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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lovecraft excerpt is a pretty important one, I think, and sort of sets the tone for the way Howard has entered the annals of weird literature. His line about Howard having “put himself into everything he wrote” is key, and a point HPL would make over and over (it forms the center of the long in memorium he wrote for the fanzine Fantasy in their Sept 1936 issue too). The idea that Howard was deeply engaged with his writing, producing art even in spite of the commercial conditions, is high praise from someone like HPL. Too, I think both he and REH shared a deep appreciation for their roles as REGIONAL authors, people interested in their specific environments and backgrounds and what it meant for them as both people and writers. And there’s certainly something to HPL statement that Howard had a “unique inner force and sincerity” in his work – read Kuttner’s Elak story or Ball’s Rald stories and tell me 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway: onto the story!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bone bats! That’s great, isn’t it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A grim doom has descended on the thieves!

And then, we reach the end of the story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strained Pulp Page

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

Guest Post over on Adam’s Notes

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Just a short little post to point you in the direction of a guest post I did for the great newsletter Adam’s Notes. It’s titled “Robert E. Howard, Grettir the Outlaw, and the origins of two-fisted Weird Fiction,” and if you like the sort of thing I write here in the Pulp Straining posts, then I reckon you’ll like it too!

Adam’s Notes is a really fun thing too, and you should subscribe (for free!) to it, too – Adam is a great writer with interests in some wide-ranging and really fun topics. He does a regular series in the Notes on the letters of Samuel Pepys, a real highlight, but he’s also interested in the Chansons de Geste and related writing. He’s also a great reviewer and interviewer, things he does both in the Notes as well as other places. It’s great, I highly recommend ya’ll sign up for it!

Straining pulp…and souls! “Soul-Catcher” by Robert S. Carr, Weird Tales v. 9, n. 3, 1927!

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Generally, when I pick a story to muse about here, I go for one that I really love, a story that I feel like has really got something going on or does something interesting or provocative. Alternatively, I sometimes pick stories that I think are historically interesting, or that represent a facet of the genre, beyond just the fiction in itself. But sometimes I just like to indulge in a little bit of gawking, pointing out something odd or strange or interesting (at least to me), and that’s what today’s (hopefully short – I free write these things stream of consciousness style, so who the hell knows!?) lil’ essay thing is. The story in question is “Soul-Catcher” by Robert S. Carr, from the March 1927 issue of Weird Tales!

Now, I actually DO like this story; it’s got some fun weirdness, and I’m a sucker for a first person narrative with a good voice, and it’s also very short and to-the-point. It’s an example of perfectly fine weird fiction from the 20s, not anything VITAL to your understanding of the genre or anything, and I’d never argue it should be anthologized or anything; it’s a decent little bit of weird writing. But what struck me when I found it, during a recent re-perusal of The Unique Magazine’s ToCs, was the author, Robert S. Carr.

It’s a deep cut, but if you’re interested in creaky old UFO lore, particularly the history of it as a social phenomenon, you might recognize that name. You see, in the 70s, long after his Weird Tales days, lil’ Bobby Carr got into the Saucer Scene in a big way, as evidenced by this little newspaper story in the Tampa Tribune, Wed Jan 16, 1974:

I think this is the first mention of Hangar 18, a place that, along with Area 51 and Roswell, would have to be one of those geographical locales that basically underpins all of modern UFO mythology. And Weird Fiction author Robert S. Carr created it! He’s the one who turned a secret hangar at Wright Patterson Air Force Base into one of the shadowy foundations of modern saucer conspiracism!!! And that’s not all! Here’s Carr again, this time from the Nov 1, 1974 issue of the Ann Arbor Sun:

That’s right, not only did Carr create Hangar 18, but he also appears to have created the modern Alien Autopsy plot that would, in the 90s, explode among UFOlogy! It’s also interesting to see that Carr, saucerizing in the 70s before Roswell had become a thing, leans into the Aztec New Mexico crash as the origin of the Saucer and its crewsicles. It’s a unique moment in paranoid outre american history.

Carr isn’t unique in that regard, of course. You might notice, in the first news clipping above there, the name of Donald Keyhoe. Even a dilletante of Saucerology would recognize that name – he, and his book “The Flying Saucers are Real” are one of the biggest reasons for the explosion in Saucer interest in 1947, tying together a new Nuts-n-Bolts approach (which treated the saucers as machines from alien worlds, in contrast to the more spiritualist Contactee movement that had dominated saucer fandom to that point) with grim suggestions of a conspiracy of silence from the u.s. gov’t about them. But what’s interesting is that, like Carr, Keyhoe was ALSO a Weird Tales writer! He’d had four stories published in the magazine in the 20s, before moving on to specialize in air adventure stories. Eventually he’d transition into a fairly lucrative article writing and “journalism” career, focusing especially on pilots and aeronautics, which is how he ended up connecting with Kenneth Arnold and the early Saucer community. Funny to see two major legs of the many-legged hydra(?) that is modern UFOlogy coming out of Weird Tales, isn’t it?

Just to wrap up the Saucer portion of the show, here’s a link to a Skeptical Inquirer article written about Carr by his son, giving some very important context to his dad, who sounds like a complex, conflicted individual. It’s kind of sad reading, but it sounds like Carr pere was, basically, one of those weird pathological liars who had a hard time distinguishing reality from his lies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he found a home in UFO circles. Anyway, a fascinating guy, and a very weird connection!

But what about his fiction, you ask? Ah, let us dive in!

A nice little title illustration from an artist I don’t immediately recognize, “G.O.Olimick” maybe? Anyway, it’s good, competently done…but doesn’t that profile look familiar? I swear it’s copied from a Renaissance portrait of some some venetian doge or evil cardinal, a Medici or Borgia or someone like that. Doesn’t it look familiar? If you have any ideas, let me know, I can see the portrait in profile in my mind very clearly, but I can’t find it! (EDIT: I reached out to Adam McPhee, all around Renaissance Man and a Writer of Note, and asked him if, in his extensive studies of Renaissance Italy, he’d seen this visage before, and he thinks it IS Cosimo de Medici! As thanks, I now insist everybody subscribe to Adam’s substack, Adam’s Notes!)

A quick, efficient intro – it’s a hospital story, and right away we’re introduced to ol’ Doc Dorsey, a quiet fellow who seems to specialize in emergency work. We learn that he’s a diligent enough doctor, trying hard to help these case even though, of course, it’s not always possible. Yet there are a couple of oddities about his practice. First off, he works alone, ALWAYS.

So there you go, Doc Dorsey would leap into action with every new case, but he never had an assistant and did all his doctorin’ behind closed doors. The narrator lets us know that that’s not too strange, when you think about it – I mean, these emergency cases are either straight forward or the person dies, not a lot of room for consultation or consideration or discussion. So of course the doctor likes to work alone, it’s just the efficient choice. But it kind of strange; for instance, sometimes they bring in a case that’s obviously hopeless, the person is 100% dead or dying with no hope for any other outcome, and still Dorsey has ’em brought in, shoos everybody out, and then spends time behind closed doors with them. And what’s even odder is that, while the interns and orderlies standing outside his room will hear him bustling around and working, they’ll sometimes see that, when he comes out, its obvious that he wasn’t doing any sort of examination or whatever – no gloves, no mess. So, what the hell was he doin’ in there?

Ah, who cares, says our narrator:

Dorsey does his best, after all, so a bit of eccentricity is to be excused!

Anyway, one day, our narrator, who is an orderly, is asked by Doc Dorsey to head down to supply and get him some surgical gloves, which he does. But while he’s doing this, a car wreck victim is brought in and Dorsey goes to work. Our narrator doesn’t know this, however, and without thinking, enters into Dorsey’s operating room, apparently the first person ever to do so while he’s with a patient. And what does he see?

I mean, that’s pretty good, isn’t it? For one thing, Dorsey has, apparently, decided that this guy is a goner – he ain’t doin’ shit for him at all. Instead, he’s got some kind of weird device, a web-filled frame with what sounds like a grounding wire running into a big glass jar. That’s an evocative scene, isn’t it? And then it gets better!

