SCOTT AND THE SUPERHERO IDIOM PT. 3

 Following my earlier ruminations on Sir Walter Scott and the titular idiom, I decided to go through the index of Leslie Fiedler's magisterial LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL--which, though centered upon American authors, contains a lot about their European forbears-- and reread everything the critic had to say about the inventor of the historical novel. I knew from previous readings that nearly everything Fiedler had to say about Scott was virulently negative, with the exception of crediting Scott with being able to create literary myths that appealed to wide audiences. In Fiedler's demi-Marxist views from that era-- late fifties to early sixties-- Scott's greatest offense was that (according to Fiedler) all or most of the author's works allowed the viewpoint characters to give up ideas of revolting against authority and accepting the bourgeois lifestyle. I'm sure even back then Fiedler had read more of Scott than I have now-- though to be sure, Fiedler doesn't cite a lot of Scott works, saying nearly nothing about the classic IVANHOE and (quite naturally) not mentioning the work that recently engaged me, THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL. But I still find this a very superficial pronouncement.

In previous readings I highlighted a lot of Fiedler's remarks in LOVE. But I missed an important insight, and it's a strange oversight on my part, given all of my earlier commentary about the intertwined literary categories of "the metaphenomenal" and "the heroic." In the overlooked insight, Fiedler brilliantly links the rise of the gothic novel in Europe (beginning with Horace Walpole's 1764 THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO) with Scott's invention of the historical novel with WAVERLY in 1814.

...behind the Gothic there lies a theory of history, a particular sense of the past. The tale of terror is a kind of historical novel which existed before the historical novel (the invention of Walter Scott) came into being.

Fiedler then credits Samuel Richardson with having essentially invented the naturalistic novel's sense of "the present," beginning with 1740's CLARISSA. I'm not sure why Defoe's 1722 MOLL FLANDERS is out of the running in that department, or why Defoe doesn't even rate a mention in the whole of LOVE. But I agree with Fiedler's next point, that "the Gothic felt for the first time the pastness of the past." Long before Walpole subtitled OTRANTO as "a Gothic Story," the word "gothic" had been used since the Renaissance to indicate that which was medieval and therefore barbaric. Following the Renaissance, the literary lights rejected, as Fiedler says of the naturalistic novel, all or most of those "improbable and marvelous" elements that culminated in the late 1500s with Spenser's FAERIE QUEENE. Wikipedia pegs the beginnings of the Enlightenment with Descartes, but I prefer 1603, the publication-year of the first book of DON QUIXOTE, which essentially ended the chivalric romance for the next two centuries.          

What is "the pastness of the past" in OTRANTO? Though of course Walpole wrote the novel in 1764, he published the book anonymously, claimed he had translated a manuscript from the 1500s, retelling a story from the era of the Crusades. Walpole fooled some contemporary reviewers into believing that OTRANTO was an authentic work penned between the 9th and 11th centuries, and after he eventually admitted authorship, many scholars of his time regarded the novel as meretricious. However, setting the story in the medieval past allowed the author to represent wild fantasies of his own creation, much like the metaphenomena of chivalric romances.

During the early 1700s there had arisen a passion in Europe for both original literary fairy tales and reworkings of oral stories, the last including a craze for the newly translated THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS. There existed a few broad fantasies like GULLIVER'S TRAVELS and proto-SF works like Voltaire's MICROMEGAS. But OTRANTO inspired imitators to delve into the historical past, and to threaten the commonplace natural world with such horrors-- ghosts (real or fake), deals with the devil, and even the "occult science" of alchemy that infuses Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN. The idiom of the Gothic even inspired an inventive hybrid of the European Gothic and the Arabian Nights fantasy in William Beckford's 1786 VATHEK.         

WAVERLY, the first of Scott's historical novels, doesn't delve very far into the past. Only about sixty years separate the novel's action during the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland and 1814, when Scott published the story. Then in 1820 Scott published IVANHOE, which, though it was a naturalistic story set in England's 12th century, nevertheless revived the genre of the chivalric romance. Further, even before the down-to-earth WAVERLY, it's also worth remembering that in 1805 Scott wrote his first original narrative poem, the aforementioned MINSTREL. And though it's not as imaginative as VATHEK, it certainly presents more wonders than did the average Gothic, such as a goblin, river-spirits, a book of magic spells, and a magician who comes back from death to reclaim his property. A case could made that just as Walpole gave birth the Modern Horror Story, Scott-- rather than usual nominees like George MacDonald or William Morris-- gave birth to the Modern Magical-Era Fantasy Tale. I now credit Leslie Fiedler with supplying me with a crucial conception for both of these modernized forms of older genres: that they are modern because they, unlike their predecessors, could not help but engage with modernity-- even when the authors might be seeking with might and main to forswear the heavy hand of history.                  

SCOTT AND THE SUPERHERO IDIOM PT. 2

 Following on the heels of both my review of THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL and the first part of this two-part series, here's a longer exploration of the relevance of MINSTREL to my concept of the superhero idiom.

My criterion for both "de facto superheroes" (those that everyone agrees to be superheroes for whatever reasons) and those characters who are "superhero-adjacent" is that they must always satisfy the connotations of "super" and "hero" thusly:

For a character to be a hero, he or she must possess, or have access to, *megadynamic* combative abilities. This can mean abilities that go beyond those of ordinary mortals, or they can be an ordinary mortal's abilities taken to extraordinary heights. 

As indicated above, the character does not himself or herself have to be "super" in the common connotation of possessing either natural super-powers (Superman) or artificially enhanced powers (Iron Man). But the hero who possesses megadynamic capabilities must move within a world where "super" phenomena are possible, whether the hero opposes those phenomena or receives aid from them.

Now, to the latter category, there's no question that the world of Scott's MINSTREL is one where supernatural phenomena are readily accepted, even though the events take place in the late 16th century-- which, ironically, is about the time that stories of chivalric romance began to die out for the most part. In this respect, MINSTREL may resemble a lot of the literary fairy tales that proliferated in the late 17th century and throughout the 18th. I say "may" because I'm talking about only original literary creations by particular authors, not retellings of oral narratives, and I've not read many works in the former category, not even the best-known of them, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST from 1741. 

Still, because Walter Scott was a historian, he doesn't emulate the tendency of oral stories to take place in generic times and places. The 13th-century scholar Michael Scott is given an anachronistic makeover, so that he has perished only some years previous to the poem's main story, and here all the ahistorical legends about his having been a benign wizard are completely true. Lady Scott, who desires to possess Michael's magical book for unspecified reasons, is herself educated in magic, and the author even claims that she learned the skill from her father, himself educated in Padua-- which is generally more information than one gets about your generic bad witches and conniving faerie queens.

MINSTREL's main hero, loose though the poem's structture is, is the loyal bondsman William of Deloraine, whom Lady Scott sends to fetch the thaumaturgic tome from the warlock Michael's tomb. It's a spooky episode, though Deloraine doesn't end up fighting anyone or anything until he gets back from his mission. He crosses swords with Henry, boyfriend of Lady Scott's daughter Margaret, and Deloraine is wounded. He loses the magical book to Gilpin, the goblin-servant of Henry and Henry's family, though Gilpin takes this action on his own recognizance, since no one in Henry's clan even knows anything about the book. The book's only function in the story is that when the goblin gets a brief look at one page, it teaches him an illusion-spell that Gilpin is able to use later.

Clan-war breaks out while Deloraine is convalescing under Lady Scott's care, and one of the demands of the enemy clan is that they want Deloraine's life for his having previously killed the brother of an enemy lord. Deloraine has the choice of being tried for murder outright, or fighting in a one-on-one with Redgrave, the lord who lost his brother. So, will Deloraine be forced to drag himself from his sick-bed to prevent total clan-war? No, because Henry-- who's such an insubstantial character, he almost seems like Deloraine's shadow -- gets Gilpin to cast an illusion-spell that makes Henry look like Deloraine, so that the unwounded young warrior can triumph over Redgrave.

