Tag: unknown

Short Story Review: “The Bronze Door” by Raymond Chandler

May 26th, 2025

(Cover by Graves Gladney. Unknown, November 1939.)

Who Goes There?

Crime fiction was and still is a genre kept in its own ghetto, like SF and fantasy, but as with those other genres it sometimes has broken into the literary mainstream. One of the big success stories of classic crime fiction is Raymond Chandler, who aside from writing some poetry had not tried his hand at writing professionally at all until he was in his forties. (This is a lesson in how if you’re such-and-such an age and wondering if it’s too late to try your hand at writing, don’t worry.) He was born in Chicago but came to be deeply affiliated with LA, which is no surprise given that that nearly all his novels take place in LA and its surroundings. He also spent some of his formative years in England, getting an education there, hence his US-UK dual citizenship. In fact Chandler’s knowledge of England plays into today’s story, which is not a detective story (although there is a detective in it), nor is it set in the US at all, but instead Victorian-era London. “The Bronze Door” is the only Chandler story to be published first in an SFF magazine, and it saw print the same year as The Big Sleep, his debut novel. Chandler had turned fifty by this point. He ended up writing only seven novels plus a rather modest supply of short fiction (he mostly stopped with the latter by around 1940), but it was enough.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the November 1939 issue of Unknown. It has the rare of actually appearing in a genre magazine twice, being reprinted in the October 1953 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can also find it in the Chandler volume Collected Stories.

Enhancing Image

James Sutton-Cornish is fat and middle-aged, and also given to day drinking, which angers his wife to the point where she can’t take it anymore. Mr. and Mrs. Sutton-Cornish have been living in the estate of the former’s ancestors, which really is the only thing that belongs to him; everything else belongs to the wife, including Teddy, their dog. “The rest was hers. Even the clothes he wore, the money in his bank account. But the house was still his—at least in name.” With their divorce underway, James heads out and goes into a bit of a stupor, and catches a cab—that being a horse-and-buggy, not a car. This strikes him as odd, but not that odd. “The Bronze Door” is presumably set in what was then the present day (the 1930s), and at one point James refers to “the war,” probably meaning World War I. But the cab seems to go back in time, at least to the Edwardian era, so that as James makes his way to Soho he also travels to an older, darker, grimier London. He doesn’t like this very much. He ends up at an auction house, and this is where he comes across the door of the title, which is a pretty weird contraption. It’s a metal door that can be placed anywhere and which opens one way, to—somewhere. Possibly nowhere. The theory we get from James is that the bronze door comes from the Golden Age of Islam, in which a sultan or whoever would use it as a method of hiding inconvenient concubines. (It’s Chandler, so of course sex comes up, but it’s also Unknown so it’s very tame.) James takes the door back home with him. Hilarity ensues.

Not that James was a good person to begin with (actually he and Mrs. Sutton-Cornish were arguably made for each other in that they’re both kinda evil), but “The Bronze Door” sees Our Anti-Hero™ slip into outright villainy by the simple abuse of a magical power. We see what the door does by some criminal who’s on the run going through it and simply vanishing into thin air, and it doesn’t take long for James to get a few ideas as to how the door might be applied to his benefit. Like getting rid of a bitchy ex-wife. There’s a tinge of misogyny here, as well as a homophobic remark that Chandler throws out there out of nowhere. At his home, James has portraits of now-gone family members, with the one sticking out being a general who was apparently an evil piece of shit, and also “fruity-looking” in the attire he wore for his portrait. Of course we’re supposed to infer that this general was depraved and debauched in some way, although in ways that Chandler is not really able to describe; for better or worse the general’s crimes are left up to the imagination. Given that Chandler’s writing can be pretty hardboiled and graphic for the time, I have to wonder if “The Bronze Door” was written as this tame or if it got put through the washer by John W. Campbell and his secretary. In the introduction for the F&SF reprint, the editors say that Chandler had actually written a lot of fantasy fiction over the years, but without the intent of seeing it published. The implication is that there’s this treasure trove of such fiction written by Chandler, but given that Chandler died in 1959 and that literally none of this alleged fiction has turned up, I have to wonder if they were misled, or if perhaps Chandler’s estate had his unpublished work locked away indefinitely. Needless to say this is not as hardboiled as Chandler’s usual stuff, and also given that he turned mostly to writing novels after this point it’s easy to see how he only had one other fantasy story published.

I mentioned earlier that while it’s not really a detective story, “The Bronze Door” does have a detective, in the form of Detective-sergeant Lloyd, who starts out as being on the trail of the criminal James has sent through the door, and who later sniffs around once one too many people in the area go missing without a trace. Lloyd is probably the closest we get in Chandler’s work to his take on Sherlock Holmes, although Lloyd is less a Sherlock parody and more your typical image of a late 19th or early 20th century British detective. (I should also probably mention again that the time period for “The Bronze Door” is rather vague, since it’s implied to take place in what was then the modern day, but there are also hints of a pre-WWI Britain. Chandler doesn’t explain it really, and this might be my biggest quibble with the story.) Generally Chandler could’ve done to explain more of the setting, or rather given us a more vivid picture, but what he does give us is splendid in the moment. Nobody does the simile quite like Chandler. There are descriptions of things here that I’d never even thought of before, let alone seen in writing. Philip Marlowe, the jaded protagonist of all of Chandler’s novels, has a way with words that tells us he’s more cultured than he appears, being a chronically drunk private detective, and Chandler does what he can to translate this prose-poetry to a very different setting with a very different kind of protagonist. If this were a more typical Chandler story then Lloyd would be the viewpoint character, since he’s the closest we get to a hero in this ordeal, but instead for the most part we’re stuck in the shoes of the no-good upper-class bum that is James.

There Be Spoilers Here

After James has gitten rid of the wife, and also her dog, one gets the sense that the walls are closing in on him. He’s “won” in the short term, but now he’s lonelier than ever, firing the few people working at his estate and spending the rest of the story as a cranky loner, sinking deeper into what is clearly insanity. There’s a hint of the gothic about “The Bronze Door,” with both the architecture of James’s estate and the implication that he’s falling prey to a strain of insanity that runs in his family. It’s somewhere between “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Rats in the Walls,” although it’s not quite a horror story. Naturally murder (in effect if not the exact result) will out, and eventually Lloyd tracks down James. The two have a bit of a fight, although it doesn’t last long, which makes since given we’re told Lloyd is a lot more physically fit than the decrepit James. The ending as a whole is not surprising, but a neat touch is that Lloyd gets some PTSD from James disappearing into the bronze door, it being a supernatural event that he can never bring himself to explain. It’s something that would freak out anyone outside of The X-Files, even someone as experienced as Lloyd. But hey, he gets a promotion and becomes an inspector by the end, so it’s not all bad. The fact that we never see what becomes of people who go through the bronze door makes it just a bit creepier. I should mention that Chandler, aside from being a raging alcoholic, seemed to have episodes of depression, most severely after his wife died, wherein he actually attempted suicide, so his fiction would be pessimistic.

