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About Eric Williams

i live on the lithified remains of a cretaceous seaway in austin texas

Robert E. Howard and Evolution

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Having returned from Robert E. Howard Days up in Cross Plains, TX (where I was nominated for but did not win The Hyrkanian award, ah, c’est le awards), I find the ol’ skull is all a-swirl with a lot of REH/S&S these days. I’ll try and space it out (and maybe save some for my annual S&S celebration time around the Yule), but I think I’ve got to exorcise SOME of it now, so today I’d like to talk about a bit of science that undergirds Robert E. Howard’s fiction: evolution.

This was inspired by the 1998 REH biopic THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD, which was screened at REH Days, and which includes a very strange exchange between Howard (played extremely D’Onofriolly by Vincent D’Onofrio) and Novalyne Price (played extremely cute-as-a-buttonly by Renee Zellweger). The scene in question occurs at around the 53 minute mark or so (you can see it right here). The two lovebirds have just had a picnic where Howard tells Novalyne that his mom thinks she must have some “Indian blood” in her, maybe as much as “half Indian.” Novalyne, confused and amused, asks why Howard’s mom had thought that. There’s a cut and the two of them are in the car, with REH taking up the topic:

HOWARD: It’s the shape of your face. Do you know how much Indian blood you have?

PRICE: None that I know of –

HOWARD: I bet you got a drop or two. We are human because our ancestors were human. That’s the one thing that persuades me that the Bible was right. I can imagine a lot of things, but I can’t imagine Man was once a monkey.

Now, there’s a lot of bonkers-ass shit to unpack in that short exchange! Setting aside (for the moment) the weird interest in race and miscegenation (one of Howard’s favorite topics in his fiction), the fact that the movie has Howard say that a) he believes in a biblically informed divine origin for humanity and b) the he “can’t imagine Man was once a monkey” is absolutely crazy, something totally incommensurate with both his fiction as well as many statements in his letters to different people.

When I got back home, I broke out my copy of Novalyne Price Ellis’s One Who Walked Alone, her memoir of her couple-o-years-long relationship with REH, written in 1986 and the source for much of the movie. Perhaps, I thought, the movie had invented the exchange for some strange reason? Afterall, coming out in ’98, the movie would’ve been right smack in the middle of one of the big Creationist waves that periodically sweep this benighted nation – perhaps they’d felt the need to situate Howard, a southerner through and through, within a comfortable southern archetype? But, there on page 150 of my copy of the book (the edition w/ Renee Zellweger on the cover), was the exact lines:

Again: this is insane. There is no possible way to reconcile this statement, that REH was a bible-believin’ Creationist, with the fiction he wrote, where the centrality of evolution is key, not merely to the biological nature of individuals, but to whole civilizations and cultures! Similarly, it is contracted directly by his own words in his letters! So let’s take a look!

The first and most obvious counterexample in REH’s fiction is in the Conan story “Rogues in the House.” This was published in the January 1934 issue of Weird Tales, so it appeared not that far in time from when the weird exchange in the movie is supposed to have happened. In it, Conan is engaged by a patriotic rebel to help kill the vile Red Priest Nabonidus (who is, basically, the scheming and clever Cardinal Richelieu from “The Three Musketeers”). In the course of infiltrating his death-trap of a house, they learn that something is amiss – one of Nabonidus’s servants, an ape-man named Thak, has taken over the compound, dressing in his robes and using his crude but effective knowledge of the various death-dealing mechanisms in the house to kill all comers. When the heroes get their first good look at Thak (via a series of complex mirrors), we get introduced to Thak’s history by the Red Priest:

Later, when Murilo, the rebel instigator, gets a good, long look at Thak’s face, Howard takes the opportunity to further underline the proto-humaness of Thak:

Thak is explicitly portrayed as part of a chain of beings leading progressively towards a kind of archetypal humanity, one that furthermore (and most horribly) suggests to Murilo that humans themselves had experienced just such a stage of life in the distant past. Howard revisits Thak’s fundamental and evolutionarily-informed idea of “human-ness” in the climactic battle between Conan and the ape-man, making sure we understand that this is not merely an ape, but a sentient being close to our own “kind.”

Let us pause briefly to admire Frazetta’s portrayal of this fight in one of his inimitable paintings:

Badass.

The important thing about Thak is that he is explicitly positioned within an evolutionary context – Nabonidus, while certainly a villain, is also portrayed as a deeply and indeed uniquely profound thinker for his age, and we are meant to take his insights into the evolutionary history and potential of Thak at face value. Furthermore, Thak’s ambitions, his wearing of the robe, and his usurpation of Nabonidus in his own home are not mere apings; rather, Thak is possessed of a sense of self and of others that is human-like, a result of his heritage as a kind of developmentally and evolutionarily intermediate man-ape.

This interest in evolution and the deep history of humans in geological time isn’t anything new for lil’ Bobby Howard either – way back in 1925, his very first professionally published story in Weird Tales (“Spear and Fang”) was all about the conflict between Cro-Magnon and Neanderthals. There is no room within a strict, fundamentalist worldview for different members of the genus Homo to be waging war on one another. Interestingly, for all its eventual violence, the story begins with a Cro Magnon character making cave paintings of extinct animals, a scene placing art, an aesthetic sensibility, and an appreciation of beauty explicitly within an evolutionary framework. But, like so many of Howard’s ancient wildernesses, this is no Edenic garden; it’s a savage and brutal landscape where violence and survival are the engines of evolution.

Indeed, over and over again, Howard portrays the past as a grim evolutionary climb, calling out specifically the rise from apedom to semi-apedom and, eventually, full humanity. In fact, taking cues from both contemporary geological literature as well as esoteric theories of human history, Howard makes these events explicitly cyclical – Kull’s Atlanteans rise from apehood into their barbaric splendor, only to be hurled back again down the evolutionary ladder by their Age’s terminal cataclysm; slowly they rise to become fully human again in the fullness of geological time where, it is implied, they become the Cimmerians. Bran Mak Morn’s Picts are likewise a people with a long and troubled past that stretches into prehistory, and Atla, the were-woman of Dagon Moor, explicitly tells Bran that the Worms of the Earth could’ve been people, were very nearly human in fact, when the Picts drove them back into atavism and subterranean degeneracy. This sort of evolutionary thinking is integral to Howard’s fiction, both mechanically as part of plots as well as conceptually, as something key to his worldview.

Howard’s exposure to evolutionary thinking can be traced from two sources. The first is in the books he owned and which, on his death, were donated to the Howard Payne University library by his father. This collection, originally something approaching 300 books, was eventually taken out of special collections and put into general circulation, the result being that there are now less than 50 or so actual books left due to loss, theft, etc. However, a group of dedicated workers over the years have put together the original accession list and chased down references in Howard’s letters, meaning we now have a pretty decent idea of the books available to REH in his home. For more on this incredible work (including a handy history), and to peruse the book list, check out The Robert E. Howard Booklist!

To cut to the chase there’s one book in particular that is extremely relevant on the list: E. A. Allen’s The Prehistoric World or, Vanished Races originally published in 1885. It’s an odd and interesting book, actually; Allen, while an obscure writer now, was a prolific popularizer of natural history, with a particular interest in anthropology and ethnography. The book that Howard owned is a helluva doorstop, 800 pages or so, that begins in prehistory and moves through the iron age in Europe before leaping over to the Americas, with chapters on the Mound Builders, on the Nahua, on the Maya, etc. It’s a remarkably interesting historical document, a snapshot of both the broadly consensus natural history scholarship of the day as well as the then popular “stadial” version of anthropology (a decidedly progressivist and positivist framework that placed “civilizations” in a developmental hierarchy; guess what sort of people were on the top?). Honestly, I suspect this books is enormously important to a lot of Howard’s thinking and writing, but I want to focus on the second chapter “Early Geological Periods.”

