Clare Winger Harris: "The Artificial Man," "The Menace of Mars," and "The Evolutionary Monstrosity"

In our last episode I enjoyed a story by Clare Winger Harris that debuted in Weird Tales, "A Runaway World," a tale full of science and scientists as well as horror and death that I thought conformed to the expectations of a traditional science fiction story as much or more to what we expect of a weird story.  So let's read three Harris pieces from steadfastly science-oriented magazines edited by science fiction pioneer Hugo Gernsback.  All three of these stories were reprinted in the 1947 Harris collection Away from the Here and Now, which you can read at this link to a scan of a signed copy of the book, but I am going to read them in scans of the magazines in which they first saw print.  Here are those links:

"The Artificial Man"   "The Menace of Mars"   "The Evolutionary Monstrosity"

"The Artificial Man" (1929)

The issue of Science Wonder Quarterly that includes "The Artificial Man" also prints Edmond Hamilton's "The Hidden World," which I don't think I have read yet, and a gushing letter from a twelve-year-old Forrest Ackerman who loves Science Wonder magazine more than mere words can express.  The issue also has tons of fun illustrations by Frank R. Paul depicting space craft, people in zero gravity, space suits, creepy aliens, so many of your favorite things--this is a pretty attractive magazine, though the tiny print is a little forbidding; I think the July 1926 ish of Weird Tales has like 51 lines on a page, but this Fall 1929 issue of Science Wonder Quarterly has 68 lines per page!  Gernsback should have marketed a companion magnifying glass with his magazines!

George Gregory is an excellent college student--he's captain of the football team, and he put on a brilliant debate performance, defending the philosophy that guides his life: "bodily perfection is a result of right thinking.”  But then tragedy strikes--injured on the football field (maybe you call it "the gridiron") he has to have one of his legs amputated!  Since GG thinks that mind and body are one, he fears this means that the loss of a limb implies that he has lost part of his soul!  He tells Rosalind, the girl he has been going steady with his entire college career, that they should break up--he doesn't want her to be held back by having to endure a relationship with half a man!

Rosalind isn't buying it, and after GG gets an artificial leg and learns to use it so well that people who do not know him can't even tell he has only one natural leg, they schedule their wedding.  But a week before they are to be bound in holy matrimony, GG is hit by a truck!  George can't catch a break!  One of his arms is amputated, and some of his internal organs are reduced in capacity.  

GG comes from healthy stock and hasn't been hitting the pizzas and ice cream as hard as some of us do, so he largely physically recovers from this second disaster, but he has some odd theories about mental, psychological and spiritual recovery:

“God expresses Himself through the physical world....As much of physical perfection as I have lost, that much of God or Goodness has left me...."

Rosalind can't shake her fiancé's adherence to these self-destructive beliefs, and then there is the fact that GG can tell she is starting to crush on GG's college buddy, Dr. David Bell, who is also his lead physician.  (It's a small world.)  When GG puts his artificial arm around Rosalind, she shudders--is it that she can't marry a man who isn't 100% natural, or that George is not the same man, mentally, with whom she fell in love freshman year?  Either way, she tells him the marriage is off, and he gets rough with her, and David has to rescue her, has to outfight his crippled former friend who now hates him, whose physical suffering has apparently driven him insane.  Rosalind and David get engaged.

GG decides to put his theory about the inseparability of body and mind to the ultimate test--he will have every possible part of his body replaced with an artificial part, and see how it changes his psyche, how much of his original identity he retains.  Obviously, GG is insane.  But mentally ill people who might benefit from therapy or psychiatric medicine can always find doctors willing, for enough of the old moola, to perform radical and unnecessary surgery on depressed or deranged people's bodies.  For five years, Rosalind and David, happily married, hear nothing from their old friend GG, but then he reappears at the hospital where the David works, unrecognizable as almost all his body has been replaced by mechanical parts, including his heart.  Most of his body operates on batteries!  He assaults David and knocks him out.

When David awakes, Rosalind is there, along with the minor character, a colleague of David's, who saved David's life.  After David was knocked unconscious, this doctor and two policemen fought the mechanical man, able to defeat him because the doctor is able to figure out GG's weaknesses.  As he expired, GG's brain in its robot body asked the doctor to tell David and Rosalind that he now realizes his theory was wrong, that if you have strength of character, if you have the right attitude, you need not become evil if your body is damaged.

This is a wild melodrama, and I kind of like it, but there are problems.  My biggest complaint is that a minor character who appears in the second half of the story is the one who defeats the monster and resolves the plot.  Obviously Rosalind and/or David should have slain GG and heard his apology with their own ears.  Why would an author choose a complicated and indirect climax and ending over a straightforward ending?  Authors do this stuff sometimes, and I don't get it.

We are moderately recommending "The Artificial Man."  Besides in Science Wonder Quarterly and Away from the Here and Now, the tragedy of George Gregory, Big Man on Campus, can be experienced in a 2015 anthology of early SF by women, The Feminine Future, and the 2019 collection for which it serves as title story. 