A Step Farther Out

As you can see, “The Bronze Door” is a little detour in Chandler’s oeuvre, being a fantastic mystery, but not a mystery of the sort that Chandler was used to writing. Then there’s the setting, of which we never see the like again before or after with Chandler. It’s predictable, but also a solid story that’s elevated by Chandler being frankly a better prose stylist than most of the people contributing to Unknown. When you read Chandler you read for the flavor of the words more so than the plot. Not sure how Campbell managed to procure a story from someone who apparently had no experience with fantasy, but it’s a charming and somewhat eerie diversion that sees a master outside of his realm of expertise.

See you next time.
Complete Novel Review: Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp

December 31st, 2023
(Cover by Edd Cartier. Unknown, December 1939.)

Who Goes There?

L. Sprague de Camp made his debut in 1937, and would remain more or less active until his death in 2000, although he would lean much more towards fantasy than SF after 1960. De Camp technically debuted before John W. Campbell’s takeover of Astounding, but he quickly became one of Campbell’s court jesters, his humor being just innuendo-laden enough but more often relying on deadpan and slapstick delivery. But it was with Unknown, Astounding‘s fantasy sister magazine, that we saw much of de Camp’s best early work, both solo and in collaboration with Fletchet Pratt. It’s not surprising that in The Best of L. Sprague de Camp a solid portion of the stories included are from Unknown, despite that magazine only lasting a few years. De Camp would go on hiatus during America’s involvement in World War II, and he would not return to writing in earnest until around 1950. He’s probably most known today for his helping in raising awareness of Robert E. Howard’s work, if also his meddling in said work. The two would’ve been close contemporaries, had Howard lived.

Lest Darkness Fall was de Camp’s first solo novel (he had already written None But Lucifer with H. L. Gold), and it’s often considered his best. It was published in Unknown as a solid 50,000-word novel, which is why I’m confused by Wikipedia calling it the “short story version.” De Camp must’ve expanded it for book publication in 1941, but not by much, and he revised it for a 1949 reprint. This is often considered an SF novel, which makes its inclusion in Unknown a bit strange, but I do have a couple theories as to why it’s here: the first is the setting, which is pre-medieval and thus almost reads like low fantasy; the second is that Unknown had a policy of sometimes printing whole novels while Astounding did not, and Campbell maybe couldn’t fit Lest Darkness Fall in as a serial in the latter, for indeed it would’ve been too long to run in one piece.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December 1939 issue of Unknown, which is on the Archive. You can also read the 1949 revision here. Lest Darkness Fall ran as a five-part serial in Galaxy’s Edge, presumably based on the 1949 version. It’s also been bundled in a Gollancz SF Gateway Omnibus with Rogue Queen and The Tritonian Ring. It’s also been bundled with a couple sequels by other hands as Lest Darkness Fall and Related Stories. In other words, this is not exactly a hard novel to find, and because it’s short by modern standards it’s often been packaged with other things.

Enhancing Image

I have some notes:
1. De Camp does not waste time here, at least with getting us to 6th century Rome. Martin Padway is an archeologist and a bit of a workaholic who’s currently staying in 1930s Rome. (We get a mention of the country being run by Mussolini’s fascists, but Padway doesn’t seem to feel anything strongly about fascism, and anyway it’s not dwelt on.) Padway is also a divorcee; his wife left him because after “one taste of living in a tent and watching her husband mutter over the inscriptions on potsherds” she realized being an archeologist’s wife was not in the cards for her. This is about all we learn about Padway before a bolt of lightning sends him back to 535 CE. We’re not given even the ghost of an explanation for how a lightning strike could do this and it’s obvious that de Camp is not interested in the how of getting his hapless anti-hero to where he wants him to be.
2. The line of plausibility is a fine one to walk, and I would say de Camp succeeds so long as one does not go deliberately looking for holes. Of course some convenience is at play. It’s convenient that Padway is an archeologist and, by extension, a kind of historian, not to mention he seems to have read Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. De Camp himself admits in the introduction he took some inspiration from Robert Graves’s historical novels (incidentally I just finished I, Claudius), although Padway himself doesn’t mention Graves. This is a curious comparison, because the idea of making history entertaining was still a new concept then—not history as told in Hollywood productions but well-researched, fact-based history. With that said, while you do get some context within the novel, de Camp makes assumptions about the reader’s knowledge that probably aren’t valid anymore.
3. There is one thing that strains one’s suspension of disbelief, which is the language barrier. Italians in 535 CE spoke Latin, and Padway just so happens to know elementary-level Latin despite being a Congregationalist and not a Catholic; to de Camp’s credit he does acknowledge that language, even one as antiquated as Latin, changes over time, and so Padway talks with a heavy accent which other characters are quick to point out. Cleverly Padway adopts the more Latin-sounding name “Martinus Paduei” to fit in with the locals. Not sure why Padway wasn’t written as a Catholic (one who is estranged from his wife), since in the pre-Vatican II days it would’ve been perfectly sensible for a Catholic to know his Latin. Then again, Padway is mostly apolitical and unconcerned with religious matters, which is true of a lot of Protestants. De Camp is playfully ribbing some people here, but he’s not trying to make any kind of serious statement; this is, ultimately, an unserious novel.
4. So, the context: Rome in 535 CE is long past the days of Augustus, to put it lightly. The Italians have accepted Christianity for a couple centuries now, no longer looking to feed infidels to the lions, but the Roman Empire is now fractured. The western Italian-Gothic coalition is about to enter war with the Eastern Roman Empire, and the ensuing war will help bring about the Middle Ages, shrouding Europe “in darkness, from a scientific and technological aspect, for nearly a thousand years.” Padway knows that life in Rome is on the downslide and about to get much worse, but the people around him are blissfully ignorant of this. Surprisingly the idea of somehow returning to his own time doesn’t much occur to him; rather he quickly becomes concerned with surviving in a Rome that is about to get totally butt-fucked by war, and he also wonders if history can be changed enough to create an alternate future.
5. If you read anything about Lest Darkness Fall in advance then you know it’s alternate history novel, and indeed it doesn’t take long for Padway to introduce some changes that will have long-term consequences—some of which will not be to his advantage. Inventing the printing press and starting one’s own newspaper (freedom of the press and all that) in what amounts to a police state can land one in jail, as it turns out. Padway starts out “small,” teaching a local banker double-entry accounting, inventing the printing press, eventually starting the world’s firs telegraph line—you know how it is. Like I said, convenience plays a not-inconsiderable part here, although Padway is not a demigod; he can’t do everything himself. He gets arrested enough times that it becomes a sort of running gag. I would still argue Padway is too much of what Heinlein would call “the competent man,” and I have to wonder what would’ve happened if someone less skilled had been thrown back to Rome right before the Middle Ages; admittedly they would probably last all of three days.
6. As with Graves’s historical novels, de Camp throws some real-life figures into the mix, although due to the relative obscurity of the time period there’s nobody the reader is likely to recognize right away. I hope you know who Justinian is. And let’s not forget Thiudahad, king of the Italians and Goths who eventually succumbs to what is probably dementia or some other neurological disease; he’s pretty funny. The funniest might be Mathasuentha, princess and wife to whomever would succeed Thiudahad once he becomes unfit for the throne—and, much to Padway’s horror, a bloodthirsty opportunist. Padway considers romancing Mathasuentha until she reveals herself to be a bit of what we would call a yandere. “You wouldn’t exactly describe her as a ‘sweet’ girl,” the narrator tells us. Better to marry her off to Urias, who after all is a war hero and who can probably deal with her shenanigans. Padway himself remains a bachelor to the end, at least in the magazine version.
7. How good you think Lest Darkness Fall is will depend on how funny you think it is, because it is very much a novel filled with what we humans would call “jokes.” De Camp isn’t always funny, and I think his cynical brand of conservatism (almost like a distant precursor to South Park-type humor) holds him back from being a more serious writer, but when he’s on the ball he can elicit some chuckles. The novel becomes less funny as it pivots more towards alternate history warfare (this is when Padway gains enough clout to basically do Thiudahad’s job for him), but we’re assured that despite what the title suggests, nothing too dark will happen. This is largely because even as Padway’s situation becomes more serious, both Padway and the third-person narrator remain as deadpan as ever. At one point Padway ponders the evils of slavery and how he should probably do something about it, but it reads like someone writing down stuff they ought to buy as the grocery store. Like I said, not a very serious novel.
8. I can see why de Camp would add a few thousand words onto the novel for book publication, but if anything he should’ve expanded it even further. Lest Darkness Fall, for how much ground it’s covering, is too short; the magazine version is about 50,000 words long and it could easily be twice that length. I know this is weird coming from me, as someone who tends to like short novels, but consider that I, Claudius is 450 pages long and still omly makes up the first half of a larger narrative. There are characters who brim with personality but barely get any screentime because this novel is a train and the train will not stop. SFF novels prior to the ‘60s often didn’t go past 300 pages, and this is sometimes a bad thing because some narratives need more space to reach their full potential. Lest Darkness Fall feels like the abridged version of a complete novel which sadly does not exist.
There Be Spoilers Here

