A. Merritt's The Fox Woman and Other Stories

The Fox Woman and Other Stories collects the shorter fiction of Abraham Merritt (whose work was always published under the byline A. Merritt). The stories were written between 1917 and 1948.

Merritt wrote one of the all-time great fantasy novels, The Ship of Ishtar, as well as some of the greatest of all lost world stories.

The novelette Fox Woman (from 1946) is set in China. The bandits who killed her husband are on the trail of a woman. She sees no hope of escape. She is about to flee up the stairway to a temple when she sees a fox. She doesn’t know why, perhaps she is simply mad with fear, but she asks the fox to help her. She desires only revenge. The fox vanishes. Then she sees a beautiful woman. Unaccountably the bandits turn on each other.


She is taken in by an old priest. And by the foxes. They are of course fox spirits. She gives birth to her child. And perhaps she will have her revenge.

Fox spirits are a major and fascinating feature of Chinese folklore and I love any story in which they are involved. An excellent tale.

In The People of the Pit (dating from 1917) a couple of gold prospectors in the Yukon see a strange light playing on the face of a mountain. Suddenly a man appears, horribly injured, and he tells them a story of terror. There is a vast pit within the mountain, but the inhabitants are far from human.

There have been many tales of mirrors as portals into other worlds but Through the The Dragon Glass, written in 1917, is certainly an early example, and a very good one. It relies mainly on a nicely disturbing atmosphere of decadence and obsession.

The Drone (dating from 1934) concerns shape-changers. Werewolves and fox-women and so forth. A group of explorers who have seen many strange things in many strange lands recount things they have seen. Perhaps physical shape-changing, or perhaps not physical. An interesting story.

The Last Poet and the Robots (written in 1934) is set in the very distant future. Narodny is a great scientist but he cares more about poetry and music than science. He does not hate humanity. He is merely indifferent. He has constructed a vast underground world, a world of beauty and poetry and song. But now he will have to stir himself to confront a deadly threat. Which means he will have to deal with the robots. Good story with strong hints of decadence.

Three Lines of Old French (from 1919) deals with a theme that obviously obsessed Merritt - the blurred boundary between reality and the life of the mind. In the First World War a soldier has a dream, or maybe a vision, or maybe it really happened. Maybe the true reality lies in our subconscious or our dreams.

The Women of the Wood dates from 1934. On the opposite shore of a lake a man sees something odd. There’s a forest. A wood cutter and his sons are chopping down the trees. Then it’s almost as if one of the sons is deliberately struck by an overhanging branch. The woodcutters hate the forest in a way that seems bizarre and irrational.

And then the narrator enters the forest. He gets the impression the trees are not just alive but conscious. It’s as if they’re tree-women. They want his help. He feels compelled to help them, although he is horrified by their request. Of course it might all be his over-active imagination. Or perhaps not. A story with a wonderful sense of magic, or at least of an almost magical quasi-mystical atmosphere. A great story.

The White Road and When Old Gods Wake are fragments of novels that were never written.

A superb and varied collection and a must-read for fans of weird fiction.

I’ve also reviewed Merritt’s The Face in the Abyss.

Theodore Roscoe’s Tarantula Tower

Tarantula Tower is the fourth collection of Theodore Roscoe’s stories of the adventures of curio hunter Peter Scarlet and his friend the naturalist Bradshaw. It’s been issued by Steeger Books in their Argosy Library series. The stories were originally published in various pulp magazines between 1933 and 1935.

The stories take place in a variety of exotic settings - central Asia, the Red Sea coast of Africa, the Dutch East Indies (as Indonesia then was) and British India. These are tales of adventure with touches of horror and weird fiction, although without any supernatural elements. There are monsters, but they are human monsters.

The stories generally have a nasty but clever sting in the tail and an atmosphere of the weird and the mysterious.

Although referred to as the Scarlet and Bradshaw stories the two men only occasionally appear in the same story.

Tarantula Tower appeared in Argosy in September 1933. Bradshaw explains where his horror of spiders originated. It started in central Asia, with a broken-down Russian officer who claimed to know where the Russian Crown Jewels had been concealed. They were hidden in a tower on a tiny island in the middle of a lake. He will take Bradshaw there. All he wants in return is a modest cash payment. The jewels are of no use to the Russian officer. He is being trailed by Bolshevik spies who would not let him get away with them.

The island is there. So is the tower. So are the jewels. But it’s not that simple as devious plot twists start to kick in. There’s something very strange, in fact quite impossible, about that tower.

Plenty of menace and creepiness in this clever story in which the mystery is never quite resolved.

Octopus appeared in the January-February 1934 issue of Action Stories. Peter Scarlet is in Somaliland. He doesn’t want to be there but he received a letter from an old buddy. Two old buddies were searching for treasure. Peter Scarlet is experienced enough not to get himself involved in such follies but when a friend needs urgent help that’s a different matter.

Scarlet will encounter the Green God of Sheba which is no god but it’s pretty formidable and dangerous just the same. It seems like the little American curio hunter might meet his doom in a sinister pool at the bottom of a ravine, a pool concealing some unknown horror. Plenty of action and excitement in this story.

Blood of the Beast was published in the March-April issue of Action Stories. Peter Scarlet faces a deadly stand-off with a madman bent on revenge. And the madman possesses the ultimate weapon- a bloodthirsty murderous pet orang-utan! A solid tense little story.

The Evil Eye appeared in Action Stories in June 1934. The setting is the Moluccas in the Dutch East Indies. A Prussian officer who is also a racketeer and a killer served a long prison sentence (which he thoroughly deserved) and died soon after his release.

Three years after his death the five men responsible for sending him to prison receive letters from the dead man. They are told that if they go to his castle and look his portrait straight in the eye they will find the key to a vast treasure.

Peter Scarlet tracks down the Dutchman, Schneider, who painted that portrait. By this time Scarlet is the only one of the five left - the others have all mysteriously disappeared. Scarlet and the Dutchman set out to solve the mystery, and a nasty little mystery it it. A fine story.

Port of Missing Heads was published in Argosy in 1935. The setting is Bhutan. It’s the most outrageous story in this collection. Bradshaw was acting as guide to a rich American on a hunting expedition. The American wanders off from the camp and is never seen again - until his head turns up in the river near the local police outpost. It’s the latest in a long series of decapitated heads found in the river. Apart from the obvious mystery surrounding these men’s fates there seems to be no rational way the heads could have ended up in that particular river.

It has something to do with the popular local superstition regarding the Little Dog. The Little Dog is actually a giant dog, with a tongue of diamond. Many have sought to find Little Dog. It has always ended badly for the seekers. Bradshaw has no choice - he must find the golden dog to clear himself of suspicion of murder. A nicely strange and creepy story.

Final Thoughts

Roscoe was one of the greats of pulp fiction, a solid prose stylist with a deliciously twisted imagination. This collection is huge amounts of fun. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed several of the Scarlet and Bradshaw collections - The Tower of Death, The Ruby of Suratan Singh and Blood Ritual - as well as the miscellaneous story collection The Emperor of Doom and his excellent mystery/adventure/horror novel Z Is For Zombie.

Leroy Yerxa’s Witch of Blackfen Moor

Leroy Yerxa’s novella Witch of Blackfen Moor appeared in Fantastic Adventures in December 1943. Leroy Yerxa (1915-1946) was a reasonably prolific American pulp writer who seemed to work mostly in the science fiction genre. I have not read any of his other work and he’s a writer totally new to me.

Witch of Blackfen Moor throws lots of gothic trappings at the reader. In a castle-like old house (apparently in England) live wealthy middle-aged Walter Brewster and his beautiful very much younger wife. The wife is not at all happy in the marriage. Her husband accuses her of wanting to consort with the Devil. Which is silly. Women don’t really have sex with the Devil do they? Or do they?

There’s a mystery about the birth of their child. Neither the mother nor the child survived. The ageing family doctor, Dr Quantry, is rather cagey when discussing the incident. It’s as if he knows some secret. Twenty years later Walter Brewster is still mourning the death of his daughter (the dead child was a girl). He’s obsessed by the crazy idea that the girl still lives. Which of course she does. Her name is Frances.

