who very clearly and definitively answers that no one can write a Conan story except Howard…something later paperback authors should’ve kept in mind, in my opinion!

This same issue includes the Ball letter that we talked about in the last Pulp Strainer blog post, and while Ball certainly isn’t asking for someone else to write Conan stories, as we discussed there is a clear expression of the desire for more stories LIKE Conan’s.

Skipping ahead a couple of issues to March ’37 (v. 29 n.3) we get another plea for a book-length collection of Howard’s work:

These calls for a collection of Howard’s work to be published are pretty insistent, and it’s a shame that Weird Tales got so brutally burned on their one and only book publishing adventure (The Moon Terror) that they couldn’t do something with Howard’s work. Derleth’s Arkham House would, in ’46, put out Skull-Face and Others in 1946, complete with a badass Hannes Bok cover:

This book included some good Conan stories, but it wouldn’t be until the Gnome Press paperbacks of the mid-50s that you’d see a dedicated Conan series. Interestingly, those same Gnome Press editions would see just the sort of “Continuing Adventures of Conan” pastiche stories that (some) people were DEMANDING in there letters:

People LOVED Conan man, and that’s all there is to it. Howard had made something new and exciting, had carved out a real niche for himself in weird fiction, and the idea that there wouldn’t be any more Conan stories was a hard pill for some people to swallow. It’s interesting that everyone is explicitly couching these as more CONAN stories…they don’t want imitations, they don’t want other characters by other people, they want CONAN doing CONAN things. In some ways, then, it’s actually quite laudable that people like Kuttner tried to do SOMETHING a little different, even while trying to reverse engineer REH’s own unique approaches to his stories. Also, again, I think you have to salute Wright’s firm “nope” here too – he has a very clear aesthetic vision for weird fiction, and it doesn’t include the bloodless imitators of an inimitable writer like Robert E. Howard.

In the next issue of the Eyrie (v29 n.4) Wright publishes a letter from H. Warner Munn, a Weird Tales author famous for his “Werewolf of Ponkert” story, which was a favorite with readers, that really offers the Last Word on whether Conan should have further adventures written by other people:

Pretty succinctly and strongly put, I’d say, and a position I support. Wright obviously thought so too, and even seems to have used Munn’s letter as the punctuation on the chapter of Official Mourning for Howard. In the next issue (May 1937, v. 29 n.5), there’s only a single, passing mention of “the late Robert E. Howard” in one of the letters, and it’s clear that they’re turning the page on the sorrowful demise of a beloved author…

…and then, in v.29 n.6, the June ’37 issue of Weird Tales:

Goddammit!

With regards to REH, I think there’s something really interesting in getting to read these letters from readers of his stories; you can see the huge enthusiasm for his work and his creations, Conan in particular, a real glimpse into the phenomenon that would become fantasy literature in general and sword & sorcery in particular. There’s a little tinge of sadness here, though – you can only hope that Howard had a sense of just how beloved his work was while he was still alive. Writers are a touchy, morose lot in general, given much to self-recrimination and disappointment, often absolutely certain that they’ve wasted their time and largely failed to achieve what they wanted to with their work. It’s something REH certainly struggled with – his letters include many gloomy reflections on his work and the struggle of writing, even when he’s arguably at the height of his career. It’s something people always talk about, but it bears repeating: if there’s someone out there whose work you like, tell ’em! Even something as simple as a nice note can mean a lot to someone, and you never know when it’ll be too late to tell them!

There’s also something extremely valuable to be had by reading these letters in the Eyrie, I think – they’re such a rich archive of READERS and their reactions to/thoughts about the stories and authors and genre as a whole. In the wake of REH’s death you really start to see the way they were ENGAGING with his work, and with Conan in particular, and it’s a real granular way to interrogate the formation of what would, eventually, become “Sword & Sorcery.” There’s ALSO a really interesting tension between what people want (more Conan!) and what they would eventually get (some pastiche-y early attempts by Kuttner, for example, and then Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser – but not in Weird Tales, of course…).

Some other stray observations – it’s interesting how CONAN focused the readers’ letters generally are, isn’t it? I mean, there’s other stuff mentioned for sure, but the Cimmerian is front-and-center, and it’s his adventures that people are clamoring for more of. Partly that’s got to be simple chronology – after all, Howard’s death is announced with “Red Nails,” one of the best Conan stories of all time, and there’d been a lot of Conan recently too, while his other characters like Solomon Kane and Bran Mak Morn hadn’t appeared for years. But there’s something about Conan’s special alchemy at work there, I think, and particularly the sense of a real, lived in, vital WORLD around him that just grabbed readers.

Finally, I’d point out how often people with talent and knowledge would point out just how inimitable Howard was as a writer. Wright is very firm in his explanations about why there’d be no more Conan stories by other people – he was a singular talent writing singular tales, and no one else could do them. Similarly, I think HPL’s oft-cited “there’s a piece of Howard in every one of his stories” is a perfect way to capture the kind of ineffable qualities of his work (and HPL’s, for that matter). It’s easiest recognized by its absence in, for instance, Kuttner’s S&S work, and really underlines the absolutely necessary quality of a writer finding their authentic voice if they want to produce art. For all the problems with Howard’s work (and there’re a lot!), the one thing you can absolutely say is that they are the products of a writer who was absolutely sincere in his efforts at communicating the things he thought were important and interesting. That he succeeded is shown by the many heartfelt letters we see in The Eyrie.

Pulp & Pastiche #42: “The Thief of Forthe” by Clifford Ball, Weird Tales v.30 n.1, July 1937

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Since I broke the (cursed Lemurian) seal on it, why not continue to plumb the depths of Swordly & Sorcerous fiction that appeared in Weird Tales in the years immediately following Howard’s death? We talked Kuttner and Elak last time, focusing on the differences in character and approach between ol’ Hank and REH, so this time we’re going to look at an example of Post-Howard S&S that adheres a bit closer to the formula perfected by ol’ Two-Gun Bob. It’s Clifford Ball’s “The Thief of Forthe” from the July 1937 issue of Weird Tales!

Interestingly, Clifford Ball’s first appearance in the magazine wasn’t as a writer, but as a Weird Tales reader mourning the loss of Howard and the stories he’d never write. His letter appeared in “The Eyrie” letter section of the January 1937:

This is only one of many such letters sent in to the Unique Magazine following Howard’s death (as I’m writing this, I think I might devote the next entry here on the blog to those letters, so stay tuned!); what’s interesting about Ball’s is that it really seems like the End of Conan struck him so deeply that he decided to try and Do Something About It – namely, Clifford Ball went and wrote some Sword & Sorcery himself! What’s more (and much like Kuttner), Ball also appreciated that one of the Keys to the success of Howard (and Conan) was the establishment of a fun, living secondary world – for Ball, this is (for lack of a better term) Ygoth, which is either a city or a country (it’s not exactly clear), and which is mentioned in all three of Ball’s S&S stories, tying them all together into a loose, unrestricted canon, much like Howard’s Hyboria.

Ball’s first story, “Duar the Accursed” would appear in the May ’37 issue; it’s an odd little work, very Theosophical honestly, about an amnesiac mightily-thewed barbarian hero who had been a mercenary, become a king, lost his crown, and then become a wanderer. There’s some interesting weirdness in it – in addition to having no memories of his early life, Duar’s accursedness is manifested as terrifying rains of blood and an ominous, unearthly raven that heralded his army. We’re also introduced to a strange, shimmering, extra-dimensional spirit that follows Duar and provides him magical support (whether he wants it or not), and has some kind of relationship with him from the past. There’s suggestions that Duar is himself some sort of Ascended Being trapped in a fleshy prison. It’s all very cosmic and, like I said, Blavatsky-ian; there’s pretty heavy foreshadowing that Duar is a kind of recurring spirit reborn as a hero or champion throughout time. But it’s also very much in keeping with Howard’s idea of the Manly Ideal of a S&S Protagonist – confident, physically powerful, fearless, and not interested in the niceties of civilization. There’s some good Gygaxian D&D flavored stuff in it too – the MacGuffin is a jeweled rose that’s actually a demon, and there’s a weird “Force” at work that drives people to their deaths in the depths of a dungeon. If you’re a completist for this sort of thing, it’s worth a read, but Duar never shows up again.

Ball thankfully (and correctly) drops the hints of “Chosen One” bullshit from his later (and last) two S&S tales, the much better and more fun Rald the Thief stories, the first of which we’ll be looking at today. But you should definitely temper your expectations here – they’re perfectly fine C-level work, I’d say, pastiches of what Ball obviously loved about Howard (and weird adventure writing), the sort of stories you expect from someone early in their writing career and looking for their voice. Unfortunately, Ball never got that chance – he wrote three more stories, though these are more straight weird fic than S&S. The last of these, a werewolf tale, was published in ’41, and then it appears Clifford enlists in the Navy. He ends up dying in, apparently, an accidental drowning in ’47, never having written anything else. It’s sad, especially because I think he had at least a sincere love of S&S, as I think you’ll see in the story today.

So let’s get to it already, sheesh:

That’s right, Rald the Thief gets the Finlay cover treatment, quite remarkable and, much like the Elak covers, it speaks to the deep love that the new and as-yet-unnamed genre of Howardian-historico-fantastique-adventure tales had garnered. The iconography is interesting here, and gets to the heart of the appeal of these stories – a sword, a Man of Action, a damsel, and a mysterious threat. There’s not even a real background – the whole scene takes place in an indistinct void, really highlighting that the whole thing is a very literal psychodrama. Simple, but effective!

A good ToC, including a reprint of what’s probably Long’s most famous story, “The Hounds of Tindalos.” Also worth noting is CAS’s memorial poem to HPL, who had died in March of the year. It’s been a rough few years for Weird Tales fans, who’ve lost some giants in quick succession! Anyway, on to today’s tale!

A pretty straightforward summary here, and truthful too – this is a brisk tale indeed, rolling along at a decent clip with very little downtime. Case in point, our story opens in medias res, with a business meeting happening in a dank, drippy, disused dungeon. Two figures are conversing:

We’re introduced to a wizard with an apparently top-notch moisturization regime – their slender womanish hands a sure sign of sorcerous puissance and subtlety. This is in contrast to the other as-yet unnamed figure, who is immediately portrayed as a forceful, man’s-man kind of dude – he grumbles, he strikes the table with a meaty fist, and he’s suspicious of all this wizardly bandying of words about the King, named (oddly) Thrall. Yes, these two are surely quite different from one another, so much so that we get two more paragraphs describing them. First, our wizard:

Good, strange wizard physiognomy, I think, and the insanely hairy face is fun (and, obvious) foreshadowing of something. The “what’s under those robes!?” is a little thickly ladled on here, but honestly it’s not too bad, and it’s perfectly fine to hammer it home given where the story will end up. “Karlk” is a decent evil sorcerer name too, I think, short and sharp and menacingly strange. All in all, a top-tier evil magician, I think. And what’s the beefy fellow Karlk has been talking to like, you ask? Well:

No mincing words here, this is just Conan. Naked and muscular in a loincloth and sandals, obviously of a kind with the Cimmerian, strong, violent, and cunning (as evidenced by phrenology). What is interesting is that Ball calls out Rald’s scars, which is a detail I don’t think I’ve read about in Howard’s loving descriptions of Conan’s rough-and-rugged body. Ball wants to highlight the history of macho violence embedded in Rald’s body, because this, along with his near-nakedness, muscular bigness, and clean-shaven face, marks him as diametrically opposed to Karlk the Magician.

There’s some fun back-and-forth arguing between Rald and Karlk about King Thrall; Karlk seems to have it in for in him, but Rald points out the King has done alright by Karlk, covering up a mishap when one of Karlk’s “experiments” escaped. All in all, Rald seems disgusted by the wizard and their planned treachery. I’m no business guy, but it really seems like at this stage of the negotiations (along in a dripping dungeon), you’d want to have this kind of stuff ironed out. Karlk seems put out by Rald’s apparent lack-of-fear; he is a weird, menacing wizard, after all, and is used to a modicum of cringing respect. So Karlk decides to show Rald some of his power:

And how does Rald react to Kralk’s laser beam?

I mean, fair enough, right?

Regardless, Rald wants to get down to business…what IS it that Kralk wants to hire him to do, anyway?

Rald’s professional pride is fun, as is his discussion of what the possible targets of his thieving might be. I like the little “No women, mind you!” bit too, it’s all very material and earthy, a lived-in detail that captures Rald pretty well and gives him a bit of depth.

That is solid wizard shit there, you know what I mean? Kralk is steeped in black lore, and has moved beyond mere jewels and such. Kralk wants Rald to steal THE VERY KINGDOM ITSELF!!!! which is so bonkers, I love it. Rald’s reaction is fun too – how can you steal a whole kingdom, particularly one which is, in some way, divinely ordained. King Thrall is the King of Forthe, simple as? How would Kralk take over, even?

Very fun stuff; Rald is thinking about the Realpolitik of Kralk seizing the throne of Forthe, how impossible it would be to hold it given how everyone hates and fears him, but Karlk leapfrogs over that problem by the simple expediency of having RALD be the king, with Karlk a hands-off power behind the throne. Rald’s realization, and the temptation, are handled really well; Ball has constructed a convincing web for his Prince of Thieves to get enmeshed in!

I love the whole “wizard practicing the blackest of sciences” angle to these early S&S stories – it’s something Howard did himself, with a lot of his evil wizards relying on drugs and alchemy and hypnotism more than thunderous bolts of power. Similarly, Kuttner had his weird little wizard Zend behaving more like a scientist, using occult forces and magic-technology to keep Atlantis from sinking, for instance. Karlk’s claim that they are merely a scientist is a lot of fun, and something that I feel like you don’t see as much of in fantasy these days – wizards are a lot more mystical and esoteric, which is a very different characterization from experimental and technical approaches to even blasphemous sorcerous knowledge.

It’s also menacing as hell, isn’t it? We had that little story about the dog-man thing that had to be executed after it escaped, a very strange and unsettling story, and Karlk seems to be mostly interested in being allowed to expand his research program, something that would necessitate a friendly king willing to turn a blind eye to whatever horrors he’s planning. Of course Rald is disgusted…but…

It’s a solid Faustian bargain – Rald puts up a good front, but he’s quickly broken down by Karlk’s tempting him with not merely wealth and power, but immortality as a dynast! It’s fun and unique, making Rald a bit darker and more morally ambivalent (for now, at least) than his literary progenitor Conan. The story is a bit grimmer and grittier too; Conan had lots of adventures motivated purely by greed, but he never stooped so low as to ally himself with an obviously evil wizard! Credit where credit is due, Ball has come up with a fun and novel plot!

The next section opens on Rald beginning his infiltration of the Palace of Thrall. There’s some fun world building in here, among some admittedly clumsy and overwritten sentences. The walls of the palace, both inner and outer, are crumbling and in poor repair, and the patrols of the guards are fairly cursory and easily evaded. Similarly, the jagged bits of metal embedded at the top of the walls are rusty and easily pushed aside. But most importantly:

That’s a nice touch, and conveys a lot about this place and its history. They don’t need to maintain the walls or a tight guard – the sanctity of the palace is exactly that: sacrosanct, the product of cultural and religious scruple that sees the King and his power as a holy, divine thing, which NO ONE in their right mind would ever violate! Luckily, Rald is free of such scruples. This is more than just a nice bit of flavor, too – it will explain what exactly Karlk’s plan is, and how a whole kingdom can be stolen.

