Zanthar at Trip's End by Robert Moore Williams

At the Wonder Book in Hagerstown, MD, I recently purchased a discolored Penguin printing of Celine's North and a torn copy of Anthony Burgess's The Pianoplayers.  At Wonder Book, if you buy two mass market paperbacks, you get a third free, so I decided to round out my purchases with a copy of Robert Moore Williams's 1969 Zanthar at Trip's End, largely because I found intriguing the Jeff Jones illustration on the cover; said cover had become totally detached from the rest of the book, the glue having entirely dried.  I recognize that this is the final of the four Zanthar novels, but I am going to read it first anyway; in the event I really like it, I guess I'll buy the three preceding Zanthar books.

Zanthar at Trip's End takes up 185 pages and is split into eighteen chapters.  Chapter One describes how several people and animals in the Los Angeles of the future, 1985, have their souls detached from their bodies by an electromagnetic field; the experience of being invaded by this field feels to its victims like "a wind blowing in my brain!"  The souls of the victims hover above their limp bodies, and they can watch their friends and the authorities responding to their apparent paralysis before they are whisked away.

Chapters Two through Five take place in the heavily fortified private laboratory of Professor John Zanthar, one of those geniuses we meet in old SF stories who is expert in many fields of science.  His greatest triumph has been to invent a matter transmitter.  The prof leads some pretty lame discussion with his two top grad students on stuff like alchemy, psi powers, how "every particle of matter in the Universe is aware of every other particle of matter in the Universe," the possibility of the afterlife, and so forth.  Then the force field attacks.  This "wind" that can wrest your soul from your physical form is accompanied and directed by the disembodied soul of Zanthar's archenemy, Fu Cong, a tall blue-eyed Asian who wants to emulate Genghis Khan and seeks to rule the world.  Somehow the soul body of Fu Cong can talk and be heard here in the physical realm, and Zanthar and Fu Cong have a debate about whether people are able to rule themselves or need to be ruled by superior individuals like Fu Cong.  Fu Cong separates the souls of the grad students from their bodies; their souls join him in a netherworld where they are manhandled by Fu Cong's underlings; their bodies collapse and are taken to the hospital to join the dozens of other people Fu Cong has attacked.  A few days later Fu Cong tries to murder Zanthar by a different but equally esoteric means and our hero flees via his matter transmitter.  

U. S. Government intelligence officers with whom Zanthar is in contact suspect Fu Cong's base of operations is in Tibet, so Zanthar transmits himself to the land known as the rooftop of the world.  In Chapter Six he calls on his mentor, an Englishman who left wealth and a woman in Britain to live in a cliffside cave in Tibet and devote his life to discovering the Philosopher's Stone.  After a philosophical discussion, the Englishman summons a salamander, a creature of fire from a dimension of fire, to guide Zanthar to Fu Cong.      

In Chapter Seven we visit the grad students, whose souls are in a hellish landscape full of monsters along with Fu Cong's other victims.  At first I thought this was some world of spirits, but later, especially after the monsters made their way to Earth, I began to think it must be an alien planet.  I was never quite clear on the issue of how the soul bodies of Terrans could not interact with the physical bodies of humans on Terra, but could interact with the physical bodies of monsters on this hell world, nor how Fu Cong's soldiers on this world, whom I thought were soul bodies just like the Los Angelenos, could bring their rifles to this monster world and shoot monsters with them--do rifles have soul bodies?  Anyway, the Los Angelenos stuck on this monster world by Fu Cong have limited, in and out, access to their memories, even periodically forgetting their own names.  When some Earthers are slain by the monsters, their bodies back on Earth in the L. A. hospital expire.

In Chapter Eight we visit Fu Cong's subterranean laboratory.  Williams does not do a very good job with Fu Cong's personality or motivation or dialogue.  For one thing, Williams gives him an accent (e. g., "Take all the men oo vant," "Profezzor Zanzar"), which is annoying to read, and he doesn't just use the accent when Fu Cong is speaking to Americans, but also when he is speaking to other Asians.  Isn't he speaking Chinese or Mongolian with his underlings?  

Fu Cong has his henchmen bring the souls of some of the Los Angelenos from that monster planet to his lab, where he tortures and destroys them, causing their bodies back in the Golden State to die.  One of the victims prays before being destroyed, and Fu Cong asks his top assistant, Kef, what she is doing.  

