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

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

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

"The Pit of the Serpent" (1929)

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intro to "The Pit of the Serpent" here in The Book of Robert E. Howard, there are twenty-seven Costigan stories, some unpublished.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

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

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

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

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

"Knife, Bullet and Noose" (1965)

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

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

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

"Gents on the Lynch" (1936)

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

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

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

We'll call this one barely acceptable.

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

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

Robert E. Howard: "The Good Knight," "Knife-River Prodigal," and "The House of Suspicion"

I recently went to Antiques Crossroads in Hagerstown, MD, where I saw a bunch of cool things and even purchased a few.  One of my purchases was a copy of the 1976 Zebra paperback edited by Glenn Lord, The Second Book of Robert E. Howard, a wide-ranging collection of stories and poems by Howard supplemented by introductions by Glenn Lord and illustrations by MPorcius fave Jeff Jones.  Let's check out three stories from the book that star Howard characters not nearly as famous as Conan, Kull or Solomon Kane.

"The Good Knight" AKA "Kid Galahad" (1931)

Nowadays the detective and various speculative fiction pulp magazines are well-remembered, but also popular during the pulp era were magazines of sports stories, and Howard sold quite a volume of material to them.  (Robert E. Howard Foundation has printed four volumes of Howard's boxing fiction and each volume is over 300 pages.)  "The Good Knight" is just such a story, making its debut in Sport Story Magazine under the title "Kid Galahad" and starring light-heavyweight boxer Kid Alison.  This is a somewhat slight but entertaining story, like a fun episode of a TV sitcom.  It feels odd comparing Robert E. Howard to P. G. Wodehouse or Jack Vance, but the slangy first-person narration and dialogue, delivered by a likable but somewhat confused and ignorant protagonist, and "The Good Knight"'s obvious but fun joke premise (a premise at least as old as Don Quixote) and all the little jokes along the way make reading the story a pleasant experience not unlike reading some of the works of those more critically acclaimed creators of Bertie Wooster and Cugel the Clever.

Our narrator is Kid Alison himself; he is on the West Coast while his manager is on the East Coast trying to set up a lucrative bout for Kid.  In hopes of keeping Kid out of trouble, a member of his entourage accompanies him to the library and suggests he read a book about Sir Galahad.  Kid becomes fired with the idea of emulating that noble knight, of helping damsels in distress and vanquishing malefactors.  So when he runs into a young woman who has been hit by her boyfriend after she caught him with another girl, Kid vows to teach her assailant a lesson.  Said assailant is a fellow boxer, a famously dirty fighter, and the woman contrives a situation that puts Kid and this knave in the ring together.  In the end, Kid knocks out the dirty boxer in front of a crowd and a sports journalist, buoying his career.  But the fickle woman regrets putting her boyfriend in such a tough situation and Kid finds himself, painfully, on the receiving end of her anger.  (This story illustrates the reality that abused women often defend their abusers in a sort of jocular way that people today may find in bad taste.)

A trifling thing that is fun, though the climactic bout may be a little too long.  In 1975 "The Good Knight" was printed in the fanzine Fantasy Crossroads, and in Britain in 1977 it appeared in The Robert E. Howard Omnibus.

"Knife-River Prodigal" (1937)

From sports to Westerns--there were also a bunch of Western pulps back in the day, and Howard wrote for those as well.  "Knife-River Prodigal" appeared first in Cowboy Stories; in 1975 it was brought back into print in the fanzine REH: Lone Star Fictioneer and since then has appeared in several Howard collections. 

As with "The Good Knight," in "Knife-River Prodigal" we have a first-person narrator who is something of an ignoramus who is good at finding trouble, starring in a somewhat silly humor story, much of the humor of which rests on unusual syntax and slang.  ("Git goin' before I scatters yore remnants all over the floor."  "Air we men or air we jassacks?")  The comedy business in this story is inferior to that in "The Good Knight," but the action is better.

Bruckner J. Grimes is a young Texan, a real hellraiser from a family of hellraisers who is always getting into feuds and fights.  (The central joke of "Knife-River Prodigal" is that Texas is a violent place.)  He causes so much trouble his family actually tells him to leave Knife River and to go to "Californy" to prospect for gold.  So he steals his brother's horse and heads west; upon arriving in New Mexico, thinking he is in California, he starts chipping away at some rocks, hoping to discover gold thereby.  Grimes gets mixed up with a band of desperadoes who decide to keep him around for laughs, and, when they terrorize the innocent folk of a small town, our hero belatedly realizes what's what and with his six-guns, bowie knife, and fists sets things to rights.

A pleasant diversion.   

   

"The House of Suspicion" (1976)

Here we have one of Howard's stories starring police detective Steve Harrison; we read another Harrison story, "Lord of the Dead," back in 2019.  "House of Suspicion" was first printed here in The Second Book of Robert E. Howard and would go on to appear in various collections of Steve Harrison stories printed here in the land of the free and the home of the brave and over in Europe, the land of croissants and home of pizza.

Harrison is looking for a man who has gone missing, the star witness in a murder case.  He has received an anonymous note, inviting him to the dilapidated mansion of a once wealthy, now decaying, Southern family--Harrison is warned to conceal his true identity from those at the mansion--the writer will reveal himself and guide Harrison to the missing witness.  At the mansion Harrison meets four people.  We've got the last member of the family.  We've got his uncle, rendered deaf, blind and dumb by disease.  We've got the hugely muscular black servant.  And last but not least we've got the biracial ("mulatto") maid.  Someone keeps trying to kill Harrison--throwing a knife at him from the shadows, tossing a water moccasin into his room, dumping poison in his coffee, etc.  Who wrote the letter?  Was the letter sincere or a trap?  Who is trying to kill Harrison and why?  Is that guy really deaf, dumb and blind or is he shamming?  And where is that witness?

There is some mystery business with clues and people concealing their identities and so forth, but mostly this story is about violence and death, with people beating up, blowing up, shooting up and stabbing (up?) other people on purpose or by mistake.  Much blood is spilt!  I enjoyed "The House of Suspicion," though it lacks the personality and atmosphere of "The Good Knight" and "Knife-River Prodigal"--the narration is third-person omniscient, and Harrison and the other characters are quite nondescript, cogs in the grinding gears of the plot.

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Our first two stories brought a smile to my face, and the violence in the third is pretty effective; we have here three undemanding and easy-to-read entertainments.  If you are a Howard fan, The Second Book of Robert E. Howard is definitely worth your time.  I paid ten bucks for mine, which seems like a good price, based on what copies are going for on ebay (mine is also in good shape--it was in one of those plastic bags at the store and I think I'm the first to read it.)  There is a 1980 Berkley printing with a Ken Kelly cover, which I assume is the same text, but Jeff Jones fans will definitely want a Zebra edition, with the great wraparound cover and the eight interior illustrations featuring skulls and bare male flesh.  I have to warn you, though, that "The Hand of the Black Goddess," though promised on the back cover, is not actually in this volume.  If isfdb is to be believed, "The Hand of the Black Goddess" seems to be a hard story to find; hopefully somebody will reprint it soon.

I'll probably read more Howard soon, but first some science fiction stories by a Grand Master.

Weird Tales September 1938: A Blackwood, R E Howard & F T Torbett and M W Wellman & G Gordon

Can't stop, won't stop!  The MPorcius Fiction Log's  quest to read at least one story from every issue of Weird Tales with a 1930s date on its cover continues.  Today, the September 1938 issue falls before our manic glazzies.  We've already read the Robert Bloch story from this issue, "The Mandarin's Canaries," but there are three more stories I'm interested in.

