Tag: c. l. moore

Short Story Review: “The Black God’s Kiss” by C. L. Moore

March 20th, 2023

(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, October 1934.)

Who Goes There?

C. L. Moore is remembered by certain readers as one half of an immensely talented writing duo, the other half being her first husband, Henry Kuttner. Moore and Kuttner, from about 1940 to Kuttner’s untimely death in 1958, wrote seamlessly and prolifically together in just about every corner of SFF that was conceivable at the time. The two were actually unsure as to who wrote exactly what in their collaborations, and to this day speculations on who did what largely remain just that: speculations. Before their coming together, though, Moore was one of the most respected authors to contribute regularly to the peak era of Weird Tales, and unlike most authors her success started with her first story. “Shambleau,” Moore’s first professional sale and the first to feature spacefaring himbo Northwest Smith, made a splash when it came out in late 1933, with Farnsworth Wright being pretty open about wanting to buy whatever Moore was selling.

In the ’30s, most of Moore’s output was comprised of two series: the aforementioned Northwest Smith adventures, and also Jirel of Joiry, sword and sorcery’s first heroine. The first entry in the latter series, “The Black God’s Kiss” (definite article removed for most reprints), is a reread for me, but I now like it much more since I’ve gotten to a) read it more carefully, and b) read it in what I consider the proper context. I had first read it as part of The Future Is Female! (ed. Lisa Yaszek), which collects science fiction stories by women published prior to 1970, and with all due respect to Yaszek and a few people I know, it’s a fatal error to classify “The Black God’s Kiss” as SF. The logic seems to be that because Jirel of Joiry shares continuity with Northwest Smith, thanks to some time travel fuckery in a later entry, that means Jirel of Joiry must be, at least retroactively, considered SF as well.

The problem is that, at least in “The Black God’s Kiss,” there’s virtually nothing to support this argument in the text itself. At best the argument is misleading: when I first read “The Black God’s Kiss” I was distracted by this sword-and-sorcery story being erroneously included in an SF anthology and thus struggled to enjoy it for what it actually was. Now I’ve rectified the issue by reading this story as it was originally published, wherein it’s clearly framed as fantasy—albeit with a remarkably dark tinge, being a mix of heroic fantasy, cosmic horror, and psycho-sexual mania.

Before I enter plot synopsis mode I wanna issue a sort of content warning. Despite its vintage “The Black God’s Kiss” overflows with eroticism and sexual angst, especially in its subtext. Sexual assault is what kicks off the plot and things only get murkier from there, just so you know.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive. Didn’t I cover something from this issue just last month? Why yes; and eventually I’ll be sure to cover Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Seven Geases.” Anyway, “The Black God’s Kiss” has been collected and anthologized quite a few times over the years. On top of the aforementioned The Future Is Female! we have The Best of C. L. Moore, part of the fabulous Ballantine best-of series, and also Black God’s Kiss, which collects all of the Jirel of Joiry stories—not that there are too many of them. One place where you won’t find this story is Two-Handed Engine, which is irritating because it’s one of the few actually essential Moore/Kuttner stories not in that collection; meanwhile there are a couple more minor stories that could’ve been replaced with “The Black God’s Kiss,” if space was a concern. Point being, you won’t have a hard time finding this one.

Enhancing Image

Moore is not fucking around, because we start in media res with a battle at the castle of Joiry having already taken place, Joiry having been invaded and with the outcome being disastrous—for the castle. Guillaume is a haughty Frenchman (as if there’s any other kind) and leader of marauders who demands the commander of the fallen troops of Joiry be brought to him, presumably for a flashy execution. However, when the commander is brought forth, Guillaume demands the commander’s helmet be removed, and this is where we get what has to be one of the first instances of the “Samus is a girl” trope—if not the first. Admittedly this tiny twist is spoiled if you know literally anything about Jirel of Joiry in advance, and also are reading a copy without any illustrations, but it’s the thought that counts. Because he is a hetereosexual man with functioning eyeballs, Guillaume’s intent with Jirel makes a 180 and turns from murder to lust.

It’s here that we get a forced kiss, the first of three kisses in the story actually, and a very pissed-off redhead. Guillaume forces a kiss on Jirel, which doesn’t go well for either of them: for Jirel for the obvious reason, and for Guillaume became he damn near gets his throat torn out when Jirel maneuvers to bite his neck. “She missed the jugular by a fraction of an inch.” Like anyone upset that his would-be rape victim would dare fight back, Guillaume knocks Jirel out, but rather than kill her he locks her up in the dungeon of her own castle—a show of mercy he’ll ultimately regret. Because this world apparently operates on Metal Gear Solid logic, Jirel knocks out the guard for her cell pretty easily and has the opportunity to sneak out of the castle, only she doesn’t do that; for one, in her defense, it’d be cowardly, but also there’s clearly something to be done about the guy who thinks he can have his way with her. The result is a rape-revenge plot with a few twists contained therein, and that’s what we’re here for.

