But perhaps it was not a color at all, but a shape--some mathematical figure or symbol that a man could not gaze upon for long without going mad.
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| Left: isfdb image. Right: My copy, showing post-eye surgery bat monster. |
How many times have I praised Belmont Books for their terrific covers? Many, many times! Well, more praise is forthcoming, as on the same trip to Wonder Book in Frederick, MD that saw me purchasing Lin Carter's Time War, an A. E. van Vogt pastiche with a Frank Frazetta cover, I purchased a copy of Belmont's 1967 paperback edition of Frank Belknap Long's Journey into Darkness which has an unattributed cover of genius! The colors, the pose of the doomed man, the sinister house, and the awesome bat monster all speak to me! Another Belmont triumph!
(A previous owner, perhaps a child with ambitions of going into ophthalmology, provided the bat monster on my copy with the irises the creature originally lacked, not neglecting the back cover.)
An old house, perched high on a cliff, overlooking the churning coastal waters of New England! Thirty-something college professor Ralph Kilmer arrived here last night in a ferocious storm, invited by his friends John and Helen Howland to stay for two months. This morning another visitor arrived, famous folk singer Joan Wilderman, and as she was walking up the beach to the treacherous stairs that climb the 100-foot cliff to the house, she was horrified to find a dead body, a horribly mangled and scorched form! Those cooked bits and pieces there on the sand turn out to be another person invited by the Howlands. Hey, why are the Howlands inviting a bunch of people who have never met each other to spend the summer with them at their house? To conduct a psychology experiment, of course!
Innovative head-shrinker Howland has invited six peeps--Kilmer, Wilderman, the dead guy, successful artist Andrew Barkham, watercolorist Barbara Freemont, and shy Robert Cleary--to spend the summer having their consciousness raised via a variety of techniques--drugs, Yoga, voodoo, etc. Each of these middle-class creatives has some kind of minor psychological issue--Barkham feels life is pointless even though he is a genius, Kilmer doubts he really is qualified to teach kids, etc.--and Howland wants to try a lot of different unconventional treatments on them.
The surviving guinea pigs--I mean patients--all experience weird phenomena once they get to the Howland house. In separate episodes, each of the women, while on the beach, suddenly feels light as a feather and indulges a compulsion to waltz among the sand, seaweed and waves (Long, whose writing exhibits a lot of weird idiosyncrasies, insists on using the word "waltz" again and again instead of mixing things up by saying "dancing" a few times.) Kilmer repeatedly has scary hallucinations of huge flying monsters in the sky. And so on. As we approach Journey into Darkness's halfway mark, Cleary turns up dead, his body damaged in a way somewhat similar to that first victim.
In the first half of the novel, Kilmer has mostly been the viewpoint character (we have learned about other people's crazy experiences when they describe them to the college prof.) But then we get a chapter in the local sheriff's office, and learn that people in the town have also been seeing weird things, and, via a phone call, that a local resident has just been killed in the same way as those two mutilated guests of the Howlands! Then the sheriff experiences one of the phenomena that Kilmer has, an unnatural darkness descending on his office, but unlike Kilmer, his noticing the strange dimness climaxes with his sudden and mysterious death!
The novel in its first half had too many digressions and non sequiturs, and lots of inauthentic dialogue, but seemed to be progressing reasonably smoothly, the mysterious deaths piling up and Kilmer learning more and more about what was going on. But in the second half the narrative goes right off the rails, Long abandoning the psychology experiment theme and all the murder mystery components (the dwindling cast of victims/suspects and the detective interrogating people and collecting clues) that gave structure to the first half of his book. Journey into Darkness now becomes a series of barely connected episodes featuring new characters we don't care about, new locations we never heard about before and new ideas that don't necessarily jive with the ideas that have come before.
