Last year we read Henry Kuttner's first three Elak stories,
"Thunder in the Dawn," "Spawn of Dagon" and "Beyond the Phoenix." Today we will read Kuttner's fourth and final story of Elak of Atlantis, "Dragon Moon," which appears in the January 1941 issue of
Weird Tales. (Adrian Cole, whose
Dream Lords trilogy I read in 2016 and
tarbandu started last year, took up the saga of Elak in our own 21st century.) We'll also tackle the stories in this ish by David H. Keller, Robert Bloch and Ralph M. Finley. Hopefully these stories will he better than those we read
last time we cracked open an issue of the magazine of the bizarre and unusual. At least thid go round we have a cover with a muscleman, a monster and a damsel in distress.
(I considered reading Nelson S. Bond's story from this issue, but it is advertised as a joke story so I am abstaining--I know you don't want to hear me yet again groan about how little I appreciate joke stories.)
"Dragon Moon" by Henry Kuttner
"Dragon Moon" has ten chapters, and each is preceded by an epigraph. Most of these are from poems by G. K. Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling, or William Rose Benet--or the Bible, but Kuttner does quote his own 1936 poem "The Sunken Towers" before Chapter 6. ("The Sunken Towers" appeared in the December 1936 issue of Donald Wollheim's zine
The Phantagraph and was reprinted in 1967 in
Operation Phantasy: The Best from The Phantagraph. The poem is easy to find if you search around a bit.)
Chapter 1 finds errant prince Elak and obese comic relief sidekick Lycon in a harborside tavern in southern Atlantis. Elak gets into a fight over a wench and is about to be killed when the Druid from "Thunder in the Dawn" busts into the room and uses sorcery to save Elak's life. In Chapter 2 the Druid delivers astonishing news--an alien entity known as Karkora is taking over the bodies of the monarchs of Atlantis! When Elak's brother, Orander, king of the northern land of Cyrena, realized he was being possessed by a being from another universe, he killed himself! The Druids want Elak to take the throne of Cyrena, but Elak refuses, thinking himself unfit!
In Chapter 3, Elak has a dream in which he has a vision of Karkora the Pallid One and finds it so loathsome he decides to travel to Cyrena to seize control of the kingdom after all. The Druid is nowhere to be found, so Elak and Lycon try to get passage on a ship, only to find it is captained by the guy Elak had that bar brawl with! Elak and Lycon are chained at the oars among the galley slaves and help propel the ship northward with their own muscles. In Chapter 4, Elak and Lycon lead a revolt of the galley slaves and take over the ship. Kuttner includes lots of gruesome details in the fight that might appeal to gorehounds, but the sequence feels a little shoddy, with a metaphor used twice in as many pages and some confusion as to what is going on. Chapter 4 would have benefited from some additional polishing and editing.
In Chapter 5 the Druid speaks to Elak in a dream--he must go to the red delta! Whatever that is! The next day is spotted a castle on an island in a delta; the sand here is red. Ah! Elak and Lycon bid farewell to the mutineers and disembark. They meet a local potentate, Aynger, one of the last of a dispersed people, the Amenalk. He tells Elak that within the castle lives a woman, Mayana, one of the few survivors of a pre-human race of sea people, a race of puissant wizards. She was married to the human king of the nation just south of Cyrena, Kiriath, but left him when Karkora the Pallid One took over his body. In Chapter 6, Elak, alone, ventures across a scary bridge, through a creepy tunnel, across a haunted underground lake, to the island under the island, where sits among a ruined city the temple under the castle, where he meets Mayana. Mayana is incredibly tall and thin, and Hannes Bok provides an absorbing illustration of her kneeling before an idol of some kind of bird god.
Chapter 7 is an expository chapter in which Mayana tells her own sad story and of the coming of Karkora the Pallid One. You see, Mayana loved her human husband, king of Kiriath, and wanted to bear him a son, but as a nonhuman was unable. A wizard in her husband's court offered to aid her with his sorcery, and she took him up on the offer, but the child she bore thereby was a stillborn misshapen mutant. The wizard offered to revive it, and Mayana again accepted the sorcerer's aid; the wizard brought the baby back to feeble life and took it under his tutelage. Eventually it was revealed that the sorcerer had summoned from another universe a horrible immaterial being to inhabit the embryo in Mayana's womb! Having brought the deformed baby back to some semblance of life, along with the powerful alien spirit dwelling within it, the wizard put the child into what amounts to a sensory deprivation tank, denying it its natural five senses in order to strengthen an alien sixth sense! This malformed human inhabited by an extradimensional spirit is now Karkora, and it seeks to conquer this world and others with the array of astounding powers this sixth sense confers upon him!