"The Magic Mirror" by Algernon Blackwood

Blackwood is a guy one often hears being called one of the best of the writers of the weird, or even the actual best.  So I guess it is about time I read something by him.  "The Magic Mirror" is apparently something of a forgotten Blackwood story--at least isfdb suggests it was only collected once, as the title story of a 1989 volume with the subtitle "Lost Supernatural and Mystery Stories," and only anthologized once, in Peter Haining's 1986 Tales of Dungeons and Dragons.  

"The Magic Mirror" is one of those stories which has a frame story.  Our narrator is on a cruise ship, and while hanging around at the bar he hears a fat guy ("Fatty") tell his two friends ("Baldy" and "Jimmy") the story of how in Monte Carlo he met a 100-year-old man who knew how to win at gambling--by leveraging the dangerous magic item he acquired in Tibet from a lama.  Said item was a magic mirror--the old geez told Fatty he would be able to read in the mirror the number to play on a roulette wheel, but that he couldn't take advantage of the mirror's powers by himself, that he needed a partner.  Fatty became the man's partner, and the two sat together at the roulette table where the old timer read the winning number in the mirror and Fatty placed the bets and and collected the inevitable winnings.  They won time and again, making lots of money, but the old guy kept getting paler and sicker looking until he finally died right there at the roulette table.  As he died the mirror broke into a thousand pieces.

This story is solid--well written and paced--but no big deal; moderately good is our judgement.

"A Thunder of Trumpets" by Robert E. Howard and Frank Thurston Torbett    

"A Thunder of Trumpets" is the only story credited to Torbett at isfdb--he also has three letters to Weird Tales listed.  Its debut appearance here in Weird Tales is supported by a dream-like Virgil Finlay nude, and "A Thunder of Trumpets" has been reprinted in numerous Howard collections behind fun covers by people like Stephen Fabian, Ken Kelly and Neal Adams; for one such collection it even serves as the title story.  While the title might invoke the image of a cavalry charge, if you are expecting high excitement from the story you are perhaps going to be disappointed.

"A Thunder of Trumpets" takes Howard's characteristic pro-barbarism, anti-civilization theme and marries it to the argument that what women want is a strong man to master them.  Perhaps the most interesting thing about the story is watching Howard, who we conventionally think of as a racist who portrays black people in a terrible light, in this story exalt Hindu ("Hindoo") and Muslim ("Muhammadan") Indians over Americans and Englishmen, and suggest that Indians who deal too closely with Westerners, getting educated in England or serving in British military units, for example, are polluted and corrupted.  Unfortunately, the story is sort of boring; instead of Howard's theories about sexual relations, race relations, and the relative merits of citified scholars, businessmen and priests on the one hand and animals, barbarians and savages who live close to nature being embedded in a thrilling adventure or horror plot, as is usually the case with Howard, here the creator of Conan just presents his theories again and again in a plot that seems like that of a weak imitation of Somerset Maugham full of passages like you might expect to see in a woman's romance novel--"A Thunder of Trumpets" is all about a white woman who is enamored with a nonwhite man and bored with white men and their dull ways.

A bit obtuse, as Anglo-Saxons are likely to be in matters not concerning business, he did not notice her abstraction.  He had other things to worry him, and with an Englishman or American, business must always come before love. 

Bernice Andover is riding her horse alone in the Indian jungle and is thrown; as she lies stunned on the ground, a man-eating tiger appears and menaces her, giving Howard a chance to sarcastically mock man's assumption that he is superior to the beasts.  A tall and supple native man with "Aryan" features rescues Bernice by staring the great cat down, and Bernice can't help but contrast this handsome man who is in touch with the natural world with her fiancé, who is too polite and doesn't know how she wishes he would sweep her off her feet and tell her what to do.  Bernice's brief glimpse of what life is like in the jungle brings home to her how lame civilized life is, how British people--and the Indians employed by the British who have taken up British habits--stifle their emotions, repress their natural instincts.  

Back in the palace of an Anglicized Hindu prince with whom her fiancé is conducting business, Bernice learns that the man who saved her is considered a yogi by the local people, is respected by Hindu and Muslim alike, and believed to have lived for centuries and to have power over animals.  For weeks, while her fiancé is trying to swing deals with the recalcitrant and/or hard-bargaining locals, Bernice is going on long walks with this yogi, falling in love with him.  The yogi is a chaste guy and never does anything untoward, but finally, one day, the yogi breaks down--for centuries he has pursued higher aspirations, quested after cosmic wisdom, but Bernice is so beautiful he can't resist her, against his better judgement he has fallen in love!  He is going to abandon the long road that leads to The Truth That Is All to marry Bernice!

Bernice goes to tell her boring English businessman fiancé that their wedding is off.  But seconds before she can break the news to him, an anti-white riot breaks out and the fiancé is knocked unconscious defending Bernice.  The yogi appears out of nowhere to wield his magic powers to drive off the rioters and heal the fiancé's wounds.  This demonstration of the gulf that lies between the yogi and the mortal woman convinces them that a relationship between them is impossible--to put a period on it, the yogi gives Bernice a glimpse of what he really looks like--a bent and wrinkled, toothless and  bald old geezer!  The yogi returns to the pursuit of The Truth That Is All, and Bernice, presumably, marries her fiancé, who minutes before the riot had inked a deal, assuring them a comfortable future.

Though perhaps interesting as a piece of insight into Howard's (and broader Western society's) views on relations between the sexes and the races, "A Thunder of Trumpets" is not very entertaining.  I'm a Howard fan, and a fan of stories about love triangles, but this one gets a thumbs down; Howard it appears is not equipped to portray a love triangle effectively, and what he is good at, depicting action, adventure and horror material, he doesn't even try to do here.

'The Cavern" by Gertrude Gordon and Manly Wade Wellman 

Like Frank Thurston Torbett, Gertrude Gordon has only one fiction credit at isfdb, plus a handful of letters to SF magazines, in her case Fantastic Novels* as well as WT.  "The Cavern" would be reprinted in the Wellman collection The Devil is Not Mocked and a few anthologies edited by Robert Weinberg.

*Gordon's letter appears in the issue of Fantastic Novels with a Virgil Finlay cover that took my breath away in an antique store back in August.

"The Cavern" is a fun little filler story, slight but entertaining.

The narrator and his friend Stoll are accosted by a fortune-teller.  After the fortune-teller has left, the narrator wonders why she picked them out of the crowd, and Stoll says she could tell he was a believer, and then explains why he believes.

Years ago Stoll was in Africa and met a young man on his first day in Africa by the name of Quade, a guy who is strong and brave and all that.  The night of his first day on the Dark Continent, a fortune teller warns Quade that his death will be in a cavern, and Stoll will witness this tragedy.  Quade goes to another fortune teller to get a second opinion, but fortune teller number 2 offers the same prediction, as does #3.  (Africa is full of fortune tellers.)

Quade leaves Stoll's party, as it is going to explore a tomb, which to Quade sounds uncomfortably like a cavern.  Quade has an exciting career ten-year career in Africa, fighting in wars, hunting big game, gambling for high stakes, trading with native tribes, etc.  He takes tremendous risks, he suffers illness, but he always survives.  He also scrupulously avoids caves, caverns, and holes, even refuses to sleep in a house or a hut, always sleeping outside on the ground.  A decade after their first meeting, he hooks up with Stoll again.  The two go hunting hippos together, and on a river we get the twist ending we expected the moment hippos were mentioned.

Minor, but successful.

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We are making good progress in our weird journey through the 1930s.  Today we passed judgement on  stories by some pretty big name weird authors, and more big names await us at the next station on the weird way, October, 1938.  In the interim, you can check out MPorcius posts on Weird Tales from earlier in the 1930s at the links below.