This chapter is a kind of speed run through geology and paleontology, giving the reader a thumbnail of 1880s vintage earth science. There’s some great bits in there, especially if you’re interested in the history of geology – this is, after all, a pre plate tectonics world, and so there are some amusing gaps in both the interpretations and the detailed stories. However, this book IS firmly post Darwin (Origin of the Species was published in 1859). That means evolution is front and center:

Like I said, there’s some fun goofy stuff in there – the old-ass taxonomic term “Quadrumana,” a paleobiogeography that predates the Out of Africa model of human origins, and the to-us-now shocking attempts to extend the presence humans back to the Miocene! (just for context, Allen’s work of course predates radiometric dating [it predates the discovery of radiation, in fact] so they’re using a relative chronostratigraphic approach; even so, a Miocene origin is wild! The Miocene *ended* ~5 million years ago, and the oldest extant example of the genus Homo is 2 million years old!) But this section is interesting when compared to the “Rogues in the House” excerpt. Here, a Miocene primate is explicitly stated to have made “a nearer approach to man than any other monkey,” which sounds very much like what Nabonidus said of Thak. Later in the passage Allen refers to a “highly organized genus” (meaning “evolutionarily advanced”) of ape as living in the Edenic Europe of the Miocene. Non-humans “ascending” towards humanness in the fathomless depths of time – this is extremely REH’s bag, you know?

It’s a bit too much to get into now (though it’s a topic I’ll definitely be returning to in the future) but there’s another relevant library in the Howard household that bears on this discussion – his dad’s bonkers collection of esoterica! That Howard was familiar with at least a popular gloss of Theosophical concepts is obvious from his work; the ideas of cyclical catastrophes, of the struggle of “root races” to ascend the ladder of progress over and over again, these concepts out of Theosophy are probably just as important as his understanding of geology and biology. Of course, the reality is that the Theosophists were actually responding to the science of day, drawing their myths and mysticism out of the mid-19th century scientific milieu the same as Allen (and everyone else). Geological catastrophism, deep time, sinking and rising lands (like Lemuria!), comparative religion, all of these ideas were taken out of their scientific and scholarly context and massaged into a new mystical quasi-religion, one that Howard’s dad was EXTREMELY well read in. But that’s for another post!

Leaving the Howards’ libraries behind, there’s an even more direct source for REH’s views on evolution we can tap: his letters! Thanks to the tireless effort of a bunch of editors, we’ve got an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the letters of REH. And, given the voluminousness of his correspondence, there’s a lot to choose from! Let’s hit a big one right away:

Let us consider the insect Man. How many specimens of this creature are willing to believe that they came from the same root stem as the elephant, the garter snake and the leopard? No, they must have a special creative act, a special Divine process to account for their godlike beings – bah, either Haeckel’s right and there is no such thing as a “soul” in the accepted sense or else everything has a soul, whether organic or inorganic. Let the theologians seek to refute the theory of spontaneous generation all they wish – I admit it is rather difficult to grasp in a cosmological sense, but biologically speaking, the scientific world has as a whole, I think, accepted the unicellular theory as a positive fact. The facts boiled down are these: theology must accept evolution both in ontogeny and in phylogeny if it accepts geology.

REH to Tevis Clyde Smith, March 1928, The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, volume 1: 1923-1929, Rob Roehm and John Bullard (eds)

That’s a pretty definitive statement, and one completely antithetical to the quote from the movie. Howard is 100% rejecting a special creation for humanity (and, indeed, for all of life). The “spontaneous generation” he’s referencing is not the “flies from meat” thing you might’ve heard about, but rather the idea of life originating on its own from inorganic matter via natural processes in the deep past. This, in particular, was one of Haeckel’s (many) research interests – taking up a topic that Darwin himself had not dealt with, he posited that highly organized but inorganic matter (like crystals) may have given rise to simple organic life, the “unicellular theory” REH mentions later. Howard is also explicitly rejecting biblical authority on theological matters in this letter too – theologians have to reckon with Haeckel’s biogenic law as well as the reality of Deep Time, rather than the other way around!

The prominence of Haeckel in Howard’s thinking is fascinating, and it’s something I’d never appreciated until I read his letters. He’s easily the biologist most mentioned by REH, and he seems to have seriously engaged with ol’ Ernst pretty heavily at some point (though, in a later letter to Lovecraft, he admits that he’d forgotten a lot of about the details of his work). Presumably, his exposure to Haeckel was in school, where Howard was part of a “science course” which, presumably, operated as a kind of theme or special focus in his curricula. It’s striking the effect it must’ve had on Howard; Haeckel comes up a lot (alongside famous scientific racist Herbert Spencer), whereas Darwin is mentioned only once…in a list of people who have “grasped the cosmic” that also includes Haeckel and Spencer and Huxley. What’s interesting in particular is that in addition to Haeckel’s biological and evolutionary work (he was a major popularizer of Darwin), REH seems enamored of Haeckel’s strange brand of monism, which provides a kind of romantic and pantheistic underpinning to the natural world (in opposition to a strictly materialist view). This same kind of vaguely mystical biology is something also seen in Herbert Spencer, another of REH’s favorite thinkers – he in particular seems to enjoy Spencer’s ideas of the “Ultimate Unknowable,” which much like Haeckel leaves room for some sort of ineffable energy or drive behind the mechanical operation of the universe and life.

Of course, the other things that Howard undoubtably took from both Haeckel and Spencer were their scientific racism and polygenism. Both men were, like many people of the age, eugenicists; Spencer, who as mentioned above was name-checked by REH a lot in his letters, originated the term and idea of “Social Darwinism;” he also coined the term “survival of the fittest,” an obvious and important part of Howard’s philosophy and ethos. Additionally, Haeckel was a vocal and powerful proponent of scientific polygenism, the idea that the various human races arose separately from different ancestors and at different times. In fact, part of Haeckel’s theories about the origins of life, the “spontaneous generation” mentioned in the letter, was that life itself was potentially polygenetic, having arisen multiple times out of inorganic matter on earth. While REH never outright states his support for polygenist views in his letters, the idea is clearly present in his fiction – there are multiple examples of different “races” rising up out of semi-apedom into humanity in his essay “The Hyborian Age,” for example, and the idea is implicit in the way he writes about Thak and the Worms of the Earth. It’s probably also a part of his horror of miscegenation: Howard clearly believes that there is something fundamentally biologically wrong with race-mixing, in addition to the moral decadence that he felt it represented.

It’s worth taking a look at Haeckel’s visual representation of this idea, because it’s a subtle but important point that illustrates REH’s thinking. The below figure is a portion of a plate from the English translation of one of Haeckel’s books, his 1879 Evolution of Man:

A few things are worth noting here: first, the placement of MAN atop the tree, crowning the progressive hierarchy implicit in the history of life. More important, however, is the very subtle way Haeckel conveys his idea that the human races arise out of different ancestors. A forking branch proceeds from APE-MEN, with single branches leading to GIBBON, ORANG, etc. But then look at the MULTIPLE BRANCHES (six of them!) leading into MAN. Like I said, it’s a subtle but very important point with some extremely unpleasant implications, namely that the various races of humans represent distinct biological species arising out of a common ape-man ancestor. It’s foul stuff, but it’s also recognizable as a very common belief among people in Howard’s time, and within Howard’s work; put “Cimmerian,” “Stygian,” “Hyborian,” etc on each of those branches and you’ve got a good representation of Howard’s ideas.

Another letter, this one part of the interminable HPL-REH Civilization-vs-Barbarism running gun battle that they had for years and years, interestingly provides some insight into Howard’s opinion of religious anti-evolutionists. The context of this short excerpt from their (unending and tedious) argument focuses on HPL’s view that REH doesn’t hold artistic endeavors in as high of esteem as he should. Regardless, the relevant section is interesting as regards our topic here today:

Between the fundamental religionist who goes into foaming rages over the idea of evolution, because he can not stand the thought of kinship with a monkey, and the artists who strains his guts to prove his distance from the protozoa, I see no basic difference; both seem outcroppings of the idea concerning the divinity of man.

