Robert E. Howard: "The Pit of the Serpent," "Knife, Bullet and Noose," and "Gents on the Lynch"

In the middle of December, we read three stories by Conan-creator Robert E. Howard we found in Glenn Lord's The Second Book of Robert E. Howard.  I also own a copy of that collection's predecessor, The Book of Robert E. Howard.  This work was first published in 1976 with a beautiful Jeff Jones cover.  Alas and alack, I have the 1980 printing with the barely acceptable Ken Kelly cover--hopefully in my wanderings far and wide I'll find an affordable copy of the earlier edition someday.  

Let's read three stories from my copy of The Book of Robert E. Howard that I think are set in the 19th or 20th centuries and that may or may not have some kind of supernatural element.   

"The Pit of the Serpent" (1929)

Here we have the first Steve Costigan story; we read a 1931 Costigan story, "Breed of Battle" AKA "The Fighten'est Pair" back in 2019.  According to Glenn Lord's intro to "The Pit of the Serpent" here in The Book of Robert E. Howard, there are twenty-seven Costigan stories, some unpublished.  I think it might be easier to get some of these stories in the language of Proust and Moliere than in Howard's native language--our French friends at Neo published three collections of Costigan tales back in the Eighties.

Steve Costigan is a sailor on a merchant ship, the entire crew of which, it seems, consists of amateur boxers.  His ship puts in at Manila, where a rival ship, also full of amateur boxers, is in port.  Steve tries to date up a local girl, and a fellow heavyweight from that rival ship is also after her, and the two men are about to brawl when an "oily" club owner stops them, proposing that they fight fair and square in his establishment.  Many people will place wagers on the outcome of the fight.

The fight, which Howard describes at length, takes place in a concrete pit that was formerly used to stage cock fights and, before that, snake fights.  (Will two snakes really fight if you throw them together into a pit?)  The flooring and the small size of the pit, with its rough walls that can abrade skin, are so unlike the legitimate rings in which Costigan generally fights that he is at a big disadvantage--it seems his foe has fought here many times before and the whole thing is crooked, the club owner acting as referee and favoring Costigan's adversary, upon whom this oily crook has bet a stack of moolah.  Our guy Steve wins the fight, but he doesn't get the girl and he doesn't get the money he bet on himself, either--it's a hard knock life!

A trifling but fun thing that is never boring, the pace being quick and Costigan's comic foolishness and the world's comic viciousness being somewhat amusing.  Marginally good.

"The Pit of the Serpent" debuted in the magazine Fight Stories and has been reprinted in quite a few collections of Howard's boxing stories.  

"Knife, Bullet and Noose" (1965)

Here we have a Western.  Lord, in his intro to "Knife, Bullet and Noose," suggests the story didn't sell in Howard's lifetime, and it looks like it was first printed in 1965 in Lord's periodical The Howard Collector.  "Knife, Bullet and Noose" was included in the 1979 Ace paperback The Howard Collector, a collection of some of what Lord considered the best material from the magazine, and would go on to be reprinted in collections of Howard's Western tales.

Steve Allison, AKA the Sonora Kid, is a trail boss, hired to lead a cattle drive on the Chisholm trail, and to carry with him the cash paid for the thousands of head of cattle he and his boys are delivering.  In an Arkansas boom town, Allison has to deal with some buffalo hunters who have a beef with him.  Knifing and shooting ensues, and the revelation that not only is the corrupt local sheriff against Allison, but that the whole business is being orchestrated by the local banker!  Luckily Allison is an expert knife fighter and an expert gunfighter.

This is a competent but quite slight story--the mayhem is good, but the story lacks the fun and personality of "The Pit of the Serpent."  Acceptable.

"Gents on the Lynch" (1936)

The hero of "Gents on the Lynch" is Pike Bearfield of Texas, and this story comes to us as a long letter penned by Bearfield describing his adventures in Colorado to his brother back home.  His brother convinced him to travel there to prospect for gold--Bearfield is a humorously dim-witted character, somewhat like Kid Alison of "The Good Knight," and it seems his brother wanted Bearfield out of town because he was Bearfield's rival in the election for sheriff.  The letter is full of phonetic spellings and odd slang.

