Pulp Science Fiction Library: Deathworld

Though not my original intention, apparently I am going to be writing more posts about the stories that gave birth to the characters described at the back of the Traveller supplements 1001 Characters and Citizens of the Imperium. Taken together, these stories form something I elsewhere dubbed "Appendix T," being for Traveller what Appendix N was for AD&D: a window into the kinds of tales characters, and situations the creator of the game found notably enjoyable and/or influential on his thinking as he created it. 

A couple of years ago, I noted a "problem" with Appendix N and the putative Appendix T suffers from a similar problem. Marc Miller provides no commentary on the books and authors he cites, leaving it to us to figure out what and in what way they were inspirational to him. This is in contrast to, say, the literary appendix found in RuneQuest, which is much more explicit about the debts owed to its contents. This fact in no way lessens the value of reading any of these books, but it does sometimes make it harder to declare definitively that this or that element of a roleplaying game was based on something from a particular book.

And sometimes it's quite obvious. That would seem to be the case for Harry Harrison's 1960 novel, Deathworld, which was originally serialized over the course of six issues of Astounding Science Fiction before being collected under a single cover and published separately by Bantam in September of the same year. The book's success would result in two sequels, both of which were also serialized in Analog (the new name of Astounding) in 1964 and 1968 respectively. Though I've read all three of these novels, this post focuses primarily on the first and, in my opinion, best of the trilogy.

Deathworld follows the adventures of Jason dinAlt, a gambler with limited psionic abilities that prove useful to him in his chosen vocation. Jason travels to the planet Pyrrus after impressing its ambassador with his skill at gambling. Pyrrus possesses an extraordinarily hostile environment, consisting of high gravity, violent weather, seismic instability, radiation, and a biosphere in which every organism, from animals to plants to microbes is lethally adapted to kill humans. Pyrrus is quite literally a deathworld and Jason seeks to test his mettle against its many dangers. Gambling is not just his profession, it's also representative of his character. He's a risk taker by nature and the deadliness of Pyrrus intrigues him on almost a primal level. 

The planet's settlers survive there only through constant training and militarized discipline. Despite this, enough of them still die that their numbers continue to dwindle. Consequently, Jason becomes intrigued by why the planet is so uniformly hostile and why the colony is failing despite the extreme measures it has taken. While doing so, Jason discovers a second group of human colonists, the “grubbers,” who live in the wilderness in relative harmony with Pyrrus. Unlike the city dwellers, whom they call "junkmen," the grubbers use psionic “talkers” to coexist with the planet’s life and kill only when necessary. Jason then comes to realize that the biosphere of Pyrrus itself is psionic and reacting collectively to the behavior of the colonists who have settled on it. Thus, around the city, all life is telepathically unified in hostility, responding to their constant aggression with coordinated, evolving attacks. Attempts by the city dwellers to destroy the source of this hostility only worsen the situation, confirming that the conflict is systemic rather than merely localized.

Having discovered this, Jason theorizes that Pyrrus is not inherently a deathworld but has only become such in response to human attitudes. The city dwellers' indiscriminate violence has triggered the planet’s ecosystem into treating them as an existential threat, while the grubbers’ more balanced approach allows a degree of coexistence. Jason's solution is, therefore, not technological but cultural. He proposes the gradual integration of the two groups of colonists, with exchange of knowledge and a shift toward living in harmony with the planet's environment. In this way, Jason offers them a path by which Pyrrus can cease to be a deathworld and become a home better suited to human life.

As I said, it's pretty easy to see what this book inspired in Traveller. First, there's Jason dinAlt himself, who's an archetypal space-going adventurer, driven by a desire to challenge himself against whatever the galaxy throws at him. Second, there's the low-level psionic abilities, something Traveller has included since the beginning. Third, and probably more importantly, there's the mystery surrounding the deadly nature of Pyrrus and its environment. Traveller adventures are full of planets like this, where its society, history, or environment (or some combination of them) are presented as problems to be solved. Taken together, Deathworld strikes me as having obvious connections to Marc Miller's masterpiece.

On a personal note, I came to Deathworld and its sequels because of having read Harrison's other series of pulp sci-fi romps featuring the Stainless Steel Rat. Though different in both their content and overt style, the two series share certain traits, most notably their social satire and use of Esperanto. Though I can't be certain, I believe it was one or the other of these series that first introduced me to the constructed language and I've been an admirer of it ever since. That's why Thousand Suns employs Esperanto as a stand-in for the universal Terran language of the setting. Regardless, Deathworld is a quick, fun read and worth your time if you can find a copy. It's short and unpretentious, both of which I consider cardinal virtues in a literary age replete with their opposites.

Pulp Science Fiction Library: Demon Princes

The trouble with Muses is that, ultimately, they're in control, not you. As I continue to work on the second edition of Thousand Suns – the draft is now close to half complete – my mind has been wandering ever farther away from the more well-known varieties of fantasy. Of course, as I recently argued, there's still lots of overlap between these two genres and not merely in terms of content. Many of the most talented and influential writers of the past tried their hands at both and succeeded brilliantly.

A good case in point is Jack Vance. Vance is a paladin of Appendix N, being one of only a handful of writers Gary Gygax singled out as being one of the "most immediate influences" upon his vision of Dungeon & Dragons. Of course, Gygax did so for Vance's tales of the Dying Earth, whose magic system he adopted for the game, and not for his science fiction tales, of which there are a great many – indeed, far more than his fantasy stories. 

Among the most celebrated of Vance's sci-fi works is his "Demon Princes" series, the first of which, Star King, was serialized in the December 1963 and February 1964 issues of Galaxy Magazine before being published by Berkeley Books later in '64. The first three books in the five-book series appeared fairly quickly, with The Killing Machine also appearing in 1964 and The Palace of Love in 1967. The fourth and fifth books, The Face and The Book of Dreams, did not appear until more than a decade later, in 1979 and 1981 respectively, which was right around the time I first entered the hobby of roleplaying. 

However, I wouldn't take much note of any of these books until several years into my introduction to Traveller. That places it somewhere in the vicinity of 1982 or '83, depending on when it was that I first acquired Citizens of the Imperium. That supplement, along with 1001 Characters, is notable for having included Traveller stats for a selection of literary SF characters, ranging from John Carter of Mars to Slippery Jim diGriz to Dominic Flandry. At the time, I already knew many of these names from novels and stories I'd read. Others, though, were new to me and they sent me off to the local public library on a quest. 

Among those unfamiliar names would be that of Kirth Gersen. Citizens of the Imperium associates him specifically with the second book in the series, The Killing Machine, but also mentions it as part of a five-book "Demon Princes" series. To my youthful mind, "Demon Princes" didn't sound like the title for a science fiction series, so I was initially confused as to why it was included alongside more well-known pillars of SF. Likewise, I had not yet read any of Vance's space operas, so my confusion was only heightened. Fortunately for me, I eventually got around to tracking down Star King and its four sequels. I enjoyed them so much that I sought out more of Vance's science fiction and the rest is history.

The titular Demon Princes of the series are not supernatural entities by five interstellar crime bosses, against whom Gersen wishes to exact revenge for their past in bringing ruin upon his home planet. Having been trained by his grandfather for this purpose, Gersen dedicates his life to hunting down them down so that justice may be done. Each of the five novels follows his pursuit of one of these Demon Princes. Though the novels include plenty of action, one of the things that's most interesting about them – or at least is to me – is how much investigation and infiltration they include. Gersen's efforts to locate his quarry, some of whom have gone to great efforts to conceal their identities, is every bit as central to Vance's stories as is dealing with them once they've been found.

Though linked, each novel presents a largely self-contained exploration of a different world or culture, often shaped by the personality of the Demon Prince Gersen is presently seeking. Consequently, the series, like so much of Vance's oeuvre, is a picaresque adventure through strange societies with elaborate social codes and fragmented political systems where justice is personal rather than institutional. That makes Gersen’s quest more than just a hunt for enemies; it becomes an extended engagement with questions of identity, culture, and obsession in the far future, all of which play to Vance's strengths as a writer and storyteller.

