Scream Along with B Copper, M St Clair and A Budrys

Followers of my twitter feed are all too aware that I spend a lot of time digging through piles of old paperbacks and magazines at antique stores.  Just a few days ago I took a look at a copy of Dell's 1970 Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Scream Along With Me, a paperback selection of stories from the 1967 hardcover anthology edited by Robert Arthur, Stories That Scared Even Me.  I balked at spending six bucks on this artifact, but decided to read three stories included in it by people we here at MPorcius Fiction Log have some interest in.  The stories: Basil Copper's "Camera Obscura," Margaret St. Clair's "The Estuary" AKA "The Last Three Ships" and Algis Budrys' "The Master of the Hounds."

Before we get to the main event, investigating these allegedly scary stories that are said to induce screams, I'll point out that I've already read and blogged about two stories from Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Scream Along With Me by major SF writers, Theodore Sturgeon's "It" and Thomas Disch's "Casablanca."  Also, note that I am reading today's three stories in a scan of Stories That Scared Even Me, not original printings or later reprints.  Plus, if you enjoy gazing upon Alfred Hitchcock's beautiful face, check out our last blog post, in which we read four stories from late 1970s issues of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

And, finally, note that the estimable tarbandu at The PorPor Books Blog is a fan of these Alfred Hitchcock anthologies and has read and blogged about all 25 stories in Stories That Scared Even Me, and talks about collecting Alfred Hitchcock anthologies and reading Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in the comments to the recent blog post of mine I linked to above.   Make sure to check out what tarbandu has to say!       

"Camera Obscura" by Basil Copper (1966)

Here we have a long and somewhat tedious story that you might say constitutes a Christian story, or an anti-Semitic story, or a story that exploits readers' bitterness at their creditors, or perhaps all three.  "Camera Obscura" also bears some similarities to "A Christmas Carol," and is one of those "horror" stories that, instead of disturbing you by telling you the universe is horrible, seeks to comfort the reader with a wish fulfillment fantasy in which the universe is in fact just and punishes people the reader doesn't like.  Not a scary story.   

The individual sentences of "Camera Obscura" are all well written and there are plenty of interesting images, but the narrative moves very slowly and is repetitive, and the story is thuddingly manipulative--we know from the get go that we are not supposed to like the protagonist, so there is little suspense, as we expect all along that something bad is going to happen to this guy and that we are not supposed to sympathize with him when it does.    

Mordecai Sharsted is a moneylender.  He has a client, Gingold, an apparently wealthy man who has not been paying his debts on time, so Sharsted walks to Gingold's place in order to give the man a final warning before seizing some of his assets.  Instead of letting us make up our own minds about Sharsted, Copper just comes out and tells us that Sharsted has a "sinister, decayed look" and a "mean soul" and so forth, laying it on thick, making sure we know he is no good.  Much is also made of his poor eyesight, I guess a metaphor for how he can't see right from wrong or refuses to open his eyes to the light of Jesus or whatever, and his green lensed spectacles, a sort of cliched way of telling us he is careful with money.  Talk of eyes and eye glasses that limit light and restrict vision also constitute foreshadowing of what Sharsted is going to encounter in Gingold's house.  

Gingold lives high up on a hill in a crummy section of town with twisty labyrinthine streets; he wears white and I guess is supposed to remind us of God.  More than once the view from this house is compared to the view God must have of the Earth.  In Gingold's presence, Sharsted get a little tongue-tied and has trouble bringing the conversation to the point of his visit.  Way upstairs in his house full of valuable paintings and other artifacts, Gingold has an elaborate camera obscura that projects upon a table a bird's eye view of the town.  He shows this to Sharsted, and points out the home of a woman who owes Sharsted money; this woman can't pay her debts and will soon be evicted.  Gingold asks repeatedly if Sharsted will forgive this woman her debts; Sharsted will not.

Gingold has a second camera obscura that projects a weird altered vision of the town, all red and showing buildings still standing which have long since been destroyed and replaced.  Gingold directs Sharsted into this world.  Sharsted desperately tries to find his way home in this maze-like hell version of the town, running into animated corpses wriggling with worms who turn out to be thieves and confidence men of Sharsted's acquaintance, men and women long dead, his steps always bringing him back to a Christian chapel.  Sharsted then tries to make his way back to Gingold's to tell the man he will forgive the woman her debts, but it is too late, Sharsted has been consigned to hell forever.

Too long, too slow, too repetitive, too obvious; seeing as the actual writing style is accomplished, if you are the type of person who figures he shouldn't have to pay his debts and that the people who loaned you money should be tortured everlastingly, maybe you'll enjoy "Camera Obscura," but I am giving it a thumbs down.

"Camera Obscura" seems to have first seen print in The Sixth Pan Book of Horror Stories and people seem to love it.  Everybody resents his creditors!  Besides in Copper collections, "Camera Obscura" has appeared in multiple anthologies that compile favorite contributions to the long-running series of Pan Books of Horror Stories and Copper's story was even made into a short for the TV show Night Gallery.  According to imdb, the TV version of Mordecai Sharsted is played by the guy who portrayed the villainous WASP on Benson, and the moneylender has been rechristened "William Sharsted."  Hmm.

"The Estuary" by Margaret St. Clair (1950)

When it first appeared in Weird Tales, this story was titled "The Last Three Ships."  "The Estuary" is a merely tolerable filler story, and it is a little odd to see it in an anthology like this, as there is not a single special thing about it.  Was Robert Arthur friends with St. Clair or something?

There are a bunch of old Liberty ships rusting away in the harbor.  Pickard sneaks aboard them at night and steals components from them to sell--his faithless and acquisitive wife uses the money to buy a fur coat.  Pickard hires other petty thieves to aid him in his illegal scavenging of this government property.  These other men tell him that, while working in the decaying vessels, that they sometimes hear strange noises.  One of the assistant thieves vanishes, then another quits because he is so spooked by the sounds.  Pickard also has a weird dream one day.  Anyway, it turns out that people who die on these Liberty ships become zombies, and one night one of them, the accomplice who disappeared, kills Pickard and Pickard becomes one of the zombies.  Don't worry about Pickard's wife--she has to return the fur coat, but she gets another man pretty quick. 

A competent trifle composed of commonplace genre fiction elements.  St. Clair does the bare minimum in the relationship and personality departments, and chooses to make her story more jokey than scary and apparently feels no need to come up with an explanation of why the Liberty ships are turning those who die in them into the living dead.  Not actually bad, but unambitious and not scary.  

After the wholly unremarkable "The Last Three Ships" was included in Stories That Scared Even Me and the abridged paperback version of that volume it went dormant for some four decades, inexplicably rising from the dead in a 2013 anthology titled Horror Gems.

"The Master of the Hounds" by Algis Budrys (1966)

Budrys' work is usually about what it means to be a man, and "The Master of the Hounds" is devoted to comparing before us two different men who have gone through, or are going through, some kind of life-changing trial.  Which of them is a real man who gets shit done and appeals to women?  Is a real man a guy who dominates others and his environment by any means that comes to hand?  Is your manhood inherent in your physique, or in your will?  Do you have to be good to be a real man?

