First off, hello from the United Kingdom! I have been moved over to a new office here, which has been quite the process! Nice people, but quieter than I expected. Now, to business.
Sometimes I feel like a pair of fuzzy dice — seemingly longhaired, but then you press me and it turns out I’m square underneath. Ray Bradbury has made a name for himself in the mundane world, but amongst the Galactic Journey, I may be his last full-throated supporter. Into this shaky environment comes his newest book, I Sing The Body Electric!, a title whose exclamation point is doing its darnedest to get us excited about a collection of reprints, albeit a pretty good one.
That better version would be 3.5 stars, but the reality is 2, and 1 if you support Irish independence.
“Tomorrow’s Child”
A child is accidentally born into a different dimension than his human parents, making the baby appear to be a glowing blue pyramid with tendrils. While the parents want to love their child, its strange outer appearance and behavior ostracizes them from their community. But they eventually realize that their love for their child is more important to them than the rest of the world.
This story is beautiful and touching, but also rather sad. I think that Bradbury is very good at quiet, reflective moments, and I wonder if this is what growing up in the Levittowns of the world has been like for these younger hippies. Hopefully, things will improve, now that we’re moving away from the blood-soaked Piscean and into the Aquarian astrological age,.
3.5 stars.
“The Women” (1948)
During a day at the beach, a woman fights to keep her husband from being seduced and destroyed by the spirit-intelligence of the ocean. She tries valiantly, but the ocean always wins in the end.
Written during Bradbury’s horror days, I would be curious how this reads now from a female perspective, especially in concert with books like Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman.
4 stars.
“The Inspired Chicken Motel”
Memories of nomadic life during the poverty of the Great Depression, told from a child’s perspective. There are multiple possible meanings of the story, but I suspect that it is simply a story written to evoke nostalgia within Bradbury’s mainstream audience.
3 stars.
“Downwind from Gettysburg” (1969)
A mechanical Lincoln has been assassinated, for a second time…the plot does not strictly matter.
When they are not horror stories, Bradbury’s plots are a surface on which to draw, not a firm structure. Nobody writes chaos, true animal chaos, quite as well as Bradbury. When it was reviewed by Erica Frank in June, it seemed much less significant. With Agnew’s recent statements to the press, and the current trial of Lt. Calley, this is a story that struck much closer to home.
4 stars.
“Yes, We’ll Gather At the River”
The last day of a town that is being cut off by the construction of a highway, implied to be the 101 in California. Not SF or fantasy, but very poignant, and good reading to remember sad times in a good way.
4 stars.
“The Cold Wind and the Warm” (1964)
A warning, first off — Bradbury’s Irish impressions are terrible things. He reminds me of a beloved relative of mine, who busts out his “Grandma Murphy” impression every St. Patrick’s day, to the embarrassment of all. But unlike “The Terrible Conflagration Up At the Place” (Bradbury is never quite so dated as when he tries to be modern), there is too much good in this story to dislike it. Odd men have come to Dublin, strangely feminine and well-heeled, and these visitors wish to experience autumn, with all its cold and changing leaves. This reminded me of Lin Carter and Randall Garrett's "Masters of the Metropolis" and some of my own experiences here in Wales.
4 stars; 3.5 if you can’t forgive the impressions.
“Night Call, Collect”
The poem at the beginning is beautiful, although not quite as intellectual as it may think. A story on Mars, though a different and more cynical one than seen in his Chronicles. Possibly a more personal story, that of an old man driven mad and destroyed by the Martian masterpiece he created in his youth.
3 stars.
“The Haunting of the New”
We had one bad story set in Ireland, and one good one, and we didn't really need a third in this collection. Moreover, it need not have been set in Ireland, as it is so deeply a California tale. The story concerns the type of home colloquially known as a “dream palace”, known for its parties and orgies, which burned down in disgust at its own evil. (Feeling a bit guilty for how you exited our SF world, Mr. Bradbury?) The house is rebuilt, but rejects the attempts to continue its old life.
I am harsh on this story because it speaks to me uncomfortably.
A sickly-sweet rewriting of “The Veldt” (Saturday Evening Post, 1950) for the mundane set. A widower and his children decide on purchasing an electric grandmother, carefully constructed. For those who could not stomach Dandelion Wine (Gourmet, 1953)
2 stars.
“The Tombing Day” (1952)
A short, broad, earthy and practical story, poking fun (not unkindly!) at the demands we put on the dead and the old; and of the ways that nostalgia is a poison if imbibed too long.
4 stars (technically 3.5; gains another 0.5 due to its placement after the worst story)
“Any Friend of Nicholas Nickelby’s Is A Friend of Mine” (1966)
A Green Town story! Hooray! I love the Green Town stories, and I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live in a place like that. It seems very alien, but also very beautiful. In fact, the Green Town stories inspired me to start calling a lunch I sometimes make for myself (PB&J sandwich, apple, glass of milk) a “Bradbury”, which makes it sound better than “George’s grocery day”.
The story itself concerns a man who arrives in Green Town, living the life and writings of Charles Dickens. He obviously cannot be — the real Dickens is long dead — but who is he, really? What does it mean to “be” someone? If one life is a failure, can it be shed for a more shining one? Has a wonderfully sweet and romantic ending, which I find unusual for Bradbury. His depictions of marriage and romantic relationships more often depict it as a punch-clock job on a good day, and nerve-grating misery on a bad one.
4 stars.
“Heavy-Set” (1964)
I have trouble believing that this story was sent to Playboy, of all publications, let alone that they published it. The story of a childlike, thirty-year-old man in a disturbing relationship with the mother he lives with, a man who is as scornful of women as he is avoidant of them, a man transforming his body into a glorious shrine to nobody and nothing. This is not Playboy, this is the anti-Playboy, the story of a man who does exactly what their overpriced pamphlet says, and it only makes him more isolated and disturbed. It made my skin crawl all the way through, and I do not know if I will read it again.
4 stars.
“The Man in the Rorschach Shirt” (1966)
Now, this story is entirely within the Playboy house style, although avoiding the general tendencies towards sexism and rape. A story of a big, boisterous but kindly intellectual fellow, who quits his psychiatric practice to wander around using his loud Rorschach shirt to help psychoanalyze passersby. There’s not much more to the story, but it’s a comfortably breezy ride.
3.5 stars.
“Henry the Ninth” (1969)
Previously reviewed by The Traveler, I enjoyed this story more than he did. Far from Bradbury’s loving descriptions of good weather, the story seemed more symbolic than anything else. The world is moving on from British homogeneity and Empire, from its old literary heroes to new ones. I do not pretend to psychoanalyze, although I hear things, sometimes.
3.5 stars.
“The Lost City of Mars” (1967)
And then, Bradbury comes out with a story that manages to blend his old strengths with the sensory depth of the New Wave, about a group of would-be adventurers seeking an abandoned Martian city. They all have their own reasons for seeking the city, and different hopes for what they will find. The bitter aftertaste of this story is the realization Bradbury can still write good SF and good horror, he can keep up with the New Wave trends, he’d just rather put out pedestrian product because—I assume—he’d rather work on his golf game. With a growing horror like the mechanical Martian city closing in, I am reminded of Kipling, who put out the beautiful “Harp-song of the Dane Women” while otherwise deep into his late-period mediocrity.
4 stars.
“Christus Apollo”
A poem for Christmas in the Space Age. A perfect end piece for the book, the year, and the decade. Would be better if it rhymed, but not by much.
3.5 stars.
Finishing this collection, I am left unsure as to whom this will please. This collection is largely reprints of already-published work, so I suppose people who want a more durable copy of his magazine stories will be happy. With the exception of the last two pieces, the seemingly random ordering of the stories means that it’s hard to grab onto anything very long.
If there’s a theme that resonates throughout the collected stories, it is the fear that your best work is long behind you, and now the only thing to look forward to is a sliding decline into irrelevance and the grave. Ray, man, if that’s how you really feel, it doesn’t have to be like this! There will always be a place for you to crash, in this new-old place across the sea.
3 stars for the collection as a whole.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
As we close in on the end of the final year of the 60s, it seems the lengthening nights are seeping into my psyche more than usual. I find myself wishing I were more hopeful for the coming of a new decade, and maybe if I paid less attention to politics or the state of the world I could retain more resistance to the gloomy morale of our divided and unrested country. Thankfully, a timely distraction arose: just think how pleasantly surprised I was to discover that there was to be a diverting new work from Rod Sterling to grace our airwaves November 8, 1969!
I was a step beyond devastated when Twilight Zone left the air, as it remains one of my all-time favorite science fiction pieces to date. To know that Rod Sterling would once again be on my television just before the dawn of a new decade sparked a hope in me that’s just enough to disrupt the gloom I’m feeling at the end of this one.
Rod Serling's "Night Gallery", shown on NBC Saturday Night at the Movies
Given the climate of our cultural atmosphere, however, I am not surprised that although the work that Rod Sterling chose to create is star-studded in cast, it is otherwise physically and emotionally dark. The macabre tone sets in right away as an eerie opening theme tinnily whines from the upper register of a harpsichord. The audience is led down a black and white drawing of a hallway, interrupted regularly by the chalky outlines of featured actors, not unlike how it would feel if one were to walk through a series of taped off crime scenes with final resting places similarly marked in each. This tense opening sequence maintains stress on the audience as the illustration gives way to the darkly enshrouded silhouette of the show’s host and final name featured in the credit sequence, Rod Serling.
Serling returns to the small screen, six years after he left it, in the resolute and deliberate fashion we’ve come to expect from him. Ever our guide through the mysterious and strange, he acts as curator of the mysterious in a black void of a presentation room featuring nothing but three portraits, their faces glamorously shrouded in red velvet curtains. He describes each of these covered works of art as suspended “in time and space, a frozen moment of a nightmare.”
Entering the scene associated with the first painting, "The Cemetery," this description is immediately validated as we are confronted with a room occupied by a once wealthy patriarch, bound both by a wheelchair and the living death that is the cognitive and physical decline of age. The elderly man, Mr. Hendrix, is waited on with care by famed film and TV veteran Ossie Davis (Mr. Ruby Dee), playing the sharply dressed and precise butler Osmond Portifoy. In a heartbreakingly relatable way, the rich and ailing painter is depicted as incapable of speaking, walking, or even holding a paint brush as he barely clings to life in his old-monied estate home. By contrast, we are confronted by his shiftless rapscallion of a nephew downstairs, who we are made to immediately dislike as he twitters about the house, disrespectfully upsetting its previous order and chirping our patient butler’s name in mockery as he puts his cigarettes out on the tray of discarded food he is carrying away from Mr. Hendrix’s room.
Portifoy is not amused
The obnoxious youth wastes no time in murdering his uncle once he has confirmed his inheritance of his estate, brazenly directing his uncle’s view to the window overlooking the family cemetery so the poor man can ‘view his future residence’ as he is slowly poisoned by the cold air from the purposely opened window that his frail body is unable to withstand. The greedy nephew makes no attempt to hide his disrespectful glee when the man dies, and he rudely directs the responding home-doctor and estate manager to hastily clear away as many traces as possible of the deceased man’s control over his wealthy home. Condescendingly, he allows Butler Portifoy to stay on staff, despite their obvious and open distaste for one another. However, Portifoy finds it almost more curse than blessing that he is allowed to continue to serve the Hendrix Estate under new management.
Just when it appears nothing could stop the young man’s wonton disrespect for all things dignified, his drunken carrying on hitches on a disturbing detail he notices in one of his uncle’s paintings hanging over the hallway stairs. When his uncle is interred in the family cemetery, it appears that the estate painting changes to depict an open grave in the corresponding area of the portrait. At first, he tries to brush off this change as a trick of the light, or his faulty memory, but the more time he spends in the home, the more fixated he becomes on the painting. When his paranoia grows to the point of inducing sleeplessness, he lashes out, ripping it off the wall and throwing it into the fireplace, only to find it back on the wall where it was before. He responds with violence to Portifoy’s insistence that there is nothing wrong with the painting and burns the man, finally breaking the man’s tolerance for his behavior. Portifoy quits on the spot, leaving the younger man to continue swiftly losing his mind alone in this apparently haunted house.
A rather satisfyingly contentious dynamic
In predictable fashion, the man fares poorly on his own, and he eventually succumbs to the battle with the paranormal forces at play, launching himself off the staircase entangled in the canvas of his dead uncle’s likeness. To my surprise, however, this is not where the story ends, and it appears that the doomed youth was not the only man in the house compelled by greed and willing to play with paranormal forces he did not understand. It's a twist too good to spoil here.
The second story, “Eyes,” features the fascinating combination of a winning performance by storied actress Joan Crawford and the professional debut of a young director named Steven Spielberg. Although it was rumored that this segment’s veteran star was originally reluctant to take a chance working with the inexperienced director, it appears her fears were unfounded. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the direction of this segment was Rod Serling’s best choice of the featured three. From the elevator door closing on Joan’s character’s disgruntled employee as we open the scene, to the acrobatic shots we get from the ceiling looking through chandelier crystals, the cinematography and dynamic story telling are movie-quality.
An ambitious shot that inverts the surgeon as he has inverted his moral code.
The story in question revolves around the aging debutant Miss Claudia Menlo, played by Joan Crawford, whose nightmare appears to be the life-long curse of blindness. It seems as if the finery she surrounds herself with and the technology with which she’s been able to make her life self-sufficient has steadily transformed into bars of a gilded cage. She has become so obsessed with the idea of the sight that she has been robbed of, that she interprets it as a cruelty that she must turn into a weapon to settle the score. It is from this space that she discovers an opportunity to right the universal wrong, and she stops at nothing to seize it.
Through the perspective of the conscripted surgeon, we discover that Miss Menlo has bribed, extorted and blackmailed enough professionals and poor slobs to direct a procedure to take place where one man will lose his vision forever to give her but twelve hours of precious sight. It’s clear we are meant to condemn Joan Crawford's character’s actions, and to be sure her victim is pathetic enough to deserve all of one’s compassion, but I cannot help but understand her desperation. Yes, her vanity, decadence and aggressive way of tearing through everything that gets in her way is indefensible, but it’s hard to say if given the same circumstances I wouldn’t make similar choices. As a senescent ice queen of an empty decaying palace, the woman that life has made of her is twisted into an unlovable shape now, but I cannot help but imagine what torture it must have been to live a whole life of such beauty without the ability to see any of it.
No matter how thoroughly we are meant to have shut her out, I cannot help but feel a pang of ache when she screams about color, while decorated in such fine examples of the same. I understand the bad intentions she paved to her own destruction, but when the irony she earned comes to call, I cannot fully say it would have been a doom I could have avoided myself.
