"Snake-Head" -- Theodore Roscoe (ARGOSY, January 7, 1939)

Greetings, readers, Bill here.  Well, my lovely long weekend with my lady has drawn to a close; she's on her way home to Maryland and I'm left with an empty bed and my own lackluster cooking.  But she'll be back to visit again next month, and we're looking at mid-January for her to move in with me, so that'll be nice and gives me something to look forward to.  For now, to fill her absence, let's take a look at a bit of pulp.  I actually read today's story on Wednesday night last week after posting "The Soul of a Regiment," and have been sitting on it for a couple days.  After this story, however, we'll be taking a short break from The Big Book of Adventure Stories; my reading this weekend, done on my Kindle while Gina was sleeping, consisted of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male.  Also, during a trip to our local Barnes and Noble this weekend, I discovered that War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches has finally returned to print, meaning my decade-long quest to find a copy in good condition that wasn't priced into the stratosphere has come to a close.  I'm not sure if I'll return to The Big Book of Adventure Stories after reviewing Rogue Male or if I'll dive into Global Dispatches for a bit.  We'll see.  Today's story, a humorous tale of adventure amidst the French Foreign Legion, originally appeared in Argosy in the January 7, 1939 issue; also appearing in that issue was Burroughs' The Synthetic Men of Mars, which I'm sure I'll cover here someday.

Thibaut Corday, a crusty old storyteller known for his tales of service in the Legion, may have finally been outdone.  Finding a copy of Bulfinch's Mythology on a cafe table, Corday is flummoxed to discover that one of the stories told within is a story about him! Oh, sure, the author changed the names of the participants and "exaggerated" events some, but everything is essentially as he experienced it ten years earlier.

Corday's unnamed companion tries to explain that the book collects Greek myths, thousands of years old, but Corday is insistent -- this "Perseus" character is him! He launches into an explanation, telling of how he found himself isolated and cut off in a box canyon, captured by vicious Kabyle tribesmen after he wounded their Sheik's son.  He's to be put to horrible death: a starved rat placed on his stomach under a copper bowl, and a fire lit on top of the bowl to encourage the rat to dig down into his bowels.

Just before the rat starts digging, Corday is granted a reprieve; a delegation from another tribe arrives, one which was to bring the princess whom the Sheik's son was to marry.  They announce that they were attacked and the princess taken to the cave of the Snake-Woman, a monstrous hag whose evil eye turns all who behold it to stone.  When none of the Kabyles are willing to risk facing the Snake-Woman to retrieve the princess, Corday, in a fit of inspiration, bellows out that he will do it -- in exchange for his freedom.  The Sheik, giving Corday an evil eye of his own, agrees, but explains that no one has ever lived to escape the realm of the Snake-Woman...

Yes, it's a retelling of the story of Perseus and Medusa in 1920s North Africa, and you know what readers? It's a damn fine tale, and one that works out great.  I love that we're given a Weird Menace that wouldn't have been out of place in the shudder pulps like Weird Tales, and then the story turns around and, via the unnamed framing narrator to whom Corday's telling the story, a sound, rational explanation is given for it all -- not that Corday believes too much of the rational explanation, despite being the one to kill the Snake-Woman in pitched combat.  Corday, an uneducated and simple man, is content to believe in what his own eyes tell him is true and leaves it at that.

The story's pacing is tighter than anything, with the reader barely given time to draw breath between incidents of high adventure; Corday drawn into a sniper's duel with the Sheik's son, Corday stretched out and beginning to feel the heat of the fire and the claws of the rat, Corday being lowered on a rope into Stygian darkness to face off against the Snake-Woman with only a scimitar and a mirror at his disposal.  Roscoe's prose really makes the reader feel the tension of the race against time Corday has found himself in as he struggles blindly to make it through the cavern system inhabited by the Snake-Woman (and her hundreds of hissing pets) in time to save the princess from petrification.

Altus Press has been reprinting the Thibaut Corday stories in a set of collected editions.  I'm intrigued enough by what I saw of the character here that they're definitely going on my wish-list.