Our first contender in the who-is-a-man battle royale is Malcolm Lawrence, the New York artist.  He has an attractive wife whom we are told was a little plump ten years ago when they married, but now is lean with a long face and high cheek bones.  I guess the implication is that Malcolm is not bringing in enough groceries, even though this kind of sounds like he has upgraded his wife into a fashion model.

Malcolm has been working at an ad agency, but aspires to be a fine artist, and has quit the agency to spend a summer in a rented house on a quiet stretch of the Jersey shore, to get away from it all and see if he can come up with some real meritorious paintings.  We witness the Lawrences interacting and the wife seems to always kind of be nudging Malcolm, not-so-subtly pushing him around, trying to manipulate him because she is disappointed in him. 

To save money, the Lawrences took a house in what we'd have to call a failed development.  The developers only finished two of the seaside houses, and only one of them is well-maintained--the two completed houses are surrounded by half finished houses that are falling apart in the seaside air.  The Lawrences take the poorly maintained house, across the street from the well-maintained one, which they learn is occupied by a famous British Army officer, Colonel Richey, a veteran of the Second World War who was the senior British officer in a POW camp where he and other British officers were held year after year.  Richey's exploits were the subject of a fictionalized film which the Lawrences have seen.  (Budrys' story here was perhaps inspired by the 1963 film The Great Escape and the books which inspired it.)

Budrys does a good job making the first part of the story sort of creepy--the sad, abortive, rundown development, the Lawrences' first intimations about Richey's Dobermans, dogs Budrys tries to make seem scary which they see long before they actually meet Richey and learn they are living next to a celebrity.  In the second part of the story the Lawrences and Richey sit down and get cozy, drinking tea, and Mrs. Lawrence and Colonel Richey seem to be flirting right in front of Malcolm!  

Richey talks about his experiences in the German camp.  The British prisoners were digging an escape tunnel, a tunnel Richey didn't really want to see used, as it would be risky to do so and perhaps pointless besides--by the time the British soldiers would be usable to leave the camp via the camp the war would be over or nearly so.  The point of the tunnel in Richey's eyes was to serve as something for the prisoners to do, a goal to inspire teamwork and promote discipline.  A cave in that occurred while Richey was working in the tunnel crippled him--among other things, his genitals were rendered inoperative.  After the war, a journalist wrote about Richey's adventures, leading to the film and a trip to Hollywood for Richey top work on the film as a technical advisor.  British taxes being so onerous, Richey decided to stay in the US and got this house and acquired and trained the two Dobermans, a breed of dog he knew something about because the Germans used them as guards in the camp.

Richey makes it clear that he will use his Dobermans to make the Lawrences his prisoners, even his slaves, all summer.  Also clear is that Malcolm's wife thinks Malcolm is a loser and Colonel Richey some kind of evil genius whom Malcolm can never outwit--even though Richey the ruthless leader of men literally has no balls, he is more of a man than Malcolm the failed artist!  Wifey even discourages Malcolm from resisting the colonel's attempt to confine and control them, and when things come to a dangerous climax she blames her husband more than the psycho who is tormenting them (she may even be appreciating the torment!)

(The Alfred Hitchcock-related stories we've been reading today and last time seem to paint women in a pretty poor light, don't they?)

Who will live and who will die?  Will Malcolm come out on top and prove to himself and to his doubting wife that he is a man, or will the crippled Richey prove his superiority even though he cannot achieve an erection and is some kind of sadistic maniac?

A good thriller that is full of surprises but not cheap surprises--everything is foreshadowed and set up skillfully by Budrys.  Budrys is almost as good at details and images and sentence construction as Copper, but while Copper overdoes it and his fine sentences become burdensome and many only provide information that is extraneous or superfluous, Budrys' sentences all contribute to the story's effect.  Budrys' story also has believable and nuanced characters we can identify with, not just lame manipulative archetypes, and real suspense--we are not sure what will happen to the characters or how we are expected to feel about them.  Thumbs up for "Master of the Hounds," easily the best story we are reading today and the only one that is legitimately scary.

"The Master of the Hounds" debuted in an issue of The Saturday Evening Post with the Beatles on its cover, and has reappeared in Budrys collections and many anthologies, including Dennis Etchison's Masters of Darkness III and Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois' Dogtales!

We've blogged about the L. Sprague de Camp story in Masters of Darkness III and
the Harlan Ellison and Fritz Leiber stories in Dogtales! 

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So there they are, three stories selected by Robert Arthur to be reprinted under the prestigious aegis of the director of Psycho.  Algis Budrys' story is very good and absolutely deserves to be widely disseminated, Copper's is pretentious and ambitious and tells people what they want to hear and so it makes sense to reprint it, but the inclusion of St. Clair's banal piece constitutes a mystery.  Well, life is one mystery after another, I suppose.

I love dipping into these anthologies, but next time we'll be reading a novel.  See you then!

Barry N. Malzberg: "Getting In," "Getting Out," and, w/ B Pronzini, "Night Rider" and "A Matter of Survival"

Digging around scans of late 1970s detective magazines I came up with two Barry N. Malzberg stories I haven't read, and to round out a full blog post let's add to them two stories Malzberg collaborated on with his pal Bill Pronzini.  I read these all in scans of the issues of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in which they debuted, haphazardly reading the collabs out of chronological order.

"Getting In" by Barry N. Malzberg (1977)

This is an absurdist, somewhat dreamlike, story depicting the pressures inherent in the life of the middle-class male.  Our narrator, I guess an architect or something like that, is so stressed out by dealing with his office job, with his wife and kids, and with his mistress, that he tries to admit himself to an insane asylum called "the Residence."  The doctors run many tests on him and over his protestations declare him sane.  They explain to him that nobody is happy, that his psychological state is normal for one of his age and socioeconomic status.  

We get jokes about how the narrator always contacts his mistress by calling her from a payphone at the fast food restaurant Wonder Waffles, and scenes in which the narrator drives his assistant insane and jealously watches as the man is hauled off to the Residence.  Plus lots of dark humor that demonstrates how selfish the narrator is and how manipulative and emotional women are.  The story ends with the narrator taking up a Smith and Wesson .38, like the guy in one of the Malzberg stories we just read a few days ago, and using it to torture a doctor, who, even as he bleeds from his gunshot wounds, insists the narrator is sane.  As the story ends it becomes starkly dreamlike, and we are given the impression the narrator is going to commit suicide.

This story is so fantastical, feels so much like a cynical fairy tale set in a hyperbolic caricature of our own world, that it is odd to see it in a crime magazine instead of a science fiction magazine.  I don't know that "Getting In" has ever been reprinted, so all you Malzberg obsessive collectors out there will need a copy of the March 1977 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, but if I know you sensitive and sophisticated guys as well as I think I do, you wanted one as soon as you saw the cool blue of the issue's cover.

"Getting Out" by Barry N. Malzberg (1978)

Nothing makes the cool blue photographic cover of the March '77 AHMM look better than the embarrassingly lame (the kids would call it "cringe") golf cartoon cover of the July 1978 ish.  Ugh.  But it seems "Getting Out" has never been printed anywhere besides behind this cover that is making me ruefully shake my head.  