It's not hard to imagine how a later melodrama would have jacked up the duel of mystic powers, maybe having Henry's clan using the goblin's powers against Clan Scott, and Lady Scott retaliating by seeking the warlock's magic book. Assuming that everything in MINSTREL is original to Walter Scott and not borrowed from some unremembered oral source, Scott just wants Gilpin to be a mischievous imp instead of a major threat, and that does keep the poem's stakes on a low side. Deloraine doesn't get to shine in a final combat scene, any more than does his descendant Ivanhoe. But he is, by all indications, a doughty warrior, and he receives supernatural aid that saves him from being slain by another skilled fighter. Deloraine doesn't request the help, the way archaic Greek heroes would request weapons from their goddess-patrons. But structurally, Deloraine is a "hero" aided by a "super" phenomenon, even though his substitute is in reality an ordinary skilled man fighting another ordinary skilled man. But once all the goblin's business has been finished-- both petty pranks and benign actions-- his supernatural master arises from his tomb to reclaim him. This is not quite a moment akin to Shakespeare's "I'll drown my book," but it may not be a total coincidence that the main story is being related by an old minstrel, who appears to live in "our" world, a world in which magic has become only the stuff of literary fantasies.   

    

SCOTT AND THE SUPERHERO IDIOM

I suppose the following "wish" might be deemed by some self-fulfilling-

I may as well as mention that the writer I **wish** had some strong candidates in this idiom is Sir Walter Scott. It looks to me like he single-handedly reinvented the adventure genre in the early 1800s, after the Age of Enlightenment made most of the fiction very talky and didactic, even when one sees occasional glimmers of adventure in Gothics or Byron's proto-swashbucklers.

-- because, after I read various summaries of Walter Scott works online, and chose to analyze the 1805 LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL, I found what I wanted on my first try. "What are the odds?" a skeptic might say.   

Still, I'm fine with admitting that MINSTREL is not the ideal "first post-Renaissance almost-superhero." While Scott's narrative poem was popular in its day, its status as a long poem probably kept it from being influential on genre fiction of the 19th century. This stands in contrast to the way, say, Scott's novel IVANHOE unquestionably influenced the 1844 penny dreadful THE BLACK MONK. So other candidates for "first almost-superhero," such as one finds in the French crime-novel THE MYSTERIES OF PARIS or the fictionalizations of the English "urban legend" Spring-Heeled Jack, would seem much more credible as DIRECT influences on the superhero idiom that would eventually include such later 19th century proponents as Allen Quatermain and Nick Carter.

However, in a purely FORMAL sense, MINSTREL has most of the right elements for what might be termed a "fantasy-hero" if not a superhero. The poem has one supernatural creature in it-- a goblin with magical powers-- and a combative conflict between powerful opponents who can be loosely framed as "hero and villain." The fly in the ointment is that though the goblin might be said to be allied to the side of the "villains" in a general sense, the creature is not opposed to the hero in the way readers now expect from most fantasy literature following the birth of "sword-and-sorcery." MINSTREL also has a sorcerer, but he's not specifically helpful or harmful to either heroes or villains. In essence I think in MINSTREL Scott was trying to meld elements of "feuds between rival Scottish clans" with those of "people encountering the supernatural"-- both of which elements appeared in the older ballads Scott had been translating before he wrote MINSTREL, his first notable original work. One may argue that the two sets of elements don't quite cohere as one might desire.

Still, since I don't imagine I'll ever be devoted enough to this topic to read the entire Walter Scott oeuvre, I'm pleased that even on the purely formal level, the author has some skin in this particular literary game. 

THE READING RHEUM: THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH (1931)

 

"...everything alive come aout o' the water onct an' only needs a little change to go back agin."-- Zadok Allen. 

"Complaints from many liberal organizations were met with long confidential discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent."-- the narrator of SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH (given the name "Robert Olmstead" in HPL's notes).

During my early enthusiasm for Lovecraft's works, I didn't tend to reread SHADOW, in marked contrast to the more imaginative "cosmic horror" stories. For that reason, to the extent that I thought about SHADOW in terms of the author's avowed racism, I might have even accepted the reigning critical opinion of the tale, apparently shared even by annotator Leslie Klinger. That opinion, drawn from HPL's own political writings, asserts that the horror of SHADOW-- of a repulsive race of fish-people, the Deep Ones, who intermarry with humans to produce hybrids-- was a one-on-one recapitulations of HPL's unequivocal distaste for almost anyone who was not of purebred English stock (including several dominantly Caucasian nationalities, like Italians and Poles). The two quotes above, however, suggest to me that HPL was aware that such a complexion could be placed upon his story, and that he took pains to tell readers, albeit indirectly, "no, my fish-people are not just allegories for ethnicities I don't like."      

Like CALL OF CTHULHU, SHADOW starts with an ordinary man who encounters strange phenomena that initially seem merely curious, but which eventually reveal the existence of alien conspiracies of which average society knows nothing. Unlike CTHULHU, SHADOW's opening posits that narrator Olmstead is able to alert the government to the existence of the conspiracy, resulting in a wholesale pogrom against the conspirators in the Massachusetts sea-town Innsmouth. Then, as in CTHULHU, the narrator tells us all the backstory of his horrific experience, in which he discovered that most of the inhabitants of Innsmouth were hybrid descendants of intermarriages of human beings and sea-dwelling fish-people (who are said at one point to worship Cthulhu). 

I won't dwell on the many ways HPL sells this concept via his excellent attention to detail regarding the history and physical layout of Innsmouth, since that would be impractical for a blogpost. Most of what Olmstead learns about Innsmouth comes from a 97-year-old Innsmouth resident named Zadok Allen, whose tongue Olmstead loosens by giving him liquor. Old Zadok was around as a child when Obed Marsh, one of the town's leading citizens, began trafficking with certain islands in the West Indies, and so essentially "colonized the colonizers," to play upon a current political buzzword. But because other residents of the polluted town see Olmstead talking to Zadok, they come after Olmstead. One doesn't normally think of HPL as an exciting author, but Olmstead's daring flight from Innsmouth, first by leaping out of his upper-floor apartment and then pretending to be one of the hybrids as he makes his way out of town on foot, is viscerally memorable. 

For an HPL-contemporary like Seabury Quinn, the violent suppression of a conspiracy would have been the end of the story. But the kicker to HPL's story involves Olmstead-- whose mother was of "Arkham stock"-- being much more intimately involved with the spawn of Cthulhu. And this is the great conundrum alluded to in the first quote: that as much as humans may want to believe themselves the lords of creation, they come from the dark abysses of the primal waters, where everything flows into everything else.

Now, in CALL OF CTHULHU, HPL implies that people not from Anglo-Saxon ethnicities may be degraded enough to traffic with unholy cults. Yet in SHADOW, the ones who surrender Innsmouth to the Deep Ones are the members of the town's "gently-bred" (HPL's word) families. Zadok tells Olmstead that although the spawn of the Deep Ones inhabited one particular island in the West Indies, he also mentions that the "Kanakys" of other islands despise the hybrids and eventually wipe them out, the same way the government in 1927 tries (but fails) to wipe out Innsmouth. Lastly, in one of Olmstead's most close-up descriptions of a fish-man resident, he observes that the man seems alien even though he does not look "Asian, Polynesian, Levantine or negroid." While SHADOW certainly is not "anti-racist" in the modern meaning of that term, it also indicates a different mindset from 1928's CTHULHU-- for reasons that will probably never be known.     