Darkness does not fall.

A Step Farther Out

The “modern man sent to the distant past” plot type has been done many times since Lest Darkness Fall, and needless to say some authors have built on the foundation de Camp laid down. There’s a lot of room for navel-gazing with this premise and de Camp keeps that to a minimum, for better or worse. If this novel succeeds (and it is a succeess for what it is), it’s because de Camp’s fascination with the foibles of ancient history is infectious, helped by the fact that this is a perfectly balanced, well-oiled machine of a novel. We’re given just enough context in what was then the modern day before being hit with the time-travel lightning. Padway is a bit of a scoundrel, but he’s not unlikable enough to make us always following him a chore; to make him a total asshole would’ve been fatal for the novel. There’s some commentary on the gap in values between Italy circa 535 CE and 20th century America, but not enough to give one the impression that de Camp is trying to make one of those pesky political statements. If this sounds like a cynical assessment of the novel, that’s because it’s a cynical novel.

What made Lest Darkness Fall inspirational for a couple generations of SFF writers is that it’s history made entertaining; one might even call it an early example of “edutainment” in genre literature. Admittely you may wanna do some extra reading on the twilight years of the Roman Empire, since de Camp assumes you’re a well-educated person who already know enough going in; this might’ve been true in 1939, but needless to say our priorities with history have changed drastically since then. It’s a genuinely funny novel, if also slight in terms of emotional and thematic content. Had I read this, say, five to ten years earlier, I probably would’ve loved it; but I also think it has since been outshined by its own progeny.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Nightmare Island” by Theodore Sturgeon

October 6th, 2023

(Cover artist uncredited. Unknown, June 1941.)

Who Goes There?

I’ve been itching to cover a Theodore Sturgeon story on here for a long time now, pretty much since I started this site over a year ago. Thing is, if we’re talking strictly short fiction, Sturgeon might be in my top five authors—he’s certainly in my top ten short story writers. He’s most known for his novel More Than Human, because novels have always sold more than short fiction and will continue to do so until the end of time, and while that is a very good novel it doesn’t show the full breadth of his talent. Sturgeon is one of the grand masters of the short story, and this would be true just going by a dozen or so of his very best, never mind the many others. From 1939 until his death in 1985 he stood out as one of the more literary and sentimental voices in the field, not too unlike close contemporary Fritz Leiber. Indeed the two men have a few things in common: they were heavy drinkers, had somewhat hectic love lives, had bouts of either writing a lot or nothing at all, and despite being elegant writers (for their time and place) they never really made it into “the slicks,” despite aspirations.

Sturgeon, despite being most associated with SF, wrote a good deal of horror, especially early in his career. I wanted to go with a story I had not read before and bonus points if it’s a deep cut, which brought me to today’s story. “Nightmare Island” was written during Sturgeon’s first productive period, from 1939 to early 1941; he wrote so much in those three years that he sort of got away with the fact that he wrote not a word of fiction between the summer of 1941 and early 1944. Even though he was only 22 when he wrote this one, he had already gone through several odd jobs while trying to make it as a writer, including a stint as a merchant sailor. Sturgeon’s fiction is sometimes inspired by the various jobs he took on, and “Nightmare Island,” set in the tropics, is about one unfortunate sailor.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1941 issue of Unknown, which is on the Archive. Sturgeon was so prolific at this point in his career that he used a pseudonym or two, although he couldn’t be bothered to keep that a secret. The much less obscure story “Yesterday Was Monday” appeared in the same issue under Sturgeon’s own name. “Nightmare Island” has been reprinted in English only twice, and never anthologized—a bit of a shame. It appeared in the Sturgeon collection Beyond as well as Microcosmic God, the second volume of his complete short fiction. Yeah, get the latter.

