Tag Archives: Weird Tales

Graveyard Rats for Kuttner’s Birthday

Henry Kuttner was born on this date in 1915. His first published story was “The Graveyard Rats”, which appeared in the March 1936 issue of Weird Tales. It has been reprinted at least 35 times, the latest being in Zombies from the Pulps, edited by Jeffrey Shanks, which where I recently reread it.

Kuttner started out as part of the Lovecraft circle, and “The Graveyard Rats” is very much in the vein of Lovecraft. The story concerns Masson, a gravedigger in an old cemetery in Salem. The man has a profitable little sideline going, digging up the bodies and removing any valuables buried with them. The problem is the rats which infest the graveyard. They’ve dug a series of tunnels and steal the bodies themselves.

When the rats literally pull a fresh corpse out of the coffin and into the tunnels as Masson is opening the coffin lid, he decides to follow them in and retrieve his prize. This isn’t the smartest move he could have made…

Kuttner became a prolific author, writing some of his best work for Weird Tales, Astounding, and Thrilling Wonder. He wasn’t afraid to take chances and stretch himself as a writer and wrote horror, fantasy, sword and sorcery, science fiction, and mystery. After his marriage to C. L. Moore, the two collaborated on almost everything they wrote.

Haffner Press has been bringing Kuttner back into print, but even so, there are a number of his stories that are still in crumbling pulp magazines that deserve to be reprinted. I’ll be looking at some of those tales later this year.

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard: “The Horror From the Mound”

Blogging Northwest Smith: Dust of Gods

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“Dust of Gods” was the fourth Northwest Smith story, and it was the last of the series published in 1934. The picture on the left accompanied the story in its original publication in Weird Tales. I scanned it from the only reproduction I’m aware of, the anthology Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors (Dziemianowicz, Weinberg, and Greenberg, ed., Bonanza Books, 1988). The book was printed on paper not much higher grade than the original pulp, and it’s yellowed with lines of text bleeding through from the other side of the page. But at least you can get a feel for what it would have been like to read the story in its original appearance. (What, you didn’t think I could actually afford copies of Weird Tales from the 30s, did you?)

Anyway, this installment in the series is a departure from the earlier tales. For one thing, Smith is not off by himself getting into trouble. His partner Yarol the Venusian is with him. In other words, Smith has company when he gets into trouble.

Secondly, there isn’t any exotic feminine menace in this one, and there certainly isn’t any of the sexual imagery that we saw in “Shambleau“, “Black Thirst“, or “Scarlet Dream“. While there isn’t any sexual content or theme, there is still an exotic menace. But compared to the earlier ones, it’s not that great of a menace.

The menace this time is more of a science fictional nature. The previous stories were science fantasy. “Dust of Gods” is essentially science fiction, although not of the hard science, nuts and bolts variety.

The story opens with Smith and Yarol in a bar on Mars, drinking and commiserating about their lack of funds. They notice some men acting strangely at a nearby table. Smith and Yarol are contemplating approaching the men when another man at an adjacent table stops them. He tells the duo that the men worked for him but failed to complete a task, recovering something very ancient in a lost Martian city. He convinces Smith and Yarol to try and succeed where the others have failed.

What he tells them is that at one time, before man arose on Earth, there was a fifth planet from the Sun where now there are only asteroids. This planet was ruled by three gods, all long gone, and two of them forgotten by most members of the races currently inhabiting the solar system. The third is still remember, and goes by the name Pharol. In fact Yarol had used his name as an oath minutes before the man approach him and Smith.

These gods came from another realm, and ruled until catastrophe befell the fifth planet. All that’s left of Pharol is dust, and it’s this dust the man wants Smith and Yarol to retrieve for him. In need of cash, they sign on.