As we were hoping, "Getting Out" is a sequel to "Getting In," even though the insane asylum, called "The Residence" in "Getting In" is called "The Institute" here in "Getting Out."  (Wonder Waffles is still "Wonder Waffles," thankfully.)  After shooting at least one person with his Smith and Wesson .38 (described here as "antique," giving us science fiction vibes), and not killing himself, the narrator is held in a cell which he considers more comfortable than the middle-class work and family milieu from which it (partially, as the wife and mistress do come to visit and the kids send correspondence requesting an increase in their allowance) separates him.  He expresses the hope he will be able to spend the next thirty years in this cell, but further tests indicate he is sane, and a doctor confides "You are a valuable social resource, a presumptive sane person. We cannot keep you, really, for thirty hours."  

Released, the narrator returns to work and to home and we get the same kinds of jokes about middle-class life as we got in "Getting In."  Then comes the punchline of the two stories--the narrator and his mistress truly fall in love, and the narrator decides to abandon his family.  This destruction of the family unit cannot be accepted by society, and so the insane asylum that rejected him when he was miserable and tried to admit himself now forcibly admits him, now that he has a chance of happiness by ditching wife and kids.     

Malzberg writes about the profession of psychology, big institutions, and disastrous sexual relationships all the time, and "Getting In" and "Getting Out" are pretty good examples of his work on these themes.  The extent to which Malzberg is sincere in his portrayal of the mental health establishment as a cog in the machine of bourgeois capitalism, as devoted to the project of corralling men in the prison that is the child-rearing family in order to bolster GDP, and to what extent he is spoofing such assessments, I don't know, but the text Malzberg produces is fun and provocative both in its general themes and in its many little jokes and details.  Thumbs up!    

"Night Rider" by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg (1977)

Compared to the "Getting" series, "Night Rider" was an international sensation, seeing reprint in the Pronzini and Malzberg collections Problems Solved and On Account of Darkness as well as translated for the Finnish edition of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine as well as the Japanese Hayakawa's Mystery Magazine.  

When I was living in the Hawkeye State, I checked On Account of Darkness out of the Des Moines Public Library, and so I read "Night Rider" in that dimly recalled period of time before I started this blog.  The New Jersey setting and the marital conflict plot stuck with me--I remembered the story immediately as I started reading it today.  Oh yeah, and the fact that I didn't really like the ending.

Our narrator is a failure in life who has always taken the path of least resistance and is married to a nagging boring woman who has the TV on all day.  His only relief is his nightly drive of over 60 miles along the highways and country roads of Northern New Jersey in his worn out Cadillac Fleetwood.  Pronzini and Malzberg take us with the narrator on one of these drives, mentioning real highways like Route 80 (what people in other states, I have learned, call "I-80") and towns like Lodi, though the geography feels fictionalized and there seems to be a typo, "Watching" for "Watchung."

Anyway, we hear how annoying the wife is and how unhappy the narrator is, and how he is stopped by the police so often for speeding he has developed a whole system of trying to bribe them with plausible deniability if the cop refuses the bribe.

Another car starts chasing the narrator, and we get a pretty good--realistic and tense--car chase.  The narrator drives too fast, is distracted by trying to figure out who might be chasing him, and crashes on a lonely country road by a swamp.  He gets out of the wreck, injured, sees the pursuer's car parked on the shoulder--it is his car!  The man emerging from the car must be himself!  The illusion, presumably a manifestation of his guilt, vanishes and the narrator remembers that he murdered his wife by hitting her with her TV and put her corpse (and that of the TV) in the trunk.

I had little tolerance for such silly psychological twist endings when I was younger, but now I take them in stride and don't find "Night Rider" as disappointing as I did when I read it over ten years ago.  So, thumbs up.

"A Matter of Survival" by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg (1976)

Another Pronzini-Malzberg collab that was reprinted in Problems Solved.  This is today's weakest story, more an idea than an actual story, and lacking the little jokes and sharp images and biting phrases that add so much value to our earlier three tales.

Two business executive are on the balcony of an apartment building over twenty stories up in some Midwestern or Western city where a party is being held.  Each man owns an electronics firm that is losing money because of competition from out east and because corporate welfare from the feds has dried up.  Both companies will fold unless they merge and take advantage of the resulting economies of scale by slashing personnel and space costs.  But the two men don't get along, so a merger seems impossible.

The men don't like each other because one is married to a faithless, manipulative, promiscuous slut and her latest affair is with the other.  She has them under her thumb, enjoys torturing them, refuses to allow her husband to divorce her, refuses to allow the other to end their affair.  And she is against the merger the men think is the only means of saving their two companies.  She comes out on to the balcony to torment them, and they join forces to throw her off the balcony and convince the cops it was a freak accident.  The men's business careers and psychological well-being have been saved.  

Merely acceptable, a sort of skeletal outline of a story that lacks personality and emotional impact.   

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So, four stories about the tragedy of the bourgeoisie, how work life and women drive middle-class men insane, drive them to violence!  Maybe we can tie these themes to a specific time and place, perhaps they reflect conditions in the doom and gloom 1970s and the exigencies typical of American capitalism, and maybe Malzberg intends that interpretation.  But I think the themes of these stories are universal--no doubt medieval European merchants and Soviet apparatchiks were under the same sorts of stresses, were themselves pushed to the brink and sometimes beyond by the pressures of juggling the demands of women and bosses and their responsibilities to and for subordinates and children.

Of today's tales, "Night Rider" feels like the most palatable to a broad audience, a conventional suspense piece written in a realistic style that I think would appeal to mainstream thriller readers, though it has a Malzbergian psychological resolution.  Also conventional, but blandly and boringly so, is today's least piece, "A Matter of Survival," a story with a sort of boiler plate plot that is unadorned by stylistic flourishes or compelling characters or images.  The two solo Malzberg stories, "Getting In" and "Getting Out," are pure Malzberg, reminiscent of so much of his body of work in their themes, style and details, and full of fun; these two are definitely worth seeking out for the Malzberg fan.

At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs

For a moment I was puzzled to account for the thing, until I realized that the reptiles, being deaf, could not have been disturbed by the noise my body made when it hit the water, and that as there is no such thing as time within Pellucidar there was no telling how long I had been beneath the surface. It was a difficult thing to attempt to figure out by earthly standards—this matter of elapsed time—but when I set myself to it I began to realize that I might have been submerged a second or a month or not at all. You have no conception of the strange contradictions and impossibilities which arise when all methods of measuring time, as we know them upon earth, are non-existent.

Let's return to the world of Edgar Rice Burroughs with the first Pellucidar novel, At the Earth's Core, which debuted in 1914 in serial form across four issues of All-Story Weekly.  The cover illustration of that first appearance appeals to readers' interest in women in chains, but such masters as Frank Frazetta, J. Allen St. John and Bob Eggleton have graced many of the book reprints of At the Earth's Core with terrific reptile-centric covers.  In 1976 a very fun film based on the book and starring fan favorites Peter Cushing and Caroline Munro hit the big screen and in 2015 at a thrift store in Iowa I bought a hardcover movie tie-in edition of At the Earth's Core; that is the version of the novel I will be reading today. 

At the Earth's Core has a prolog in which a man who is acquainted with members of the Royal Society tells us that he unexpectedly ran into another white man among Arabs in the African desert; the main text of the novel is the author's recounting of the wild tale related to him by this gentleman, who was astonished to learn his adventure began ten years ago--he thought it was just one year!