"The Menace of Mars" (1928)

"The Menace of Mars" bears more than a passing resemblance to the 1926 story we read in our last episode by Harris, "A Runaway World."  She even quotes the exact same lines from Tennyson in both stories, and has a dog be the victtm in a horror scene.  Unfortunately, this 1928 treatment of the material is less entertaining.  In "A Runaway World" we had some real human relationships, and the characters made some decisions that affected the course of their lives, while "The Menace of Mars" lacks such human drama--Harris does not explore relationships, and everybody in the story is just at the mercy of titanic forces and lives or dies based mostly on luck.  Harris doesn't mine the material for horror scenes and images as effectively as she did for "A Runaway World," either.

It is the 1950s.  Our narrator Hildreth is a young astronomer, his girlfriend Vivian Harley is a young chemist whose father is a world-famous chemist.  We get a lecture about how the molecular structures of gasses, liquids and solids differ, and there is talk of how maybe the atoms of our universe are the suns and planets of other smaller universes, and our sun a nucleus and our planets electrons of a larger universe.  Then comes a disaster which makes these theories manifest.  All of a sudden there are earthquakes and floods and the night sky is full of abnormally bright stars and huge planets and people's weight feels different--the universe is apparently contracting!  Our universe was a gas in the universe one step up, but has now become a solid, all the heavenly bodies packed close together.    

To escape the heat as Earth gets closer to Sol, the small number of people who have survived the cataclysm flee to the poles in giant airships.  Harris strikes a blow against superstition with a digression, the episode of the airship Icarus.  Icarus suffered a famous crash some time ago, and people think she is cursed and even though she is fully repaired, so people are afraid to board Icarus.  She and her sister ship Celestia are rated to carry 1000 passengers, but over 1000 crowd onto Celestia and none of them volunteers to move to Icarus, which has fewer than 800 passengers.  Overladen, Celestia crashes on the way to the North Pole and everybody aboard is lost.  Icarus arrives safely.  Our narrator makes sure we don't miss the point:

Her fate should prove a constant reminder of the failure of fear and superstition against the triumph of reason. 

In the confusion, Hildreth and his family go to the North Pole, and Vivian and her father to the South Pole.  The people at the North Pole have to construct floating cities because the ice melts--the people on the South Pole build what they call an Eden or a Utopia on solid land. 

Hildreth and his closest colleague, Miles Tracy, have an unprecedented opportunity to study Venus and Mars, they now being very close.  Venus apparently had a civilization but it was destroyed by the recent cataclysm.  Mars seems to have never fostered life of any kind. 

Or has it?  Yet another scientist in this story full of scientists has a crazy theory--that Mars itself is one big organism, one big intelligent being!  When Earth's orbit begins to change, causing more earthquakes, this guy thinks it is because Mars is sending out a gravity ray to move Earth into position to act as a sunshade for the red planet!  And it gets worse--Mars begins to somehow turn parts of Jupiter and the Earth into red rock just like itself, and Hildreth and Vivian are aboard an aircraft, travelling between the poles over barren North America, when a Martian magnetic force draws their aircraft to the ground right where the red growth is occurring!  Those who touch the spreading red growth become red rock themselves, are integrated into the Martian colony!  Luckily, Hildreth and Vivian run away from the spreading red waste and make it to a river--the spreading Martian cancer is retarded by water.  Our heroes are then rescued by an aircraft.

The equatorial and temperate zones of Earth turn red, but then our universe shifts to a liquid state, the stars and planets now somewhat further apart, and there is a big rainstorm, which arrests the spread of the red rock.  Hildreth brings back a sample of the post-deluge red rock, now a sort of jelly.  He accidentally allows the jelly to come back to life and kill a dog but then neutralizes the spreading Martian rock with a hose.  We are told that the Earth and human society have now reached a stable state, that artificial means of delivering water are employed to keep the red borders of Martian territory on Earth in check.  The story ends on a philosophical note--of life like our own, and the queer-to-us life of the giant rock that is Mars, which is the "normal" life of our universe and which is the anomaly--are we plants and animals merely a fungus that sometimes grows on the surface of the primary life forms of our universe, which are the planets?

Merely acceptable, I'm afraid.  Besides the aforementioned The Artificial Man and Other Stories and Away from the Here and Now, "The Menace of Mars" has been reprinted in the first volume of The Routledge Anthology of Climate Fiction (2025.)  

"The Evolutionary Monstrosity" (1929) 

Harris' name appears on the cover of the Winter 1929 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly in which "The Evolutionary Monstrosity" debuted, and the editor's intro to the story refers to her as "our well known author;" Harris seems to have been a draw for readers.

Ted Marsten grew up in poverty, but his natural talent has made him a success at university.  Ted has a theory about evolution, that it is "a certain bacterial growth which slowly and continuously changes the cellular structure of living organisms, causing the formation of new tissue and organs, and breaking down the old."  One of his friends, our narrator Frank Caldwell, son of a Ioawan factory owner, agrees with me that this theory is bonkers, but Ted's other pal, Irwin Staley, son of a New York broker, finds Ted's brainwave very convincing.  After these three biologists graduate, narrator Frank goes to work for the university, pushing the party line from Darwin,  while Ted and Irwin put Irwin's riches to work trying to prove Ted's it's-bacteria-what-done-it theory of evolution.