Prior to writing this post, it had been decades since I last read any of the Demon Princes novels and that's a shame. Like so many of the books that inspired Traveller, they're fast-paced, pulpy adventures filled with quirky and memorable characters and equally quirky and memorable situations. They're not deep scientific speculations about a possible future and that's OK. Sometimes, you just want to read a fun, engaging novel about one man's quest to bring justice to some bad guys who deserve what's coming to them. In that respect, the Demon Princes series delivers and does so enjoyably.

Pulp Science Fiction Library: The Rebel Worlds

I'm sure it'll come as no surprise, given my recent posts here and over on my Substack, that I'm in a decidedly science fictional frame of mind of late. As work continues on the second edition of Thousand Suns, I'm finding it harder and harder to maintain any focus on fantasy, which usually occupies pride of place on the blog. Consequently, when I started pondering which story or novel I'd discuss today, I immediately thought of the tales of Poul Anderson's interstellar secret agent, Dominic Flandry, sometimes called "the James Bond of science fiction," even though he first appeared two years before Ian Fleming's much more famous character.

The Flandry stories have long been favorites of mine. I was probably introduced to them through Traveller, whose Third Imperium setting borrows liberally from Anderson's "Technic" future history featuring Flandry and his predecessors, Nicholas van Rijn and David Falkayn. Though I fell in love with these tales for their espionage-inflected action, what ultimately solidified their place in my affections was their understated melancholy. Flandry, as an officer of the Imperial Navy, is duty-bound to defend a sclerotic empire he knows is dying because he believes the alternative – the Long Night – is worse. Something about that spoke to me, even in my teen years, and, the older I get, the more it does so.

This theme is central to Anderson's 1969 novel of Flandry, The Rebel Worlds. The novel begins with Flandry being dispatched to Alpha Crucis sector to deal with the titular rebellion brewing there. The uprising began after Admiral Hugh McCormac, a respected and decorated officer, uncovers corruption abuses by the imperial governor of the sector. McCormac attempts to remove the governor, as is his right, but is instead arrested, along with his wife. The admiral eventually escapes custody and becomes the leader of a growing insurgency, not just against the corrupt governor but against the Empire itself. 

Flandry is ordered by Naval Intelligence to deal with this problem, but, as he investigates conditions in the sector, he finds that the rebels’ grievances are legitimate and that imperial rule there has indeed become exploitative and short-sighted. Complicating matters further, he becomes personally entangled with people connected to the rebellion, including the admiral’s wife, with whom he falls in love. Despite his sympathy for the rebels, Flandry ultimately concludes that allowing the revolt to succeed would weaken the Empire at a critical moment and hasten its ultimate collapse, an outcome he cannot countenance. He therefore works, with reluctance and increasing cynicism, to undermine the rebellion and restore imperial control, even as he recognizes that any victory he achieves for the Empire is only temporary but comes at the cost of justice. 

What I most enjoy about The Rebel Worlds is Anderson’s refusal to grant either Flandry or the reader a moral "escape hatch." The rebellion is justified; there is no doubt about that. Admiral McCormac is an honorable man responding to genuine abuses and his grievances against the Empire are real. Flandry himself recognizes this. Even so, he also believes that the consequences of successful revolt, even one undertaken for the "right" reasons, would serve as a catalyst for the Empire's collapse. The novel thus presents its central conflict as being between competing goods rather between something so simple as "good" and "evil."

This is the thematic core of the Flandry series. The Terran Empire is thoroughly corrupt and declining, but it still serves as a bulwark against the coming dark age of fragmentation and loss. Flandry is under no illusions about the Empire’s flaws. Indeed, the tragedy of the character lies in his clear-eyed understanding of them. Nevertheless, he chooses to defend it, not out of loyalty, let alone optimism, but because he judges the alternative to be worse. His is a calculus of decline, where every action preserves a flawed order at the cost of perpetuating its injustices.

That tension gives The Rebel Worlds its melancholy. Flandry’s wit, his indulgence in pleasure, even his romantic entanglement with McCormac's wife serve as a way of enduring the burden he carries. He succeeds in crushing the rebellion, but the victory is hollow. Because of his actions, the Empire endures for a little while longer. The Long Night is only postponed rather than prevented. That's enough for Flandry – or at least that's what he keeps telling himself in both this story and the others Anderson write about him.

If I may be so bold, I'd argue that The Rebel Worlds is about tragic responsibility. Though carrying himself with great panache, Flandry is not a hero who saves the day. Rather, he is a man who kicks the can of interstellar collapse down the road a little farther in the hope that, at the very least, he will never experience it during his lifetime. For Flandry, there are no clean choices, only necessary ones. Anderson's talent as a writer is that he doesn't cheer this or present it in a cool or edgy way. It's ultimately sad and tragic and that's probably why it continues to resonate with me after all these years. 

Pulp Science Fantasy Library: Empire of the East

Having enjoyed revisiting Hiero's Journey in last week’s installment of Pulp (Science) Fantasy Library, I thought I would continue along a similar path this week with 1979's Empire of the East. Before turning to the book itself, however, a bit of context is helpful.

Empire of the East is not a wholly new novel but an omnibus edition that gathers together three earlier works by Fred Saberhagen, The Broken Lands, The Black Mountains, and Changeling Earth. In preparing the omnibus edition, Saberhagen revised portions of the original texts so that they would read more smoothly as a single, unified narrative rather than three loosely connected installments. The result is a work that functions much more clearly as an epic novel than the original publications did.

Of these three component books, only Changeling Earth appears in Gary Gygax's Appendix N. The absence of the earlier volumes is somewhat curious, since they are integral parts of the same story. One possible explanation is that Gygax regarded Changeling Earth as representative of the trilogy as a whole, but this is only speculation. Regardless, the series as a whole exemplifies the kind of exuberant science fantasy that almost certainly helped inspire many early role-playing campaigns and adventures.

One of the central conceits of Empire of the East is that sufficiently advanced technology might appear indistinguishable from magic. By the 1950s and 1960s, the concept (immortalized as Clarke's Third Law) had already appeared in numerous science fiction stories. Saberhagen, however, approached the notion from a different direction. Rather than presenting magic as misunderstood technology, he imagined a catastrophe in which technology itself had literally been transformed into magic. It is an intriguing inversion of a familiar idea and one that gives the setting much of its distinctive flavor.

In Saberhagen’s imagined past, mankind fought a devastating war using immensely powerful computers capable of manipulating the laws of physics to achieve specific military ends. At the height of that conflict, these systems inadvertently triggered a phenomenon known as the Change. The Change permanently altered the behavior of the physical universe, rendering advanced technology unreliable or entirely inoperable. In its place arose a new set of forces that later generations would understand as magic. Over time, as knowledge of the pre-Change world faded, people came to regard magic not as a transformation of technology but simply as the natural order of things.

Within this transformed world stands the titular Empire of the East, a tyranny that dominates vast territories through a combination of sorcery and alliances with demonic powers. (The Change, it turns out, did more than reshape machines: it also gave rise to supernatural beings, including a powerful demon named Orcus, a name that will sound familiar to fans of Dungeons & Dragons.) Against this empire stands a loose resistance movement known as the Free Folk.

The story begins with Rolf, a young man whose life is shattered when imperial forces destroy his village and carry off his family. Escaping captivity, he joins the Free Folk and soon begins receiving mysterious visions from an unseen entity called Ardneh. These visions guide him on a path that gradually reveals the deeper mysteries of his world. During his adventures, Rolf discovers an “Elephant,” an ancient armored vehicle from before the Change. To the people of his era, it appears to be a kind of legendary mechanical beast, but in truth it is a relic of the lost technological age. In a world where such artifacts are almost unknown, the Elephant becomes both a symbol of hope and a tangible advantage against the Empire.

As Rolf’s role within the resistance grows, the truth about Ardneh gradually comes to light. Ardneh is not a spirit or a wizard but a surviving artificial intelligence created before the Change. Long ago, it intervened to prevent global nuclear destruction. In doing so, however, it inadvertently helped trigger the very transformation that reshaped the world into its current magical form. The Empire, aided by the demon Orcus, seeks to destroy Ardneh and thereby secure its domination forever.

The narrative ultimately builds toward a large-scale confrontation between the Free Folk, guided by Ardneh, and the armies and supernatural forces of the Empire. It should surprise no one that the forces of resistance prevail in the end, though the victory comes only after the underlying truth about the world is revealed and some of the consequences of the Change are reversed.