The two end up in an ancient Martian city near the North Pole of the planet. Deep beneath the city, after avoiding a trap, they find a chamber filled with a strange glowing light that flows like water. In the center of the chamber is a huge throne built for three occupants. And in one of the seats there is a pile of dust. Yarol climbs up to gather the dust while Smith waits below, thinking while he watches the light pour out of the chamber. He concludes the guy who has hired them is up to no good, and if he gets his hands on the dust, there’s no telling what kind of damage he could do or if there would be any way to stop him. They decide to leave the dust. Just to be safe, they destroy it with their blasters.

And that’s pretty much all that happens in the story. It’s very much a departure from the earlier tales. The setting is a pretty standard science fiction setting for the time in which “Dust of Gods” was written. The concept of gathering literal dust of a god is an original idea, and not one I’ve seen much done with outside of this story.

But this story lacks the power and impact of the earlier ones. Maybe it’s the lack of suggestive or outright sexual imagery. Maybe Moore was having an off day when she wrote the story. (Okay, a series of off days since she almost certainly didn’t write this one in one day. Or maybe she did. That would explain a lot.) It almost reads as though Moore had tired of the character, but with another 10 installments to come in the series, that’s hardly likely. Moore’s prose is still as rich and evocative as ever, but it seems like there’s less she wants to evoke. The menace isn’t particularly threatening, and all Smith and Yarol really have to do is think for a bit. While they do encounter some danger, it’s not really of the soul-shattering kind in the previous stories.

Whatever the reason, I found “Dust of Gods” to be the weakest story in the series to date, even though it’s not a bad story. That sounds harsh, but it’s really not saying much. Moore on a bad day was better than almost every writer of her time on a good day, with a few exceptions such as Howard. She’s certainly better than many of the writers working today, even the acclaimed ones.

There are 10 more stories to go, and I’ll look at another one soon.

Blogging Northwest Smith: Scarlet Dream

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“Scarlet Dream”
C. L. Moore

This post contains content of an adult nature and is not suitable for younger readers. You have been warned.

“Scarlet Dream” is the third Northwest Smith story. In terms of sexually charged imagery, it’s the most explicit of the ones so far, hence the warning above. (My discussions of “Shambleau” and “Black Thirst” can be found here andhere.) There will be spoilers, as well. You’ve been doubly warned.

When the story opens, Smith is wandering through the Lakkmanda Market on Mars. The name has a decidedly Leigh Brackett feel to it. “Scarlet Dream” was published in 1934, predating Brackett’s Mars by a few years, but still I can’t help wondering if Brackett was influenced a bit by the name.

Smith spies a shawl with an intricate pattern consisting of a scarlet thread woven in a blue and green background. The Martian vendor displaying tells Smith the thing gives him a headache, and he sells it to Smith for a good price.

After he returns to his quarters, Smith tries to trace the pattern on the shawl, gives up, covers himself with it, and goes to sleep. Sometime in the night he begins dreaming that he’s walking up a mist enshrouded stair. He soon loses sight of the bottom.

Eventually he is nearly run over by a young girl with long orange hair, wearing a short shift, and covered in blood. She babbles something about some type of monster killing her sister. Smith manages to calm her enough to carry her to the top of the stairs. Once there he takes her into a side room, sets her on a stone bench, and gets a little more explanation from her.

The girl, who is never named, tells Smith that he’s dreaming but that he’s entered a dream world that can only be exited by death or by a fate worse than dying. Most of Smith’s questions are answered along the lines of “We find it best not to think/ask/do that.” This includes trying to leave or learn new things. Indeed, it’s only when Smith eventually decides to leave that the monster shows up and attacks him. But that comes later.

One of the things she tells him is that no one has ever gone down the stairs he came up. She only went down the stairs in a panic. Why Smith doesn’t at some point try to retrace his steps is never explained. But if he did, then there would be no story.

Smith and the girl are in giant temple, and she leads him outside to a lake and a small shrine containing two cots, two blankets, and a few clothes. It’s completely open to the air, but since the temperature never changes, that’s not a problem.

The trees seem to bend towards them, and the grass certainly does. Smith eventually learns that if a person stands barefoot in the grass for long, it will begin sucking blood through the feet. The trees are implied to be flesh eating.

