Crystal Phoenix by Michael Berlyn

To her, his job began and ended with supplying rich, empty people with poor, desperate victims.  She only looked at the negative side of his job--never saw the good side, the kindness and help it let him give....the dust addicts who wanted and needed another chance; the working people who had sunk all their earnings into paying for the memory crystals; the victims of disease whose bodies were no more than mockeries of the human form; none of them would have had any hope of reconstruction if it weren't for procurers. 

Someone's collection of 1970s and 1980s SF paperbacks ended up at the Goodwill in Middletown, MD, and I recently came upon it.  Lots of Fred Pohl and Poul Anderson, as well as other authors you've heard of, solid representatives of the respectable mainstream of SF, both the pinko end of the spectrum and the libertarian end, people who care about science, history, economics, politics, and actually know about that stuff.  Not to take anything away from Pohl or Anderson, I found more intriguing, more strange and mysterious, a bunch of books by people I'd never heard of (or forgotten--I have a bad memory), books that looked like they were novels about future dystopias that are full of sex, or maybe novels full of sex that are about future dystopias.  Either way, I got five of those for one dollar each.  One dollar!  A bargain, even if the covers are marred by those $0.99 stickers.  

Am I actually going to read these?  Well, I'm going to read at least one of them!  Right now!  But which?  Let's go with the blue one.  Under the Goodwill sticker, Joe Haldeman, a good writer whose work I respect and often like, says Crystal Phoenix by Michael Berlyn "grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go until the last page."  The publisher tells you that Crystal Phoenix is "in the tradition of A Clockwork Orange."  Well, A Clockwork Orange is a good book--maybe this book will be in that tradition, the tradition of books that are good?  Crystal Phoenix is like 214 pages long, which sounds long, but we are putting our trust in Joe Haldeman and the topless brunette who is impervious to fire on the cover and reading this artifact of 1980 by a guy whose main claim to fame is that he created video games I have never heard of.  (Also, there are 32 chapters and lots of white space between chapters, so actual text is significantly less than 200 pages.)

My copy doesn't smell too bad, so I'm going to read this book the way people read books in 1980, turning the pages with my own hands.  You can read like a 21st-century person by clicking the links to a scan of Crystal Phoenix at the internet archive here or here.

From Chapter 1, we know we're reading a book that is totally insane when we meet olive-skinned, 213-centimeter-tall Oleo.  Oleo tortures people to death for fun, either jerking off with one hand while he flays them alive with the other or fucking them while keeping a hand free to hold a pistol with which to shooting them in the head just as he is about to achieve orgasm.  Equipping himself with a glove that has needles in its palm, he sets out from his home, which is furnished with coffins and electric chairs, for a bit of fun.  But first he takes a minute to record his mind in his crystal--if he gets killed tonight, his mind will be uploaded in a new body and he'll still, sort of, be alive, only having lost a few hours.

Over the next few chapters we meet a bunch more unsavory characters and learn how this insane future world operates.  We've got Dennis the "procurer," who operates out of Bentwell's. We've got the disgustingly obese Bentwell, who runs a night club where people meet to drink, drug, have sex and hire the services of procurers like Dennis.  Dennis has a wife, Kira, who thinks Dennis' job is a disgrace, and whom Bentwell is always pursuing, groping her when she gets drunk and high.  Dennis also has to deal with rival procurers, the married couple Frank and Mara, inferior operators who blame Dennis for stealing their clients and angels.  In these early chapters of Crystal Phoenix Mara tries to steal a potential angel, Warren, from Dennis.

"Angels" are people who enjoy abusing and killing people--Oleo is an angel, and Warren, an office clerk who lives in a slum apartment with his fat wife, aspires to become one.  A procurer's clients are people who are, for whatever reason, tired of their current bodies and want to have their minds uploaded to a new body created in a lab that looks just like them at a healthy 25.  This whole "reconstruction" process is expensive, so many people contact a procurer who hooks them up with an angel--the angel pays to rape or torture or whatever the client and ultimately kill him or her, and the client gets enough money from the deal to have his or her most recent save state uploaded from his or her crystal to a new body.  Obviously, the procurer gets a percentage.  Wealthy people like Oleo kill again and again and again, become addicted to the thrill, while less affluent types like Warren save up and only kill somebody once in their lifetimes.  Another such wealthy angel is Mary, a sixteen-year-old girl, the daughter of a rich and powerful couple of businesspeople who are also angels who work with Dennis--each member of this prominent family regularly pays Dennis to connect her or him to somebody they can legally torture and kill, but keeps this habit a secret from the other two.  When Mom and Dad cut off Mary's allowance, Mary comes to Dennis as a client so she can make the money she wants by being killed.

This society is obsessed with untimely, violent death.  People pay to watch the angels torture and slay the clients.  In Chapter 4 we see how Dennis relaxes--by strapping on a dream helmet and living out a scenario in which he rides a roller coaster which malfunctions and kills the riders, including him.  Dennis believes he loves Kira, but when he is angry at her, when they have an argument, he has elaborate fantasies of murdering her.  While all moat of our characters are upper middle-class, there are apparently lots of slums full of impoverished people who murder each other.

Adding to the stress of this future world in which everybody is obsessed with death is the fact that jobs are hard to find and so businesses can dock your pay for the smallest inefficiencies and fire you at will.  Warren's job offers as one of its perks a crystal for him and one for his fat spouse who hates him, making it imperative he not lose his job.  Another source of stress is class distinctions reflected in fashion choices.  Fashions change in intervals as short as a month, and wealthy people have to keep up with the fashions or lose face.  Warren, who is just a clerk, wears his latest suit to Bentwell's and almost everyone ignores him because his clothes indicate he is a nobody.  (Warren has a cousin in show biz who leant him his membership card to Bentwell's.)  Berlyn does a little satire of fashions at the time he was writing, having the disgusting Frank wear a polo shirt with a little crocodile on it even though he doesn't really know what a crocodile is, a reference to preppies and Izod/Lacoste shirts.

OK, the plot.  Oleo is a stockbroker and makes lots of dough.  He hires Frank's services and rapes and kills a teenaged girl; Frank, being essentially incompetent, screws up the paperwork and can't pay his fee at Bentwell's, so Dennis pays it for him, which Frank, who is already brainstorming ways to put Dennis out of business so he can pick up Dennis' angels and enjoy less competition for clients, takes as an insult.  Meanwhile, Oleo has a problem.  He killed a girl like five years ago, absolutely legally, but the girl's father has come out of the woodwork and wants revenge.  Worried this guy might murder him, Oleo contacts Frank to see if Frank will preemptively murder the bitter father.  

Halfway through the novel, somewhat abruptly, Kira and Dennis's troubled marriage seems to be revived when Kira convinces Dennis to quit being a procurer by insisting they go to a shopping mall and look down at the glassed-in bit of nature where he proposed to her--overcome by nostalgia about the happy days before Dennis took on the job of procurer, they have the best sex in years and he agrees to quit.  But first he has to settle Mary's case, hook her up with an angel with lots of money so she can score a profit from being raped and killed.  He settles on Oleo, an angel with whom he has worked before.

Mara and Frank win Warren as an angel, stealing him away from Dennis, largely because Kira, the procurer-hater, interfered with the deal Dennis was trying to make with Warren.  Then comes our big horror/fetishistic sex scene--Frank tricks Dennis into watching as Oleo and Warren torture, rape and murder Kira, burning her alive as the finale.  In return for Oleo's help in torturing Kira (Oleo is the best torturer in town, it appears), they provide that embittered and vengeful father to Oleo.  Mara plotted out this whole thing, and Frank realizes how clever, how dangerous, she is, and begins to think he has to kill her, and probably torture expert Oleo and torture neophyte Warren as well.

