"The Gods of Bal-Sagoth"
"People of the Dark"
"Children of the Night"
"The Dead Remember"
"The Man on the Ground"
"The Thing on the Roof"
"Dig Me No Grave"
"Old Garfield's Heart"
"The Hyena"
"The Dream Snake"
"In the Forest of Villefere"
"The Black Stone"
"The Valley of the Worm"
"Wolfshead"
"The Fire of Asshurbanipal"
"The Horror From the Mound"
If our calculations are correct, that leaves four stories unread: "The Garden of Fear," "The Voice of El-Lil," "The House of Arabu" and "The Cairn on the Headland." Today we broaden our weird horizons and absorb these texts born of the mind of the man who brought us the immortal Cimmerian. You can read along at the links in the previous sentence, though be warned the linked version of "The Cairn on the Headland" is a little different than the text I read.
"The Garden of Fear" (1934)
Our narrator, James Allison, whom we met in the story "The Valley of the Worm" some years ago, is one of those guys who can remember his past lives, his mind able to reach back, back, back, back millions of years--he can remember being a cave man, he can remember being an anthropoid, he can remember being an animal! (I can't remember what I did yesterday!) But "The Garden of Fear" focuses not on the adventures of a lizard or a monkey or whatever, but on those of Hunwolf, a blonde tribesman who fights with a big flint-headed axe, the descendent of Northern Europeans who have colonized much of the world in an age now totally forgotten, an age before any of the civilizations of which we are aware arose.
Hunwulf fell in love with a beautiful pale blonde woman, Gudrun; Gudrun is not of Hunwulf's tribe, but joined Hunwulf's tribe as a young girl, some kind of refugee or fugitive. Hunwulf has to leave his tribe after he kills a fellow who also has the hots for this beauty; Gudrun returns Hunwolf's love, and accompanies him across a raging river and up a mountain tin his flight from vengeful pursuers. Along the way Hunwulf uses up his arrows and loses his spear fighting off giant birds. Luckily he still has his flint axe. On the other side of the mountain some brown people welcome the lovers, but then a monster, a winged man, swoops down, snatches up Gudrun, and carries her off. Woah, I think this is the caper that Esteban Maroto was painting when he did the cover of the 1979 edition of Pigeons from Hell! Awesome!
The brown people know where the winged man lives and direct Hunwulf to its lair so he can try to rescue Gudrun. On the way he avoids mammoths, sabre-toothed cats and cave bears, and eventually comes to a valley in which looms a 70-foot tall tower. The valley is covered in a dense forest of flowers, the blossoms the size of a man's head, each atop a four-foot-high stalk. As Hunwulf watches, the winged man feeds the bloodsucking flowers a human sacrifice--luckily one of those brown villagers and not pale Gudrun.
Moskowitz in his introduction compares "The Garden of Fear" to a science fiction story, and like in classic science fiction, Hunwulf uses his quick wits and knowledge of science to overcome the garden of writhing and voracious flowers, starting a fire that stampedes a herd of mammoths to the base of the tower, their passage trampling a path through the vampiric blossoms. Up in the tower Hunwulf and Gudrun outfight the winged man. Wokies will perhaps be thrilled that Gudrun fights fiercely and is instrumental to the defeat of the flying man, but dismayed that Howard takes time out to assure us that the winged man, though black, has nothing of the "negroid" about his features.
"The Garden of Fear" in its speculations about what it would be like to remember life in the ancient past, to apply your 20th-century mind to the memories of an unlettered savage, and in its theories about the winged man and his possible civilization, perhaps also comes close to achieving the intellectualism and the "sense of wonder" Moskowitz would associate with science fiction. These elements certainly add value to this story of a barbarian and his girlfriend killing the last survivor of a more sophisticated--though totally evil!--civilization. (The barbarians overcoming the culturally superior and morally debased being is of course illustrative of Howard's view of life and history.)
Moskowitz, perhaps because of those science fiction adjacent elements, tells us "The Garden of Fear" is one of Howard's best stories, but while I enjoyed it and am giving "Garden of Fear" a thumbs up, I must disagree. Because they offer human emotion and human relationships, I would say that "Wolfshead" and "The Hyena" are certainly better than "The Garden of Fear." Those stories' battle elements are also better than the perfunctory fight between the white barbarians and the black winged man in "The Garden of Fear," and their supernatural menaces more fun and more chilling than the slightly more realistic blood-drinking flowers for which Howard offers a rational explanation.