Good weird shit, in my opinion, and I love the little self-satisfied “got ’em!” from Dorsey there. But it’s all too much for our narrator, who must’ve moaned or made some sort of noise.

It’s good tension here, I think – the narrator (and we) don’t know what the hell is happening here, but it’s obviously something weird and occult. I mean, he’s got a weird net that funnels smokey essence from corpses into jars…that’s a helluva thing to just walk in on. And the look in Dorsey’s eyes when he realizes he’s been caught is concerning, to say the least! But then it all settles down, and Dorsey explains:

Dude’s been jarring souls for a while, apparently – he’s got a big ol’ cabinet full of smoky jars. And he explains that, if he can’t help ’em survive whatever accident or trouble their body is in, he at least tries to save their souls. Literally. In jars.

There’s some good writing on Carr’s part here, where our narrator explains that, upon seeing the jars, he gets a very strange, very distinct sensation of being observed, like what he used to experience when he worked backstage at a theater and would, sometimes, have to step out in front of an audience to do something. It conveys the creepiness of the situation well, I think, and also really captures the weird way our brains work when they’re confronted with something odd – we grope around in our memories for some kind of analogous situation to make sense of what we’re experiencing, and the results are often equal parts illuminating and confounding. Anyway, it’s good.

Dorsey doesn’t seem troubled by his soul collection, however. He accepts that he’s been found out, and even seems to come around to the idea that it’s a good thing; it was bound to happen eventually, and Dorsey is glad that it wasn’t a prissy, smug internist, at least. In fact, Dorsey seems to come to the decision that he might need some help after all, and he asks our narrator if he’s interested in the job.

No time for discussion or thought – an ambulance is bringing in a new victim right away! Talk about on the job training!

Another hint that something not all together copacetic is going on here – that glimmer in Dorsey’s eyes is, to put it simply, menacing. But our narrator can’t do anything about it, barely has time to reflect, as Dorsey calls him over to help with the weird net thing. They catch another soul, and the narrator notices that, briefly, the body weight of the corpse decrees by a few ounces when they snag the smoke. Dorsey explains that there is a physical aspect to the smoke; it weighs about four ounces or so, and the weight discrepancy is compensated for by air filling in the soul vacuum left behind in the corpse. It’s weird and I love it.

The next day, the narrator comes across Dorsey seemingly in a kind of weird trance in his rooms. Eventually he wakes up and explains to the narrator that he was “astralizing,” basically projecting his own consciousness out of his body? Where to, and to what ends, we’re never told…just more weirdness from Doc Dorsey!

And then, sometimes later…Dorsey is found dead:

A mechanical fault in the elevators had made the hospital shake, and as a result all those jars had fallen and shattered and, presumably, all those souls had…gotten out. Our narrator goes over to the body and pulls the cloth off the face, and gets a bit of fright…

I mean, damn…that’s gruesome! His head, and especially his face, had ruptured, as if it had sudden been full of some very argumentative critters.

Well, our orderly puts it together, same way as we did:

And that’s the end of “Soul-Catcher” by Robert S. Carr!

Freaky shit, huh? Dorsey had left his body behind, and when those souls got out, they poured into his vacant corpus, filled it up, maybe fought for control, and it was too much, physically, for the body to withstand. After all, there is some kind of weight and substance to the souls…four ounces of soul stuff, and how many souls had Dorsey been jarring up over the years. Just straight up Scanners-ed his head! And what happened to Dorsey’s astralized soul, anyway?

The key to weird fiction is the unanswered question, you know what I mean? The way a story creates a framework where the characters can, plausibly, come to conclusions based on hints within their own story, a kind of semi-certainty about the events that they’ve experienced; meanwhile, we, the reader, have to have just a little bit MORE certainty, shared with us by the author, that yeah, for sure, 100% some weird stuff had been going down. But what makes it all work is the unanswered parts of the story. What was Dorsey doing here? He’d been collecting a bunch of souls, but why? Was he doing it out of some twisted altruism, the idea that he was preserving something of these people that would’ve vanished otherwise? Or did he have sinister motives afterall? His “astralizing” seems to suggest an occult knowledge and interest that could imply that there’s more to Dorsey’s work, that those flashes of mad, manic glee at the chance to get a soul were about more than we realize. Was he doing something with these souls? And was his death an accident, a sudden influx of souls looking for a new body, or was it a deliberate thing, an act of revenge on their jailor?

Who knows? That’s the sort of stuff that makes great weird fiction! I also really love that last line…the OTHER key to weird fiction is the imposition of these weird events and unanswered question on the otherwise banal, everyday life of a normal person. This poor orderly has had a brief glimpse behind the curtain, and they don’t know what the hell it all means beyond the very real fact that it is unsettling and upsetting. So they’ll just have to start looking at the want ads again. Great stuff!

Anyway, fairly quick little story, and even my long-winded thoughts got put down fairly quick. A fun little tale, I think, with a bonus interest factor brought about by the weird connections the author would have much later in life to the big, unanswered questions about UFOs.

Weird Pulp of the Old West #33: “Spud and Cochise” by Oliver La Farge, (originally published in The Forum, January 1936, but reprinted in Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine v.13, n.6, Dec. 1957)

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Howdy Pardners! Been a dog’s age, ain’t it? Lotta shit happening, so I ain’t had the time to scratch out as much writin’ and musin’ as I’d like to for this here blog, but still! Catch as catch can, so here we are again, and it’s a rip-snorter this time, a wonderful little story that one could very easily classify as an early example of the “Weird Western” genre originally from 1936: it’s “Spud and Cochise” by Oliver La Farge, originally published in The Forum but republished nearly 20 yrs later in good ol’ Fantasy & Science Fiction!

First thing to touch on – is this, truly, really, actually, pulp? Well, frankly…no. The magazine it was published in originally, back in ’36, was a slick called The Forum, a long-lived magazine first published in the late 1800s and running well into the middle of the 20th century. It’s early iteration took its name very seriously, hosting dueling essays on the major news topics of the day – it famously had a whole issue devoted to American Imperialism and whether it was Good or Bad following the 1898 expansion of U.S. holdings into the Caribbean and the Pacific, for instance. Beginning sometime in the teens, though, The Forum began to publish more fiction, although it never truly abandoned its “Ripped from the Headlines” essays and articles.

I called it a “slick,” by which I mean it was published on higher quality paper, had pretentions of greater literary/intellectual/social merit, and also had a lot more advertising. In fact, during some of its run, particularly in the 30s and 40s, it might’ve actually graded into the storied heights of the “glossies,” since it had circulation and distribution comparable to Harper’s and The Atlantic at the time, with whom they also shared a number of authors. With regards to the fiction it published, it also never focused on a specific genre, which is something else it had in common with the glossies and fancier slicks. In general, the fiction in The Forum was of a more serious, literary bent, though of course you’ll see that today’s story was republished in Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine in ’57, and it is very definitely a work of fantasy.

Of course, F&SF isn’t exactly a pulp either; it was first published in ’49, a period that, really, can’t be said to be truly of the pulp era, at least not classically. The post-war publishing boom had changed that landscape irreparably (along with changes in printing and mail distribution), resulting in very different magazine business and newsstand culture. Similarly, radio and teevee totally changed the nature of popular entertainment. Gone were the heady days of dozens of magazines battling it out for a vast audience of readers hungry for more short stories. Now, genres were firmly cemented, and only those with sturdy, reliable fandoms could survive in the hardscrabble world of magazine publishing.

