"The Devil in Iron" by Robert E. Howard
I could have read "The Devil in Iron" in my copy of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, but according to the notes in that 2003 book the version therein is unchanged from the Weird Tales text, so I just read the story online at the internet archive as I did the Cave and Long stories.
Conan, the Northern barbarian, has made himself leader of a tribe of bandits living in the wild steppes on the border of a major empire. As usual, Howard describes the ethnic and cultural make up of this empire and of the bandits, contrasting them with Conan. We are assured that even though Conan is a dangerous criminal, he is not as bad as some of the nobles of the empire, for example, Jelal Khan, "a monster such as only an overly opulent civilization can produce." Howard is fascinated by racial and ethnic distinctions and demographic history, the movements and interminglings of peoples, and of course with the comparative virtues of barbarism and civilization, as we can see in his correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft, in which they discuss and opine at length upon all sorts of different ethnic and cultural groups, their characters, their potential, what economic niches they tend to inhabit, etc., as well as debate the superiority of urban or rural life.
Jehungir is the lord of the border province Conan's band keeps raiding, and is getting a lot of pressure from his monarch to put a stop to the Cimmerian's depredations. So, Jehungir and his right hand man Ghaznavi devise a somewhat complicated scheme to trap Conan, alone, on an uninhabited island that rises steeply out of the ocean just across from the swampy shore of the mainland. This island, Xupar, is the site of some mysterious ancient ruins, where, as we witnessed in a first chapter that acts as a sort of prologue, a fisherman (don't worry, we learn the demographic history and characteristics of this fisherman's people as well over the course of the story) has recently awakened some kind of ancient fighting man who stands like seven or eight feet tall and has impenetrable skin.
The bait used by the border lord to get Conan alone and vulnerable on this island is a fair blonde girl with a curvaceous body, a young noblewoman from the West who had the misfortune to become a slave of Jehungir's. Octavia is tough, brave, and resourceful, and when the border lord gave her to the aforementioned Jelal Khan, to escape his abuse she busted out of his castle and, looking for a place to hide, made her way to Xupar herself. On Xupar she is quickly captured by some mysterious individual.
When Conan gets to the island, having been fooled by Jehungir's agents into thinking Octavia is there (which, ironically enough, she is), he is astounded by what he finds. He's been to this island before, but last time the ruins were a pile of rubble--today the ruins appear to have been built back up into an intact city with a solid circular wall! The prospect of such diabolical sorcery has Conan all ready to leave, but he then spots clues suggesting that Octavia is nearby, captive of some man, so he puts aside his fear and follows their trail into the town.
Conan explores the city and through inexplicable occult means learns its history. (Characters in stories by Howard and Lovecraft and those they have influenced are always finding ancient lost cities and then, through means that exercise the reader's ability to suspend disbelief, learning their histories.) A demon thousands of years ago took the form of an oversized man, one made of impenetrable metal, and stalked the earth as a cruel god. It came to this island and built this city--Dagonia--and raised the natives to a level of cultural sophistication. Dagonia thrived for "many ages," but then a tribe of people they had enslaved rose up against them, their leader armed with a magic dagger made of metal from a meteor--this dagger is the only weapon that can injure the demon! The city dwellers who had worshipped the demon were exterminated, and the demon was paralyzed and laid to rest with the dagger on its chest.
For centuries the descendants of the slaves who won their freedom lived in the city, but eventually under the stress of famine and plague and war their civilization fell and they dispersed to become tribal fishermen, and Dagonia went to ruin. But just recently (as we saw in that first chapter) a fisherman--a descendent of those liberated slaves--accidentally freed the demon by moving the dagger, his people having forgotten the details of their own history. The demon rebuilt the city and resurrected his worshippers, but, as Conan noticed when he interacted with them (including a woman who wanted Conan to have sex with her) these revenants are a scatterbrained and addlepated lot, who, haunted by their memories of being killed during the slave uprising and the knowledge that they are dead, sleep all day and only stir at night.
Conan meets up with Octavia (the sun having risen, the revenant who captured her is asleep) and they are pursued by the demon. Cornered, it looks like they are doomed, but just then Jehungir and a squad of soldiers come to the island hunting for Conan. While the demon is distracted by the task of killing the soldiers, Conan finds the magic dagger, though to secure the blade he has to fight a giant snake Octavia stupidly wakes up. Jehungir, having eluded the demon, attacks Conan and is slain by our hero. Then the demon attacks Conan, but the Cimmerian uses the magic dagger to kill it. As the demon expires it reverts to its natural alien form; Dagonia--and its living dead inhabitants--return to ruin.
Conan grabs the beautiful Octavia--she initially resists his attentions but Conan doesn't know that "no" means "no" and she quickly succumbs to the charms of the irresistible he-man. Oh Conan, you ladykiller!