Mayana knows a talisman that can destroy Karkora, the monster whose earthly form came from her own womb, even if its alien soul did not, and Elak convinces her to provide it to him--she agrees to do so at the right moment. Mayana even enchants Elak's blade, and gifts him some of her own magical strength, so he will be able to succeed in battle against Karkora and the Pallid One's unwitting human servants. Kuttner doesn't say that impossibly tall, creepily skinny, shockingly pale and disturbingly scaly Mayana of the sea-folk has sex with Elak in order to give him this strength, but it is sort of metaphorically or euphemistically implied.
"Stay with me for a moon--drinking the sea-power and Poseidon’s magic.”
“A moon—”
"Time will not exist. You will sleep, and while you sleep strength will pour into you."
(There's a lot of bestiality in the world of Lovecraftian and Lovecraftian-adjacent fiction.)
All the business with Mayana is good because it is about disturbing and heart-breaking human relationships and at the same time about the evil wizards, extradimensional aliens, lost races and lost cities, and undertone of perverse sex that we are looking for when we open up an issue of Weird Tales.
In Chapter 8, Elak makes his way to the capital of Cyrena and with the help of the Druid's magic wins the throne and raises an army. In Chapter 9, Elak's army of Cyrena and Aynger's army of the reassembled Amenalk diaspora battle the army of Kiriath, led by Mayana's husband, who is controlled by her alien son. Kuttner dwells on blood and wounds, on the writhing bodies of dying horses and men in the dirt and mud underfoot. Elak kills the possessed king of Kiriath with the blade ensorcelled by the king's own wife, and then comes Chapter 10, the surreal psychic battle in a parallel dimension between Elak, supported by the Druid and Mayana, and the alien Karkora the Pallid One. Stories by Kuttner and his wife C. L. Moore often feature these sorts of psychic battles as a climax (see Kuttner's "Where the World Is Quiet," and "The Time Axis," Moore's "The Tree of Life" and "Black God's Shadow," the Moore/Kuttner collab "Quest for the Starstone," and numerous others I am too lazy to link to.) Uniting the two themes that make "Dragon Moon" noteworthy, the Mayana tragedy and the gore Kuttner fills the story with, our surprise ending is that the talisman Mayana gives to Elak at the moment he requires it is her own beating heart! The heart, oozing blood, cast upon the hidden body of her son, makes the body disappear and sends the alien entity inhabiting it packing, saving the Earth.
While not as good as one of the better Conan, Elric, or Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, "Dragon Moon" is a solid sword and sorcery caper, maybe the best Elak story, thanks primarily to the Mayana material, though Kuttner's use of the Aynger character, which I have not gone into in this already too long blog post, is also interesting.
"Dragon Moon" has been reprinted in various Elak collections and, among other anthologies, L. Sprague de Camp's The Fantastic Swordsmen, an abridged version of which was published by our Teutonic pals as Science Fiction Stories 20 and then in full as Drachenmond.
"The Goddess of Zion" by David H. Keller
Let's see, in the history of MPorcius Fiction Log we've read eleven stories by Keller. OMG it is links time.
"Valley of Bones"
Today with "The Goddess of Zion" we make it a round dozen! Maybe this is a good one--Jacques Sadoul and Messrs. Greenberg, McSherry and Waugh thought it worthy of reprinting in anthologies, and it also appears in the first volume of the David H. Keller Memorial Library.
This is a pretty good one, actually, well-written and exhibiting a higher tone than much of the sex and violence exploitation stuff we often read, but the sex and violence are still there! "The Goddess of Zion" also offers plenty for intellectual types interested in issues of race and gender to chew on.
Out narrator relates to us the uncanny experience he had while visiting Zion National Park back in 1938. At a far corner of the park, where there are no other tourists, he comes upon a sort of white mountain, shaped a little like a throne, with a hole in its crest through which he could see the sky. Then another man appears, a handsome blue-eyed blonde. Blonde invites the narrator to accompany him in a hike up the white mountain. The mountain looks unscalable, but Blue-Eyes knows a path. Along the way they discover sophisticated wall paintings featuring a mammoth and a beautiful blonde woman.
At the summit Blonde tells his crazy story. His soul is that of a Viking ancestor who explored America centuries ago--his soul has shifted from father to son over many generations. He forgets many intervening events, but recalls perfectly his adventure here on the mountain.
He was the last survivor of his Viking band, which had marched far across the continent, fighting Indians and facing other hardships for years. He was taken prisoner by a race of brown pygmies who lived around and on this white mountain. These pygmies regularly captured Indians and sacrificed them to their gods--a wooly mammoth who lived with them on top of the mountain and a gorgeous blonde woman with blue eyes who was their queen. The mammoth would lift the Indians in its trunk one at a time and hurl them down through that hole in the mountain. When the blonde queen showed signs of losing her looks with age, a new blonde queen, a teenager, would then appear and the older queen would be thrown down the hole to her death.
The current queen and the Viking became lovers. The mammoth was somehow affected by their love, and, when the new queen arrived because the current queen got sick, the mammoth flipped the script by throwing the teenager down the hole, casting pygmy society into disarray. The queen, near death from her illness, told the Viking that after she died he would live for many centuries but eventually return here to follow her so they could be together forever. Then at her request the Viking threw the queen down through the hole.