In fact, F&SF was clearly meant to be seen as a break from the pulpy past. It had no interior illustrations, for one thing, focusing instead on the stories, something that immediately stands out in contrast to, say, Astounding or Weird Tales. It was also created by and associated with a very specific group of editors and writers, people who had basically split with what I call the “Ray Palmer” school of sci-fi. There’s a whole story there, a fascinating (but also, sadly, a constantly recapitulating) one too, but to make it short, there had been an aesthetic and philosophic break with classic “gee whiz ray-guns-and-bug-eyed-monsters” sci fi, starting in the 30s and accelerated by WWII; guys like Pohl, Asimov, etc had pushed sci-fi into headier, more literary territory, ushering in a classic era of thoughtful, introspective, and frankly modern (sometimes to a fault!) stories that defined the genre. F&SF was a publication by and for those sorts of stories, as evidenced by its authors and editors; for instance, Anthony Boucher, the editor of this issue, was one of the first English-language translators of Borges. These serious literary chops are evident from a glance at the ToC:

It’s just ringer after ringer, both in terms of straight sci-fi (Asimov, Pohl, Anderson, Dickson) as well as the fuckin’ Master herself, Shirley Jackson. I mean, this is a scorching table of contents, some great stories by some great writers, including the reprint we’re interested in today, “Spud and Cochise” by Oliver La Farge!

But, before we get stuck in, let’s briefly introduce our author, since it’s A) extremely possible that you’ve never heard of him and B) his biography is relevant to this story. La Farge, born in 1901, was originally an anthropologist, doing important work on Olmec sites in Mexico before shifting his focus to the desert southwest and, specifically, the Navajo. He learned to speak Navajo, and wrote several scholarly works on both Navajo lifeways and their language. It was this experience, particularly in living in the southwest with the Navajo, that informed the majority of his writing. He’s probably most famous for a novel, Laughing Boy, which is set on a Navajo reservation and represents an important record of Navajo life and culture from the time; it won the Pulitzer in ’29 and set La Farge off on his career as a novelist. He also wrote a fair number of short stories, publishing a couple of collection in his lifetime and one volume posthumously. I’ve not read any of his novels, nor his autobiographical memoir “Behind the Mountain,” but after I found this story (in an old 60s paperback “best of” collection of F&SF) I chased his stuff down. He’s a good writer, interesting and with a lot of keen descriptions of people and places in the southwest, worth reading! But, I will say, today’s story is easily my favorite thing he’s done, a real masterpiece. I’ll link it again here just in case, and strongly urge you to read it before I go and spoil everything. It’s really honestly great!

Anyway, we’re burning daylight, so let’s mount up and get into the story!

Incredible western writing…you can smell the desert air, taste the dust, feel the sun, it’s great stuff. The tone is wonderful too; that little bit at the end, about the dead horse being a godsend for the ants, just a perfect encapsulation of the desolate and alien nature of the desert, you know? Balzac wrote that “In the desert you see there is everything and nothing – it is God without mankind” and La Farge gets it, you know what I mean?

Our dusty, weary feller, identified simply as Spud, rides up a ridge and sees a cloud of dust moving towards him. What’s the western equivalent of hard-boiled? Raw-hide? Whatever it is, that’s what we get, the sort of spare, efficient prose that lets you know Spud is an old hand at western living, wary of the dust, knowing it could be dangerous, particularly when it vanishes.

It’s interesting the way the medium in which we read things mediates our experience, isn’t it? I mean, think about someone reading this in The Forum in ’36 – you’d hit these first few scenes, these first few paragraphs, and think “okay, we’ve got some kind of cowboy story here.” But us, reading it in a science fiction magazine, we know there’s more than just a cow opera in the offing here, so we’re primed and waiting for the weirdness, reading between the lines…why did that dust cloud vanish?

Spud rides on, and eventually comes across the source, a weary, dusty woman who he greets with all the tact and graciousness of a true Gentleman of the Range.

Great stuff, perfect tone, perfect edge to everything. This woman is, very definitively, heading away from the town of Spareribs; there’s obviously something there, some reason that this exhausted woman has lit out of town in such a hurry, and Spud simply must know what’s going on. It turns out that, beneath the dirt and dust and grimness, he recognizes this woman!

Man, but “came out flat with what moved in him” is a perfect line, isn’t it? The western genre is the perfect, natural home of the valiant Paladin, particularly if you like your chivalric hero a little dusty and trail weary, and in this section La Farge is presenting us with an all time Cowboy Knight Errant in Spud. Just a really wonderful bit of character work here.

And then it turns out that this woman, a prostitute, actually recognizes Spud!

Plotwise, there it is: this woman, hoping to start a new life, bought up a mine and figured on settling in Spareribs, only to end up getting menaced by someone names Snakeweed. Stylistically, I think this is great stuff – very western, very gritty, but then the way these two know each other, the way they share a geography, it’s very mythic, you know what I mean, like a greek myth, or from the chansons. And they way she just has to ask “Do you know Snakeweed?” and he only has to answer “I do” well, I mean, c’mon, that’s fantastic. We’re immediately transported into a world, although we don’t know yet what kind of world it is, exactly. But damn if I don’t love it! Also, just as an aside, I love her statement “I tried to get out o’ the corral, but I guess it’s too high for me.” What a great line, full of despair at her inability to escape her past. Wonderful stuff!

Seeing and hearing her despair, Spud tells her not to worry – he’s been around the block a bit and seen many a woman like her find happiness. Then, moved by the weird that dominates his life as a heroic wanderer, Spud tells her to hold off going all the way to Tucson. Instead, she should take another trail, head to a place where she can hole up for a while and give him a chance to take care of Snakeweed.

Flawless stuff, in my opinion. The woman worries Spud will get killed, what with him being a wiry little feller and Snakeweed a great big bear of a man, but Spud tells her not to worry, telling what we think in the moment is a Pecos Bill style tall tale about himself. Anyway, there’s something in his bearing and words that convinces her that she oughta let him try, at least. They make an agreement to meet at an appointed time, and then she gives him a gift.

Two whole bottles of Four-Eye Monongahela! Now, at this point in the story, this is just some fancy liquor (Monongahela, by the way, is a valley in Pennsylvania, were the tradition of making whiskey with a mash of 80% rye and 20% barley originated), though you’ll want to just tuck these two blue bottles away for now in the back of your mind.

Spud rides off, there’s more wonderful desert description, and then he reaches Spareribs, a rough patch in the middle of nowhere. He’s been here before, as evidenced by the fact that the corral boss knows him and hands him a key. There some fantastic western writing here, a clearly painted picture of a dusty mining town in the middle of the desert, complete with saloon and fancy faro table. Spud gets a drink, eats a steak, and gets the feel of the place.

And then: enter, Snakeweed.

What’s Tiger Bone, you ask? Well,

So already, we’ve got some stuff going on, right? The whiskey earlier, a kind of heavenly drink, and now we’re introduced to its opposite, Tiger Bone, a Left Handed liquor, if you will. And it has effects!

Just gonna come clean – I love this, it’s perfect. “You know me. I’m Snakeweed; that’s what they call me and they better like it.” War talk indeed! And Spud has the sense (perhaps influenced by the preternatural Tiger Bone he’s been drinking) that he too has become a part of this myth cycle, back when he made his own war talk and Named himself in the same way. We’ve stepped out of the West, per say, and into some real Wizard shit now. And it just gets better!

Spud recognizes the truth of the thing – there’s magic in this world, Spud and Snakeweed both partake of it and use it and understand it. Without that bullet, Spud knows he can’t kill Snakeweed. He briefly contemplates trying to drink him under the table, but he calculates that it’d take a lot, more by far than he could handle himself. Similarly, there’s the sense that the Four Eye booze, powerful as it is, wouldn’t help him here either – there’s a great line about how the Tiger Bone didn’t make Spud mean, and in the same way the Four Eye wouldn’t make Snakeweed kind. This is my favorite kind of magic, a sort of Taoist point-counterpoint, forces-in-balance sort of thing.

Spud retires for the night, turning over the problem in his head. Spareribs is too small for both Spud and Snakeweed, but so long as Snakeweed has that bullet, there’s no way to get rid of him. Spud mulls it over, letting the Tiger Bone roil in his veins, and then he comes on a memory of a time when, once, he’d had a horse stolen out from under him by an Apache, a man who clearly could steal anything. And so, in the morning, Spud heads off in search of the great leader of the Apache resisting the Americans and the Mexicans both, Cochise.

Spud does some magic to learn where he has to go and then, after the manner of a hero, travels through the borders of the known world and into the unknown. La Farge spent a lot of time in the desert, and it shows again in the way he writes about the landscape and pure magic of it. Eventually Spud reaches his goal, confronts the Apache, and meets Cochise.

