"The Fire of Asshurbanipal" by Robert E. Howard (1972/1936)
I decided to read "The Fire of Asshurbanipal" in an electronic edition of the 2010 collection El Borak and Other Desert Adventures because sometimes these 21st-century books have versions based on Howard's own manuscripts that lack the editorial changes sometimes seen in magazines and present a text closer to Howard's original intent. After finishing the story, I drafted my reactions to it and then took a gander at a scan of the December '36 Weird Tales to find that the illustration for "The Fire of Asshurbanipal" showed a monster that I did not recall appearing in the text. A few moments' look at the intro to El Borak and Other Desert Adventures and at isfdb opened my eyes--the version I had read was first printed in 1972 in Glenn Lord's The Howard Collector and is an alternative version with almost no supernatural elements; the WT version includes explicit fantastical and Yoh-Sotherish material. In light of this revelation, I then read the 1936 version of the story in an electronic edition of the 2008 collection The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard; except for a few typos, that book version, we are told, is identical to the 1936 magazine version.
So, below, find my assessment of the mundane '72 version of "The Fire of Asshurbanipal" and then some comments on how different the '36 WT version is.
An American adventurer and his friend, a huge Afghan, came to the desert to search for a lost city they had heard about--within the city is said to rest, in the hand of the skeletal remains of a king upon his throne, the jewel of the title, the Fire of Asshurbanipal. Howard's story begins in medias res, as our heroes fight off some Bedouins with their Lee-Enfield rifles. (Howard may be making a mistake; I think the Lee-Enfield is a bolt action rifle, but at one point Howard tells us that the Afghan "levered out his last empty shell and slipped a single cartridge into the breech of his rifle," which sounds like maybe he's using a Martini-Henry.)
Then comes the long march to the city; Howard spends a lot of time on the agony of the journey, our guys having lost most of their supplies in a sandstorm, on describing the appearance of the ruined city, and on the American's speculations about the history of the city and the Afghan's fears it is haunted by devils and protected by curses. Howard is good at this sort of thing and I was into it. Just as the men find the throne and the jewel in a huge temple dedicated to Baal, a "hawk-faced" sheik appears at the head of his band of thieves--the American has met this guy before, in East Africa, when he protected a "wretch of a negro" from this slave-trading Arab. The sheik seeks elaborate vengeance on our guys so even though the Yank and his Afghan comrade kill many of the sheik's lackeys in the fight, the sheik insists they be taken alive.
Before our heroes can be tortured or whatever, the sheik snatches up the jewel and a small snake emerges from the bones on the throne and kills him, scaring off his superstitious followers. The bandits leave behind not only the jewel but some equipment and supplies which our heroes sorely need--a happy ending for them.
The interesting thing about this story for 21st-century readers is how all the characters' behavior is driven by their ethnic or cultural background. Two examples: the American seeks the Fire of Asshurbanipal because "deep in his soul lurked the age-old heritage of the white man, the urge to seek out the hidden places of the world," and when the sheikh seizes the jewel he "was like one hypnotized, as all the slumbering mysticism and mystery of his Semitic blood were stirred to the deeps of his strange soul." These quotes may also give you an idea of the sort of melodramatic style Howard employs in this story in reference to everything, not just people's racial makeup, and which I personally find fun.
1936 supernatural version
Though the idea of an "Oriental telepathic instinct" is a little much, not only goofy but unnecessary, Howard otherwise handles the supernatural elements pretty well, and this version certainly feels more complete, what with the history of the city being revealed and the sheik being destroyed not by some random event but by his own effrontery in ignoring the warnings of his fellow Muslims.
I'll also note that, in the Weird Tales version, instead of "negro" we get the full strength "n-word;" did Glenn Lord in 1972 do a little editing of the manuscript of the mundane version of the story?
Both versions are good, but the supernatural version of "The Fire of Asshurbanipal" is more satisfying. You can find the weird version of the tale in many Howard collections and some anthologies of Lovecraftian stories. As for the version lacking weird elements, besides the El Borak volume, it has been reprinted in Joe Marek's The "New" Howard Reader and Robert M. Price's Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos.
"Portrait of a Murderer" by John Russell Fearn
The bulk of the text of "Portrait of a Murderer" is the first-person testimonial of a dead man, a journalist executed for murder, transmitted to this world through a medium.