Enhancing Image

We start with a rather vague framing narrative in which we have an unnamed American, here on business, and “the governor,” an older gentleman of some position on the island. We’re in the tropics, maybe the Caribbean, but Sturgeon doesn’t give any real clues as to where we are (aside from a reference to the Panama canal) and maybe that doesn’t matter. Getting one criticism out of the way, I would’ve asked Sturgeon for one more rewrite so as to make the framing device less conspicuous, since this is mostly a first-person narrative from the governor’s perspective and we don’t really need the short buildup between him and the American; hell, why not have the reader take the place of the American and have the governor talk to us directly. It’s short, this opening scene, but it’s a bit clunky. We do, however, get introduced to Barry, our protagonist, who at this point lives as a beachcomber apparently in the governor’s employ. Barry is a bit fucked up and we’re about to find out why, since the conflict of the story has already happened.

We then flash back to when Barry was—well, “normal” is not the right word. Sturgeon’s protagonists can be pretty dysfunctional (think of the misfits at the heart of More Than Human), but even by those standards Barry is a hot mess. His main vice is drinking, like an insane amount of booze. He needs only the flimsiest pretext to indulge his alcoholism. “When he had a job he’d guzzle to celebrate, and when he lost one he’d guzzle to console himself,” as the governor says. At the beginning of the flashback we see Barry getting laid off again, and having been laid off he sees it fit to enter another bout of hard drinking. At a bar one night he has the misfortune of meeting Zilio, a shady character who seems to take pity on him and offers him a punch. “The name did not refer to the ingredients of the drink but to its effect.” Big mistake. I’m not sure if it used to be considered common courtesy to accept a drink a stranger offers or if at some point there was more public awareness of getting roofied and stuff like that.

Getting shanghaied in first-world countries is probably much rarer now than it would’ve been a century ago. With the internet and more ways to identify a person it’d be harder to knock someone out and make them work on some tin can against their will, as happens with Barry. He’s a real sailor, and a union man, but that doesn’t help him much as he’s stuck working on an oil vessel with mostly non-seaman for almost no pay and seemingly no way of jumping ship that wouldn’t spell death. Just when it seems Barry’s luck couldn’t get worse, it does—arguably; it certainly gets stranger, as Barry manages to topple overboard during the night, and while most people would drown, Barry does not. Nay, by taking hold of a piece of driftwood, he survives and even washed ashore on an uninhabited island.

It’s here that the fantastical part of the story comes in, because you may have noticed we’re a good third or so in and nothing strictly out of the ordinary has happened. I’m actually not sure if “Nightmare Island” would count as fantasy or science fiction, since the creatures Barry meets could very well be understood in science-fictional terms (no ghosts or anything like that), but it’s framed as a waking nightmare, one of Barry’s “horrors” resulting from his alcoholism, and it’s never rationalized. Fuck it, calling it fantasy will do the trick. I’m also not sure if Sturgeon had read any William Hope Hodgson, especially The Boats of the “Glen Carrig,” although I seriously doubt he had read Hodgson at this early point. I’m saying this because the bulk of “Nightmare Island” reads like one of Hodgson’s seafaring stories, although it doesn’t read the sheer cosmic unknowability of Hodgson.

But I’m getting ahead of myself slightly.

For most people, getting stranded on a small deserted island would be very bad; but for Barry it’s more of an inconvenience on account of having to make his own booze somehow. A much bigger problem presents itself as Barry has to share the island with giant worms, who are big and have tentacles—and are apparently sentient. Or at least one of them is; again, we’re not given a scientific explanation as to where these things came from or how they work. Encountering such creatures would drive people to insanity, but Barry is already insane, never mind perpetually drunk. This is not cosmic horror, and indeed I’m not sure if it’s possible to write cosmic horror if the protagonist is already unhinged and so not terribly frightened of unearthly horrors. While it is downbeat, the tone and genre of “Nightmare Island” are a bit hard to pin down, which might explain why it has never been anthologized.

Something that is easier to understand is the style Sturgeon employs here, which is conversational, even reminding me of what he did in “Microcosmic God.” Makes sense, as he likely wrote the two stories in very close succession, and as far as other early short stories of his go there’s this recurring sassiness in the style, like someone with a mean sense of humor is telling us a story while huddled around a campfire. In the case of “Nightmare Island” this very much makes sense since a character within the story is telling us what’s happening. Because the governor is not the most succinct of narrators, the story is perhaps a bit longer than it ought to be, but at the same time it doesn’t feel dragged out and it’s easily readable. A lot of the stories Sturgeon wrote for Unknown have a comedic streak, or are straight-up horror, but this is an attempt at serious narrative that’s also not too dour. I’m not even sure I’d call it a horror story, although it is fairly spooky and Barry certainly counts as what we would call a grotesque; he’s an outsider who, for a brief time, finds shelter in the company of worms.

One such work is Ahniroo, who is able to mimic human speech )although how sentient it is is unclear) and who speaks for the other works, who for some reason can’t talk to Barry. Through a misunderstanding (because English is so new to Ahniroo that he doesn’t even know what it is) the the friendly worm ends up calling himself and his kind “nightmares,” hence the title. Barry manages to cooperate with the giant worms and make something of a living for himself on the island, with the omly adversary being “the Big One,” a hostile and especially large worm that resides in a crater. Well, you know what they say, this town ain’t big enough for the two of us, so a confrontation in time for the story’s climax is inevitable.

There Be Spoilers Here

With the help of Ahniroo and some almighty booze he had grown himself (it’s unclear how long he’s on this island for, but it could be a few months), Barry’s able to defeat the Big One, in what might be the only time in his life where he comes out a winner. Normally this would be the end of the story, but because the governor is narrating after the fact and we know from the outset Barry is now a lunatic, we know we won’t get a happy ending. Having been exhausted from his fight with the Big One, Barry passes out on the shore, and by the time he awakes he finds himself on a government ship, a mile or two away from the island already. 99% of people would see getting rescused off a desert island as a good thing, but unfortunately Barry is part of the 1% who would rather not be rescused.

Because he sees a sort of demented nobility in Barry, and because he feels some remorse for “saving” him from maybe the only place where he could feel at home, the governor now keeps watch over our shattered protagonist. It’s tragic in the sort of way that Sturgeon, even almost from the outset of his career, was really good at. We get this nugget of a pasage from the governor as he ruminates on the rescue team finding Barry:

They found him there, dead drunk on the beach. It was quite a puzzle to the shore party. There he was, with no footprints around him to show where he’d come from; and though they scoured the neighborhood of the beach; they found no shelter of anything that might have belonged to him. And when they got him aboard and sobered him up the island was miles astern. He went stark raving mad when he discovered where he was. He wanted to go back to his worms. And he’s been here ever since. He’s no use to anyone. He drinks when he can beg or steal it. He’ll die from it before long, I suppose, but he’s only happy when he’s plastered. Poor devil. I could send him back to his island, I suppose, but— Well, it’s quite a problem. Can I, as the representative of enlightened humanity in this part of the world, allow a fellow human being to go back to a culture of worms?