And then begins what is, in my estimation, the finest wizard’s duel ever written.

The thing about magic is that it’s hard to write, you know what I mean? What does it represent it? How is it expressed? You look at the classics of fantasy literature, your Conan or your Lord of The Rings, and you’ll find a paucity of magic, at least of the flashy, spectacular, D&D style spell-flinging; Gandalf lights a stick on fire in the blizzard magically, and that’s about it. Now, he does some other stuff too, but its all about will power and determination, a kind of intrinsic magic, hidden from mortal eyes. Similarly, in Howard’s S&S, the magic is either hypnotism and suggestion and alchemy, fancy psychological trickery, or it’s demon-powered and inhuman; either way, it’s rarely the focus of the story, since Howard knew if you dwelled on it too much it tended to strain the verisimilitude.

As for having two wizards go at it, well, forget about it. I mean, honestly, two old bearded dudes hurling fireballs at each other is boring as hell. That’s why people either subvert it, like Jack Vance and his ridiculous (and very limited) ultra-scholastic magic, or they go back to a real old-school kind of mythic “duel” like Le Guin in her great “The Rule of Names,” or White in The Once and Future King. Here the wizards are trying to one-up each other in a kind of escalating game, to see who can be trapped. That’s fun, for sure, and in both Le Guin and White’s work it is presented really effectively, but in all honesty: once you’ve seen two wizards trying to out rock-paper-scissors each other, there’s nothing really more to add, you know?

Which is why La Farge’s work here is so exciting – this is a fantastic wizards’ duel, with rules that are evident but obscure, and it feels both old and mythic while also being new and totally unprecedented. I’ll not paste any of it here, because otherwise I’d just end up putting pages of the story here, but I really hope you’ve already gone through and read this story; I really can’t say it enough – this is a great story, and this part in particular is fantastic.

Their duel starts with Cochise stopping the sun and sending it back along its track, a horrible thing (as no one can live in the past) and an awe inspiring display of power. Spud counters with a stream of mystic cursing in a range of languages, transforming his words into pure power that sends warriors fleeing and makes a buzzard drop, scorched to death, from the air. Cochise’s magic was flashy, but Spud’s demonstrated his power to actually affect things in the world permanently. Cochise responds by literally cutting a hole in the sky, and Spud nearly loses himself in the otherworldly emptiness exposed, and only with difficulty does he shake it off. Spud ties a knot in a string, a powerful spell that binds and traps Cochise. Both are left wearied.

The two wizards, Cochise and Spud, have some more magical fun – the contest is over, and by their exertions they have bound each other in friendship. There’s more mythic goodness from the buzzard, who threatens the two if they won’t share their booze, and then they get down to brass tacks – Spud came here to find a great thief to steal Snakeweed’s magic bullet. Cochise knows just the man. The thief is eager for the challenge, and agrees to help Spud. Cochise and Spud discuss deep, mystic matters long into the night, finishing off the Four Eye, and they part as friends and comrades, brother wizards both.

Spud and the Thief return to Spareribs, and he gets to work:

Again, the portrayal of magic in here is just so goddamned perfect, matter-of-fact but never banal, and the implication of it is always one of long study, serious dedication, and deep skill. It’s some of the best examples of magic I’ve ever read in any fantasy anywhere. It’s really great!

The thief returns with the bullet, and Spud, in thanks, says he can loot the town of its horses, which the thief cheerfully does. Meanwhile, Spud takes the malachite bullet, fixes it so it’ll work as a center-fire round, and then goes and loses some money at faro (in some obscure, mystical way, this is a magical act too, and its that easy ambiguity that La Farge captures that makes his magical writing so good, I think). And then he goes to kill Snakeweed:

And that’s the end of the story!

Look, obviously, I fuckin’ love this story. It’s great; Spud Flynn is a goddamn trail-worn paladin, easily my favorite kind of character, and La Farge has given him a vital voice that works perfectly in this kind of story. I love the way the world is just absolutely steeped in magic, too; like I said, this is the best wizards’ duel I’ve ever read, and the weirdness of Snakeweed and Spud’s own wizard duel in the saloon is fun too. There’s a real rugged realness to this world’s magic that I love too; it feels organically like a part of the story, you know? I reckon that’s because La Farge, a writer who loved the Southwest, was intimately familiar with the folklore and tall tales of that place, as well as the legends and folklore of the Native Americans of the region.

His familiarity and first-hand knowledge of the land and the people of that region is evident, particularly in the way he writes Cochise, I think, and it’s a goddamn relief to read something that treats the Indians as real people and not mere props; it’s sadly rare NOW, let alone from something in 1936!

As an example of a “Weird Western,” I think it’s really great – there’s a real tendency, especially know, to lean heavily into “cowboy vs monster” and, don’t get me wrong, that’s great too, but man I love the fable-like quality on display here, and the emphasis on magic and the conflict between two Cunning Men (in the sense of them being wizards) on display here; it’s a much rare kind of weird western, I think, and that’s always refreshing.

Reckon I’ve jabbered on enough about it; it’s a good story, and I hope to see ya’ll somewhere down the trail. Adios!

Greater Austin Book Festival 2025 Recap

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Blowin’ the dust off the ol’ blog to, hopefully, start to begin to approach maybe writin’ more on here. I was all primed for Sword & Sorcery posting last Xmas, but, as always, life and such took precedence. But, while things have been quiet on here, I have not been vegetating (as nice as that sounds); I’ve been using my scant spare time to put together another collection of weird short stories that, hopefully, will find a publisher and be available for people to read at some point. Also got a few stories published here and there (check out the Writing page for links). And, most recently, I took part in the Greater Austin Book Festival, a really fun event the library foundation does here in Austin. Had a great time, sold some books, met some folks, moderated a panel, got some free beer and lunch…all in all, a success!

This is the second year of the festival; you might recall that I did a write-up of the first year’s event too, wherein I was suitably impressed by the fact that everything ran as smoothly and went as well as it did! Well, I’m pleased to report that this year was no different; in fact the heroic library staff who put on the festival made it bigger and better than last years!

As someone with exceptionally poor organizational skills, it really is impressive to me to see people get something like a book fest, with so many moving parts, humming along with no hitches. Speaks really well to the skill and resilience of the Austin Public Library and its tireless workers and volunteers!

The night before the festival, the library hosted a reception with snacks and free beer/wine for all the participating authors, which was a lot of fun. Rain meant we couldn’t use the (really beautiful) rooftop garden, but even trapped indoors it was still a fun chance to get to meet other local writers (and drink free beer). It’s always interesting to meet other writers, because it’s a pretty wide-ranging and diverse field – everything from MFA types to hobbyists, and from traditionally published to self-published (although it feels like small, indie-press published books were in the majority).

It’s also interesting to encounter writers and learn why they write – I’d say a fair number of them entertain dreams of a particularly remunerative cast with regards to their writing, which is really an alien view to me. I mean, if I could pull down mid-five figures writing my dumb little stories, I’d love it, but that said the money a book pulls down isn’t ever a metric I’d want to reckon success by. And I’d certainly never want to write anything with that in mind – there were a few folks skirting dangerously close to marketeering talk there, which bums me out when I encounter it.

As I’m writing this I realize there might be some conflict in what I just said and my avowed love of the pulps – after all, some of my favorite writers approached their work with at least one foot in the “write for $$$” camp. But, when I look at it, I think what’s frustrating NOW versus back THEN is the scale of the problem, as well as the nature of the publishing world – I mean, back in the glory days of the short story, you could absolutely crank out some work explicitly for some quick cash, and use that to subsidize your more artistically-satisfying work. Also, the whole nature of pulp publishing was just this big ol’ bubbling mass, you know – lots of change, very dynamic, if one market didn’t work for you there were others, that sort of thing. You contrast that to today, and it feels very different, everyone seems to be chasing the exact same market-tested-and-approved thing, for one, with very little room for real experimentation or diversity. And, of course, the idea of someone being able to write potboilers for cash and then work for themselves just doesn’t really make sense today, not with the idea of a unified “brand identity” that publishers all seem to have bought into. Of course, in the indie world, none of that applies, but then that’s probably because nobody is making any money at all.