REH to HPL, September or October 1933, letter 259, The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard Volume 3: 1933-1936, Rob Roehm and John Bullard (eds)

It’s a pretty funny statement; I love to imagine a tortured poète maudit weeping over the need to distinguish themselves from protists in the eyes of the posterity. But it’s also a helluva rejoinder to the weird statement from Novalyne’s memoir and in the movie, isn’t it?

One last letter excerpt, because they’re fun and more people need to read ’em! This one is from a letter to August Derleth, and in addition to its relevance to our discussion here, it is also one of those great examples of REH really playing up rurality for his non-western interlocutors:

A friend of mine was trapping once […] He thought he had a muskrat and climbed carelessly up and stuck his head over the ledge, and there was a skunk in the trap and it let him have a full volley smack in the face […] My friend fell off the ledge with an ear-splitting shriek and rolled on the ground for some time after the exact fashion of a hound-dog […] Nobody could doubt evolution after watching the antics of a man who has just been slapped in the mush by a polecat.

REH to August Derleth, July 4 1935, letter 319, The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard Volume 3: 1933-1936, Rob Roehm and John Bullard (eds)

In addition to just being a funny story, it also shows how, even beyond the eugenicist background of his thinking, Howard’s worldview (and his fiction) was founded on an philosophical framework of what was “natural,” a view informed strongly by a belief in evolution. There’s also present the idea that this “naturalness” reflects the fundamental biological order of the world – a man, for all his sophistication, is no different than a dog when confronted with the same problem (of getting their shit rocked by a pissed-off skunk). There’s really no way to imagine Robert E. Howard without a belief in evolution – the idea is as central to his work and worldview as it is for Lovecraft, and having him question it in the movie (rejecting it in favor of the bible even!) is truly bizarre!

So what’s going in Novalyne Price Ellis’s memoir, One Who Walked Alone and the movie it inspired? Well, there’re a few options, I reckon:

1 – Novalyne Price made it up whole cloth. It’s a possibility, certainly – as described by Bobby Derie the creation of One Who Walked Alone remains opaque, with the author dead and her notes and materials unavailable, leaving us merely with the book. A key motive for Price writing it was to counter negative portrayals of Howard; perhaps she felt a definitive statement of belief in the Bible was important (including a statement of Creationist faith) and so inserted it into the narrative. As far as I can tell, we don’t know anything specific about Novalyne Price’s religious leanings, though she does write about attending church and believing in God (and in everyone’s right to worship God in whatever way they see fit) in the book. But who knows? An older Southern lady writing in the late 70s-80s, she very easily could’ve held Creationist beliefs, and decided to put REH in the camp of the angels. Without access to her diaries and journals, we’ll never know! But this is clearly the very darkest option – it puts her memoirs, as a source of sincere recollection, into *very* shaky, shady territory!

2 – Novalyne Price misunderstood/misinterpreted something REH had said. Reading Price suggests (to me at least) that she *thought* she understood REH better than she actually did. There’re numerous places in the book where she seems to be confused by what is, plainly, REH making a joke or poking fun or being ironical. Additionally, Howard could clearly be kind of a combative asshole, picking at people or arguing for argument’s sake. The exchange in the book is actually a good deal more contentious than is presented in the movie; Howard, at least to my reading, absolutely understands that his mother was talking shit about Novalyne, and he’s getting a kick needling her and watching her reaction (a very common thing in the book). If so, the odd statement about the bible and creationism becomes legible as just more of REH’s situational weirdness, where he’s trying to offer biblical support for his position, knowing that it’d annoy her.

3 – REH said it because he thought it was something Novalyne wanted to hear. Like I said, the discussion around miscegenation that REH and Price are having is a bit of a strange, heated one. Maybe Howard wanted to change the subject, or in the moment felt like he was offering an olive branch by claiming to be a bible-believer (something clearly important to Price, from sections elsewhere in the book). It would mean he was straight up lying of course, since his letters seem to make his position very clear. Also, it’d be an odd moment of him backing down too; he seemed to love scrapin’ and arguin’ with Novalyne in particular!

4 – REH said it because he believed it. The weirdest and hardest-to-swallow option, but there it is. We contain multitudes, and maybe Howard had had a strange religious epiphany. I knew a devout Mormon paleontologist who described his life this way: six days of the week, he believed in evolution and geochronology and the fossil record, but on Sunday, he didn’t. Maybe Howard separated himself from his work like that, though that seems extremely unlikely given the whole “he put a bit of himself into everything he wrote” paean from Lovecraft and all. It’s again also a statement completely at odds with his own words, both fictional and in his letters!

As to which one it is, who the Hell knows? What I think is very certain, however, is that contrary to the statement reported by Price, Howard absolutely believed in evolution. In particular, the concept was central to his whole world view, both in his life and in his work. This is not to say that he had no religion; the scientists from whom he had drawn his understanding of evolution, Ernst Haeckel and Herbert Spencer, were themselves certainly not atheists; both of them believed in a kind of pantheistic drive that, while operating within the realm of the mundane and through the laws of biology and physics, nonetheless held something of wonder and, if not divine, then at least something more-than-mechanistic about it. Given his father’s own unusual religious milieu, something like that, a combination of Haeckelean monism with pop Theosophy, makes a lot of sense. Afterall, Jesus was an Ascended Master in a lot of New Age religious movements, so there’s even room for a (nondenominational) kind of appreciation for the Bible in there.

What there ISN’T room for is creationism – time and time again, the centrality of the concept to Howard’s writing is made abundantly clear. The battle between Cro Magnon and Neanderthal at the dawn of human history, the punctuated cataclysms of Howard’s Atlantis and Hyboria, the aspirational evolutionism of Thak and the thwarted phylogenetics of the Worms of the Earth, all of these are just as much evidence for Howard’s deep commitment to the reality of evolution as are his literal statements of the same in his letters.

Short Introductory Texts for Radicalizing People

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It is abundantly clear that the good ol’ U.S. of A. needs to be totally and irrevocably destroyed; this has been true for 250 years, but now, with a genocidal white nationalist empowered by the most feckless cowards in world history at the helm, the simple truth of that fact seems to be dimly, faintly, tremulously beginning to shine through the cracks for even the most obdurate, blinkered, knuckleheaded citizen of this moronic, evil country. There are real historical resonances between us and late 19th/early 20th C. Tsarist Russia, I think – an absolutely oblivious political class, insane wealth disparity, cultural and economic collapse on the horizon are the most obvious, but another similarity must be the anxiety and frustration felt by those who, recognizing the evil, cannot see what there is to do about it.

This floundering uncertainty was certainly being felt by the Russian activists and revolutionaries, because ol’ Lenin himself wrote a pretty great (in parts) long essay on the problem, “What Is To Be Done?” The whole point of this pamphlet was that there was a definite crisis looming, in fact they were in one right then, and yet the path forward was not clear, and it was not obvious what actions should be taken to hasten the radical reshaping of society. Importantly, this pamphlet was written in 1901, a major period of reaction and oppression in tsarist Russia, and a long way from the heady days of 1917-1918. So how does ol’ Vlad answer the question he poses in the title? What, exactly, is to be done?

I’ve written about it before (back when Trump was reelected) but the thing that I like about this essay is that Lenin is very clear-headed – the goal of all revolutionaries is the same, regardless of the conditions around them: degrade the power of the oppressor. The means to achieving this, of course, change depending on the conditions, and the conditions that Lenin faced in the early 20th C and that we are confronting in our own 21st century are the same – we are scattered, disorganized, atomized, while the evil pricks are the ones holding all the power. So, with this in mind, Lenin sez that what is to be done is to increase the political consciousness of socialism among people, pushing the verboten discussion of revolutionary anti-capitalism out of the shadows and into the light of the public sphere. Propagandize! I’m a firm believer that you’ve gotta wear your anti-capitalism on your sleeve, unapologetically and openly. There’s no room for milquetoast appeasement of dumbass centrists or rat-faced neolibs – you have to take the fight to them, because the only thing to do now is to make socialism (in whatever flavor you want) an out-and-proud political identity.