The depths of Mara's diabolical plot become apparent to us readers as the final third of the novel begins.  She kidnapped Kira but set things up so that Kira Number 2, after Kira's most recently saved consciousness was uploaded into a fresh 25-year old clone of her body, would believe she had volunteered to be raped and killed while Dennis watched as a way to spice up their sex life.  This is the lie the doctors tell her, the lie they think is fact because of forged legal documents Mara got from an ex-husband from an earlier incarnation who now is a government administrator.  (The Mara in this novel is like Mara Number 4.)  Luckily for Dennis, Kira doesn't believe this lie, even though her last crystal save was before the shopping mall, before Dennis promised to quit being a procurer, before their marriage was rejuvenated.  Unfortunately, he has to try to rejuvenate their marriage again, even though it was she who rejuvenated it the first time, and it isn't easy, and it doesn't help that he keeps remembering watching her burned to death by Oleo--in this future world people use drugs all the time, and when Dennis drinks "mescanol" and looks at Kira he has hallucinations that she is burning even as she is sitting there talking to him.  

Dennis again promises to quit procuring, and again says he has to finish up some business.  But this time that business includes getting revenge on the people who murdered Kira!   First, he gets Warren fired from his job; Warren blames Frank and goes to confront Frank and is gunned down by a trigger-happy associate of Frank's.  (Just a couple of weeks after driving Dennis out of the business, Mara and Frank, on the brink of bankruptcy at the start of the novel, are now big wigs with a big entourage, having gotten all of Dennis' former angels, apparently due to Mara's skillful operating, not that of dullard Frank--Mara didn't hire the trigger happy goofball, Frank did without consulting her.)  

Next comes Oleo.  Berlyn wraps up Mary's fate off screen, telling us that, in Dennis' absence, she ended up getting Oleo as an angel--uh oh, Oleo hates Mary's family for business reasons.  Oleo the sadist tortured Mary with a knife while updating her crystal so that she, in her new body, will remember the pain and terror of being carved up.  How Oleo got a hold of Mary's crystal, when she lives with her rich parents, is left unexplained.  Dennis breaks into Oleo's house and sabotages Oleo's crystal so it kills him and erases itself when Oleo tries to use it, killing him permanently.  In a world whose culture revolves around killing people you'd think wealthy people like Mary's parents and Oleo would have better security, but breaking and entering and kidnapping are childishly easy in this novel.

Dennis has an elaborate plan to drug Mara and Frank and toss them in a swimming pool of sulfuric acid; he even has an old book about fighting techniques, weapons, drugs and acids that he consults, and Berlyn includes passages from this book in the text, for some reason.  But then Dennis just junks the plan after finding it difficult to locate a suitable pool and acquire the drugs and acid.  I find it annoying when fiction includes these kinds of abortive plans--I spent page after page reading about this plan and it was for nothing?  Maybe Berlyn had to pad out the length of the book here.  A similar frustrating thing Berlyn does a few times in the novel is lead us to believe that Kira is going to leave Dennis and then perfunctorily reveal that no, that is not what Kira is thinking at all.  Maybe that is supposed to make us readers realize Dennis is bad at reading other people, or at least reading his wife.

Anyway, Dennis captures Frank and Mara and takes them out to the country.  Mara tries to seduce him and Dennis grabs her by the ankles, spins in place so Mara is whipping around in a circle above the ground, and hits her head against a tree so her blood and brains splatter all over.  Maybe this was supposed to be funny?  Dennis tricks Frank into thinking he and Frank can be friends now that the evil Mara is out of the way.  Frank helps Dennis dig a grave and toss Mara in, and then Dennis breaks Frank's legs and buries him alive with Mara's body.

In the final chapter it seems like Kira and Dennis will stay together, but uneasily--Dennis still sees and smells Kira burning when he looks at her, and while he is no longer going to be a procurer, he will still be in that evil world, working as Bentwell's partner, still indirectly profiting from the whole angel business.  Dennis has killed a bunch of people, and Kira has died and been reborn, physically better but psychologically worse than before, but their relationship is right back where it was when we met them in Chapter 2, he doing a job she will, presumably, find degrading and immoral, in proximity to the fat disgusting Bentwell and all kinds of desperate wretches and noxious killer perverts.

"Crystal Phoenix" isn't terrible.  It is an easy read, as the sentences are short and straightforward and the chapters are similarly brief and direct.  The setting is sort of interesting, the plot more or less works, and the crazy stuff that goes on is a little shocking, which keeps you reading as you wonder what crazy thing will happen next.  Unfortunately, the most shocking bit is in the first chapter, on the second page; all the killing and torture after that is a little bit of a let down.

One of the good things Berlyn does in Crystal Phoenix is describe this world in its own terms--he doesn't tell you that all the stuff going on is revolting and evil, he lets it speak for itself.  The business with the angels and killing and torturing people so they can finance their rebirth in cloned bodies of themselves is treated by the characters in the novel the way people in our own world treat issues like abortion, sex change drugs and surgery for minors, and affirmative action: lots of people just casually accept this stuff as a normal part of the landscape, plenty of people passionately fight for these things as essential to a just society, and plenty of people find these things revolting and monstrous injustices that must be ended, and these three types of people try to coexist.

The characters and their relationships in Crystal Phoenix are not great.  Dennis' character feels all over the place--is he a normal guy of this world who loves his wife and wants to make his marriage work, or is he some kind of criminal genius who knows how to manipulate the system and outwit dangerous criminals and who is always on the verge of beating up his annoying wife?  In the start of the novel I just thought he was one of many procurers, a regular joe procurer, but as things go on I guess we are supposed to see him as the best procurer, one of very few at Bentwell's, a top dog whose success dominates the market and makes things hard for people like Mara and Frank.  Or maybe that is just in dim-witted and envious Frank's head?  The way Dennis skillfully kills off all his enemies in the last quarter of the book comes as sort of a surprise, because earlier in the book he doesn't run any complicated operations or anything--in fact, he is screwing up his relationships with everybody.  (One of the smarter things Berlyn does with Dennis' character is hint that he and Frank are really the same kind of person--we see Frank consider killing Mara, Oleo and Warren, and then we see Dennis actually do it.)  

Another character issue is how so many minor characters pop into view to fulfill some plot requirement and then are dropped--examples include the rich girl Mary, the bitter and vengeful father of one of Oleo's victims, Mara's ex-husband, and the trigger happy guy who shoots Warren down.

Crystal Phoenix is tolerable.  It is more like a crime novel in a bizarre setting than a traditional science-fiction novel.  In a classic-style SF novel the protagonist would start out ignorant of some astounding fact, learn that fact, and then lead or at least witness a paradigm shift--Kira would convince Dennis that the whole angel and reconstruction business was evil and he would launch or join a revolution leading to a liberal democratic or socialist dictatorship regime that would end the angels and make crystals and cloning available to all or to none.  As it is, the novel describes a circle--Dennis and Kira are firmly enmeshed in a wacky society and have a troubled marriage and at the end after an adventure full of trauma and death they are still enmeshed in the same wacky society and still in their troubled marriage.  Maybe we should see this book, published in 1980, as a product of 1970s pessimism and as a representative of the elite intellectual class's hostility to American prosperity and consumerism, signaled by the satire of shopping malls, Izod/Lacoste polo shirts, and quick changing fashions.  (Michael Berlyn, contributor to Accolade's Snoopy's Game Club and Bend Studio's Columbo's Mystery Capers, doesn't have to be a member of the intellectual elite to ape their pronouncements.)

Will I read any more of the five novels I bought at Goodwill this recent weekend?  The three novels by Mark Adlard appear to be a series, and I don't know if I want to embark on a series, even if this series looks to be more popular and respectable than my other two Goodwill finds (Crystal Phoenix has never been reprinted.)  So probably of this Goodwill haul we'll next experience Rick DeMarinis' Scimitar.  Is there any chance Scimitar is about Islam?  We may soon know.

                          

Robert E. Howard: "The Garden of Fear," "The Voice of El-lil," "The House of Arabu" and "The Cairn on the Headland"

As foreshadowed, I pored over the tables of contents of the Robert E. Howard collections Pigeons from Hell, Wolfshead, and The Dark Man and Others to try to get straight which stories I had read and which I had not.  Here, in no particular order, find the list of stories that were printed in these three volumes which I have read and blogged about.