"Nor Idolatry Blind the Eye" -- Gabriel Hunt (HUNT THROUGH THE CRADLE OF FEAR, 2009)

It's sometimes easy to forget that pulp continues to be written to this day.  Oh sure, there's Indiana Jones, of course, and Clive Cussler's ubiquitous paperbacks can be seen as a successor to the pulp adventure stories of days gone by, but 1930s throwback pulp is apparently the real deal.  There are people writing Shadow and Doc Savage stories to this day, Tarzan pastiches as well, and of course dreaming up new characters from old molds.  One of these is the two-fisted adventurer Gabriel Hunt, created by (surprisingly enough) Charles Ardai, CEO of internet service provider Juno.  The star of a series of novels, dictated by Hunt to various authors, (a nice throwback to how the Shadow stories were told to "Maxwell Grant" by the Shadow) Hunt is an independently wealthy globe-trotter with a woman in ever port and a side-iron that doesn't seem to stay cold for very long.  Today's story originally appeared as a backup feature for the novel Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear in 2009.

Malcolm Stewart used to be a soldier of fortune and an adventurer.  But a few years ago his wife died and he crawled deep into the bottle, drowning his sorrows in whatever cheap booze he could lay his hands on.  When a job offer comes, he sees it as just another source of income for his binges.  But his latest employer, a Mr. Burke, wants him to work dry.

This comes as no surprise, as Mr. Burke's job is one of delicacy and care; Burke was an archaeologist who found what he believes to be the Biblical Golden Calf, despite the Bible's claims that the Calf was ground to dust.  For laying a hand on the calf, the cult guarding it cut off Burke's hand, and for looking at it they sliced off his eyelids and dumped him in the desert to go blind, mad, and die.  Through sheer luck, Burke survived, though in no condition to continue the quest for the Calf.  To that end, he wants to hire Stewart.

Not sure if he believes in the Golden Calf, Stewart does believe in the money Burke has advanced him, and has promised as payment in return for the Calf, but doesn't forget that one of the qualifications that got him the job was "nothing left to lose."

Once in the desert, Stewart discovers the temple and cult guarding the Calf is quite real...and lording over them, invisible but sonorous, is an entity that introduces itself as "brothergod to the Lord you worship, and have been since men first spoke of gods.  I am many-named: men call me Melech, and Molekh, and Moloch; I have been called Legion, and Horror, and Beast, in fifty tongues, and fifty times fifty, but men also call me Father, and Master, and Beloved." Moloch offers Stewart a deal; Stewart's wife will be restored to him, if he will but bow down, and worship Moloch as a "god of might."

And after all, Stewart has nothing left to lose.

This was wonderful.  It read like a more horror-oriented take on INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE, with its desert locale, hidden, trap-filled temple and sinister guardian cult -- and even in that an older man who has spent years looking for the icon of religious significance at tremendous cost emotionally and physically is forced to ask a younger, more virile man to take up the quest on his behalf, as Burke does to Stewart, calls to mind Henry Jones Sr.'s lifelong obsession with the Grail and Indiana's desperate race to get the grail to save his life.

I wouldn't go so far as to call it a Lovecraftian take on THE LAST CRUSADE, because I don't believe for a second that Lovecraft could have written a word of this; though it does remind me of some of Robert E. Howard's Mythos fiction, in which square-jawed, stalwart toughs are brought face to face with cosmic horror and escape through a mixture of luck and chutzpah.

While Moloch is presented in the story strictly in terms of a Judeo-Christian framework (and its introduction, quoted above, might be the best of its sort I've seen since the Rolling Stones released "Sympathy for the Devil"!), I can't help but suspect that this is a ploy; Moloch, as written, strikes me as something far older than Christianity, or Judaism, or possibly humanity as a whole, something that has learned how to adapt and adopt different personas with different eras to better ensnare the unwary.  Moloch is something like a cosmic anglerfish, a monster that uses its victims' own psychology and worldview against them.  And I love this.  I love the idea of a monstrous "god" that understands psychology and uses that knowledge to lure and corrupt.  Too many times I've seen Cthulhu presented as a slavering tentacled Godzilla, hungry for brains/souls, and I feel this does a disservice to Lovecraft's original concept of the Great Old One.  Moloch, in the tantalizing glimpses we're given in the story, is a Yog-Sothoth or Nyarlathotep figure done right, as far as I'm concerned.