Whether you consider the ending bittersweet or a total downer depends on whether you believe Barry’s alcoholism is terminal. As someone who has had a couple family members destroy their bodies through heavy drinking, I think Barry gets off fine enough; but still, you can’t blame him for missing his worms. Makes you feel sorry for the bastard.

A Step Farther Out

I’ve read about half the stories Sturgeon wrote for Unknown at this point, which is a fair amount because Sturgeon clearly preferred writing fantasy over SF at that early point. “Shottle Bop,” “It,” and the aforementioned “Yesterday Was Monday” have been reprinted fairly often while “Nightmare Island” has not, and I’m not sure why. It could be that tonally it doesn’t quite land on one end of the spectrum, having not the whimsy of “Yesterday Was Monday” nor the sheer terror of “It.” It’s also not easily classifiable as SF or fantasy so I have to flip a coin on that one. Sturgeon wasn’t so much a genre writer as a writer who saw genre (he wasn’t terribly picky about which one) as a great conduit for expressing his thoughts and fears—and boy can Sturgeon be a little fucking neurotic and boy can he try a little too hard at times. Fine. He’s a fabulous writer, one of the best, and while this is still a very early piece it and the other best stories Sturgeon wrote at this time (especially for Unknown, although we can never forget “Microcosmic God”) showed the first inklings of a master.

See you next time.
Serial Review: The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson (Part 3/3)

September 13th, 2023

(Cover by M. Isip. Unknown, May 1940.)

The Story So Far

Theseus, known as Captain Firebrand the infamous Greek pirate, has landed ashore on the island of Crete, at the time the most powerful empire in the world despite its small size. Separated from Cyron, his right-hand man, along with the rest of his crew, Theseus now stands alone except for a crafty but “minor” Babylonian wizard named Snish. Every nine years games are held in Knossos, the capital palace of Crete, to see if anyone is worthy to succeed Minos as the ruler of the island—and to take his beautiful daughter Ariadne as their bride. Things seem to be going well until Theseus’s disguise breaks at the worst possible moment and he gets taken into prison, to be thrown into the labyrinth and meet his death at the hands of the dreaded Minotaur, known to Cretans as the Dark One.

With Snish’s help once again, Theseus hatches a plan to break out of prison and into Ariadne’s bedchamber, where, for reasons unfathomable to both Our Hero™ and the reader, Ariadne admits her intense love for the Greek pirate and they almost agree to escape the island together—only Theseus still has a job to do. The plan is foiled and Theseus is caught once again, and this time is thrown straight into the labyrinth, naked and weaponless, although not bitchless, as Ariadne still helps him in the few ways she can. Reunited with his beloved sword, Theseus thinks he might stand a chance against the Minotaur, only to be blind-sided by what feels like a horn grazing his side. The Greek pirate seems to be in quite the pickle!

Enhancing Image

Good news: it’s a fake-out. The “horn” belongs to Cyron, who was also tossed into the labyrinth and left to be either killed or die from the elements. The two recognize each other and it’s a sweet reunion—only problem being that they’re still trapped in a maze with no obvious way out. It’s here, however, that we’re given what is perhaps the biggest twist in the narrative, which is that despite a statue of the Minotaur being constructed in the labyrinth, the Minotaur himself seems to be nonexistent—an elaborate ruse devised by Minos centuries ago to keep the Cretans in line. Those trapped in the labyrinth either kill each other, themselves, or die presumably from starvation, for hitherto nobody has escaped to tell of the big lie that has haunted the island for so many years.

This has to be coincidental, but I couldn’t help but think if maybe John W. Campbell had a certain theme in mind, as The Reign of Wizardry was serialized back-to-back against Robert Heinlein’s If This Goes On—, which also covers religious fear and tyrants using the people’s faith to rule over them with an iron fist. In the case of the Heinlein novella there’s a conspicuous aside where we’re told that Christianity is totally fine actually, and that the villains of the story are using a religion similar to Christianity but actually something different. The Abrahamic God also gets off pretty easy in Williamson’s story, but in fariness it takes place in pre-Christian times, so it’s only natural that the religion of evil has nothing to do with what some reader at the time would’ve believed.

The Minotaur turning out to be a fabrication is inherently disappointing, since it deprives the narrative of what could’ve been a gripping cosmic element, but in the context of a work written specifically for Unknown I begrudgingly admit it makes sense. Works published in Unknown generally try to urbanize the creatures of myth, such that they become either as ordinary in the context of the story’s world as a real-life animal, or they turn out to be something that can be easily rationalized. The result is that there’s very little cosmic horror to be found in Unknown, and I think this is compounded by Williamson being such a rational storyteller, although his fast-paced pulp action style of writing at this point in his career can make this rationalism not so obvious. That the Minotaur does not exist in this rendition of the Theseus-Minotaur myth is only fitting for something published in a “rational fantasy” magazine.

What’s not so easy to rationalize is Ariadne’s cooperating with Theseus in overthrowing her father, which only becomes harder to swallow as a couple more twists come our way. I’ve said this before, but I wanna stress that Ariadne is a far worse-written leading lady than either of the female leads in The Legion of Time, which who were not exactly deeply realized themselves but who served clear purposes in the narrative. Ariadne’s seems split between her loyalty for her father and her newfound passion for Theseus—the problem being we have no reason to believe Theseus and Ariadne would love each other. It’s one of those inexplicable romance plots that plagues old-school pulp writing, only here it’s more conspicuous because Williamson is going for something a little more high-concept. Sure, it’s a somewhat neat premise, but the characters are still lacking in psychology; we’re not allowed to understand the why of anything.

Anyway, Theseus and Cyron lead a rebellion against the higher-ups of Crete on the basis that the Minotaur, the thing that supposedly lurked in the island’s depths, is not real, and therefore the power of the wizards is based on a falsehood. It goes pretty well! People are surprisingly quick to believe the guy who has been on the island for maybe three days. But there’s still work to be done. Minos goes down without much of a fight, although Theseus realizes that the old wizard might not be dead after all, as the doppelganger, upon dying, turns into “an old, old woman” whose real identity is unknown—for the moment. The real Minos must be hiding somewhere, but Theseus struggles to articulate this, and for now it looks like the day might be saved. Ariadne, who as it turns out is not much of a fighter, encourages Theseus to escape with her using a flying machine (what?) Daedalus had built, but Our Hero™ refuses. Something is not right.