"Pigeons from Hell"
"The Gods of Bal-Sagoth" 
"People of the Dark"
"Children of the Night"
"The Dead Remember"
"The Man on the Ground"
"The Thing on the Roof"
"Dig Me No Grave"
"Old Garfield's Heart"
"The Hyena"
"The Dream Snake"
"In the Forest of Villefere"  
"The Black Stone"
"The Valley of the Worm"
"Wolfshead"
"The Fire of Asshurbanipal"
"The Horror From the Mound"

If our calculations are correct, that leaves four stories unread: "The Garden of Fear," "The Voice of El-Lil," "The House of Arabu" and "The Cairn on the Headland."  Today we broaden our weird horizons and absorb these texts born of the mind of the man who brought us the immortal Cimmerian.  You can read along at the links in the previous sentence, though be warned the linked version of "The Cairn on the Headland" is a little different than the text I read.

"The Garden of Fear" (1934)

"The Garden of Fear" debuted in a sort of fanzine, Marvel Tales, a publication that put out five issues across 1934 and '35.  This story was first reprinted in a small press pamphlet anthology as the title story in 1945, and in 1961 appeared in Cele Goldsmith's Fantastic, again as the cover story.  In 1963 "The Garden of Fear" was included in Arkham House's The Dark Man and Others and in 1976 Pigeons from Hell.  I'll be reading the Fantastic version, which is preceded by a long Sam Moskowitz intro.

Our narrator, James Allison, whom we met in the story "The Valley of the Worm" some years ago, is one of those guys who can remember his past lives, his mind able to reach back, back, back, back millions of years--he can remember being a cave man, he can remember being an anthropoid, he can remember being an animal!  (I can't remember what I did yesterday!)  But "The Garden of Fear" focuses not on the adventures of a lizard or a monkey or whatever, but on those of Hunwolf, a blonde tribesman who fights with a big flint-headed axe, the descendent of Northern Europeans who have colonized much of the world in an age now totally forgotten, an age before any of the civilizations of which we are aware arose.

Hunwulf fell in love with a beautiful pale blonde woman, Gudrun; Gudrun is not of Hunwulf's tribe, but joined Hunwulf's tribe as a young girl, some kind of refugee or fugitive.  Hunwulf has to leave his tribe after he kills a fellow who also has the hots for this beauty; Gudrun returns Hunwolf's love, and accompanies him across a raging river and up a mountain tin his flight from vengeful pursuers.  Along the way Hunwulf uses up his arrows and loses his spear fighting off giant birds.  Luckily he still has his flint axe.  On the other side of the mountain some brown people welcome the lovers, but then a monster, a winged man, swoops down, snatches up Gudrun, and carries her off.  Woah, I think this is the caper that Esteban Maroto was painting when he did the cover of the 1979 edition of Pigeons from Hell!  Awesome!

The brown people know where the winged man lives and direct Hunwulf to its lair so he can try to rescue Gudrun.  On the way he avoids mammoths, sabre-toothed cats and cave bears, and eventually comes to a valley in which looms a 70-foot tall tower.  The valley is covered in a dense forest of flowers, the blossoms the size of a man's head, each atop a four-foot-high stalk.  As Hunwulf watches, the winged man feeds the bloodsucking flowers a human sacrifice--luckily one of those brown villagers and not pale Gudrun.

Moskowitz in his introduction compares "The Garden of Fear" to a science fiction story, and like in classic science fiction, Hunwulf uses his quick wits and knowledge of science to overcome the garden of writhing and voracious flowers, starting a fire that stampedes a herd of mammoths to the base of the tower, their passage trampling a path through the vampiric blossoms.  Up in the tower Hunwulf and Gudrun outfight the winged man.  Wokies will perhaps be thrilled that Gudrun fights fiercely and is instrumental to the defeat of the flying man, but dismayed that Howard takes time out to assure us that the winged man, though black, has nothing of the "negroid" about his features.

"The Garden of Fear" in its speculations about what it would be like to remember life in the ancient past, to apply your 20th-century mind to the memories of an unlettered savage, and in its theories about the winged man and his possible civilization, perhaps also comes close to achieving the intellectualism and the "sense of wonder" Moskowitz would associate with science fiction.  These elements certainly add value to this story of a barbarian and his girlfriend killing the last survivor of a more sophisticated--though totally evil!--civilization.  (The barbarians overcoming the culturally superior and morally debased being is of course illustrative of Howard's view of life and history.)

Moskowitz, perhaps because of those science fiction adjacent elements, tells us "The Garden of Fear" is one of Howard's best stories, but while I enjoyed it and am giving "Garden of Fear" a thumbs up, I must disagree.  Because they offer human emotion and human relationships, I would say that "Wolfshead" and "The Hyena" are certainly better than "The Garden of Fear."  Those stories' battle elements are also better than the perfunctory fight between the white barbarians and the black winged man in "The Garden of Fear," and their supernatural menaces more fun and more chilling than the slightly more realistic blood-drinking flowers for which Howard offers a rational explanation.

In response to Moskowitz's going overboard, I am comparing "The Garden of Fear" unfavorably to "Wolfshead" and "The Hyena," but it is like comparing a 4 star film to a 4.5 star film--I still recommend "The Garden of Fear," and its more sciency and less occult sensibility is perhaps a refreshing change of pace from the typical occult business we find in Howard's stories.      

"The Voice of El-lil" (1930)

Farnsworth Wright, famous editor of Weird Tales, also edited for a span of four or five years a total of 14 issues of a magazine initially titled Oriental Stories and then later renamed to Magic Carpet.  "The Voice of El-lil" was printed in the very first issue of Oriental Stories and went on to be included in Donald Wollheim's Avon Fantasy Reader (under the provocative title "Temptress of the Tower of Torture and Sin"--hubba hubba!) and many Howard collections, including The Book of Robert E. Howard, which has a great Jeff Jones cover and plenty of Jones interior illustrations--it is a must have for all you Jones fanatics out there--you know I have mine!

Our initial narrator is a bartender in "Maskat," the capital of Oman, but that is just the brief frame story--the main narrator of "The Voice of El-Lik" is an English adventurer, Kirby, a tall muscular blue-eyed guy who tells his crazy story to the barkeep.  

It seems muscleman got hooked up with a skinny American college professor, Conrad, who was trying to find a rare insect.  Kirby acted as his guide into Somaliland, where the two saw things no other white man has ever seen!  

In a distant little-travelled region of Somaliland, the safari hears a strange whispering sound--it scares off all the black porters and askaris, but the two white men and their biracial ("half-caste") assistant stick it out--the professor, in particular, finds the weird sound to be like a summons, and he says he won't rest until he knows the source of the unique sound.

The three men march towards the source of the sound, it becoming clearer each day, it bringing them exotic dreams of the mysterious East!  Eventually they are captured by an army of people who are neither blacks nor Arabs and wear curious attire!  These "light yellowish brown" men of some lost race tie up the Englishman and American and butcher the half-caste.  The white men are forced to march to a walled city beside a ten-story-tall tower and dragged before the city's tyrant.  Certain clues lead the white adventurers to conclude this city is a colony of ancient Sumer, these people the descendants of the Sumerians!  And sure enough, the one person in the city who speaks Somali, the beautiful dancing girl who brings their food, confirms their suspicion.  This gives history-loving romantic Howard (in the voice of Kirby) a chance to wax poetic on how great the Sumerians were and how they compare to "Hamites, Semites and Arayans."  (Here we have three proper nouns that a 21st-century individual should never use if he or she wishes to maintain employment.)

The dancing girl also tells them that the people of the city worship the god El-lil, who resides at the top of that tower, which is the temple of El-lil.  The music, at this close range a booming, comes from atop the temple; we learn the music, "the voice of El-lil," is generated with a gong fabricated from some special material, maybe jade, that has unusual musical properties; it can produce "golden waves of sound" of "exotic sweetness" as well as the aforementioned "booming." 

The dancer falls in love with the college professor, so when the two white men are dragged up to the top of the tower where the tyrant (doing double duty as high priest) performs the ceremony to see if they will be killed or spared, after her sexy dance (Howard unleashes more extravagant romanticism on us here, describing the dance as "Time and Eternity, the urge of Creation and the urge of Death; birth and dissolution in one, age and infancy combined" and much more) she frees Kirby and returns to him his Webley .44 revolver, with which he guns down the black slave who plays the gong and then the tyrant.  A few more shots drive off all the guards--these Sumerians have never seen a European or an Arab or a firearm before, and recent unprecedented event have broken their morale.