“The Black God’s Kiss” is a novelette that very easily could’ve been a novella, had Moore wanted to flesh out the setting and background behind Joiry—only she deprives us of that backstory because really it’s not necessary to us understanding Jirel’s character. Jirel is an impressive creation, partly because she’s a Woman™, but also because this was still pretty early in the formation of sword and sorcery as a subgenre; hell, Conan had only debuted two years prior to this. Even in this first entry in the series we see multiple facets of Jirel’s character, her virtues and flaws, and there’s ambiguity about her that, at least in this story, does not sharpen into clarity. Being the heroine of a heroic fantasy plot would be enough, but Jirel is also in several ways a subversion of what was expected of female characters in pulp fiction at the time. After having escaped, she meets up with ~~Ricky~~ Father Gervase, the castle chaplain, who I guess was not fed to pigs when Guillaume took over, and it’s here we find out a few things of interest…

For one, it’s implied that we’re in an alternate medieval France—a world where ancient Rome was still a thing, but also the fantastic has intruded upon the normal human world. Jirel is shown to be a practicing Catholic, but she sure is not a pious one; she is French, after all. She makes it clear that Guillaume’s forced kiss was not her first; she is not the waifish virgin of most pulp fiction women, being neither waifish nor virginal. Sex and religion are not uncommon sights in the pages of Weird Tales, in that their imagery makes it in for the sake of titilation and shock value, but they’re rarely discussed by characters within those stories. “The Black God’s Kiss” is unusual for several reasons, but what struck me the most is its willingness to tackle the complex web of emotions involved in sex—and this is way before we even get to the ending! Anyway, Jirel is looking for a specific weapon she might use to wreak her vengeance on Guillaume; she doesn’t know what the weapon is, but she knows where it is.

There’s a level of the castle beneath it that goes down—far further below ground than the dungeon, a place so horrid that Jirel’s only gone there once before, and she got too spooked before she could venture that far. Gervase was with Jirel during that earlier venture to the realm below, and perhaps wisely he tries to convince Jirel to not go (for the sake of her immortal soul more than anything), only Jirel will not be convinced. As the following dialogue shows, Jirel is thinking about her immortal soul, but she’s thinking about doing terrible things to Guillaume way more:

“To wreak my vengeance upon Guillaume I would go if I knew I should burn in hell for ever.”

“But Jirel, I do not think you understand. This is a worse fate than the deepest depths of hell-fire. This is—this is beyond all the bounds of the hells we know. And I think Satan’s hottest flames were the breath of paradise, compared to what may befall there.”

“I know. Do you think I’d venture down if I could not be sure? Where else would I find such a weapon as I need, save outside God’s dominion?”

“Jirel, you shall not!”

“Gervase, I go! Will you shrive me?” The hot yellow eyes blazed into his, lambent in the starlight.

After a moment he dropped his head. “You are my lady. I will give you God’s blessing, but it will not avail you—there.”

Savor this, because with one exception this is the last bit of dialogue we get in the whole story and we’re only about five pages into it. Something I realized is that once Jirel starts making her way to the lower depths the writing becomes entirely either action or the narrator trying to capture Jirel’s mindset. Anyway, Gervae reluctantly gives Jirel his blessing and she heads off on her own to make her way to the lower depths. There’s a bit of subtle fanservice with Jirel’s getup for the journey: at the beginning of the story she wore armor bulky enough that Guillaume at first assumed she was a man, but now her attire is more flexible and revealing, wearing “a fresh shirt of doeskin” and “a brief tunic of link-mail.” She’s able to carry a sword and a dagger in her belt, but can’t bring a torch—a hindrance that may ultimately prove to be an asset.

As she finds the trap door leading to the lower depths and begins her descent, Jirel is reminded, to her horror, that the spiraling staircase going down was almost certainly not built by humans—rather the architecture seems more fit for a giant snake. I have a couple questions such as, “Who built this castle anyway?” and “If the lower depths were built by something non-human, would it have preceded the castle’s construction? How much did the builders know about this place?” Questions which go unanswered, but really we need not worry about those things. The castle of Joiry, much like an onion or an ogre, has layers, which are peeled back once the revenge plot kicks into gear. Because she doesn’t have a torch Jirel is unable to see SHIT, but it turns out there could be another reason for the unfathomable darkness of these depths—a reason that can only be deemed supernatural rather than super-scientific, at least without serious retconning.

We get what might be called a demented sense-of-wonder bit when Jirel realizes what has been causing her to be unable to see anything in the depths, and it’s here that the story switches gears from medieval fantasy to something much harder to classify, though I think “heroic Lovecraftian fantasy” might do the trick. Jirel came to this unholy place with a crucifix, a holy object, round her neck, which she finds may be preventing her from taking in her surroundings. Get this:

She lifted her hand and found the chain of her crucifix taut and vibrant around her neck. At that she smiled a little grimly, for she began to understand. The crucifix. She found her hand shaking despite herself, but she unfastened the chain and dropped the cross to the ground. Then she gasped.

All about her, as suddenly as the awakening from a dream, the nothingness had opened out into undreamed-of distances. She stood high on a hilltop under a sky spangled with strange stars. Below she caught glimpses of misty plains and valleys with mountain peaks rising far away. And at her feet a ravening circle of small, slavering, blind things leaped with clashing teeth.

They were obscene and hard to distinguish against the darkness of the hillside, and the noise they made was revolting. Her sword swung up of itself, almost, and slashed furiously at the little dark horrors leaping up around her legs. They died squashily, splattering her bare thighs with unpleasantness, and after a few had gone silent under the blade the rest fled into the dark with quick, frightened pantings, their feet making a queer splashing noise on the stones.