There’s a really nice bit of writing around Rald’s skulk through the garden here:

The statue he mistakes for a person, and the annoyance of the wet sandal are great, nice little bits of very realistic detail that lend Rald some interiority as well as highlighting his real physical experiences sneaking through the forbidden grounds. Equally fun is the fact that Rald knows the layout of the castle absolutely, due to the simple fact that everyone does, from servant’s gossip. The way Ball tells us that the simple peasants would be horrified at the use their gossip is being put to is fun writing. There’s a lot of nice details in this story, I think, and Ball is very much taking his time trying to develop the scene and evoke the setting, and it’s (largely) paying off, I think.

Rald makes in into the castle and encounters a drunk guard and, in a room beyond, a sleeping woman whom he takes to be a courtesan of some sort. Finally, he reaches a door that, via the clarity of narrative convenience, Rald realizes must be his goal:

Might be a real “Marge_Potato.jpg” moment here, but look: I just think this is neat. It’s extremely fun that Rald is an atheist in a magical world with gods, and that it’s this atheism that allows him to lift the magically warded lockbar without being struck down by the mighty curse woven into its very matter. That’s good stuff, and it works nicely with the whole thing going on in this story – the decrepit theocracy being vulnerable to One Atheist Thief!

Rald pushes through the door and enters some kind of sacred council chamber where the King and his sister hold court. More importantly, there’s the sacred necklace that is the goal of his quest hanging there!

So potent a symbol is this necklace that merely possessing it makes one, functionally and practically, the ruler of Forte. It might seem like a goofy system of gov’t, but who the hell am I, an Amerikkkan, to judge? More importantly, it’s in keeping with the whole tenor of this country/city-state, right? This religiosity that seems to rule here would absolutely imbue an object, and whoever happened to be holding it, with absolute political power; it makes sense! And it seems to have worked out just like Kralk imagined it would…or has it!? For, while Rald is admiring the sparkle of the diamonds that make up the necklace, he’s interrupted by a voice!

Do I wish Ball had given Rald a better swear than “faith?” Of course I do. Do I love this mysterious person telling Rald to knock it off with all the jumping around like some damn ape? Absolutely. It’s funny! The whole thing is very swashbuckly, and I love it.

The newcomer is the King’s sister, the Lady Thrine (apparently a real, if rare, Danish girl’s name, by the way), and she’s aghast at the temerity of Rald to not only break taboo by touching (and proposing to steal) the Sacred Necklace, but also by DARING to enter her bedchamber and peer at her sleeping. Yes, she was the “courtesan” from earlier, and its the whole shock of the boldness of Rald’s crimes that have lead her here, rather than, say, calling out all the guard. There’s some flirty banter, honestly not badly done, particularly since Ball is working on his own here in a Pre-Mouser world, but it’s cut short by the sudden arrival of Karlk!

Again, it’s a really great part here that Karlk, a magician and therefore intimately familiar with the reality of occultic forces, couldn’t move the magical bar with its potent spell, so he hired an atheist thief to do it. That’s good, a solid interesting premise for a S&S story, and also an interesting “mechanic” (if you’re excuse the vulgarism) for a S&S world, where magical potency is in some way related to belief. It’s fun, and something you don’t see much of these days!

Anyway, Kalrk prepares to zap Thrine, something the besotted Rald CANNOT ALLOW TO HAPPEN…but it’s all put on hold by the arrival of King Thrall, in full battle armor. There’s a funny bit where Rald, again in Mouser fashion, asks exasperatedly “doesn’t anybody SLEEP in this castle?” which is a funny, solid joke for a S&S story. There’s more banter, some guards show up, and the Kralk and Rald are bound up with ropes. They’re left, unguarded, in the council room (with the necklace) while Thrall, having sent his sister back to her room, orders a quick search of the gardens, in case there are more conspirators. Left alone, Rald and Kralk bicker a bit, with Karlk realizing that Rald has scruples he hadn’t imagined.

And then Karlk does something weird:

Khalk unties himself with an extra pair of small, white furred arms that emerge from his robes! I mean, that’s absolutely great! Equally fun in the kind of nonchalance with which Karlk assures Rald that there’s a LOT about him no one knows. It’s a great scene, and very weird.

Also fun is how Karlk, while having to leave Rald behind, still proposes to honor their partnership – he’ll kill the people Rald can’t, and then Rald can become King, with Karlk the power behind the throne. It’s very logical and straightforward and, honestly, makes Karlk out to be even more inhuman and mysterious. Afterall, while he’s disappointed Rald didn’t just kill the Princess, he can still use him. It’s fun, weird, stuff, and honestly between that and the extra arms, Karlk is up there with the evil wizards in S&S lit, in my opinion.

Rald doesn’t waste time, however. After Karlk has left, he painfully hoists himself up, knocks a torch from its sconce, and uses it to free himself. In the corridor he finds a guard, horribly magicked to death by Karlk. Grabbing the dead man’s sword, Rald rushes down the corridor, hearing a woman’s sobbing scream of terror from somewhere ahead. Rald comes upon a deadly, dangerous scene – Karlk, crouched horribly over the bound and terrified figure of Thrine, preparing to blast the unsuspecting King Thrall with evil magic. Rald leaps into action, slicing into the surprised Karlk with his sword:

Thrine tells the king that Rald saved him, indeed saved them all from Karlk’s deadly magic, which the King grants, though of course he DID plan on seizing the throne himself. With a modicum of contrition, Rald foreswears his earlier actions:

Rald agrees that an evil, murderous wizard can never be a man, but hilariously he has misunderstood Thrine. For, in fact…

Karlk was a GIRL all along!!!! The fake beard, the scrupulous flowing robes, all a trick! But that’s not her only secret…

How came she to have royal blood, you might ask, and King Thrall certainly does. Well, it’s a funny story:

Kind of grim, and with an unfortunate amount of “monstrous ape rape” (a surprisingly popular theme in early Weird Fiction). Also, you might not recognize it, but the “white apes of Sorjoon” are basically the multi-armed white apes of Barsoom, from Burrough’s John Carter of Mars stories; in the earlier Duar the Accursed story, Ball refers to them as the white apes of the “hills of barsoom,” even. Maybe it was an editorial decision to change them, or perhaps he thought in hindsight that that was a little too on the nose. Still, everybody reading Weird Tales would’ve immediately recognized the Great White Apes for what the were, horrific multi-armed ape monsters from a classic swashbuckling sword-and-planet tale. It’s interesting that Ball uses them here; speaks to the importance of Burroughs for the readers of these more action-oriented, thrilling adventure weird tales, I think, and is in keeping with Ball’s letter eulogizing Howard too; he mentions “a thousand international Tarzans” as being unable to make up for the thrill and power of Conan, suggesting the lens through which he was being read, by some at least.

Anyway! Karlk’s extra arms come from her White Ape parentage. There’s a bit of Howard’s Atla in Karlk here too, from “Worms of the Earth.” Both of them are outsiders, cursed by their lineages to belong to neither of their parents’ worlds. Cursing all of mankind, Karlk devoted herself to evil and the eventual overthrow of Forte. There’s some great, creepy writing as Karlk’s laments her poor experiment back in her hut, and then she dies.

The story wraps up with a nice little bow – the King roars that, for his great deeds this night, he’ll make Rald a baron, but the thief is gone. But don’t worry, says Thrine, he’ll be back…for her!

And that’s the end of “The Thief of Forte!”

From a Sword & Sorcery perspective, I think this story is pretty decent. There’s good world building, and Karlk is a fun and interesting character that, honestly, I would’ve liked to spend more time with. Rald is basically and blandly a species of Conan, though maybe just that much more avaricious than the original – like I said, working with an obviously evil wizard seems a bit too much for ol’ Conan, though Rald readily agrees (even if he does have second thoughts later).

It’s not some lost masterpiece of the genre by any stretch, but it’s at least as good as Kuttner’s Elak stories, I’d say. What is interesting is that both of them, Ball and Kuttner alike, offer different perspectives of the post-Conan and post-Howard genre. Ball’s is much more straightforwardly a pastiche, I’d say, with Rald simply being Conan, or at least much closer than Kuttner slim and amoral Elak. Ball also seems interested in the women in S&S stories, more so than Kuttner at least; perhaps he’s influenced by Moore’s Jirel stories there, probably the most important non-Conan S&S character to emerge in the 30s. Ball has a bunch of tough amazons in the second Rald story, and there’s a pretty tough queen in the Duar story, though of course all end up conforming to comfortable 30s heteronormative roles by the ends of their respective tales. By far the most interesting character in Ball’s slender oeuvre is Karlk, though, and I think the story is worth reading for them alone!

Maybe more to the point, I think it’s worthwhile to read these attempts at carrying the torch forward in the post-Howard days of Weird Tales, particularly because they’re wrestling with something that would dog the genre well into today, namely: where do homage, tradition, pastiche, and out-and-out cribbing fit in the genre, and how do we push at the boundaries and make something new? Obviously there’s a deep love of Howard and his work here, but how do you build on it without simply (and more weakly) recapitulating the same tired old themes and plots and characters. I don’t think there’re answers in these stories, but I do think it’s fruitful to read them and think about these questions!

Spawn of Pulp #41: “Spawn of Dagon” by Henry Kuttner, Weird Tales v.32 n.1, July 1938!

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Sword & Sorcery is a wonderful genre, inventive and vital, and the way it’s grounded intimately within the materiality of its world and characters lets you investigate issues of the body, of the environment, of class and wealth and oppression and violence, in surprising and often insightful ways. That being said…there are, like all genres, some, ah, lesser works, where the promise of the form is not entirely fulfilled. C’est la littérature! And that’s what we’re going to be looking at today, a very middling story that, none-the-less, helps illustrate some important things about the genre. And what story is that, you ask? It’s Henry Kuttner’s “Spawn of Dagon” from the July 1938 issue of Weird Tales!

Now, I don’t wanna be too rough on ol’ Hank here – Kuttner is a hugely important figure in the history of speculative fiction, much more so than may be immediately evident, given both his untimely death at age 42 (in ’58, juuuuust on the cusp of a big explosion in science fiction that he would’ve been a huge part of) AND the fact that he wrote under so many goddamn pseudonyms. He was a good writer, with an interesting perspective on complex, psychological science fiction in particular, laying the foundation for what would eventually become the New Wave much later. And when he was working with his wife, C.L. Moore, on one of their collaborations? Well, there are some exceptional bits of work there, sharp and thoughtful, some of the best stories from the time (we’ve talked about a few of ’em on this here blog, even – check ’em out here, here, and here!)

Similarly, Kuttner has the distinction of being a part of the Lovecraft Circle, writing some good Lovecraftian fiction (“The Invaders” is a fun and weird one) as well as his own distinct weird horror too (“The Shadow on the Screen” and “The Graveyard Rats” in particular are worth checking out). He’s a good, fun writer, and he likes a weird monster and a horrible scenario as much as the next guy, so don’t let my forthcoming criticisms of his S&S scare you off of him, okay? Because I think there’s some important context here for Kuttner’s approach to these types of stories.

For one thing, the genre that we call “Sword & Sorcery” didn’t exist yet, not really – there wasn’t a corpus to point to, for instance, though it was in the process of gelling. Robert E. Howard, who died in ’36, left a body of work in Weird Tales that was, in some inchoate way, obviously it’s own thing; two-fisted adventures full of monsters, magic, and peril, centered around recurring, rough-and-ready characters and told in blood-and-thunder prose. They were popular stories, the Conan tales in particular, and the combination of lost prehistories, exotic locales, and grim violence was something new and exciting and vibrant, so it makes sense that Kuttner would chase after ’em; he was a working writer, after all, perfectly happy to go after a market if it meant a check. Also, like Howard, Kuttner was an inveterate Lovecraftian Circler, sharing with REH the same general interests with regards to alien gods and mind-shattering horror, so he’s got a toe in the Howardian door already. But, given that it’s only a couple of years Post-Howard, you can forgive Kuttner for his somewhat clumsy attempts here, I think.

Similarly, something I think you’ll see in today’s story, is that Kuttner is actually in some ways writing against Howard’s work. Kuttner was good friends (and sometimes collaborator) with another Lovecraft Circle writer, Robert Bloch who, somewhat famously, absolutely positively with deep fiery conviction 100% HATED Conan. Hated the character, hated the stories, hated everything about them, thought Howard was wasting his time and ink writing ’em. It was a minority opinion in the magazine, but it was there! Now, I don’t think Kuttner had a similar animus towards the nascent genre as Bloch did – he wouldn’t have written the stories if he had – but I do think he very consciously wrote his Elak stories as a slightly skewed reaction to Conan. That alone makes them interesting, examples of people doing the boundary definition work necessary to creating a genre.

But, we’ll talk about all that when we get there! First – the Cover!

Yes indeed, lookit that, ol’ Hank got himself a cover, and one by the Master Finlay too! Perfectly serviceable cover, Tor Johnson-lookin’ goon luggin a scantily clad unconscious lady, weird little freak at the front, Errol Flynn watchin’ em there. Kind of a shame, though, that Finlay didn’t get a chance to do the monsters in this story – they’re very much in his wheelhouse, and would’ve been neat to see in his inimitable style. Kind of feels like this cover speaks to the popularity of the late Howard’s Conan tales, though; real hunger for anything even approaching The Master’s Work, so Wright et al. would’ve definitely jumped at the chance to highlight a weird fantasy tale. Not the last time Kuttner’s Elak would appear on the cover of WT either – in fact, only the first Elak story failed to get a cover! Crazy!

Solid ToC this time – the real highlight is the Smith story, “Mother of Toads,” which is a classic. But there’s Bloch on here, Gans Field (aka Manly Wade Wellman), a Price reprint, posthumous verse from Lovecraft and Howard… even the Quinn here is better than his usual stuff (i.e., it’s not a Jules de Grandin story). All in all a solid late Wright issue, I’d say!

So this is the second Elak story the readers of Weird Tales would’ve come across; the first was a two-parter, “Thunder in the Dawn,” and had appeared in the May and June issues of the same year. Unlike Howard’s introduction of Conan, Kuttner had provided a clear and fairly well defined biography of our pal Elak of Atlantis in his first outing. To orient us all: In a time undreamt of (etc etc), the continent of Atlantis, with many cities and many kings, is out there, being all fantastical and suchlike. One of the many city-states on the continent is Cyrena, the northernmost kingdom that was, once, ruled by some guy named Norian. This king, Norian, had two stepsons, Orander and Zeulas. Zeulas ends up killing his stepfather Norian in an apparently aboveboard duel for which both sides had good cause (we’re told this by a druid, so you know it’s solid info) BUT, as a result of this patricide, Zeulas refuses the crown that is his by birthright and leaves the city in (voluntary, it seems) exile, with his younger brother Orander assuming the crown. Zeulas takes the name Elak and becomes a stateless, homeless adventurer. In the first story, Elak and his drunken thief buddy Lycon are summoned back to save Cyrena from an evil wizard, restore Elak/Zeulas’s brother to the throne, and then voluntarily resume the life of a wandering adventurer. Just stick a pin in that “rightful king in voluntary exile with a complex relationship to his family” stuff for now, because I’ll be mentioning it later.