Smith sits with the girl beside the lake, drifts off, and comes to as night is falling. Moore implies that at this point Smith engages the girl in sex. Regular sex between them is implied, with the word “kiss” and its variations being a euphemism for more than a kiss. In spite of the raciness of the covers Farnsworth Wright selected for Weird Tales, the contents tended to be squeaky clean. One of Robert E. Howard’s early Conan stories was rejected because Wright felt Conan took too many liberties with a young lady. (My opinion of that can be found here.)

Where Moore engages in some serious sexual imagery is when the girl shows Smith the only source of food. She takes him to a hall in the temple in which there are people “eating”. That there are other people present is mentioned more than once, but this is the only time we see them. Smith has no interaction with them. In fact, they’re only mentioned in a few sentences, basically as backdrop.

The way people eat is they kneel before spigots in the wall, spigots that curve upwards. What they drink from the spigots is blood, with the hint that it contains some addictive substance. Once Smith realizes what he’s drinking, he’s repulsed but finds himself returning the next day. Moore goes into details describing how pleasant and yet repulsive feeding is, dwelling on the taste.

Now I don’t know what mental picture you get, but what comes to my mind now is the same thing that came to mind when I was 15. Fellatio, although I had not encountered that word at the time. It’s hard to escape that image. The posture of kneeling, along with Moore deliberately stating that the spigots curve upward from the wall, leave little room for any other conclusion. What I have to wonder is what Wright thought about this imagery, or if he even noticed it. I doubt we’ll ever know. Smith comes to enjoy the feeding more than the girl, although he never completely overcomes his revulsion of it.

Smith eventually spies mountains through the surrounding mist, attempts to leave, is attacked by the monster, and drives it off with his blaster. It’s at this point that the girl tells Smith she would rather lose him to the fate worse than death than through death at the hand of the monster. She helps him get home, although he doesn’t realize what’s happening until it’s too late.

Smith awakens to find his partner Yarol and a doctor leaning over him. Smith has been in a coma for a week. Seems Smith can’t be left alone to wander about on Mars without getting into trouble. Yarol gave the shawl away while Smith was out. The pattern was giving him a headache.

This is the third Northwest Smith story, and other than “Shambleau”, it’s the one that has stuck out the most in my mind since I first read the series nearly 30 years ago. Again, I’m struck by how graphic the sexual imagery is in these stories. If my parents had known what I was reading….

Moore seems to have a theme of vampirism going as well. In the first story, the vampire fed on life essence, in the second beauty, and now the grass actually drinks blood.

I’m going to continue this series. The post on “Black Thirst” is in the top 10 most viewed posts I’ve done. Stay tuned. There’s more to come. Or should that be Moore to come?

Blogging Northwest Smith: Shambleau

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“Shambleau” is the first of the Northwest Smith adventures, and the first published story by C. L. Moore. According to Lester del Rey, in his introduction to The Best of C. L. Moore (1975), she had been writing for 15 years before she submitted anything for publication. I’d like to know where he got that information, but I’m not questioning it. Since he’d known Moore personally for decades, I’m inclined to believe him. Of course, what I’d like even more is to get my hands on some of those unpublished stories. I suspect they’ve long since ceased to exist.

I don’t remember if “Shambleau” was the first story I read by C. L. Moore, but it certainly made the strongest impact on me. Here’s a synopsis of what happens (spoiler alert):

A young woman is being chased by a mob down a street in a spaceport town on Mars. The mob is closing in on her when she runs into Northwest Smith, a notorious criminal. He intervenes on her behalf to the bafflement of the crowd. Smith takes her back to his room, tells her she’s welcome to stay for the few days until he gives up the room and leaves. This girl isn’t human, and Smith doesn’t recognize her race. She’s dressed only in a shift and a turban. Smith assumes she’s bald. He realizes later she’s not when he sees her tuck what he thinks is a lock of hair under her turban. He’s sure he saw the lock move on its own. But he must be mistaken…

While Moore points out that sexual temptations don’t have much hold on Smith, he does find her attractive enough to make advances. At least until he takes in his arms, at which point he finds her repulsive. He doesn’t really understand why that is, only that the repulsion he feels is almost primal in nature.