But only temporarily; we get a good chase scene in which the white men and the dancing girl flee in a boat from Sumerians who shoot arrows at them; the dancer proves resourceful and brave--it is a cliche to complain that old fiction is full of "damsels in distress" but here at MPorcius Fiction Log, where we actually read old fiction and don't just talk about it, we are always running into women like this dancing girl who save the day or at least pitch in, killing people and monsters alongside the men.  Anyway, she participates in the hand-to-hand fight when the lead Sumerian boat catches up to them and is mortally wounded.  Bleeding, she leads the men on a hidden trail that allows them to escape their pursuers, then gives a melodramatic speech about her love for Conrad before she expires in his arms.  The gong sounds, summoning Conrad back (I guess that black slave had an understudy and the tyrant had a vice-tyrant), and, when the professor is unable to resist the voice of El-lil, Kirby knocks him out and carries him onward.  Kirby and Conrad manage to make their way out of Somaliland and Conrad hurries back to America; Kirby, having had his fill of Africa, shifts the locale of his adventures to India.

The last lines of "The Voice of El-lil," in the voice of the barkeep again, dismiss skepticism of the insane story we have just heard of the lost Sumerian colony and celebrate the innumerable fine qualities of all the white adventurers across history who have battled foreigners in every clime:

...I prefer to believe Bill Kirby, for I know his breed from Hengist down, and know him to be like all the rest—truthful, aggressive, profane, restless, sentimental and straightforward, a true brother of the roving, fighting, adventuring Sons of Aryan.

This is a solid adventure story that is full of the racial and ethnic essentialism we are advised is anathema.  The fight scenes are good, if I seem to be poking fun at Howard's romanticism and melodrama I remind you I do it with love, and all the race and gender stuff offers an interesting window into the attitudes of the past.  Thumbs up for "The Voice of El-lil"!

"The House of Arabu" (1952)

This one wasn't printed in Howard's lifetime, though, according to the website REH.World, "The House of Arabu" was sent to Weird Tales and rejected and also presented to a British publisher as a possible component of a Howard collection that never got off the ground.  It first saw print in the last issue of Donald Wollheim's Avon Fantasy Reader as "The Witch from Hell's Kitchen."  This is a terrible title because it makes you think the story takes lace in New York City, or maybe that's just me because i have NYC on the brain.  Since that first appearance, this grim caper has resurfaced in a bunch of places under one or the other of its titles.  I am going to read the version in the scan at the internet archive of the 1972 Canadian edition of the Lancer Wolfshead.

The protagonist of "The House of Arabu" is mercenary soldier Pyrrhas the Argive, a blue-eyed blond from the north who travels around having adventures centuries before the rise of Babylon.  He is currently the leader of the army of Nippur, a bustling town full of temples and aristocrats and merchants.  Howard makes a big deal of class distinctions and ethnic distinctions in Nippur; Pyrrhas hangs around in the feast-hall of a wealthy man whom Howard tells us multiple times is a Semite, not a native of the town--the locals are Shumirians, who shave their heads and faces.  Pyrrhas attends the feast, but he is very distinct in behavior as well as looks from the Semite and the Shumirians he parties with, gulping as they sip, walking on the street unattended, "like a tradesman," instead of being carried on a litter, and so on.  

Pyrrhas is in a mood because in his last battle he killed a priest of one of the many gods worshipped in this region and fears he may be cursed.  Sure enough, one of the many naked girls ("playthings") at the feast jumps up, gives a wacky speech, and tries to stab Pyrrhas with a dagger--Pyrrhas throws her and she lands on her own dagger, dying.  (Compare to Reynolds, in "The Cairn on the Headland," below.)  On his walk home, Pyrrhas sees a venomous snake that turns out to be an illusion.

Our guy has been having disturbing dreams of a woman who can fly and who bites  neck, and tonight he actually sees this evil woman while awake--he knows he really has to do something about this curse now.  In one of the more misogynistic scenes in these Howard stories, Pyrhas beats a courtesan with a belt once she lets slip that she knows who can help Pyrrhas wioth his cirse but doesn't feel like spilling the beans because she hates him.  (Pyrrhas has long known this woman, a gift from the ruler of the city, hates him, but he continues to keep her around because it gives him "an angry gratification" to possess her.  Nasty!)

Pyrrhas proceeds to visit the wizard named by the now scarred courtesan, out at a cavern some distance from the city.  The appearance and behavior of, and cosmology described by, this wizard are all pretty entertaining.  He agrees to help Pyrrhas, but not for money!  Blood and death are what the sorcerer demands!  After securing the magic item that, it is hoped, will free Pyrrhas from the torment of the flying woman, Pyrrhas pays the magician by murdering him!  Wild!

The magic item works in Pyrrhas' favor, but not quite as expected.  Instead of capturing the flying woman, he captures her mate, and tortures him so that she will help Pyrrhas figure out who set her upon him.  She guides him to the world of the dead, the House of Arabu of the title.  This is a grim story, what with everybody, including our hero, torturing and murdering people, women included, and Howard gives us a very dark view of life and the universe once Pyrrhas is in the House of Arabu.

He stood in darkness of a quality which he had never encountered....amidst it, it was not easy even to imagine sunlight and bright rivers and grass singing in the wind. They belonged to that other world–a world lost and forgotten in the dust of a million centuries. The world of life and light was a whim of chance–a bright spark glowing momentarily in a universe of dust and shadows. Darkness and silence were the natural state of the cosmos, not light and the noises of Life. No wonder the dead hated the living, who disturbed the grey stillness of Infinity with their tinkling laughter. 

Pyrrhas' uncanny trip to hell climaxes in a fight with the dead man who has directed the flying woman to torment him, and then comes the revelation of an unwelcome truth--this spirit was enlisted to attack Pyrrhas by the man Pyrrhas thought his best friend in Nippur--that Semite who holds those feasts!  

“Why, of all the men of Nippur, he has been my staunchest friend!”

“Friend?” she mocked. “What is friendship but a pleasant pretense to while away an idle hour?”

This very Semite has learned from the woman beaten by Pyrrhas that Pyrrhas has gone to consult the wizard, and has laid an ambush for Pyrrhas.  But Pyrrhas outfights him and then decides to abandon this region of treacherous city dwellers altogether, despite his employment here making him wealthy.

"The House of Arabu" covers some of the same thematic ground as "The Voice of El-lil," the comparisons of the races and so forth, but while "the Voice of El-lil" celebrates the friendship of two white men and the prowess and honesty of Aryans and depicts a woman who makes the ultimate sacrifice for love and demonstrates ability and bravery in defending the man she loves, "The House of Arabu" is unrelieved misery--the preoccupation with death and how death renders life meaningless and even a mockery of the reality of the universe; the prominence of torture and betrayal; the disgusting and mercenary nature of the depicted sexual relationships and non-sexual friendships.  Ouch, a downer!  But still an effective horror and adventure story.

"The Cairn on the Headland" (1933)

I'm going to read "The Cairn on the Headland" in an electronic version of the 2008 Del Rey/Ballantine volume The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard because it seems that the editor of Strange Tales, where the story debuted, changed significant elements of the story (a letter by Howard sent to Lovecraft explaining this is quoted in The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard) and the 2008 collection's editor, Rusty Burke, tried to fix this by integrating material from an earlier draft. 

(If the January 1933 cover of Strange Tales rings a bell maybe it is because in 2021 we read August Derleth's "The Thing That Walked on the Wind" and Clark Ashton Smith's "The Second Internment" from this magazine.  The editor of Strange Tales, Harry Bates, sounds like a hands-on type of guy--apparently he guided Smith in the construction of the plot of "The Second Internment."  Probably someday we'll read the cover story, "Murgunstrumm" by Hugh B. Cave--it is one of Cave's more famous productions, the title story of a Cave collection and anthologized by both Stephen Jones and Martin H. Greenberg.  Evert day I read two or three stories and resolve to read three or four stories, so that I will never catch up.)