Then Walter Brewster encounters a very strange very scruffy man known as Monk, on a lonely road at night. Monk claims to have the answer to Walter’s quest.

Dr Quantry discovers the nature of the mystery surrounding Frances Brewster, but is it the whole explanation? Or the correct explanation. It’s a shocking explanation which devastates the doctor. Such things are unimaginable in a logical rational world. But he has seen things for himself which make it impossible for him to deny the horrible truth.

The fact that his young assistant Philip has fallen for Frances adds a complication. Dr Quantry knows that this is one romance that cannot possibly work. Poor Philip is in for a shock.

There are some moments of fairly visceral horror (by 1943 standards). Even touches of gore.

This is a very pulpy book and it’s a bit rough around the edges. Yerxa was not exactly a great prose stylist.

On the other hand he has taken some old ideas and given them new and original twists. And quite clever twists.

This is gothic fiction with some definite folkloric touches and perhaps even dark fairy tale touches. It certainly fits into the weird fiction category.

There are some far-fetched moments but also some very effective moments. Whether you’ll find the ending satisfactory is up to you but I thought it was interesting and it worked.

There is evil afoot, but with some touches of ambiguity. Evil exists in the world, real cosmic evil, but love exists as well. Can love conquer evil? Perhaps.

Witch of Blackfen Moor has its flaws but it’s a bit offbeat and it’s rather enjoyable. It’s a bit more than a straightforward gothic horror tale. In some ways its flaws make it more interesting. Recommended.

Armchair Fiction have paired this book with Karl Tanzler von Cosel’s bizarre and disturbing The Secret of Elena’s Tomb in one of their two-novel paperback editions.

Arthur J. Burks, The Wizard of Weird Tales

The Wizard of Weird Tales is a collection of short stories by Arthur J. Burks that were originally published in the Weird Tales pulp magazine.

Arthur J. Burks (1898-1974) wrote for pulp magazines in various genres and later began writing on paranormal subjects.

These stories really are wildly original and very very weird. They’re weird in totally unexpected ways. Even the weaker stories are interesting because they’re so bizarre.

Bells of Oceana appeared in Weird Tales in 1927. A young officer on a troopship has an uncanny feeling that something is wrong. Perhaps it’s the bells he hears. There cannot be any bells but he still hears them. He thinks for a moment he sees a face at a porthole but that’s impossible as well. And then one of the sentries cannot be found. Things get stranger. The woman he sees cannot be real. It must be a dream. Or perhaps not. A nicely odd tale of terror at sea.

Room of Shadows appeared in Weird Tales in 1936. A well-to-do man checks into a hotel in New York. There’s something odd about the room. There’s that scent, and the light seems strange. And later the bellhop denies have taken him to the room. The dogs are disturbing. Very very small dogs. The woman disturbs him as well. She went into the bathroom and then seemed to vanish. A very unusual creepy tale that gives a new twist to an old legend. Excellent story.

Black Harvest of Moraine (published in 1950) is truly bizarre. A wheat harvest turns into disaster. The wheat is infected with smut (a fungal crop disease). Only it turns out not to be smut but something much stranger. It is something ancient and evil, and terrifying and remorseless.

The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee (1926) is obviously going to involve ghosts of some sort, but but this is an unconventional ghost story. A returned soldier dying from the effects of being gassed in the war is offered refuge in a remote log cabin. He hears an infant wailing. It is impossible, but he has to check. Then he sees something horrifying. He sees it again and again. Very good story.

Luisma’s Return (1925) takes place on Haiti. Luisma is the general of the emperor of Haiti, Christophe. The emperor has stolen Luisma’s woman. Luisma wants revenge. It is impossible. Christophe’s power is absolute. But Luisma is determined. An OK story.

Rhythmic Formula (1952) is a neat little story about Russ Creavey, a famous explorer who becomes very rich by marrying rich wives. They don’t live too long thanks to some tricks Russ picked up in the Amazon rainforest. Russ is now set for life. Nothing can go wrong. Good story.

Orbit of Souls (1926) concerns a rich man whose wealth was built on lies and deception facing the ire of one of his victims. He never thought he might one day pay for his misdeeds. He still doesn’t think he’ll have to but a series of strange events might change his mind. An OK story.

Morpho on the Screen (1954) is about a young boy who has vivid dreams about riding butterflies in the Amazon rainforest. The dreams continue as he gets older. A very very strange tale but fascinating.

In Asphodel (1926) the narrator meets an old hermit. He then finds himself in a meadow of asphodels, the flowers of death. What follows might be merely a dream, or perhaps not. Very weird but rather disturbing.

When the Graves Were Opened (1925) is a very weak story of time travel, of a sort. A man is transported back to the time of Crucifixion.

Voodoo (1924) is one of his earliest stories and one of several with a Haitian setting. It’s a straightforward not very interesting story of a soldier seeking revenge on a voodoo priest.

Vale of the Corbies (1925) is another reasonably effective tale of frightening dreams.

The Invading Horde (1927) is oddly enough a science fiction story set in the future, in the vast City of the East which covers the whole of the eastern half of the United States. The city is a miracle of technology. People move about the city in monopters which are like wearable flying suits. Now the City of the East faces a deadly threat from the sea.

Something Toothsome (1926) begins with two Army officers, one of them an army dental surgeon, discussing writing. They both have ambitions in that direction. They concoct crazy story about a murder involving dentistry. But of course it could never happen in real life, or could it?

Some of these stories will definitely shock the delicate sensibilities of some modern readers.

Overall a good collection with the strong stories outnumbering the weaker ones. And Burks can certainly get very weird indeed. Recommended.

Colin Wilson’s The God of the Labyrinth

Colin Wilson’s The God of the Labyrinth was published in 1971.

Colin Wilson (1931-2013) was one of the most fascinating literary figures of his age. To say that his intellect was wide-ranging would be an understatement. He became a sensation at the age of 24 with his book The Outsider which to a large extent introduced existentialism to the English-speaking world. He wrote on philosophy and on the occult. He wrote crime novels and science fiction.

And he wrote novels like The God of the Labyrinth which are difficult to classify. You could call it an existentialist literary detective story combined with philosophical musings on sex and consciousness.

The first-person narrator is Gerard, a writer who had achieved notoriety with the publication of a scandalous sex diary. Sorme is on a lecture tour in the United States when he is offered a commission by a sleazy publisher to write an introduction to an erotic journal by a moderately obscure Irish rake named Esmond Donnelly. The manuscript Sorme is given is disappointingly brief and with few literary qualities. Sorme had however come across Donnelly’s name is another context a few days earlier. He is a firm believer that coincidences are not coincidences. He feels compelled to accept the commission.

The publisher tells him that he would be delighted if Sorme could find more material. Sorme is convinced that what he means by this is that he wants Sorme to forge the additional material, which Sorme certainly has no intention of doing. Then Sorme discovers that the whole existing manuscript is a forgery. There almost certainly was however a genuine manuscript which may still exist. Tracking down the original manuscript will be an interesting challenge and Sorme is becoming fascinated by Donnelley. In fact he’s becoming obsessed.

Finding the manuscript really does require the skill and patience of a detective. It may be in the hands of Donnelly’s descendants, or in the hands of descendants of various people with whom Donnelly was involved.

Sorme finds a variety of genuine writings by Donnelly, more than enough to justify a book.

The God of the Labyrinth includes copious extracts from Esmond Donnelly’s diaries. Some is mostly interested in the erotic material, not for prurient reasons but for philosophical reasons. Sorme believes that sex can be the key to unlocking elevated states of consciousness and he suspects that Donnelly held similar views. Esmond’s sexual adventures in some ways parallel Sorme’s own. Sorme also sees sexual desire as being driven not by purely physical desire. It’s an attempt to establish some mystic communion with a member of the opposite sex. When a man and a woman have sex it’s much more than a union of two bodies, or at least it can be much more.