Smith is in town setting up some type of criminal venture. We’re not ever told what. Over the next few days, Smith experiences a back and forth attraction and repulsion. He struggles with it, but ultimately he succumbs. Only when Smith’s partner Yarol shows up does Smith have a chance of escape, and even then it’s not easy.

Moore is playing with the concept of a gorgon, and goes so far as to state that the ancient Greeks had some knowledge of the Shambleau, which is the name of the race rather than of the girl. She even takes her resolution from that myth.

One of the things that’s so interesting about this story is that for all its length (~30 pages), not much actually happens. Other than the initial confrontation, which takes less than 5 pages, and Yarol’s rescue of Smith and the conversation that follows, about half of the story revolves around the Shambleau’s seduction of Smith. Yet Moore’s prose is so rich that you hardly notice that that many pages have passed.

Caedmon Records recording of “Shambleau”

And it’s the seduction that is the heart and soul of the story. Moore makes it very clear that Smith’s fall into the Shambelau’s clutches is a very bad thing, but she also makes it clear that it’s also an intensely pleasurable thing. And it’s described as the Shambleau caressing and touching Smith’s soul more than his body. It’s how she feeds, essentially a type of psychic vampire.

Moore also stresses Smith’s internal conflict, attracted by the pleasure and repulsed by the unnaturalness of it. It’s a struggle he ultimately loses, giving in to the temptation while the whole time being repulsed by his actions. It’s a struggle that on some level most people can probably relate to. The desire for something that you know is wrong or harmful, the momentary pleasure of something that will ultimately destroy you.

The imagery is definitely sexual in nature. While tame by today’s standards, I suspect this was pretty potent stuff back then. It was certainly powerful to the teenage boy I was when I first read it. Awash as I was in hormones, this story had a major impact on me. It was almost like Moore was reading my mind at times as I struggled to understand and contain the natural changes I was undergoing and the accompanying urges. And while the emotional impact when I reread the story the other night wasn’t nearly that intense, echoes were still there.

The reason “Shambleau” had such an impact on me, and why its popularity and acclaim has endured for over 75 years, is simple. What Moore deals with here, as I mentioned in a previous paragraph, is something that most people can relate to on some level. She’s dealing with what it means to be human, what it means to struggle with what’s right and what’s convenient. Unlike many writers obsessed with their own self-importance, she does it by telling a compelling story, and telling it well.right up to the end.

Much has been made of Moore’s introduction of emotion and sexuality into the science fiction and fantasy fields in the 1930s. I’m not going to rehash that here. I have neither the time nor the patience for the literature search. And I’m certainly not going to get into amateur psychoanalysis, a la L. Sprague de Camp with Robert E. Howard, and try to interpret Moore’s emotional and mental state. I have too much respect for her to ever do that.

One last bit of trivia. At one point in the story, Smith hums the tune of a song, “The Green Hills of Earth.” Robert Heinlein has gone on record saying this was the inspiration of his classic story by that name.

Henry Kuttner’s Prince Raynor: Cursed be the City

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Elak of Atlantis
Henry Kuttner
Planet Stories
trade paperback, 221, $12.99

In addition to the four Elak stories collected in this book, the only two stories Kuttner wrote about Prince Raynor are also included. These stories were published in Strange Stories, a rival of Weird Tales published by Better Publications. Started in 1939, this pulp was often seen at the time as a dumping ground for stories rejected by Weird Tales. It only lasted until 1941.

In a way I prefer the Prince Raynor tales to those of Elak. They are set in a more recent prehistory, one in which the ancient kingdoms we know existed are beginning to take shape, rather than some mythical past. As a result, any anachronisms are less glaring. Also, the prose is leaner and more polished than in some of the early Elak tales, especially the first one, “Thunder in the Dawn”.