In "The Cairn on the Headland," Howard contrasts the people of Southern Europe, the Latins, with the people of Northern Europe, the Nordics.  Two Americans, Ortali the Italian-American and O'Brien, our  Irish-American narrator, are in Ireland, at the site of the Battle of Clontarf, where stands a cairn the locals have avoided for almost a thousand years!  There is a lot of talk between the two men that serves to dramatize the idea that Nordics are romantic or superstitious and Latins are practical and logical, that the easy life under the Mediterranean sun gives Latins a rosy attitude and that life in the cold bitter north has given Nordics a knowledge of demons and other grim realities scoffed at by those of the South.  As we know from dozens of stories, Howard sympathizes with barbarians over city sophisticates, and he casts the passionate Irishman as the barbarian and the dismissive and sneering Italian as the city boy--Howard suggests such differences are transmitted through the blood, are not just a product of where and when you grew up.

There is also a lot of talk about how the Christian era decisively began at Clontarf, where the Irish defeated the Vikings and the reputation of Odin, the last god to resist the spread of the religion of Jesus Christ, suffered a fatal blow.  In a lot of speculative fiction, the spread of Christianity and the fall of paganism is seen as a tragedy or even a crime, but Howard seems to take the opposite tack here, describing the rise of Christianity in very positive terms.

The Italian wants to dig up the cairn, figuring it is full of treasure, that beneath it lie the bones of some Viking king still clad in jewels.  The Irishman doesn't want to, and it is hinted that removing the cairn will unleash some kind of terrible evil.  Ortali walks off, and the ghost of an Irishwoman appears to warn O'Brien not to do anything to the cairn and to give him an ancient cross fashioned by Saint Brandon himself that should protect O'Brien if "the people of the night" or other evils should threaten him.

We then get a flashback to the narrator's university days that explains why he is mixed up with this Italian whom he abhors, who makes his blood boil and his temples throb with rage, whom he fantasizes about murdering by bashing him in the head from behind with a rock he picks up from the cairn.  You see, our Irish boy was poor and a wealthy professor, name of Reynolds, was mean to him, and when our red-headed hero insulted the professor back, Reynolds hit him, so young O'Brien knocked that academic a-hole right to the ground.  Reynolds had the narrator thrown out of school--O'Brien tells us he would have starved without his connection to the university, so he went to the professor's place to beat him up.  I expected that sentence to end with "to beg for my position back" but no, it goes like this:

Facing not only an abrupt termination of my work and studies, but actual starvation, I was reduced to desperation, and I went to Reynolds’ study late that night intending to thrash him within an inch of his life.

Upon his appearance, the professor attacked him with a dagger, slipped on a rug and fell, stabbing himself to death.

(At times, "The Cairn on the Headland" feels like an Irish person indulging in revenge fantasies against the Scandinavian and English people who ruled Ireland during various periods, and the Italian people.  I haven't witnessed it myself, but I have been told by Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans that, in Catholic schools and New York neighborhoods, that these two groups didn't get along too well.)

Ortali--the mean professor's secretary--saw the whole thing and blackmailed the Irishman into being his lackey.  The Italian recognized that the Irishman was a genius, and financed O'Brien's education and appointment to a good academic position with a good salary--the Italian demanded and received most of the salary, and O'Brien moans to us that he is Ortali's slave.  I realize that hundreds of times I have given a pass to stories about witches and psykers and going to hyperspace and having reproductive sex with space aliens, but I have to say that the components of the plot of "The Cairn on the Headland" that deal with Ortali and O'Brien's relationship are pretty hard to believe. 

Back to the present day, but not for long.  Our narrator goes to sleep with that rock he almost assassinated Ortali with in his hand and has a vivid dream of fighting in the Battle of Clontarf.  Howard uses the metaphor of men falling like grain being reaped three times in this dream, after having had the ghost woman use it.  That's three times too many, REH!  Our narrator's consciousness is cast back, back, back to inhabit the body of one of his ancestors, an Irish warrior who was in the middle of the fray, and then, the battle decided, set out to loot the Viking dead.  O'Brien's alter ego, Red Cumal, kern of Brian Boru, comes upon a dying Viking, realizes it is Odin himself, the god having taken on flesh to lead his people!  Odin was felled by a spear that was given power by the symbol of Jesus Christ, a cross, carved into its metal blade.  Red Cumal learns that if Odin's corpse should ever be touched by holly, an important component in Viking sorcery, the god will rise from the dead to seek vengeance on the human race!  Thus the cairn and the reluctance of people over the centuries to tamper with it.  Of course, we readers recall that Ortali, as a goof, has some holly on him as a mock talisman--if Ortali tears down the cairn and any of that holly touches the corpse beneath it, well, the world is in for a heap of trouble!

While the Irishman was reliving an adventure of a past life in a dream, the Italian has been sneaking back to the cairn to scatter its stones and seize that which it has hidden for nine centuries.   The narrator runs through the night to the cairn, but, too late, watches as Odin rises from his disturbed grave and electrocutes Ortali.  O'Brien holds up the cross made by Saint Brandon and a white beam shoots out of it and drives the alien demon that is Odin back to outer space.

This is by considerable measure the weakest of today's stories.  Howard in "The Cairn on the Headland" amps up his ethnic and racial theories to the point that, instead of adding a seasoning or an additional dimension to the plot, the theories overwhelm the plot; also, his theories here come off as a little silly, casting Southern Europeans as cold practical men and Northern Europeans as emotional and superstitious folk long after the fall of the Roman Empire; surely 19th- and 20th-century London was full of sneering city sophisticates and the contemporary Italian countryside full of passionate and superstitious peasants and villagers.  

I looked at him somberly with unveiled hate. Two men could scarcely have been of more opposite types.

He was slender, self-possessed, unmistakably Latin with his dark eyes and sophisticated air. I am massive, clumsy and bear-like, with cold blue eyes and tousled red hair. We were countrymen in that we were born in the same land; but the homelands of our ancestors were as far apart as South from North.

“Nordic superstition,” he repeated. “I cannot imagine a Latin people allowing such a mystery as this to go unexplored all these years. The Latins are too practical–too prosaic, if you will. Are you sure of the date of this pile?”

Another problem is that "The Cairn on the Headland" is one of those stories in which the hero is a pawn of greater forces--in the climax Howard literally writes "I was but a pawn in the game–merely the hand that held the relic of holiness, that was the symbol of the powers opposed forever against the fiends of darkness."  I prefer stories in which the hero is making decisions and his success or failure is founded on those decisions and his own abilities and personality.  In this story the narrator is worked like a puppet by a cruel man and then by an Irish ghost and the God of Abraham, and it is Odin who resolves the narrator's problems by killing Ortali.  We might also say he is at the mercy of his own anger and hate, which we are privy to long before the convoluted explanation that he is Ortali's slave, and which is pretty off-putting, making O'Brien unsympathetic during the early parts of the story.

Finally, compared to so many Howard stories, the action scenes are weak.

I'm going to call this story acceptable.  I have a lot of complaints, as you have seen, but "The Cairn on the Headland" isn't actually bad.  It is sort of interesting to see a positive view of Christianity in a weird story, to find it a story that celebrates the rise of Christianity and the defeat of paganism in an apparently sincere way and doesn't just use a cross as a prop, but embraces the cross as a Christian symbol.  Similarly, the idea that Odin is a demon masquerading as a god, then as a man, is creative, and I like it in the way that I liked Howard making up his own werewolf rules in "Wolfshead."  So, "The Cairn on the Headland" has some virtues and I of course think students of the weird and fans of Howard should read it, even if I can't call it good.

"The Cairn on the Headland" is another story Wollheim included in his magazine Avon Fantasy Reader, and he also printed it in his anthology The Macabre Reader.

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So we've got two very good stories, "The Voice of El-lil" and "The House of Arabu," a pretty good story, "The Garden of Fear," and a merely acceptable story, "The Cairn on the Headland."  Not too shabby.  All of these stories also help us get into the head of one of the most famous and important of the weirdies, give us insight into Howard's thinking about life, history, religion, and his own Irish background.

