"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  He returns withdrawn and taciturn, initially only saying that he'd found the ruin but that legends of treasure were false.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.

"Sredni Vashtar" -- Saki (H.H. Munro; THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVIS, 1911)

Happy Halloween, readers! While I'd originally intended to mark today by taking a break from The Big Book of Adventure Stories and talking about Robert E. Howard's classic Southern Gothic tale of revenge and undeath, "Pigeons from Hell," I happened to look ahead in The Big Book and was delighted at what I saw was next.  I'd originally discovered the works of Saki (real name: H.H. Munro) at least a dozen years ago in a slim book in my grandmother's house; the book included today's story which, like many of Saki's works, satirized his native Edwardian England, with a macabre twist to it all.  When I saw that "Sredni Vashtar" would fall on Halloween if I stuck with The Big Book of Adventure Stories, I knew I had to leave Howard aside for the time being and talk about this story.  Short, sweet and gruesome, this story (and several of Saki's other tales) can be read for free here.

Conradin is a sickly ten year old boy, and according to the doctors, unlikely to live another six months.  He lives in the care of his cousin, Ms. De Ropp, whom he privately refers to simply as "the Woman."  Overbearing and distasteful, the Woman's ministrations strike Conradin as cruel, pointless, and likely the cause of his deterioration.  For her part, while she would never openly admit to disliking Conradin, she'll admit to feeling no displeasure at depriving him of things that might be "bad" for him.

Conradin has two "friends," both of whom live in a disused gardener's shed at the back of the Woman's property.  The first, dubbed Henrietta, is a mature hen; the second is Sredni Vashtar, a "polecat-ferret" kept locked in a hutch, discreetly purchased from the local butcher's boy.  In Conradin's lonely mind, Sredni Vashtar assumes the proportions of a diabolic god, and Conradin comes to worship the beast as an idol.

On the grounds that being out in the shed so much can't be good for the boy, the Woman has Henrietta removed and sold; upon noticing that the removal of the hen does not stop Conradin from visiting the shed, she realizes that something is locked in the hutch.  Assuming the hutch to contain guinea pigs, the Woman goes to clear them out, as Conradin watches in horror and dejection from the house.  But Conradin has been praying to Sredni Vashtar, and perhaps today's the day his prayers are answered...

"Sredni Vashtar," like its eponymous polecat-ferret, is proof of the power that can be contained in small packages.  In The Big Book of Adventure Stories, "Sredni Vashtar" clocks in at just three pages but it's a powerful tale that just sticks to you forever, you know?

The story is told entirely from Conradin's perspective, and he seems like a fairly hale and healthy boy (or at least, perceives himself as such), and it's hard to get a sense of him as sickly; I, at least, came away from the story with the nagging idea that Conradin's supposed sickness is an imaginary hobgoblin, created and enforced by the Woman to keep Conradin quiet, contained and inoffensive.  The fact that she forbids him the luxury of having toast on the equal grounds of it A) being "bad for him" and B) because it's too much trouble to make, I think lends credence to this idea that his "illness" is something she's created.  His satisfaction as he sits in the dining room, defiantly making himself buttered toast, while listening to the maid in the other room debating with the rest of the household staff how to tell him his cousin's run afoul of Sredni Vashtar seems like the medicine he needed all along.

While an iconic and popular tale, I feel like "Sredni Vashtar" lacks some of the twistedness that makes many of Saki's tales so much fun.  As soon as you know Conradin has an overbearing guardian and a pet ferret, you know she's going to meet a bad end by said ferret; compare with a story like, say, "The Interlopers," where just as things are starting to look up for the characters, things turn worse then ever.

"The White Silence" -- Jack London (OVERLAND MONTHLY, February 1899)

When it comes to adventures in the frozen north, no name resounds louder than that of Jack London.  It's been over a decade and a half since I read The Call of The Wild, and it's still a story I can recall in vivid detail; London's prose is as stark and grim as the Yukon he so frequently wrote of.  Having completed the "Megalomania Rules" section of The Big Book of Adventure Stories, we've entered the realm of "Man Vs. Nature," and no author is better suited to lead the charge in that regard then London.  This short story -- profoundly short, filling just six pages -- is pretty typical London, concerning itself with the harshness of the frozen north and the imprint that harshness leaves on those humans wild-hearted enough to challenge it.  The story has, I believe, entered the public domain, and can be read in its entirety here, or as part of The Son of the Wolf, a collection of London's short fiction of the north, here.