I am always hesitant to call a woman a nightmare, but when the shoe fits…
The last story for me is the weakest of the three. “Escape Route” features an ex Nazi officer from a concentration camp hiding out in Buenos Aires after the end of World War II. As many men with this description did (do?) in real life, he is haunted by paranoia of being found and held responsible for his cruelty and past actions as he lives a life of poverty and insignificance in a foreign country he does not seem to enjoy any aspect of. I felt like this had the least compelling premise because even if he wasn’t a war criminal, the protagonist seems to be a completely irredeemable, unlikable nightmare. While he is haunted, he appears remorseless and even defensive of his past behavior. It also seems to have turned him into a miserable, belligerent drunk who verbally abuses the only person in his life that knows his secret: his consistently drunk, lady-of-the-night neighbor. Even though she is the only one who seems to tolerate him, she still uses his secret to twist the knife of insults she slings right back at him.
A well-deserved haunting
One day, in hiding from the detectives attempting to get him to answer for his crimes, he seeks refuge inside a closing museum and is unexpectedly moved by a painting of a fisherman who he hallucinates as having his face. It is here that his personal moment is interrupted by an elderly Jewish man emotionally connecting with another painting that expresses the agony of a holocaust victim. Based on how often he is drunk and/or hallucinating, I am not entirely convinced that the other man, Herr Bleum, isn’t a physical manifestation of the ex-Nazi’s guilty conscience.
In fighting against the web of his own weaving, he predictably hangs himself, using the thread of magic he has discovered in his story to yoke himself to a punishment far worse than any he could have received at the hands of real-life avengers.
Rod Serling, in all his glory
Whatever unevenness exists in this trio of stories is overwhelmed by the sheer quality of production, and also the joy at having an old master back at the game. The gilded tapestry Rod Serling has woven with The Night Gallery is a welcome masterpiece capable of warming my heart in these cold and dark winter months. The papers say that Serling is uninterested in serialized television work after Twilight Zone, and that these three episodes were a one-off set. However, after turning out such well-crafted, well-acted and well-directed gems as these, I cannot imagine this vignette not inspiring a sequel or two in the coming decade, either penned by Serling or a successor he designates. That hope alone gives me something to look forward to as the curtain draws this year to a close.
5 stars
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
The streets of West Germany are currently plastered with campaign posters, because a federal election, the sixth since 1949, will happen on September 28.
This campaign poster by the conservative CDU reminds us that the chancellor is important.This SPD campaign poster features foreign secretary and vice chancellor Willy Brandt and asks people to vote for him so we can live in peace tomorrow.This SPD campaign poster features the popular secretary of the economy Karl Schiller, who promises a stable economy and secure jobs.This SPD campaign poster features social democratic floor leader Helmut Schmidt who promises to create a modern Germany with vigour and energy.The liberal party FDP forgoes the usual black and white headshot and promises to abolish antiquated customs and laws.
The posters are eerily similar across parties, usually consisting of a party logo, a slogan in Helvetica typeface and a black and white photo of a candidate. Hereby, the conservative CDU mainly points out that they provide the current chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger and that he does a good job (which is debatable).
This SPD campaign poster features images of the modern West Germany they want to create and also reminds voters that the SPD "has the right men".
The SPD, meanwhile, has made "For a modern Germany" the focal point of their campaign, though the tagline "We have the right men" made quite a few woman voters grumpy. In response, the SPD launched a campaign where women – both celebrities like actress Inge Meysel and ordinary citizens like Johanna Lammers, miner's wife from Castrop-Rauxel – explain why they vote SPD.
Johanna Lammers, miner's wife from Castrop-Rauxel, poses with her sewing machine in this SPD campaign flyer and praises secretary of the economy Karfl Schiller for preserving mining jobs.Popular actress Inge Meysel explains why she votes SPD in this campaign flyer.
In general, it is notable that the SPD enlisted several celebrities, including writers Günther Grass, Siegfried Lenz and Heinrich Böll, actors Romy Schneider, Götz George, Marianne Hoppe, Sabine Sinjen, Inge Meysel, Horst Frank and Horst Tappert, TV personalities Peter Frankenfeld and Hans-Joachim Kuhlenkampf, directors Victor de Kowa and Wolfgang Menge and singer Katja Ebstein, to campaign for them, something that is common in the US, but almost unheard of in West Germany.
This SPD campaign poster lists all the celebrities who endorse the SPD.
A Small Step
But whatever the outcome of the September 28 election, it's very likely that the current great coalition of the conservative CDU and the social-democratic SPD will not continue.
Due to its large majority, the great coalition actually got a lot done in its three years in office, for better or for worse. Under "for worse", most people would classify the controversial and unpopular emergency powers act, which passed last year – in spite of massive protests.
On the positive side, there is the Great Reform of the Criminal Code, which passed in June and took effect on September 1, which got rid of outdated laws (many of which dated back to the Third Reich or even the Second German Empire) and brought particularly morality related offences more in line with our modern age.
Among other things, adultery is no longer a criminal offence in West Germany. The so-called "Kuppelei" paragraph, which under the guise of combating prostitution forbade landlords from renting apartments and hotels from renting rooms to unmarried couples, and prevented parents from allowing their adult children's boyfriend or girlfriend to sleep over, has been significantly modified.
But most importantly, homosexual relationships between men have been decriminalised, at least if both participants are over twenty-one and there is no employment or service relationship between them. Homosexual prostitution remains illegal.
These are small steps forward, especially since most of the legal limitations applied to homosexual relationships between men do not apply to heterosexual relationships or relationships between women. But they are important steps, because every year between two thousand and three thousand men are tried and convicted for consensual homosexual relationships on the basis of a law dating back to the Second German Empire and significantly tightened by the Nazis.
The end of WWII is often viewed as a liberation, but for homosexual men incarcerated by the Nazis it was anything but, for they remained in prison, while other victims of Nazi persecution were set free. And while the Federal Republic of Germany distanced itself from the Third Reich, it displayed the same zeal in persecuting homosexual men. In 1950, the public prosecution of Frankfurt on Main dragged some 170 men into court on homosexuality charges, based on the questionable statements made by a nineteen-year-old male prostitute named Otto Blankenstein, later revealed to be a notorious liar. Many of the accused were found guilty and jailed, six men committed suicide, others lost their jobs or were forced to flee Germany.
Otto Blankenstein, the nineteen-year-old male prostitute who set off an unprecedented persecution of homosexual men in Frankfurt on Main in 1950, when he ratted out his clients to save himself from prison.
In the light of events such as those that happened in Frankfurt nineteen years ago, the decriminalisation of homosexual relationships between consenting adults is an important step forward. And indeed, the immediate effect of the new law was not the sudden eruption of homosexual orgies in West German streets that conservatives feared but that many men who had been convicted under the old law were set free, because there was no reason to keep them in jail any longer.
More Treasures from the Pulps
But while old and outdated laws are best left behind, older fiction is often ripe for rediscovery. Particularly the pulp magazines of thirty to forty years ago contain many hidden gems and secret treasures just begging to be rediscovered by a new generation of readers. And thanks to the twin success of Lancer's Conan reprints and the Ballantine paperback editions of The Lord of the Rings, many other fantasy works from the first half of the century are coming back into print.
I recently got my hands on two paperbacks reprinting some fantasy gems that until recently could only be found in the crumbling pages of thirty to forty year old copies of Weird Tales.
The Last King of the Picts: Bran Mak Morn by Robert E. Howard
cover by Frank Frazetta
Nowadays, Robert E. Howard is mainly remembered as the father of what Fritz Leiber called sword and sorcery. However, Howard was also fascinated by history and wrote a lot of historical fiction, with or without fantastic elements. The Bran Mak Morn stories sit on the boundary between fantasy and history. The titular hero is the king of the Picts, a native tribe living in Scotland in ancient times.
Howard was clearly fascinated by the Picts, because they appear throughout his work. The best friend and frequent saviour of Kull of Atlantis is a Pictish warrior named Brule the Spearslayer. The Picts also appear in two Conan stories, "Beyond the Black River" and "The Treasure of Tranicos", where they are portrayed as fierce warriors and sworn enemies of Conan's people, the Cimmerians.
The Bran Mak Morn stories take the Picts out of fantasy and into history, though it must be noted that Howard's Picts bear scant resemblance to what little we know about the actual ancient inhabitants of Scotland. Mostly set in Roman Britain during the second or third century AD, the stories recount the conflict between the technologically superior Roman colonisers and the Picts, who at this point in their history have devolved into Neanderthal-like primitives. Their king Bran Mak Morn knows that his people are doomed, but he is not willing to go down without a fight.
Cororuc is about to meet an unpleasant fate in "The Lost Race" by Robert E. Howard-
Though the first story in this collection, "The Lost Race", does not feature Bran Mak Morn at all, but instead follows Cororuc, a traveller in Roman Britain, who is captured by Picts and taken to their underground lair. The Picts are described as diminutive – in Howard's time some historians believed they were pygmies – and the likely source of legends about dwarves and little people. They are quite hostile and want to burn Cororuc at the stake – after a history lesson delivered by their chief. But Cororuc's life is spared due to the intercession of a werewolf he'd saved earlier.
"The Lost Race" is one of Robert E. Howard's earliest stories, published in the January 1927 issue of Weird Tales, when Howard was only twenty-one, and is clearly the work of a beginning writer. Three stars.
Bran Mak Morn does appear in "Men of the Shadows", though once again the protagonist is another character, a Norseman who became a Roman citizen and legionnaire. He's part of a squad sent north of Hadrian's Wall on a mysterious mission. The legionnaires are slaughtered in a series of battles with the Picts, until only a handful remain. The survivors try to make it back to safety beyond Hadrian's Wall, but are picked off one by one, until there is only a single survivor who is captured and brought before Bran Mak Morn himself. The Picts want to kill him, but Bran spares his life and also reveals the reason why the legionnaires were sent into Pictish territory, namely because a wealthy Roman had taken a liking to Bran's sister and wanted to take her for his own. Bran's refusal to kill the legionnaire leads to a staring contest between Bran and a Pictish wizard upset that Bran is forgetting the old ways. Bran wins the contest, whereupon the wizard launches into a lengthy explanation of the history of the Picts and also prophesizes the fall of the Roman Empire.
This story was never published in Howard's lifetime and it's easy to see why. It's a disjointed mess and Howard forgets both the plot and even the protagonist, once the wizard launches into the extended history of the Picts. We never even learn what happened to the legionnaire. Perhaps he was bored to death by the lecturing wizard. Two stars.
A ghostly Kull appears on the battlefield in the interior art for "Kings of the Night".
In "Kings of the Night", Bran Mak Morn is preparing for battle against a Roman legion marching on his land. Bran's Picts have joined forces with Gaels and Britons, but Bran also needs to persuade a group of Norsemen to join the battle. However, their chief has been killed and the Norsemen refuse to fight until they find a new leader. So the Pictish wizard Gonar casts a spell and conjures up none other than Kull of Atlantis, brought forward through time. Kull is understandably confused and mistakes Bran for his Pictish friend Brule the Spearslayer, implying that Bran is a descendent of Brule. However, he also agrees to lead the Norsemen into battle. But is the victory worth the price in blood?
First published in the November 1930 issue of Weird Tales, this is a highly enjoyable story and the return of Kull of Atlantis is most welcome, though it's interesting that Bran outbroods even the traditionally broody Kull. Four stars.
Bran Mak Morn confronts the witch Atla who wants his body in "Worms of the Earth".
"Worms of the Earth" starts with an incredibly visceral and brutal crucifixion scene. A Pict is executed for killing a Roman merchant who'd swindled him. Presiding over the execution is Titus Sulla, Roman governor of Eboracum (nowadays known better by its British name York), as well as a Pictish emissary. Unbeknownst to the arrogant Sulla, this emissary is none other than Bran Mak Morn in disguise.
Infuriated by the way the Roman colonisers treat his people. Bran vows revenge upon Titus Sulla and he is willing to go to great lengths to get it. And so against the warnings of the wizard Gonar, Bran enlists the aid of the titular worms, the remnants of a pre-human civilisation who may be descendants of the Serpent Men from the Kull stories. But in order to find the worms, Bran first has to consult the witch Atla, who is not entirely human herself, and whose price is nothing less than Bran's virtue. So Bran leans back and thinks of the Picts, while Atla has her way with him.
Bran finally locates the worms and they agree to help him get his revenge on Sulla. But things don't go the way Bran expects…
Published in the November 1932 issue of Weird Tales, this is a great story, which perfectly balances sword and sorcery, history and horror. "Worms of the Earth" is the highlight of this collection and worth the price of admission alone. Five stars.
"The Night of the Wolf" is another story which remained unpublished during Howard's lifetime. Set during Arthurian times, it's the tale of Cormac Mac Art, an Irish reiver who gets embroiled in a conflict between Vikings and Picts in the Shetland Islands, where Cormac tries to negotiate the release of an important prisoner.
"The Night of the Wolf" is a well written story full of action and excitement, but I'm not quite sure why it was included in this collection, because it is not a Bran Mak Morn story, even though the Picts appear. Four stars.
The statue of Bran Mak Morn gloomily looks on, as the kidnapped Irish maiden Moira is about the escape a forced marriage by the only means she can.
Bran Mak Morn does appear in "The Dark Man", at least after a fashion — because the story is set in the ninth century during the Viking invasion of Ireland, i.e. at a time when Bran is long dead. Instead, he appears in the form of a statue that is worshipped by the surviving descendants of the Picts.
Our hero is an Irish outlaw named Turlogh Dubh O'Brien who's on a mission to rescue his childhood sweetheart Moira, daughter of an Irish chieftain, who was kidnapped by Vikings. Turlogh comes across the statue of Bran and decides to take it along. He crashes the forced wedding of Moira to the Viking chief Thorfel and takes bloody vengeance. The statue of Bran, the titular dark man, comes in handy as well, for where Bran goes, or rather his statue goes, the Picts are not far behind and they are still formidable warriors.
First published in the December 1931 issue of Weird Tales, "The Dark Man" is another fine historical adventure story and unlike "The Night of the Wolf", it has at least some connection to Bran Mak Morn, albeit rather tenuously. Four stars.
I have to admit that I was very eager to finally get my hands on Robert E. Howard's Bran Mak Morn stories. Though I have no Scottish ancestry, I recognise the parallels between Bran and his Picts struggling against Roman rule and the history of my own homeland. For just like the historical Picts, my own ancestors, the Germanic tribes of Northern Germany, managed to kick the Romans out of North Germany and drive them back beyond the Limes Germanicus in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD.
