Poking around isfdb and the internet archive, those websites indispensable to the speculative fiction enthusiast, as I composed my recent blog post on three Clark Ashton Smith stories that have been pretty widely anthologized, a number of stories by other writers came to my attention and set my antenna quivering. Today we scratch the itch engendered by four of those stories, two by pop culture sensations who have left their marks on Hollywood and the American psyche, two by guys I'm not very familiar with.
"The Man-Eaters of Zamboula" AKA "Shadows in Zamboula" by Robert E. Howard (1935)
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| That's Zabibi on the cover, forced to dance by Totrasmek among illusions she believes to be venomous serpents |
Zamboula is a desert city on a major trade route, its population multicultural, or, as one of Conan's comrades, a desert nomad, puts it, an "accursed city which Stygians built and which Hyrkanians rule--where white, brown, and black folk mingle together to produce hybrids of all unholy hues and breeds...." This buddy of Conan's warns the blue-eyed barbarian not to stay in the tavern of hook-nosed Aram Baksh, saying he is rumored to murder travelers who partake of his hospitality, but Conan has paid for his room in advance and, after a day of losing at the gambling tables, the Cimmerian checks in at the tavern on the edge of town anyway.
Conan soon learns that Aram Baksh supplements his income by letting cannibals--huge black men with teeth filed to points and hair sculpted into horns with mud--come in to the tavern at night to murder his guests and drag the bodies off to a human barbecue out in the desert. Conan, with his keen senses and powerful muscles and straight-bladed broadsword, is able not only to save himself, but a sexy dancing girl the cannibals have caught. The dancing girl, Zabibi, says that everybody in Zamboula knows to stay indoors at night because of the cannibals, but she had to run out of her house because her boyfriend, army officer Alafdhal, had gone insane and tried to kill her. Why is she dating an insane guy when with that body of hers she could date just about any man she wanted? Well, her boyfriend isn't insane normally, but she bought from a priest of Hanuman, Totrasmek, a love potion to use on him, and that duplicitous cleric gave her a potion that insteaddrove Alafdhal bonkers, presumably because Totrasmek envied Zabibi and Alafdhal's relationship. At least that is what she tells Conan.
Zabibi convinces Conan to find Alafdhal and subdue him, and then accompany her to the shrine of Hanuman the ape-god to exact revenge from Totrasmek. In the shrine, Zabibi is captured and Conan is temporarily disarmed and has to fight hand-to-hand against an Eastern muscleman who has been strangling human sacrifices all his life! Conan proves the better strangler. "You fool...I think you never saw a man from the West before." We learn the truth about the relationships and identities of Zabibi, Alafdhal and Totrasmek, and Conan rescues the dancing girl and kills the priest. Then Conan satisfies his own appetite for revenge, disfiguring Aram Baksh so the cannibals he habitually feeds won't recognize him and then handing the tavern owner over to the blacks to be cooked and eaten.
Obviously this story about black cannibals, Near Eastern thieves and mixed race dancing girls who use lies and sex appeal to get what they want out of men--and the white muscleman who foils all their schemes--is full of wrongthink and if you value your career, your friendships and your access to the internet you shouldn't read it, and you certainly shouldn't announce online that you enjoyed it. But "Man-Eaters of Zamboula" is a fun caper. The pace is fast, and Howard does a good job of painting a vivid picture of a totally crazy place full of crazy people and making it, somehow, internally consistent and believable. Every crazy thing that happened brought a smile to my face. Gotta give this one a thumbs up....but let's keep that between ourselves.
"The Feast in the Abbey" by Robert Bloch (1935)
"The Feast in the Abbey" appeared in the same issue of Weird Tales as Clark Ashton Smith's "The Dark Eidolon." Readers voted Bloch's story the best in the issue, which seems to have caused some surprise and even consternation. In a March 27, 1935 letter to William F. Anger, H. P. Lovecraft praises Bloch, but asserts it is "absurd to compare anything in the issue with 'The Dark Eidolon'" and hints at the possibility of "the fan vote" having been "deliberately whipped up." HPL dismissively opines that "After all, the vote of the readers means almost nothing--including as it does vast hordes of the ignorant, the tasteless, & the superficial." HPL is one hell of a snob.