From here on, Jirel is on her own in her surreal nightmare adventures, the last conversation in the whole story happening between her and a ghoulish doppelganger, which tries to trick her at first but then points her towards what she wants: a temple on an small island, in the middle of a lake of stars. Here the plot gets rather hard to summarize, since it’s basically an episodic adventure wherein Jirel sees or fights off some weird thing in the midst of this vast underground realm—a realm which, given the appearance of a sky, cannot possibly be underground unless it’s an elaborate optical illusion. I’ll discuss one or two of these highlights, plus the ending in the spoilers section, but I’ll say for now that if this episodic style of fantasy storytelling is up your alley then you’ll have a lot of fun with this. The loose narrative might’ve turned me off on my initial reading, but now I can see more clearly what Moore is going for, and it must be said she’s quite good at it.

There Be Spoilers Here

The temple on the island, connected to the rest of the realm via an invisible bridge, houses a black Buddha-esque statue with one eye, “and its mouth was pursed for a kiss.” Jirel is unable to explain in words how she feels about this statue, something perhaps beyond human comprehension compels her to kiss the statue, hence the title and Margaret Brundage’s cover for the issue. After having fought off indescribable little horrors and seen some rather disconcerting stuff (the most evocative of these being a herd of blind and insane white horses, galloping through the dark fields), there’s a peculiar sense of relief—almost ecstacy—when Jirel kisses the black statue and gains what she deduces to be a poison kiss—a kiss she’ll then pass on Guillaume. Very strange, that of all the weapons she could be given a kiss of deah is what will satisfy her bloodlust.

Firstly, the kiss is clearly meant to be a stand-in for sex, as a kind of very thin metaphor; and not just one of the three kisses but all of them. Guillaume forces a kiss on Jirel, but we’re to understand that, at least subtextual, this was more than “just” a kiss; and Jirel kissing the black statue strikes me as a variation on the deal-with-the-devil plot turn (I’m thinking specifically of the film Belladonna of Sadness wherein the heroine has sex with the devil and becomes a powerful witch), even though the statue is inanimate. The black god’s kiss itself is mystifying, but it’s also a sexual experience. It may seem assbackwards that the weapon Jirel has sought requires such close content with her would-be victim, but the intimacy is deliberate since Jirel wants not only vengeance on Guillaume but also to dominate him—to have that kiss again, but on her terms this time.

This brings us to the ending, which is divisive and rather hard to explain since it’s here that the psycho-sexual angle kicks into high gear, and indeed it’s hard to rationalize what happens at the end without psychoanalysis. When Jirel hurries back to the surface (being made suddenly afraid to see the horrors of the depths with full clarity), she finds Guillaume with his men, and also Gervase, who may or may not have ratted on Jirel. The confrontation here is made all the more bewildering because there’s not even a word of dialogue in this scene, and while the narrator does a little explaining we do not get a play-by-play of Jirel’s mind. Rather than have Jirel killed on the spot, Guillaume does the heterosexual male thing and seems pretty happy to see her again, for some reason expecting a consensual kiss from her this time—which in a way he does get.

It’s not hard to imagine an alternate version of this story where Jirel and Guillaume have sex and it’s her lips down there that deliver the poison, and the strangest thing of all is that the outcome would basically be the same; more importantly, despite sex being far more overtly erotic than a kiss, the erotic power of the kiss is still perfectly intact and comprehensive. The moment of the kill is almost orgasmic for Jirel, but this is immediately followed by the lowest of lows—the realization, too late, that Guillaume living rent free in Jirel’s head this whole time was not simple due to hatred: it was also all-consuming lust which manifested as murderous obsession. Maybe not love, as the text hints at, but certainly there’s an attraction between the warrior maid and the conqueror that, under different circumstances, could have led to a wonderful partnership.

They knew he was dead. That was unmistakable in the way he lay. Jirel stood very still, looking down upon him, and strangely it seemed to her that all the lights in the world had gone out. A moment before he had been so big and vital, so magnificent in the torchlight—she could still feel his kiss upon her mouth, and the hard warmth of his arms…

Suddenly and blindingly it came upon her what she had done. She knew now why such heady violence had flooded her whenever she thought of him—knew why the light-devil in her own form had laughed so derisively—knew the price she must pay for taking a gift from a demon. She knew that there was no light anywhere in the world, now that Guillaume was gone.

Jirel regretting killing Guillaume is a character choice that some will find hard to swallow: this is, after all, akin to a rape victim falling in love with her rapist after the fact. Another way of looking at it is that Jirel, having been obsessed with Guillaume, suddenly finds her existence devoid of meaning once she’s gotten rid of the object of her obsession. Another way of looking at all this is that Moore may be suggesting that the relationship between Jirel and Guillaume is tragic, as they are (in some ways anyway) kindred spirits who have the misfortune of being on opposite sides of the battlefield. Certainly Moore did not understand consent in 1934 as we understand it now, but I can’t help but feel like she’s trying to say something about the occasional blurriness of consent, and how sexual desire may manifest in ways people can’t predict. I can speculate all I want, but it’s still impressive that the actual meaning behind “The Black God’s Kiss” remains, after nearly a century, elusive.

Oh, and to complicate thing further, we get notice at the very end of a direct sequel in the wings, “Black God’s Shadow,” which will be available in the December 1934 issue of Weird Tales. Well, I guess I know what the next Moore story I cover will be!