Postcard of the Hermann Monument near Detmold, which reminds us that Arminius knocked the Romans out of their sandals somewhere around here.
The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest is extremely important to German history. The so-called Hermann Monument near Detmold, a 53 meter tall statue of the Cherusci chieftain Arminius a.k.a. Hermann, is a popular destination for school trips and much beloved. Whenever I'm in the area, I always pay a visit to good old Arminius, even if the statue is not even remotely accurate and the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest most likely did not take place anywhere near Detmold. Archaeologists are still looking for the actual location of the battle
Arminius is to the Germans what the Gaul leader Vercingetorix is to the French, a national hero who fought back against the arrogant Roman invaders. Unlike Vercingetorix, Arminius was victorious and lived to tell the tale. And just like the fictional Bran Mak Morn, Arminius was driven by vengeance, for according to legend he was an officer in the Roman army who turned against his former allies, when the Romans paraded his pregnant wife Thusnelda naked through the streets of Rome in triumph. The veracity of the tale of Thusnelda is debatable, but it is a compelling story and always made me sympathise with Arminius. Bran's story and motivation, though entirely fictional, are just as compelling and I'm sure that Arminius and Bran would find a lot to talk about over a jug of ale or mead.
For all that, the actual collection is a little bit of a letdown. Robert E. Howard just didn't write very many stories about Bran Mak Morn, so Dell topped off the collection with unpublished stories and fragments, poems, juvenilia and vaguely related stories that feature the Picts.
Nonetheless, "Worms of the Earth" is a top tier Howard story and most of the other stories are at the very least entertaining, even if Bran isn't actually in them.
Four stars.
Women's Lib, Sword and Sorcery Style: Jirel of Joiry by C.L. Moore
The yellowing pages of Weird Tales contain treasures beyond the stories of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, whose work Arkham House is doing a good job of keeping in print. One of those treasures that I was extremely excited to get my hands on are the stories C.L. Moore wrote about the medieval French swordswoman Jirel of Joiry. At last the stories are available again for the first time in more than thirty years.
Jirel kisses the Black God in Margaret Brundage's cover art for the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales.
"Black God's Kiss" first appeared in the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales and introduced Jirel of Joiry to the world. The story opens with the iconic and much imitated scene of the warlord Guillaume conquering Castle Joiry. The captured lord of the castle is brought before Guillaume in full armour. When Guillaume orders his captive's helmet removed, the Lord of Castle Joiry is revealed to be a lady, the red-haired firebrand Jirel. Guillaume is quite delighted by this discovery and forces a kiss on Jirel. Jirel is considerably less delighted and tries to bite his throat out.
The revealing of Jirel's gender is an iconic scene and remains impactful even thirty-five years later. I can only imagine how female readers in 1934 reacted to this revelation, even if the surprise was spoiled both by Weird Tales cover artist Margaret Brundage and interior artist H.R. Hammond.
H.R. Hammond's interior art for "Black God's Kiss" sadly spoils the revelation of Jirel's gender.
For her troubles, Jirel is thrown into her own dungeon, but she quickly escapes, plotting revenge against the overbearing Guillaume. She has no illusions about what Guillaume will do to her, namely rape her and then either kill her or sell her into slavery. So she goes to see Father Gervase, the resident priest of Castle Joiry, to ask for his help and forgiveness. For in order to avenge herself on Guillaume, Jirel is willing to descend into hell itself. And luckily, there happens to be a passage to the underworld deep beneath the foundations of Castle Joiry. It's interesting how much this scene mirrors the scene in "Worms of the Earth" where Bran Mak Morn plots revenge against Titus Sulla. Both Bran and Jirel are willing to do whatever it takes, even if it means selling their soul (and in Bran's case, his body) and enlisting demonic aid. And in both cases, their spiritual advisors, respectively Gonar or Gervase, strongly advice against this course of action, noting that some weapons are too terrible to use.
Like Bran, however, Jirel is determined and so she descends into the underworld beneath the castle. The bulk of the story is given over to Jirel's journey through the underworld and the fantastic things she encounters there. It is notable that even though Jirel wears a crucifix which she has to discard in order to enter the underworld and has a theological argument with a Catholic priest earlier in the story, the dreamlike land underneath Castle Joiry does not resemble the traditional Christian depictions of hell in the slightest—it is much stranger.
Jirel finally finds the titular black god in a temple in the middle of a lake of fallen stars and begs him to give her a weapon against Guillaume. The black gods grants her this wish, but just like Bran Mak Morn in "Worms of the Earth", Jirel realises that the revenge she gets isn't what she wanted after all.
This is an amazing story that stands shoulder to shoulder with the best the sword and sorcery genre has to offer. Five stars.
Only two months later, in the December 1934 issue, Weird Tales published the sequel to "Black God's Kiss" entitled "Black God's Shadow". Jirel is still haunted by the events of the previous story. She's having trouble sleeping, the memories of Guillaume forcing a kiss on her keep resurfacing and by night, Jirel hears Guillaume's voice, begging her to save his soul from hell.
Jirel's feelings towards Guillaume are very conflicted. On the one hand, he was an overbearing pig who assaulted her, but on the other hand Jirel was also attracted to him. So she decides to descend into the underworld once more to save Guillaume's soul. But in doing so, Jirel will not only have to fight the black god, but also her own conflicted emotions and come to terms with what happened to her.
This story is more quiet and philosophical than its predecessor and the battles Jirel fights are purely in her mind. From a psychological standpoint, this story is fascinating, because Jirel's feelings and reactions mirror those of women who have been sexually assaulted or raped, suggesting that Guillaume did more than merely steal a kiss.
An unusual but excellent story. Five stars.
Not Jirel and Jarisme, but Margaret Brundage's cover art for "Avenger from Atlantis" by Edmond Hamilton.
"Jirel Meets Magic" first appeared in the July 1935 issue of Weird Tales. The title is rather weak, especially since Jirel already encountered more than her share of magic in her first two adventures.
The story opens with Jirel leading the charge against a castle, whence the evil wizard Giraud has fled. Once again, the hotblooded Jirel is out for vengeance, because Giraud had ambushed and killed some of her men. However, as Jirel and her men comb the castle, Giraud is nowhere to be found. Bloody footprints lead to a window, which doubles as a portal into a fantastic world. Undeterred, Jirel climbs through the window in pursuit of Giraud and quickly finds herself tangling not just with the wizard, but also with his patroness, the sorceress Jarisme.
This story establishes what will become a pattern with the Jirel of Joiry stories, namely that Jirel keeps venturing into fantastic dream landscapes. "Jirel Meets Magic" is not quite as dark as the Black God duology, but still a great story. Five stars.
Not Jirel either, but a strikingly erotic cover for a Seabury Quinn story, courtesy of Margaret Brundage.
"The Dark Land" opens with Jirel lying in bed in her castle, mortally wounded in battle. Father Gervase is called in to give her the last rites, when Jirel abruptly vanishes. When she comes to, she finds herself in yet another fantastic dreamland called Romne. Its king Pav informs Jirel that he saved her from death, because he wants her to be his bride. Jirel has other ideas, especially once she learns what happens to Pav's discarded wives…
Jirel faces off against Pav in the interior art for "The Dark Land"
Published in the January 1936 issue of Weird Tales, this is a good story, but not quite as strong as the previous tales. Four stars.
"Hellsgarde" opens with Jirel on her warhorse outside the haunted castle of Hellsgarde. The castle, we learn, has been shunned and abandoned for two hundred years, ever since its previous lord stole a mysterious treasure and was tortured to death by those eager to take that treasure for themselves.
Jirel has come to Hellsgarde for just this treasure, though she doesn't want it for herself. No, a villainous nobleman named Guy of Garlot has taken several of Jirel's men hostage and demands the treasure of Hellsgarde as ransom.
Jirel faces the ghosts haunting the Castle of Hellsgarde
As the previous stories have shown, Jirel is perfectly willing to descend into hell itself and so she enters the haunted castle to face of the horrors awaiting her within. As for Guy of Garlot, he fares about as well as all overbearing men who try to force Jirel to do something against her will.
First published in the April 1939 issue of Weird Tales, "Hellsgarde" is a very much a haunted house story, but what a haunted house story it is. Five stars.
Reading the Jirel of Joiry stories in the year of the lord 1969, it's hard to image that these stories are already more than thirty years old, because they feel so very modern, both with regard to Jirel's adventures in psychedelic dreamlands and her conflicts with overbearing men which many a modern feminist will sympathise with. Jirel is very much a heroine for the 1960s, a strong woman willing to brave even hell itself to get what she wants.
C.L. Moore only ever wrote six stories about Jirel of Joiry (one of which, a story featuring Jirel and Moore's interplanetary outlaw Northwest Smith, is not included in this collection) and sadly retired from writing altogether after the untimely death of her husband Henry Kuttner eleven years ago. However, the Jirel stories are so good that I hope that Moore will eventually return to writing and revisit this groundbreaking character.
If you are looking for the two-fisted adventures of Conan or the hijinks of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, this collection is very much not that. Jirel's adventures are internal conflicts given form in her journey through dreamlike and often nightmarish landscapes. Nonetheless, these stories are among the best the sword and sorcery genre has to offer. Five stars.
Recently, on one of my travels to the Far East, I was invited to visit the Republic of Korea by Ewha Women’s University (the oldest women’s university in Korea, established in 1883 and therefore five years older than my own home institution, Royal Holloway College).
While there, I was able to take in a recent Korean horror movie, Sal-Inma (whose title is rendered into English variously as A Devilish Homicide and A Bloodthirsty Killer; I don’t know enough Korean to say which is the better translation).
Korean cinema is currently undergoing a strong revival, with numerous movies being produced in Korean every year and some even gaining international prominence. Sf, fantasy, and horror, which did not feature strongly in Korean popular culture before the war apart from Japanese imports, are also surging forwards, with a number of original SF novels being produced in Korean every year of this decade. However, the lack of works in translation means they are not really accessible to audiences outside the peninsula, and, similarly, the fact that the Korean film industry has made relatively few genre movies to date, means that a lot of this creativity is lost to Western audiences.
Poster for Sal-Inma (1965)
While low-budget, Sal-Inma really speaks to the creativity and abilities of Korean movie-makers and their grasp of the horror genre. The plot revolves around Lee Shi-Mak, a man with a successful business, a beautiful wife, Hye-Sook, and three children. Visiting an art exhibition, he’s astonished to see a picture of his deceased first wife, Ae-ja. Afterwards, the driver who is supposed to be taking him home, instead takes him to the house of the artist, Park Joon-Chul, who begs him to take the painting, before Ae-ja herself reappears and murders Joon-Chul. Ae-ja then collapses into inertia, seeming as if she were newly dead. Shi-Mak takes her to the family doctor, Dr Park (no relation—there are relatively few Korean surnames), who is also murdered by Ae-ja, who then disappears.
Returning home, Shi-Mak finds events continuing to unravel. Ae-ja reappears and kidnaps his older daughter. His mother is attacked by Ae-ja and subsequently starts to act like a cat; meowing, and grooming herself and her grandchildren with hands and tongue. His two younger children vanish mysteriously and a mysterious woman arrives without explanation. Ae-ja then murders Hye-Sook, and Shi-Mak, seeing that his mother’s reflection in the mirror is now that of a cat, kills her.
Ae-ja murders Joon-Chul
And this is where things take an even more interesting turn. Grieving and confused, Shi-Mak finds a document written by Joon-Chul, which subverts everything we have seen so far about the family, revealing, in flashback, strange and sinister things about the relationship between Ae-ja, Hye-Sook, Shi-Mak’s mother, Joon-Chul, and even Dr Park. With this information, the seemingly random events of the first two-thirds of the movie fall into place, as does the identity of the mysterious new arrival, and Shi-Mak is able to resolve the situation and lay the feline ghost to rest.
A good horror movie isn’t just about the events it portrays, though, and this one has plenty to say about contemporary Korean society, struggling with its past and the pace of modernisation. Japan plays an ambivalent background role in the story: it’s implied that Shi-Mak’s mother was widowed during the Japanese occupation; the events of the flashback take place while Shi-Mak is away in Tokyo on business, and Joon-Chul later flees to Tokyo in an attempt to escape supernatural retribution for his part in the events.
Putting it together, you can see the film as being about Korea’s need to come to terms with the occupation, and that Japan continues to be a source of trouble even as Koreans also have to work with the Japanese in order to succeed economically. In the end, the message seems to be that Koreans have to understand the traumas of the past, put them behind them, and move forward.
The cat spirit manifests through Shi-Mak's mother
This ties in with the other major theme of the movie, the changes in the traditional Korean family structure since the occupation and in the postwar period. The Lee family seems very traditional on the face of it—man, wife, children and grandmother—and yet, we’re also shown that one of the reasons Shi-Mak’s mother turned against Ae-ja was her childlessness, and that Shi-Mak’s mother was herself engaged in a love affair without her son knowing. An insistence on traditional family structure thus only comes at the price of violence, and is a hypocritical position in any case. The end of the movie not only suggests that Shi-Mak’s family life will become far less traditional in the future, but also that this is approved of, even endorsed, by Buddhist religious figures.
The movie contains a few logic holes, but it also uses its low budget well. The effects suggesting that Shi-Mak’s mother has been possessed by a cat spirit could have been risible, but they’re sparingly and effectively used and are quite shocking in the end. Certainly if Korea is capable of this sort of genre movie-making, they’ll be a rival to the Japanese powerhouse in a few years. Four out of five stars.
Cat spirit revelation
Korea itself is currently struggling to recover from a very difficult first half of the 20th century. Following the Japanese occupation and the devastating Korean War, the Republic has been governed by a succession of authoritarian regimes; the current leader, Park Chung-Hee, is a general who seized power following a student revolution in the early 1960s. However, despite widespread dislike of Park’s dictatorial style and his decision to bring Korea into the Vietnam War as a US ally, he is certainly bringing modernisation to the country through projects like developing transport infrastructure, and a policy of focusing on consumer exports.
And from a genre perspective, things are certainly looking up. Serialised SF by the likes of Han Nak-Won is winning over the young people, and a prestigious mystery fiction prize was recently won by a short story authored by Moon Yoon-Sung; a story which takes place in a 22nd century where only women survive. The country’s first official SF group, the Korean Sci-Fi Writers’ Club, was established by Seo Gwang-Woon just last year, and hope to publish their first collection soon. I would advise all fans of Asian SF to keep their eye on the peninsula for future developments.
