Hallowe’en Eve, how the hell did that happen already! Yeesh, time flies like an arrow (but fruit flies like a banana). Anyway, I’ve got one last tranche of halloween audio for you today, and they’re some good uns! Years and years ago, the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast (now renamed the Strange Studies of Strange Stories podcast) did some truly excellent readings of some classic Lovecraft stories. Professional sound, with great effects and music, and with some really phenomenal readers, I think these are some of the best audio versions of lil’ Howie Lovecraft’s spook-em-ups. Plus they’re all FREE! You’ll have to follow the links for each to the website, but you can download ’em there. I highly recommend them all, but their “From Beyond,” “Cool Air,” and “The Picture in the House” are particular treats, in my opinion! Enjoy!
Despite a general lack of Halloweenishness in Austin right now (summer is lingering here, dry and hot and miserable) I refuse to let it deter me. I SHALL fulfil my sacred vow of rambling interminably about pulp stories I like! And today is a fun one, a Lovecraftian story from Carl Jacobi: “The Tomb from Beyond” in Wonder Stories, Nov 1933! Archive.org remains down, so that link takes you to a google drive address where you’ll probably have to download the whole issue.
I’ve been on a Jacobi kick lately – you can read some of my previous musings on his stories “Mive” and, more recently, his vampire story “Revelations in Black.” Obviously I like his paleontologically- and geologically-informed approaches to horror and weird fiction, but I also think he has an interesting take on Lovecraftian-style cosmic horror. Unlike, say, Frank Belknap Long or Robert Bloch, he’s not just aping ol’ HPL’s stuff – he’s inspired by a lot of it, of course, and appreciates both Lovecraft’s fascination with science and Deep Time, but Jacobi does so in his own way, and without the kind of “pastiche-y” quality that a lot of the HPL Imitators seems to fall into. In some ways he’s more of a fellow traveler with regards to Lovecraft’s cosmicism, rather than just another acolyte, someone whose approaches and style are his own, even when the subject matter is inspired by Lovecraft’s work. Also, I frankly think he’s a good writer – his scenes and impressions and descriptions are fun to read and interesting to think about, and that’s worth a lot, in my book.
Today’s story is interesting because it really reads like a Weird Tales rejection that ol’ Hugo Gernsback caught on the rebound for his sci-fi magazine, Wonder Stories. There’s very little “science” in Jacobi’s story, and I even wonder if Gernsbeck didn’t insert some of the rambling bits about “the Fourth Dimension” that are in there.
Gernsback, of course, is the Grand Old Man of Sci-Fi (or “Scientifiction” as he preferred), an enormously influential figure in the field who, basically, shepherded the genre into being in the pages of his magazines. His first endeavor, Amazing Stories, was one of the first real competitors of Weird Tales, siphoning off both its more science-flavored stories as well as the “planet stories” that had been so contentious among Weird Tales‘ readers. Gernsback also had the great luck/foresight to publish what is probably Lovecraft’s single best story, “The Colour out of Space” in Amazing Stories in 1927, during one of Lovecraft’s many attempts to get our from under Wright and Weird Tales. Of course, it kind of backfired, in that Gernsback only paid him only $25 (~$500 in 2024 money, which I’d kill for btw) for a truly remarkable story, and extremely late at that – Lovecraft soured pretty quickly on the dude he dubbed “Hugo the Rat” in his letters, and never published with him again.
What’s fun is that, even in 1933, you can see that the sci-fi and weird tales fandoms are in the process of peeling off, but haven’t quite separated yet; check out this kind of funny message Gernsback sticks up at the front of the story, using his usual pseudo-technical jargon (“story interest is highly developed”) and also his somewhat backbreaking attempts to reassure the readers that this IS a sci-fi story.
Yes, “plausible science” indeed! It’s a funny bit of genre boundary work, an important but understudied aspect of the pulp magazine era.
We’ll forgo the ToC this week because there’s very little of interest there (although Hamilton’s “The Man With X-Ray Eyes” is in this issue, which would later be turned into a pretty great movie with Ray Milland that you all should go watch). So we’ll get into our story right away with a quick look at the climax-spoiling illustration that accompanied the first page!
Feels like this one is a particularly egregious example of the spoiler genre of illustrations these mags like to do, since it commits the cardinal sin of Showing the Monster before the story is ready for you to see it – as you read, you’ll quickly be annoyed that this fucking picture just goes and gives away the weird monster right off the bat. Very stupid and very frustrating, especially when there are much more atmospheric and strange images in the story that would’ve been way more effective. Infuriating stuff! But, we march onward.
Our story starts with some poor real estate agent type fellow, who we’ll learn later is named John Arnold, out in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere, heading towards some place called Opal Lake. I really like the sense of abandonment and decay that Jacobi evokes in these opening paragraphs – the difficulty in actually getting to this town, Flume, makes it clear that it’s out in the sticks, and the omnipresence of the collapsed timber business makes for a fun, spooky atmosphere…I mean, even the name of the town, Flume, harkens back to a formerly prosperous and industrious time. It’s very much in keeping with that “decayed new england” so popular in weird fiction. And not only is Flume decaying…it’s actually a ghost town!
That’s some good, atmospheric writing here, evoking long, dreary, tiring miles and general abandonment and collapse, the infrastructure rotting in place, the road bad and the trip exhausting. Arnold has hired a car for this last leg, and he’s being driven by a taciturn old Finn, a further bit of alienation – even with another person, Arnold is alone in this landscape, long gone from human company or civilization. As he’s staring out the window, he tries for a bit of conversation:
Gotta pause here to call out Jacobi, who’d studied geology and paleontology at the University of Minnesota, calling out the terminal morraine! Always a treat with him, these little glimmers of earth science!
Anyway, the driver grunts the affirmative – this is indeed Opal Lake, and they’re getting close to Flume. But, as Arnold continues to look out over the rain-spattered countryside, he spots something odd – there’s a second, smaller lake, a kind of half-crescent, not far off of Opal Lake proper. What, pray tell, is the name of that lake, he asks, but the question seems to trouble the driver, who only answers gruffly “that isn’t a lake.” Arnold finds it odd, and is a little annoyed that this guy is being so grim and gnomic, but there’s a bad patch of road and in all the jostling he decides to let it go.
Night falls and they turn a curve and, voila, they’re in the abandoned lumber town of Flume. The car creeps slowly through the silent streets – at first it seems like the man has come to meet isn’t there, but then:
Arnold is a bit taken aback that Trenard neither greets nor thanks him for coming all the way out to the middle of nowhere, but what are you gonna do? The driver is dismissed, and he gets the hell out of Dodge with a quickness, leaving just Arnold and Trenard alone in the ghost town. Trenard offers two paths to his house, one through the woods and one by…the lake!
Well, I mean, how are you supposed to respond to that? Arnold choses not to, and they walk out of town and start heading down a logging road to the house. Trenard lapses immediately back into moody, meditative silence, which gives Arnold a chance to give us some exposition.
Oh hell yes – sunken city? scientific expedition? lost civilizations? undecipherable hieroglyphs? QUEER ARTIFACTS BROUGHT BACK TO NEW YORK?
That is some solid, classic weird fiction stuff right there. The only thing it’s missing is if something strange and mysterious and tragic had happened during the expedition, something…horrific…
Rumors of fuckin’ sea monster attack? Check, check, and check, baby!
Now, me personally, as a writer of weird fic, I’d have left out “sea monster,” just stuck to rumors of a weird death, but nonetheless, it’s fun. Trenard and his partner ran afoul of something off the coast of Borneo it seems, and whatever it was has left Trenard…changed.
Now that’s some Rockefeller/Cloisters shit right there, disassembling, raising, shipping, and then reassembling an ancient tomb from Sunken Dras right there in the backwoods of old timbercountry upstate New York! Weird, huh? People speculate that he’d had a touch of the ol’ fever when he’d been inspired to do it, and then again maybe he’d been driven off the deep end by the sudden death of his sister while he was out adventurin’ there in Borneo too. Either way, he gets good use of this tomb – when he installs it in Flume, he puts his sister’s body in there, among the grand architecture of a lost civilization. You’d think something like that might be a boon for Flume going on, but, nope:
Good solid scene-setting. Jacobi is bringing in his own ancient civilization stuff, with all the attendant weirdness of deep archeological time and hidden branches of human history. I love it!
Anyway, they get up to the house, finally, and its big and weird and full of odd stuff. Trenard goes to get some refreshments for his guest, leaving Arnold to look around and do a bit more scene setting. There’s a fun passage where Jacobi does the classic Lovecraftian move of inserting real stuff (Wallace’s famous book The Malay Peninsula), but the real highlight is when he gets a chance to really look as a framed picture on the wall:
Jacobi knockin’ it out of the park here, in my opinion. You can see this weird, blotchy picture, the view distorted by the water, strange ruins getting picked out by the beam of the submarine’s light. It’s very evocative, very strange, and would’ve made for a much better and more interesting title illustration too!
Arnold’s strange revery is broken by Trenard’s return with “a tray of china.” Arnold eats, Trenard smokes a ridiculous meerschaum, and then Arnold tries to get down to brass tacks – he’s here because the company is willing to sell Trenard’s property for him, but he’s got to be realistic about the price he’s going to get, what with it being way the fuck out in the middle of nowhere and all. Trenard understands that, and just needs to recover the costs he sunk into it so he can get the hell out of there. Something is clearly troubling him, and he is desperate to escape from this place.
You’ve probably already noticed that this first part is, at least spiritually, cribbing a lot from “Dracula.” The real estate stuff, the Finn driver dumping him and then driving off, the wild and ruined countryside. I don’t think Jacobi is doing more than simply nodding at it, enjoying the resonance and taking advantage of one of the greatest bits of horror writing in the canon, although there might be a little bit more to it, which we’ll talk about when we get there.
Like I said, Trenard quickly dismisses Arnold’s concerns and basically agrees to accept whatever price they get first, and fast. Definitely seems like one of those “this meeting could’ve been a telegram” sort of things, especially since Trenard says he’s going to bed and they can finalize the paperwork in the morning. He leaves Arnold on his own in the study and, refreshed by his repast, he decides to pull a book from the shelf and do some reading. The book he chooses? Why, it’s Trenard’s own “The Mysteries of Sunken Dras.” He notices some underlined passages:
Two things here: did Trenard underline his own writing here? If so, that’s hilarious…I imagine him penciling in, like “Good Point!” or “Genius” with like a couple of stars. Funny thing to do to your OWN writing, is my point. The second point comes after we get Arnold’s reaction to these insane statements about an ancient civilization’s knowledge of hyperdimensional physics and alternate planes teeming with unimaginable horrors:
Dry and bookish!? Tough crowd, yikes!
Arnold ALSO finds a scrap of paper with, apparently, Trenard’s own notes on it – perhaps he had been going through his book, with its dry and bookish description of ancient ultrascience and transcosmic monsters, and reexamining them in light of more recent developments? The note reads thusly:
Oddly specific thing to be musing about and, not to spoil it, but he ends up being 100% correct. The mausoleum is, basically, a fourth-dimensional portal, and it wasn’t broken by moving the building – he’s brought a portal to hell all the way from the coastal shelf of Borneo to upstate New York! Neat! I really like the hint of another story in here too – what was it that drove out the villagers who had been living in Flume? What kind of weirdness were they dealing with while this weird transdimensional architecture was being installed in their town? Trenard seems little concerned with that, though – he’s more troubled by the thought of his sister’s body being trapped in there with something from…beyond.
As an aside, it’s interesting to me how, up to the early 20th century grave desecration and particularly troubling the remains of the dead was such a huge part of horror literature. I mean, for us today, I don’t think it elicits the same kind of seemingly existential horror that it did for folks back then, you know? I mean it’s gross, sure, but the way people viewed it back then, there’s really some deeper meaning attached to it, you know? It’s interesting, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen, like, a paper on it or anything.
Anyway, back to the story! We also get a hint about the origin of the smaller, secondary crescentic lake that Arnold had spotted from the car. There’s a leak in the dike bounding Opal Lake, which, uh, doesn’t seem to bother Arnold as much as it should. Like, he’s a real estate agent trying to sell this land, and it’s getting flooded by a faulty dike?
In fact, Arnold just shrugs and goes for a night-time stroll on the balcony overlooking this flood hazard scenic pond…and then it hits him!
Not only is Opal Lake leaking, but it’s flooded Flume’s graveyard, including the mysterious tomb that Trenard brought back from mysterious Sunken Dras. All kidding aside, it’s an evocative image, isn’t it, and the description of Arnold’s epiphany about what those small, regular white shapes are in the water is just fantastic, a real shivery moment in the story, very visceral. Jacobi has a real affinity for moonlit scenes, as we saw in “Revelations in Black.”
So fascinated by this realization, Arnold decides he simply must take a boat ride out to the drowned cemetery IMMEDIATELY. He hops in a little row boat that’s moored to the shore below the house, and paddles on out there. Setting aside the mysterious tomb and the cemetery aspect, a solitary night-time row while the only other person for miles is konked out seems like a bad idea, but oh well!
There’s some more great environmental descriptions of the lake and the environs and the house receding into the night as he rows away, and then Arnold reaches the drowned graveyard:
Great spooky stuff, and I can’t blame him for wanting a peek in the weird Dras tomb; I mean, if I’d just read something insane about their dark sciences, I’d wanna get a look too. And what does he see?
Nothin’ but darkness, then a bad stink, and then a hiss, a splash, and, oh, my hands have been gashed to the fuckin’ bone! Jesus Christ man! Bloody hands be damned, Arnold leans into the obvious shock he’s experiencing and power rows back to shore. Back in his room, he iodines and tapes up his wounds and, finally, exhausted, drifts off to sleep.
Bad weather greets him in the morning – if he thought he was going to get out of Flume early, he was mistaken. In fact, given the state of the roads, he might be stuck there for a while, a grim thing given what he’d experienced last night. And, aside from the fact that something uncanny is definitely happening out on ol’ graveyard lake, it also quickly becomes clear that Trenard is kinda off his rocker too.
It’s kind of odd that we’re reiterating the “fourth dimension” stuff here again – I wonder if that was in the original work, of if Gernsback had it inserted (or even, possibly, wrote it himself – he was famous for a heavy-handed editorial approach). It doesn’t really give us much new information, not after the note in the book, although it does give Trenard a chance to be weird and talk a lot of crazy shit, while also being oblivious to his guest’s wounded hands.
Arnold spends a dismal day with Trenard, doin’ up the paperwork and then just kinda hangin’ out, listenin’ to the storm, watchin’ Trenard get more and more freaked out. And then, in the late afternoon, the storm dies, and with the clear weather Trenard seems to reach some kind of sudden decision!
Arnold runs after him, and finds Trenard down by the shore rolling a bunch of huge barrels onto a weird barge like boat. Arnold realizes that Trenard is obviously in the throws of some kind of delirious state, working madly, sweat steaming off him and a wild energy to all his movements. Finally, with the barrels loaded, he pushes off from the shore; Arnold follows in the little duck boat, and sees that Trenard, while generally making towards the tomb, is doing so fairly circuitously, taking the time to pause and dump the barrels into the water – they’re full of oil, and soon the whole surface of the cemetery lake is a vast, flammable slick. When the barrels are all empited, Trenard paddles over to the tomb and opens the vault!
He’s haulin’ out his sister’s body, rescuing it from this weird-ass tomb, and he’s obviously concerned that he’ll need to set everything on fire…it’s a weird scene for sure! Here’s the part where that illustration at the beginning really sucks, because otherwise you might not know what’s happening…hell, you might think, given his preoccupation with his sister’s body, that there’s something going on there, that SHE’S somehow been weirded-up by the tomb and is the danger here! But, no, we already KNOW there’s a weird monster attack coming up (of course, there’s the “sea monster” attack from the expositionary dump earlier, but still…)
Anyway, Trenard is trying to haul out a coffin AND hold the door closed against some kind of implacable force pushing from within…but it’s too strong, and Trenard has to leap back, undoing the mooring and paddling furiously away, while, from out of the black crypt, comes…something…
A spider-mosasaur-thing erupts from the tomb, it’s jaws slavering, ravening with delight. I love the image of a weird hairy, jointed legged reptile thing, it’s a good, solid monster, a little more Robert E. Howard than H.P. Lovecraft – this isn’t weird mass of bubbling protoplasm from beyond the stars, it’s a fuckin’ beast, albeit one of very alien evolution and history…but still, you could see Conan takin’ a swing at this thing, couldn’t you?
The little aside about the critter looking like something “from the canvas of the mas August Schlegel” is a fun bit of Yog-Sothory, I think. Now, there was a real August Schlegel – he’s kinda famous for having translated Shakespeare into German in the 19th century, but this is obviously a different guy (he’s a painter, for one thing). This is Jacobi inventing and alluding to a crazed artist of the past whose work captures something of the preternatural or cosmic beyond our mundane understanding, a trick Jacobi probably picked up from the Weird Tales crowd for sure (Robert E. Howard’s mad poet Justin Geoffrey comes to mind, as does Lovecraft’s Wilcox in The Call of Cthulhu or, more famously, Pickman in Pickman’s Model). This stuff’s like popcorn to me – I’ll eat it up by the fistful.
Anyway, this horror surges out of the tomb and after Trenard and the barge. There’s some good, fairly suspenseful “death race” kind of stuff, with Trenard working the oar on the barge while this big weird monster chases after him. There’s also a fun part where Arnold, watching all this from his boat, realizes what Trenard was afraid of:
That bit is great, and pushes it beyond the simple “grave desecration” point I made earlier. And it makes sense to – I mean, I’m a strict materialist, but if confronted by the existence of other weird dimensions full of crazy-ass monsters, maybe there is some reason to be worried about the body of a loved one being in close proximity to door to another fuckin’ universe, you know!? It’s good weird stuff!
The critter eventually catches up with him, of course, and just as it is leaping up to chomp Trenard, he lights some matches and sets the fuckin’ lake on fire!
Our boy Arnold paddles to shore, leaps out, and in some kind of fugue state, stumbles off down the road, walking back towards civilization. He remembers little of the trek, but form a high point, perhaps the terminal morraine from the beginning, he catches a final glimpse of the lake:
And that’s the end of “The Tomb from Beyond” by Carl Jacobi!
I think it’s a fun story, and while the conclusion is kind of forced (dude thinks he might have to set the lake on fire in case of monster attack, is attacked by a monster and sets the lake on fire) I think Jacobi’s descriptions of the scenery and environment and atmosphere more than make up for it – he’s an evocative writer with an eye for weird, oppressive settings, and the storm, the abandoned landscape, the cemetery lake, all of these are excellently realized here.
