In the “Thief of Forthe” discussion, I posted Clifford Ball’s brief encomium to REH from The Eyrie, Weird Tales‘s enormously important and incredibly interesting letter section, where readers, writers, and editors wrangled with Weird Fiction and discussed the stories, characters, and aesthetics of the genre. It’s an interesting little letter, mostly because it explicitly couches Howard’s death in terms of the loss of stories that readers would never see (one of the most gratifying types of mourning a writer can imagine, honestly). And ol’ Ball wasn’t alone – Howard’s death really rocked the Weird Tales readership, and elicited a lot of shocked and saddened letters from a lot of fans.
What’s fun about ’em, though, is that these letters offer a really interesting ground-level view of both fandom and the way it mediates genre-ification – in a lot of ways, the death of Howard is a crisis that forces people to reckon not only with his work as it was, but the future of both it and writing allied with it. It’s a fascinating archive!
But, before we dive in, here’s a pic of the Big Man himself, enjoying a refreshing big ass beer:
my favorite REH pic
Howard died on June 11th, 1936, and the announcement was made in Weird Tales in the v 28, n. 2 Aug/Sept issue’s Eyrie:
A short but heartfelt tribute from Wright and the Weird Tales staff, highlighting both his imagination as well as his dedication to his craft (something that would get lost in certain later reevaluations of his work; much like what happened with Lovecraft, there were certain parties later on interested in portraying both of them as being weirdo savants who, by accident rather than careful work, produced important and interesting fiction). I’d also point out that, right away, we begin to see certain inaccuracies creeping into the Official Biography – REH did not attend the University of Texas. He took business courses at Howard Payne College, a private Baptist college in Brownwood, TX. By the way, one of those posthumous stories promised in forthcoming issues of Weird Tales included what many consider to be his very best horror story, “Pigeons from Hell.”
The next issue of Weird Tales, v 28, n.3 October 1936, had further semi-official remembrances of Howard’s life and work published in the Eyrie, this time from his friend and voluminous correspondent HPL, as well as E. Hoffmann Price, who actually met him in person:
The Lovecraft excerpt is a pretty important one, I think, and sort of sets the tone for the way Howard has entered the annals of weird literature. His line about Howard having “put himself into everything he wrote” is key, and a point HPL would make over and over (it forms the center of the long in memorium he wrote for the fanzine Fantasy in their Sept 1936 issue too). The idea that Howard was deeply engaged with his writing, producing art even in spite of the commercial conditions, is high praise from someone like HPL. Too, I think both he and REH shared a deep appreciation for their roles as REGIONAL authors, people interested in their specific environments and backgrounds and what it meant for them as both people and writers. And there’s certainly something to HPL statement that Howard had a “unique inner force and sincerity” in his work – read Kuttner’s Elak story or Ball’s Rald stories and tell me that, no matter how fun and possibly good they are, there IS certainly something missing from them.
Also interesting is the appearance (and misattribution) of REH’s death poem there. It’s a bit of a convoluted story, and I’d point you towards Todd Vick’s biography of REH “Renegades & Rogues” for more detail, but it became a major part of REH’s mythology, a suitably literary (and barbaric) poem to mark his passing.
Even more interesting, though, is that the Eyrie is still working through fan letters from people who had written them before they’d known of REH. Take, for example, this letter from Irvin Gould of PA, asking about a map of Conan’s world:
An interesting letter that sheds some light on the way people were reading and enjoying Conan – they love the hints and callbacks and history peppered throughout the stories, suggestive details about the larger world and deeper lore that imbued Howard’s writing with such vitality and sincerity, and want to know more about it! Specifically, they want a damn fantasy world map! While something like that is de rigueur in fantastic fiction now, back then it was a pretty novel request, I think. I know that there were maps in Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mine novel, for instance, and the Oz books famously had fantastic maps, but it’s fun to see people yearning for fantasy cartography because of the stories themselves and the sense of the scale and sweep of Howard’s vision. And maybe even MORE interesting is Mr. Gould’s recognition that asking for such concrete canonicity from weird fiction might not be appropriate! It’s a fun glimpse into the way READERS were engaging with both weird fiction AND Howard’s work particularly, navigating new genre conventions.
In this same issue there’s also a letter from the famously idiosyncratic fan, Gertrude Hemken. These letters from “Trudy” would become a beloved part of the Eyrie, mostly because she wrote in an absolutely delightful and totally fannish style – they’re a lot of fun, and it’s always fun to run into her in the pages of Weird Tales. Anyway, in the midst of a longer letter, she has this to say about Howard (unaware of his death, of course):
“So-o-o happy. I could gurgle!” should be the blurb they use on any and all Howard books henceforth. But it again speaks the clarity with which Howard presented Conan to the readers – he’s instantly and clearly defined, and folks like what they see!
The November 1936 issue (v. 28 n.4) includes the first fans letter reacting to the death announcement from a few issues back.
This letter’s request for a reprinting of his “best stories” as selected by the WT readership isn’t a bad one, honestly, and shows that, while the pulps were an ephemeral medium, there was a real desire to ensure that their contents lived on and were accessible to readers new and old alike. Later, in the same letter, Hopkins has an interesting thing to say:
It’s an interesting daydream: “The Death of Conan the Cimmerian!” And this musing about what could’ve been, and the extension of the character’s adventures beyond the pen of the creator, is an interesting seed that we’ll see explored more in later letters.
But the desire for a collection of Howard’s work was a common one:
I wonder if Clark’s personally bound collection of Conan stories exists in some attic somewhere?
The December ’36 issues (v. 28, n.5) is mostly dedicated to wranglin’ about the covers and whether they’re too risqué or not, but that leads into an interesting letter from Robert Lowndes about the artistic representations of Conan in The Unique Magazine:
It’d be worthwhile collecting these all together and doing a careful interrogation of each, but there’s no room (or time!) here for it…maybe later. I will grab the Rankin piece that Lowndes speaks so highly of, though, from the Jan 34 issue:
I find the sexualization of Conan by readers (and, to be fair, by Howard) hugely interesting, so the way this letter-writer highlights what it was the women found so damn hot about Conan in the stories is pretty fascinating!
I’ll just highlight one more prescient letter about REH from this issue, by the great Clark Ashton Smith:
The next issue, Jan 1937 v. 29 n.1, opens with Wright reflecting on the “necrology” of Weird Tales:
It’s a sad editorial, particularly in the way Wright’s hopes that no one else will die are pretty quickly about to be dashed. But, as he said, they’ve been getting a lot of letters about REH, and this issue includes some very fascinating ones!
I mean, that’s fascinating, isn’t it? Can’t Weird Tales find someone else to keep writing Conan for them? What a wild question, and I can’t think of any precedent for it at all, can you? On the one hand, there must’ve been fairly widespread knowledge that some “writers” in the pulps were house names with lots of different individuals contributing stories under them (a fairly common practice in particular in the western pulps), but the idea that a writer as singular as REH could be replaced is a wild one. On the OTHER hand, though, weird fiction DID have shared universes, if not shared characters – what is Lovecraft’s Mythos but a shared world with the same gods and aliens and dark books showing up in different stories by different authors? Is that the model this letter writer is drawing from when they talk about Conan continuing without REH? I think you have to give credit to Wright here, who very clearly and definitively answers that no one can write a Conan story except Howard…something later paperback authors should’ve kept in mind, in my opinion!
This same issue includes the Ball letter that we talked about in the last Pulp Strainer blog post, and while Ball certainly isn’t asking for someone else to write Conan stories, as we discussed there is a clear expression of the desire for more stories LIKE Conan’s.
Skipping ahead a couple of issues to March ’37 (v. 29 n.3) we get another plea for a book-length collection of Howard’s work:
These calls for a collection of Howard’s work to be published are pretty insistent, and it’s a shame that Weird Tales got so brutally burned on their one and only book publishing adventure (The Moon Terror) that they couldn’t do something with Howard’s work. Derleth’s Arkham House would, in ’46, put out Skull-Face and Others in 1946, complete with a badass Hannes Bok cover:
This book included some good Conan stories, but it wouldn’t be until the Gnome Press paperbacks of the mid-50s that you’d see a dedicated Conan series. Interestingly, those same Gnome Press editions would see just the sort of “Continuing Adventures of Conan” pastiche stories that (some) people were DEMANDING in there letters:
People LOVED Conan man, and that’s all there is to it. Howard had made something new and exciting, had carved out a real niche for himself in weird fiction, and the idea that there wouldn’t be any more Conan stories was a hard pill for some people to swallow. It’s interesting that everyone is explicitly couching these as more CONAN stories…they don’t want imitations, they don’t want other characters by other people, they want CONAN doing CONAN things. In some ways, then, it’s actually quite laudable that people like Kuttner tried to do SOMETHING a little different, even while trying to reverse engineer REH’s own unique approaches to his stories. Also, again, I think you have to salute Wright’s firm “nope” here too – he has a very clear aesthetic vision for weird fiction, and it doesn’t include the bloodless imitators of an inimitable writer like Robert E. Howard.
In the next issue of the Eyrie (v29 n.4) Wright publishes a letter from H. Warner Munn, a Weird Tales author famous for his “Werewolf of Ponkert” story, which was a favorite with readers, that really offers the Last Word on whether Conan should have further adventures written by other people:
Pretty succinctly and strongly put, I’d say, and a position I support. Wright obviously thought so too, and even seems to have used Munn’s letter as the punctuation on the chapter of Official Mourning for Howard. In the next issue (May 1937, v. 29 n.5), there’s only a single, passing mention of “the late Robert E. Howard” in one of the letters, and it’s clear that they’re turning the page on the sorrowful demise of a beloved author…
…and then, in v.29 n.6, the June ’37 issue of Weird Tales:
Goddammit!
With regards to REH, I think there’s something really interesting in getting to read these letters from readers of his stories; you can see the huge enthusiasm for his work and his creations, Conan in particular, a real glimpse into the phenomenon that would become fantasy literature in general and sword & sorcery in particular. There’s a little tinge of sadness here, though – you can only hope that Howard had a sense of just how beloved his work was while he was still alive. Writers are a touchy, morose lot in general, given much to self-recrimination and disappointment, often absolutely certain that they’ve wasted their time and largely failed to achieve what they wanted to with their work. It’s something REH certainly struggled with – his letters include many gloomy reflections on his work and the struggle of writing, even when he’s arguably at the height of his career. It’s something people always talk about, but it bears repeating: if there’s someone out there whose work you like, tell ’em! Even something as simple as a nice note can mean a lot to someone, and you never know when it’ll be too late to tell them!
There’s also something extremely valuable to be had by reading these letters in the Eyrie, I think – they’re such a rich archive of READERS and their reactions to/thoughts about the stories and authors and genre as a whole. In the wake of REH’s death you really start to see the way they were ENGAGING with his work, and with Conan in particular, and it’s a real granular way to interrogate the formation of what would, eventually, become “Sword & Sorcery.” There’s ALSO a really interesting tension between what people want (more Conan!) and what they would eventually get (some pastiche-y early attempts by Kuttner, for example, and then Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser – but not in Weird Tales, of course…).
Some other stray observations – it’s interesting how CONAN focused the readers’ letters generally are, isn’t it? I mean, there’s other stuff mentioned for sure, but the Cimmerian is front-and-center, and it’s his adventures that people are clamoring for more of. Partly that’s got to be simple chronology – after all, Howard’s death is announced with “Red Nails,” one of the best Conan stories of all time, and there’d been a lot of Conan recently too, while his other characters like Solomon Kane and Bran Mak Morn hadn’t appeared for years. But there’s something about Conan’s special alchemy at work there, I think, and particularly the sense of a real, lived in, vital WORLD around him that just grabbed readers.
Finally, I’d point out how often people with talent and knowledge would point out just how inimitable Howard was as a writer. Wright is very firm in his explanations about why there’d be no more Conan stories by other people – he was a singular talent writing singular tales, and no one else could do them. Similarly, I think HPL’s oft-cited “there’s a piece of Howard in every one of his stories” is a perfect way to capture the kind of ineffable qualities of his work (and HPL’s, for that matter). It’s easiest recognized by its absence in, for instance, Kuttner’s S&S work, and really underlines the absolutely necessary quality of a writer finding their authentic voice if they want to produce art. For all the problems with Howard’s work (and there’re a lot!), the one thing you can absolutely say is that they are the products of a writer who was absolutely sincere in his efforts at communicating the things he thought were important and interesting. That he succeeded is shown by the many heartfelt letters we see in The Eyrie.
Sword & Sorcery is a wonderful genre, inventive and vital, and the way it’s grounded intimately within the materiality of its world and characters lets you investigate issues of the body, of the environment, of class and wealth and oppression and violence, in surprising and often insightful ways. That being said…there are, like all genres, some, ah, lesser works, where the promise of the form is not entirely fulfilled. C’est la littérature! And that’s what we’re going to be looking at today, a very middling story that, none-the-less, helps illustrate some important things about the genre. And what story is that, you ask? It’s Henry Kuttner’s “Spawn of Dagon” from the July 1938 issue of Weird Tales!
Now, I don’t wanna be too rough on ol’ Hank here – Kuttner is a hugely important figure in the history of speculative fiction, much more so than may be immediately evident, given both his untimely death at age 42 (in ’58, juuuuust on the cusp of a big explosion in science fiction that he would’ve been a huge part of) AND the fact that he wrote under so many goddamn pseudonyms. He was a good writer, with an interesting perspective on complex, psychological science fiction in particular, laying the foundation for what would eventually become the New Wave much later. And when he was working with his wife, C.L. Moore, on one of their collaborations? Well, there are some exceptional bits of work there, sharp and thoughtful, some of the best stories from the time (we’ve talked about a few of ’em on this here blog, even – check ’em out here, here, and here!)
Similarly, Kuttner has the distinction of being a part of the Lovecraft Circle, writing some good Lovecraftian fiction (“The Invaders” is a fun and weird one) as well as his own distinct weird horror too (“The Shadow on the Screen” and “The Graveyard Rats” in particular are worth checking out). He’s a good, fun writer, and he likes a weird monster and a horrible scenario as much as the next guy, so don’t let my forthcoming criticisms of his S&S scare you off of him, okay? Because I think there’s some important context here for Kuttner’s approach to these types of stories.
For one thing, the genre that we call “Sword & Sorcery” didn’t exist yet, not really – there wasn’t a corpus to point to, for instance, though it was in the process of gelling. Robert E. Howard, who died in ’36, left a body of work in Weird Tales that was, in some inchoate way, obviously it’s own thing; two-fisted adventures full of monsters, magic, and peril, centered around recurring, rough-and-ready characters and told in blood-and-thunder prose. They were popular stories, the Conan tales in particular, and the combination of lost prehistories, exotic locales, and grim violence was something new and exciting and vibrant, so it makes sense that Kuttner would chase after ’em; he was a working writer, after all, perfectly happy to go after a market if it meant a check. Also, like Howard, Kuttner was an inveterate Lovecraftian Circler, sharing with REH the same general interests with regards to alien gods and mind-shattering horror, so he’s got a toe in the Howardian door already. But, given that it’s only a couple of years Post-Howard, you can forgive Kuttner for his somewhat clumsy attempts here, I think.
Similarly, something I think you’ll see in today’s story, is that Kuttner is actually in some ways writing against Howard’s work. Kuttner was good friends (and sometimes collaborator) with another Lovecraft Circle writer, Robert Bloch who, somewhat famously, absolutely positively with deep fiery conviction 100% HATED Conan. Hated the character, hated the stories, hated everything about them, thought Howard was wasting his time and ink writing ’em. It was a minority opinion in the magazine, but it was there! Now, I don’t think Kuttner had a similar animus towards the nascent genre as Bloch did – he wouldn’t have written the stories if he had – but I do think he very consciously wrote his Elak stories as a slightly skewed reaction to Conan. That alone makes them interesting, examples of people doing the boundary definition work necessary to creating a genre.
But, we’ll talk about all that when we get there! First – the Cover!
Yes indeed, lookit that, ol’ Hank got himself a cover, and one by the Master Finlay too! Perfectly serviceable cover, Tor Johnson-lookin’ goon luggin a scantily clad unconscious lady, weird little freak at the front, Errol Flynn watchin’ em there. Kind of a shame, though, that Finlay didn’t get a chance to do the monsters in this story – they’re very much in his wheelhouse, and would’ve been neat to see in his inimitable style. Kind of feels like this cover speaks to the popularity of the late Howard’s Conan tales, though; real hunger for anything even approaching The Master’s Work, so Wright et al. would’ve definitely jumped at the chance to highlight a weird fantasy tale. Not the last time Kuttner’s Elak would appear on the cover of WT either – in fact, only the first Elak story failed to get a cover! Crazy!