There's more Robert E. Howard in our future as well as other weirdies and explorations of the broader reaches of speculative fiction in all its diversity, from hard science fiction to the New Wave, from the respectable work of award-winning Grandmasters to disreputable exploitation nonsense by goofballs, if you can tell the difference.  Stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log.        

September Collection Post

It looks like we are doing this again--welcome to September's blog post about stuff I recently bought, stuff I would have tweeted about if I hadn't lost my X account to diabolical hackers, crackers, and fraud and deceit backers.  Click the pictures below to get an eyeful of all the filthy details.  

In Mt. Airy, MD, in a shopping center with a Weis grocery store where you can buy Ovaltine and a Home Goods where you can buy the mass produced plastic Chinese Christmas decorations you need to fill up your basement, your attic, and that hole in your soul, also sits the Toy Exchange, a store which is choked full of old toy robots and monsters.  There I acquired this beige (Ajax? Archer?) spacewoman and this blue and silver Rascal Robot for five bucks each, even though I already had a blue-green spacewoman and four other Rascal Robots--it felt like a real bargain.

As a kid I was dinosaur crazy, and I collect the dinosaur books I owned, borrowed from the library, and saw at other kids' houses in my childhood, as well as dinosaur books of a similar aesthetic and appeal.  I found this one, which I had never seen before, at Beaver Creek Antiques in Hagerstown, MD.

Another Beaver Creek Antiques find--a book of poetry by Emil Petaja with illustrations by Hannes Bok.  Regular readers of MPorcius Fiction Log will be aware of how big a fan I am of Bok.  As for Petaja...well, I read his novel about space crabs eating people back in 2014, as well as his novel about the best pilot in the Terran Space Navy who is also Earth's best psyker who also goes back in time to deal with a witch and a giant.  Click the links to get a sense of what io thought of Petaja's fiction. 

As for Petaja's poetry in this book, As Dream and Shadow, a lot of it has Lovecraftian themes--there's a direct reference to Cthulhu, and lots of stuff about dreams and the idea that knowledge will not help you, but drive you insane.  Worth looking at for the weird completist.

At Wonder Book in Hagerstown, MD, I picked up some paperbacks because I liked their covers and because I could get them free because my wife had bought something and had filled up my points card or whatever they call it.  Every store nowadays has a card you have to carry around or an app you have to download or a club you have to join or something, even the used bookstore.

Richard Matheson's Third From the Sun has a mesmerizing Gene Szafran cover and reprints 13 stories from the earlier collection Born From Man and Woman.  Of these 13 tales I believe I have blogged about four: "Mad House," "Lover, When You're Near Me," "The Wedding," and "Disappearing Act."  I would have thought I'd read more, as I feel like I have read many Matheson stories--maybe I read some of them before I started the blog.  I'm actually curious to read this thing, maybe soon.

Then we have The 27th Day by John Mantley, which has a cool Richard Powers cover painting, a painting obscured by line drawings of the five people whom the aliens have given the power to destroy the world.  It looks like the world is in trouble--the aliens gave a college professor and what look like a Maoist spy and a Soviet commissar the power to destroy the world.  Thanks, E. T., this is really the help we needed--what's next, airdropping pallets of cash to Tehran?  And, you know, I can't tell if Eve is suffering from postpartum depression, so our odds may be even worse than they appear.  This book looks a little silly, its plot like that of a mainstream melodrama, its point likely that the commies are no worse than us decadent capitalists.  A few moments on wikipedia suggests John Mantley's career was focused largely on the dramatic arts; he apparently is to blame for the second season of Gil Gerard's Buck Rogers.  Don't bet any money on my reading The 27th Day any time soon. 

Finally, another book I brought home (from a flea market, maybe) for its Powers cover, Charles Eric Maine's High Vacuum.  I read Maine's He Owned the World back in 2018, and it is good I blogged about it, because I don't remember a thing about it.  High Vacuum sounds like it is about being trapped in space or on Luna or something, which sounds fun, so maybe I'll read this one, enjoy it, blog abut it, and then forget about it.

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There they are, some recent bargains, some of which we may be hearing more about in the future.  If I buy enough stuff, maybe we'll do this again in November.

   

Robert E. Howard: "Wolfshead," "The Dream Snake," and "The Hyena"

Let's explore a Robert E. Howard bestiary by reading three late 1920s stories from Weird Tales penned by the creator of Conan, Kull and Solomon Kane, all of which, coincidentally, have animal titles.  These stories have all been reprinted in books, including books I own or have access to via the magic of internet piracy, but I will be reading the versions that appeared in Farnsworth Wright's unique magazine through the medium of scans at the internet archive.  Click the links below for quick access to these scans your own self.

"Howoooooo!"               "Hissssssss....."            "Hehehheheheheheeh!"  

"Wolfshead" (1926)

"Wolfshead" is the cover story of the April 1926 issue of Weird Tales and it gets a blood-dripping woman-in-peril cover that is just bursting with energy and emotion.  Weird Tales covers often look static, but this one really conveys motion and feeling to the viewer, so kudos to E. M. Stevenson.

The narrator of "Wolfshead" is an old man hanging out with some soldiers in the 16th or 17th century or whenever, and tells them a story of his youth, prefacing his tale with the suggestion that his story will relate the scariest event any man will witness until the arrival of the end of the world.

Dom Vincente da Lusto was an adventurer and he built a castle on the coast of West Africa to trade with the natives, acquiring slaves and ivory and other valuables and shipping them up to Europe.  Negotiating with African chiefs and driving local labor with the lash is hard work, so every year Dom Vincente invited a bunch of European friends down to his castle for a few weeks of revelry.  Our narrator was one such invitee, and he describes the castle and the surrounding landscape and the assembled Europeans, among thtem men who love to drink and women who love to flirt (and maybe more!)  One European who drinks heavily but never gets drunk, and is otherwise quite stern and taciturn, is a de Montour.  "Wolfshead" is a sequel to "In the Forest of Villefere," a story in which, you will remember, de Montour fought a werewolf.  Well, it is quickly quite clear that de Montour himself is now a werewolf, what with his comments on the moon and warning to everybody to bolt their doors securely at night.

A beautiful woman is assaulted and left bleeding, her clothes torn to reveal her body; a white man in the castle is torn to pieces, as are local blacks out in the jungle--who is committing these atrocities?  Native worshippers of the leopard?  Some of the rowdier European guests, who are having a feud over a woman who has been flirting with both of them?  De Montour, whom Howard has been hinting is a werewolf but not necessarily so bad a guy?  Or Dom Vincente's rat-faced nephew Carlos, whom the narrator, when he isn't describing how he beat the hell out of his slave, Gola--Gola volunteered to be the narrator's slave because he was fascinated by the narrator's hair(!?)--has been foreshadowing is the true villain of the story.

Things escalate radically when Carlos tries to seize the castle himself by murdering Dom Vincente and leading an army of Africans to storm the place and the werewolf enters the fight, performing unimaginable deeds to decide the battle's outcome and resolve its own eerie fate!

"Wolfshead" is a good werewolf story and a good white-people-up-to-their-necks-in-danger-in-Africa story.  The terror and violence and exploitative eroticism are all there, and Howard also comes up with his own theory of lycanthropy and how it operates that is pretty cool, more epic and weird than the general werewolf "rules" which are regularly presented to us.  The story is also full of disturbing ethnic and sexual stereotypes and sexist and racist behavior--just about everybody in the story is morally compromised--but don't we read horror stories to be disturbed?  Thumbs up for "Wolfshead," another Howard story worth seeking out.

"Wolfshead" is justly popular and is the title story of a Howard collection which has been graced by cover illustrations by such savants as Frank Frazetta and Paul Lehr.  After reading such a cool story, and seeing these awesome and evocative cover paintings, you have every reason to say to yourself "The speculative fiction world really is full of talented people!"