Now, perhaps the weirdest part of the story is a bit underdeveloped – I think the idea that there’s some kind of intrinsic transdimensional portal in the tomb that is so fundamental to its architecture that it can be broken down and reconstituted elsewhere, no problem, is a lot of fun, and it’s a shame Jacobi doesn’t do MORE with it than let there be a monster in there. But, even so, the suggestion of the weirdness is fun, and I enjoy what little glimpse we get of it.
I also enjoy the obvious inspirations behind this work too; there’s Dracula, sure, but there’s also “The Fall of the House of Usher” here, and it’s neat to see these being reworked with such a light touch – Jacobi never beats you over the head with them, I mean. He’s just been inspired by some classics to write a story, and he’s turning them into something new and interesting while doing it.
Plus, what makes this a good bit o’ weird fic for me is the fact that there’s lost of strange, unanswered questions in it. Is the flooding of the cemetery just an accident, or is the tomb somehow responsible for this inundation? Remember, it’s a sea monster, basically, so maybe IT is remaking its environment, much in the same way Trenard tried to remake his in Flume. What happened to make the villagers leave? Was Sylvia’s “soul” somehow endangered by being in the weird ass tomb? It’s all good, fun, weird stuff, and I like it! And, while it’s certainly a “fourth-dimensional” story, it never really treads over Lovecraftian crowd; Jacobi is an original writer, with his own ideas and very much his own style, and it’s fun to see a Lovecraft contemporary doing his own thing on the same themes.
Now, look, I’m not gonna apologize here. Everyone knows Lovecraft, he doesn’t need any exposure or anything, so you might be asking why I’m covering his stories in these little free-writing exercises I’m doing here? Well, first off, he’s without a doubt the single most important horror/weird fic writer of the past 100 years, bar none. In terms of influence, he’s everywhere, with his tentacles extending into sci-fi, fantasy, comics, pop culture, and even modern occultism. His particular brand of cosmicism, a world where alien forces and laws operate in ways we simply cannot understand, has come to DOMINATE weird fiction (for good or ill), and while he didn’t INVENT the idea, I think you can argue he did PERFECT it. So it would be disingenuous to preclude him from discussion here merely for being well known.
A second good reason to read Lovecraft is that he is, simply put, the Best to Ever Do It. I mean, artistically, he’s top-tier – his refinement of and commitment to his particular aesthetic of weirdness is unparalleled, and it lends his writing a real force that you simply aren’t going to find in yer Seabury Quinns or yer Edmond Hamiltons. His writing, while elaborate, isn’t affected or purple – he comes by his vocabulary and style organically through Dunsany, Poe, Bierce, and Blackwood, and his appreciation for both their approach and technique is evident.
Finally, I think a lot of people have some serious misconceptions about Lovecraft – I’ve seen a lot of people online say shit like “oh, Lovecraft, all his stories are the same, like: ‘Look, an old weirdo tells me a story and then it turns out he’s right about a big tentacle monster!'” which is extremely annoying and factually inaccurate. He’s enormously inventive, and all the cliche bullshit you think he did he DIDN’T ACTUALLY DO, you’re thinking about the bullshit pastiches that came AFTER him by OTHER people! It’s very frustrating, because, like I said, for all that his DNA is in so much genre literature, his actual stories remain fresh and strange and unique and GOOD, fer fucksake! It’s the same thing that keeps people from reading, like, Jane Austen or Melville or Sterne! Don’t deny yourself the pleasure of reading them out of some misplaced hipsterish misapprehensions!
So, with that goal in mind, we’re going to talk about his very short and very good story “From Beyond,” published posthumously in Weird Tales in Feb, 1938! As I’m writing this, archive.org remains down, so that link takes you to the whole issue that you’ll probably have to download (it’s ~150 MB or so), fyi.
Anyway, the Cover:
Virgil Finley channeling some horny Margaret Brundage vibes here. As an aside, that lady has some long ass hair, doesn’t she? Like, down to her knees! When they thaw her out that’s gonna be one hell of a soggy mess, huh?
An interesting ToC this time around. “Gans T. Field” is Manly Wade Wellman, and “The Passing of Van Mitten” is one of Roy Temple House’s great translation efforts for the magazine. But, perhaps more importantly: lotta dead guys on here! Lovecraft, who died in ’37, is on here twice, actually; he wrote “The Diary of Alonzo Typer” for crazy ol’ William Lumley, one of his “collaborations” were someone paid him to take a teeny tiny kernel of a story idea and turn it into a story that they then slapped their name on. What’s funny about those is that Lovecraft is such a stylist that there’s no real way to miss it when he’s the one behind the pen, it’s so obviously Lovecraft. This one is a particularly middling effort, an obvious vulgar job for filthy lucre, but it’s got some funny bits in it. Worth a read if you got nothin’ else to do, but don’t expect greatness! Whitehead and Howard, both also dead of course, round out this somewhat macabre ToC.
All these dead guys showing up in Weird Tales reflects a bit of a slow-moving crisis in the magazine. The titans who strode through the pages of the magazine in its glory days are, for the most part, all gone – REH in ’36, HPL in ’37. These two deaths in particular come at a tough time, when Weird Tales is facing some particularly stiff competition, from both weird fiction magazines as well as from the burgeoning sci-fi pulps – the field is crowded, and the sf magazines in particular are able to pay MUCH better than Weird Tales, which further cut into their ability to find and publish good work. As such, and in the shadow of these difficulties, Weird Tales began to mine whatever they could from the back catalog of their heavy-hitters. With REH, that ended up being a lot of his verse (for what that’s worth…), but with Lovecraft, there was a whole world of amateur press publications of his.
And that’s where today’s story, “From Beyond,” comes from! It was originally published in 1934 in The Fantasy Fan, the very first weird fic fan magazine, but he’d written it waaaay back in 1920, which is pretty clear from the work itself – it’s obviously one of his earlier efforts, with a style and pacing very similar to stories like “The Terrible Old Man” or “The Tomb.” But, there’s an important difference here, one that marks a key development for ol’ Howie Lovecraft! So let’s get into it!
No illustrations for this one, which is a damn shame, given the wild visuals we’re going to encounter her. Weird Tales was on a very tight budget, and probably figured that the name itself would be enough to ensure people would read this one, so why bother. Still, it’s too bad!
Really dig that first sentence – grabs you and throws you right into the scene, focusing on the terrible transformation that has overtaken Crawford Tillinghast. We learn that Tillinghast, who the narrator considers his BEST FRIEND(!), has become a gaunt, harried shadow of his former stout and vibrant self. Even worse, this transformation occurred over the shockingly short span of ten weeks, following a tremendous argument between the two of them that ended with Crawford chucking our narrator out of the house. What was this argument about, you ask?
Just a fantastic mad scientist speech, isn’t it? Tillinghast has (correctly) identified that fact that our human sensory apparatuses are limited, the product of a messy and lazy evolution that has equipped us well for the mundane world, but which leaves us in the lurch when it comes to deeper and more fundamental layers of reality. Just like the microscope or the spectrograph, Tillinghast has built a machine that will expand human perception into these hidden realms!
Well, this freaked out our narrator, because he knew Tillinghast well enough that he could see this going one of two ways – either he’d fuck it up and be crushed and desolate, OR he’d succeed and discover something horrible, terrible, and overwhelming. Reader, guess which one happened.
So, after balking at his ideas, Tillinghast had thrown our narrator out of the house ten weeks ago, raging and fanatical. Now, he’s suddenly summoned our narrator back again and, despite the row, our dude can’t help but wonder what has happened. So now he’s back, shocked at the change that has come over Tillinghast, and also somewhat perturbed by the fact that the huge old house appears to be utterly empty, except for Tillinghast. Where have all his servants gone?
But our narrator pushes all this aside, because he’s just so danged curious about what Tillinghast hath wrought in those ten weeks. They creep through the dark house with only the lamp for light – Tillinghast seems afraid to turn on the light for some reason – and eventually reach the attic laboratory…and The Machine.
Again, excellent mad science work here – a weird glowing machine, the whine settling into a soft yet pervasive droning, and then, finally, the weird instantiation of an invisible color…ultraviolet made visible.
I mean, crazy cool wave machine weird fiction aside, this is also a remarkable early 20th C. document regarding the popular view of science and the mind, isn’t it? The “shallow endocrinologist, felloe-dupe and fellow parvenu of the Freudian” is just amazing stuff, using the cutting-edge brain science of the day to make weird fiction in 1920. When talking about Lovecraft and science most people reflexively (and not incorrectly) point towards his love of astronomy and physics, both obviously cosmic-scale and important to his world view, but you also run across geology and, here, some great biology (and what we’d now call neuro-psych). That the brain (and, therefore, one’s mind) is a biochemical organ is really just then beginning to be understand, but Lovecraft is putting a weird twist on here – it retains a certain sleeping evolutionary heritage that, properly awoken, allows humans to access the more fundamentally “real” (and terrifying) reality around them!
It can be hard for us, in 2024, to really appreciate how weird the world had been recently made for people back in the early 1900s. I mean, an entirely unknown, totally new, and otherwise INVISIBLE world of rays and mysterious energies had only recently been made manifest! Röntgen had discovered and named X-rays in 1895 and the Curies and Becquerel had been awarded the Nobel in 1903 for their work on radiation; that we were surrounded by processes and waves and things that were mostly invisible was, relatively, a pretty new and newsworthy thing. Likewise, the idea of science as inevitably pushing farther and further into these new invisible worlds was likewise a kind of cultural background noise to daily life. This is one of the KEYS to Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, and this story is where he first articulates it. It’s amazing stuff!
As the machine drones on, our narrator begins to, perhaps, hallucinate…or is he beginning to really see for the first time? The attic laboratory seems to him to become a strange, alien temple of cyclopean black masonry, but then this gives was to an even more unsettling sensation:
This sense of drifting in illimitable space so startles our narrator that he involuntarily draws the revolver that he’s been carrying, a habit that started after he’d been held up in East Providence (as an aside, when I attended the NecronomiCon this past summer, I stayed in East Providence, a lovely little end of the city with some great Portuguese restaurants/bakeries). Tillinghast watches this with sardonic amusement, and it’s clear that as much as our narrator is experiencing, ol’ Crawford is seeing and hearing even more.
I mean, c’mon – “we are able to be seen as well as to see” is just fantastic, isn’t it! And the revelation that something from beyond got the servants when they turned on the lights downstairs…creepy, wonderful stuff. And it gets better!
Kaleidoscopic impressions fill our narrators mind; there’s a great image of him staring at a starry sky and seeing the leering, gloating face of Tillinghast in the constellations. And he somehow senses animate things brushing invisibly past him as the machine continues to work. He also notices that Tillinghast seems be able to see these things with his better tuned third eye…something that begins to awaken in our narrator.
Just an absolute blast, and the effect of these overlapping visions, the weird invisible world (now becoming visible) overlaying the mundane laboratory…great stuff!
And once again, Tillinghast goes full Mad Scientist:
I mean, how incredible is that! Tillinghast, in his mad questing after knowledge has transgressed some cosmic boundary – now things are hunting him, but he’s got a plan! He’ll sacrifice our narrator to them to escape, the narrator who hurt his feelings and refused to encourage him when he needed all the support he could get! A great little revenge plan in among the ultracosmic horror! And how about the description of the things, huh? “Shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness…” is unbelievably great, isn’t it?
And then there’s a mini-cliffhanger, where the action breaks and we leap forward a bit in the narrative…
What a twist! Our dude fires the revolver…not at Tillinghast, but at the Machine!!!! Of course, Tillinghast has died, apoplectically struck down by either the noise of the shot, the sudden and jarring destruction of the machine, or perhaps even by the things that he’d been summoning to get our narrator, who knows! Everybody figures that Tillinghast must’ve killed the servants himself and hidden the bodies, and had planned to do the same to our guy here; a doctor even suggest that he’d been hypnotized by Tillinghast, and that the weird shit he’d seen had been the result of suggestion and illusion. How does our guy take that?
And that’s The End!
I mean, really, what more do you want? Short, straightforward, and full of amazing weird ideas and imagery, AND it’s also a major turning point for Lovecraft’s thinking and approach to weird fiction. The things that Tillinghast’s machine make visible are basically at the core of all of Lovecraft’s stories: strange, mysterious presences that lurk just behind the placid delusion that we call “reality.” They’re truly alien, made of different matter and obeying different laws; it’s basically a brief summary of Lovecraft’s entire worldview and approach to weird fiction, all in one short, sweet little package!
After last time’s fairly straightforward Vampire Story, I promised something weirder, and I think I’m gonna deliver. This time around we’ve got a very enigmatical, very thoughtful, very weird short story from a writer famous for her enigmatical, thoughtful, weird writing…it’s Brenda, by the great Margaret St. Clair, from the very last year that Weird Tales saw print (in it’s original incarnation…the later revivals don’t count!).
Before we go any farther, you’ve probably noticed that the link to the story I’ve provided you doesn’t go to the Internet Archive. That’s because, as I’m writing this, some assholes have taken it down with a DDoS, so you’ll have to navigate your way through that pdf to the story on your own. When the Archive is back up I’ll come in an add a link directly to the story, but as always: go read it now! This is a great one!
Margaret St. Clair is one of my favorite writers, endlessly inventive, marvelously talented, and deeply incisive – everything she wrote is worth reading, and in a just world she’d be remembered right alongside Issac Asimov and PKD and Harlan Ellison as one of the great authors of fantasy and science fiction from that era. Like C.L. Moore, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr., and Samuel R. Delany, she recognized that imaginative genre fiction provided a startlingly robust toolset with which a writer could break down and rebuild the world around them.
In addition to her skills as a writer, I ALSO love Margaret St. Clair because she was UNABASHADLY a pulp magazine writer. She began her career in the late 40s, at the tale end of the era, but she never had any ambitions for the “slicks” and, luckily, her interest in science fiction short stories coincided nicely with the growth in 50s and 60s sff mag culture. She wrote a LOT of short fiction, something like a 100+ stories easy over her life, as well as some novels (which are good, but, of course, I prefer her shorter work). She was also a card-carrying and practicing Wiccan (along w/ her husband), something that becomes a large influence on her later work, in particular. All in all, a fascinating woman and a great writer.
And her she is, the dawn of her writing life coinciding with the death of Weird Tales. Yes, we’re in 1946, that dolorous year when The Unique Magazine ceased to Be, and merely Had Been. It’d been a helluva run, of course – March 1923, v.1.n.1, through the Depression and WWII and the rise of Television, but The Reaper comes for us all in the end. The final issue of Weird Tales would be September of 1946, volume 46, number 4. Ask not for whom the bell tolls…
Generic ass cover, as was usual for the time. Gone are the heady days of Margaret Brundage! Nothing special here, sorry Evan Singer, whoever the hell you were.
The ToC is interesting though, not least for the fact that there’s an awful lotta women on it. For sure, there had always been women writing (and reading) Weird Tales, but you gotta think that Dorothy McIlwraith, editor of the mag and a lover of the genre, must’ve been interested in cultivating more gender equity in the pages of her magazine. Anyway, she’s got some heavy hitters here – Elizabeth Sheldon, Suzanne Pickett, and good ol’ G.G. Pendarves making a posthumous appearance. But we’re here for the star of this issue – Margaret St. Clair! So let’s get on with it already, yeesh!
An odd little title illo, especially since is has nothing to do with the story and, arguably, doesn’t even portray the eponymous Brenda, a tomboyish blonde. Oh well! It’s 1954, what the hell do you want!? It’s entirely possible that they weren’t even paying for specific art at this point, and were just running through the catalog.
Great job of character introduction here – Brenda, poor child, is on vacation on Moss Island with her parents who, if not cruel, are certainly not kind either. She’s an outsider, tall and gangly and without any friends among the children on the island, largely left to her own devices. Good standard protagonist kid for a genre story – a loner, misunderstood, left to themselves. And, since there’s not much to do on the island and no kids to play with, she spends a lot of time in the woods, like you do. But on that particular Monday, there’s something else in the woods with her:
I mean, that “Sometimes she liked to smell and look at rotten things” is a fantastic line, more of St. Clair’s genius, little knives she sticks in the reader to make sure they’re paying attention to the characters in the story. It’s such a great bit of characterization for Brenda too – there’s a sense of rebellion to it, but also a bit of secretiveness there, a sense that Brenda knows it’s something morbid about her that others might look down on.
Anyway, Brenda hound dogs her way through the woods, following the odd stink as best she can, until she finds “the man.”
I mean, what the fuck!? A weird blobby, greasy, disgusting muddy gray man-thing in the woods, holding a dead bird, all clotted up and sloppy? Brenda stops and stares, but then the gray man extends a blobby arm towards her and she fuckin’ books it.
At first, driven by panic, she’s running flat out, trying to escape. The grey man is following her, too – she can hear it and smell it pursuing her. But, when she chances a look backwards, she sees that he’s much farther back than she hoped he would be. In fact, while he IS chasing her, he’s doing it very clumsily and slowly. Implacable, sure, but she realizes she doesn’t have to run full tilt to get away from it. With that realization, comes a plan. Brenda, rather than running home, turns and goes through the woods, leading the stumbling, shambling grey man thing towards a deep, steep-walled quarry on the island.
She tricks the thing into the quarry where it stumbles around, searching, until finally it gives up. But, when it tries to escape, it can’t – the walls are too steep, and its weird blobby arms aren’t strong or dexterous enough for it to actually climb up, out of the pit. She’s trapped it there!
The flash of teeth is a great image, this weird blob man thing trapped in a quarry and grinning/snarling/??? up at her, very spooky and unsettling.
Brenda “hug[s] her secret to herself for the rest of the day,” another fun bit of characterization for this kid. She’s got a goo man trapped in a quarry, and that fact is HERS and HERS alone. But what fun is a secret if you can’t share it?
An interesting dynamic going on here, isn’t it? Ol’ Chuck is the closest thing to a friend that Brenda has on (and, possibly, off) the island, and it is to him that Brenda goes with this new, strange thing that has entered her life. Interestingly, it’s that touch though that convinces him not to go – something about the way she touches him is upsetting to Charles, and he tells her to, basically, fuck off.
She helps her dad with a barbecue pit out back, but the whole time she can only think about the gray man in the quarry. Unable to share her secret, she decides on a rather dramatic course of action; she’s going to set him free. She uses some planks to build a kind of ramp that lets the gray man clamber on up out of the quarry.
Great, chilling stuff – imagine being on an island with a Weird Thing that YOU released and YOU know is out there, but no one else does? Spooky and paranoiac, all while being a plausible action from a frustrated and probably petulant child. Nobody wants to see this thing that I captured? Fine, they can see it when it comes to THEM!
Brenda chooses not to head out to the woods the next day, a wise choice given that she overhears her parents discussing a rather disturbing event:
Brenda is sent to her room for eavesdropping, where she mulls over the gray man, trying to figure out what it could be, and where it could have come from, inventing some answers and writing them down, then deciding to tear them up and flush the pieces down the drain.