Solid ToC this time – the real highlight is the Smith story, “Mother of Toads,” which is a classic. But there’s Bloch on here, Gans Field (aka Manly Wade Wellman), a Price reprint, posthumous verse from Lovecraft and Howard… even the Quinn here is better than his usual stuff (i.e., it’s not a Jules de Grandin story). All in all a solid late Wright issue, I’d say!
So this is the second Elak story the readers of Weird Tales would’ve come across; the first was a two-parter, “Thunder in the Dawn,” and had appeared in the May and June issues of the same year. Unlike Howard’s introduction of Conan, Kuttner had provided a clear and fairly well defined biography of our pal Elak of Atlantis in his first outing. To orient us all: In a time undreamt of (etc etc), the continent of Atlantis, with many cities and many kings, is out there, being all fantastical and suchlike. One of the many city-states on the continent is Cyrena, the northernmost kingdom that was, once, ruled by some guy named Norian. This king, Norian, had two stepsons, Orander and Zeulas. Zeulas ends up killing his stepfather Norian in an apparently aboveboard duel for which both sides had good cause (we’re told this by a druid, so you know it’s solid info) BUT, as a result of this patricide, Zeulas refuses the crown that is his by birthright and leaves the city in (voluntary, it seems) exile, with his younger brother Orander assuming the crown. Zeulas takes the name Elak and becomes a stateless, homeless adventurer. In the first story, Elak and his drunken thief buddy Lycon are summoned back to save Cyrena from an evil wizard, restore Elak/Zeulas’s brother to the throne, and then voluntarily resume the life of a wandering adventurer. Just stick a pin in that “rightful king in voluntary exile with a complex relationship to his family” stuff for now, because I’ll be mentioning it later.
Anyway, that’s basically the gist of Elak’s life before now; it’s not really relevant to today’s story, but I *do* think it’s probably important to the point I’ll be making at the end (and I also doubt if I’ll ever talk about another Elak story again on here), so just keep it in mind for later. Regardless, now we can get into today’s story “Spawn of Dagon!”
And how does Hank open his tale? Why, with an epigraph from G.K. Chesterton, of course!
An interesting quote for a couple of reasons; first, it’s from Chesterton’s “Ballad of the White Horse” which was one of REH’s favorite poems, and it’s easy to see why – it’s a super heroic epic about Alfred the Great fighting the Danes in England, full of wild roaring poetry, the force of destiny, civilizational clashes, magic weapons, very much in the mode of what would become sword and sorcery (even if it is super Christian). In fact, REH liked it so much that he used excerpts from it as epigraphs in some of HIS stories too (off the top of my head I *think* it was in the Solomon Kane story “The Moon of Skulls” but I might be wrong). So it’s notable that Kuttner chooses to include a passage from the same work in his story here. He ends up using a lot of Chesterton, all from the same poem, in subsequent Elak tales too. It’s a little funny, of course; after all, this is a tale of Lost Atlantis, from the misty prehistory of the world…so it’s a bit jarring to see it opening up with a poem from Chesterton, very much a contemporary writer.
It’s also interesting because it underlines that Chesterton is in the lineage leading up to modern fantasy literature, something people sometimes forget. There’s his famous essay “Ethics in Elfland” (which *is* great honestly; it’s so frustrating that it came from the pen of a reactionary and sympathetic-to-fascism asshole like Chesterton) of course, but his “Ballad of the White Horse” is a huge and influential part of the genre’s story too – I’ve even read that Tolkien had, at least, a few positive things to say about it.
Anyway, with Chesterton out of the way, we can finally get into the story proper:
There’s a LOT to unpack here, right off the bat. First – our “hero” Elak is squatting over a corpse with his buddy Lycon, watching two streams of blood oozing from its wounds winding across the floor towards an arbitrary objective…that’s right, they’re gambling over which blood stream reaches a crack in the floor first. I mean, that’s wild, callous shit, truly outrageous! Even crazier, the prize they’re gambling for is the right to loot the body! AND it seems like they killed this guy specifically to rob him – Elak castigates Lycon for picking a fight with a pauper when he doesn’t find any money on him. That’s some grim stuff!
You sometimes see knuckleheads describe Conan as an “anti-hero” which, of course, is nonsense; Conan is 100% a barbarian HERO, rough and uncivilized, but ruled by a strict code of honor and with a clear moral framework. And while it’s true that Conan was a pirate and reaver professionally and therefore certainly must’ve been killing (or at least threatening to kill) folks for their money, he at least had the narrative decency to do it all off camera. Not so with Elak! Here we are, in some Atlantean pub, and right off the bat he’s watching a guy they butchered bleed out, for kicks!
The other interesting thing here is Kuttner’s description of Elak. He’s tall and “extremely slender” with an almost boneless suppleness, a far cry from the mightily-thewed and hairy-chested Conan. To be sure, Elak is strong; we’ll have scenes later in the story demonstrating his superlative physicality (one of the core attributes of S&S character), but it’s of a different sort than the tigerish, muscular dominance of Conan.
Not to harp on it, but I do think that, since Kuttner is writing in the shadow of Howard, it’s worthwhile to see how different he’s making his sword & sorcery hero from the epochal example of the Cimmerian. It’s relevant also because, in terms of plot, Kuttner is clearly cribbing from Howard – there’s a bit of “Tower of the Elephant” in this one, and there’s a later story that is a pretty blatant riff on Howard’s “The Phoenix on the Sword” story. So, in differentiating his stuff from REH, Kuttner has chosen to have a VERY different hero – a willowy, amoral ex-prince…
Hm, who does that sound like?
Honestly, if he had albinism (and an evil sword), he’d *be* Elric; even the names are suspiciously similar, aren’t they? I’ve never encountered Moorcock talking about Kuttner or Elak of Atlantis, but it’s a fair bet that he’s read ’em before, of course, given his deep presence in the genre. And, to be clear, I’m not saying he grabbed Elak or anything; in fact, it’s entirely likely that he independently came up with an anti-Conan the same way Kuttner did, as a direct response to REH’s own work. After all, Howard’s S&S is steeped in his particular interests – clean-bodied and noble barbarism against decadent and effete civilization, rugged frontier individualism, the power of the body to impose one’s will over an unruly world. If you’re taking part in that conversation, there’s a natural counterpoint in a character like Elak (or Elric).
Back to the story: it turns out that Lycon has already pilfered the dead man’s purse, making the blood race game meaningless…but because he’s drunk, he passes out, and Elak is forced to lug his blacked-out buddy out of the tavern and into the night, since the innkeeper has returned with guards who, for some reason, frown on wanton murder. Fleeing through the dark streets, they’re suddenly attacked by a guard!
(Brief aside for weapon talk – our boy Elak is armed with a rapier, as befits a slender, supple warrior, emphasizing speed and precision and skill over the brute butchery of a barbarian’s broadsword. It’s an interesting development!)
So, what was it that spooked that guard?
Well, there you go, everything seems to be perfectly in order and extremely normal: the guard was, of course, scared by the sudden appearance of Some Guy. This strangely blank-faced, robed fellow offers help, and Elak is forced to accept it unhesitatingly, since more guards are thundering down the road. A secret passage in the wall yawns wide, and Elak, bearing his drunken pal Lycon, follows the mysterious stranger in.
Again, perfectly normal – some people, even robed people with strange, unmoving faces, just have cold, clammy hands! Nothing untoward at all!
Elak follows his new (and normal) friend through a dark tunnel – there’s strange, unnatural sounds in the dark around them, but when they reach a hollow in the earth, there’s light:
The line “amid chuckles of goblin laughter” is fun, isn’t it? There’s some good flourishes in here, and Kuttner has certainly got a flair for atmosphere. I love a nitred chamber deep in the earth, myself, particularly if there’re mysterious impossible sounds of the sea about.
Anyway, Elak’s mysterious benefactor introduces themselves: they’re Gesti, and please pay no attention to their chalk white complexion or their curiously glazed eyes. In fact, the only thing that does matter is that Gesti would like to hire Elak for a little job:
I do kind of like Lycon’s glibly cornball vaudeville schtick, though I also 100% accept that some might find it a bit grating – it is basically his entire character, other than drinking, so it can be a little repetitive. Elak asks for some more details about the job:
It turns out Gesti and his vaguely defined band have tunneled a secret passage up through the VERY LIVING ROCK OF ATLANTIS and into one of Zend’s basements in his Mighty Tower of Sorcery. All they need is a brave and violent assassin to use their passage, kill the wizard, and smash a red ball up there. Easy peasy, 1000 gold coins. Plus there’s a pile of loot in the tower too, and Elak can have all that too. Seems suspicious, but like we saw earlier: Elak is an amoral and extremely greedy guy. Plus he’s probably still drunk. Gesti offers to babysit Lycon while he sleeps it off, and that’s pretty much it. Elak, our hero, agrees to murder Zend for money! They give him a weird tube-like weapon which will play no part whatsoever in the story, and then they part ways, Gesti unable to advance farther; as he goes, he gives Elak a strange farewell:
Eh, it’s probably nothing.
Elak pushes up through the secret door into the tower basement, which is dusty and mouse-riddled, obviously a space rarely used by the mysterious Zend. He sneaks his way through the dim, empty halls, knowing he must make it to the very top minaret to destroy the Red Sphere there (presumably killing Zend on the way). But as he’s sneaking:
Helluva security system! A living (in some fashion) disembodied head sitting on a pedestal! I mean, that’s pretty gruesome, isn’t it, especially the way Elak spears it (through the eye! yuck!) and “kills” it! Reckon it’s some kind of weird undead horror, maybe, a product of Zend’s dark sorcery. Very strange and a great image, which ol’ Virgil Finlay drew up for us:
It’s a fun, weird scene…BUT it’s kind of a shame that it doesn’t really amount to anything. The alarm call of the freaky head doesn’t summon any guards or even seem to reach Zend; nothing happens at all, which is a real shame. Personally, if you’ll indulge me, as a writer of S&S myself I 100% would’ve had the headless body of the thing shamble out and fight Elak, directed BY the head on the pedestal. I mean, SOMETHING should’ve happened, you know what I mean? That kind of missed opportunity, and other events-for-no-reason, is a real problem that dogs all of Kuttner’s S&S, so much so that you might be tempted to think he’s actively subverting the expectations from the leanly efficient structures employed by Howard in his stories…but I honestly kinda believe he’s just a little lazy and writing extremely fast, for cash.
Elak continues down the dark corridor, parting a curtain, only to see a group of grotesqueries coming towards him!
Yes indeed, Kuttner is engaging in the tried-and-true-and-tired convention of having an evil wizard exhibiting some physical deformity, just to really highlight the contrast between them and the clean-limbed and hard-bodied S&S protagonist. It’s unfortunate, but it’s something that goes hand-in-hand with this era of literature, so you have to get use to recognizing it.
Anyway, you might assume that Zend and his Big Guy are coming to get Elak, alerted by the head, but that’s not it at all. They don’t know about Elak, and in fact are out on business of their own, vis-a-vis the unconscious girl being carried by the huge giant. Via some clumsy exposition, we learn that Elak recognizes the giant…he’s a criminal he saw getting beheaded at a public execution, transformed into a monstrous servitor by Zend’s necromantic power! Elak decides that he doesn’t like the thought of fighting a dead man, and reckons he ought to hide, waiting for a chance when Zend is alone to stab him in the back. Unfortunately for him, the best laid plans gang aft agley…for Zend and the Giant turn up the VERY CORRIDOR where Elak is hiding! What’s he to do now!?
That’s right: Elak mutherfuckin’ Batmans it there in the passage way.
Defining “Sword & Sorcery” as a genre can be a fraught thing, especially if you’re trying to argue it’s something different from other types of Fantasy (which, to go on the record, it is), but this sort of thing is probably the easiest and most important difference to point out, I think: Sword & Sorcery stories are about the heroes’ ability to physically impose their will on a recalcitrant and hostile world, relying on the native strength, grit, endurance, and willpower inherent in their bodies to do so. They don’t have to have physiques of superheroic proportions (though it helps, and often narratively coincides with other themes important to the literature if they do), but they all have to confront threats through the use of their body; even Elric, who is defined as a sickly figure with little bodily strength, still relies on an inborn strength of will (who else could endure the corrupting and murderous effects of his evil sword?) to perform his epic feats. Here, we have Elak, whom we know is a supple, muscular man capable of fighting and running and such, demonstrate even further the superlative prowess of his body by holding himself perfectly still high up in the ceiling of a tunnel while his foes pass by beneath him, all unawares.
Elak gets a chance to ogle the girl while they pass beneath him, wryly musing on how she would express her gratitude if he saves her, but he lets them pass untroubled: that big ol’ giant is still awful threatening. When it’s safe, he drops to the ground; his hands and feet are bruised and bleeding, but he has successfully evaded detection and is able to sneak on after his prey. He enters a chamber with a window to the outside and three curtained doorways, which he peers through in order.
In the first room he encounters a strange, steel-walled room, where an odd mud-colored rock sits absolutely pulsing with terrible, frightful power. Good wizard shit here, I think, with lots of mysterious and unexplained details. Behind the second curtain he sees Zend at work in a sort of wizard’s laboratory, preparing to Do Something Evil to the unconscious girl:
Again, excellent ambient weird wizardry in this section; I especially like the detail that Zend is going to send the girl’s soul to some planet around the star Antares in case there’s some magic he can learn there. It’s fun stuff! But Elak has no time for that; he leaves the girl to her dark fate and checks out the third curtain, where he encounters a rosy glowing light…the chamber of the red sphere! And it’s filled with weird techno-sorcery too, tubes and wires and pipes and things; it reminds me a little of the robo-tower from Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story “Two Sought Adventure” and, I think, speaks to Kuttner’s more sci-fi interests. But, just as Elak is about to get to work destroying the macguffin, the giant rushes up the stairs and into the room!
So, a couple of things – first and most importantly for the story, the Red Sphere is unplugged and powered down BUT NOT DESTROYED in the fight. Secondly, it’s a fun fight, honestly – the rapier, bending dangerously as it pierces the giant’s heart, but to no avail, is good stuff, as is the eventual wrestling match that sees Elak pitching the giant out the window. Also, as an aside: I think Kuttner uses “his body fell as a tree falls” or some variant in EVERY SINGLE S&S story he wrote, all the Elaks and even in the two Prince Raynor stories, every single time. Something about the image that he liked, I guess, or it just felt very actiony and sword-and-sorcerous to him, or something. It’s an odd tic. Everybody is always crashing to the ground like a felled tree.
As he’s recovering from the fight, he hears a shriek from the room below; running to investigate, he encounters Zend, fleeing in terror, and hears a babble or horrible voices coming up the passage.
I mean, they’re great monsters, aren’t they? Bubbling, semi-solid tentacle monsters with parrot- (or octopus-) like beaks, slimy and oozy and terrible. Good weird critters, for sure, and much more interesting than the gillmen you might’ve expected, given the title of the story. The Dagon of this story is no Biblical Philistine Fish God; this is Lovecraft’s Dagon, for sure, but these ain’t Innsmouth Deep Ones at all. It’s fun, and nice to see Kuttner really going for a much more alien, deep sea kind of monstrosity here, you know?
Anyway, Elak is quickly trussed up with cords by the Jelly Monsters, and sees that Zend is similarly tied up. Hilariously, Elak seems to be an obstinate optimist because he asks Gesti, who came in with the monsters, for his money.
Betrayal! Who could’ve foreseen such a turn of events, particularly since Gesti seemed so nice and normal, a real bro.
This is why you gotta ask ALL prospective employees if they’re the hellish spawn of an alien god. They gotta tell you if they are, like cops. Zend seems a little surprised that Elak is so dumb:
While he’s wrangling unsuccessfully with the ropes around Elak’s wrists, Zend is able to provide some more exposition with regards to the jellymen’s motivations. Following the state of the art pre-tectonics ideas about the evolution of the earth then current in Kuttner’s day, Zend explains how the Earth was once one vast ocean, ruled by the Spawn of Dagon. The rising of the Continents, in addition to reducing their sovereignty are also an affront to their dignity, and so they have worked tirelessly to sink all the land and return the world to a state of Primal Ocean. There’s some fun bits in here about ancient, prehuman races that got dumped in the drink by the Dagonians, big ol’ weirdos and sphinxes, good ancient fantasy stuff. Zend then explains that, without his intervention, Atlantis would’ve long ago been sunk – it’s his magic alone that keeps the island above water, and the monsters know it. “How’re those bonds coming,” asks Elak:
I really wanted Zend to make an aside to Elak here: “Oh, by the way, you’re, uh, sterile now.” Yes, the weird radiations of the Red Sphere kill the Jellyfish Guys instantly; that’s why they needed a foolish catspaw to break it, so they could get at Zend and bring about a return of their Oceanic Empire. Real shame those ropes are holding strong, an adventurer like Elak might be able to thwart them if he wasn’t trussed up like a Yule Goose.