"The White Silence" tells of three travelers: Mason; his wife Ruth, a Native American woman who has left her tribe to be with him; and a character known simply as Malamute Kid.  These three have been traveling together across the ice, and supplies are running low.  Their sled-dogs are turning vicious, snapping at each other and their masters, nearly wild enough with hunger to ignore the slash of a whip across their backs.  Their journey becomes harder when Mason is crippled by a falling tree, and their struggle to survive becomes that much more desperate.

I really don't have a whole lot to say about this story, other than to note that it's a brilliant author who can make the reader, curled up in bed under enough blankets to pin him to the mattress under their weight (as I tend to be when doing my reading), shiver in sympathetic chill at the descriptions of icy deprivations suffered by the characters.  "The White Silence" is not just a story about the cold, it's a story that's cold in and of itself.

Also of interest is the definite symbiosis between man and dog in the Yukon; neither can survive without the other in the White Silence; the story opens with Mason clearing ice from between a dog's toes with his teeth to prevent frostbite, while simultaneously discussing with Malamute Kid the somber fact that with food running low, they'll likely be eating some of the dogs before the journey's end.  It makes an impressive contrast, this scene of showing utmost care and devotion to his dogs while discussing the fact that some of them will have to die to keep himself alive.

"The Wings of Kali" -- Grant Stockbridge (THE SPIDER, May 1942)

If there's one enduring legacy of the pulps, it's the superhero genre.  Figures like Superman and Batman borrowed heavily from such pulp icons as John Carter, Doc Savage, The Shadow and Zorro, and these early figures formed the prototype for all future superheroes, with their secret identities, strange costumes and "rogues' galleries" of villains.  While The Shadow is perhaps the best-remembered of these masked heroes, rivaling him in popularity during the 1930s and 1940s was a similar character called "The Spider."  Real name Richard Wentworth, The Spider donned first a mask, and later elaborate, ghoulish make-up complete with fright wig, to terrorize the underworld.  For around a decade, The Spider fought gangsters, robots, monsters and assorted sundry supervillains.  The brain child of R.T.M Scott, The Spider was designed from the start to rival and challenge the Shadow's popularity.  Scott provided two Spider novels before being replaced by Norvell Page, a prolific pulpateer, under the pen name Grant Stockbridge.  The final story in The Big Book of Adventure Stories' section on "Megalomania Rules," dating from May 1942, is a Spider story recounting the masked hero's first foray into heroism, before he'd even created the persona of the Spider.

"The Wings of Kali" finds Wentworth in Benares, India, in a small, discrete nightclub called the Beano Club.  Here, he overhears a young woman by the name of Melissa James who has found herself in trouble.  Trouble in the form of Walter Bishop, an American consul official rotten to his core.  Hearing what Bishop is trying to pressure - blackmail, really - Melissa into doing, Wentworth intervenes, letting Bishop know that his vile scheme is known to someone besides himself and his intended victim.

Angry, Bishop leaves suddenly -- to arrange an assassin, Wentworth surmises, and he leaves a bracelet with Melissa to show him when he returns.  Bishop's eyes blaze when he sees the bracelet on the table, but his blood runs cold when a dagger (thrown by Wentworth, hiding in the shadows) embeds itself in the table.  Bishop flees, and Wentworth takes Melissa and heads in the opposite direction, explaining as they go that the bracelet belonged to a girl Bishop had murdered, and the dagger was the murder weapon.  The two take to the streets of Benares, Bishop's hired assassins hot on the heels...