"Gents on the Lynch" is a little too slapsticky for me; a guy gets shot in the ass, another guy sits on a bear trap, there are a lot of mistaken identity gags, that sort of thing.  There is a lot of violence, but it is played for laughs.  

The plot is kind of all over the place, with lots of characters, and exists mainly to set up joke situations.  Immediately upon arriving in Blue Lizard, CO, Bearfield is fooled into helping a criminal escape, which puts him on the bad side of the local vigilantes, who are hard pressed to protect the frontier community from the bandits that plague it.  He meets an old friend and does something stupid that gets that guy angry at him as well.  He meets a beautiful girl and commits blunders while trying to impress her.  He gets mixed up in hand-to-hand fights involving various groups of citizens and criminals, and comes through them intact because he has the strength of ten men.  In the end he fails to get any gold and similarly fails to get the girl, and vows to return home to get revenge on his brother.

We'll call this one barely acceptable.

"Gents on the Lynch" first appeared in Argosy, and since then has been included in Howard collections.  I guess people like it more than I did--Rusty Burke selected it for inclusion in Del Rey / Ballantine's 2007 The Best of Robert E. Howard, Volume 2: Grim Lands, where it appears alongside famous stories like "The Tower of the Elephant," "Red Nails" and "Pigeons from Hell."

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These are minor things, but not bad.  I expect there will be more Robert E. Howard boxing stories and Westerns, and more stories by Howard with guys named "Alison" or "Allison," in our future.

Dangerous Visions from L del Rey, B Aldiss and H Ellison

We took my hardcover first edition of Harlan Ellison's oft-discussed, oft-reprinted, Dangerous Visions (1967) off the shelf to read Robert Bloch's "Toy for Juliette," and we might as well read some more stories from it before putting it back.  We'll read Ellison's own contribution--a sequel to Bloch's--and, sticking towards the front of the 500+ page volume, the story by Lester del Rey and the one by Brian Aldiss.

"Evensong" by Lester del Rey

Ellison in his intro to "Evensong" reports that del Rey put him up when your old pal Harlan moved from Ohio to New York, and del Rey served as a brilliant teacher to a young Harlan.  Del Rey also loves to argue, and, according to Ellison, has never lost an argument.  Maybe del Rey taught Ellison how to deploy hyperbole.  We are warned in the intro that this story is some kind of allegory.

The mercifully brief "Evensong" is one of the many stories that we explorers of the SF landscape encounter that laments how human beings are violent and mean to the environment.  I guess people love to read this stuff again and again...at least writers love to write it again and again and editors love to print it again and again.  The conceit behind Dangerous Visions is that the stories therein are ones that only Harlan was brave enough to publish, stories conventional editors would shy away from because the broke social taboos or something.  I guess "Evensong" is "dangerous" because it sort of goofs on religion, portraying God as weak, lacking the omniscience and omnipotence we conventionally associate with the deity of monotheistic religion.

Anyway, a strange being, left largely undescribed, is capable of crossing the galaxy on its own power, but despite its amazing abilities is a fugitive, a refugee, from "the Usurpers," who have sensors and traps all over the galaxy, on all the planets, between all the stars.  The being finds a planet where there seems to be no Usurper presence.  Once on the surface, the being realizes that this planet is the very same planet where it first met the Usurpers, when they were still primitive, still confined to this one world.  In fact, our protagonist is largely responsible for helping the natives grow in ability to the point that they were able to conquer the galaxy and build the prison in the galaxy's center from which it escaped.

The Usurpers catch up to the being and the twist ending that we likely saw coming is that the Usurpers are the human race and the superbeing they are hounding is God.  

In his Afterword, del Rey tells us this story is an allegory, you know, in case we ignored Ellison's intro, and hints that it is about good and evil, free will, and whether the universe is a bunch of random phenomena or is directed by an intelligence with a purpose.  He also refers to William Ernest Henley's "Invictus."  Presumably the point of "Evensong" is that people have free will and generally take advantage of that freedom to behave abominably.

"Evensong" feels like a gimmicky filler story, though a particularly pretentious one.  Gotta give it a thumbs down in recognition that it is a waste of time.   

"Evensong" has reappeared in several anthologies, in English and other languages.