1930  1931 1932 1933  1934  1935  1936  1937 

           

Weird Tales, May 1938: Robert E. Howard, Edmond Hamilton & J. Wesley Rosenquest

Our exploration of Weird Tales continues, today with the May 1938 number.  This issue of "The No. 1 Magazine of Bizarre and Unusual Stories" prints installments of serials by two authors I like, Henry Kuttner and Jack Williamson, but on this occasion we'll limit ourselves to a famous story by Texan Robert E. Howard which I read decades ago, a piece by our pal Edmond Hamilton of Ohio, where I lived for a couple of years, and a tale by some guy I never heard of who only has two fiction credits at isfdb, J. Wesley Rosenquest.

"Pigeons from Hell" by Robert E. Howard

Steven Tompkins, in his introduction to the 2005 Howard collection The Black Stranger and Other American Tales, calls "Pigeons from Hell" "one of the finest American horror stories," and it has been reprinted in a host of anthologies in numerous languages.  I read the story ages ago, and as I recall was a little underwhelmed by it, considering its high reputation.  But maybe I'll appreciate it more now that I am older and have feels like an uncountable number of weird stories under my belt.

Two New Englanders, buddies since childhood, are driving around the American South on a vacation.  In a remote region they get off the treacherous poorly-maintained road to sleep in an abandoned mansion, and there experience a night of eerie horror and gruesome death!  One of the men survives, just barely, rescued in a nick of time by the local sheriff who just happens to be in the area, a brave and resourceful man who throws around the "n-word" with abandon.  The sheriff connects the clues the New Englander provides with some local legend, and then consults an ancient black man--a voodoo priest who has made a pact with an ophidian African god--and finally resolves the plot by returning to the mansion with the New Englander to destroy the monster and reveal the twist ending.

Despite what I thought when I first read it, "Pigeons from Hell" is a great story--five out of five brain-smeared hatchets!  Howard stuffs every paragraph with compelling and entertaining material and we readers are subjected to zero fluff or filler.  The plot, which under all the sickening gore and black magic fireworks has the structure of a detective story, is solid--scenes follow one another logically and people's actions are believable, so the narrative draws you in and carries you along unflaggingly, unencumbered by any dull spots or rough patches that threaten your suspension of disbelief.  Both the supernatural content and the human dimension are well-handled; Howard's descriptions of the many horror images as well as of the surviving New Englander's wretched emotional state are sharp and powerful.  I found particularly effective Howard's description of the experience of being a victim of hypnotism.

As we all have heard a hundred times, Howard tried to imbue his writing with a sense of history, and "Pigeons from Hell" is chock full of pointed references to American history--Tompkins is quite right to consider this a very American story.  All the numerous characters' personalities and motivations reflect racial and regional stereotypes and grow out of the tragic and violent relationships between the European colonists who conquered the New World and the native Indians they met and the black Africans they dragged to the new civilization they founded there.  Whether we regard Howard's sketches of archetypal New Englanders, white Southerners, and African-Americans to be insightful or merely extravagant racist caricatures, they are engaging and serve to add life and credibility to the story.    

A major theme of "Pigeons from Hell," like Howard's "Black Canaan," which we read in 2019, is that black people have special knowledge and a peculiar connection to the supernatural.  Says the sheriff:  

"We're up against something that takes more than white man's sense.  The black people know more than we do about some things."

But while blacks are certainly "the other" in the story, it is not like "Pigeons from Hell" presents white people in a universally positive light.  The sheriff assumes the killer monster he is hunting is a living-dead "mulatto" woman, but in the end he finds that, in fact, the supernatural menace is a cruel white woman who has been warped by her relationships with black people and assumed some of the very worst characteristics of (Howard's pulp fiction vision of ) African culture.  Howard's story suggests that relationships between the races are inherently destructive and degrading, causing immense suffering and bringing out the worst in participants of both races.  

As the identity of the villains suggests, "Pigeons from Hell" not only offers readers a surfeit of race-based material, but plenty of sex- and gender-related content as well, with numerous female characters who suffer and/or commit all manner of crimes and mayhem.  Also noteworthy, and this is hinted by the story's title, is the role of animals in "Pigeons from Hell": birds, reptiles, and other beasts appear in the story as striking symbols as well as concrete agents of the supernatural.      

An entertaining and well-wrought classic with the ability to disturb 21st-century readers in a variety of ways.  Recommended to all readers, whether you be of the thrill-seeking or academic bent.

"The Isle of the Sleeper" by Edmond Hamilton

"The Isle of the Sleeper" might be considered one of the prolific Hamilton's more popular stories; in 1951 Farnsworth Wright's successor as editor Dorothy McIlwraith reprinted it in Weird Tales, and it would also resurface in Leo Margulies' 1961 anthology The Ghoul Keepers and a 1993 anthology edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Weinberg entitled To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare.  

Hamilton wrote tons of stories about guys who end up in another world and get involved with a princess and her wars, and we have read a lot of them here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  "The Isle of the Sleeper" bears some similarity to those Princess of Mars-style stories, but has a twist and a note of sadness to it that is likely what caught the eye of editors.  The gimmick Hamilton uses here is not unlike that employed by Ambrose Bierce in "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and William Golding in Pincher Martin, but adapted for a speculative fiction audience.  

Garrison is the sole survivor of the sinking of a ship on the Pacific, and he is near death when his life raft runs aground on a forested island teeming with animals.  He finds not only life-preserving food and water but a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl!  They fall in love and enjoy several happy days together.

The girl insists that the island, the flora and fauna of which Garrison finds are unusual for these climes, is the product of a man's dream--she even leads Garrison to the couch of the sleeping man.  She implores our hero to refrain from waking The Sleeper--if the man awakes, she is sure, the island, including Garrison and herself, will vanish.  Garrison thinks this is nonsense, of course, but, as the days pass, odd events render her theory more and more plausible.  New geographical features and new island inhabitants appear, including monstrous beast-men whom the girl declares must be the product of the Sleeper's bad dreams.  Garrison and his beloved are taken captive by the beast-men, and our desperate heroes decide that annihilation would be preferable to whatever torture the savages have in store for them, so they wake the Sleeper.  Garrison witnesses the island and everything else around him disappear, and then wakes up to find that he is the Sleeper, that he is shipwrecked on a barren rock.  He is rescued, but sadly doubts that he will ever find a woman he can love as much as the girl birthed from his own subconscious; the last lines of the story also suggest that some unique property of the rock actually did give material form to Garrison's dream girl and the lush ever-changing island of his dreams.

A mildly good filler story, competently executed.

"The Secret of the Vault" by J. Wesley Rosenquest

isfdb indicates that "The Secret of the Vault" was adapted for a segment of Rod Serling's TV show Night Gallery; a look at imdb reveals that the segment aired in 1972 and was entitled "You Can Come Up Now, Mrs. Millikan."  Presumably Serling read the story in Peter Haining's 1968 anthology Legends for the Dark, which has a fun human sacrifice cover, though I suppose he might have owned or had access to a collection of old issues of Weird Tales.  I have to say that it is hard to believe that the memorable components of the story could be profitably reproduced on the small screen.

Our narrator is the youngest member of a large and wealthy family whose deceased predecessors are interred in a vault beneath the family mansion.  The first part of the story is given over to effective descriptions of the narrator's childhood fears of the vault, into which his elders regularly descend to pray for their dead loved ones.  Then the narrator indulges in odd speculations about the life force or soul, and about the character of death.  Is a human's soul like a fire that radiates energy, a force that colors and influences the world around him or her?  Is the division between life and death as sharp and clear as we generally believe, or does the life force in fact only gradually leak out of those bodies we consider dead, a proportion of it lingering long after the physical form we are sure is inert has been buried?