Yes, despite harboring an insane hatred of all dirt-grubbing humans, the horrors below didn’t bother to kill Lycon when they had a chance or even, apparently, tie him up. So he, rested and sufficiently sobered up, has arrived in the nick of time! Oh, and the sexy girl Zend had kidnapped wakes up, just in time for Elak to promise to help her escape…if they survive!
It seems like our heroes are doomed, however – there are too many of the monsters, and their weapons seem powerless against their gelatinous unearthly bodies…but then they begin to melt away! Zend has gotten his Red Sphere back online, bathing them all in its strange radiation!
Having learned a lesson from Gesti’s betrayal, Elak grabs the girl and the three of them skedaddle, ending up in one of the city’s many municipal parks. Lycon leaves Elak and Coryllis in search of some grog.
And that’s how Kuttner ends his story “Spawn of Dagon,” with his hero having public sex in a park.
Perfectly breezy little story. Are there some problems? Absolutely – the writing in places is sloppy and rushed (the geography of the tower is a bit strange), things happen for no reason and have no impact on the story (the alarm head, the weird weapon that never comes into play), and there’s TWO dei ex machina in here: Lycon’s sudden arrival to cut the ropes and Zend’s offscreen repair job on the Red Sphere. These same problems crop up again and again in Kuttner’s S&S stories too, by the way – there’s lots of unsatisfying action and narrative hops that, frankly, just don’t work very well. So why the hell should you read these, then?
Well, as I mentioned in several places, I really think these Elak stories are interesting historical documents that capture a very specific moment in the S&S genre. Howard is dead, but he’s left behind something new in his stories, something unique and interesting. And so Kuttner is engaging with it, trying to figure out what works and the ways he can make it his own, and while the experiments might not WORK, they are interesting and important failures.
Kuttner recognizes that he can’t (and doesn’t want to) just write a Conan clone, so he makes a decision to create a different protagonist. A strong, physical, brave character, sure, but one without the Noble Savage trappings of Howard’s heroes. Moreover, rather than Conan’s rough but iron-clad sense of honor, Kuttner makes Elak a sneaky, amoral, and largely dissipated character – Conan’s pristine wilderness is discarded for a world-weary urban cynic. Moreover, whereas Conan’s arc is, broadly, defined as the ascent of a vital barbarian to the pinnacle of power as a king, Elak has REJECTED kingship outright, before his stories even begin!
Kuttner simply isn’t interested in the same things that a rural hayseed from Cross Plains TX is – he’s a son of the city, living in Chicago and LA and New York, huge metropolises at the height of the Great Depression! His sword and sorcery is much more interested in cities and power and corruption, something very different from Howard’s preoccupation with nature and wilderness. And I think Kuttner DOES see that there’s something in the genre that lets him wrestle with those topics in a new and interesting way.
So, while I don’t think the Elak stories are necessarily good, they are important. Kuttner’s grasping mercenary characters having adventures in well-developed (or at least, more well-developed than Howard’s) fantasy cities IS a new direction in ’38, part of the current that would produce Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and Elric later on, evolving out of and in response to Howard’s very sui generis Conan stories. Elak isn’t nearly as well developed or interesting as those later creations, of course, but he’s an important stepping stone leading to them, and therefore an interesting part of the genre’s history!
We’re in the home stretch for Hallowe’en now, so lets try and get some good chilling pulp fiction discussions going on, shall we? It’s nice here in Austin now, too – we finally got some rain, our first in like forty days, and in addition to filling up the rain tanks (we’ve got about 950 gallons of water storage now, which we put in right as the drought started, so it’s nice to finally have it full!) it has also gotten almost seasonable – low 70s as I write this, with overnight temps promising to hit crisp 60s and 50s. Not really what most people think of when we start talkin’ October country and all, but by Satan, I’ll take it!
The sudden shift to Fall(ish) weather and thoughts of The Season inspired the choice of stories today: it’s from the Mayor of October Country himself, Ray Bradbury, and his fun, mythopoetical story “The Scythe” from the July 1943 issue of Weird Tales!
Bradbury, of course, needs no introduction – a truly major figure in sci-fi, and he’s one of the rare genre guys it’s ok for your Very Serious Literary Types to praise, fer chrissake, someone who gets a pass for writing imaginative fiction because it’s got such heart and verve and style. And it’s all very justified; Bradbury is one of the greats (though Fahrenheit 451 sucks), and he’d be rightly numbered among the Titans for The MartianChronicles, easily one of the greatest short story collections in history, a true masterpiece. And, while he’s often remembered mostly as a sci-fi guy, he’s also got some serious Weird Fic chops too (I’d argue that’s why his sci-fi was so successful, actually; there’s a vital strain of weirdness, and all that implies, when he’s writing about Martians, for instance)!
In fact, Bradbury got his start in the pages of Weird Tales, writing something like 20 or 25 stories between 1942 and 1948, if I remember correctly. This is all post-Wright, of course, and I think Bradbury benefited from Dorothy McIllwraith’s tenure as Editor; his weird fic seems to fit nicely into her vision of the genre, I think, a slightly sentimental (though rarely sappy) atmosphere shot through with real glimmers of coal-black darkness. And, of course, Bradbury’s first collection, Dark Carnival, was published by August Derleth’s Arkham House in 1947. That’s what you call a serious Weird pedigree!
(As an aside, if you’re interested in a great and extremely granular biography of ol’ Ray, I’d highly recommend John Eller’s THREE VOLUME biography from University of Illinois Press, Becoming Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury Unbound, and Bradbury Beyond Apollo. They’re great, very interesting and with considerable attention to the details of his papers, correspondence, and archives, as well as putting his work and life in important historical contexts. I will say, though, that you should be prepared for Bradbury’s extremely bad politics, particularly later in life – he was a Reagan fan and was extremely anti-affirmative action, basically your bog standard boot-straps-and-elbow-grease small gov’t libertarian, not as ugly or as bad as, say Niven, but still dumb as hell! It’s shocking, until you start thinking about his deep nostalgia for midwestern childhood. Oh well!)
Anyway, let’s look at this issues cover and ToC:
A quiet, contemplative cover for this July 1943 issue, particularly interesting given the date that this issue came out. The cover is for the Bedford-Jones story, “His Last Appearance,” and it posits an old soldier returning to the Pacific theater after the end of World War II. Of course, in 1943, WWII was still raging, with the siege of Stalingrad finally coming to an end, the beginning of the long brutal retreat of the Nazis westward, and the start of Allied plans for the invasion of Europe at the Casablanca conference. For Americans, WWII didn’t start until the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in Dec 1941, and the war in the Pacific had been a long and brutal one in ’42, with the Fall of Manila and rapid Japanese advances in a number of places, including the Aleutians. But here we are, in 1943, with a story that is already imagining the war over!
It’s interesting to see the way the war was being interrogated in the public sphere and within the pages of the speculative fiction magazines at the time, imagining an end to the war and return to a more “normal” status quo in the near future. What’s missing from all these stories, of course, are the horrific specificities of future history, death camps and the Holocaust, V2 rockets and the Atomic Bomb, and the global detente of the Cold War. It makes for fascinating reading, glimpses into how people are grappling with such dramatic and profound events and changes. The Pulps give you a chance to really see the world and the people at very specific times, and they’re just fascinating!
As for the ToC:
The big story here is Bloch’s “Yours Truly – Jack the Ripper,” probably one of his best and most famous stories. Bloch by this point in his career has basically exorcised Lovecraft from his work, having found his own style, tone, and topics of interest outside of the shadow of the Old Gent. Bloch’s “Ripperverse” work is an important part in his career, both because it laid the groundwork for his intensely psychological interest in murderers/serial killers, but also because it would lead his to write “A Toy for Juliette” in Harlan Ellison’s epochal anthology Dangerous Visions; so taken with the story was Ellison that he would write a sequel, “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World,” which he put in right after Bloch’s story in the collection. Anyway, it’s fun to see the beginnings of all that right here in Weird Tales!
Enough jibber-jabber, on to our story today, “The Scythe” by Ray Bradbury!
Look, the art in WT at this time…it ain’t what it used to be, okay? This is a perfectly evocative image, a little rough maybe, but it gets the job done I suppose. Still, makes you dream of the days of Finlay, don’t it? Also, I’ll just point out, that this is yet another example of the art giving too much away from the story; combined with the little blurb thing at the top of the pic, you definitely start this story with far too much information, in my opinion. Oh well! We’re used to it by now, but it’s still annoying as hell!
There’s no denying it – Bradbury knows what he’s doing. Great sudden in medias res opening here, and the short, percussive first sentence (“Quite suddenly there was no more road.”) is nigh on a perfect way to start the story, evocative and sharp and perfect, and a great lonely image. A road winding on through farmland, leading past trees and the stones and then a farmhouse and a wheatfield and then, as if it’s job were done, the road dies. Great, great stuff!
We’re introduced to some characters who might’ve escaped from the “Grapes of Wrath,” or maybe they’re just off-broad versions. “Tom Joerg” seems awfully close to “Tom Joad,” doesn’t it? And, like their Oakie comrades in Steinbeck’s book, they’re having a rough time of it, having followed this road that goes nowhere and running out of gas. A long-suffering wife and some hungry kids – that’s what you call prairie pathos, man.
What’s also interesting is that section there in the middle, where Tom starts looking at his hands. The writing is great of course (“farm blown out from under them” is a gem), but it also very specifically evokes the image of the dust bowl, doesn’t it? Now, while the droughts and soil loss and economic collapses continued into the 40s, it was even then very strongly associated with the 30s. Bradbury is priming us for the fact that, while this story was published in ’43, it probably took place earlier. The timeline is very important to this story, indeed is one of it’s major points, so we’re being prepped here. A neat bit of mechanical work, is my point, that Bradbury is doing here.
Starved, lost, and without anything else to do, Molly suggests to Tom that he head on up to the little farmhouse and see if they couldn’t spare a bite for the travelers. Tom swallows his pride and stumps on up to the house:
The knocking three times has some kind of mystical resonances, doesn’t it? There’s the trifold symmetry of time, Past-Present-Future, there, but there’s also a sense of “asking three times” being the amount that signifies contractual obligation in magical relationships. Anyway, Tom enters the house and his spidey-senses start tingling immediately. Sure enough, he finds a dead body, an old man clutching a single blade of ripe wheat and a scythe leaning against the wall. Weird as that is, Tom finds that the old man apparently anticipated his death, and left behind what amounts to a will:
A lot here! First, and of most immediate importance, is the fact that the Joerg’s are now landowners – the old man has bequeathed the house and land to whoever has found him. What would give me pause, of course, is the next bit, which comes off as a little weird: take the farm AND THE TASK ORDAINED THERETO, and take ’em freely and unquestioningly. That’s a magical compact right there, a binding of Joerg to the land and some unspecified job that has to be done.
Also, we get a date here – April 1939. Note it!
Tom seems a bit spooked, but he and Molly quickly accept this lucky twist of fate. They take the farm as offered, and plan to start living the good life there in the middle of nowhere.
Not quite sure what the economic benefit of growing a fast-dying/fast-sprouting variety of wheat is! Also, it’s planted on a vast scale, and it seems to ripen in weird, localized clusters or zones. But he seems driven to cut it!
It’s strange, and it makes me wonder how exactly the farm is supporting this family, but after a while Tom decides that this preternatural wheat can go fuck itself, and he decides to stop cutting it. How’s that work out for him, you ask? Well:
He took the farm, and with it the APPOINTED TASK which, apparently, is to cut the weird wheat, day in and day out, unceasingly. Or else! The details of the task elude him, save for the necessity of it, the necessity of cutting the grain down when and where it is ripe in this strange stretch of field, not harvesting, not tilling, not planting, just cutting it down as it comes up, over and over again, letting it sprout and grow where and when it does. Extremely strange and mythic, isn’t it? And then, when he’s harvesting, he suddenly has a very strange, very mysterious reveleation:
Great writing, the sudden vertiginous sense of disorder and confusion that Tom feels is very ably conveyed to the reader – what is going on? Why’s he freaking out now? Tom runs into the house, half-panicked, but eventually he can get the words out to Molly:
Pretty spectacularly weird isn’t it – he’s literally a grim reaper, ending a thousand lives every time he cuts a single stalk of wheat in that uncanny field. It seems like maybe his exposure to the work has, slowly, given him insight into its nature, or maybe the fact that he had some relationship to one of the lives he just cut down has triggered his illumination, but it doesn’t matter – Molly thinks he’s nuts, and Tom knows he’s not. Molly tells him to shut up, that they’ve got a good thing going with this farm (I guess there must be other food crops, and a cow or two, so that’s how they’re eating?). And she reads the Bible at him all week, I guess trying to get him to settling down, until of course a telegram arrives letting Tom know his Mom DID die, on the very day that he had his wheat-based freak out.
Tom wants to leave, but Molly is made of sterner stuff. She shoots his California plan down and tells him that by God they’re staying right there, where they’ve got a home and food and future! And, realistically, what can Tom do – we (and he) must know that he’s made the deal, he’s accepted the job, and the job HAS to be done.
With a certain mid-western pragmatism, Tom begins to accept the inevitability of his task. He communes with the grave of his predecessor and contemplates the long-line of harvesters that must’ve come before him, down to prehistory. (As and aside, the idea of the Cro-Magnon harvester is funny and strange – so like, before agriculture there were cavemen forced to chop down the Magic Sheaves of Life and Death? It’s an odd, incongruous image, but one we’ll just have to forgive Bradbury for).
Now we’re getting into the real interesting part of the story – there’s a little musing here about what Tom’s relation to the Work is. He’s not KILLING the people, not maliciously – he’s just doing a job, taking care of his family. An interesting bit of ethics to consider, maybe, though Tom abandons it when he has the brain flash that, if he could find his and his family’s wheat stalks, why, could they live forever? I’m sure this magical wheat never considered that loophole before!
No sooner thought than answered – Molly and his kids’ time HAS come, he HAS to cut them down…and he can’t! He decides to fight fate!
Over supper Molly asks some questions about the wheat, even suggesting that Tom oughta call in the Extension boys from the local Ag Dept to have a look – what the hell good is this weird wheat that rots immediately, anyway? Tom is horrified – what might the GOV’T do with the Grain of Life and Death, after all? It’s a neat little part of the story, another of those little asides that Bradbury raises and which run a chill up and down the ol’ spine as you regard them in the story. It’s fun! Of course Tom is having no part of it. Molly doesn’t think the Wheat of Fate is real, but Tom KNOWS it is.
Grim stuff, and Tom again tries to abandon the work, locking up the Scythe and choosing to ignore the wheat…but then Molly begins to suffer from a strange kind of lassitude, and his kids seem to whither and fade a bit too, afflicted with a kind of odd malaise. He doesn’t know what will happen to them, or to the countless thousands he has refused to reap, but he’s going to wait and see…
…and of course he wakes in the middle of the night out in the field, with the scythe in his hand, being driven by a mad compulsion to DO THE JOB. He fights it, struggles mightily…
…and then the house fuckin’ blows up!
Horribly, Molly and Susie and Tom Junior AREN’T dead…they’re trapped behind horrible walls of flame a smoke between life and death, unresponsive, unaware, undying. It’s a horrible scene, and there’s some very fine writing here as Tom is forced to confront the implacable nature of Life and Death. He brings his family out onto the lawn, cold and sleeping beyond death, and realizes that he cannot abandon the task, that he cannot have a life anymore – he is the grim reaper.
Pretty horrible scene, isn’t it, the image of his family just out of sight screaming and dying as Tom, chained to the merciless scythe, cuts through the wheat in the night. Grim as hell!
There’s the significance of the date of the story coming around: 1939, and the beginning of the Second World War.
Is Tom *causing* it, do you think? Is he heedlessly cutting, maybe cutting more than he should, causing a horrible war and its aftermath out of his grief? Or is he simply, heedlessly, heeding the wheat, cutting madly because that is what has been Fated? It’s not clear, and that ambiguity is troubling and, of course, probably the point.
And as for Tom?
And that’s the end of “The Scythe” by Ray Bradbury!