Summer rolls around the Ted and Irwin send Frank a written invitation, and Frank goes over to the Staley estate to check in on the independent scholars' progress.  And what progress they have made!  Ted has mutated a normal housecat into a bipedal hairless servant who can talk!  This revolting monster leads Frank to the lab, where Frank suggests that Ted's experiments, his advancing the cat through stages of evolution without the ameliorating influence of the environment, is risky, even the work of the--metaphorical!--devil.  Frank does not believe in Satan, but he does believe in a Creator, and that God has "laws" which man must not "tamper with" or "distort."

Ted angrily storms off, and Irwin informs Frank that things are even worse than they seem--Ted has been evolving himself!

(I shrug off nonsense like hyperspace and psychic powers in stories, but somehow stories that have evolutionary mutations that occur in a living being instead of being realized across generations, and stories that suggest that evolution is not a series of random mutations that propagate through a population because they offer some benefit in sexual selection processes or defense against disease or predators or something like that, but rather that the course of evolution confirms to some kind of plan that slowly unfolds, stick in my craw.)

Frank goes to Europe for like a year, and then is busy working at the university, so doesn't return to the Staley estate for three years.  Irwin's sister, Dorothy, tells Frank that she has not seen Ted in a year, that her brother Irwin is a slave to Ted due to Ted's psychic powers.  But Irwin can speak his own mind on those rare occasions when Ted sleeps.  According to Irwin, Ted has ingested so many evolutionary bacterium that he has advanced to a point to which he no longer resembles a human being!  Ted is in love with Dorothy, and has ordered Irwin to inject her with the evolution germs so that he and she will be on the same rung of the evolutionary ladder!  Ted aspires to rule the world with Dorothy at his side!

Irwin, under psychic control, has injected Dorothy once so far, but she still looks like an attractive young lady, though she reports that the injection had a psychological or mental effect:

"I seemed to understand things in a quiet, impersonal sort of way, and was, so to speak, above petty emotions and passions that had swayed me constantly prior to this experience."

Dorothy asks Frank to help her, and Frank, already falling in love with this beauty in peril, agrees.  I kind of wonder if Harris here is making some kind of comment or joke on men's belief that women are emotional and flighty, that she is suggesting Frank fell in love with Dorothy because--thanks to evolving to a higher form, she now she has a more rational, more "masculine," mind. 

When Irwin emerges from the lab to give his sister her second injection, Frank intercepts him, then marches into the lab to confront Ted, who is now merely a head with tentacles sitting on a cushion, a thing that from a distance looks a little like a big tarantula or maybe an octopus.  Ted can levitate, and read minds, and control people like puppets, but he can only use his psychic powers on one person at a time, so while the would-be world ruler is dealing with Frank, Irwin sneaks up behind Ted and kills him with blows from an iron bar.

"The Evolutionary Monstrosity" is certainly better than "The Menace of Mars," having more human relationships and a plot that is driven by human desires and decisions.  I can mildly recommend it.  The tragic tale of Ted and his germ theory of evolution can be found in the 2016 volume Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction.

**********

These stories are not great, but they are not at all bad, and it is cool to read from these very science-oriented Gernsback publications.  The prominence of religion in the stories is also noteworthy--Harris and the characters attack superstition and specific tenets of the prominent religions, like the existence of the devil, but they acknowledge the existence of a God the Creator, and come up with their own idiosyncratic theories about Him and his Laws.  A lot of people think Harris is important because she is a woman, and maybe she does deal with family life and love triangles in a way that is different than a man would, but I suspect it is Harris' treatment of religion in her science fiction stories that is more worthy of analysis, that is more singular and more of a distinguishing feature that separates her from other science fiction writers.

More from the Gernsback stable next time we meet here at MPorcius Fiction Log!

    

Weird Tales, July 1926: E H Price, C W Harris and A Derleth & M Schorer

After a brief break in the year 1980, let's return to the interwar period and read three stories from the July 1926 issue of Weird Tales, which has a cover that looks like one of my recurring pre-adolescent daydreams.  (I mean the guy shooting a gigantic reptile--the rosy cheeked brunette resembles elements of my postpubescent daydreams.)  We'll read a story by E. Hoffmann Price, one by Clare Winger Harris, and a collab between August Derleth and Mark Schorer.  I'll be reading these tales in a scan at the internet archive--click here to join me.  

"The Dreamer of Atlanaat" by E. Hoffmann Price 

This story takes place in the ummah.  A wanderer, Haaj Isfendiyar, arrived in the city of Nippur ten years ago, and over that time has become a close friend of the Calif.  A skilled fighter and a clever and courageous man, today he commands a unit of 1000 cavalry and lives in a beautiful house.  But he has an enemy--the Calif's wazir, Ismail.  Ismail contrives to steal a dagger owned by Isfendiyar and one night while the Calif is out taking a walk, Ismail throws it at the Calif so that it looks like Isfendiyar tried to murder the Calif.  Isfendiyar is exiled and impoverished, his home and belongings given over to the city mob.  

Out in the country, Isfendiyar is accosted by an old man he at first takes to be a beggar.  The man corrects our hero, identifying himself as a darvish and promising to use his occult power to help Isfendiyar achieve revenge.  He leads Isfendiyar to the sinister ruins of a city in a forest to consult a being he refers to as Lord of All the Worlds, whom he says is more powerful even than Allah, a creature of whom the darvish claims his "idle fancy created not only Allah, but all the gods before whom men have bowed!"  All the world, all the universe, is created by this being's dreams, and when he ceases to dream of something, that thing ceases to exist!