We’ve made baby steps in that direction, but because actual anti-capitalist Leftists have refused to push it, we’re basically letting a few wishy-washy DSA types stand in for actual Left political thought in this country. One reason for that, I think, is because a specter is haunting our public politics; the specter of the dreaded Marxist Study Group. You know the scene (you might’ve even participated in it): a bunch of frustrated people trying to slog their way through Capital, worried about deriving the use-value of a bolt of cloth in labor-hours.

That’s not particularly useful propaganda, I think. Don’t get me wrong, everyone absolutely should read Capital (esp the Third Volume, where all the fun soil science is), but it’s not at all the way to take one’s first steps on the Path to Enlightenment. What’s needed are short, punchy, and fairly direct documents that quickly and clearly make the argument for anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. So, off the top of my head, I put together a short list of some of my favorite short (or short-ish) essays/pamphlets, with links. If you have any that you love or that you think I missed, let me know – I feel like a nice centralized resource like this is a good thing to have and, in this moment when Trump is baring for all to see the horrors of Capitalism and Imperialism, these documents can be a nice wedge to help crack the shell of people who might not have ever envisioned anything different as being possible!

Anarchism

Capital, Technology, and Proletariat by Miguel Amorós

The Capitalist System by Michail Bakunin

Anarchism: Past and Present by Murray Bookchin

Anarchism: What it Really Stands For by Emma Goldman (Chapter 1 from her volume of collected essays)

Are You an Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! by David Graeber

Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideals by Peter Kropotkin

An Anarchist Programme by Errico Malatesta

An Anarchist on Anarchism by Elisee Reclus

“Anarchism” by George Woodcock

Marxism

Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith by Frederick Engels

Wage Labor and Capital by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

An Introduction to Marx’s Theory of Alienation by Judy Cox

Revolution

What Is To Be Done? by V.I. Lenin (you should absolutely read Chapter 3, though the first three chapters all together are great…feel free to ignore the long last chapter on Russian newspapers, though)

The Political Socialists by Ricardo Flores Magón

Art and Socialism by William Morris

The Meaning of Socialism by William Morris and the Executive Council of the SDF

Imperialism and the Task of the Proletariat by Anton Pannekoek

The Struggle Against Fascism by Klara Zetkin

Further, Longer Reading (Book length texts, for when you’ve read the above pamphlets and essays!)

What is Communist Anarchism? by Alexander Berkman

Strike! by Jeremy Brecher

The End of Anarchism? by Luigi Galleani

The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin

The Great French Revolution 1789-1793 by Peter Kropotkin

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by V.I. Lenin

Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History by Staughton Lynd & Andrej Grubacic

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx

Critique of the Gotha Program by Karl Marx

The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem

The Unknown Revolution 1917-1921 by Volin

Cthulhu, quo vadis? Cosmic Horror and the 21st century

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Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.

H.P. Lovecraft to Farnsworth Wright, July 5 1927

Only at a dread of dark

Quaver, and they quit their form:

Thousand eyeballs under hoods

Have you by the hair.

Enter these enchanted woods,

You who dare.

“The Woods of Westermaine” by George Meredith (1883)

H.P. Lovecraft inaugurated a revolution in modern imaginative fiction when he articulated, in stories, essays, and letters, the philosophical underpinning of his cosmic approach to horror. In perhaps his most autobiographically informed story, “The Silver Key,” Lovecraft wrote that “the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.[1]” This was indeed the key to Lovecraft’s concept of weird fiction, where the horror of a tale arises not from rank supernaturalism or mere physical danger, but from the revelation that the anthropocentric view of the world, with human beings crowned in the center of creation, is not merely mistaken, but actively delusional.

This radical decentering of humanity was a favored “punchline” in many of his stories: humans are revealed to be merely the accidental byproduct of Elder Thing bioengineering in “The Mountains of Madness;” the vanity of human supremacy is punctured by the reproductive machinations of the Deep Ones in “The Shadow over Innsmouth;” the presumed permanence of human civilization is shown to be a mere footnote in the vast sweep of the biological history of Earth in “The Shadow Out of Time;” even our ability to physically comprehend the universe is questioned in “The Colour Out of Space.” In these and other stories, Lovecraft uses the abjectification of humans as the shocking denouement of his weird fiction.

Part and parcel with this is Lovecraft’s twisting of the very idea of the ineffable march of progress. Crawford Tillinghast in “From Beyond” has created a machine that exposes the deeper but otherwise invisible reality of nature, revealing a maddening world of alien existences beyond the ability of our paltry senses to perceive. More to the point, in the famous opening to “The Call of Cthulhu,” Lovecraft completely inverts the positivist narrative of early 20th century science and technology; rather than advancing human knowledge and prosperity,

The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.[2]

In fact, Lovecraft’s “cosmic indifference” relies on the idea that an increasing knowledge base, whether individually or socially, inevitably overturns the comfortable fiction of the primacy and permanence of humanity.

These two concepts, an indifferent universe in which humanity is menaced by vast forces beyond their comprehension and a world in which the inevitable progress of human knowledge is an existential threat to humanity, represent the major aesthetic and thematic development in horror literature in the early 20th century. Lovecraft’s articulation of them is not entirely sui generis of course (he himself acknowledged his debt to his literary antecedents), but his work is unique in its almost single-minded exploration of what has come to be called “cosmicism.” More to the point, Lovecraft’s popularity, initially as a beloved cult writer but, more recently, as an important figure that has influenced both literary[3] and popular culture[4], has ensured that cosmic horror has become a part of the zeitgeist.

From the perspective of early 20th century America, the aesthetic pleasure and transgressive appeal of cosmicism as a philosophy of horror is evident; it toyed nicely with the very real fear that the grand American experiment was not as unassailable and inevitable as it seemed. It titillated readers by undermining the placidly bourgeois status quo with the threat of displacement by the alien Other, with miscegenation, and with the possibility that the universe was not as neatly Panglossian as all that. In this way, Lovecraft’s cosmic horror simply (though extremely) extrapolated from the conclusions of contemporary science. The realization of the depths of Deep Time in Earth’s history, the identification of extinction as a biological possibility for any species, the Darwinian revolution, and finally the discovery of a whole world of invisible energy and effects in the form of radiation – all of these things factually decentered humanity, making them subject to nature rather than its overlord and highlighting our smallness and fragility.

For cosmic horror’s decentering to be shocking and transgressive, however, it requires first that humans be assumed to be at the center – this is how the revelation of cosmic indifference can function as the frightful climax of a story. In Lovecraft’s milieu of the early 20th century this was indeed the case, with a popular status quo best be described as broadly anthropocentric and positivist.

But in the 21st Century, do these same assumptions exist? And if not, if the wider cultural understanding of humans now is that they have already been decentered, what does that mean for our concept of cosmic horror?

After all, it’s not much of a dark epiphany to state that human beings are small animals in an uncaring world – that’s the lived experience of the 21st century, reinforced daily. Humanity is existentially threatened by maddeningly complex forces that operate on scales we can scarcely conceive. Climate change, pandemics, capitalism; all of these threats represent as profound a reordering of humanity’s relationship to the world around them as anything Lovecraft ever wrote. The primary revelation of cosmicism, that humans are not special and that the universe will not shepherd them safely through danger, is simply the fundamental background noise of day-to-day life. Any real person believing otherwise strikes us as delusional, and it’s laughable to imagine a horror protagonist beginning from a place of such naivety, such that the shattering of that illusion is merely corrective, rather than shocking or transgressive.

Similarly, cosmic horror’s “piecing together” of knowledge into a starkly and bleakly apocalyptic whole seems quaint and ridiculously optimistic in a world of commodified corporatized science, slashed funding for research, a “post-fact” media landscape, and the hallucinogenic world of venture capitalist A.I. schemes. The popular median view of technological “progress” is purely declensionist now[5], with information technology in particular subject to decay, collapse, and abuse. “Reality” is popularly understood to be illusory and malleable, subject to the whims of unknowable and inscrutable forces; similarly, the conspiracism inherent in cosmic horror, with cultists and cabals manipulating events from the shadows, has taken on a very different valence in the 21st century.