Both “Cursed be the City” and its sequel, “The Citadel of Darkness”, open with quotes from something called “The Tale of Sakhmet the Damned”. What this is exactly, we’re never told, nor does anyone named Sakhmet ever appear. It’s a nice touch, though.

The story opens with the fall of Sardopolis, capital city of the kingdom of Gobi. The king is killed by the conqueror Cyaxeres, and the king’s son Prince Raynor is taken to the dungeon to be tortured. Cyaxares has a companion and adviser, Necho, who may not be human. Raynor is rescued by his Nubian friend and servant Eblik. Together they make their way to the temple of Ahmet. There a dying priest tells them that when Sardopolis was founded, a great forest god was displaced, but it was prophesied that he would one day return to set up his altar again in the ruins of Sardopolis. That day is at hand. Raynor and Eblik are given the task of going to a group of bandits led by the Reaver of the Rock and informing them of the fall of Sardopolis. They’ve been waiting for generations for the old god to return.

Cyaxares’ men follow them. The Reaver and his men stay to fight. Raynor and Eblik, guided by the Reaver’s daughter Delphia, a formidable fighter in her own right, take a talisman to free the forest god. Most readers will recognize the name of the forest god.

The story moves well and has a satisfying, if not exactly upbeat, resolution. In fact, the story ends on a pretty dark note.

Kuttner continues to break from pulp conventions here. Eblik is more than just a black sidekick, and Delphia takes an active role in the events. The tone and feel of this story, as well as that of “The Citadel of Darkness”, is much more Howard-esque than the Elak stories. In those, Kuttner tended to play the sidekick Lycon for comic relief. None of Howard’s fantasy heroes had true sidekicks, although at times they had companions, who were treated as equals. In the Prince Raynor stories, while Eblik may be a servant, and upon occasion is reminded that he is, he’s still portrayed as a companion, not a stereotype to be played for laughs. This was an uncommon portrayal of someone of African descent in the pulps of this era.

By this time C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry had made her appearance, so a strong active woman wasn’t exactly groundbreaking. Still, to cast Delphia as a competent fighter and one of the leaders of the bandits was a departure from the typical standards of the day.

So to sum up, if, as some have stated, Kuttner was trying to fill the void in sword and sorcery stories left by Robert E. Howard’s death, I think he succeeded more with Prince Raynor than with Elak. It’s unfortunate that he only wrote two stories featuring the character. We’ll look at the other tale in a future post.

Continue reading →

The Frost King, The Frost-Giant, and Their Daughters

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It’s been bitterly cold here on the South Plains of Texas for much of the last week. Temperatures were near record lows for several days. Just when it looked like things were going to warm up again, we got more snow Sunday. And that made me think of “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter”, which made me think of “The Frost King’s Daughter”. And I knew what the next post on this blog would be.

The tale (or tales, if you prefer) concerns the lone survivor of a battle in the frozen north. Having just killed the only member of the opposing army left standing, he sees a beautiful young woman wearing only a gossamer veil walking among the dead. She taunts him with her body, and he pursues hers. Of course, this is a trap. After a time, she calls her brothers forth, two ice giants, to kill the man. Instead, he defeats them, captures the girl, and is about to ravish her when she calls on her father, Ymir. The girls is transported into the sky in a blaze of blinding light that leaves the hero unconscious. He is awakened by a band of his allies who were delayed by an ambush. After he tells his story, one of the older men in the group tells the warrior he saw Ymir’s daughter Atali, who haunts battlefields and lures survivors to their deaths so that she might present their hearts to her father. The old man claims to have seen her as a youth when he was too wounded to follow her. Everyone thinks the old man had his brains addled by a sword stroke until the hero unclenches his fist to find a veil.

This pair of stories are essentially the same, only the names have changed. “The Frost King’s Daughter” concerns Amra of Akbitana, while the “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” is an early Conan story that was rejected by Farnsworth Wright (more on that later) and wasn’t published until the August 1953 issue of Fantasy Fiction. Unfortunately, that version was rewritten by L. Sprague de Camp. It wasn’t until 1976 that Howard’s version saw print in Donald M. Grant’s Rogues in the House. This was a hardback collectible volume, not a mass market edition. “The Frost King’s Daughter”, on the other hand, was published in the March 1934 issue of The Fantasy Fan. You probably couldn’t afford an original copy of that little fan publication, provided you could find one. Fortunately, the entire run has been reprinted in facsimile (details on how to order are here.)