Then comes the plot.  The narrator's Aunt Helena was remarkably healthy and energetic, and it was a surprise to the narrator when she suddenly expired, leaving behind only two survivors of the once populous family, our protagonist and Helena's husband, Henry.  Whereas in his childhood the narrator felt the vault emanate a black gloom, now, presumably illuminated by Helena's powerful life force, the underground crypt radiates a warm vitality.  Uncle Henry goes down into the vault every day, the narrator assumes to pray beside his wife's tomb--that is until, drawn by some whim or force, the narrator intrudes for the first time into his uncle's forbidden library!  Therein he discovers dozens of books he would not have expected a Christian to be familiar with, books on the necromancy of remote tribes, books of spells for raising the dead!  The narrator's fears are confirmed when he finds Henry's diary, which Unc has been keeping up to date with descriptions of his activities since his wife's death--even more shockingly, the diary indicates that Henry convinced Helena to commit suicide so she could serve as the subject of his necromantic experiments!

The ending of the story is a little mysterious.  The narrator goes down into the family burial vault for the first (and last) time of his life, and sees the pentagram and candles and necromantic apparatus, and witnesses Helena's body return to animate life, upon which sight he flees the family house forever.  Whether Helena and Henry are satisfied with the experiment and Helena is a healthy immortal, or Helena is instead some kind of monster, perhaps a vengeful one, is not made clear.       

Not bad, but I would have liked a more transparent conclusion; the reader (at least this reader) receives mixed messages from "The Secret of the Vault."  Has Henry performed a miracle to be celebrated or committed a sin for which he will be punished?  Is Helena a victim or beneficiary?  Will this amazing event change the world or remain a secret forever?        

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The Hamilton and Rosenquest stories are entertaining, but it is Howard's "Pigeons from Hell" that stands out as a classic of the genre.  A good issue of Weird Tales, and one I expect to return to for the Kuttner and Williamson serials.

More Weird Tales in our future--stay tuned!

Weird Tales, Sep '37: Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth

Back in March of 2022, we read some stories from a 1941 book that some people consider the first ever science fiction anthology.  One of those stories was Manly Wade Wellman's "School for the Unspeakable," which first appeared in a 1937 issue of Weird Tales.  Let's crack open that September '37 issue of the magazine of the bizarre and unusual, as it includes three more pieces of fiction from people we are interested in here at MPorcius Fiction Log, Weird Tales regulars Edmond Hamilton, Clark Ashton Smith, and August Derleth.  Hamilton's contribution is the first part of a three-part serial, which we'll read next time; today let's focus on the stories by Californian Smith and Wisconian Derleth.   

But first--weird poetry!  This issue of Weird Tales has lots of verse in it by some of the greatest writers to ever appear in the pages of the No. 1 Magazine of Strange and Unusual Stories.  There's Robert E. Howard's 14-line poem about a guy who has a nightmare in which he is killed by a giant animate statue, "The Dream and the Shadow."  Henry Kuttner contributes "H. P. L.," sixteen lines about the dreams only a few men can ever experience, dreams of strange alien worlds.  And from Howard Phillips Lovecraft himself, the seven-page "tale in rime" "Psychopompus," which is about a creepy medieval nobleman--apparently a werewolf--and his creepy wife--a witch who can change into a serpent--and the gruesome end they meet when they seek to work their evil on a Christian couple who are good at swinging an axe.  God helps those who can chop the head off a monster themselves!

Of these poems, the Kuttner is the hardest to get, as it is just a bunch of vague images and mythological references.  Howard's is better, as it tells a little story, and the images are better, too.  Lovecraft's is the least ambitious poetically, and the easiest to read--as its subtitle suggests, it is just a horror story in simple rhyming verse.  "Psychopompus" is actually a pretty effective horror tale, and I recommend it to all fans of the weird, even those who have little interest in poetry. 

"The Death of Ilalotha" by Clark Ashton Smith

"The Death of Ilalotha" is set in the decadent court of Queen Xantlicha, where days-long drunken sex orgies are the norm.  Queen Xantlicha murdered her husband and since has taken a series of lovers; these lovers also end up murdered when the Queen tires of them.  Her current lover, the nobleman Thulos, returns from a week away at his estate to find one of the wild parties winding down after three days.  This shindig was held to commemorate the death of the Queen's lady-in-waiting, Ilalotha--the deceased lies in the middle of the site of the festivities.  Ilalotha was one of notorious womanizer Thulos' favorite lovers before he took up with the Queen, and seeing her lying there dead reminds him of one of his and Ilalotha's little sex games--she would pretend to be asleep or dead while he made love to her.

Is Thulos hallucinating, or has he just heard Ilalotha's voice, requesting that he meet her at midnight in her tomb?  Could it be that via infernal sorceries she has faked her death--or that she might in fact be one of the undead?  The Queen, burning with jealousy, sees Thulos leaning over the corpse of Ilalotha, and requests that the nobleman meet her at midnight in the garden.  

Which rendezvous will Thulos keep?  Of our three cruel, selfish, and passionate characters, which if any will live to see the morning?  

Thumbs up for this great little story of murder, sex and sorcery.  Smith offers not only a solid eerie suspense plot but striking images, effective metaphors, and generally skillful wordsmithery.  

One of Smith's tales of the far future continent of Zothique, "The Death of Ilalotha" can be found in many languages in a stack of Smith collections as well as horror and science fiction anthologies.  

"McGovern's Obsession" by August Derleth  

Derleth has laid some clunkers on us over the years of this blog's existence, but here we have a successful little piece I can sincerely recommend.

One of these middle-class British guys who has a manservant and spends time at a club, name of McGovern, moves into a new house; it is a comfortable place, but has a strange, disturbing, atmosphere.  One day Mac is doing some mundane paperwork and his hand suddenly writes out, automatically, indifferent to his will, a long passage in a woman's handwriting, a sort of fragment of a wife's account of a disastrous marriage full of adultery and abuse.  

Some investigations and another episode of automatic writing follow.  Big revelations as the story draws to a close include Mac's arm seizing a hammer and bashing a hole in the wall to reveal a gruesome clue, and in the climax Mac's arm is again possessed by the abused wife as he fights the abusive husband, her spirit pursuing justice and revenge.

Much better than Derleth's average; "McGovern's Obsession" is not nearly as well-written as Smith's "The Death of Ilalotha," but the style doesn't get in the way of the plot or waste your time (remember how Derleth hamstrung himself with unnecessary scenes and plot complications in "The Wind from the River"?--he doesn't commit those blunders this time, thank the Elder Gods), and that plot is actually pretty good.  Finding yourself writing something in someone else's voice, totally unbidden, is a pretty cool horror story idea.  So, kudos to Derleth.

"McGovern's Obsession" would be reprinted in a few Derleth collections and a 1970 French anthology.

**********

One very good and one quite good story today, both with a little something something for you sex fetishists and gorehounds out there.  Let's hope when we read Hamilton's contribution to this issue next time we find it lives up to the standard set by Smith and Derleth!    

The Return of Conan by Bjorn Nyberg and L. Sprague de Camp

"Man of Cimmeria!  You are a son of Crom, and he will not let you suffer eternal damnation!  You have always been true to him in your heart, and the black arts of the East shall not have your soul!"

Recently I spent quite a bit of my limited time on this Earth looking at many different images online of the Frank Frazetta painting that appears on the oft-reprinted paperback Conan the Avenger, which first appeared in 1968.  There are serious differences in color tone and cropping among different reproductions of the 1968 painting, and in 1980 Frazetta revised the work, making radical changes to the hero figure and the female figure (the revised painting was used as the cover of the 1981 Italian translation of Conan the Liberator.)  I have to admit I have always been skeptical of this particular Frazetta painting.  I love the wizard, and the crocodile and the octopus and the overturned bowl, and either version of the young woman is good (though I think I prefer the earlier one, as you can see the woman's face and her color fits in better with the rest of the colors in the painting.)  My gripe is with the hero--what is he standing on?  Why does he look so large?--his size is such that he looks like he should be closer to the viewer than the wizard and the woman, but he is obviously further away than they are.  I'm compelled to consider that the painting would be better without the hero.