I confess that I do not have a clear sense of how influential Empire of the East was when it first appeared, whether in its original installments or in its omnibus form. Apart from Gygax’s reference to Changeling Earth in Appendix N, I rarely encountered discussion of it during the years when I was first exploring fantasy literature. More often, the trilogy seems to arise in conversation as background to Saberhagen’s later The First Book of Swords and its sequels. Those novels appear to have achieved greater visibility, perhaps simply because they formed a longer and more widely published series.

Nevertheless, I think Empire of the East stands as an appealing example of a once-common strain of science fantasy featuring a magical world that is, in fact, the distant future of our own Earth. During my youth, such settings were remarkably popular, blending the wonder of fantasy with the speculative imagination of science fiction. Saberhagen’s trilogy embraces that hybrid approach wholeheartedly. By transforming the relics of advanced technology into the foundations of a magical world, he created a setting that feels at once ancient and futuristic, which, being a fan of "secret sci-fi," continues to hold great appeal for me.

Pulp Science Fantasy Library: Hiero's Journey

Today, I'm being doubly cheeky. First and most obviously, I've decided to dub today's post an entry in the previously non-existent Pulp Science Fantasy Library series. In the past, I've occasionally run posts under the Pulp Science Fiction Library title, so this isn't wholly without precedent. In the case of Hiero's Journey, though, I think it's a reasonable modification, since it's definitely not a fantasy book in the usual Tolkien/Howard sense most people understand the term, but neither is it a "proper" science fiction tale of the sort that could have appeared in Gernsback's Amazing Stories.

Second, this is another book I have discussed before, albeit briefly. Like last week's post, this too was part of the Pulp Fantasy Gallery series, an early series that I more or less abandoned after a while (though I have revived a version of it from time to time, many to discuss the different pieces of artwork that have graced the covers of famous fantasy books). In any case, I like Hiero's Journey enough that I thought it would be productive to do a full post on it and its relationship to the history of RPGs.

Though first published in 1973, I didn't read Sterling Lanier's post-apocalyptic tale until almost a decade later, when I chanced upon it in a bookstore at the local mall. Though Gary Gygax listed the book in Appendix N, I am almost certain the first time I ever saw a reference to it was in the foreword to Gamma World, which is why I picked it up. I instantly fell in love with it. If I had to pick a single book that captures my own sense of what Gamma World was meant to be, I'd probably choose Hiero's Journey. Certainly, it's the book that, even now, I still find myself subconsciously influenced by whenever I try to imagine what the game is and should be.

Lanier himself is an interesting fellow. As a writer, he produced only a small number of works, of which Hiero’s Journey is probably the best known (and that's being kind). For a time, he worked as an editor at Chilton Books, where he was involved in bringing Frank Herbert's Dune to publication after having read it in serialized form in Analog magazine. Herbert had had great difficulty in selling his novel elsewhere, but Lanier believed it would sell well. When it didn't, he lost his job at Chilton, which led to his taking up writing more seriously.

Hiero’s Journey is set in North America thousands of years after a catastrophic nuclear war referred to simply as “the Death.” The devastation of that ancient conflict reduced the technological civilization of the past to scattered ruins and reshaped the natural world in unexpected ways. Mutated animals roam the wilderness, some hostile, others capable of domestication, while human societies have reorganized themselves into small states and tribal cultures amid the remnants of the old world.

The novel’s protagonist, Per Hiero Desteen, is a priest-scholar belonging to a monastic order known simply as the Abbey, located within the Republic of Metz, a polity occupying part of what was once Canada. The Abbey preserves fragments of ancient learning and trains individuals with psychic abilities, including telepathy, which have become an important if poorly understood feature of the post-Death world.

At the outset of the novel, Hiero is dispatched on a secret mission by the leaders of the Abbey. Rumors suggest that somewhere to the south lies a cache of ancient knowledge about relics called "computers" that might aid the Republic of Metz in its ongoing struggle against a shadowy group known as the Dark Brotherhood. These enemies, whose influence extends across large portions of the former United States, employ both advanced relic technology of their own and psychic powers in pursuit of domination over the scattered civilizations that survived the Death.

Hiero’s titular journey takes him across a landscape that is at once recognizably North American and yet profoundly altered by millennia of mutation, ecological change, and cultural transformation. Along the way he encounters both allies and enemies, from human societies struggling to survive in the wilderness to intelligent animals capable of communication and monstrous creatures born from the lingering consequences of ancient radiation and experimentation.

One of the most distinctive aspects of the novel in my opinion is the way it blends several types of science fiction. On the one hand, the novel clearly belongs to the lineage of post-nuclear adventure stories that became common during the Cold War, exploring the long shadow cast by nuclear catastrophe. On the other hand, Lanier freely incorporates elements, such as psychic powers, telepathic animals, and quasi-medieval social structures, that give the setting a distinctly fantasy character. The resulting world feels less like a conventional science fiction future and more like a kind of Lost World romance set amid the ruins of modern civilization. That's probably why I so enjoyed the novel when I first read it.

It's also probably why Gary Gygax saw fit to include it in Appendix N to the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. Though set in post-apocalyptic North America, so much of the story's elements feel as if they could be part of an eccentric Dungeons & Dragons campaign, with psychic powers substituting for spells and ancient technology standing in for magic items. Of course, these qualities are also why the novel almost perfectly encapsulates what Gamma World is about, at least for me. The first time I read this book, I felt as if I finally understood Gamma World in a way I hadn't before. It might be an exaggeration to say this is the "key" to the game, but there's no question in my mind that it's helpful in getting into the mood for playing or refereeing it.

Lanier did write a sequel, The Unforsaken Hiero, which came out in 1983, shortly after I read the original. As follow-ups go, it's fine but nowhere near as good as its predecessor. Lanier was working on a third novel in the series but it was never released during his lifetime. Supposedly, it was finished by another author and published in 2024, but I've never read it and have doubts that it's any good. I had bad experiences with the sequel to A Canticle for Leibowitz being released under similar circumstances, so I'm quite wary of these posthumous collaborations. If anyone knows otherwise, I'd love to hear about it.

Pulp Fantasy Library: Dwellers in the Mirage

Despite the fact that I’ve long championed the fiction of Abraham Merritt on this blog, I’ve somehow never devoted a proper Pulp Fantasy Library post to his 1932 novel Dwellers in the Mirage. That omission is especially glaring given that it’s one of only three Merritt works singled out by Gary Gygax in Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, the other two being Creep, Shadow! and The Moon Pool. In my defense, I did write about Dwellers years ago, but that was for the short-lived Pulp Fantasy Gallery, not this series. Correcting that oversight has also reminded me how easily certain classics slip through the cracks simply because one assumes they’ve already been treated. I intend to rectify that in the weeks and months ahead.

First serialized in Argosy magazine across six issues in early 1932, Dwellers in the Mirage perfectly captures a transitional moment in fantastic fiction. The 19th-century Lost World romance had not yet entirely vanished, but it had begun to darken and mutate under the influence of the weird tales of the pulps. Merritt’s novel stands squarely at this crossroads. Its protagonist, Leif Langdon, an American of Norwegian descent, is exploring Alaska when he stumbles upon a warm, hidden valley cut off from the outside world. There he discovers two ancient peoples locked in ceaseless conflict and, more disturbingly, the worship of a monstrous, tentacled deity named Khalk’ru, whose cult demands blood sacrifice.

As if this weren't complication enough, Langdon gradually learns that he is the reincarnation of Dwayanu, a legendary warrior from the valley’s past. The memories and passions of that former life begin to surface, creating a psychological tension that drives much of the novel. The struggle against Khalk’ru is thus not merely external but internal. Langdon must reconcile his modern identity with the shadow of an older, more ruthless self. In doing so, Merritt transforms what might have been a straightforward lost race adventure into a story of possession, temptation, and the perilous allure of power.

That fusion of elements is one of the novel’s strengths. Merritt weaves together reincarnation, romance, occultism, lost civilizations, and cosmic horror with a confidence that makes the whole feel seamless rather than overstuffed. The narrative moves briskly, pausing just long enough to explore the psychological toll of Langdon’s divided soul and the seductive pull of Khalk’ru’s terrible grandeur. Merritt’s prose is, as always, lush, rhythmic, and incantatory. He imbues even the more conventional adventure scenes with a dreamlike intensity. The result is a tale that transcends its pulpy origins without abandoning them.