We’re often not sure whether we’re getting the opinions of Donnelly or of Sorme or of Wilson. Wilson was certainly interested in ideas similar to those espoused by Donnelly and Sorme.

Sorme finds lots of manuscripts. Some are forgeries, some are not. Some were written by Donnelly and some by others. Donnelly had been associated with some interesting literary figures. Sorme comes to realise that there is more at stake than an erotic diary. Donnelly’s interests ranged well beyond sex, perhaps into more esoteric fields. Sorme keeps coming across references to the Sect of the Phoenix, and even to the Hell Fire Club.

This novel is more than a literary detective story and as it progresses it becomes more and more difficult to be sure exactly what kind of a story this is.

Donnelly becomes an ever more elusive character, and Sorme becomes ever more obsessed.

There’s plenty of sex but it would be misleading to call this an erotic novel. It’s very cerebral and very obscure but it’s always interesting. No-one but Colin Wilson could have written this novel. As a writer he was a one-off and this novel is a one-off. But it is weirdly fascinating and it is highly recommended.

Thorp McClusky’s Loot of the Vampire

Thorp McClusky’s short novel Loot of the Vampire was published in two parts in Weird Tales in 1936. It’s a vampire story in a contemporary big-city American setting.

Thorp McClusky (1906-1975) is a rather obscure American writer whose works appeared in pulp magazines in the 1930s.

It begins with a jewel robbery. The jeweller has been discussing the sale of a very valuable string of pearls to a European nobleman. The jeweller is found dead and the pearls are gone. The strange thing is that there’s no obvious way the killer could have made his escape.

Even more curious is the fact that the jeweller seemed to be suffering from a very serious case of anaemia. It’s almost as if there’s no blood at all in the body.

Then on the following day the dead jeweller turns up at the jewellery story, very much alive. The police commissioner and Detective-Lieutenant Peters are both puzzled and alarmed.

They do have a suspect, a Count Woertz. The count is about to hold a mind-reading session at a swank charity party. Lieutenant Peters poses as a guy wanting to have his mind read and discovers, to his consternation, that the count really can read minds.

Peters has an interest in the occult and he wonders if possibly they’re dealing with a vampire.

There’s no solid evidence against the count and the police commissioner has another problem. He’s in love with a sweet girl named Mary. They’re going to be married. The count has threatened to steal Mary away from the commissioner and the big worry is that he may be able to do just that by using some form of mind control.

There’s not much more than this to the plot. There are a couple of slightly creepy moments. There’s no action to speak of. There’s no reign of terror carried out by the vampire.

And to be honest there’s not much suspense. We don’t get enough of a sense that Mary is in real danger, and we don’t get enough of the feeling that the natural order is being threatened and that’s something I consider to be an essential element in supernatural horror.

The sea chase is the highlight and it’s not too badly done.

The vampire in this tale conforms to some of the rules of established vampire lore as it stood at the time, but not all. This vampire cannot tolerate sunlight but on the other hand he’s totally indifferent to garlic. The mirror stuff is an interesting variation on the usual idea. I like vampire stories that vary the rules a bit.

Loot of the Vampire is OK but it doesn’t quite deliver the goods. It’s recommended purely for its historical interest and its curiosity value.

Armchair Fiction have paired this novel with The Man Who Made Maniacs in one of their excellent two-novel paperback editions.

This story seems to belong to a very short-lived 1930s genre, the weird detective story. These were basically hardboiled detective stories with some supernatural and horror elements added for extra spice. That’s actually a promising combination.

If the weird detective story genre attracts you then you should check out Off-Trail Publications’ volume Cult of the Corpses which includes two novellas of this type by Maxwell Hawkins and they’re both far superior to Loot of the Vampire.

Dorothy Quick, Mistress of Dark Fantasy

Mistress of Dark Fantasy is a collection of stories by Dorothy Quick that were published in pulp magazines from the 1930s to the mid-50s. Most of them appeared originally in Weird Tales.

These are horror tales combined with love stories. That’s a common enough combination in gothic romances but these are not gothic romances. Or perhaps they are in a way, but not in the usual sense. They do however all deal with love.

In some of these tales the horror is quite real. In others it’s more ambiguous.

There’s a definite fairy tale vibe to a lot of these stories.

Quick is not a great prose stylist, in fact her prose on occasions is just a little flat. On the other hand she comes up with very clever story ideas. Some are startlingly original but even when they’re not original she gives them fresh twists.

If there’s a weakness to these stories it’s the author’s unwillingness at times to go for a full-blooded horror payoff.

The stories all have contemporary settings but the author shows a lot of skill in introducing familiar gothic trappings to such setting.

The first story is The Witch’s Mark. Aspiring writer Shamus O’Brien has just figured out that he’s in love with Trudy. He’d thought they were destined just to remain friends. Then he meets gorgeous glamorous redhead Cecily. It’s lust at first sight but he starts having some strange memories of events in which he could not possibly have been involved. Memories from long long ago.

Had Shamus and Cecily been lovers centuries ago? The memories seem so real. They may be real, but not in the way he thinks. It’s an effectively spooky tale of a dangerous love.

In Strange Orchids a young woman meets a rather creepy man at a party. She feels him undressing her with his eyes, but then she feels that he’s peering into her soul as well. He gives her a very beautiful orchid. She has the strange feeling that the orchid almost speaks to her. She meets another man as well. He’s looking for girls. Eighteen of them. All of whom have mysteriously disappeared. A very good story.

In The Cracks of Time a woman notices some faint cracks in one of the tiles in her sun room. She fancies that the cracks resemble a face. The next time she notices the cracks the face seems more distinct. She is sure it is the face of Pan. The face even changes expression. She feels it might in some mysterious way be communicating with her. And then she hears the music. A low-key subtly mysterious story, but very effective.

A Year from Tonight initially seems like a goofy lighthearted story. A guy gets caught in a wild storm on a quiet road in Georgia. His car breaks down. He sees a light and thinks he’s found a house where he might be able to some help. Instead he finds himself held captive my mediæval nights in what appears to be an authentic feudal castle. He thinks he’s found himself among lunatics but slowly comes to think that maybe he really is somehow in the year 1050. The story does slowly become rather darker.

The Horror in the Studio has a Hollywood setting. A young woman is hired to design the costumes for Bryant Holden’s new picture. She had Bryant had once been sweethearts. Bryant is disturbed about the movie, based on an old manuscript someone at the studio found. It’s the story of a man who sells his sold to the Devil and then tries to redeem it by delivering five other souls to damnation. Bryant think the story is pure evil and has a bad feeling about it. He’s right to have that feeling.

A man being possessed by the spirit of someone else, someone truly evil, isn’t a dazzlingly original idea but making the victim an actor, someone whose stock-in-trade is pretending to be someone he isn’t, makes the idea work rather well. A good story.

Edge of the Cliff is not really a story, just a very brief vignette which manages to be very dark and very romantic.

The Gothic Window is about a window that has a long tragic history going back to mediæval Spain. The window now resides in a modern house in America but it has to be kept locked at all times. This is a story that seems to be heading in a predictable direction until Quick throws in a couple of clever twists at the end. A very good story.

In The Lost Door a young American, accompanied by his friend Wrexler, travels to France to claim his inheritance. It is a magnificent chateau named Rougemont. By the terms of his father’s will he must live there for six months in the year, and everything in Rougemont must be kept just as it was in the sixteenth century. The two young men both see and fall in love with a beautiful girl, but the girl appears to be a ghost. There is a curse, and a mysterious door. Good story.

The Man in Purple concerns a haunted hotel room and, once again, a curse.

More Than Shadow has a strong folk tale feel. There’s the shape of a dog that appears on the carpet when water is spilt, then a dog turns up and Mona has a dream that the dog offers her something. It is perhaps an offer that she should not accept.

In The Enchanted River an Englishman in Ceylon falls in love with a girl but the priests forbid the marriage. They get unexpected help. It’s another story in which the distant past has a profound effect on the present. Not a bad story.