The journalist tells us that while on holiday in the environs of Coniston Old Man, apparently a famous mountain in England, he met a fat guy with a beautiful voice and captivating eyes, Pym. Pym is one of those guys we meet on the regular in SF stories, the guy who is studying the occult, and one of those people we meet regularly in all fiction*, the individual who is sick of his or her spouse. The plot of "Portrait of a Murderer" follows the journalist as he is hypnotized by the "podgy" little Pym into murdering Mrs. Pym and carries this small attractive woman up the mountain to throw her down into a chasm. The narrator thinks the murder is all a dream while he is committing it, but come the morning, the boys in blue carry him off to jail. Pym visits the imprisoned journalist and tells him that the missus was unfaithful and so a perfectly suitable subject for Pym's experiment investigating the possibility of using mental powers alone to commit a murder.
*Don't say "And in real life!" you comedians--it's Christmas, for goodness' sake!
Following conviction and execution, the journalist found himself in the afterlife, envisaged by Fearn as a sea of empty darkness in which one swims amid the jumbled vague thoughts of most living people but the clearer thoughts of gifted clairvoyants and trained mediums. He achieves vengeance on Pym, exerting his mental force to drive the fat little hypnotist insane.
Like Howard's "The Fire of Asshurbanipal," "Portrait of a Murderer" is a sort of routine or traditional story, but it is well-told, Fearn doing a particularly good job on the hypnotism bit and making the actual murder pretty exciting, so I enjoyed it. The vision of the afterlife Fearn paints, and the journalist's method of revenge, are a little questionable (the deceased journalist detects no sign of other dead people, but can sense the teeming masses of living people?) and probably should have been eliminated, but this rocky stretch at the end doesn't sink the story.
"The Cyclops of Xoatl" by Otis Adelbert Kline and E. Hoffmann Price
Earlier this year we read Kline and Price's story about a white hunter and his Afghan pal fighting a leopard monster in Burma, "Spotted Satan." I gave that 1940 work a passing grade, so let's see if this story published like four years earlier can also escape condemnation by the ruthless MPorcius Fiction Log staff. The heartless jury that is the editors of the SF community has already passed a severe judgement on "The Cyclops of Xoatl," as reflected in the fact that the story has never been reprinted, but maybe I'll find the story more palatable?
"The Cyclops of Xoatl" turns out to be the story of a white adventurer and his Mexican pal fighting a one-eyed ogre in a Mexican village, a tale built along the same lines as "Spotted Satan," but, unfortunately, less interesting and entertaining than that later work; "The Cyclops of Xoatl" is a mish mosh of tedious detective story elements, less than credible science fiction elements, and mediocre action sequences, while its pacing and structure are poor, rendering the story a repetitive series of scenes that don't flow logically or satisfyingly from one to the next.
Well-known American he-man Bart Leslie, a veteran of the Border Patrol known as "Two-Gun Bart," has been summoned to a little Mexican village by his friend Arturo Hernandez. Arturo, who speaks a sort of comedy Spanglish presented here in phonetic form ("Son of wan gun! That ees good") recently purchased a hacienda, I guess a sort of ranch-slash-farm, but is having trouble making it pay because all his employees ("peons" or "mozos") are liable to quit due to a series of murderous attacks upon them; these murders are attributed to an eleven-foot tall cyclops that drinks the blood of its victims.
"I cannot work the property. It is a total loss, but if I abandon it, I am what you call busted! Clean’ out.”
The day he arrives in his roadster, somebody tries to murder Bart with a machete. That night, a waiter tries to drug Bart, but Bart turns the tables on the creep, making him drink the coffee he tried to serve to our hero. Bart puts the unconscious waiter in the bed he himself was to occupy, and during the night the waiter is murdered--this poor bastard's throat is torn out, like those of the victims at the hacienda, and Arturo declares that it must have been the blood-drinking cyclops that slew him.
A German anthropologist has been eavesdropping on Bart and Arturo as they discuss the weird goings on at the hacienda, and this nosey Teuton asks to join our gang when they head out to the estate--herr doktor, of course, thinks there is no monster, that the workers are letting their superstitions get the best of them.
In his absence, another of Arturo's men has been slain and drained of blood. The entire workforce threatens to quit, but the presence of Bart, a famous gunslinger, and the example of the loyal housekeeper, a pretty middle-aged mestiza, stiffens them. Throughout the story the Mexican peasant and working class are shown to be emotional and excitable, fickle and erratic like women or children, quick to take fear and quick to take heart again when things seem to be going their way, and Bart and Arturo often talk about methods of managing these people. Bart leads a hunting party in search of the cyclops; they don't find the monster, but do discover a clue that seems to suggest there is no monster, that somebody is hoaxing the peons as well as murdering them, as herr doktor has been saying.