By 1932, Merritt was among the most popular and respected writers in the American pulps. Earlier novels such as The Metal Monster and The Ship of Ishtar had already established him as a master of exotic fantasy steeped in ancient civilizations and occult forces. Dwellers in the Mirage is very much in this vein as well, but it also exemplifies how far the genre had evolved from its Victorian antecedents. Where Haggard and Doyle offered rationalist heroes confronting marvels at the edges of empire, Merritt presents a world in which the marvelous is tinged with cosmic dread and psychological ambiguity. The adventures in both are similar, but Merritt's version embraces the weid and uncanny.

Khalk’ru himself deserves special mention. Readers have long debated whether this tentacled, malign entity was intended as an homage to H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu or represents a case of parallel invention. Lovecraft greatly admired Merritt and the two even collaborated on the round-robin story “The Challenge from Beyond.” While their styles differ markedly, both writers were captivated by the intrusion of ancient, inhuman powers into the modern world. Merritt’s vision is ultimately more romantic and mythic. His heroes are not reduced to insignificance before the abyss. Instead, they resist it. Cosmic horror still remains, but Merritt believes it can be confronted and, at least temporarily, overcome. In this respect, Dwellers in the Mirage thus anticipates later sword-and-sorcery fiction, in which bold heroes pit their wills against dark gods and sorcerous tyrants. One can readily see why Gygax valued the novel highly enough to cite it in Appendix N. 

Some of Merritt’s fiction is more significant as a historical artifact than as living literature. Dwellers in the Mirage, however, retains an immediacy that makes it rewarding for its own sake. It is delightfully atmospheric and filled with both memorable characters and situations. More than that, it stands as a vivid testament to a moment when pulp fantasy had finally coalesced into its own distinct genre, one that would go on to influence not only later fantasy literature but also comic books, movies, and other forms of popular entertainment.

If you've never had the chance to read the novel before, I highly recommend you do so. There's a wonderful new edition of the novel available through DMR Books that I cannot recommend enough.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Thing on the Roof

When I restarted the Pulp Fantasy Library series back in September, I did so primarily because I knew I could devote myself to writing about every H.P. Lovecraft story associated with the Dreamlands, even tangentially. Because there are a lot of stories that fit this description, I didn't have to think much about which story I'd write next, which eased a lot of the burden I'd previously felt about the series. Now that I've concluded that project, I find myself once again pondering what next to write about and I felt some of my former apprehension return. After all, with 350 entries to date, I've written about most (though not all) of the obvious stories.

Because I'd devoted the first month of the year to Clark Ashton Smith rather than to his colleague and fellow January baby, Robert E. Howard, I thought a good way to solve my immediate problem was to find one of his stories I'd never covered before. REH was a prolific writer and, while his tales of Conan and Solomon Kane are probably his best and most well-known, there's still a wealth of options to choose from, especially if I wanted something a little off the beaten path. That's when I remembered "The Thing on the Roof."

Originally published in the February 1932 issue of Weird Tales, "The Thing on the Roof" is a horror story in the vein of Lovecraft's tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. I first came across it in the early '90s in an anthology of Howard's horror fiction edited by David Drake and then, later, encountered an adaptation of it from an early '70s Marvel comic book (Chamber of Chills issue #3). Compared to, say, "Pigeons from Hell," which is likely the most celebrated of Howard's horror yarns, "The Thing on the Roof" is a much more modest affair, but it's still interesting nonetheless, if only for its slightly different take on "Lovecraftian" subject matter.

The story itself is quite short and fairly straightforward. Its unnamed narrator is a scholar and book collector. He is unexpectedly approached by his academic rival, Tussmann, who offers to publicly retract his previous aspersions on his work in exchange for help obtaining the rare 1839 “black book” edition of Friedrich von Junzt’s Nameless Cults. Tussmann has become obsessed with a passage describing a remote “Temple of the Toad” in Honduras, where a mummy wearing a toad-shaped red jewel supposedly guards a hidden treasure and believes only the 1839 edition contains a full description of the temple. After months of effort, the narrator secures a copy and Tussmann confirms that the original text contains crucial details omitted from later editions. Claiming firsthand knowledge of the temple from a previous expedition, Tussmann then departs for Central America determined to recover the treasure of the temple, convinced that the jewel is, in fact, a key to a store of gold concealed beneath the altar.

Months later, Tussmann summons the narrator to his Sussex estate, where he reveals that he found no gold, only the mummy and the strange jewel, which indeed opened a hidden passage beneath the temple. His account of what lay below is evasive and unsettling and he appears increasingly unstable, hinting that he may have awakened something when he used the jewel to open a subterranean crypt. The narrator, rereading von Junzt, realizes the horrifying implication: the “treasure” was not gold but the temple’s monstrous god. That night, amid strange noises and signs of an unseen presence, Tussmann locks himself in his room with the jewel. The narrator later breaks in to find him dead, his skull crushed by what appears to be the imprint of a gigantic hoof and the jewel missing, suggesting that whatever was released from the temple has followed its key back to England.

As a story, "The Thing on the Roof" is a modest affair. Most of the story consists of conversations between the narrator and Tussmann, as the two discuss historical details about von Juntz, the Temple of the Toad, and related matters. For a Robert E. Howard tale, it's devoid of almost any action, which is probably its most remarkable quality. As a story, it's fine – nothing special but perfectly serviceable for the kind of story it is. For whatever reason, Howard himself really like the tale, writing in a 1930 letter to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith that "this story is by far the best thing I have ever written and one which I am really inclined to believe approaches real literature, distantly, at least." Even overlooking an author's inevitable blindness about his own material, REH's self-assessment is overly charitable.

"The Thing on the Roof" is worth a read, because it's quick and has a few interesting elements, even if it's far from Howard at his best. Sometimes, even Homer nods. 

Pulp Fantasy Library: H.P. Lovecraft and the Literature of Longing (Part II)

It is tempting to draw a sharp line between H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales and his cosmic horror fiction. I do not believe, however, that this division is as firm as it appears. The Dreamlands stories and those of the so-called Cthulhu Mythos are not separate creations so much as different angles on the same vision. In both, Lovecraft presents mankind as small. In both, the powers beyond humanity are indifferent, remote, and often hostile. In both, the pursuit of knowledge leads not to enlightenment but to disillusionment. The difference lies primarily in tone and imagery. The Dreamlands stories dress these ideas in velvet and moonlight rather than slime and starlight.

This becomes increasingly clear in Lovecraft’s later dream tales, where the Dreamlands grow darker and more overtly connected to his cosmic horror. The Plateau of Leng, for example, belongs to both realms. It appears first as a dreamlike landscape of cold and mystery, but later becomes a threshold to something far more alien. Likewise, Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, the messenger of the Outer Gods, enters the Dreamlands not as a jarring intrusion but as a natural inhabitant of that realm. All of this suggests that the Dreamlands are not an escape from the Mythos. They are instead another way of approaching it. Dreaming is not a refuge from cosmic indifference, merely a different form of it.

“The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” is often treated as the key to understanding Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories and with good reason. It is his most expansive narrative set there, consisting of a long episodic journey in which Randolph Carter travels across the dream world in search of the “sunset city” he has seen in visions. Carter believes the gods have stolen this city from him and he seeks to confront them and reclaim it.

On the surface, the story is a fairly typical fantasy quest. Carter journeys from place to place, encounters strange beings, bargains with ghouls, is saved by cats, and eventually reaches the cold, forbidding heights of Kadath. The Dreamlands are presented here in perhaps their fullest form, populated by both familiar names and new terrors. Yet a careful reading reveals that, despite outward appearances, this is not a tale of heroic adventure at all. Carter is not seeking to restore order or defeat evil. He seeks only personal fulfillment. He believes that somewhere in the Dreamlands there is a Beauty that will satisfy his longing.

Nyarlathotep’s revelation at the end of the tale is one of Lovecraft’s most moving statements about the imagination. Carter’s sunset city is not something stolen by the gods. It is something he already possesses, namely, his own memory, transformed by dream into something seemingly unattainable. The gods have not taken his desire from him; his desire has taken him away from himself. This is no mere literary twist. Indeed, it could be read as the thesis statement of Lovecraft’s dream tales as a whole. The dreamer’s longing is not truly directed outward toward some distant paradise. It is directed inward, toward something irrecoverable, like childhood, innocence, or the first encounter with wonder.