In response to Moskowitz's going overboard, I am comparing "The Garden of Fear" unfavorably to "Wolfshead" and "The Hyena," but it is like comparing a 4 star film to a 4.5 star film--I still recommend "The Garden of Fear," and its more sciency and less occult sensibility is perhaps a refreshing change of pace from the typical occult business we find in Howard's stories.
"The Voice of El-lil" (1930)
Our initial narrator is a bartender in "Maskat," the capital of Oman, but that is just the brief frame story--the main narrator of "The Voice of El-Lik" is an English adventurer, Kirby, a tall muscular blue-eyed guy who tells his crazy story to the barkeep.
It seems muscleman got hooked up with a skinny American college professor, Conrad, who was trying to find a rare insect. Kirby acted as his guide into Somaliland, where the two saw things no other white man has ever seen!
In a distant little-travelled region of Somaliland, the safari hears a strange whispering sound--it scares off all the black porters and askaris, but the two white men and their biracial ("half-caste") assistant stick it out--the professor, in particular, finds the weird sound to be like a summons, and he says he won't rest until he knows the source of the unique sound.
The three men march towards the source of the sound, it becoming clearer each day, it bringing them exotic dreams of the mysterious East! Eventually they are captured by an army of people who are neither blacks nor Arabs and wear curious attire! These "light yellowish brown" men of some lost race tie up the Englishman and American and butcher the half-caste. The white men are forced to march to a walled city beside a ten-story-tall tower and dragged before the city's tyrant. Certain clues lead the white adventurers to conclude this city is a colony of ancient Sumer, these people the descendants of the Sumerians! And sure enough, the one person in the city who speaks Somali, the beautiful dancing girl who brings their food, confirms their suspicion. This gives history-loving romantic Howard (in the voice of Kirby) a chance to wax poetic on how great the Sumerians were and how they compare to "Hamites, Semites and Arayans." (Here we have three proper nouns that a 21st-century individual should never use if he or she wishes to maintain employment.)
The dancing girl also tells them that the people of the city worship the god El-lil, who resides at the top of that tower, which is the temple of El-lil. The music, at this close range a booming, comes from atop the temple; we learn the music, "the voice of El-lil," is generated with a gong fabricated from some special material, maybe jade, that has unusual musical properties; it can produce "golden waves of sound" of "exotic sweetness" as well as the aforementioned "booming."
The dancer falls in love with the college professor, so when the two white men are dragged up to the top of the tower where the tyrant (doing double duty as high priest) performs the ceremony to see if they will be killed or spared, after her sexy dance (Howard unleashes more extravagant romanticism on us here, describing the dance as "Time and Eternity, the urge of Creation and the urge of Death; birth and dissolution in one, age and infancy combined" and much more) she frees Kirby and returns to him his Webley .44 revolver, with which he guns down the black slave who plays the gong and then the tyrant. A few more shots drive off all the guards--these Sumerians have never seen a European or an Arab or a firearm before, and recent unprecedented event have broken their morale.
But only temporarily; we get a good chase scene in which the white men and the dancing girl flee in a boat from Sumerians who shoot arrows at them; the dancer proves resourceful and brave--it is a cliche to complain that old fiction is full of "damsels in distress" but here at MPorcius Fiction Log, where we actually read old fiction and don't just talk about it, we are always running into women like this dancing girl who save the day or at least pitch in, killing people and monsters alongside the men. Anyway, she participates in the hand-to-hand fight when the lead Sumerian boat catches up to them and is mortally wounded. Bleeding, she leads the men on a hidden trail that allows them to escape their pursuers, then gives a melodramatic speech about her love for Conrad before she expires in his arms. The gong sounds, summoning Conrad back (I guess that black slave had an understudy and the tyrant had a vice-tyrant), and, when the professor is unable to resist the voice of El-lil, Kirby knocks him out and carries him onward. Kirby and Conrad manage to make their way out of Somaliland and Conrad hurries back to America; Kirby, having had his fill of Africa, shifts the locale of his adventures to India.
The last lines of "The Voice of El-lil," in the voice of the barkeep again, dismiss skepticism of the insane story we have just heard of the lost Sumerian colony and celebrate the innumerable fine qualities of all the white adventurers across history who have battled foreigners in every clime:
...I prefer to believe Bill Kirby, for I know his breed from Hengist down, and know him to be like all the rest—truthful, aggressive, profane, restless, sentimental and straightforward, a true brother of the roving, fighting, adventuring Sons of Aryan.This is a solid adventure story that is full of the racial and ethnic essentialism we are advised is anathema. The fight scenes are good, if I seem to be poking fun at Howard's romanticism and melodrama I remind you I do it with love, and all the race and gender stuff offers an interesting window into the attitudes of the past. Thumbs up for "The Voice of El-lil"!