Having spent so much time looking at this picture, I was inspired to read from the paperback upon which it appears.  Conan the Avenger prints two documents; part of Conan creator Robert E. Howard's 1930s history of Conan's world, "The Hyborian Age," and a 1957 novel by Bjorn Nyberg and L. Sprague de Camp, The Return of Conan.  So let's read that 1957 novel; there are three different printings of Conan the Avenger available at the internet archive, so the text from the paperback is not hard to find.  (The 1957 hardcover from Gnome Press is a little harder to come by, and goes for over $150 on ebay.)  

The Return of Conan takes place not long after the events of The Hour of the Dragon, and refers many times to earlier Conan adventures, and includes many secondary characters from Howard's stories.  Conan is king of Aquilonia, the leading Western nation, and his policies have brought it peace and prosperity.  In the first chapter of the novel he is holding a big party in the palace, and, when his wife (Conan almost always refers to her as his "mate" or "woman") Zenobia goes out on the balcony to get some fresh air after a dance, a flying demon snatches her and flies off with her.  (Conan met Zenobia in The Hour of the Dragon: a brave slave girl familiar with horses and weapons, she helped Conan escape captivity and at the end of that novel he freed her from a rival monarch's seraglio and declared his intention to marry her.)

Conan puts some other guy in charge of the kingdom and rides off at a furious pace, exhausting multiple horses.  His destination is the golden tower of Pelias, a wizard he met in "The Scarlet Citadel" when both men were captives in a dungeon full of wells leading to hell and worked together to escape.  Conan hopes Pelias can use his magical abilities to divine Zenobia's whereabouts and the identity of her kidnapper.  Pelias's tower is in a city, and in the city a disguised Conan is quickly distracted from his mission by a hot chick.

A spy in his palace has alerted some of Conan's innumerable enemies of the Cimmerian's solo departure, and some of them have laid an ambush for our hero, using a gorgeous woman as bait.  She comes to Conan for help, saying some brutes in a tavern tried to take advantage of her.  Conan may be a pirate and a bandit and a thief and a torturer, but he won't stand for mistreatment of women; at least that is what we hear at this juncture in the plot.  So he goes into the tavern, where the trap is sprung  but without success, Conan killing all his attackers.  The woman has disappeared, to the disappointment of Conan, who "had meant to take a kiss at the very least as a reward for helping her" even though he is married and actually on a mission to rescue his wife.  

At the tower of Pelias, Conan gets plenty of intelligence from the friendly wizard, and the novel takes on some of the aspects of a "Yellow Peril" story.  The wizards of the East, Pelias tells the Cimmerian, are more powerful than the wizards of the West, and the most powerful of all, Yah Chieng of the city of Paikang in the land of Khitai, has the ambition of ruling the world.  Conan is an obstacle to Yah Chieng's conquest of the world, even though the Cimmerian doesn't know it!  You see, the world is evolving away from magic and towards "enlightenment and reason," and magic spells are becoming less powerful all the time.  Conan and his rule of Aquilonia are, somehow, one of the main drivers of this evolution.  If Yah Chieng wants to cast the spell that will give him power over the world, he will first have to kill Conan, and so he has abducted Zenobia in hopes of luring the barbaric Cimmerian king of civilized Aquilonia into undertaking a perilous journey that will lead to his death.

Pelias gives Conan a magic ring that he says should protect him from summoned monsters, and Conan hurries off, bound for the purple tower of Yah Chieng in far Paikang.

In Chapter 3 Conan gets distracted again when he learns that the civilized Turanians have wiped out a band of nomadic Zuagirs and captured their chief.  Conan in "A Witch Shall Be Born" led a band of Zuagirs against the Turanians and he still has a soft spot for the Zuagirs and so he decides he will rescue this chief.  He disguises a party of Zuagirs as merchants and they enter the walled city where this chief is held, and at night open the gates and allow in the rest of a big Zuagir war party.  Despite all that goop about Conan's "barbaric code of chivalry" in Chapter 2, he doesn't seem to mind how the Zuagirs round up all the town's women while sacking the place.

In the quarters of the governor of the town (after killing the governor, naturally), Conan runs into that woman again, the one who lured him into the ambush in the tavern back west.  In Chapter 3 we get to know this woman pretty well in scenes in which Conan does not directly appear; she is Thanara, a spy working for Yah Chieng but ostensibly in the employ of King Yezdigerd of Turan (a figure from "The People of the Black Circle.")  She has been given some special equipment by a shaman who is acting as an intermediary between her and Yah Chieng ("He who is not to be named") and when Conan, instead of just killing her or avoiding her, lowers his guard because she is so sexalicious ("Conan felt the hot urge of his racing blood"), Thanara tosses into his face "pollen of the yellow lotus of Khitai" and Conan is rendered unconscious.

Conan wakes up in Chapter 4 in chains in a dungeon under King Yezdigerd's palace, which overlooks the sea from high atop a cliff.  Soon he is dragged before Yezdigerd's court; with the help of another Western barbarian who is present at court, Rolf, Conan escapes, jumping out a window to the sea below after first humiliating Yezdigerd and Thanara.

Again and again in The Return of Conan, Conan meets an old enemy like Yezdigerd or an old friend like Rolf, and in Chapter 5 he and Rolf climb aboard a pirate ship among the crew of which number many of Conan's comrades from his pirate days and whose captain is an old rival of Conan's.  Conan makes himself captain lickety-split and then leads the pirates to victory over two Turanian vessels, including one commanded by Yezdigerd, who is killed.  

Chapter 6 sees Conan in Vendhya, which is ruled by Queen Yasmina, whom we met when we read "The People of the Black Circle."  Yasmina summons Conan to her bedroom and they have sex.  Between bouts of lovemaking, some assassins sneak into the queen's bed chamber and Conan and Yasmina kill them; they then have sex again while Conan still has their blood on him.

Chapter 7 has a little introductory prologue like those we often see in horror literature in which a minor character is killed by a mysterious monster.  The main portion of this brief chapter has Conan hanging out with some hill tribesmen, then climbing the snowy Himelias, where he is attacked by a snow demon; the ring Pelias gave Conan (and which Yezdigerd's subordinates apparently neglected to seize from him when they stripped him naked) protects Conan from this alien creature.

In Chapter 8 Conan has crossed the Himelias and is in Khitai, where he climbs over the Great Wall of Khitai and meets "saffron-skinned" people, including a beautiful girl whose "slant-eyed face was of startling oriental beauty."  We are reminded that Khitai is an old civilization, that the people of Khitai had vast rich cities when the men of the West had yet to invent fire.  Conan rescues the woman from two of Yah Chieng's top soldiers who are tying her to a tree as a sacrifice to a dragon.  Moments after he kills the two guys the dragon shows up and Conan kills it as well with a lance he makes out of bamboo.

The "oriental beauty" has sex with Conan and then leads him to her hidden village, a colony of dissidents.  In Chapter 9 the girl's father describes to Conan how Yah Chieng took over Paikang twenty years ago, driving him and his surviving relatives and friends into the jungle.  His wife, a sort of seer, died during the Yah Chieng takeover, but her dying words were a prophecy, that a white king from the West would overthrow Yah Chieng within twenty years.  Conan has shown up just in time to make the prophecy come true!

Conan and these counter revolutionaries hatch a scheme to get into the palace during the big annual celebration that is taking place next week--Conan, who is of course taller than all these people, hides under one of those big dancing dragon costumes we've all seen on TV during Chinese New Year.  Once inside the town he sneaks off in the confusion if the drunken celebration. Down in the dungeons Yah Chieng has imprisoned an entire company of white mercenary soldiers; Conan frees them, and, as luck would have it, one of them is an old friend, Lyco of Khorshemish.  These mercenaries join the anti-Yah Chieng locals in attacking Yah Chieng's troops.