This is why the dream tales cannot end in triumph. Even when the dreamer finds what he seeks, he cannot keep it. The Dreamlands can offer wonder, but they cannot resolve longing. They can only intensify it, often to the point of existential suffering.

One reason I find these stories so attractive is that they represent Lovecraft’s most sustained attempt to write against modernity. In his horror fiction, modernity is presented as a thin veneer over ancient terror. Science and progress do not protect man; they merely reveal how little control he has. In the Dreamlands, by contrast, modernity is not terrifying so much as impoverished. The dreamer flees the modern world because it cannot satisfy his imagination. Lovecraft’s narrators frequently describe contemporary life as gray, repetitive, and spiritually barren. The Dreamlands, by contrast, are filled with ancient streets, mysterious temples, forgotten gods, and landscapes untouched by industry. They are not simply exotic. They are pre-modern in the most Romantic sense, a world where the past is not history but present.

This is not an incidental feature but a central one. The Dreamlands tales are fueled by a profound dissatisfaction with the contemporary world and a longing for something older, richer, and more enchanted. The irony, of course, is that Lovecraft does not ultimately believe such enchantment can be recovered. The Dreamlands are not a return to the past. They are a fantastical counterfeit of it and, as such, ultimately unsatisfying. This is why so many of the most powerful moments in these stories are tinged with melancholy. Even at their most wondrous, they carry the sense that the dreamer is pursuing something that cannot last.

If Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories have a unifying subject, it is the imagination itself, not merely its power or necessity, but also its danger. These stories are not truly escapist. They do not reassure the reader that there is a better world waiting just beyond the wall of sleep. Instead, they explore the cost of wanting such a world. The suffering dreamers experience in these tales reveals the limits of the human condition. Dreams can show beauty but cannot grant permanence. They can open doors but cannot change the fundamental indifference of the universe. They can provide refuge, but only by separating the dreamer from everything else.

For that reason, I do not think Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories can be separated cleanly from his cosmic horror. They are another side of the same coin, one Lovecraft continued to flip throughout his life. Both bodies of work are concerned with the human desire for meaning, beauty, and transcendence in a universe that does not promise any of these things.

The Dreamlands tales do, however, allow Lovecraft to approach this concern through longing rather than terror. They are the literature of yearning rather than dread, even if their conclusions are not so different. The dreamer may travel far, meet gods, and glimpse wonders beyond imagining. In the end, though, he remains what he always was – a fragile consciousness, haunted by desire and unable to hold what he most wants.

Whether that is comforting or terrifying is likely a matter of temperament. It may well be both. I do not think Lovecraft ever fully resolved this tension, even in his own mind, which makes sense, since it may be intractable. I know I feel it ever more keenly as I get older, hence the continued fascination I have with these stories and the man who struggled for most of his life trying to give shape to longing, only to discover that it cannot be satisfied, only endured.

Pulp Fantasy Library: H.P. Lovecraft and the Literature of Longing (Part I)

This week’s Pulp Fantasy Library post is going to be a little different. After spending several months re-reading the stories commonly associated with H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, I wanted to gather my thoughts in one place. It’s been a long-running project and it seems to deserve a proper send-off. I should also note at the outset that I’ve lately been in a melancholy mood, which likely accounts for some of the tone of what follows, as well as its length. What I’m offering here (and in tomorrow’s conclusion) isn’t intended as a definitive statement so much as an attempt to make sense of a number of impressions that have been accumulating for a while now.

Lovecraft’s present literary reputation rests on his stories in which human beings confront the indifferent vastness of the universe and discover how little mankind matters. Alongside these, however, he wrote another kind of tale, the so-called Dreamlands stories. These fantasies unfold in strange cities and landscapes of impossible antiquity, where remote gods brood, cats are not quite what they seem, and dreamers wander. Fans of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror frequently treat these stories as merely youthful imitations of Lord Dunsany and thus diversions from his “real” work.

To be fair, there is some truth to that assessment. The Dreamlands stories do not constitute a “series” in any strict sense. They were written over the course of many years, in different moods, and for different purposes. Some are little more than exercises in stylized diction, while others are surprisingly straightforward. A few are whimsical, while several are bleak. Even Randolph Carter, the character most often associated with these tales (and with Lovecraft himself), does not appear in most of them, and the Dreamlands themselves shift in tone and detail from one story to the next.

Nevertheless, taken together, Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories do reveal a consistent set of preoccupations. They return to the same themes again and again. What gives them unity is not plot or continuity but impulse. They are, at bottom, stories about longing and about the imagination as refuge, temptation, and trap. As someone who has lived inside his own head for much of his life, I find these subjects hard to resist, which likely explains why the Dreamlands continue to exert such a pull on me, even after a lifetime of reading them.

Any discussion of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories inevitably – and rightly – turns to Lord Dunsany. Lovecraft’s fantasies adopt Dunsany’s Biblical cadence, his remote and capricious gods, his invented antiquity, and his sense that wonder and melancholy are inseparable. Stories such as “The White Ship,” “The Doom That Came to Sarnath,” and “The Cats of Ulthar” wear their inspiration openly. They are written in a consciously archaic style, as though recited by a storyteller who has never heard of the modern world.

Lovecraft admired Dunsany’s ability to evoke vastness without the use of literary realism. Dunsany invited the reader into a realm of dream, but it's not a comforting dream. It is beautiful, yes, but also fatalistic. The gods are not moral; they are simply powerful. Mortals may glimpse wonder, but they will never possess it and there is often a price to be paid for the attempt to do so. Lovecraft borrowed much from this approach, but, even in his most Dunsanian fantasies, there are also differences. Dunsany’s distance is poetic; Lovecraft’s is metaphysical. For him, the dream is never merely a dream. It is a sign of something beyond human reach and the desire for it is not without danger.

The Dreamlands are sometimes discussed as if they were a setting in the sense of a coherent world with geography, history, and consistent detail. Lovecraft occasionally encouraged this impression. He names cities and regions, refers back to earlier stories, and returns to certain motifs, like Ulthar and its cats, the streets of Dylath-Leen, and the Plateau of Leng, to cite just a few obvious ones. Yet, despite the desires of many a fan, the Dreamlands defy cartography. Their consistency is psychological rather than geographical. The Dreamlands are not really a place so much as a condition given form – the landscape of longing.

I think this is why Randolph Carter serves as something like the Dreamlands’ "mascot." Carter is not a hero in the usual pulp fantasy sense. He does not seek treasure or power. Instead, he seeks experience, specifically, a sense of wonder that cannot be found in waking life. He wants to escape the ordinary and, in doing so, find freedom. One can see the same impulse at work in “Celephaïs.” Its protagonist, Kuranes, finds refuge only in dreams, which become more real than his impoverished waking existence. The story’s conclusion is both triumphant and tragic. Kuranes achieves a kingdom in the Dreamlands where he may rule in peace, but he does so only by abandoning the real world entirely. This is one of the governing ideas of Lovecraft’s dream stories. The Dreamlands offer salvation of a kind, but it is a salvation that demands withdrawal.

For this reason, the Dreamlands tales are sometimes treated as a gentler alternative to Lovecraft’s more well-known cosmic horror stories. They contain moments of beauty, whimsy, and even mercy. The cats of Ulthar avenge cruelty. The White Ship carries its dreamer to lands of wonder. There is, at times, a sense that the imagination, for all its dangers, can grant something the waking world cannot. Even so, I think this supposed gentleness is often overstated. The Dreamlands do not offer simple consolation. In many cases, the dreamer’s longing is both a source of wonder and a cause of ruin.

In “The White Ship,” Basil Elton sails to marvelous lands, but his desire is not satisfied. He must go further. He must reach Cathuria, the Land of Hope, which promises absolute fulfillment. Yet in pressing on beyond the Basalt Pillars of the West, he causes the ship to founder and he awakens from his dream, unfulfilled. The story’s structure is essentially moral, but its morality is existential. The lesson is not that the dream is sinful, but that longing is insatiable and that insatiability will always court disappointment.