The day after hearing this story, the narrator descends the mountain, leaving the reincarnated Viking on the mountain top; that night he watches from below as the man jumps down through the hole so he can rejoin his beloved.
I like it.
"House of the Hatchet" by Robert Bloch
Here we have one of Bloch's Hollywood writer stories that references the fact that California is full of freaks and conmen, but, unlike the totally lame
"Wine of the Sabbat" that I told you sucks earlier this month, "House of the Hatchet" is a good one with real human feeling and real human personalities. Our third good story in a row today, and our third story with a strange sexual relationship at its core.
(This story also has a good Hannes Bok illustration. This is shaping up to be a superior issue of Weird Tales.)
Our narrator has been married for three years to Daisy, a pretty girl who has a sadistic streak and loves reading horror and murder stories, following the crime news in the paper, and watching detective and monster movies. (Bloch's work is full of evidence that he suspected the line of work he himself was in was somehow bad for individuals and/or society, or reflected deficiencies in its fans or society at large.) Their marriage is rocky; the narrator has a crush on another woman and Daisy has detected it, and for quite a while now the narrator's expenses have been exceeding the proceeds he gets from selling scripts, leading Daisy to moan about their finances.
On their third anniversary they drive up to the region where they spent their honeymoon after eloping. On the way they come upon a tourist attraction that advertises itself as a haunted house. Daisy loves this kind of thing and so they go in. The owner, a guy like W. C. Fields (this story has quite a few Hollywood references), describes how a Russian emigre, a failed film director, owned the house and murdered his wife before disappearing, and how since then hoboes and burglars who have invaded the house have been found killed in the same way the director's wife was killed--with a hatchet on a Satanic altar--and how people have seen the wife's ghost.
The writer and Daisy are shown to the room in which the murders took place, which is complete with hatchet and altar. The room has a powerful effect on both the narrator and on his wife. Will one of them kill the other, possessed by the ghost or perhaps with the alleged ghost merely providing an excuse?
Bloch does a good job imagining the thoughts of both a murderer and his victim, and the twist ending isn't bad--the narrator murders his wife and then the ghost of his wife starts killing people, blossoming into reality the bogus story cooked up by the owner of the macabre tourist trap. One of Bloch's better efforts, he keeping the jokes and the Kal-if-OR-NIGH-AYYY local color to a manageable level and delivering a powerful dose of "look into the mind of a killer" and "explore the psychology of a vengeful ghost" material. Thumbs up!
Among the numerous Bloch collections in which "House of the Hatchet" has been reprinted are two different British collections for which it serves as title story and a French volume with a cool mummy cover.
"Test Tube Twin" by Ralph Milne Farley
Last year we read six stories by Farley, a soldier, lawyer, politician and writer who is said by some to have sometimes collaborated with his daughter. Of the six stories, I liked
"House of Ecstasy," "Liquid Life," and
"Horror's Head," and thought
"Time for Sale," "Mystery of the Missing Magnate" and
"Stratosphere Menace" were OK. As things go here at MPorcius Fiction Log, that is a pretty good record! Hopefully Farley's run of luck here at MPFL will continue today as we read "Test Tube Twin," which it seems has never been reprinted. (Uh oh.)
Happily, "Test Tube Twin" is a diverting crime/science fiction story about a ruthless murderous gangster who tries to use cloning techniques to get revenge on people and escape justice. Public Enemy Number One is our main character, and Farley succeeds in making him sort of interesting, and pretty evil, equally willing to kill with his own hand those who have been loyal to him and those who have betrayed him, providing the reader plenty of shocking thrills.
To be brief, the mobster through bribes and threats gets a scientist to develop a means of cloning a person by taking samples of his tissue and growing a genetically identical twin of him in a test tube. He also has the egghead come up with techniques to make the clone grow at a super fast rate--it will appear to be 30 years old when it is only six or seven months old. When a clone of the mobster has been produced that looks just like him, as if it is his age (though its mind is that of a child), the gangster murders the clone. Now the police will think he is dead and stop looking for him. He plants the gun on a rival gangster so that guy will be tried for murder. Then, to cover his tracks, he tries to kill a woman who loves him (a trained nurse, she worked with the scientist in raising the clone), his most loyal associate (a dim-witted thug), and the scientist. Who will live? Who will die? Who will end up in prison? Will the scientist prove to have an ace in the hole that will preserve his highly educated hide and dump the gangster in the clink for his various murders?
An entertaining crime story.
**********
Four good stories? Amazing! Bravo to all involved, McIlwraith, Kuttner, Keller, Bloch, and Farley, and let's not forget Bok who has multiple fine illustrations in the issue. Weird Tales lives up to its reputation today and gets 1941 off to a good start.
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