Category Archives: Weird Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let’s get to it already, sheesh:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I mean, fair enough, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then Karlk does something weird:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 Replies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hm, who does that sound like?

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

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

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

So, what was it that spooked that guard?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eh, it’s probably nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But enough! On to the story!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As for the ToC:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…and then the house fuckin’ blows up!

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

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

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

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

And as for Tom?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, on to the story!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Psychically Strained Tourist Pulp #35: “Chinese Processional” by Arthur J. Burks, Weird Tales, 1933, number 1, vol 21

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The shittiest, dumbest fascists in all of history may be crowing (for now) about their reactionary censorship, but we shan’t let their weepy, whining bullshit deter us – fuck them and fuck all fascists forever! And so, pushing them out of our minds and into the dustbins of history, we shall instead turn our attention to fun, useful, and interesting topics; namely, WEIRD FICTION.

Been a good couple of months since the last of these posts, but we always come back to the topic of classic weird fiction here at the ol’ blog. And, as the most Hallowed of all Eves looms in our future (a scant month-and-a-half away!) it’s time to get down to brass tacks and dive back into the pages of the Unique Magazine, Weird Tales. And this story today is an interesting one, though not without some problematic content, of course. It’s Arthur Burks’ “Chinese Processional” from the 1933!

Burks is an interesting guy, one of the absolute machines of the pulp era who came to be known as a “million-words-a-year” guy for his insane productivity. He wrote something like 800 short stories in his long career, and was famous for his methodical approach to his fiction. That being said, I think there’s actually some fairly nice writing in some of his work (today’s story included), a vibrancy and thoughtfulness to the descriptions and mood he’s trying to invoke.

Doubtless, this is because ol’ Burks actually lived in China. Most of the biographies of Burks focus on his time stationed in the Dominican Republic during the brutal occupation there, a period of his life that inspired him to write some (often shockingly racist) “voodoo” stories that were immensely popular with pulp readers of the day. However, in 1927 he resigned his commission while in China and ended up living there for a while, a period of his life that was an equally strong influence on his writing; I think it gave him a bit more depth and insight into the period and place at least, which we’ll talk about below. His deep connection to China, and specifically to the Manchu dynasts who oversaw the collapse of the Empire in the face of European Imperialism, is evident in the fact that he wrote the preface for a memoir by one of the Dowager Empress’s Ladies-in-Waiting (“Old Buddha” by Princess Der Ling).

But, before we dive in, let’s take a look at the cover and the ToC!

A nice painterly action scene curtesy of ol’ J. Allen St. John. It’s a nice one; I like the shocked look of the goon getting shanked there, and the Venusian beast has a nice sense of motion and heft to it. The only problem with it is that it’s an illustration of one of ol’ Kline’s pretty cash-grabby and pastiche-y “Venus” stories. As far as sword-n-planet fiction, it’s not *bad* per se; you’ll just be unable to shake the feeling that you’ve read basically all this same stuff about another guy, Carter was it? And didn’t it take place of Mars? Oh well; c’est les pulps, after all!

The ToC has some fun stuff here – a work-a-day Leinster story with some Big Ass Bugs, which is always fun, as well as what’s probably my favorite Conan-the-King story, “The Scarlet Citadel.” Also neat to see them reprinting “The Night Wire” again! That’s absolutely one of my favorite weird stories of all time; we talked about it a couple of years ago, if you remember.

But enough of this! On to the story: “Chinese Processional” by Arthur J. Burks!

A pretty brutal title illustration by ol’ “Jay Em” Wilcox here! Also notable in that it’s not *particularly* racist, although of course it is definitely grounded in the pulp orientalism of the day, trading in the brutish menace and cruel savagery of a racialized other. Interestingly, I don’t think you can say the same about the story, and even the tone of the violence, which in this illustration seems to be of a particularly barbaric nature, is different in Burks’ writing. But we’ll get to that!

Our story opens with our narrator musing upon his subtle, innate psychic abilities, something that it seems like Burks also thought – his later life, in the 50s and 60s, included a fair bit of writing about psychic phenomena and supernaturalism. But, our narrator is quick to assure us, even his psychic gifts cannot FULLY explain what we’re about to read!

Right of the bat, we’re introduced to some history about the Summer Palace outside of Peking, a royal retreat where the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi (known more commonly as Cixi today) went into retirement. Cixi is, of course, a real person, a powerful and fascinating figure who, through a combination of political acumen, ruthless realpolitik, and versatile diplomacy, ruled China for fifty something years, pitting European powers against one another while brutally suppressing reform and dissent. Here’s a picture of her, btw, from 1904:

Burks’ familiarity with the history of the Manchu court is on display in this short but sweet first section; it provides a nice sense of the power of the Chinese Empire and the monumental weightiness of the Summer Palace, I think, particularly where Burks’ points out to us the artificial, engineered nature of the landscape – the hill is human made, as is the vast Kun Ming Lake, speaking to the power of the Emperors who can reorder the surface of the Earth to fit their whims:

It also introduces a major theme that will run through this story: tourism, and in particular the way a we interact with the past when visiting these places. The little aside about a guide showing you where the (much reviled) “Emperor” Piyu was locked away in the Summer Palace, for instance, orients us within a framework of tourism and exploitation.

There’s a real sensuous delight that our narrator is taking from the Summer Palace; indeed it seems like he’s really just fascinated by Imperial China, and particularly of the grand palatial complexes that represented both the temporal power AND spiritual centrality of the Emperors. This yearning to steep himself in this history is such that our dude here wants to spend the night in the Summer Palace, just like he did in the Forbidden City, a very intimate connection to history, don’t you think? Our revere is interrupted, however, by the reminder that he (and us, by extension) are tourists here, and can’t just wander about and do as we please.

Our guy, unable to duck off and hide away in the Palace during the day, sneaks back in after hours and ends up swimming through the lake towards the boathouse he visited earlier. I think there’s some nice writing here, the way the lake is made into this mysterious, mythical place that our “hero” must cross:

We get great sensory writing here, the moonlight like glaring eyes, the fish and the lotus roots, a real “spell of the past” sort of thing…that is AGAIN broken by the reminder that there’s a thriving tourist industry here, that our guy first encountered these stories and images as a tourist being told these things. It’s a great little writerly trick, a very conscious and effective stylistic flourish that produces a marvelous mood; as weird fiction readers, we’re quite familiar with ruins and decay and the hoary tales of the past, but then to have them all contextualized as part of a modern tourist complex transforms the “mythic” landscape in a remarkable way – there’s even an explicit mention of the crass commodification of these cultural/historical/mythic tales, with anyone who can afford to being able to engage in what had previously been the sole privledge of royalty! It’s good stuff!