This main narrator is David Innes, a native of Connecticut and physical fitness hobbyist who inherited a successful mining business.  Innes is friends with Perry, an old scientist and a religious man who, with Innes' financial backing, developed a superior engine and used it to power a colossal vehicle of his own design, a sort of ship that could bore through rock and earth.  Burroughs, like a legit science fiction writer, comes up with solutions for the problems presented by travelling through dirt and solid rock, like ways to refresh the air in the machine, how to make sure the occupants are seated upright no matter the direction the "iron mole" is travelling, where the earth dug away by the drill nose of the vessel must go, and so on.  Innes is our leading man, who does the fighting and who gets involved in love triangles, while Perry plays the role of comic relief and of wise man--he gets scared and prays and swears when there is danger, and it is he who identifies the exotic fauna they encounter (his hobby is paleontology) and figures stuff out by reading alien documents that providentially fall into his hands.  Much of the plot of At the Earth's Core is driven by Perry's inventions and aspirations; the rest is propelled by Innes' relationships.

The iron mole's test voyage, crewed solely by Innes and Perry, quickly goes awry, neither brainiac Perry nor muscleman Innes  finding himself able to steer the machine.  The iron mole drills downwards for days, carrying our heroes hundreds of miles below the Earth's surface.  Just as the vessel's air supply is about to run out, after digging through bands of rock and ice of radically diverse temperatures, the machine unexpectedly emerges into a region that offers cool fresh air!  Has Innes and Perry's conveyance accidentally been turned round and come back to the surface?

Of course not; the adventurers have emerged in a subterranean world alongside a placid sea, below a sun that forever sits in the center of the sky.  This is Pellucidar, a world on the inner surface of the hollow sphere that is the Earth, somehow held there by a gravity that pulls people away from the center of the planet, where hangs a small sun.  Burroughs puts some real effort into describing this world, most mind-bendingly, the psychological effect of living in a milieu where the sun doesn't move, so there is no sense of time--Burroughs even suggests that there is no such thing as time, that it is an illusion.  Even if this stuff is unconvincing--all the talk of time in At the Earth's Core I personally consider absolute balderdash--it adds texture and additional levels of interest to a story that is, of course, mostly about a guy who meets a princess in an alien world and gets involved in her wars, like most of Burroughs' compositions.  

Almost at once, Innes and Perry are set upon by a huge prehistoric mammal, and only escape destruction thanks to the intervention of some naked monkey-people and their teeming pack of ferocious canines.  These jolly primitives, whom Burroughs describes as having the skin color and facial features of "the Negro of Africa," have no tools or weapons, but they have a village fifty feet above the surface in the branches of trees, as well as a crude arena into which they throw Innes and Perry to be devoured by a hyaenodon.  Before the hyenadon can overpower them, furry gorilla people who have clothes and weapons attack, putting the monkey people and hyaenodon to flight and adding Innes and Perry to their chained line of captive humans.

The gorilla-people lead the chained humans past a sea teeming with battling plesiosaurs and icthyosaurs and giant turtles to the city of their masters, the Mahars.  Innes makes friends with a beautiful woman chained next to him, Dian, and she teaches him the language of her tribe.  Also among the captives is Hooja, who covets the beautiful Dian.  When Hooja gets fresh with Dian, Innes punches him out.  According to the custom of the humans of Pellucidar, this makes Dian Innes' property--he is expected to formally take her as a mate or give her her freedom, but Innes doesn't know this idiosyncrasy of local culture yet, and Dian is insulted and gives Innes the silent treatment.

When the party of gorilla men and captives passes through a dark tunnel, Hooja, a deft hand at picking locks, escapes and takes Dian with him.  Now that Dian is gone, another captive explains Pellucidar sexual relationships to Innes, and also helpfully points out that Dian is the princess of her people.

Innes and Perry end up in the city of the Mahars, where humans by the thousands serve as slaves to the dominant race of this inner world.  The Mahars are intelligent pterosaurs up to eight feet long who are deaf and communicate among themselves via some mental power and with lesser races, like the gorilla men, their servant and soldier class, through sign language.  The slavery our heroes endure doesn't involve particularly taxing work or particularly severe surveillance--Innes and Perry are assigned jobs like shelving books and find free time to make swords out of scrap metal that is laying around.  From the Mahar documents he is supposed to be dusting, Perry learns the history of the flying psykers--the current Mahars are all female, having figured out a way to artificially fertilize their eggs and then dispensed with the males.  Innes conceives a scheme to topple the hegemony of these scaly matriarchs and put homo sapiens where he belongs in Pellucidar as on the surface--on top!   

We readers are administered a hearty dose of gore and brutality when, as exemplary punishment for their fellow humans and as entertainment for the Mahars, two disobedient slaves with whom Innes and Perry are not acquainted get thrown into the Mahar's elaborate arena with two huge prehistoric mammals, a gargantuan bovine and a titanic feline.  Chaos erupts when one of these colossi ends up out of the arena and among the audience; Innes seizes this opportunity to sneak out of the underground city and back out into the wider world.  He meets a tribe of human fishermen who have a business relationship with the Mahars; as so often happens in these Burroughs stories, our protagonist ingratiates himself with strangers by helping them fight a monster.  We get an additional helping of horrible gore as this fisherman guides Innes to a Mahar temple, where they watch as the Mahars hypnotize and eat human women and children--because they are hypnotized, these humans do not flinch as their limbs and breasts are eaten off!  Yikes!  Male human slaves are devoured, without benefit of hypnotism, by the low-IQ pterosaurs who serve as the intelligent Mahars' watchdogs and bodyguards.

At the Earth's Core is a something of a peripatetic novel, one in which the narrative, instead of proceeding directly from point A to point B to point C, instead wanders here and there a bit.  The episode of the primitive monkey people, for example, seems to serve little plot purpose, though it is entertaining--why have Innes and Perry captured by the good-natured savages and then captured by the barbaric henchmen of the Mahars, why not just have them get captured first by the gorilla-men?  Similarly, Innes escapes the city of the Mahars, witnesses some horror scenes, and then just goes back to the city.  There is also some foreshadowing that doesn't pay off.  All this "extra" material is fun or otherwise affecting, so doesn't weaken the novel, but on reflection the plot is far from streamlined.

Anyway, Innes decides to return to the city of the Mahars to be with Perry and work on their scheme to overthrow the Mahars and civilize and Christianize the humans of Pellucidar.  When Innes is reunited with the old man, Perry suggests it was only an hour ago that they parted in the arena, while Innes, who has been marching for miles and miles, rowing canoes, fighting monsters, and witnessing atrocities, feels like months have passed.

The Mahars interrogate Innes, the strangest slave they have ever owned--no escaped slave has ever returned of his own volition, and no human has ever claimed to be from another world.  The psychic matriarchal feminist rhamphorynchusoids determine Innes must be lying about being from some outer surface world and sentence him to live vivisection--the Mahars may not have invented the bow and arrow or discovered electricity, but they are skilled biologists and eugenicists.  Innes, in chains, watches as the Mahars vivisect a shrieking living man, but luckily contrives to escape before being put on the operating table himself.  