"I believe in their world they call it praying," Kef answered.

"Vhat is she praying to?"

"To something that she calls Almighty God."

"Vhat is this Almighty God?"

"I do not know, master.  It is some great being worshipped by these strange humans."

"Ah!" Fu Cong said.  "Someday they vill worship me!"

This sounds like dialogue you'd give space aliens, not two educated 20th-century Mongolian or Chinese dudes.  We've witnessed Fu Cong speaking English, been told some of his underlings are from India and Pakistan, and yet we are supposed to believe he has had no exposure to Christianity or Islam?  Dumb!

In Chapter Nine we observe the grad students taking refuge from monsters up a tree in a jungle.  Their memories come and go, but at one point they consider jumping to another tree and recall Tarzan; I guess this is Williams paying homage to one of his influences, the great Edgar Rice Burroughs.  The grad students witness the start of a war between the native intelligent race of this alien world--swine people--and Fu Cong's soldiers.

In Chapter Ten professor Zanthar is guided through the alchemist's fire by the salamander into a world of fire, then through this alien dimension to a fire burning in Fu Cong's lab.  We rejoin the grad students in Chapter Eleven; they have been captured by the hog people.  The hog people have limited technology, and demand the grad students help them make or acquire the firearms Fu Cong's soldiers have been using against them.  Chapter Twelve sees us back in Fu Cong's lab, where Williams again describes at length his use of the force field to attack people in the United States.  Much of this stuff reproduces things we saw in Chapter One and is thus annoying, but I guess Williams thought the episodes worth relating because Fu Cong has updated his soul-stealing field, and no longer has to accompany it with his spirit body--he can now control it remotely via TV. 

In Chapter Thirteen, Zanthar, having stepped into Fu Cong's lab from a fireplace, has a conversation with the would-be world ruler.  Fu Cong does not just kill Zanthar out of hand, because he wants the American genius to act as his assistant.  To secure Zanthar's cooperation, he threatens to kill the female grad student--somehow, her soul is in his custody.

Chapter Fourteen has us back at the cave of the English alchemist.  We learn about his life and a lot about alchemy--the end goal of alchemy is not to get rich by transforming lead to gold, but to transform a man into a superman with superpowers who can direct human history into more beneficial channels.  As we watch he suddenly achieves his goal--he creates the philosopher's stone at exactly the right moment, and the radiation released by the stone strikes his body at the same instant that cosmic rays from outer space strike him, working synergistically, these complementary rays change his body, giving him super powers!

In Chapter Fifteen, Zanthar kills his guards and frees the female grad student's invisible soul body from confinement--he can't see her or touch her, but he can talk to her.  She explains how Fu Cong's soldiers took her from the hog people.  In Chapter Sixteen the male grad student arrives with an army of swine men whom he has taught to use rifles and guided here via the matter transmitter of Fu Cong's on the monster world.  The hogs inflict heavy casualties on Fu Cong's men but are in the end defeated; the fracas allows the two grad students to float away, back to their bodies in Los Angeles.

Captured by Fu Cong again, in Chapter Seventeen Zanthar is rescued by the alchemist, whose super powers make him invulnerable and make it easy for him to destroy the machinery that powers Fu Cong's soul-stealing electromagnetic fields.  In Chapter Eighteen Zanthar is reunited with his two students in his lab in L.A., and we get some final discussion of alchemy.

Back in 2020 I read Williams's 1946 story "The Counterfeiter" and in 2018 I read his 1938 tale "Robot's Return" and I thought them pretty good.  But Zanthar at Trip's End is bad in almost every way.  The style is like that of a kid's book or a superhero comic, earnest and simple, overexplaining, with sappy and sentimental hero characters whose dialogue does not sound at all natural and villain characters whose actions don't make much sense.  There are also some bad metaphors.  The pacing and structure are bad, with many passages that are superfluous or redundant, and many that are too long.  There are internal contradictions; we are clearly told something specific about the soul-stealing force field or the hog people at one point and then later in the novel these essential elements of Williams's story perform in a way that is totally incompatible with what we were earlier told about them.  It is as if Williams wrote Zanthar at Trip's End as he went along and never went back to revise or copy edit it.  

Thumbs down!