A bit of a discursion there, sorry! And really, the majority of the authors I met were doin’ it for the love of the game, which is always a refreshing thing to encounter out there. And it was something that several readers/browsers at the Festival said too – the fun thing about GABFest is it really *does* expose people to books that they might otherwise have had a hard time encountering, and people really do love it when that happens!

And there were a lot of really nice people who were genuinely excited to see my books. A huge thanks to Alan Good at Malarkey and Matthew Spencer at Paradise Editions once again for doing such great work on the covers – they grabbed folks’ eyeballs from a fair distance, that’s for sure, and there were a lot of excited exclamations of “Oh! Horror!” as they came up.

There were also, hilariously, a fair number of people who came over just to let me know they *didn’t* read horror, which is a bit odd. Like they felt like I needed to know that they had instituted a widespread ban in their own reading on spooky stuff. Do other genres get that? Like do people make an effort to physically come over and tell authors “ugh, memoir? not for me!” or “sorry, I don’t read sci-fi?” It’s a strange phenomenon; happened to me several times. And when I asked them why not, they really didn’t have much of an answer for me, though several people said the real world was scary enough, which is a weird one. Like, if my books were titled “The Fascist Who Became President” or “Night of the Tariffs” I could understand that position, but, like, my book has weird monsters in it. There’re haunted atomic mannequins, fungus mimics, an ancient roman liche! That’s pure escapism man!

That bit of goofiness aside, a productive horror discussion was had in the Horror Panel, which I got to moderate. Three authors (originally four, but one had to drop out at the last minute) and me, chattin’ up in a conference room on the fourth floor of the Central Library, a great time with a great crowd. I really enjoy panels, and honestly I think I’ll only ever do conventions if I’m on one – for one thing, they’re just fun, but on another practical level, they’re also the best way a nobody like me can convince someone to take a chance on the books.

I like a pretty loose and free-flowing sort of panel, more like a broadly directed conversation than anything else, so I opted to start with a Lovecraft quote: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear…” and then asked the panelists (Brendon Vayo, Burke de Boer, and Julius Crow) how their work approached and engaged with fear. The resultant discussion was a lot of fun, and I think we got into some pretty neat areas, thinking about ways fear, as both a very idiosyncratic thing as well as a kind of universal experience, can be used both thematically and, frankly, mechanically in writing. The audience seemed to dig it too – we talked for about a half-an-hour or so, and then I opened it up to the audience for questions. There were a bunch of ’em, and one really heartening thing was that, when the inevitable question about AI and writing came up, the audience was 100% in agreement that AI sucked and they would never read anything that used it, let alone something produced explicitly by it. Great to hear!

All in all, it was a lot of fun, sold some books, met some folks, got to talk about books, free beer (and lunch), what more can anyone ask. It’s a neat thing that the library here does, and I’m really glad that it seems to be settling into an annual event – there were plenty of folks there walking around, taking advantage of the space and programming of a great little community institution, which is just a really nice thing to see. If you’re ever in Austin in the spring time, late April/early May, it’s a fun event and worth seeing!

I’ll just close out with the reminder that, yes Virginia, there *are* books left over from the Fest, and if you want to buy one, why not contact me?

Lookit ’em, cute little things in need of a good home…

What is to be done?

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Well, here we are, at the end of all things. Trump, moron, rapist, fascist, has returned to power. More to the point, he’s the first Republican to win the “popular” vote (a bit of a misnomer, because of course for the 47th consecutive time, the actual winner of the presidential race was “did not/can not vote” in a landslide). There’s a whole lot of stuff already written about the utter fucking catastrophe of the 2024 election, and I don’t want to be repetitive, but sufficed to say: fuck all fascists, and fuck the corporate soulless monsters of the official “opposition” who lost to one of the stupidest, vilest pieces of shit in history.

Trying to elaborate for myself what exactly Trump’s victory means helps explain it, in part. For example, Harris, VP to a president who oversaw the largest expansion in domestic hydrocarbon production in history (something her boss’s old boss, Obama, bragged about back when HE held the previous record), explicitly refused to follow through on an older promise to ban fracking, promising that oil and gas “had a place” in the “clean energy transition.” It’s hard to see how Trump could do any worse than Biden did and Harris promised to do, honestly; the only real difference between them is that Trump won’t try and hoodwink people with a greenwashing “Infrastructure Renewal Act” like the previous bosses did. Hell, Biden didn’t even lift a finger on one of Trump’s previous oil giveaway cornerstones, the ANWR drilling scheme, until literally hours AFTER Trump won reelection (guaranteeing that he’ll just reverse it after Jan).

You can go down the list and do the same with almost every position: Border Security? Well, Harris was flabbergasted at how the Republicans had the crass gall to REFUSE to vote for the Dem’s hard right anti-migrant bill, so now we get worse than that with the addition of nonstop cruelty theater alongside it. FDA is tanked, so the listeria outbreaks that happened under Biden/Harris will just accelerate and expand, plus we get vaccine denialism!

And, of course, there’s Gaza, which just sums up the whole fucking thing really. Smugly dismissing peace protestors, refusing to even appear to be considering arms reductions let alone embargos to the israelis while giving carte blanche to their well documented genocide and ethnic cleansing, and then being shocked when the good little boys and girls don’t line up to vote for them anyway. Grim, ugly stuff, and now it’ll be grimmer and uglier.

Hell, the Dem’s had a slamdunk in the immensely unpopular overturning of Roe and subsequent surge in abortion bans and resultant fatalities and misery. But, of course, Biden has a well-documented history of anti-abortion sentiments and statements, so he didn’t do shit when he could, and beyond some dolorous platitudes and solemn declarations of vague support, what, exactly, was Harris et al.’s plan? The conspiracist on my shoulder whispers stuff about “a perpetual fund-raising grift” while the grim realist, who is pretty loud these days, shouts “they’re just dumb as hell!”

The big story, of course, is the rightward shift of the “working class” electorate, at least at the national level – we get another four years of navel-gazey punditry about “the working class” and what “they” want. Now, there’re very real material concerns in this country – housing is an insane pipedream for most, rents eat up half or people’s monthly income, and the cost of food is through the roof; only an idiot or a flak would tell you differently. But the idea that the Republican trickle-down bootstrappers in general and Trump and his billionaire buddies in particular are going to do shit about it is maybe one of the darkest jokes I’ve ever heard.

Which brings us to Lenin.

I titled this one “What is to be done?” because, in addition to it being my favorite bit of ol’ Vlad’s writing, it seems pretty goddamn relevant today. If you’ve read it (which you should, it’s good and important), then it’s no surprise why I’m talking about it – the whole point of Lenin’s essay is to clarify that the workers are not going to just spontaneously achieve real class consciousness sittin’ under the Bodhi tree and worrying about wages and the cost of living and their trouble with the bosses. Unconnected, uneducated, and uncoordinated, they’re ripe for the plucking by parasites like Trump and Musk and Thiel, who have a million “explanations” for why the workers are struggling; pointy-headed profs worried about land acknowledgements, perfidious and ambiguously-gendered people that make you feel funny, scary immigrants with their weird customs, alien languages, and willingness to work for less, anyone and everyone but capitalism and the vampires empowered by it. Not even unionism helps here, according to Lenin: you might get concessions and better conditions, but ultimately trade-unionism is just more sectionalism and rank self-interest embedded in capitalist structures of exploitation.

What is to be done is this: active, energetic, and aggressive education about socialism. Strident and uncompressing anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, and anti-imperialism. A clear enunciation of not only economic themes, but also the theoretical underpinnings of capitalist oppression and socialist liberation. Armchair (or, these days, Gaming Chair) Marxists aren’t enough – actual people have to be enrolled in their own liberation, have to be given the opportunity to learn and understand where their alienation and immiseration is coming from in order to fight it.