This pattern appears in different forms throughout Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales. “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” is not a dream story in the strict sense, but it is deeply Dunsanian and shares the same fatalism. A city grows proud, destroys what it considers lesser, and is eventually consumed by forces older than its own arrogance. The story is told as a legend, but its message is quintessentially Lovecraftian: history is not progress but a cycle of forgetting and punishment. Even “The Cats of Ulthar,” one of Lovecraft’s most charming fantasies, contains a darker undercurrent. The cats are not merely fanciful. They are agents of an ancient, inhuman justice. Their mercy is conditional, their vengeance absolute. The tale is comforting only if one is on the right side of it.

This is one of the Dreamlands’ most revealing features. Even in dream, Lovecraft cannot fully imagine a universe governed by benevolence. Beauty exists, but it is fragile. Wonder exists, but it is fraught. The dreamer may glimpse transcendence, but he cannot possess it without consequence.

I've rambled on longer than I'd intended already, so I'll leave the remainder of my thoughts for the second part of this post tomorrow.

REPOST: Pulp Fantasy Library: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath was one of the first stories by H.P. Lovecraft I ever read and it baffled me. It baffled me not because its content was difficult to understand – though it does ramble quite a bit – but because it was not at all what expected from Lovecraft. Prior to entering the hobby, I don't believe I'd ever heard his name. Once I had, many of the older fellows with whom I'd become acquainted sang his praises as an unsurpassed horror writer and a huge influence on many of gaming's early designers.

So, naturally, I made my way to library to grab any book by Lovecraft that I could. Among those volumes was the book pictured here, a 1943 Arkham House-published collection of some of Lovecraft's tales, including The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Though completed in 1927, Lovecraft never submitted it for publication in his lifetime and, indeed, felt "it isn't much good," as he admitted in a letter to Wilfred Talman. Consequently, the version that appeared in 1943 was based on a largely-unedited rough draft, which may explain some of its disjointedness.

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is an odd tale – "a picaresque chronicle of impossible adventures in a dreamland," as HPL himself described it in the same letter quote above. At over 40,000 words, it rivals At the Mountains of Madness in terms of length. I'd also argue that it rivals At the Mountains of Madness in terms of being one of Lovecraft's greatest – or at least, most ambitious – works. That's not an opinion everyone shares. Many critics consider The Dream-Quest to be without much merit, seeing it as yet another ape of Dunsanian fantasy without many redeeming features. I won't deny that it owes much to Lord Dunsany, as all Lovecraft's dreamlands tales do, but I think it's a mistake to see it only as yet another knock-off of the Irish writer. That's because I consider the novella to be a valedictory tale, where Lovecraft not only bids farewell to Dunsany but lays the groundwork for the next phase of his writing career.

For this tale, Lovecraft brings back his dreaming hero and alter ego, Randolph Carter, who'd appeared in three previous stories.

Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a fever of the gods, a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things and the maddening need to place again what once had been an awesome and momentous place.

What follows is a record of Carter's attempts to find the "majestic sunset city" of his dreams. This quest includes visits to the Enchanted Wood, to Oriab Isle aboard a black galley, to Celephaïs, and, at last, to the Cold Waste, where Kadath lies. Along the way, he meets the rodent-like zoogs, the cats of Ulthar, ghouls, fellow dreamer King Kuranes, moon beasts, and many, many wondrous and terrifying creatures. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is a veritable catalog of the beautiful and the weird, often coming so quickly, one after the other, that it's difficult to really appreciate any of them, or the care with which Lovecraft describes them. That's probably the biggest fault of the novella: it contains so much that it demands a more coherent narrative structure from which to make sense of it all. Without it, the reader is left reeling.

Yet, I can forgive that, partly because I like catalogs of the beautiful and the weird, especially when drawn so artfully as Lovecraft does here. However, the ultimate reason for my forgiveness is the conclusion of the tale, when the messenger of the gods, Nyarlathotep himself, explains to Carter the true identity of the city he has seen in his dreams:

"For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth. It is the glory of Boston's hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset, of the flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily. These things you saw, Randolph Carter, when your nurse first wheeled you out in the springtime, and they will be the last things you will ever see with eyes of memory and of love. And there is antique Salem with its brooding years, and spectral Marblehead scaling its rocky precipices into past centuries! And the glory of Salem's towers and spires seen afar from Marblehead's pastures across the harbour against the setting sun.

"There is Providence quaint and lordly on its seven hills over the blue harbour, with terraces of green leading up to steeples and citadels of living antiquity, and Newport climbing wraithlike from its dreaming breakwater. Arkham is there, with its moss-grown gambrel roofs and the rocky rolling meadows behind it; and antediluvian Kingsport hoary with stacked chimneys and deserted quays and overhanging gables, and the marvel of high cliffs and the milky-misted ocean with tolling buoys beyond.

"Cool vales in Concord, cobbled lands in Portsmouth, twilight bends of rustic New Hampshire roads where giant elms half hide white farmhouse walls and creaking well-sweeps. Gloucester's salt wharves and Truro's windy willows. Vistas of distant steepled towns and hills beyond hills along the North Shore, hushed stony slopes and low ivied cottages in the lee of huge boulders in Rhode Island's back country. Scent of the sea and fragrance of the fields; spell of the dark woods and joy of the orchards and gardens at dawn. These, Randolph Carter, are your city; for they are yourself. New England bore you, and into your soul she poured a liquid loveliness which cannot die. This loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and polished by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that marble parapet with curious urns and carven rail, and descend at last these endless balustraded steps to the city of broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood.

The world of Randolph Carter's dreams is not in some faraway place, but right before him, in the familiar places he loves and has loved since his childhood. Perhaps it's because I know so much more about Lovecraft's life that I find this passage so powerfully moving, perhaps it's because I, too, feel the pull of my past and an attachment to the places of my youth or perhaps it's because I'm middle-aged and feel more keenly than ever the weight of the past, I don't know, but I consider it one of the truest things Lovecraft ever wrote and enough to earn The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath a place among the pantheon of my favorite stories.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Strange High House in the Mist

H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Strange High House in the Mist” is a restrained yet quietly affecting tale, often grouped with his Dunsanian or Dreamlands stories. This is understandable, as the story shares with them a preoccupation with mood, suggestion, and the power of longing rather than with overt horror. Instead, it focuses on reverie and yearning, centered on an encounter with something ancient, beautiful, and meaningful that lies just beyond the reach of modern life. In this respect, the story offers a glimpse of Lovecraft’s wistful and elegiac sensibilities, one that is simultaneously at odds with and supportive of the horror stories for which he is better known.

First published in the October 1931 issue of Weird Tales, the story is set in Kingsport, Lovecraft’s fictionalized version of Marblehead, Massachusetts. Kingsport is a location to which he returned repeatedly as a symbol of the old New England (and, by extension, the old world) he so revered. The seaside town is portrayed as steeped in age and wonder. Here, the past is never entirely absent but lingers just beneath the surface of everyday life. In this particular case, that past takes the form of a strange house perched impossibly high on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The house is visible only at certain times, half-lost in mist, and the townsfolk are reluctant to learn more about it.

“The Strange High House in the Mist” reflects, in part, HPL's increasing preoccupation with the erosion of the strange and wondrous. Industrial modernity, the rise of mass society, and the perceived loss of continuity with the past weighed heavily on his imagination. In many of his stories from this time, these anxieties are transmuted into horror, with ancient survivals revealing humanity’s insignificance in an uncaring cosmos. In this tale, however, the same concerns are expressed through melancholy and yearning rather than terror.

The protagonist, Thomas Olney, is a philosopher vacationing in Kingsport. He is immediately captivated by the sight of the house on the cliff and feels an almost instinctive pull toward it. Driven by curiosity, Olney ascends the cliff and discovers that the house is indeed a peculiar locale.

When he climbed out of the chasm a morning mist was gathering, but he clearly saw the lofty and unhallowed cottage ahead; walls as grey as the rock, and high peak standing bold against the milky white of the seaward vapours. And he perceived that there was no door on this landward end, but only a couple of small lattice windows with dingy bull’s-eye panes leaded in seventeenth-century fashion. All around him was cloud and chaos, and he could see nothing below but the whiteness of illimitable space. He was alone in the sky with this queer and very disturbing house; and when he sidled around to the front and saw that the wall stood flush with the cliff’s edge, so that the single narrow door was not to be reached save from the empty aether, he felt a distinct terror that altitude could not wholly explain. And it was very odd that shingles so worm-eaten could survive, or bricks so crumbled still form a standing chimney.