Anyway, that’s basically the gist of Elak’s life before now; it’s not really relevant to today’s story, but I *do* think it’s probably important to the point I’ll be making at the end (and I also doubt if I’ll ever talk about another Elak story again on here), so just keep it in mind for later. Regardless, now we can get into today’s story “Spawn of Dagon!”

And how does Hank open his tale? Why, with an epigraph from G.K. Chesterton, of course!

An interesting quote for a couple of reasons; first, it’s from Chesterton’s “Ballad of the White Horse” which was one of REH’s favorite poems, and it’s easy to see why – it’s a super heroic epic about Alfred the Great fighting the Danes in England, full of wild roaring poetry, the force of destiny, civilizational clashes, magic weapons, very much in the mode of what would become sword and sorcery (even if it is super Christian). In fact, REH liked it so much that he used excerpts from it as epigraphs in some of HIS stories too (off the top of my head I *think* it was in the Solomon Kane story “The Moon of Skulls” but I might be wrong). So it’s notable that Kuttner chooses to include a passage from the same work in his story here. He ends up using a lot of Chesterton, all from the same poem, in subsequent Elak tales too. It’s a little funny, of course; after all, this is a tale of Lost Atlantis, from the misty prehistory of the world…so it’s a bit jarring to see it opening up with a poem from Chesterton, very much a contemporary writer.

It’s also interesting because it underlines that Chesterton is in the lineage leading up to modern fantasy literature, something people sometimes forget. There’s his famous essay “Ethics in Elfland” (which *is* great honestly; it’s so frustrating that it came from the pen of a reactionary and sympathetic-to-fascism asshole like Chesterton) of course, but his “Ballad of the White Horse” is a huge and influential part of the genre’s story too – I’ve even read that Tolkien had, at least, a few positive things to say about it.

Anyway, with Chesterton out of the way, we can finally get into the story proper:

There’s a LOT to unpack here, right off the bat. First – our “hero” Elak is squatting over a corpse with his buddy Lycon, watching two streams of blood oozing from its wounds winding across the floor towards an arbitrary objective…that’s right, they’re gambling over which blood stream reaches a crack in the floor first. I mean, that’s wild, callous shit, truly outrageous! Even crazier, the prize they’re gambling for is the right to loot the body! AND it seems like they killed this guy specifically to rob him – Elak castigates Lycon for picking a fight with a pauper when he doesn’t find any money on him. That’s some grim stuff!

You sometimes see knuckleheads describe Conan as an “anti-hero” which, of course, is nonsense; Conan is 100% a barbarian HERO, rough and uncivilized, but ruled by a strict code of honor and with a clear moral framework. And while it’s true that Conan was a pirate and reaver professionally and therefore certainly must’ve been killing (or at least threatening to kill) folks for their money, he at least had the narrative decency to do it all off camera. Not so with Elak! Here we are, in some Atlantean pub, and right off the bat he’s watching a guy they butchered bleed out, for kicks!

The other interesting thing here is Kuttner’s description of Elak. He’s tall and “extremely slender” with an almost boneless suppleness, a far cry from the mightily-thewed and hairy-chested Conan. To be sure, Elak is strong; we’ll have scenes later in the story demonstrating his superlative physicality (one of the core attributes of S&S character), but it’s of a different sort than the tigerish, muscular dominance of Conan.

Not to harp on it, but I do think that, since Kuttner is writing in the shadow of Howard, it’s worthwhile to see how different he’s making his sword & sorcery hero from the epochal example of the Cimmerian. It’s relevant also because, in terms of plot, Kuttner is clearly cribbing from Howard – there’s a bit of “Tower of the Elephant” in this one, and there’s a later story that is a pretty blatant riff on Howard’s “The Phoenix on the Sword” story. So, in differentiating his stuff from REH, Kuttner has chosen to have a VERY different hero – a willowy, amoral ex-prince…

Hm, who does that sound like?

Honestly, if he had albinism (and an evil sword), he’d *be* Elric; even the names are suspiciously similar, aren’t they? I’ve never encountered Moorcock talking about Kuttner or Elak of Atlantis, but it’s a fair bet that he’s read ’em before, of course, given his deep presence in the genre. And, to be clear, I’m not saying he grabbed Elak or anything; in fact, it’s entirely likely that he independently came up with an anti-Conan the same way Kuttner did, as a direct response to REH’s own work. After all, Howard’s S&S is steeped in his particular interests – clean-bodied and noble barbarism against decadent and effete civilization, rugged frontier individualism, the power of the body to impose one’s will over an unruly world. If you’re taking part in that conversation, there’s a natural counterpoint in a character like Elak (or Elric).

Back to the story: it turns out that Lycon has already pilfered the dead man’s purse, making the blood race game meaningless…but because he’s drunk, he passes out, and Elak is forced to lug his blacked-out buddy out of the tavern and into the night, since the innkeeper has returned with guards who, for some reason, frown on wanton murder. Fleeing through the dark streets, they’re suddenly attacked by a guard!

(Brief aside for weapon talk – our boy Elak is armed with a rapier, as befits a slender, supple warrior, emphasizing speed and precision and skill over the brute butchery of a barbarian’s broadsword. It’s an interesting development!)

So, what was it that spooked that guard?

Well, there you go, everything seems to be perfectly in order and extremely normal: the guard was, of course, scared by the sudden appearance of Some Guy. This strangely blank-faced, robed fellow offers help, and Elak is forced to accept it unhesitatingly, since more guards are thundering down the road. A secret passage in the wall yawns wide, and Elak, bearing his drunken pal Lycon, follows the mysterious stranger in.

Again, perfectly normal – some people, even robed people with strange, unmoving faces, just have cold, clammy hands! Nothing untoward at all!

Elak follows his new (and normal) friend through a dark tunnel – there’s strange, unnatural sounds in the dark around them, but when they reach a hollow in the earth, there’s light:

The line “amid chuckles of goblin laughter” is fun, isn’t it? There’s some good flourishes in here, and Kuttner has certainly got a flair for atmosphere. I love a nitred chamber deep in the earth, myself, particularly if there’re mysterious impossible sounds of the sea about.

Anyway, Elak’s mysterious benefactor introduces themselves: they’re Gesti, and please pay no attention to their chalk white complexion or their curiously glazed eyes. In fact, the only thing that does matter is that Gesti would like to hire Elak for a little job:

I do kind of like Lycon’s glibly cornball vaudeville schtick, though I also 100% accept that some might find it a bit grating – it is basically his entire character, other than drinking, so it can be a little repetitive. Elak asks for some more details about the job:

It turns out Gesti and his vaguely defined band have tunneled a secret passage up through the VERY LIVING ROCK OF ATLANTIS and into one of Zend’s basements in his Mighty Tower of Sorcery. All they need is a brave and violent assassin to use their passage, kill the wizard, and smash a red ball up there. Easy peasy, 1000 gold coins. Plus there’s a pile of loot in the tower too, and Elak can have all that too. Seems suspicious, but like we saw earlier: Elak is an amoral and extremely greedy guy. Plus he’s probably still drunk. Gesti offers to babysit Lycon while he sleeps it off, and that’s pretty much it. Elak, our hero, agrees to murder Zend for money! They give him a weird tube-like weapon which will play no part whatsoever in the story, and then they part ways, Gesti unable to advance farther; as he goes, he gives Elak a strange farewell:

Eh, it’s probably nothing.

Elak pushes up through the secret door into the tower basement, which is dusty and mouse-riddled, obviously a space rarely used by the mysterious Zend. He sneaks his way through the dim, empty halls, knowing he must make it to the very top minaret to destroy the Red Sphere there (presumably killing Zend on the way). But as he’s sneaking:

Helluva security system! A living (in some fashion) disembodied head sitting on a pedestal! I mean, that’s pretty gruesome, isn’t it, especially the way Elak spears it (through the eye! yuck!) and “kills” it! Reckon it’s some kind of weird undead horror, maybe, a product of Zend’s dark sorcery. Very strange and a great image, which ol’ Virgil Finlay drew up for us:

It’s a fun, weird scene…BUT it’s kind of a shame that it doesn’t really amount to anything. The alarm call of the freaky head doesn’t summon any guards or even seem to reach Zend; nothing happens at all, which is a real shame. Personally, if you’ll indulge me, as a writer of S&S myself I 100% would’ve had the headless body of the thing shamble out and fight Elak, directed BY the head on the pedestal. I mean, SOMETHING should’ve happened, you know what I mean? That kind of missed opportunity, and other events-for-no-reason, is a real problem that dogs all of Kuttner’s S&S, so much so that you might be tempted to think he’s actively subverting the expectations from the leanly efficient structures employed by Howard in his stories…but I honestly kinda believe he’s just a little lazy and writing extremely fast, for cash.

Elak continues down the dark corridor, parting a curtain, only to see a group of grotesqueries coming towards him!

Yes indeed, Kuttner is engaging in the tried-and-true-and-tired convention of having an evil wizard exhibiting some physical deformity, just to really highlight the contrast between them and the clean-limbed and hard-bodied S&S protagonist. It’s unfortunate, but it’s something that goes hand-in-hand with this era of literature, so you have to get use to recognizing it.

Anyway, you might assume that Zend and his Big Guy are coming to get Elak, alerted by the head, but that’s not it at all. They don’t know about Elak, and in fact are out on business of their own, vis-a-vis the unconscious girl being carried by the huge giant. Via some clumsy exposition, we learn that Elak recognizes the giant…he’s a criminal he saw getting beheaded at a public execution, transformed into a monstrous servitor by Zend’s necromantic power! Elak decides that he doesn’t like the thought of fighting a dead man, and reckons he ought to hide, waiting for a chance when Zend is alone to stab him in the back. Unfortunately for him, the best laid plans gang aft agley…for Zend and the Giant turn up the VERY CORRIDOR where Elak is hiding! What’s he to do now!?

That’s right: Elak mutherfuckin’ Batmans it there in the passage way.

Defining “Sword & Sorcery” as a genre can be a fraught thing, especially if you’re trying to argue it’s something different from other types of Fantasy (which, to go on the record, it is), but this sort of thing is probably the easiest and most important difference to point out, I think: Sword & Sorcery stories are about the heroes’ ability to physically impose their will on a recalcitrant and hostile world, relying on the native strength, grit, endurance, and willpower inherent in their bodies to do so. They don’t have to have physiques of superheroic proportions (though it helps, and often narratively coincides with other themes important to the literature if they do), but they all have to confront threats through the use of their body; even Elric, who is defined as a sickly figure with little bodily strength, still relies on an inborn strength of will (who else could endure the corrupting and murderous effects of his evil sword?) to perform his epic feats. Here, we have Elak, whom we know is a supple, muscular man capable of fighting and running and such, demonstrate even further the superlative prowess of his body by holding himself perfectly still high up in the ceiling of a tunnel while his foes pass by beneath him, all unawares.

Elak gets a chance to ogle the girl while they pass beneath him, wryly musing on how she would express her gratitude if he saves her, but he lets them pass untroubled: that big ol’ giant is still awful threatening. When it’s safe, he drops to the ground; his hands and feet are bruised and bleeding, but he has successfully evaded detection and is able to sneak on after his prey. He enters a chamber with a window to the outside and three curtained doorways, which he peers through in order.

In the first room he encounters a strange, steel-walled room, where an odd mud-colored rock sits absolutely pulsing with terrible, frightful power. Good wizard shit here, I think, with lots of mysterious and unexplained details. Behind the second curtain he sees Zend at work in a sort of wizard’s laboratory, preparing to Do Something Evil to the unconscious girl:

Again, excellent ambient weird wizardry in this section; I especially like the detail that Zend is going to send the girl’s soul to some planet around the star Antares in case there’s some magic he can learn there. It’s fun stuff! But Elak has no time for that; he leaves the girl to her dark fate and checks out the third curtain, where he encounters a rosy glowing light…the chamber of the red sphere! And it’s filled with weird techno-sorcery too, tubes and wires and pipes and things; it reminds me a little of the robo-tower from Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story “Two Sought Adventure” and, I think, speaks to Kuttner’s more sci-fi interests. But, just as Elak is about to get to work destroying the macguffin, the giant rushes up the stairs and into the room!

So, a couple of things – first and most importantly for the story, the Red Sphere is unplugged and powered down BUT NOT DESTROYED in the fight. Secondly, it’s a fun fight, honestly – the rapier, bending dangerously as it pierces the giant’s heart, but to no avail, is good stuff, as is the eventual wrestling match that sees Elak pitching the giant out the window. Also, as an aside: I think Kuttner uses “his body fell as a tree falls” or some variant in EVERY SINGLE S&S story he wrote, all the Elaks and even in the two Prince Raynor stories, every single time. Something about the image that he liked, I guess, or it just felt very actiony and sword-and-sorcerous to him, or something. It’s an odd tic. Everybody is always crashing to the ground like a felled tree.

As he’s recovering from the fight, he hears a shriek from the room below; running to investigate, he encounters Zend, fleeing in terror, and hears a babble or horrible voices coming up the passage.

I mean, they’re great monsters, aren’t they? Bubbling, semi-solid tentacle monsters with parrot- (or octopus-) like beaks, slimy and oozy and terrible. Good weird critters, for sure, and much more interesting than the gillmen you might’ve expected, given the title of the story. The Dagon of this story is no Biblical Philistine Fish God; this is Lovecraft’s Dagon, for sure, but these ain’t Innsmouth Deep Ones at all. It’s fun, and nice to see Kuttner really going for a much more alien, deep sea kind of monstrosity here, you know?

Anyway, Elak is quickly trussed up with cords by the Jelly Monsters, and sees that Zend is similarly tied up. Hilariously, Elak seems to be an obstinate optimist because he asks Gesti, who came in with the monsters, for his money.

Betrayal! Who could’ve foreseen such a turn of events, particularly since Gesti seemed so nice and normal, a real bro.

This is why you gotta ask ALL prospective employees if they’re the hellish spawn of an alien god. They gotta tell you if they are, like cops. Zend seems a little surprised that Elak is so dumb:

While he’s wrangling unsuccessfully with the ropes around Elak’s wrists, Zend is able to provide some more exposition with regards to the jellymen’s motivations. Following the state of the art pre-tectonics ideas about the evolution of the earth then current in Kuttner’s day, Zend explains how the Earth was once one vast ocean, ruled by the Spawn of Dagon. The rising of the Continents, in addition to reducing their sovereignty are also an affront to their dignity, and so they have worked tirelessly to sink all the land and return the world to a state of Primal Ocean. There’s some fun bits in here about ancient, prehuman races that got dumped in the drink by the Dagonians, big ol’ weirdos and sphinxes, good ancient fantasy stuff. Zend then explains that, without his intervention, Atlantis would’ve long ago been sunk – it’s his magic alone that keeps the island above water, and the monsters know it. “How’re those bonds coming,” asks Elak:

I really wanted Zend to make an aside to Elak here: “Oh, by the way, you’re, uh, sterile now.” Yes, the weird radiations of the Red Sphere kill the Jellyfish Guys instantly; that’s why they needed a foolish catspaw to break it, so they could get at Zend and bring about a return of their Oceanic Empire. Real shame those ropes are holding strong, an adventurer like Elak might be able to thwart them if he wasn’t trussed up like a Yule Goose.