"The Cyclops of Xoatl" is like a mystery story in its requirement that there be many characters to serve as suspects, and Arturo's sister Maria, the most beautiful woman Bart has ever seen, arrives at the hacienda, followed by Pacheco, the old man who sold Arturo this cursed estate and seems to have had some relationship with the mestiza housekeeper in her youth. Bart carefully watches the facial expressions of the many characters, trying to figure out the connections between them and assess whether they might be behind the murders and the monster--Pacheco is a prime suspect, as he now wants to buy the hacienda back. Then Bart catches sight of the monster and he as well as those of us reading this thing have no choice but to accept the reality of a towering blood-drinking ogre. Professor Jerry of Kraut U. suggests the being is an atavism, a throwback to the race of the cyclops Polyphemus described in Homer, and should be captured and put in a museum or zoo.
There are multiple scenes in which the monster attacks and gets away, sometimes after grabbing a woman and then dropping her, and the behavior of the various Mexicans as well as of the German anthropologist during the monster encounters raises questions about who is in cahoots with the monster and clues as to why. For example, Bart is about to catch the ogre but then his horse is felled by one bullet of the wild fusillade coming in the monster's general direction from the posses of trigger-happy peons accompanying him--is this an accident born of Latin exuberance or deliberate sabotage?
The story grinds on, suspicion drifting from one figure to another, people getting killed, etc., until somebody betrays Bart and our hero ends up trapped in a cave with the bloodthirsty cyclops. "The Cyclops of Xoatl" then resembles a science fiction story for a brief period as we get a description of the monster's biology and scenes of Bart using his knowledge of literature and the properties of the batteries in his flashlight to improvise a means of escape from the blood-drinking menace. Then, as at the end of a conventional detective story, we are provided a full accounting of which of the characters has been using the monster to achieve his or her goals, passages on the how and the why of each murder, plus the less than believable origin story of the monster, which turns out not to be a space alien or a member of a lost race but the product of the illicit liaison of Pacheco and the mestiza housekeeper, what Bart explains as
"an example of teratology, caused by a deficiency in formative power in the embryo, and resulting in what the doctors call 'imperfect separation of symmetrical parts.’"Oh, brother, a birth defect that makes you eleven feet tall and keeps you from growing any grinding teeth so you can't eat hard food and can only subsist on milk and blood? "The Cyclops of Xoatl" would work better if it was more Lovecraftian or more Christian, with the monster being the product of sex with an alien or sex with Satan or representing God's punishment for infidelity or something like that. Random instances of bad luck have no moral weight and do not reflect poor decisions, and so are far far less satisfying in a story than when bad things happen as a result of a character's actions or judgement. Tsk, tsk.
Anyway, the monster is dead, the manipulators and killers are all punished, Maria falls in love with Bart, and I guess Arturo's hacienda will now turn a profit.
Thumbs down for the deservedly obscure "The Cyclops of Xoatl," though it may perhaps be of value to students of depictions of Latin America in popular fiction with its sexy and sophisticated Maria, stolid and Catholic Arturo, and excitable and malleable masses of superstitious Mexican peons.
"The Woman at Loon Point" by August Derleth and Mark Schorer
"The Woman at Loon Point" is an obvious and traditional werewolf tale. The narrator is spending a few months at his father's remote hunting cabin in the woods of Minnesota and learns from the locals about a pretty girl and her brother who live in a cabin a few miles away, how the girl was happy and carefree when the pair first arrived in the area but now she is always nervous and sad and is almost never seen. Her brother has become very ill and is seen even less often. Oh yeah, and a wolf is terrorizing the neighborhood.
Our narrator tries to build a relationship with the hermitish girl, at the same time avoiding the dangerous wolf which is always skulking around, and eventually she tells him the truth and enlists his aid in freeing her brother from the malign influence of the werewolf. Our guy kills the monster and marries the girl and the brother heals up.
The plot of "The Woman at Loon Point" is routine but Derleth and Schorer do a good job with the individual scenes, the characters are sympathetic and act in a manner that is believable, and the narrative moves forward in a fluid, logical fashion, and so I enjoyed this competent filler piece. I can recommend the story moderately. Critics are always praising work that pushes the envelope or subverts expectations or innovates, but here in "The Woman at Loon Point" we have a healthy specimen of the foundations, the norms, the conventions, that those innovators are lauded for subverting or expanding, and it is an entertaining read.
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