And then, before bed, she slips into her parents’ room and unlatches their windows. Yikes!
The blob man is in the house, and her parents are (quietly) trying to confront it. Her dad has it trapped in a beam of light from a flashlight, which is apparently enough to dazzle and confuse it while her mother, giggling nervously, is calling a neighbor to bring his gun over and shoot this thing. It’s pretty comical, par for the course for Margaret St. Clair, who often wrote about the absurdities of petit bourgeois suburbanites in her fiction.
The neighbor brings his gun over, but it really do much to the gray man – he’s made of goop, after all. Instead, the neighbor and Brenda’s father use a torch to drive it out of the house and, in a bit of synchronicity, through the woods and into the quarry where they trap and, eventually, bury the thing under a huge cairn of loose stone, which Brenda discovers when she is able to slip away the next afternoon.
And this signals a major change in Brenda’s life. For starters, no one on the island seems to want to talk about the thing under the cairn. Secondly, the children that had previously avoided her start showing up and following her around. Brenda becomes something of a leader to them, in fact, and they end up getting into all sorts of trouble.
Brenda eventually comes back to the island the next summer, having been left on the mainland after the school term by her exhausted and annoyed parents. She has continued to change, however, and it seems that, perhaps, she has finally started to grow into something more acceptable to her parents.
She waits until nearly the end of the summer before making a trip to the quarry and the cairn.
And that’s the end of “Brenda” by Margaret St. Clair!
Honestly, it’s kind of a masterpiece. It avoids the crude, stereotypical pitfalls of a “coming of age” story, instead relying on the weirdness of the gray man and Brenda’s relationship to it to arrive at something altogether stranger and more poignant. There’s obviously a puberty aspect to this tale – the interaction between Brenda and Charles is fraught, like all early adolescent encounters, but then there’s also the question of Brenda and her parents. Clearly there’s tension there, her parents obviously not understanding her in any way. The trapping of the gray man under the rocks by her father is ripe for a Freud Reaction meme, you know what I mean?
St. Clair, a student of Greek mythology, is also evoking the myth of Theseus here; the thing trapped under the rocks, which “one day” she’ll move to set it free, echoes Theseus having to wait until he comes of age and is strong enough to move the boulders that hide the symbols of his manhood (his sandals and sword). Both Brenda and Theseus know that their destinies lie under their respective rocks, and they know that they’ll have to wait to get strong enough to free them.
And, as weird fiction, I think it’s a blast too – the sense of the uncanny is strong all through this story, from Brenda’s own oddity, to the gray man (of course), and persisting in the weird mythic way Brenda changes after the gray man is trapped. It’s not a very long story, but there’s a lot of subtext and complexity at work here, but St. Clair is a good enough writer that she never lets either that OR the need for weirdness come into conflict; rather, they reinforce each other, like all great speculative fiction.
Anyway, Margaret St. Clair is a great writer, and there’re a few other works of hers that we’ll certainly be looking at in the future. There’s a pretty good collection of some of her short stories out there that you can get, easily and cheaply, from Dover Books, titled “The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales.” I’d highly recommend it!
Roughly a quarter of the way through the Hallowe’en Season already, how the hell did that happen!? Ah, but let us forget the merciless march of time with some timeless Weird Fiction! And this time, we’re looking at Carl Jacobi’s “Revelations in Black” from the April 1933 issue of Weird Tales!
We’ve met Jacobi before, roughly around this same time last year, when we examined his weird forest/bug/hallucinations story “Mive,” another of ol’ Carl’s appearances in Weird Tales that I really liked. Today’s story is much more traditional and, frankly, staid in comparison to the out-and-out trippy action in “Mive,” but even so (and despite not having any geology or paleontology content) I think it IS a good example of Jacobi’s moody, atmospheric writing.
Jacobi had a VERY long writing career that stretched well into the 80s, and he had a longstanding relationship with August Derleth’s Arkham House that kept a lot of his work in circulation via collections. Interestingly, the Arkham House connection came about because of H.P. Lovecraft, who praised Jacobi’s “Mive” in a letter to ol’ Derleth as having the kind of real, vital weirdness that he (meaning Lovecraft) really dug. The feeling was obviously mutual, as Jacobi would often flit around the edge of the Lovecraft circle – he had been classmates in college with another of Lovecraft’s circle, Donald Wandrei, and as a fellow Midwesterner (Jacobi lived in Minneapolis his whole life) the two of them struck up quite the literary friendship.
With regards to the pulps, Jacobi was a pretty prominent figure – in addition to numerous appearances in Weird Tales, he also wrote detective fiction, adventure stories, and even a little sci-fi. He’s a good example of how a writer can be successful (artistically, at least – he was, like most pulpsters, crushingly poor for most of his life) and then kind of vanish from the scene. Honestly, for his weird fiction at least, I think he’s due for a revival.
Enough jibber-jabber! Onwards!
This month’s cover, by J. Allen St. John, isn’t particularly weird, unfortunately, although I like the snarl on that giant ass tiger’s face. Very orientalist, something that editor Farnsworth Wright (and the readership of Weird Tales) loved with a fierce undying passion, so it makes sense that Williamson’s “Arabian” style multi-part novel would be made the cover. Still, c’mon man – gimme a monster!
Still, some fun stuff in the ol’ ToC. I don’t remember the Price story, but I’d love a Perfect Strangers/Weird Tales bit of fanfiction about “The Return of Balki.” Hamilton, Smith, Kline, Counselman, all big names for the readers at the time, along with Jacobi of course. Solid issue, I feel like the reader is getting their twenty-five cents worth this month.
Now, on to “Revelations in Black!”
Classic “Jayem” Wilcox title illustration, down to the whole “we’re giving away most of the story to you right off the bat” aspect too. Yep, this here is a VAMPIRE story, specifically about a LADY VAMPIRE, one of the top tier kinds of Vampires out there. A nice, traditional approach to a Halloween staple, I think.
Our story opens with a narrator battling his seasonal affective disorder by going antiquing. What’s funny is that our dude exchanges a dreary rainy day for what is, apparently, an equally dreary shop – the description of the wine cabinet shrinking despondently into its corner is a good bit o’ writing that sets the tone for Larla’s shop, I think. Our guy’s not after anything in particular, of course, but Larla is COMMITTED to his pitch, and even after the narrator suggests he’d like to see some books, Larla makes him go through the whole shop, looking at furniture, paintings, a “muddle of yellowed statuettes,” all kinds of junk. But, eventually, they reach the Old Books in the back.
Carl lays it on a little thick here, I think – the whole “oh, if only I hadn’t done whatever, the horrors I could’ve avoided,” yadda yadda, it’s easily the weakest part of this story, although I DO think that it helps if you read this part (and the whole story) as something very FIRMALY within a certain stylistic tradition. Jacobi is writing a VAMPIRE STORY – he’s not interested in reinventing it or subverting anything, he’s just enjoying the languorous pleasure of playing in a very well-established sandbox, right? In that context, this kind of “ah, would that I hadn’t fucked up so badly back then” stuff is VERY MUCH a part of the genre. Take it for what it is, is what I’m telling you.
But anyway – our guy plucks an interesting book from a shelf, one that Larla the shop-owner says was placed there by mistake and isn’t for sale. In fact, the book was made (literally – we learn that he bound it himself) by his “poor” brother.
Am I a sucker for the “last ravings of lunatic” macguffin? Yes, and so is our narrator – when he learns it was written BY a guy IN an asylum, he wants it EVEN more badly. Larla explains the Sad Tale of his Brother, Alessandro:
We learn then that there are actually THREE volumes to the “Five Unicorns and a Pearl” series, books that Alessandro had filled with his mad scribblings in his time in the asylum. Now, his brother keeps them as a keepsake, trying to forget the tragedy of his death and remember happier times (something probably not helped by keeping the Black-bound and Skull-embossed Book of Horror he wrote while dying mysteriously, but then again the human mind is a labyrinth, right?).
Like I said, this sort of wild-ass story just makes our guy want these books even more. When he sees he can’t buy it, he ends up RENTING the book for a single night for TEN GODDAMN DOLLARS (that’s like $250 now). He has a single night, and he MUST return it the next day, in perfect condition. A crazy deal, huh?
So, having plunked down a pile of cash for a chance to examine the book, our hero settles in for the night in his apartment to do some readin’. First thing he notices is a weird inscription “in a feminine hand” on the inside of the front cover:
Shoulda signed it “XOXO – The Vampire” to make sure he got the point.
He reads on:
Our boy here is strangely moved by the kind of odd and obviously symbolism-rich language that poor Alessandro used when composing his last work. In fact, he’s so struck and, frankly, troubled by it that he decides to go for a midnight walk!
Indulging in this weird impulse, however, does little to alleviate his mania – in fact, if anything, it increases it. He feels like he’s looking for something, that he’s being drawn towards something, and there’s nothin’ fer it but to wander in search of whatever the hell it is.
Our guy pushes through the strangely unlocked gate and into the preternaturally alluring night garden.
Quelle horreur! Our guy suddenly, shockingly realizes that this garden is, IN FACT, what poor mad Alessandro was writing about in Volume One of his book “Five Unicorns and Pearl,” the very book HE HAD JUST BEEN READING (*thundercrash*)!!!!!1!
All kidding aside, I DO think that our guy’s entrance into the garden is an extremely well done bit of eerie writing – the scene perfectly captures, a dark, seemingly abandoned garden in the Fall, the plants dead or dormant, and full of odd architecture, ornamentation, and statuary. Gardens are strange places, after all, sites dedicated to specific ideas about aesthetics and nature, carefully curated and maintained, so seeing one at an “off” time (at night, in the autumn, and apparently not being “kept-up”) is automatically a disjointing and unsettling experience. I think Jacobi is one of the great landscape/scenery describers of the pulps, and this garden is a perfect example of his mastery.
While he’s musing about this place, and how perhaps Alessandro wasn’t the hopeless lunatic he’d been labeled as, a strange, pungent perfume assails his nostrils…it’s the scent of heliotrope, powerful and fulgent in the night air…and it’s comin’ from a goddamn LADY he hadn’t even noticed a minute again!
The way Jacobi describes this woman, all in black, veiled, and with only a pale white neck exposed, strikes me as very Arthur Rackham. I mean, everybody has probably guessed what’s happening here, right, but for me that doesn’t detract from the pleasure of the story – honestly, there’s a lot to be said for weird fic/horror that tips its hand early but keeps on heading steadily towards the already-spotted conclusion. You can’t get that kind of slow-burn consummation without letting the reader see the road ahead, and I think when it’s done well, like in Jacobi’s story here today, there’s a lot to appreciate.
Anyway, this crazy vulpine woman and her enormous dog don’t seem bothered by the fact that some guy has just busted into their garden. In fact, the lady asks him to stay; she’s lonely, and would like someone to talk to. With a curt “fort mit dir, Johann!” she sends her dog away and bids the interloper join her by the fountains. Then, she introduces herself:
I’ll just break in here to post this picture of Field Marshal August von Mackensen, a WWI Imperial German general, because his picture is wild as hell:
Germans, yeesh!
Perle von Mauren continues her tale of woe:
“…found him…no longer living” is one of those “I don’t drink…wine” statements that vampires just love – technically true but omitting certain key information. Fun stuff!
Fun bit of subtle weirdness here – she’s obviously the author of the “feminine hand” that our narrator spotted on the frontpiece of the book, but there’s an implication here that, somehow, the book and she are intimately and causally connected. It could just be dissembling on her part, of course, but it really seems like our guy reading the book has summoned both Him and Her to the garden, together, some kind of weird link being forged between them by the reading of the story. It’s good and interesting, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it with regards to vampires – the idea that they’re associated with some kind of cursed object like that is neat!
Anyway, our dude spends the whole night talking to this lady in the garden. He’s obviously enchanted by her, even if he has a mounting sense of unease the whole time…why won’t she remove her veil, for instance. Then, just as the night gives way to dawn, something weird (well, weirder) happens!
They call that a “Vampire’s Goodbye.”
The next day finds out guy increasingly preoccupied with Perle and the garden and the books of Larla. He describes himself as addicted to the mystery of the thing, and can’t help but go back to the shop where, despite not returning the first book, he procures the second volume at another ridiculous price. He rushes home, reads it, but the mystery merely deeps for him, and his weird craving to return to the garden grows stronger and stronger. He tries to resist it, to ignore it, but then, in a flash he has the sudden idea that the garden scene and her and all that moonlight would make one hell of a picture, something he could even submit to the International Camera Contest in Geneva next month! Is that a delusion on his part, or an excuse? Regardless, our shutterbug grabs his fancy camera with its newfangled flashbulb and hustles on out to the garden again.
She’s there, of course, and they chat for a long while – she seems weirdly reticent to talk about her brother, and yet simultaneously compelled to tell our narrator about him. There’s an interesting section of his time as a student in Vienna where, as is traditional, he’s considered a weird and potentially dangerous avant garde philosophy student with odd and offputting ideas. His experiences in the war, and in digging graves as a prisoner of war, seem to be a particular focus of her morbid interest. It feels like this is Jacobi gesturing towards an underutilized bit of Vampire Lore here, the idea that a vampire rises out of the grave of a sorcerer. Her brother’s background as a “weird philosophy” student matches that, and she also seems to be suggesting that his terrible experiences in the war somehow “tainted” his soul.
The sky clears and the moon comes out; a perfect time to take a picture. Our guy tells her not to move, hops up, and then snaps a pic.
Lady, I get it – I don’t like to have my picture taken either. But she’s REALLY pissed, because she vanishes into the house and sic’s her big ass dog on our guy! This huge hounds comes hurtling out at him and attacks! It’s only with the greatest difficulty and a bit of luck that our guy survives – he chokes the dog while it’s trying to kill him, then remembers the German Perle had used when ordering the dog to go in. “Fort mit dir, Johann!” he manages to croak out, and it’s enough to confuse the dog that he’s able to escape.
Our guys calls in sick to work the next day, and decides to develop the picture he took. I wonder how it turned out?
Get a clue dude!
Anyway, he’s so shaken by the experience of the picture that he goes to bed. He wakes hours later, seemingly out of some kind of a vague yet terrible nightmare, and he notices that the drapes are fluttering in the breeze from a window that he had thought he’d shut before going to bed. He grows weaker, and ends up staying there for THREE DAYS, worn out, weak, and sick. A doctor visits and tells him he needs to rest and recuperate and, oh, by the way, where’d those two marks on your neck come from?
But even this isn’t enough to curb his NEED to read the third book. He’s been through the first two, and as he lays there in bed a kind of feverish desire builds and builds until he is forced to head to the shop. He, of course, has not returned the first two volumes, and so Larla refuses to “rent” him the third. It’s like, dude, take them off the shelf if you don’t want to sell ’em, right? But our guy’s NEED for the book is too great and, when Larla’s back is turned, he steals it and runs.
He reads through the mad yet damningly suggestive text of Alessandro Larla’s FINAL book, troubled and unnerved, until he reaches THE FINAL PAGE:
Yeah no shit man, jesus christ. I do like that the dog is her brother though, that’s neat.
He realizes that Alessandro had been ensnared by these things in some way and, although unable himself to escape, had written these books in hope of exposing and destroying them. Then our guy remembers the odd frontpiece…didn’t it say something about “stakes” in there…
He won’t be a victim, not like Larla! He smashes the legs of his tripod to make two sharp stakes and takes a taxi IN THE DAYTIME over to the house. Inside, he finds a room with coffins and the cloying, masking odor of Heliotrope…and does what needs to be done.
And then there’s a classic Hammer Horror style reveal:
And then, a final coda:
And that’s the end! Hope ol’ Larla the shop keeper had some other stuff of his brother’s to remember him by, because this dude just burns those books.
This story, while very *classical* in format and execution, is still awfully evocative and atmospheric; Jacobi is great at scenes and environments, and I like the way in particular he describes the moonlit garden and the fountain. Apparently, this was a view shared by the editor of Weird Tales Farnsworth Wright – he originally and very firmly rejected this story, only to contact Jacobi a few weeks later to ask if he could publish it! Our narrator discovering the garden had stuck with ol’ Wright, so much so that he’d found himself thinking about that scene long after he’d rejected the story.
And, you know, for all the “seen it” stuff in here, I think there’s some interesting little glimmers of weirdness – the book aspect is inventive and cool, for instance, and I really like the way it seems to summon them ALL to the garden. And would they have returned if he *hadn’t* burned the books? And, of course, some things are a classic for a reason, you know, and damned if a straightforward Vampire Tale isn’t one of ’em! And I mean, c’mon, Jacobi does a GOOD job here with the genre.
Anyway, I hope ya’ll enjoyed a classic bit of Vampire fic fer Halloween. I know I did, but maybe next time around we’ll dig into some weirder stuff, eh? Until then!
We recently put in a stocktank water feature in the backyard, got a pump to circulate water and a bunch of pretty good rocks to make a little cascade, and we’ve got grand designs regarding water plants – there’s some good Texas native pond flora out there, including a native pitcher plant from east Texas, that I want – but the real hope is that we’ll have a good habitat for frogs and toads. When we first moved to the neighborhood in 2019, the warm summer nights were FULL of frogsong at every house with a water feature, and we’ve seen plenty of toads and such hanging out in our garden. Big fan of frogs, is what I’m saying here, so HOPEFULLY that will put me in good with the subject of today’s story, “Frogfather” from Weird Tales, November 1946, by the one and only Manly Wade Wellman.
Wellman is, if not obscure, then at least of specialist interest these days – if you’ve ever played Dungeons & Dragons, then you owe him more than you probably realize, since Gygax and Arneson pulled a number of monsters directly from his stories, as well as using his “John the Balladeer” character as the basis for the “Bard” class in the game. In his heyday, however, Wellman was a prolific pulp writer, and in the 40s and 50s was one of Weird Tales’ major talents. He’s an interesting guy with an interesting biography, although it *may* have been a little embellished and romanticized.
Briefly, Wellman was born in 1903 in a port city in what is now Angola. His father, Frederick Creighton Wellman, was stationed there as a medical officer for a British charity, and seems to have been quite a weird and colorful character himself. A specialist in tropical medicine, Wellman pere was famous in the international press for having “gone native” while in Africa, whatever that means. He helped build railroads and ran medical centers while there, and while he was doing missionary work he also apparently took the time to learn local languages and record local stories and beliefs. Old Man Wellman was one of those tropic-lovin’ anglos; he ended up working for United Fruit in central America, and became quite an authority of tropical diseases.
