Kothar and the Wizard Slayer by Gardner F. Fox

"Free me," she whispered to the lich of the dead magician.  "Free me, so I may help those of our wizard brotherhood left alive."

My copy, front

In 1969 and 1970 five books by comic book legend Gardner Fox about Kothar, the barbarian swordsman, were published.  A copy of the fifth of these volumes, Kothar and the Wizard Slayer, is in the MPorcius library here in suburban Maryland; I purchased this 1974 edition, put out by "Modern Promotions, A Unisystem Company," because of the Jeff Jones cover, even though that cover is terribly marred by an ancient retailer's hideous yellow price stickers.  isfdb indicates that it was our friends at Belmont who originally published Kothar and the Wizard Slayer in 1970--the Belmont edition seems to have been almost identical to this later Unibooks edition.  Fox was a big enough wheel that Kothar and the Wizard Slayer appeared in Portuguese, Dutch, German and Italian translations!  In the 21st century, multiple electronic editions have been made available--there is no excuse for your ignorance of Kothar's final adventure!

Back in 2015 I read Lori Flanagan's copy of Fox's Escape Across the Cosmos and gave it the old thumbs down, but I'm willing to give Fox a second chance.  (That same year I read another Unibook, Day of the Beasts, and was pretty critical of it as well, so I guess I am also giving the Modern Promotions people a second chance.  Don't listen to my relatives--I'm actually a very forgiving guy!)

...and back

In the first chapter of Kothar and the Wizard Slayer we witness two wizards murdered by undead assassins (Fox calls each of these killers a "lich.")  Then we meet Red Lori, a sorceress whom Kothar imprisoned in the tomb of the wizard Kalikalides in an earlier Kothar adventure.  Somehow in this world without cable news Lori knows about the serial killer who is thinning the ranks of the wizard population, and wants to do something to preserve those of her fellow thaumaturgists still drawing breath.  In a dream she talks to the ghost of Kalikalides (whom Fox also calls a "lich,"), and he obligingly teaches her a spell that allows her to project her astral form outside of the tomb, even if her actual body is still imprisoned.  (I hear this is what Luke Skywalker does now in Star Wars movies instead of just shooting people and dropping bombs on their space stations like he did in the Star Wars of my youth.  We were all so innocent back then!)

In Chapter Two we find Kothar, the blond barbarian mercenary, in the desert.  He spends a few chapters, with a companion adventurer, fighting bandits and looting an ancient king's tomb (this book has plenty of liches and tombs).  Red Lori, in her astral form, joins them, and even has sex with Kothar (her "astral" form can touch and affect material objects just like her normal body.)  It seems that, even though Lori and Kothar were trying to murder or imprison each other in earlier books, that they have a kind of love-hate relationship.  Besides, Lori needs the help of Kothar's strong arm and magic sword in her mission to stop the wizard killer.  To secure Kothar's aid, Lori not only shares her body with him, but promises to lift a curse with which he was afflicted by the spirit of the long-dead wizard Afgorkon; if neither of those inducements can get the job done, she just resorts to hypnotizing him.  Nothing stands in this chick's way!

In the middle section of the novel, Lori leads Kothar by the nose to a coastal city, where she hires a ship and guides its captain to the middle of the ocean, to the site of a city that was submerged 50,000 years ago--the very city that Afgorkon himself called home five hundred centuries in the past!  The witch makes Kothar dive to retrieve the famous wizard's airtight chest of scrolls, and the statue which houses Afgorkon's very soul!  When, in the midst of this death-defying dive, a kraken tries to make a meal out of Kothar, Afgorkon's spirit gifts the blonde barbarian the strength he needs to triumph over the super-sized cephalopod!

With these recovered artifacts of Afgorkon's at her disposal, Lori has the power to summon demons to aid her and to teleport Kothar around the world and through time so he can rescue various wizards from undead assailants.  Lori assembles an alliance of magicians, and they, protected from various foes by sword-swinging and arrow-shooting Kothar, travel to the oldest city on the planet, the city where magic was first employed!  There they discover the identity of the guy murdering all the wizards, a wizard called Antor Nemillus, and sic Kothar on him.  Kothar's scheme to murder Antor Nemillus fails, and Kothar, Lori, and the rest of Lori's party are about to be subjected to a horrible death when Afgorkon intervenes and pulls all their bacon out of the fire.  After disposing of  Antor Nemillus, Afgorken does Kothar another solid--he erases Lori's memory, so she goes from being an evil genius who sees nothing wrong with seducing barbarians and sacrificing young women to demons in pursuit of her goals to being a helpless and innocent naif.  The natural order of the universe is restored as Lori, who once dominated and manipulated Kothar, is now totally dependent on Kothar, and we readers are led to believe that in the future Kothar will carve out a kingdom of his own and will live happily ever after with the defanged Lori as his queen.