I’m going to have some fun with this, and I hope you do too. Some of you may remember that I pitched a TV show called “Laugh-In” on May 4, 1968. Although I initially experienced the show on FM radio, lacking a TV but having a local TV station with a frequency reachable on my FM dial, I have actually watched the show on the TVs of friends every chance I’ve had. This movie was a treat for me.
"The Maltese Bippy"
Poster for “The Maltese Bippy”
This seems to be the only movie so far with “Maltese” in its title that is not an adaptation of the Dashiell Hammett detective novel, The Maltese Falcon. “The Maltese Bippy” is a movie starring Dan Rowan and Dick Martin clearly made in the hopes of taking advantage of the popularity of their comedy team in the TV weekly show “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.” “Bippy” is a catchphrase of that show that might refer to anything from something Dick Martin is “betting” to a Bippy Burger served at one of a chain of Laugh-In restaurants, or something offered in exchange by Sammy Davis, Jr. for his “wagon.”
It is called a horror-comedy, spoofing movies like “Blood of Dracula’s Castle,” and it portrays Dick Martin as a werewolf-in-training. It is also rated as a “mystery,” with the team splitting up, Rowan hoping to take monetary advantage of Martin’s expected transition to lycanthropy, as well as a woman among the neighbors whom Rowan hopes to sign as a performing werewolf herself, as Martin pursues the question of why their neighbors have masqueraded as werewolves and taken an interest in him and his home.
TV show title with typical curtain style
The movie is identifiable as having the “Laugh-In” style of rapid-fire delivery as well as the show’s way of mocking everything: the duo can’t even let the titles go by at the beginning without appearing beside them and making fun of them, and the last moments of the film are no less flippant than the first. But it proceeds Without (and this is a big W) the political commentary that we’ve grown used to on their shows.
Scene from "Once Upon a Horse"
This was not their 1st movie—the pair starred in “Once Upon a Horse” in 1958, 6 years after they began their comedy partnership as a nightclub act, and 9 years before the pilot of “Laugh-In.”
Dan Rowan on "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In"
Daniel Hale Davis (“Dan Rowan”) became an orphan at 11 after traveling with his parents in a carnival. He was seen through high school by a foster family, then hitchhiked to Los Angeles, where he worked in the Paramount Studios mailroom. He next served as a fighter pilot in WWII, being awarded medals for his service. After the war, he returned to Los Angeles and got together with Dick Martin, with Martin starting out in the “straight man” role in their nightclub act, which worked better when they switched, allowing Martin to get the laughs.
Dick Martin on "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In"
Thomas Richard Martin ("Dick Martin"), on the other hand, spent his ordinary childhood in Michigan, and survived an infection with tuberculosis that kept him out of the military. His first job in entertainment was as a writer for a radio sitcom that I remember listening to, “Duffy’s Tavern.” (It always began with an actor answering a phone with: “Duffy’s Tavern, where the elite meet to eat. Duffy ain’t here”—Duffy never does appear.) Martin was also in the movie "Glass Bottom Boat," a comic spy movie with Doris Day (1966). He was working on "The Lucy Show" (since 1962) when "Laugh-In" came along and proved itself to have legs, ending his appearance on that show in 1968.
Sammy Davis, Jr. as "da judge"
I was intrigued to remember that the original premise of the movie is based on the same story as a sketch in the March 17 “Laugh-in” show this year, performed by Rowan and Sammy Davis, Jr. (a regular guest known for prancing about chanting “Here come da judge” in a judge’s gown and antique wig, also in this show missing his "wagon"). In the TV sketch the two lament that their pornographic-film company is going bust and they will not be able to continue making movies without an injection of cash. In the movie, Rowan and Martin are ejected from their “studio” in an office building, in which they have been making soft pornography films, employing women who don’t know what they’re in for.
Martin's housekeeper played by Mildred Natwick, shown here in "The Trouble with Harry"
The pair move their office to Martin’s house, since he has been backing the enterprise with his money. The place has already been turned into a boardinghouse, to try to support the business and earn a living, and a beautiful young woman (Carol Lynley) is rooming there, as well as a suspicious young man (Leon Askin). After a murder occurs in the cemetery nearby some strange neighbors begin to come around. Martin’s housekeeper, played by Mildred Natwick, is justifiably suspicious of everybody, even Martin.
From Horror Movie to Mystery
Early on the movie appears to be rapidly developing into a horror movie with gags. But after a sufficiency of graveyard shots, a sequence intervenes that I would sit through the whole movie again just to watch: in a dream Martin sees himself in a bathroom mirror, turning into a werewolf before his eyes—a very good makeup job. As the wolf, he seeks help but only gets himself into more trouble, ending up in an old-time silent-movie-style chase being cranked too fast. Lynley comes to his aid and wakes him up, providing a transition from the horror comedy to a mystery story with now 2 murders to solve. Between this point and the end, a literal heap of murderers are dispatched and a man pretending to be a representative of the “Motion Picture Code” commands a policeman to arrest Rowan and Martin for “excessive violence on film.”
WARNING
This movie has 4 endings, no taste, and enough silliness for a truckload of stooges, but then that’s “Laugh-In,” isn’t it? And that’s why people like me (“Laugh-In” fans) go to see it. We want to see Dan Rowan and Dick Martin make fools of themselves and each other—and anyone else in range, such as their guest stars, who have so far included Tiny Tim, Garry Moore, Gina Lollabrigida, the Smothers Brothers, Mel Brooks, Hugh Hefner, Lena Horne, Rock Hudson, Jack Benny, Guy Lombardo, Liberace, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Johnny Carson, Marcel Marceau, Rod Serling, Jimmy Dean, Colonel Sanders, John Wayne, and Richard Nixon, to name a few.
If you are, like me, a fan of “Laugh-In,” by all means go and see it, and for you I would give the film 4 and a half stars out of 5. If you are not a fan, don’t bother, you will probably see it as maybe a 2 out of 5.
It’s exam time here at Royal Holloway College, and there’s nothing better than a bad movie to burn off the stress whether you’re studying or marking. As a break from examining sociology papers, I’ve taken in a double bill of new American movies to check out the state of the low-budget horror world in, well, the States.
Poster for Blood of Dracula's Castle
A young couple (Gene O’Shane and Barbara Bishop) inherit a castle somewhere in Arizona (yes, really). Upon arrival, they find out that the tenants are Dracula (Alexander D’Arcy), his wife (Paula Raymond), his pagan priest butler (John Carradine and probably the best thing in the movie), a shambling moronic manservant named, for some reason, Mango (Ray Young), and a werewolf (Robert Dix). At this point the viewer should be wondering if this is, in fact, a spoof along the lines of The Addams Family or Carry on Screaming, but no, apparently it’s being done straight. It continues on in the same grab-bag-of-horror-cliches vein (pun intended), echoing the Mad Libs feel of the title, up to an ending which I think is a cargo-cult version of the climax of Witchfinder General.
The Draculas: they're just regular folks.
Which is a pity, because I think there could be genuine satirical potential in a modern-day Dracula. He and his wife are living an affluent and luxurious Southwestern socialite lifestyle; rather than biting their victims to death, they have a cellar full of young women whose blood they periodically extract and drink from wine-glasses. It’s not too far a stretch to view this as a metaphor for the movie world, where the old and established prey on the young and naïve, and get away with it thanks to a permissive social environment. Their relationship with the werewolf, Johnny, is also one that could have been more interestingly explored, as they use him to do their dirty work so as to maintain plausible deniability. But this isn’t that movie.
I never like to be totally negative about a film, so I will say that the landscape is beautiful and is shot to its best advantage. The castle scenes were filmed at the real-life Shea’s Castle, a 1920s folly in the California (not Arizona) desert, and I’d like to see more of it. The opening features a groovy theme tune that really ought to make it into the charts.
There's also a human sacrifice scene, because you have to have one of those for some reason.
However, the acting is wooden, the script appears to be a first draft, there are a lot of time-wasting filler sequences and inexplicable character actions. For instance, the girls that the Draculas have chained up in the cellar apparently just hang there, not bothering to attempt escape or even conversation. A human sacrifice to the god (sic) Luna takes place right in front of our protagonists and neither of them do anything to stop it or even raise an objection. The horror is surprisingly chaste and bloodless (particularly given the movie’s title) so there isn’t even the benefit of titillation or a good cathartic wallow in gore. The opening section is a long and seemingly pointless advertisement for an aquatic theme park named Marineland.
One star, mostly for the castle.
Poster for Nightmare in Wax
Vincent Renard (Cameron Mitchell), a brilliant Hollywood makeup artist and lover of the beautiful actress Marie Morgan (Anne Helm), is disfigured when the studio head Max Block (Berry Kroeger), who has designs on Marie himself, throws a glass of wine at Renard just as the latter lights a cigarette. Some time later, Vincent is working at a Hollywood-themed wax museum; Marie’s boyfriends seem to have a habit of disappearing, and tribute mannequins of them winding up in Vincent’s wax museum. You can see where this is going, particularly as one can assume his revenge plan for Max is a bit more complicated than simple murder, though there’s a twist at the end which could have been better handled.
How to get a head in Hollywood.
The performances are at least better than in Blood of Dracula’s Castle, with two weary policemen (Scott Brady and Johnny Cardos) trying their best to investigate the goings-on and Victoria Carroll providing some humour as Theresa, a mercenary blonde trying to get onto Max’s casting couch. There’s some knowing humour about Hollywood and its incestuous, venal culture, and, once again, there’s a groovy psychedelic dance number, albeit in the middle of the movie rather than the start.
We get a little more motivation for the main character than in the previous movie, through the interesting, if not terribly original, idea which comes in towards the end of the story, that Vincent is convinced everyone else is laughing at him and yet we also see that the other characters, in fact, respect his genius as an artist even if they think he’s a bit weird as a person. His turn towards misogyny is also credibly introduced, as his experiences with Hollywood cause him to believe that all women are simply interested in trading sex for career advancement.
I hope I wasn't the only one who shouted "Frying tonight!" at the sight of the boiling vat of wax.
Again, though, it’s all a bit tedious and bloodless, and the cliché of the bitter, scarred artist has been done, well, to death. This is another movie where the script could definitely have done with another draft: plot threads are left hanging, and the motivations of secondary characters left unexplained. The idea that Vincent is deeply insecure really ought to have been brought into the story earlier than it is. A movie director who is something of a Hitchcock figure, but young and handsome, is introduced with great fanfare, leading one to assume that he will be Marie’s new love interest and the one who saves her from Vincent’s twisted affections, but then he vanishes from the story with no explanation.
Two stars.
One conclusion I’m drawing from this slate of films is that the traditional horror genre is, for the moment at least, played out. Vampires, werewolves, twisted scarred genisues and imperiled ingenues don’t have much to offer these days. The future, on both sides of the Atlantic, is clearly with the folk horror movement.
The folk-horror movement shows signs of becoming a craze, and now the Americans are in on the game. The Witchmaker is a movie that makes a virtue of its low budget, though it’s let down by some low-level misogyny and a surprising degree of prudishness.
Poster for The Witchmaker
The story involves a professor who studies psychic phenomena (Alvy Moore) and, since psychic powers are apparently vulnerable to interference by things like radio and electricity, takes a research team including himself, a reporter, his research assistant and a few students out to the backwoods of Louisiana. Their aim is to test the abilities of Anastasia, or “Tasha” (Thordis Brandt), a pretty blonde with witches in her ancestry, and apparently genuine psychic powers. They are also undeterred by the fact that someone in the area has been killing young women and draining them of their blood, which would seem a good reason to postpone the trip, but never mind. This turns out to be the work of Luther the Berserk (John Lodge), acolyte of a two-hundred-year-old witch (Helene Winston and Warrene Ott—she rejuvenates at one point in the film, hence the change in actress). Upon learning about the research team and Tasha’s powers, they resolve to add Tasha to the coven and sacrifice the rest of the researchers. The story ends with a twist which, while not unpredictable, was still fairly satisfying.
The aptly named Luther The Berserk
While the twist has caused a lot of early reviewers to compare the film to Rosemary’s Baby, I think a better comparator is actually The Devil Rides Out, given that we have a pair of older men who genuinely believe in psychic phenomena, attempting to rescue a vulnerable young person from a suspiciously international coven (the only non-White person in the story is one of the witches). Which also marks an interesting culture shift of recent years: a decade ago, this would have been a story of Science Versus Superstition, where older male authority figures would expose the “real” answer behind the witchcraft. Now, however, everyone’s a believer and witches are very real. I think people today are taking a more critical view of science and a more positive view of folk culture, and whether or not that’s a good or bad thing remains to be seen.
The main sticking point is an unexpected one. The film apparently wants to imitate British and European horror movies not just in terms of folk culture themes and making the most of a small budget, but in terms of prurient and gratuitous nudity and kinkiness. However, it also seems to be afraid of upsetting the censors too much, so we get scenes like a naked blonde running through the woods with her hands firmly clamped over her breasts so you can’t see the nipples, or the world’s tamest orgy with all whippings and rogerings taking place off-camera. There’s also a little bit of sexism in that the women in the movie are fairly obviously divided between Maggie (Shelby Grant), the Good Girl, who is “plain”, intelligent, and conservatively dressed, and Sharon (Robyn Millan) and Tasha, the Bad Girls, who frolic around in unsuitable nightwear and swimming costumes (in a swamp, in February?) and who both get stalked and punished for their sexual forwardness.
No tits please, we're Americans
In any case, I would say that this isn’t an instant classic like Witchfinder General or The Devil Rides Out, nor is it a schlocky piece aimed only at titillation and diversion. What it is, is an interesting take on folk horror from an American perspective, and worth spending a couple of shillings on. Three and a half stars.
Elsewhere in cinema, the latest offering from Tigon is, despite the presence of Hilary Dwyer as the leading lady, definitely no Witchfinder General. The Body Stealers is a tedious alien-invasion story with an unlikeable protagonist that might have made a reasonable episode of an ITC adventure series if it were half its length.
Poster for The Body Stealers
The story begins with the mysterious disappearance of eleven paratroopers while skydiving. All of them have had training for space flight, a mysterious electrical discharge happens before each disappearance, and yet it isn’t until more than halfway through the movie that someone even suggests aliens might be responsible. One paratrooper turns up but with his biology changed so that he’s not human, and a mysterious blonde named Lorna (Lorna Wilde) is wandering the local beaches late at night and distracting the chief investigator, Bob Megan (Patrick Allen)—- but she also doesn’t seem to be human. After far too much time we eventually get an explanation by a very long expository speech, which I won’t reveal too much about except to say that if you’ve seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers you’ll have worked out what was going on much earlier. Lorna takes off in the Dalek spaceship from Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 AD (no, really), and the whole thing is a waste of everyone’s time.