A Step Farther Out

I’ll be honest, when I read “Shambleau” I enjoyed it enough but didn’t think it was all that special—though it was certainly well-written considering Moore was barely out of her teens at the time. However, on a deeper reading, “The Black God’s Kiss” strikes me as easily the more impressive venture, and it’s a shame that she basically gave up sword and sorcery once she started teaming up regularly with Kuttner given her obvious knack for it. The premise is simple, with as little context for the conflict being given as possible, and there are a few logical questions left unanswered, but this is a disturbed and deeply evocative piece that showed Moore (who, mind you, was still very early in her career) as a force to be reckoned with. The ending is not for everyone, but I’m convinced Moore knew what she was doing, especially considering she seems to have written “Black God’s Shadow” before the first story was even published. Speaking of which, there’s only a two-month gap in publication between these stories…

See you next time.

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Things Beyond: March 2023

March 1st, 2023
(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, July 1933.)

Weird Tales, across incarnations, has been arguably the most important outlet for dark fantasy and horror in the American market for the past century now. Yes, it’s been that long. The first issue of Weird Tales is marked March 1923 and would have appeared on newsstands in February (I’m not splitting hairs), and while it wasn’t immediately impressive it would become the quintessential pulp horror magazine within a decade. Given the nature of my site and how important Weird Tales is, I thought it appropriate (not to mention a break away from tackling serials) to do a month-long tribute by reviewing entirely short stories from this magazine’s pages—but make no mistake, this is not an attempt to cover its incredibly wide-spanning history. What I’m doing rather is to cover the most famous period of Weird Tales: from the mid-1920s to the end of the 1930s.

In a way this is not so much a tribute to Weird Tales as to the man who, more than anyone, made it the legend it now is: Farnsworth Wright. Wright hopped on as editor with the November 1924 issue and stayed until failing health forced him to step down after the March 1940 issue; he died only a few months later. But in the decade and a half that Wright was editor there was a profound change in the magazine’s contents, as it went from focusing on unassuming ghost stories to encompassing a wider range of “weird” fiction, including but not limited to sword and sorcery, operatic science fiction, and of course, cosmic horror. Ghost stories remained a firm part of the magazine’s identity, but under Wright we saw several big forerunners to modern horror and fantasy, including H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, and indeed Weird Tales was the birthplace of both Conan the Barbarian and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Weird Tales was not that friendly to novellas unless they were serialized, and anyway I figured it’d be more accurate a representation to review all short stories this month, which also allows for a more diverse set of authors. We’ve got some famous ones here, but also some deep cuts that I’m very much interested in exploring.

Anyway, here are the short stories:
1. “The Stolen Body” by H. G. Wells. From the November 1925 issue. This is the first true reprint I’ll be reviewing for Remembrance. “The Stolen Body” was first published in the November 1898 issue of The Strand Magazine, but we’re reading it as it appeared in Weird Tales, and apparently Wright (or somebody) deemed it major enough to make it the cover story despite its reprint status. Wells is someone who needs no introduction, and this is a story from his peak era.
2. “The Canal” by Everil Worrell. From the December 1927 issue. Not much is known about this author, but her vampire story “The Canal” has been reprinted several times over the years, including as a “classic” reprint in Weird Tales itself. Lovecraft was apparently a big admirer of this one, and he also didn’t seem immediately aware that Worrell was a woman. There’s a later revised version with a different ending, but we’re reading its first magazine appearance.
3. “The Star-Stealers” by Edmond Hamilton. From the February 1929 issue. Hamilton had made his debut in Weird Tales, and he soon proved to be the most prolific contributor of “weird-scientific stories,” or ya know, just science fiction. “The Star-Stealers” is the second entry in the episodic Interstellar Patrol series, which while not often read now was an early exmaple of space opera, which Hamilton helped codify alongside E. E. Smith and Jack Williamson.
4. “The Black Stone” by Robert E. Howard. From the November 1931 issue. This has to be the fastest I’ve returned to an author for my site, since only last month I finished covering Howard’s Conan serial The People of the Black Circle. “The Black Stone,” however, is not sword and sorcery but cosmic horror, and it’s supposed to be one of the best old-school Lovecraftian narratives, on top of being one of the first examples of someone taking cues from Lovecraft’s work.
5. “The Dreams in the Witch-House” by H. P. Lovecraft. From the July 1933 issue. Speaking of which, it’d be impossible to do a Weird Tales tribute without covering its most famous contributor, although Lovecraft was certainly not that at the time. Wright and Lovecraft did not get along, with Wright rejecting At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow Out of Time.” Still, this is one of his more famous short stories, and it even got adapted for TV recently.
6. “The Black God’s Kiss” by C. L. Moore. From the October 1934 issue. The only reread of the bunch, and that’s because I honestly did not give this one the attention I should have when I encountered it a couple years ago. Moore is now more known for collaborating with her husband Henry Kuttner, but she started as one of the more popular authors in Weird Tales. “The Black God’s Kiss” is the first in the Jirel of Jory series, featuring the titular sword-and-sorcery heroine.
7. “Vulthoom” by Clark Ashton Smith. From the September 1935 issue. The literary sorcerer returns! Smith was, for a brief time, one of the most prolific contributors to Weird Tales, although he mostly retired from writing fiction by the time Wright left. “Vulthoom” is a “late” Smith story, and you can tell because it was one of only a few he put out in 1935. It’s also a comparitibely rare example of Smith doing SF, with the setting being not Earth but a haunted Mars.
8. “Strange Orchids” by Dorothy Quick. From the March 1937 issue. As with Worrell we don’t know much about Quick, and unlike “The Canal” this has not been reprinted so often. I do remember first seeing Quick’s name in Unknown, the magazine that for a brief time usurped Weird Tales, but she appeared more in the latter; she basically stopped writing fiction once the first incarnation of Weird Tales shut down. Probably the most obscure pick of the bunch.
9. “Roads” by Seabury Quinn. From the January 1938 issue. Quinn was the most popular author to appear in Weird Tales during the Wright era, and yet his reputation dwindled enough since his death that he later “won” the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award. The posthumous obscurity could be because a lot of what Quinn wrote was hackwork, but “Roads” is distinct for apparently being one of those pieces that Quinn wrote out of passion, being an earnestly told Christmas story.
I know Halloween was only like five months ago, but truth be told it’s always Halloween in my heart. If I could get away with just reading and reviewing spooky fiction I probably would; nothing warms my bones like a good horror yarn. The greatest hits from Weird Tales are still cited after nearly a century, but I suspect there are also deeper cuts (especially by female authors, as there would’ve been several) that are worth our attention. We have a healthy variety of authors and a good deal of diversity as to this magazine’s contents, ranging from the supernatural to the weird-scientific.