Innes and Perry then put into operation their plan to destroy the Mahars--two natives, Hooja, who has been recaptured by the Mahars, and a another guy, have joined their crusade.  Innes slays four Mahars (three of whom were asleep when he launched his attack) and the men skin them and don their scaly hides as a disguise.  They steal the only copy of the formula for the fertilization chemicals the Mahars use to reproduce without male participation, and manage to sneak out of the city.

For months--maybe years!--the four men march across Pellucidar, overcoming obstacles and fighting off monsters.  The gorilla-men of the Mahars are on their trail, and catch up to them just before the fugitive slaves reach a human tribe.  The party splits up, the treacherous Hooja sneaking off and Innes going it alone in a successful effort to divert the gorilla-men away from poor old Perry and the hulking native who has to carry the Yankee inventor.  Innes has good fortune--a huge cave bear ambushes and massacres the entire company of gorilla-men.

Perry and his native companion escape to a human settlement, but Innes gets lost amid mountains and canyons and does not reunite with them for some time.  By chance he runs into Dian, the beauty who has been incessantly on his mind since her escape from the slave raiding party, just as she is being attacked by a pterosaur.  Innes kills the flying reptile and then has to contend with Jubal the Ugly One, a seven-foot tall he-man who has been after Dian, and whom she has been avoiding, the whole of her postpubescent life.  More horror material from Burroughs--Jubal is a famous fighter of monsters, and his body bears testimony to his many battles; the flesh of one side of his face, including an eye, is missing, the bones of his skull exposed.  Having defeated this brute, Innes still has to figure out how to win the heart of Dian, who keeps saying she hates him.  Of course, she really loves him, and when he gets frustrated enough to throw aside his civilized gentlemanliness and just grab her and kiss her against her (apparent, performative and false) will, she melts in his arms.  

Dian is keen on Innes' plan to unite the human tribes and teach them how to make bows and maybe even gunpowder and firearms and exterminate the Mahars and their gorilla-men.  The two lovers seek out Perry and begin to put the plan into action; Dian's tribe is one of the first to join the human coalition, of which Innes is declared Emperor!  But our heroes find that producing gunpowder is more difficult than anticipated, so Innes takes the iron mole back to the surface to get the science books that will spell it out for them.  But the iron mole again proves impossible to steer and Innes ends up in the Sahara instead of New England.

As the novel ends the author of the prolog has again taken up the narrative.  He tells us Innes has collected the books and other equipment he wants to bring back to Pellucidar with him, but doesn't know if Innes has made it back to Perry and Dian down in Pellucidar.  Like the first Barsoom book, the first Pellucidar book ends on a cliffhanger!

At the Earth's Core is a quite good adventure story with plenty of science fiction elements that speculate on how you might get to the Earth's core, what a society of deaf feminist monsters might be like, how the lack of a view of the sky might affect you psychologically, the nature of time, etc.  Of course the plot relies on wacky coincidences and at its center has a guy meeting and falling in love with a princess, as do so many Burroughs plots, so if that gets on your nerves I can't recommend At the Earth's Core to you.  But let's consider some ways At the Earth's Core may be different from other ERB classics.  I think the fight scenes in At The Earth's Core are a little more believable than many of those that take pace on Barsoom and in Tarzan's Africa--Innes doesn't single-handedly outfight huge animals or hordes of men all the time like John Carter and Lord Greystoke do.  The novel also has a sort of horror or grand guignol flavor to it, thanks to the fact that people and animals are forever getting mangled and dismembered.

I really enjoyed At the Earth's Core and look forward to our next journey down to Pellucidar.  There are five or six more Pellucidar books, so I suspect we have plenty of mutilation and musing about the nature of Time ahead of us.  But first we'll have a blog post addressing one of our bread and butter topics here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Barry N. Malzberg: "1984," "Reason Seven" and "Piu Mosso"

I was digging through the old paperbacks and magazines at Antiques Crossroads in Hagerstown, MD, when I came upon an issue of a digest-sized magazine I'd never heard of before, Espionage.  The cover illustration was sort of crude and I would have just ignored the thing and forgotten about it ten seconds later had I not spotted on the cover the name of our hero, Barry N. Malzberg!  Attached to a cryptic title that I didn't recognize, a title doesn't appear at isfdb!  I had to own this magazine!  And luck was with me--the price sticker on the plastic bag read "$1!"

Let's read this story and two other Malzberg stories from magazines printed in 1985, stories we might call rare.  

"1984" 

"1984" is a trifle, taking up a mere half page of Ed Ferman's F&SF.  This issue of F&SF also includes a book column by Algis Budrys, in which Budrys talks about A. E. van Vogt and van Vogt's influence on or relationships with Damon Knight, Philip K. Dick and Charles L. Harness, and a film column by Harlan Ellison, in which Ellison savages Gremlins and questions the effect on society of the way talented filmmakers George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg are using their power.  Both of these columns are clever and compelling, Budrys and Ellison demonstrating a deep knowledge and commitment to genre literature (and in Ellison's case, cinema) and getting pretty emotional, Budrys' column ultimately being heartwarming and sweet and Ellison's of course self-important and over-the-top bitter and angry.  I definitely see where Ellison is coming from with Gremlins and Lucas and Spielberg's work, however--as a kid I loved Gremlins, and of course the film is very competent technically, but when I saw it for the first time as an adult back in 2015 I was put off by how much it feels like a vicious attack by the contemptuous cognitive elite on ordinary average-and-below-average-IQ Americans and their perhaps childish attitude about Christmas.

Anyway, Malzberg's "1984," which Ferman suggests is about the election in which Ronald Reagan thrashed Walter Mondale, relates a scene in a school for scientists or gods or whatever; the narrator is the teacher and he is reviewing students' work.  A student has created a simulation of a society, or an actual miniature society (like in Ted Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God," I suppose), apparently a regular part of the curriculum.  The miniature society's politicians are stupid, its cities are full of riots, its countryside plagued by pollution.  The student is protective of his work and thinks he can jigger with it and get this fallen society back on course, but teach insists he put the people of this society "out of their misery."  The student will fail if he doesn't follow orders, so he pulls "the electoral lever" and destroys the little civilization.  

Presumably the implication is that by voting for Ronald Reagan the American people had destroyed the world, but maybe we should take solace in the fact that the world is in a terrible irreparable mess.  A view into the mind of the center-left intellectual in the Reagan era, which I guess was a tough time for them psychologically, as so many times are.  

Not a good story by any means, but an interesting time capsule that is brief and to the point.  Acceptable.  "1984" can be found in the recent Malzberg collection Collecting Myself.  

"Reason Seven" 

"Reason Seven" debuted in Omni and was reprinted in 1994 in the anthology Omni Visions Two and in 2023 in the anthology Ready When You Are and Other Stories.  Maybe it is not fair to call this one "rare."  Anyway, the issue of Omni in which "Reason Seven" appeared, where I am reading it, has a column by Charles Platt about the use of speculative futuristic languages in SF with references to Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and Russel Hoban's Riddley Walker, and a story by Kate Wilhelm, a person whom we are always hearing is so very important.  Photos of Malzberg and Wilhelm are included on page 10 for those who want to admire these two lookers.