This dreamer takes the form of an old sleeping man.  Isfendiyar can see something the old man is dreaming--an assassination attempt on the Calif!  Still sympathetic to the Calif, Isfendiyar kills the dreamer to save his former friend in a high place, even though he exiled him

Then the boring truth is revealed!  The "darvish" is Isfendiyar's grandfather in disguise, and this whole sacrilegious caper has been a test of Isfendiyar's loyalty to the Calif, who has watched the whole thing.  Isfendiyar's visions were induced by drugs fed to him by grandpa.  By killing the dreamer to save the Calif, Isfendiyar has passed the test and their friendship is renewed.  Who was impersonating the dreamer whom Isfedniyar killed?  It was a drugged Ismail, whom the Calif had begun to suspect had faked the assassination attempt to frame Isfendiyar.

Long, somewhat silly, convoluted to the point I'm not sure it even holds together--we're grading "The Dreamer of Atlanaat" merely acceptable.  The improbable saga of Isfendiyar the wanderer would be reprinted in 1975's Far Lands, Other Days, a big collection of Price stories.

"A Runaway World" by Clare Winger Harris

Way back in 2015, when we were young, we read two stories by Clare Winger Harris printed in 1920s issues of Amazing, "The Fate of the Poseidonia" and "The Miracle of the Lily," and I didn't exactly burnish my bona fides as a feminist by saying they were "interesting" as "historical document[s]" but "mediocre as...entertainment or literature."  Still, I didn't say they were bad, so I have no qualms about reading more Harris stories, and here we have one adorned with an illustration of a guy scared out of his mind by something seen through a telescope, which is promising.

"A Runaway World" is set 100 years in the future, in the year 2026.  Two scientists, a French expert on astronomy and an American expert on atomic physics, meet.  Harris' writing reminds me of the over-the-top dialogue of a comic book and a dramatic presentation in which everybody is overacting:

"La Rue is my name; Leon La Rue.”

Henry Shipley’s eyes grew wide with astonishment.

“Indeed I am honored by the visit of so renowned a scientist,” he cried with genuine enthusiasm.

“It is nothing," said La Rue. "I love my work.”

These eggheads talk about the theory that the planets in our universe are subatomic particles in other universes, the sun a nucleus and the planets electrons or something, and that similarly the protons and neutrons and all that here are stars and planets in tiny little universes.  When we cause chemical reactions, we are destroying whole galaxies full of people.

Well, it looks like our turn has come!  In Harris's 2026 there aren't space ships, but we are able to contact the alien civilizations on Mars, Venus, etc., via radio.  Harris has the men talk about the way Earthers figure out how to talk to aliens--by founding a code on universal mathematical principles.  "A Runaway World" is classic science fiction, all about teaching us readers science and romanticizing and valorizing the scientist while denigrating and lampooning religious people, and trying to give us that old sense of wonder as we contemplate the vastness of the universe.  

But "A Runaway World" also has weird horror elements, like those Edmond Hamilton space operas and disaster stories from Weird Tales that include mass death, torture and bondage.  The Martians are reporting that their planet is being pulled away from the sun and soon they will all freeze to death!  Our universe is suffering from chemical reactions in the universe one step larger than ours!  At least, so say the scientists--the common people of Earth think the Martians have offended God by learning too much science and are being punished like some big red Gomorrah.

Abruptly, we find that "A Runaway World" is a first person narrative, our narrator a business professional who works in an office.  Like in a sitcom, the narrator, expert accountant Griffin, reveals that he thinks Mars--before the current catastrophe--was closer to the sun than is Earth, and is humiliated when his assistant and next-door neighbor Zuttell corrects him and expresses astonishment at his boss's ignorance.  

The Zuttells and Mardens come over to watch the President give an address on the TV--the Griffin family has the latest model, and Harris talks a bit about "the televisio" and its operation and capabilities.  In the middle of the President's speech, it starts getting dark and cold outside, and the President tells everyone to tune their radios to the French astronomer whom we readers met earlier--as we readers feared, the Earth is now being pulled away from the sun!

Griffin is humiliated again when Marden, an astronomer from the university across the street, takes charge during the crisis and directs the three families to collect food and clothes and come to his observatory where they have an atomic reactor and thus will have heat longer than most people.

The three families spend months in the observatory as the Earth travels away from the sun, accelerating all the time.  It is so cold outside that to leave the atomic-heated building would mean instant death.  Marden is able to calculate the speed the Earth is travelling, and at the two year mark good ol' Terra is moving at the speed of light!  At the three year mark, the air begins to warm up as the Earth approaches a star--will our big blue marble crash into the star and be annihilated?

People can go outside again and they do so to bury the masses of dead who had no access to atomic energy or who had not stockpiled enough food.  The Earth begins to orbit the alien star--it looks like the human race will survive in a new solar system!  Mars has already arrived, and is now closer to its sun than is Earth, as if Griffin's boneheaded mistake has now been manifested in the real world.

Harris' style is sophomoric at times, but the plot--at least once the scientists are left behind--works and "A Runaway World" is fun, so thumbs up!  The tale of Griffin and the human race's harrowing journey through interstellar space would be reprinted in the 1947 Harris collection Away from the Here and Now, the 2019 collection The Artificial Man and Other Stories, and in 2026 in Stephen Jones' big anthology of stories from 1920s issues of Weird Tales.    