Additionally, the very idea of scholarly inquiry into the bleeding edge of human knowledge has been made laughable by recent history. Cosmic horror is built on a world of expertise and specialist knowledge, something under attack in the 21st century. The High Energy Physics Lab at Miskatonic would undoubtably have shut down due to federal funding cuts, while the college administration would probably be investigating the Forbidden Books Department of the Henry Armitage Memorial Library for “radical leftist” DEI practices.

From a thematic perspective, therefore, it is difficult to see what “cosmic horror” in the 21st could even mean. What cosmic revelation is there left to make about humanity, after all? That said, the aesthetics of cosmic horror are definitely going strong – tentacular horrors from other dimensions and cults communing with alien intelligences abound in the literature and have escaped into other genres, like science fiction, fantasy (where secondary worlds may still need decentering), and even literary fiction (see, for example, Thomas Pynchon’s brief but memorable evocation of an alien horror in the tunnels under Montauk in Bleeding Edge).

Within the larger horror genre, the interest in “folk horror” can be seen as partaking of cosmic aesthetics; the countryside is a liminal territory, the folkways of the natives are transformed into ancient rites, animals and plants are twisted and altered. Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach novels are an interesting example of the new ends to which cosmic horror aesthetics can be put – the skewed and altered reality within Area X is as strange as the alien architecture of R’lyeh. Interestingly, the radical decentering of humans (to the point of excision) from Area X suggests a sort of “optimistic” cosmicism, a kind of reading only possible under anthropogenic climate derangement; the removal of humans and the restoration of a (new and alien) “natural” order becomes a comforting corrective to human-caused ecological degradation.

This subversion of cosmicism, where very human evils are countered by the restoration of a natural (or more natural) order is an interesting development in 21st century horror. Many works use the aesthetics of cosmic horror while inverting its themes. For example, P. Djèlí Clark’s Ring Shout uses classic cosmic horror concepts (extradimensional horrors that feed and infect humans and are served by a cult) to explore themes of marginalized identities and resistance. N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became was written, as per the author, to explicitly explore the history and influence of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror (and his racism) on the genre. In it, an embodied avatar of the extradimensional city of R’lyeh wages a war of gentrification on the communities of New York; tentacles, fungal corruption, and skittering things make numerous appearances. What unifies these (and other) works of modern cosmic horror is that, contrary to the older traditions of the genre, they actually radically recenter humanity, not in a solipsistic way, but rather restoratively, affirming the importance of identity and community in the face of hegemonic cosmic hate.

This is an interesting development, and one that is, actually, anticipated (albeit obliquely) by Lovecraft. In an often overlooked section of “The Call of Cthulhu,” the cultist Castro explains that the time for Cthulhu’s return will be patently evident, for then humans “would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy.”[6] Lovecraft here leaves open the way a narrative can enfold human activity within cosmic horror, as Clark or Jemisin have ably done.

Another commonly encountered aspect of modern cosmic horror is the aesthetic deployment of surreality and uncertainty within a work. John Langan, Brian Evenson, and Laird Barron are exemplars of this, making excellent use of the vast and suggestive unknowable in their work, something Lovecraft himself often did to great effect. What differs in the 21st century is, again, the fact that there is no need to decenter the human via incomprehensible and indifferent cosmic weirdness; that is the understood precondition of the modern-day human being. Rather, for these contemporary cosmicists, it is the aesthetic of unknowing that becomes centered, the way people (either as characters or readers) cannot confront meaningfully the alien logic at work. While this is certainly allied to the older expression of cosmic horror, it actually recenters the human and their faculties of apprehension as the site of the uncanny. In other words, it is fundamentally about the trauma of experiencing cosmic horror, rather than the cosmic horror of knowing your experiences don’t fundamentally matter; there is actually very little uncertainty in Lovecraft, for example, where the clarity of the horrific revelation is clear and hard as a diamond for both characters and readers.

The question to ask then is: does the strict, “classic” flavor of cosmic horror still have any relevance or power to startle today? For example, actually existing A.I. has rendered robo-centric science fiction suspect, at least for now; have our constant confrontations with existential crises done the same for cosmic horror? With apologies to Adorno, is it barbaric to write cosmic horror in the 21st century?

I personally hope not. Cosmic horror is an explicitly epistemological literature, a particularly worthy approach these days, it seems to me. Horror as a genre often tries to justify itself as a literature with particular power to comment on the world around us, and the origins of cosmic horror surely illustrate that. But the nature of our epistemologies have, perhaps, changed – if the cosmicism of the early 20th century found horror in the decentering of humanity, where does that leave those of us ontologically decentered in the 21st century? What is the epistemic horror inherent in a modern cosmicism?           

An approach centered around the horror of uncertainty is a dead end, I think – perfectly pleasurable, but hardly revelatory. After all, Heisenbergian indeterminacy has been a potent metaphor in cosmic horror since Lovecraft’s day, where it underlined the breakdown of the comfortably quotidian Newtonian mechanics that underpins our illusion of a stable, “real” world. There is nothing horrific about uncertainty today, if only because it’s become so banal; there’s nothing new or startling in our confronting it. Actually, the breakdown of concrete reality can be seen now as a kind of consolatory epiphany, the revolt of messy and vital organicism against mechanistic and dehumanizing systems, a cri de Coeur that history (and therefore life) has not ended. Uncertainty and unsettlement can be read as an almost heroic epistemology (something common in the New Weird, for example). This is laudable and makes for good literature, but it is the antithesis of horror.

If, as I’ve argued, the baseline understanding of the human condition is one of tininess and powerlessness in the face of vast, incomprehensible forces beyond our understanding, is there horror to be mined from embracing it? In other words, rather than being frightened by the vast indifference of the universe, perhaps modern cosmicism reflects the horror of people becoming like the Great Old Ones, living only to kill and take pleasure? That’s certainly one of the true horrors of our times now, the gleefulness with which some people embrace the degradation of humanity for capitalism and oppression. That’s a subtle but important difference, I think – in other words, it’s not the indifference of the cosmos that’s behind the horror, it’s the way a human can wholeheartedly cast off their own humanity to become a part of that indifference[7]. Cthulhu, then, isn’t the problem – it’s his cultists, human beings who have made a decision, that are the real source of cosmic horror today. But, as I write that, I’m confronted by the fact again that this seems to be recentering humanity, making human agency the source of horror, something totally antithetical to cosmicism.

Maybe, then, the cosmic horror moment has passed? There was a brief time where the positivist anthropocentrism of western culture and the scientific materialist worldview were both equally strong enough to create a kind of horrific frisson, but now that’s long gone, with no hope of ever really recapturing it. We can play with the elements of cosmicism, the nostalgic fun of tentacles from beyond and all that, but it will never have the immediacy or excitement or vitality that it did in the early 20th century. Horror is, simply, different now, dealing with different things in different ways, and maybe it’s time we made that break with the past explicit?

[1] “The Silver Key” H.P. Lovecraft, Weird Tales, v. 13, no. 1, 1929, p. 42.

[2] “The Call of Cthulhu,” H.P. Lovecraft, Weird Tales, v.11, n.2, 1928, p. 159.

[3] Borges dedicated his story “There Are More Things” to Lovecraft, for instance, and Joyce Carol Oates has edited a collection of his fiction; similarly, critical appraisals of his work have become something of a minor academic industry.

[4] The existence of plush “Cthulhus” would be enough to make this point, but Lovecraft’s influence on science fiction, fantasy, comics, movies, cartoons, and games is well documented. See, for example, Mark Jones’s 2013 essay “Tentacles and Teeth: The Lovecraftian Being in Popular Culture.”

[5] Merriam-Webster enshrining “enshittification” in the official English lexicon, for example.

[6] “The Call of Cthulhu,” H.P. Lovecraft, Weird Tales, v.11, n.2, 1928, p. 170.