Now here we've got some real PULP! Masked heroes like The Shadow and The Spider are what drew me to pulp in the first place, and "The Wings of Kali," written late in the Spider's tenure but set at the very beginning of his crime-fighting career, is a great example of everything that makes these stories great.  A villain whose evil seeps from his very pores, exotic locale, exotic "mooks" (nameless, faceless enemies who exist solely to be beaten by the hero on his way to their master) in the form of "Mahommedan Assassins," a woman whose sensuality puts her in peril (while what Bishop asks of her isn't explicit, it's implied he wants her sexually; he threatens to have her deported on grounds of moral turpitude if she won't comply)... and it's all packed in to a lean little package, the story filling just five pages (six, counting the editor's introduction) in The Big Book of Adventure Stories.

With this story, I do have to address something I haven't really been looking forward to addressing.  There are elements in the pulps that would be appalling to the sensibilities of the 21st century.  Many stories of this era are filled with elements that would be deemed racist, sexist, and variably offensive to various peoples.  However, it's unfair to judge these stories by the standards of today; times change, attitudes change, and what was acceptable then is not acceptable now.  It doesn't make stories that include racial slurs or "insensitive" elements inherently bad - it makes them of a previous era, and should be treated as such.

That being said, Wentworth drives away a group of Muslim assassins sent to kill him by reaching into the back seat of his car, pulling out live piglets, and throwing them at the crowd of would-be killers.  He explains that he'd been observing Bishop for some time, and knew that when the corrupt official needed someone killed, he hired Muslim assassins to do the job.  He also knew, he continues, that the assassins won't kill if they've been defiled by the touch of pork, preferring to retreat and purify themselves before resuming their bloody business.  Hence, throwing baby piggies at them.

I do not advocate needless cruelty towards animals, nor am I generally one to make a mockery of others' faith, but that act rockets this story straight up into the Outer Batshittosphere, and audaciously rocketing up into the Outer Batshittosphere is one of the things I love most dearly about Pulp.

I don't know that "The Wings of Kali" has been reprinted outside of The Big Book of Adventure Stories, but I'm linking to a line of Spider reprints for those interested in reading more of Wentworth/The Spider's exploits.


The Spider Pulp Doubles Series on Amazon

"The Man Who Would Be King" -- Rudyard Kipling (THE PHANTOM RICKSHAW AND OTHER EERIE TALES, 1988)

Ah, Kipling.  I admit a certain fascination with the Victorian era, especially with the spread of the British Empire through its colonial holdings (a fascination aided and abetted, no doubt, by lingering family stories of an ancestor who, while serving with the British army in India, learned how to swallow live frogs - a talent he used to con people into buying him drinks every night at the pub once back in England), and as such, the writings of Kipling have always held some amount of fascination for me.  I can recite "Gunga Din" from memory (and my love for the 1939 film adaptation always surprises people who know me only through my writings on horror films) and more than once in my life I've psyched myself up for a bad day at school or work with an inspirational morning reading of "If--". Today's story was quite memorably filmed in 1975 with Sir Sean Connery and Sir Michael Caine in the leading roles, and I was quite pleased at the opportunity to read it.  I offer you the story via Project Gutenberg, to enjoy as well.

The narrator of the story (or rather, the framing story), unnamed by clearly a stand-in for Kipling himself, is crossing through India, broke but with no loss of enthusiasm for life.  In this state, he encounters two men, Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan, two adventurers ("Loafers," they call themselves) whom he stops from blackmailing a minor rajah.  Some time thereafter, Dravot and Carnehan stop in to see him at the newspaper office he's found himself working at in India.  Dravot and Carnehan want a favor from the unnamed narrator; bearing him no ill will for having spoiled their earlier plans, they ask his help in researching the area of Kafiristan, an obscure corner of Afghanistan.  In so doing, they reveal a plan they've conceived: They intend to make themselves kings of Kafiristan.  Armed with Dravot's skill with languages and 20 Martini-Henry rifles (at the time, the best rifles in the world), they intend to befriend a chieftain, help him vanquish his enemies, and then overthrow him and forge a kingdom of their own.

The next morning, the narrator sees Dravot and Carnehan off as they leave for Kafiristan.