But enough buildup…

It’s time to venture into the eerie, the uncanny, and the WEIRD!
Short Story Review: “Daemon” by C. L. Moore

October 17th, 2022

(Cover by Lawrence. Famous Fantastic Mysteries, October 1946.)

Who Goes There?

When I reviewed Clark Ashton Smith’s “Genius Loci” some days ago, I said that Smith, H. P. Lovecraft, and Robert E. Howard were the defining authors during the “classic” period of Weird Tales, in the ’30s. This is not entirely true. I omitted a fourth name because I knew I was gonna get to her very soon, and now she’s getting her own introduction. C. L. Moore was one of the great practicioners of SFF in the ’30s and ’40s, and her rise to prominence was swift in a way that most authors’ are not. Her first professional sale, “Shambleau,” was published in Weird Tales in 1933, and it instantly made her a big deal to that magazine’s readership. During this early period, Moore created two series, both set in the same continuity (though this was not immediately known), named after their protagonists: Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry. The former leans toward planetary romance while the latter leans toward heroic fantasy, and this duality was a line Moore would walk for the rest of her career.

Things get complicated when Moore marries a fellow author, Henry Kuttner, in 1940, after the two had already collaborated on a story or two. Kuttner was a few years younger than Moore, and was a big fan of her work, soon exhanging letters with her and assuming (erroneously) at first that she was a man. Once misunderstandings were out of the way, they formed inarguably the biggest power couple in old-timey SFF, collaborating prolifically throughout the ’40s and writing together so seamlessly that they could not tell apart each other’s writing, and neither can anyone else. To this day there’s no agreement as to who wrote what or how much one contributed to the other’s writing, even when a story is credited to only one of them. “Daemon” is credited to Moore solo, and for reasons I’ll get into I believe firmly enough that Kuttner had basically nothing to do with its creation.

Placing Coordinates

First printed in the October 1946 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, which is on the Archive. FFM was primarily a reprint magazine without zeroing in on a specific genre, covering science fiction, fantasy, and even non-supernatural horror. In the October 1946 issue alone we have reprinted stories by H. G. Wells (a presumably abridged version of The Island of Dr. Moreau) and Bram Stoker, but “Daemon” was an original story. One need not look far to see why Moore would submit her fantasy-horror story to a reprint magazine: the magazine market for fantasy was quite small in the ’40s, with the only other notable outlet being a now past-its-prime Weird Tales. Now, why, when reading these stories for review, do I always try to read the original magazine version? Partly this is because sometimes there are revisions made between the magazine publication and the book publication, but also, there’s flavor when reading anything within the confines of a magazine issue. Take, for instance, Virgil Finlay’s interior illustration for “Daemon,” which as usual is stunning, and which we would not have gotten in a book reprint.

When it comes to reprints of “Daemon” we’re talking quality over quantity; none of the reprints seem to be, well, in print, but these volumes are both good collector’s items and easy enough to find. First we have The Best of C. L. Moore, part of a best-of series by Ballantine Books (Henry Kuttner also got one), and boy do I wanna get these two together. Then we have A Treasury of Modern Fantasy, edited by Terry Carr and Martin H. Greenberg, which might be the same book as Masters of Fantasy; it’s edited by the same people, and unless I’m missing something the contents are also the same. If you’re fond of Moore and Kuttner, at some point you have to get your hands on Two-Handed Engine: The Selected Stories of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, a mammoth tome that collects all the essential short fiction by both authors, solo as well as in collaboration.

Enhancing Image

“Daemon” is a deathbed confession (not a spoiler, our narrator is upfront about this) told by Luiz o Bobo, his title apparently coming from his simplemindedness. Luiz, despite his own admitted lack of intelligence, has a special gift that may well be more of a curse: he sees these things that accompany other people, calling them daemons when they could just as easily be called ghosts. According to Luiz, everyone has a daemon on his shoulder—everyone except him. At the outset of the story we’re far more planted on the horror end of the horror-fantasy spectrum which “Daemon” plays with, and there’s some delicious eeriness at work here. “Do you know who stands beside you, padre, listening while I talk?” says Luiz at one point. The daemons themselves don’t seem to do anything exactly; they don’t have voices, they don’t talk, they can’t interact with the material world—at least not directly. As we’re to find out later, though, it’s maybe possible for a daemon to take possession of its host.