Bob Megan: rugged, sexy and a knitwear aficionado
This is the sort of story that, a decade earlier, might have been helmed by a Quatermass-figure scientist, but, times having changed, we now get a rugged James Bond type who chases literally anything in a skirt and uses harassment as a means of courtship, and for some reason this succeeds rather than getting him slapped and told off. There are a few witty lines in it (for instance, when Megan is asked what he wants, and he says: “A room at the Hilton”. “Try something smaller.” “Okay, a smaller room at the Hilton”). George Sanders has a rather delightful turn as a general and the cast are generally solid.
Recognise this? You should
Unfortunately, as well as the story being slow and drawn-out, the characterisation is rather difficult to believe, and motivations are opaque or contradictory. There is, for instance, a surprising amount of resistance to the logical suggestion of grounding all parachute drops until they have a decent idea of what’s happening, and the ending requires the perpetrators of the kidnappings to do a 180 degree reversal of strategy for no good plot or character reason. One secondary character (played by Neil Connery, brother of the more famous Sean) dies offscreen and no one, not even his supposed best friend, seems inclined to pursue the matter. I could have forgiven at least some of this if the movie was any fun, but it wasn’t.
One star because I am fine with schlock but not boredom.
West Germany has a new president, the seventy-year-old Social Democrat Gustav Heinemann, who up to now was secretary of justice in the grand coalition cabinet. Heinemann was elected with the narrowest of majorities, beating his conservative opponent by only six votes.
West Germany's new president Gustav Heinemann is sharing a laugh with Social Democratic floor leader Helmut Schmidt.
The West German president is mainly a ceremonial figure; he has very little political power. The president is also elected by the members of the West German federal and state parliaments rather than the people. Apparently, we cannot be trusted to elect our own president, because our parents and grandparents elected Paul von Hindenburg more than forty years ago.
But even though I had no chance to vote for Gustav Heinemann, I welcome his election, because I've come to know Mr. Heinemann as a highly principled politician who stands for peace and justice and opposed the rearmament of West Germany.
In his first speech after his election, Gustav Heinemann promised that he wanted to be a president for the people, even if the people did not get to elect him. Personally, I believe that he is exactly the right president for these difficult times.
More than just Conan
When Lancer started reprinting the adventures of Conan the Cimmerian three years ago, exactly thirty years after Robert E. Howard's untimely death, they not only pushed the already simmering revival of the genre Fritz Leiber called sword and sorcery into overdrive, but also opened the floodgates for other vintage fantasy stories and novels to come back into print.
No longer do you have to sift through the crumbling pages of Weird Tales or Unknown or pay extortionate prices for Gnome Press or Arkham House hardcover reprints to track down an early adventure of Conan or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. On the contrary, the heroes of yesteryear are right there in the spinner rack of your local newsstand, gas station, grocery store or bookstore, sporting striking covers by talented artists like Frank Frazetta or J. Jones. The sword and sorcery revival has truly been a boon for fans of vintage weird fiction.
Among the authors of yesteryear coming back into print is none other than Robert E. Howard himself. For while Howard will probably always be associated with Conan first, he was extremely prolific, penning more than two hundred stories in various genres in his short life. In this article, I want to take a look at some of the other Robert E. Howard heroes whose adventures you can find on the shelves right now.
The Philosophical Atlantean: King Kull
Spurred on by the success of their Conan reprints, Lancer made a foray into the rest of Howard's oeuvre and reprinted the adventures of Howard's other Barbarian hero, Kull of Atlantis.
Like Conan, Kull is a wandering adventurer who winds up becoming king of the civilised kingdom of Valusia after slaying the previous ruler. Kull only appeared in two stories in Weird Tales, though the ever enterprising L. Sprague de Camp found several unpublished and sometimes unfinished Kull stories in Howard's trunk (and I have it on good authority that it really is a trunk), had Lin Carter finish the incomplete stories and assembled King Kull.
Because of his superficial similarities to the Cimmerian Barbarian, Kull is considered a prototype Conan. But that would be unfair, because even though they are both adventurers turned kings, Kull is a very different character from Conan, quieter, more introspective, more philosophical, more – dare I say it – gullible.
The Conan stories cover the entire spectrum of Conan's career, from teenaged thief to middle-aged king. The Kull stories, on the other hand, focus almost entirely on his time as King of Valusia – with one exception. Because for Kull we get something we never got for Conan: the story of why he left his home Atlantis in the first place. And no, it's not for the reason you think.
"Exile of Atlantis" introduces us to a teenaged Kull, an outsider adopted into a tribe of Atlantean barbarians. Most of the story is given over to a hunting expedition as well as a dream sequence, where Kull sees his future as king. But what spurs Kull into leaving home is seeing a young woman from his village about to be burned at the stake for daring to fall in love with a Lemurian pirate. Kull is disgusted by this and mercy-kills the woman before the flames can reach her. Then he flees, pursued by furious tribespeople.
"Exile of Atlantis" was never published during Howard's lifetime and it's easy to see why—it's more vignette than story. But it does set the tone for the adventures that follow and introduces Kull both as a perpetual outsider as well as someone who is willing to question and defy tradition, if necessary. Finally, forbidden love as well as Kull's firm believe that love should trump tradition, custom and law is a recurring theme throughout the stories, as Kull helps several young couples to get together with their one true love, against legal and parental opposition.
"The Shadow Kingdom" was the first of the two Kull stories published during Howard's lifetime in the August 1929 issue of Weird Tales and very much sets the stage for what is to follow. The story introduces us to King Kull, as he is watching a parade in his honour, while musing about identity, the nature of reality and the great questions of life.
However, Kull has more immediate problems to deal with, because the Pictish ambassador, Ka-nu the Ancient, warns him of a conspiracy in his own court and sends one of his warriors, Brule the Spear-Slayer, to aid and protect Kull. Those who have read the Conan stories have encountered the Picts before. Based on the ancient inhabitants of Scotland, the Picts reoccur throughout Howard's work, though Howard's Picts bear no resemblance to their historical counterparts.
Kull is initially irritated by Brule, who seems to know the royal palace better than Kull himself. But the two men quickly become fast friends, when Brule informs Kull that an ancient pre-human race of shapeshifting Serpent Men has invaded the kingdom and the royal palace and are quietly replacing guards, courtiers and councillors and are planning to murder and replace Kull, too.
Hugh Rankin's interior art for "The Shadow Kingdom" shows Kull and Brule battling the Serpent Men.
"The Shadow Kingdom" is a chillingly paranoid story reminiscent of John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" and the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, though it predates both. Apparently, there are folk who believe that the Serpent Men from "The Shadow Kingdom" really existed and still exist today, similar to how some people believed that the Shaver Mysteries which infested Amazing Stories some twenty years ago were real.
After their ordeal in "The Shadow Kingdom", Brule remains Kull's constant companion and frequently has to rescue his friend from conspirators and assassins as well as from Kull's own gullibility and tendency to get lost in his thoughts. In "The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune", the only other Kull story published during Howard's lifetime, Kull becomes fascinated with the House of Thousand Mirrors inhabited by the wizard Tuzun Thune and keeps gazing into those mirrors, wondering whether he is real or merely a mirror image himself. Just as Kull is about to be sucked into the mirror completely, Brule appears, kills the wizard and smashes the mirrors.
Brule has smashed the mirror and the wizard, once again saving Kull, in the interior art for "The Mirrors of Tusun Thune".
"The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune" will seem familiar to anybody whose ever visited a hall of mirrors at a fun fair or carnival. The story "Delcardes' Cat" also clearly appears to be inspired by travelling fun fairs and fraudulent sideshow attractions. This time around, Kull becomes fascinated with Saremes, an ancient and wise talking cat owned by the noblewoman Delcardes who asks Kull's permission to marry a commoner. Kull has deep and philosophical discussions with Saremes and never once wonders why this regal feline is always carried around by the masked slave Kuthulos.
Things come to a head, when Saremes informs Kull that his friend Brule is in danger and that Kull must dive into a lake inhabited by an ancient amphibian race to rescue him. Brule, however, is not in danger, but once again has to rescue Kull from a plot by his archenemy, the skull-faced wizard Thulsa Doom. As for the cat, she may be wise and ancient and beautiful, but she obviously cannot speak. Instead, her voice was provided by the masked slave Kuthulos. It's easy to imagine Howard witnessing a similar performance in a small carnival somewhere in rural Texas in his youth.
"By This Axe I Rule!" features yet another plot against Kull, instigated by disgruntled noblemen and a rabble-rousing poet. Kull himself, meanwhile, is depressed that some people still mourn the tyrannical king Borna whom Kull slayed and replaced and that even the Cult of the Serpent Men still has worshippers. Kull is also frustrated that even as king he is still constrained by the ancient laws of Valusia, such as a law which forbids free men to marry slaves, even though a young nobleman petitions Kull to allow him to wed the slave girl Ala with whom he has fallen in love. Not long thereafter, Kull meets Ala herself and confesses to her that even as a king, he is still slave to Valusia's cruel ancient laws.
The conspirators strike that night and invade Kull's bedchamber. Kull fights them off with battle axe, but there are too many of them. However, he is saved in the nick of time, because Ala overheard the plot against the king and sounded the alarm. Grateful, Kull takes his battle axe to smash the stone tablets containing Valusia's outdated laws and declares that he is the law now. Then he personally sees to it that Ala and her lover are allowed to marry.
If "By This Axe I Rule!" seems a little familiar, that's maybe because it is. For after the story failed to sell, Howard rewrote it as "The Phoenix on the Sword", the story which introduced Conan the Cimmerian to the world. But while "The Phoenix on the Sword" is a great story, I still prefer "By This Axe I Rule!" because the touching love story between Ala and the young nobleman and the scene of Kull taking his battle axe to the outdated laws of Valusia are sadly absent from the Conan story.
It is notable how many of the Kull stories are concerned with forbidden love and how Kull is clearly frustrated by outdated marriage laws keeping lovers apart until he literally smashes those laws to pieces. Considering that the US Supreme Court struck down state laws forbidding mixed race marriages in several southern states only two years ago (not using a battle axe), I for one can only cheer on Kull and his creator.
But while there is a lot of romance in the Kull stories, Kull himself has no romantic entanglements with women – very much unlike Conan – and even muses at one point that the love of a woman is not for him. One can see homoerotic undertones in Kull's relationship with Brule, though Howard could not clearly spell this out in the late 1920s. Or maybe Kull just prefers celibacy.
It may be blasphemy, but I prefer Kull to Conan. Everybody who enjoys the adventures of the Cimmerian Barbarian should pick up King Kull.
Five stars.
The Avenging Puritan: Red Shadows
J. Jones' striking portrait of Solomon Kane for Red Shadows.
Another Robert E. Howard character who predates Conan is Solomon Kane, a sixteenth century Puritan who is on a mission from God (or so he believes) "to ease evil men of their lives". The idea sounds fascinating, but once again the Solomon Kane stories are only found in forty-year-old issues of Weird Tales and have never been reprinted. Until now.
Luckily, my friend Bobby, who shares my interest in the works of Robert E. Howard and other Weird Tales authors of yesteryear, sent me a copy of Red Shadows, a collection of all the Solomon Kane stories, including those that were never published and sometimes not even finished during Howard's lifetime. Red Shadows is a hardcover volume with interior illustrations by J. Jones published by the small press Donald M. Grant Publisher Inc. which also published two collections of Howard's humorous westerns about a very big, very strong and not very bright hillbilly named Breckenridge Elkins and his chaotic family. Sadly I don't own either of those.
The Solomon Kane stories, however, are excellent, mixing historical adventure of the sort that used to be found in the pages of the pulp magazine Adventure with horror elements. Unlike with Kull, we never learn why Solomon Kane does what he does. There are hints, particularly in the poems included in the collection, that Kane was always a violent man and sailed with Sir Francis Drake, but we never learn how Solomon Kane came by his strong religious convictions or how he came to believe that he is on a mission from God.
Early stories show Solomon Kane wandering around England and later the Black Forest in Germany, tangling with pirates and observing several cases of vengeance from beyond the grave. These are fine adventure stories and suitably spooky gothic morality tales. But then Solomon Kane's wanderings literally take him into the heart of darkness with the novelette "Red Shadows", first published in the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales.
C.C. Senf's cover for the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales shows the villainous Le Loup murdering a young woman.
"Red Shadows" begins in France, where Solomon Kane finds a mortally injured young woman by the side of the road and comforts her as she dies. Before she draws her final breath, the woman tells Kane that she was assaulted and left for dead by a bandit named Le Loup. "Men will die for this," Kane vows darkly and embarks onto a hunt for Le Loup and his associates which will take him several years and across the world.
Kane finally tracks down Le Loup in a village in the darkest heart of Africa. When the opponents finally come face to face, Le Loup asks Kane whether the woman he murdered was Kane's bride, wife, or sister and is stunned when he learns that Kane had never met the young woman before that fateful day.
In the course of "Red Shadows", Kane also meets and befriends N'Longa, an African shaman, a so-called juju man. Though a sympathetic character, N'Longa initially appears to be an outdated and racist stereotype speaking broken English. However, as Solomon Kane and N'Longa share further adventures, it gradually becomes clear that N'Longa is much more than a mere stereotype. Not only is his magic real, he is also clearly the smartest person in the Solomon Kane stories. Indeed, N'Longa even calls out Kane on his prejudices at one point. Finally, N'Longa also gives Kane a magical weapon, an ancient juju staff, which turns out to be the biblical Staff of Solomon, now wielded by his latter day namesake.
Pulp fiction set in Africa is often full of offensive and downright racist caricatures. Howard does not completely manage to avoid these pitfalls, when describing Kane's wanderings through Africa, encountering vampires, harpies, hidden cities and monsters sealed away in ancient tombs. However, it is also notable that Solomon Kane himself makes no racial distinctions between the people he helps and is as willing to save an angelic blonde English girl from being sacrificed to an ancient god as he is to protect an African village from winged monsters and liberate African slaves from their Arab captors.
Hugh Rankin's colourful cover art for the June 1930 issue of Weird Tales illustrates the Solomon Kane story "The Moon of Skulls", where Kane rescues the kidnapped English girl Marilyn from the African vampire queen Nefari.
During his wanderings through Africa, we also see Kane's religious convictions gradually crumbling. As a devout Puritan, he initially abhors magic, but he also sees that N'Longa's magic, though not even remotely Christian, is nonetheless a force for good as is the Staff of Solomon, which predates both Judaism and Christianity.