This story isn't bad, though there are problems. Having Conan learn the secret history of the city by telepathic leakage or whatever, as he does here in "The Devil in Iron," is even more absurd than learning the secret history of a city by finding an old scroll or looking at wall decorations like he did in "Servants of Bit-Yakin." Maybe the living dead woman who wanted to have sex with him could have told him that stuff, like the princess who wanted to have sex with him in "Xuthal of the Dusk" told him the history of the lost city in that story? I also wanted to see more of Jelal Kahn; we hear how much of a jerk he is, how he mistreated or was going to mistreat Octavia, and how his civilized perversity compares poorly to Conan's barbaric elemental vitality, so I expected him to accompany Jehungir to the island to be destroyed by Conan, but no dice.
Among the many Conan collections in which "The Devil in Iron" has appeared is Conan the Wanderer, one of the Lancer/Ace Conan paperbacks which included pastiches by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp.
"The Isle of Dark Magic" by Hugh B. Cave
Well, "The Isle of Dark Magic" appears to be a relatively well-respected piece (of crap?) by Cave--at least it was translated into French (the language of love!) and chosen as the title story for a French Cave collection--the hubba hubba sextastic cover even portrays one of the characters from "The Isle of Dark Magic!" The story was also included in the American collection Murgumstrumm and Others.
The narrator of this longish story (isfdb calls it a "novelette" and it takes up like 18 pages in WT) is a missionary, the only white man on a little South Pacific island. Well, the only white man until the arrival of Peter Mace. Mace is a skinny and nervous 25-year old who brings to the island with him a "large wooden packing-case;" he has come to the island to live the life of a hermit, having a house thrown together far from the missionary's house, on the other side of a jungle. Mace acts strangely, exciting the curiosity of the native islanders, and he really lets himself go, giving up on shaving and hitting the bottle harder and harder until he's basically a drunk. It takes a while, as Cave tries to build suspense, but eventually we learn what Mace's story is as he breaks down and relates it to the narrator.
As a medical student living in New York, Mace fell in love with a pretty girl, Mureen Kennedy, "a creature of the streets." Mace was already an odd character, the kind of guy who is interested in forbidden books and conducts experiments that the medical establishment frowns upon, and in fact eventually got expelled from school, and when the impoverished Mureen died he went bonkers and began working on ways of "keeping her with me forever." Mace had been hanging around with a sculptor in the Village, and he and this artiste took up thievery and got together enough money to buy a chunk of marble that the sculptor carved into an ultra-lifelike statue of a nude Mureen. So that was what was in the packing-case!
Now, on the island, far from interference, Mace has been engaging in the rituals and casting the spells that his forbidden books tell him will bring the statue to life! Mentally unbalanced and inebriated, he dares the narrator to come witness one of his rituals, apparently eager to show the missionary how irrevocably he has rejected the God of Abraham that is worshipped by squares, the God he blames for Mureen's death, and demonstrate how powerful are the diabolical alien gods he now worships. During the ritual Mace calls upon Nyarlathotep and Hastur and name checks the Yellow Sign and the Black King and Yuggoth. As the narrator watches in horror, the marble statue of the young woman stirs briefly, its face contorted in agony, but then goes still--bringing it to life will require seven such rituals, and this is only the fifth.
The narrator hears about the sixth ritual from a terrified native. Then comes the day of the seventh and final ritual! A veiled woman dressed in black, a woman who moves and speaks stiffly, arrives on the island, only the second person to come to the island in four years, Mace being the first. The narrator leads this taciturn figure through the jungle to Mace's house, thinking it some relative of Mace's who can, the missionary hopes, bring the young man to his senses. When they arrive, Mace has just finished the ritual and "the unnamable horrors of the world of darkness" Mace contacted have given the statue life! He is embracing the stone woman and calling it his beloved! But then the woman in black raises her veil--it is Mureen, risen from the grave! Somehow she heard Mace calling to her and has crossed half the world to be with him. Now Mace embraces this rickety corpse, and the stone woman, excited to homicidal jealousy, strangles first Mureen and then Mace to death, and then walks off into the jungle.
This story isn't bad, though perhaps too long, and I was kind of wondering about the logistics of moving a life-sized marble statue to Polynesia from New York (I guess sailors and natives helped this skinny wretch lug it), and of a living corpse making the same trip. It is also unclear if Mace was trying to call Mureen's soul from the afterlife to bring life to the statue (which is what I, perhaps wrongfully, had assumed) or just asking Nyarlathotep et al to animate a statue that looked just like Mureen but wouldn't have her personality or memories. Cave also doesn't do anything with the fact that Mace was a medical student (Mace doesn't use medical knowledge to animate the statue--probably Cave should have made Mace the sculptor) and doesn't exploit the South Sea Island setting--any remote location would have sufficed (it might have been better if Mace had come to Polynesia seeking a particular witch doctor or some specific material spell component, or maybe some spot on the globe where a specific conjunction of stars could be seen or something like that.)