"The Elixir of Life" by Marc Schorer and August Derleth

This two-and-a-half-page story is advertised as a "Five-Minute Story."  We've read a few of these Derleth-Schorer collaborations:

"Pacer"

"They Shall Rise"

"Death Holds the Post" 

"Colonel Markesan"

"The Return of Andrew Bentley"

"Eyes of the Serpent"

"Spawn of the Maelstrom"

"The Woman at Loon Point"

"The Elixir of Life" is an obvious filler story, a trifle I will charitably say is barely acceptable.  

A Duke, residing in Milan, has hired a wizard to make him an elixir that will prolong his life.  He comes to the wizard's abode on a narrow alley in the city and gets pissed off that the elixir isn't quite ready.  The wizard admits he has not yet acquired the final ingredient--the blood of a child.  The duke angrily orders the wizard's black servant ("Nubian servitor") to just go out and seize the first child he sees.  Then the Duke leaves, saying he will return in three hours and the elixir better be ready.

When the Duke returns he drinks the elixir and then makes some comment on how his son has escaped his nurse.  Everybody realizes the elixir includes the blood of the Duke's son's, and the Duke is responsible for the murder of his own son.  

A banal and pedestrian thing, but not exactly bad.  It doesn't look like it has reappeared in any Derleth collections or anthologies.

**********

Clare Winger Harris is today's big winner.  While Price and the Mssrs. Derleth and Schorer give us tired and obvious twist ending wizard murder stories that, I guess, they mean to elevate by setting them in the exotic and diabolical worlds of the Muslim Near East and the Italy of the Borgias, Harris, while her writing is a little childish, lays a lot of big science theories on us, tries to predict the roles of television and nuclear power in our future, and gives us actual human relationships we as middle-class Americans of the 20th century can identify with, along with horrible danger, privation and death.  Maybe I should read more of Harris' stories from the Gernsback magazines. 

Stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log for more stories published before you were born about wizards, scientists, and murderers.

Crystal Phoenix by Michael Berlyn

To her, his job began and ended with supplying rich, empty people with poor, desperate victims.  She only looked at the negative side of his job--never saw the good side, the kindness and help it let him give....the dust addicts who wanted and needed another chance; the working people who had sunk all their earnings into paying for the memory crystals; the victims of disease whose bodies were no more than mockeries of the human form; none of them would have had any hope of reconstruction if it weren't for procurers. 

Someone's collection of 1970s and 1980s SF paperbacks ended up at the Goodwill in Middletown, MD, and I recently came upon it.  Lots of Fred Pohl and Poul Anderson, as well as other authors you've heard of, solid representatives of the respectable mainstream of SF, both the pinko end of the spectrum and the libertarian end, people who care about science, history, economics, politics, and actually know about that stuff.  Not to take anything away from Pohl or Anderson, I found more intriguing, more strange and mysterious, a bunch of books by people I'd never heard of (or forgotten--I have a bad memory), books that looked like they were novels about future dystopias that are full of sex, or maybe novels full of sex that are about future dystopias.  Either way, I got five of those for one dollar each.  One dollar!  A bargain, even if the covers are marred by those $0.99 stickers.  

Am I actually going to read these?  Well, I'm going to read at least one of them!  Right now!  But which?  Let's go with the blue one.  Under the Goodwill sticker, Joe Haldeman, a good writer whose work I respect and often like, says Crystal Phoenix by Michael Berlyn "grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go until the last page."  The publisher tells you that Crystal Phoenix is "in the tradition of A Clockwork Orange."  Well, A Clockwork Orange is a good book--maybe this book will be in that tradition, the tradition of books that are good?  Crystal Phoenix is like 214 pages long, which sounds long, but we are putting our trust in Joe Haldeman and the topless brunette who is impervious to fire on the cover and reading this artifact of 1980 by a guy whose main claim to fame is that he created video games I have never heard of.  (Also, there are 32 chapters and lots of white space between chapters, so actual text is significantly less than 200 pages.)

My copy doesn't smell too bad, so I'm going to read this book the way people read books in 1980, turning the pages with my own hands.  You can read like a 21st-century person by clicking the links to a scan of Crystal Phoenix at the internet archive here or here.

From Chapter 1, we know we're reading a book that is totally insane when we meet olive-skinned, 213-centimeter-tall Oleo.  Oleo tortures people to death for fun, either jerking off with one hand while he flays them alive with the other or fucking them while keeping a hand free to hold a pistol with which to shooting them in the head just as he is about to achieve orgasm.  Equipping himself with a glove that has needles in its palm, he sets out from his home, which is furnished with coffins and electric chairs, for a bit of fun.  But first he takes a minute to record his mind in his crystal--if he gets killed tonight, his mind will be uploaded in a new body and he'll still, sort of, be alive, only having lost a few hours.

Over the next few chapters we meet a bunch more unsavory characters and learn how this insane future world operates.  We've got Dennis the "procurer," who operates out of Bentwell's. We've got the disgustingly obese Bentwell, who runs a night club where people meet to drink, drug, have sex and hire the services of procurers like Dennis.  Dennis has a wife, Kira, who thinks Dennis' job is a disgrace, and whom Bentwell is always pursuing, groping her when she gets drunk and high.  Dennis also has to deal with rival procurers, the married couple Frank and Mara, inferior operators who blame Dennis for stealing their clients and angels.  In these early chapters of Crystal Phoenix Mara tries to steal a potential angel, Warren, from Dennis.