Solomon Kane is a complex and fascinating character. He has the religious zeal of Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins, memorably portrayed by Vincent Price (who would be perfect to play Solomon Kane) on film last year, only that he is a heroic figure, whereas Hopkins is the darkest of villains.
Gothic horror at its very best.
Five stars.
The Time and Space-Displaced Fugitive: Almuric
Almuric is an oddity even for Robert E. Howard's extremely varied oeuvre. It's his sole foray into Burroughs style planetary romance and one of only two novels Howard wrote. Almuric was serialised posthumously in Weird Tales from May to August 1939 and reprinted by Ace in 1964.
Taking his cue from Burroughs' Barsoom novels, Almuric opens with a framing story. The scientist Professor Hildebrand recounts his meeting with Esau Cairn, whom the Professor describes as "definitely not a criminal", but "a man born in the wrong time". Cairn stumbles into Hildebrand's observatory while on the run for murdering the corrupt politician Boss Blaine (don't worry, he had it coming), the police hot on his heels. Cairn is determined to go down fighting and die in a shootout with the police just like Bonnie and Clyde, who to Howard were not just the subject of a popular movie, but outlaws who operated in his home state of Texas and were shot dead not far from his hometown Cross Plains. Luckily, Professor Hildebrand has a better idea and uses a machine he invented to teleport Cairn to the planet Almuric.
Once there, Cairn takes over as the narrator and has the sort of adventures you would expect from a Burroughs style planetary romance. He encounters the local wildlife as well as a species of ape men named the Guras. After putting his boxing skills to good use and proving his mettle, Cairn is adopted into a tribe of Guras and falls in love with Athla, daughter of the chief. Lucky for Cairn, female Guras look like regular human women.
More adventures follow, as Cairn is captured by a rival tribe, has to fight various monsters and must rescue Athla from a species of winged humanoids called the Yagas whose queen Yasmeena not only has carnal designs on Cairn, but also wants to sacrifice Athla to her gods.
In theory, Robert E. Howard would seem to be the perfect writer for a Burroughs style planetary romance. In practice, however, Almuric is the weakest work by Howard I've read so far. The novel feels choppy and disjointed and there are lengthy passages where Cairn gives us all sorts of information about the world of Almuric and its inhabitants. This is very uncommon for Howard who normally doesn't resort to lengthy encyclopaedic descriptions, but integrates the information into the plot. It almost feels as if Howard's private notes about the world of Almuric, similar to "The Hyborian Age" essay which details the world of Conan, had somehow ended up in the novel itself.
So why is Almuric so different from Howard's other works? The answer is simple. Almuric was published posthumously and very likely remained unfinished at the time of Howard's death and was completed by another writer. We do not know who this writer was, since Weird Tales does not credit them. A likely suspect is fellow Weird Tales author as well as Howard's literary agent Otis Adalbert Kline, who penned several planetary romances himself. Alas, Kline died in 1946, so we will never know for sure.
Even a weak novel by Robert E. Howard is still better than those by many other writers at their best.
Three and a half stars.
Lovecraftian Terrors: Wolfshead
Following the success of their Conan reprints, Lancer is gradually branching out into other works by Robert E. Howard and brought us not only King Kull, but also Wolfshead, a collection of seven horror stories by Robert E. Howard with a striking cover by Frank Frazetta.
Unsurprisingly, the titular story, which appeared in the April 1926 issue of Weird Tales, published when Howard was only twenty years old, is a werewolf story and apparently the sequel to another story, which Lancer in their infinite wisdom chose not to include. "Wolfshead" is not a bad story by any means, though very much the work of a beginning writer.
"Wolfshead" was the first Robert E. Howard story to make the cover of Weird Tales, illustrated by E.M. Stevenson.
In "The Horror From the Mound", first published in the May 1932 issue of Weird Tales, Howard puts his unique spin on that other classic monster of modern horror, the vampire. However, his vampire is not residing in a coffin in the bowels of a castle in Transylvania, but much closer to home (at least from Howard's point of view) in an Indian burial mound in Texas, which a white rancher unwisely disturbs after having been warned not to do so by his Mexican neighbour.
The cover of the May 1932 issue of Weird Tales features a vampire, but not Howard's vampire.
The remaining stories are clearly influenced by H.P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos and feature mysterious tomes of black magic and unspeakable monsters from beyond. The Lovecraft influence is not that surprising, since Lovecraft and Howard did not just both write for Weird Tales, but were also pen pals who kept up a voluminous correspondence, much of which apparently survives and will hopefully see print someday.
But even though they influenced each other, Robert E. Howard was a very different writer than H.P. Lovecraft and also brings a very different sensibility to his stories. For while Lovecraft's protagonists tend to be driven mad by their encounters with the unspeakable, Howard's protagonists usually fight the monster or die trying, though the poet Justin Geoffrey, protagonist of "The Black Stone", does go mad after an encounter with a cursed stone, an unspeakable cult and a terrifying monster.
The cover of the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales does not illustrate "The Black Stone", but it's still a great cover.
Howard's stories also have a wider range of settings from Texas via Ireland, France and Hungary all the way to Middle East, which is the setting of "The Fires of Asshurbanipal", which combines Lovecraftian horror with the high adventure of the Conan stories.
The cover of the December 1936 issue of Weird Tales by J. Allen St. John illustrates Robert E. Howard's "The Fires of Asshurbanipal"
"The Valley of the Worm" and "The Cairn on the Headland", include two more subjects that are dear to Howard's heart, reincarnation and Norse mythology. "The Valley of the Worm" features James Allison, a terminally ill man on his deathbed, remembering a previous life as Niord, a Norse tribesman who fights a giant snake in a scene strikingly illustrated by Frank Frazetta on the cover and later takes his revenge on a monstrous Lovecraftian entity that slaughtered his tribe. The Picts, another subject that clearly fascinated Howard judging by their repeated appearances in his stories, also show up. Apparently, Howard wrote several stories about James Allison remembering his past lives and I hope that all of them will eventually see print again.
"The Cairn on the Headland" is set in Ireland, where the two-fisted scholar James O'Brien not only relives the Battle of Clontarf in 1014 AD, in which he took part in a previous life as the Irish warrior Red Cumal, but also has to save Ireland from the wrath of the Norse god Odin who took part in said battle disguised as a Viking chieftain and lies buried in the titular Cairn, which O'Brien's villainous companion unwisely disturbs. Howard has Irish ancestry and was clearly fascinated by the history and mythology of his forebearers.
Wolfshead includes but a small selection of the many horror stories that Howard wrote, but it also offers a taste of how varied Howard's works were. I hope that this is but the first of many collections of Robert E. Howard's horror stories to come.
A great and varied horror collection by a true master of the genre.
Four and a half stars.
There's Gold in Them Pulps and in That Trunk, Too: Other Howard works we may hopefully see again soon
The untimely death of Robert E. Howard is one of the great tragedies of our genre. Whenever I read a Howard story and marvel at what a great writer he was, I also mourn all the stories he never got to write, all the tales that remain untold. Howard pivoted to the more lucrative western market towards the end of his life, but would he have returned to Conan or even Kull or Solomon Kane later in life, just as his nigh contemporary Fritz Leiber keeps returning to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser? We will never know.
However, the success of the Conan reprints is giving us the chance to explore the rest of Howard's work. Another Howard hero, Bran Mak Morn, last king of the Picts who defends his people against Roman occupiers, is set to be reprinted later this year. There is still so much more to discover such as the tales Howard wrote for Weird Tales' sister magazine Oriental Stories and other adventure-focussed pulps like Top-Notch or Thrilling Adventure, featuring the adventures of the American treasure hunter Kirby O'Donnell and the Texan gunfighter Francis Xavier Gordon a.k.a. El Borak in Kurdistan and Afghanistan at the turn of the century. For Oriental Stories, Howard also wrote several historical stories set during the Crusades, which are allegedly excellent.
Francis Xavier Gordon a.k.a. El Borak is a cover boy for the December 1936 issue of Thrilling Adventures.Donald von Gelb's striking cover art for the February 1931 issue of Oriental Stories illustrates Robert E. Howard's "Red Blades of Black Cathay", co-written with his friend Tevis Clyde Smith.
For the infamous shudder pulps, Howard penned several tales featuring the occult investigator Steve Harrison and for Weird Tales, he wrote the Fu Manchu type thriller "Skull Face". Howard also had a funny side, which is in full display in the humorous westerns featuring the big and dumb hillbilly Breckenridge Elkins as well as his stories featuring the boxing sailor Steve Costigan, which first appeared in the pulp magazine Fight Stories. I've read one of the Steve Costigan stories and it was hilarious. I hope that eventually we will get to read them all.
This gruesome cover of the February 1936 issue of Thrilling Mystery illustrates Robert E. Howard's story "Graveyard Rats".
And then, of course, there is also Howard's trunk of unpublished stories. Who knows what gems still lurk in there?
Belgian Italian singer Salvatore Adamo is not only the second bestselling musician in the world after The Beatles, but also adorns the cover of the latest issue of the West German teen magazine Bravo.
It's a highly superior clutch of books this month around—plus a double review of the new Vonnegut…
by Victoria Silverwolf
Sophomore Efforts
By coincidence, the last two books I read were both the second novels to be published by their authors. Otherwise, they are as different as they could be.
Coleman's first book was something called Seeker From the Stars. I haven't read it, so I can't comment. In fact, I was completely unfamiliar with this author, so I asked my contacts in fandom and the publishing industry about him. I turned up a couple of interesting facts.
Firstly, he's one of the few Black science fiction writers. (The most notable is, of course, the great Samuel R. Delany.) That's a good thing for the field. The more variety of writers, the better the fiction.
Secondly, he's currently in jail for burglary. It seems that he's taken up writing while incarcerated. That seems like a decent path to rehabilitation, so let's wish him good luck while paying his debt to society.
But is the book any good? Let's find out.
At some time in the future, humanity has reached the far reaches of the solar system. However, a conglomeration of business interests known as the Five Companies has put a stop to further development of space science, unless they control it. They're so powerful that they have their own secret police. Not even the World Government or the Space Patrol can keep them from crippling research.
Our protagonist is Catherine Rogers. She is part of a private space research group that dares to defy the Five Companies. Trouble starts when a scientist shows up at their headquarters, shot by the secret police. Just before dying, he gives Catherine and her colleagues a book and a key to a hidden cache of highly advanced technology brought from another world.
We quickly find out that two aliens in the form of glowing spheres are on Earth. One of them is insanely evil. He kidnapped the other, who is essentially the queen bee of her species. He intends to mate with her against her will, forcing her to produce one hundred million offspring (!) who will be raised to be as wicked as himself.
He wants to feed off the life force of human beings, and teach his children to do the same, wiping out humanity. Complicating matters is the fact that the evil alien shares his mind with one of the leaders of the secret police, who wants to get his hands on the advanced technology.
This all happens very early in the book, and we've got a long way to go. Suffice to say that Catherine and her friends work with the good alien, who has enormous psychic powers, to defeat the bad one.
The author's writing style isn't very sophisticated, sad to say, nor is the plot. Much of the time I imagined this story as a comic book. On the good side, the pace keeps getting faster and faster. By the end, it makes Keith Laumer look like Henry James.
I also appreciate the fact that the heroes are of mixed races, and a large number of them are women. All in all, however, I have to confess that this is a disappointing work.
Randall's first novel was called Hedgerow. I haven't read that one either, but apparently it's a Gothic Romance without supernatural elements.
Unlike Coleman, I'm familiar with this author. She had two excellent stories published in Fantastic a few years ago.
Will she be as adept at a longer length? Let's take a look.
An automobile accident claims the lives of the parents of two sisters. Elizabeth (twenty-four years old) escapes without a scratch, but Gabrielle (nineteen) is severely injured. The two young women move into a house owned by the great-aunt of a doctor who cared for Gabrielle during her long and painful recovery.
The house is located on an island off the coast of New England, the perfect setting for a Gothic Romance. Elizabeth and the doctor fall in love, giving us the other mandatory element for this genre.
The first half of the book is narrated by Gabrielle. On the very first page she feels the presence of Alarice, a woman who lived in the house long ago. (She's the dead sister of the great-aunt. Throughout the book, there's a strong parallel between the two pairs of sisters, including a love triangle.)
It's obvious from the start that Gabrielle is mentally and emotionally unstable, after her traumatic experience, so it's not always clear what's real and what's not. The second half of the book is narrated by Elizabeth, who gives us a very different perspective on events, including the tragic accident.
I haven't mentioned a third narrator, who shows up only a few pages from the end, adding a genuinely chilling touch.
This is a beautifully written book, with great psychological insight into its characters. Besides gorgeous language that makes me want to read it out loud, it has a plot as intricately woven as a spider web. We witness the same things happen from different viewpoints, completely changing what we thought we knew.
Five stars.
by Brian Collins
This month's Ace Double is a very good one for both Fritz Leiber fans and readers in general. The quality packed into this Double is unsurprising, though, since it is all reprints. There's the short collection Night Monsters, which contains four stories that all run in the horror vein. Three of these stories were previously printed in Fantastic, and so Victoria covered them some years ago. The other half is The Green Millennium, one of Leiber's more overlooked novels, first published in 1953 and not having seen print in the U.S. in about fifteen years.
The longest story here is also the best, at least in terms of the sheer beauty of Leiber's prose. It's Southern California in the early '60s, and the narrator is recounting the strange ramblings of a friend of his who would disappear under mysterious circumstances. Said friend believes that not only is oil a corrupting force, but that oil might somehow be alive. The supernatural is never seen but is strongly alluded to, in passages so evocative, so oppressive, that they compare with Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The plot itself is rather structureless, but this doesn't matter because Leiber is so good at chronicling modern horrors such as industry and the urban landscape. I lived in California (in Pasadena) for a short time, and I'll be sure never to return.
Another contender for best in the collection is a more personal, more melancholy story. A middle-aged man, a chess-player, astronomer, and divorcee who reads somewhat like a stand-in for Leiber, sees a silhouetted figure behind him in the doubled mirrors he sees going up and down the stairs every night. Without giving away the ending, the apparition may be the ghost of a theatre actress he had met by chance who had committed suicide not long after their encounter. The man, in an attack of conscience, is confronted with a memory he had suppressed, of a person he had deeply wronged, though he didn't know it at the time. It's a ghost story, a striking portrait of guilt, and in a strange way, a love story.