Stories about Manly Wade Wellman’s childhood in Africa are romantic (and suspect in my opinion); he supposedly spoke a native dialect before he learned English, and had been adopted by a “native chief” after his father had cured the potentate of his blindness; to me that sounds like the usual kind of nonsense expats like to brag about. What is true, though, is that his time as a child in Africa was very foundational to his outlook on life – a love of wilderness and a certain (though paternalistic) regard for people of different races, creeds, and backgrounds is evident in his work. He was also one of those people from Old South stock that liked to talk up their Native American ancestry, something that will have relevance in the story today, I think. He was an inveterate Confederate apologist, especially when around “Yankees,” apparently; you get the feeling that he was one of those romantic Lost Cause-ers who felt that there was, shall we say, a certain “order” to the world that those outside of the antebellum South could never truly appreciate or understand. His stories with black American characters clearly reflect this world-view; reminds me a little of Flannery O’Connor’s racism, honestly.
The Wellman family would move back to the U.S. when Manly was a kid; he did his schoolin’ here in the States, got a degree in Literature and Journalism, and went to work as a reporter in the 20s. It was during this time that he toyed around with fiction, selling a few stories to Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales here and there, mostly based on childhood tales of Africa. He met and became friends with some of the early sci-fi and fantasy writers of that era, like Al Bester and Henry Kuttner, when he moved to New York. He also knew and travelled with the famous Ozark folklorist Vance Randolph, visiting Appalachia and getting a strong sense of the traditions and folklore of the area, something that would loom large over his career, as we’ll see in this story.
A hugely prolific writer, in the 30s and 40s he was also a major contributor to Weird Tales, producing a number of very popular “occult detective” style stories, as well as a lot of straight horror tales, usually set in either Africa or Appalachia. As mentioned above, later in his career, in the 60s, he’d invent his most famous character, “Silver John,” a wandering troubadour country boy who faced eldritch evil and dark magic in the hills and hollers of Appalachia with only his wits and his silver-stringed guitar. They’re good stories and worth hunting up – there was a recently republished collection from Valancourt, “John the Balladeer,” that I’d recommend, if that sort of thing sounds interesting to you.
One last little anecdote that I find hilarious – in 1946 Wellman won the Ellery Queen Mystery Award for a story of his (“A Star for a Warrior”), beating William Faulkner, who was apparently absolutely furious that he’d taken second place to a “mere science fiction” writer. Faulkner was apparently so pissed off that he wrote a long angry letter to the editors of the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, wherein he explained that he was, simply, the greatest living American Writer and they could all go to hell. Pretty funny!
Enough of these maunderings! Lets get down to business!
Lookit that cover, hot damn! Spectacular pic from Boris Dolgov, another one of those Maxfield Parrish influenced artists producing some of the best, most vivid work that ever appeared on the cover of a magazine. Dolgov, about whom almost nothing is known, did some spectacular work for Weird Tales in this era – I love the weightlessness of his figures, and the sharp, dangerous feyness that he invested in his otherworldly figures – that nereid or siren or whatever, the naked blue-green lady…she’s delicate and cute, sure, but there’s also a feral otherness to her that is just unbeatable. Spectacular stuff! Between Dolgov, Bok, and Coye, the 40s and 50s editions of The Unique Magazine are some of the best lookin’ ever made.
ToC’s pretty good this time around, too – Quinn is still out there, fightin’ the good fight, and you’ve got the enigmatical Allison V. Harding up there too, a mysterious woman about whom almost nothing is known (there’s some suggestion that she was, actually, Jean Milligan, the wife of Lamont Buchanan, the associate editor of the magazine). Bradbury, Derleth, Bloch, and Wellman – this is a relatively heavy-hitter of an issue for this late 40s era! Anyway, on to our story!
A.R. Tilburne again doin’ great work…guy in a coffin boat bein’ menaced by a Big Frog. Solid, fun piece.
Our story starts with the narrator explainin’ how he never liked frogs’ legs, but he sure as shit wouldn’t eat ’em now, not after what happened. A good, snappy little entry into the story, and one that preserves what I think is the key *tale* part of the genre of the weird tale. This is some guy tellin’ us a tale, and there’s an intimacy and immediacy to that kind of framing device that I think helps us step right into the proper frame of mind to enjoy what is sure to be a weird-ass story. Anyway, our narrator introduces us briefly to Ranson Cuff, a moneyed asshole who, through his financial clout, basically rules the Swamps.
Good, efficient characterization, with the unmistakable “backwoods” voice of Wellman here, setting up a petty tyrant asshole that nobody likes. But what’s Cuff got to do with frogs’ legs?
Not only is Cuff a bastard, he’s flat-out evil too! Cruel, sadistic, and he’s keeping our narrator as an indentured servant. We are quickly establishing the fact that Cuff is the guy who absolutely deserves to die, one of the most important aspects of a horror story. He’s an evil guy in a boat he’s repossessed out huntin’ for frog legs with his slave and an oppressed minority. The frog legs are a nice touch, too – they’re almost automatically a very special kind of prey, you know what I mean? Like they’re a symbol of explicit cruelty already, way more so than if this guy was out fishing or hunting ducks, right? The fact of their dismemberment is right there in the name, and Cuff enjoys that aspect maybe even more than the eating of them. Solid stuff, and again, very efficient.
Cuff and his unfortunate cronies are out paddling around the swamp, looking for frogs to gig and havin’ a hell of a time of it – there doesn’t seem to be any frogs along the banks. Cuff, angry and frustrated, orders his men to paddle him up to a secluded neck of the swamp that he’s never been in before, but where he can hear the frogs calling. Our narrator starts paddling, but his comrade pulls his paddle from the water and stops the boat.
And there he is, the titular Frogfather himself. This old, nameless, stereotyped Indian, who speaks better than either Cuff or the narrator, tries to stop Cuff from heading into that particular stretch of the Swamp, on account of it being home to, basically, a big ol’ Frog God. Wellman has given it a suitably “exotic” sounding name, one he made up whole clothe, and it’s basically the only real misstep in the story, in my opinion. “Frogfather” is, simply, way cooler and way more menacing a name than this fake Native American word that he’s invented. I mean, christ, I wanna start a speed metal band called “Frogfather” right now, don’t you? It’s a rad name!
Of course, Cuff can’t believe what he’s hearing – he don’t give a shit about Frogfathers, he wants some extra-cruelty supper, and he wants it now! He tells the nameless Indian to shut up and get paddling, which, of course, the nameless Indian refuses to do.
Wellman underlining once again what a fuckin’ piece of shit Cuff is for us. He makes the nameless Indian *swim* to shore! No question: Cuff is DEFINITLEY going to die now. One of the fun parts of weird fiction, for me, is the sense of the shape of the story coming along as you read it – we know that Cuff is in trouble, and Wellman WANTS us to know that, which is part of the pleasure – Cuff, that asshole, has no clue what’s about to happen to him!
Johnny, our narrator, paddles them to the distant neck, and they see a strange sight. The water here is phosphorescent, glowing faintly and eerily as they slip silently into this forbidden corner of the swamp. Cuff can’t be bothered with it though, since there’re frogs to kill!
Pretty brutal frog murder there, isn’t it? The gaping mouth, the smacking it alongside the boat to make it stop its squirming, grim stuff. Cuff’s bloodlust is up now – he sees another one and wants more! But, as they’re trying to maneuver towards it, the boat starts to wobble and tip. Cuff curses Johnny, and tells him to hold the boat steady. Johnny says he IS holding the boat steady, it’s Cuff in the prow that’s causing the imbalance, which, of course, Cuff denies. Must be a snag, Johnny figures; he takes the lantern and peers over the side of the boat, trying to spot whatever it is they’re caught up on.
Hell yeah, it’s the Frogfather!
The story wastes NO time – Cuff goes into The Forbidden Swamp, kills a frog, and BAM! Frogfather is on the scene! No lurking about or skulking or haunting – you piss of Frogdaddy, you get walloped.
I like the description of the Big Frog here – the line about the eyes being “every jewel-flashing color known to the vainest woman” is both fun and shows Wellman’s ear for backwoods eloquence. The neat thing, too, about the Frogfather is that it’s purely the size and bulk of the thing that’s alien; other than that it is, simply, a Big Frog, and honestly that’s something I appreciate. There’s no reason for this thing to be some kind of eldritch abomination, or even something “frog-like” akin to Clark Ashton Smith’s Tsathoggua – this thing, which has some mythic, folkloric, primal linkage to frogs and their lives, appears as a truly big frog, simple as. I think that makes the weirdness of its actions, in the section above and what we’ll see in a bit down below, all that much weirder, too. It heaves itself up onto the boat, casually snaps Cuff’s iron gig, and then tips the boat, grabbing Cuff by the head and neck – the monstrousness of the Frogfather is in the incongruity of its very deliberate, almost human-like, actions.
Johnny sees all this and just starts swimming. He’s in the water, which is all lit up from the phosphorescence in the water. This enables him to see something even stranger than just a Big Frog:
“…tucked like a stolen baby” is a a phenomenal line, isn’t it? The whole scene is really strange and evocative – the Frogfather has built a little house down there out of tree trunks, and the weird glow is coming from inside his lair. And, rather than simply gulping down Cuff, he’s swimming away with him into that glow, towards a fate that is implied to much weirder and worse than simple death. That’s great stuff, man, real weirdness here that you might not have expected from a simple Big Frog monster.
Johnny is swimming to safety when he hears a strange whistle, and something dark and swift suddenly bears down on him as he’s treading water…it’s the nameless old Indian, this time in a canoe. He helps Johnny into the boat and lets him gather his thoughts before they talk.
Another nice little glimpse of weirdness there: Frogfather would “have a way to deal with” a lot of people, if they were to go in there and try and do something about him, and buddy, you don’t wanna see what that would be! It’s another well-executed classic bit of weird fiction, where there’s a *hint* or something much stranger at work. Some dude comes in and starts killing frogs where he isn’t supposed to, well, that calls for the Frogfather just comin’ up and grabbing the guy. But a more complicated kind of incursion, with more people and boats and suchlike…well, that would mean the Frogfather would be forced to do something a bit more dire. Great, great stuff.
And that’s the end of Manly Wade Wellman’s “Frogfather!”
I love a good comeuppance story, and Wellman sets Cuff up as the perfect asshole – vindictive, cruel, sadistic, and totally uncaring. This is also a VERY short story, an efficient weirdness delivery system that sets up the scenario, executes its monster, and gets it done, all in a handful of pages.
It’s also interesting as a bit of eco-horror. Cuff is an exploiter of nature – he leads hunting and fishing trips for rich out-of-towners, explicitly the sorts of people who don’t need or appreciate the wilderness, but rather just use it for their own entertainment. Hand-in-hand with this is Cuff’s exploitation of his neighbors and fellow swamp folk – Johnny is an indentured servant, working to pay of his aunt’s debt to Cuff, and the nameless Indian is the definition of exploited labor, an oppressed minority barely scraping by on whatever pittance Cuff is paying him. All of this is in play when the Frogfather makes an accounting of Cuff’s many sins.
Now, speaking of the “nameless Indian,” I do think we have to unpack the racism going on here. This is 100% the kind of “mystical Indian in tune with the rhythms of nature” bullshit that is, unfortunately, still really common to see today. I mean, this guy doesn’t even get a name, he’s so primal and wise and mystical. He’s also just “an Indian,” a kind of undifferentiated and vague “other” that belongs to a different age. Combine that generic bullshit with the honestly very bad fake Indian name of the Frogfather, you end up with a sort of icky paternalism that just feels bad. I mean, at least he can use pronouns and doesn’t talk like Tonto, right? But even there, the fact that he’s better spoken than either of these (presumably) white characters is another part of that myth-making, part-and-parcel with his humble mien and deep-seated wisdom.
That said of course, the ending is great and fairly radical for the era – the idea that these stupid white people can’t handle themselves in the wilderness, even when told to their face what dangers there are out there, is satisfying, as is the explanation that they’ll have to come up with a lie that the white people will believe with regards to Cuff’s disappearance. This is a fairly common thread in a lot of Wellman’s fiction, the idea of indigenous or folkloric knowledge as fundamentally valid and valuable and deserving of respect.
I also like the setting – there’s plenty of backwoods, southern stories in Weird Tales, but the majority of them are honestly just using it as an “exotic” or (morally and geographically) remote locales, or, worse still, as a chance to indulge in some chicken-fried dialog. But Wellman, similar to REH and his Texas tales, has both experiences with the setting and a real affection for it, and that shows in his stories. Cuff isn’t just some dumb hick we’re supposed to laugh at; he’s an evil bastard, and it’s for that, his EVILNESS, that he’s punished.
Anyway, I like this story. Wellman, like I said, was a PROLIFIC writer and worth chasing down if you’re interested in this era of weird fiction and fantasy. He was an influential figure too, with a long shadow on the shadow, and he’s worth reading for that fact too. I’d stay away from the Africa stories; frankly, they’re a little rough, and while he DOES have an affection for the setting and history of the continent, he’s not equipped to really dig into it or approach it correctly. It’s his Appalachian stuff that’s most worth reading, both because he’s a better writer by the time he gets around to it AS WELL AS because he really DOES approach it in a way and with a style that you don’t see much of. Read the Silver John stories, at least; you won’t be disappointed!
Break out the pumpkins and skulls and eldritch horrors, it’s October, which means it’s fuckin’ spooky season again, baby! And, as is common ’round these parts (i.e., Austin Texas) it’s still in the goddamn mid 90s during the day time, temperatures that are not particularly conducive to the traditional Halloween spirit. So, as in years past, I’m gonna try and get into the spookemup mood by focusing on some particular favorite weird stories of mine, and we got a fun lil’ one this week: it’s “Cellmate” by the great Theodore Sturgeon, from the January 1947 issue of Weird Tales!
Now, we’ve talked about ol Ted Sturgeon just a few pulp strainers ago in the “The World Well Lost” post (number 21 in this series), so we don’t have to spend too much time on him here, biographically – he’s great, one of the absolute top-o-the-heap sci-fi writers of the 20th century, but much like Bradbury, he flit around stylistically (and financially), placing stories where he could. He appeared in the cross-genre pages of Weird Tales with eight of his stories, and this one, Cellmate, is his first appearance in the magazine. It’s also, I think, probably his absolute “weirdest” of the bunch – a lot of the other Weird Tales sturgeon work is very much more science fictional, but this one is basically a straight up weird monster story.
Before we dive in, though, we should take a moment to reflect on Weird Tales. This is a particularly unique iteration of the venerable ol’ mag, and one from much later than I usually sample from. We’re in 1947, a remarkable time in the history of the pulps (in general) and Weird Tales (in particular). The great (and enormously important) editor Farnsworth Wright was long gone, having handed the reins of editorship over to Dorothy McIlwraith in 1940 (and then promptly dying of complications from his Parkinson’s disease). Now, we’ve also talked a little bit about Dorothy McIllwraith before (most thoroughly in last years’ discussion of Fritz Lieber’s “The Automatic Pistol“), so we won’t spend too much time on her here, but, sufficed to say – Dorothy McIllwraith is a hugely important figure in the history of weird fic, someone who was able to navigate a pulp magazine through not only the paper shortages of WWII but ALSO the rise of television (for a while, at least). No mean feat!
How about that fuckin’ cover, huh? Great, wild stuff from A.R. Tilburne, one of the stand-outs from Weird Tales covers, in my humblest of opinions. This is a perfect example of real weirdness – some kinda weird sea monster? In a storm? Who the hell knows what’s going on, but the mastery of linework and style here is c’est magnifique, n’est-ce pas? I love it, 10/10, nice work A.R.!
A quick glance at the ToC shows us some things:
First off, this is a *much* slimmer Weird Tales than we’ve ever seen – we’re well into the sub-100 page issue era, something unheard of in the glory days before the war. It’s also worth noting that this is now a bi-monthly mag (by which I mean it’s only six issues a year), so you’re getting a lot less weirdness over the course of the year. I mean, it’s lean times in the magazine world, and only getting leaner. Of course, the magazine is also cheaper than it had ever been – fifteen cents in 1947, when it was a quarter a decade ago!
Now, there’ still some excellent and exciting writing going on here – you’ve got Sturgeon and Bradbury, and Hamilton is still slugging away, one of the last of the old generation still writing. Charles King there is an interesting figure, another sci-fi heavy guy who bled over into Weird Tales, and the story in this issue from him is likewise a good one. But it’s interesting to me that the big center piece story this issue is a reprint from William Hope Hodgson, maybe a cost saving measure but also, maybe, indicative that Weird Tales was definitely having a hard time competing against the flashier (and better paying) sci-fi mags out there. That’s also probably why they publish two chunks of Lovecraft’s longer poem “The Fungi from Yuggoth.” In fact, they’re tiny, so I’ll just give you a bonus and reproduce ’em here:
Like I said, these are two smaller sonnets from a larger work. Lovecraft always thought of himself as a poet first and foremost, and in these I think he does actually end up transcending that affectation. I think they’re good, and taken together in the whole singular piece (which is 36 sonnets long, in total) it’s a pretty phenomenal piece of weird poetry. I also think it’s Lovecraft directly responding to T.S. Eliot, but that’s a subject for another day!
But enough! On to…CELLMATE, by THEODORE STURGEON:
Lookit that title illo – that’s weird right there, yessir! On first past, you can’t really even tell what’s going on here, although by the end of the story this’ll make more sense. But for now, it’s a good bit o’ visual weirdness, and I also think it nicely captures the lonely grimness of prison too – the inky black walls, the high narrow-barred window, even the institutional-lookin’ bed frame thing in the foreground. Nicely executed work from the inimitable Lee Brown Coye!
The beginning of this (pretty short) story wastes no time:
We’re introduced to our narrator, a fairly run-of-the-mill hard boiled criminal who, we’ll learn, is a basic low-level thug, a violent guy who spends a lot of time in and out of jails for various offenses. He’s doing 60 days for some kinda crime (he tells us not to worry about it, which is a surefire way to make you worry about it, right?) when he gets saddled with a cellmate…Crawley.
How about that for a description, huh? It’s very strange. Average height sorta guy, but with spindly limbs, a long stringy neck, and a humongous chest. And the narrator makes it very clear that he’s not merely barrel-chested or anything – he’s abnormally, even freakishly proportioned, a “humpback with the hump in front.” A very strange figure, and with the personality to boot – weird voice, weird breathing, something off-putting and unnerving about him. Our narrator takes an immediate dislike to him.
Crawley ain’t been in this cell thirty minutes, and he’s already acting weird. Again, Sturgeon has a real pen for this kind of stuff, these extremely odd little details – the weird, echoey, resonating scratching, and the way he’s described as “burrowing his fingers into his chest” (emphasis mine) is very, very odd. But, anyway, our narrator has informed Crawley that he gets the top bunk (the worst), but Crawley just keeps standing there, lookin’ dumb and scratching, while everybody listens to a radio soap opera that one of the guards is playing loudly. As an aside, it’s those little touches that make Sturgeon so great – the section about these prisoners having nothing else to do but listen to some dumb shit on a radio, night after night, is good writin’ for sure, really captures the banality of jailhouse life.