Luiz recalls the death of his grandmother, for a long time the only earthly person who treated with decency, and how her daemon changed as she was dying; it was an unusual event, as the daemon grew brighter, radiating a brightness that threatened to blind Luiz, before finally disappearing once his grandmother’s spirit has moved to—somewhere else. What this could signify, the daemon changing colors as its host nears the end of their life, we’re not given a clear answer on, but then Luiz is no rocket scientist. Actually, let me take a moment to talk about Luiz’s characterization, because this is easily the most interesting part of the story for me: Luiz is obviously neurodivergent. While “Daemon” is on its face a dark fantasy yarn about a man who gets shanghaied and then stranded on an island with a bunch of magical creatures, it’s more potently a tale of alienation, about a man who is unable to relate to other people in the conventional sense, who quite literally sees something “normal” people have that he lacks. Make sure to put a pin in this one.

Oh right, getting shanghaied. Luiz has a bad night at a saloon and finds himself an unwilling passenger on a trading vessel. As you do. The fact that Luiz is not very smart, and can’t even read, makes him an easy target. It’s here that we come across the closest the story has to a villain: the captain of the ship. The captain, who normally would not be the happiest or kindest of men, seems to have his violent urges heightened by a suitably evil-looking daemon which follows him around. The causal relationship between host and daemon is not clear, but it’s quite possible that a daemon’s disposition influences its host, with the captain’s daemon being a particularly nasty example. The captain’s daemon’s uncanniness is not helped by the fact that not only is it blood-red, it doesn’t seem to have eyes.

Now, most men have shapes that walk behind them, padre. Perhaps you know that, too. Some of them are dark, like the shapes I saw in the saloon. Some of them are bright, like that which followed my grandmother. Some of them are colored, pale colors like ashes or rainbows. But this man had a scarlet daemon. And it was a scarlet beside which blood itself is ashen. The color blinded me. And yet it drew me, too. I could not take my eyes away, nor could I look at it long without pain. I never saw a color more beautiful, nor more frightening. It made my heart shrink within me, and quiver like a dog that fears the whip. If I have a soul, perhaps it was my soul that quivered. And I feared the beauty of the color as much as I feared the terror it awoke in me. It is not good to see beauty in that which is evil.

Luiz does find one ally on the ship, called the Shaughnessy (we don’t get his actual name), a dying man from “a foreign land called Ireland” who apparently also comes from a very well-to-do family, and who stands as the only thing between Luiz and oblivion. The captain hates his guts and there will come a point when the Shaugnessy will not be around to protect him. This early-middle section of the narrative, with Luiz on the ship, is probably my favorite part; it’s atmospheric, exceptionally brutal, it’s set on the high seas (which I have a fondness for), and it elaborates on the disconnect Luiz feels with other people. It’s not so much that Luiz befriends the Shaughnessy as he sees the Shaughnessy as a guardian figure, since the most Luiz can hope for, realistically, is not be treated like garbage by others. This is not to say Luiz is a blank slate or a totally passive protagonist; nay, he’s quite active, even if he doesn’t articulate his internal anxieties vocally.

It’s here that Moore does something seemingly clever and really plants the seeds of doubt for us, as to whether Luiz is right or if he’s just delirious. The ship’s water gets tainted, which is pretty bad. “A man can pick the maggots out of his salt pork if he must, but bad water is a thing he cannot mend.” Not helping things is that a particularly brutal encounter with the captain results in Luiz getting what is probably a skull fracture (saying he heard his skull crack, which sounds horrific), and it’s amazing he doesn’t simply die on the ship. Hell, dying at this point might not be so bad. Luiz contemplates suicide, which in his predominantly Catholic homeland of Brazil would be deemed a mortal sin, but Luiz rationalizes that he can’t go to Hell if he doesn’t have a soul, but virtue of not having a daemon. Checkmate, Christians! But no, he does not kill himself, and it’s about here that things get very weird indeed.

Before we get to the spoilers section, I wanna return to something I said earlier, which is that “Daemon” is pretty discernibly a solo Moore effort and not a collaboration. Not that I want to downplay Kuttner’s talent (which happens too often, such as on ISFDB where works under just Kuttner’s name are far more likely to be listed as collaborations than with Moore), but I can’t find any Kuttner-esque elements here. More tellingly, this has the tone and polish of a Moore tale, in the sense that it’s deeply melancholy, even humorless, yet there is a real humanity to Luiz’s character that makes him relatable. I’m not sure why, but Moore tends to sympathize with the underdog, not in a self-congratulatory way, but in a genuinely empathetic way, where she manages to convey a character’s fears and aspirations. Kuttner was an excellent humorist, but Moore was almost like a poet, and “Daemon” reads in parts almost like a poem. Moore wears her emotions on her sleeves, which feels prescient given how often old-timey SFF authors are demeaned (sometimes rightly) as emotionally inept Tough Guys™.