"The House of Arabu" (1952)
The protagonist of "The House of Arabu" is mercenary soldier Pyrrhas the Argive, a blue-eyed blond from the north who travels around having adventures centuries before the rise of Babylon. He is currently the leader of the army of Nippur, a bustling town full of temples and aristocrats and merchants. Howard makes a big deal of class distinctions and ethnic distinctions in Nippur; Pyrrhas hangs around in the feast-hall of a wealthy man whom Howard tells us multiple times is a Semite, not a native of the town--the locals are Shumirians, who shave their heads and faces. Pyrrhas attends the feast, but he is very distinct in behavior as well as looks from the Semite and the Shumirians he parties with, gulping as they sip, walking on the street unattended, "like a tradesman," instead of being carried on a litter, and so on.
Pyrrhas is in a mood because in his last battle he killed a priest of one of the many gods worshipped in this region and fears he may be cursed. Sure enough, one of the many naked girls ("playthings") at the feast jumps up, gives a wacky speech, and tries to stab Pyrrhas with a dagger--Pyrrhas throws her and she lands on her own dagger, dying. (Compare to Reynolds, in "The Cairn on the Headland," below.) On his walk home, Pyrrhas sees a venomous snake that turns out to be an illusion.
Our guy has been having disturbing dreams of a woman who can fly and who bites neck, and tonight he actually sees this evil woman while awake--he knows he really has to do something about this curse now. In one of the more misogynistic scenes in these Howard stories, Pyrhas beats a courtesan with a belt once she lets slip that she knows who can help Pyrrhas wioth his cirse but doesn't feel like spilling the beans because she hates him. (Pyrrhas has long known this woman, a gift from the ruler of the city, hates him, but he continues to keep her around because it gives him "an angry gratification" to possess her. Nasty!)
Pyrrhas proceeds to visit the wizard named by the now scarred courtesan, out at a cavern some distance from the city. The appearance and behavior of, and cosmology described by, this wizard are all pretty entertaining. He agrees to help Pyrrhas, but not for money! Blood and death are what the sorcerer demands! After securing the magic item that, it is hoped, will free Pyrrhas from the torment of the flying woman, Pyrrhas pays the magician by murdering him! Wild!
The magic item works in Pyrrhas' favor, but not quite as expected. Instead of capturing the flying woman, he captures her mate, and tortures him so that she will help Pyrrhas figure out who set her upon him. She guides him to the world of the dead, the House of Arabu of the title. This is a grim story, what with everybody, including our hero, torturing and murdering people, women included, and Howard gives us a very dark view of life and the universe once Pyrrhas is in the House of Arabu.
He stood in darkness of a quality which he had never encountered....amidst it, it was not easy even to imagine sunlight and bright rivers and grass singing in the wind. They belonged to that other world–a world lost and forgotten in the dust of a million centuries. The world of life and light was a whim of chance–a bright spark glowing momentarily in a universe of dust and shadows. Darkness and silence were the natural state of the cosmos, not light and the noises of Life. No wonder the dead hated the living, who disturbed the grey stillness of Infinity with their tinkling laughter.Pyrrhas' uncanny trip to hell climaxes in a fight with the dead man who has directed the flying woman to torment him, and then comes the revelation of an unwelcome truth--this spirit was enlisted to attack Pyrrhas by the man Pyrrhas thought his best friend in Nippur--that Semite who holds those feasts!
“Why, of all the men of Nippur, he has been my staunchest friend!”
“Friend?” she mocked. “What is friendship but a pleasant pretense to while away an idle hour?”
This very Semite has learned from the woman beaten by Pyrrhas that Pyrrhas has gone to consult the wizard, and has laid an ambush for Pyrrhas. But Pyrrhas outfights him and then decides to abandon this region of treacherous city dwellers altogether, despite his employment here making him wealthy.