The radio show ends, and it’ll be lights out soon enough. The narrator is wondering why Crawley hasn’t gotten into his bunk yet. He’ll get in trouble if he’s not in when the guards come by for the final check, not that HE cares. Hell, he doesn’t even like Crawley!
Strange! Maybe our narrator is just a big softy after all?
In the morning, our narrator hops down out of the top bunk, and immediately sees something weird:
Understandably put out by what he’s seen, our narrator decides he truly, sincerely, does not like his new cellmate. When the food cart comes around, he hatches a scheme that he’s going to take Crawley’s food as well, chortling about how he’ll starve him out until, eventually, the guards will be forced to take him away to the hospital and he’ll be left along. But while he’s chortling about this scheme to himself, he starts to feel some eyes on his back…like Crawley is staring and staring and staring…and then he get the idea that he feels TWO sets of eyes…four eyes, looking at him…but it’s only him and Crawley in the cell…!
His panic builds, as does his belief that he’s got two pairs of eyes on him, but his horrific reverie is broken by the food cart coming by. He gets his own food, then grabs Crawley’s, just like he’d planned…but he still feels the horror of the eyes, and the loathing that they elicit. He briefly contemplates beating Crawley to death, but then:
Aww…another nice thing! Rather than squashing his weird cellmate like a bug, or even stealing his food liked he’d been planning, he gives him some food, and even shows him how to improve its quality, lets him eat on the bunk, everything all nice and sweat and domestic!
Later that day, our narrator hits on another plan to get Crawley in trouble and out of his hair. The prisoners have to keep their cells and their messkit clean, see, but of course Crawley doesn’t know that and, even if he did, doesn’t seem capable of doing it anyway. So our narrator is going to scrub half the cell, and clean his own messkit – the guards, familiar with his habits, will recognize that Crawley isn’t cleaning, and keeping a dirty a messkit is a punishable offense, so he’ll get sent down to solitary. Yes, a sterling plan! So our narrator commences to clean, gets right up to the half-way point of the cell, and then…
AGAIN our violent criminal ends up doing something nice for Crawley, basically unbidden and, of course, unthanked. Weird how that keeps happening, huh? Especially since, after each incident, our narrator seems to be more and more convinced that he hates Crawley, that he wants nothing to do with him at all. And yet, he keeps on bending over backwards for him, helping him out at every turn.
This kind of wild, crazy level of helpfulness from out narrator towards Crawley continues later when, during an outdoor period, Crawley just straight up tells our narrator to buy him four candy bars (“two marshmallow, one coconut, and one fudge”). And that’s WITH our narrator’s carefully shepherded tobacco money too, mind you. At first our narrator laughs in his face; why the fuck would he do that, spend his own money on candy for a guy he absolutely hates…but he does. In fact, he goes out of his way to make sure he gets the candy. He also seems unable to talk about Crawley to anyone, either – he thinks he’ll get some good laughs telling his buddies in the yard about this freak he’s bunking with, but for some reason he just never can get around to talking about him.
Later that night, after helping Crawley with his blankets (effectively tucking him in), our narrator hops up into the top bunk and tells Crawley he shouldn’t talk to himself in his sleep, which results in a truly weird scene:
I mean, that’s weird, huh? A really strange and unearthly scene, this insane, grating, screaming laughter, and when he looks, Crawley’s mouth is shut, the laughter coming from somewhere deep inside his chest, an unearthly sound that doesn’t make any sense. Our narrator feels himself losing his grip, the laughter is driving him crazy, and it only stops when he, apparently, passes the fuck out.
He comes to sometime in the very early morning, three or four he thinks; he feels like he’s been slugged, groggy and strange, and he hears Crawley talking in his bunk.
And someone else answering!
You might have guessed where this is going, though I think it’s weird enough that it kept me guessing, right up until the reveal. It’s very weird, and honestly spooky, especially after the weird hollow laughing from earlier – imagine being this thuggish narrator, waking up from something and hearing two voices where you only expected one…spooky shit! Our narrator carefully, quietly tries to investigate…
Crawley’s weird clamshell chest is some kinda kangaroo pouch for his weird stunted conjoined twin brother! And whatta twin! It’s the size of baby, but with a shaggy head of hair and a long, lean face and a fanged mouth. It’s a legit monster. And, moreover, our narrator intuits what this thing is, and what it’s been doing:
It’s some kinda psychic dominator stunted twin, living inside of Crawley! If you go back to the picture at the beginning of the story, you’ll recognize the scene it’s depicting now, and see that it’s actually pretty faithful to the story. It’s pretty wild and, like all great reveals in weird fic, it makes you go back into the story and think about the strangeness you’ve read in a slightly different way – clearly this little monster twin has been controlling our narrator from the get-go, getting him to give up the bunk, give big Crawley the food, etc. It also seems to imply that our narrator has probably seen this thing before – it’s why he knew about the four eyes he felt, but he’d probably been ordered to forget it. So, why does little Crawley let him remember now?
Because it’s jail break time, baby!
Little Crawley has put our narrator into berserker mode – he kills two guards with his bare hands, uses a third as a human shield, and causes the death of at least one prisoner from a ricochet round. He’s a one man riot, impervious to pain and utterly fearless, doing everything he can to cause chaos and attract attention.
And that’s the end of “Cellmate” by Theodore Sturgeon!
First thing first: is this the earliest example of the “evil secret conjoined twin” trope in fiction? There’s the movie Basket Case from the 80s, a real goopy gory (and funny) monster movie about an evil conjoined twin that has been removed and is being cared for by his more normal brother, and then there’s that X-Files episode, or that recent movie Malignant. Are there earlier examples though? The interesting thing in all of those, of course, is that the tiny twin is almost all monstrous id, right, a kind of primal and murderous atavism that is either autonomous or takes control of its sibling to do evil, whereas here in this story, the twin and the larger brother have a working relationship, and in fact the littler evil twin is by far the smarter of the two.
Honestly, for me, Crawley’s creepiness come more from the weird hinged chest cavity than from the tiny guy living in it…I mean, yeesh, that’s just plain weird you know? Like big Crawley is a straight up mutant! Oh, there’s another example, Kuato from Total Recall, who is also an example of the little guy being the “boss” (although Kuato, of course, is a good guy).
In fact, in terms of “evil conjoined twin,” the only earlier example that I can think of is the apocryphal and almost certainly fictional story of Edward Mordake, who supposedly had an evil (and female) second face on the back of his head that whispered horrible suggestions to the otherwise morally upright Edward. It was originally published in The Boston Post in 1895 (you can see it here), and there’s lots of obviously made up stuff in the whole article, but it is a weird and interesting precursor to Crawley here.
But, aside from that, I think this is some great weird fiction – the prison setting is fun, spare and claustrophobic, but the narrator’s familiarity with it makes it all seem drab and kind of humdrum. Sturgeon, who is a master at getting into a character’s head and finding their voice, does a great job with the narrator – he’s a violent but somewhat jaded thug. He’s got his routine and he’s used to coming and going from jail all the time, so the imposition of weirdness in the form of Crawley on his “normal” life is really stark and unmooring.
And man, Crawley is just WEIRD right off the bat – the physical description is very strange, with his odd proportions, and then his behavior is just very odd and kind of alien. Like I said, it all makes sense in hindsight – why bother to even try to behave normally if you’ve got a psychic dominator twin living in your weird chest pouch, after all?
Now, you don’t wanna get all Freudian psychoanalytical about this stuff BUT as mentioned in the last Sturgeon write-up I did (here!), ol’ Ted DID spend a fair amount of his time interrogating queer relationships between men. As mentioned, he himself was what we’d call “bisexual” (he certainly would not have used that term, however), and had a number of sexual and romantic relationships with men (while being married with a family to a woman). In “The World Well Lost” we have a kind of interesting mirror-universe version of Crawley and our Narrator, although one not so freakish. Still, there’re some similarities between the two couples; there’re both confined together, there’s a disparity between their physical attributes, etc., and the themes of homosocial male relationships undergirded by “something else” are present in both. Why does the Narrator keep doing so many generous kindnesses for someone he also simultaneously feels repulsion for? You don’t want to read too much into these things; Sturgeon, a working writer, liked to eat hot meals indoors, and so he wrote stories that he could sell, and sometimes that means adhering to certain narrative conventions and such. But he was also an artist, and finding a topic or theme that interests you is a key to making good work, so the thread of his own experiences is certainly worth keeping in mind when reading his stories.
It is a fairly short story, and while I would say that the weirdness is on simmer for most of it, there length means that there’s not much of the slow, mounting dread that I normally like in a weird story. But it works here, particularly because the reveal really puts all the previous actions of the narrator in a different light, kind of retroactively imposing weirdness on them. Speaks to Sturgeon’s skill as a writer that it works so well, that he’s willing to let the scenes just play out fairly straight because he knows that what is coming will force you to look back at them and recognize what was going on.
And, while the slow burn isn’t really there, the creep factor IS high; I think this story is flat out scary, especially the weird laughter scene that builds to the climactic reveal of little Crawley in the chest cavity. The narrator’s murderous fugue is well done too, and the idea that Crawley has escaped and is back out there amongst us is good, classic Weird Tales stuff.
Anyway, I think it’s a good start to this Halloween season, an inventive, weird, and sometimes scary story that will, hopefully, get us all in an appropriately spooky mood!
We’ve drained the mead horns, reduced the great roast boar to gnawed bones, and watched the vast bonfire around which we defied winter’s darkness smolder into mere ashes, but we’re not done with sword and sorcery yet! No indeed, not on this, the most sword-and-sorcerous sounding holiday of the year…Three Kings’ Day! And what better way to celebrate it than by talking about the Last King of the Picts, Bran Mak Morn! It’s Robert E. Howard’s “Worms of the Earth” from Weird Tales, November 1932!
We’ve talked about ol’ REH a lot during the sword and sorcery festivities; how can you not? We’ve encountered both Solomon Kane and Conan in some great stories already, but for me, personally, I think Howard’s single greatest character is Bran Mak Morn – there’s something really compelling about him, this very last ruler of Pictdom, presiding over a declining and dying people and watching the Romans marching over his homeland. Howard loved to indulge in a certain Celtic gloominess, both personally and literarily, and that’s fully on display in the Bran stories. It lends them a poignancy that’s not often present in his other works; Conan’s barbarism and Kane’s zealotry are portrayed as powerful and vital forces, elemental and therefore permanent, but Bran is the last of his kind, and we know that he is destined to be ground down by the millstone of implacable history.
Aside from the purely aesthetic appeal of this Pictish mono no aware, it’s also a chance to see Howard examining a different point in the Spenglerian cyclicity he believed in; Kull and Conan are barbarians who, in Howard’s weird racialist worldview, revitalize their respective nations by taking up the crown and injecting their own wild vitality into civilized kingship. But here we see a people at the end of their “natural” lifespan, senescent and impoverished, struggling vainly against an ascendant Empire. And, to top it all off, in this story Bran glimpses the possible fate of his own Picts when he confronts the twisted and degraded remnants of a people his own ancestors had conquered and displaced! Bran Mak Morn is Howard’s greatest, most interesting character, which makes this story, “Worms of the Earth,” his greatest sword and sorcery story ever, at least for me. Hell, I’d put it up there as one of the all time greatest stories in the genre ever!
Worth keeping in mind is that the readers of Weird Tales had yet to be introduced to Conan at this point; Kane had made it to the pages of The Unique Magazine already, of course, and Kull had shown up in a previous Bran story from 1930 (“Kings of the Earth”), so readers were certainly familiar with Howard’s blood-and-thunder style and approach. The Cimmerian himself wouldn’t show up until the NEXT issue of Weird Tales, when “Phoenix on the Sword” would be published (Dec 1932), and after that, of course, Howard’s career and writing really changes; I think “Worms of the Earth” is still very much a weird tale, with its emphasis on inhuman horrors, atavism, and vast sweeps of time embodied in ancient landscapes. It’s still very much sword and sorcery, of course, but I think that it isn’t until Conan that Howard tips the balance more towards adventure and away from the Lovecraftian-influenced cosmicism on display here. But enough jibber jabber, let’s get to it!
A great swashbuckling cover, but this isn’t Bran fighting a Loch Monster or anything…it’s Kline’s heroic Venusian he-man Grandon fighting some swamp-dwelling space devil! Kline is an interesting guy; along with Farnsworth Wright, he had been an early editorial assistant to the first editor of the magazine, Baird, and had stayed on as an editor and reader under Wright, as well as writing his own weird fiction, fantasy, detective stories, and science fiction. He would shortly leave off writing, focusing more on becoming a literary agent for a number of big names in the pulps, including Howard himself! In fact, after Howard’s death by suicide in ’36, Kline would continue to represent his estate, helping Howard’s father get the many thousands of dollars still owed to REH by Weird Tales (and some other magazines, too). The scene illustrated here on this cover is interesting; first off, it’s from what would end up being a novel-length work that would stretch over seven issues of the magazine. It’s obviously a pastiche on Burroughs’ “John Carter of Mars” novels, largely successfully so too, I might add; if you liked those novels, then you’ll almost certainly like Kline’s planetary romances, which are often more-Burroughs than Burroughs in execution. But this cover also illustrates that, while Howard is rightfully identified as the creator of sword-and-sorcery, there was both a lineage of swashbuckling weird fiction that predated and inspired him AS WELL AS a clear hunger from readers for that kind of thing.
Nothing too noteworthy in the ToC (other than our story today), but the Weird Story Reprint is interesting; they’d reprinted “Frankenstein,” with this issue’s segment being the penultimate entry in an eight-issue long stretch that really annoyed a lot of people. There had always been some annoyance with multi-part stories among the readers, because of the dangers of missing an issue, but in particular a lot of people felt that reprinting a classic that almost everyone had read or could have easily gotten a copy of was a waste of good magazine space. It would actually lead to a change in policy for Wright and the magazine, which would in response to those complaints rededicate itself to reprinting more obscure work (for more about the history of the “Weird Story Reprint” series in the magazine, you should read my introduction to the collection “Night Fears: Weird Tales in Translation” from Paradise Edition books).
And now, on to the story itself!
A great title illustration, as usual, and one that doesn’t even spoil the story or anything! Just a great scene from one of the best parts of the story, in my opinion, with a really subtly devilish Atla and a grim and haunted looking Bran… wonderful stuff! The shadows are a nice touch, too, very moody and pensive and weird. It’s signed “MW,” but based on the style I’m pretty sure it’s J.M. Wilcox’s work (sometimes known as Jayem Wilcox, or JMW). Wilcox would go on to produce the very first illustration of Conan when he did the title art for “The Phoenix on the Sword” next issue, making him an important part of sword and sorcery history.
Pumped up with that great bit of art, we’re ready to dive into the text of the story!
Love a story that starts with dialog; gives it an immediacy that can’t be beat, in my opinion. And this dialog starts off strong – nothing good is going on, you can be sure of that, and that conclusion is further supported by the imperial haughtiness of Titus Sulla, lounging in his chair of office, surrounded by a guard of Teutonic legionaries. You can again see Howard’s preoccupation with bodies and physicality here, too – Sulla is a Roman, but he’s no weak, lisping functionary, made soft by bureaucracy and civilization. No, he’s a soldier, a conqueror with a strong body and cruel countenance, and he’s surrounded by other huger bodies, “blond titans” from Germania, further symbol of the power and decadence of Rome. These powerful bodies are immediately contrasted with another body, this one made abject:
It’s a crucifixion party, one apparently being put on for the sake of the “guest” mentioned above, a dark man identified later “Partha Mac Othna.” But before we get this name, we get a very Ellsworth Huntington-esque discourse of race, civilization, and climate that contrasts this dark somber man with the Romans and Germans that surround him.
A “supple, compact body” with “broad square shoulders,” a “deep chest,” “lean loins…” you can joke all you want, but Howard’s fascination with and interest in masculinity and its physicality is certainly enthusiastic and sincere. Similarly expressed in this story is REH’s belief in the importance of racial purity, as made clear by the comparison of this dark, northern barbarian with his two compatriots, one at his feet and one on the cross:
There’s some kinship between these three, though it’s clear that the man on the cross and the “stunted crouching giant” represent a “lower type” than the clean-limbed and well-knit dark man. This racial hierarchy stuff is a central part of Bran’s pathos, for Howard at least, and it’s something that we’ll come back to in the story later. But for now, let’s get this guy crucified!
There’s some more verbal sparring, almost as if the Sulla is trying to goad his “guest” into something, but the strange, noble-looking Pict seems to reserve his ire for the Pictish King:
Takin’ it kinda personally, isn’t he? Almost weirdly so…oh well.
Anyway, they crucify the guy, who doesn’t scream out in pain or anything, only staring at Partha Mac Othna with a strange and plaintive intensity. Seeking to mock their victim’s suffering, a Roman solider offers the dying man a cup of wine and receives a defiant loogie in the eyes instead. Enraged, the soldier stabs the man with his sword, which pisses of Sulla something fierce.
The Pictish emissary stays awhile, contemplating the dead body hanging on its cross against a reddening sky, before turning back and heading to the Roman fortress city. A grim and perilous beginning to the story indeed!
How about that little bit of Yog-Sothery there, huh? “Black gods of R’yleh” is great, and the fact that “Partha” here would evoke even THEM speaks to his anger and despair at Rome. But why does this feller feel such animus towards to the Romans, you ask? Well…
What a twist! Partha Mac Othna is, in fact, Bran Mak Morn, King of Picts, posing as an emissary to gather intelligence on these his most hated of foes! Grom, his gnarled companion, begs his master to keep his voice down; the Romans would hang him from a cross if they knew who he really was. Rather, why not let faithful ol’ Grom ice the Roman dick?
I mean, that’s some top notch, grade-A badassery right there, isn’t it? Grom’ll happily run a suicide mission for his King, vowing to kill Sulla anyway, even if he is surrounded by bodyguards. But Bran knows that won’t work, and instead is already working on another plan…
It turns out that Sulla is frickin’ terrified of a certain Gael by the name of Cormac na Conacht who has vowed to eat Sulla’s heart raw. Showing sensible caution vis a vis having his heart eaten, Sulla tends to stick to the impenetrable fortress known at the Tower of Trajan when there’s trouble along the Wall. This knowledge inspires Bran to some dark, fearful plan…he sends Grom out of town with some gold and his diplomatic pass; he’s to ride to Cormac and get him to start raiding, sending Sulla off to the Tower. Then Bran takes a quick nap, where in a dream he meets his faithful advisor the Wizard Gonar who, having divined Bran’s yet-to-me-specified plan, is absolutely freaking the hell out:
What “this thought” is exactly will remain obscure, for now, but it does lead to a pretty great speech from Bran explaining why he has been pushed to this extreme measure (whatever it is):
It’s some real “burden of kingship” shit, sure, but damn if it doesn’t get me. In particular, the stuff about their shared experiences I find pretty moving…both of them listened to the same tales and songs, and that forged an unbreakable bond of shared heritage that held them together. And that final statement is, again, just a perfect encapsulation of a sword-and-sorcery ethos: by those bonds, Bran had the responsibility to protect him, and if he cannot do that, then he will avenge him. Shivery, noble stuff, great fantasy writing, some of the best Howard ever did in my opinion. And there’s more to come!