A Frenchman, our narrator, is riding through Flanders, headed for his brother's home. Caught in a storm, he stops at a monastery in a forest, where the abbot puts him up and invites him to dinner. Bloch describes in detail the furnishings of this monastery, which are extravagant and rich in an unseemly way, and totally lacking in Christian ornament. At the lush and luxurious dinner--Bloch lists all the different fruits and courses that are served, and the ceremony attending the carving of the roast that is the main course--the forty monks display terrible table manners. They also tell ghost stories and legends and sing ribald songs. Finally, the abbot tells the legend of the mysterious abandoned priory which at night demons render magnificent in order to beguile travelers--no doubt he refers to this very abbey! Even worse, he lifts the lid off a platter to reveal the head of the narrator's brother, indicating that the roast, of which the narrator partook, was his brother's flesh!
The narrator wakes up in the woods, hurries to his brother's home, and is told his brother is missing. Mon Dieu!
This story is merely acceptable, a gimmick surrounded by laborious overwriting.
"The Feast in the Abbey" has reappeared in various Bloch collections and horror anthologies, including 1945's The Opener of the Way and 1969's The Unspeakable People.
"The Thing in the Cellar" by David H. Keller (1932)
I don't think I've ever read anything by Keller before, though I have seen his name many times. "The Thing in the Cellar" caught my eye when I looked over the contents list of John Pelan's The Century's Best Horror Fiction. "The Thing in the Cellar" is quite short, and has been reprinted numerous times in books like Pelan's, Groff Conklin's The Supernatural Reader and Mary Danby's 65 Great Spine Chillers. It first appeared in the same issue of Weird Tales in which Clark Ashton Smith's "Planet of the Dead" made its debut.
This is a good story written in a smooth colloquial style, though it is vulnerable to the charge that it has no real resolution. A London house has a cellar of inordinate size, full of hundreds of years worth of junk; the door in the kitchen that leads to this cellar is peculiarly heavy and strong. The family living in the house today have a single child, Tommy. Since birth, the child has been scared when in the kitchen, and his fear grows in proportion to how loosely the door to the cellar is secured. Tommy isn't so bad when the door to the cellar is locked--in fact he will caress and even kiss the stout lock--but if the door is actually open he will cry and if possible flee the kitchen. Because his mother spends lots of time in the kitchen doing house work, as a small child Tommy has often had to play in the kitchen, and one of his favorite kitchen games is shoving bits of cloth and paper and junk in the space between the bottom of the cellar door and the floor.
Tommy's behavior is bewildering and annoying to his hard-working and not very well educated parents, and when he is six years old they take him to a doctor and explain their problem. The physician suggests they drive Tommy's fears away by forcing him to sit in the kitchen alone with the cellar door open for an hour--he will realize that there is nothing down there that can harm him, something he should have realized long ago, because his mother goes down into the cellar every day and nothing has ever happened to her. The physician, that evening, talks to a psychiatrist friend who warns him his advice was bad, so the doctor visits Tommy's parents that night to rescind his advice. Too late--when the doctor gets there he finds that Tommy, left alone in the kitchen, the cellar door left wide open, has been severely mauled and killed--by what agent it is impossible to comprehend.
The atmosphere, pacing and style of this story are quite good, and all the psychological stuff rings true (Keller was a psychiatrist himself) and I am giving "The Thing in the Cellar" a thumbs up, but the lack of any explanation of what killed Tommy and why it never harmed or made itself known to his mother is a little frustrating.
"The Crawling Horror" by Thorp McClusky (1936)
Here's another piece I spotted in the contents list of John Pelan's The Century's Best Horror Fiction. Thorp McClusky has two dozen short story credits at isfdb, and I have never read any of them. Here's our chance to get some clue as to what he is all about.
The first part of "The Crawling Horror" is the narrative of bachelor farmer Hans Brubaker, as told to a country doctor, Kurt. Brubaker relates how he heard the rats fighting in his home's walls, and then how he spotted a new cat in the neighborhood, and how the cat population of his farm abruptly declined. Following this he saw a slimy transparent blob creature of some fifty pounds hanging around one of his dogs, inside the house--when he touched it the blob quickly escaped by sliding under a door. Later, his dogs fought each other; after Hans euthanized the injured loser of the fight--the dog touched by the blob--its corpse disappeared. Brubaker later encountered a dog which looked like the dead dog--this dog didn't respond to Brubaker's familiar calls. A while later Hans saw a teen-aged boy walk down the road, and he sensed that this boy was not truly human.