Our guy makes his way across the lake and up a canal towards the boathouse:

Good spectral writing in this section as our narrator investigates the forbidden boathouse. Invisible pigeons cooing overhead, the ancient boats (one half-sunk in the water), the sense of age and the weight of memory…it’s good environmental writing, real pleasurable. Burks, as mentioned above, was famous for his prolific output, but I do think you can tell when a writer is *into* what they’re writing, and this is such a clearly envisioned scene with such sharp emotional resonance that it’s impossible for me to think he was ONLY adding words up for money here. It’s honestly good stuff!

Anyway, our guy hangs out in the boathouse, musing upon history and the Emperors of China deeply and profoundly and, possibly, a little psychically? He feels like that, if he just puts his mind to it, he can summon up, in some misty, numinous way, a shadow of that glorious age…

Who could’ve foreseen such a weird turn of events!

Yes, our guy seems gripped by some vision…but is it an internal expression of his desire to imagine the past, or is it something more, something external to him? Regardless, and luckily blessed with the ability to understand Mandarin, he slips into one of the barges (the one still afloat) and watches a strange scene unfold before him!

First, and very nicely described in the prose, there wrecked barge rising from the water, mended and restored to its original glory. Then, a marvelous procession of people enter the boathouse:

A lot to unpack here – first off, the spectral figures are a stately procession of an Imperial Chinese household led, we can safely assume, by the shade of the powerful Empress Dowager Cixi herself. Alongside her is a powerfully built man armed with a beheading knife, an example of Chekov’s Executioner. But even MORE interesting is the way the narrators attempts to justify this scene transforms into a commentary of Ugly American Tourists. Perhaps these are but actors, hired by crass Americans to enact some kind of historical play for their delight and amusement.

It’s incredible how bitter this idea is expressed here, isn’t it? Our guy expects these Americans to appear any minute now “to pay their money, and watch, and laugh over” the show they paid for. “Tourists had no sentiment” is a remarkably condemning statement, and one apparently very strongly felt by the narrator. “The aura of heart-ache which shrouded this old place,” all the old “sorrows and tears” would mean nothing to a bunch of loud, rowdy Americans come to gawk and consume and generally disrespect history and the dead.

Our narrator is, presumably, also an American; only an American can have such sharply specific contempt for their countrymen, after all. It is interesting though that our guy here, of course, is also acting somewhat disrespectfully though, isn’t it? He swam the lake and broke into the boathouse after all – is the fact that he has reverence for the history (or so he claims) enough to absolve of, basically, doing exactly the same thing he’s cursing the hypothetical American tourists for doing?

It is a somewhat moot point however, because of course no tourists come in – this is not a reenactment at all. The Imperial entourage continues to pack into the boathouse, with the Empress and her favorites taking their place in the restored boat, while the rest of the crew piles into the boat in which our narrator is hiding (though they take no notice of him at all…). Then, in a very ghostly fashion, the chains slip from the boathouse doors, the gate opens, and the Imperial Barges sail once again the surface of Kun Ming lake.

There’s some very dreamlike writing here as they glide across the lake, whispers of mysterious conversation, the dilapidated ruins of the Summer Palace restored to their former glory, lights in windows and so forth. Our guy has clearly entered into another time, a spectral memory of China at its Imperial height, but even so he persists in thinking “any moment those crass American tourists will show up.” It’s a little funny, but perhaps the resilience of belief in the face of the mysterious is stronger than we can imagine.

Anyway, something happens which brings all this to a head for our narrator:

A man has been found within the grounds of the Summer Palace, and he’s in some serious trouble. The Empress, regal and terrible, steps from the barge to the shore, and confronts the man, who trembles before her. He’s beaten with bamboo rods, his blood mingling with the earth and staining the grass, and then, having confessed to his crime, the Empress orders him executed.

Now, before we go on, let’s take a moment to interrogate the usage of the offensive slur “coolie.” It’s a definitely racialized (and class-based) term, used to refer to laborers, particularly “unskilled” manual laborers, from south east Asia (generally India or China). The origins of the term go as far back as the 16th century, a Europeanized spelling of a Tamil word “kūli” which means “wages” or “hire.” It came into prominence and achieved its deeply racist connotation with the abolition of slavery by the British in the 1800s; needing a replacement for the vast labor needed to prop up the Empire and their colonial holdings, they took to hiring huge amounts of cheap workers and shipping them across the world from China or India to places like the Caribbean. These were, ostensibly, free people (mostly men) who had been contracted for their work, though in practice they were often little more than indentured servants, having signed contracts that basically enslaved them for a period of time. The labor trade was a major commercial enterprise of the era, both for the British and China, and is a hugely important part of the brutal exploitation of the age. It also carried over into the English language, and became a catch all term meant to convey a particular racial and class-based identity for the people being referred to. Interestingly, there is some relatively recent reclamation of the term, with working class heroes proudly proclaiming their identity as such in more recent movies and books. One of those things you have to be aware of and confront when reading old literature.

Anyway, our guy is troubled by what he sees – a brutal beating is one thing, but is seems clear that they’re going to kill this guy. He runs around trying to get them to stop, but he can’t actually interact with anybody – just like on the boat, they don’t seem able to see him, and when he tries to grab the Empress’s sleeve he simply can’t; it’s as if she’s incorporeal.

A grisly scene indeed!

Everybody, including our narrator, clambers back into the boats and continues their sailing around the lake, though it has become a decidedly weird experience for our guy.

The barges wheel about and make for the boathouse…and as they travel, everything seems to subtly begin to change:

Everything is returning to its ruined, dark, abandoned state as they travel the lake – whatever spell had restored the Summer Palace to its previous glory has vanished, apparently. There’s a wonderful line about the lights on the shore extinguishing as the boats sail by, a great and very spooky image, and when they arrive at the dock of the boat house there’s a shadow waiting for them, a kind of presence that seems to swallow up one by one the figures of the night’s haunting. When the shadow touches our guy, he feels a terrible coldness…and suddenly everything was as it was before in the boathouse; a barge sunk, everything dirty and dusty and abandoned.

He doesn’t swim back; he runs.

The coda to the story is a newspaper story that he comes across later:

And that’s THE END of “Chinese Processional” by Arthur Burks!

Now, as weird fiction, the ending is, admittedly, a little lackluster – the Empress returned to punish the guy who had tried to loot her tomb in the Summer Palace, simple supernatural vengeance story, pretty standard ghost fare. And the scene of the beheading is fine, though I wish it had been a bit more nightmarish, given the dreamlike quality of the prose that characterized the scenes on the lake.

But, all things considered, I like it. There’s good writing in here, like I said, and the fact that it’s a story set in China by a white guy and it’s not MORE racist or MORE “exotic” is actually pretty remarkable – Weird Tales, readers, writers, and editors alike, all LOVED a good ol’ “Mysterious Inscrutable Orient!” story, which can be quite rough going these days. But the tone that the author takes here is, shockingly, respectful, at least of the Imperial past of China. And the way he attacks tourism, and AMERICAN tourists at that, is very interesting and, honestly, fairly atypical for the era. Just goes to show you that there’s often SOMETHING interesting in the stories that showed up in these magazines!