The first mass market publication of Howard’s original version of “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” wasn’t available until 1989, when both stories were printed side-by-side in Karl Edward Wagner’s Echoes of Valor II. If you aren’t familiar with the series, it ran to three volumes (as far as I know; if there was a fourth I missed it). Wagner, a fan and writer of sword and sorcery who deserves to be better remembered, compiled collections of rare heroic fiction. While many of the stories Wagner selected have been reprinted in recent years, especially the Robert E. Howard and C. L. Moore pieces, there are still some tales that haven’t seen the light of day since and make the volumes worth seeking out.

In his introduction, Wagner states that Howard wrote “The Frost King’s Daughter” first and that the Conan version, “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” was the rewrite. How he knows this to be true, Wagner doesn’t exactly say. He supports his case by saying that “The Phoenix on the Sword” was a rewrite of the Kull story “By This Axe I Rule” (documentably true), and that “Frost-Giant” was a rewrite of “Frost King”. We know Howard would recycle stories if they didn’t sell, at times changing the names of major characters, and we also know that sometimes the details of his stories would change from one draft to the next. Furthermore, there is evidence that Howard was still developing the character of Conan as well as the Hyborian Age for the first several Conan stories. Patrice Louinet, in his essay “Hyborian Genesis” (The Coming of Conan), does a thorough job of showing this development.

And here we encounter a small problem. Louinet suggests that Howard changed the title of the story and Conan’s name to Amra when he sent the story to The Fantasy Fan. His evidence seems to be the publication date of “Frost King” as well as an unreferenced letter from Howard to Charles D. Hornig, editor of The Fantasy Fan. Patrice Louinet is one of the leaders in the field of contemporary Howard scholarship. Wagner was one of the foremost authorities of his day. So who is correct? Was “Frost King” the rewrite, or was “Frost-Giant”?

As far as their respective texts are concerned the stories are almost identical. I compared them, and there was only one significant deviation I found. This one:

“Far have I wandered, from Zingara to the Sea of Vilayet, in Stygia and Kush and the country of the Hyrkanians; but a woman like you I have never seen.”

So who do you think said this, Conan or Amra? Based on the place names, which are the settings of other Conan stories, you would probably think Conan, right?

Well, you would be wrong. Amra said this. In the Conan version of the story (Frost-Giant), the wording is “Far have I wandered, but a woman like you I have never seen.” Conan’s wanderings and the Hyborian geography are never mentioned. The only reason that I can think of for Howard to add place names from the Conan stories to a rewrite of a Conan story in which he changes the name and nationality of the viewpoint character is to clue readers in that Amra is really Conan. And since it had been established by the time “Gods of the North” AKA “The Frost King’s Daughter” was published in The Fantasy Fan that Amra was one of the names Conan was known by, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that this was Howard’s motivation. But why would he do this? The only explanation I can come up with was that because Conan was a Weird Tales character, either Howard had an agreement with Farnsworth Wright not to try to sell a Conan story to another market (I’m unaware of any such agreement) or he felt that do sell a Conan story to another market would, in a sense, be dishonorable. It was standard practice in the pulp days for an author’s character(s) to only appear in one magazine.Howard may have been abiding by that practice.

On the other hand, it could be that “Frost-Giant” is the rewrite. The passage quoted above, the one with the place names, tends to disrupt the flow of the story. Certainly, its prose is more purple than the same passage without the travelogue. It could very well be, since as far as I know the exact composition date of either version of the story is unknown, that Howard was already working out the geography of the Hyborian kingdoms and simply hadn’t settled on a final name and nationality of his principle character. I will be the first to admit that the evidence isn’t conclusive either way, but this is the interpretation I favor. I’m sure if there’s information I’ve overlooked, Howard fandom will let me know about it. Quickly.