It’s here at the novel’s climax (which also happens to be its ending, since the story ends right when the action does) that we get back-to-back twists, which I have some very mixed feelings about. The first is that impossibly old lady who died disguised as Minos turns out to be… Ariadne’s mother, who, mind you, was a non-presence up to this point; I honestly thought she was dead already, but apparently she chose to take Minos’s place by the time Theseus appeared on the island. I don’t get any emotional weight from this since we have no clue who Ariadne’s mom is as a character, and we barely even get a glimpse of how Ariadne’s feels about her own now-dead parent. It feeds into the other twist I’m about to give and it does explain “Minos’s” odd behavior before, but I honestly would’ve preferred if they just got some random person to stand in for Minos.

The other twist is that Snish, the real Minos, and Talos are all the same person. Let’s sit around a bonfire and ponder this. Snish and Talos—you know, the giant bronze statue, are both disguises for Minos. Theseus recalls, during this revelation, that he never saw Snish and Talos in the same place, and that Snish and Minos being together can be explained by “Minos” being a fake here. I will say, this is not, strictly speaking, a self-contradicting twist, and it’s also a twist I did not see coming, which would give it a point each—bringing its score to a total of two points. Yeah, otherwise it reads as fucking stupid to me; there’s really no other way for me to describe it, other than it feels dumb somehow. I figured Williamson would dish out a few twists in the name of subverting the myth, but he may have gone too far. It doesn’t help that through all this Ariadne is still a blank slate.

But due to the power of “love,” Ariadne gives Theseus the deus ex machina necessary to defeat her father and end the reign of wizardry on Crete for good. Personally if I was pining for Ariadne I would be concerned by the fact that she played a part in the deaths of both her parents, but Theseus is not so bothered by that detail. It ultimately doesn’t matter, though, as it’s implied that Ariadne dies from… something, going limp in her man’s arms. Maybe she’s just tired. I could take a nap myself. Theseus kisses his dead (or maybe just sleepy) girlfriend and the novel ends. Even if Ariadne is not dead at the end, the chemistry between the two is so inert that Theseus may as well be making out with a corpse.

A Step Farther Out

In a deliberate attempt to extinguish wonder, Williamson replaced it with something of very little substance. I have to think The Reign of Wizardry got a Retro Hugo nod because there wasn’t much competition that year. Jason and the Argonauts it ain’t. I suspect the reason it gets so little wordage in Williamson’s autobiography is because there was little he could say about it, other than that it was his first attempt at writing more “mature” fantasy and that it getting published technically made it a success. While it now only exists as a footnote in a pretty good writer’s oeuvre, it did do good in that it probably encouraged Williamson to write a much better and more unique fantasy story—that being “Darker Than You Think.”

See you next time.
Serial Review: The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson (Part 2/3)

September 6th, 2023

(Cover by Edd Cartier. Unknown, April 1940.)

The Story So Far

Theseus, in his quest to end the reign of wizardry in Crete, takes part in the games to see who might be worthy enough to succeed Minos as ruler of the island empire. Disguised as a viking with the help of the Babylonian sorcerer Snish, Theseus persists through the combat trials, going up against men and bulls as they symbolize the Minotaur, the half-man half-bull dark god who lurks in the labyrinth. Having survived the final test, that of “the gods,” Theseus is one step away from taking control of Crete and claiming Ariadne (Minos’s daughter) as his bride when his disguise evaporates at the worst possible moment. Revealed as Theseus, or Captain Firebrand, the Greek pirate with a bounty on his head in Crete, Theseus is thus thrown into jail, where he awaits his death at the hands of the Minotaur. How will he get out of trouble this time, eh?

Know that this review will be short and sweet, in accordance with the installment but also because certain real-life circumstances have made my laptop unavailable for the next couple days, or rather it has been available and I won’t get it back until tomorrow or Friday. Despite this inconvenience, you can’t keep a good dog down, and while I’ve had to write this post in less-than-ideal circumstances, the show must go on.

Enhancing Image

Theseus, if he were acting alone, would surely be toast by now; it’s a good thing he’s not, as Snish, for reasons unknown, continues to serve despite being mistreated. Despite claiming repeatedly to be only the most minor of wizards, Snish’s ability to cast disguises proves to be a life-saver once again, with Theseus this time luring Phaistro (the Creten admiral he had a run-in with earlier) into a trap and switching places with him. Phaistro buying into Theseus’s promise of hidden treasure was ill-advised and a more reasonable man would’ve smelled something fishy, but it turns out that Phaistro was desperate for that treasure. Disguising oneself as a prominent member of Crete’s navy sounds like a good idea until you realize said member also has a crippling gambling addiction.. with debts to pay.

There’s some irony at play here, and unlike the few attempts at humor in Part 1 it’s actually amusing, if in an exhale-through-the-nostrils sort of way. Theseus goes from having a target on his head to having a different kind of target, attributed to a different person (someone whom Theseus normally wouldn’t mind seeing punished) but now aimed at him. Out of the frying pan and all that. Phaistro owes a ton of money to a servant named Amur who apparently is at the end of his paience with the admiral, now offering one last chance for him to pay off his debt: by “making love” to Ariadne, sort of prostituting himself. I suspect that this is the archaic definition of the phrase, since “to make love” used to mean simply to court, which is probably (but I can’t guarantee it is) what Williamson intended, as opposed to the more modern definition. When exactly the definition changed in the English-speaking world I don’t know, but almost certainly the change happened by 1960. Anyway the idea is that Theseus-as-Phaistro will woo Ariadne, who, we need be reminded, is rather a cold bitch.

This seems like it’ll be the end for Theseus, since Snish’s disguise magic evaporates with a kiss, which was how Ariadne found him out in the first place. The good news is that Ariadne’s chamber will be darkly lit, so that with enough luck Theseus will be able to go in and pull a bit of a sleight of hand a la Anton Chekhov’s “The Kiss,” being a touch in the dark that’s nigh impossible to connect with a face. As should be expected, though, the ruse doesn’t fucking work, as at some point Ariadne figures out Phaistro is really Theseus in disguise… and then she goes along with it. It’s here that we get what has to be the most baffling plot development in the novel, which is that Ariadne actually oves Theseus, after seeing him in the games. Despite having known each other for all of two days and being enemies, Ariadne hopes that (so she says) Theseus will take her off the island where they can have a honeymoon in peace. Theseus, for his part, is skeptical about this, which is understandable given Ariadne’s sppsed affection for him makes no goddamn sense. Not that Williamson is a raging misogynist, but his struggle to write women convincingly is most apparent here.