Three years later, Carnehan crawls into the narrator's office, his hair stark white, his face haggard and drawn, his sanity shattered.  Bolstered by a sip or three of whiskey, Carnehan tells the story of how they became kings in Kafiristan -- or at least, how Dravot became a king in Kafiristan -- and how it was all shot to hell in an instant...

I will be the first to admit this is hardly proper "pulp" in terms of time-period, but with its exotic locale and hare-brained winner-take-all scheme, and the horrific violence that breaks out when it all falls apart, it's a story that has the heart of pulp.  Men shattered by their experiences and cruel tortures inflicted by strange foreigners were staples of pulp literature, and Kipling's take on them here is masterfully chilling.

More impressive is the story's basis in fact -- James "Rajah" Brooke accomplished exactly what Dravot and Carnehan set out to do, and was referenced in the story; Brooke had made himself ruler of the state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo and not only maintained his kingship, but cleared out nest after nest of Malay pirates, making the area safe for British commerce.  One of my favorite pieces of "new pulp" is Paul Malmont's The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, in which the question of where the line stands between what is "real" and what is "pulp" forms a major running debate threading through the action, and "The Man Who Would Be King," for my money, is a perfect example of that line.  In a world of real-life Dravots like James Brooke, William Walker and Cecil Rhodes, who's to say what's real and what's pulp?

"The Most Dangerous Game" -- Richard Connell (COLLIER'S WEEKLY, January 19, 1924)

I was so excited to see this story come up next in The Big Book of Adventure Stories, readers.  I've seen at least six different film adaptations, ranging from the serious 1932 film, starring Joel McCrea, Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong (and which was shot at night on the same sets Wray and Armstrong were on by day shooting KING KONG!) to the cheesy 1980s sci-fi bimbo-rama SLAVE GIRLS FROM BEYOND INFINITY starring Brinke Stevens, and which was once famously condemned on the Senate floor by Jesse Helms.  And of course, by 2013, the theme of a wealthy man hunting other men for sport has become almost cliche.  I was excited to see how the original short story held up compared to the various adaptations and takes on the theme I'd seen, and let me tell you, Richard Connell's prose did not disappoint.

Sanger Rainsford, a prominent big game hunter from New York, is sailing to Rio de Janeiro with his friend Whitney in order to hunt jaguars.  One dark night, the two men are sitting on deck and find themselves discussing the upcoming hunt, with Whitney pondering what the jaguars must think of it.  Rainsford scoffs at this line of thought, and Whitney retires to bed.  Rainsford stays on deck smoking his pipe, until startled by a trio of pistol shots echoing from nearby Ship-Trap Island, causing him to drop his pipe.  Fumbling for it in the dark, he falls overboard, and when he realizes he can't swim fast enough to catch back up to the ship, makes for Ship-Trap Island.

On the island, Rainsford is stunned to discover an elegant chateau, and soon learns that the island is home to a pair of Cossacks (an ethnic group that's strangely become a theme around here...) -- the aristocratic General Zaroff and his deaf-mute servant, Ivan.  Zaroff is a big game hunter as well, and in fact is a great admirer of Rainsford's books on hunting.

Over dinner, Zaroff explains to Rainsford how over many years, he's grown bored with hunting, and finds no thrill in hunting big game animals any more -- but has found a new prey, "the most dangerous game." On Ship-Trap Island, Zaroff lures ships aground and hunts the people he captures from these wrecks for sport.  He asks Rainsford to join him in a hunt, and when Rainsford, appalled, refuses, Zaroff decides to hunt him instead.

Given a few hours' head start, Rainsford must survive three days without being shot by Zaroff or torn to bits by either Ivan or Zaroff's pack of hunting dogs.  If, at the end of three days, Rainsford is still alive, Zaroff pledges to put him safely ashore on the mainland with no ill will.  It will take all of Rainsford's cunning and intellect to survive...

"The Most Dangerous Game" is a brilliant exercise in "less is more."  The story doesn't quite fill nine pages in The Big Book of Adventure Stories (ten including the introduction), but doesn't need more than that to tell itself.  The writing is as lean and wolfish as Zaroff himself, unfettered with purple prose.