The Lost Gods once again deals with supernatural powers from the past. A man is tempted by a Dream Woman. She is perhaps a goddess. He finds ancient jewels that might bring her to him in reality but what will this mean for his wife? A clever story hingeing on the power of belief.

The Woman on the Balcony is a routine ghost story and is rather disappointing.

The White Lady is the first story in this collection to have a period setting. In the England of Henry VIII a young heiress wishes to choose her on husband, against the wishes of a scheming abbot. It’s an OK story.

Turn Over seems to be an attempt at whimsy but it falls very flat and it’s the worst story in the collection.

Final Thoughts

I’d describe most of these stories as gothic romance with some genuine horror elements. The later stories are just romance with the supernatural thrown in to advance the romance plot. These later stories are not very successful.

Overall there’s more good than bad in this collection and Quick does have an approach that is intriguingly different to that taken by most pulp weird fiction writers. This book is worth a look and is definitely recommended to gothic romance fans.

Otis Adelbert Kline's Lord of the Lamia

Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946) was an American pulp writer veery much in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mould. In fact Kline has been accused of more or less recycling most of Burroughs’ most popular ideas. That’s perhaps a bit unfair. Both writers were working in the same genres - jungle adventures and sword-and-planet adventures. Some similarities were inevitable, and Burroughs and Kline were certainly not the only writers setting adventures on Mars and Venus.

Kline’s Lord of the Lamia was serialised in Weird Tales in 1935.

It is is based on the legend of the lamia, or rather legends. There were lots of lamia legends. The starting point was the late of a Libyan queen named Lamia. Later legends described a lamia as a demon who has sex with young men, as a serpent-woman and even as a vaguely vampire-like female demon. Kline takes the most interesting ones and adds a few flourishes of his own. In this novel Lamia is indeed a Libyan queen who lived several thousand years ago, and she can transform herself into a cobra. If her mummy can be found she can be revived by means of an incantation ad she will become the slave of the man who awakens her.

The novel begins with a young American archaeologist named Tane renting a house in Cairo from portly middle-aged German archaeologist Dr Schneider. Before Tane takes possession of the house the funeral procession of a Muslim holy man passes by. Although deceased the holy man is able to give unmistakeable signs that he wishes to be interred in what is now Tane’s house. Dr Schneider tells Tane he will just have to accept this.

Tane has strange dreams, which he believes may be because he has been drugged. But they may not be dreams after all. He finds that the coffin of the holy man contains the mummy-case of a beautiful young queen, and the mummy-case contains a mummified cobra which comes to life. Tane thinks he saw the cobra become a beautiful young woman who informed him that she is Lamia and that she is now his slave.

There are several powerful men who would like to have Lamia as a slave. They’re prepared to play rough. One of these men is Hagg Nadeem, the head of the Egyptian secret police. He is a man of deep learning in esoteric subjects and he knows a great deal about Lamia. Whether Hagg Nadeem is really just out to enslave Lamia or whether he’s one of the good guys is one of the questions Tane would like to be able to answer but can’t. Hagg Nadeem is interested in other things besides Lamia. He has another agenda.

This is certainly an action-packed story. Tane is continually being set upon by ruffians. He would surely have been killed several times had it not been for the powerful ally he has in Lamia. She’s not much use in a fight in human form but when she transforms into a cobra she can be very handy indeed.

The big question is the nature of Lamia. Is she a monster? Will having her as his slave prove fatal to Tane? Or is she a kind of benevolent demi-goddess, or even just morally neutral? What exactly is her agenda? Tane really needs answers to those questions, given that he’s fallen hopelessly in love with her.

Tane can give a good account of himself in a brawl but he’s not quite a conventional hero. He never really understands what is going on. He isn’t stupid but he is out of his depth and unlike most conventional heroes he never really manages to take control of the situation. He reacts to the actions, and manipulations, of others. That actually makes him a rather sympathetic character.

We do not of course know if Lamia will turn out to be heroine of villainess but she’s unlikely to be either a totally conventional heroine or a totally conventional villainess. She is however rather fascinating. A lamia makes a change from the usual run of witches and vampires and werewolves.

Egyptology had become fashionable in the late 19th century and became big news in 1922 when Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun so using ancient Egyptian mythology as a basis for a story was a sound commercial move on Kline’s part. And personally I love any story with an Egyptology angle so I’m certainly not complaining.

Kline wasn’t quite in the front rank of pulp writers but he was very competent and he had no problems pacing a story.

Lord of the Lamia is a lightweight but fun story. There’s mystery, there’s action, there’s some horror and there’s an offbeat love story. It all adds up to pretty solid entertainment. Recommended.

Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique

Poet-short story writer Clark Ashton Smith was a prolific contributor to pulps such as Weird Tales in the 1930s. He was part of Lovecraft’s circle of writer friends who kept in constant contact by letter, shared ideas and sometimes settings and influenced one another. The big three of the Lovecraft circle were Lovecraft himself, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. They were three very different writers but with a good deal of respect for each other’s work. Smith wrote most of his hundred-plus short stories in the early 1930s.

Apart from being one of the finest of all writers of weird fiction Smith was perhaps the greatest of all American decadent writers. He was certainly the most extravagant prose stylist that America has produced. His stories are lush in a most unhealthy unwholesome way. It is the lushness of decay and degeneracy. Very few writers could match Smith as far as creating an atmosphere of dread was concerned, and none could match him when it came to the seductiveness of evil and the unnatural and perverse.

Occasionally, just to keep us on our toes, Smith would give us a happy ending. Yes, there is a Zothique story with a genuine happy ending. Mostly however things end badly for all concerned. And sometimes he would give us a slightly ambiguous ending. Smith understood that no matter how much a story might be heading towards an apparently inevitable conclusion it is a mistake to allow the reader to know with certainty how the tale will end.

The Zothique stories take place in the very distant future. The sun is now very old and sheds but a feeble light. The last inhabited continent is Zothique. It is a world in which the secrets of technology and science have long since been lost. The level of technology is that of the ancient world. It is also a world of magic. Human civilisation has reached the point of extreme decadence. Cultural exhaustion, pessimism, hedonism and self-indulgence are the hallmarks of human society. This is a society haunted by the glories of the past, and often haunted by the evils of the past as well.

The Last Hieroglyph tells of Nushain the astrologer who is disturbed one day when he notices three new stars in the sky. They are very near to the constellation of the Great Dog, the constellation which presided over his birth. He recasts his horoscope and after poring over his books he decides that it means that he will undertake an unexpected journey, a long journey, and three guides will show him the way. Whether he will find the journey profitable or unprofitable, whether it portends good or evil for him, is beyond his powers to discern.

The journey turns out to be arduous and at the end of it - well you’ll have to read the story to find that out. Suffice to say that Smith comes up with a perfect ending. It’s typical of Smith’s work - clever and imaginative with a sense of foreboding, or at least of unease.

The Empire of the Necromancers tells of two sorcerers who are banished to a wasteland for practising the forbidden art of necromancy. In this wasteland nothing lives, but that’s not a problem for men who can restore the dead to life. They create an empire for themselves, an empire of the dead. They have gained immense power but they are corrupted by it.

This is the kind of story that has gained Smith his reputation as a decadent. It’s a tale not just of a decaying or dying empire but a truly dead one. Smith’s style is rich but it’s the richness of decay.

In The Isle of the Torturers a kingdom is afflicted by a plague. Only the king is immune. With his kingdom destroyed and in despair he sets off on a sea voyage only to find himself on the fabled Isle of the Torturers. On this island torture is the fate awaiting all visitors and the methods of torture are ingenious and fiendish, relying as much on psychological terror as pain. The king’s only chance is a girl who offers to save him.

The Weaver of the Vault is one of Smith’s most anthologised stories. Three men have been sent to a dead city to retrieve a relic, but the dead are guarded well and in a terrifying manner.