"Angels" are people who enjoy abusing and killing people--Oleo is an angel, and Warren, an office clerk who lives in a slum apartment with his fat wife, aspires to become one.  A procurer's clients are people who are, for whatever reason, tired of their current bodies and want to have their minds uploaded to a new body created in a lab that looks just like them at a healthy 25.  This whole "reconstruction" process is expensive, so many people contact a procurer who hooks them up with an angel--the angel pays to rape or torture or whatever the client and ultimately kill him or her, and the client gets enough money from the deal to have his or her most recent save state uploaded from his or her crystal to a new body.  Obviously, the procurer gets a percentage.  Wealthy people like Oleo kill again and again and again, become addicted to the thrill, while less affluent types like Warren save up and only kill somebody once in their lifetimes.  Another such wealthy angel is Mary, a sixteen-year-old girl, the daughter of a rich and powerful couple of businesspeople who are also angels who work with Dennis--each member of this prominent family regularly pays Dennis to connect her or him to somebody they can legally torture and kill, but keeps this habit a secret from the other two.  When Mom and Dad cut off Mary's allowance, Mary comes to Dennis as a client so she can make the money she wants by being killed.

This society is obsessed with untimely, violent death.  People pay to watch the angels torture and slay the clients.  In Chapter 4 we see how Dennis relaxes--by strapping on a dream helmet and living out a scenario in which he rides a roller coaster which malfunctions and kills the riders, including him.  Dennis believes he loves Kira, but when he is angry at her, when they have an argument, he has elaborate fantasies of murdering her.  While all moat of our characters are upper middle-class, there are apparently lots of slums full of impoverished people who murder each other.

Adding to the stress of this future world in which everybody is obsessed with death is the fact that jobs are hard to find and so businesses can dock your pay for the smallest inefficiencies and fire you at will.  Warren's job offers as one of its perks a crystal for him and one for his fat spouse who hates him, making it imperative he not lose his job.  Another source of stress is class distinctions reflected in fashion choices.  Fashions change in intervals as short as a month, and wealthy people have to keep up with the fashions or lose face.  Warren, who is just a clerk, wears his latest suit to Bentwell's and almost everyone ignores him because his clothes indicate he is a nobody.  (Warren has a cousin in show biz who leant him his membership card to Bentwell's.)  Berlyn does a little satire of fashions at the time he was writing, having the disgusting Frank wear a polo shirt with a little crocodile on it even though he doesn't really know what a crocodile is, a reference to preppies and Izod/Lacoste shirts.

OK, the plot.  Oleo is a stockbroker and makes lots of dough.  He hires Frank's services and rapes and kills a teenaged girl; Frank, being essentially incompetent, screws up the paperwork and can't pay his fee at Bentwell's, so Dennis pays it for him, which Frank, who is already brainstorming ways to put Dennis out of business so he can pick up Dennis' angels and enjoy less competition for clients, takes as an insult.  Meanwhile, Oleo has a problem.  He killed a girl like five years ago, absolutely legally, but the girl's father has come out of the woodwork and wants revenge.  Worried this guy might murder him, Oleo contacts Frank to see if Frank will preemptively murder the bitter father.  

Halfway through the novel, somewhat abruptly, Kira and Dennis's troubled marriage seems to be revived when Kira convinces Dennis to quit being a procurer by insisting they go to a shopping mall and look down at the glassed-in bit of nature where he proposed to her--overcome by nostalgia about the happy days before Dennis took on the job of procurer, they have the best sex in years and he agrees to quit.  But first he has to settle Mary's case, hook her up with an angel with lots of money so she can score a profit from being raped and killed.  He settles on Oleo, an angel with whom he has worked before.

Mara and Frank win Warren as an angel, stealing him away from Dennis, largely because Kira, the procurer-hater, interfered with the deal Dennis was trying to make with Warren.  Then comes our big horror/fetishistic sex scene--Frank tricks Dennis into watching as Oleo and Warren torture, rape and murder Kira, burning her alive as the finale.  In return for Oleo's help in torturing Kira (Oleo is the best torturer in town, it appears), they provide that embittered and vengeful father to Oleo.  Mara plotted out this whole thing, and Frank realizes how clever, how dangerous, she is, and begins to think he has to kill her, and probably torture expert Oleo and torture neophyte Warren as well.

The depths of Mara's diabolical plot become apparent to us readers as the final third of the novel begins.  She kidnapped Kira but set things up so that Kira Number 2, after Kira's most recently saved consciousness was uploaded into a fresh 25-year old clone of her body, would believe she had volunteered to be raped and killed while Dennis watched as a way to spice up their sex life.  This is the lie the doctors tell her, the lie they think is fact because of forged legal documents Mara got from an ex-husband from an earlier incarnation who now is a government administrator.  (The Mara in this novel is like Mara Number 4.)  Luckily for Dennis, Kira doesn't believe this lie, even though her last crystal save was before the shopping mall, before Dennis promised to quit being a procurer, before their marriage was rejuvenated.  Unfortunately, he has to try to rejuvenate their marriage again, even though it was she who rejuvenated it the first time, and it isn't easy, and it doesn't help that he keeps remembering watching her burned to death by Oleo--in this future world people use drugs all the time, and when Dennis drinks "mescanol" and looks at Kira he has hallucinations that she is burning even as she is sitting there talking to him.  