Yes, despite harboring an insane hatred of all dirt-grubbing humans, the horrors below didn’t bother to kill Lycon when they had a chance or even, apparently, tie him up. So he, rested and sufficiently sobered up, has arrived in the nick of time! Oh, and the sexy girl Zend had kidnapped wakes up, just in time for Elak to promise to help her escape…if they survive!

It seems like our heroes are doomed, however – there are too many of the monsters, and their weapons seem powerless against their gelatinous unearthly bodies…but then they begin to melt away! Zend has gotten his Red Sphere back online, bathing them all in its strange radiation!

Having learned a lesson from Gesti’s betrayal, Elak grabs the girl and the three of them skedaddle, ending up in one of the city’s many municipal parks. Lycon leaves Elak and Coryllis in search of some grog.

And that’s how Kuttner ends his story “Spawn of Dagon,” with his hero having public sex in a park.

Perfectly breezy little story. Are there some problems? Absolutely – the writing in places is sloppy and rushed (the geography of the tower is a bit strange), things happen for no reason and have no impact on the story (the alarm head, the weird weapon that never comes into play), and there’s TWO dei ex machina in here: Lycon’s sudden arrival to cut the ropes and Zend’s offscreen repair job on the Red Sphere. These same problems crop up again and again in Kuttner’s S&S stories too, by the way – there’s lots of unsatisfying action and narrative hops that, frankly, just don’t work very well. So why the hell should you read these, then?

Well, as I mentioned in several places, I really think these Elak stories are interesting historical documents that capture a very specific moment in the S&S genre. Howard is dead, but he’s left behind something new in his stories, something unique and interesting. And so Kuttner is engaging with it, trying to figure out what works and the ways he can make it his own, and while the experiments might not WORK, they are interesting and important failures.

Kuttner recognizes that he can’t (and doesn’t want to) just write a Conan clone, so he makes a decision to create a different protagonist. A strong, physical, brave character, sure, but one without the Noble Savage trappings of Howard’s heroes. Moreover, rather than Conan’s rough but iron-clad sense of honor, Kuttner makes Elak a sneaky, amoral, and largely dissipated character – Conan’s pristine wilderness is discarded for a world-weary urban cynic. Moreover, whereas Conan’s arc is, broadly, defined as the ascent of a vital barbarian to the pinnacle of power as a king, Elak has REJECTED kingship outright, before his stories even begin!

Kuttner simply isn’t interested in the same things that a rural hayseed from Cross Plains TX is – he’s a son of the city, living in Chicago and LA and New York, huge metropolises at the height of the Great Depression! His sword and sorcery is much more interested in cities and power and corruption, something very different from Howard’s preoccupation with nature and wilderness. And I think Kuttner DOES see that there’s something in the genre that lets him wrestle with those topics in a new and interesting way.

So, while I don’t think the Elak stories are necessarily good, they are important. Kuttner’s grasping mercenary characters having adventures in well-developed (or at least, more well-developed than Howard’s) fantasy cities IS a new direction in ’38, part of the current that would produce Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and Elric later on, evolving out of and in response to Howard’s very sui generis Conan stories. Elak isn’t nearly as well developed or interesting as those later creations, of course, but he’s an important stepping stone leading to them, and therefore an interesting part of the genre’s history!

Thieves’ Pulp #40: Thieves’ House by Fritz Leiber Jr., Unknown Worlds, v. 6 n. 5, February 1943

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Know, O Reader, that in the time after the Great Turkey Slaughter and before the sinking of the Year there is a month undreamt of, a month of Sword & Sorcery where the Yule, a time of gigantic mirth and gigantic melancholies, strides forth to tread the jeweled wrapping paper beneath its buckle-booted feet!

Yes, that’s right, it is once again time for my annual celebration of the Best of all Genres, Sword & Sorcery! As I’ve mentioned before, the Xmas season is, for me, the most Heroic and Sorcerous of times, one where I like to kick back and read about the derring-do of various mightily thewed types. And while things have been busy down here in Austin, December has come in like a Nemedian Lion finally, bringing cold temperatures and, with them, a resultant coziness that is PERFECT reading weather. So let’s get to it!

This time around we’ve got a true classic too, foundational in terms of Leiber’s Lankhmar stories AS WELL AS the genre as a whole, for today’s story has the very first example of a fantasy “Thieves Guild” that I’ve ever come across! The idea of organized thieves operating as a cohesive and hierarchical medieval-style guild is a core concept in fantasy, as much a part of the genre as evil wizards and scimitar-wielding bad guys, yet another cornerstone laid by the genre’s greatest mason, Fritz Leiber, Jr. Without further ado, the story this time around is Thieves’ House, from the Feb 1943 issue of Unknown Worlds!

A few years ago, we talked about the very first Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story, “Two Sought Adventure,” and of course we’ve also talked about Leiber as a weird fic writer, so we won’t spend too much time on bio and background. So let’s dive in!

The cover of this issue of Unknown Worlds is a bit underwhelming, huh? I do like the little thumbnails, but it’s hard to imagine that utilitarian little summaries of some of the stories are going to do a better job than a big, crazy cover by one of the many talented artists available for hire at the time. We’re nearing the end of the run for the magazine, though; it’s been losing money for a while and, what with war time paper rationing, it’d soon go under completely, so I imagine the decision to do the covers like this might’ve been influenced by those realities. What’s weird though is that they don’t just put the WHOLE ToC on the cover – these are just a selection of the stories in this issue, plus editor’s columns and letters etc. If you weren’t familiar with the magazine, you might think that all you’re getting for your two bits are these four stories, when, in fact:

A pretty respectable list of work! It’s an odd decision to have only a sampling of the ToC on the cover… maybe based on perceived popularity of the writers, although it seems like a new Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story should’ve warranted inclusion if that was the case? But, oh well! What is interesting is how Unknown Worlds was really positioning itself as the “fantasy” magazine here. There’s some modern day stuff in here, but a LOT of this issue is devoted to what you’d call classic fantasy, either in the (as-yet-unnamed) sword-and-sorcery genre or in the more broadly defined medieval-ish vein.

Anyway: onto the story!

Title illustration is of a guy getting a back massage from a skeleton, good workmanlike art I’d say, and a fun bit of sword-and-sorcerous menace to start it off – you know something macabre and outre is in the works, but the picture here doesn’t really give anything away, which is good!

An absolutely killer way to start a story, isn’t it? Leiber can really set the hook – a skull with its own name, gilded and gem-encrusted, being discussed by some thieves, and then a brief precis or interior thieves’ memo about the skull of Ohmphal, with a nice little summary of its history AND the difficulties involved in retrieving the stolen item. Really, truly: if you’re interested in the history of tabletop fantasy roleplaying in general and D&D in particular, then you’ve simply gotta read Leiber. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are absolutely the ideal dungeon delvers, and Leiber’s stories lay out so much of the tone and flavor (and, honestly, mechanics) that Gygax and Arneson would mine for their game. The note, the weird factional aspects (with the Priests of Votishal stealing a skull from the Thieves’ Guild), the dungeon-y aspect of the lost temple, and even the need for a well-balanced party – this is a Dungeons & Dragons adventure! Hell, even the format of the memo on the skull is a diegetic DM’s entry, you know what I mean?

Over the next few paragraphs, we get a very nice, efficient explication of these thieves and the “red-haired wench” – they’re mulling over an ancient parchment that the black-bearded boss-thief discovered in a hidden compartment in an ancient chest at the Thieves’ Guild HQ. Now, piqued by the description of the bejeweled skull, they’re planning on liberating the skull of Ohmphal. Fissif, the fat thief, balks a bit at the challenge, though – the hidden temple is a grim and perilous place, and there’s the whole “guardian beast of terrible ferocity” thing too. Luckily, Krovas, master of the Thieves’ Guild, knows just the rogues to help them out:

A double cross! Man, if you can’t trust the Thieves’ Guild…

But what a rousing adventure is in the offing, hey? An ancient crypt, full of traps and ingenious locks, a jewel-skull guarded by a horrific monster, and a planned betrayal. Can’t wait to read about all that, huh? Let’s get RIGHT INTO IT!

Oh, seems like we’ve cut to 25 days later, and we’re suddenly in a foggy, disreputable street somewhere in the winding streets and alleys of Lankhmar. And what’s this fat, scuttling figure making his way to the Thieves’ House?

Fissif, carrying an ancient box and looking a little worse-for-wear, hurries up and slips inside, warning Krovas that “the two” are following quickly! And it’s true, they are, because very shortly we hear a bunch of secretive whistling warnings, and two figures approach!

That’s right, it’s our two “heroes,” Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and they’re hot on the trail of the traitorous Fissif!

We’ve completely skipped over the whole dungeon dive that was introduced in the beginning of the story, leaping directly to the betrayal and its aftermath – it’s a bold, strong choice from Leiber, and the right one too, because while it would be fun to see the Mouser matching wits with ancient traps and Fafhrd slaughtering a horrible monster, the real action is in the betrayal. Leiber’s always much more interested in the way his two adventurers deal with the scrapes, schemes, and hardships they encounter, more so than in the threats themselves – fighting a monster is one thing, but having to chase after a thief who has betrayed these two is where the real meat of the story is at. It’s also reflects Leiber’s interest in urban settings, I think; he passes over a fairly straightforward “dungeon” portion of this story to leap right into the twists and turns of the city, because compared to the wily, evil ways of the city, a dark and dangerous dungeon is nothing!

There’s also a great example of what is one of the most fun parts of these two characters: the dialog between Fafhrd and the Mouser. Both characters have very clear voices, with very well-developed perspectives, and the comradely rapport between them is always great and often quite funny.

Discussing Two Sought Adventure I mentioned how these two are such fun and unique S&S characters because, in a lot of ways, they know that they’re S&S characters – both of them envision themselves as daring swashbucklers with steely nerves and unmatched skill, true heroes of their Age. They are, literally and consciously, adventurers, and this fully informs the view of both themselves and the world around them. Because of that, their motivation is never in doubt or has to be hand-waved away – Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser will always behave “heroically” in their stories, because they are (and they KNOW they are) the “heroes.” Of course, they’re also very well-developed characters, with Leiber writing with very clearly defined characters in mind.

Mechanically, their interactions are also interesting – so many great S&S stories are centered around hard-bitten lone wolf types, which by necessity means that there tends not to be too much interiority on display with the main characters – Conan is almost always an enigma, really, and we as readers rarely get to see WHY and HOW he’s deciding on what he wants to do. That limitation is why the best Conan stories all have a secondary character that interacts with Conan, questions him, gets him to explain himself and his plans, etc. With Leiber, there’s no need for that – he’s given us two characters that are intimately bound together, and who are always very consciously playing a part for both themselves and one another. Leiber, son of actors and an actor himself (as well as someone very interested literarily in Elizabethean dramas) has made a very conscious, very deliberate decision in the way he portrays these two, and it lets him generate these interesting and fun bits of dialog and scenarios, like we’re seeing here.

The Mouser, always (and often hilariously) the more hot-headed of the two of them, cools himself sufficiently to agree that they should at least be PREPARED to meet with some resistance in attacking the Thieves’ Guildhall directly. This is wise, because they are immediately confronted with sneaky ambushes! Each of them neutralizes the other’s threats in kind, which is another neat little benefit of having two equal participants in the adventure as your protagonists. Then, menaced from the street, the pair are forced to head deeper into the Guild’s inner chambers where, strangely, they meet no further resistance; it’s almost like something has happened, and these two are just stumbling into it. But what else can they do? They make there way to Krovas’s rooms, hoping to find Fissif and the stolen skull there.

The red-haired woman flees through a secret door, taking the skull and locking the passage behind her. Frustrated in their pursuit, our two heroes are busy contemplating the barred passage behind thick curtains when, suddenly, Fafhrd remembers Krovas, who they left, oddly motionless and oddly complexioned, at the desk in the room. They approach him slowly and with needless caution for, of course, he’s dead, mysteriously strangled to death. This puts it a crimp in the Mouser’s half-formed plan of holding Krovas hostage in order to escape, something of immediate concern because now they hear voices approaching! They sneak behind the curtains just as a bunch of cutthroats arrive, including the betrayer Fissif and another thief they recognize as Slevyas, the #2 in the Guild. But something is going down – the thieves are all nervous and seemingly scared, and Fissif is in deep shit with Slevyas, who demands to know where the Jeweled Skull is.

Slevyas orders a Thief’s Trial of Fissif, whom he obviously believes has betrayed the Guild and connived with Fafhrd and The Mouser to steal the skull for themselves. It’s a fun bit of formal procedure that really hammers home the bureaucratic nature of the Thieves’ Guild. We get a nice little scene summarizing the mission, including some fun bits where our heroes get to hear themselves talked about graciously, and Fissif gets to reiterate what happened – the fuckin’ skull killed Krovas! Judgment is postponed, however, when a thief runs in to let Sleyvas know that the watchers on the roof haven’t seen ANYBODY leave…which means Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are STILL in the building!

I mean, what a great image, huh? The drapes billowing out, the onrushing Mouser and Fafhrd leaping into action, it’s very dramatic! But of course, you don’t get to be a Master Thief without learning a few tricks; Sleyvas is nimble as a cat, and he ducks and dodges and avoids Fafrhd’s murderous blow. The whole room is in chaos, but Fissif throws a knife at Fafrhd, bonking him on the head with the pommel and muddling the poor barbarian mightily as he and the Mouser dart out the door and into the labyrinthine interior of the Guild Hall.

The Mouser knows the layout, so he leads them in their flight, pursuit hot on their heels. Fafhrd’s head is just starting to clear when he bonks it again against a low doorframe – he’s having a rough night. Fuddled again with a severe head injury, he stumbles one way, leaving the Mouser behind to face an assailant on his own (which he handily dispatches). But the rest of the thieves are hot on his heels, and he splits, heading in a different direction than Fafhrd.

We cut to poor Fafhrd, stumbling around with a concussion – he’s been sick and is having trouble ordering events, and he feels at least three lumps on his head as he bumbles his way through what must be a disused and forgotten deep cellar in the Thieves’ HQ. At some point he stumbles of a secret passage. Everything is dusty and strangely hot, and he’s got no light, instead crawling around blindly, prey to the sorts of weird illusions you get if you’ve ever spent anytime in pure lightless dark. He seems to catch a strange, sepulchral scent, a sort of tomb-ish spiciness, and there are strange whirring things in the air and around his head, bats presumably. It’s very spooky and claustrophobic and unearthly.

Bone bats! That’s great, isn’t it?

Fafhrd then catches another sound, and when he shouts he hears from the echoes that he has come upon a very large chamber of some sort. And he’s not alone!