The Charnel God is a superb story. In Zul-Bha-Sair the dead belong to the priests of Mordiggian. What happens to the dead is unknown but it’s assumed that they’re devoured by the god. It’s all very unfortunate for a young traveller named Phariom. hIs wife suffers from catalepsy and she’s had another attack. And now the priests have claimed her body. There is of course nothing wrong with her, in the normal course of events she would soon recover, but now she’s going to be devoured by the god. Phariom is determined to save her but it seems impossible.

The Tomb-Spawn is closer to out-and-out horror but as usual with echoes of the past. Two merchants listen to a story about a king from the distant past. He was a king and a sorcerer and he had as his familiar and creature from the stars. The merchants forget about the story and ride on but perhaps they should have remembered the story.

Xeethra is about a young goatherd who discovers a hidden valley. But what has he really discovered? Has he entered the past or a world of dream and illusion, and is he really a humble goatherd. This is a particularly evocative and subtly disturbing tale.

In The Dark Eidolon a young beggar-boy is trampled under the hooves of the horse of Zotulla. The beggar-boy survives and later, in a distant land, becomes the notorious sorcerer Namirrha. Zotulla becomes the king. Namirrha still wants his revenge and returns to the city of his birth for that purpose. He calls upon dark powers to aid him, but that can be a dangerous thing to do. Especially if you have the arrogant belief that you compel those powers of darkness to do your bidding.

In The Black Abbot of Puthuum two warrior have to escort a eunuch to a distant town. There’s a rumour of a particularly beautiful girl living here ad the eunuch is to buy her for his king. They buy the girl but on the return journey they encounter a strange wall of darkness then an isolated monastery. The abbot, a huge black man, has a sinister air about him. That monastery turns out to be a very bad place to visit. Another tale of evil from the distant past, with an ending which is not what you expect from Clark Ashton Smith.

In Necromancy in Naat Prince Yadar searches for his beloved Dalili, stolen by slavers. His quest takes him to the dread island of the necromancers of Naat. Does he find what he is seeing? Well, yes and no.

The Death of Ilalotha is a story of love, of sorts. Ilalotha, lady-in-waiting to Queen Xantlicha, is dead and is laid out on her bier whilst the traditional mourning orgy takes place. Lord Thulos had been her lover but he had abandoned her in favour of the queen. Ilalotha, who was rumoured to dabble in sorcery, took her defeat in love rather badly. Now Lord Thulos has returned from a journey, and he has the odd impression that perhaps Ilalotha is not truly dead. Love and passion usually do not end well in Clark Ashton Smith’s stories.

The Garden of Adompha is a nicely macabre tale. The garden belongs to the king. Only the king and his chief sorcerer have access to the garden. And very strange things happen in that garden. Things grow there that should not grow anywhere.

Morthylla is about a young man who has sampled all of life’s pleasures and he is now suffering from ennui. He needs stronger pleasures. It is suggested to him that if he visits a nearby necropolis he will encounter a lamia, and that she may introduce him to pleasures sufficiently perverse to meet his needs. Of course since she’s a lamia those pleasures might be fatal. He goes to the necropolis and meets a beautiful woman there. But is she the lamia?

Every single one of the Zothique stories is very very good. The Zothique cycle was an astonishing and unique achievement. There’s nothing else, in any fictional genre, that has quite the same flavour. Very highly recommended.

Seabury Quinn’s The Dark Angel

The Dark Angel is a collection of tales by Seabury Quinn that were published in Weird Tales in the early 1930s. It includes his short novel The Devil’s Bride.

Seabury Quinn (1889-1969) was an American pulp writer who enjoyed considerable success. In fact in the 1920s and 30s he was the most popular of all the Weird Tales writers. His reputation did not last. While his fellow Weird Tales writers like H.P. Lovecraft Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith have gained at least a limited degree of literary respectability Quinn is still (for the most part) reviled as one of the kinds of hack writer who gave the pulps a bad name.

That’s a bit unfair. Quinn had no literary pretensions whatsoever. He wrote to earn money. To achieve the success that he did achieve he needed to have a very sound instinct for what would work in commercial terms and he most certainly did have that instinct. He wrote commercially oriented pulp fiction and he wrote it very well.

His tales of occult detective Jules de Grandin (with an American doctor named Trowbridge acting as his Watson) are immense fun but they’re also very clever.

Jules de Grandin is a bit like Hercule Poirot if you can imagine Poirot on crystal meth. He’s a wildly over-the-top character, insanely self-confident and utterly unstoppable and remorseless in his pursuit of those who use occult powers for evil.

The Lost Lady is a tale of the East. More specifically it has its origins in French Indo-China. It involves a woman from the East, but not of the East. In involves evil and it involves power but it is the belief in evil and in power that matters. Actually it involves several women, one of whom is (or was) a Khmer temple-slave but she is European, not Khmer.

White slavery was an immensely popular subject at the time (with plenty of salacious potential) but this is not an ordinary story of white slavery. It does however have lots of salacious content.

The Ghost Helper is obviously a ghost story and it’s quite a good one. We start with a married couple and there is obviously some tension between them. Jules de Grandin and his friend Dr Trowbridge are then called in to treat the wife who seems to have been terrified by something. I don’t think it’s giving too much away to reveal that there really is a ghost but it’s the motives of the ghost that are important. A good story.

In Satan’s Stepson an old foe of de Grandin’s returns and he faces a new and even more terrifying foe. It is a tale of a man and a woman who both cheat death, but in very different ways. And it is a tale of a monster, partly human and partly diabolical, not a vampire but just as monstrous. It is a tale of an evil that can only be destroyed in a very specific way. And it is a tale of espionage as well. This is Quinn at his best, superbly inventive and energetic. A very good story.

The Dark Angel involves a series of murders, apparently carried out by an angel of Satan. Jules de Grandin finds that are all kinds of evil in the world and evil is not always where you expect it to be. This one is a bit too obvious but it’s OK.

There’s murder at the ballet in The Heart of Siva. Someone is trying to prevent the Issatakko Ballet Russe from presenting their latest somewhat outrageous production and the motivations could be religious. There’s some decent suspense in this one, some gruesomeness and some sleaze and of course hints of sinister eastern conspiracies and secret societies. And some real creepiness. These are the kinds of things Quinn did well and it’s a very good story.

In The Bleeding Mummy de Grandin and Trowbridge are called to the home of archaeologist Professor Larson, to find that Larson has suffered a grisly and terrifying death. He had been in the process of unwrapping a mummy he had brought back from Egypt. His is just the latest in a series of deaths associated wth his most recent expedition. The first mystery that Jules de Grandin must solve is the manner of the professor’s death but there is another much more ancient mystery to be solved as well. This is a rather scary story and a clever one as well.

The Door to Yesterday deals with a series of mysterious deaths, horrors from the past, a giant snake, voodoo and an interesting take on haunted houses. You can’t go wrong with those ingredients and I’m especially find of voodoo tales so for me this story was definitely a winner.

A Gamble in Souls is one of the cleverer stories in the collection. For some reason de Grandin and Trowbridge pay a visit to the penitentiary, or more specifically to Death Row, and witness a heart-breaking scene. A woman named Beth is saying farewell to the man she loves, a man named Lonny who is to be executed next day. A few hours later de Grandin and Trowbridge encounter the woman again. She is about to commit suicide by throwing herself off a bridge. While they try to dissuade her from suicide she pours out her tragic story. Lonny is innocent. The murder of which he was convicted was carried out by his brother Larry. But Beth is married to Larry and cannot testify against him, and therefore there is no way to save Lonny from the executioner.

The case is so hopeless that even Jules de Grandin is powerless - unless perhaps his old friend Hussein Obeyid can do something to save Lonny. De Grandin has seen Obeyid do many seemingly impossible things. Obeyid thinks that he may be able to help although he can make no guarantees that such a fantastic scheme will work. And it is a fantastic scheme. A very good story.

In The Thing in the Fog two young men are attacked in the city by a huge dog. One is killed, the other seriously hurt and would have been slain had Jules de Grandin not happened to be on the scene. The attack happened at night, in thick fog. The injured young man’s fiancée Sallie is of course dreadfully upset and tells de Grandin a strange story that confirms the Frenchman’s suspicion that they are not dealing with a dog but a werewolf. And this young lady may well be tainted by lycanthropy as well.

