"The King of Shadows" by Edmond Hamilton
John Fallon and his best friend Rick Carnaby served together in World War II, flying supplies from India to China. During the war, Rick crashed in the mountains, and, now that the war is over, John has come looking for his buddy, dead or alive! John's native guides are afraid to enter the part of the mountains where he believes Rick crashed because they know it is inhabited by Erlik, the evil god of death! John scoffs at these superstitious goofballs until he is kidnapped by a beautiful translucent flying woman and taken to a lost city for an audience with Erlik himself!
Of course, Erlik isn't a god and the throngs of dark translucent people inhabiting the lost city aren't ghosts--that would be silly! The logical explanation is that Erlik is an alien, one of the leaders of the human race which originated elsewhere thousands of years ago and colonized the entire galaxy, tens of thousands of planets, of which Earth was only one. When extragalactic aliens, collective creatures not of matter but of energy who were immune to human weapons, invaded the galaxy they enslaved one planetary population after another until only Earth was left! Erlik, a genius scientist, figured out how to turn humans into immortal beings of pure energy who could fight the invaders on their own terms. For centuries, Erlik and people he has turned into shadows have been flying out into space to wage war on the invaders, protecting Earth and building up their strength so they can liberate the rest of the galaxy.
Rick Carnaby, we learn, was fatally injured in his crash but Erlik saved his consciousness by transforming John's buddy into one of those shadow beings consisting of energy. Now Rick regularly flies into space with the others to fight the hive mind invaders, and Erlik decrees that John must also be transformed into a space-war-fighting shadow man!
John isn't crazy about losing his material form, and Rick and Valain, the beautiful woman who first captured John (and who is falling in love with John), sympathize with him, and help John in an escape attempt. Hamilton gives us a sort of lame deus ex machina ending--Erlik is able to thwart John's escape attempt, but then decides to let John go anyway, because the war for the galaxy is almost won and new recruits are not needed. When the space war is over Erlik will figure out a way to turn Valain back into a mortal flesh creature so she can be John's wife.
This story is mediocre. The Earth is saved and John gets the girl without having to take any risks or perform any impressive deeds; John is basically a spectator, and "The King of Shadows" is thus more like a description of an idea and a setting than an actual story with character development and a plot that generates tension and leads to a climax. Too bad.
Hamilton scholars will recognize similarities between "The King of Shadows" and other Hamilton works. The Valley of Creation, for example, which was published in 1948, takes place in the same part of world, and also stars a war veteran who discovers the alien origin of the human race. In "King of Shadows" a guy figures out the truth behind some Turkic mythology, and in A Yank in Valhalla a guy figures out the scientific truth behind Norse mythology. Outside the Universe, which was in Weird Tales in the '20s, is all about intergalactic war, and "Child of the Winds," in Weird Tales in the '30s, features superstitious Near Eastern natives and immaterial people and our hero falling in love with some weird woman he meets far from civilization.
"The King of Shadows" was reprinted only once in English, in the 1974 collection What's It Like Out There? and Other Stories. (I wrote about the highly regarded title story of that collection back in 2017.)
"Cellmate" by Theodore Sturgeon
One of my favorite Sturgeon stories is "The Other Celia," which I read years ago in the 1978 DAW collection A Touch of Strange and reread today after reading "Cellmate." Both stories are about people who have limited respect for the law encountering beings who are even more alienated from society, and both are well-written, smooth, vivid and absorbing, and just the right length. I think "The Other Celia" is better, the protagonist more interesting and the weirdo he encounters more bizarre and original, but "Cellmate" is quite good.