This sparseness of story-telling may be a turn-off to modern readers; it's a tale of suspense and tension, not of violence and blood-letting, and I think if readers come in expecting a battle royale they'll be deeply disappointed.  The emphasis is on the fraying of Rainsford's nerves as he struggles to survive in the face of Zaroff, an almost supernaturally-talented hunter, and his efforts to maintain a strong enough control of himself to fight back.

In fact, so little emphasis in the story is on violence that the finally conflict between Zaroff and Rainsford doesn't even take place "on screen" as it were; the second-to-last paragraph ends with Zaroff accepting Rainsford's offer of a man-to-man fight, while the last paragraph, only a sentence long, describes Rainsford settling in to rest up and recuperate after his ordeal.  The fight is left entirely to the reader's imagination, which is a bold move that I don't think would fly today.

"The Master Magician" -- Loring Brent (ARGOSY, February 25th, 1933) PART 2

I kind of feel like a chump now for splitting this story into two nights of reading and two blog-posts.  When I got into bed and started reading last night, I discovered that the remainder of "The Master Magician" took me no more than 20 minutes to devour.  I probably could have sat up and finished the story all in one go the night before if I'd but realized.  Oh well.

To recap where we left our hero Peter Moore last time, Moore and his friend Roger Pennekamp have realized that an old enemy, the magician and would-be dictator Zarlo, has returned to exact revenge on them for deposing him in the Philippines six years earlier.  With the three men who'd aided them already dead and several attempts made on Pennekamp's life, Moore and Pennekamp resolve to take the fight to Zarlo, wherever he may be holed up.  This resolve is strengthened when Moore's traveling companion, the thrill-seeking heiress Susan O'Gilvie, is kidnapped to lure Moore into Zarlo's clutches.  An impromptu seance, at Pennekamp's insistence, suggests the island of Soononga, more commonly known as Skull Island, is the site of Zarlo's hideout.

Traveling to Soononga, Pennekamp's ship is stormed by a boarding party of black pirates (my guess being that these aren't blacks of African descent, but rather dark-skinned Polynesians, given the location) and Moore is taken captive, along with sniveling American wimp Jason Whitelaw, who has come along in hopes of convincing Susan that he loves her and she'll hopefully love him back.

Brought before Zarlo, Moore is given a glimpse of the possible fates that await him -- the skulls of the three men who'd preceded him in dying at Zarlo's hand are on display with neatly-lettered placards describing who they were and how they died, and more ominously, Zarlo shows Moore "Ronga" -- a former American business man, regressed to a snarling, mindless beast by Zarlo's magic, more than eager to feast on raw human flesh.  Zarlo assures Moore that should Moore make any attempt to escape, Ronga will follow him like the best-trained of bloodhounds.

Before long, of course, Moore breaks free and, with Whitelaw showing what he's made of for a change, sets off to rescue Susan and give Zarlo a taste of his own mad medicine...

Wow, what a story! Action, adventure, romance, exotic locales, mysticism, monsters (one made from a human being, no less!), betrayal, and so much more crammed into so few pages, I can say in all honesty that "The Master Magician" is a story that grabs the reader by the lapels and doesn't let go until the ink's dry on the last punctuation mark.

The characters are rich and interesting, and nothing about them feels forced or unnatural.  From Susan's headstrong conviction that whichever possibility offers the most excitement must be the truth to Peter's horrified ruminations on what would happen if he, a man who just wants some peace and quiet, were to marry Susan, these all feel like real people.

I also liked Brent's committal to remaining non-committal on the subject of the occult, carefully presenting every seemingly-supernatural event as one that has a rational explanation...but maintaining an open-mindedness towards the notion that that explanation might not be the "correct" one.  Sure, it's likely that Zarlo kept Ronga an animal through keeping him drugged and under hypnotic suggestion...but maybe, just maybe, he did use his mystical powers to drive a man's soul out of his body, leaving only a brutal monster behind.

This story really slapped me upside the head and took me by surprise, and I'll say no more about it other than to advocate you really check it out.