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!

What is good in life? To have your pulp strained, to drive the magazines before you and hear the lamentation of their editors! Pulp Strainer #32: Sword & Sorcery Month! “Hellsgarde” by C.L. Moore, Weird Tales v.33 n.4, April 1939

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CONTENT WARNING: the story we’re talking about today includes sexual assault.

A hyperborean wind howls from the north, locking my Texan kingdom in the icy grip of mid-40 degree temperatures, which can only mean one thing: Sword & Sorcery month is upon us again!

As I mentioned last year, I have long associated the Yule with fantasy in general and sword & sorcery in particular – something about the atmospherics and the holiday free time lends itself to curling up with some rollicking barbarians-and-wizards action, you know what I mean? Last Sword & Sorcery month, we talked about a lot of fun stories either leading up to the genre – the Solomon Kane story Rattle of Bones for instance, or my favorite S&S tale of all time, Worms of the Earth – or those firmly within its walls, like the classic Conan adventure The Tower of the Elephant, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser’s first story Two Sought Adventure, or Black God’s Kiss, the very first Jirel of Joiry tale.

That last one on the list above is relevant, because it strongly influenced which story I wanted to do today. Again, as is tradition, we gave November over to C.L. Moore stories, and like last year I moved from Moorevember into Sword & Sorcery month with the very first Jirel story. So, with frightful symmetry, let’s start of our celebration of all things sword-and-sorcerous with the LAST Jirel story that C.L. Moore ever wrote, the absolutely killer Hellsgarde!

As is clear if you’ve been reading these long rambles of mine, Moore is one of my favorite writers, and Jirel is one of my favorite characters – she’s really a singular creation, a badass swordswoman in full command of herself and her destiny; she’s not some wandering mercenary or exotic barbarian, she’s a goddamn robber baron(ess), ruling a castle and with a band of rough-and-ready slayers under her command. Interestingly, it’s that singular independence that serves as the instigating factor for most of her adventures – in the first story, we meet Jirel after her defeat, with her castle occupied and herself a prisoner. The threat to her autonomy that this represents leads her to take a drastic and blasphemous path towards vengeance, with a grim and tragic result. Jirel’s saga is bookended by a similar constraint in “Hellsgarde;” here, Jirel has been forced into dire action by the treachery of a (strangely attractive) man, and she also ends up facing strange, alien, and altogether blasphemous magic, a source of pervasive corruption that, I think, really sets the tone for a lot of sword & sorcery later.

But, before we dive into the story, let’s look over this issue of Weird Tales!

The cover, by Virgil Finlay, is a little disappointing and bland, a shame given what we know Finlay is capable of. In fact, there’s actually some killer Finlay art in the magazine, so let’s take a minute to wash the dullness of the cover out of our eyes with some of that, shall we?

I mean, holy smokes, lookit that! Great, weird art for McClusky’s (middling) story “The Red God Laughed. And lookit this:

Late Wright-era Weird Tales would do these one page spreads where an artist would take inspiration from a short passage, often of poetry, to create these marvelous full illustrations. I mean, jumpin’ cats, what a piece, huh? Baffling that Finlay’s cover is so dull when he’s capable of masterpieces like this, isn’t it? But oh well!

The ToC is interesting:

At first blush, there’s not a lot to recommend this big ol’ issue, is there? A lot of second-stringers, in my opinion; Moore’s Jirel story is the stand-out, from our perspective today at least. Folks back then loved Quinn though, which is probably why his (perfectly fine but nothin-to-write-home-about) story got the cover. Bloch is still working to find his niche – there’s a bit of gratuitous violence and gore in this one, hints of things to come for ol’ Bob Bloch. Moore’s husband and writing partner, Henry Kuttner, has a story in here, and it’s 100% a Lovecraft story, with two weirdos doin’ occult experiments to contact things from Beyond and all that. There’s some funny drug stuff here too, with the occultists using weed as part of their mystic preparations. It’s actually not a bad piece of Lovecraft inspired fiction, even if it does come off a bit derivative and pat. He even excerpts the same passage from Machen that H.P. used in “The Horror at Red Hook!”

But speaking of the Old Gent, there’s two Lovecraft pieces in this issue, pretty good for a guy who’d been dead for two years. “The Wicked Clergyman” is unusual, in that it’s an excerpt of a letter that Lovecraft sent to a friend, Bernard Dwyer, in 1933, and the part that became this story is basically him recounting a weird dream he’d had. Following Lovecraft’s death, Wright took some effort to gather up any remaining bits an pieces of his work and publish (or republish, in the case of the amateur press stuff) things like this in the magazine. On the one hand, it’s nice this stuff got preserved, but on the other, you can’t help but feel like a note about this story would’ve been nice, at least for Lovecraft’s sake – this isn’t a “story” per say, and not knowing its provenance might give a reader a weird idea about Lovecraft’s work and style.

The other Lovecraft piece is a reprint of Zelia Bishop’s 1929 story “The Curse of Yig.” Bishop is a very interesting character who hired (and occasionally actually paid) Lovecraft to do some revisionary/ghost writing work, which she then sold (or offered) under her name. By far theirs in the most “impactful” collaborations in the mythos world; these stories introduce Yig the Father of Serpents into the pantheon. They’re also interesting stories for their western flavor – they’re set in Oklahoma and have a decided “frontier” aspect.

A long ramble, but the point is that Moore’s “Hellsgarde” is coming in at a strange and chaning time for the pulp world – the old masters of Weird Fiction are, for the most part, dead or in decline, and the powerful editor of the magazine, Farnsworth Wright, would soon follow them. Simultaneously there’s more competition, particularly in the sci-fi (and fantasy) realm out there, magazines that had bigger budgets and could pay better prices than The Unique Magazine. Every Jirel story that Moore wrote appeared in Weird Tales, but the landscape of magazine publishing was changing, and Moore (and Kuttner) would expand their markets, particularly as sci-fi grew in popularity.

But, anyway, enough! Let’s get to “Hellsgarde” already, yeesh!

Good illo by Finlay, of course, although I can’t help but wish he’d taken on the weird “nobles” that Jirel meets in Hellsgarde, with their subtle but definite “wrongness.” Oh well! Also interesting how Moore is still being connected with “Shambleau” all these years later! It’s an important story, and it definitely had a very strong impact on ol’ Farnsworth and the Weird Tales world!