I'm of mixed mind about Kothar and the Wizard Slayer.  Obviously it is a trifle, but I have nothing against a trifling entertainment if it is actually entertaining.  I liked the basic plot, with its raw material of wizards both living and undead and the hapless fighting men they work like puppets looting tombs and lost cities and trying to murder each other, and I liked that the real protagonist of the story was a conniving and merciless witch who wrapped everybody around her finger (Kothar himself is a pretty boring character, to be honest.)  Fox could have done a better job with the characters' motivations--if the author provided any insight into why Antor Nemillus was trying to kill his fellow wizards and why the selfish Red Lori wanted to help them, I must have missed it.

Fox's style is not very good, though I guess it would be exaggerating to call it bad.  Unpolished is perhaps a good description.  Fox definitely makes some odd word choices.  He uses "cantraip" instead of the more common "cantrip."  He uses "kak" for saddle, which I have to admit I don't think I've ever seen before (I suspect the term is used primarily by American cowboys, and thus is a little out of place in one of these fantasies with a setting that is supposed to remind you of the ancient Mediterranean and medieval Europe.)  When the wizards complain that they can't work their best magic because all their sorcerous apparatus is back home, Fox has them refer to their absent equipment with such not-quite-appropriate terms as "impedimenta" and "palimpsests."  No doubt Fox uses these words because of how they sound, but I find his willingness to ignore their precise meanings a little irritating.  I also don't like his using "fired an arrow" instead of "shot an arrow," and I don't like the use of "shaft" for a sword's hilt or grip, either.  Maybe it sounds like I am nitpicking, but little things like this are distracting and make the work feel sloppy, shoddy.  If the text isn't going to be beautiful or evocative, at the very least it should be smooth, and these imprecisions and idiosyncrasies of Fox's are like potholes.

I'll judge Kothar and the Wizard Slayer as acceptable...barely acceptable.  I think I might have really liked it if Fox or his editor had taken the time to polish up the language and add a little dimension to the characters.  But I guess if you are putting out five books in two years you don't really have that time.

More crazy sword and sorcery shenanigans in our next episode!

**********

I know I'm not the only one who finds not only the texts and illustrations of these old books fascinating, but even the advertising!  My 1974 Unibooks edition of Kothar and the Wizard Slayer included, bound between pages 80 and 81, a color ad which an earlier owner tore out.

At the end of the novel is an interesting ad for a catalog of overstock paperbacks available at warehouse prices.  It would be fun to leaf through such a catalog!










      

Escape Across the Cosmos by Gardner Fox

"Hannes Stryker gave you a body for one reason.  To destroy Ylth'yl.  Do that and I'll make you the richest man--outside myself, naturally--in the Empire."

I'm the kind of guy who relishes a challenge.  I mean, you won't find me climbing mountains or wrestling alligators, but when Joachim Boaz suggested that Gardner Fox's Escape Across the Cosmos might not be very good (on Fox's birthday no less!), I was all "unto the breach!"  I'm content to let other men fly experimental planes and battle Al Qaeda--reading a 160-page novel from 1964 by the guy who created DC Comics' The Flash and Hawkman is an MPorcius-sized challenge!

Soon after opening my copy of Escape Across the Cosmos I realized that another explorer had blazed this trail before me: Lori Flanagan, who acquired this novel in 1982 and has the world's most adorable bookplate!

Fellow SF fan Lori Flanagan, we salute you!

Planet Dakkan is a vast desert with a eleven moons and a sun "twenty-four hundred times more luminous than Sol of old mother Earth so far away."  The Empire drops off their worst criminals there--nobody is expected to live on the waterless world more than a day or two.  The latest resident of Dakkan is Kael Carrick, formerly the Empire's number one war hero!  On a successful commando mission Carrick's body was totally mutilated, but the Empire's greatest scientist, Hannes Stryker, built Carrick a bionic body for his still-intact brain to inhabit.  Sounds good, but then Stryker turned up dead, and Carrick was framed for the crime!

After wandering the barren lifeless planet for 18 hours or so Carrick finds it is not quite so barren and lifeless after all!  Than Lear, the space pirate, was sentenced to Dakkan a few years ago, and, thanks to his connections, a ship smuggles in the food and water he needs to survive.  Lear has been rescuing all the criminals landed on Dakkan, and is now king of the planet, with a court of fifteen people.

Carrick (and his new girlfriend) hijack one of the smuggler ships and escape Dakkan.  Like in a detective story, Carrick travels from planet to planet, talking to lowlifes and corrupt bazillionaires and studying documents relating to his trial, looking for evidence of who framed him for the murder.  Reading Hannes Stryker's diary he learns some facts that, despite their being foreshadowed earlier, shake his view of the universe and of himself!  1) Stryker built a portal to another dimension, Slarrn, where reigns a horrible monster, Ylth'yl the Eternal, that lives by devouring the life forces of human beings. 2) Stryker designed the body Carrick is in to battle Ylth'yl to the death!  Carrick's super-body is silicon-based because Ylth'yl can only absorb the life force from a carbon-based body. Ylth'yl has almost exterminated the human race in Slarrn, and thanks to Stryker's portal, Ylth'yl will soon be paying our dimension a visit and we are all on the menu!