"The Beast-Helper" by Frank Belknap Long
I hope you enjoyed the Hugh B. Cave trivia, because there is Frank Belknap Long trivia where that came from. (If you didn't enjoy it, um, maybe skip to the fourth paragraph?) It seems that in the early 1930s Long was a hardcore supporter of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or at least that is the way H. P. Lovecraft tells it in letters to August Derleth and Robert E. Howard. In a letter to Derleth from November 1932, Lovecraft, in the midst of a discussion of newspaper accounts claiming that Ivan Pavlov was not persecuted by Lenin's government, even though the famed scientist did not disguise his low opinion of the Communist Party's rule, says of Long, who was born in 1901 (HPL was born in 1890):
That young scamp (who has gone bolshevik in the past year) was quoting the case (whatever it was) only a couple of months ago in an effort to prove the liberality of his beloved soviets.In a December 1932 letter to Derleth, Lovecraft suggests that Long has aligned himself with Moscow merely in response to fashion, following the example of famous critic Edmund Wilson, Jr., but by October 1936, Lovecraft was himself singing the praises of the Soviet Union and government control of resources and allocation of jobs in a letter to C. L. Moore. In one italicized and caps-heavy passage he explains to her that he once admired aristocracy because of the kind of culture it fosters, and that he has now come to see that socialism could deliver that culture of "non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage & generosity...." Oh, brother!
Anyway, in an early 1935 letter to Lovecraft from Howard we find the paragraph:
I hope you enjoyed your trip to see Long in New York. I learn with interest that Long is now a Communist. But I suspected it when I read his story in Weird Tales some months ago--the one about the dictator and the ape.
That story, my friends, is the very story we are about to read, "The Beast-Helper."
Thompson is a thin man, "a profound skeptic and scientific humanist," and an American journalist. Across from him sits a fat man, the dictator Kerriling, who took over the European nation of Trivania in "the November Revolution." Thompson is in Trivania to interview the dictator, who tells him that in pursuit of his revolutionary cause he is going to crush all dissent. During the interview, Thompson briefly sees a strange shadow on the wall, its shape much like a man's, but somehow distorted.
Sure enough, as Thompson is walking back to his hotel, taking the short route through a slum, the gorilla attacks! But Thompson has a revolver, and he shoots the gorilla dead! The dictator, I guess because he has a telepathic connection to the gorilla, suffers wounds similar to the gorilla's and also dies, liberating Trivania.
There are dramatic possibilities in the idea of a dictator in tune with a gorilla who uses the primate to kill people and is himself somehow altered by his communion with a beast. But setting such a story in a 20th-century European dictatorship instead of a Conan or Grey Mouser fantasy world seems like a mistake. Doesn't the dictator have an NKVD or Gestapo to kill his rivals and crush dissent? Long doesn't do a good job of explaining the whole relationship between Kerriling and the gorilla; it wasn't made clear (to me at least) if Kerriling had a psychic/telepathic connection to the beast, or if he was just giving it orders verbally. And during the first scene, the dictator's response to the shadow strongly hints he is losing control over the gorilla or is somehow scared of the gorilla, but Long never does anything with that idea.
I recall complaining that Long's famous story "The Horror From the Hills" was full of non-sequiturs and superfluous matter that didn't add to the plot. Even though "The Beast-Helper" is only seven and a half pages, it is similarly burdened with extraneous stuff, like that Jung "reptile-mind" lecture. The suggestion that the brain connection between man and gorilla has made Kerriling more beastly is sterile, because Kerriling was already a ruthless and murderous dictator before the operation, and he doesn't do anything in the story that suggests he has changed--the scientist says, in italics, that "something from the beast flowed into him," but the effects of this change are never demonstrated. Similarly, in that first scene, Long just comes out and tells us that Thompson has "more iron in him" than does the dictator, but Thompson doesn't do anything particularly courageous--when the gorilla attacks him the journalist is running to the hotel to pack and leave the country--and Kerriling never demonstrates cowardice--in fact, when the scientist talks about the operation, he specifically says that Kerriling was "fearless."
Gotta give "The Beast-Helper" a thumbs down. All that foreshadowing that never bears fruit makes the story feel shoddy--did Long just write this story in one sitting, as he started the story laying the foundations for developments that he just abandoned as he approached the word count he had set for himself? Lovecraft comes off as a jerk when he is bitching about the practices of pulp writers, but probably he has something there--maybe if Long had spent a few extra hours eliminating some of the dead ends in this story and fostering the blossoming of other of the seeds he planted early in the tale I could have given a positive review to this thing.
Finally, Howard's claim that reading this story led him to suspect that Long had become a communist is a little dubious, as Long does not use the story to attack capitalism or extol socialism or revolutionism. The hero of the story is an American and the villain is a dictator who came to power in a revolution, so one would be forgiven for thinking it actually an attack on Lenin or Stalin.
"The Beast-Helper" would have to wait until 2010 and Centipede Press's $450.00, 1100-page volume on Long in its Masters of the Weird Tale series to see republication.
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Well, I think we squeezed a lot of juice out of the August 1934 issue of Farnsworth Wright's magazine of the bizarre and unusual. Stay tuned for more spelunking in the pages of Weird Tales.
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