We open the story with Jirel, mounted upon her mighty steed, staring out over a strange and empty swampland just as the sun is setting. There’s some great environmental writing here – I think sword & sorcery is a genre uniquely suited to this sort of thing, landscapes and “wilderness” I mean, given the deep resonance they have with themes of natural vs unnatural, civilization vs barbarism, and the contrast between the smallness of the protagonist and the hugeness of the forces arrayed against them. Moore, who is simply a great writer, does this stuff really well too – the glassy unnatural stillness of the swamp, the silence, the long dying sunlight, it’s fantastic stuff, top-notch writing.

And why has Jirel come to this ruined castle of Hellsgarde in the lonely vastness of this swamp? Why, ’cause of a dude, of course:

So first off, there’s more of that strange sexual tension that Moore is so interested in. Jirel is, once again, obviously experiencing some complicated emotions – Guy of Garlot is a scumbag and a villain, but he’s easy on the eyes, that’s for sure! It’s an interesting bit of characterization for Jirel too, since she’s obviously at least appreciative of his physical attractiveness, even if he’s “ugly as sin itself” on the inside. But how’d this hot asshole get Jirel to agree to go questing for Hellgarde Keep in a haunted swamp?

Guy has, somehow, captured 20 of her best bullyboys, and unless Jirel, fearless and mighty swordswoman that she is, retrieves the treasure of the Lord of Hellsgarde, then they die! Guy apparently desires Andred’s treasure above all things (scorning even Jirel’s rockin’ bod!), and will only exchange her men for it; but it’s a deadly dangerous quest, for all who have gone into the ruins has vanished. And what is this treasure? Hilariously, Guy doesn’t know – it’s something small and said to be stored in a box, that’s it. I guess he’s just jazzed about it because it’s so rare a prize and no one has been able to get it? Jirel, pissed off, is forced to agree the bargain; after all, regarding her men:

Great bit of characterization there, huh? Jirel understands honor and the obligations she has to her soldiers – if she must, she’ll go into this preternatural swamp with its haunted ruin and search for a cursed, mysterious treasure, all for the sake of her twenty dudes.

Jirel rides down towards the castle, and we get some more great descriptive writing:

What a vision, huh? As she goes, she has an expository reverie that lets us learn, quickly, a little bit about Andred. A big, violent, mean fucker in life, the rumor of his weird little treasure box was enough to draw his enemies to his lonely castle, where they besieged and captured it. His treasure hidden, Andred was subjected to the most terrible of tortures, but his raw vitality and stubborn strength meant that, after long sufferings, he died and took its secret with him. No one found the treasure, and eventually the castle was abandoned…

Standard issue vengeful ghost guarding its treasure, although take note of the fact that Andred’s ghost is said to be a direct result of the vitality and force that he had in life.

The mists continue to rise around Jirel as she rides towards the castle along the causeway, and she thinks they must be playing tricks on her eyes, because it almost looks like there’s some guys stationed in front of the gate of this abandoned castle. That can’t be though…can it?

It is a bunch of guys…dead guys! All stuck by their own spears! It’s a gruesome as hell scene, and very uncanny. Jirel, of course, is no stranger to death and brutality; hell, honestly its easy enough to envision her ordering the same thing done to some guys she’d killed…but out here, in the swamps, something is making sport of death, and it’s damn spooky! While she’s regarding these dead men, the door to the castle suddenly groans open…and a weird little guy greets her.

Now, first thing to point out and mull over is the somewhat uncomfortable way Jirel articulates the wrongness of this fellow. He’s described in frankly ableist terms, something that we find a little offputting these days – the idea of a villain’s disability being used in some literary way to reflect their twisted soul is not only offensive, it’s cliche, a very common trope from the past. Now, within the context of this story, I think you can approach it as the way Jirel, an indeterminately medieval person, would view the world around her. I mean, within the context of stories and literature from the broadly defined medieval Europe, that was a common and self-evident view, moral decay or sin stamped on the body or face. In detail, it’s important to recognize that Jirel is perceiving a kind of moral deformity in this guy – he’s not actually a hunchback, after all, and the clumsy and uncomfortably language we can choose to read as diegetic here, Jirel articulating a strange new concept to herself. It’s also of a piece with her reflections on Guy from earlier in the story – she several times brought up the apparent contrast between him being grade-A beefcake and a vile asshole. This discourse on form and (evil) function is an interesting one here, a key theme of the story.

This weird creep says he works for the lord of Hellsgarde, a guy by the name of Alaric, who holds court here. That’s news to Jirel – as far as she knew, this pile was a ruin and no one lived here. Alaric, however, appears to claim some distant ancestry with Andred, and as such has taken the castle as his inheritance. Jirel is troubled by this – doubtless anybody living in Hellsgarde would have searched it thoroughly for the treasure. Has this Alaric found it? And even if he hadn’t, as a descendant of Andred, he would, ostensibly, have more of a claim on the treasure than anyone else. Either way, her plan is somewhat complicated by this development. And so, Jirel tries subterfuge. She’s just travelling through the swamp, will this fellow’s master give her shelter for the evening?

Inside the courtyard of the castle, Jirel sees a gaggle of extremely rough dudes. They’re obviously evil thugs, but at least their particular evil is something human and understandable to Jirel, in contrast to the majordomo and, as we’ll soon see, Alaric and his household.

Horse stowed, Jirel is led into the main hall where, at the far end, there’s a huge fire in the hearth and a semi-circle of people around it. Immediately though, Jirel catches a hint of “wrongness” about the scene. The fire seems merry enough, but there’s something about the people sitting around it, their faces and postures, that seems odd and strange. A man, obviously Alaric, sits in a highbacked chair, and a strange lute player (someone actually with a hump, it turns out) seems to be looming over the back of the chair. On cushions or benches there’s a “handful” of women and girls, as well as two small preternatural boys as well as a pair of scarlet-eyed greyhounds. All eyes are on her as she strides across the hall towards them, and knowing this, Jirel struts as she approaches them:

Again, Jirel is such a fun character. She’s a badass warrior AND a stone-cold fox, and she not only knows it, she revels in it! Honestly, a lot of warrior women in fantasy stuff aren’t allowed to have this much fun – they’re either weirdly (and coquettishly) virginal or absolutely sexless. But Jirel, in addition to obviously being someone who fucks, is allowed to have fun with it too; her sexuality is another weapon in her formidable arsenal, one that she deploys against men and women alike (I don’t think we’re meant to take that last little aside in the paragraph above as sapphic in any way, though – I mean she’s perfectly willing to let those 5s know that she’s a 10.) (Although you can put whatever the hell you want into your fanfiction, of course.)

Up close, the weirdness of these people is even more evident – there’s the same kind of spiritual deformity that she recognized in the doorman in Alaric and his jester, a hint of something twisted and off behind their eyes. And the rest of the household is no less strange. The women are strange beings, tall and with shockingly large and staring eyes, a similar shadow of evil hanging on them. The dogs are hellish things with red eyes and a foul disposition, and the two young boys, while silent and watchful, have the faces of devils with cruel, lusterless eyes. Equally weird is that it’s never made very clear how all these people are related to one another, despite the clear affinity for evil shared between them.