[7] A great recent example of this kind of horror, of humans making themselves like the cruelly indifferent cosmos, is Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night (tr. Megan McDowell, 2023).

The Pulp Carts #46: “The Milk Carts” by Violet A. Methley, Weird Tales, v.19 n.3, March 1932

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Spring has sprung, at least down here in Texas; in fact, there might not be much more of it, since we’re looking at some mid-90s later this week. Regardless, this is one of the lovelier times in these parts, with everything green and flowering, so I thought I’d take a break from work and write up a short, fun, outdoorsy and landscape-o-centric bit of Weird Fic from the March 1932 issue of Weird Tales. Our story today is “The Milk Carts” by Violet Methley!

Methley is an interesting if enigmatical figure. Not much in the way of biographical information on her out there, despite being a fairly prolific and apparently popular writer of children’s adventure novels. At least some of her output was what we’d now consider “weird” – in addition to a couple of short stories appearing in Weird Tales she also wrote a novel about a bunch of Australian schoolgirls hunting for Bunyips. But she must’ve been a fairly versatile writer with wide-ranging interests, because her first published book was a biography of the journalist, revolutionary, and friend-of-Robespierre Camille Desmoulins, which is kind of wild. She’s English, though, and was born in Kent in the late 1800s, a relevant bit of information for this story, I think.

As for this issue of Weird Tales:

Good ol’ C.C. Senf doing the cover, based on the Kirk Mashburn story “The Vengeance of Ixmal,” one of the countless Aztec/Mayan (they played fast and loose with the definition) stories that appeared during the great flowering of interest in Central and South American archeology/history in the 20s-50s. Good example of the lurid exoticism inherent in a lot of these stories, where well-meaning but stupid anglos end up getting menaced by swarthy religious zealots with a mania for liturgical heart extraction.

The ToC is kind of interesting this month:

Some CAS and Quinn on here, they’re what you’d call the Heavy Hitters, and some REH verse too. A solid if unspectacular offering, I’d say, perfectly middle-of-the-road. It’s always good to see the reprint series still going strong, though if you’ll indulge me a minute, I’d like to point out some kind of silly things about this version of Dumas’ werewolf novel. First off, check out this little footnote which has a remarkable density of incorrect things in it:

First off, Le Meneur de Loups was NOT written by Alexandre Dumas fils, but by Alexandre Dumas pere, he of Three Musketeers and Count of Monte Cristo fame (among others). Strange to see Weird Tales get that wrong, especially since the editor here is Farnsworth Wright, who spoke, read, and translated French fluently and was familiar with classic French literature. Another thing that’s wrong about it is the claim that this was the first English translation of the work – it was translated in the 1904 in England! In fact, despite some light editing by Wright himself (and the inclusion of the summaries), the version in Weird Tales IS that translation, by Alfred Allison, though of course the translator is never named or acknowledged! Makes me wonder if the errors aren’t some way to help elide the fact that Wright and Weird Tales almost certainly didn’t pay to publish this translation. Ah well, c’est le pulps!

Anyway, enough perfidy! On to “The Milk Carts!”

We’re well in the back of the magazine, without any illustrations or ornamentation for these (often shorter) stories. A decent summary too, without too much in the way of a spoiler or anything, so that’s good.

A nice, economical beginning – two guys in those baggy, classic golf pants are tromping around the great outdoors. One of them is Seton Croft, golf-course architect, and he’s busy writing notes and making measurements, all with an eye towards turning this stretch of green turf (owned by the bluff fellow who we’ll learn is named Scayles) into a premiere bit o’ golfing!

In particular, it seems like this spot, where these two have stopped and agreed to begin work, is ideal for what Croft is envisioning:

There’s a damn Roman encampment in the middle of these downs! I mentioned earlier that the author, Violet Methly, was born in Kent, and there’s clearly a bit o’ the Kentish countryside in this story, a place rich in Roman history; the initial Roman invasion of Britain started in Kent, and it was always one of the the strongest points of its far-flung colony. It’s a landscape with a deep history that is still visible today!

Anyway, Croft’s golf course musings are interrupted rudely!

I’m a sucker for landscape descriptions, and that’s a particularly nice bit of work about these wheel-track furrows, I think – “the soft skin of the turf” ripped down to “the flesh and bone of chalk and rock beneath” is really good. In particular, I think it really nicely captures Croft’s view of the situation – after all, it’s just some wheel-ruts in the downs, not exactly an open-pit mine or anything, you know? But for Croft, this landscape must be adhere to an ideal, a particularly managed and manicured vision of Golf, artificially and meticulously pristine, and this cart track has no part in it! It’s a fun bit of characterization, and really highlights the centrality of landscape AND land usage in this story.

Anyway, Scayles, the owner of the land, is likewise aghast at this brutalization of the grass, and vows to have it turfed and repaired immediately! After all, he wants this fairway done and opened for golfing by Easter, and Croft promises it will be done!

I really like the little sandbox he’s using to do a scale-model of the project, complete with teeny tiny little flags and everything. A fun glimpse of the way Croft is managing and shaping this land, I think.

But all is not well! Back at the 12th hole, those damned cart tracks have appeared…again!

Scayles vows to make enquiries among his neighbors, but all the various cart-owning locals deny having driven across the greens. After all, it’s not a short-cut to anywhere, so why would they? Still, SOMEONE is wrecking Croft’s beautiful fairway, because shortly after levelling and turfing the ruts…they’re back! Croft and his wife are out looking over the site, when they run across the ruts again!

How great is that, “they plaguey milk-carts” with all their cans a-jangling? Great bit of gnomic mutterings from a weird old guy, classic ghost story stuff. And the idea that the wheel-tracks will ALWAYS come back, that there’s nuthin’ to do about ’em, is a lot of fun. Croft, of course, is still trapped in the mundane world so beloved of golf architects – he and Scayles investigate if there’re any dairies near by, but no dice. So, Croft does the obvious thing – he’s going to stand guard out by the 12th hole and catch the mad cart drivers in the act!

Whisky and sandwiches in the moonlight it is!

Again, this is a very short story, but the writing is economically evocative, I think – love the squeaking critter and the feebly piping bird, really conveys the loneliness of the wide-open rough here. We get another gesture towards the hummock of the Roman earthworks, just to remind us that this landscape is not a primeval wilderness or anything – the Romans were here long before Croft, and they too had modified the landscape to fit their purposes.

Croft’s peaceful vigil is interrupted by a clanging and a clanking – the milk carts have arrived!

Croft is pissed! He hops up, intent on confronting these cart hooligans who keep running roughshod over his golf course!

Tweedy little golf architect Croft is ready to crack some skulls! He’s got a stick, and he yells at the figures, telling them to fuck off (not is so many words, of course)…but the off cart drivers don’t seem to be paying him ANY attention. Furious, Croft grabs at the bridle of the nearest horse…

Those aren’t milk carts at all! Why, they look like…

Roman ghost chariots! How rad is that? They’re still practicing, all these centuries later, in the same spot that they’d chosen for their recreation, the land they’d levelled and modified and built up, just the same as Croft was doing now! With this new realization, Croft heads home and meets his wife:

And that’s the end of “The Milk Carts!”

A short, placid little tale, and much more of a classic English ghost story than what I’d call a “weird tale,” but still, I like it – there’s a surprising amount of depth to it, I think, a kind of interesting meditation on landscapes and history that I really like. Plus, it’s extremely short, and that kind of efficient brevity is something worth studying too. And not everything needs to end in tentacular horror and madness either – I like Croft’s simple “they proved to me that they had a prior claim” and his later enigmatical justification for altering his design around the 12th hole. I like the way this story uses landscape and embedded history to good, spooky effect. And the idea of these spectral Roman charioteers circling their track night after night, especially in a spot that was being transformed into another location for sport and recreation, is a lot of fun!