Inside, he is welcomed by a bearded man who "seemed young, yet looked out of eyes steeped in the elder mysteries." The encounter is striking because it lacks the menace one might expect. The man is dignified and reflective, speaking of distant times and forgotten wonders. Olney’s visit is brief, but it has an effect on him, as we shall see. What he experiences is not forbidden knowledge in the usual Lovecraftian sense, but a momentary awakening to another manner of understanding the world.

Consequently, Olney leaves house a changed man – but not quite for the better. He does not remember what he saw in the house nor does he recall what he discussed with its lone inhabitant. In some sense, both real and metaphorical, he is no longer the same person who climbed the pinnacle and entered the house full of curiosity and wonder.

And ever since that hour, through dull dragging years of greyness and weariness, the philosopher has laboured and eaten and slept and done uncomplaining the suitable deeds of a citizen. Not any more does he long for the magic of farther hills, or sigh for secrets that peer like green reefs from a bottomless sea. The sameness of his days no longer gives him sorrow, and well-disciplined thoughts have grown enough for his imagination.

There is fear present in this story, but it's the fear not of cosmic annihilation or human insignificance, but of loss, specifically, the loss of imagination and curiosity, a perennial concern of Lovecraft. The tragedy is not that wonders such as the house are dangerous, but that the desire for such wonders is vanishing, driven away by unthinking skepticism and the structure of modern life.

In this respect, the story shares a great deal with “The White Ship,” “Celephaïs,” and “The Silver Key,” though I think it's more firmly anchored in something akin to the "real world." Rather than transporting its protagonist to a dream realm, the tale suggests that wonder lies just out of sight but still visible to those who seek for it. Of course, not everyone who does so will find his longing satisfied and, as in the case of Thomas Olney, the opposite might occur. 

Though it is easy to see why some readers classify the story among Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales, it seems more accurate to view it as occupying a middle ground between his early, explicitly Dunsanian fantasies and his later, more austere and uncompromising cosmic horror. The unease it generates does not arise from revelations about what lies beyond humanity, but from an awareness of what humanity may have already abandoned. The true loss is not safety or sanity, but memory, imagination, and continuity with the past. 

Artwork by Joseph Doolin

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Isle of the Torturers

Clark Ashton Smith’s cycle of stories set on Earth’s last continent, Zothique, has long been a personal favorite of mine. For that reason, I assumed I had already written a Pulp Fantasy Library post about each of its tales. I was mistaken. An obvious omission was “The Isle of the Torturers,” first published in the March 1933 issue of Weird Tales. This lapse strikes me as particularly odd, since the story is among the most memorable in the cycle, rich with images and ideas that recur throughout Smith’s work. It is, in fact, a minor masterpiece of decadent irony, a grim parable about the impossibility of escape in a dying world.

Like the other Zothique stories, “The Isle of the Torturers” gives voice to Smith’s cosmic pessimism. Written during his most fertile period as a prose writer, it captures the moment when his poetic sensibility fused seamlessly with the demands of pulp fantasy. As with “The End of the Story,” which I discussed last week, it is less a conventional adventure than a dark moral fable, concerned not with triumph but with a protagonist trapped between two equally terminal forms of damnation.

The tale opens with a cataclysm known as the Silver Death, a plague foretold by astrologers to descend from the star Achernar and perhaps inspired by Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” This scourge does not merely kill; it transforms its victims into rigid, gleaming corpses, their flesh sealed in a “bright, metallic pallor.” Young King Fulbra of Yoros survives only because his sorcerer, Vemdeez, fashions a magical ring of black-jeweled stone that repels the contagion. Fulbra’s subsequent flight from his silent, silvered kingdom is no journey toward renewal or safety. It is a panicked retreat into the wider, equally doomed world of Zothique.

Cast ashore on the island of Uccastrog, Fulbra discovers that he has exchanged the indifference of Nature for the calculated cruelty of Man. Uccastrog is ruled by King Ildrac, whose people have elevated torture into a supreme esthetic discipline, giving the island both its infamous sobriquet and the story its title. Here, pain has become the last meaningful sensation in a world where extinction looms ever closer. Torture is not merely punitive or sadistic; it is treated as a refined art, one of the few remaining assertions of human will in the face of cosmic decay.

Smith’s treatment of torture is distinctive. He does not linger on visceral realism but instead cloaks suffering in an ornate, almost ceremonial elegance. The torments prepared for Fulbra, such as the constricting coils of hair-covered, ell-long serpents or the psychological horror of a glass-walled dungeon, are described with the same meticulous care Smith might apply to exotic landscapes or jeweled relics. The effect is unsettling. The reader is drawn in by the beauty of the language even as the subject matter repels, reinforcing the story’s theme of estheticized despair.

At the heart of the tale’s irony stands Ilvaa, a woman of Uccastrog who appears to take pity on Fulbra. She offers him hope, whispering of a hidden vessel and an escape from Ildrac’s dungeons. Smith deliberately plays upon the reader’s expectations here, invoking the familiar “rescuer” trope only to subvert it with shocking cruelty. Ilvaa is not Fulbra’s savior but a living instrument of torture. Her role is to weaponize hope itself, intensifying Fulbra’s suffering when she finally reveals that there is, in truth, no escape. Psychological torment proves as refined and devastating as any physical agony.

The story’s climax delivers a form of poetic justice characteristic of Smith at his most mordant. King Ildrac, covetous of Fulbra’s protective ring, forcibly removes it, unleashing the Silver Death that had been suppressed but patiently “waiting” within Fulbra’s flesh. The very plague Fulbra crossed the sea to escape becomes, paradoxically, his sole means of release from the torturers of Uccastrog.

As the silver crust spreads over Ildrac and Fulbra alike, Smith closes the tale with a line of chilling finality:

“And oblivion claimed the isle of Uccastrog; and the torturers were one with the tortured.”

“The Isle of the Torturers” captures the elegant hopelessness of Zothique with exceptional clarity. It mourns the erosion of human agency in a universe governed by entropy, while refusing to offer the consolation of heroic resistance or moral victory. Instead, Smith gives us a king who finds his only peace in becoming a statue. The story ultimately suggests that we are all fugitives from a fate that cannot be outrun, a fate that will, sooner or later, claim us, regardless of how desperately we attempt to flee.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The End of the Story

When I was writing my three-part series on the worlds of Clark Ashton Smith, I realized that I had somehow never written a Pulp Fantasy Library post about “The End of the Story,” the very first tale of the Averoigne cycle, appearing in the May 1930 issue of Weird Tales. In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised. “The End of the Story” is frequently overlooked, probably because, unlike most other entries in the cycle, it is set not in the Middle Ages but in 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution. [Note: The text linked above gives the date as 1798, which I believe is simply a typographical error. —JDM]

Even so, I feel a little sheepish about this, as it's an excellent story, both within the Averoigne cycle and within Smith's larger body of work. It's also one of his earliest fiction works, written just a few years after "The Abominations of Yondo." Though still a relative amateur at prose, the story nevertheless presents a clear expression of Smith’s decadent sympathies and his esthetic rebellion against conventional morality. Consequently, it is less a horror story than a parable of temptation and the lingering bitterness that follows salvation.

The story is framed as a manuscript discovered after the mysterious disappearance of a young law student, Christophe Morand. The manuscript contains his confession, written at his father’s estate near Moulins in the province of Averoigne. What Morand recounts there is not a description of an ordeal escaped, but of a paradise glimpsed and lost.

Caught in a violent storm while riding through the forest, Christophe stumbles upon the abbey of Périgon, where he is warmly received by its abbot, Hilaire. The abbot is no ascetic but rather a cultivated Epicurean. He is well-fed, well-read, proud of his wine cellar, and even prouder of his astonishing library. The abbot’s library is a treasure trove of lost antiquities, holding lost fragments of Sappho, an unknown dialog of Plato, and many other unique literary and philosophical curiosities. 