In the last 35 or so pages of the novel Carrick and his love interest go through the portal to Slarrn.  In Slarrn, Carrick gets posthypnotic messages, left in his brain by Stryker, that allow him to use psychic powers that Stryker installed in his silicon body. Carrick's final battle with Ylth'yl (who appears as a white cloud) is like a fight between Jedi, with lots of telekinesis, hypnotism, lightning, etc.  Ylth'yl even says "Why should we destroy one another?  You could rule two universes with me."  This battle is way too long, like ten pages, and probably the most boring parts of the book. After Ylth'yl is disposed of, Carrick returns to our dimension to exact justice on Than Lear and his other enemies and unravels the mystery of who killed Hannes Stryker.

This plot is crazy, of course, but I kind of like it.  The issue is in the execution.  It would be easy to imagine somebody like Jack Vance, who does detective stuff in his novels, or Kuttner and Moore, who are often sending people between dimensions, making this plot work well.  But as Escape Across the Cosmos sits, it feels rushed, like it wasn't edited, and has too many distracting problems.  For example, why does Fox have the girlfriend accompany Carrick off Dakkan?  Fox doesn't develop an interesting relationship between her and Carrick, and she doesn't seem to have any role in the plot beyond Dakkan; Fox tells us repeatedly what clothes she is wearing and how pretty her hips are, and that's about it.  If Carrick were totally alone on his journeys through space and between the dimensions it might have added some oppressive loneliness, added to the "one man vs the universe" atmosphere.  

According to isfdb, some vile creeps
published this pirated copy of  Fox's
text under this title and author in 1978

The writing style Fox employs in this novel is not very good.  Some sentences are hard to understand ("The only city on Dakkan planet, it held no undiscovered secrets except for the fact of its own existence,") some sentences are laughably dumb ("Carrick thought his [Than Lear's] mouth betrayed a man fond both of philosophy and plunder.")  I encountered more than one sentence in which commas seemed to be in the wrong spot.  There are weird verbal tics, like how everybody says "Dakkan planet" instead of "planet Dakkan" or just "Dakkan." Nobody says "gun" or "car," it's always "implositron" or "blipper" and "sandsled" or "monowheeler," which is fine, but after Fox makes up all these futuristic words for everything he distractingly tosses in a mention of "Bristol board," I guess a winking acknowledgement ("Hey, Mom!") of his comic book background.    

The names used by Fox in Escape Across the Cosmos gave me pause.  One villain is named Felton Pratt, and another is Alton Raymond.  Are these jocular references to SF writer Fletcher Pratt and comics creator Alex Raymond, both of whom died in 1956?  Did Fox have some kind of feud with Pratt and Raymond?  Felton Pratt is described as "a rat of a human being" and we are reminded again and again that Alton Raymond is fat.  And of course "Hannes" makes me think of Hannes Bok.

I've got to give Escape Across the Cosmos a thumbs down, but it is not so terrible that I wouldn't recommend it to fans of Fox's comic book work, who might be curious about this other facet of his creative output.  I've never actually read any Flash or Hawkman comics; maybe they include concepts or devices Fox used here.

January 1974 stories by Ted White, Janet Fox, J. J. Russ, and "Susan Doenim"

Let's tackle the rest of the fiction from my copy of January 1974's Fantastic.

"...And Another World Above" by Ted White

White, editor of the magazine, includes a longish story by himself; on the Table of Contents it is called a "novelete."  In its introduction White tells us it is the first in a series of stories about his character, "Long Hand," but I'm not finding any evidence online of further stories about the character.

Which is too bad, because "...And Another World Above" is a pretty good piece of work, a good start for a novel or a series of closely connected stories.  It doesn't really work as a stand alone tale, as it spends all its pages setting the scene and introducing the characters, so there is no conflict or climax or resolution.

Long Hand (is this name some kind of writerly in-joke?), a teenage boy, is a member of a nomadic tribe of only 22 people.  They can only barely eke out an existence in the barren desert they inhabit, and have virtually no technology--Long Hand has never even seen a wheel!  One day the band is visited by wise men who have magical (or high tech) healing abilities.  These wise men do some good deeds for the tribe, and then leave.  Long Hand, curious, follows them, and witnesses them teleporting away. Imitating their actions, the boy himself is teleported.