Like "1984," "Reason Seven" has on its surface a difficult and destructive human relationship and is some kind of attack on Ronald Reagan that doesn't actually mention the 40th president's name.  It is the near future, I guess the mid or late '90s, and the United States has been engaging in invasions and raids all over the Third World in the prosecution of its conflict with the Soviet Union.  The assumption of the American intellectual class, of course, is that opposing the Soviet Union is a mistake or actually immoral, so the US government strives to deceive the public into supporting these kinetic actions and one means of doing so is producing what are purported to be enemy documents captured during the attacks, documents that make the enemy look bad.  Our narrator's job is composing this black propaganda. 

Like so many Malzberg stories, "Reason Seven" is a sort of report or testimonial the narrator has been ordered to produce.  In it he describes how he, stupidly, told a woman he was dating, a nurse with a masters degree, about his job.  Government agencies and employees in Malzberg stories are always incompetent, and not only is the narrator shown to be foolish enough to explain his espionage job to a civilian predisposed to oppose American foreign policy; Malzberg also makes clear that the fake documents the narrator concocts are shoddily composed but that the narrator, nevertheless, is very proud of them, and confident that by creating them he is "making a difference."

The nurse is outraged when the narrator explains his job and shows her his elaborately and lovingly organized library of his own half-baked meretricious writings, and she not only denounces him and his work but starts destroying the binders full of them and declaring she will expose him to the press.  So, the narrator murders her.  When he tells his superiors about what he has done, they quickly move to solve the problem presented by the woman's death, and assign the narrator the job of writing a suicide note.  I believe the final twist is that the narrator is going to be extrajudicially executed by the agency for which he works, that the suicide note he is writing is his own--in the same way he has been writing fake documents in the voice of commies the government has murdered as a way of justifying the killing of those reds, he is writing a fake document in his own voice to justify his own murder in pursuit of anti-communist policy.

More interesting than the story's banal and silly idea that the US is no better and perhaps worse than the USSR is Malzberg's depiction of the inner life of the writer and his relationship with his employers and with the public.  The narrator of "Reason Seven," for money, churns out at a high rate of speed a vast quantity of writing at the direction of callous employers, texts that few people end up reading and which most ordinary people would find unconvincing or uninteresting or even incomprehensible, but the narrator is nevertheless proud of his work, the artistic touches he has tried to include within it, and he cherishes the idea that by doing this (in-fact useless or even evil) literary work he is somehow "making a difference."  This is of course a somewhat caricatured depiction of Malzberg's own career.  This sad self-reflection is clever and compelling, and of course I appreciate Malzberg's depiction of a disastrous sexual relationship, one of my favorite themes and one that Malzberg skillfully addresses again and again in his work, in particular how here Malzberg focuses not on physical sexual dysfunction but on the risk we all run when we expose our true selves to others, when we make ourselves vulnerable in pursuit of an intimate physical or emotional connection to others; here in "Reason Seven" the result of a man opening himself up to a woman is catastrophic for all involved.

I like it.

"Piu Mosso" 

Malzberg knows all about music and a quick search on the google machine tells us that "piu mosso" is an instruction you might find on sheet music that directs the musician to play faster and with more energy.  What this has to do with this story is a little vague; maybe we are expected to think this story strives to achieve "the condition of music," i. e., it seeks to affect us directly, without having to describe reality or construct a plot or engage in other such intermediary techniques and devices.  (Music inspires emotion in the listener without having to tell a story or conjure an image the way painting, sculpture and literature generally do.)  Of today's stories, "Piu Mosso" is the least tethered to reality, a dream-like absurdist narrative featuring jokes about how government employees are lazy and corrupt and government operations are incomprehensible.  But just because a story tells a truth doesn't mean it is good; "Piu Mosso" is the weakest of today's stories.

A civil servant working in a building full of shirkers, malingerers, liars, and double and triple agents has decided to murder the President, he is not sure why; perhaps to become famous.  (Political murder is one of Malzberg's hobby horses, one I find far less entertaining than the sexual dysfunction theme.)  By threatening him with a revolver, the narrator acquires from his office mate the itinerary for the President's movements today, a document of loose sheets variously called "plans" and "charts."  This turns out to be unnecessary, as out in the corridor the narrator encounters the President--the chief executive is on his own, in a disguise and exposes himself as a quadruple agent somehow already aware of the narrator's scheme of assassinating him.  The narrator drops his revolver (one of the story's little jokes is how the narrator insists on calling the gun his "point thirty-eight") and the President picks it up and, after consulting the itinerary to make sure he is actually supposed to be here, the President shoots the narrator--in the flash of the shot the narrator sees his office mate and has a ridiculous conversation with the man. 

There is very little plot, emotion or substance of any kind here; "Piu Mosso" is like an unfunny dream sequence taken from a novel that was included in the novel only to pad out the page count.  Thumbs down, I'm afraid.

**********                

I can only really recommend one of today's 1985 Malzberg productions, but that one, "Reason Seven," is pretty solid.  But I have no regrets about exploring some of the less-travelled paths in the sprawling bibliography of our pal Barry.

Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle by Edgar Rice Burroughs

In peace he [Tantor the elephant] had lived with Dango the hyena, Sheeta the leopard and Numa the lion.  Man alone had made war upon him.  Man, who holds the unique distinction among created things of making war on all living creatures, even to his own kind.  Man, the ruthless; man, the pitiless; man, the most hated living organism that Nature has evolved.

It is time to read Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, the eleventh Tarzan book, which first appeared in serial form in 1927 and 1928 across five issues of Blue Book.  (The covers of the first two of those issues promoted Burroughs' latest latest Tarzan adventure with illustrations; the second cover was by famous illustrator J. Allen St. John.)  I'm reading my Ballantine edition of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, which has a $1.25 cover price and a Boris Vallejo cover depicting our hero Lord Greystoke rescuing a gorilla from a python.  This scene from the novel seems to be a favorite of illustrators and is brought to life on the covers of many editions of the novel, even though the craziest and most notable element of the book is the presence of people who are, more or less,12th-century crusaders.  Only Joe Jusko seems to have leaned into this medieval component of the book on the covers of a German 1995 printing and a 2021 US edition.

(I have to report that my Ballantine edition has some pretty distracting typos.  Tsk, tsk, Ballantine!)  

Characters in genre fiction get knocked unconscious all the time, and this commonplace occurrence befalls Tarzan on the third page of the text when the elephant Lord Greystoke is riding is spooked by musket fire from a member of a Bedouin hunting party.  Tarzan is captured by the Muslims, who, we learn, are members of an expedition led by Sheik Ibn Jad.   The sheik (whose title is variously spelled "sheik," "shiek" and "sheykh" here in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, a novel noteworthy for inconsistent spellings--e.g., "Beduw" or "Beduwy" or "Beduin" for "Bedouin"--and the exotic plural "'Aarab"--this word bears an initial apostrophe--for "Arabs" ), at the head of a large party of Arabs and black slaves, is marching through Tarzan's realm on the way to the little-known city of Nimmr, Ibn Jad having been told by a magician that a great treasure and a beautiful woman await him there.