As an unintended companion to the previous story, this one is interesting. It also features a ghostly woman who has been wronged, albeit the crime committed upon her is much worse. We're led to believe at first that this woman is simply a temptress, but while she may creep up on the unsuspecting male lead, she is not a totally malicious specter. "I'm Looking for 'Jeff'" is about a decade older than the other stories, and it certainly shows a restraint (given the horrific crime at the center) that Leiber would probably not show if he had written it today. My one real problem is the ending, which is an expositional monologue from a third party that explains the twist, rather than Leiber showing us what happened.
The last and shortest is also the most lighthearted; it's what you might call a horror-comedy. An actress is quite literally fading (her body is becoming more transparent) as her popularity is on the decline, so she resorts to a very old family ritual that might make her famous again—at a price. The satire is cute, although I think Leiber tackled something similar but better and more seriously in "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes." I'm also not sure about those rhyming couplets. It's fine, but ultimately minor.
Phil Gish is aimless and unemployed, but his life quickly gets turned upside down when he meets a green cat he takes an immediate liking to. He calls the cat Lucky, and like Lovecraft, who liked taking care of strays, he thinks of the animal as his own—only for Lucky to run off. Man gets cat, man loses cat, man goes looking for cat. This is the skeleton on which the book's plot is built, but it balloons into something much weirder and more convoluted.
The future America of The Green Millennium is dystopic, but not in ways we now take as obvious. Robots have become normalized, taking away much of human labor, and the people themselves are largely hedonists desperate for stimulation—not even for pleasure itself but more to fight off boredom. Despite being first published in 1953, it reads like something written in the past few years—in the wake of the New Wave and even something like Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Certainly it could not have been serialized in the magazines of the time, what with the explicit references to sex and drug use.
The plot, at its core, is simple, but Leiber introduces a colorful array of characters, all of whom want Lucky as much as Phil does. These characters include, but are not limited to, a husband-wife wrestling duo, an analyst who sounds like he himself could use an analyst, a woman with prosthetic legs that hide what seem to be hooves for feet, a pack of corporate higher-ups who may as well be mobsters, actual mobsters, and a few others I have not mentioned. The green cat might be an alien, or a mutant, or a weapon devised by the Soviets, I won't say which.
I might sound inebriated as I'm trying to explain all this, but let me assure you that I haven't smoked or ingested marijuana in five months!
Leiber is a mixed bag when it comes to comedy: he can be pretty funny, but he can also write The Wanderer. The Green Millennium is a madcap SF comedy that was written at a time (the early '50s) when Leiber could seemingly do no wrong, and it demonstrates his keen understanding of things that haunt the modern American. Most importantly, it's just a lot of fun.
On a routine flight from Stockholm to London, sixteen travellers (eight women and eight men) with no connection to each other, find themselves whisked to another world. Their new environs are suggestive of nothing so much as a zoo habitat designed to be reminiscent of home. To wit: a strip of highway flanked by a supermarket and a hotel, complete with electricity and running water. Two automobiles sans engines. A few workshops. A nightly replenished supply of booze, groceries, and tools.
Russell Graheme, M.P., quickly takes charge of the unwilling emigrants, organizing exploration parties. Soon, contact is made with a medievalist enclave, a Stone Age encampment…and what appear to be flocks of fairies.
What is this world? Who brought them there? And to what end? Those are the key riddles answered in this terrific little new book.
It's sort of a cross between Cooper's book Transit (in which five humans are transported to an extraterrestrial island) and Philip José Farmer's "Riverworld" series (in which everyone who ever lived is transported, along with his/her culture, to the banks of an extraterrestrial world-river) with a touch of the whimsy of L. Sprague de Camp (viz. The Incomplete Enchanter). It reads extremely quickly, and what with the short chapters and quick running time, you'll be done with the novel (novella?) before you know it.
What really engaged me, beyond the tight writing and fine characterization, was the central message of hope throughout the book. In "Riverworld", the various cultures who find themselves alongside each other in the hereafter almost immediately form belligerent statelets; war is the constant in Farmer's series. But in Seahorse, it's all about making peaceful contact, working together, having a productive goal. There's no Lord of the Flies to this story (though it is not unmitigatedly happy, either). Cooper clearly has a positive view of humanity, or at least wants to inspire us toward his idealistic vision. Count me in.
Five stars.
Contrast this upbeat book with the other one I read recently…
By page 100, Gideon determined that Slaughterhouse Five is not a book one enjoys, but rather experiences.
Two thirds of the way through the book, Gideon realized he'd been hoodwinked. Slaughterhouse Five is not science fiction at all, but rather the author's attempt to convey his experiences as a POW in Nazi Germany during the War, culminating in his presence at the firebombing of Dresden (now sited in East Germany). The SFnal wrapping, in which Billy Pilgrim is abducted by 4D aliens who unstick him in time and incarcerate him in an extraterrestrial zoo, seems there mostly to get eyes on the book. Or maybe to maintain a certain detachment from the material by changing the genre from "memoir."
For the same reason Billy Pilgrim, the eternal schlemiel, gets to be the closest thing the book has to a hero rather than the author, himself. The only way Vonnegut could work through his battle fatigue and War-derived ennui was to make the protagonist as hopeless and hapless as possible, to reflect the flannel-wrapped blinders through which the author now sees the world. To Vonnegut, Earth is a pathetic stage on which man inflicts indignity on himself and then on others. Then they die. So it goes.
On or about page 81, Gideon got a little tired of the fairy-tale language Vonnegut employs. It worked in Harrison Bergeron, but it's a bit of a one-trick pony.
Somewhere along the line, Gideon figured that the inclusion of the starlet, Miss Montana (who exists to provide someone besides the enormous Mrs. Pilgrim for Billy to stick his hefty wang into) was so that, in addition to appealing to SF fans, the book would appeal to horny SF fans. And horny readers in general. And because S.E.X. s.e.l.l.s.
Kilgore Trout, if he existed, would probably be reprinted these days in Amazing.
About a third of the way in, Gideon determined that he would write the review of Slaughterhouse Five in the style of Slaughterhouse Five.
Whatever the book is not, it is, at the very least, a memorable account of the author's feelings toward and memories of those dark last months of the war. It is a poignant counterpoint to all the jingoistic WW2 films that have come out this decade, and perhaps a more suitable epitaph for the millions who died in that conflict. So it goes.
Four stars.
by Cora Buhlert
War is hell: Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Last month, thousands of people gathered in Dresden to remember the victims of the Allied bombings in the night from February 13 to 14, 1945, the night from Shrove Tuesday to Ash Wednesday and never was a day more aptly named. These memorial gatherings happen every year and while the number of East German officials and politicians attending and the degree of belligerence in their speeches waxes and wanes with the greater political situation (East German officials like using the Dresden bombings for propaganda purposes as an example of the infamy of the West), one thing that remains constant is the number of Dresdeners who come to remember the dead and the nigh total destruction of their city.
The burnt out ruin of the Church of Our Lady in Dresden, once a jewel of Baroque architecture.The Semper opera house in Dresden after the bombings. The exterior is still standing, but the once gorgeous interior is burned completely out.
I have never seen Dresden before 1945, though my grandmother who grew up in the area told me it was a beautiful city and how much she missed attending performances at the striking Semper opera house, which was largely destroyed by the bombings and is in the process of being rebuilt (The proposed completion date is 1985). However, I have visited the modern Dresden with its constant construction activity and incongruous mix of burned out ruins, historical buildings in various stages of reconstruction and newly constructed modernist office and apartment blocks and could keenly feel what was lost.
Views of the modern rebuilt Dresden in postcard form
I also know survivors of the Dresden bombings such as my university classmate Norbert who witnessed Dresden burning as teenager evacuated to the countryside and who – much like Kurt Vonnegut – was forced to help with the clean-up work and body recovery and wrote a harrowing account of his experiences for the university literary magazine.
Of course, Dresden was not the only German city bombed. Every bigger German city has its own Dresden, that night when entire neighbourhoods were wiped out and thousands of people, the vast majority of them civilians, were killed. For my hometown of Bremen, the night was the night of August 18, 1944, when Allied bombers destroyed the Walle neighbourhood next to Bremen harbour (while miraculously missing most of the harbour itself, similar to how the bombing of Dresden miraculously missed the industrial plants on the outskirts of the city). My grandfather, a retired sea captain, lived in the Walle neighbourhood. He was one of the lucky ones and survived, though his home in a housing estate for retired seafarers was destroyed. I remember sifting through the still smoking rubble of Grandpa's little house with my Mom the next day, looking for anything that might have survived the bombs and the firestorm and finding only two bronze buddha statues that Grandpa had brought back from Thailand. These two buddhas now stand guard in my living room, the war damage still visible. Meanwhile, the street where Grandpa once lived no longer exists on modern city maps at all.
An aerial view of Dresden's old slaughterhouse, where Kurt Vonnegut was imprisoned and survived the bombing of the city.
This is the perspective from which I read Kurt Vonnegut's latest novel Slaughterhouse Five, which uses science fiction as a vehicle for Vonnegut to describe his experiences as a prisoner of war who survived the bombing of Dresden and – like my classmate Norbert – never forgot what he saw that night and in the days that followed.
The result, much like the contemporary Dresden with the burned out ruin of the Church of Our Lady overlooking a parking lot and a hyper-modern restaurant and entertainment complex sitting directly opposite the newly restored Baroque Zwinger palace, is jarring and incongruous. Vonnegut's protagonist is Billy Pilgrim, an American everyman whose suburban postwar life is disrupted when he is abducted by aliens and becomes unstuck in time, forced to revisit the bombing of Dresden over and over and over again.
No, this photo of the burnt out ruin of the Church of Our Lady in winter was not taken in 1945, but in 1960. It still looks the same today.A banner advertises an exhibtion of contemporary Soviet art, while the ruins of Baroque Dresden loom in the background.The ultra-modern restaurant complex Am Zwinger, the largest in all of East Germany, opened only last year – directly opposite the newly restored Baroque Zwinger palace.Aerial view of the ultra-modern restaurant complex Am Zwinger, which includes a self-service restaurant, the Radeberger beer cellar and the Café Espresso, pictured here. Just don't expect the coffee on offer to actually taste like espresso.Tourists lounge in the terrace café of the restaurant complex Am Zwinger, overlooking the recently rebuilt Baroque Zwinger palace.
Slaughterhouse Five is not so much a novel, it is a metaphor for the trauma of war, a trauma that still hasn't subsided even twenty-four years later but that keep rearing its ugly head again and again. Many veterans report having flashbacks to particularly traumatic experiences during the war – any war. But while those flashbacks are purely psychological, poor Billy Pilgrim physically travels back in time to the worst night of his life over and over again.
Barely a blip on the radar
The bombings of World War II loom large in the collective memory of people in Germany and the rest of Europe, yet they are comparatively rarely addressed in contemporary German literature. Der Untergang (The End: Hamburg) by Hans Erich Nossack from 1948, Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (A Time to Love and a Time to Die) by Erich Maria Remarque (who was not even in Germany, but sitting high and dry in Switzerland during WWII) from 1954 and Vergeltung (Retaliation) by Gert Ledig from 1956 are some of the very few examples. It's not as if World War II plays no role in German literature at all, because we have dozens of war novels. However, these are all tales about the experiences of soldiers on the frontline, not about the civilians getting bombed to smithereens back home. Most likely, this is because war novels focus on the experiences of men (and note that both Slaughterhouse Five and Remarque's A Time to Love and a Time to Die focus on soldiers experiencing bombings and air raids) and the experiences of men are deemed important. Meanwhile, the people who suffered and died during the bombing nights of World War II were mainly women, children, old people, sick people, prisoners of war, concentration camp prisoners and forced labourers and their experiences are not deemed nearly as relevant.
Considering how utterly destructive the bombing of Dresden was, it's notable that it is barely a blip on the radar of German literature in both East and West. Erich Kästner's memoir Als ich ein kleiner Junge war (When I was a little boy) touches on the bombing of Dresden, where Kästner grew up, though the book is not about the bombing itself, which Kästner did not experience first-hand, because he was living in Berlin at the time. And for the twentieth anniversary of the Dresden bombings, Ulrike Meinhof, one of the brightest lights of West German journalism, penned a scathing article for the leftwing magazine Konkret, condemning Winston Churchill and Royal Air Force commander Arthur Harris for ordering the attack on Dresden under false pretences. "Was Winston Churchill a war criminal?" the cover of the respective issue of Konkret asked, while quite a lot of readers wondered why this was even a question.
So should Slaughterhouse Five, a work by an American author, albeit one who witnessed the bombing of Dresden first-hand, become the definitive account of the destruction of Dresden and of the bombing nights of World War II in general? I hope not, because I want to read more accounts by German civilians about the bombings of World War II. Nonetheless, I'm glad that Slaughterhouse Five exists, as an account about the horrors of war by one who has seen them. I'm also glad that this novel was published in the US, because too many Americans still consider the bombings of cities and civilians during World War II justified. Maybe Slaughterhouse Five will make some of them reconsider, especially since – as I said above – it wasn't just Dresden that was destroyed by bombing. It was also Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Rotterdam, Coventry, Guernica, Hamburg and right now, it's Hanoi. And the next generation's Billy Pilgrim is currently locked up in a bamboo cage in the Vietnamese jungle somewhere, watching the flames over Hanoi turn the sky blood red.
Not a pleasant book at all, but an important one. Four and a half stars.
And now for something much more pleasant. For after a difficult book like Slaughterhouse Five, you need a palate cleanser. Luckily, I found the perfect palate cleanser in The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs, a young American writer currently living in Britain. The Face in the Frost is thirty-year-old Bellairs' third book and his first foray in the fantasy genre.
John Bellairs
The novel starts off with a prologue that informs us that this is a book about wizards – just in case readers of Bellairs' previous two books, collections of Catholic humour pieces, are confused – and then introduces us to the setting, two adjacent kingdoms known only as the North and the South Kingdom. Such prologues can be dry and boring, but Bellairs' whimsical humour, which is on display throughout the book, makes them fun to read.
Once the introductions are out of the way, we meet our protagonist, the wizard Prospero ("not the one you're probably thinking of", Bellairs helpfully informs us) or rather his home, "a huge, ridiculous, doodad-covered, trash-filled two-story horror of a house that stumbled, staggered, and dribbled right up to the edge of a great shadowy forest of elms and oaks and maples", which Prospero shares with a sarcastic talking mirror which can offer glimpses of faraway times and places, though mostly, it's just annoying and also has a terrible singing voice.
Prospero's house, as illustrated by Marilyn Fitschen
This first chapter very much sets the tone for the entire novel, humorous and whimsical – with moments of dread occasionally creeping in. For Prospero has been plagued by bad dreams of late, he has the feeling that a malicious presence is watching him and finds himself menaced by a fluttering cloak, while getting a mug of ale from his own cellar. To top off Prospero's very bad day, he finds himself attacked by a monstrous moth that "smells like a basement full of dusty newspapers".