Despite the weirdness and menace of these oddballs, Jirel has a mission to do. She asks to stay the night, and Alaric graciously offers her room and board. She settles in among the throng, although she keeps her sword handy and her reflexes primed – she does not like these people and senses something is wrong and very dangerous here. She and Alaric fence verbally, although every time she asks a question about them or their experience at Hellsgarde, a ripple of subtle amusement runs through the whole company, as if they’re all sharing a secret joke. The whole scene is great and very weird; Alaric et al are just flat out odd; they’re clearly watching her hungrily the whole time, but we’re right there with Jirel in not understanding what it is that they’re after. She (and us, the readers) have to be thinking that this, in some way, orbits the question of the treasure; perhaps Alaric has guessed her errand, and is laying a trap for Jirel? Who knows! But then, supper is served, and Jirel’s brief relief at the normalcy of a meal is soon replaced by further unease:

But, when the table is set and the meal begins, it turns out everything is a little…off:

Brave woman to bite into whatever unrecognizable beast had been roasted. But then again, everything tastes bad and foul and rotten. Jirel is the only one who seems troubled, though – everyone else is digging in with gusto. And then Alaric notices Jirel isn’t eating:

Grade A weirdness! I love it! It’s particularly fun to take this hyper-competent character, a cunning and clever warrior, and put her in a situation where that really doesn’t matter, where something totally alien and strange is happening, and she’s just kinda gotta ride it out. And the menace behind these weirdos is good and palpable too – this strange group with their furtive jokes and their staring eyes and their evil auras. Solid stuff!

Following the bad meal, Alaric offers to show Jirel the great hall full of armor and banners and whatnot. It’s all rotted and rusted of course, what with being an abandoned castle in the swamp and all, but while they’re promenading Alaric escorts her to a huge stained patch of stone floor – the very spot where Andred died, dismembered and broken by the long tortures he’d endured. And, while Jirel is regarding the spot:

A sudden furious storm seems to descend on her, right there in the hall. The lights go out, she’s seized in an oddly disembodied grip, and a mouth is suddenly thrust upon hers, bestowing a “savagely violent, wetly intimate kiss” unlike anything she’s ever experienced (gross!). At the same time, she’s being bodily dragged across the hall by some kind of implacable, unstoppable force. It’s very weird! And maybe very uncomfortable for the reader, since Moore makes sure that we know that Jirel is 100% experiencing this kiss as a violation. Her mouth is “ravaged,” she’s gripped by an “insolent” hand, she can only make inarticulate sounds since her mouth is sealed by the “storming violation” of the kiss; it’s very much a sexual assault, and the suddenness and overwhelmingness of it is very shocking to the reader.

Anyway, as this is happening, Jirel is also experiencing a sense of claustrophobic confinement, as if she’s being dragged out of the hall and into a small room or closet. It’s pretty frightening, obviously, but just as suddenly as it appeared it vanishes. Suddenly there’s light in the hall again; one of the weird women has tossed a bunch of brush onto the doused fire and suddenly there’s a blaze going. Jirel sees that she’s standing alone in the far end of the hall – the rest of the people are by the fireplace, and Alaric himself is standing over the stain, at the other end of the hallway. She has been dragged across the room, although she was never “confined,” and it’s clear that Alaric, who had been near her at the beginning of the attack, had not been the person to grab and assault her.

It suddenly becomes clear that Alaric and the others had expected something like this to happen. They’re speaking in a weird language Jirel doesn’t understand, but they’re all very excited and running around with a strange, hungry look in all their eyes. Alaric questions her about what happened, and they all get very excited when she muses about it being the ghost of Andred.

We learn that Alaric and his weird crew have been waiting here for the ghost of Andred to appear, but it hadn’t come out until Jirel shows up – Alaric speculates that Jirel has a kindred fierceness that Andred’s spirit finds irresistible. Similarly, they, being Andred’s descendants, have not been able to get him to appear (an obvious lie, as we’ll see soon). When Jirel asks why they want to see this horrible ghost, Alaric stammers a bit before saying that, why, only with the help of this ghost can his treasure be found (another obvious lie, and one Jirel catches right away). Anyway, now that Jirel is here, they can get on with it. If she’d be so good as to go stand in the spot again…?

Jirel, of course, tells him to go fuck himself, but then suddenly she’d gripped from behind. No ghost this time, it’s the damn lute player, whose snuck up and pinned her arms. She struggles, but there’s a bunch of them and they quickly grab hold of her. Her sword is taken away, and she’s dragged over the blood stain again. Then, the fire is doused, the hall plunged into perfect darkness, and the people holding her melt away to the far corners of the room. Spookily, it becomes clear that, even though it’s pitch black in the hall, Alaric and pals can see her just fine – they react to her moving around, and even carefully and precisely deliver a pillow to her when she complains of how sitting on the cold floor for hours is uncomfortable.

They wait there in the dark for a long time, until sometime after midnight when it becomes clear that no second appearance of Andred’s ghost is forthcoming. With everything perfectly dark still, Alaric and company grab her up and, without striking a light, carry her off into the castle somewhere, tossing her into a small, locked room. It’s clear that they’re going to keep her imprisoned to try again later.

Then, through the cracks in the door of her cell, she sees a light, and realizes that they’ve summoned one of the human thugs from the courtyard, who has brought a lantern. She waits awhile until, eventually, the guard leans his bulk against the door to take a nap, and she shivs him through the door with the dagger in her greaves. She grabs the lantern and considers her options; there’s a fun bit of meta-fictive playfulness from Moore:

Jirel needs the treasure, and however unpleasant it was, she knows she needs to brave the horrible ghost of Andred again if she wants to get that treasure! So, she sneaks down into the hall, finds the weird stain and, steeling herself, she blows out the lantern.

The challenge apparently works, because she’s suddenly in the center of the supernatural vortex again! She’s grabbed and dragged again across the hall, and all the time the horrible ghostly mouth pressed against hers. And then things get real weird!

Jirel again experiences the sensation of walls closing in, as if she’s being confined in a small room. As this sensation builds, so to does the fury of the vortex, as if they storm is also confined, and therefore all the more terrible. In her struggles, she reaches out and feels cold, slimy, stone walls – she is in fact in a small chamber, one full of bones, the remains of previous treasure hunters! Somehow, this ghostly vortex is magically dragging her into a different space, a pocket dimension or whatever. As she struggles, she is aware of flickering back and forth between the extradimensional prison and the great hall – it’s as if her soul is in one and her body in another. In the prison, she stumbles and picks up the box, and then she fights against the vortex and is back in the hall and her own body, still holding the box – she’s somehow carried it from one space to another. But she’s weakening, the terrible tireless force of Andred’s ghost is beating her down; she knows she will soon be dragged back to the little dimensional prison place, where her bones will mingle with those of the thieves who came before her. As she begins to lose consciousness, she hears a dog barking…and then lute music!