Inevitably, because this is a novel and we still have at least another 45 magazine pages to go, Theseus gets caught yet again, this time courtesy of the real Phaistro; this time Snish is not here to save him. If you went into The Reign of Wizardry knowing it’s about Theseus and the Minotaur, you go in thinking we’ll get an epic fight sequence with them in the labyrinth; we’re not quite there yet, but the back end of Part 2 does see Theseus get thrown, naked and weaponless, into the labyrinth. Good thing modesty is no issue, or at least would be the least of Theseus’s problems. (Something I’ve noticed with the Campbell magazines is that sex rarely ever gets brought up, even implicitly, no doubt due to Campbell being a puritan and also his devoutly religious secretary scrubbing manuscripts of salty language in advance. However, male nudity, even described in some detail, seems to be fair, with there even being several male nudes as Astounding covers. What’s the meaning of this?) I’m getting distracted.

Being thrown into a deadly maze without a weapon or even clothes would drive most people to despair, but not Theseus, who like a true warrior makes the best of what he can… even using human bones as weapons. It’s here, as we approach our encounter with the Minotaur, that the horror of the so-called Dark God takes on an almost Lovecraftian aura, as Theseus sees a statue of the Minotaur and the creature’s voice without ever seeing the creature itself… and then, without seeing what hit him, there’s a horn digging into his side. Had Clark Ashton Smith written this we would’ve gotten more atmosphere and spookiness, especially with the towering idol of the Minotaur, but I’ll take what I can get. It’s fiiiiine.

A Step Farther Out

After the slog that was the first installment we’re on firmer ground, if only because Williamson has far less setup to worry about; could also be that at thirty pages (as opposed to the first installment’s fifty) there’s less room for suffering. Recently getting into Dark Souls again may have also gotten me into the right mindset for this and that I was being unfair to Part 1, but that’s probably not the case. As we approach the third act it’s become apparent to me that this is indeed a short novel, with hardly enough meat on its bones for what we would not consider a modern fantasy novel. I still wish Williamson would take more liberties with what is quite literally ancient source material, but we’ll see how he manages

See you next time.
Serial Review: The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson (Part 1/3)

August 27th, 2023

(Cover by M. Isip. Unknown, March 1940.)

Who Goes There?

Jack Williamson was the second author to be made an SFWA Grand Master, after Robert Heinlein, and yet he is little read nowadays. Actually, past the first decade of his career, I’m not sure when Williamson would’ve been “popular.” That’s not a knock. This man right here is one of the most respectable old-timey SF writers, never quite reaching the heights of Heinlein, true, but also never sinking nearly to such lows as latter day Heinlein. Remarkably, unlike most writers of his generation, Williamson caught a second wind at such a late point in his career, putting out some pretty good work in the ’90s and 2000s—so, ya know, when he was in his 80s and 90s. He remains, by a good margin, the oldest person to have won a Hugo in any of the fiction categories.

I recently read Williamson’s autobiography, Wonder’s Child (which also won him a Hugo), and I’ve somehow gained an even greater respect for the man. He discusses, to some degree, all the fiction he wrote up to 1980 he thought worth mentioning, although of course the book is more about his life and how he tried balancing that (various jobs, romantic/sexual false starts) with trying to make it as a pulp writer. Curiously, today’s novel only got a single paragraph to itself, and Williamson says little about it even within that space. The Reign of Wizardry was his first published work in Unknown, the fantasy sister magazine to Astounding Science Fiction, and for both readers and Williamson himself it does not hold the esteem of his subsequent Unknown effort, “Darker Than You Think.”

There may be a reason for this.

Placing Coordinates

Started serialization in the March 1940 issue of Unknown, which is on the Archive. It has an e-book edition, wooo. For print versions your best bet would be either the Phantasia Press hardcover (out of print) or the Williamson collection Gateway to Paradise (also out of print). Yeah it’s a novel, but it’s apparently short enough to fit in the latter.

Enhancing Image

The prologue is a curious one, in that while the story to come is unabashedly fantasy, Williamson takes the effort to root it in actual science: in this case archaeology. Crete is an island, still existing today with its own people, off the coast of Greece, but what in modern times (i.e., the 19th century onward) archaeologists uncovered what must’ve been as advanced a civilization as ancient Egypt, during a time when Greece itself would not have been so prosperous. For centuries there were only hints, combined with legends, as to the workings of ancient Crete, whose golden age came to an abrupt end before being occupied by several empires over the centuries. The narrator proposes that the myth of the minotaur and the labyrinth, and the Greek hero Theseus, may have some historical legitimacy in explaining the golden age of ancient Crete coming to an end.

Now we’re on the high seas, with Our Hero™, whom to us is known as Theseus but to other characters as Captain Firebrand—a redheaded pirate who patrols the waters between Greece and Crete. One day, upon raiding a Cretan ship, Theseus and his right-hand man Cyron take in what appears to be a woman of incredible beauty as part of the loot, but who turns out to be an impish Babylonian wizard named Snish; this character, at least so far, seems to be Williamson’s biggest contribution to the myth. Snish is a low-level wizard who, for all his physical weakness, can get through trouble by disguising himself, although the illusion is an audio-visual one that will evaporate if touched and especially if kissed. Curiously the narrator refers to Snish as a “she” when in his female disguise. Anyway, Theseus considers killing the little man, but Snish convinces the crew he’d be of more use in infiltrating the island empire of Crete, at that point the most powerful nation in the Mediterranean—and host to evil wizardry.

While obviously not historically sound, we’re led to believe that Crete is such a powerful nation at this point in history because it is ruled with an iron fist by Minos, the most powerful wizard in the known world. Minos, who apparently is immortal, has ruled Crete for a thousand years, but there is at least theoretically a chance that such a tyrant can be overthrown. We’re told that every nine years (why not ten is beyond me) games are held to test the finest warriors in the land, to see if any survive the trials. “And if any man wins the contests, the old Minos must give up his life, and go down into the dread Labyrinth of the Dark One.” The Dark One being the minotaur—one part bull, one part man, one part god. Being a pirate, Theseus hates authority, and especially authority with magic powers. The games are set to begin in a couple days. If he could get to the shores of Crete, and into Knossos, that magical palace just in time to participate…

I might not be making it obvious, but the first half of this installment (which is really the first quarter of the novel) is messy. The goal is simple: Get Theseus from point A to point B, i.e., from off the island to on the island. Sounds simple, right? But this is a 50,000-word novel and said novel is frontloaded with lore, a few characters who will not matter later, and a couple action scenes that lack the pulpy zest of Williamson’s earlier writing. This was his attempt at writing a “serious” fantasy tale, and I also think there’s a reason why he would only show up in Unknown two more times; in fairness, the second of these three appearances was “Darker Than You Think,” which really is one of the standout fantasy narratives of the ’40s. But whereas that novella captivates with its grimness and psychological implications, The Reign of Wizardry starts out as too convoluted for people not already familiar with what its retelling and yet too shallowly written to be considered a demanding-but-it’s-worth-it reexamination of old material. It’s a remix of a song that barely stands on its own.