But Gonar is still scared. Why not just chop some dudes up like usual, he asks, ride along with the Gaels and slaughter Romans from sun-up to sun-down. Oh, don’t worry, Bran replies, I’ll definitely be doing that…BUT FIRST he wants something special for Sulla.
We’re spending A LOT of time on this early part of the story, I know, but I think it’s worth it to see Howard really doing some great work establishing Bran Mak Morn and the world of the Picts and Romans here. Bran has been fighting these Romans for a long time, and we feel his desperation and struggle – you get the sense that it’s not been going great for the Picts. After all, why else would their goddamn King risk himself to sneak into their stronghold? Things must’ve gotten pretty dire back in Pictland. And then, to have seen his man crucified and forced to confront his failures as King and Protector…he’s gone a little crazy now, and nothing is off limits in his war against the Romans.
Gonar tries one last desperate gamble: the things Bran is planning on using have gone from the world, they’ve dwelled apart for countless ages and no one knows where they are now. But Bran is sure that that can’t be true…somewhere, there is some sign, some thread of a connection that will lead him to them.
Really appreciate the care Howard is taking here – right now, we have no fuckin’ clue as to what exactly it is that Bran is planning, but it’s been made clear that it is dire as hell and going to be extremely dangerous. From a story telling perspective, I just don’t think REH ever hits this level of mastery again, it’s so good and sharp and propulsive. Bran is desperate, his back to the wall, and capable of anything in his quest for vengeance; to him, there’s nothing foul enough for the Romans, no act so base or vile that he wouldn’t stoop to, just so long as Sulla gets his. And even though he’s talked this good game about his responsibilities as king and all that, you see that there’s more there – it’s a deep, personal affront that he wants to avenge, so much so that Gonar basically calls him out for putting this personal hatred ahead of the actual needs of the Picts. It’s great stuff, isn’t it?
Before Bran heads out on his insane and horrific mission, he takes a brief moment to sneak over to the prison to murder the roman soldier that stabbed the Pict on the cross. It’s yet another scene of great badass action, particularly in the way Howard described Bran’s dark chuckle, the slash through the barred windows, and the blood welling up from Valerius’s throat as he dies. Ticking that chore off his to-do list, Bran then rides out of the city and into the wilderness, searching for…them.
There’s some great, evocative environmental writing in this section, wildernesses and border regions and ancient landscapes all lovingly described by ol’ REH. The romanticism of landscapes, and their hidden dangers, are something Howard is really well-equipped to work with in his fiction, having reflected extensively on his own wildernesses and frontiers back in Cross Plains, Texas. I’m also a sucker for ancient, nameless earthworks – these curiously regular hillocks and mysterious monoliths are wonderfully potent images, suggestive of deep time and lost civilizations.
There is also in this section another long paean to racial purity from Howard. As we’ve already mentioned, Howard was an unapologetic and enthusiastic racist, something that strongly informed his fictional stories, as we see here:
A big part of Howard’s disdain for “civilization” comes from his belief in racial purity – with civilization comes miscegenation, which for Howard is both unnatural and decadent. What’s funny, though, is how all this talk of Bran being a pure-blooded noble from a long-line of reproductively isolated aristocrats strikes us today; far from the strong limbed and lean-loined pantherish ubermensch Howard described, talking about Bran’s paternity like that immediately evokes the Hapsburgs, at least for me. The idea of Bran looking like Charles II of Spain during all this stuff going on is hilarious, and makes his revulsion at the fenmen, Atla, and the Worms of the Earth themselves later in the story all the funnier.
But anyway, Bran is spending some time wandering around the wastelands, searching for any sign of the horrible things that once dwelt there. He gets news from the fen dwellers, and learns that his Gaelic buddy Cormac has begun raiding, spreading terror all along the Wall and sending Sulla scurrying off to the Tower of Trajan, just like Bran said he would. Meanwhile Bran, all alone, keeps up his hunt, until one day he spies a distant daub-and-wattle hut in a particularly lonely corner of the fens. He goes to investigate, and meets one of the greatest characters in sword-and-sorcery history.
This is Atla, and she’s 100% rad as hell. Howard lets us know immediately that she’s not entirely human, too – she’s got fang-like teeth, almost pointed ears, oddly-shaped yellow eyes, and all her movements are sinuous, lithe, and serpentine. Bran recognizes all the signs, and since he’s one of the Old Picts, he knows the stories, guesses her heritage, and knows she can help him.
There’s so much to love about this – the fencing between Atla and Bran, and the shock and horror that even she feels to hear Bran speak so openly and blithely about forbidden things, it’s really fantastic. But even more, there’s a real grimness and sorrow to Atla, something strange and sad and special that you makes her character so interesting and unique. For one thing, she’s utterly and completely ostracized, living way the hell out in a place called the Dagon-Moor which you KNOW is not exactly on any of the major bus routes. She’s been exiled out here because of her heritage; it’s implied that she’s the product of a rape, a human mother attacked by one of them out on the moors, and that her inhuman blood has meant that she’s been driven to the very edge of the human world. And that revulsion is definitely something Bran feels too, even though she is the only thing that can help him find the Worms of the Earth.
Atla’s recklessness and scorn is just fantastic here, and the way she laughs at Bran’s threat is wonderful. Her mocking question “Do you think that such life as mine is so sweet that I would cling to it” is really great, an absolute gut-punch. And Bran’s realization that he’ll have to try different means of persuasion is met with equal scorn!
Atla is such a badass! But, after all that, Atla does have a price.
I think this is some of the best writing Howard ever did. There’s a real and aching loneliness to Atla, and it’s tempting to think that Howard, an artistic and romantic young man living way the hell out in an oil boomtown in central Texas, might’ve been mining something of himself when he’s having Atla express this deep and heartfelt yearning. There’s real humanity in Atla, probably the most you’ll ever see in a Howard character honestly – the only other example that I feel like even comes close to this is Balthus’ reminiscing about home from the Conan story “Beyond the Black River.”
Anyway, Bran swallows his revulsion and agrees to have sex with the snake lady, and Howard tastefully draws the curtains on the scene.
The next morning, while Bran is dressing for his walk of shame, Atla tells him that what he needs to do is steal the Black Stone; with that, he can force them to do whatever he wants. The Stone is deep beneath Dagon’s Barrow, which, again, love that Lovecraft connection.
There’s some fun stuff here for sure, and I can’t help but wonder if Tolkien (who certainly had read some Howard) read this one in particular – between the faces in the mere that Atla mentions, and then this whole shunning of sunlight and moonlight and even starlight, there’s some real Gollum resonances here, you know? But, regardless, this is prime sword-and-sorcery stuff, especially that last sentence; the idea that the Picts and these subterranean horrors have history really nicely sharpens the threat and danger of Bran’s scheme.
Bran, armed with the knowledge that Atla has given him, heads out, finds the strange prehuman stone circle atop Dagon’s Barrow, lifts the stone, and plunges into the deep darkness of the Earth. The path he’s on mirror the devolution of the Worms themselves, going from rough hewn steps to a smooth and almost slimy tunnel at the base. There, in a dark chamber, he finds the Black Stone, and is able to abscond with it. He decides to stash it in Dagon’s Mere, chunking the rock out into the center of the eerie pond.
Bran returns to Atla, who is not unsurprised to see him both alive and sane after his trip into the darkness beneath the Earth. Bran informs her that not only has he safely secreted away the Black Stone, but that he has become aware of things hunting him…his horse trod on something unnatural in its stable one night, and he’s been hearing a faint scrabbling beneath the earthen floor of his hut. They’re hunting him, using whatever strange senses and powers they’ve developed over their long exile in the dark. Now he’s ready to deal, and so Atla takes him to a forlorn range of hills that border the fen where the black mouth of a cave yawns wide to take them in.
Howard really paints the landscape here, conveying both its distance from humanity in both space and time – this is an old place, and the things that live here are older than the Romans, the Celts, and even the Picts. That sense of Deep Time, a key part of weird fiction, is really well-expressed here, a testament to Howard’s own appreciation of the earth and the tiny, transient things that call its surface home.
Bran and Atla plunge into the cave, and its somewhat shocking to both us and Bran that Atla herself is scared here – in lesser hands, the snake woman would be a one-off monster lady, but Howard makes sure we understand that she meant it when she said she was “half human, at least.” This place and the things that live there are scary as hell and fully alien, even to her.
And then they meet the Worms of the Earth.
Spectacular writing from Howard here, this sea of glowing eyes in the dark. It’s really truly an eerie and uncanny scene, but does it spook Bran?
Fuckin’ bad ass, man! And these horrible subterranean things think so too – Bran rolls a nat 20 on his intimidation check, and the Worms of the Earth are fully cowed by his killer speech. They hiss and mutter with Atla, and she’s shocked to report that they’re actually scared of Bran, and will do whatever he wants in exchange for the stolen the Black Stone. Bran wants them to take Sulla from the Tower of Trajan, and he agrees to meet them at Dagon’s Ring tomorrow and exchange the stone for the Roman.
Bran goes for a swim in Dagon’s Mere, recovering the Stone that he chucked in there earlier, which is heroic enough in my opinion – I once dropped something in Barton Creek Pool here in Austin, which is a natural spring fed pool with crystal clear water, and I never found it again…and there’s not even monsters in Barton Creek Pool! That’s actually a really fun little piece of this story too – there IS a monster in Dagon’s Mere, something huge and threatening which Bran only catches a glimpse and a ripple of. It reminds me a lot of the scene in Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” where we learn that there’s some kind of huge white polypus thing in the swamps of Louisiana that the cultists commune with…you can’t beat these little hints of other weird shit and scary monsters on the periphery of a main story, in my opinion. It’s an evocative and effective tool in weird fiction’s box, and I appreciate it here because, in addition to just being fun, it’s also part of Bran’s mounting realization that he actually doesn’t know this landscape or its history as well as he thought he did.
Black Stone in hand, Bran rides towards Dagon’s Ring, making a brief stop over to see what’s happening at Trajan’s Tower, just out of idle curiosity.
He finds a dying Legionary amid the ruins, and from him he hears a tale of horror.
Bran realizing that he might’ve fucked up here is pretty great – he forced these things to involve themselves in the surface world again, and maybe he doesn’t have as much control as he thought he did over this situation. It’s a grim moment for Bran, who had been expecting to get this great triumphant revenge on his hated enemy…and it’s only going to get worse…
Bran, horrified at the destruction he’s wrought, hurries on to Dagon’s Ring, where he meets Atla and sees a seething, shadowy tide of the things approaching through the grass. And mingled in with the susurrus of their hissing is a lone human voice, gibbering and tittering. Bran demands that they give him Sulla, and Atla, with a smirk, presents him.
Sulla has been driven mad, not by anything they did to him, but by the simple brain-shattering realization of the true nature of a world honeycombed by tunnels through which inhuman horrors swarm and thrive. Bran kills Sulla, not in rage but rather out of mercy, realizing that there are in fact some weapons too foul and terrible to use. He hurls the Black Stone into the seething mass of shadows, and for a moment gets a clear view of them:
If Lovecraft’s synecdoche of horror is the deep sea, with its tentacles and slime, then Howard’s is the reptile, particularly the snake, with all its symbolism of ancient and pre-mammalian life and potency. The Worms of the Earth, the things that were once almost men before being driven underground and sinking deeper in atavism, are basically hellish snake-things, subtly human perhaps, but mostly all cold scales and merciless coils and hissing, flickering tongues. Sick with terror, Bran flees, but not before Atla gets a final mocking shot off.
And that’s the end of Robert E. Howard’s masterpiece, “The Worms of the Earth.”
It’s just so good, isn’t it? I mean, the characters are great, the setting is a blast, the action is killer, and the ending is perfect and horrible, with Bran having unleashed something that should’ve been left well enough alone. I love basically everything about this story; the pacing is even good, which can be tough in a short story that’s trying to deal with such a wide scope of geography and action.
Unfortunately, Howard never did take up the semi-cliffhanger he left there at the end, though. For all intents and purposes, this is the last Bran Mak Morn story he ever wrote – he’s mentioned again in a later, modern horror tale (“The Children of the Night”), but REH never again gives us a story about the Last King of the Picts. Karl Edward Wagner, most famous for his grim n’ gritty Kane stories DID write a sequel novel based on the premise that Bran had awakened a horror in the hills; it’s called “Legion of Shadows” from the 70s, and I remember liking it well enough as a pastiche, although I don’t think it nails the real weirdness or tragedy of REH’s original story.
I’ve gone on and on about what I like in this story, so I won’t repeat myself, but I really do think this is one of the greatest sword and sorcery stories ever written. There’s a real depth to this one, with a lot of actually meditative moments from Bran, something that’s sometimes lost in the wilder and more action-packed Conan stories to come. And while the Cimmerian would end up defining the genre, I think Bran Mak Morn and his tragic, dying Picts illustrate some of its strengths better than Conan ever does, exploring history, memory, violence, obsession, and regret while also delivering a rollicking, tense adventure story full of flashing swords and horrible snakemen. I mean, what more could you want!?
Many names of Great Renown grace the Annals of the Heroic Age of the Pulps, but even in that ancient age of mighty deeds, three names tower above all others with regard to sword and sorcery. Howard we have touched upontwice (and we’ll revisit him soon enough), and we devoted a whole month to the incomparable C.L. Moore, so I reckon it’s high time we hit the final member of the classical sword and sorcery trinity! That’s right, we’re finally going to encounter Fritz Leiber’s foundational duo, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in their very first published story, “Two Sought Adventure,” from the August 1939 issue of Unknown!
Of course, we’ve already talked about ol’ Fritz, but that was in regards to his weird fiction story “The Automatic Pistol” from 1940 in Weird Tales, which is good and a lot of fun, you should read it. But undoubtedly Fritz’s greatest creations and most lasting renown come from the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. Given that, AND the fact that he’s the one who actually coined “Sword and Sorcery” for this the best of all genres, I think it’s appropriate to give him another fanfare and more detailed biographical info this time around.
Leiber is, for my money, one of the best writers of genre fiction from the 40s through the 60s, in many ways a predecessor to the New Wave that would revolutionize science fiction in the 70s. His background and various experiences give his writing a depth and vitality that’s really unparalleled, especially for the time; he was the son of Shakespearean actors (and he himself acted on the stage), he was a fencer and an expert chess player, studied for (but did not get) a graduate degree in Philosophy, studied for but did not become a minister at a seminary, read and wrote for technical encyclopedias as a day job, taught as a drama instructor at Occidental college…I mean, the list pretty well sums up Leiber’s interests and the themes he explored in his writing. He also had a brief but important correspondence with Lovecraft near the end of the Old Gent’s life, and in many of his memoirs/recollections he attributed much of his development as a writer to HPL’s encouragement and advice. He wrote a lot of great stuff; his 1947 collection, “Night’s Black Agents” is simply one of the best short story collections of the era, in addition to having just the coolest fucking title of all time (a line from Macbeth, Leiber again subtly showing off his erudition).
Unfortunately, like a lot of writers in the post-pulp era, Leiber had a hard time of it financially. He lived in some apparently truly squalid apartments in California, and there’s some great anecdotes from the 70s of Harlan Ellison raging about how Leiber was forced to do his writing on a shitty typewriter propped up over the kitchen sink. Actually, it wasn’t until TSR, the company that made Dungeons & Dragons, licensed the rights to Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser that he was able to live somewhat more securely and comfortably. Frankly, and as we’ll see in today’s story, even if they hadn’t made official Leiber products, TSR 100% should have just been sending checks to Leiber (and Wellman and Vance) because a shockingly large amount of fantasy tabletop roleplaying is taken directly from his work.
Leiber wrote in a lot of different genres, although you might be surprised at how few times his work showed up in Weird Tales, despite his association with Lovecraft and horror. Case in point, today’s story was published in Unknown, the short-lived fantasy-focused companion to AstoundingScience Fiction created and edited by lil’ Johnny W. Campbell himself. Campbell, as we’ve mentioned before, considered himself an intellectual and so he envisioned a a similarly intellectual fantasy magazine that would compete with Weird Tales. Unknown was therefore less lurid, more realistic (or at least the magic and monsters where supposed to be more internally rational), and generally more literary and sophisticated, even going so far as to allow for humor! That said, apparently Campbell would often tell Leiber that his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories were more like “Weird Tales stories, but…” he would accept them anyway. In fact, no Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story would ever appear in the pages of Weird Tales, which is kind of interesting.
That’s right, the cover of this issue went to Thelemite and future Founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. It’s a fairly bland cover, in my opinion, kind of lacking the *punch* you’d see in, say, a Brundage cover from Weird Tales. Very much more main stream looking, in my opinion.
The ToC shows Campbell’s editorial perspective too – fewer stories, but longer. That Hubbard is 90 pages (stretching somewhat the definition of “novel” perhaps, but still…that’s a long ‘un for a magazine)! You’ve got some of Campbell’s heavy hitters here too, del Rey and Kuttner, both important in the pulps and (del Rey as an editor in particular) in the paper back revolution that would come post WWII. Also neat are the two “Readers’ Departments,” integral parts of the participatory fandom that played a huge role in the development of modern genre literature. Unknown had a fun readers’ letters section; taking the title from the famous lines of Omar Khayyam is a very evocative, stylish, and literary thing to do, and the illo is good too:
Very E.C. Comics, isn’t it? But, godammit, let’s get to the story! Fritz Leiber’s first ever published short story AND also the very first adventure of that incomparable duo, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser!
And more comic-book style art, though this time maybe it’s more “Prince Valiant” than “Vault of Horror.” Honestly not really my cup-o-tea, if’n ye ask me…just a fairly bland fantasy scene, though at least Unknown has enough sense NOT to toss in an illustration from the climax of the story right off the bat. Still, I wish the artists had had a little more verve or style or something, especially for such great and visually distinct characters (and situations) that appear here. Oh Well!