Quinn gives his own rather interesting spins to werewolf lore - you don’t need silver bullets to kill a werewolf and the curse of lycanthropy can be transmitted in many ways. These variations on standard werewolf lore are the highlight of the story.

De Grandin has an added incentive in this adventure - Sallie and her young man wish to worry and being a Frenchman de Grandin is determined to see young love triumph. But can the taint of lycanthropy be removed from Sallie? This is a fairly entertaining werewolf tale.

The Hand of Glory is the final story in the collection. The hand of glory itself (the hand of a condemned murderer which was supposed to have magical powers) plays only a minor part in the story. It’s a tale of the old gods (or in this case the old goddesses) exercising their evil powers. Not a bad story but nothing special.

This collection also includes the short novel The Devil’s Bride which I’d already read and which I reviewed here a few years back.

Summing Up

There’s no sense in trying to claim that Seabury Quinn was the equal of Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith or Robert E. Howard. He clearly wasn’t. But he knew how to assemble the right ingredients for a pulp story and he knew how to cook up those ingredients into a good entertaining tale. This collection is on the whole pretty enjoyable. Recommended.

The Citadel of Fear

Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1884-1948) had a very brief career writing for the pulps from around 1917 to around 1919. At the time her work was widely praised by luminaries such as A. Merritt. Most of her fantasy/science fiction/weird fiction was published under the pseudonym Francis Stevens. She seems for some reason to have stopped writing in 1919. After that she disappears into complete obscurity. Until recently even the date of her death was unknown.

Her best-known novel, The Citadel of Fear, was reprinted in 1952 and her reputation slowly revived. She is now considered to be one of the most important female writers of fantasy of her era. The Citadel of Fear is a lost world story and that happens to be one of my favourite genres. The Citadel of Fear was originally serialised in the pulp magazine The Argosy in late 1918.

Two prospectors, a tall Irishman named Colin O’Hara (usually known as Boots) and a man named Kennedy, are lost in the desert somewhere in Mexico. Just when it looks hopeless for them they stumble upon a hidden valley. There’s not supposed to be any trace of civilisation anywhere in the vicinity but here is a fertile valley full of cultivated crops and a large hacienda.

There is something slightly odd about all this. The owner of the hacienda is not Mexican but a Norwegian-American and he gives the impression of being just a trifle secretive.

In fact the two prospectors haven’t just stumbled into a hidden valley, they have discovered a whole lost civilisation. A Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican culture, with vast temples and cities. And (of most interest to Kennedy) gold. This is the legendary land of Tlapallan. And they’ve also blundered into a power struggle between the priests of Quetzalcoatl and the priests of Nacoc-Yaotl.

While Kennedy is interested in the gold O’Hara is more interested in the moth girl. What gets Kennedy into trouble is not the gold but witnessing a religious ritual, something forbidden to outsiders. What gets O’Hara into trouble is a combination of his fascination for the moth girl, his natural chivalry and his impetuosity. These two outsiders could unwittingly start a civil war. A civil war that could involve gods taking sides.

There are some nice touches to this lost world, such as the lake. I won’t spoil things by telling you what’s strange about the lake. And the light is strange too. As in the best examples of this genre the author creates a lost world that really does feel odd and alien.


It’s only the first half of the story that takes place in Mexico. Then the scene switches to the United States, many years later, but the story is far from finished. There are monsters loose. Are they human or animal or maybe even supernatural? And there’s another strange other-worldly girl. Not the moth girl, but with the same ethereal beauty and the same oddness. She’s quite mad. At least that’s what O’Hara is told. He doesn’t seem to care, although he doesn’t really know why he’s drawn to her. Is there some memory at the back of his mind?

The latter part of the story, even without the exotic setting of the first half, has plenty of strangeness and it gets stranger. O’Hara has no idea why he has suddenly become caught up in such inexplicable and disturbing events. Again there’s an ambiguity - is this story science fiction or fantasy? Is O’Hara dealing with gods or men, with monsters or ghosts or science gone very very wrong?

He’s certainly dealing with evil, and possibly madness. A house of secrets which should have stirred some memories but perhaps not his memories.

There’s plenty of danger and action (this is after all pulp fiction), there’s some romance with a touch of weirdness and there’s some fairly visceral horror. There is at times just a slight Lovecraftian tinge although at this stage Lovecraft had only just started his weird fiction writing career so it’s more a case of Bennett and Lovecraft responding to similar literary influences.

The Citadel of Fear is a fine example of the lost world genre and it’s not surprising that it attracted the admiration of A. Merritt who would in the ’20s and ’30s explore similar territory. Highly recommended.

Clifford Ball’s sword & sorcery tales

Clifford Ball (1896-1947) was an American writer who had half a dozen stories published in Weird Tales between 1937 and 1941 after which he vanished into obscurity. The reason he matters is that after the death of Robert E. Howard in 1936 Ball was one of the first writers to pick up the sword & sorcery torch that Howard had dropped. Ball’s first three stories fall firmly within the sword & sorcery genre.

The first story, Duar the Accursed, was published in Weird Tales in May 1937.

Duar, a barbarian warrior who has been in his time a king and a pirate, is brought in chains before Queen Nione of Ygoth. Later, in her dungeon, an apparition of light appears to him, reminding him of things he has forgotten. It seems that he has forgotten much. The apparition, in the shape of a beautiful woman, commands him to go to the Black Tower of Goth wherein he will find the Rose of Gaon. The Black Tower is where the worst of criminals are sent, to await an unknown but doubtless horrible fate.

Duar would seem to be a man with a destiny, if only he could remember what that destiny might be. What he does know is that he was once a king and he wants to be a king again.  He would also like a queen to possess and Nione is beautiful and she is definitely a queen. Whether Duar discovers his destiny, whether he gets to possess Nione and what the secret of the Rose of Gaon might be - you’ll have to read the story yourself.

This is a decent enough sword & sorcery tale. Obviously it lacks the driving energy of Robert E. Howard’s stories, it lacks the decadent strangeness of Clark Ashton Smith’s tales and the imagination of C. L. Moore’s. It’s something of a by-the-numbers attempt at the genre but it’s enjoyable. And Duar has the potential to be an interesting hero. For sword & sorcery fans it’s worth a look.

The Thief of Forthe appeared in the July 1937 issue of Weird Tales. The magician Karlk and the thief Rald have hatched a plan to steal something that will rock the kingdom of Forthe to its foundations - they intend to steal nothing less than the kingdom itself. Or at least to steal the means whereby to gain the kingdom. For Karlk it will mean being the power behind the throne. For Rald it will mean the throne itself. And he might, if he’s lucky, even get to possess the king’s sister as well. The Lady Thrine is both beautiful and spirited. To possess her would be every bit as pleasant as to possess the kingdom.

When you have both a beautiful woman and a wizard to deal with things are apt to become a mite unpredictable.

Rald will also have cause to wonder if some of the more terrible rumours about Karlk might be true.

This story confirms the impression made by Duar the Accursed. Ball does not attempt anything in the way of full-blooded action scenes, which may have been a wise decision. To do so would have meant trying to match Robert E. Howard’s mastery of such scenes and that’s something very few writers have been able to do. Compared to Howard the eroticism is not quite there either. Having said that I have to add that it’s another perfectly competent sword & sorcery adventure.

The Goddess Awakes, published in Weird Tales in February 1938, is the third instalment of the adventures of thief-adventurer Rald. Rald and his comrade Thwaine have been serving the king of Livia as mercenaries but now the king’s army has been destroyed and the survivors, including Rald and Thwaine, are being hunted by the victors. They find themselves captured by an army of women, in a land ruled by women.

Queen Cene rules here, or does she actually rule? Is there another power here? Perhaps a supernatural power and perhaps not, but certainly malevolent. Is it some hitherto unknown goddess? Rald and Thwaine do not yet know what fate they are about to confront in the arena in this strange queendom.