Tom keeps on cutting – again, is he causing the accelerating deaths, the horror of modern warfare and conflict and imperialism and transnational capitalism, or is he merely the instrument of it, his feverish monomania and ceaseless toil a product of OUR horrible times?
It’s a nice little story, I think, and it really captures a very pure strain of myth that Bradbury often mined in his work. It’s also an interesting time capsule, a writer watching the world around him ending and reflecting on it, what it meant to him and society. A good reminder of the power and possibility of pulp literature!
The shittiest, dumbest fascists in all of history may be crowing (for now) about their reactionary censorship, but we shan’t let their weepy, whining bullshit deter us – fuck them and fuck all fascists forever! And so, pushing them out of our minds and into the dustbins of history, we shall instead turn our attention to fun, useful, and interesting topics; namely, WEIRD FICTION.
Been a good couple of months since the last of these posts, but we always come back to the topic of classic weird fiction here at the ol’ blog. And, as the most Hallowed of all Eves looms in our future (a scant month-and-a-half away!) it’s time to get down to brass tacks and dive back into the pages of the Unique Magazine, Weird Tales. And this story today is an interesting one, though not without some problematic content, of course. It’s Arthur Burks’ “Chinese Processional” from the 1933!
Burks is an interesting guy, one of the absolute machines of the pulp era who came to be known as a “million-words-a-year” guy for his insane productivity. He wrote something like 800 short stories in his long career, and was famous for his methodical approach to his fiction. That being said, I think there’s actually some fairly nice writing in some of his work (today’s story included), a vibrancy and thoughtfulness to the descriptions and mood he’s trying to invoke.
Doubtless, this is because ol’ Burks actually lived in China. Most of the biographies of Burks focus on his time stationed in the Dominican Republic during the brutal occupation there, a period of his life that inspired him to write some (often shockingly racist) “voodoo” stories that were immensely popular with pulp readers of the day. However, in 1927 he resigned his commission while in China and ended up living there for a while, a period of his life that was an equally strong influence on his writing; I think it gave him a bit more depth and insight into the period and place at least, which we’ll talk about below. His deep connection to China, and specifically to the Manchu dynasts who oversaw the collapse of the Empire in the face of European Imperialism, is evident in the fact that he wrote the preface for a memoir by one of the Dowager Empress’s Ladies-in-Waiting (“Old Buddha” by Princess Der Ling).
But, before we dive in, let’s take a look at the cover and the ToC!
A nice painterly action scene curtesy of ol’ J. Allen St. John. It’s a nice one; I like the shocked look of the goon getting shanked there, and the Venusian beast has a nice sense of motion and heft to it. The only problem with it is that it’s an illustration of one of ol’ Kline’s pretty cash-grabby and pastiche-y “Venus” stories. As far as sword-n-planet fiction, it’s not *bad* per se; you’ll just be unable to shake the feeling that you’ve read basically all this same stuff about another guy, Carter was it? And didn’t it take place of Mars? Oh well; c’est les pulps, after all!
The ToC has some fun stuff here – a work-a-day Leinster story with some Big Ass Bugs, which is always fun, as well as what’s probably my favorite Conan-the-King story, “The Scarlet Citadel.” Also neat to see them reprinting “The Night Wire” again! That’s absolutely one of my favorite weird stories of all time; we talked about it a couple of years ago, if you remember.
But enough of this! On to the story: “Chinese Processional” by Arthur J. Burks!
A pretty brutal title illustration by ol’ “Jay Em” Wilcox here! Also notable in that it’s not *particularly* racist, although of course it is definitely grounded in the pulp orientalism of the day, trading in the brutish menace and cruel savagery of a racialized other. Interestingly, I don’t think you can say the same about the story, and even the tone of the violence, which in this illustration seems to be of a particularly barbaric nature, is different in Burks’ writing. But we’ll get to that!
Our story opens with our narrator musing upon his subtle, innate psychic abilities, something that it seems like Burks also thought – his later life, in the 50s and 60s, included a fair bit of writing about psychic phenomena and supernaturalism. But, our narrator is quick to assure us, even his psychic gifts cannot FULLY explain what we’re about to read!
Right of the bat, we’re introduced to some history about the Summer Palace outside of Peking, a royal retreat where the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi (known more commonly as Cixi today) went into retirement. Cixi is, of course, a real person, a powerful and fascinating figure who, through a combination of political acumen, ruthless realpolitik, and versatile diplomacy, ruled China for fifty something years, pitting European powers against one another while brutally suppressing reform and dissent. Here’s a picture of her, btw, from 1904:
Burks’ familiarity with the history of the Manchu court is on display in this short but sweet first section; it provides a nice sense of the power of the Chinese Empire and the monumental weightiness of the Summer Palace, I think, particularly where Burks’ points out to us the artificial, engineered nature of the landscape – the hill is human made, as is the vast Kun Ming Lake, speaking to the power of the Emperors who can reorder the surface of the Earth to fit their whims:
It also introduces a major theme that will run through this story: tourism, and in particular the way a we interact with the past when visiting these places. The little aside about a guide showing you where the (much reviled) “Emperor” Piyu was locked away in the Summer Palace, for instance, orients us within a framework of tourism and exploitation.
There’s a real sensuous delight that our narrator is taking from the Summer Palace; indeed it seems like he’s really just fascinated by Imperial China, and particularly of the grand palatial complexes that represented both the temporal power AND spiritual centrality of the Emperors. This yearning to steep himself in this history is such that our dude here wants to spend the night in the Summer Palace, just like he did in the Forbidden City, a very intimate connection to history, don’t you think? Our revere is interrupted, however, by the reminder that he (and us, by extension) are tourists here, and can’t just wander about and do as we please.
Our guy, unable to duck off and hide away in the Palace during the day, sneaks back in after hours and ends up swimming through the lake towards the boathouse he visited earlier. I think there’s some nice writing here, the way the lake is made into this mysterious, mythical place that our “hero” must cross:
We get great sensory writing here, the moonlight like glaring eyes, the fish and the lotus roots, a real “spell of the past” sort of thing…that is AGAIN broken by the reminder that there’s a thriving tourist industry here, that our guy first encountered these stories and images as a tourist being told these things. It’s a great little writerly trick, a very conscious and effective stylistic flourish that produces a marvelous mood; as weird fiction readers, we’re quite familiar with ruins and decay and the hoary tales of the past, but then to have them all contextualized as part of a modern tourist complex transforms the “mythic” landscape in a remarkable way – there’s even an explicit mention of the crass commodification of these cultural/historical/mythic tales, with anyone who can afford to being able to engage in what had previously been the sole privledge of royalty! It’s good stuff!
Our guy makes his way across the lake and up a canal towards the boathouse:
Good spectral writing in this section as our narrator investigates the forbidden boathouse. Invisible pigeons cooing overhead, the ancient boats (one half-sunk in the water), the sense of age and the weight of memory…it’s good environmental writing, real pleasurable. Burks, as mentioned above, was famous for his prolific output, but I do think you can tell when a writer is *into* what they’re writing, and this is such a clearly envisioned scene with such sharp emotional resonance that it’s impossible for me to think he was ONLY adding words up for money here. It’s honestly good stuff!
Anyway, our guy hangs out in the boathouse, musing upon history and the Emperors of China deeply and profoundly and, possibly, a little psychically? He feels like that, if he just puts his mind to it, he can summon up, in some misty, numinous way, a shadow of that glorious age…
Who could’ve foreseen such a weird turn of events!
Yes, our guy seems gripped by some vision…but is it an internal expression of his desire to imagine the past, or is it something more, something external to him? Regardless, and luckily blessed with the ability to understand Mandarin, he slips into one of the barges (the one still afloat) and watches a strange scene unfold before him!
First, and very nicely described in the prose, there wrecked barge rising from the water, mended and restored to its original glory. Then, a marvelous procession of people enter the boathouse:
A lot to unpack here – first off, the spectral figures are a stately procession of an Imperial Chinese household led, we can safely assume, by the shade of the powerful Empress Dowager Cixi herself. Alongside her is a powerfully built man armed with a beheading knife, an example of Chekov’s Executioner. But even MORE interesting is the way the narrators attempts to justify this scene transforms into a commentary of Ugly American Tourists. Perhaps these are but actors, hired by crass Americans to enact some kind of historical play for their delight and amusement.
It’s incredible how bitter this idea is expressed here, isn’t it? Our guy expects these Americans to appear any minute now “to pay their money, and watch, and laugh over” the show they paid for. “Tourists had no sentiment” is a remarkably condemning statement, and one apparently very strongly felt by the narrator. “The aura of heart-ache which shrouded this old place,” all the old “sorrows and tears” would mean nothing to a bunch of loud, rowdy Americans come to gawk and consume and generally disrespect history and the dead.
Our narrator is, presumably, also an American; only an American can have such sharply specific contempt for their countrymen, after all. It is interesting though that our guy here, of course, is also acting somewhat disrespectfully though, isn’t it? He swam the lake and broke into the boathouse after all – is the fact that he has reverence for the history (or so he claims) enough to absolve of, basically, doing exactly the same thing he’s cursing the hypothetical American tourists for doing?
It is a somewhat moot point however, because of course no tourists come in – this is not a reenactment at all. The Imperial entourage continues to pack into the boathouse, with the Empress and her favorites taking their place in the restored boat, while the rest of the crew piles into the boat in which our narrator is hiding (though they take no notice of him at all…). Then, in a very ghostly fashion, the chains slip from the boathouse doors, the gate opens, and the Imperial Barges sail once again the surface of Kun Ming lake.
There’s some very dreamlike writing here as they glide across the lake, whispers of mysterious conversation, the dilapidated ruins of the Summer Palace restored to their former glory, lights in windows and so forth. Our guy has clearly entered into another time, a spectral memory of China at its Imperial height, but even so he persists in thinking “any moment those crass American tourists will show up.” It’s a little funny, but perhaps the resilience of belief in the face of the mysterious is stronger than we can imagine.
Anyway, something happens which brings all this to a head for our narrator:
A man has been found within the grounds of the Summer Palace, and he’s in some serious trouble. The Empress, regal and terrible, steps from the barge to the shore, and confronts the man, who trembles before her. He’s beaten with bamboo rods, his blood mingling with the earth and staining the grass, and then, having confessed to his crime, the Empress orders him executed.
Now, before we go on, let’s take a moment to interrogate the usage of the offensive slur “coolie.” It’s a definitely racialized (and class-based) term, used to refer to laborers, particularly “unskilled” manual laborers, from south east Asia (generally India or China). The origins of the term go as far back as the 16th century, a Europeanized spelling of a Tamil word “kūli” which means “wages” or “hire.” It came into prominence and achieved its deeply racist connotation with the abolition of slavery by the British in the 1800s; needing a replacement for the vast labor needed to prop up the Empire and their colonial holdings, they took to hiring huge amounts of cheap workers and shipping them across the world from China or India to places like the Caribbean. These were, ostensibly, free people (mostly men) who had been contracted for their work, though in practice they were often little more than indentured servants, having signed contracts that basically enslaved them for a period of time. The labor trade was a major commercial enterprise of the era, both for the British and China, and is a hugely important part of the brutal exploitation of the age. It also carried over into the English language, and became a catch all term meant to convey a particular racial and class-based identity for the people being referred to. Interestingly, there is some relatively recent reclamation of the term, with working class heroes proudly proclaiming their identity as such in more recent movies and books. One of those things you have to be aware of and confront when reading old literature.
Anyway, our guy is troubled by what he sees – a brutal beating is one thing, but is seems clear that they’re going to kill this guy. He runs around trying to get them to stop, but he can’t actually interact with anybody – just like on the boat, they don’t seem able to see him, and when he tries to grab the Empress’s sleeve he simply can’t; it’s as if she’s incorporeal.
A grisly scene indeed!
Everybody, including our narrator, clambers back into the boats and continues their sailing around the lake, though it has become a decidedly weird experience for our guy.
The barges wheel about and make for the boathouse…and as they travel, everything seems to subtly begin to change:
Everything is returning to its ruined, dark, abandoned state as they travel the lake – whatever spell had restored the Summer Palace to its previous glory has vanished, apparently. There’s a wonderful line about the lights on the shore extinguishing as the boats sail by, a great and very spooky image, and when they arrive at the dock of the boat house there’s a shadow waiting for them, a kind of presence that seems to swallow up one by one the figures of the night’s haunting. When the shadow touches our guy, he feels a terrible coldness…and suddenly everything was as it was before in the boathouse; a barge sunk, everything dirty and dusty and abandoned.
He doesn’t swim back; he runs.
The coda to the story is a newspaper story that he comes across later:
And that’s THE END of “Chinese Processional” by Arthur Burks!
Now, as weird fiction, the ending is, admittedly, a little lackluster – the Empress returned to punish the guy who had tried to loot her tomb in the Summer Palace, simple supernatural vengeance story, pretty standard ghost fare. And the scene of the beheading is fine, though I wish it had been a bit more nightmarish, given the dreamlike quality of the prose that characterized the scenes on the lake.
But, all things considered, I like it. There’s good writing in here, like I said, and the fact that it’s a story set in China by a white guy and it’s not MORE racist or MORE “exotic” is actually pretty remarkable – Weird Tales, readers, writers, and editors alike, all LOVED a good ol’ “Mysterious Inscrutable Orient!” story, which can be quite rough going these days. But the tone that the author takes here is, shockingly, respectful, at least of the Imperial past of China. And the way he attacks tourism, and AMERICAN tourists at that, is very interesting and, honestly, fairly atypical for the era. Just goes to show you that there’s often SOMETHING interesting in the stories that showed up in these magazines!
Howdy Pardners! Been a dog’s age, ain’t it? Lotta shit happening, so I ain’t had the time to scratch out as much writin’ and musin’ as I’d like to for this here blog, but still! Catch as catch can, so here we are again, and it’s a rip-snorter this time, a wonderful little story that one could very easily classify as an early example of the “Weird Western” genre originally from 1936: it’s “Spud and Cochise” by Oliver La Farge, originally published in The Forum but republished nearly 20 yrs later in good ol’ Fantasy & Science Fiction!
First thing to touch on – is this, truly, really, actually, pulp? Well, frankly…no. The magazine it was published in originally, back in ’36, was a slick called The Forum, a long-lived magazine first published in the late 1800s and running well into the middle of the 20th century. It’s early iteration took its name very seriously, hosting dueling essays on the major news topics of the day – it famously had a whole issue devoted to American Imperialism and whether it was Good or Bad following the 1898 expansion of U.S. holdings into the Caribbean and the Pacific, for instance. Beginning sometime in the teens, though, The Forum began to publish more fiction, although it never truly abandoned its “Ripped from the Headlines” essays and articles.
I called it a “slick,” by which I mean it was published on higher quality paper, had pretentions of greater literary/intellectual/social merit, and also had a lot more advertising. In fact, during some of its run, particularly in the 30s and 40s, it might’ve actually graded into the storied heights of the “glossies,” since it had circulation and distribution comparable to Harper’s and The Atlantic at the time, with whom they also shared a number of authors. With regards to the fiction it published, it also never focused on a specific genre, which is something else it had in common with the glossies and fancier slicks. In general, the fiction in The Forum was of a more serious, literary bent, though of course you’ll see that today’s story was republished in Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine in ’57, and it is very definitely a work of fantasy.
Of course, F&SF isn’t exactly a pulp either; it was first published in ’49, a period that, really, can’t be said to be truly of the pulp era, at least not classically. The post-war publishing boom had changed that landscape irreparably (along with changes in printing and mail distribution), resulting in very different magazine business and newsstand culture. Similarly, radio and teevee totally changed the nature of popular entertainment. Gone were the heady days of dozens of magazines battling it out for a vast audience of readers hungry for more short stories. Now, genres were firmly cemented, and only those with sturdy, reliable fandoms could survive in the hardscrabble world of magazine publishing.
In fact, F&SF was clearly meant to be seen as a break from the pulpy past. It had no interior illustrations, for one thing, focusing instead on the stories, something that immediately stands out in contrast to, say, Astounding or Weird Tales. It was also created by and associated with a very specific group of editors and writers, people who had basically split with what I call the “Ray Palmer” school of sci-fi. There’s a whole story there, a fascinating (but also, sadly, a constantly recapitulating) one too, but to make it short, there had been an aesthetic and philosophic break with classic “gee whiz ray-guns-and-bug-eyed-monsters” sci fi, starting in the 30s and accelerated by WWII; guys like Pohl, Asimov, etc had pushed sci-fi into headier, more literary territory, ushering in a classic era of thoughtful, introspective, and frankly modern (sometimes to a fault!) stories that defined the genre. F&SF was a publication by and for those sorts of stories, as evidenced by its authors and editors; for instance, Anthony Boucher, the editor of this issue, was one of the first English-language translators of Borges. These serious literary chops are evident from a glance at the ToC:
It’s just ringer after ringer, both in terms of straight sci-fi (Asimov, Pohl, Anderson, Dickson) as well as the fuckin’ Master herself, Shirley Jackson. I mean, this is a scorching table of contents, some great stories by some great writers, including the reprint we’re interested in today, “Spud and Cochise” by Oliver La Farge!