Yah Chieng is not participating in the celebration.  In Chapter 10 Conan makes his way to the chamber in which Yah Chieng has Zenobia chained to an altar and is about to sacrifice her, on the way overcoming the flying demon who abducted Zenobia back in Chapter 1 and rescued Thanara from Conan in Chapter 5.  After a trip of some months, the King of Aquilonia has arrived on the very day, at the very hour, when Yah Chieng has decided to murder Zenobia.  If this sacrifice is part of the spell that will allow Yah Chieng to take over the world, Nyberg and de Camp didn't make it clear to me, and, anyway, I thought the Khitan wizard couldn't cast that spell while Conan was stull alive.  Anyway, the magic ring and direct intervention by Crom, Conan's god, save Conan from the wizard's magic, and then he kills Yah Chieng with his bare hands a second before the sorcerer kills Zenobia.

(The text makes clear that Frazetta's painting means to depict Conan leaping over the altar to tackle Yah Chieng.  I would never have guessed that the central male figure was airborne; he looks like he is running, not jumping.  Also, and I know I am not supposed to say stuff like this, the facial features of the wizard in the painting do not in the least look like those of an East Asian.)    

In an Epilogue Conan and Zenobia are almost home when they are attacked by an army lead by Thanara; just in time an Aquilonian army arrives to save the day.  Zenobia, a skilled archer, shoots down Thanara just as she is about to shoot down Conan.  (This is the one time Conan uses the word "wife" to describe Zenobia, as he praises her after she saves his life.)

I don't want to say The Return of Conan is bad, but I can't say it is good, because it has a lot of problems.  A big issue is its lack of direction and unity of theme and a related flagging of narrative drive.  Nyberg and de Camp start off the novel with two big ideas that serve as the foundation for the story and which should supply Conan and the other characters with their motivations--Conan's queen has been kidnapped and Yah Chieng is trying to take over the world.  But Zenobia's liberation and Yah Chieng's campaign for world conquest, instead of being the source of everything that goes on, are almost forgotten for six or seven chapters as Conan flits from one self-contained episode to the next.  In those chapters--the bulk of the book!--Conan almost never thinks of Zenobia or Yah Chieng, and he is always getting distracted from what should be his unwavering goal, getting to Paikang.  The King of Aquilonia never pines for his queen or worries she is dead or has been tortured or raped or whatever, and the fact that he is the one thing standing between the world and an Eastern tyranny never seems to cross his mind; as a result, the novel lacks tension--why should I care about Zenobia and Yah Chieng if Conan doesn't?  Conan is far more passionate about helping friends from his past like the Zuagirs or getting vengeance on enemies from his past like Yezdigerd than he is about the here and now problems of saving his queen and saving the world.  Now, maybe you could argue that this jives with Conan's personality, that Conan is a womanizer and a selfish sort of individualist, but if Nyberg and de Camp are choosing to portray Conan in this way, why did they build the structure of the novel around two quests that Conan is going to be indifferent to?

Some of the early self-contained episodes work reasonably well, and Chapters 9 and 10 are not bad, though the excitement of sneaking a disguised army into a walled town at the end of the novel is somewhat undermined by the fact that Conan has already sneaked a disguised army into a walled town in this book, just 75 pages ago.  Some of the fight scenes are good.  But too many of the capers in the middle of the novel are weak and/or needlessly encumber the narrative, and a few--the episodes of Yasmina and the snow demon are good examples--are pretty perfunctory.  Some of the secondary characters from Conan's past contribute nothing to the narrative; Rolf and Yasmina, for example, appear and disappear without adding anything to the story.  It would have been better if the authors had spent those pages developing Yah Chieng and Thanara, giving them more screen time.  I even think shortening the novel--say, eliminating the Yasmina and snow demon chapters altogether--would have been an improvement.

I have my own vision of what Conan should be, and a lot of the things Nyberg and de Camp do here are contrary to my conception of Conan and thus I found they detracted from my enjoyment of the story.  I like to think of Conan as the embodiment of the individual who triumphs over adversity in pursuit of his own chosen goals, a man who bends the universe to his will.  But all that jazz in Pelias's tower about Conan (in some vague and abstract and involuntary or autonomic way) personifying the rise of reason and actually causing the decline of magic, and then the prophecy business among the Khitans, turn Conan into an instrument of fate or just a man blown by the winds of fate.  Maybe this would be fine in a Michael Moorcock story in which the protagonist is a tragic figure, but to my mind, Conan should represent the man who is master of his own destiny and the master of his environment.   

Curious about Pelias, I reread "The Scarlet Citadel" and its virtues cast into sharp relief the shortcomings of The Return of Conan.  The characters, even the minor ones, all have powerful emotions and strong motivations that bring them to life--Howard transmits to the reader the genuine anger and fear of Conan and the various wizards and kings, and the actions of everybody in the story stem from their emotions and their personalities.  The magic and monsters are strange and scary and feel fresh and original.  Howard describes the settings vividly, offering not only a picture you can see in your mind but also an atmosphere you can feel.  "The Scarlet Citadel" is engrossing.  Nyberg and de Camp in The Return of Conan don't achieve any of this--the characters lack personality and seem to do what they do not out of inner drives but because it is what the plot demands of them, and the magic (e.g., magic ring) and monsters (e.g., dragon) and settings are pedestrian, banal, and vague.  

We're grading The Return of Conan barely acceptable.

Weird Tales Aug '34: R E Howard, H B Cave and F B Long

Let's read three stories from the August 1934 issue of one of our favorite magazines, Weird Tales.  Now, we've already read one of this issue's highlights, the fourth of C. L. Moore's Northwest Smith stories, "Dust of Gods," but tales by Robert E. Howard, Hugh B. Cave and Frank Belknap Long await us.  We all know what to expect with Conan, and I've read "The Devil in Iron" before, albeit over a decade ago, but, in my experience, at least, Cave and Long are all over the place and often disappointing, so I still feel like I'm exploring uncharted territory here!

"The Devil in Iron" by Robert E. Howard

I could have read "The Devil in Iron" in my copy of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, but according to the notes in that 2003 book the version therein is unchanged from the Weird Tales text, so I just read the story online at the internet archive as I did the Cave and Long stories.

Conan, the Northern barbarian, has made himself leader of a tribe of bandits living in the wild steppes on the border of a major empire.  As usual, Howard describes the ethnic and cultural make up of this empire and of the bandits, contrasting them with Conan.  We are assured that even though Conan is a dangerous criminal, he is not as bad as some of the nobles of the empire, for example, Jelal Khan, "a monster such as only an overly opulent civilization can produce."  Howard is fascinated by racial and ethnic distinctions and demographic history, the movements and interminglings of peoples, and of course with the comparative virtues of barbarism and civilization, as we can see in his correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft, in which they discuss and opine at length upon all sorts of different ethnic and cultural groups, their characters, their potential, what economic niches they tend to inhabit, etc., as well as debate the superiority of urban or rural life.

Jehungir is the lord of the border province Conan's band keeps raiding, and is getting a lot of pressure from his monarch to put a stop to the Cimmerian's depredations.  So, Jehungir and his right hand man Ghaznavi devise a somewhat complicated scheme to trap Conan, alone, on an uninhabited island that rises steeply out of the ocean just across from the swampy shore of the mainland.  This island, Xupar, is the site of some mysterious ancient ruins, where, as we witnessed in a first chapter that acts as a sort of prologue, a fisherman (don't worry, we learn the demographic history and characteristics of this fisherman's people as well over the course of the story) has recently awakened some kind of ancient fighting man who stands like seven or eight feet tall and has impenetrable skin.  