This is the strongest of the three stories, with genuine menace and weirdness. The nature of the goddess is a clever idea. There’s also real tension.

While Ball might not have been another Robert E. Howard he did have talent. The potential was certainly there, each story is better than the preceding one, and overall these three tales (especially The Goddess Awakes) are actually pretty good. It’s a great pity that this author’s career was so short-lived.

Clifford Ball's half-dozen published stories, including these three sword & sorcery tales, have been reprinted by DMR Books as The Thief of Forthe and Other Stories.

Nictzin Dyalhis’s The Sapphire Goddess

The Sapphire Goddess collects all of Nictzin Dyalhis’s stories that appeared in Weird Tales from 1925 to 1940.

Nictzin Dyalhis 1873-1942 was an American pulp writer who was extremely successful in obscuring the details of his own life. His birth date and place of birth are both uncertain and while Nictzin Dyalhis seems to have been his legal name it may or may not have been his birth name.

Dyalhis was a remarkably unproductive writer, producing just thirteen short stories in a period of eighteen years. Eight of the stories were published in Weird Tales. He should therefore be little more than a footnote in the history of pulp fiction except for one thing - he was exceptionally popular with the readers of Weird Tales.

When the Green Star Waned marked the author’s first appearance in Weird Tales (in April 1925). At first you could be forgiven for thinking it’s going to be a space opera. In fact it does have some science fictional elements but it’s more a fantasy with a dash of horror. It’s probably best to think of it simply as weird fiction. There’s also a preoccupation with good and evil and even perhaps a hint of some religious themes.

The planet Venhez constantly monitors everything that happens on its neighbouring worlds and recently there appears to be nothing at all happening on the planet Aerth. It’s as if the entire population of that world has vanished. An expedition is despatched to Aerth, each of the seven members being the acknowledged leader in his field (fields such as war, diplomacy, science and medicine). What they find is unimaginably horrifying.

Of course once you find out that one of Venhez’s other neighbouring planets is named Marhz you’re going to really that the story takes place in our own solar system, but in the very distant future.

Aerth has been taken over but the nature of the invaders is bizarre indeed. It seems impossible to defeat them , or even to fight them at all, but such evil cannot be allowed to continue to exist.

I’m not sure that this could be described as a good story but it’s interesting in its own way and you do have to remember that it was written in 1925 at which time some of ideas in it were quite original.

The Eternal Conflict, also published in Weird Tales in 1925, is much stranger. It’s a cosmic battle between good and evil. On one side there’s with a kind of goddess of love but she’s really an archangel and on the other side there’s the power of hate represented by Lucifer. They hurl lightning bolts and similar things at each other. And the battles take place in outer space, or at least in the Aether. It’s a mishmash of Christianity and mystic occultism. The hero is a middle-aged businessman who is a student of the occult and serves the power of love.

It has affinities to When the Green Star Waned but without the science fictional elements. It’s fantasy, but with spiritual overtones. I’m afraid it’s not my cup of tea at all.

He Refused to Stay Dead was published in Ghost Stories in 1927. I suppose it could be called a ghost story, but an unconventional one. A soldier, prematurely aged by a great shock, recounts the events that left him a wreck of man. After serving in the First World War he had married a strange girl named Edwina, a girl with a fascination for folklore and the occult.

The soldier happens to own a castle. A very old castle, dating from the ninth century. His new wife discovers that there’s more to the ghost that supposedly haunts the castle than had been supposed. It’s all connected to terrible events that happened more than a thousand years in the past, events set in motion by a Viking raid.

This is a much much better story, involving a past that won’t stay dead and an old old quarrel that must be resolved. If the soldier cannot resolve it he will lose the love of his life. A very good story.

The Dark Lore appeared in Weird Tales in 1927. It’s the story of Lyra Veyle, recounted by herself. She had been a beautiful dark-haired young woman but filled with pride. She had a sister, blonde and virtuous. The sister loved a fine man and that drove Lura to commit a terrible sin. She made use of evil incantations and summoned a demon, a handsome demon who became her lover. But loving a demon is not a very good idea and Lura is cast into a nightmare of sin and debauchery, and then cast aside. She is already in Hell but she discovers that there are even worse Hells. And even greater debaucheries.

Dyalhis’s vision of Hell is outlandishly over-the-top. Lura encounters unimaginable horrors and the worst thing is that even death will provide no escape. In these Hells you can just keep on dying.

Again Dyalhis offers us a struggle between good and evil but the main focus is on Lura’s own inner torment - she knows that she deserves her suffering. Apart from the mystical quasi-science fictional cosmic visions that we’re starting to expect from this author there’s an obsession with sin and also sexual depravity. It’s actually quite a strong story.

The Oath of Hul Jok (published in Weird Tales in 1928) is a sequel to When the Green Star Waned. The seven leading Vehnezians are all having troubles with their women. The evil creature they captured in the earlier story seems to be behind this. If there’s one thing that Venhezians will not tolerate it is anyone messing with their Love-Girls. The war leader Hul Jok’s Love-Girl has been so troublesome than even a spanking failed to bring her into line.

The Love-Girls are kidnapped by the Lunarian who intends taking them back to Aerth and having all seven of them as his wives. Aerth meanwhile is now controlled by creatures that  are half-human and half-monster. One of whom, a female, wants to be the wife of all seven Venezhians.

This is more space opera than fantasy. It’s also rather disturbing. The Venezhians are supposedly the good guys, the most civilised culture in the solar system, but their vengeance is quite blood-curdling in its calculated cruelty and ferocity. One can only speculate as to the source of the author’s taste for refinements of bloodthirstiness. There’s also, as in some of his other tales, something of an obsession with sexual depravity. The Venezhians are rather terrifyingly possessive of their Love-Girls. One can also speculate on the source of this obsession and I can think of some plausible explanations which I have no intention of going into. There’s a lot of weirdness here but it’s morbidly fascinating.

The Red Witch (published in Weird Tales in 1932) bears some thematic similarities to He Refused to Stay Dead. Once again we have a hero and a heroine trapped in the grip of the distant past. Randall Crone and his beloved, Rhoda Day, were once a young warrior and his wife in the primitive world of the last Ice Age. She was Red Dawn, the Red Witch of one of the tribes. There was a mighty war-axe and an equally mighty warrior who sought to steal Red Dawn. There was love and betrayal and a thirst for vengeance and those things never die. And old quarrels are not forgotten even after thousands of years.

These were themes that clearly obsessed Dyalhis and he handles with skill and energy. A very good story.

The Sapphire Goddess (AKA The Sapphire Siren) appeared in Weird Tales in 1934. There are the usual Dyalhis obsessions with the past and with shifting identities. Reincarnation was a popular notion at that time but while Dyalhis flirts with the idea he avoids being too obvious or simplistic about it. Once again there’s a hero who finds himself in a sort of alternative reality and this time it’s a classic sword & sorcery world, and indeed this is to a large extent a sword & sorcery tale although it owes more to Catherine L. Moore and Clark Ashton Smith than to Robert E. Howard.

There’s plenty of action, there’s magic, there are two evil sorcerers and there’s a giant sapphire shaped in the form of a beautiful nude woman but is it really just a jewel? There’s also a hero in search of both his past and his destiny. And it’s all great fun. A very good story indeed.

The Sea-Witch was published in Weird Tales in 1937. The narrator, obviously no longer a young man, lives in a cottage on a cliff-top on the New England coast. For some unaccountable reason he decides to take a walk along the shore-line in the middle of a raging tempest and he sees something extraordinary washed up on the beach. It is a young woman. She is extremely beautiful and extremely naked. More unsettling is the fact that she seems oblivious to both the cold and to her own nakedness. Naturally he takes her back to his cottage. He finds some clothes for her but she declares that, despite the bitter cold, it is much too warm to wear clothing. Even more disconcertingly she offers to be his slave.

It’s the sort of offer that a retired anthropologist, ethnologist and archaeologist (for that is what the narrator John Craig is) can hardly refuse. He is familiar with the Norse sagas and he knows he’s dealing with a witch, but not a witch in the Christian sense. She is a Norse witch, possessed of great powers, and she can be frightening but she is by no means evil. She is charming (if disturbing) and will be a fascinating object of study for a man well-versed in Norse lore.