But, before we get stuck in, let’s briefly introduce our author, since it’s A) extremely possible that you’ve never heard of him and B) his biography is relevant to this story. La Farge, born in 1901, was originally an anthropologist, doing important work on Olmec sites in Mexico before shifting his focus to the desert southwest and, specifically, the Navajo. He learned to speak Navajo, and wrote several scholarly works on both Navajo lifeways and their language. It was this experience, particularly in living in the southwest with the Navajo, that informed the majority of his writing. He’s probably most famous for a novel, Laughing Boy, which is set on a Navajo reservation and represents an important record of Navajo life and culture from the time; it won the Pulitzer in ’29 and set La Farge off on his career as a novelist. He also wrote a fair number of short stories, publishing a couple of collection in his lifetime and one volume posthumously. I’ve not read any of his novels, nor his autobiographical memoir “Behind the Mountain,” but after I found this story (in an old 60s paperback “best of” collection of F&SF) I chased his stuff down. He’s a good writer, interesting and with a lot of keen descriptions of people and places in the southwest, worth reading! But, I will say, today’s story is easily my favorite thing he’s done, a real masterpiece. I’ll link it again here just in case, and strongly urge you to read it before I go and spoil everything. It’s really honestly great!
Anyway, we’re burning daylight, so let’s mount up and get into the story!
Incredible western writing…you can smell the desert air, taste the dust, feel the sun, it’s great stuff. The tone is wonderful too; that little bit at the end, about the dead horse being a godsend for the ants, just a perfect encapsulation of the desolate and alien nature of the desert, you know? Balzac wrote that “In the desert you see there is everything and nothing – it is God without mankind” and La Farge gets it, you know what I mean?
Our dusty, weary feller, identified simply as Spud, rides up a ridge and sees a cloud of dust moving towards him. What’s the western equivalent of hard-boiled? Raw-hide? Whatever it is, that’s what we get, the sort of spare, efficient prose that lets you know Spud is an old hand at western living, wary of the dust, knowing it could be dangerous, particularly when it vanishes.
It’s interesting the way the medium in which we read things mediates our experience, isn’t it? I mean, think about someone reading this in The Forum in ’36 – you’d hit these first few scenes, these first few paragraphs, and think “okay, we’ve got some kind of cowboy story here.” But us, reading it in a science fiction magazine, we know there’s more than just a cow opera in the offing here, so we’re primed and waiting for the weirdness, reading between the lines…why did that dust cloud vanish?
Spud rides on, and eventually comes across the source, a weary, dusty woman who he greets with all the tact and graciousness of a true Gentleman of the Range.
Great stuff, perfect tone, perfect edge to everything. This woman is, very definitively, heading away from the town of Spareribs; there’s obviously something there, some reason that this exhausted woman has lit out of town in such a hurry, and Spud simply must know what’s going on. It turns out that, beneath the dirt and dust and grimness, he recognizes this woman!
Man, but “came out flat with what moved in him” is a perfect line, isn’t it? The western genre is the perfect, natural home of the valiant Paladin, particularly if you like your chivalric hero a little dusty and trail weary, and in this section La Farge is presenting us with an all time Cowboy Knight Errant in Spud. Just a really wonderful bit of character work here.
And then it turns out that this woman, a prostitute, actually recognizes Spud!
Plotwise, there it is: this woman, hoping to start a new life, bought up a mine and figured on settling in Spareribs, only to end up getting menaced by someone names Snakeweed. Stylistically, I think this is great stuff – very western, very gritty, but then the way these two know each other, the way they share a geography, it’s very mythic, you know what I mean, like a greek myth, or from the chansons. And they way she just has to ask “Do you know Snakeweed?” and he only has to answer “I do” well, I mean, c’mon, that’s fantastic. We’re immediately transported into a world, although we don’t know yet what kind of world it is, exactly. But damn if I don’t love it! Also, just as an aside, I love her statement “I tried to get out o’ the corral, but I guess it’s too high for me.” What a great line, full of despair at her inability to escape her past. Wonderful stuff!
Seeing and hearing her despair, Spud tells her not to worry – he’s been around the block a bit and seen many a woman like her find happiness. Then, moved by the weird that dominates his life as a heroic wanderer, Spud tells her to hold off going all the way to Tucson. Instead, she should take another trail, head to a place where she can hole up for a while and give him a chance to take care of Snakeweed.
Flawless stuff, in my opinion. The woman worries Spud will get killed, what with him being a wiry little feller and Snakeweed a great big bear of a man, but Spud tells her not to worry, telling what we think in the moment is a Pecos Bill style tall tale about himself. Anyway, there’s something in his bearing and words that convinces her that she oughta let him try, at least. They make an agreement to meet at an appointed time, and then she gives him a gift.
Two whole bottles of Four-Eye Monongahela! Now, at this point in the story, this is just some fancy liquor (Monongahela, by the way, is a valley in Pennsylvania, were the tradition of making whiskey with a mash of 80% rye and 20% barley originated), though you’ll want to just tuck these two blue bottles away for now in the back of your mind.
Spud rides off, there’s more wonderful desert description, and then he reaches Spareribs, a rough patch in the middle of nowhere. He’s been here before, as evidenced by the fact that the corral boss knows him and hands him a key. There some fantastic western writing here, a clearly painted picture of a dusty mining town in the middle of the desert, complete with saloon and fancy faro table. Spud gets a drink, eats a steak, and gets the feel of the place.
And then: enter, Snakeweed.
What’s Tiger Bone, you ask? Well,
So already, we’ve got some stuff going on, right? The whiskey earlier, a kind of heavenly drink, and now we’re introduced to its opposite, Tiger Bone, a Left Handed liquor, if you will. And it has effects!
Just gonna come clean – I love this, it’s perfect. “You know me. I’m Snakeweed; that’s what they call me and they better like it.” War talk indeed! And Spud has the sense (perhaps influenced by the preternatural Tiger Bone he’s been drinking) that he too has become a part of this myth cycle, back when he made his own war talk and Named himself in the same way. We’ve stepped out of the West, per say, and into some real Wizard shit now. And it just gets better!
Spud recognizes the truth of the thing – there’s magic in this world, Spud and Snakeweed both partake of it and use it and understand it. Without that bullet, Spud knows he can’t kill Snakeweed. He briefly contemplates trying to drink him under the table, but he calculates that it’d take a lot, more by far than he could handle himself. Similarly, there’s the sense that the Four Eye booze, powerful as it is, wouldn’t help him here either – there’s a great line about how the Tiger Bone didn’t make Spud mean, and in the same way the Four Eye wouldn’t make Snakeweed kind. This is my favorite kind of magic, a sort of Taoist point-counterpoint, forces-in-balance sort of thing.
Spud retires for the night, turning over the problem in his head. Spareribs is too small for both Spud and Snakeweed, but so long as Snakeweed has that bullet, there’s no way to get rid of him. Spud mulls it over, letting the Tiger Bone roil in his veins, and then he comes on a memory of a time when, once, he’d had a horse stolen out from under him by an Apache, a man who clearly could steal anything. And so, in the morning, Spud heads off in search of the great leader of the Apache resisting the Americans and the Mexicans both, Cochise.
Spud does some magic to learn where he has to go and then, after the manner of a hero, travels through the borders of the known world and into the unknown. La Farge spent a lot of time in the desert, and it shows again in the way he writes about the landscape and pure magic of it. Eventually Spud reaches his goal, confronts the Apache, and meets Cochise.
And then begins what is, in my estimation, the finest wizard’s duel ever written.
The thing about magic is that it’s hard to write, you know what I mean? What does it represent it? How is it expressed? You look at the classics of fantasy literature, your Conan or your Lord of The Rings, and you’ll find a paucity of magic, at least of the flashy, spectacular, D&D style spell-flinging; Gandalf lights a stick on fire in the blizzard magically, and that’s about it. Now, he does some other stuff too, but its all about will power and determination, a kind of intrinsic magic, hidden from mortal eyes. Similarly, in Howard’s S&S, the magic is either hypnotism and suggestion and alchemy, fancy psychological trickery, or it’s demon-powered and inhuman; either way, it’s rarely the focus of the story, since Howard knew if you dwelled on it too much it tended to strain the verisimilitude.
As for having two wizards go at it, well, forget about it. I mean, honestly, two old bearded dudes hurling fireballs at each other is boring as hell. That’s why people either subvert it, like Jack Vance and his ridiculous (and very limited) ultra-scholastic magic, or they go back to a real old-school kind of mythic “duel” like Le Guin in her great “The Rule of Names,” or White in The Once and Future King. Here the wizards are trying to one-up each other in a kind of escalating game, to see who can be trapped. That’s fun, for sure, and in both Le Guin and White’s work it is presented really effectively, but in all honesty: once you’ve seen two wizards trying to out rock-paper-scissors each other, there’s nothing really more to add, you know?
Which is why La Farge’s work here is so exciting – this is a fantastic wizards’ duel, with rules that are evident but obscure, and it feels both old and mythic while also being new and totally unprecedented. I’ll not paste any of it here, because otherwise I’d just end up putting pages of the story here, but I really hope you’ve already gone through and read this story; I really can’t say it enough – this is a great story, and this part in particular is fantastic.
Their duel starts with Cochise stopping the sun and sending it back along its track, a horrible thing (as no one can live in the past) and an awe inspiring display of power. Spud counters with a stream of mystic cursing in a range of languages, transforming his words into pure power that sends warriors fleeing and makes a buzzard drop, scorched to death, from the air. Cochise’s magic was flashy, but Spud’s demonstrated his power to actually affect things in the world permanently. Cochise responds by literally cutting a hole in the sky, and Spud nearly loses himself in the otherworldly emptiness exposed, and only with difficulty does he shake it off. Spud ties a knot in a string, a powerful spell that binds and traps Cochise. Both are left wearied.
The two wizards, Cochise and Spud, have some more magical fun – the contest is over, and by their exertions they have bound each other in friendship. There’s more mythic goodness from the buzzard, who threatens the two if they won’t share their booze, and then they get down to brass tacks – Spud came here to find a great thief to steal Snakeweed’s magic bullet. Cochise knows just the man. The thief is eager for the challenge, and agrees to help Spud. Cochise and Spud discuss deep, mystic matters long into the night, finishing off the Four Eye, and they part as friends and comrades, brother wizards both.
Spud and the Thief return to Spareribs, and he gets to work:
Again, the portrayal of magic in here is just so goddamned perfect, matter-of-fact but never banal, and the implication of it is always one of long study, serious dedication, and deep skill. It’s some of the best examples of magic I’ve ever read in any fantasy anywhere. It’s really great!
The thief returns with the bullet, and Spud, in thanks, says he can loot the town of its horses, which the thief cheerfully does. Meanwhile, Spud takes the malachite bullet, fixes it so it’ll work as a center-fire round, and then goes and loses some money at faro (in some obscure, mystical way, this is a magical act too, and its that easy ambiguity that La Farge captures that makes his magical writing so good, I think). And then he goes to kill Snakeweed:
And that’s the end of the story!
Look, obviously, I fuckin’ love this story. It’s great; Spud Flynn is a goddamn trail-worn paladin, easily my favorite kind of character, and La Farge has given him a vital voice that works perfectly in this kind of story. I love the way the world is just absolutely steeped in magic, too; like I said, this is the best wizards’ duel I’ve ever read, and the weirdness of Snakeweed and Spud’s own wizard duel in the saloon is fun too. There’s a real rugged realness to this world’s magic that I love too; it feels organically like a part of the story, you know? I reckon that’s because La Farge, a writer who loved the Southwest, was intimately familiar with the folklore and tall tales of that place, as well as the legends and folklore of the Native Americans of the region.
His familiarity and first-hand knowledge of the land and the people of that region is evident, particularly in the way he writes Cochise, I think, and it’s a goddamn relief to read something that treats the Indians as real people and not mere props; it’s sadly rare NOW, let alone from something in 1936!
As an example of a “Weird Western,” I think it’s really great – there’s a real tendency, especially know, to lean heavily into “cowboy vs monster” and, don’t get me wrong, that’s great too, but man I love the fable-like quality on display here, and the emphasis on magic and the conflict between two Cunning Men (in the sense of them being wizards) on display here; it’s a much rare kind of weird western, I think, and that’s always refreshing.
Reckon I’ve jabbered on enough about it; it’s a good story, and I hope to see ya’ll somewhere down the trail. Adios!
Blowin’ the dust off the ol’ blog to, hopefully, start to begin to approach maybe writin’ more on here. I was all primed for Sword & Sorcery posting last Xmas, but, as always, life and such took precedence. But, while things have been quiet on here, I have not been vegetating (as nice as that sounds); I’ve been using my scant spare time to put together another collection of weird short stories that, hopefully, will find a publisher and be available for people to read at some point. Also got a few stories published here and there (check out the Writing page for links). And, most recently, I took part in the Greater Austin Book Festival, a really fun event the library foundation does here in Austin. Had a great time, sold some books, met some folks, moderated a panel, got some free beer and lunch…all in all, a success!
This is the second year of the festival; you might recall that I did a write-up of the first year’s event too, wherein I was suitably impressed by the fact that everything ran as smoothly and went as well as it did! Well, I’m pleased to report that this year was no different; in fact the heroic library staff who put on the festival made it bigger and better than last years!
As someone with exceptionally poor organizational skills, it really is impressive to me to see people get something like a book fest, with so many moving parts, humming along with no hitches. Speaks really well to the skill and resilience of the Austin Public Library and its tireless workers and volunteers!
The night before the festival, the library hosted a reception with snacks and free beer/wine for all the participating authors, which was a lot of fun. Rain meant we couldn’t use the (really beautiful) rooftop garden, but even trapped indoors it was still a fun chance to get to meet other local writers (and drink free beer). It’s always interesting to meet other writers, because it’s a pretty wide-ranging and diverse field – everything from MFA types to hobbyists, and from traditionally published to self-published (although it feels like small, indie-press published books were in the majority).
It’s also interesting to encounter writers and learn why they write – I’d say a fair number of them entertain dreams of a particularly remunerative cast with regards to their writing, which is really an alien view to me. I mean, if I could pull down mid-five figures writing my dumb little stories, I’d love it, but that said the money a book pulls down isn’t ever a metric I’d want to reckon success by. And I’d certainly never want to write anything with that in mind – there were a few folks skirting dangerously close to marketeering talk there, which bums me out when I encounter it.
As I’m writing this I realize there might be some conflict in what I just said and my avowed love of the pulps – after all, some of my favorite writers approached their work with at least one foot in the “write for $$$” camp. But, when I look at it, I think what’s frustrating NOW versus back THEN is the scale of the problem, as well as the nature of the publishing world – I mean, back in the glory days of the short story, you could absolutely crank out some work explicitly for some quick cash, and use that to subsidize your more artistically-satisfying work. Also, the whole nature of pulp publishing was just this big ol’ bubbling mass, you know – lots of change, very dynamic, if one market didn’t work for you there were others, that sort of thing. You contrast that to today, and it feels very different, everyone seems to be chasing the exact same market-tested-and-approved thing, for one, with very little room for real experimentation or diversity. And, of course, the idea of someone being able to write potboilers for cash and then work for themselves just doesn’t really make sense today, not with the idea of a unified “brand identity” that publishers all seem to have bought into. Of course, in the indie world, none of that applies, but then that’s probably because nobody is making any money at all.
A bit of a discursion there, sorry! And really, the majority of the authors I met were doin’ it for the love of the game, which is always a refreshing thing to encounter out there. And it was something that several readers/browsers at the Festival said too – the fun thing about GABFest is it really *does* expose people to books that they might otherwise have had a hard time encountering, and people really do love it when that happens!
And there were a lot of really nice people who were genuinely excited to see my books. A huge thanks to Alan Good at Malarkey and Matthew Spencer at Paradise Editions once again for doing such great work on the covers – they grabbed folks’ eyeballs from a fair distance, that’s for sure, and there were a lot of excited exclamations of “Oh! Horror!” as they came up.