The '68 printing (left) has as an intro an excerpt from a letter to H. P. Lovecraft written by Howard;
the '79 edition (right) has an intro by Robert Bloch of Psycho fame;
both intros are well worth the time of the weird aficionado

"The Dream Snake"  (1928)

"The Dream Snake" debuted in the same issue of Weird Tales as one of the most famous and influential of all weird or speculative fiction stories, H. P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu," an issue the cover of which seems to illustrate a story about an evil piece of furniture.  Even though our pal from Texas won the cover illo just two years ago with the great "Wolfshead," this cover doesn't even mention Howard's name!  

A bunch of people are hanging out outside at night.  The moon rises, and one of the party, Faming, responds to the appearance of this heavenly body by going pale and rigid, by biting his lip so it bleeds.  His friends notice, so Faming explains the uncanny reason the moon affects him so.

Like plenty of people in the kinds of stories we read here at MPorcius Fiction Log, Faming has been having a dream all his life in which he inhabits the life of a similar man in radically different circumstances.  This dream feels so real that at times Faming wonders if that life might be the real one and this life the dream!  

In that other life, Faming is a fugitive living in a hilltop bungalow in Africa, surrounded by grassland.  He lives with a servant, a Hindu ("Hindoo"), also a fugitive.  The dream is almost the same every time he has it, and covers a few days time.  In the dream, he comes home from an unsuccessful hunting expedition, his rifle broken beyond repair.  He finds his Hindu companion absent, and clues suggest the man was carried off or swallowed whole by a mind-bogglingly colossal serpent!  With no rifle, Faming is horrified the snake will come for him and he will be powerless to defend himself.  All night he listens in horror to the snake move through the tall grass, to its pushing at the bolted door!  The bungalow has a window, and Faming knows if he sees the snake through the window he will go insane!  The huge reptile does not reveal itself, and during the day Faming hurries towards the coast.  When night falls he is still making his desperate way through the grasslands, and he looks back and in the light of the moon to see the tall grass waving in the still air--the giant snake must be behind him!  And closing in!

Faming wakes up before the snake catches him--but lately the snake has been getting closer and closer before he awakes!  

That night Faming's friends here a scream and rush to Faming's room to find him dead, his body crushed, as if by an impossibly huge constrictor snake.

This is filler material but Howard handles it very well--thumbs up!  "The Dream Snake" is very smooth and economical, with the odd notes--why is Faming a fugitive in the dream?  Why is his servant a Hindu?-- adding to the air of menace and mystery.  (Gola's bizarre fascination with the hair of the narrator of "Wolfshead" serves a similar purpose--it doesn't add to the plot but it adds to the atmosphere of alienness and disorder.)    

"The Dream Snake" has reappeared in a bunch of books with terrific covers, including one I own, the edition of Pigeons from Hell with cover illo by Jeff Jones that features two of your favorite warm-blooded reptiles, Tyrannosaurus Rex and Pteranodon.  Let's also today celebrate the edition of Pigeons from Hell with an Esteban Maroto cover, where we find some of your favorite cold-blooded reptiles, among them the cobra.

"The Hyena" (1928)

Here's another story that was reprinted in Pigeons from Hell.  You can also find it in the various editions of The Dark Man and Shadow Kingdoms.  "The Hyena" debuted in an issue of Weird Tales that carries a story by August Derleth and serials by Murray Leinster and Ray Cummings, all of which we may very well find ourselves reading as we continue our Weird Tales journey.  

One reason I like stories in which people are in space or on the moon, in spacesuits, that kind of thing, is that in the vacuum of space or on the surface of an alien world death is just moments and millimeters away--one mistake, one bit of carelessness, a little bad luck or betrayal or negligence on the part of a comrade and you are done for.  The setting of such a story generates a tension which is exciting.

I feel the same way about these stories of white people in Africa or some such place.  As in outer space, in Africa it is like the whole universe around you is out to destroy you, so you'd better keep on your toes!  And just as the science of what is going on in the void between the worlds or on the surface of the moon is mysterious and alien, the culture of Africans and the plants and animals of Africa are alien, inscrutable, will kill you you know not why, kill you you know not how.

(Of course I refer to the outer space and the Africa of fiction--I know next to nothing about space or Africa in real life and am sure Africa is a great place.)

I say all this as a preamble to telling you I really enjoyed "The Hyena."  Thumbs up!  

Our narrator, Steve, is a young man newly arrived in East Africa, with a job on a cattle ranch.  Steve is a fish out of water.  He doesn't speak the language of the locals, the Masai, and he doesn't have much in common with his boss, a Boer.  He doesn't really like to hunt, to kill animals, or to boss the blacks around, and when the blacks start sniggering that he is womanish he has to beat one to maintain his dignity and reputation.  We get the impression Steve even felt uneasy and out of place back home in Virginia when he tells us he didn't know how to act around women back there and would avoid them.

Living in the area is a singular black man, very tall, very lean and muscular, his skin a different shade than that of the Masai, his facial features--the thin nose, the thin lips--suggesting he has some Berber blood.  Confident and well-spoken, Senecoza the fetish-man gives Steve an inferiority complex, and Steve comes to hate the fetish-man, based more on instinct than any evidence.  The Masai fear Senecoza and avoid him, while the white ranchers like him and trade with him.

Howard admires barbarians and the primitive and so we shouldn't be surprised that Steve's intuition, even if it seems to be based on simple racism and childish envy and fear, turns out to be correct and Senecoza turns out to be a monster who can turn into a hyena at will and who is plotting to lead a crew of cannibals with filed teeth in a campaign of murder against all the white ranchers.  The hints of magic early on and the fight scenes that ensue once Senecoza's powers and plans are made plain to Steve and us readers are pretty good, quite exciting--Howard excels at this sort of thing.  Also effective are Steve's and Senecoza's relationships with a woman who comes to the ranch from New York, a beauty who exerts a powerful attraction on both the sexually naive Virginian and the masterful dominating fetish-man.  The woman from the Big Apple is open-minded and finds everything in Africa just fascinating and she and Steve don't see eye to eye about Senecoza at first, but she gets an education when the fetish-man rips her clothes off and ties her up and she has to be rescued by Steve.

Like "Wolfshead," "The Hyena" is a well-crafted adventure and horror story and it covers some of the same themes and has many of the same disturbing attributes as the tale of de Montour the werewolf.  Quite entertaining.

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Three good stories.  It is always gratifying to read the work of a writer and find that he deserves his high reputation.  These stories buttress Robert Bloch's contention that the Conan stories are far from Howard's best work.  I should look into the collections Wolfshead, Pigeons from Hell and The Dark Man and Others and read the included stories I have not yet blogged about.  Stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log and see what comes of that idea.

Frank Belknap Long: "The Dog-Eared God," "The Man Who Died Twice," and "The Black Druid"

Let's continue our readings of 1920s weird fiction with three stories by Frank Belknap Long, one of H. P. Lovecraft's more intimate associates.  We'll be venturing beyond Weird Tales today, and even into 1930, as we hunt for stories by Long we haven't already read--we've already read a lot of them!

Today's stories have all been reprinted in books, but I'm reading the original magazine versions in scans at the internet archive, and you can too by just clicking these handy dandy links:

"The Dog-Eared God"  "The Man Who Died Twice"  "The Black Druid"

 "The Dog-Eared God" (1926)

We get the ethnic stereotypes right out of the gate today as the narrator of "The Dog-Eared God" tells us about his friend, a short and hideous neurotic New York Jew with a hook nose.  Our protagonist's pal is a college professor and he has an elaborate hobby--an amateur Egyptologist, he has smuggled 83 mummies into Gotham and destroyed them one by one in his mansion on Riverside Drive in the course of performing experiments on them.

The professor shows the narrator his latest acquisition, a mummy of strange proportions.  The prof shares with our narrator one of his theories--that the animal-headed gods of the Egyptians were based on real beings, members of a nonhuman intelligent race who lived upon the Earth long ago.

Somewhat ridiculously, the professor proposes that he and the narrator sleep in the room with the strange mummy.  I guess this is an experiment?  Long could have come up with a more plausible reason for the men to be asleep in the room with the mummy, like having them fall asleep while translating boring documents late into the night or after drinking to celebrate the acquisition of this bizarre over-sized and queerly-shaped mummy. 