A low level criminal, a strong and violent man accustomed to brief stretches in jail or prison, narrates "Cellmate." He is doing a 60-day stretch when an odd man joins him in his cell. This character, named Crawley, has a huge barrel chest but skinny limbs, and appears quite weak and lazy. As the story proceeds, the narrator slowly learns what this freak is all about. Crawley is, in fact, a pair of conjoined twins, the somewhat dimwitted man whom the world sees and, inside a sort of cavity in his chest with a hinged cover, his tiny genius brother! The miniature brother has psychic powers that enable him to give orders that other people must obey, and our narrator is soon doing Crawley's bidding, in things small, like cleaning Crawley's meal tin and spending his precious cigarette money appeasing Crawley's sweet tooth, and large, like helping Crawley break out of the joint!
I remember complaining about how, in his famous story in John W. Campbell's Astounding, "Killdozer," Sturgeon wasted my time by describing all the little details of operating construction equipment. In "The Other Celia" Sturgeon describes little details of being a snoop in a crappy boarding house and in "Cellmate" we get little details of being in a prison, but in these two stories all the details build up to create a mood and a memorable picture of a strange milieu, ol' Ted calibrating just right how much to tell us.
"Cellmate" was included in the 1953 collection E Pluribus Unicorn and in 1959 was reprinted in the magazine Satellite, in what they called their "Department of Lost Stories."
"The Handler" by Ray Bradbury
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| A British edition of Dark Carnival. |
Mr. Benedict owns the mortuary and cemetery in a small town. Physically ugly, and shy and submissive by nature, Mr. Benedict has never been successful with women and has never been good at making friends. He's one of those incels we keep hearing about! Everyday the people in the town make little snide remarks to him, make little jokes about him, or just ignore him, like he is beneath them. And every night, at work in his mortuary, he gets his revenge by mutilating the corpses brought to him!
Benedict's abuse of the cadavers takes the form of what he considers poetic justice. For example, a racist white man's corpse is pumped full of ink so its skin color resembles that of the African-Americans he detested in life. A woman who ate too many sweets has her brain removed and whipped cream put in its place. A man with a handsome body who seduced many women is decapitated, to be buried without that chick magnet bod. And so on and so on (Bradbury gives us plenty of examples.)
An old geezer subject to "spells and comas" is brought to the mortuary. He wakes up, not being dead after all, and discovers the sorts of violations Benedict has been subjecting the townspeople's deceased loved ones to all these years. Benedict murders him by pumping full of poison with a hypodermic needle, but before he expires this old coot cries out to the dead in the surrounding graveyard, begging them to exact revenge on Benedict and liberate the town from his abuses. His cri de coeur is heard, and an army of corpses in various states of disrepair rise from their graves and tear Benedict to pieces and bury each part in a separate grave.
This story is just OK; it is a little silly and a little obvious. I guess the interesting thing about it is that it is so misanthropic and cynical. Obviously Benedict is a bad person--besides mutilating all these corpses, it is hinted that he murdered his own mother in an attempt to create a new life for himself way back when he was starting his career. But most of the ordinary people in the town are also depicted as deplorables--snobs, racists, gossips, womanizers, bullies, etc. Emotionally and ethically, the story is a little confusing--we can't really sympathize with Benedict, who is so wicked, but we can't really sympathize with the townspeople, either, they being a bunch of jerks.
The story's "social politics" might prove interesting grist for some feminist grad student's mill. Bradbury is on the right side of the woke divide when Benedict harshly condemns the guy who "hated Jews and Negroes." But Benedict (and, we may speculate, perhaps Bradbury) also levels at the fair sex many of the traditional criticisms of women, for example, that they are sluts easily seduced by a good looking guy, that they gossip all the time, and that they have a weakness for sweets. The most shocking part of the story is probably how one "old maid" is buried along with body parts severed from an old man--it is implied that Benedict put a dead penis in her dead vagina.
Not Bradbury's best work. A much better Bradbury story you might accuse of misogyny is "The Silent Towns," one of the stories included in The Martian Chronicles. And "The October Game," which I was gushing about in our last episode as a perfect non-supernatural horror story, is a far superior tale about a frustrated nut playing around with dead body parts.
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More Weird Tales in our next installment, if you can stand it!
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