Not long after telling his story to Doctor Kurt, Brubaker marries an outgoing blue-eyed blonde, Hilda Lang. Hilda loves Hans, believes his monster story, and wants to be at his side to support him if there is danger. The rest of "The Crawling Horror" is told directly by Doctor Kurt, relating how he helps the Brubakers protect their home from this blob that can change shape, appearing human when need be, and can dissolve and absorb flesh. The narrator theorizes that this blob, which can pass through narrow cracks, is the source of the legend of the vampire, of the Slavic practice of carefully sealing up coffins. In a gory scene the monster dissolves and absorbs Hilda. It appears, however, that Hilda's soul is still alive within the monster, along with the souls of its other victims. Hans, a man of indomitable will, allows the monster to try to absorb him, but he masters it instead of the other way around, retaining his human form but becoming the first among equals of a sort of composite person--he looks like Hans, but within him live not only his own soul but that of Hilda, other people the monster absorbed, and the evil consciousness of the monster itself, which struggles to take over the body. (The presence of additional souls in Hans's body are symbolized by Hans looking the same as ever but being much heavier--floorboards bend under his weight.)
The pacing and style of this story are good, and the horror scenes work, but the monster's powers and characteristics are inconsistent and confusing. Sometimes it burns people like acid, other times people can touch it safely, even wrestle with it. The creature takes over Hilda's soul by dissolving her physical body and killing her--Kurt sees her carcass, the skin and muscles of her back absent, entrails hanging out, bones exposed--but the monster also appears to steal a dog's soul without damaging the canine's body--the dog lives after the blob oozes away, but is listless, without will, barely fighting back when attacked by the other Brubaker dog, which somehow senses it is an enemy. And in the final battle of wills between the monster and Hans, it's like Hans's normal human body absorbs the blob instead of the other way around.
Acceptable, maybe marginally good. "The Crawling Horror" first oozed onto the public stage in the same issue of Weird Tales as Robert E. Howard's "The Black Hound of Death," which like "Shadows in Zamboula" should probably be considered a no-go zone, it being the story of a vengeful werewolf and his collaboration with a violent African-American criminal. Donald Wollheim liked "The Crawling Horror," including it in an issue of the Avon Fantasy Reader (as the cover story!) and in the anthology The Macabre Reader. In his intro to "The Crawling Horror" in Avon Fantasy Reader, Wollheim points out the similarity of the story's monster to that in John W. Campbell's 1938 "Who Goes There?" and says that some SF fans have come up with a collective name for a shape-shifting monster: "vombis." I've never heard the word "vombis" before, so maybe this moniker hasn't stuck.
When I realized "Who Goes There?" came out like two years after "The Crawling Horror," I wondered if maybe Campbell was inspired by McClusky's story. But a note at isfdb indicates that Isaac Asimov, in Before the Golden Age, an anthology I own, wrote that "Who Goes There?" was a rewrite of Campbell's 1936 story "Brain-Stealers of Mars," which appeared in Thrilling Wonder a month after "The Crawling Horror" was printed in Weird Tales. I'll have to read "Brain-Stealers of Mars" for myself, but if the monster in that story is the same as that in "Who Goes There?" it seems like McClusky and Campbell hit upon the same idea for a monster at about the same time.
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"The Man-Eaters of Zamboula" is a good Conan story, and the Keller story and the McClusky story, though they have their problems, have good elements. As for Bloch's "The Feast in the Abbey," well, it is not terrible, and it is of historical importance, I guess.
I feel safe in predicting more gore and terror in the near future here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
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| A French translation of Conan the Wanderer, which includes "Shadows in Zamboula," with a fun cover |
Obviously this story about black cannibals, Near Eastern thieves and mixed race dancing girls who use lies and sex appeal to get what they want out of men--and the white muscleman who foils all their schemes--is full of wrongthink and if you value your career, your friendships and your access to the internet you shouldn't read it, and you certainly shouldn't announce online that you enjoyed it. But "Man-Eaters of Zamboula" is a fun caper. The pace is fast, and Howard does a good job of painting a vivid picture of a totally crazy place full of crazy people and making it, somehow, internally consistent and believable. Every crazy thing that happened brought a smile to my face. Gotta give this one a thumbs up....but let's keep that between ourselves.