The bait used by the border lord to get Conan alone and vulnerable on this island is a fair blonde girl with a curvaceous body, a young noblewoman from the West who had the misfortune to become a slave of Jehungir's.  Octavia is tough, brave, and resourceful, and when the border lord gave her to the aforementioned Jelal Khan, to escape his abuse she busted out of his castle and, looking for a place to hide, made her way to Xupar herself.  On Xupar she is quickly captured by some mysterious individual.

When Conan gets to the island, having been fooled by Jehungir's agents into thinking Octavia is there (which, ironically enough, she is), he is astounded by what he finds.  He's been to this island before, but last time the ruins were a pile of rubble--today the ruins appear to have been built back up into an intact city with a solid circular wall!  The prospect of such diabolical sorcery has Conan all ready to leave, but he then spots clues suggesting that Octavia is nearby, captive of some man, so he puts aside his fear and follows their trail into the town.

Conan explores the city and through inexplicable occult means learns its history.  (Characters in stories by Howard and Lovecraft and those they have influenced are always finding ancient lost cities and then, through means that exercise the reader's ability to suspend disbelief, learning their histories.)  A demon thousands of years ago took the form of an oversized man, one made of impenetrable metal, and stalked the earth as a cruel god.  It came to this island and built this city--Dagonia--and raised the natives to a level of cultural sophistication.  Dagonia thrived for "many ages," but then a tribe of people they had enslaved rose up against them, their leader armed with a magic dagger made of metal from a meteor--this dagger is the only weapon that can injure the demon!  The city dwellers who had worshipped the demon were exterminated, and the demon was paralyzed and laid to rest with the dagger on its chest.  

For centuries the descendants of the slaves who won their freedom lived in the city, but eventually under the stress of famine and plague and war their civilization fell and they dispersed to become tribal fishermen, and Dagonia went to ruin.  But just recently (as we saw in that first chapter) a fisherman--a descendent of those liberated slaves--accidentally freed the demon by moving the dagger, his people having forgotten the details of their own history.  The demon rebuilt the city and resurrected his worshippers, but, as Conan noticed when he interacted with them (including a woman who wanted Conan to have sex with her) these revenants are a scatterbrained and addlepated lot, who, haunted by their memories of being killed during the slave uprising and the knowledge that they are dead, sleep all day and only stir at night.

Conan meets up with Octavia (the sun having risen, the revenant who captured her is asleep) and they are pursued by the demon.  Cornered, it looks like they are doomed, but just then Jehungir and a squad of soldiers come to the island hunting for Conan.  While the demon is distracted by the task of killing the soldiers, Conan finds the magic dagger, though to secure the blade he has to fight a giant snake Octavia stupidly wakes up.  Jehungir, having eluded the demon, attacks Conan and is slain by our hero.  Then the demon attacks Conan, but the Cimmerian uses the magic dagger to kill it.  As the demon expires it reverts to its natural alien form; Dagonia--and its living dead inhabitants--return to ruin.

Conan grabs the beautiful Octavia--she initially resists his attentions but Conan doesn't know that "no" means "no" and she quickly succumbs to the charms of the irresistible he-man.  Oh Conan, you ladykiller!

This story isn't bad, though there are problems.  Having Conan learn the secret history of the city by telepathic leakage or whatever, as he does here in "The Devil in Iron," is even more absurd than learning the secret history of a city by finding an old scroll or looking at wall decorations like he did in "Servants of Bit-Yakin."  Maybe the living dead woman who wanted to have sex with him could have told him that stuff, like the princess who wanted to have sex with him in "Xuthal of the Dusk" told him the history of the lost city in that story?  I also wanted to see more of Jelal Kahn; we hear how much of a jerk he is, how he mistreated or was going to mistreat Octavia, and how his civilized perversity compares poorly to Conan's barbaric elemental vitality, so I expected him to accompany Jehungir to the island to be destroyed by Conan, but no dice.   

Among the many Conan collections in which "The Devil in Iron" has appeared is Conan the Wanderer, one of the Lancer/Ace Conan paperbacks which included pastiches by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp.  

"The Isle of Dark Magic" by Hugh B. Cave

Before I tell you all about this story that you could just as well read yourself for free (what is the point of this website again?), I'm going to lay some Hugh B. Cave trivia on you, gossip from the world of the weird culled from my flipping through volumes of the correspondence of H. P. Lovecraft in books published by Hippocampus Press.  In his correspondence, H. P. Lovecraft often harps on the distinction between popular writing done for money, and genuine literature, and argues that by writing for the pulps, talented people like Edmond Hamilton and E. Hoffmann Price threw away their gifts, getting into bad habits that inhibited their ability to produce the good work of which they were capable early in their careers.  (A good example of such a letter is Lovecraft's March 1935 letter to C. L. Moore in which he warns her against allowing this to happen to her--Moore, in an April 1935 response, says she "gets a tremendous lot of pleasure out of dealing in a slap-dash, wild-western manner with just the basics of cheap fiction you so dislike," and that besides, she needs the money.)  Hugh B. Cave is one of those people Lovecraft considered to have "sold out to commercialism" (letter to August Derleth of October 28, 1932) and HPL tells Derleth in an August 1932 letter that he got into "quite a fight with Hugh B. Cave on the subject of literary motivation;" Cave arguing a writer shouldn't get upset if an editor altered his work because writing is merely a business.  In a March 25, 1933 letter to Robert E. Howard, Lovecraft says "I simply can't read the crap [Otis Adelbert] Kline and Cave grind out...."  Ouch!  

Well, "The Isle of Dark Magic" appears to be a relatively well-respected piece (of crap?) by Cave--at least it was translated into French (the language of love!) and chosen as the title story for a French Cave collection--the hubba hubba sextastic cover even portrays one of the characters from "The Isle of Dark Magic!"  The story was also included in the American collection Murgumstrumm and Others.    

The narrator of this longish story (isfdb calls it a "novelette" and it takes up like 18 pages in WT) is a missionary, the only white man on a little South Pacific island.  Well, the only white man until the arrival of Peter Mace.  Mace is a skinny and nervous 25-year old who brings to the island with him a "large wooden packing-case;" he has come to the island to live the life of a hermit, having a house thrown together far from the missionary's house, on the other side of a jungle.  Mace acts strangely, exciting the curiosity of the native islanders, and he really lets himself go, giving up on shaving and hitting the bottle harder and harder until he's basically a drunk.  It takes a while, as Cave tries to build suspense, but eventually we learn what Mace's story is as he breaks down and relates it to the narrator.

As a medical student living in New York, Mace fell in love with a pretty girl, Mureen Kennedy, "a creature of the streets."  Mace was already an odd character, the kind of guy who is interested in forbidden books and conducts experiments that the medical establishment frowns upon, and in fact eventually got expelled from school, and when the impoverished Mureen died he went bonkers and began working on ways of "keeping her with me forever."  Mace had been hanging around with a sculptor in the Village, and he and this artiste took up thievery and got together enough money to buy a chunk of marble that the sculptor carved into an ultra-lifelike statue of a nude Mureen.  So that was what was in the packing-case!

Now, on the island, far from interference, Mace has been engaging in the rituals and casting the spells that his forbidden books tell him will bring the statue to life!  Mentally unbalanced and inebriated, he dares the narrator to come witness one of his rituals, apparently eager to show the missionary how irrevocably he has rejected the God of Abraham that is worshipped by squares, the God he blames for Mureen's death, and demonstrate how powerful are the diabolical alien gods he now worships.  During the ritual Mace calls upon Nyarlathotep and Hastur and name checks the Yellow Sign and the Black King and Yuggoth.  As the narrator watches in horror, the marble statue of the young woman stirs briefly, its face contorted in agony, but then goes still--bringing it to life will require seven such rituals, and this is only the fifth.