The vortex is still raging, but it seems to have forgotten her, spinning angrily around the hall. But it seems to have been trapped, as spinning around it in a wild Bacchic dance is Alaric and the others, wild and weird and very sinister.

Extremely weird! And what a great bit of writing too, the sense of motion and the wild frenzy of Alaric and the others, and the way that they, suddenly, are much more menacing and dangerous and deadly than Andred’s ghost! Fantastic weird fiction!

Jirel grips the small box to her chest, but she realizes that Alaric and his coven have no interest in it or her – they’re focused solely on Andred’s ghost. The music and the dance wind down, and with it the fury of Andred’s ghost ebbs too. Something is happening, clearly, but Jirel doesn’t see the end, as she finally just konks out.

She wakes to daylight streaming into the hall. She’s sore from all the buffeting that she took, but she’s alive, and she has the small, worm-eaten casket that she grabbed out of Andred’s ghostly oubliette. She looks around, and sees the whole of Alaric’s coven sprawled out across the hall.

A special kind of grimness to the morning-after, isn’t there? And the obscene satiety on all their faces is just a cherry on the top of all this weirdness, isn’t it? There’s a real sense of disgusting, licentious, gluttonous, excess in the aftermath of whatever the fuck happened last night, made worse by the fact that we (and Jirel) don’t really understand anything about what’s been going on! Great weird fiction! And it gets better when she runs into Alaric, the first of his group to come out of their stupor.

I mean c’mon, that’s just fun, isn’t it? You can imagine Alaric, bleary-eyed, needs a shower and a cup of coffee, all cotton-mouthed and stale from last night’s debauch, suddenly being reminded that, oh yeah, that’s right, Jirel is still here. “No worries, I’ll have your horse brought around. Take it easy, bye!” And then of course the capper is that he doesn’t give a shit about the box, help yourself lady! It’s so much fun, and like all great weird fiction, it hinges on us getting a glimpse of something with its own rules and purpose and meaning that we can never really understand.

But of course Jirel demands SOME kind of answer. Alaric explains that they used the lure of the treasure to get her to play the part of the bait for the ghost, since they couldn’t explain what they REALLY wanted from Andred’ shade. Her getting the treasure was incidental to their purpose, as was her survival – she just got lucky that one of the weird dogs had heard her and roused the rest when she was down in the hall on her own. Alaric and the others had swooped in at the last minute almost accidently!

Truly wild stuff, huh? Alaric and his coven (dogs, little boys, and all!) go around eating ghosts, basically – something sweet about the furious dark energies created by their violent deaths. But it’s tricky; he admits that Andred was, rightly, afraid of them, and without Jirel’s own energy to draw him out they might never have had a chance to slurp him up. As thanks, Alaric offers Jirel a bit of advice:

As Jirel rides off, trying to put the memories of the night and the weird horror of the Hunters of Undeath behind her, Jirel regards the box, and considers Alaric’s warning.

And that’s the end of “Hellsgarde,” and the final entry in the original run of C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry stories!

First off, right away, I think it’s great. Jirel is such a wonderful character, her attitude and sharpness and command are fantastic and always a lot of fun to encounter. As weird fiction (the genre that birthed and nurtured sword & sorcery), I think it is again another example of Moore’s command of weirdness and the uncanny; much like the strange hell world that Jirel journeys to in “Black God’s Kiss”, there’s a real undercurrent of alien-ness to everything here. Hellsgarde and its swamp are spooky, but the discover of it being inhabited, and particularly by the strange critters that Alaric and his coven seem to be, just elevates everything. I mean, these hunters of undeath are very strange – are they humans who’ve been changed by their weird appetites, or are they something else? The dogs seem to suggest that there’s something horrible and corrupting about ghost-munchin’ but it’s never explained (thankfully), so you can just kind of savor the weirdness of it all. Great stuff!

As a sword & sorcery story, it’s great, although I can appreciate that some might find Jirel here a little disappointing – she’s often just along for the ride for much of the story, although the fierce joy she feels when she considers her hidden dagger, and the iron determination she expresses by sneaking down to the hall when she’s escaped the prison is absolute top tier s&s heroics, in my opinion. Also, I feel like the threat here is so otherworldly that anything more would break the spell of the story, you know? The ghost is already very scary and strange and obviously something that a strong sword arm isn’t going to be much use against, let alone the weird threat posed by undeath hunters (whatever they are). It would be very dissatisfying if Jirel had been able to, conan-like, brute force her way out of these situations. Much more satisfying is the weird glimpse into an alien world that she got, in my humblest of opinions. Also, she’s got her own agenda here – she needs the treasure to get her guys out of a dungeon, and she’s focused on that above all else, very much in keeping with a s&s protag’s pragmatism!

Of course, we do have to talk about the sexual assault aspect of these stories, particularly since they’re not one-offs by any stretch. I mean, three of the five (ish, I’m not counting “Quest of the Starstone”) Jirel stories are directly about Jirel being violated or threatened with violation. In particular, there’s a strange symmetry between the first story, “Black God’s Kiss,” and this one, isn’t there? The central image of the kiss as violation, for one thing; Guillaume forcibly kisses Jirel when she’s his prisoner, and the outrage of it spurs her on to seek the deadly kiss of the black god to get her revenge. Here, Andred’s kiss is somewhat more straightforward, a violent and unwanted kiss for sure, but one from a ghost many hundreds of years dead; it’s even kind of implied that Andred’s atavistic tendencies are a result of his ghostliness – he’s a thing of violence, almost elemental in death now.

Some people make the argument that Moore, bowing to the realities of pulp publishing, uses “kiss” euphemistically for out-and-out rape in these stories. I mean, I don’t think we’re meant to read these stories, see the word “kiss,” and immediately think that Moore is eliding or winking at what *really* happened. I also think it kinda sorta doesn’t matter, in terms of the story – Jirel experiences these kisses as violations, after all, and that’s enough, although I will say that Moore dwells on the ghostly kiss and its violence a LOT in this story, to an uncomfortable degree. It makes for an odd reading experience, although at least in “Hellgarde” we’re not confronted with as complex an ending – again, the ghost is elemental in its violence, and Jirel can’t have a relationship to it beyond being subjected to it’s innate and impersonal violence.