Now, I’m no vanguardist – I’m right there with El Sup and the Zapatistas in saying that I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards on this planet. The idea of a permanent vanguard is both theoretically loathsome and historically dubious. But no one can deny that americans are enormously and disastrously ignorant – their votes for Trump, a conman whose economic policies are explicitly constructed to help capitalists maximally exploit workers, proves it. The idea that the workers of america are capable of arising to some sort of actually informed understanding of political economy is just patently false, because american society, institutions, and education have been built around actively suppressing that possibility. They can’t even identify their own self interest, so successfully have they been propagandized to by capitalists, instead blaming imaginary immigrant hordes and fictionalized trans student athletes for getting lavish gov’t funding while they can’t feed their families or own a home. The only way to combat that deep-seated bullshit is to make people recognize that truth – that they’ve been lied to their whole damn lives, all in service of shoring up and securing capitalist domination. And only by making it clear how capitalists have used division, prejudice, and hate to cement their own rule and wealth can we hope for any actual liberation.

Now, what that looks like in actual practice is something I don’t know, and I’d guess no one does really, or they’d be doing it. I mean, we remember the debacles of the DSA in the shadow of the first Trump term and how that all turned out, so there’s no easy organizational checklist we can just run down. But with everybody kind of waving their hands and telling us all to “build community,” I feel like this at least offers a little more structure, you know? Like, sure, build community with your neighbors, but you gotta wear your socialism on your sleeve when you’re doing it (and socialism of whatever stripe, mind you – that’s why I keep using the lower-case “s” in socialism [I myself am an anarcho-communist, a fan of Kropotkin and Zapatismo] but, honestly, I don’t give a shit about our cute little internecine theoretical conflicts; so long as we’re all devoutly and sincerely anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, I will call you comrade).

I’d also say that, as important as building community is, sometimes destroying them is just as important. I cannot emphasize it enough – you absolutely cannot be committed to change and liberation and improvement while ALSO maintaining relationships with Trumpists, fascists, vile “respectable” right-wingers, and mealy-mouthed Liberals – if they will not change their minds and denounce their old beliefs, you must break community with those people immediately. Now, I understand that there might be safety or survival issues here, and if you cannot safely escape, then do what you must (but at least piss in their coffee or something). Otherwise, if you can, you must disengage from these people totally. No Holidays, no “can’t we just have a nice family dinner,” no “stop making things awkward,” all of that is why we’re where we’re at today. By all means, give ’em the ol’ socialist pitch, but if they remain unmoved, there has to be consequences, you know? Tell these people to go fuck themselves, loudly and in no uncertain terms, and then move on with your life. There is no other way forward, because these people have already shown that they are immoral, cruel, uncaring monsters who do not respect or love you in any way. Cut them out of your lives like they cancer they are, permanently.

Anyway, that’s about it – just doin’ my usual thing and using this blog to muse via the ol’ “writing is thinking” approach. Not much in the way of catharsis or hope, and I’m sorry about that, but if we can’t live for hope, then let’s live for revenge. And part of that is living well! Get in with your people and stand together, we’re definitely in for some dark times ahead. Oh and buy some damn dried beans and rice and stuff – very easily see the U.S. shifting into mega-ultra-hyperinflation under Secretary of the Treasury Musk very VERY quickly, so you’ll wanna be prepared.

Stay strong, Comrades!

Pulp Beyond the Strainer #27: “From Beyond” by H.P. Lovecraft, Weird Tales, v.31 n.2, February 1938

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Now, look, I’m not gonna apologize here. Everyone knows Lovecraft, he doesn’t need any exposure or anything, so you might be asking why I’m covering his stories in these little free-writing exercises I’m doing here? Well, first off, he’s without a doubt the single most important horror/weird fic writer of the past 100 years, bar none. In terms of influence, he’s everywhere, with his tentacles extending into sci-fi, fantasy, comics, pop culture, and even modern occultism. His particular brand of cosmicism, a world where alien forces and laws operate in ways we simply cannot understand, has come to DOMINATE weird fiction (for good or ill), and while he didn’t INVENT the idea, I think you can argue he did PERFECT it. So it would be disingenuous to preclude him from discussion here merely for being well known.

A second good reason to read Lovecraft is that he is, simply put, the Best to Ever Do It. I mean, artistically, he’s top-tier – his refinement of and commitment to his particular aesthetic of weirdness is unparalleled, and it lends his writing a real force that you simply aren’t going to find in yer Seabury Quinns or yer Edmond Hamiltons. His writing, while elaborate, isn’t affected or purple – he comes by his vocabulary and style organically through Dunsany, Poe, Bierce, and Blackwood, and his appreciation for both their approach and technique is evident.

Finally, I think a lot of people have some serious misconceptions about Lovecraft – I’ve seen a lot of people online say shit like “oh, Lovecraft, all his stories are the same, like: ‘Look, an old weirdo tells me a story and then it turns out he’s right about a big tentacle monster!'” which is extremely annoying and factually inaccurate. He’s enormously inventive, and all the cliche bullshit you think he did he DIDN’T ACTUALLY DO, you’re thinking about the bullshit pastiches that came AFTER him by OTHER people! It’s very frustrating, because, like I said, for all that his DNA is in so much genre literature, his actual stories remain fresh and strange and unique and GOOD, fer fucksake! It’s the same thing that keeps people from reading, like, Jane Austen or Melville or Sterne! Don’t deny yourself the pleasure of reading them out of some misplaced hipsterish misapprehensions!

So, with that goal in mind, we’re going to talk about his very short and very good story “From Beyond,” published posthumously in Weird Tales in Feb, 1938! As I’m writing this, archive.org remains down, so that link takes you to the whole issue that you’ll probably have to download (it’s ~150 MB or so), fyi.

Anyway, the Cover:

Virgil Finley channeling some horny Margaret Brundage vibes here. As an aside, that lady has some long ass hair, doesn’t she? Like, down to her knees! When they thaw her out that’s gonna be one hell of a soggy mess, huh?

An interesting ToC this time around. “Gans T. Field” is Manly Wade Wellman, and “The Passing of Van Mitten” is one of Roy Temple House’s great translation efforts for the magazine. But, perhaps more importantly: lotta dead guys on here! Lovecraft, who died in ’37, is on here twice, actually; he wrote “The Diary of Alonzo Typer” for crazy ol’ William Lumley, one of his “collaborations” were someone paid him to take a teeny tiny kernel of a story idea and turn it into a story that they then slapped their name on. What’s funny about those is that Lovecraft is such a stylist that there’s no real way to miss it when he’s the one behind the pen, it’s so obviously Lovecraft. This one is a particularly middling effort, an obvious vulgar job for filthy lucre, but it’s got some funny bits in it. Worth a read if you got nothin’ else to do, but don’t expect greatness! Whitehead and Howard, both also dead of course, round out this somewhat macabre ToC.

All these dead guys showing up in Weird Tales reflects a bit of a slow-moving crisis in the magazine. The titans who strode through the pages of the magazine in its glory days are, for the most part, all gone – REH in ’36, HPL in ’37. These two deaths in particular come at a tough time, when Weird Tales is facing some particularly stiff competition, from both weird fiction magazines as well as from the burgeoning sci-fi pulps – the field is crowded, and the sf magazines in particular are able to pay MUCH better than Weird Tales, which further cut into their ability to find and publish good work. As such, and in the shadow of these difficulties, Weird Tales began to mine whatever they could from the back catalog of their heavy-hitters. With REH, that ended up being a lot of his verse (for what that’s worth…), but with Lovecraft, there was a whole world of amateur press publications of his.

And that’s where today’s story, “From Beyond,” comes from! It was originally published in 1934 in The Fantasy Fan, the very first weird fic fan magazine, but he’d written it waaaay back in 1920, which is pretty clear from the work itself – it’s obviously one of his earlier efforts, with a style and pacing very similar to stories like “The Terrible Old Man” or “The Tomb.” But, there’s an important difference here, one that marks a key development for ol’ Howie Lovecraft! So let’s get into it!

No illustrations for this one, which is a damn shame, given the wild visuals we’re going to encounter her. Weird Tales was on a very tight budget, and probably figured that the name itself would be enough to ensure people would read this one, so why bother. Still, it’s too bad!

