Henry Kuttner: "Spawn of Dagon" and "Beyond the Phoenix"

On March 25 we read Henry Kuttner's longish first story about Elak, sword-swinging Atlantean prince and wandering adventurer.  Let's read the second and third Elak tales, which are pretty short and appeared in the July and October issues of Weird Tales in 1938.  I am reading them in scans of those 85-year-old magazines, but you can find all of Kuttner's Elak stories in book form, for example, in a 1985 book entitleed Elak of Atlantis, illustrated by Brad Foster, and a 2007 book bearing the same title with an introduction by Joe R. Lansdale.

"Spawn of Dagon" 

"Spawn of Dagon" is the cover story of an issue of Weird Tales, from which we have already read numerous stories: "He That Hath Wings" by Edmond Hamilton, "Return to the Sabbath" by Robert Bloch, "Dust in the House" by David H. Keller, "Mother of Toads" by Clark Ashton Smith, and "Saladin's Throne Rug" by E. Hoffman Price.  This is an issue perfectly tuned to appeal to the MPorcius staff!  Well, except maybe for the mediocre cover.

The "extremely slender" Elak and the "remarkably simian" Lycon are drunk and placing bets on which of two trails of blood oozing from the guy they just killed will reach a crack between floorboards as the story begins.  The Elak stories are supposed to be funny, you see.  

The bet resolved (comic relief sidekick Lycon cheats), our heroes flee the city guards, and are directed to safety by a mysterious figure.  This weirdo then offers them a pile of money if they will murder a sinister wizard and shatter the wizard's red globe, purportedly the source of his power.  Lycon is too drunk to go on this mission, but Elak volunteers and is guided through a secret tunnel and sneaks into the wizard's tower.

The absence of Lycon means there is a lot less comic relief in the meaty middle section of the story, to the story's benefit.  Besides the dwarfish wizard, within the tower Elak encounters the animated corpse of a huge executed criminal who is serving the wizard and the beautiful woman the wizard plans to separate from her soul as part of the process of communicating with magicians in another star system.  Elak neutralizes the red globe, and finds the weirdo has double crossed him--Elak's client is a monstrous gelatinous tentacled creature, a worshipper of Dagon, and he and an army of his fellows burst into the tower.  It turns out the diminutive wizard's red globe was the only thing keeping the Dagon worshippers from taking over and then sinking Atlantis!  Elak and the wizard have to join forces to save Atlantis; in the end Lycon arrives and saves the day.  Elak ends up with the girl.

This is a pretty good sword and sorcery story, though maybe it could have benefited from another round of polishing--most glaringly, the disguised agent of Dagon gives Elak some kind of super weapon to use on the wizard, but Kuttner seems to forget about it, and it never plays any role in the plot that I can remember.  Still, thumbs up!

"Spawn of Dagon" has been anthologized numerous times, in books of sword and sorcery stories, horror stories and stories centered around Atlantis.

"Beyond the Phoenix"

"Beyond the Phoenix" was also a Weird Tales cover story, and this cover is even more boring--is that Lycon?  Isn't he supposed to look like a fat monkey and not like Elak's equally hunkalicious brother?  This third Elak adventure hasn't been as widely anthologized as "Spawn of Dagon,"  though it does appear in Peter Haining's 1976 anthology of stories from Weird Tales, which has gone through several editions, as well as an elaborate 2023 German boxed set of five hardcover anthologies of material from Weird Tales which looks pretty awesome.  Uber alles indeed.

Elak and Lycon are serving as soldiers in the royal guard of a remote Atlantean nation.  The kingdom's high priest, Xander, a huge muscular hunchback, leads faithless members of the guard in a coup attempt; Elak, Lycon and the Princess Esarra manage to outfight the traitors, but the king has been mortally wounded, and Xander escapes.

As he dies, the king explains that Xander has summoned the evil god of dark lust, Baal-Yagoth, to the Earth, and this god now inhabits Xander's twisted body.  The only way to defeat Baal-Yagoth is to visit the land of the gods and enlist the aid of the god Assurah, also known as the Phoenix.  Traditionally, the dead monarchs of this kingdom have been put on a barge and sent to the land of the gods via an underground river, so Elak, Lycon and the princess take the king's corpse with them on the waiting barge and head to the land of the gods.

The trip to the subterranean country of the gods, whose inhabitants call it "Nyrvana," includes some needlessly dreamy sequences.  Nyrvana is ruled by two beings, a man, Ithron, who is striving to obey the instructions left by the long dormant Assurah the Phoenix, and a woman, Tyrala, who is revealed to be in cahoots with Xander and the evil god Assurah imprisoned so long ago, Baal-Yagoth!  Tyrala is bored with Nyrvana, where the men are soft--she wants to rule Atlantis, which is full of real men, men  like Elak!  Ithron saves Elak from being seduced by Tyrala, who has a chalice she carries around with her--men who drink from the chalice become her slaves and she them vampirically absorbs their life energy.  

Ithron summons Assurah to deal with Baal-Yagoth, but before the Phoenix is aroused Tyrala has launched a coup of her own and (off screen) Ithron somehow falls prey to her chalice and (on screen) has his life force drawn from his body to augment the witch's own power.  Not that she is able to enjoy her triumph for very long.  Assurah inhabits Elak's body so that our hero can fly and wield a flaming sword that shoots lightning, and quick work is made of Tyrala in Nyrvana and then of Xander up on the surface.  Princess Esarra is installed on the throne and I guess we are expected to think she and Elak will, temporarily, become an item.  

(The WT printing of "Beyond the Phoenix" includes a pretty good Art Deco type illustration by future DC comics artist, and personal friend of Henry Kuttner, Jim Mooney depicting Tyrala and the ensorcelled Ithron dancing nude to the music of batrachian flutists in their last moments.)

"Beyond the Phoenix" feels underdeveloped--it is almost like an outline, or a condensation, of a novel.  Kuttner crams too many characters and too much back story into the space he has to work with, so he doesn't have any room to build excitement or suspense, to make us interested in the characters, or even to give Elak much to do.  The deformed priest who likes to torture women and wants to get his hands on Princess Esarra and the immortal witch who seeks power and manly men to seduce are potentially compelling villains, but we don't spend enough time with them.  As for Elak, he does what the king told him to do, then what Ithron tells him to do, and then what Assurah the Phoenix tells him to do.  

Merely acceptable.

**********

So now we have read all three Elak stories published in 1938.  "Spawn of Dagon" is the best of these, it having by far the best realized villains--the disguised Dagon worshipper, the evil wizard who it turns out is instrumental in keeping Atlantis above the waves, and the hulking undead criminal--and by far the most entertaining plot twists, as well as the best fights and magic; Kuttner also correctly paced "Spawn of Dagon," giving us just the right amount of material to comfortably inhabit its page count.

A fourth Elak story was published in Weird Tales in 1941, and I expect we'll read it someday, but we will probably explore a lot of other Weird Tales content before we get to it.