       

THE READING RHEUM: POSEIDONIS (1973)

 As it happens, the last Ballantine collection of Clark Ashton Smith works I'm reviewing for my blog was also the last one the company published. Of the four, ZOTHIQUE was the only sub-universe for which Smith wrote enough stories to fill a paperback book. Thus, POSEIDONIS, like XICARRPH and HYPERBOREA, includes only a comparative handful of stories/poems set in the titular world. The rest of the three books were perforce filled with a lot of one-off horror and SF stories, that, while interesting, aren't Smith's strength in comparison to the magical fantasy stories.                                                                   

Since I didn't get much more than moderate entertainment from the majority of this collection, I'll get those out of the way first, though I'll pass on commenting on either the verse or prose poems. THE DOUBLE SHADOW-- A narrator from Poseidonis describes the dire fate of his perceptor Avyctes (who's loosely tied to the character Malygris, whose stories are discussed below). A VOYAGE TO SFANOMOE-- Two Atlantean inventors flee their doomed home to take refuge on the planet Venus. And Venus welcomes them with an irresistible embrace. A VINTAGE FROM ATLANTIS-- A group of buccaneers happen across an ancient bottle of Atlantean wine, and quaffing it opens their way into the limbo of its vanished glories. "And only a teetotaler escaped to tell thee." AN OFFERING TO THE MOON-- Two archaeologists investigate the moon-worship of the vanished people of Mu, little realizing that they will be offering up their own lives in their pursuit of knowledge. THE UNCHARTED ISLAND-- A castaway finds himself on an isle not quite deserted, as he encounters an ancient people who seem to be re-enacting, like habit-afflicted ghosts, the actions that led to their collective doom. THE EPIPHANY OF DEATH-- A quasi-Egyptian scholar witnesses the fate of his colleague Tomeron in his family's tomb. Worms are involved. SYMPOSIUM OF THE GORGON-- A modern New Yorker somehow ends up in the palace of Medusa just as she's beheaded. I had hopes for this one since Smith followed the part of the Medusa-myth in which Pegasus is born from the gorgon's blood. Then Pegasus takes the narrator to the place he most desires to visit, and the tale turns into a shaggy-dog story about frustrated cannibals. THE INVISIBLE CITY-- What a surprise! Two explorers in Africa comes across an invisible domain, whose denizens don't want the explorers to leave. But in a departure from the norm, both of the guys escape with their lives and the aliens are either exiled or destroyed. THE ROOT OF AMPOI-- In the best of the "fair-to-poor" stories, a conniver seeks treasure in the Papuan Mountains and finds a tribe where the women have rebelled against their gender's natural shortcomings. All the females eat a special root that makes them grow eight feet tall, thus making matriarchal rule a slam-dunk. To the adventurer's surprise, the queen takes a shine to him (the reader never knows why) and marries him. This gives the man the chance to plunder the secrets of the "tall sex," but he does not profit thereby.                                                                                                         

  Only three stories in POSEIDONIS make my cut for high-mythicity stories, and two of them take place in the titular Atlantean city, examining the doomed career of the sorcerer Malygris. In my review of the XICCARPH collection, I wondered if the sorcerer Maal Dweb, who appeared in two stories, was Smith's only continuing character. But I forgot that he devoted the same number of stories to Malygris, and I found both tales more psychologically astute and ornately written than those about the Xiccarph magician. In THE LAST INCANTATION, Malygris, who's become the world's supreme sorcerer, becomes overtaken with ennui despite his vast knowledge of cabalistic matters. He remembers his former love Nylissa, whom he lost to disease, and whose loss precipitated his pursuit of rare magicks. He gets the idea of bringing her back from the dead, but with true ambivalence, once he's done so his memory has become too distorted to know whether he conjured up the real thing or just a pleasing illusion. In THE DEATH OF MALYGRIS, several of the magician's rivals haven't seen him about for years, and become obsessed with learning whether or not Malygris has been claimed by death at last. Since it's a Smith story, the experienced reader can be pretty sure that even though the wizard is dead, he's still not too dead to take his enemies with him. Not only was the sorcerer and his magicks a correlation for the author and his ability to conjure word pictures, he also more or less marked the end of Smith's only productive writing-period, for after MALYGRIS was written in 1933, editor Lin Carter asserts that the writer only produced a handful of stories in the last 26 years of his life on Earth.                                                                                                           

But of all the stories in POSEIDONIS, the best is one I don't even remember reading the first time, however many years that may have been. Like some of those covered above, THE VENUS OF AZOMBEII is a story of a white explorer finding a lost civilization in Africa-- and though Smith probably coined the place name "Azombeii" in response (conscious or not) to Haitian voodoo's origins in Darkest Africa, nothing remotely like a zombie appears in the tale. But unlike most lost cities full of white or Asian people, Azombeii is a lost city full of Black people. However, these Blacks become appealing to explorer Julius Marsden because their ancestors intermarried with some ancient Roman legion, who bequeathed to all of their descendants "classic" Roman features and a fertility goddess, Wanaos (Venus under a new name).                                   

  However, the true "Venus" of the story is the high priestess Mybaloe, who falls in love with Marsden at first sight. The two seem destined to be united in eternal bliss-- and actually, Smith does strongly suggest that the white American and the dark African with Roman features at least have some ecstatic encounter during a pagan orgy. But there's almost always a worm in every CAS apple, and this time it's an envious high priest, Mergawe, who poisons Marsden with a mystic potion that causes his flesh and bones to contract until he perishes, which is how the story ends, after Marsden has returned to the US and a boon friend reads the backstory of his demise in a memoir. But arguably the real star of the story is Mybaloe. I've not encountered that many distinctive female characters in Smith's stories-- usually just one-dimensional vampires and undead corpses. But Smith really tries to make Mybaloe an "ideal woman," possessed of humor and courage despite her isolated origins. In fact, this story saw print in 1931, long before the rise of jungle-girls in pulps and comic books-- and to demonstrate the resourcefulness of this "Venus," Smith even gives her a "Tarzan moment," where she saves Marsden from crocodiles by stabbing two of the reptiles to death. Obviously, whether from personal taste or in deference to his mostly Caucasian readers, Smith gives Mybaloe European features so that she's not exotic in a displeasing way. But in 1931, it was pretty daring to imagine a pulp story in which a white man and a colored woman were joined in an entirely serious romance, in contrast to the many times white explorers canoodled with high priestesses on the right side of the color line. Despite my earlier statement that Smith's magical fantasy stories played best to the author's greatest strengths, I now regard this 1930s exotic tragedy to rate as one of his top ten short stories.   

THE READING RHEUM: AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS (1931/1936)

 

This is my third reading of Lovecraft's AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS, though it's my first time checking out Leslie Klinger's annotated version. Klinger also specifies that the text was taken from HPL's manuscript, whereas my earlier readings were probably based on the altered text from the ASTOUNDING publication. However, none of the corrections or annotations changed my view of MOUNTAINS: that it's an extremely important example of Mythos world-building, but that as a story MOUNTAINS feels rather inert.             

 In earlier reviews I've commented on the extraordinary power HPL could convey through his meticulous descriptions of landscapes, most often those of his native New England. He definitely moved out of his comfort zone to describe the barren wastelands of the Antarctic terrain, and since I'm sure he never traveled to either that continent or to any comparable terrain, he must have depended heavily upon travel writers' descriptions. Many of his descriptions of Antarctica rate among his best. However, despite this level of excellence, these frozen wastes have the disadvantage that they host no human tribes or settlements. This was ideal for painting a picture of all the various extraterrestrial beings that once inhabited Earth. But Antarctica doesn't carry the same associations in human culture, so HPL wasn't able to play to that particular strength in this story.               