Luckily, Prospero's friend and fellow wizard Roger Bacon – and note that this time around, Bellairs does not inform us, that this is not the one we're thinking of, so this likely is the famed medieval scholar and creator of a talking brazen head – chooses just this evening to drop by for a visit, after having been kicked out of England, when a spell went awry and instead of constructing a wall of brass around the island in order to keep out Viking raiders, Bacon instead raised a wall of glass with predictable results.
As the two old friends discuss the day's events, it quickly becomes clear that something or rather someone is after Prospero and all that this is linked to a mysterious book that Bacon tried to locate on Prospero's behalf. However, it's late at night, so the two wizards go to bed, only to awaken in the morning to find the house surrounded by sinister grey-cloaked figures, sent by a rival wizard. There's no way out – except via an underground river that the two wizards navigate aboard a model ship, after shrinking themselves down to toy size.
A Magical Mystery Tour
What follows is a marvellous, magical quest, as Prospero and Bacon attempt to figure out just who is after Prospero and once they do, how to stop that villainous sorcerer from casting a spell that will plunge the whole world into everlasting winter. On the way, the two wizards encounter such fascinating locations as the village of Five Dials, which turns out to be an illusion, a magical Potemkin village of hollow houses inhabited by hollow people. They also escape all sorts of horrors their opponent sends against them such as a magical puddle that will capture a person's reflection, should they happen to look into it, and of course the titular face that appears in a frost-encrusted window to mock and menace Prospero.
Fantasy is experiencing something of a boom right now, triggered by the paperback release of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and Lancer's reprints of Robert E. Howard's tales of Conan the Cimmerian. But while Conan has inspired a veritable legion of other fantastic swordsmen and barbarian warriors from Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné to Lin Carter's Thongor, Lord of the Rings has inspired very few imitators. Until now.
This does not mean that The Face in the Frost is a carbon copy of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. Quite the contrary, it's very much its own story, even though the Tolkien inspiration is clear and was acknowledged by Bellairs. Furthermore, Bellairs' light and frothy tone makes The Face in the Frost a very different, if no less magical experience than Professor Tolkien's magnum opus.
The Face in the Frost is a delightful book, skilfully mixing humour and whimsy with horror and dread, and the illustrations by Marilyn Fitschen help bring the wonderful world of Prospero and Roger Bacon to life. The ending certainly leaves room for a sequel and I hope that we will get to read it sooner rather than later. At any rate, I can't wait to see what John Bellairs writes next.
A wondrous confection of whimsy, horror and pure joy. Five stars.
by Robin Rose Graves
Society Without Gender…
Another year, another Le Guin. For those tuning in for the first time, my introduction to Le Guin began two years ago, with her novel City of Illusions, which left me disappointed. Last year, I read A Wizard of Earthsea, where finally I saw Le Guin’s potential realized. When I saw she has another book coming out this year, I was interested, but reined in my expectations when I realized The Left Hand of Darkness would take place in the same universe as City of Illusions.
This is book four of the Hainish Cycle, but fortunately, you do not need to read these books in order to understand the story. In fact, I found little connection between this book and the previous one.
Genly Ai is an envoy sent to the snowy planet of Winter to convince the people to join the Ekumen (a sort of alliance between planets). Winter, or Gethen in their native language, is not as technologically advanced as the rest of the universe. They have yet to build airplanes, let alone a vehicle capable of space travel. Following an outsider’s perspective allows readers to learn about a new culture alongside the narrative main character.
As per my experience with her previous works, Le Guin excels at creating compelling and unique settings. Smaller, intermediate chapters offer folkloric stories from the planet of Winter to further enhance the reader’s understanding of Gethenian culture.
All the characters are human, though the Gethenians differ in one key way. They are completely androgynous except for once a month when they enter their reproductive cycle (known as “kemmer”) where they then shift into either male or female (as in they can either impregnate or become pregnant.) Which role a Gethenian will take on during kemmer is not predetermined and can change between cycles.
This confuses and occasionally disgusts Genly Ai, who regards all characters with he and him pronouns, perhaps because he is male and unable to empathize with or respect anyone who isn’t.
Without gender, Le Guin posits that there is no sexuality, no rape, no war. People who get pregnant are not treated as lesser. Children are raised by everyone, not just the person who gave birth to them. Jobs account for kemmer, giving time off for those experiencing their cycle, and special buildings are set aside for reproduction.
Contrasted with the world we live in today, this book subtly calls out the sexism of our own society, while also exemplifying how we may improve. I was pleasantly surprised by the feminist slant of this book.
Five stars.
Reflections in a Mirage, by Leonard Daventry
By Jason Sacks
Leonard Daventry is a British science fiction author whose work tends to follow standard pathways – until it doesn’t. As my fellow Galactic companion Gideon Marcus wrote about one of Mr. Daventry’s previous novels, Daventry likes to explore ideas of free love and complex relationships, using familiar set-ups with slightly surprising resolutions.
His latest book, Reflections in a Mirage, is an excellent demonstration of how Mr. Daventry takes on those challenges while delivering his own unique view of the world. Unfortunately, this novel is perhaps overly ambitious for its length. Mirage consequently falls short of the author’s clear goals.
We return to the lead character Daventry established back in 1965 in A Man of Double Deed: Claus Coman is a telepath, a so-called “keyman” who can create connections to minds of both humans and non-humans. Coman is enlisted to join a motley band of outcasts and criminals who journey to one of the many worlds which humanity has discovered among the vast stars: a forbidding but intriguing planet called Sacron. Coman at least has the comfort of traveling with longtime companion Jonl, a woman with whom he’s had a complex relationship.
But just as many British exiles to Australia rebelled against their crew, the group of 50 outcasts rebel against the crew of their space cruiser. A violent, vicious battle kills most of the men who can fly the cruiser, and terrible damage is visited upon the ship. They only have one choice: to land on the planet which is ironically called Paradise 1. Paradise 1 seems to be a desert world, nearly bereft of any life whatsoever, but there are hints the planet may be more complex than it initially seems.
In fact, we get an intriguing revelation towards the end of the book (with a few concepts which will be well understood by Star Trek fans), but I found myself hungering for more context of the deeper story. At a mere 191 paperback pages, I was constantly under the impression that Daventry had to cut out important elements to the story; its brevity leaves the conclusion feeling a bit unsatisfying.
Reflections in a Mirage is at its best when it explores the human relationships it depicts. Coman’s relationship with Jonl is at the center of the story and provides a happy connection where so many of the other connections are tenuous. Daventry spends some time showing Jonl’s relationship with other women on the colony ship – the men and women are partitioned away from each other – and alludes to furtive, loving relationships among the women. There are similar hints about some of the men's connections to each other, and a strong implication that this society accepts a full gamut of sexuality, from polygamy to homosexuality and even to asexuality.
All of that is very interesting, and places this novel firmly in a “new wave” mindset, but there’s just not enough of it to satisfy. Ultimately, Reflections in a Mirage has the potential to be great, but I felt Daventry needed at least 100 more pages to fully illuminate his story.
You’ll probably be more satisfied reading some of the other works in this column. (I do recommend the LeGuin and Vonnegut books.)
Much as I enjoy the jollity of the festive season, I’m also firmly of the opinion that there is nothing better than a ghost story—or, failing that, a horror story—at Christmas. So I was quite delighted to learn my local cinema would be showing the latest British horror movie, Curse of the Crimson Altar.
Curse follows in the footsteps of this summer’s Witchfinder General in being a film where the horror is not supernatural but psychological, suggesting that this genre may be coming into fashion. Although the biggest creative obstacle Curse has to overcome is that someone behind the scenes, or possibly in the censor’s office, has meant that the actual catalyst for the horror remains subtextual throughout.
At the start of the movie, we get a quote from an unnamed “medical journal” about the influence of psychedelic drugs on the human brain: “drugs of this group can produce the most complex hallucinations and under their influence it is possible by hypnosis to induce the subject to perform actions he would not normally commit.” Thereafter, we get no reference to drugs at all, but it should be fairly clear to the viewer how we should interpret the proceedings.
The plot involves an antique dealer, Robert Manning (Mark Eden), going in search of his brother Peter, who has disappeared on an expedition to hunt for salable stock, sending Manning a single candlestick, a witchfinders’ bodkin, and a cryptic note on notepaper from a country estate, Craxted Lodge in the town of Greymarsh. Arriving at the estate, Manning finds Lord Morley (Christopher Lee) and his niece Eve (Virginia Wetherell) gearing up for a local Bonfire Night-type holiday, celebrating the anniversary of the burning of a local witch, Lavinia Morley (Barbara Steele), the Black Witch of Greymarsh. They claim never to have met Manning’s brother, but invite him to stay with them while he investigates. Manning begins suffering from strange erotic dreams about Lavinia Morley and sleepwalking episodes, and, with the help of a local historian and occult enthusiast, Professor Marsh (Boris Karloff), discovers he is descended from one of the people who sentenced Lavinia to death. Someone is out for revenge, but who, and how, and why?
Lascivious Lavinia as played by Barbara Steele
The movie boasts a lot of familiar names behind and in front of the camera, being scripted by Henry Lincoln and Mervyn Haisman, creators of Doctor Who’s Great Intelligence and Yeti, and featuring Roger Avon, Michael Gough and scream-queen Barbara Steele in supporting roles. Gough in particular does a great turn as a manservant who is either under the influence of malign spirits, or else doped to the eyeballs, at all times. The casting of Lee and Karloff, both seasoned horror veterans who usually play villains but have turned their hand to more benign roles, keeps the suspense going as to who is behind the sinister events, and there's a cute nod to Karloff's role when Manning remarks that he feels “like Boris Karloff might pop up at any moment” shortly before, in fact, he does.
Michael Gough as a zombie manservant.
In many ways the story feels a little like an episode of The Prisoner or The Avengers, involving as it does a villain who is using psychedelic drugs and mind games to wear down an unsuspecting victim. The fact that the script can’t directly say that drugs are involved also helps to make the events more ambiguous, suggesting for most of the movie that Manning might really be haunted by the vengeful spirit of Lavinia Morley. The imagery of the dream sequences is very much drawn from British folk culture, with sinister figures in animal masks and references to the witch-hunts of the 17th century.
Unfortunately, the story is also a little uneven, with a long prurient episode featuring Eve having a debauched party with her young artist friends apparently going nowhere; presumably the intention was to suggest that Eve might be behind, or at least complicit in, the implicitly drug-fueled activities which follow, but it mostly seems to be included to cater to the crowd of people who like to tut about modern youth going wild while secretly enjoying the orgy scenes. Similarly I found the dream sequences more laughable than erotic, with supposed demons and witches walking around clad in strips of imitation leatherette. There are also some gaps in the narrative, which I won’t detail in order not to give away the denouement, and the ending felt rather rushed to me.
Another tedious sex party, ho hum.
All in all, I’d say this is a solid if uneven horror story that keeps the viewer guessing for a long time, and suggests that the non-supernatural horror based in British folk mythology is here to stay.
Three and a half stars.
I’d also like to devote a little time to the B feature on the night I saw Curse of the Crimson Altar, a short and cheap SF-horror from 1964 entitled The Earth Dies Screaming, directed by the supremely talented Terence Fisher. The scenario is straight out of John Wyndham: a test pilot, returning from a high altitude flight, discovers that almost everyone else on Earth has been killed—apparently through some kind of gas attack, as the few survivors are people who, for one reason or another, were not breathing the atmosphere at that point. Less Wyndham-esque are the eerie, silent robots now stalking around the deserted Earth, who bear such a strong resemblance to Cybermen that one wonders if it is simply coincidence or if Doctor Who’s design team had been at the movies before working on “The Tenth Planet”. The robots also have the ability to turn anyone they shoot into grey-eyed, mindless creatures who do their bidding.
See what I mean? That's a Cyberman, that is.
Our hero joins a band of survivors seemingly calculated to provide optimum drama (society woman; hedonistic good-time couple; sinister man in a mac; teddy-boy mistrustful of anyone over 30 and his heavily pregnant young wife) and collectively they attempt to figure out how to survive and to stop the robots, despite the conflicting agendas in the group.
While suffering a little from uneven pacing and characterisation (the teddy boy, for instance, suddenly overcomes his suspicions of the establishment for no reason other than plot convenience), this is a pleasingly eerie 62 minutes. I quite like the sub-genre of apocalypse stories that just focus on a small group of people trying to cope with their changed circumstances, and the parallels with the aftermath of a nuclear war are clear without being didactic.
![[December 22nd, 1969] Safety On! (<i>I Sing the Body Electric!</i> by Ray Bradbury)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Bradbury-Cover-595x372.jpg)
![[December 10, 1969] Night Gallery: A Frightening Tableau](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/NightGallery-553x372.png)
![[September 14, 1969] More Gems from the Pulps: <i>Bran Mak Morn</i> by Robert E. Howard and <i>Jirel of Joiry</i> by C.L. Moore](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/690914coracovers-601x372.jpg)
![[August 12, 1969] Cat’s Got Your Tongue: Sal-Inma (A Devilish Homicide) (1965) & Report From South Korea](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/A_Devilish_Homicide-265x372.jpg)
Ae-ja murders Joon-Chul
The cat spirit manifests through Shi-Mak's mother
Cat spirit revelation
![[June 28, 1969] I Don’t Have Your Wagon (Review of “The Maltese Bippy”)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/The_Maltese_Bippy.jpg)
![[May 24, 1969] Cinemascope: The [NOUN] of [PROPER NAME]’s [NOUN]: Blood of Dracula's Castle and Nightmare in Wax](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/690524posters-672x372.jpg)
![[April 28, 1969] Cinemascope: Witchmaker, Witchmaker, Make Me A Witch: "The Witchmaker" (a movie) and "The Body Stealers" (a flick)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/690428posters-672x372.jpg)
Poster for The Witchmaker
No tits please, we're Americans
Poster for The Body Stealers
Bob Megan: rugged, sexy and a knitwear aficionado
Recognise this? You should![[March 28, 1969] Life Beyond Conan: The Other Heroes of Robert E. Howard](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/KNGKLLWGLQ1967-390x372.jpg)
![[March 14, 1969 ] (March 1969 Galactoscope)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/690314covers-672x372.jpg)
![[December 18, 1968] Sex, Drugs and Boris Karloff: Curse of the Crimson Altar](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Curse_of_the_crimson_altar_poster.jpg)
Another tedious sex party, ho hum.