Really dig that first sentence – grabs you and throws you right into the scene, focusing on the terrible transformation that has overtaken Crawford Tillinghast. We learn that Tillinghast, who the narrator considers his BEST FRIEND(!), has become a gaunt, harried shadow of his former stout and vibrant self. Even worse, this transformation occurred over the shockingly short span of ten weeks, following a tremendous argument between the two of them that ended with Crawford chucking our narrator out of the house. What was this argument about, you ask?

Just a fantastic mad scientist speech, isn’t it? Tillinghast has (correctly) identified that fact that our human sensory apparatuses are limited, the product of a messy and lazy evolution that has equipped us well for the mundane world, but which leaves us in the lurch when it comes to deeper and more fundamental layers of reality. Just like the microscope or the spectrograph, Tillinghast has built a machine that will expand human perception into these hidden realms!

Well, this freaked out our narrator, because he knew Tillinghast well enough that he could see this going one of two ways – either he’d fuck it up and be crushed and desolate, OR he’d succeed and discover something horrible, terrible, and overwhelming. Reader, guess which one happened.

So, after balking at his ideas, Tillinghast had thrown our narrator out of the house ten weeks ago, raging and fanatical. Now, he’s suddenly summoned our narrator back again and, despite the row, our dude can’t help but wonder what has happened. So now he’s back, shocked at the change that has come over Tillinghast, and also somewhat perturbed by the fact that the huge old house appears to be utterly empty, except for Tillinghast. Where have all his servants gone?

But our narrator pushes all this aside, because he’s just so danged curious about what Tillinghast hath wrought in those ten weeks. They creep through the dark house with only the lamp for light – Tillinghast seems afraid to turn on the light for some reason – and eventually reach the attic laboratory…and The Machine.

Again, excellent mad science work here – a weird glowing machine, the whine settling into a soft yet pervasive droning, and then, finally, the weird instantiation of an invisible color…ultraviolet made visible.

I mean, crazy cool wave machine weird fiction aside, this is also a remarkable early 20th C. document regarding the popular view of science and the mind, isn’t it? The “shallow endocrinologist, felloe-dupe and fellow parvenu of the Freudian” is just amazing stuff, using the cutting-edge brain science of the day to make weird fiction in 1920. When talking about Lovecraft and science most people reflexively (and not incorrectly) point towards his love of astronomy and physics, both obviously cosmic-scale and important to his world view, but you also run across geology and, here, some great biology (and what we’d now call neuro-psych). That the brain (and, therefore, one’s mind) is a biochemical organ is really just then beginning to be understand, but Lovecraft is putting a weird twist on here – it retains a certain sleeping evolutionary heritage that, properly awoken, allows humans to access the more fundamentally “real” (and terrifying) reality around them!

It can be hard for us, in 2024, to really appreciate how weird the world had been recently made for people back in the early 1900s. I mean, an entirely unknown, totally new, and otherwise INVISIBLE world of rays and mysterious energies had only recently been made manifest! Röntgen had discovered and named X-rays in 1895 and the Curies and Becquerel had been awarded the Nobel in 1903 for their work on radiation; that we were surrounded by processes and waves and things that were mostly invisible was, relatively, a pretty new and newsworthy thing. Likewise, the idea of science as inevitably pushing farther and further into these new invisible worlds was likewise a kind of cultural background noise to daily life. This is one of the KEYS to Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, and this story is where he first articulates it. It’s amazing stuff!

As the machine drones on, our narrator begins to, perhaps, hallucinate…or is he beginning to really see for the first time? The attic laboratory seems to him to become a strange, alien temple of cyclopean black masonry, but then this gives was to an even more unsettling sensation:

This sense of drifting in illimitable space so startles our narrator that he involuntarily draws the revolver that he’s been carrying, a habit that started after he’d been held up in East Providence (as an aside, when I attended the NecronomiCon this past summer, I stayed in East Providence, a lovely little end of the city with some great Portuguese restaurants/bakeries). Tillinghast watches this with sardonic amusement, and it’s clear that as much as our narrator is experiencing, ol’ Crawford is seeing and hearing even more.

I mean, c’mon – “we are able to be seen as well as to see” is just fantastic, isn’t it! And the revelation that something from beyond got the servants when they turned on the lights downstairs…creepy, wonderful stuff. And it gets better!

Kaleidoscopic impressions fill our narrators mind; there’s a great image of him staring at a starry sky and seeing the leering, gloating face of Tillinghast in the constellations. And he somehow senses animate things brushing invisibly past him as the machine continues to work. He also notices that Tillinghast seems be able to see these things with his better tuned third eye…something that begins to awaken in our narrator.

Just an absolute blast, and the effect of these overlapping visions, the weird invisible world (now becoming visible) overlaying the mundane laboratory…great stuff!

And once again, Tillinghast goes full Mad Scientist:

I mean, how incredible is that! Tillinghast, in his mad questing after knowledge has transgressed some cosmic boundary – now things are hunting him, but he’s got a plan! He’ll sacrifice our narrator to them to escape, the narrator who hurt his feelings and refused to encourage him when he needed all the support he could get! A great little revenge plan in among the ultracosmic horror! And how about the description of the things, huh? “Shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness…” is unbelievably great, isn’t it?

And then there’s a mini-cliffhanger, where the action breaks and we leap forward a bit in the narrative…

What a twist! Our dude fires the revolver…not at Tillinghast, but at the Machine!!!! Of course, Tillinghast has died, apoplectically struck down by either the noise of the shot, the sudden and jarring destruction of the machine, or perhaps even by the things that he’d been summoning to get our narrator, who knows! Everybody figures that Tillinghast must’ve killed the servants himself and hidden the bodies, and had planned to do the same to our guy here; a doctor even suggest that he’d been hypnotized by Tillinghast, and that the weird shit he’d seen had been the result of suggestion and illusion. How does our guy take that?

And that’s The End!

I mean, really, what more do you want? Short, straightforward, and full of amazing weird ideas and imagery, AND it’s also a major turning point for Lovecraft’s thinking and approach to weird fiction. The things that Tillinghast’s machine make visible are basically at the core of all of Lovecraft’s stories: strange, mysterious presences that lurk just behind the placid delusion that we call “reality.” They’re truly alien, made of different matter and obeying different laws; it’s basically a brief summary of Lovecraft’s entire worldview and approach to weird fiction, all in one short, sweet little package!

Pulp Strainer #26: Special Coming-of-age Edition! “Brenda” by Margaret St. Clair, Weird Tales, V.46, n.1, March 1954

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After last time’s fairly straightforward Vampire Story, I promised something weirder, and I think I’m gonna deliver. This time around we’ve got a very enigmatical, very thoughtful, very weird short story from a writer famous for her enigmatical, thoughtful, weird writing…it’s Brenda, by the great Margaret St. Clair, from the very last year that Weird Tales saw print (in it’s original incarnation…the later revivals don’t count!).

Before we go any farther, you’ve probably noticed that the link to the story I’ve provided you doesn’t go to the Internet Archive. That’s because, as I’m writing this, some assholes have taken it down with a DDoS, so you’ll have to navigate your way through that pdf to the story on your own. When the Archive is back up I’ll come in an add a link directly to the story, but as always: go read it now! This is a great one!

Margaret St. Clair is one of my favorite writers, endlessly inventive, marvelously talented, and deeply incisive – everything she wrote is worth reading, and in a just world she’d be remembered right alongside Issac Asimov and PKD and Harlan Ellison as one of the great authors of fantasy and science fiction from that era. Like C.L. Moore, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr., and Samuel R. Delany, she recognized that imaginative genre fiction provided a startlingly robust toolset with which a writer could break down and rebuild the world around them.

In addition to her skills as a writer, I ALSO love Margaret St. Clair because she was UNABASHADLY a pulp magazine writer. She began her career in the late 40s, at the tale end of the era, but she never had any ambitions for the “slicks” and, luckily, her interest in science fiction short stories coincided nicely with the growth in 50s and 60s sff mag culture. She wrote a LOT of short fiction, something like a 100+ stories easy over her life, as well as some novels (which are good, but, of course, I prefer her shorter work). She was also a card-carrying and practicing Wiccan (along w/ her husband), something that becomes a large influence on her later work, in particular. All in all, a fascinating woman and a great writer.