 It occurred to me that structurally MOUNTAINS is not that different from 1920's STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER. In that short story, two dilettantes, making "terrible researches into the unknown," descend into a forbidding sepulcher, with the result that one man disappears and the other lives to tell the tale. In MOUNTAINS, a whole scientific research team ventures into the antipodean wastes and stumbles across a labyrinthine city. They find preserved alien corpses that are originally called "Elder Things," which is what I will continue to call them. (HPL most frequently calls them "the Old Ones," but I deem that confusing given his use elsewhere of "Great Old Ones" for another species of foreign entity.) Despite the other researchers in the party, only two humans survive the expedition's encounter with the horrors left behind by the Elder Things, and one of the two goes insane. Aside from the narrator Dyer, at least two named characters have strong familiarity with the rudiments of the Mythos, which made it a lot easier for HPL to lay out his large-scale worldbuilding project.                                             

I think my somewhat negative reaction to MOUNTAINS stems from HPL's approach to the Elder Things. These aliens are not godlike entities like Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth, but a race of scientific investigators not totally like the modern-day humans examining their remains. HPL's "Outer Ones," the stars of THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS, were also simply ETs with advanced science. However, in WHISPERER the aliens are still very mysterious in terms of their aims and motives. Dyer and others are able to decipher much of the far-removed history of the Elder Things, and the result is that the Things lose any semblance of mystery. One of the last horrors Dyer witnesses is a "shoggoth," a leftover slave-entity once mastered by the deceased Things, and many readers have liked this particular menace. But for me the effect of telling me pretty much everything about the vanished scientists and their living tools dispersed any potential for what HPL himself called "cosmic horror." So, while I appreciate the author having laid out a grand scheme of various creatures whose powers dwarf those of pitiful humans, MOUNTAINS didn't resonate with me.                                                 

  It is interesting that the Elder Things have two major prehistorical encounters with other inhabitants of the Mythos. One of those groups are WHISPERER's Outer Ones, who I tend to call "the Fungi from Yuggoth," again because "Outer Ones" sounds too much like "Great Old Ones." I absolutely refuse to call them "Mi-Go" as Klinger does, just because Dyer idly uses that Tibetan word to allege that the Fungi were once mistaken from Tibet's "abominable snowmen." Sorry, HPL, no way do I believe that any human ever saw your crab-like creatures, whether winged or wingless, and imagined them to resemble the hairy men of the Himalayas. The other major opponents of the Things are "the spawn of Cthulhu," whom the Things manage to drive out of Antarctica. All this condensed history is very useful for fans of the Mythos, but since these encounters are only being written about long after they occurred, they only register in my system as "null-crossovers." I suppose if a big-screen movie version of MOUNTAINS had come to pass, such a film would have had to show these cosmic wars on screen, and THOSE would have counted as crossovers, as they became part of the ongoing narrative. A point that concerns only me, to be sure.                 
          

THE READING RHEUM: THE HELLBOUND HEART (1986)

 My general negative estimation of Clive Barker's work probably discouraged me from bothering to check out "The Hellbound Heart" until now. But given that I did read the 2015 SCARLET GOSPELS, in which Barker sought to construct a "Cenobite mythology" independent of the movie franchise, that probably motivated me to gauge the origins of the Cenobites in prose fiction. In my review I rated the "iconicity" of those characters in the movies over that of the GOSPELS novel, and that made me more a little curious about the source novel. There's also another reason for my reading-reticence, but I'll come back to that later.                                                                       

 To my great surprise, HEART was the best Barker prose work I've ever read. The characters are clearly delineated and confined to a small group of necessary functions in a tightly plotted tale. At base HEART is a "devil's bargain" story, in which a mortal makes a deal that he thinks will be to his benefit, but that instead ends up leaving him both burned and burning. The transgressive mortal this time is Englishman Frank Cotton, a hedonistic reprobate who travels from city to city, getting by on his charm and looks. His one relative is his brother Rory, but Frank holds Rory in contempt for his dull conservatism. On the day Rory wed his glamorous bride Julia, Frank secretly seduced Julia and then blew town.                                                                                                                                                       

But a life of heedless pleasures leaves Frank wanting something beyond ordinary experience. At a family house in England, Frank uses that iconic "puzzle box" to summon other-dimensional beings called "Cenobites." They're not connected to any religious entities, so there's no soul-bartering going on, but Frank thinks that he can make a deal with them anyway, one he thinks will result in his gaining access to new levels of heterosexual pleasures. Instead, the Cenobites' definition of pleasure is the imposition of endless forms of torture upon the body, until pain becomes synonymous with pleasure. Frank is taken into their dimension for the Cenobite games, and the book loosely suggests that these strange entities, with their body piercings and mutilations, may have been humans who became enthralled with self-inflicted mortification. None of the Cenobites in the story are as vivid as their movie-counterparts, by the way.           

Barker's first HELLRAISER movie followed the novel's plot fairly closely, and since I minutely described the plot-action of the 1987 HELLRAISER in this review, I won't repeat myself here. The greatest alteration the movie made to the book is that Kirsty Singer, a friend of Rory's nursing unrequited feelings for him, gets changed in the 1987 movie into Kirsty Cotton. This Kirsty is the unmarried daughter of Rory (whose name is changed to Larry), who resents her stepmother without knowing precisely why. In both book and movie, Kirsty is responsible for consigning Frank back to "Hell" after Frank has murdered his brother. So, in the book Kirsty's no relation to either Rory or Frank. Yet HEART includes a strange scene in which Frank's trying to masquerade as Rory to deceive Kirsty. To lure the young woman, Frank utters a come-on that Barker himself calls "incestuous:" saying "Come to Daddy" to Kirsty Singer. But if Kirsty's not related to either man, how can the come-on seem "incestuous" to anyone, least of all Kirsty?                                                                                                           Despite the various actions of Kirsty, Frank and Julia, Barker throws his narrative spotlight upon the mysterious Cenobites, though they're much more nebulous in prose than in cinema. One Cenobite displays the "pinhead" look and gets more lines than the others, so obviously in crafting the movie Barker built up that character to be more of an authority over the others, so as to take advantage of the talents of actor David Bradley. The movie still edges out the novel in terms of iconicity, but the mythicity of the two is about equal. Lastly, the other reason I was reluctant to read HEART was that I wondered if Barker, who has been public as a gay author for many years now, might not have constructed Frank's "bad bargain with the Devil" as a punishment for his heterosexual excesses. I've seen no shortage of modern narratives willing to punish fictional characters for the sin of being "heteronormative." But while I don't dismiss the possibility that Barker might have had some sort of punitive notion in mind, at least subconsciously, he succeeded in creating myth-figures that went beyond the boundaries of ideology. That the Cenobites deserve that status is suggested by the fact that other authors could excel in depicting the infernal pain-freaks in terms Barker would not have attempted, not least the HELLRAISER movie sequel. Ironically, though SCARLET GOSPELS wanted to stand apart from those other works, Barker's character of "The Hell Priest" owes a lot more to the movie's Pinhead than to the vague figure from HEART.                                               

THE READING RHEUM: THE SCARLET GOSPELS (2015)

I'm glad I got some of my takes on author Clive Barker set down in an earlier essay, so that here I can focus more on the specific problems I had with SCARLET GOSPELS, one of Barker's rare crossovers between two of his icons.