Dennis again promises to quit procuring, and again says he has to finish up some business.  But this time that business includes getting revenge on the people who murdered Kira!   First, he gets Warren fired from his job; Warren blames Frank and goes to confront Frank and is gunned down by a trigger-happy associate of Frank's.  (Just a couple of weeks after driving Dennis out of the business, Mara and Frank, on the brink of bankruptcy at the start of the novel, are now big wigs with a big entourage, having gotten all of Dennis' former angels, apparently due to Mara's skillful operating, not that of dullard Frank--Mara didn't hire the trigger happy goofball, Frank did without consulting her.)  

Next comes Oleo.  Berlyn wraps up Mary's fate off screen, telling us that, in Dennis' absence, she ended up getting Oleo as an angel--uh oh, Oleo hates Mary's family for business reasons.  Oleo the sadist tortured Mary with a knife while updating her crystal so that she, in her new body, will remember the pain and terror of being carved up.  How Oleo got a hold of Mary's crystal, when she lives with her rich parents, is left unexplained.  Dennis breaks into Oleo's house and sabotages Oleo's crystal so it kills him and erases itself when Oleo tries to use it, killing him permanently.  In a world whose culture revolves around killing people you'd think wealthy people like Mary's parents and Oleo would have better security, but breaking and entering and kidnapping are childishly easy in this novel.

Dennis has an elaborate plan to drug Mara and Frank and toss them in a swimming pool of sulfuric acid; he even has an old book about fighting techniques, weapons, drugs and acids that he consults, and Berlyn includes passages from this book in the text, for some reason.  But then Dennis just junks the plan after finding it difficult to locate a suitable pool and acquire the drugs and acid.  I find it annoying when fiction includes these kinds of abortive plans--I spent page after page reading about this plan and it was for nothing?  Maybe Berlyn had to pad out the length of the book here.  A similar frustrating thing Berlyn does a few times in the novel is lead us to believe that Kira is going to leave Dennis and then perfunctorily reveal that no, that is not what Kira is thinking at all.  Maybe that is supposed to make us readers realize Dennis is bad at reading other people, or at least reading his wife.

Anyway, Dennis captures Frank and Mara and takes them out to the country.  Mara tries to seduce him and Dennis grabs her by the ankles, spins in place so Mara is whipping around in a circle above the ground, and hits her head against a tree so her blood and brains splatter all over.  Maybe this was supposed to be funny?  Dennis tricks Frank into thinking he and Frank can be friends now that the evil Mara is out of the way.  Frank helps Dennis dig a grave and toss Mara in, and then Dennis breaks Frank's legs and buries him alive with Mara's body.

In the final chapter it seems like Kira and Dennis will stay together, but uneasily--Dennis still sees and smells Kira burning when he looks at her, and while he is no longer going to be a procurer, he will still be in that evil world, working as Bentwell's partner, still indirectly profiting from the whole angel business.  Dennis has killed a bunch of people, and Kira has died and been reborn, physically better but psychologically worse than before, but their relationship is right back where it was when we met them in Chapter 2, he doing a job she will, presumably, find degrading and immoral, in proximity to the fat disgusting Bentwell and all kinds of desperate wretches and noxious killer perverts.

"Crystal Phoenix" isn't terrible.  It is an easy read, as the sentences are short and straightforward and the chapters are similarly brief and direct.  The setting is sort of interesting, the plot more or less works, and the crazy stuff that goes on is a little shocking, which keeps you reading as you wonder what crazy thing will happen next.  Unfortunately, the most shocking bit is in the first chapter, on the second page; all the killing and torture after that is a little bit of a let down.

One of the good things Berlyn does in Crystal Phoenix is describe this world in its own terms--he doesn't tell you that all the stuff going on is revolting and evil, he lets it speak for itself.  The business with the angels and killing and torturing people so they can finance their rebirth in cloned bodies of themselves is treated by the characters in the novel the way people in our own world treat issues like abortion, sex change drugs and surgery for minors, and affirmative action: lots of people just casually accept this stuff as a normal part of the landscape, plenty of people passionately fight for these things as essential to a just society, and plenty of people find these things revolting and monstrous injustices that must be ended, and these three types of people try to coexist.

The characters and their relationships in Crystal Phoenix are not great.  Dennis' character feels all over the place--is he a normal guy of this world who loves his wife and wants to make his marriage work, or is he some kind of criminal genius who knows how to manipulate the system and outwit dangerous criminals and who is always on the verge of beating up his annoying wife?  In the start of the novel I just thought he was one of many procurers, a regular joe procurer, but as things go on I guess we are supposed to see him as the best procurer, one of very few at Bentwell's, a top dog whose success dominates the market and makes things hard for people like Mara and Frank.  Or maybe that is just in dim-witted and envious Frank's head?  The way Dennis skillfully kills off all his enemies in the last quarter of the book comes as sort of a surprise, because earlier in the book he doesn't run any complicated operations or anything--in fact, he is screwing up his relationships with everybody.  (One of the smarter things Berlyn does with Dennis' character is hint that he and Frank are really the same kind of person--we see Frank consider killing Mara, Oleo and Warren, and then we see Dennis actually do it.)  