Burroughs tries to build atmosphere by having the Muslims and their black slaves say "thy" and "thou" and use words like "menzil," "thob" and "thorrib;" my brief internet searches suggest that last word is rarely used outside of this novel.  A more substantive component of the Islamic facet of the novel is the relationships among the Arabs and blacks in the sheik's expedition.  One of the senior slaves, Fejjuan, a member of the Galla people, was seized as a child by Arab slavers; the Galla live near the supposed site of Nimmr and Fejjuan plots to escape bondage and return to his childhood home.  Sheik Ibn Jad wants his beautiful daughter Ateja to marry one guy, Fahd, but she is in love with another guy, Zeyd.  And then there is the sheik's brother, Tollog, who is plotting against the sheik; if anything happens to Ibn Jad, Tollog will inherit leadership of the expedition and ownership of any treasure it discovers. 

Tarzan presents a problem to the Arabs, seeing as Lord Greystoke forbids the hunting of elephants and the taking of slaves in this region, and of course these are precisely the practices the sheik's party has been engaging in as they pass through.  If Ibn Jad releases Tarzan, Lord Greystoke will round up a posse to force the expedition back to the desert from whence it came.  But just killing Tarzan is dangerous, as the ape man is popular among the local blacks, and if word gets out that the Arabs have killed the hero, the local tribes will gang up on the Bedouins and render their mission impossible, maybe kill them all.  

Ibn Jad instructs his brother Tollog to murder the bound Tarzan silently at night and hide the body so the Bedouins can claim Tarzan sneaked off to parts unknown, but the ape man summons an elephant to liberate him and then great apes of his acquaintance free him from his bonds.  The elephant attack scene and the scenes in which Tarzan negotiates with monkeys and then the apes are good, especially if it has been a few years since you've read such scenes in earlier Tarzan books.  It is unfortunate that these scenes, some of the best in the book, come so early.

A recurring theme of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle is how humans are worse than animals and white people are the absolute worst of the worst.  On the very first page of the novel we get this kind of material from the narrator as he describes the feelings of that elephant, and elsewhere in the novel we get additional helpings of this sort of material from other animals and from Tarzan.  In the fourth of the novel's 24 chapters, a Western white man shows up to embody the book's denunciation of humanity of the paler persuasion.  Middle-aged stock broker Wilbur Stimbol and sophisticated young man James Blake are New Yorkers on safari, the former seeking trophies and treating the black porters cruelly while the latter hopes to photograph animals and treats the natives kindly.  These two Americans get in so many arguments that they decide to split up their safari.  While Blake is divvying up the supplies, Stimbol runs off after a gorilla, rifle in hand, and bumps into Tarzan, who rescues the gorilla from a huge snake and then from Stimbol.

J. Allen St. John's cover for the first book edition of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle
seems to be inspired by Frederic, Lord Leighton's sculpture Athlete Wrestling a Python

In a totally predictable but still effective scene, none of the black hirelings wants to go with Stimbol; they all want to accompany the kind Blake.  Stimbol is amazed by this turn of events because he thought the porters respected him because he was hard on them.  (This scene is of particular interest because in the last Tarzan novel, Tarzan and the Ant Men, Burroughs made it clear that women will admire men who treat them roughly, show them who is boss; I guess the logic that applies to relations between the sexes doesn't apply to white people's relations with black people.)  Tarzan has to order some of the natives to accompany Stimbol, whom he commands go directly to the nearest railhead; Tarzan also prohibits Stimbol from hunting.  Tarzan permits Blake's party greater freedom so Blake can take photos.

Stimbol ignores the ape man's ukase against hunting and so the blacks assigned to him feel justified in abandoning him.  All alone in the treacherous jungle, the stock broker eventually stumbles into the camp of Ibn Jad's expedition where he becomes a new component of the scheming among the Muslims.  Fahd frames Zeyd for the attempted murder of the Sheik, but he escapes execution the next day thanks to Ateja's clandestine aid.  Zeyd flees into the wilderness.  Zeyd is no match for the jungle on his own, but Tarzan appears and saves him from its hazards.  Fejjuan is sent ahead by Ibn Jad to negotiate with his fellow Galla, whom Ibn Jad figures can guide his expedition to Nimmr, and Fejjuan reunites with his family at his home village.

Meanwhile, a freak accident separates Blake from his safari, and he blunders into a valley where live thousands of white people, the descendants of medieval English crusaders who got shipwrecked over 700 years ago, and the black African natives who have joined their cause and self-identify as Englishmen.  These people wear medieval European clothes and wield medieval weapons, their buildings have medieval architecture, etc.  Way back in the 12th century the crusaders split into two hostile camps, and a sort of cold war has endured ever since between the two rather prosperous fortified cities built by the shipwrecked Englishmen; the valley has but two entrances, one to the north, one ot the south, and guarding each is a city and castle.  Blake enters the valley at the southern city, Nimmr, the very city that Ibn Jad is seeking.  Blake finds that no crusader has ever left the valley because they think a huge Muslim army has the valley surrounded.  

In the same way that, when we are among the Arabs, we get words like "nasrany," "beyt" and "mukaad," among the crusaders we get a lot of "methinks" and "ods bodikins" and "art thou."  Most of the crusaders of Nimmr take a liking to Blake, who knows how to ride and fence and is a decent and fun guy, so they accept him as a foreign knight.  As we expect in a Burroughs story, Blake, essentially the protagonist of much of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, develops a relationship with the local princess and this inspires the jealousy of one of the knights of Nimmr, and Blake ends up fighting a duel with this joker, winning further admiration for his swordplay and for his good sportsmanship.

Tarzan leaves Zeyd at a village where he will be safe and goes to Ibn Jad's expedition with the intention of forcing them to return to North Africa.  Ibn Jad decides, again, to have somebody murder Tarzan in his sleep, this time manipulating Stimbol into assaying the dirty deed, he telling the stock broker that Tarzan has scheduled Stimbol's execution for tomorrow.  Burroughs makes a mistake his editor should have saved him from by portraying Stimbol as reluctant to murder Tarzan. 

Stimbol had been an irritable man, a bully and a coward; but he was no criminal. Every fiber of his being revolted at the thing he contemplated. He did not want to kill, but he was a cornered human rat and he thought that death stared him in the face, leaving open only this one way of escape.

The quoted paragraph is compelling drama and characterization, but when he composed it Burroughs apparently forgot that 60 pages earlier Stimbol came upon an unconscious Tarzan and tried to kill the ape man (the New Yorker was stopped by a gorilla) and in that scene the Manhattan money grubber had no qualms about assassinating a sleeping man, in fact actually come up with the idea himself.  Tsk, tsk, ERB!  

After Tarzan is believed killed (in the dark Stimbol didn't realize the sleeping man he killed was Tollog, Ibn Jad's brother, whom the wily Tarzan had left in his place) the Muslims are guided to the valley by the Galla in return for surrendering all the Galla slaves they have in their party.  The Galla are confident they will never see the Muslims again, as no Galla who has gone into the valley has ever returned.

The Bedouins enter the end of the valley opposite that where Blake arrived, at the northern English city.  Ibn Jad's adventurers arrive at an opportune moment.    Every year, the two English crusader cities suspend their cold war unneighborliness to hold a magnificent tourney where they have jousts and duels and as the climax a big sort of melee.  Ibn Jad's band of Arabs arrives during the tourney, so they are able to take and loot the northern city, it being almost entirely unguarded.