First I'll say that even though GOSPELS isn't well-plotted and its characters are under-realized, Barker succeeds in creating enough of a linear sense of menace that the novel is a decent read, though I don't envision ever wanting to reread it. The criticism I voiced in the earlier essay-- that often Barker's works are just catalogues of sex-and-sadism scenes, without much narrative "glue" to hold them together-- particularly applies here. Because Barker doesn't care about delving into individual characters, he often tosses in new ones without any attention to context. For instance, one of Harry D'Amour's allies is a female body builder, name of Lana. This makes it possible for Barker to throw in a little femme-formidable action. But who is Lana? Is there a story about why her character devoted herself to muscle-building? Not at all, and so even though Barker might have included her as a change from his studiously swishy characters, she comes off as just another "freak flag" getting flown.

This is even more evident with one of Barker's starring icons, Harry D'Amour. D'Amour isn't exactly a well-known figure outside Barker fandom, for the author has only placed the detective in a handful of short stories, one major role in an unfinished novel-series (THE BOOK OF THE ART), and an unsuccessful stand-alone movie, LORD OF ILLUSIONS. Yet Barker wants to play up D'Amour as if he's a fascinating "everyman" (his word) type of character, who becomes enmeshed in occult situations far beyond his means. Barker doesn't arm his detective-hero with any special weapons or skills, so he clearly wanted him to be the sort of protagonist who just muddles through situations far beyond his compass. I for one just found D'Amour terminally dull, and his relationships with his various allies didn't improve his character. D'Amour doesn't really have the mojo to be dealing with the more famous icon of the story, and so he usually comes off as a glorified viewpoint character rather than an icon with his own stature.

There's actually zero reason for D'Amour to be involved in the story of the Cenobite mastermind Pinhead (whose movie-name I'll use for convenience, since Barker's name for him, "The Hell Priest," is cumbersome). Pinhead has a master plan to take control of Hell, and to that end, he spends a lot of time invading the sanctums of mortal magicians to plunder their secrets. One of these forays brings Pinhead into contact with D'Amour, and Pinhead hatches some contrived idea that D'Amour should be the witness of the Cenobite's grand scheme. Thus Pinhead lures D'Amour and a handful of helpers into Hell to witness his grand scheme in action. Said scheme involves the revelation that Satan, after centuries of ruling Hell, committed suicide due to his estrangement from Heaven. Pinhead uses this opportunity to steal Satan's armor, with which he can channel even greater mystical powers and thus take control of the infernal realm. However, for some obscure reason Satan comes back to life when his armor's removed, and the two demons fight. Without giving away too much, Barker seals the fate of his best-known icon here-- and I wouldn't mind that, except that Barker's Hell Priest isn't much more interesting than Harry D'Amour.

I may finally take time to read the original novella on which Barker based his HELLRAISER movie concept, but without question, Pinhead of the movies is far more famous than his prose predecessor, much less this 2015 version. The first HELLRAISER is indubitably Barker's best venture into cinema, just on the strength of his interbreeding between Hell's standard association with suffering and the new idea of demons informed by sadomasochistic obsessions. But I also admired how HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II-- an original story not derived from a Barker story-- created a Hell with a much more impressive visual appearance. Barker may not have wanted to emulate that approach for either legal reasons, aesthetic reasons, or a little of both. But his Hell is utterly routine and visually unimpressive. 

On my movie-blog I've reviewed all eight of the HELLRAISER movies starring Doug Bradley as Pinhead. While only the first two films are better than average, all of them contribute to a fairly consistent cosmos in which Pinhead only intrudes on reality under special conditions and depends on tempting mortals in approved Satanic style. Barker doesn't abide by any particular rules in his book, much less having any deeper appreciation of the deeper myths informing Hell and, by extension, the rest of the Judeo-Christian cosmos. So his idea of a new Gospel is more like a heresy against the superior iconicity of the cinematic HELLRAISER. 

MY THOUGHTS ON CLIVE BARKER

 I could write overall evaluations of a lot of writers given that I've read all or most of their repertoires. But I can't do more than make general comments about English horror-writer Clive Barker. I'm currently about to finish SCARLET GOSPELS, which I'll review separately, but what I have finished didn't impress me much-- the 1985 DAMNATION GAME and the 1988 CABAL (reviewed here) and one of his short story collections. I certainly didn't feel that he was "the future of horror" as Stephen King fulsomely claimed decades ago.        

At first, I thought the only thing I didn't like about Barker was that I found most of his characters superficial. Yet I've enjoyed a lot of authors who aren't particularly good at characterization and who depend mostly on "types." But reading GOSPELS makes me realize that a lot of my problems with Barker depend on his heavy dependence on projecting his oft declared S&M fetish into his fiction. This would not be a problem if he was able to make his characters come alive, to sound as if each of them has specific motivations. But without a sense of individual character, Barker's constant barrage of hyperviolence and (usually gay) sexuality becomes wearying and takes me out of his stories. True, I sometimes have the same reaction to the works of Sade, the author whose name begat the term "sadism." But whenever I enter Sade's world, I know in advance that sex-and-violence scenarios are pretty much all he offers.                 

In my review of the last firm that Barker both wrote and directed, LORD OF ILLUSIONS, I remarked that the Barker stories I've read don't "hold together" because of his lack of ability to empathize with the world of ordinary people, in contrast to the occult demimonde in which his characters move. I have not read the story Barker used as the source of his movie HELLRAISER, but I note that in the movie Barker did an admirable job of showing how the ordinary folks Kirsty and her father get trapped in the bizarre domain of the Cenobites and their votaries. Yet Barker also scores fairly low in the realm of imaginative play when he's not depicting his sadism scenes, as the version of Hell he depicts in GOSPELS is not nearly as interesting as the one in the HELLRAISER sequel that was given to two other raconteurs, Tony Randel and Peter Atkins.                        

In conclusion, there's some irony that Barker is just as hemmed-in by his dependence on his demimonde tropes as a more conservative creator-- say, Frank Capra-- might be by his concentration on tropes of middle-class life. The moral of the story might then be, as Captain Kirk sagely said, that "too much of anything isn't necessarily a good thing."                                           

THE READING RHEUM: "THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS" (1930/1931)

 

Now this is more like it; cosmic horror the way HPL fans like it!

WHISPERER is one of the first six HPL stories I encountered in a particular collection back in The Day, and as I noted in my previous essay it eschews the dodgy dialect of HPL's immediately previous Mythos-tale DUNWICH HORROR. I'll note briefly that this time the reader also doesn't know the significance of the novella's title until the very end of the story. 

WHISPERER also resembles THE COLOUR OUF OF SPACE because it shows HPL's skill at describing the natural backdrops of the story, which in this case are the desolate woodlands of Vermont. The flooding of a local river causes the local townsfolk to circulate rumors about the corpses of mysterious beings in the waters. Albert Wilmarth, a literature teacher at Miskatonic University in Arkham, launches an amateur investigation of the rumors, writing newspaper articles on the local mythology of the aboriginal Indians. These essays cause a local farmer, Henry Akeley, to contact Wilmarth about his own experiences.

Though most of the exchanges between Wilmarth and Akeley are in the form of letters, this epistolary method of storytelling never sacrifices any tension. Akeley tells Wilmarth that for months his secluded farm has been besieged by mysterious beings which, when glimpsed at all, look like winged, claw-handed humanoids. The two humans eventually learn that these beings, "the Outer Ones," are visitors from the planet Yuggoth (Pluto), and they've set up a clandestine mining-operation in the vicinity of Akeley's farm. Only Akeley's supply of guns and guard-dogs has preserved him from being killed or abducted by these alien intruders. Eventually Wilmarth hears enough to convince him of the farmer's veracity, but by the time he physically arrives at the farm, he encounters what he thinks is Akeley, but is in truth "the whisperer in darkness."