There were also, hilariously, a fair number of people who came over just to let me know they *didn’t* read horror, which is a bit odd. Like they felt like I needed to know that they had instituted a widespread ban in their own reading on spooky stuff. Do other genres get that? Like do people make an effort to physically come over and tell authors “ugh, memoir? not for me!” or “sorry, I don’t read sci-fi?” It’s a strange phenomenon; happened to me several times. And when I asked them why not, they really didn’t have much of an answer for me, though several people said the real world was scary enough, which is a weird one. Like, if my books were titled “The Fascist Who Became President” or “Night of the Tariffs” I could understand that position, but, like, my book has weird monsters in it. There’re haunted atomic mannequins, fungus mimics, an ancient roman liche! That’s pure escapism man!
That bit of goofiness aside, a productive horror discussion was had in the Horror Panel, which I got to moderate. Three authors (originally four, but one had to drop out at the last minute) and me, chattin’ up in a conference room on the fourth floor of the Central Library, a great time with a great crowd. I really enjoy panels, and honestly I think I’ll only ever do conventions if I’m on one – for one thing, they’re just fun, but on another practical level, they’re also the best way a nobody like me can convince someone to take a chance on the books.
I like a pretty loose and free-flowing sort of panel, more like a broadly directed conversation than anything else, so I opted to start with a Lovecraft quote: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear…” and then asked the panelists (Brendon Vayo, Burke de Boer, and Julius Crow) how their work approached and engaged with fear. The resultant discussion was a lot of fun, and I think we got into some pretty neat areas, thinking about ways fear, as both a very idiosyncratic thing as well as a kind of universal experience, can be used both thematically and, frankly, mechanically in writing. The audience seemed to dig it too – we talked for about a half-an-hour or so, and then I opened it up to the audience for questions. There were a bunch of ’em, and one really heartening thing was that, when the inevitable question about AI and writing came up, the audience was 100% in agreement that AI sucked and they would never read anything that used it, let alone something produced explicitly by it. Great to hear!
All in all, it was a lot of fun, sold some books, met some folks, got to talk about books, free beer (and lunch), what more can anyone ask. It’s a neat thing that the library here does, and I’m really glad that it seems to be settling into an annual event – there were plenty of folks there walking around, taking advantage of the space and programming of a great little community institution, which is just a really nice thing to see. If you’re ever in Austin in the spring time, late April/early May, it’s a fun event and worth seeing!
I’ll just close out with the reminder that, yes Virginia, there *are* books left over from the Fest, and if you want to buy one, why not contact me?
Lookit ’em, cute little things in need of a good home…
CONTENT WARNING: the story we’re talking about today includes sexual assault.
A hyperborean wind howls from the north, locking my Texan kingdom in the icy grip of mid-40 degree temperatures, which can only mean one thing: Sword & Sorcery month is upon us again!
As I mentioned last year, I have long associated the Yule with fantasy in general and sword & sorcery in particular – something about the atmospherics and the holiday free time lends itself to curling up with some rollicking barbarians-and-wizards action, you know what I mean? Last Sword & Sorcery month, we talked about a lot of fun stories either leading up to the genre – the Solomon Kane story Rattle of Bones for instance, or my favorite S&S tale of all time, Worms of the Earth – or those firmly within its walls, like the classic Conan adventure The Tower of the Elephant, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser’s first story Two Sought Adventure, or Black God’s Kiss, the very first Jirel of Joiry tale.
That last one on the list above is relevant, because it strongly influenced which story I wanted to do today. Again, as is tradition, we gave November over to C.L. Moore stories, and like last year I moved from Moorevember into Sword & Sorcery month with the very first Jirel story. So, with frightful symmetry, let’s start of our celebration of all things sword-and-sorcerous with the LAST Jirel story that C.L. Moore ever wrote, the absolutely killer Hellsgarde!
As is clear if you’ve been reading these long rambles of mine, Moore is one of my favorite writers, and Jirel is one of my favorite characters – she’s really a singular creation, a badass swordswoman in full command of herself and her destiny; she’s not some wandering mercenary or exotic barbarian, she’s a goddamn robber baron(ess), ruling a castle and with a band of rough-and-ready slayers under her command. Interestingly, it’s that singular independence that serves as the instigating factor for most of her adventures – in the first story, we meet Jirel after her defeat, with her castle occupied and herself a prisoner. The threat to her autonomy that this represents leads her to take a drastic and blasphemous path towards vengeance, with a grim and tragic result. Jirel’s saga is bookended by a similar constraint in “Hellsgarde;” here, Jirel has been forced into dire action by the treachery of a (strangely attractive) man, and she also ends up facing strange, alien, and altogether blasphemous magic, a source of pervasive corruption that, I think, really sets the tone for a lot of sword & sorcery later.
But, before we dive into the story, let’s look over this issue of Weird Tales!
The cover, by Virgil Finlay, is a little disappointing and bland, a shame given what we know Finlay is capable of. In fact, there’s actually some killer Finlay art in the magazine, so let’s take a minute to wash the dullness of the cover out of our eyes with some of that, shall we?
I mean, holy smokes, lookit that! Great, weird art for McClusky’s (middling) story “The Red God Laughed. And lookit this:
Late Wright-era Weird Tales would do these one page spreads where an artist would take inspiration from a short passage, often of poetry, to create these marvelous full illustrations. I mean, jumpin’ cats, what a piece, huh? Baffling that Finlay’s cover is so dull when he’s capable of masterpieces like this, isn’t it? But oh well!
The ToC is interesting:
At first blush, there’s not a lot to recommend this big ol’ issue, is there? A lot of second-stringers, in my opinion; Moore’s Jirel story is the stand-out, from our perspective today at least. Folks back then loved Quinn though, which is probably why his (perfectly fine but nothin-to-write-home-about) story got the cover. Bloch is still working to find his niche – there’s a bit of gratuitous violence and gore in this one, hints of things to come for ol’ Bob Bloch. Moore’s husband and writing partner, Henry Kuttner, has a story in here, and it’s 100% a Lovecraft story, with two weirdos doin’ occult experiments to contact things from Beyond and all that. There’s some funny drug stuff here too, with the occultists using weed as part of their mystic preparations. It’s actually not a bad piece of Lovecraft inspired fiction, even if it does come off a bit derivative and pat. He even excerpts the same passage from Machen that H.P. used in “The Horror at Red Hook!”
But speaking of the Old Gent, there’s two Lovecraft pieces in this issue, pretty good for a guy who’d been dead for two years. “The Wicked Clergyman” is unusual, in that it’s an excerpt of a letter that Lovecraft sent to a friend, Bernard Dwyer, in 1933, and the part that became this story is basically him recounting a weird dream he’d had. Following Lovecraft’s death, Wright took some effort to gather up any remaining bits an pieces of his work and publish (or republish, in the case of the amateur press stuff) things like this in the magazine. On the one hand, it’s nice this stuff got preserved, but on the other, you can’t help but feel like a note about this story would’ve been nice, at least for Lovecraft’s sake – this isn’t a “story” per say, and not knowing its provenance might give a reader a weird idea about Lovecraft’s work and style.
The other Lovecraft piece is a reprint of Zelia Bishop’s 1929 story “The Curse of Yig.” Bishop is a very interesting character who hired (and occasionally actually paid) Lovecraft to do some revisionary/ghost writing work, which she then sold (or offered) under her name. By far theirs in the most “impactful” collaborations in the mythos world; these stories introduce Yig the Father of Serpents into the pantheon. They’re also interesting stories for their western flavor – they’re set in Oklahoma and have a decided “frontier” aspect.
A long ramble, but the point is that Moore’s “Hellsgarde” is coming in at a strange and chaning time for the pulp world – the old masters of Weird Fiction are, for the most part, dead or in decline, and the powerful editor of the magazine, Farnsworth Wright, would soon follow them. Simultaneously there’s more competition, particularly in the sci-fi (and fantasy) realm out there, magazines that had bigger budgets and could pay better prices than The Unique Magazine. Every Jirel story that Moore wrote appeared in Weird Tales, but the landscape of magazine publishing was changing, and Moore (and Kuttner) would expand their markets, particularly as sci-fi grew in popularity.
But, anyway, enough! Let’s get to “Hellsgarde” already, yeesh!
Good illo by Finlay, of course, although I can’t help but wish he’d taken on the weird “nobles” that Jirel meets in Hellsgarde, with their subtle but definite “wrongness.” Oh well! Also interesting how Moore is still being connected with “Shambleau” all these years later! It’s an important story, and it definitely had a very strong impact on ol’ Farnsworth and the Weird Tales world!
We open the story with Jirel, mounted upon her mighty steed, staring out over a strange and empty swampland just as the sun is setting. There’s some great environmental writing here – I think sword & sorcery is a genre uniquely suited to this sort of thing, landscapes and “wilderness” I mean, given the deep resonance they have with themes of natural vs unnatural, civilization vs barbarism, and the contrast between the smallness of the protagonist and the hugeness of the forces arrayed against them. Moore, who is simply a great writer, does this stuff really well too – the glassy unnatural stillness of the swamp, the silence, the long dying sunlight, it’s fantastic stuff, top-notch writing.
And why has Jirel come to this ruined castle of Hellsgarde in the lonely vastness of this swamp? Why, ’cause of a dude, of course:
So first off, there’s more of that strange sexual tension that Moore is so interested in. Jirel is, once again, obviously experiencing some complicated emotions – Guy of Garlot is a scumbag and a villain, but he’s easy on the eyes, that’s for sure! It’s an interesting bit of characterization for Jirel too, since she’s obviously at least appreciative of his physical attractiveness, even if he’s “ugly as sin itself” on the inside. But how’d this hot asshole get Jirel to agree to go questing for Hellgarde Keep in a haunted swamp?
Guy has, somehow, captured 20 of her best bullyboys, and unless Jirel, fearless and mighty swordswoman that she is, retrieves the treasure of the Lord of Hellsgarde, then they die! Guy apparently desires Andred’s treasure above all things (scorning even Jirel’s rockin’ bod!), and will only exchange her men for it; but it’s a deadly dangerous quest, for all who have gone into the ruins has vanished. And what is this treasure? Hilariously, Guy doesn’t know – it’s something small and said to be stored in a box, that’s it. I guess he’s just jazzed about it because it’s so rare a prize and no one has been able to get it? Jirel, pissed off, is forced to agree the bargain; after all, regarding her men:
Great bit of characterization there, huh? Jirel understands honor and the obligations she has to her soldiers – if she must, she’ll go into this preternatural swamp with its haunted ruin and search for a cursed, mysterious treasure, all for the sake of her twenty dudes.
Jirel rides down towards the castle, and we get some more great descriptive writing:
What a vision, huh? As she goes, she has an expository reverie that lets us learn, quickly, a little bit about Andred. A big, violent, mean fucker in life, the rumor of his weird little treasure box was enough to draw his enemies to his lonely castle, where they besieged and captured it. His treasure hidden, Andred was subjected to the most terrible of tortures, but his raw vitality and stubborn strength meant that, after long sufferings, he died and took its secret with him. No one found the treasure, and eventually the castle was abandoned…
Standard issue vengeful ghost guarding its treasure, although take note of the fact that Andred’s ghost is said to be a direct result of the vitality and force that he had in life.
The mists continue to rise around Jirel as she rides towards the castle along the causeway, and she thinks they must be playing tricks on her eyes, because it almost looks like there’s some guys stationed in front of the gate of this abandoned castle. That can’t be though…can it?
It is a bunch of guys…dead guys! All stuck by their own spears! It’s a gruesome as hell scene, and very uncanny. Jirel, of course, is no stranger to death and brutality; hell, honestly its easy enough to envision her ordering the same thing done to some guys she’d killed…but out here, in the swamps, something is making sport of death, and it’s damn spooky! While she’s regarding these dead men, the door to the castle suddenly groans open…and a weird little guy greets her.
Now, first thing to point out and mull over is the somewhat uncomfortable way Jirel articulates the wrongness of this fellow. He’s described in frankly ableist terms, something that we find a little offputting these days – the idea of a villain’s disability being used in some literary way to reflect their twisted soul is not only offensive, it’s cliche, a very common trope from the past. Now, within the context of this story, I think you can approach it as the way Jirel, an indeterminately medieval person, would view the world around her. I mean, within the context of stories and literature from the broadly defined medieval Europe, that was a common and self-evident view, moral decay or sin stamped on the body or face. In detail, it’s important to recognize that Jirel is perceiving a kind of moral deformity in this guy – he’s not actually a hunchback, after all, and the clumsy and uncomfortably language we can choose to read as diegetic here, Jirel articulating a strange new concept to herself. It’s also of a piece with her reflections on Guy from earlier in the story – she several times brought up the apparent contrast between him being grade-A beefcake and a vile asshole. This discourse on form and (evil) function is an interesting one here, a key theme of the story.
This weird creep says he works for the lord of Hellsgarde, a guy by the name of Alaric, who holds court here. That’s news to Jirel – as far as she knew, this pile was a ruin and no one lived here. Alaric, however, appears to claim some distant ancestry with Andred, and as such has taken the castle as his inheritance. Jirel is troubled by this – doubtless anybody living in Hellsgarde would have searched it thoroughly for the treasure. Has this Alaric found it? And even if he hadn’t, as a descendant of Andred, he would, ostensibly, have more of a claim on the treasure than anyone else. Either way, her plan is somewhat complicated by this development. And so, Jirel tries subterfuge. She’s just travelling through the swamp, will this fellow’s master give her shelter for the evening?
Inside the courtyard of the castle, Jirel sees a gaggle of extremely rough dudes. They’re obviously evil thugs, but at least their particular evil is something human and understandable to Jirel, in contrast to the majordomo and, as we’ll soon see, Alaric and his household.
Horse stowed, Jirel is led into the main hall where, at the far end, there’s a huge fire in the hearth and a semi-circle of people around it. Immediately though, Jirel catches a hint of “wrongness” about the scene. The fire seems merry enough, but there’s something about the people sitting around it, their faces and postures, that seems odd and strange. A man, obviously Alaric, sits in a highbacked chair, and a strange lute player (someone actually with a hump, it turns out) seems to be looming over the back of the chair. On cushions or benches there’s a “handful” of women and girls, as well as two small preternatural boys as well as a pair of scarlet-eyed greyhounds. All eyes are on her as she strides across the hall towards them, and knowing this, Jirel struts as she approaches them:
Again, Jirel is such a fun character. She’s a badass warrior AND a stone-cold fox, and she not only knows it, she revels in it! Honestly, a lot of warrior women in fantasy stuff aren’t allowed to have this much fun – they’re either weirdly (and coquettishly) virginal or absolutely sexless. But Jirel, in addition to obviously being someone who fucks, is allowed to have fun with it too; her sexuality is another weapon in her formidable arsenal, one that she deploys against men and women alike (I don’t think we’re meant to take that last little aside in the paragraph above as sapphic in any way, though – I mean she’s perfectly willing to let those 5s know that she’s a 10.) (Although you can put whatever the hell you want into your fanfiction, of course.)
Up close, the weirdness of these people is even more evident – there’s the same kind of spiritual deformity that she recognized in the doorman in Alaric and his jester, a hint of something twisted and off behind their eyes. And the rest of the household is no less strange. The women are strange beings, tall and with shockingly large and staring eyes, a similar shadow of evil hanging on them. The dogs are hellish things with red eyes and a foul disposition, and the two young boys, while silent and watchful, have the faces of devils with cruel, lusterless eyes. Equally weird is that it’s never made very clear how all these people are related to one another, despite the clear affinity for evil shared between them.
Despite the weirdness and menace of these oddballs, Jirel has a mission to do. She asks to stay the night, and Alaric graciously offers her room and board. She settles in among the throng, although she keeps her sword handy and her reflexes primed – she does not like these people and senses something is wrong and very dangerous here. She and Alaric fence verbally, although every time she asks a question about them or their experience at Hellsgarde, a ripple of subtle amusement runs through the whole company, as if they’re all sharing a secret joke. The whole scene is great and very weird; Alaric et al are just flat out odd; they’re clearly watching her hungrily the whole time, but we’re right there with Jirel in not understanding what it is that they’re after. She (and us, the readers) have to be thinking that this, in some way, orbits the question of the treasure; perhaps Alaric has guessed her errand, and is laying a trap for Jirel? Who knows! But then, supper is served, and Jirel’s brief relief at the normalcy of a meal is soon replaced by further unease:
But, when the table is set and the meal begins, it turns out everything is a little…off:
Brave woman to bite into whatever unrecognizable beast had been roasted. But then again, everything tastes bad and foul and rotten. Jirel is the only one who seems troubled, though – everyone else is digging in with gusto. And then Alaric notices Jirel isn’t eating:
Grade A weirdness! I love it! It’s particularly fun to take this hyper-competent character, a cunning and clever warrior, and put her in a situation where that really doesn’t matter, where something totally alien and strange is happening, and she’s just kinda gotta ride it out. And the menace behind these weirdos is good and palpable too – this strange group with their furtive jokes and their staring eyes and their evil auras. Solid stuff!