And her she is, the dawn of her writing life coinciding with the death of Weird Tales. Yes, we’re in 1946, that dolorous year when The Unique Magazine ceased to Be, and merely Had Been. It’d been a helluva run, of course – March 1923, v.1.n.1, through the Depression and WWII and the rise of Television, but The Reaper comes for us all in the end. The final issue of Weird Tales would be September of 1946, volume 46, number 4. Ask not for whom the bell tolls…

Generic ass cover, as was usual for the time. Gone are the heady days of Margaret Brundage! Nothing special here, sorry Evan Singer, whoever the hell you were.

The ToC is interesting though, not least for the fact that there’s an awful lotta women on it. For sure, there had always been women writing (and reading) Weird Tales, but you gotta think that Dorothy McIlwraith, editor of the mag and a lover of the genre, must’ve been interested in cultivating more gender equity in the pages of her magazine. Anyway, she’s got some heavy hitters here – Elizabeth Sheldon, Suzanne Pickett, and good ol’ G.G. Pendarves making a posthumous appearance. But we’re here for the star of this issue – Margaret St. Clair! So let’s get on with it already, yeesh!

An odd little title illo, especially since is has nothing to do with the story and, arguably, doesn’t even portray the eponymous Brenda, a tomboyish blonde. Oh well! It’s 1954, what the hell do you want!? It’s entirely possible that they weren’t even paying for specific art at this point, and were just running through the catalog.

Great job of character introduction here – Brenda, poor child, is on vacation on Moss Island with her parents who, if not cruel, are certainly not kind either. She’s an outsider, tall and gangly and without any friends among the children on the island, largely left to her own devices. Good standard protagonist kid for a genre story – a loner, misunderstood, left to themselves. And, since there’s not much to do on the island and no kids to play with, she spends a lot of time in the woods, like you do. But on that particular Monday, there’s something else in the woods with her:

I mean, that “Sometimes she liked to smell and look at rotten things” is a fantastic line, more of St. Clair’s genius, little knives she sticks in the reader to make sure they’re paying attention to the characters in the story. It’s such a great bit of characterization for Brenda too – there’s a sense of rebellion to it, but also a bit of secretiveness there, a sense that Brenda knows it’s something morbid about her that others might look down on.

Anyway, Brenda hound dogs her way through the woods, following the odd stink as best she can, until she finds “the man.”

I mean, what the fuck!? A weird blobby, greasy, disgusting muddy gray man-thing in the woods, holding a dead bird, all clotted up and sloppy? Brenda stops and stares, but then the gray man extends a blobby arm towards her and she fuckin’ books it.

At first, driven by panic, she’s running flat out, trying to escape. The grey man is following her, too – she can hear it and smell it pursuing her. But, when she chances a look backwards, she sees that he’s much farther back than she hoped he would be. In fact, while he IS chasing her, he’s doing it very clumsily and slowly. Implacable, sure, but she realizes she doesn’t have to run full tilt to get away from it. With that realization, comes a plan. Brenda, rather than running home, turns and goes through the woods, leading the stumbling, shambling grey man thing towards a deep, steep-walled quarry on the island.

She tricks the thing into the quarry where it stumbles around, searching, until finally it gives up. But, when it tries to escape, it can’t – the walls are too steep, and its weird blobby arms aren’t strong or dexterous enough for it to actually climb up, out of the pit. She’s trapped it there!

The flash of teeth is a great image, this weird blob man thing trapped in a quarry and grinning/snarling/??? up at her, very spooky and unsettling.

Brenda “hug[s] her secret to herself for the rest of the day,” another fun bit of characterization for this kid. She’s got a goo man trapped in a quarry, and that fact is HERS and HERS alone. But what fun is a secret if you can’t share it?

An interesting dynamic going on here, isn’t it? Ol’ Chuck is the closest thing to a friend that Brenda has on (and, possibly, off) the island, and it is to him that Brenda goes with this new, strange thing that has entered her life. Interestingly, it’s that touch though that convinces him not to go – something about the way she touches him is upsetting to Charles, and he tells her to, basically, fuck off.

She helps her dad with a barbecue pit out back, but the whole time she can only think about the gray man in the quarry. Unable to share her secret, she decides on a rather dramatic course of action; she’s going to set him free. She uses some planks to build a kind of ramp that lets the gray man clamber on up out of the quarry.

Great, chilling stuff – imagine being on an island with a Weird Thing that YOU released and YOU know is out there, but no one else does? Spooky and paranoiac, all while being a plausible action from a frustrated and probably petulant child. Nobody wants to see this thing that I captured? Fine, they can see it when it comes to THEM!

Brenda chooses not to head out to the woods the next day, a wise choice given that she overhears her parents discussing a rather disturbing event:

Brenda is sent to her room for eavesdropping, where she mulls over the gray man, trying to figure out what it could be, and where it could have come from, inventing some answers and writing them down, then deciding to tear them up and flush the pieces down the drain.

And then, before bed, she slips into her parents’ room and unlatches their windows. Yikes!

The blob man is in the house, and her parents are (quietly) trying to confront it. Her dad has it trapped in a beam of light from a flashlight, which is apparently enough to dazzle and confuse it while her mother, giggling nervously, is calling a neighbor to bring his gun over and shoot this thing. It’s pretty comical, par for the course for Margaret St. Clair, who often wrote about the absurdities of petit bourgeois suburbanites in her fiction.

The neighbor brings his gun over, but it really do much to the gray man – he’s made of goop, after all. Instead, the neighbor and Brenda’s father use a torch to drive it out of the house and, in a bit of synchronicity, through the woods and into the quarry where they trap and, eventually, bury the thing under a huge cairn of loose stone, which Brenda discovers when she is able to slip away the next afternoon.

And this signals a major change in Brenda’s life. For starters, no one on the island seems to want to talk about the thing under the cairn. Secondly, the children that had previously avoided her start showing up and following her around. Brenda becomes something of a leader to them, in fact, and they end up getting into all sorts of trouble.

Brenda eventually comes back to the island the next summer, having been left on the mainland after the school term by her exhausted and annoyed parents. She has continued to change, however, and it seems that, perhaps, she has finally started to grow into something more acceptable to her parents.

She waits until nearly the end of the summer before making a trip to the quarry and the cairn.

And that’s the end of “Brenda” by Margaret St. Clair!

Honestly, it’s kind of a masterpiece. It avoids the crude, stereotypical pitfalls of a “coming of age” story, instead relying on the weirdness of the gray man and Brenda’s relationship to it to arrive at something altogether stranger and more poignant. There’s obviously a puberty aspect to this tale – the interaction between Brenda and Charles is fraught, like all early adolescent encounters, but then there’s also the question of Brenda and her parents. Clearly there’s tension there, her parents obviously not understanding her in any way. The trapping of the gray man under the rocks by her father is ripe for a Freud Reaction meme, you know what I mean?

St. Clair, a student of Greek mythology, is also evoking the myth of Theseus here; the thing trapped under the rocks, which “one day” she’ll move to set it free, echoes Theseus having to wait until he comes of age and is strong enough to move the boulders that hide the symbols of his manhood (his sandals and sword). Both Brenda and Theseus know that their destinies lie under their respective rocks, and they know that they’ll have to wait to get strong enough to free them.

And, as weird fiction, I think it’s a blast too – the sense of the uncanny is strong all through this story, from Brenda’s own oddity, to the gray man (of course), and persisting in the weird mythic way Brenda changes after the gray man is trapped. It’s not a very long story, but there’s a lot of subtext and complexity at work here, but St. Clair is a good enough writer that she never lets either that OR the need for weirdness come into conflict; rather, they reinforce each other, like all great speculative fiction.

Anyway, Margaret St. Clair is a great writer, and there’re a few other works of hers that we’ll certainly be looking at in the future. There’s a pretty good collection of some of her short stories out there that you can get, easily and cheaply, from Dover Books, titled “The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales.” I’d highly recommend it!