Kilmer gives Wilderman a lecture on Jung and racial memory and puts forward the theory that our subconscious minds, when we see something very scary, substitute something less scary in order to preserve our sanity. Kilmer believes that the thing killing people in this seaside town is an intelligent gas, color (the prof gets this idea from H. P. Lovecraft stories and Wilhelm Reich's theories about the color blue--I told you this novel was full of digressions!) or non-Euclidian shape from another universe, and the reason he and others are seeing it as bat-faced figures, a giant spider, or other crazy things, is that the subconscious is substituting these merely horrifying images for the super-horrifying sight of this alien entity's true color and shape because seeing it would drive them totally bonkers.
In the last quarter of the novel, Kilmer and we readers suddenly learn that near the Howland house is a castle built by a rich guy twenty years ago and then abandoned. Kilmer and Wilderman decide to take cover there from the monsters. When they get to it they realize the rich guy also built his family a fallout shelter over a hundred feet deep, and they decide to hide down there. This doesn't make a lot of sense, especially since they don't close the door to the shelter, because they need the sunlight to see their way, they not having a flashlight.
Down there they meet the alien monster, and Howland, who has some kind of store room or something down there. The alien kills Howland, but as he dies he tells them the secret of where to hide in his store room, behind some cubes made of stone and metal. Kilmer theorizes that the non-Euclidian monster can't stand cubes, the cube being a very stable Euclidian shape, and sure enough the monster fades away when it approaches. (Why didn't Howland hide behind these cubes, which he must have built for this very purpose?)
In the last little chapter Barkham has Howland's diary and Long drops a bombshell on us: Howland's experiments were not really, or not wholly, about expanding consciousness--he was trying to solve people's neuroses by copying a healthy aspect of one person's personality and pasting that piece over the unhealthy part of some other person's character. Somehow, this explains the waltzing. Also somehow, these experiments opened the door to the invasion from another dimension. Now that Howland is dead, the invasion is over, because it was Howland's brain that was the portal to the other dimension, and not that of any people he experimented on. Also, Barkham and Kilmer conspire to make sure the cops don't find out how all those people got killed, in order to protect Howland's reputation. This is all very annoying, because all these elements have the potential to provide exciting SF speculations and horror scenes and human drama scenes, but Long didn't do any of that; it feels like he didn't have any of these ideas when he started writing the novel, that they occurred to him after he had written the bulk of the book and then tacked them on in the last chapter and didn't trouble himself to go back to revise the novel to bring these ideas to life. Frustrating!
Journey into Darkness, then, is a total disjointed mess, a mish mosh of unconnected elements. Why doesn't Long focus the story on either how the aliens are going to drive you insane, or, how they are going to tear you limb from limb? Having them just flat out kill people with ease means we don't really care about the whole driving-us-insane part, and, in fact, there are no characters who actually suffer being driven insane, but plenty of people who get burned and torn to pieces. Why does Long have a chapter about a little kid, a chapter about some fishermen, and a chapter about a dog, instead of more chapters with Howland and his patients? Why aren't there scenes exploring the potentially compelling issues of whether Howland attracted the monsters by mistake or on purpose, whether or not he feels the monster attacks are an acceptable risk considering the potential of his experiments to add to our scientific knowledge, or stuff like that, and why are there so many scenes with totally boring TV folk singer Wilderman?
Gotta give this baby a thumbs down. I go into these things with an open heart, looking to love, but Frank, buddy, you gotta meet me halfway!
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In the back of Journey into Darkness are two more pages of ads, one full page dedicated to hawking nineteen SF books, and a page of four crime books and three books about paranormal phenomena. Among the SF titles, there is Edmond Hamilton's Doomstar, which we read back in 2017. Also, Space Tug and Space Platform by Murray Leinster; I read one of these online like 12 or 15 years ago and thought it pleasant enough tale about the space race; in a blow for diversity, one of the characters is a Native American. There are novels by James Schmitz and Ted White which I would be willing to read, having had good experiences reading those gentlemen's work, and multiple books by Frank Belknap Long which I will likely end up reading some day despite my better judgement. I can't quit you, Frank!
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| Squint or click to see what fine wares Belmont was promoting in 1967 |
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