"The House of Arabu" covers some of the same thematic ground as "The Voice of El-lil," the comparisons of the races and so forth, but while "the Voice of El-lil" celebrates the friendship of two white men and the prowess and honesty of Aryans and depicts a woman who makes the ultimate sacrifice for love and demonstrates ability and bravery in defending the man she loves, "The House of Arabu" is unrelieved misery--the preoccupation with death and how death renders life meaningless and even a mockery of the reality of the universe; the prominence of torture and betrayal; the disgusting and mercenary nature of the depicted sexual relationships and non-sexual friendships. Ouch, a downer! But still an effective horror and adventure story.
"The Cairn on the Headland" (1933)
(If the January 1933 cover of Strange Tales rings a bell maybe it is because in 2021 we read August Derleth's "The Thing That Walked on the Wind" and Clark Ashton Smith's "The Second Internment" from this magazine. The editor of Strange Tales, Harry Bates, sounds like a hands-on type of guy--apparently he guided Smith in the construction of the plot of "The Second Internment." Probably someday we'll read the cover story, "Murgunstrumm" by Hugh B. Cave--it is one of Cave's more famous productions, the title story of a Cave collection and anthologized by both Stephen Jones and Martin H. Greenberg. Evert day I read two or three stories and resolve to read three or four stories, so that I will never catch up.)
In "The Cairn on the Headland," Howard contrasts the people of Southern Europe, the Latins, with the people of Northern Europe, the Nordics. Two Americans, Ortali the Italian-American and O'Brien, our Irish-American narrator, are in Ireland, at the site of the Battle of Clontarf, where stands a cairn the locals have avoided for almost a thousand years! There is a lot of talk between the two men that serves to dramatize the idea that Nordics are romantic or superstitious and Latins are practical and logical, that the easy life under the Mediterranean sun gives Latins a rosy attitude and that life in the cold bitter north has given Nordics a knowledge of demons and other grim realities scoffed at by those of the South. As we know from dozens of stories, Howard sympathizes with barbarians over city sophisticates, and he casts the passionate Irishman as the barbarian and the dismissive and sneering Italian as the city boy--Howard suggests such differences are transmitted through the blood, are not just a product of where and when you grew up.
There is also a lot of talk about how the Christian era decisively began at Clontarf, where the Irish defeated the Vikings and the reputation of Odin, the last god to resist the spread of the religion of Jesus Christ, suffered a fatal blow. In a lot of speculative fiction, the spread of Christianity and the fall of paganism is seen as a tragedy or even a crime, but Howard seems to take the opposite tack here, describing the rise of Christianity in very positive terms.
The Italian wants to dig up the cairn, figuring it is full of treasure, that beneath it lie the bones of some Viking king still clad in jewels. The Irishman doesn't want to, and it is hinted that removing the cairn will unleash some kind of terrible evil. Ortali walks off, and the ghost of an Irishwoman appears to warn O'Brien not to do anything to the cairn and to give him an ancient cross fashioned by Saint Brandon himself that should protect O'Brien if "the people of the night" or other evils should threaten him.
We then get a flashback to the narrator's university days that explains why he is mixed up with this Italian whom he abhors, who makes his blood boil and his temples throb with rage, whom he fantasizes about murdering by bashing him in the head from behind with a rock he picks up from the cairn. You see, our Irish boy was poor and a wealthy professor, name of Reynolds, was mean to him, and when our red-headed hero insulted the professor back, Reynolds hit him, so young O'Brien knocked that academic a-hole right to the ground. Reynolds had the narrator thrown out of school--O'Brien tells us he would have starved without his connection to the university, so he went to the professor's place to beat him up. I expected that sentence to end with "to beg for my position back" but no, it goes like this:
Facing not only an abrupt termination of my work and studies, but actual starvation, I was reduced to desperation, and I went to Reynolds’ study late that night intending to thrash him within an inch of his life.
Upon his appearance, the professor attacked him with a dagger, slipped on a rug and fell, stabbing himself to death.
(At times, "The Cairn on the Headland" feels like an Irish person indulging in revenge fantasies against the Scandinavian and English people who ruled Ireland during various periods, and the Italian people. I haven't witnessed it myself, but I have been told by Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans that, in Catholic schools and New York neighborhoods, that these two groups didn't get along too well.)
Ortali--the mean professor's secretary--saw the whole thing and blackmailed the Irishman into being his lackey. The Italian recognized that the Irishman was a genius, and financed O'Brien's education and appointment to a good academic position with a good salary--the Italian demanded and received most of the salary, and O'Brien moans to us that he is Ortali's slave. I realize that hundreds of times I have given a pass to stories about witches and psykers and going to hyperspace and having reproductive sex with space aliens, but I have to say that the components of the plot of "The Cairn on the Headland" that deal with Ortali and O'Brien's relationship are pretty hard to believe.