Great, weird scene, with Fafhrd in the dark, unable to see anything, and yet obviously able to be seen by whatever is in the tomb with him. Already we the readers have a sense of what these things are, of course: the spicy, dry, hot air has primed us for tombs or crypts, and the undead skeletal bats flitting around have got us in a very necromantic frame of mind too, so there’s little surprise that these sepulchral voices are the undead liches of long dead Master Thieves, compatriots of the late Ohmphal. Long ago they demanded the return of the lost skull, and their dark sorcery informs them that Fafhrd was one of the three who HAD finally done as they wished…though of course, he hasn’t brought the skull back with him. And that’s a problem:

Justifiably spooked, Fafhrd flees wildly off into the dark, charged (on pain of horrible death) with returning the skull by next midnight! And then, having escaped the secret tomb and finally making his way back to the dusty cellars, Fafhrd gets one more traumatic brain injury when he gets bonked on the head by Fissif, who was skulking around down there. Fafhrd is brought before Sleyvas and, seeing as how he doesn’t have the skull, the Thieves decide that that means the Mouser MUST have it…so they make some plans and send a message to the Mouser, who is waiting in vain for his friend back at their favorite bar, the Silver Eel:

The bar scene is a fun one – Leiber is interested in all the little background stuff happening in his fantasy city, really just as much as the main action, and so every scene is populated by these fun little vignettes that do so much to enrich the world he’s created. The drunken soldiers, the barkeep, the squalid surroundings, it’s a lot of fun. And then, of course, when we have to get back to the Real Action, Leiber doesn’t dissapoint; the line “we will begin to kill the Northerner” is really great, a grim and brutal threat of torture and eventual death. It’s fun!

Of course, the Mouser is in a bit of a bind here, what with not actually having the Skull of Ohmphal. But, being the Mouser, he’s got a very cunning plan.

We smash cut back to the misty, murky streets of Lankhmar, where a little old lady is making her way slowly and carefully towards the house where a certain red-haired woman lives. There’re, again, more great scenes of the city and the people in it, and some fun interactions between them as this frail old woman picking her way through the dark. Finally, the old woman reaches her destination:

Thus does the Mouser, disguised as a mysterious and witchy old woman, gains entrance to the fortress-like House of Ivlis!

The whole scene between the Mouser and Ivlis is really fun, as our hero tries to bluff his way into her confidence and trick her into betraying the location of the Skull. He also notices the signs of a secret door at the back of the room, presumably one that connects with the Thieves’ Guild next door, a very handy thing for him what with midnight coming on. It’s always fun when the Mouser goes into full on theatrical mode, and Leiber is having fun here, making his character revel in every lie and trick as he wrangles what he needs out of the besieged Ivlis. Equally fun is when the Mouser overplays his hand, which happens when he screams out about smelling the bones of a dead man; Ivlis glances up at an unlit lamp on the wall, but the Mouser’s triumphant look betrays him. There’s a brief, silent struggle, but the Mouser succeeds in overpowering and tying up Ivlis, and claiming the Skull from it’s hiding place!

Smash cut back to the Thieves Guide, where a water clock is dripping its way to midnight; Fafhrd, tied up in a chair, is surrounded by grim thieves who, when midnight comes round, will begin to kill him slowly and painfully. But while they’re waiting, Sleyvas is browbeating his underlings, one of whom got perilously close to the horrible tombs below the guildhall.

The strange events, the uncanny halls beneath the guild that none knew about, the strange marks on the late Krovas’s neck…all of these things are beginning to spook the thieves a bit. And, like a good skald, Fafhrd seizes on the moment to both perform some Northern Tale-Telling AND buy himself some time:

Fun stuff – Sword & Sorcery is sometimes accused of being overly reliant on physicality and violence, and while Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser certainly slaughter their fair share of mooks, you can ALSO see the way Leiber highlights their wits and, in particular, their ability to perform as part of their heroic repertoire. The Mouser’s disguise as a Wise Woman, and now Fafhrd’s skaldic recitation of his adventure in the crypt are just as much moments of heroism and derring-do as any fight or scramble up a cliff, for instance, and Leiber (who again was himself an actor) revels in them. It’s a real fun part of these stories, both a part of their charm AS WELL AS a key to understanding their importance to the development of the genre.

Anyway, Fafhrd has totally captured the attention of his audience with his grim tale of undead horror deep beneath this very guildhall! The water clock has long since run out, and yet they have let him continue talking, and they don’t even notice the slight skritching and scratching coming from the wall behind the curtains.

ANOTHER performance, this time from The Mouser who, having snuck back into the hall via the secret passage in Ivlis’s room, is now pretending to be the ghost of Ohmphal come to pronounce judgement on them all! It’s really fun, particularly in the way the Mouser/Ohmphal engineers Fafhrd’s release, which has all the hallmarks of a hasty improvisation:

I mean, c’mon, that’s fun! And, spooked all to hell as they are, the thieves comply, cutting Fafhrd’s bonds and sending him forward. But, before he can reach the safety of the curtain, there’s an animal scream of rage from the curtains, which begin billowing and flapping, as if some great struggle were happening. Ivlis has broken her bonds and followed the Mouser down the hall, and now she (and her guards) have attacked him!

And then all hell breaks loose! The thieves attack, the bodyguards attack, Ivlis attacks, our Heroes attack, everybody is whomping on everybody, though shortly Ivlis (and her last remaining guard) side with Fafhrd and the Mouser when they see that they are being attacked by Sleyvas and the thieves. There’s dead and wounded everywhere, but the thieves are more numerous and things look grim for our heroes when, suddenly:

But Slevyas is a staunch materialist, right to the end:

But no one does follow Slevyas, and he alone charges in, meeting Fafhrd and the Mouser in battle. A furious combat ensues, though one curiously quiet and lonely – for the rest of the thieves have shrunk back against the wall in silent fear!

A grim doom has descended on the thieves!

And then, we reach the end of the story:

And that’s the end of Fritz Leiber’s “Thieves’ House,” from 1943.

It’s a blast; Leiber is such a fun writer, and he’s got a very strong hand on the tiller in these stories, writing them exactly the way he wants and producing exactly the sort of effect he’s looking for, I think. Now, some people I’ve spoken to find Leiber, and his S&S stories in particular, a little too self-aware for their tastes, and that’s fine – the heart wants what it wants, after all. But you can’t deny that Leiber succeeds in doing exactly what he wants to do with these stories, even if they’re not to your particular taste.

Of course, I think that while it’s true that Leiber was certainly aware of the genre he was writing in (even if it didn’t have a name yet) and was, in fact, often commenting on it, he’s also sincerely writing excellent adventure stories about two very interesting characters. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are spectacular fantasy protagonists, rough and ready but also very much interested in having a good time and cultivating a myth about themselves while they do it. In fact, so much of the fun in these stories comes from the way both characters are constantly trying to reassure themselves and each other that they are truly real life heroic adventurers in a world of sorcery and peril. There’s an existential quality to these two that’s fairly rare in the world of fantasy fiction – they are constantly evaluating themselves, interrogating their place in their world in relation to this Ideal Adventurer. Often, the comedy in the series comes from them twisting themselves in knots as they try to JUSTIFY their less-than-heroic actions within this same S&S hero framework. They’re just a lot of fun, and it’s something that I think the genre would benefit from if more writers today tried to emulate Leiber’s approach.

I mentioned above that this story also seems to be the first to introduce the idea of a thieves’ guild into the genre. This is a pretty big deal, one of those huge gravitational sort of pulls that end up dominating the genre, to the point that they’re kind of invisible and taken for granted. The idea that there is a craft guild of criminals operating within a fantasy city is a huge part of the genre’s landscape, providing a lot of narrative potential energy as well as giving writers the chance to engine in some light mafia-style highjinks if they want to. With respect to fantasy TTRPG’s this story, like so much of Leiber’s fantasy, is absolutely foundational – imagine D&D or WFRP without Thieves’ Guilds; it can’t be done!

Now, I don’t know where exactly ol’ Fritz got the idea for his Thieves’ Guild; as far I know no one has every found a letter or notes or anything where he explained its origin. In some ways, it might just be a natural outgrowth of his obviously somewhat skewed and satirical approach to Lankhmar – the idea of a guild of criminals is a funny, weird idea, and it fits perfectly in with the other absurdities he’d go on to invent for his secondary world of Nehwon.

HOWEVER, to me, I can’t help but see the shadow of Cervantes here, particularly from his short story Riconete y Cortadillo which is about two extremely self-important and self-aggrandizing thieves who meet on the road, become fast friends and devoted comrades, and then are inducted into an extremely ridiculous and comedically bureaucratic Thieves’ Guild in the great port city of Seville. In particular, it’s interesting to me how, in Leiber’s story, the Guild starts out atheistic and materialistic, only to end up deeply religious and cultish about their Dead Masters deep in the Tombs beneath the Guildhall; in Cervantes’ story, the Guild is rife with superstitions and complex rituals, like all good secret societies. That Leiber would’ve been familiar with the story seems extremely likely; after all, he was a devoted lover of that era’s literature, and if you’re going to read any 17th century Spanish lit in translation, you’ll certainly be familiar with THE MOST FAMOUS WRITER OF THAT PLACE AND TIME. I know that Fafhrd and the Mouser were modeled on Leiber and his pal (and cocreator of Lankhmar) Harry Fischer, but I think there’s a lot of Rincon and Cortado in the two, particularly in their ridiculous grandiloquence and self-conceit, as well as in their deep loyalty to one another. Anyway, it’s interesting, and if true it puts Cervantes in the lineage of Sword & Sorcery’s deep ancestors, which I really like.

But, regardless, I think this is a very fun story, and it’s importance in the history of the genre can’t be denied. A good way to start of the Yule Season’s S&S, I think!

Straining the Folk Horror Pulp #39: “The Wishing-Well” by E.F. Benson, Weird Tales v14, n.1, 1929

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Hallowe’en eve, so why not take a break from building your wicker men or hanging thorny wreaths from the old Druid Oak to read some more pulp weird fic! And it’s a fun, haunting one today: “The Wishing-Well” by E.F. Benson, from the July 1929 issue of Weird Tales!

Looking back at the previous Hallowe’en flavored Pulp Strainers this time around, it kind of seems like I’ve been on a Classic Monsters kick, for the most part. Ghosts and Vampires and scary Subway Ghouls; it’s been a regular mash, or perhaps bash, around here. And who am I to buck against the momentum we’ve been building up? So, having reflected on the previous stories, I decided I wanted to do a witchy one today, and after careful consideration (’cause there’s a LOT of ’em out there!) I landed on this story by E.F. Benson, a particular favorite story from a particularly good writer.

Now, I’m a weird fiction guy – I love it strange, I love it confusing, I love the peek through the crack in reality that the genre strives for. So what the heck are we doin’ focusing on TradMonsters like ghosts and witches, you may be asking? I mean, didn’t Lovecraft chuck all the tired old cliches out the window? After all, as the Old Gent said, Weird fiction is “more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule.” So where do these matinee monsters fit in?

Well, Lovecraft actually kind of answers that in the very next sentence in his “Supernatural Horror in Literature” essay: successful weird fiction is characterized by a “certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces.” In other words, the problem isn’t yer wolfmans and draculas per se…it’s the hackneyed and trite conventions around them that turn a horror story into a dull, rote recitation of banal familiarity. Even the most overused horror mook has SOME kind of vein of weirdness that can be mined – take Lovecraft’s own “The Dreams in the Witch House,” complete with a cackling crone and satanic pacts and sabbaths, and you’ll see that it is possible to take a stock Halloween character and turn them into something interesting and strange and truly weird. And I think that’s the case in today’s story too, which takes a very thoughtful and modern approach to witchcraft.

Which is par for the course for our author today. E.F. Benson was a writer not only of spook-em-ups, but of “society” literature, essays, and biographies as well – he was extremely prolific, with hundreds of short stories to this name. He was also gay, a fact that is relevant when reading his work, which often have either subtextual gay relationships in them or, more broadly, deal with themes of romantic and social alienation. There’re a lot of outsiders in his stories, particularly in his ghost/horror/weird stories, as we’ll see shortly.

While he’s fairly well represented in anthologies, particularly those published in England, he’s probably most well known today among weird fictioneers because Lovecraft singled him out for specific praise in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature:”

That’s high praise, and well deserved, I think; Benson could, when he wanted to, get pretty weird, occasionally producing some truly otherworldly and alien monsters. The weird Hell Slug in “Negotium Perambulans” would be a worthy addition to the mythos, I’ve always said (and it seems like it was a huge influence on Brian Lumley, who had a darkness generating extradimensional slug in some of his Titus Crow stories).

But, even when ol’ Benson WASN’T going all cosmic, I think he still had a streak of the Outside about him, you know? Even in his most conventional ghost story, there’s always a hint that there were deep shadows both within people and outside in the wider world, and I think that’s what I like about the story we’re going to talk about today.

But first, lets take a peep at the cover and the ToC!

An excellent Senf this time, very weird and menacing. Love the corpse-white lady contrasted with the riot of colors, and the sneaky lil’ feller on the left, leering and with dagger drawn, is fun – it’s all very lurid and decadent, a perfect Weird Tales cover in my opinion. As for the ToC:

Quinn and Whitehead are probably the Big Names on here if you were a fan in ’29 reading the magazine – both of them were popular, though they can be tough reading these days (Whitehead because of the uncomfortable paternalism and exoticism of his “voodoo tales,” Quinn because the Jules de Grandin stories are just not that good). There are some interesting oddities in here, though! Hamilton writing a “planet story,” the sort of thing that would eventually get shifted over to the science fiction pulps once they get a little more firmly established. There’s the poems, including some vintage REH, but there’s also a very strange little story by Lt. Edgar Gardiner, “The Cruise of the Vega,” which is an enjoyable little bit of metafictive fun, ostensibly an essay written by Gardiner about his hugely lucrative and wildly popular novel “The Cruise of the Vega” (which isn’t real, of course) and the REAL story of how he came by the tale. It’s fun, and speaks both the inventiveness of writers at the time and the fact that the genre has always been playful about itself and the writing profession.

But enough! On to the story!!

A great title illustration by the inimitable Hugh “Doak” Rankin! It’s a great, atmospheric piece, beautiful shadows and light, and the slightly translucent specter getting smooched, coupled with the creepy line from the story, is basically perfect. Points also for not giving anything away in the story! Rankin was one of the big interior illustrators, and did important work on Lovecraft and Howard stories, among others, so it’s fun to see him here too!

Our story opens with a very Dunwich-ian geographic summary, situating us on the Cornish Moors and in the tiny, out-of-the-way, remote little village of St. Gervase. People don’t come to the town, and those in the town seldom leave it. It’s mostly cut off from the world, and the people of St. Gervase like it that way:

Yes indeed, it seems there was, and perhaps still are, followers of The Old Ways in town here, hedge witches and wise women, part of a long matrilineal tradition of secret knowledge. Of course, every light casts its shadow, and for all the healing and wisdom, there’s also a darker cast to these powers, a tradition of affliction and evil that is, apparently spoken of only in one house in St. Gervase. And what house is that?