She moves into his cottage, presenting herself to the world as his niece. Their relationship is platonic. Well, sort of platonic. She takes her clothes off a great deal and she’s rather an affectionate girl. John Craig is not entirely indifferent to her naked charms even if he is (mostly) able to convince himself that he loves her as a niece. But why did she come to him that day on the beach and was does she want? The answer is a terrible one and it lies in the distant past (which will come as no surprise to anyone who has read of a few of Dyalhis’s stories). There’s a lot of suppressed eroticism in this extremely fine tale.

Dyalhis’s final story, Heart of Atlantan, appeared in Weird Tales in 1940. Two men are obsessed with the idea of discovering the secrets of the lost civilisation of Atlantis. They are able to make contact with Tekala, priestess of Atlantan. A struggle for power between good and evil had taken place in that long-ago civilisation and Tekala believes she was responsible for its final fall. Can Tekala and the two men of the 20th century defy Destiny? Can anyone do such a thing? And what price would have to be paid? Another very fine story to round off this fascinating collection.

I think I can now see why Dyalhis wrote so few stories. He had certain obsessions to which he returned again and again. Had he been a prolific author such obsessions might have become repetitive. By limiting itself to a handful of tales he was able to take the same themes and play fascinating variations on them.

He Refused to Stay Dead, The Red Witch, The Sapphire Goddess and The Sea-Witch are all variations on one theme and they’re all interesting variations. They’re by far the strongest stories he wrote.

I can also see now why Dyalhis was so highly thought of by contemporary readers of Weird Tales. His best stories are stories of love and revenge, erotically charged and with just a dash of the decadence of Clark Ashton Smith. Dyalhis was also a writer who seemed to improve with each story that he wrote. The Sapphire Goddess is an uneven but intriguing collection. The better stories are very very good indeed. Highly recommended.

The Complete Adventures of Richard Knight vol 1

Donald E. Keyhoe (1897-1988) was one of the most interesting of American pulp writers. He had a succession of careers, all of them fascinating.

Initially he joined the Marine Corps and became a pilot but that was cut short a few years later by a plane crash. Then he acted as manager for a couple of pioneer aviators undertaking national publicity tours. One of these aviators was a guy called Lindbergh. That inspired Keyhoe to write a book about Lindbergh, which became a bestseller. Then he became a prolific and very successful writers for the pulps, in a variety of genres. Finally, after the Second World War, he made his most successful career of all out of UFOs. He wrote a bestselling book on the subject, Flying Saucers Are Real, followed by further books and articles and lectures and he became a recognised authority on the subject.

As a pulp writer his most notable achievements were his aviation action adventure stories. What made Keyhoe’s stories particularly interesting is that he combined aerial combat, espionage, science fiction and the supernatural. He not only combined these elements, he did it with consummate skill. Keyhoe wrote a vast number of stories featuring Philip Strange, a First World War fighter pilot and intelligence agent who uses his paranormal skills against enemies both human and inhuman. These stories can be found in several collections, beginning with Strange War. His Vanished Legion stories are just as good.

His other major series character was Richard Knight, a post-war sporting aviator and barnstormer who is actually a U.S. secret agent. Several collections of these stories are now available from Age of Aces Books, beginning with The Complete Adventures of Richard Knight Volume 1. The four novellas in this collection originally appeared in the pulp magazine Flying Aces in 1936 and 1937.

Vultures of the Lost Valley is not only a spy thriller with lots of air combat, it’s also a lost world tale (and lost world stories happen to be one of my favourite genres). It all starts when Richard Knight rescues a pretty girl from a stolen aircraft. She speaks Spanish only but what’s really weird is that she gives the impression that she has never seen an aircraft, or an automobile, before. She seems to have no knowledge of the modern world. She’s also in possession of a famous and fabulously valuable emerald though to have been lost for a century. Benita (that’s the girl’s name) has another problem - there are quite a few people trying to kill her.

Richard Knight can’t help wondering if there’s any significance in the fact that he spotted notorious Japanese master spy Hiroki. He knows there’s definitely something strange going on when the Northrop aircraft in which he and his buddy Doyle are flying is attacked by American fighter planes. The really strange thing is that these American planes don’t exist - only twenty of these new Drake PV-11 fighters have been built and all twenty were destroyed in a disastrous fire at the Drake factory. They may no longer exist but they looked pretty well when they jumped him.

There is of course a dastardly conspiracy behind all this and it’s an immediate national security threat.

This is typical Keyhoe, packed with action and intrigue and with just enough of the weird and inexplicable to add some spice. A very fine story.

It’s very important to read Vultures of the Lost Valley before any of Richard Knight’s other adventures, otherwise you’ll be rather confused about where the beautiful but slightly odd Spanish girl who wants to be a secret agent fits into the picture.

Hell Flies High has a wonderfully macabre opening. Knight and Doyle are flying towards Washington when they encounter a Douglas airliner. This aircraft is an aircraft of death. They then get jumped by a French Morane-Saulnier fighter with Soviet markings, and an Italian Breda. The French fighter and the Italian fighter seem to be trying to shoot down the Douglas airliner, and Knight’s Northrop, and each other! And this is happening within a few miles of Washington.

And things get stranger. The green blood is worrying. Naturally there’s a gigantic conspiracy behind these events but there’s no telling exactly what the nature of the conspiracy might be except that it involves some kind of secret weapon. In fact multiple secret weapons, of horrifying destructiveness. It all leads up to aerial battles in the stratosphere where aircraft attain unimaginable speeds and the air in the pressurised cabins can cook a man and sounds do strange things. Really high altitude flight was still science fiction in 1937 and Keyhoe’s wild speculations about the stratosphere add to the wonderfully bizarre feel of this story.

Hell Flies High is Keyhoe piling on the weird stuff and this is where he’s at his very best. A terrific story.

Death Flies the Equator pits Knight and Doyle against the Four Faces, a vast international criminal organisation that for some reason is taking an extraordinary interest in the development of a new trans-Pacific airline route. It’s not clear why these crime lords would want to stop the air route from being used. And why would they want to steal one of the Clippers, the gigantic flying boats that dominated international air travel in the 1930s.

Knight finds himself working with the Royal Navy on this case. British commercial interests are threatened by the Four Faces. The British are also upset about the disappearance of half a dozen of the seaplanes and they’re even more upset abut the aircrews being turned into zombies.

Knight soon figures out that there’s really no-one (other than Doyle) that he can trust. The Four Faces have agents everywhere. There’s a very high paranoia quotient in this story.

There’s also, as usual, non-stop action and thrills and countless aerial combats. Great stuff.

Falcons from Nowhere has a pretty sensational opening. Richard Knight suddenly blacks out for no good reason and then regains consciousness half an hour later. That would be disturbing at any time but it’s positively alarming when it happens when you’re in flight. Lucky the auto-pilot was engaged!

There's worse to come. There’s a horrible disease that can turn a person to stone but it seems like someone has found a way to inflict this disease instantly and at will. There are also aircraft that can be heard but not seen. And aircraft that just vanish. It’s part of a diabolical criminal conspiracy and Knight suspects that he’s dealing with an old enemy that he thought had been destroyed. It’s vintage Keyhoe. An excellent story, which makes four excellent stories out of four

Keyhoe had a knack for working firmly within the conventions and limitations of pulp fiction but at the same time managing to make his work slightly more interesting than most pulp stories. His heroes were just a little bit more than standard square-jawed action heroes, he put some imagination into his villains and his plots are pleasingly outrageous without becoming merely silly. This is pulp fiction, but it’s A-grade pulp fiction. He was also very good at combining the fast-paced aviation action adventure stuff with the weird fiction stuff.

For my money Keyhoe was one of the most consistently entertaining of pulp writers. His output was vast but the good news is that a goodly proportion of that output has been published in book form in the past few years.

This collection is very highly recommended.