Before I began this review-project, I mentioned here that I wondered if any of HPL's Mythos stories registered as crossovers. After all, the cosmic horror of WHISPERER is enhanced by two major sequences in which the human protagonists are exposed to an overwhelming variety of references to dozens of alien beings, domains, and deities, some original with HPL, some invented by authors with whom the writer was friendly, like Robert E Howard, Frank Belknap Long, and Clark Ashton Smith. (Smith had apparently shown HPL his story "The Story of Satamptra Zeros," because that tale, which was the debut of Smith's toadlike god Tsatthoggua, didn't see print until after WHISPERER did.) 

All these arcane references built up HPL's vision of a bizarre universe beyond the ken of human reason-- but references, in my system, count only as "null-crossovers." However, though the main monsters of WHISPERER are the Outer Ones-- who had previously appeared in an HPL poem, "Fungi from Yuggoth"-- they do apparently enlist one of the "Great Old Ones" to deceive Wilmarth. HPL subtly mentions that the "mighty messenger" Nyarlathotep-- who was the narrative focus of a 1920 tale-- "shall put on the semblance of men." And this imposture proves necessary because, unlike the Outer Ones with their wings and claws, Nyarlathotep had already been established as being able to pass for human. So, in addition to THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH. WHISPERER is a bonafide crossover story.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE DUNWICH HORROR" (1928/1929)

 Though I respect THE DUNWICH HORROR as a major Lovecraft work, I've never liked the story that much, and my re-reading of an annotated version didn't make that much difference. At most, the annotations made clear how much HPL was indebted to the Judeo-Christian mythology of angels mating with mortals-- which myth-trope was of course also derived from stories of pagan deities begetting demigods on humans. For instance, Klinger notes that one of the angel-references mentioned by HPL was to "Azazel," an angel with that precise reputation.

The opening of DUNWICH provides some strong description of the Massachusetts town of Dunwich, and of its multitudinous associations with the New England witch-trials and with the older pagan traditions of the Amerindians. In addition, HPL dumps on almost the entirety of the rural population of the area, expanding on his disgust for Joe Slater in 1919's BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP. I was rather surprised, for two reasons, to read a line in which the writer tore down these "white trash" for their history of "half-hidden murders, incests, and deeds of almost unnamable violence and perversity." On one level I found this odd because subjects of murder and incest were the common coin of the Gothic fiction that HPL thoroughly lambasted in his overview of horror fiction, SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE. On a second level, it's weird to hear DUNWICH associated with "incest," because it's about a mortal woman who has sex with an extradimensional creature-- which is about as "out-cest" as one can get. I can only conclude that HPL wasn't above associating one form of abominable sexuality with another, even though the fantasy of demon-coitus has nothing to do with familial interbreeding.

I also didn't like HPL's buildup to his big reveal. For most of the story, the author keeps the focus on the repulsive figure of Wilbur Whatley, the offspring of Lavinia Whatley and the demon-god Yog-Sothoth (making his debut as a "featured Old One.") While keeping the reader busy with Wilbur's peregrinations-- which are focused on obtaining information on occult rituals in order to unleash his demonic father on Earth-- HPL throws in a secondary mystery, about Wilbur's earthly father building a huge extra room atop the Whatley farmhouse and buying cattle that no neighbor ever sees again. Wilbur is slain at one point, and his half-alien body is revealed to onlookers. The big reveal, though, is that Lavinia Whatley also spawned a second son, a huge amorphous thing that occupied the extra room, with only tangential humanity, and this offspring is also killed when a Miskatonic U scholar, Doctor Armitage, is able to defeat the ritual and banish Yog-Sothoth.

Another problem with the story is that HPL is pretty bad with both his rural characters and their dialect. He kept dialogue to a minimum in THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE. But in DUNWICH, there's a lot of farmer-talk, and it's excruciating. Fortunately, in the next Mythos story HPL eschewed almost all dialogue in yet another of his ventures into rural New England, and the results were far better. 

I note in passing that as far as I recall, the 1970 cinematic adaptation doesn't show Wilbur as being having a repugnant alien physiology that he hides from other humans, and the ending of the film is stronger for not "giving away the game" too early.

THE READING RHEUM: THE GREEN EYES OF BAST (1920)

 SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I probably read THE GREEN EYES OF BAST some thirty or more years ago, thanks in large part to a series of Pyramid paperback reprints of Sax Rohmer's non-Fu Manchu works. I remember enjoying the novel, but this time around, my main reaction was that Rohmer had a great idea and wasted it in a pedestrian mystery novel.

The viewpoint character of BAST is London journalist Jack Addison, who has had some mostly unspecified experiences in Africa, though not enough to make him one of Rohmer's experts in exotica. He has a professional friendship with Scotland Yard Inspector Gatton, which is the main reason Addison gets in on the ground floor regarding a mysterious murder. This killing has personal ramifications for the reporter, because the victim is a man named Coverly, the cousin of an aristocrat who has become affianced to Addison's true love Isobel. Though Isobel has not yet married her intended, the experienced mystery-reader will anticipate that at some point the competing fiancee will get knocked off, leaving Addison's path to Isobel cleared. But though we don't learn the nature of the murderers for over a hundred pages, Rohmer teases the reader with intimations of a strange female watching Addison at his house. He sees the titular "green eyes" through his kitchen window and finds evidence that some intruder-- apparently female, due to leaving tracks from high-heeled shoes-- vaulted the wall around his house in order to gain access to his grounds.

After that intriguing opening, though, Rohmer fills lots of pages with dull ratiocinative exchanges between Addison and Gatton about the investigation, and those exchanges aren't helped by the dullness of both characters. Addison unknowingly encounters the green-eyed woman a couple of times, but Rohmer doesn't make her a compelling character either. Not until about page 90 does Addison meet the prime mover involved in both the murder and the mystery of the green-eyed female athlete. Doctor Damar Greefe is a Eurasian physician, ostensibly in service to one of the Coverly family, and like many of Rohmer's Oriental masterminds he is brilliant, reserved, and obsessed with an idee fixee.

The great idea Rohmer wastes is based on this folklore-notion that pregnant women can have their offspring affected by seeing certain animals. As the online Brittanica puts it:

An old wives’ tale that exists in several cultures suggests that when a pregnant woman looks at an unpleasant or ugly animal, her baby will take on a resemblance of that animal. 

As Greefe informs Addison and Gatton at the novel's close-- given that even by then they're nowhere near solving any mystery-- he, being a "hybrid" between white and not-white parents, became fascinated with evolutionary hybrids. In Egypt he found evidence of children born with animal-like characteristics, and his rationale, knowing that they were not sired by actual animals as in folklore, was to suppose that such people were "psycho-hybrids." He happens to be on hand when a British matron in Egypt gives birth to one such hybrid, after having met one of the strange wildcats that prowls around the long-deserted Temple of Bast, the Egyptian cat-goddess. Greefe tells the matron and her spouse-- two elder members of the Coverly family-- that the delivery is stillborn, when in fact Greefe absconds with the infant, precisely because she is one of the hybrids he's obsessed with, with cat-like eyes and cat-like reflexes. When the girl has matured, Greefe takes her to London so that he can blackmail her high-society parents. But during that sojourn, the cat-woman-- named Nahemah after a Jewish demon-- sees Addison from afar and falls in love with him. 

There's other stuff about who killed who and for what reason, but it's dull stuff. Nahemah, who being the "monster" behind the scenes ought to be the story's imaginative center, never comes alive. Does she regard Greefe as a father, before he informs her of her parentage? Rohmer tells us that she conceives a hatred for the Coverlys, knowing that she was denied her patrimony, but there are no scenes in which she directly interacts with any of her blood relations. Rohmer treats her as if she's absorbed the purported tendency of Eastern women to fall in love quickly, even though she's entirely English. And at no time does Rohmer give her the tragic air he bestows upon a superior character like Fah Lo Suee.