Anyway, the narrator wakes up in the middle of the night and has a vision that indicates that, indeed, in ancient Egypt, lived people with the heads of lizards and other beasts.  The mummy here in the professor's mansion was their king and god, a cruel ruler from outer space who drank people's blood and devoured virgins.  The narrator observes, in his vision, the ceremony at which the space monster-god was buried, and at which the king's resurrection was predicted.

Our guy then observes that resurrection as the mummified alien, who has an elephant nose in the center of its bat-face and big dog ears to either side of it, busts out of its wrappings and attacks the prof.  The prof is briefly thrilled to see his theory proven correct, but has little time to celebrate as the monster god breathes fire on him, killing him and setting the whole place aflame.  The narrator runs out of the house screaming, at a subway station jumping the turnstile and boarding a train without paying.  The next day he reads about the fire in the paper--it seems that the firemen had a hard time putting out the blaze because dozens of people who concealed their heads under hoods kept trying to get into the burning building!  The animal-headed people theorized by the professor are still alive, living in concealment in New York City!  

Though ridiculous, this story is a lot of fun--thumbs up!  Professional scholars of the weird also like it--you can find it in the 2022 volume Weird Tales: Best of the Early Years: 1926-27 (edited by Kaye Lynne Booth and Jonathan Maberry) and 2026's Weird Tales Volume One: The Early Years (edited by Stephen Jones.)  "The Dog-Eare God" also appeared in 2000's Arkham's Masters of Horror: A 60th Anniversary Anthology Retrospective of the First 30 Years of Arkham House.

"The Man Who Died Twice" (1927)

Here's today's non-WT story.  "The Man Who Died Twice" first haunted the material world in Ghost Stories, a magazine that endured from 1926 to 1931.  I don't know if I have ever read a story from this magazine before; some of the covers are pretty good, with attractive women being menaced by skeletons, the devil, a clown, a cobra, and--of course--figures that look like freshly laundered white sheets, but I can't recognize hardly any of the names on the table of contents pages.  One day we may dig through a (virtual) stack of these magazines to read stories by people we know, like Ray Cummings, who has "They Hanged a Phantom for Murder" in the same issue that presents Long's" "The Man Who Died Twice," Robert E. Howard, who has a boxing story, "The Apparition in the Prize Ring," in a 1929 issue under a pen name, and Hugh B. Cave, who appears in a 1931 ish with "The Strange Case of No. 7."

Hazlitt walks into the office of the insurance company where he has worked for twenty years, and, in his own mind, at least, been essential to the building of the firm to its current state.  He sees another man at his desk, dictating to a secretary!  Has he been let go?  Enraged, Hazlitt busts into the boss's office, where the boss and three other bigwigs are smoking and talking over some business.  He yells at the boss, insults him, but the boss and the other executives just ignore Hazlitt.  Hazlitt goes so far as to strike the boss in the face, but the boss just touches his chin and remarks that he has felt a sudden pain.  The business talk resumes, and, humiliated, Hazlitt sobs and then returns home, despondent, to face the wife.  Similarly, the wife--and a man in the apartment with her!-- ignores Hazlitt.  Hazlitt realizes, remembers, he is a ghost, that he died six months ago!  How did Hazlitt die?  His wife poisoned him!  He seeks revenge, but when he tries to strangle the bitch, she feels a pain in her neck and throat, but can still breathe.  Hazlitt exerts all his strength, and his diabolical widow senses that somehow the man she promised to have and to hold in sickness and in health, is punishing her, but Hazlitt exhausts his ectoplasmic strength and doesn't even come close to slaying his killer.

Hazlitt gives up and walks the streets.  He sees a child stupidly standing in the middle of the street, about to get hit by a car.  Hazlitt runs at the child, pushes him to safety, and is himself struck by the car and killed, his soul sent to its final rest.  The woman driving the car saw Hazlitt briefly as she ran him over, and jumps out of the car to look for the dead or wounded man, by passersby tell her she has hit no one and conclude she is "batty."

This is a good story up until the end; Long describes Hazlitt's wild emotions in a way that is compelling and amusing.  And then there is the wife:

...standing above him with a spoon, and a bottle in her hand, on which was a skull and crossbones....She bent and forced the spoon between his teeth. “I don't love you,” she laughed shrilly. 

I also like the colloquialisms Long's characters utter, like "I hope he chokes" and "She'll think I'm a jellyfish."  

Stories in which people express and act upon passion are entertaining, even if, as here, people's dialogue and behavior reminds you of Looney Tunes.

It feels like Long didn't know how to end the story, however.  Hazlitt walks down the street, people again and again passing through him, but then he can touch a little boy to save him and get hit hard enough by a car to be slain?  And after being invisible the whole story, even to people he is physically assaulting, he can be seen by the female motorist?  These inconsistencies are a little hard to take.       

 I still like "The Man Who Died Twice", even if the ending doesn't quite work.  Endings are hard.

"The Man Who Died Twice" had to wait until the year 2000 to rematerialize in an anthology of stories from Ghost Stories, and it was also included in 2010's huge (1100 pages!) volume of Long stories from Centipede Press.

"The Black Druid" (1930)

Long ago, I read Edmond Hamilton's "The Death Lord" from the July 1930 issue of Weird Tales, but I skipped the Long and Donald Wandrei contributions to the issue.  Well, today we fill in one of those gaps by reading Long's "The Black Druid," which has been reprinted in multiple Long collections and anthologies with cool covers.

Benefield is a New Yorker and an archaeologist who has been around the world, explored the Egyptian pyramids and read forbidden books in China and all that sort of thing.  His colleagues consider him something of a crank because he seems to believe in vampires and voodoo.  He also dresses sloppily and unfashionably, and has an unhappy marriage and money troubles.  

He consults a book at the library, reads a passage that suggests the Druids invested magical power into all they touched, so that it was dangerous for people to come into contact with any item or article touched by a Druid.

When Benefield makes to leave the library he finds his overcoat is on a different hook--someone must have moved it.  On the subway ride home his face feels odd, and people are looking at him curiously.  He touches his face and it is wet, slimy--some goop must have dripped down onto him from a drain or a roof or something.  He hurries homewards and in a reflection in the glass of the door to his building he sees that his face has changed, become bestial!  His hands likewise are like those of an animal, all claws and hair!  Even his mind has unbidden thoughts, as if another being's consciousness is invading his mind!  He suddenly realizes his overcoat is causing this transformation.  He throws the coat off and enters the building and proceeds to his apartment, his appearance being back to normal.   

The next morning his wife tells him a story a neighbor told her.  Last night a mysterious figure climbed into the neighbor's apartment via the window, went out the door and, down by the entrance, picked up and donned an overcoat and walked off with it.  This burglar or whatever he was had odd pointy ears.

I guess we are to think Druids are living secretively in New York and one of them accidentally took Benefield's overcoat because it looked like his, leaving the professor with the Druid's coat.  The Druid than used his magic to find his coat.

It is a little annoying that a guy reads about a vanishingly rare phenomenon that almost nobody in the world knows about and then, amazingly, by coincidence, he experiences it like ten minutes later.  Maybe we are to think the Druid, lurking in the library, heard Benefield request that particular book and so set out to lay a trap for him, and then retrieved the coat when the trap failed?  Long also makes a lot out of the fact that Benefield is a Saxon, the mortal enemy of the Celtic druids, suggesting he is able to resist the conquest of his mind and throw off the overcoat because his blood is that of those who defeated the Celts.  Maybe the Druid sensed Benefield's ethnicity and sought to attack him because of it?

This caper feels a little clunky and confusing; I'm calling this one merely acceptable. 

The Fifteenth Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories reprints
Anthony Boucher's "They Bite," which we read back in 2019.

**********

These stories really exercise your suspension-of-disbelief muscles, but "The Dog-Eared God" and "The Man Who Died Twice" keep you interested with their driven, emotional characters.  "The Black Druid" has an odd and interesting character, but he doesn't propel the narrative--the story happens to him, rather than he determining the course of the story.  I can recommend the first two stories; as for the last, it isn't actually bad, but merely merits a passing grade.