I can't speak for the Gabriel Hunt novels themselves, but I really enjoyed "Nor Idolatry Blind the Eye" and call it worth checking out.

"The Seed from the Sepulchre" -- Clark Ashton Smith (WEIRD TALES, October 1933)

For those who are aficionados of such things, the "Holy Trinity" of Weird Tales authors are generally reckoned as H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. Beginning his career as a poet with a macabre and fantastic bent, Smith was encouraged to turn his hand to prose fiction by Lovecraft, with whom he maintained an extensive correspondence over the years (though to be fair, everyone Lovecraft corresponded with ultimately ended up with an enormous volume of letters having been sent back and forth).  Smith's work lacks the grim goriness of Howard or the bleak cosmic outlook of Lovecraft, and instead brings a touch of fantasy or whimsy to the darkness; while many of his tales were fairly straight forward stories of ghouls, ghosts and extraterrestrials, quite often his stories would take unusual turns or contain hidden jokes (for example, in "The Seven Geases," the subhuman Voormis dwell in caves on Mount Voormithadreth - which sounds an awful lot like a lisped 'Voormis' address'). Today's story is more of a straightforward piece of macabre adventure, and can be read here.

James Falmer and Roderick Thone, professional orchid hunters, decide to try their hand at another profession -- treasure hunters.  Hearing rumors of a crumbling ruin raised by forgotten hands, deep in the jungles of Venezuela, in which unimaginable quantities of gold and silver have been buried, they set off in search with two local guides.  Thone is laid up with fever a day's trip from the ruin, and Falmer presses on ahead.  He returns withdrawn and taciturn, initially only saying that he'd found the ruin but that legends of treasure were false.

As a fever grips him, Falmer becomes more talkative; he explains, frenzied and horrified, that in the great pit that served the people of that ruin as an ossuary, he encountered the dried remains of some monstrous plant, its roots and vines threaded through multiple human skeletons, apparently having sprouted from the bodies of the dead; brushing against it, he got a face full of some grayish powder, like spores of some sort.  And now the pain in his head is becoming unbearable, like something inside trying to get out...

At first glance, this is a fairly straightforward Weird Menace story with human protagonists struggling to survive against a killer plant.  But looking beneath the surface suggests that there's a lot more going on here.

First off, it's kind of really left to the reader to decide if there actually is a killer plant that roots itself in the human brain and then threads its vines through the entire body.  Both men are stricken with tropical fever during the story, and the killer plant could very well be the result of delirium and hallucinations brought on by disease, dehydration and who knows what else.  Is the plant rooting its way through Falmer or is he slowly dying of some nameless disease up a forgotten tributary of the Orinoco? Thone is our viewpoint character here, and he's bedridden with fever from the very beginning of the story - hardly the most reliable of narrators.

But, assuming the plant is real, Smith gives us some tantalizing hints about its nature - and then leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions.  Falmer describes the ruins as resembling no civilization's he's seen, and as being like something from another world.  Perhaps they are.  Perhaps they were raised by inhuman hands in some unimaginably remote epoch of Earth's past, and the plant was something that came with them from some other world to Earth.

Or maybe they're not alien; maybe it's some strange development, some quirk of evolution deep in the jungle that had its chance, didn't quite make it, but left a viable seed pod, buried in the ossuary, waiting to be disturbed and dispersed to try again.  In a world where there are plants that smell like rotting meat to attract flies as pollinators and plants that trick prey into climbing into a vat of digestive fluids, whose to say a plant that survives by rooting itself in animal tissue and feeding on that is unrealistic? And after all, there's no reference to the bones the plant had been rooted in being non-human...but, to play devil's advocate, there's also no firm evidence to suggest the people buried in the ruined city are its original builders.

Now I'm just going back and forth and it's making my head hurt.