First thing first, I love fantasy calendrics like that…”Year of the Behemoth, Month of the Hedgehog, the Day of the Toad…” it’s just really fun, an easy and striking bit of genre semiotics that immediately shifts the reader into a “fantasy adventure” mode. Leiber keeps ladling on that fantastical flavor with more and more little flourishes, scenes of bucolic yeoman farmers, medieval-esque mercantilism, followed by the promise of a shift-change to astrologers and thieves; it’s great writing that sets a specific scene AS WELL AS positioning the whole of the story within a certain genre-space. And then it’s followed by a couple of paragraphs that introduce the main characters.
The tall northern barbarian is, of course, Fafhrd, while the small dark man is The Gray Mouser. As far as introductions go, these can’t be beat. Their gear, their appearance, their movements, everything is in service of explaining and presenting their characteristics – Fafhrd is a bluff and forthright barbarian in rough linen, bearing a sword and bow, and with a hint of wildness to him, while The Mouser is sneaky, clever, sharp, and secretive. It’s frankly just a perfect intro, efficient and effective.
Of course, we haven’t actually learned their names yet, although that’s not too far off in this story. Still, they’re very well developed and, for the most part, fully formed, the same characters that we’ll meet in their future adventures – this is due to the fact that Leiber, with his friend Harry Fischer (who actually created and named Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, basing them off of Leiber and himself) had been exploring the two and their world for several years already. Leiber in fact had already written several of their adventures already, and that background had practice has given Leiber a good handle on these two.
Anyway, as these two are riding along they’re suddenly ambushed! Bows twang, arrows fly, and the pair spur their horses onward, pursued by a band of eight or so well-armed and similarly equipped ruffians. But, unfortunately for the thugs, these two guys are characters in a sword and sorcery story who have JUST been introduced, so they use this convenient ambush to demonstrate their unparalleled skill and toughness.
Fafhrd executes a flawless Parthian shot and the Mouser zings a leaden ball back at their pursuers, striking two riders down and sending the rest scattering. That done, it’s time we got PROPERLY introduced to these two bad-asses:
There’s a cool efficiency to these two that Leiber likes to play with, particularly in their dialog and the way they speak to each other about what’s going on, always commenting on the action and characters around them. Their friendship is really compelling and very lived in and is, honestly, probably pretty familiar to a lot of people; these two are the kind of friends who, confronted with dangers or troubles, tend to minimize all the challenges they face, kidding around and making fun of the “blundering fools” who would dare challenge them, always talking each other up. It’s a great bit, honestly, and helps reinforce the central idea of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser: they are self-mythologizers that are always confident that they are the main characters in a story. Sometimes this self-awareness comes awfully close to metafictive fourth-wall breaking, but where Hamlet struggles against the role he’s cast in, the Mouser and Fafhrd relish it – they are swashbuckling sword-and-sorcery heroes, the very best possible thing to be, and they’re having a great time (even when they’re not, really).
Having dealt with the ambush, the two realize that this very valley is most likely the one they’ve been searching for. The Mouser unrolls an ancient vellum, and we’re introduced to their quest:
Certainly a taunting tone to Urgaan of Angarngi’s missive, isn’t there? He’s daring treasure-hungry fools to come and face the challenge of his mysterious treasure tower, but that doesn’t daunt these two. Rather, as they ride on, The Mouser reflects on how similarly equipped and armed the ambushers they faced were, suggesting that they might have been Lord Rannarsh’s men. It turns out that the Mouser cut the vellum sheet about the treasure tower out of an ancient book in Rannarsh’s library, and that the Lord, famously avaricious, might’ve taken notice of the theft and sent his boys out to kill them and claim the treasure for himself. Fafhrd scoffs at the idea, which of course means that The Mouser will turn out to be 100% correct.
The two adventurers come across a small cottage not far from the stumpy ruins of the tower, meeting a hilariously taciturn old farmer and his large extended family.
I like the farmer, and the later scenes with his whole family are really great, but for now Fafhrd and The Mouser decide to reconnoiter the tower in the fading light. It takes them a strangely long time to reach the tower, which seemed so close, and when they get there they find a skull and shattered bones just inside the treasure house. A strange sensation of foreboding and danger settles over The Mouser.
Very good foreshadowing, I think; the sense that there is very much something unnatural going on in this treasure tower, something watching and waiting and certainly at least a little sorcerous is conveyed well, but we’re still wondering what exactly is going on.
Heading back to the cabin, the two have a great and boisterous evening with the farmer and his family. Mouser does magic tricks, Fafhrd roars his wild sagas, and they get the whole lot of ’em drunk on wine. It’s probably my favorite scene in the whole story, actually, a wonderful little slice of life scene that really evokes the strangeness of these two adventurers showing up out of nowhere and throwing the normal humdrum pattern of these people’s lives pleasantly off kilter. Leiber is of course just as interested in adventures and swordplay and derring-do as Howard, but he’s ALSO interested in the little material things of life that define the world; his stories are steeped in this kind of rich, lived-in detail, with an interest in the way people spend their downtime. In addition to just being flat-out a lot of fun to read, I think it’s also an important development in sword-and-sorcery literature, a real key moment. Here, back in ’39, Leiber is illustrating to people a kind of “fantasy realism” that uses realistic, naturalistic details to deepen and enrich a secondary world setting.
Of course, it also serves a nice narrative function, because the ancient old man, roused by wine and sing, manages to croak out an enigmatical little statement:
“Maybe beast won’t get you” and then he konks out…great stuff! And it’s echoed again the next day when, striking out early in the morning, they’re stopped by the gangly and shy farmer’s daughter, who has a warning for them.
This family of farmers live right next door to a death trap, apparently, and have learned to give the place a wide berth and keep a respectful distance. I really like how Leiber uses the peasants here – again, they have had to live next to this tower. Whatever danger dwells within, they’ve learned how to avoid it, getting on with their own life in the shadow of its threat. It’s only interlopers and outsiders who blunder into the tower who get killed. It’s a fun, subtle inversion of what a fantasy hero armed with cunning and expertise and knowledge and all that.
But of course no warning, no matter how blood-curdling or threatening, would cause Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser to turn aside from a quest. They continue on through the woods, reflecting merrily (and perhaps a bit unconvincingly) on the remarkable imagination of the farmer’s daughter. Then they meet a very material threat: the men who had ambushed them yesterday have regrouped and reformed at the tower. It’s obvious that they know about the treasures rumored to kept in there, since they’ve also brought shovels and picks.
There’s a long (and good!) scene of sneaking and combat, with Fafhrd and The Mouser getting the drop on these guys. Now, I find the “Fantasy Combat Discourse” generally pretty boring, but I DO like the way Leiber does his fights. To be fair, if you’re one of those HEMA nerds who pours over fechtbücher and owns a broadsword, you’re going to be annoyed with Leiber; he’s a fencer, apparently a very good one, and so the way his heroes fight is very much informed by that. In particular, Fafhrd tends to wield his enormous sword a lot like a rapier, something that might strike some as silly. Deal with it, though, is all I can say, because the combat in this section is fun, and also better than any swordplay that Howard wrote – Conan might hew his way through twenty dudes, but Fafhrd is having to be realistically careful fighting two guys who have him flanked. There’s a sharper sense of danger, is what I’m getting at, probably because Leiber at least has a sense from actual fencing practice about the ways someone can get overextended or leave themselves vulnerable. Makes his fighting descriptions that much scrappier, I think.
A certain red-haired fellow among the ambushers confirms what The Mouser had suspected: these were Rannarsh’s men, and the venal lord had certainly hoped to get the fabled gems himself. Following the battle, there’s a great bit of Fafhrd barbarism – the combat over, becomes first almost hysterically hilarious, and then deeply, almost ridiculously, solemn about a man he’d just killed.
This is contrasted with The Mouser’s own reaction – he may be feeling a little sick and anxious now, but he knows that the force of the combat won’t come on him for some time. It’s another of these Leiber flourishes, a deep and abiding interest in the interiority of his characters and the often very different ways people can react to or experience extreme things. It is simultaneously taking a part in and commenting on the Howardian tropes of sword-and-sorcery, in particular the way Fafhrd’s barbarism is being contrasted with The Mouser’s more urbane reaction.
Entering the tower, The Mouser is relieved that he no longer feels the dread that had oppressed him the night before. They explore the first chamber of the tower, and run across more smashed skeletons – it seems like something indeed has been pulverizing interlopers here, although it may have been a very long time ago. Interestingly, however, the two find a scroll case on one of the corpses that includes a note very similar to their own!
This note, along with the many other skeletons strewn about Urgaan’s treasure house, reveal the truth: the dude has made some kind of death trap, and is luring people here with tales of unbelievable treasures.
Undeterred, the two advance up the stairs, determined to search out discover the treasure. As they reach the top of the stairs, steel glitters in the dark as a knife is hurled from a doorway, nicking the Mouser in the shoulder! Enraged, he darts into the room, sword drawn, and discovers Lord Rannarsh hiding there.
Unmanned by fear, Rannarsh seems only to be interested in escaping, even abandoning all claims to the treasure. However, confronted by his hated enemies, he masters himself enough to try a second dagger, which earns him a skewering at the hands of The Gray Mouser. Following his death, Fafhrd muses on how Rannarsh seemed to be seeking death, which The Mouser says was simply because he had appeared weak and afraid in front of witnesses. It’s another trademark of this duo, always willing to believe that others are as awed of them as they are of themselves, conveniently ignoring all other contradicting information, like when Rannash refered to a “thing” that had been playing “cat and mouse” with him. But, just as The Mouser makes this pronouncement, a sudden and horrific pall of fear falls upon them!
Having failed their saving throw vs fear, the two of them are frozen to the spot, listening to the steady footfall of someone approaching through the tower, up the stairs, and coming towards them. Eventually, a new NPC is introduced, an ancient looking holy man who looks grimly over the room before greeting them.
This man is Arvlan, a direct descendant of Urgaan, here to destroy the horror that his ancestor has left behind. Not letting them speak, Arvlan explains his purpose and history, and then sweeps out of the room on his holy mission.
Arvlan, we hardly knew ye! But, interestingly, once Arvlan gets mashed offscreen, the paralyzing fear that had held the two of them in thrall lifts, and they’re able to move again. Swords out, they rush into the room and see the red ruin left behind of the holy man, crushed and splattered in the middle of the room. But their attention is soon drawn away from the corpse and towards a stone marked with the words “Here rests the treasure of Urgaan of Angarngi.”
The two of them set to work, using pick, mattock, and pry-bar to begin their excavations. Weirdly, they quickly encounter some kind of strange, tarry substance in among the masonry, though not even that gives them pause; they keep gauging away, eventually exposing enough of raw stone that they can get their pry-bar in and wiggle it around, loosening and gouging alternatively. As they keep at the work, though, a new strange feeling of revulsion comes over The Mouser, a sensation clearly related to this dark, foul smelling glop that they’re working on. Nauseated, he goes to a window for a breath of fresh air, and sees down below them the farmer’s daughter. The young girl is clearly trying to screw her courage to the sticking place to come in and warn them of their danger.
A kind of mania descends on everyone now – The Mouser has seen something in the ceiling, but he can’t articulate it even to himself, and instead lurches sick and fearful out of the room, focused only on keeping the girl from entering the tower. Meanwhile, Fafhrd seems possessed, blind and deaf to everything else expect the stone that hides the treasure. Like the weird fear aura the place had earlier, it seems like the tower is projecting some kind of weird psychic effect, and everyone is mostly powerless to resist it. As the Mouser reaches the bottom of the stairs, his muddled mind steadies itself enough to realize that what he’d seen on the ceiling was a corresponding smear of gore, the counterpart to the blood on the floor. What could it mean!? And why is the tower suddenly vibrating!?
Meanwhile, Fafhrd has finally cracked into the treasure chest!
In the moment, this is all extremely strange and weird and not entirely clear. A weird basin full of dark celestial mercury, upon which floats a weird tangle of glittering geometric shapes, including the huge diamond promised in Urgaan’s message. Everything sparkles with a strange inner light, and Fafhrd weirdly seems to sense that he’s gripping a piece of a thinking mind in his hand as he grabs for the diamond. Meanwhile, the tower is beginning to twist and undulate; The Mouser thinks at first it is toppling, but he realizes there’re no fissures or breaks…rather, it’s like it’s wiggling or bending! Back in the treasure chamber, the weird gems start jittering in the black mercury, and Fafhrd is having a hard time holding on to the skull-sized diamond in his hand. Doors and windows begin to clamp shut, closing like a sphincter, and Fafhrd realizes that the room itself is changing shape.
The Mouser reaches the girl, and they dive for safety beyond the clearing outside of the tower, while Fafhrd confronts the realization that, basically, he’s inside an insane robot.
The diamond, strangely mobile and very hostile, flings itself at Fafhrd’s own skull as he tries to escape, eventually exploding into a cloud of sparkling dust. At that, the tower begins its death throes, with Fafhrd only just escaping before the door slams hut.
There’s a break in the story, resuming after some time has passed.
And that’s the end of the story!
It’s a pretty strange one, isn’t it? I think it’s true to Leiber’s own proclivities, but you can see the Campbellian “rationality” in the tower/robot. Urgaan’s tower is not merely magical; it’s some kind of weird magical technology, complete with what is obviously a kind of high-tech gem-based brain. Presumably, Urgaan has built this conscious robotower as some kind of horrible death trap – lured in, the computer then smooshes all interlopers, it’s weird stone body lubricated by that odd tarry goop. It’s a fun and fully bonkers idea, although it’s not too wildly different from Howard’s magic, which is often more occulto-scientific that pure magic. Why Urgaan would do that is left mysterious, which is actually kind of fun – people can be real assholes, and if you’re some kind of ancient technomancer then maybe that’s the sort of the thing you’d do!
You can also really see the influence Leiber had on Dungeons and Dragons in this story, too. It’s almost exactly the kind of thing Gary Gygax would write, right down to the dungeon built around a weirdly complex and almost certainly fatal death trap. But even beyond the setting and the trappings of the dungeon, I think you get a sense that Gygax et al. ALSO certainly styled their adventurers after Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.
And it’s the characters of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser that are so important and foundational to the genre, in my opinion. Even Conan at his most avaricious (say, in “The Jewels of Ghwalur”) ends up shifting gears, exploring a mystery, saving a girl, and engaging in heroics, whereas Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser are almost single-mindedly focused on this tower, ignoring countless warnings and obvious signs that something is amiss. That stubbornness and single-minded selfishness is key to their motivation and characters, and Leiber is really the first writer of the genre to really explore that aspect of sword-and-sorcery. Even though they envision themselves as heroes, any actual heroism that they end up doing is often in spite of themselves. It’s often funny, although only rarely does Leiber play that purely for laughs; rather, their self-importance and unassailable confidence gives them the boost they need to persevere in the face of insane odds. Mostly, Leiber is interested in the way these characters, who clearly see themselves in a certain light, are actually a little more complicated and gray than we might expect. Particularly in the post-Howard world, most of the sword and sorcery heroes are painfully noble barbarians; guys like Elak of Atlantis are even Kings who (despite renouncing a throne) always carry with them a sense of portentousness and destiny. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are different, wanderers and adventurers and thieves, just a couple of scrappy normal dudes who are going to carve their destiny and wealth out of the carcass of the world. Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser are an interesting counterpart to Conan and Jirel, and represent a key part of the evolution of the genre.
Like a true Barbarian Hero I am currently adventuring in distant lands, having braved the cursed tomb of Newark Airport to arrive in the bleak, windswept hills of Pennsylvania, where death and danger lurk in the shadows of every tree, mountain, and Wawa. But that doesn’t mean an end to my long-as-hell ramblings, no, far from it indeed! For hark! Another edition of Pulp Strainer (Sword & Sorcery Edition) is upon us, and we’re continuing our REH lovefest with probably my favorite Conan story of all time: The Tower of the Elephant from the March 1933 issue of Weird Tales!
“The Tower of the Elephant” is an interesting story because, aside from being rad as hell, it was also the first Conan story where he’s an adventurer, wandering through civilized lands in search of fortune and excitement. The previous two stories published in Weird Tales, “The Phoenix and the Sword” (Dec ’32) and and “The Scarlet Citadel” (Jan ’33) both take place when Conan is wearing the crown of Aquilonia upon his troubled brow (my least favorite phase of Conan’s chronology, personally). Interestingly, the first tranche of three stories that REH submitted to Weird Tales included “The Frost Giant’s Daughter” which had Conan as a young wanderer up among the viking-flavored berserkers of Hyboria; it was rejected by Farnsworth Wright, however, and wouldn’t be published until the 70s, if I recall correctly. “The Phoenix and the Sword” story is a reworking of an unsubmitted Kull story anyway, swapping out Kull for Conan and expanding the evil sorcerer Thoth-Amon a bit, but still it’s mostly concerned with Conan’s tenuous hold on the throne as a barbarian usurper. “Scarlet Citadel” is a similar (but better) story, this time with King Conan betrayed and imprisoned (in a legitimately cool-as-hell dungeon full of awesome monsters) while his kingdom totters.
Both are fun and all, and they certainly have good sword-and-sorcery action, but for my money Conan is at his most interesting when he’s just a rogue and a reaver, a barbarian wandering among “civilized” people, relying on his wits and his strength to survive. According to some histories I’ve read, following the positive response to the first two Conan stories, Wright encouraged Howard to work up an essay on the world of “Hyboria” that he’d created and glancingly mentioned; the result of that work would be important for Howard, who got interested in exploring more of these lands in greater detail, leading him to write “The Tower of the Elephant,” a very different sort of Conan story from those he’d written previously.
But, as always, before we can get into that let’s take a look at the cover! And damn if it ain’t a spicy one this time!
That’s a Brundage, of course, still obscuring her gender behind the semi-pseudonym of “M. Brundage.” Just a straight-up buck-ass naked lady hanging out her wolf pack, what’s it to ya buddy, huh? You some kinda prude or something!? The story is a perfectly serviceable Jules de Grandin adventure from ol’ Quinn, this time with some interesting werewolfery thrown in. As for the ToC, there’s some interesting stuff here too:
Kline, Smith and Ernst here too, all solid fellows, but the interesting thing here (besides from our Conan story) is the “In Memoriam” for Henry Whitehead. Whitehead is an interesting guy, an Episcopalian minister who lived and worked for most of his life in the Virgin Islands (specially St. Croix) and used that setting and island folklore for his weird fiction. He was a good friend of Lovecraft, who actually visited Whitehead in Florida after he’d retired and spent several weeks with him and his family; it’s actually HPL who wrote the “In Memoriam” here, and the affection he felt for his friend is evident, I think. Whitehead is also interesting from a horror perspective because he’s basically the guy who introduced a lot of what would become the dominant pop cultural understanding of “Voodoo” into weird literature. An interesting and important figure, though little known these days.
But enough of that, there’re Towers to be scaled, Threats to be overcome, and Fabled Gems to be plundered! Let’s get into it!