"The Night That All Time Broke Loose" by Brian Aldiss

It is the future!  Most people live in domed cities!  Talking chimpanzees drive flying taxis!  People eat synthetic lobster!  Most importantly and least credibly, miners in the last few years discovered pockets of "time gas" far below the Earth's surface!  When you breathe this gas, your mind returns to the past--you feel the way you did at an earlier moment in your life, or the way an ancestor did at a particular moment.  What moment?  The pressure of the gas determines how far back are the memories you relive.  A big company pipes the gas into city people's flats and the tenants vary the pressure via dials and switches so they can experience happier times of their lives again and again.  "The Night That All Time Broke Loose" is not a serious speculation or even a well-plotted entertainment, but a bizarre farce that offers Aldiss a chance to make some weak jokes and, sort of offhandedly, attack the market economy, dramatizing the foolishness and gullibility of consumers and the duplicity and greed of business people.

Our protagonists are a good-looking couple, dairy farmers who have to live in the country to conduct their business.  Aldiss stresses that country people are looked down upon by the dome dwellers.  The couple have finally got time gas lines installed in their country house--all the pipes and workmen really made a mess of things, and the process took forever.  But today the gas is on line!  They contemplate setting the pressure of the time gas so they feel like they are children and then having sex ("You must have been very sexy in your preteens" says hubby and the little woman responds "We can work back to when we were tots!" )--this must be the "dangerous" component of this story.

There is a disaster at the time mine, and too much time gas comes up too fast, and people start experiencing the feelings of their ancestors--recalling the Korean War or the reign of George III or even dinosaur attacks, and saying stuff like "Unhand, me varlet" and "God's breath!"  Eventually everybody thinks he is a cave man or cave woman, and it is implied that civilization is going to collapse.

The way the time gas works makes no sense (if the husband is experiencing his childhood before he met his wife, and she is experiencing her childhood before she met him, how would he have the experience of having sex with a minor while banging his wife--wouldn't he instead experience how it would be to have sex with an adult as a minor himself?) and the jokes are lame.  I guess the idea is original, but the story is not good, another gimmicky filler piece.  Thumbs down!  

The autobiographical material from Aldiss in the intro and the afterword comes across as self-important bragging and is a little off putting.  The afterword also explains that "The Night That All Time Broke Loose" was inspired by the fact that Aldiss recently moved to an old country house and it needed lots of plumbing work done on it.  Aldiss wasn't sending Ellison his best work.     

"The Night That All Time Broke Loose" has reappeared in a few anthologies, including one edited by Robert Silverberg and a German book of time travel stories.

"The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World" by Harlan Ellison

Del Rey's story is only four pages long, and Aldiss's ten; Ellison's is almost twenty.  Maybe with all that room Ellison will come up with an actual plot, or maybe some human character or drama?

Well, Ellison does gives us some vivid images, and he takes the characters Bloch has provided him in "Toy for Juliette" and explores them to some extent, and with some success, so we'll say "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World" is acceptable, but I am reluctant to call it good as a whole, as the plot is unsatisfying and the point of the story, which Ellison spells out for us in the three-page afterword, should we have missed it (though only after spending two and a half pages bragging about how hard he works and claiming that he has figured out the motive and identity of Jack the Ripper) is banal and lame at best, annoying and insulting at worst.  That point is the sort of thing we have heard all our lives from boring welfare state liberals and disgusting leftists, that criminals are not really responsible for their crimes, that society has driven them to thievery, rape and murder--the real monsters are not the thieves, rapists and murders, the real monsters are everybody else!  Don't you think I am exaggerating--the last two sentences of Ellison's afterword are:

That is the message of the story.  You are the monsters.

(Ellison is not an original thinker--he just says the same goop other people say but says it really loudly.)

OK, I said above that the images and characters in "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World" were successful.  As for the images, Ellison does a good job of describing the material reality of the city of the year 3077 in which Jack the Ripper finds himself, the walls and streets and the futuristic knife he stole from Juliette and with which he killed her, that sort of thing.  And then we have the images of mayhem and gore.  Ellison really lets himself go describing sexualized violence: the knife severing a penis, being used to chop breasts into little bits that are then placed on a corpse's eyes, cutting a fetus out of a pregnant woman, etc.  There's a lot of cutting people open and cutting them apart and then rearranging the pieces.  It is vivid and shocking, but whether it is mere exploitation or serves Ellison's plot and theme, I'm less confident.  I guess the way one person controls another's body, and uses this control to not only destroy but humiliate the subject's body, dramatizes Ellison's theme that people are not responsible for their own actions, that they are at the mercy of larger forces.