There Be Spoilers Here

You may be thinking, what does that Virgil Finlay illustration have to do with the story? Well…

Luiz and the Shaughnessy get stranded on an island and it’s not some ordinary Robinson Crusoe island: it’s a magical island. The Shaughnessy kicks the bucket, but not before giving Luiz some instruction that he doesn’t do a good job explaining. That’s fine, since, probably unbeknownst to the Shaughnessy, Luiz is not left all lonesome after the fact; he quickly finds some friends. Luiz had aludded to nymphs, or as he called them, “ninfas” (I’m not joking when I say I had first misread it as ninjas), at the start of his confession, but now we’re actually getting to those. Finlay’s illustration shows one of these nymphs, called the orlead (who actually talks with Luiz), and a unicorn. Yeah, there’s a unicorn. This place fucking RULES. Admittedly, I don’t buy into the Eden-like nature of the island, as this pure place where there’s no pain (the Shaughnessy is pretty chill about dying), as it feels too idyllic, not to mention it casts doubt on Luiz’s story despite the fact that he’s telling the truth.

But soon there’s trouble in paradise, and the captain has landed in search of his castaways, most likely to do away with them. With the Shaughnessy already dead he need only worry about one now, but Luiz has the fantasy creatures of the island on his side. Okay, I should be a bit more specific here: these are, at least in part, Greek mythological creatures, hence the appearance of the humanoid goat-footed god Pan who comes in as a sort of deus ex machina. I have to admit the image of Pan chasing the captain (who can now see him, apparently) literally around the island until the captain, thoroughly exhausted, runs back to the place he started at, is funnier than it’s supposed to be. It’s weird, sure, and it’s not boring, but it’s a touch goofy.

I said before that a person’s daemon grows brighters as that person’s death nears, and while I’m not a fan of the turn towards action in the climax, I have to respect just how creepy the captain’s final moments are. We’re not totally sure what happens, because Luiz averts his eyes, but it’s clear that the captain, in the last moments of his life, becomes aware of the red-hot daemon that had been stalking him the whole time, and the way Moore writes his death is the closest the story comes to being genuinely scary, as opposed to just eerie.

Some knowledge deeper than any wisdom warned me to cover my eyes. For I saw its lids flicker, and I knew it would not be good to watch when that terrible gaze looked out at last upon a world it had never seen except through the captain’s eyes.

I fell to my knees and covered my face. And the captain, seeing that, must have known at long last what it was I saw behind him. I think now that in the hour of a man’s death, he knows. I think in that last moment he knows, and turns, and for the first time and the last, looks his daemon in the face.

I did not see him do it. I did not see anything. But I heard a great, resonant cry, like the mighty music that beats through paradise, a cry full of triumph and thanksgiving, and joy at the end of a long, long, weary road. There was mirth in it, and beauty, and all the evil the mind can compass.

After a detour into fantasy we’ve swung back around into horror, almost of the cosmic variety. There are things people are not supposed to see—like their own daemons. Weirdly, I find this aspect to be the least involving, as the scope of the story has by now thoroughly gone beyond Luiz’s psychology and grappled onto something that’s quite “spooky” by not very scary. For me “Daemon” works better as a horror-tinged character study than a straight horror yarn, and likewise I don’t find the stuff with Pan and the nymphs to be totally convincing, although Moore’s lyrical hand stays steady, and I have to admit there’s a bit of a sense of wonder with the island and its fantastical secrets. This isn’t pulp horror but rather something in the Unknown tradiction, and hell, “Daemon” could’ve been published there had it not gone bust in 1943. My point is that Moore can sure as hell write, even when she does something that conceptually I don’t think is the most interesting thing ever.

A Step Farther Out

After I finished “Daemon” I did something I’ve not done before for these reviews, and it’s really something I ought to do again: I looked up readers’ reactions. Not modern reviews of the story (I haven’t even checked if there are any), but FFM‘s letter column, which, as it turns out, was fairly active. Not on the same level as Planet Stories, mind you, but still, we’ve got some yays and nays from the peanut gallery! As far as I can tell reception to “Daemon” was pretty damn positive, although there is one comment that I found interesting, made by some bloke named R. I. Martini, in the February 1947 issue:

Miss Moore’s name is all too seldom in your table of contents, but when listed she inevitably brings forth a new and unique situation. “Daemon,” in that respect, held to standard, though somehow it didn’t have the scope or pimch anticipated. It was when she came to the “ninfas” that disillusionment as to its cIassic qualifications set in. Albeit the atmosphere was there, so saving whatever was left of the day.

I really loved the first half or so, when Luiz is on the ship, whereas I merely liked the second half, when he’s on the island. I think I get where Martini is coming from, because I can’t help but feel like something is lost once the nymphs come into play, and it’s basically spelled out that what happened to Luiz had to be fantastical and not a big hallucination as the result of, say, the brain damage he had undoubtedly suffered. Which is not to say my earlier evaluation of Luiz was rendered invalid by the second half, because I think his character still very much works on an allegorical level; I just wish the literal level was a bit more satisfying. Moore is still a strong writer on a sentence-by-sentence level, her penmanship bordering on the poetic—indeed I wouldn’t be surprised if her lyricism influenced George R. R. Martin’s early work. “Daemon” doesn’t feel like it comes from the ’40s, but rather feels a bit more timeless than that, like Moore is tapping into a study of human loneliness that remains relevant, and for that I admire it.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: October 2022

October 1st, 2022
(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, June 1933.)

Halloween is getting close, and you know that means: a Halloween-appropriate story lineup! I feel no shame when I say I fucking love Halloween; it’s the only holiday I really get in the mood for. As such I figured I ought to do something special for October, not only picking more horror-centric stories but also changing my rotation method. Normally I would cycle short stories and novellas with serials, but something I’ve realized about horror (and you can say this is just my opinion) is that it works best in small doses. There wasn’t even much of a market for horror novels until the ’80s, and aside from Weird Tales there has, historically, not been much magazine space given to longer horror tales unless they’re reprints. As such, serials are OUT this month, and so are novellas, much as I love the things. Instead of getting only a few short stories and novellas we’re looking at nine short stories and novelettes, which is a considerable number!