A neat title illustration to this one, by ol’ Jayem Wilcox again. As is usual in Weird Tales, this illustration is based on a scene near the climax of story; it’s a bad habit of theirs and has in the past given away too much of the story, but here it’s okay since the way the story unfolds is a bit more complex than what is shown here. But, regardless, it’s fun to see the way the artists were envisioning Conan at a time when the visual iconography hadn’t been invented yet for sword and sorcery; we’re so used to Frank Frazetta’s iconic paintings from the 70s that these early Conans can be a bit jarring. They always remind me of Douglas Fairbanks, more like a dashingly handsome swashbuckler than the dark and brooding barbarian we’re used to. In particular, the vaguely Celto-roman tunic thing is an interesting touch, especially since Conan is explicitly described as being stripped to the loin cloth for much of this story.
Like I mentioned up top, REH wrote this story hot on the heels of a personal history/geography of his secondary world, something that really comes through in the beginning of this story, I think:
I mean, c’mon; that’s just some incredible sword-n-sorc stuff, right? A thieves’ quarter called The Maul where all the rough bastards and real assholes like to party, a real grim and grimy scene; the sensory language is so rich here, and the combination of visual (torches flaring, steel glinting), auditory (roaring thieves, shrill laughter, scufflings and strugglings, fists-hammering), tactile (sloppy puddles), and especially olfactory (heaped refuse, stale wine and “rank sweaty bodies”) descriptors perfectly evoke a rough neighborhood on a Saturday night in a fantasy city. And all in a single introductory paragraph! There’s a danger of reading REH and thinking he’s cliche, but that’s simply because he invented the things that would later become cliche in the hands of lesser writers, but even so, I think everyone can appreciate the sweep and power of his writing. This is simply good sword and sorcery writing.
The second paragraph seems born from the supplementary writing that REH had been doing. He’s obviously been thinking a lot about the geography and history of his secondary world, inspired by Farnsworth Wright to elaborate and develop some coherency for his fantasy setting. Now Howard never got into the depths of codification than Tolkien did; that’s a good thing in my opinion, since he had neither the expertise nor the time that Tolkien did to do a job of that size. Also, honestly, I think Howard’s rough-sketch or thumbnailed approach is actually much richer and more productive than the strict and set-in-stone “series bible” that a lot of later fantasy writers use. I mean, Howard apparently never even made a map until some fans wrote and asked for one, and I think that kind of hazy uncertainty, in addition to having much more verisimilitude, also gives a lot more freedom to the writer. Howard could slap Conan into a high seas galleons-and-pirates adventure one story and then drop him into a ziggurat full of demon-worshipers the next, and that’s important to the freshness of a series of short stories helmed by the same character. Maybe a novel requires more secondary world discipline, although if so I’d say that’s yet another point in favor of my “short story is the superior prose format” argument.
The other thing that strikes you immediately in that second paragraph is the very obvious racial/ethnonationalist reductionism that Howard uses. The Zamorans are all dark and guileful, there’s a very uncomfortably described Shemitish counterfiter, there’re tawny-headed Gundermen, etc. It is important to acknowledge that Howard was 100% a dyed-in-the-wool and absolutely committed racist, and that it played a huge part in his writing and his world view. A lot has been made of Howard’s love of the barbarian and his belief, quite sincerely, that civilization was largely an accidental configuration of society, fragile and unstable and always temporary, and that the natural state of humanity was the noble savage. Civilization poisons the individual, makes them soft and sneaky and duplicitous and decadent, and part of that decadence for Howard is the mingling of races, both socially and, horror of horrors for a white southerner like him, reproductively.
Equally important for Howard is his belief in a Spencerian hierarchy of the races, meaning that all barbarians are not created equally. The Cimmerians, Conan’s people, represent the highest and best of the barbarians – white, rough, hardy, savage but with an inborn sense of fair-play and nobility about them. Next down the hierarchy for Howard are the Picts who, in the Conan stories, are basically an early 20th century pop cultural expression of the Native Americans, almost as good as a white barbarian but given over to superstition and cruelty. It is notable that Howard never introduced a black barbarian, and even in the stories where Conan is running around the fantastical precursor of modern Africa, the northern barbarian’s woodcraft, survival skills, and martial prowess always trump the natives, even in the depths of their own home territories. As an aside, let me pause here to plug the late Charles Saunder’s “Imaro” and “Dossouye” series of books, truly great sword-and-sorcery by a black writer who loved the genre and also thought deeply and insightfully about its history, politics, and shortcomings.
But it’s important to recognize that this racism is a big part of Howard’s writing, and it will not be going away – it is integral to how he envisions the world and creates his stories, even more so than in the works of his friend and fellow racist, Lovecraft. And here, where Howard has begun to really think about the world of Conan, those beliefs and prejudices are getting baked into Hyboria.
But anyway, let us continue. Our synoptic view of The Maul narrows down to a specific corner of a specific bar, where a Kothic slaver is giggling sloppily about the Brythunian girl he’s going to kidnap and sell into sexual slavery in Ophir – grim stuff!
And it is this mention of the Elephant Tower that causes the ears of a tall barbarian youth to perk up…
That’s our boy for sure, but this is a much different Conan than the readers’ of Weird Tales were used to. The previous stories had centered on Conan the King, a middle aged, experienced, and supremely confident ruler and warrior king. This is a youth, seemingly fresh from Cimmeria and perhaps experiencing for the first time the decadent and dangerous cities of the south. I think this is also the only time Conan is described as having an accent, a signifier of both his inexperience and his barbaric foreignness.
ALSO I might as well point out here the loving and expressive attention paid to Conan’s body, a hallmark of Howard’s sword-and-sorcery in particular. Howard’s interest in masculinity and the body is clear in all his work, but with Conan in particular it’s an important part of the stories. For one thing, diegetically it’s the key to how he makes his living; Conan as warrior, thief, and survivor relies on his body above all else, and its stamina, its strength, and its smooth and powerful functioning are all central to his adventures. Secondly, it’s a signifier of his barbarity; his body is hard and lean and disciplined from his life and background; his strength is inherent and native to his body, which is very different from the civilized people in the stories, who are either soft and weak from easy living or who, it is implied, must train and work and practice to attain physical fitness in spite of their surroundings. This is a key difference, because again, for Conan, his strength, his muscular coordination, and his reflexes are all natural, honed from the life-or-death struggle that is a barbarian’s lot. No amount of training or expertise or practice can ever match it, because even the most diligent body-builder or swordsman or thief is, at core, artificially attempting to mimic what is pure and natural to the barbarian. Finally, it’s worth pointing out the homoeroticism inherent here. I’ve never done it, but an analysis of Howard’s use of superlatives and adjectives to describe specific characters would be extremely telling; even in stories with women characters, dollars to donuts Howard lavishes at least twice as much ink on Conan’s broad hairy chest and mighty thews as on heaving bosoms and curvaceous hips. I’m not saying Howard was gay, but I am saying that it is clear from the stories that what he is interested in is masculinity, pure and simple, it’s perceived strength and ruggedness and the way it’s expressed in the idealized masculine form.
Lotta damn theorizin’ and philosphizin’ there, sorry! Let’s get back to the damn story!
This young barbarian, still unintroduced formally, has heard this the man’s strange statement, and wants to know what is the secret of the Elephant Tower? The Kothic slaver, well in his cups and enjoying the role of an in-the-know city slicker, decides to set this rube from the sticks straight.
Heedless of his danger, our Kothic drunkard gets on his high horse and deigns to explain to this Cimmerian hick that Zamora is the City of Thieves, and if someone could have stolen the Heart of the Elephant then it would already have been done. But Yara the Priest, whose magic is unparalleled, guards his prize with both steel and dangerous sorcery. But what of climbing the tower and coming in from above, asks the Cimmerian?
The threat of a fight sends the crowd surging backwards, and the single candle illuminating the scene is snuffed out. Chaos erupts, there’s shouting and screaming and a single strident yell…and when the candle is relit the barbarian is gone and the Kothic slaver lies dead, ripped open by a sword stroke unerringly delivered in the dark.
I’ve spent a LOT of time on this first section because I think it warrants it. First of all, it’s just great, thrilling stuff, full of flavor and rich descriptions that really capture the scene; it’s very visceral and exciting! But also, I think this is a key moment in sword and sorcery’s history. Remember, the previous Conan stories have been set later in his life, as a King, and while there’s some great blood-and-thunder stuff there for sure, it’s here in this opening section of the Tower of the Elephant that we are introduced to the very first Barbarian Hero in the whole of the genre, and the way it’s done is so important and impactful on what would come later that it warrants some attention.
The good stuff continues in the next section, where Conan is striding towards to the temple district and the Tower of the Elephant, reflecting on his time among civilized people. It’s pure undiluted barbarian hero backstory, and it’s great:
In particular, that last line summing up barbarian theology is basically a primer on both Howard’s view of the world as well as sword and sorcery as a genre – it’s all about a character alone and armed only with their courage and willpower taking on the world!
Conan (or, rather, the Cimmerian, because he hasn’t YET been named in this story) arrives at the Tower of the Elephant, a silvery spire with glassy outer walls and rimmed with gems that dominates the Zamoran skyline. It’s from here that Yara the Priest dwells and performs his strange magical rites.
Just fantastic evil magic stuff, really hammering home how this weird and mysterious force is quintessentially and elementally is opposed to the clean and natural strength of a barbarian. It’s also fun to see the inexplicableness of the tower AND gem’s names…they’re just named after Elephants, for some reason, and no one knows or remembers why. While Conan is musing on all this, he suddenly hears a noise from beyond the outer – the sound of someone tromping by. A guard, Conan thinks, but instead of hearing him come by again on his patrol, all is silent within.
Succumbing to his curiosity (and avarice), Conan clambers easily over the wall and drops down into the first of the inner rings surrounding the Tower. This one is wide and mostly open, with only some shrubberies near the far inner wall. Gliding pantherishly, Conan makes his way towards that inner wall, when he stumbles across the dead body of solider who has been strangled from behind. Somewhat unnerved by the uncanniness of the murder, Conan continues forward cautiously, his sword drawn and his senses alert. He spies a strange bulk near the wall, a shadowy figure who, somehow (and perhaps for the only time in any of these stories) actually hears Conan’s stealthy approach. The shape whirls around, resolving itself into a big-bellied but strangely lithe man!
There, finally, is Conan’s name. And we’re introduced to one of the first in a long-line of important and entertaining side characters in a Conan story. In this one its Taurus of Nemedia, the Prince of Thieves, but it could just as well be Balthus from “Beyond the Black River” or “Murilo” from “Rogues in the House.” Actually, it’s kind of interesting, but the very best Conan stories generally have a strong secondary character; Conan doesn’t have a lot of interiority, honestly, so it’s useful to have another POV that lets the reader see both Conan and how he fits into the world at the same time. Also, mechanically, it’s handy to have someone who can throw out exposition or explanations, which Taurus of Nemedia does here.
He quickly explains that Yara’s defenses rely on what lies beyond the inner wall, in the second garden. The human guards, like the man he killed, all hunker down for the night behind sealed doors in the lower chambers of the tower, leaving the garden to be defended by deadly, nonhuman sentinels. It’s these that baffled Taurus for so long, but he’s figured out some kind of scheme or plan for taking care of them. Once they’re neutralized, they’ll climb the tower, enter through the roof, murder Yara and take his Gem. Easy peasy!
Conan and his new best friend hop the wall and land in a lush inner garden. Conan prepares to stride forward, but Taurus, tense and on edge, pushes him back and tells him that, as he values his life, he must stay behind him. They wait; everything is silent at first, and then there’s movement in the bushes and among the trees, and terrible blazing eyes suddenly glare out at them from the foliage!
It turns out Taurus had a tube full of black lotus powder, a horrifically toxic substance that kills with the merest whiff. As an aside, Howard’s reliance on lotuses in these stories is really one of my favorite things. The black lotus shows up a lot, as does a white and (I think) a yellow lotus, all with strange and mysterious powers and properties. It’s a lot of fun, and puts Howard in a lineage with Homer and the Odyssey, as far as strange botanicals go.
Conan gets to display his prowess by killing one more lion with his sword, and then he and Taurus get to the tower itself, a metallic mass with smooth, glassy sides, seemingly unclimbable. But the wily Prince of Thieves has a solution to this problem, too!
Sometimes it seems like sword and sorcery is as much a genre about climbing as anything else – it’s such a common way to demonstrate the hero’s prowess, strength, courage, tenacity, AND their connection to wild landscapes and untamed nature. Of course a Cimmerian can climb like a cat, they live in a rocky, hilly landscape of towering precipices and foreboding cliffs! Taurus and Conan get to the tower, and that’s when Taurus gets a little tricksy. He tells Conan to go to the edge of the tower and check to see if the guards are alert. Conan is no dummy and thinks its an odd request, but he complies, and while he does Taurus slips in through the door, leaving his buddy behind. I guess he’s decided that he doesn’t want to share the spoils with Conan, but it doesn’t work out so well for our Nemedian Prince of Thieves:
With a gurgle and a dumb look on his face, poor ol’ Taurus dies, apparently without even knowing what it was that had killed him! Examining his late compatriot’s body, Conan discovers a wound on the base of Taurus’s neck, like three nails that had been driven in and then pulled out. Already the edges of these marks are turning black, and there’s a faint smell of putrefaction. Cautiously Conan prods the door open, and inside the chamber he sees a bunch of fainting couches and several chests full of glittering gems. Already he’s found more wealth than he could’ve imagined existed in all the world! But, while he’s contemplating it, the guardian of the chamber attacks!
It’s a good ol’ fashioned giant spider fight, an encounter appropriate for one level 3-5 barbarian! Again, a little cliched now, but remember, Howard was writing this stuff in 1933! Give him a break! Besides, it’s a fun fight – the spider is super nimble, and it’s fun to think of it swinging through the chamber, trying sink its venomous fangs into Conan. When that doesn’t work, the spider then starts darting all around, roping off the chamber with thick cords of rough, sticky webbing that threatens to trap Conan. Finally, unable to come to grips with the monster using his sword, Conan lifts a huge chest full of gems and splatters the big crawlie with it. It’s neat!
Conan is nothing if not dogged, and despite the fact that he’s twice now encountered a king’s ransom in gems just lying around, he’s committed to finding the Heart of the Elephant. After all, if Yara was willing to just leave chests of gems sitting around in his rumpus room, imagine what the Heart must be like! So on he goes, venturing through the door and deeper into the silent, uncanny tower. Eventually he finds a huge ivory door with strange markings on it. He enters, and sees something truly strange:
An elephant headed horror sits enthroned in this strange chamber, and its no mere idol…it’s a living thing! Conan is horrified, struck dumb and seemingly paralyzed by what can only be an elder demon of the old world. But then, Conan notices that the great amber eyes stare out blankly, and the trunk of the thing grope forward…the monster on the throne is blind. And then, it speaks with an unearthly voice!
It’s both a surprising reveal and an honestly moving bit of writing; Conan’s realization that this thing which he had been so horrified at has been made to suffer, has in fact been tortured, moves him to both deep pity and profound shame.
Possessed of senses beyond humankind, the elephant-heading thing senses that Conan has killed this evening, up to and including the man in the tavern. And it also knows that a man lies died above at the top of the tower. These two deaths seem to have some occult significance for the thing, who begins to share its story with Conan, explaining that he and others like him had come from a weird green planet called Yag, rebels against their king there. Seeking refuge on earth their wings withered and so they came to live in the primordial world, warring against the prehuman monsters that dwelt there. They conquered, and watched humans rise from ape-dom to the kingdoms of Valusia and Atlantis, and they saw the cataclysm that swallowed those ancient lands and gave rise to the world of Conan and his people. One by one his people died throughout the long ages, until only he, Yag-Kosha, was left, worshipped as a god far in the east. But it was there that Yara found him and, feigned to be his acolyte, learned magic from Yag-Kosha. But, like all evil wizards, he wanted to know Dark Sorcery, which Yag-Kosha would not teach him. Using forbidden magic he’d learned in Stygia, Yara was able to trap and enslave Yag-Kosha, forcing him to use his magic to fulfill Yara’s every whim.
Conan takes up the gem, a great clear crimson crystal, the Heart of the Elephant. Yag-Kosha has a plan, and Conan is now a part of it.
It’s really good, and Yag-Kosha’s story and in particular his speech here is some great, eldritch stuff, truly weird and unearthly and hinting at much stranger stuff. It also nicely demonstrates the importance of weirdness in sword-and-sorcery (which is, of course, a subgenre of the larger genre of weird fiction). Rather than just pure supernaturalism, Yag-Kosha is, basically, a Lovecraftian alien-god, made of different stuff and possessing alien powers, sure, but in a way that’s consistent with a vision of a material (if strange and magical) universe.
Conan complies with Yag-Kosha’s wishes, cutting out its heart and then squeezing the blood onto the gem, where it gets soaked up, like a sponge. As he’s leaving, he senses that there’s something strange and marvelous going on with Yag-Kosha’s remains, but he averts his eyes, not sure whether he could safely witness it.
The gem has become murky and pulses with a strange power that seems to draw and trap Yara’s attention. The wizard stoops over and grips the gem, staring into its depths, and Conan realizes with a start that the wizard is shrinking. Soon he is no larger than a child, and its only when he’s baby-sized and standing on the table that the evil sorcerer seems to realize his danger. He drops the gem and tries to flee, but some kind of weird magnetism has trapped him; he can only run in ever tightening circles around the jewel, drawing closer and closer with each circuit. Eventually, big as a mouse, Yara ends up atop the gem, and then his final doom comes upon him:
Conan turns and hauls ass out of the tower, running downward through the lower halls, seeing the guard room full of suddenly and mysteriously killed guards. Yag-Kosha had said the way would be made clear for him, and if there’s one thing weird elephant-headed space gods are, it’s honest. Conan finds it all to be a bit too much though, and decides to get out of Dodge:
And, with that crashing apocalyptic collapse, so ends “The Tower of the Elephant.”
It’s really almost the perfect sword-and-sorcery tale, inventive and thrilling and action-packed, but also moody and contemplative and a little sad. There’s real cosmic sorrow in Yag-Kosha, and Conan’s sense of humankind’s collective shame for his imprisonment is particularly poignant; it’s probably the most introspective Conan ever gets, unfortunately. Don’t get me wrong, there’re some truly great Conan stories yet to come, full of great ideas and inventive plots and fun characters, but I really think that this is my favorite of the series. It’s so effortlessly fun (and weird!), and it really lays out what makes for great sword-and-sorcery. It’s been a lot of fun re-reading it and thinking about it, and I hope ya’ll have enjoyed both it AND my ridiculously wordy musings about it too. Anyway, stay tuned, we’re only half-way through Sword and Sorcery month, and I’m thinkin’ I’ll do a fun one for the solstice next week. See ya’ll then!
Eric Williams 