Back to the present day, but not for long. Our narrator goes to sleep with that rock he almost assassinated Ortali with in his hand and has a vivid dream of fighting in the Battle of Clontarf. Howard uses the metaphor of men falling like grain being reaped three times in this dream, after having had the ghost woman use it. That's three times too many, REH! Our narrator's consciousness is cast back, back, back to inhabit the body of one of his ancestors, an Irish warrior who was in the middle of the fray, and then, the battle decided, set out to loot the Viking dead. O'Brien's alter ego, Red Cumal, kern of Brian Boru, comes upon a dying Viking, realizes it is Odin himself, the god having taken on flesh to lead his people! Odin was felled by a spear that was given power by the symbol of Jesus Christ, a cross, carved into its metal blade. Red Cumal learns that if Odin's corpse should ever be touched by holly, an important component in Viking sorcery, the god will rise from the dead to seek vengeance on the human race! Thus the cairn and the reluctance of people over the centuries to tamper with it. Of course, we readers recall that Ortali, as a goof, has some holly on him as a mock talisman--if Ortali tears down the cairn and any of that holly touches the corpse beneath it, well, the world is in for a heap of trouble!
While the Irishman was reliving an adventure of a past life in a dream, the Italian has been sneaking back to the cairn to scatter its stones and seize that which it has hidden for nine centuries. The narrator runs through the night to the cairn, but, too late, watches as Odin rises from his disturbed grave and electrocutes Ortali. O'Brien holds up the cross made by Saint Brandon and a white beam shoots out of it and drives the alien demon that is Odin back to outer space.
This is by considerable measure the weakest of today's stories. Howard in "The Cairn on the Headland" amps up his ethnic and racial theories to the point that, instead of adding a seasoning or an additional dimension to the plot, the theories overwhelm the plot; also, his theories here come off as a little silly, casting Southern Europeans as cold practical men and Northern Europeans as emotional and superstitious folk long after the fall of the Roman Empire; surely 19th- and 20th-century London was full of sneering city sophisticates and the contemporary Italian countryside full of passionate and superstitious peasants and villagers.
I looked at him somberly with unveiled hate. Two men could scarcely have been of more opposite types.
He was slender, self-possessed, unmistakably Latin with his dark eyes and sophisticated air. I am massive, clumsy and bear-like, with cold blue eyes and tousled red hair. We were countrymen in that we were born in the same land; but the homelands of our ancestors were as far apart as South from North.
“Nordic superstition,” he repeated. “I cannot imagine a Latin people allowing such a mystery as this to go unexplored all these years. The Latins are too practical–too prosaic, if you will. Are you sure of the date of this pile?”
Another problem is that "The Cairn on the Headland" is one of those stories in which the hero is a pawn of greater forces--in the climax Howard literally writes "I was but a pawn in the game–merely the hand that held the relic of holiness, that was the symbol of the powers opposed forever against the fiends of darkness." I prefer stories in which the hero is making decisions and his success or failure is founded on those decisions and his own abilities and personality. In this story the narrator is worked like a puppet by a cruel man and then by an Irish ghost and the God of Abraham, and it is Odin who resolves the narrator's problems by killing Ortali. We might also say he is at the mercy of his own anger and hate, which we are privy to long before the convoluted explanation that he is Ortali's slave, and which is pretty off-putting, making O'Brien unsympathetic during the early parts of the story.
Finally, compared to so many Howard stories, the action scenes are weak.
I'm going to call this story acceptable. I have a lot of complaints, as you have seen, but "The Cairn on the Headland" isn't actually bad. It is sort of interesting to see a positive view of Christianity in a weird story, to find it a story that celebrates the rise of Christianity and the defeat of paganism in an apparently sincere way and doesn't just use a cross as a prop, but embraces the cross as a Christian symbol. Similarly, the idea that Odin is a demon masquerading as a god, then as a man, is creative, and I like it in the way that I liked Howard making up his own werewolf rules in "Wolfshead." So, "The Cairn on the Headland" has some virtues and I of course think students of the weird and fans of Howard should read it, even if I can't call it good.
"The Cairn on the Headland" is another story Wollheim included in his magazine Avon Fantasy Reader, and he also printed it in his anthology The Macabre Reader.
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