He reappears in a much more fertile land, one of towns, farms and rivers, and a population that wears clothes and uses wagons.  The sky is also different; White seems to be hinting that this world is on the interior of a globe or cylinder with a sun in its center, like in the generation ship in Gene Wolfe's 1990s Book of the Long Sun or Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1914-1963 Pellucidar books.  Long Hand meets an older woman who is a mind reader, and becomes her assistant.  He also meets a friendly teenage girl in a town, and loses his virginity with her.  Then the story is over.

I liked White's writing style, and the way he handled the characters was pleasant.  I think I would have enjoyed following Long Hand as he explored his new world and did whatever the plot would end up consisting of, going on a quest or fighting in a war or whatever.  Is there any chance one of White's novels is a continuation of this story?

NOTE:  There's a fun story autobiographical story by White about his relationship with Harlan Ellison available online here; check it out, it is like something Harvey Pekar would write, and even includes charming cartoons!

Mike Kaluta's illo for "She-Bear"; I
don't get the Asian style; this is a Northern
European story (Arcana invokes Odin)

"She-Bear" by Janet Fox

I'd never even heard of Janet Fox before reading this story; apparently she is most well-known for a series of novels about an alien called Scorpio who travels through time.  Those novels appeared under the pseudonym Alex McDonough.

"She-Bear" is a competent, if ordinary, sword and sorcery adventure.  Maybe I'm supposed to praise it because it's about a woman who kills people with a magic sword instead of about a man who kills people with a magic sword?  Be that as it may, I liked "She-Bear,"--the plot is solid, and Fox's style and pacing are good.

Arcana is a "tall, sturdily-built girl" climbing snow-covered mountains on a quest to find a magic sword and kill a troll.  The sword is imbued with the bloodthirsty soul of the great king of a forgotten people, and when Arcana has to fight rapists, the sword basically fights for her, guiding her hand in intricate fencing moves.  Besides her magic sword, Arcana (who is a witch) is accompanied by a daemon trapped in the body of a blind horse, and a handsome man who is in her thrall, she having used the magic sword to outfight him and win his obedience.  A romance seems to be brewing between the two, but is not consummated within the period of the story.

While a complete story, "She-Bear" feels like an episode in a series, and I'd certainly be interested to read more about Arcana, the captive daemon, and the thrall and their Conan/Elric/Grey Mouser-style adventures.  Fox published something like 50 stories in anthologies and periodicals, so with luck I will encounter some more of her work in my usual course of scrutinizing tables of contents in libraries and used book stores. 

An entertaining fantasy caper with some effective horror elements; thumbs up. 

"The Interview" by J. J. Russ

J. J. Russ only has six entries, all short stories, on the isfdb.  White tells us this is a Kafkaesque story, and that Russ is a published poet.

This is a first person narrative in which the protagonist endures a job interview in a dystopian world in which there is only one company to work for and the unemployed are "disappeared" soon after losing their positions.  Our narrator is presented with impossible challenges at the interview, like being asked to recall something from the day of his birth, or define words that the interviewer has just made up.  The story is mildly amusing, though it feels a little long and I spotted the twist ending early.

Acceptable.

"Heartburn in Heaven" by Susan Doenim

When I looked up Doenim at the isfdb I was surprised to find that this was a pseudonym used by George Alec Effinger.  In his intro to the story Ted White reports that "Miss Doenim" recently graduated high school--in 1974 Effinger, born in 1947, was 27 years old!  Was White in on the joke, or was he the victim of an elaborate charade on Effinger's part?  Is the "affectionate dedication" to Harlan Ellison sincere, or some kind of dig?

I liked Effinger's 1973 story, "City in the Sand," but was not impressed by several of his earlier stories. "Heartburn in Heaven" isn't terrible, but I can't quite say I enjoyed it; it is a sterile literary exercise.

A man awakes naked in a long steel corridor.  He can only vaguely remember his earlier life; he doesn't even recall his own name.  On the floor are a scrubber and a can of polish.  He eventually learns that if he polishes the walls of his prison, food will appear.  Exploring, he meets other prisoners; none know any more about how they got here than he does.  The inmates cannot live communally, because their food only appears in the place where they awoke.   The female prisoners have a little more mobility, because they will have sex with men who trade them half a ration of food for the privilege. 

And that's all folks, we never learn anything about how or why he is in this environment, or who put him there.  I guess this is just a (tepid) allegory of life.

Barely acceptable.

************

All in all, this issue of Fantastic is pretty good.  White, Malzberg and Fox provide stories I can confidently recommend.  The Meyers, Russ and Effinger stories, all of them odd in one way or another, get (perhaps grudgingly) passing grades.  That leaves us only one truly bad story, the anemic Bunch piece.  And the ancillary matter--editorial, letters, the whole business of Effinger impersonating a young woman--are fun.  So, reading this magazine has been a positive experience, and opened my eyes to two authors, White and Fox, worth a further look.