But, like in so much of Moore’s fiction, there’s a definite fascination with sex and relationships, and an appreciation that there’s positive and negative aspects to all of it. Jirel’s obvious fascination with Guy in this story does make me think of Guillaume in “Black God’s Kiss.” The ending of “Hellsgarde” is also kind of funny, again in a symmetrical way, when compared to “Black God’s Kiss.” Jirel, having slain Guillaume with the horrible and obviously evil magic of the Black God’s Kiss, feels remorse (both for the act, which is tainted by alien forces, as well as because she realizes she had kind of loved Guillaume). But if she learned a lesson from that, she’s obviously forgotten it here! Again she has an obviously evil magic weapon, and sure as hell she’s gonna use it to horribly kill another hot (and evil) guy she has a complex relationship with! It’s pretty interesting that, again, Moore is drawing from that same well for another Jirel story, isn’t it?

It speaks to the strength of Moore’s writing that the stories engender so much discussion; really, there’s no one writing at that time who does so much in such little space. All of her stories are these subtle, complex things, not necessarily puzzles to be solved so much as koans to be appreciated, I think. And they’re sophisticated, to; she’s always diving into heady territory, and using the conventions of the genre (even ones as young as S&S and weird fiction) to really explore and highlight conversations that you otherwise couldn’t have really had (in “straight” lit fic, I mean). Howard (and Smith) clearly influenced Moore’s approach to what would later be called sword & sorcery, but she did something really magical with it, I think, recognizing in it a way to talk about people, environments, relationships, all in new and interesting ways.

Anyway, it’s a great story, Moore is a great writer, and it’s a great way to start of Sword and Sorcery month, I think!

The Pulp (of Capitalism) Strainer #29: “Smoke Ghost” by Fritz Leiber, Unknown Worlds, V. 5, n. 3, Oct 1941

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The Big Day is here: All Hallow’s Eve; Samhain; Satan’s Birthday(?); Pumpkinmas. Yes, it’s Halloween, and as is good and right, we’re celebrating the day with a particularly excellent story dissection/discussion/ramble – Fritz Leiber’s “Smoke Ghost” from the October 1941 issue of Unknown Worlds!

We’ve hit Leiber before, of course, discussing his very first story in Weird Tales (“The Automatic Pistol“) as well as the first Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser story in Unknown Worlds (“Two Sought Adventure“) so, obviously, we’re all huge Leiberheads around these parts, just absolutely Fritzpilled. He’s a great writer who had a huge impact across multiple genres – weird fiction, sci-fi, and especially in the genre he named, sword & sorcery. Immensely important figure, and a helluva writer too boot! And man, lemme tell ya – this story today is a killer!

Pretty rad ToC in this issue – the de Camp and Pratt Novel up front is great, one of their “Mathematics of Magic” series that is, I think, criminally underappreciated among fantasy folks. There’s a good Kuttner story in here, a lesser (but still fun) Bloch effort too, as well as some of Hubbard’s usual hackwork. Anyway, a solid issue of the magazine, made more interesting by the editorial (“Of Things Beyond,” on page 6) where Campbell and Tarrant are trying to couch their style of fantasy as something more urbane and, frankly, science fictional than the traditional (i.e., Weird Tales) stuff. It’s always interesting to see the genre discussions going on in the pulps – we tend to take the labels for granted these days, but there was a real tension about what exactly was, say, sci-fi or horror, and the only place to hash them out was in the magazines!

But, anyway, enough! Let’s get down to business with one of my favorite weird stories of all time, “Smoke Ghost” by Fritz Leiber, Jr!

Good, almost “EC Comics” ghastly ghoul there, huh? Cartier is among the top of the heap, especially in the sci-fi magazines, and had a long and storied career as an illustrator, with a fun and playful style that I like. Also really appreciate that this bit o’ art doesn’t give anything away at all, a rarity in the pulps sometimes!

A fantastic opening, isn’t it? A secretary is wondering what the hell is up with her boss, and who can blame her when he’s spouting off truly wild, apocalyptic ideas about the kind of ghosts born into a world of steam and smoke and capitalism. “The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings…” I mean, holy smokes, great stuff! And there’s more! Miss Millick is taking dictation from him when he has another odd interlude:

Absolutely killer stuff here, and a good overview of not only the theme of this story but of a lot of Leiber’s fiction, where myths and beliefs and monsters are a dark reflection of the material conditions of life, a kind of instantiation of collective fear and pain whose form and expression comes from the specific types of sordid miseries visited on people. And here, in this story, written at the tale end of the Depression (though who was to know that) and while Europe was engulfed in World War II (with America watching from the sidelines, as yet), Leiber is evoking a particular flavor of modern, industrialized hauntings.

I hope Miss Millick is stealing office supplies, because goddamn that is one grim diatribe to be enduring for thirty-five cents an hour or whatever the going rate for secretarial work was in 1941. She objects that, of course, there’re no such things as ghosts, but this seems to only send Mr. Wran further ’round the bend. With a huge, tight, unnatural smile, he spouts some boilerplate about how of course there’s no such things as ghosts, modern science assures us of this very fact yadda yadda. It’s all very strange for Miss Millick, who nervously runs her hands across the edge of Wran’s desk…and discovered that it’s covered in some kind of weird black smudge or gunk.

Strange how the sight of that dark grime seems to affect him so, huh? When Millick is gone, Wran runs over and examines the black gunk – he’s obviously troubled, because not only does he furiously scrub the stuff off the desk, we also learn that the trash basket is full of similarly inky rags…this weird grimy shit seems to be part of some kind of regularly occurring phenomenon, tied in with other things that Wran, attempted to convince himself, calls “hallucinations.”

And what are the things he’s been “hallucinating?”

I gotta watch out, Leiber is such a good writer I’m in real danger of just copy-pasting the whole damn story onto here. But I mean, c’mon, how evocative and moody and moving is that passage? This bleak, almost nihilistic scenery is as terrifying and as existentially threatening as any of Lovecraft’s Cyclopean ruins, and the psychogeographical connection between it and the troubled times (specifically the “Fascist wars”) is really phenomenal. Also, neat writerly trick of Leiber’s, tying Wran’s observation of this scenery to dusk and twilight only, doubling down on the sense of fading light and ending cycles.

It’s during these Blakean reveries that Wran captures sight of something – it’s nothing at first, just some windswept garbage…and yet…

That’s a real lived-in moment, isn’t it? One summer, when I was doing field work out in Wyoming, I watched the same same pile of antelope bones slowly disarticulate and scatter down hill. It was on the path I would hike to get to some outcrops, and for like two weeks I saw the steady movement of vertebrae and ribs and long bones, starting up near the ridgeline and, as a result of time and curious coyotes and intermittent rain storms, ending up at the foot of the hill in a little dry creek bed. It’s an interesting thing, getting to “know” a bit of ephemeral stuff in the landscape, and Leiber beautifully describes Wran’s fascination with this weird, oddly behaving bag of trash. And of course, the fun part is that Wran doesn’t know he’s in a weird tale (yet), but we do, so we know that the strange peripatetic movement day by day of this horrible bag thing is much more portentous and threatening than poor ol’ Wran does.