Meanwhile, there is drama at the site of the tourney.  When the melee ends, the king of the northern city kidnaps the princess of Nimmr with whom Blake is in love and rides off with her; Blake and the other Nimmr knights pursue them.  Tarzan, looking for Blake, arrives at this moment and joins the fracas.  Blake is able to rescue the princess because he uses the automatic pistol he has with him to kill a bunch of the Northern knights; for his part, Tarzan uses his African hunting skills to get a leg up on the Northern knights.  One of the more memorable passages of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle is Burroughs' description of Tarzan's reaction to the knights' behavior.

Never in his life had Tarzan seen such fierce, bold men, such gluttons for battle. That they glorified in conflict and in death with a fierce lust that surpassed the maddest fanaticism he had ever witnessed filled Tarzan’s breast with admiration. What men!

Before Tarzan can get to Blake, Blake and the princess are captured by Ibn Jad.  The English princess of Nimmr is the best-looking woman the Arabs have ever seen--more beautiful than a houri!  So they seize her and leave Blake bound up to be eaten by a leopard.  Tarzan saves Blake from the leopard--over the course of his career Tarzan saves people one second before they get killed, and is himself similarly saved, more times than can be counted, and even minor characters get into the act, as we see a few pages later.

The Muslims escape the valley but their camp erupts into chaos when Fahd tries to murder the sheik so he can carry off the crusader princess himself.  Ateja saves her father the sheik from eating poison with like one second to spare, but Fahd escapes with the English princess and with the hapless Stimbol.  Blake is captured by the Northern crusaders and chained up in a dungeon, but, before their wicked king can have him tortured to death, two Northern knights free him in recognition of Blake's chivalry during the tourney.  (These kinds of feel-good virtue-will-be-rewarded scenes are much more appealing than the "Tantor...avoided men--especially white men" passages that tell the reader the world and his life are deplorable.)

Burroughs wraps things up in the last few chapters, all the characters getting their just deserts.  A gorilla seizes the princess of Nimmr from Fahd, Tarzan rescues her and takes her back to Nimmr, where she is eventually joined by Blake.  Zeyd kills Fahd and reunites with Ateja--the lovers are given a job on the Greystoke estate.  The rest of the Muslims are killed by Tarzan or, like Ibn Jad, enslaved by the Galla.  It seems that the jewels Ibn Jad looted from the northern crusader city end up in Tarzan's hands.  Stimbol is humiliated and sent back to America.  (Stimbol gets off pretty easy--after all, he did try to murder Tarzan!)  One of the problems with Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle is that there is no real climax--Blake shooting down a bunch of Northern knights and saving the princess would have made sense as a climax, but the novel has over 30 pages to go and both Blake and the princess get captured and rescued multiple times before they are happily reunited in Nimmr, and we've also got various other plot threads to resolve.  Instead of the novel building to a final crescendo, the level of excitement rising and then being relieved after a final explosion, the level of tension remains at a steady boil, people getting killed, captured and liberated all the way up to the final page.

Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, the eleventh book of Tarzan, is a good novel, but I feel it is a step down from the tenth, Tarzan and the Ant Men.  Tarzan and the Ant Men put us into three alien milieus--a cannibal village full of schemers, a matriarchal society of savages, and an urban civilization of quarter-sized slave-owning aristocrats.  All three of these weird societies was more interesting than Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle's Bedouin expedition full of schemers and medieval towns full of knights; Book 10's locales are horror and science fiction settings new to the reader, and Burroughs developed crazy architecture and economies and sexual mores for the latter two that served as satires that had the capacity to challenge the reader.  The Arabs and the English crusaders in Book 11 are just fictionalized reconstructions of real societies, and ERB's efforts to make them compelling or immersive consist largely of putting clunky words like "y-clept" and "mukaad" in the mouths of their inhabitants.  Burroughs does very little to make them satirical; the humor in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle revolves around Blake using Jazz Age slang and other artifacts of and references to 1920s New York which befuddle the medieval Englishmen.

While Tarzan and the Ant Men had something to say about sexual relationships on the level of the individual and of society, the ideological content of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle is comprised primarily of Burroughs attacks on mankind and European civilization in particular.  Burroughs denunciations are silly and banal, and Burroughs sort of bungles them, making nonsensical claims and contradicting himself.  On the very first page, in the second paragraph, Burroughs tells us that only man makes war on his own kind.  But I'm pretty sure ants, rats and chimps wage wars amongst themselves.  And what are we to make of the fact that Tarzan, who on that first page is shown to be the best--or maybe the only good--white man because he is so much like an animal, is filled with admiration of the belligerence of the crusaders on page 159?  Is Tarzan a paragon for being closer to primitive man and the animals, or is he as foul as other white people?  

In the same paragraph as that questionable assertion about war, Burroughs declares mankind "the most hated living organism."  But then in the third paragraph of the novel Burroughs asserts that animals do not feel hate, greed or lust.  I suspect some animals actually do have these feelings, and that they express them in the pages of Burroughs' fiction, and if animals don't hate, how can man be the most hated organism?  Maybe in Burroughs' day people didn't know about the chimps making war thing, and maybe in lawyerly fashion you can argue the "most hated organism" line is a reference to self-hate, but these issues with Burroughs' declarations make Burroughs' argument feel shoddy.

Another problem with the sort of misanthropy we see in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle is that it is sterile virtue-signaling at best, and at worst enervating.  Burroughs' attacks on feminism, high taxes, and Prohibition in Tarzan and the Ant Men imply policy solutions, like supporting traditional gender roles, lowering taxes and permitting the sale and consumption of alcohol; Burroughs identifies problems and offers prescriptions for resolving them.  Saying people are worse than animals and white people are worse than nonwhites here in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle is just a pointless counsel of despair--what can we do about this alleged problem?  Are we supposed to burn down New York and Chicago and abandon the corn fields of Iowa and cattle ranches of Texas and devote our lives to catching bugs and squirrels with our bare hands and sticks?  It is simply ridiculous.          

As for the characters, Book 10's Esteban Miranda and the witch doctor who lost his daughter are more interesting than the Bedouins and knights in Book 11.  Stimbol had real potential as a bad man pushed to see how bad he really is and to then repent if Burroughs hadn't made the blunder I point out above.  Fejjuan the Galla slave is interesting but is underused--I expected him to become friends with Tarzan or Blake or save Stimbol or join the crusaders or have to choose between the Muslims who enslaved him but treated him decently enough and offered him wealth and his own people or something cool like that, but Fejjuan is just discarded after he reunited with his people.  Blake is OK as the protagonist of like a third or half the chapters.  The intrigue among the Muslims isn't bad, but the disputes among the Englishmen aren't interesting because we learn very little about the Northern king. 

As for the action scenes, Tarzan against the snake and Blake killing knights with a .45 are pretty good, but the escape from imprisonment and rescue of the Minunian princess in Tarzan and the Ant Men is better than the tourney and the desultory fighting between the crusaders and Saracens in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle.  (After worrying about the Saracens for 700 years the English crusaders' encounter with them should have been monumental, but instead there are just little skirmishes that demonstrate that the Bedouins' muskets are very accurate when they aren't shooting at Tarzan.)

Having leveled all these criticisms, I will reiterate that I like Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, but it is obviously inferior to its predecessor.  We've got more Burroughs coming up--let's hope our next ERB excursion will achieve a higher level of satisfaction than this one.