Following the bad meal, Alaric offers to show Jirel the great hall full of armor and banners and whatnot. It’s all rotted and rusted of course, what with being an abandoned castle in the swamp and all, but while they’re promenading Alaric escorts her to a huge stained patch of stone floor – the very spot where Andred died, dismembered and broken by the long tortures he’d endured. And, while Jirel is regarding the spot:
A sudden furious storm seems to descend on her, right there in the hall. The lights go out, she’s seized in an oddly disembodied grip, and a mouth is suddenly thrust upon hers, bestowing a “savagely violent, wetly intimate kiss” unlike anything she’s ever experienced (gross!). At the same time, she’s being bodily dragged across the hall by some kind of implacable, unstoppable force. It’s very weird! And maybe very uncomfortable for the reader, since Moore makes sure that we know that Jirel is 100% experiencing this kiss as a violation. Her mouth is “ravaged,” she’s gripped by an “insolent” hand, she can only make inarticulate sounds since her mouth is sealed by the “storming violation” of the kiss; it’s very much a sexual assault, and the suddenness and overwhelmingness of it is very shocking to the reader.
Anyway, as this is happening, Jirel is also experiencing a sense of claustrophobic confinement, as if she’s being dragged out of the hall and into a small room or closet. It’s pretty frightening, obviously, but just as suddenly as it appeared it vanishes. Suddenly there’s light in the hall again; one of the weird women has tossed a bunch of brush onto the doused fire and suddenly there’s a blaze going. Jirel sees that she’s standing alone in the far end of the hall – the rest of the people are by the fireplace, and Alaric himself is standing over the stain, at the other end of the hallway. She has been dragged across the room, although she was never “confined,” and it’s clear that Alaric, who had been near her at the beginning of the attack, had not been the person to grab and assault her.
It suddenly becomes clear that Alaric and the others had expected something like this to happen. They’re speaking in a weird language Jirel doesn’t understand, but they’re all very excited and running around with a strange, hungry look in all their eyes. Alaric questions her about what happened, and they all get very excited when she muses about it being the ghost of Andred.
We learn that Alaric and his weird crew have been waiting here for the ghost of Andred to appear, but it hadn’t come out until Jirel shows up – Alaric speculates that Jirel has a kindred fierceness that Andred’s spirit finds irresistible. Similarly, they, being Andred’s descendants, have not been able to get him to appear (an obvious lie, as we’ll see soon). When Jirel asks why they want to see this horrible ghost, Alaric stammers a bit before saying that, why, only with the help of this ghost can his treasure be found (another obvious lie, and one Jirel catches right away). Anyway, now that Jirel is here, they can get on with it. If she’d be so good as to go stand in the spot again…?
Jirel, of course, tells him to go fuck himself, but then suddenly she’d gripped from behind. No ghost this time, it’s the damn lute player, whose snuck up and pinned her arms. She struggles, but there’s a bunch of them and they quickly grab hold of her. Her sword is taken away, and she’s dragged over the blood stain again. Then, the fire is doused, the hall plunged into perfect darkness, and the people holding her melt away to the far corners of the room. Spookily, it becomes clear that, even though it’s pitch black in the hall, Alaric and pals can see her just fine – they react to her moving around, and even carefully and precisely deliver a pillow to her when she complains of how sitting on the cold floor for hours is uncomfortable.
They wait there in the dark for a long time, until sometime after midnight when it becomes clear that no second appearance of Andred’s ghost is forthcoming. With everything perfectly dark still, Alaric and company grab her up and, without striking a light, carry her off into the castle somewhere, tossing her into a small, locked room. It’s clear that they’re going to keep her imprisoned to try again later.
Then, through the cracks in the door of her cell, she sees a light, and realizes that they’ve summoned one of the human thugs from the courtyard, who has brought a lantern. She waits awhile until, eventually, the guard leans his bulk against the door to take a nap, and she shivs him through the door with the dagger in her greaves. She grabs the lantern and considers her options; there’s a fun bit of meta-fictive playfulness from Moore:
Jirel needs the treasure, and however unpleasant it was, she knows she needs to brave the horrible ghost of Andred again if she wants to get that treasure! So, she sneaks down into the hall, finds the weird stain and, steeling herself, she blows out the lantern.
The challenge apparently works, because she’s suddenly in the center of the supernatural vortex again! She’s grabbed and dragged again across the hall, and all the time the horrible ghostly mouth pressed against hers. And then things get real weird!
Jirel again experiences the sensation of walls closing in, as if she’s being confined in a small room. As this sensation builds, so to does the fury of the vortex, as if they storm is also confined, and therefore all the more terrible. In her struggles, she reaches out and feels cold, slimy, stone walls – she is in fact in a small chamber, one full of bones, the remains of previous treasure hunters! Somehow, this ghostly vortex is magically dragging her into a different space, a pocket dimension or whatever. As she struggles, she is aware of flickering back and forth between the extradimensional prison and the great hall – it’s as if her soul is in one and her body in another. In the prison, she stumbles and picks up the box, and then she fights against the vortex and is back in the hall and her own body, still holding the box – she’s somehow carried it from one space to another. But she’s weakening, the terrible tireless force of Andred’s ghost is beating her down; she knows she will soon be dragged back to the little dimensional prison place, where her bones will mingle with those of the thieves who came before her. As she begins to lose consciousness, she hears a dog barking…and then lute music!
The vortex is still raging, but it seems to have forgotten her, spinning angrily around the hall. But it seems to have been trapped, as spinning around it in a wild Bacchic dance is Alaric and the others, wild and weird and very sinister.
Extremely weird! And what a great bit of writing too, the sense of motion and the wild frenzy of Alaric and the others, and the way that they, suddenly, are much more menacing and dangerous and deadly than Andred’s ghost! Fantastic weird fiction!
Jirel grips the small box to her chest, but she realizes that Alaric and his coven have no interest in it or her – they’re focused solely on Andred’s ghost. The music and the dance wind down, and with it the fury of Andred’s ghost ebbs too. Something is happening, clearly, but Jirel doesn’t see the end, as she finally just konks out.
She wakes to daylight streaming into the hall. She’s sore from all the buffeting that she took, but she’s alive, and she has the small, worm-eaten casket that she grabbed out of Andred’s ghostly oubliette. She looks around, and sees the whole of Alaric’s coven sprawled out across the hall.
A special kind of grimness to the morning-after, isn’t there? And the obscene satiety on all their faces is just a cherry on the top of all this weirdness, isn’t it? There’s a real sense of disgusting, licentious, gluttonous, excess in the aftermath of whatever the fuck happened last night, made worse by the fact that we (and Jirel) don’t really understand anything about what’s been going on! Great weird fiction! And it gets better when she runs into Alaric, the first of his group to come out of their stupor.
I mean c’mon, that’s just fun, isn’t it? You can imagine Alaric, bleary-eyed, needs a shower and a cup of coffee, all cotton-mouthed and stale from last night’s debauch, suddenly being reminded that, oh yeah, that’s right, Jirel is still here. “No worries, I’ll have your horse brought around. Take it easy, bye!” And then of course the capper is that he doesn’t give a shit about the box, help yourself lady! It’s so much fun, and like all great weird fiction, it hinges on us getting a glimpse of something with its own rules and purpose and meaning that we can never really understand.
But of course Jirel demands SOME kind of answer. Alaric explains that they used the lure of the treasure to get her to play the part of the bait for the ghost, since they couldn’t explain what they REALLY wanted from Andred’ shade. Her getting the treasure was incidental to their purpose, as was her survival – she just got lucky that one of the weird dogs had heard her and roused the rest when she was down in the hall on her own. Alaric and the others had swooped in at the last minute almost accidently!
Truly wild stuff, huh? Alaric and his coven (dogs, little boys, and all!) go around eating ghosts, basically – something sweet about the furious dark energies created by their violent deaths. But it’s tricky; he admits that Andred was, rightly, afraid of them, and without Jirel’s own energy to draw him out they might never have had a chance to slurp him up. As thanks, Alaric offers Jirel a bit of advice:
As Jirel rides off, trying to put the memories of the night and the weird horror of the Hunters of Undeath behind her, Jirel regards the box, and considers Alaric’s warning.
And that’s the end of “Hellsgarde,” and the final entry in the original run of C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry stories!
First off, right away, I think it’s great. Jirel is such a wonderful character, her attitude and sharpness and command are fantastic and always a lot of fun to encounter. As weird fiction (the genre that birthed and nurtured sword & sorcery), I think it is again another example of Moore’s command of weirdness and the uncanny; much like the strange hell world that Jirel journeys to in “Black God’s Kiss”, there’s a real undercurrent of alien-ness to everything here. Hellsgarde and its swamp are spooky, but the discover of it being inhabited, and particularly by the strange critters that Alaric and his coven seem to be, just elevates everything. I mean, these hunters of undeath are very strange – are they humans who’ve been changed by their weird appetites, or are they something else? The dogs seem to suggest that there’s something horrible and corrupting about ghost-munchin’ but it’s never explained (thankfully), so you can just kind of savor the weirdness of it all. Great stuff!
As a sword & sorcery story, it’s great, although I can appreciate that some might find Jirel here a little disappointing – she’s often just along for the ride for much of the story, although the fierce joy she feels when she considers her hidden dagger, and the iron determination she expresses by sneaking down to the hall when she’s escaped the prison is absolute top tier s&s heroics, in my opinion. Also, I feel like the threat here is so otherworldly that anything more would break the spell of the story, you know? The ghost is already very scary and strange and obviously something that a strong sword arm isn’t going to be much use against, let alone the weird threat posed by undeath hunters (whatever they are). It would be very dissatisfying if Jirel had been able to, conan-like, brute force her way out of these situations. Much more satisfying is the weird glimpse into an alien world that she got, in my humblest of opinions. Also, she’s got her own agenda here – she needs the treasure to get her guys out of a dungeon, and she’s focused on that above all else, very much in keeping with a s&s protag’s pragmatism!
Of course, we do have to talk about the sexual assault aspect of these stories, particularly since they’re not one-offs by any stretch. I mean, three of the five (ish, I’m not counting “Quest of the Starstone”) Jirel stories are directly about Jirel being violated or threatened with violation. In particular, there’s a strange symmetry between the first story, “Black God’s Kiss,” and this one, isn’t there? The central image of the kiss as violation, for one thing; Guillaume forcibly kisses Jirel when she’s his prisoner, and the outrage of it spurs her on to seek the deadly kiss of the black god to get her revenge. Here, Andred’s kiss is somewhat more straightforward, a violent and unwanted kiss for sure, but one from a ghost many hundreds of years dead; it’s even kind of implied that Andred’s atavistic tendencies are a result of his ghostliness – he’s a thing of violence, almost elemental in death now.
Some people make the argument that Moore, bowing to the realities of pulp publishing, uses “kiss” euphemistically for out-and-out rape in these stories. I mean, I don’t think we’re meant to read these stories, see the word “kiss,” and immediately think that Moore is eliding or winking at what *really* happened. I also think it kinda sorta doesn’t matter, in terms of the story – Jirel experiences these kisses as violations, after all, and that’s enough, although I will say that Moore dwells on the ghostly kiss and its violence a LOT in this story, to an uncomfortable degree. It makes for an odd reading experience, although at least in “Hellgarde” we’re not confronted with as complex an ending – again, the ghost is elemental in its violence, and Jirel can’t have a relationship to it beyond being subjected to it’s innate and impersonal violence.
But, like in so much of Moore’s fiction, there’s a definite fascination with sex and relationships, and an appreciation that there’s positive and negative aspects to all of it. Jirel’s obvious fascination with Guy in this story does make me think of Guillaume in “Black God’s Kiss.” The ending of “Hellsgarde” is also kind of funny, again in a symmetrical way, when compared to “Black God’s Kiss.” Jirel, having slain Guillaume with the horrible and obviously evil magic of the Black God’s Kiss, feels remorse (both for the act, which is tainted by alien forces, as well as because she realizes she had kind of loved Guillaume). But if she learned a lesson from that, she’s obviously forgotten it here! Again she has an obviously evil magic weapon, and sure as hell she’s gonna use it to horribly kill another hot (and evil) guy she has a complex relationship with! It’s pretty interesting that, again, Moore is drawing from that same well for another Jirel story, isn’t it?
It speaks to the strength of Moore’s writing that the stories engender so much discussion; really, there’s no one writing at that time who does so much in such little space. All of her stories are these subtle, complex things, not necessarily puzzles to be solved so much as koans to be appreciated, I think. And they’re sophisticated, to; she’s always diving into heady territory, and using the conventions of the genre (even ones as young as S&S and weird fiction) to really explore and highlight conversations that you otherwise couldn’t have really had (in “straight” lit fic, I mean). Howard (and Smith) clearly influenced Moore’s approach to what would later be called sword & sorcery, but she did something really magical with it, I think, recognizing in it a way to talk about people, environments, relationships, all in new and interesting ways.
Anyway, it’s a great story, Moore is a great writer, and it’s a great way to start of Sword and Sorcery month, I think!
Moorevember is the cruelest month, at least this time around, so our posts have been a bit thin on the ground. Nonetheless, here we are on the eve of Thanksgiving to celebrate another great bit o’ pulp, this time a semi-silly story full about labor agitation, class struggle, and gnomes, by Henry Kuttner (and C.L. Moore – we’ll talk about the authorship below). It’s “A Gnome There Was” in the October 1941 issue of Unknown Worlds!
You might remember this issue, if you’ve been reading along – we’ve actually flipped through these very same pages when we talked about Fritz Leiber’s killer story “Smoke Ghost” last month. It’s an interesting pairing for a single issue of the magazine, given the subject matter; both stories are broadly concerned with industrial modernity and capitalist oppression, something on the minds of a lot of folks back in the late 30s-early 40s (twas ever thus…).
Anyway, since we’ve already been over the ToC and all that, let’s dive right in!
Great illustration on the title page by Edd Cartier, perfect little gnomish guys with great expressions and proportions. no notes! Cartier does some good illos in this one, and you really gotta appreciate Unknown Worlds art dept, just some top-notch talent all around.
First off, let’s talk authorship – right there on the title page, and on the ToC too, this story is attributed to Henry Kuttner solely and individually. The complication comes later, in 1950, when this story was included in a collection, “A Gnome There Was and Other Tales of Science Fiction and Fantasy” by Lewis Padgett.
The Padgett name, we know, was one of several noms de plume that Kuttner and Moore published under. Now, I’ve not read that collection – it’s entirely possible that Moore helped Kuttner revise the story in the intervening years, although that’s pure conjecture. More parsimoniously, I’ll just go with the idea that, given their incredibly close writing partnership and their self-admitted inability to tell who wrote what, this story was a Kuttner/Moore joint production that they just published under his name solely, for whatever reason.
Last time in discussing their collabs, I mentioned that I felt that, more often than not, you could spot the “Moore” parts and the “Kuttner” parts pretty easily; based on my gut-feelings-based-approach, I do think that there is a LOT of Kuttner in this one, particularly in the more slap-sticky bits. That being said, I think there’s plenty of (admittedly vibes-based) evidence for Moore in here too – the sense of menace, the alien-ness of the gnomic world, the oddly libidinal violence, and the sharper-edged social commentary are all just extremely Moore-esque, you know what I mean? But see for yourself and let me know what you think!
A scathing indictment right off the bat, of our main character specifically and a certain flavor of “activist” more generally, and damn if Kuttner and Moore don’t go for the throat right away! If you’ve ever spent any time inactivist spaces, you’ve definitely encountered someone like Tim Crockett – an entitled know-it-all bleeding heart with nothing but bottomless contempt for those they, ostensibly, are supposed to be helping. These sorts certainly know better than the workers what is needed and how to get it, and are bravely and selflessly willing to help these poor benighted souls out of the pit of their own oppression.
There’s a lot of very heavy-handed stuff in these first paragraphs, but there’s also a very nice, subtle dig in there too – the part where it’s mentioned that Crockett, a great giver of speeches and writer of articles, has chosen not to use his connections to get into law, a place where someone with real convictions and a drive could actually learn some stuff and do some good. It’s a good, sharp bit, and sets up Crockett right away a kind of feckless, spineless worm, more interested in the social capital gained from activism than from activism itself.