Wran finds himself obsessing over the weird bag thing – when it’s not visible one day, he’s oddly relieved, and then becomes annoyed with himself for, apparently, having been worried about seeing the thing. The next evening, he tries to ignore it, but the desire to look out the train window at the thing’s usual spot proves too strong, and he does indeed see something: it looks like there was a head of some sort, peering over the parapet of the roof.

At this point Wran really is justified in his assumption that he’s developing some kind of psychosis – the things is dominating his thoughts, and he develops a weird compulsion about grime and dust and inky grit that he suddenly is noticing everywhere in the office. Similarly, he decides that this is something he has to confront, and so, one evening on the train, he strains his eyes looking out over the grim cityscape.

And so Wran decides to visit a psychotherapist.

Leiber was, like a lot of people, intensely interested in psychiatry/psychology – we now tend to not really appreciate how HUGE and REVOLUTIONARY the idea that the brain was “fixable” had on people in the early 20th century. In our modern world of commodified and wide-spread therapy, it’s kind of taken for granted, but back then there’s a real sense that not only is it possible to interrogate and adjust the human mind, but it could be done scientifically. There’s a reason why people like Sturgeon, Campbell (the editor of the Unknown Worlds), and Philip K. Dick were such devoted believers in PSI/psychic stuff, and why it shows up so often in the science fiction of the day – it was bleeding edge science, doing for the mind what medicine was doing for the body and what physics and chemistry promised to do for the external world. Leiber, who received undergrad degrees in both psychology and biology, was uniquely equipped to integrate these concerns into his fiction.

Wran’s visit to the head-shrinker allows him to relive and explore the “unfortunate incident” that Miss Millick had alluded to earlier in the story. It turns out that ol’ Wran was, apparently, a psychic kid, although that’s really the least important part of the story – what TRULY matters here is the Wran, while apparently clairvoyant, continuously disappointed his mother because he could NOT communicate with the dead. The fact that this “sensory prodigy” could only see real, physical objects and NOT spiritual ones is interesting, in the context of this story.

Childhood Wran’s life as a psychic oddity is interesting – it seems like he mostly hated it, but he desperately wanted to please his mother and other adults, all of whom paid attention to him because of his gifts. This need to please is so great that it maybe ends up sabotaging him; his first public test at a university elicits such anxiety that he ends up psyching himself out and, apparently, loosing the ability totally.

At this point, we have been told a few things about Wran that’re important to the story – he’s a needy little guy, he had a brush with the occult world as a child that has resulted in him turning away from the unknown and towards placid rationality (see, in particular, all his talk about science and his desire for an expert to tell him everything is okay) and, most interestingly, his psychic power ONLY worked on real, physical objects…he never spoke to the ghost a dead person, no matter how hard his mother pushed him.

All this is very interesting, and Wran is even apparently feeling a little better from having taken the talking cure when, suddenly…

Don’t be bothered by the uncomfortable usage of the age here – it’s unfortunate phraseology, but the needs of the story justify it I think and, besides, trust me; in hands other than Leiber’s it could be waaaaay worse. Anyway, the bag thing has obviously followed Wran to the doctor’s office, which is freaky as fuck. Also interesting is that the doctor sees it too – this isn’t something only the “sensitive” can see, it’s a real physical presence in the world!

Obviously, Wran decides it’s time to wrap it up, and he heads out – he’d been hoping modern psychiatry would be enough to solve his delusion, but now he knows that’s all done with. There was no delusion; the bag thing was real. He wanders around the city, taking comfort in crowds and lights, only to find himself wandering back to his office. He realizes that, subconsciously, he’s recognized that he can’t lead the bag thing back to his home, where his wife and child are. Dejected and without a plan, he heads up to the office, mulling over his newfound enlightenment:

His thoughts are interrupted by a sudden phone call! It’s his wife, with some troubling news!

The bag thing is at his house anyway! He hurries out the office and calls the elevator, looking through the grate and down the shaft…

…where he sees the bag thing…

Wran is looking down the elevator shaft, and the thing is three stories below, looking up the shaft, directly at him. I mean, that is some killer, chilling stuff, isn’t it? Just spectacular, and it’s only going to get better – we’re entering the home stretch of the story, and Leiber is just about ready to let us have it.

Wran flees back into the office, locking the door and retreating to his desk, terrified out of his mind. He hears the elevator come up to his floor, and then a silhouette appears in the glass of the office door. Why, no worries! It’s just Miss Millick!

Yeah…poor ol’ Miss Millick has been possessed. This begins one of the scariest sections in basically all of literature. Leiber has made Millick into this terrifying avatar of something inhuman and alien, and it’s just some spectacular stuff:

The tittering, the weird playfulness, the way it starts every sentence with “Why, Mr. Wran…” and then the horrific alteration of Miss Millick’s body, followed by the implacableness of the thing…it’s absolutely spectacular, and the last line of the section (“I’m coming after you”), I mean, it doesn’t get any better than this. Absolute top notch weird horror.

Wran flees to the roof, but of course the thing follows him.

Chilling fucking stuff. There’s even a fun, spooky illustration of Wran’s abjectification:

The thing titters, demanding total abasement from Wran:

The thing, pleased with Wran’s submission, releases its hold on Miss Millick, and Wran is left alone, having pledged himself totally to his new god, The Smoke Ghost. He helps Miss Millick, who for the life of her can’t understand how she ended up on the roof, and then the story closes:

I mean, goddamn, am I right? A hell of a story, and such a rich text, with so much going on. The big picture, at least for me, is Leiber very much recognizing the dark truth of his (and, now, our) times: the age of “rationality” is an illusion. Rather, we live in a haunted world, one stalked by the phantoms of fascism, of capitalism, of industrial gigantism, of smoke and soot and abjection. Wran, confronted by the implicit threat of this world, breaks immediately, begging for his life at the feet of the oppressor and promising to serve and worship it utterly. It’s dark stuff! And kind of a bummer! Sorry!

Setting aside the crushing existentialist horror of the story, though, I think we can all agree that it’s also a homerun in terms of being a technically perfect piece of weird fiction. Not a sour note there, the pacing is great, the build-up is spectacular, the weirdness is solid, and when the horror starts up it gets really good, really fast. It’s also such a great, original take – the Smoke Ghost is a specter of modernity, a being called into existence by a world of rampant, soulless capitalism and wracked by fascist war. There’s even a bit of early environmental critique here – the ghost is a thing of garbage and soot; it’s physical presence is one fundamentally of pollution and corruption.

Obviously, I love this story; it’s definitely one of my favorites, a great example of Leiber’s mastery of weird fiction. A perfect way to celebrate Halloween!