Greefe is easily the novel's most interesting character. In some ways, he's "Fu Manchu Lite." Greefe comes to London with a mute Negro servant armed with a strangling-cord and sets up a weapon with which he can shoot poison gas shells at anyone who gives him trouble! Yet Greefe, unlike the usual penny ante pulp villains, has a genuine beef with the two cultures that spawned him, both of which have rejected his very existence. In one of the book's better scenes, Addison interviews a London pub-crawler regarding the physician, whom the bigoted local calls "the black doctor." For once, a Rohmer protagonist openly scorns this ugly chauvinism. Yet at the same time, the author is still getting some mileage out of the fear of insidious Orientals invading jolly old England.

I don't have a good chronology for Rohmer's published works, but one point of interest is that BAST was published two years after THE GOLDEN SCORPION. In my review I noted that in 1918 Rohmer loosely tied the villain of that story to Fu Manchu, last seen the previous year, as well as implying that the antagonist of 1915's YELLOW CLAW was also allied to the Si-Fan. But for whatever reason, Rohmer seems to have dropped the Fu Manchu concept for the next nine years. In my GOLDEN SCORPION review I noted that the author sought to distance himself from "Yellow Peril" associations despite his using a Chinese villain. In BAST, Rohmer admits that both "white" and "non-white" societies have usually been unjust to biracials, and clearly Greefe's rejection by both cultures is the foundation of his obsession. Though I'm sure many modern readers would find these observations insufficiently political, I find them relatively enlightened for 1920.

I really wanted BAST to be a myth-novel. But at best, it falls into my category of "near myths," which don't quite manage to take full advantage of their imaginative content. 

THE READING RHEUM: ZOTHIQUE (1970)

 In contrast to my rather so-so experience in reading the Clark Ashton Smith collection XICCARPH, ZOTHIQUE, another of the Lin Carter paperback editions from Ballantine Books, re-acquainted me with all the reasons I liked Smith's wry, mordant stories. Zothique-- possibly named for the Greek idea of the "Sothic Year," sometimes associated with cycles of world annihilation-- is Earth in its final days. But Zothique, unlike most if not all previous future-Earths in fiction, became dominated by ancient magicks, as described in the opening lines of "The Dark Eidolon:"

On Zothique, the last continent on Earth, the sun no longer shone with the whiteness of its prime, but was dim and tarnished as if with a vapor of blood. New stars without number had declared themselves in the heavens, and the shadows of the infinite had fallen closer. And out of the shadows, the older gods had returned to the gods forgotten since Hyperborea, since Mu and Poseidonis, bearing other names but the same attributes. And the elder demons had also returned, battening on the fumes of evil sacrifice, and fostering again the primordial sorceries...

It's a world in which Smith establishes a loose continuity between a few dozen exotic domains and their equally exotic deities, though in a sense none of the stories are literally tied together, even to the extent of the Cthulhu mythos. Oddly, editor Carter arranged the seventeen Zothique stories into what he considered their historical order. I can't claim that I don't pursue intellectual chimera just as elusive, but since there really isn't a "history" as such in Zothique-- which resembles the world of the Arabian Nights seen through the charnel lens of Edgar Allan Poe-- I didn't see the point. Personally, I might have preferred to see the stories-- all written in the early thirties-- to have been ordered according to their time of writing, though I concede that this could have been difficult, given that the author was something of a hermit.

Not all of the seventeen stories in the Ballantine collection meet my criteria for high-mythicity fiction, but as I've done in many other reviews, I'll go down the list, judging each with the symbols "G" (good), "F" (fair), and "P" (poor). 

XEETHRA (G)-- The titular character is a simple goatherd who wanders into a mountain cavern and finds himself in a long-vanished realm. Hungry, he helps himself to some nearby fruit, after which he beholds two huge dark guardians, though they do nothing to impede him. He then begins to have dreams of a separate existence, wherein he was Amero, king of the ancient realm. Xeethra's mind becomes so divided between his two incarnations that he returns to the cavern-world. There he meets the lord of the domain, the demon lord Thasaidon, who offers to restore Xeethra to his earlier glory, but only if the goatherd can keep true to that incarnation. It turns out to be a "grass always greener" situation, but it's interesting that Xeethra's unhappy fate arises from tasting a sort of "forbidden fruit."

NECROMANY IN NAAT (F)-- Prince Yadar goes hither and yon seeking his lost love Dalili. He finds her on the isle of Naat, which is dominated by two necromancers with a small army of zombies. Sadly, Dalili died before coming to Naat, and the sorcerers have made her one of their undead followers. Things don't turn out all that well for Yadar either, but better than they do for the necromancers.

THE EMPIRE OF THE NECROMANCERS (P)-- This tale follows yet two other necromancers who create their own private kingdom of dead people. This one loses points given the presence of a zombie guy who turns on his masters, just because the story needs him to do so.

THE MASTER OF THE CRABS (P)-- A sorcerer and his apprentice go seeking treasure on an island inhabited only by crabs. But another sorcerer seeks the same wealth, and he knows how to turn the local fauna against the other seekers. Not much of anyone to root for.

THE DEATH OF ILALOTHA (F)-- King Thulos, though married to his reigning queen, becomes obsessed with the idea that his dead lover Ilalotha may cheat the Reaper thanks to her skills in witchcraft. He braves the tomb to find out. Things do not go well.

THE WEAVER IN THE VAULT (P)-- This tale suffers from a big buildup and an arbitrary resolution. A king sends three warriors to a dead city to bring back an ancient mummy for purposes of divination. Of course, things end badly for all three men, but Smith earns point in that the titular "weaver" isn't some stock vampire or zombie. However, the alien-seeming creature doesn't lend itself to context of any kind, and so seems rather contrived.

THE WITCHCRAFT OF ULUA (G)-- Smith was at his best when he wasn't so focused on delivering a "gotcha" to the horror fans. Young Amalzain plans to accept a position in a corrupt kingdom full of degenerates, particularly the witch queen Ulua. He visits his anchorite uncle Sabmon, who wants him of the perils and gives him a protective amulet. Sure enough, Ulua attempts to seduce the innocent youth, and when he rejects her, he's haunted day and night by specters of rotting corpses. Amalzain finally flees and escapes back to the protection of his uncle, who shows him the fate he missed, as the entire kingdom is dragged down to the hell of Thasaidon. 

THE CHARNEL GOD (G)-- Poe would have loved this one. While Phariom and his bride Eliath pass through a city dominated by worshippers of the death god Mordiggian, Eliath succumbs to a cataleptic fit that makes her look dead. The priests of Mordiggian ignore the young man's protests and claim the woman to be buried in their sacred tombs. Phariom must brave the sepulchers of the god to prevent his bride from being buried alive. But as it happens, there are worse blasphemies transpiring that night, as a necromancer plans to steal the corpse of a woman he slew, the better to raise her from the dead for his pleasure. Will the worshippers, or even the death god himself, consume both the licit and illicit transgressors?

THE DARK EIDOLON (G)-- The evil king Zotulla commits many nasty acts, but he doesn't even remember driving his chariot over the body of a beggar-boy, Narthos. But Narthos becomes obsessed with gaining revenge for his injuries, and for years he studies sorcery. Years later, under the name Namirrha, the magician shows up in the city where Zotulla still reigns. Slowly Namirrha weaves spells to confuse and disconcert the ruler, like a cat toying with a mouse. But there's a new wrinkle when Namirrha's patron god Thasaidon warns the magician to leave Zotulla alone, since the king provides the demon with lots of evil deeds. Not surprisingly, Namirrha still visits an appropriate equine doom upon the king, but gods are not defied, and the dish of revenge never tastes good cooked by demon-fire.