"The Feast in the Abbey" by Robert Bloch (1935)
A Frenchman, our narrator, is riding through Flanders, headed for his brother's home. Caught in a storm, he stops at a monastery in a forest, where the abbot puts him up and invites him to dinner. Bloch describes in detail the furnishings of this monastery, which are extravagant and rich in an unseemly way, and totally lacking in Christian ornament. At the lush and luxurious dinner--Bloch lists all the different fruits and courses that are served, and the ceremony attending the carving of the roast that is the main course--the forty monks display terrible table manners. They also tell ghost stories and legends and sing ribald songs. Finally, the abbot tells the legend of the mysterious abandoned priory which at night demons render magnificent in order to beguile travelers--no doubt he refers to this very abbey! Even worse, he lifts the lid off a platter to reveal the head of the narrator's brother, indicating that the roast, of which the narrator partook, was his brother's flesh!
The narrator wakes up in the woods, hurries to his brother's home, and is told his brother is missing. Mon Dieu!
This story is merely acceptable, a gimmick surrounded by laborious overwriting.
"The Feast in the Abbey" has reappeared in various Bloch collections and horror anthologies, including 1945's The Opener of the Way and 1969's The Unspeakable People.
"The Thing in the Cellar" by David H. Keller (1932)
This is a good story written in a smooth colloquial style, though it is vulnerable to the charge that it has no real resolution. A London house has a cellar of inordinate size, full of hundreds of years worth of junk; the door in the kitchen that leads to this cellar is peculiarly heavy and strong. The family living in the house today have a single child, Tommy. Since birth, the child has been scared when in the kitchen, and his fear grows in proportion to how loosely the door to the cellar is secured. Tommy isn't so bad when the door to the cellar is locked--in fact he will caress and even kiss the stout lock--but if the door is actually open he will cry and if possible flee the kitchen. Because his mother spends lots of time in the kitchen doing house work, as a small child Tommy has often had to play in the kitchen, and one of his favorite kitchen games is shoving bits of cloth and paper and junk in the space between the bottom of the cellar door and the floor.
Tommy's behavior is bewildering and annoying to his hard-working and not very well educated parents, and when he is six years old they take him to a doctor and explain their problem. The physician suggests they drive Tommy's fears away by forcing him to sit in the kitchen alone with the cellar door open for an hour--he will realize that there is nothing down there that can harm him, something he should have realized long ago, because his mother goes down into the cellar every day and nothing has ever happened to her. The physician, that evening, talks to a psychiatrist friend who warns him his advice was bad, so the doctor visits Tommy's parents that night to rescind his advice. Too late--when the doctor gets there he finds that Tommy, left alone in the kitchen, the cellar door left wide open, has been severely mauled and killed--by what agent it is impossible to comprehend.
The atmosphere, pacing and style of this story are quite good, and all the psychological stuff rings true (Keller was a psychiatrist himself) and I am giving "The Thing in the Cellar" a thumbs up, but the lack of any explanation of what killed Tommy and why it never harmed or made itself known to his mother is a little frustrating.
"The Crawling Horror" by Thorp McClusky (1936)
The first part of "The Crawling Horror" is the narrative of bachelor farmer Hans Brubaker, as told to a country doctor, Kurt. Brubaker relates how he heard the rats fighting in his home's walls, and then how he spotted a new cat in the neighborhood, and how the cat population of his farm abruptly declined. Following this he saw a slimy transparent blob creature of some fifty pounds hanging around one of his dogs, inside the house--when he touched it the blob quickly escaped by sliding under a door. Later, his dogs fought each other; after Hans euthanized the injured loser of the fight--the dog touched by the blob--its corpse disappeared. Brubaker later encountered a dog which looked like the dead dog--this dog didn't respond to Brubaker's familiar calls. A while later Hans saw a teen-aged boy walk down the road, and he sensed that this boy was not truly human.