That’s right, St. Gervase has a very M.R. Jamesean vicar, a bookish and independently wealthy scholar who, in between some light preaching and bake sales, has become an academic authority on magic and folklore and witchcraft.

What’s fun about this character is that, while he’s this vaunted authority on witches who lives in a town with a vibrant and apparently thriving witch scene, he’s curiously removed from the living tradition in St. Gervase. He knows of the history of the town, and even apparently has some reports from locals on older traditions, but (as we’ll see) he is one of those academically informed types who can’t seem to see the forest for the trees. His patriarchal (and paternalistic) view of the world has cut him off from the cultural underground that is, quite literally, all around him.

But you know who IS making use of all of the Good Reverend’s research? His spinster daughter (she’s 40, and unmarried) and unpaid research assistant, Judith!

There’s some fun writing, just above this except, where Benson is taking pains to really situate Judith in the Cornish landscape of St. Gervase. He’s also interested in taking pains to explicate her complicated relationship to the town and the people and her own life – she has been isolated “from her own class” and, therefore, never had any serious prospects for marriage or a life outside of her Father’s home, and while that has (and does) engender some bitterness in her, for all that she IS in love with the town and the land and the strange undercurrents of older, matriarchal traditions and knowledge (as we’ll see).

The bitterness in Judith might be stronger than even she realizes, however – without putting too fine a point on it, Benson takes some pains to really show how Judith is absolutely fascinated by the darker, more retributive side of the magical lore that her old dad is researching. And now, down through the months and months, she was taking dictation from him on his researches about wishing-wells, and in particular, the famous Well of St. Gervase!

Rev. Euster’s helpfully expository declamations tell us that the best and most famous of these strange, satanic wells is in St. Gervase and that its power is still respected, though of course no one in town actually uses it these days. With regards to this, however, Judith knows better:

The shift from the landscape to the Reverend and then, finally, to his daughter Judith as the main character of the story is a neat little trick, a very fun way to sink the reader deeper and deeper into the story, as well as providing a sense of nice, comfortable disorientation, which of course is one of the pleasurable aspects of weird fiction. The uncertainty of the direction of the story, even as we begin to get little glimmers of familiar witchy-ness here and there, is an extremely masterful touch, part of Benson’s strength as a writer.

Judith, her head full of her father’s research of wishing-wells, heads on out into the countryside to visit a particular acquaintance, a Mrs. Penarth, who we quickly learn is something of a wise woman, indeed may have been The Wise Woman in St. Gervase, because in addition to her fame as a healer, also seems to have been the only person in town not afraid of Old Sally Trenair, the spooky witch we were introduced to earlier. In fact:

We also learn that Mrs. Penarth has a strapping son named Steven who has just returned from overseas. Judith remembers him as a boy, and is interested to see the kind of man he’s become, though the main reason for her visit is to pick the brain of Mrs. Penarth about the scholarly materials she’s been learning about at her father’s side.

On her walk there, Benson gives us some good description of Judith who, for lack of a better word, sounds hot as hell:

I call out this particular bit of description for a couple of reasons. First, it’s interesting to see Benson making sure we’re not thinking of Judith as mousy or shabby or a shrinking violet – she’s tall, she’s robust, she’s vital and active and sharp. That’s important to the story because otherwise, if she were this drab little thing, the tale becomes rather conventional and uninteresting. Instead, there’s a real sense of Judith as a forceful personality with an, if not imposing, then at least vibrant presence. Also interesting is the bit about the eyes – the slight inward turning as both a physical AND mental aspect, and not as a disfigurement, but rather as simply a part of who Judith is, warts and all.

The second reason I bring it up is because, as a writer myself, I generally eschew descriptions of characters (except for my villains, who are almost uniformly towheaded aryans) because as a reader I usually find them boring and pointless. Here’s a good example of a description used well, though – Benson is DOING something in the story with Judith’s physical description, in the same way as he was DOING something with the shift from the landscape of St. Gervase to the Reverend to, finally, Judith. It’s a very neat writerly trick, and speaks to Benson’s mastery.

Anyway, Judith arrives at the Penarth’s and find Mrs. Penarth knitting (a perfectly witchy activity, putting together the threads of fate and all) on her front steps.

Good bit of Cornish cadence, I reckon, and an immediate sense that Mrs. Penarth is as wily and cunning as we’ve been lead to believe – the bit about being hatless and making friends of the sun and wind is just perfect. And then, to really hammer home Judith’s somewhat protean nature (and her need to belong), we get the next bit:

It’s already been mentioned that Judith is of a different class than the native St. Gervasers; it’s why she never married, after all, and you can bet that the Ol’ Rev never slips into a Cornish accent around the house.

Judith’s mentioning of the death of Old Sally Trenair brings up a sly remark from Mrs. Penarth:

Perfect, perfect, perfect; just such a smooth and unobtrusive way to paint Mrs. Penarth as knowing certain things and secrets, and seeing in Judith a similar yearning. It’s really great. And, of course, it also efficiently serves the interests of the story, for we get another bit of exposition about the Well, though unlike the removed and scholarly musing of her father, Mrs. Penarth knows of which she speaks:

Mrs. Penarth’s quick-n-dirty user’s guide to wishing-wells is interrupted by the arrival of Steven, and goddamn if he didn’t grow up hunky as hell. Judith is immediately smitten with this big blonde slab of corned beef. Between her learning some pretty startling things about the Wishing-Well in town and meeting Steven Penarth, her brain is all a-bubblin’ like a witch’s cauldron.

After an evening of dictation, she takes a nighttime walk through the village, the air sultry and the sky overcast. She gets a little thrill when she catches sight of Steven walking into town. When he’s out of sight, she turns into the churchyard where the wishing-well yawns in the dark. Beyond it, she catches sight of Sally Trenair’s freshly filled grave:

The spirit of the old witch IS there, “friendly and sisterly and altogether evil.” I mean, how is that for a turn of phrase, huh? Helluva writer, ol E.F. Benson, and the way he’s building this atmosphere of mystery and deep, earthy magic, it’s just really incredible, isn’t it? Judith drinks from the occult well, and is granted a glimpse of the ghost of Sally:

Judith’s fear seems to banish the ghost, and the horror of her vision of the dead haunts her for a few days – she seems to be both annoyed that she, perhaps, squandered her chance to commune with something powerful, and also a bit trepidatious about her glimpse beyond the veil.

She throws herself into the banalities of day to day life in order to find some respite, and in particular begins to make subtle efforts to come into contact with Steven Penarth, making sure she’s out gardening when he delivers milk, for instance. As music director of her father’s church choir she starts singling out Steven for praise, and also seems to have taken a jealous dislike to a pretty young villager by the name of Nance. Judith takes to calling on the Penarth farm more and more, no more merely seeking Mrs. Penarth’s witchy wisdom but also hoping to catch Steven at home. It’s clear that Judith thinks she’s being very clever and discrete, but Benson makes sure we get the hint with a phrase rich with double meaning: “In a hundred infinitesimal ways she betrayed herself.” Because not only is she being insanely obvious with her infatuation, but she is also, step by step, moving towards Doing Something about it:

Judith makes her way to the churchyard and the Well, but just as she arrives she comes across something Fateful:

Oof, right? Sad stuff, and embarrassing as hell too, to find out that all your clever dissembling was seen through immediately. The part about Mrs. Penarth laughing at her is particularly bitter, isn’t it? And then, to hear Steven propose marriage to Nance after all that? Well, it’s a grim moment for poor ol’ Judith.

Grim and spooky stuff! Judith takes the slip of paper to the churchyard and the wishing-well, and feels the tide of her power rising:

I mean, what a great bit of writing, murky and grim and just freighted with occult power, isn’t it? The ghost that appears before her now is a rotting, decayed thing, appropriate for the use to which Judith plans to put its power. And how about that smooch that seals the deal? Honestly an incredible image!

Say what you will about the dark powers of the earth, but they fuckin’ deliver, man! Right away, next morning, it’s not Steven who delivers the fresh produce to the vicarage, but his mother, Mrs. Penarth. Seems poor lil Stevey is feeling a bit under the weather, real shame that, what with his marriage to Nance coming up and all.

Judith had leaned into her Evil Sorceress phase, but we the reader see the fatal flaw in her plan – as we learned, there were Two witches in town, and the stronger of them is not only still around, but also the mother of Judith’s victim. Oh, and also, SHE WAS THE ONE WHO TAUGHT YOU ABOUT THE POWER OF THE WELL!!! So, of course, as a canny and wise witch, Mrs. Penarth lies in wait in the churchyard, to see if someone hasn’t been screwing around with forces they can’t comprehend.

Steven is almost immediately better, while Judith, with similar alacrity, starts wasting away. She feels the dark power that had filled her being drained away too, taking her life with it. Even the ghost of Old Sally is taken from her, leaving her weak and alone and dying. Steven is back to delivering the milk, and asking after Judith’s health on behalf of his mother. Judith doesn’t understand what’s happening – has she missed some important step in the spell, or failed to fulfil some expected action, and that is why she is now being afflicted by the curse she had laid on Steven. Only one thing for it – gotta check on the well, and the slip of paper she had put there. Stumblingly, she makes her way to well, and when she gets there, she finds Mrs. Penarth!

And that’s the end of “The Wishing-Well” by E.F. Benson!

Potent stuff, huh? Mrs. Penarth’s vengeance is swift and terrible, something poor ol’ Judith might’ve expected given the well known history between her and Ol’ Sally. And while sure, she DID try to kill someone through dark sorcery, you can’t help but feel a little bad about Judith’s end, you know? The solitude and longing and shame of her life – Benson makes us see all that, makes it a deep part of Judith’s being, and there’s a real pitiful quality to it. Particularly so, now that I think about it, because as was established at the beginning of the story, witchcraft was a passed down mother to daughter, a tradition of secret knowledge held by women; Mrs. Penarth had a son, though, so to whom was she expecting to pass on the wisdom and power of the strongest witch in St. Gervase? Sure does seem like she was maybe sounding out poor Judith for the role, doesn’t it, the way she was quick to spot something intriguing in her questioning and the way her mind worked, as well as her willingness to share the lore and traditions with her. It kind of explains her obvious anger at Judith – not only has she attacked her son, but she also has betrayed her, trying to use the little knowledge she had been given in such an irresponsible and dangerous way.

The view of witchcraft in fiction today is almost uniformly a feminist one, and there’s a strong thread of that in this story from 1929: witchcraft as a tradition of women of course, but also in the way Judith, though seemingly content, has been denied a full life by the patriarchal class-based rigidity of society. Furthermore, the breakdown of the relationship between Judith and Mrs. Penarth, one that would have had full consummation in the sharing of witchy tradition, is brought about by the advent of a conventional marriage, with Judith trying to corrupt it and Mrs. Penarth trying to preserve it.

This feminist reading of witchcraft is one taken up by a lot of modern “folk horror” (a term I’m not enamored with, but oh well), which makes for an interesting tension because, of course, the other major axis in folk horror is almost always something along the line of Deep Tradition. That kind of battle between empowerment and traditional gender roles makes for some unique frisson in works of that sort, and I think that’s something at work here – Judith’s desire for liberation undone by her rage at the most conventional expression of heteronormativity.

Benson’s interest in women and their role in society is well documented; his novel “Dodo” (and its sequels) is all about an Edwardian proto-flapper spitfire and the ways one can twist and wiggle through society’s hoops to get what one wants. There is some biographical aspect to this, I reckon; as mentioned above, Benson was gay, but ALSO of a social and economic class that, while not necessarily allowing him to live openly, did give him a certain freedom to quietly and politely live his life without being arrested. In other words, he wasn’t exactly closeted – it was more of a don’t ask, don’t tell kind of gentlemen’s agreement where everybody (within that stratum of society) knew he was gay but had the good taste not to mention it, and he reciprocated by not wearing it on his sleeve.

This kind of fluidity and ambiguity is something that Benson explores in a lot of his fiction, and it makes this particular story an interesting one – he’s really captured something in Judith’s lonely outsider status, a woman seemingly resigned to her life rather than liberated by it. There’s also a simple parable about the destructive nature of both sexual inexperience and infatuation here – in a lot of ways, Judith is an incel, isn’t she? She’s been forced (by society) into spinsterhood, and then when her affection isn’t reciprocated, she fuckin’ tries to kill the guy with evil magic!

The sheer amount of off-the-cuff musing going on here just speaks to how great of a writer Benson is, I think – his stories are always full of interesting little threads and diversions, stuff you can mull over and pick at and think about long after you’ve finished reading, the sign of great fiction. And on a mechanical level, he’s worthy of emulation too, I think – the deftness of his characterizations, the structure of his plotting, the way he sets a scene and efficiently cuts through to the heart of the matter with a short, sharp line, all of it is just spot on. Too, his ability to construct legitimate bit of witchcraftiness without getting bogged down in detail is admirable. He’s one of my favorite writers, and I think this witchy little tale is a great bit of weird fiction, and a good way to celebrate Hallowe’en!

Sowing the Pulp, Straining the Whirlwind #38! “The Scythe” by Ray Bradbury, Weird Tales v.36 n.12, 1943

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We’re in the home stretch for Hallowe’en now, so lets try and get some good chilling pulp fiction discussions going on, shall we? It’s nice here in Austin now, too – we finally got some rain, our first in like forty days, and in addition to filling up the rain tanks (we’ve got about 950 gallons of water storage now, which we put in right as the drought started, so it’s nice to finally have it full!) it has also gotten almost seasonable – low 70s as I write this, with overnight temps promising to hit crisp 60s and 50s. Not really what most people think of when we start talkin’ October country and all, but by Satan, I’ll take it!

The sudden shift to Fall(ish) weather and thoughts of The Season inspired the choice of stories today: it’s from the Mayor of October Country himself, Ray Bradbury, and his fun, mythopoetical story “The Scythe” from the July 1943 issue of Weird Tales!

Bradbury, of course, needs no introduction – a truly major figure in sci-fi, and he’s one of the rare genre guys it’s ok for your Very Serious Literary Types to praise, fer chrissake, someone who gets a pass for writing imaginative fiction because it’s got such heart and verve and style. And it’s all very justified; Bradbury is one of the greats (though Fahrenheit 451 sucks), and he’d be rightly numbered among the Titans for The Martian Chronicles, easily one of the greatest short story collections in history, a true masterpiece. And, while he’s often remembered mostly as a sci-fi guy, he’s also got some serious Weird Fic chops too (I’d argue that’s why his sci-fi was so successful, actually; there’s a vital strain of weirdness, and all that implies, when he’s writing about Martians, for instance)!

In fact, Bradbury got his start in the pages of Weird Tales, writing something like 20 or 25 stories between 1942 and 1948, if I remember correctly. This is all post-Wright, of course, and I think Bradbury benefited from Dorothy McIllwraith’s tenure as Editor; his weird fic seems to fit nicely into her vision of the genre, I think, a slightly sentimental (though rarely sappy) atmosphere shot through with real glimmers of coal-black darkness. And, of course, Bradbury’s first collection, Dark Carnival, was published by August Derleth’s Arkham House in 1947. That’s what you call a serious Weird pedigree!