The mention of the “Kallikaks” deserves some explication, as it’s a fairly obscure but important bit of history. In the early 20th century, as the modern sciences of heredity and psychology were juuuuust starting to be teased out and explored, a fellow by the name of Henry Goddard published a seminal book titled The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. Goddard was a eugenicist, like a great many educated people at the time, and ran a hospital for “feeble-minded” people. One of his “patients” there was a woman named Deborah Kallikak, and Goddard claimed to have discovered a clear-cut genealogy in her family basically proving the tenets of eugenics and hereditary hygiene. Basically, according to Goddard’s book, the Kallikak family could be divided into two halves, one “good” and “healthy” and the other cursed with disease and “feeble-mindedness,” traced back to a Revolutionary War era grandsire who had a “dalliance” with a bar maid while returning home one night. Thus, two branches of the Kallikak’s sprung from his loins, the upright and healthy side from his lawful marriage and a tainted lineage from his impure relations with a social and moral inferior. It’s all bullshit, of course, with copious amounts of lies and fabrications from Goddard (explored and explained in Gould’s great book The Mismeasure of Man, which everyone should read immediately). But at the time, and well in the 50s and 60s, Goddard was one of the titans of eugenics in America, and his “study” of the inheritance of the Kallikaks featured in all sorts of textbooks and papers and monographs.
Now, the use of “Kallikak” here is basically just saying that our character Crockett, a self-deluded meddler, probably believed that the workers he was “helping” were congenitally “lower class” and “feeble-minded” and, therefore, incapable of organizing themselves. Moore and Kuttner, of course, were interested in questions of heredity and the family; check out our discussion of their “When the Bough Breaks” from earlier in the year to read about all that. While I’m certainly not calling Moore and Kuttner eugenicists, I think sometimes we have a hard time recognizing just how ingrained into the mainstream those ideas were (and are still). The idea of genetic hygiene, of bloodlines mingling and diluting and passing on undesirable traits, was simply taken for granted – I mean, consider the whole of gothic literature and its preoccupation with congenital madness, for instance. The eugenic idea that, through careful and selective “hygiene” (i.e., choices of breeding) the human species could be “improved” was something that, likewise, was taken for granted at the time, and Moore and Kuttner were embedded in that milieu, same as everyone else.
A long digression, but that’s to be expected here, I reckon! Anyway, on with it!
We learn that Crockett has been jetting around, trying to infiltrate various industries to get the scoop on labor oppression, with a healthy dash of tragedy tourism in there too. He’s currently snuck into a coal mine in Pennsylvania where he’s disguised himself as a miner and descended deep into the earth. However, while he’s bumbling around and generally making a nuisance of himself, he accidently stumbles into a disused shaft that gets demolished, trapping him!
Waking after who-knows-how-long, Crockett slowly gets his bearings – he thinks he sees some kind of weird figure, but it vanishes and he decides that he must’ve been hallucinating. Then he starts to wonder how the hell he’s seeing anything anyway (radium, he decides, stupidly) and then begins to panic! Digging madly, he suddenly notices his hands:
Shocked, he continues the self-examination:
It would appear that Crockett has turned into a Weird Little Guy! His assumption, that his dying brain is causing him to hallucinate, would be a good one, if he weren’t in a pulp science fantasy story. Because, of course, the reality is that he’s been transformed into a Gnome, which he soon comes to realize when he hears a voice talking to him.
Crockett gets lifted up and hustled on his way, escorted by Gru Magru, who somewhat condescendingly explains to Crockett what’s happening:
It’s breezy and light, but a lot of fun – I like that kind of straight-forward fantasy stuff too, just enough exposition to get you situated and with some vague gestures towards a larger world to keep you interested, solid fantasy writing in my opinion.
Anyway, ol Gru Magru is hurrying Crockett along because he’s heard a fight has started, and he desperately wants to join it. This is a fun and weird bit of the story, because it turns out the fight is between gnomes, and it’s basically a form of recreation – we learn later that its the one unsanctioned non-work activity that they’re allowed, and they relish it. In fact, it’s almost a sensual experience for them, apparently – walloping and clobbering one another is a real, vital activity for the gnomes, and while it’s played for laughs there’s also a kind of deep strangeness going on here, where the gnomes, basically slaves to their emperor, can only connect with one another via violence. There’s a lot going on in there, I think!
In the brawl Crockett meets a girl gnome, Brockle Bhun, and learns about the important place the Brawl has in gnomish society. Then, the fight ended, Gru Magru grabs Crockett and drags him off to meet the Emperor, who likes to meet the new gnomes before they get put to work. In the throne room, they meet a gnomish servant of the emperor, who explains to Crockett (and us) that the emperor is basically a lazy indolent slug who luxuriates in mud baths all day – your standard senior managment, really, a characterization that is underscored when Crockett meets him. At first, he seems an easy-going sort, jovial even, getting Crockett oriented and admonishing him to work hard, but he finds a worm in his mud bath he becomes a roaring, bloviating, insulting bully. Basically, he’s a CEO.
Crockett is put on anthracite mining detail (and he’s told NOT to eat it, just mine it), where he again meets Brockle Bhun, a troublemaker who DOES like to eat the anthracite. More good art around this part, with a gnome hard at work:
While working, his new pal Brockle Bhun fills him in on life as a gnome – everybody works for the emperor, who rules through his powerful magic. That’s it. You work, you sleep, you work some more, there’s an official break after hour ten although you can fight as much as you want. A grim life of toil, although it’s taken as the simple, gospel truth. In other words, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of mining, for a gnome.
Crockett, of course, finds the work difficult and exhausting, and so he begins to scheme a way out of it. If the emperor is a magician, perhaps he could transform Crockett back into a human and set him free? But how to convince him? The answer, of course, is a work strike.
Now, like a lot of this story, this solution is played for laughs, although I think it’s more than just a kind of shaggy-dog yuk-it-up sort of tale. Crockett was a labor organizer (of sorts…), so his mind turning in that direction is consistent with his character. Also keeping with his particular history is that he’s doing it solely to help himself. We know he’s actually kind of a snake and a parasite, unconcerned with the actual plight of the worker, so his plan for a strike that would force the emperor to negotiate is all in service of helping HIM, rather than the workers. Consistently satirical, a hallmark of Moore and Kuttner.
Anyway, that night there’s a secret planning committee meeting, where Crockett lays out the theoretical underpinnings of the labor strike and what they could get out of it. The other gnomes seem kind of half-hearted about it, until Crockett lies and says that the Emperor is planning on outlawing fighting; that makes them sit-up alright, since fighting is a cherished and beloved and, perhaps even vital, pastime for all gnomes. It’s that lie that convinces them to join in and agree to the strike. It’ll be dangerous, though:
The cockatrice eggs are the basis of the Emperor’s power – with them he can transform gnomes into all sorts of nasty things, including humans. Obviously, Crockett is very interested in the red human-transforming eggs. Everybody agrees to meet in the council chamber and declare a strike, and then the meeting devolves into a brawl.
Afterwards, and presumably in bed, Crockett engages in a bit of introspection:
An interesting bit of musing, on his part, and one that we, as readers, have to wrassle with. Is this alluding to the idea that, perhaps, there is a natural order to the universe, with some people being meant to be workers and others, naturally, bosses? Maybe Crockett’s dissatisfaction with his gnomish life is a left-over bit of his humanity that, given time, will be worn away? It seems possible:
Is Crockett simply struggling against being a worker, something that he secretly desires and, maybe, needs? There’re some complicating (and, honestly, reactionary) readings that could be made from this, although of course they are coming from Crockett, a character that we know is kinda dumb and untrustworthy. It’s a fun, complicated text, the sort of thing you expect from C.L. Moore (and Kuttner, when he’s working with her).
Anyway, after an exhausting day of work, Crockett and the rest of the gnomes assemble in the council chamber. The emperor barrels in, and Crockett declares the strike:
Crockett, laboring under the misapprehension that the cockatrice eggs are stored somewhere, tries to encourage his gnomish comrades to interpose themselves between the emperor and any doors that might lead to his stash. Gru Magru disabuses him of this notion – the emperor simply pulls the eggs out the ether, a kind of key tactical point that would’ve been nice to know about ahead of time.
The Mother of All Brawls erupts in the cavern, with all prole gnomes trying to wallop the emperor, who is just as scrappy as any of them, even without his magical weapons. Crockett tries to get everybody to sit down and negotiate, but the die has been cast and its a regular donnybrook in the council chamber. Finally, the emperor starts chuckin’ cockatrice eggs!
There’s some fun writing here – the image of this king hurling crystals into gnomes, and then the gnomes getting instantly turned into weird little critters by them, is a lot of fun. We get a good scene where some gnomes, caught on the edge of an explosion, are only partially transformed; one gets a mole head, another a worm’s lower half, and yet another gets turning into something unrecognizable, causing Crockett to realize that the cockatrice eggs aren’t restricted to the zoology he knows alone. It’s fun, and there’s a great illustration:
There’s also a fun bit where the emperor pulls out a red cockatrice egg; that, according to what Crockett has heard, turns gnomes into humans, as foul a fate as can be imagined. The emperor agrees apparently, because he thinks twice about throwing it and then, very carefully, sets it down behind him, rather than using it. Crockett, seeing his chance, darts forward and grabs it! Maybe he’s got his ticket back to humanity? Looking back on last time, Crockett sees a total bedlam in the council chamber:
Crockett wonders where it went wrong as he flees. Podrang should’ve negotiated, should’ve sat down and, recognizing that it was in his best interest, agreed to a compromise between himself and his workers. It’s an interesting bit of commentary, and you can read it how you like – maybe it’s a scathing indictment of Crockett and an organized labor movement that cannot see beyond its immediate needs and its relationship to management? Or maybe it’s saying that the bosses, and the system they serve, is not rational at all, that it would destroy itself and everything else rather than cede any power or control? At the very least, it’s clear that Crockett has misjudged the power of the gnomish proletariat and the determination of the gnomish emperor, because the latter has squashed the former and is now chasing after him! Crockett sprints through the earth, spots daylight, and runs hard, but he realizes that the emperor is RIGHT behind him – he won’t make it! So, he turns, and lifts the red egg over his head!
He wakes eventually, and is pleased to realize that he’s seeing the sunlight not as a dazzling and poisonous glare, but as a pleasant and healthful glow, like a human would. The emperor pulls himself out of the rubble, takes a look, and then flees back into the earth with a scream! Of course, Crockett remembers, gnomes are afraid of humans, that must be it. He’s free! He’s escaped!
And that’s the end of the IWW pamphlet “There was a Gnome” by Henry Kuttner (and C.L. Moore)!
There’re two ways you can read the ending, I guess. One is that he’s a weird mixed up monster, right? That the half-dozen or so spheres all interacted and left him some kind of chimera. The other interpretation, and the one that I prefer, is that the red one DID work first, but it’s just that red doesn’t make humans, but rather something else alien and horrible (like the thing he saw in the council chamber). Doesn’t really matter, of course – Crockett comes out, thinks he’s escaped, but he’s actually been transformed into something horrible and scary and weird.
It’s a fun and silly fantasy story, and even if that ISN’T your thing I think you can agree that it’s written well; the pace is brisk, there’s plenty of weirdness, and the gnome world and lifestyle is presented well and interestingly, without any superfluous nonsense and a lot of solid, good strangeness. The labor organizing aspect of it is interesting – it’s certainly making fun of that era of kinda dumb, feckless activists, people obviously more loyal to the aesthetics of organization than organization itself. There’s ambiguity there, of course – is Crockett meant to be a stand in for a particular kind of labor aristocrat organizer, or is he meant to indict the whole movement? Are the workers/gnomes actually happier in there “place,” or are they blinded by habituation to their own exploitation? It’s an interesting story because it doesn’t really come down on one side or the other, but I feel like the fact that it engages with these ideas and makes us think about them is, actually, a much better purpose for fiction (no one wants a didactic story, you know what I mean?)
It’s interesting that this issue of Unknown Worlds had “Smoke Ghost” and this story in it together – they both come off as pretty radical, honestly. “Smoke Ghost” of course is a bit harder edged; it explicitly evokes a decaying world prey to monsters as the direct result of capitalism and its handmaiden, fascism. But this one is clearly capturing a moment too. Obviously the depression had seen a lot of labor organizing, but with the build up to world war II (raging in europe at the time, though America wouldn’t join in until December of the year) there had been a substantial bit of tension in the country’s industrial base; there had been a huge steel worker strike earlier in the year, and the idea of social justice and unrest had been bubbling away. In that light, it’s interesting to see the ways pulp fiction reflected these ideas and concerns, and I think “There was a Gnome” makes for not only a fun story, but also an interesting historical document.
Anyway, that’s it for now! Hope ya’ll have a good holiday, if you’re in the states, or a good thursday if you’re not! Take ‘er easy, and see ya’ll next time!
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!
This past weekend, on the 11th, I took part in the Greater Austin Book Fair, a brand new event held at the (pretty schmancy) Central Library here in Austin. I had a good time, sold/traded some books, got some free beer, met some folks. It was my first time attending anything like that, so I thought I’d just jot down some thoughts/reflections here, a kind of after-action report.
First off, the library system here in Austin is really incredible, and what a cool thing that they had the funds, space, and gumption to put something like this together. In particular, the whole thing was free for me – no tabling fee, no registration, free beer and appetizers for the writers the night before, free lunch/snacks/coffee the day off, hell they even validated parking, something almost unheard of in downtown Austin these days. Also, for it being the first time they’ve put this thing on, they did a really nice job – lots of volunteers, everything worked like it was supposed to. Good work all around!
The organizing principle of the whole shebang was to get writers from the “Greater Austin” area involved, which included Travis, Hays, and Williamson counties, and it seems like they held to it. About 80 or so authors were involved, and they were all central Texans, as far as I could tell. It’s a neat idea, and really speaks to our library’s commitment to the whole “community” thing. As an approach, I think it worked really well – people who wandered in seemed to really enjoy the fact that they were, by default, welcomed.
What that produced, in terms of the books on display, was a pretty eclectic floor. Graphic novels, children’s picture books (a surprisingly lot of these!), YA, all alongside the full sweep of adult fiction, literary, genre; it was all roughly spatially organized with similar stuff close together, but it did result in some kind of funny interactions. For instance, a lot of people would come off of the historical/speculative fiction folks next to me and then get spooked out by my books; I had several people say that the covers to both Toadstones and Night Fears were TOO scary, which just speaks to the skill and care that Malarkey Books and Paradise Editions lavished on them.
spookiness is a feature, not a bug
Made me realize, though, that there’s probably a pretty big difference between the Greater Austin Book Fair and a more focused, genre-specific event. Had to spend a lot of time orienting people within the genre itself, something that might be easier if everybody comes in with the idea of lookin’ at spooky books already. Then again, you might be just exchanging one set of explanations for another, in that in a genre-defined setting, I’d have to work to highlight why THESE books deserve attention among all the other spook-em-ups there. We’ll see, I’m planning on doing a very specifically horror-genre convention later this summer.
It was also interesting for me, because I’ve never been to a non-academic conference before – the biggest difference is in the way panels are done, which was kind of odd in that there was just sort of a broad topic, with a mediator asking a few questions and then the panelists kind of just going down the line and answering them. Maybe that’s atypical and just the way this one worked out, but I feel like it could be done better. Not necessarily people coming in to give presentations, but maybe something more structured like a conversation. I dunno, it’s tricky, and I have to admit that I’m also not ever *really* all that interested in hearing writers talk about writing, so maybe that was just on me.
I suppose I should get down to brass tacks, thought: how many books did I sell? Grand total of seven, or about 1/hr for the whole day. Three Toadstones and four Night Fears, and I swapped four (two of each) to folks for copies of their books. I brought twenty of each, which meant I hauled a lot back, but that’s okay… although if anybody out there wants a copy of either (or both) of them, I’d be happy to sell em for, lets say, $20 each? Feel free to shoot me an email at geoliminal [at] gmail [dot] com if that’s the case!
for real, help me out – i got cats to feed, man
What did I learn about conventioning? First off, HUGE thanks to Lauren Bolger (buy her book, Kill Radio!) who, as a veteran of many conventions, gave me so solid advice: in particular, getting some bookstands and printing out papers with book info and QR codes on ’em and such was extremely helpful. In the future, I think I’ll have some cards printed up too, mostly so I could hand over my contact info to other writers I met more easily.
But, all in all, I had a lot of fun, and I’d encourage people to attend these sorts of things, if they can – I don’t think they’re any kind of career-making event, but this one was fun and I’d definitely do it again.
Eric Williams 