Another character issue is how so many minor characters pop into view to fulfill some plot requirement and then are dropped--examples include the rich girl Mary, the bitter and vengeful father of one of Oleo's victims, Mara's ex-husband, and the trigger happy guy who shoots Warren down.

Crystal Phoenix is tolerable.  It is more like a crime novel in a bizarre setting than a traditional science-fiction novel.  In a classic-style SF novel the protagonist would start out ignorant of some astounding fact, learn that fact, and then lead or at least witness a paradigm shift--Kira would convince Dennis that the whole angel and reconstruction business was evil and he would launch or join a revolution leading to a liberal democratic or socialist dictatorship regime that would end the angels and make crystals and cloning available to all or to none.  As it is, the novel describes a circle--Dennis and Kira are firmly enmeshed in a wacky society and have a troubled marriage and at the end after an adventure full of trauma and death they are still enmeshed in the same wacky society and still in their troubled marriage.  Maybe we should see this book, published in 1980, as a product of 1970s pessimism and as a representative of the elite intellectual class's hostility to American prosperity and consumerism, signaled by the satire of shopping malls, Izod/Lacoste polo shirts, and quick changing fashions.  (Michael Berlyn, contributor to Accolade's Snoopy's Game Club and Bend Studio's Columbo's Mystery Capers, doesn't have to be a member of the intellectual elite to ape their pronouncements.)

Will I read any more of the five novels I bought at Goodwill this recent weekend?  The three novels by Mark Adlard appear to be a series, and I don't know if I want to embark on a series, even if this series looks to be more popular and respectable than my other two Goodwill finds (Crystal Phoenix has never been reprinted.)  So probably of this Goodwill haul we'll next experience Rick DeMarinis' Scimitar.  Is there any chance Scimitar is about Islam?  We may soon know.

                          

Robert E. Howard: "The Garden of Fear," "The Voice of El-lil," "The House of Arabu" and "The Cairn on the Headland"

As foreshadowed, I pored over the tables of contents of the Robert E. Howard collections Pigeons from Hell, Wolfshead, and The Dark Man and Others to try to get straight which stories I had read and which I had not.  Here, in no particular order, find the list of stories that were printed in these three volumes which I have read and blogged about.

"Pigeons from Hell"
"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)

"The Garden of Fear" debuted in a sort of fanzine, Marvel Tales, a publication that put out five issues across 1934 and '35.  This story was first reprinted in a small press pamphlet anthology as the title story in 1945, and in 1961 appeared in Cele Goldsmith's Fantastic, again as the cover story.  In 1963 "The Garden of Fear" was included in Arkham House's The Dark Man and Others and in 1976 Pigeons from Hell.  I'll be reading the Fantastic version, which is preceded by a long Sam Moskowitz intro.

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)

Farnsworth Wright, famous editor of Weird Tales, also edited for a span of four or five years a total of 14 issues of a magazine initially titled Oriental Stories and then later renamed to Magic Carpet.  "The Voice of El-lil" was printed in the very first issue of Oriental Stories and went on to be included in Donald Wollheim's Avon Fantasy Reader (under the provocative title "Temptress of the Tower of Torture and Sin"--hubba hubba!) and many Howard collections, including The Book of Robert E. Howard, which has a great Jeff Jones cover and plenty of Jones interior illustrations--it is a must have for all you Jones fanatics out there--you know I have mine!

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)

This one wasn't printed in Howard's lifetime, though, according to the website REH.World, "The House of Arabu" was sent to Weird Tales and rejected and also presented to a British publisher as a possible component of a Howard collection that never got off the ground.  It first saw print in the last issue of Donald Wollheim's Avon Fantasy Reader as "The Witch from Hell's Kitchen."  This is a terrible title because it makes you think the story takes lace in New York City, or maybe that's just me because i have NYC on the brain.  Since that first appearance, this grim caper has resurfaced in a bunch of places under one or the other of its titles.  I am going to read the version in the scan at the internet archive of the 1972 Canadian edition of the Lancer Wolfshead.

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)

I'm going to read "The Cairn on the Headland" in an electronic version of the 2008 Del Rey/Ballantine volume The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard because it seems that the editor of Strange Tales, where the story debuted, changed significant elements of the story (a letter by Howard sent to Lovecraft explaining this is quoted in The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard) and the 2008 collection's editor, Rusty Burke, tried to fix this by integrating material from an earlier draft. 

(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.

**********

So we've got two very good stories, "The Voice of El-lil" and "The House of Arabu," a pretty good story, "The Garden of Fear," and a merely acceptable story, "The Cairn on the Headland."  Not too shabby.  All of these stories also help us get into the head of one of the most famous and important of the weirdies, give us insight into Howard's thinking about life, history, religion, and his own Irish background.

There's more Robert E. Howard in our future as well as other weirdies and explorations of the broader reaches of speculative fiction in all its diversity, from hard science fiction to the New Wave, from the respectable work of award-winning Grandmasters to disreputable exploitation nonsense by goofballs, if you can tell the difference.  Stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log.