(As an aside, if you’re interested in a great and extremely granular biography of ol’ Ray, I’d highly recommend John Eller’s THREE VOLUME biography from University of Illinois Press, Becoming Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury Unbound, and Bradbury Beyond Apollo. They’re great, very interesting and with considerable attention to the details of his papers, correspondence, and archives, as well as putting his work and life in important historical contexts. I will say, though, that you should be prepared for Bradbury’s extremely bad politics, particularly later in life – he was a Reagan fan and was extremely anti-affirmative action, basically your bog standard boot-straps-and-elbow-grease small gov’t libertarian, not as ugly or as bad as, say Niven, but still dumb as hell! It’s shocking, until you start thinking about his deep nostalgia for midwestern childhood. Oh well!)

Anyway, let’s look at this issues cover and ToC:

A quiet, contemplative cover for this July 1943 issue, particularly interesting given the date that this issue came out. The cover is for the Bedford-Jones story, “His Last Appearance,” and it posits an old soldier returning to the Pacific theater after the end of World War II. Of course, in 1943, WWII was still raging, with the siege of Stalingrad finally coming to an end, the beginning of the long brutal retreat of the Nazis westward, and the start of Allied plans for the invasion of Europe at the Casablanca conference. For Americans, WWII didn’t start until the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in Dec 1941, and the war in the Pacific had been a long and brutal one in ’42, with the Fall of Manila and rapid Japanese advances in a number of places, including the Aleutians. But here we are, in 1943, with a story that is already imagining the war over!

It’s interesting to see the way the war was being interrogated in the public sphere and within the pages of the speculative fiction magazines at the time, imagining an end to the war and return to a more “normal” status quo in the near future. What’s missing from all these stories, of course, are the horrific specificities of future history, death camps and the Holocaust, V2 rockets and the Atomic Bomb, and the global detente of the Cold War. It makes for fascinating reading, glimpses into how people are grappling with such dramatic and profound events and changes. The Pulps give you a chance to really see the world and the people at very specific times, and they’re just fascinating!

As for the ToC:

The big story here is Bloch’s “Yours Truly – Jack the Ripper,” probably one of his best and most famous stories. Bloch by this point in his career has basically exorcised Lovecraft from his work, having found his own style, tone, and topics of interest outside of the shadow of the Old Gent. Bloch’s “Ripperverse” work is an important part in his career, both because it laid the groundwork for his intensely psychological interest in murderers/serial killers, but also because it would lead his to write “A Toy for Juliette” in Harlan Ellison’s epochal anthology Dangerous Visions; so taken with the story was Ellison that he would write a sequel, “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World,” which he put in right after Bloch’s story in the collection. Anyway, it’s fun to see the beginnings of all that right here in Weird Tales!

Enough jibber-jabber, on to our story today, “The Scythe” by Ray Bradbury!

Look, the art in WT at this time…it ain’t what it used to be, okay? This is a perfectly evocative image, a little rough maybe, but it gets the job done I suppose. Still, makes you dream of the days of Finlay, don’t it? Also, I’ll just point out, that this is yet another example of the art giving too much away from the story; combined with the little blurb thing at the top of the pic, you definitely start this story with far too much information, in my opinion. Oh well! We’re used to it by now, but it’s still annoying as hell!

There’s no denying it – Bradbury knows what he’s doing. Great sudden in medias res opening here, and the short, percussive first sentence (“Quite suddenly there was no more road.”) is nigh on a perfect way to start the story, evocative and sharp and perfect, and a great lonely image. A road winding on through farmland, leading past trees and the stones and then a farmhouse and a wheatfield and then, as if it’s job were done, the road dies. Great, great stuff!

We’re introduced to some characters who might’ve escaped from the “Grapes of Wrath,” or maybe they’re just off-broad versions. “Tom Joerg” seems awfully close to “Tom Joad,” doesn’t it? And, like their Oakie comrades in Steinbeck’s book, they’re having a rough time of it, having followed this road that goes nowhere and running out of gas. A long-suffering wife and some hungry kids – that’s what you call prairie pathos, man.

What’s also interesting is that section there in the middle, where Tom starts looking at his hands. The writing is great of course (“farm blown out from under them” is a gem), but it also very specifically evokes the image of the dust bowl, doesn’t it? Now, while the droughts and soil loss and economic collapses continued into the 40s, it was even then very strongly associated with the 30s. Bradbury is priming us for the fact that, while this story was published in ’43, it probably took place earlier. The timeline is very important to this story, indeed is one of it’s major points, so we’re being prepped here. A neat bit of mechanical work, is my point, that Bradbury is doing here.

Starved, lost, and without anything else to do, Molly suggests to Tom that he head on up to the little farmhouse and see if they couldn’t spare a bite for the travelers. Tom swallows his pride and stumps on up to the house:

The knocking three times has some kind of mystical resonances, doesn’t it? There’s the trifold symmetry of time, Past-Present-Future, there, but there’s also a sense of “asking three times” being the amount that signifies contractual obligation in magical relationships. Anyway, Tom enters the house and his spidey-senses start tingling immediately. Sure enough, he finds a dead body, an old man clutching a single blade of ripe wheat and a scythe leaning against the wall. Weird as that is, Tom finds that the old man apparently anticipated his death, and left behind what amounts to a will:

A lot here! First, and of most immediate importance, is the fact that the Joerg’s are now landowners – the old man has bequeathed the house and land to whoever has found him. What would give me pause, of course, is the next bit, which comes off as a little weird: take the farm AND THE TASK ORDAINED THERETO, and take ’em freely and unquestioningly. That’s a magical compact right there, a binding of Joerg to the land and some unspecified job that has to be done.

Also, we get a date here – April 1939. Note it!

Tom seems a bit spooked, but he and Molly quickly accept this lucky twist of fate. They take the farm as offered, and plan to start living the good life there in the middle of nowhere.

Not quite sure what the economic benefit of growing a fast-dying/fast-sprouting variety of wheat is! Also, it’s planted on a vast scale, and it seems to ripen in weird, localized clusters or zones. But he seems driven to cut it!

It’s strange, and it makes me wonder how exactly the farm is supporting this family, but after a while Tom decides that this preternatural wheat can go fuck itself, and he decides to stop cutting it. How’s that work out for him, you ask? Well:

He took the farm, and with it the APPOINTED TASK which, apparently, is to cut the weird wheat, day in and day out, unceasingly. Or else! The details of the task elude him, save for the necessity of it, the necessity of cutting the grain down when and where it is ripe in this strange stretch of field, not harvesting, not tilling, not planting, just cutting it down as it comes up, over and over again, letting it sprout and grow where and when it does. Extremely strange and mythic, isn’t it? And then, when he’s harvesting, he suddenly has a very strange, very mysterious reveleation:

Great writing, the sudden vertiginous sense of disorder and confusion that Tom feels is very ably conveyed to the reader – what is going on? Why’s he freaking out now? Tom runs into the house, half-panicked, but eventually he can get the words out to Molly:

Pretty spectacularly weird isn’t it – he’s literally a grim reaper, ending a thousand lives every time he cuts a single stalk of wheat in that uncanny field. It seems like maybe his exposure to the work has, slowly, given him insight into its nature, or maybe the fact that he had some relationship to one of the lives he just cut down has triggered his illumination, but it doesn’t matter – Molly thinks he’s nuts, and Tom knows he’s not. Molly tells him to shut up, that they’ve got a good thing going with this farm (I guess there must be other food crops, and a cow or two, so that’s how they’re eating?). And she reads the Bible at him all week, I guess trying to get him to settling down, until of course a telegram arrives letting Tom know his Mom DID die, on the very day that he had his wheat-based freak out.

Tom wants to leave, but Molly is made of sterner stuff. She shoots his California plan down and tells him that by God they’re staying right there, where they’ve got a home and food and future! And, realistically, what can Tom do – we (and he) must know that he’s made the deal, he’s accepted the job, and the job HAS to be done.

With a certain mid-western pragmatism, Tom begins to accept the inevitability of his task. He communes with the grave of his predecessor and contemplates the long-line of harvesters that must’ve come before him, down to prehistory. (As and aside, the idea of the Cro-Magnon harvester is funny and strange – so like, before agriculture there were cavemen forced to chop down the Magic Sheaves of Life and Death? It’s an odd, incongruous image, but one we’ll just have to forgive Bradbury for).

Now we’re getting into the real interesting part of the story – there’s a little musing here about what Tom’s relation to the Work is. He’s not KILLING the people, not maliciously – he’s just doing a job, taking care of his family. An interesting bit of ethics to consider, maybe, though Tom abandons it when he has the brain flash that, if he could find his and his family’s wheat stalks, why, could they live forever? I’m sure this magical wheat never considered that loophole before!

No sooner thought than answered – Molly and his kids’ time HAS come, he HAS to cut them down…and he can’t! He decides to fight fate!

Over supper Molly asks some questions about the wheat, even suggesting that Tom oughta call in the Extension boys from the local Ag Dept to have a look – what the hell good is this weird wheat that rots immediately, anyway? Tom is horrified – what might the GOV’T do with the Grain of Life and Death, after all? It’s a neat little part of the story, another of those little asides that Bradbury raises and which run a chill up and down the ol’ spine as you regard them in the story. It’s fun! Of course Tom is having no part of it. Molly doesn’t think the Wheat of Fate is real, but Tom KNOWS it is.

Grim stuff, and Tom again tries to abandon the work, locking up the Scythe and choosing to ignore the wheat…but then Molly begins to suffer from a strange kind of lassitude, and his kids seem to whither and fade a bit too, afflicted with a kind of odd malaise. He doesn’t know what will happen to them, or to the countless thousands he has refused to reap, but he’s going to wait and see…

…and of course he wakes in the middle of the night out in the field, with the scythe in his hand, being driven by a mad compulsion to DO THE JOB. He fights it, struggles mightily…

…and then the house fuckin’ blows up!

Horribly, Molly and Susie and Tom Junior AREN’T dead…they’re trapped behind horrible walls of flame a smoke between life and death, unresponsive, unaware, undying. It’s a horrible scene, and there’s some very fine writing here as Tom is forced to confront the implacable nature of Life and Death. He brings his family out onto the lawn, cold and sleeping beyond death, and realizes that he cannot abandon the task, that he cannot have a life anymore – he is the grim reaper.

Pretty horrible scene, isn’t it, the image of his family just out of sight screaming and dying as Tom, chained to the merciless scythe, cuts through the wheat in the night. Grim as hell!

There’s the significance of the date of the story coming around: 1939, and the beginning of the Second World War.

Is Tom *causing* it, do you think? Is he heedlessly cutting, maybe cutting more than he should, causing a horrible war and its aftermath out of his grief? Or is he simply, heedlessly, heeding the wheat, cutting madly because that is what has been Fated? It’s not clear, and that ambiguity is troubling and, of course, probably the point.

And as for Tom?

And that’s the end of “The Scythe” by Ray Bradbury!

Tom keeps on cutting – again, is he causing the accelerating deaths, the horror of modern warfare and conflict and imperialism and transnational capitalism, or is he merely the instrument of it, his feverish monomania and ceaseless toil a product of OUR horrible times?

It’s a nice little story, I think, and it really captures a very pure strain of myth that Bradbury often mined in his work. It’s also an interesting time capsule, a writer watching the world around him ending and reflecting on it, what it meant to him and society. A good reminder of the power and possibility of pulp literature!

Strained Pulp Page

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A quick note: I made a page where I’ll be able to chronologically list the pulp story dissection/free writing exercises I like to do, because it was getting impossible to either find or, in some case, even remember what stories I’d already done! So, anyway, you can see it here, with links to all the posts, or navigate to it in the menu bar over head! Neat, huh? Like livin’ in the future.

ACAB Includes Strained Pulp #37: “Far Below” by Robert Barbour Johnson, Weird Tales v 34 n 1, 1939

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Trying to do these little free writing essay/dissections a bit more frequently because a) it is Hallowe’en season, after all, and b) it seems like we’re in another round of “social media death throes.” This time it’s over on Bluesky where the CEO appears to be following the Elon Musk playbook of going insane to protect the rights of fascists and TERF scum. It’s not like anyone reads blogs either (I know, I’ve got the stats for this little project right here), but we shan’t let that discourage us! So, with our hearts blazing and our eyes open, let us once again enter the mysterious, pathless wilderness that is the Pulps! And for today we have a fun (and interesting!) story: Robert Barbour Johnson’s homage to Lovecraft, “Far Below” from the 1939 June-July megaissue of Weird Tales!

Ol’ Bob Barbour Johnson seems to have been a bit of an odd duck. While a fairly prolific writer, particularly of circus tales later in life, his footprint in Weird Tales is small but deep, if that makes sense; I mean he didn’t actually write a lot for the magazine, publishing I think only six stories between ’35 – ’41, with a couple more weird stories published in other magazines later. But, despite that, readers apparently thought fairly highly of his writing, particularly of today’s story, “Far Below.” Depending on where you’re getting your info, it was either voted by the readers as the single best story published in Weird Tales OR editor Dorothy McIllwraith said it was the best story the magazine ever published.

Both statements are incorrect, although this is a good and fairly interesting story. But that kind of odd indeterminacy around Johnson seems to be fairly typical. For instance, he’s clearly a fan of Lovecraft (as we’ll see when we dive into the story today) but, with great grandiosity, Johnson says that Lovecraft wrote HIM a fan letter after reading Johnson’s 1935 story “Lead Soldiers.” It’s possible that this is true; Lovecraft was both a voluminous letter writer and the sort of person who would certainly praise work he thought good and interesting…but it just doesn’t feel correct, particularly because the story this “fan letter” is supposedly about doesn’t seem like the sort of thing Lovecraft would’ve liked! “Lead Soldiers” is about a tinpot fascist dictator whose delusions of grandeur are leading the world towards another World War, but he ends up getting killed by a bunch of toy soldiers. It’s VERY timely (then and now, sadly), EXTREMELY didactic, and BLUDGEONINGLY allegorical – not really the sort of work Lovecraft generally praised! It seems like this claim of a fan letter from Lovecraft comes out of some memoir/reminiscences type essays Johnson wrote later in life, and while I haven’t chased them down to read them in full, I gather that there’s a general Derlethian tone to them with respect to Johnson’s view of himself.

(As an aside, it appears there was a Joshi-edited-and-introduced collection of Johnson’s work that, in addition to the weird fiction, also included a few of these biographical essays. It was titled Far Below and Other Weird Stories and was published in 2021 by Weird House Press, though it’s out of print and seems like it must’ve been an extremely small run, since I can’t find a copy for sale anywhere. If you know about it or have one, hit me up!)

What is certainly true, however, is that Johnson thought a great deal of Lovecraft, and the story we’re going to be looking at today is, basically, an homage to the Old Gent and a spiritual sequel to his (great) story “Pickman’s Model,” as well as maybe the earliest example of the metafictional appearance of Lovecraft as a Lovecraftian character! But, before we can get to all that, let’s check out the cover and ToC of this big ass issue of Weird Tales!