There’s one other thing I want to address. Wagner says Wright rejected “Frost-Giant” because it was too racy. Considering the sexual imagery in some of C. L. Moore’s Northwest Smith stories (another topic for another day), not to mention the sex implicit in some of the other Conan tales, I’m not sure I buy this line. If Wright was that uptight, why did he publish some of those Margaret Brundage covers? (I know, I know, racy covers on pulps had nothing to do with the contents.) Wagner says Wright’s view of Conan was of “a noble barbarian out to perform deeds of chivalrous heroism.” Again, Wagner doesn’t provide details to back this position up. In fact, Wright’s rejection of the story, which Wagner quotes, simply says Wright didn’t care for the story and gives no reasons as to why he didn’t care for it. The general consensus I’ve heard for years on this point was that Wright didn’t like the hero attempting to commit rape.

But is this what Conan/Amra really does? In the interest of stirring up trouble taking a deeper interpretation of the story, let’s look closely at what happens, shall we? Atali taunts Conan. “Spreading her arms wide, she swayed before him, her golden head lolling sensuously, her scintillant eyes half shadowed beneath their long silken lashes. ‘Am I not beautiful, oh man?’ ” Sounds to me she’s trying to entice him to pursue her. This is born out at the end of the story, when the old man Gorm tells Conan Atali lures men to their deaths. Gorm also describes her as beautiful and naked. Atali continues to taunt Conan, essentially daring him to follow her. Conan’s reaction is described as a madness that sweeps away his pain and fatigue. Howard makes the pursuit sound as though Conan were possessed.

Rather than trying to commit rape, I read the story as Conan being put under a spell of desire by Atali. Only Conan is stronger than she bargains for. When he kills her brothers, she realizes she can’t control him nor reverse the spell. Otherwise, why would she have to call on Ymir for help? Am I saying Atali was asking for it? You bet. Even a casual reading of the story would tend to show that was the case. What I’m NOT saying is that every (or even any) attempted rape victim was asking for it, so please don’t read that into my remarks. I don’t consider what Conan/Amra does here to be attempted rape because I don’t interpret his actions as being of his own free will. This is a fictional story, a fantasy, in which an evil woman’s spell goes wrong and she can’t control the desires she has deliberately cultivated in a man, with the outcome being other than what she intended. I don’t for a minute think that’s how the real world works, and in spite of some of Howard’s detractors, I don’t think Bob meant that here either. I think he was telling an entertaining story in the best way he could with a character whose personality he was still developing and exploring. And in that, he succeeded.

So, to sum up. I think “Frost-Giant” is probably a rewrite of “Frost King”, and furthermore Conan has gotten a bad rap these many years, accused by some critics of attempting a crime of his own free will when in truth he had no choice about. Those are my thoughts on this cold winter night.

A Little Something for the Season: "Roads" by Seabury Quinn

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Roads
Seabury Quinn
Battered Silicon Dispatch Box
hardcover $25 Cn
paperback $15 Cn

So I was wanting to post something in the spirit of the season. I thought about The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum. Way too long. Then I read a couple of passages. Waaayyyy too much saccharine.

Instead, I chose “Roads”. Back in the 1930s, when Howard, Lovecraft, and Smith were writing many of the tales that would one day make them famous, there was only one person who gave them any competition in popularity in Weird Tales. That person was Seabury Quinn. Today he’s mostly forgotten except by fans of The Unique Magazine and historians of fantasy and the weird tale. If he’s remembered at all, it’s usually for his occult detective, Jules de Grandin.

But Quinn was also a versatile writer who could pen a good tale that wasn’t part of a series. “Roads” made its appearance in the January 1938 issue of Weird Tales. It tells the story of a gladiator in the arena of Herod the Great. Known as Claudius by the Romans, Klaus (you can see right away where this is going) has finished his contract and is wanting to go home to the northern climes he calls home. Continue reading →

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