Also present is a hidden volume that the abbot fears – an anonymous text written in archaic French, which he claims is cursed. Hilaire's warning is melodramatic, full of signs of the Cross and invocations of Satan. Unfortunately, it's precisely for this reason that Christophe is so tempted by it. Smith handles the temptation represented by the forbidden text beautifully. It is not lust, ambition, or even greed that drives Christophe, but pure esthetic curiosity. It is the scholar’s hunger for forbidden beauty.

When Christophe eventually does read the manuscript, he finds that it tells of Gérard de Venteillon, a medieval knight who, on the eve of his wedding, encounters a satyr in the forest. The creature whispers a secret so powerful that Gérard abandons his faith, his fiancée, and the world itself. He then follows a hidden path to the ruins of Château des Faussesflammes, presses a triangular stone, and descends into the earth, never to return.

The satyr says that

The power of Christ has prevailed like a black frost on all the woods, the fields, the rivers, the mountains, where abode in their felicity the glad, immortal goddesses and nymphs of yore. But still, in cryptic caverns of the earth, in places far underground, like the hell your priests have fabled, there dwells pagan loveliness, there cry the pagan ecstasies."

Though the words are those of a satyr, it seems clear to me that they're also the words of Smith himself, who had little use for formal religion of any kind, least of all medieval Christianity.

Later, from his window at the abbey, Christophe recognizes nearby ruins. Like Gérard before him, he feels irresistibly drawn to them. Ignoring every warning, he slips away, finds the triangular stone, and descends into the vaults beneath Faussesflammes. Instead of the horror he was promised, Christophe discovers a radiant pastoral world – a classical paradise of laurel groves, flowing rivers, marble palaces, satyrs, and nymphs. This is no hellscape but Arcadia restored, the world Christianity erased.

At the heart of this paradise waits Nycea. She is one of Smith’s most memorable creations: a lamia, an ancient vampire-serpent whom Christophe perceives only as a goddess of beauty. Their meeting is neither violent nor coercive. It is, in fact, strangely tender, luxurious, and, above all, intoxicating. Yet Christophe’s response goes beyond simple lust, just as his desire for the forbidden manuscript in the abbey was more than mere curiosity. Nycea represents recognition, the sense that he has always loved her without knowing it. Smith presents their union not as corruption but as fulfillment. The reader is meant to understand why Christophe would risk damnation for her.

It is at this point that Hilaire bursts in, brandishing holy water. Nycea flees, and the paradise Christophe has discovered collapses into dust. The vision vanishes, and he comes to his senses amid the rubble of the vaults beneath Faussesflammes. Hilaire explains that Nycea is an ancient demon who lures men to their doom, drains them, and devours them. The manuscript was her bait, her carefully laid trap. Gérard and countless others met their deaths this way, and Christophe, the abbot insists, is fortunate to have escaped the same fate.

Christophe feels no gratitude. He feels only rage. He does not believe he has been rescued; he believes he has been robbed.

Unheedful whether or not he had rescued me from dire physical and spiritual perils, I lamented the beautiful dream of which he had deprived me. The kisses of Nycea burned softly in my memory, and I knew that whatever she was, woman or demon or serpent, there was no one in all the world who could ever arouse in me the same love and the same delight.

The true end of the story comes when Christophe vows to return. He swears that he will seek out the ruins of Faussesflammes again and descend once more into the vaults below. He has chosen to risk death and damnation, because he cannot unsee paradise and cannot accept a world without it.

“The End of the Story” is among Smith’s finest tales. Though it differs in many respects from later Averoigne stories, I have always found it especially compelling. Those later entries lean more overtly into the grotesque, but this one is strangely moving and elegiac. It mourns not only the loss of one man’s vision of paradise but also the passing of an older, pagan world – a realm of beauty, sensuality, and wonder erased by the march of Christianity and history.

In the end, Smith does not ask us to decide whether Christophe is a fool or a tragic hero. Instead, he leaves us with something far more unsettling: the suggestion that some illusions are worth dying for and that paradise, once glimpsed, can never truly be forgotten.

REPOST: Pulp Fantasy Library: The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis

[I was initially reluctant to do offer up a repost during The Ensorcellment of January, but the fact remains that this is such a good story that I think it's worth making an exception in this case. I hope you'll agree.] 

Although the stories of Clark Ashton Smith that most interest me are those that belong to his Hyperborea, Averoigne, and (especially) Zothique cycles, his May 1932 story of Mars, "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis," may be his best story. 

Allow me to qualify that statement before going further. I’ve said before that Smith’s best work resists easy classification. Although his stories are clearly fantastical, it does them a disservice to label them simply as “fantasy,” as the recent Night Shade Books volumes do. Likewise, trying to be more precise by pedantically sorting individual tales into “horror,” “science fiction,” or similar categories misses the point. Such labels attempt to box in writing that deliberately refuses neat boundaries. In fact, I suspect Smith’s reputation has suffered in part because his work and subject matter are so thoroughly sui generis.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" is very accessible and nicely highlights Smith's talents as a writer: luxuriant language, an aura of dread, sardonic humor and irony, and the sense of the immensity of history. Reading this first-person account of Rodney Severn, "the one surviving member of the Octave Expedition to Yoh-Vombis," one is easily transported to a version of Mars quite unlike anything found in the pages of Burroughs and his imitators. It is, for lack of a better word, "weird Mars," a place that that, while ostensibly within the realm of science fiction, is not limited by the strictures or expectations of that genre but instead plays with those literary boundaries to present a tale that is both enthralling and genuinely unsettling.

We know from the start that Octave Expedition's journey to the ruined Martian city of Yoh-Vombis ended in tragedy. Thus, the story is one of mounting revelation, as we learn, bit by bit, the details of the events that led to demise of everyone except Rodney Severn, who himself hopes to die in order to escape "the compulsion of the malignant and malevolent virus which is permeating my brain." Stories of this sort are, in my experience, difficult to pull off properly. With the conclusion foregone, the writer needs to find some way to ensure that the reader nevertheless is surprised, shocked even, by what it was that led to the already-known end. Smith succeeds in doing just this, but, compared to the atmosphere he conjures, that of an immeasurably ancient and dying Mars – a kind of "hyper-Zothique" – it is a small accomplishment.

"That place is deader than an Egyptian morgue," observed Harper. 

"Certainly it is far more ancient." Octave assented. "According to most reliable legends, the Yorhis, who built Yoh-Vombis, were wiped out by the present ruling race at least forty thousand years ago." 

"There's a story, isn't there," said Harper, "that the last remnant of the Yorhis was destroyed by some unknown agency – something too horrible and outré to be mentioned even in myth?" 

"Of course, I've heard that legend," agreed Octave. "Maybe we'll find evidence among the ruins, to prove or disprove it. The Yorhis may have been cleaned out by some terrible epidemic, such as the Yashta pestilence, which was a kind of green mould that ate all the bones of the body, starting with the teeth and nails. But we needn't be afraid of getting it, if there are any mummies in Yoh-Vombis – the bacteria will all be dead as their victims, after so many cycles of planetary desiccation. The Aihais have always been more or less shy of the place. Few have ever visited it: and none, as far as I can find, have a thorough examination of the ruins."

And so Severn and the other members of the Expedition set off into the ruins to discover the fate of once-great Yoh-Vombis. This gives Smith the opportunity to describe the eldritch beauty of the place, illuminated by the lights of Phobos and Deimos. As the archeologists descend into the depths, Smith has the opportunity to employ some of his most evocative language:

The air was singularly heavy, as if the lees of an ancient atmosphere, less tenuous than that of Mars today, had settled down and remained in that stagnant darkness. It was harder to breathe than the outer air; it was filled with unknown effluvia; and the light dust arose before us at every step, diffusing a faintness of bygone corruption, like the dust of powdered mummies.

Here, Severn and his companions discover just what happened to the inhabitants of ancient Yoh-Vombis and pay the price for their knowledge. I won't spoil the ending here, in part because I don't think that, in straight, expository language, I can do justice to it. This is a good example of how Smith's unique ability to transport his readers through an alchemy of language turns what could very well have been a banal, ineffective resolution into something terrifying. "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" shows Smith at the top of his game and I highly recommend it to anyone who's never read it before. It's as good an introduction to this overlooked author as almost any I can recommend.