As for the characters, Ellison expands upon Juliette's grandfather, the time traveler.  We learn that Grandpa regularly had sex with Juliette and that he summoned Jack from the past specifically to kill his murderous but sexy granddaughter.  And we learn all about Jack and his motives--why was he killing those women in Victorian London?  Jack's apparent, ostensible, motive, the thing he tells himself, is that he was murdering the prostitutes as a way of raising awareness of the plight of the poor--Jack is a social reformer!  Is Ellison here satirizing revolutionaries and terrorists, the sorts of people who massacre kulaks in Eastern Europe and shoot down insurance executives in New York City, who send aristocrats to the guillotine and middle-class people to the killing fields, not because they have a lust for blood or power or fame--they say--but in the noble pursuit of social justice?  Maybe, but probably not.  Regardless, the people of 3077 invade Jack's brain and find that he really, or additionally, murdered whores because of sexual frustrations and embarrassments--a woman gave Jack a venereal disease and he had to tell his father, a physician, and Jack covets a clergyman's wife.

Finally, let's talk about the plot, which I found unsatisfying.  To me, a satisfying plot is one in which the course of a story and its conclusion are linked to a character's actions, decisions, personality.  Many people, of course, for reasons like Spinoza's and d'Holbach's, or reasons like Marx's, don't think the course of a man's life is in any real sense determined by his actions and decisions but by external forces.  Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't, but either way, a work of fiction in which the protagonist is controlled by external forces is not satisfying, and Ellison's "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World" is all about how individuals are not responsible for their actions, and how Jack, the protagonist, is not responsible for his actions and those actions accomplish nothing besides.  Jack murdered whores to create a better city, but 1) he really murdered whores because of sub- or unconscious sexual problems and 2) he didn't create a better city--the city of the future is totally evil.  Jack didn't really outwit and save himself from Juliette--Grandpa manipulated him into destroying Juliette, Jack was just a tool.  Finally, the last portion of "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World" details how Jack runs around the future city, murdering and carving people up, and we are given the idea that the city operates based on psychic feedback from the citizens and Jack is causing the city to malfunction, to collapse, by slaughtering its inhabitants.  But then we realize that that is all an illusion--the citizens are permitting Jack to kill people for their own entertainment, Jack is just their puppet.  "He was not evil, he was pathetic."

"The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World" isn't a bad story, as it is competently structured and well written on a sentence by sentence basis, but as I have exhaustively explained, it isn't a good story, either.  Better, and more "out there," than del Rey's and Aldiss's "dangerous" visions, though.  Looking at the Dangerous Visions project as a whole, we might consider that Ellison's story, even though it is derivative of one already written by Bloch, and Ellison claims it took him like a year to write, so likely was finished after he had received a bunch of submissions, is a sort of model of what he hoped to get from other writers, a story full of twisted sex, explicit violence that is disgusting rather than cathartic, and a philosophy that turns upside down conventional morality. 

"The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World" has been reprinted in various places, including Jack the Ripper-themed anthologies (of which there are many--who knew?) and a French magazine with a surrealist and hubba hubba cover.

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We are often told Dangerous Visions is important and all that  ("A landmark!" "A classic!" "The most honored SF anthology of all time," "The single best collection of Science Fiction stories ever compiled!"), so maybe I should have read these stories, purportedly landmark classics worthy of innumerable honors, earlier.  In my defense, before I had availed myself today of the wisdom of del Rey and Ellison and the humor of Aldiss, I had already read seven other stories from the book, and here are the links to prove it:

"Eutopia" by Poul Anderson

"Land of the Great Horses" by R. A. Lafferty

"Auto-da-Fe" by Roger Zelazny

"The Jigsaw Man" by Larry Niven 
"If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" by Theodore Sturgeon
"Shall the Dust Praise Thee?" by Damon Knight

"A Toy for Juliette" by Robert Bloch

There are quite a few more stories by authors I am interested in to be found within the sacred pages of Dangerous Visions, and maybe we'll get to them some day.  Stay tuned!