The Man who Strained Pulp #45: “The Man who Collected Poe” by Robert Bloch, Famous Fantastic Mysteries v. 12, n. 6, Oct 1951

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January 19th, which was last Monday, was Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday, one of the high holy days for weird fiction! Poe, of course, is hugely important, not merely as an antecedent to what would coalesce into the genre of “Weird Fiction,” but also beyond it in the larger world of literature; for starters, just look at the huge impact his work had in other languages once it was translated – Baudelaire’s translations of (and essays on) Poe in the 1850s and 1860s were epochal in French (and Continental) literature, while Konstantin Balmont’s translation of Poe in 1895 ushered in the Russian Symbolist movement. Similarly, Arno Schmidt’s love of Poe, whom he (with Hans Wollschläger) translated and celebrated in his insanely fun (and insanely huge) novel Bottom’s Dream (which is, among other things, a novel about Poe), was an important part of mid-century German lit. There’s Edogawa Ranpo in Japan, Borges and Cortazar in 20th century Spanish lit (preceded by Landa and Alarcon who similarly revolutionized 19th century Spanish literature with Poe as a major factor), I mean, the list goes on and on! Poe was a big deal!

There’s even a fun bit of Poe-in-translation history in the story of Weird Tales – as a college student at the University of Nevada, Farnsworth Wright translated Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” into Esperanto and published it in the Esperantist magazine La Simbolo in the ‘teens! Wright, who would go on to become the single most powerful editor in the history of the genre of Weird Fiction, would often cite Poe as a foundational figure for the genre. And, of course, there’s Lovecraft, for whom Poe was a god; point is, Poe is hugely important to literature, both highfalutin’ AND pulpy, so how about we spend some time reading and enjoying and thinking about a very fun story by Robert Bloch about ol’ Ed A. Poe? It’s “The Man Who Collected Poe” from Famous Fantastic Mysteries 1951!

We’ve talked out little Bobby Bloch before, specifically while looking at “Notebook Found in a Deserted House,” his great Lovecraftian story and one of the few non-HPL mythos stories that rises above homage and pastiche to be something interesting, spooky, and good in itself. Interestingly, that story is also from 1951; in both of those it sort of feels like Bloch is looking back on the great influences of his writing career one last time, waving goodbye to them fondly as he begins to really develop his own voice and style.

What we haven’t talked about, though, is the magazine that this story was published in: Famous Fantastic Mysteries was one of the great sci-fi-ish mags that came around as the genre really got going, a major competitor to Weird Tales. It was first published in ’39, when it was owned by the Munsey company, who had a great backlog of weird- and science fictional stories from it’s older mags, like Argosy, that it decided to exploit. For the first few years of its existence, into the 40s, FFM was mostly a reprint magazine, focusing on classics, but it later got bought by another company (I wanna say Popular, but I’m not 100% sure of that right now, and checking would run counter to the spirit of these off-the-cuff essays!) which promptly changed the policy and began publishing new fiction. Some good writers showed up in its pages, Moore, Kuttner, Arthur C. Clarke, some big names. The editor for its entire run was Mary Gnaedinger, who was a HUGE name in sci-fi back then, famous for her deep knowledge of the field.

Oh, hey, it was “Popular” who bought ’em from Muncey then; you can see that on the ToC, above. Margaret Irwin is an interesting character – she was an English writer most famous for her historical novels, mostly set in Elizabethan times, but she (like so many writers from the UK) also wrote “ghost” stories (a term the brits use to cover both traditional spooky tales as well as what we’d call weird fic, too). You can see, though, that FFM focused on longer work with their reprints – that big ol’ “Rebirth,” originally from ’34, is a hefty un! But, luckily, they filled the nooks and crannies with shorter work, and that’s what we’re looking at today!

I love these little writer’s statements up front of the stories in FFM, fun little glimpses into the processes and how the author views their work. It’s a little odd because, as we’ll see, I don’t think this story really does address the question Bloch raises there (goofy and ahistorical as it is) – it’s not about whether Poe would’ve sold his work today at all, so it’s a little strange to see that point raised here. But what IS fun is that Bloch tells you, up front, that he’s grabbed a LOT of text straight from Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and, by God, he’s right! Here’s the first two paragraphs of this story:

And for comparison, here’s the opening of Poe’s story:

I mean, that’s super fun, isn’t it? What I really like is the way Bloch hangs a lampshade on the whole thing in the story by suggesting that our nameless narrator seems to recognize the whole scene – which of course he would, since he’s a Poe expert who happens to be entering into a Poe(esque) story about all things Poe! It’s fun and playful, which is one of the hallmarks of Bloch’s writing (and why he’s such a good horror writer).

Anyway, we do get a name here, and it’s another deep cut from Poe’s story: Launcelot Canning, who is the fictional author of the fake book (The Mad Trist) that Roderick Usher reads aloud while his sister, Madeleine, is clawing her way to freedom in the tomb beneath the house. As an aside, that part of “Usher” is a lot of fun and is an interesting earlier example of what would become a hallmark of Lovecraft and his circle of weird writers – the inclusion of a fake book in among a some real ancient texts.

Again, Bloch was very sincere in saying he was mining “Usher” directly here – the allusions come thick n’ fast in this story! It makes for a fun read after reading “Usher” honestly, and I’d recommend you do that too! But, anyway, back to the story:

A good weird intro to the character – ol’ Lance Canning here is the world’s greatest collector of Poe-mobilia, something that, while interesting enough to the narrator, isn’t the real hook that reels him into Canning’s orbit. Rather, it is Canning himself, who is just a straight-up oddball seemingly right our of a Poe tale:

I really like that little joke at the expense of people with obsessive interests – the bit about wanting to figure out EXACTLY when Poe first grew a mustache is a funny line!

Anyway, our narrator accepts Canning’s invite out to the ol’ home place in Maryland (the state where Poe died and is buried, an important point to this story). The house is, of course, the Usher mansion, though without moat and tarn, and the rooms are straight outta the story too. Canning is languidly reclining on a couch, and our narrator feels like there’s something forced, or maybe manic, about his greeting, but our guy here just chalks it up to his weirdness. Moreover, he comes to realize that Canning is, literally, a BORN collector:

As a brief interlude, here are the graves themselves in Baltimore, which I visited during a conference in Baltimore a few years ago. This first one is the original monument:

And here’s the newer one, which was indeed commissioned by notable and literary members of Baltimore’s citizenry in 1875 and which necessitated an exhumation and reburial of Poe’s remains:

In particular, it’s this grandfather, Christopher Canning, the one who helped fund the new monument, that built the bulk of the Canning collection. Lance shows off some of the insanely rare and insanely valuable pieces:

This is some fun bibliomania, and the “commingled pride and cupidity” is a great line that really conveys the very specific affect of Canning here. It’s not merely greed or snobbery – it’s a kind of all-consuming obsession, something Poe wrote about often. It’s also fun to see the long list of Poe works here, especially the weird Conchologist’s First Book, which is a real fun deep cut in Poe’s oeuvre. And this obsessiveness seems to run in the family too:

Some fun metacommentary on the kind of mania that can develop around a subject of study, as well as an important part of the story – we learn that ol’ Grandpappy Canning was not above rank thievery to get what he wanted for his Poe collection! Our narrator tries to explain Canning’s grandfather’s truly all-consuming obsession with Poe by asking if there wasn’t some deeper reason behind it? Perhaps the old man thought he’d been related to Poe in someway?

Canning then goes on to talk of his father who followed in Grandpa’s footsteps and became a reclusive scholar and collector of all things Poe, in particular focusing on letters either from, to, or about ol’ Edgard Allan Poe. While Lance gathers these particular pieces, he pours them some amontillado (natch), and the two of them proceed to get increasingly toasted as they look over the collection.

Aside from the fact that the above passages are just good writing, I like the kind of mounting (or, perhaps “deepening” is more appropriate here) intensity here – Canning began with his Grandfather’s collection, a remarkable but still very MATERIAL kind of thing, full of rare and valuable books. But now we’ve moved beyond the man’s work to the man himself. Canning’s father was obsessed with the letters, little glimpses into Poe the person, and that kind of voyeuristic and intimate examination of a person’s life is a very intoxicating thing, you know, just as much as the wine they’re drinking. It ALSO nicely sets up a kind of generational escalation to this Poe obsession that afflicts the family Canning, right? Grandpa was all about the material of the man, his son was getting into the psychology and life of Poe…so what does that leave for the grandson, Launcelot Canning?