Not long after telling his story to Doctor Kurt, Brubaker marries an outgoing blue-eyed blonde, Hilda Lang. Hilda loves Hans, believes his monster story, and wants to be at his side to support him if there is danger. The rest of "The Crawling Horror" is told directly by Doctor Kurt, relating how he helps the Brubakers protect their home from this blob that can change shape, appearing human when need be, and can dissolve and absorb flesh. The narrator theorizes that this blob, which can pass through narrow cracks, is the source of the legend of the vampire, of the Slavic practice of carefully sealing up coffins. In a gory scene the monster dissolves and absorbs Hilda. It appears, however, that Hilda's soul is still alive within the monster, along with the souls of its other victims. Hans, a man of indomitable will, allows the monster to try to absorb him, but he masters it instead of the other way around, retaining his human form but becoming the first among equals of a sort of composite person--he looks like Hans, but within him live not only his own soul but that of Hilda, other people the monster absorbed, and the evil consciousness of the monster itself, which struggles to take over the body. (The presence of additional souls in Hans's body are symbolized by Hans looking the same as ever but being much heavier--floorboards bend under his weight.)
The pacing and style of this story are good, and the horror scenes work, but the monster's powers and characteristics are inconsistent and confusing. Sometimes it burns people like acid, other times people can touch it safely, even wrestle with it. The creature takes over Hilda's soul by dissolving her physical body and killing her--Kurt sees her carcass, the skin and muscles of her back absent, entrails hanging out, bones exposed--but the monster also appears to steal a dog's soul without damaging the canine's body--the dog lives after the blob oozes away, but is listless, without will, barely fighting back when attacked by the other Brubaker dog, which somehow senses it is an enemy. And in the final battle of wills between the monster and Hans, it's like Hans's normal human body absorbs the blob instead of the other way around.
Acceptable, maybe marginally good. "The Crawling Horror" first oozed onto the public stage in the same issue of Weird Tales as Robert E. Howard's "The Black Hound of Death," which like "Shadows in Zamboula" should probably be considered a no-go zone, it being the story of a vengeful werewolf and his collaboration with a violent African-American criminal. Donald Wollheim liked "The Crawling Horror," including it in an issue of the Avon Fantasy Reader (as the cover story!) and in the anthology The Macabre Reader. In his intro to "The Crawling Horror" in Avon Fantasy Reader, Wollheim points out the similarity of the story's monster to that in John W. Campbell's 1938 "Who Goes There?" and says that some SF fans have come up with a collective name for a shape-shifting monster: "vombis." I've never heard the word "vombis" before, so maybe this moniker hasn't stuck.
When I realized "Who Goes There?" came out like two years after "The Crawling Horror," I wondered if maybe Campbell was inspired by McClusky's story. But a note at isfdb indicates that Isaac Asimov, in Before the Golden Age, an anthology I own, wrote that "Who Goes There?" was a rewrite of Campbell's 1936 story "Brain-Stealers of Mars," which appeared in Thrilling Wonder a month after "The Crawling Horror" was printed in Weird Tales. I'll have to read "Brain-Stealers of Mars" for myself, but if the monster in that story is the same as that in "Who Goes There?" it seems like McClusky and Campbell hit upon the same idea for a monster at about the same time.
**********
"The Man-Eaters of Zamboula" is a good Conan story, and the Keller story and the McClusky story, though they have their problems, have good elements. As for Bloch's "The Feast in the Abbey," well, it is not terrible, and it is of historical importance, I guess.
I feel safe in predicting more gore and terror in the near future here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
I just posted my review of Barry N. Malzberg's SCREEN/CINEMA in the new STARK HOUSE volume at http:\\georgekelley.org
ReplyDeleteOn the back of this omnibus volume, there's a quote from "MPorcius Fiction Log" that you should be proud of.
Wow, cool, maybe I have to get a copy. I didn't realize Cinema was an alternate title to the novel I read under the name Everything Happened to Susan. As I wrote back in 2016, Everything Happened to Susan is hilarious and has interesting stuff to say about the welfare system, the publishing industry, and the sexual revolution, as well as the movie biz.
Deletehttps://mporcius.blogspot.com/2016/07/everything-happened-to-susan-by-barry.html
The blurb that quotes you is definitely worth owning. What an ego-boost! STARK HOUSE is pricing SCREEN/CINEMA at $15.95, but I'm sure you can find it online at a lower price.
ReplyDelete