An incredible cover by the inimitable Virgil Finlay, representing a cavalier of some sort exploring a mysterious and ghoul-ridden cavern. Absolute perfection, just a blast all around. No idea what story it’s supposed to be illustrative of, and it’s entirely possible Finlay only had the broadest of scenic outlines provided to him. But who cares! Let Finlay paint up whatever weird shit he wants, he’s one of the best to ever have graced the covers of the pulps with his talents!

ToC-wise, it’s a heavy-hitter, lots of Lovecraft and Howard on here, some CAS. We’re VERY late in the Farnsworth Wright run here, and the magazine is facing some challenges, but you can see they’re still putting up the good fight here, and there’s some fun weirdness in this big ol’ issue. Also, it’s always worthy pointing out the magazine’s commitment to poetry – it’s such a huge part of weird fiction’s history and lineage, and it’s nice that the premier magazine (that, I would argue, actually created the genre by doing the necessary boundary definition work) both recognized and encouraged poetical weirdness within its pages!

Now, on to the story!

Absolutely incredible art from the great Harold DeLay here – those old school NYPD uniforms, on a weird little rail cart, emptying a machine gun into a horde of hellish C.H.U.D.s…truly a classic! Excellent little atmospheric touches here too; the smoke, the beam of light, the expressions, and the way the horrible ghoulish horde recedes into the background of the tunnel. Just incredible, action-packed stuff, immediately eye-catching and exactly the sort of thing that gets people to actually sit down and read the story! DeLay was a great artist, and it shows. He did some excellent Conan illustrations for Weird Tales, including some for “Red Nails,” and would go on to a career in comics, something he’s obviously well suited for, given the compact and propulsive nature of his artwork.

The little italicized summary under the title is evocative and tells you everything you know, nice and succinct without giving anything away from the story. That, and the spoiler-free art, is a nice surprise!

A great, powerful start to the story; the reader is immediately drawn into whatever the hell is happening, and the quick transition from the “roar and the howl” into the revelation that the “thing” is a subway train is really nicely executed. Johnson is a good writer, and there’s some real craft in this story!

It is also, of course, a story of its time, which is why the next part has some eye-rolling White Nonsense™ in it:

Johnson wants to highlight the big, heterogeneous nature of New York with a tableau of society, specifically calling out the presence of the minorities in the subway car to give us a kind of population sample that is (unknowingly) under threat in this story. It’s cringe-worthy language, of course, and the description of the two black people as “grinning” is particularly unpleasant, an image straight out of minstrel show. It’s something you have to confront in these older stories, but I think a modern reader, acknowledging the racism, can then focus on the narrative function of the scene like we just discussed: the way Johnson is giving us a thumbnail sketch of the civilian population of NYC, dull businessmen, smoochin’ folks, and a substantial proportion of non-WASPs. Very urban and very modern subway commuters!

The medias res beginning opens up and we realize we’re in some kind of little room, where our narrator is hanging out with someone who, apparently, knows the subway system in detail. We learn that the room is actually some kind of command center, with state-of-the-art ultra-modern technology that lets them monitor the passage of the subway cars:

The Mayor Walker here is a real person, good ol’ Jimmy Walker, the mayor of New York City from 1926 to his resignation in disgrace (and at the behest of FDR) in ’36. He had been a Tammany Hall boy, and become a sort of poster child for bribery and corruption at the time; Weird Tales readers, even those not from NYC, would absolutely have recognized the name, as well as the context of his getting this super expensive and super complex monitoring system installed in the subway as he was resigning. It’s an interesting historical, but it functions in the story to really GROUND us in a very specific time and place – this is no Lovecraft country invented landscape, or even a quasi-mythic NYC. This is New York City, 1939, exactly as you know it; it’s an important part of the power of the story, this very precise, very real grounding.

It also offers a convenient date for the Subway Expert to use to explode the ridiculous conception of just how long whatever it is they’re talking about has been going on:

So we get a sense that there’s something old and frightful going on, and that there’s a concerted, directed conspiracy to keep it under wraps because the truth is so terrible, so horrible, that it would destroy civilization (or at least NYC) to know what was happening. The evocation of Chateau-Thierry and Verdun, famously bloody battlefields in WWI, is interesting; this story is a sequel of sorts to Lovecraft’s own “Pickman’s Model,” and in it the narrator mentions how he’d seen some rough stuff in France, but even that hadn’t been enough to prepare him for the horror he encountered (in the story). Here’s Johnson making sure to hit that exact same point – the horrors of modern, mechanized warfare are nothing to the horror down in these tunnels, AND it’s something with a long, deep history.

An interesting meditation from the Subway Expert on what it means to be in contact with Horror, day in and day out, and the ways the mind shifts and adapts to survive.

The story shifts into a multiple-page long monolog from the Subway Expert, another stylistic choice in imitation (or homage) of Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model,” which is entirely told as the first person dialog of a character. It’s a very effective narrative trick because in addition to letting the writer give a LOT of exposition very naturally, it also anchors the reader in the very personal, very visceral experiences of the view point character, something that can only help a horror story.

We learn that the Horrible Things that our Subway Expert has been tasked with fighting are seemingly restricted to a very small segment of the subway system, for reasons unknown. This is lucky, because its evident that successful containment of this threat is costly and complicated – there’re a bunch of militarized police stationed down here, with multiple command-and-control centers spaced along the line, and lots of careful, attentive monitoring for signs of “Them!” And it takes it’s toll on these members of the NYPD’s “Special Detail:”

Grim stuff indeed, both from the perspective of people in danger of being transformed by the work of combatting these horrors, as well as from the obvious extrajudiciality of the whole apparatus! We learn that these subway-patrollin’ Special Detail Boys are paid handsomely for their work, and that why they are *technically* part of the NYPD, and wear the uniform, they are outside of the hierarchy, free from usual discipline, and apparently answerable only to themselves. Wild, fascist shit! We also get a little bit more about out interlocuter here:

So our guy used to be a Professor who worked at the AMNH, a specialist in gorillas. He mentions that he’d been on Carl Akeley’s first African expedition when he was recruited for this subway hell job. Incidentally, although the “Akeley” name would seem to be another example of Lovecraftian hat-tipping (Henry Akeley was the rural hermit menaced by the Mi-Go in “The Whisperer in Darkness”), Carl Akeley was a real guy, a hugely important figure in museum display technology and taxidermy, perfecting and advocating a method of “life-like” presentation of specimens for museums; the Hall of African Mammals at the AMNH is named after him. Akeley’s first professional visit to Africa was in 1896, but since the NYC subway didn’t open until 1904, I reckon Craig here is referring to Akeley’s first expedition for the AMNH, which would be around 1921 or so. Incidentally, that trip was a turning point for Akeley, who had undertaken it as part of an attempt to learn more about LIVING gorillas and determine whether it was “okay” to kill and stuff them for museums back home – he came to the conclusion that it was not, and was instrumental in starting one of the first Gorilla preserves in Africa.

ANYWAY our guy Craig gets recruited by ~~Delta Green~~ the NYPD Special Detail because he’s an expert in comparative anatomy. He dissects a specimen of the Things (losing 1d10 SAN, presumably), and submits a report detailing the mad truth of the thing:

It turns out that much of what he’d discovered was already known, or at least suspected, by the shadowy cabal of the NYC Transit Authority or whoever it is; they had extensive reports about the subway accident, showing that it was a deliberate, planned attack by horrible anthropophagus mole-men…which sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

That’s from Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” from 1927, and yeah, sure, it’s a subway PLATFORM in Boston, but it’s very clearly the inspiring image for this story!

The “accident” as described by Craig is pretty gruesome – men, women, children, all getting munched on in the dark. It’s some grisly shit! Seems like something that’d be difficult to cover up, doesn’t it?

More brutal authoritarian actions by the Special Detail of the NYPD! It’s wild stuff!

Craig goes into the history of their anti-ghoul actions, and how hard the work was at first, before all the modern technology and approaches had been figured out. There’s some great, spooky writing in this section; Craig remembrances of hunting the Things through the dark tunnels, of glinting eyes in the dark, half-seen white forms flitting into the shadows, tittering mirthless laughter…it’s phenomenal, really atmospheric and legitimately unsettling.

Then we get a long section about the historical and geographical distribution of the ghouls – they’ve been here for a long time, there’s evidence that the Indians knew about them and had taken steps to nullify their danger, and there’s even a kind of funny (if tasteless) retconning of the reason for the cheap price the Dutch got for Manhattan. It’s honestly some very good Lovecraftian history, suggestive fictions woven through history and folklore and things like references to darker meanings behind certain passages in the real book “History of the City of New York” by Mary Booth; it’s not easy to do, and you’ll often run across clumsy attempts in the pastiches of Lovecraft, but here it’s pretty adroitly handled, I’d say! And then we get to a real fun bit:

I mean, c’mon – that’s just good plain fun, isn’t it? Lovecraft, presumably while living in the city, took Craig’s Grand Tour of NYC’s Subway from Hell, and much like Pickman’s practice of painting from life, those experiences are what gave Lovecraft’s story a certain hellish “authenticity.” A delightful bit of metafiction, I think!

Craig goes into the details of their work a bit; the Things seem restricted to a certain stretch of the subway, perhaps for some underlying geological reason, he muses. They also seem to restrict their activity to night-time, even though it’s always dark under the earth, which seems to make the NYPD’s Special Detail’s job a whole lot easier, at least. Craig even seems to let slip a hint of bloodlust here:

“We run them down howling with terror” is a bit grim, isn’t it, and then of course there’s Craig admission that they sometimes CAPTURE the things, imprisoning them in some kind of insane Hell Zoo. These specimens are used to illustrate the seriousness of the horrors and the need for a ruthless extrajudicial police force to recalcitrate officials, but of course they are stored in Craig’s laboratory…what’s he doin’ in there, you have to wonder. There’s a very unpleasant suggestion of experimentation, vivisections and such like. And, of course, they can’t keep any individual Thing around for very long – they’re too horrible, too alien, so they end up exterminating them eventually. It’s dark stuff:

Craig’s discourse on the Things is interrupted by a buzzing from The Big Board – there’s activity in the tunnels, movement and sounds picked up by the vast subterranean panopticon that they’ve built up down in the subway tunnel. Our narrator sees something whirr by the window, and Craig proudly explains that it’s a souped-up electric hand cart, chock full o’ cops w/ heavy artillery, dispatched to take care of the Things in the tunnel. Another one is also coming from the opposite direction; they’ll pin the Things between ’em and gun ’em down.

Because there’re microphones all over the tunnels, Craig and the narrator can hear everything that’s happening:

And then we get to the real meat of the story – in a brilliant bit of writing, Johnson has the characters (and us) overhear the action, narrated by Craig, which builds great tension and forces us to confront what, exactly, Craig has become, down here in the dark, hunting monsters:

Just in case you don’t get it, Johnson spells it out in the next section:

Craig is becoming a ghoul; in fact, all the NYPD Special Detail officers are becoming ghoulish, to a greater or lesser extent, but it’s worse and more pronounced for Craig because he’s been down here the longest. And it’s not just a physical transformation, either!

Even in the midst of his horrible decline, Craig can’t help but be scientifically intrigued by the transformation, however. He muses that perhaps the transformation is the explanation for the origins of the Things, and also why they’ll never be able to exterminate Them fully. He suggests that, while there’s some suggestion of cosmic horror chicanery going on, the transformation is simply atavistic retrogradation, something about being driven underground, being made abject in the dark.

We’re nearing the end of the story; Johnson recapitulates his opening line, the “roar and a howl” bit, as another commuter subway train comes roaring by:

And that’s the end of “Far Below” by Robert Barbour Johnson!

It’s not a long story, and it’s pretty simple structurally, built around a long expository monologue and relying on the neat trick of a character’s second-hand exposure to horror and weirdness. But there’s a lot to unpack, I think!

First off, in our current times (Oct ’25, as of this writing) it’s hard not to read this story as having something to say about both the long history of policing and prisons as well as our very current fascist U.S. government’s use of a militarized, extrajudicial police force to terrorize those it has deemed undesirable. The NYPD Special Detail’s powers are unchecked, their funding unlimited, their remit unrestricted; they are heavily armed, are capable of apparently ignoring any and all oversight, and consider themselves absolutely essential to the continuity of human civilization. And, more importantly, they are completely dehumanized by their task, transforming into literal monsters because of the work they do. It’s pretty on the nose!

Of course, that reading is a little undercut by the fact that, within the text, the Things are ontogenically capital-E Evil, right? They sabotage a subway train and devour the survivors alive, fer chrissake. That complicates the Nietzschean “Beware lest ye become monsters” reading, because these are of course literal monsters; in this way, the horrible degradation Craig and his brave Mole Cops are facing is actually heroically tragic, a sad but necessary sacrifice that must be made for the good of all.

I kind of suspect that, for Johnson, it’s the second one, about brave men sacrificing body and souls, that he wanted us to take away from it. Of course, Johnson was politically-minded; his story “Lead Soldiers,” for all it being a Moral Fable, shows that he was aware of current events and Had Opinions about them, so it is possible that he was thinking about, say, WWI era interment camps or even the crisis in protests and violent police actions post-WWI, and wanted to talk about that. But the way this story is written, and the climax that it’s building to, suggests that he wants us mostly to focus on the horror these cops are facing, and not trying to get us to think about how dehumanizing the Other dehumanizes Us, you know what I mean? That doesn’t mean we have to adhere to that reading, of course; death of the author and all that (literally, in this case; Johnson died in ’87).

As a piece of weird fiction, I think it’s awfully successful. It’s probably in my mind one of the most successful “inspired by Lovecraft” stories I’ve ever written, right up there with Bloch’s “Notebook Found in a Deserted House” or anything by Michael Shea, for example. Obviously based on that little bit of “Pickman’s Model” I excerpted above (which is super evocative, very brief but very striking in the original story), and I think Johnson does it justice, captures the fun and weirdness and horror of a subway being attacked by monsters.

It’s also neat to see Johnson really taking the conspiracy-ball and running with it. Lovecraft creates what is probably the first “widespread gov’t paranormal conspiracy” in his story “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (written in ’31 and published in ’36) – there, the u.s. gov’t comes in (off screen) and raids the town, blows up devil’s reef, sends a submarine against the Deep One’s city, and then sets up concertation camps for the fish-human hybrid survivors. There’s even a mention that the gov’t brings in “liberal activists” and shows them the horrors they’ve imprisoned, which makes the various civil rights organizations shut up about the camps, something echoed in this story by Johnson. It’s a very striking part of Innsmouth, and Johnson does it honor here, establishing a plausible and powerful conspiracy built around directly combatting the mythos menaces out there! Has anybody ever done anything with the story in the Delta Green (a cthulhu ttrpg) setting, I wonder? Craig is even a Call of Cthulhu character, in the way he had an expertise that got him plugged into the darker mythos world (and that he’s going insane and will inevitably die horribly).

Anyway, it’s a fun and interesting story, two things that you can’t always say about work with such clear (and acknowledged) connection to Lovecraft. It’s probably the best thing Johnson ever wrote, at least for Weird Tales, and I think it deserves to be read and remembered for more than just “the sequel to Pickman” that it sometimes seems to be cast as. It’s an inventive story with some good, scary imagery, it uses its source material well, and it’s a fascinating glimpse into the immediate post-HPL world of weird fiction!