A fun little nod in the text there to Arthur Quinn who wrote, in 1941, the excellent and still definitive biography of Poe (you can read the 1960 edition over on archive.org here, btw).

Lance cracks open a chest and shows our narrator the intimate objects of Poe’s life, a helluva collection. And while he’s doing so, Lance seems to be afflicted with a mounting panic or dread, like he’s juuuuuuust barely tamping down some kinda freak-out.

His reserve almost cracks when our narrator asks about a small box in the chest.

So now we’re getting to the details of the hinted-at mysterious death of ol’ Grandpappy Canning. The two of them take a trip (with more wine) into the weird Poe-themed fun-house mansion that is Canning Manor, wandering down a dark hallway and dismal stairs into the bowels of the castle-like edifice before coming to a huge, copper-lined door:

I mean, that’s excellent stuff right there. Love the wildly Poe-flavored rantings of the madman, for one thing – it’s fun to see ’em purely as allusions, but within the text it’s interesting because we, as the readers, can’t be sure WHAT exactly is happening here – did ol’ Christopher’s Poe-obsessed brain break, and THAT’S why his rantings are all Poe-flavored…or is something else happening, something darker and much weirder? We don’t get an answer immediately, but we do get a nice reveal of Christopher Canning’s ghoulishness:

Just wonderful! It’s really fun to use the Real Life exhumation and movement of Poe’s body as the seed for a story of body theft, isn’t it? It also suggests the joke (or a joke, as we’ll see…) behind the title of this piece. Christopher Canning did, indeed quite literally, Collect Poe.

And what of the little box, which he was clutching when they found him mad and raving before the door of the secret tomb of Edgar Allan Poe?

If you’re a fan of Lovecraft (as Bloch was), you might have an inkling of where this story is heading, but if not, we’ll come back to it shortly.

Lance leads the narrator back to the study, where he continues his tale – his Father kept secret the fact that Poe’s corpse lay in the tomb beneath the house, and only told Lance about it as he lay dying. Even so, it was several years before Lance even found the key that would unlock the door to the secret, shameful tomb. And yet, with that key, somehow, Launcelot Canning is confident in stating that now HE, more than his grandfather or father, is in fact the Greatest Collector of Poe! Wait, what’s that now?

The storm builds in fury, and Lance takes up Poe’s childhood flute and begins to play madly on it, in a scene reminiscent of Roderick Usher’s guitar-playin’ while the storm (and his sister) creep upon the doomed house. Seems like a weird scene, but I guess the wine must be good because, rather than gettin’ the Hell out of Dodge, our narrator decides to peruse the bookshelves of his obviously mad host (as you do when you’re in a weird tale):

Oh hell yes. That’s right – this is Bloch before he’d shed himself entirely of his Lovecraftianisms, so of course there’re forbidden books of dark lore and evil magic here…and they’ve been well-thumbed too!

“…what can be summoned forth if one but hold the key.” hmm…

Anyway, THIS is apparently enough for the narrator, who refuses his ninth glass of wine and says he must, at last, be on his way. This panics poor ol Lance, who seems to desperately want to have someone there with him, particularly on this stormy night. Our narrator demands that Canning admit that all this stuff about the stolen body and the tomb and all is a hoax, but Canning says its all real. And, in fact, he can PROVE it:

A very fun reveal – secret Poe stories that no one has ever read! But how can this be?

Super fun, isn’t it? And if it weren’t for those magical Lovecraftian tomes mentioned earlier, you might think that the Narrator has hit on the solution here, right? That Lance Canning, a la Norman Bates (who hasn’t been written about yet) has monomaniacally BECOME the dead person who is the focus of their obsession. Maybe Canning has so steeped himself in Poe that he has, in some mad way, convinced himself that he IS Poe, right?

Well, surely that IS what has happened, right? New paper, one of the stories is dated 1949…clearly Canning is just nuts and thinks he Poe. MYSTERY SOLVED!

But Canning persists in his denial:

A boxful of dust, you say…what does that sound like…

That’s right – this IS a Lovecraftian mythos tale after all! Canning, like Charles Dexter Ward, has used the essential salts of the corpse to REANIMATE the dead!

It’s a pretty fun little twist, and one you might not have seen coming – after all, even knowing that Bloch began his writing life as a Lovecraft acolyte, you might assume that, by ’51, he’d transformed himself into the writer who was more interested in the twists and turns of a fucked-up mind than in weird gibbering cosmic entities from behind. And it’s fun to see him set that up here – the idea that this family, so obsessed with Poe, would eventually produce a deranged member that believed himself to actually BE Poe is a perfectly good bit of weird horror, you know what I mean? But in many ways this is not merely a story ABOUT Poe…rather, it’s a story about the influence of Poe, of the way an older writer can still impact people from beyond the grave. And, of course, Bloch is also thinking about how that influence was felt by Lovecraft, and how he was, in many ways, the grandson of Poe and the son of Lovecraft, at least from a writing perspective. It’s a neat, weird mediation on influence and writerly genealogies!

AND it’s got an undead Poe writing impossibly horrific stories from beyond the grave!

We’re rapidly approaching the end, so of course we start hearing the metallic pounding on the tomb door below echoing through the house!

A chilling image, and a great, horrific concept too: Poe’s new material is informed by concrete knowledge of what he could only have imagined in life. His old published work is merest preamble to the true horror of his undead writings! It’s all so huge and over the top that it really can’t be beat, it’s so much fun!

Of course, Poe has escaped the Tomb and has been making his way up the stairs and through the house towards the study. Our narrator pushes aside the panicking Canning (knocking over a flaming candelabra) and flings open the door!

And that’s the end of Robert Bloch’s “The Man Who Collected Poe!”

This story has some great art with it that sorta kinda gives away the plot, so I’ve saved it for last:

A wonderful piece by the great Lawrence Stevens showing the moment of the revivified Poe’s appearance. I really like the border there, full of little allusions to Poe’s works. A great piece all around!

Obviously, I love this story. It’s just a blast, and you can really see Bloch is having fun writing it, playing with the original text from “Usher,” really relishing the language and vivacity of Poe’s words. But beyond that, I think it’s a really interesting example of a writer very explicitly exploring both their genre in general and those in it who influenced them very specifically. And, not to be schmaltzy, but I think there’s a real affection and appreciation on display here, both for Poe and Lovecraft, writers who were very important to Bloch at one time but whose work he’s moved (and will continue to move) away from as he develops and grows and ages.

And, like I said above, it is interesting to see Bloch musing on his changing interests in his writing – there’s still the Lovecraftian weirdness here, of course, but there’s also a preoccupation with minds and psychology, highlighted both in his own writing as well as in the sections of “Usher” he chose to use. It’s also reflective of Bloch’s deeply Freudian impulse to look his progenitors square in the face and, if not reject them, at least put them to bed. Poe is the grandfather of all horror writers, and for Bloch Lovecraft was a sort of literary father – for Bloch to grow he has to step out of the shadows, otherwise he’d be in the shoes of Launcelot Canning, brooding over his collection, unable to live his own life and write his own work.

Poe is a writer who often suffers from peoples’ assumptions – the idea that he wrote only horrible, macabre, freaky shit is a common one, and tends to color most peoples’ views of his work. But a careful reading of Poe shows, I think, that he’s deeply interested in consolation after the horror, in looking for solace in the face of unimaginable terror and tragedy. And while he’s mostly just a Monster in this story, I think that there is a kind of catharsis here – Poe is, of course, freed at last, but so too is Canning. The conflagration that consumes him and his collection (and its centerpiece, Poe himself) is a cleansing fire, in more ways than one!

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

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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:

my favorite REH pic

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!