The narrator hears about the sixth ritual from a terrified native.  Then comes the day of the seventh and final ritual!  A veiled woman dressed in black, a woman who moves and speaks stiffly, arrives on the island, only the second person to come to the island in four years, Mace being the first.  The narrator leads this taciturn figure through the jungle to Mace's house, thinking it some relative of Mace's who can, the missionary hopes, bring the young man to his senses.  When they arrive, Mace has just finished the ritual and "the unnamable horrors of the world of darkness" Mace contacted have given the statue life!  He is embracing the stone woman and calling it his beloved!  But then the woman in black raises her veil--it is Mureen, risen from the grave!  Somehow she heard Mace calling to her and has crossed half the world to be with him.  Now Mace embraces this rickety corpse, and the stone woman, excited to homicidal jealousy, strangles first Mureen and then Mace to death, and then walks off into the jungle.  

The narrator proceeds to gather the island's small native population and they all flee the island in their canoes.

This story isn't bad, though perhaps too long, and I was kind of wondering about the logistics of moving a life-sized marble statue to Polynesia from New York (I guess sailors and natives helped this skinny wretch lug it), and of a living corpse making the same trip.  It is also unclear if Mace was trying to call Mureen's soul from the afterlife to bring life to the statue (which is what I, perhaps wrongfully, had assumed) or just asking Nyarlathotep et al to animate a statue that looked just like Mureen but wouldn't have her personality or memories.  Cave also doesn't do anything with the fact that Mace was a medical student (Mace doesn't use medical knowledge to animate the statue--probably Cave should have made Mace the sculptor) and doesn't exploit the South Sea Island setting--any remote location would have sufficed (it might have been better if Mace had come to Polynesia seeking a particular witch doctor or some specific material spell component, or maybe some spot on the globe where a specific conjunction of stars could be seen or something like that.)  

"The Beast-Helper" by Frank Belknap Long

I hope you enjoyed the Hugh B. Cave trivia, because there is Frank Belknap Long trivia where that came from.  (If you didn't enjoy it, um, maybe skip to the fourth paragraph?)  It seems that in the early 1930s Long was a hardcore supporter of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or at least that is the way H. P. Lovecraft tells it in letters to August Derleth and Robert E. Howard.  In a letter to Derleth from November 1932, Lovecraft, in the midst of a discussion of newspaper accounts claiming that Ivan Pavlov was not persecuted by Lenin's government, even though the famed scientist did not disguise his low opinion of the Communist Party's rule, says of Long, who was born in 1901 (HPL was born in 1890):

That young scamp (who has gone bolshevik in the past year) was quoting the case (whatever it was) only a couple of months ago in an effort to prove the liberality of his beloved soviets. 

In a December 1932 letter to Derleth, Lovecraft suggests that Long has aligned himself with Moscow merely in response to fashion, following the example of famous critic Edmund Wilson, Jr., but by October 1936, Lovecraft was himself singing the praises of the Soviet Union and government control of resources and allocation of jobs in a letter to C. L. Moore.  In one italicized and caps-heavy passage he explains to her that he once admired aristocracy because of the kind of culture it fosters, and that he has now come to see that socialism could deliver that culture of "non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage & generosity...."  Oh, brother!

Anyway, in an early 1935 letter to Lovecraft from Howard we find the paragraph:

I hope you enjoyed your trip to see Long in New York.  I learn with interest that Long is now a Communist.  But I suspected it when I read his story in Weird Tales some months ago--the one about the dictator and the ape.

That story, my friends, is the very story we are about to read, "The Beast-Helper."

Thompson is a thin man, "a profound skeptic and scientific humanist," and an American journalist.  Across from him sits a fat man, the dictator Kerriling, who took over the European nation of Trivania in "the November Revolution."  Thompson is in Trivania to interview the dictator, who tells him that in pursuit of his revolutionary cause he is going to crush all dissent.  During the interview, Thompson briefly sees a strange shadow on the wall, its shape much like a man's, but somehow distorted.

Later, at a restaurant, a man approaches Thompson.  It is one of Trivania's top scientists!  This joker invokes the name of Jung, and indulges in a lot of mumbo-jumbo about how beneath the human surface of our brains lurks an ape-mind, and beneath that a reptile-mind, and beneath that a fish-mind, etc.  Then he tells the story of how Kerriling compelled him with threats of execution to perform a terrible surgical procedure on him--and on a gorilla!  By implanting devices into Kerriling's brain and into the great ape's brain, and then connecting these devices for a brief period with a wire, he enabled Kerriling's ape-brain to talk to the gorilla's brain.  The gorilla gained some human discipline, but Kerriling became more beast-like!  Since then, Kerriling has used the gorilla as an assassin to knock off government officials like the Minister of War, the Minister of Finance, etc.  The prof warns Thompson that soon the gorilla will probably come after him!  

Sure enough, as Thompson is walking back to his hotel, taking the short route through a slum, the gorilla attacks!  But Thompson has a revolver, and he shoots the gorilla dead!  The dictator, I guess because he has a telepathic connection to the gorilla, suffers wounds similar to the gorilla's and also dies, liberating Trivania.

There are dramatic possibilities in the idea of a dictator in tune with a gorilla who uses the primate to kill people and is himself somehow altered by his communion with a beast.  But setting such a story in a 20th-century European dictatorship instead of a Conan or Grey Mouser fantasy world seems like a mistake.  Doesn't the dictator have an NKVD or Gestapo to kill his rivals and crush dissent?  Long doesn't do a good job of explaining the whole relationship between Kerriling and the gorilla; it wasn't made clear (to me at least) if Kerriling had a psychic/telepathic connection to the beast, or if he was just giving it orders verbally.  And during the first scene, the dictator's response to the shadow strongly hints he is losing control over the gorilla or is somehow scared of the gorilla, but Long never does anything with that idea.  

I recall complaining that Long's famous story "The Horror From the Hills" was full of non-sequiturs and superfluous matter that didn't add to the plot.  Even though "The Beast-Helper" is only seven and a half pages, it is similarly burdened with extraneous stuff, like that Jung "reptile-mind" lecture.  The suggestion that the brain connection between man and gorilla has made Kerriling more beastly is sterile, because Kerriling was already a ruthless and murderous dictator before the operation, and he doesn't do anything in the story that suggests he has changed--the scientist says, in italics, that "something from the beast flowed into him," but the effects of this change are never demonstrated.  Similarly, in that first scene, Long just comes out and tells us that Thompson has "more iron in him" than does the dictator, but Thompson doesn't do anything particularly courageous--when the gorilla attacks him the journalist is running to the hotel to pack and leave the country--and Kerriling never demonstrates cowardice--in fact, when the scientist talks about the operation, he specifically says that Kerriling was "fearless."

Gotta give "The Beast-Helper" a thumbs down.  All that foreshadowing that never bears fruit makes the story feel shoddy--did Long just write this story in one sitting, as he started the story laying the foundations for developments that he just abandoned as he approached the word count he had set for himself?  Lovecraft comes off as a jerk when he is bitching about the practices of pulp writers, but probably he has something there--maybe if Long had spent a few extra hours eliminating some of the dead ends in this story and fostering the blossoming of other of the seeds he planted early in the tale I could have given a positive review to this thing. 

Finally, Howard's claim that reading this story led him to suspect that Long had become a communist is a little dubious, as Long does not use the story to attack capitalism or extol socialism or revolutionism.  The hero of the story is an American and the villain is a dictator who came to power in a revolution, so one would be forgiven for thinking it actually an attack on Lenin or Stalin.

"The Beast-Helper" would have to wait until 2010 and Centipede Press's $450.00, 1100-page volume on Long in its Masters of the Weird Tale series to see republication.

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Well, I think we squeezed a lot of juice out of the August 1934 issue of Farnsworth Wright's magazine of the bizarre and unusual.  Stay tuned for more spelunking in the pages of Weird Tales.