MORTHYLLA (G)-- In the midst of courtly degeneracy, discontented youth Valzain can't get any satisfaction. But someone at court tells him that there's a lamia who hangs out at the local necropolis, and Valzain is willing to risk death to allay boredom. The lamia Morthylla welcome the young blade, and they make love. He begins to wonder, though, why she spares him her fangs. This leads to a sad story of disillusionment and death, but at least Valzain receives a mild surcease of sorrow in the afterlife.

THE BLACK ABBOT OF PUTHUUM (F)-- Two young warriors are charged with making a trek to a foreign land in order to guide a beautiful woman to her wedding with their king. Hostile creatures force the little band to seek shelter in a temple run by a Black man named Ujuk, even though the warriors think he's got a yen either to hump the young (implicitly White) girl, or to devour her. Smith playing to the worst elements of the pulp magazine audience? Not precisely, because in the catacombs beneath the temple, the two stalwarts meet the spirit of the real Abbot of Puthuum. Formerly a living Black man, the late Abbot belonged to an ascetic cult, but he strayed from his path, had sex with a succubus, and so spawned the only half-human Ujuk. After the two heroes slay the false abbot, they jointly decide that they don't want to waste the young bride on some decrepit king and decide only one of them should take her as the prize. The young woman's response provides one of the few humorous denouements in a Smith story.

THE TOMB-SPAWN (P)-- Two jewel merchants give ear to the story of an ancient kingdom whose king commanded a fell spirit, Nioth Korghai, who may still guard the king's tomb. The two begin their journey back home, but on the way, they're harried by a beast-like people. Unlike the various treasure-hunters in other stories, the innocents end up in a certain tomb, guarded by the very spirit they just learned of. This is easily the weakest story, though Smith does name-check the sorcerer Namirrha from DARK EIDOLON just for an inside reference.

THE LAST HIEROGLYPH (F)-- Nushain the astrologer seeks to avoid the fate decreed for him by the stars. Only the inventive nature of the doom redeems this so-so story.

THE ISLAND OF THE TORTURERS (G)-- I realize this story is basically just one of many "the biter bit" stories, but it's easily the most memorable one in the collection. A virulent plague, the Silver Death, decimates all the people ruled by King Fulbra. He survives the loss of all his people thanks to a magic ring which suspends the effects of the plague with which he too is infected, even keeping him from spreading it to others. He sets sail for a kingdom where he hopes to spend his days in peace, secluded so as to minimize contact with others. But a storm casts the unfortunate king upon the shores of Uccastrog, the island home of a people devoted to coming up with skillful tortures. Fulbra endures the torments of the vile natives without resorting to his one ace in the hole because a woman tells him she plans to help him escape. Then she betrays him, and there's no reason for Fulbra to withhold his hand-- or rather, his ring-- and the doom of the torturers is eminently satisfying.

THE GARDEN OF ADOMPHA (F)-- This too is a "biter bit" tale, but not nearly as interesting as TORTURERS. King Adopha maintains a fantastic garden, and how it grows is with the bodies of his pawns and enemies. The king owes his success to his court wizard Dwerulas, but the rash royal decides the magician's power might threaten him, and so murders Dwerulas. So this time, instead a worm turning the garden, the garden turns the worm.

THE VOYAGE OF KING EUVORAN (G)-- One of the best takes last place. Like most of the idiot monarchs in Zothique, Euvoran fills his days tormenting the subjects who fall under his scrutiny. His rulership is symbolized by his fabulously bejeweled crown, and much of his pride in his kingship is tied up is this hereditary possession. Then a stranger, either a magician or a god, decides to mess with Euvoran's peace of mind. In full sight of the court, the stranger brings to life a stuffed bird, and all watch as the bird flies off with the monarch's crown. Since Euvoran doesn't have the sense to know when he's out of his depth, he launches an expedition to find the bird's nest and recover the crown. Numerous events, both tragic and comic, eliminate all of Euvoran's retainers. Finally, in a great tour de force, the hapless monarch is taken prisoner by a race of intelligent birds, who are naturally offended when he mentions having stuffed one of their kindred. Despite Euvoran's massive stupidity and his indifference to the suffering of others, he's actually spared any of the ghastly dooms Smith metes out to the guilty and innocent alike, though, to say the least, he ends up in comically reduced circumstances.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE" (1927)

THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE was another of the first HPL stories I ever read, and in many ways it's a better story of "cosmic horror" than any of the "Mythos" tales. There are no references to the many alien entities of the Mythos here, and Klinger has most likely included COLOUR because of its propinquity to Arkham, the same reason the editor included THE SILVER KEY.

The "colour" of the title is some force or property dwelling in a meteor that falls to Earth near a farm in a Massachusetts farming community west of Arkham. Researchers examine the meteor, and their investigations implicitly release the strange force, which then settles within a well on the property of farmer Nahum Gardner. The meteor itself dissolves, and it's only recently occurred to me that it may have been the "vehicle" in which the "colour" traveled.

Not that HPL endows the malignant force with any sense of intentionality. For pages and pages, HPL goes into extensive descriptions of how plants, animals and humans in the community are adversely affected by the influence of the force, either dying prematurely or being altered in some freakish manner. There is no clue as to whether the force that causes all this is in any way sentient, and calling it a "colour" seems to imply that it is just a presence from another realm of being, that may not particularly intend malice but simply poisons everything on Earth by reason of being so alien to mundane organic nature. Only toward the end is there some sense that the force may seek to return to the stars that spawned it, but even that sense is largely the impression of one of the witnesses. I'm tempted to opine that the doom the Colour brings to Earth-- which may spread to pretty much every living thing eventually-- may be in line with HPL's views of the entropy of all things, according to the science of his time.

I confess that though I think this is a great story, I didn't get into re-reading it this time, probably because its slow depiction of degeneration doesn't reward repeat visits. But I think I'll always remember my first reading of COLOUR, which was like seeing the entire universe transformed into a Gothic horrorshow.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD" (1927/1941)

 

For convenience's sake I read the above Belmont paperback edition and then read through Klinger's annotations on the book. I noted that most of said notes talked about all of the antiquarian accuracy that HPL poured into this short novel-- which meant very little to me, given that I think all that detail hurt the story.

For me as a reader, WARD inverts all the strengths of CTHULHU's gradual detective-style revelation of a great mystery. WARD uses much the same structure and approach, but the story broadcasts the Big Reveal on the first page, talking about a magic ritual that can bring back "any dead Ancestour." The titular Ward, born in 1902, becomes enthralled with the legend of his sorcery-using, 18th-century ancestor Joseph Curwen, and accidentally revives Curwen's spirit, which then usurps Ward's body. Ward's doctor intrepidly discovers the truth and destroys the body Curwen inhabits.

HPL wasn't entirely without ability to create at least broad characterization, but he utterly fails to make Ward (a probable self-insert) even as interesting as Henry Wilcox from CTHULHU. Doctor Willett is no better, and Ward's unnamed parents are only brought in to serve very limited plot functions. For me WARD has only two distinctions, aside from inspiring loose film adaptations like 1963's HAUNTED PALACE:

(1) WARD is the first text to mention the Old One Yog-Sothoth, though only as a name within a mystic chant.

(2) There's a brief mention of a "Sign of Koth," which receives a little more expansion in DREAM QUEST. Robert E Howard used Koth as a place-name in the Conanverse, and in the 1930s tales of the comic-book hero "Doctor Occult," writer Jerry Siegel used the name for the titular hero's villain.

I guess I should also add that HPL may have been having some fun by portraying his self-insert as unwise for having invested so much time and energy into his antiquarian pursuits, since they bring about his doom. At the same the story may have been primarily a method by which HPL could share his passion for New England history with readers, though WARD wasn't published until after HPL's passing.