For a while, when picking stories for my schedule, I had planned on including works by Lovecraft, Bradbury, and Stephen King, but decided at the last minute that I didn’t wanna deal with those who are unquestionably the most popular in the field; instead I went for deeper cuts, some by established horror authors, others by authors who are not normally associated with horror. I had almost included “Colony” by Philip K. Dick, but seeing as how I had already read it before and since I had come to the conclusion that I wanted all of these to be first reads, I ejected it. I’m sorry, Phil, I STILL LOVE YOU. This is also the first lineup where there are more female authors than male authors—that’s right, there are five women against four men! But to “compensate” we have the raw male chauvinism of James Blish and Harlan Ellison.

Now, as for the short stories…
1. “The Mindworm” by C. M. Kornbluth. Published in the December 1950 issue of Worlds Beyond. While not usually associated with horror, Kornbluth’s fiction tends to run in a morbid vein, being incredibly pessimistic and clearly disguted with the human condition. Despite dying at the horribly young age of 34, Kornbluth was both something of a prodigy (he started getting published professionally while still a teenager) and prolific at short lengths, especially from 1949 to his death in 1958. “The Mindworm” belongs to that streak of fiction, and is apparently a rare instance of Kornbluth writing straight horror.
2. “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” by Alyssa Wong. Published in the October 2015 issue of Nightmare Magazine. Wong is a young author in the field, and their body of work remains fairly small, but their interests are spread impressively wide and they’ve already gotten their fair share of accolades. On top of being a productive short story writer (no novel as of yet, though), Wong has also written for comic books and even video games, with Overwatch being their big credit in the latter medium. “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” won the Nebula as well as the World Fantasy Award.
3. “Bite-Me-Not or, Fleur de Feu” by Tanith Lee. Published in the October 1984 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Lee is (or was) a startlingly prolific author of mostly fantasy and horror, writing dozens of novels plus a small army of short stories. Her reputation is apparently quite high, but unfortunately I’ve not read anything by her before. I found out through someone on Twitter that she’s one of the very few authors in SFF history to have more than one magazine issue made in tribute to her, including but not limited to an issue the revived Weird Tales.
4. “Genius Loci” by Clark Ashton Smith. Published in the June 1933 issue of Weird Tales. Smith was, along with H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, one of the defining authors contributing to Weird Tales during its “classic” run. A poet first and foremost, Smith turned to writing short stories as a way of paying the bills, and during that brief time in the early to mid-1930s he gave Lovecraft a run for his money with both his lavish prose and his tales of cosmic speculation. Smith virtually stopped writing fiction by 1937, but his legacy very much lives on.
5. “Daemon” by C. L. Moore. Published in the October 1946 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries. Aside from the trio of Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith, no author defined the glory days of Weird Tales more than C. L. Moore, although unlike her aforementioned contemporaries she would move on to bigger and better things. Moore was, alongside her husband Henry Kuttner, one of the great masters of Golden Age SF, but “Daemon” sees her try her hand at horror and fantasy once again, at a time when the market for both genres had shrunk greatly.
6. “The Horse Lord” by Lisa Tuttle. Published in the June 1977 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Tuttle debuted in 1972 and immediately made some sort of impression with the SFF readership, being barely out of her teens when she tied with Spider Robinson for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. While she sometimes writes science fiction, most famously collaborating with George R. R. Martin, Tuttle’s home turf would remain feminist-tinged horror, and more often at short lengths.
7. “Grail” by Harlan Ellison. From the April 1981 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine. Ellison has to be onf of the most acclaimed and yet divisive personae in SFF history. When his career gained direction in the mid-’60s he seemingly catapulted from a second-rate hack to one of the biggest names in the field, eventually winning the Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, and other awards. Much of Ellison’s fiction can be classified as horror, despite Ellison himself not being thought of as primarily a horror author, but “Grail” sees him in pure terror mode.
8. “The Idol of the Flies” by Jane Rice. Published in the June 1942 issue of Unknown. Rice is pretty obscure nowadays, which isn’t surprising considering she never had a novel published (she did write one, but for reasons I’ll get into it’s lost media) and her output became highly sporadic after Unknown shut down. A shame, because Rice was one of the more interesting young horror authors coming about at a time when there wasn’t much of a market for horror. “The Idol of the Flies” is considered major enough to have Rice’s single collection named after it.
9. “There Shall Be No Darkness” by James Blish. Published in the April 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. Like Kornbluth, Blish was a member of the Futurians, a New York-based SF fan group that would prove unspeakably influential on the field, especially in the ’50s. Also like Kornbluth, Blish would die fairly young, albeit under different circumstances. 1950 saw the start of Blish’s iconic Cities in Flight series, but he also produced a curious SF-horror mashup with “There Shall Be No Darkness,” which supposedly explains werewolves in science-fictional terms.
As of late I’ve been struggling a bit to keep up the read/review schedule as my day job has gotten a bit more hectic lately (though my natural tendency toward procrastination doesn’t help things), but with all short stories this month it looks like I’ll get a breather for the moment. I’m in the mood for SPOOKY MONTH and I hope these stories won’t let me down.

Won’t you read with me?