But it’s not all bad. A shipwreck puts Theseus on the shores of Crete but separates him from both Cyron and Snish, and this is where the plot goes from a series of random events to something more cohesive. Snish is not exactly Williamson’s best attempt at humor, being the closest we have to a comic relief character, so him being absent for most of the latter half of this installment is no loss. It’s here that we meet Talos, the living statue who serves Minos’s will, although sadly unlike his depiction in Jason and the Argonauts he’s not the size of a goddamn building, just a twelve-foot-tall man with an odd skin condition. He also talks. Then there’s Ariadne, Minos’s daughter, who serves the role of the single female character of any significance. (There’s also a haggard old woman who is implied to be a prostitute, but that’s the closest this novel gets to acknowledging sexuality thus far.) It took a while to get started, but once we’ve met all the key players, including Daedalus, Minos’s right-hand man, it’s time to (quite literally) let the games begin. Took long enough.

There Be Spoilers Here

Entering the games at Knossos under the disguise of a “Northman” (a viking) named Gothung, since apparently Minos was expecting Captain Firebrand to participate, the plot gets funneled into a series of action scenes wherein Theseus proves his might against a series of opponents, first bulls and then other men. This ties into the nature of the minotaur, which as said is part bull and part man, and of course there will be the final trial: judgment by the dark god himself. This section of the novel is the strongest part, but even so the action is not as grippingly written as it would be in a Robert E. Howard or Fritz Leiber fantasy adventure. There’s a bit of gore, but surprisingly it’s not as violent as the back end of the other Williamson novel I’ve covered, The Legion of Time, despite Williamson giving himself the perfect pretext for blood and guts. It could be that in an attempt to write something more dignified he wrote something that’s not as fun.

You may be thinking, “Brian, what are you saying? Violence isn’t fun!” And in the context of real life I agree. Violence, in the real world, is usually horrific and completely unnecessary. As Asimov said, violence is the last refuge of the incompetent—and there are a lot of incompetent people out there. But in fiction, especially when it’s a couple degrees removed from reality, violence can be immensely satisfying. Unfortunately that level of carnage was reserved for the “pulpy trash” of Weird Tales, which John W. Campbell wanted to counter. As such, even in this opening installment’s most gripping moments, it seems underwritten—like it’s afraid to go all out.

Anyway, Theseus succeeds in his trials, and a little too easily at that. This skepticism turns out to be justified as Minos, Daedalus, and the bitchy Ariadne pull a fast one on him and reveal his true identity. It’s implied that Minos knew Theseus would come to Crete in disguise well in advance, and just as it looks like Theseus will take to the throne as the new ruler of Crete, the rug gets pulled out from under him. We know that something like this had to happen, because this is the first part of a three-part serial, but we also know, and are all but told at the beginning, that Theseus will ultimately succeed in ending the Cretan empire’s reign of wizardry (get it?). It’s possible Williamson has a few tricks up his sleeve, but I have to wonder how much he can change given that ultimately he has to abide the trajectory of the myth. Or does he? We’ll have to wait and see… and hope.

A Step Farther Out

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…

At first I wasn’t feeling it, and even by the end of this first installment I wouldn’t say I was onboard. Something is wrong here. It could be that I need to catch up on my Greek mythology, but this seems like a straightforward retelling of a myth that would’ve probably been common knowledge for readers in 1940. That Theseus starts out as a pirate and mostly uses his wits instead of his brawn to get the job done can only go so far. The thing about much of the material published in Unknown is that while a lot of it would now be called urban fantasy, the stuff that wasn’t still had a sense of humor—you could say a lust for life—that defined the magazine. Yet at least so far Williamson’s retelling of the minotaur-and-labryinth routine is humorless, and Williamson is not one for straight-faced action—pulpy action, sure, but not something trying to be this serious.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Idol of the Flies” by Jane Rice

October 27th, 2022

(Cover artist uncredited. Unknown, June 1942.)

Who Goes There?

The story of Jane Rice is one of the more quietly tragic in the history of fantasy and horror fiction—but not because of her personal life. Actually, Rice seemed a pretty well-adjusted woman, and it’s not like her career took a nosedive on the part of some grave career error; she did not, for instance, get wrapped up in Dianetics or something like that. Rather, Rice’s career as a writer was forever hampered by the fact that historically speaking, the magazines have been a poor market for fantasy; there just has never been that much demand for fantasy in the magazines. When John W. Campbell launched Unknown, Astounding‘s fantasy-leaning sister magazine, in 1939, he went out of his way to publish fantasy that was a lot more than just occult horror and heroic fantasy, like in Weird Tales; its scope was far more ambitious. Rice made her debut in Unknown in 1940, and a good third or so of her total output would be published in this magazine, in the span of just three years, despite her career spanning more than half a century.

And no, she’s not to be confused with Anne Rice, nor are they related in any way, although you may be tempted to confuse one with the other!

Rice’s fiction (from what I’ve read of it anyway) is unique, even among the Unknown stable of writers, for its often rural locales, being inspired by Rice’s Kentucky upbringing, and for a mean streak that would almost make Flannery O’Connor blush (almost!). Her werewolf story, “The Refugee,” appeared in that magazine’s final issue, and has been (rightly) reprinted quite a few times over the years. Unfortunately, Unknown‘s sales were never high, despite being issue-for-issue stronger than Astounding, and when Street & Smith, the publisher for both, pulled the plug on the former because of wartime paper rationing (Astounding itself barely survived World War II), several stories which had been purchased were left stranded. At least one, Anthony Boucher’s “We Print the Truth,” would see print in Astounding, but what would’ve been Rice’s debut novel, Lucy, not only did not get published, but it got lost in Street & Smith’s files; it’s been lost media for nearly eighty years. The loss must’ve been devastating, and except for a spat of short stories in the ’80s, Rice would never be nearly this productive again.

Placing Coordinates

“The Idol of the Flies” was first published in the June 1942 issue of Unknown, which is on the Archive. The weird thing about this one is that there aren’t any reprints that are in print, and only some are reasonably cheap; you’d actually be better off finding the older sources. Perhaps the anthology of most interest here is Witches’ Brew: Horror and Supernatural Stories by Women, edited by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini. Another curious anthology reprint is Children of Wonder: 21 Remarkable and Fantastic Tales, edited by William Tenn of all people, with Rice’s story appropriately falling under the section called “Terror in the Nursery.” There’s also the single comprehensive collection of Rice’s short fiction, The Idol of the Flies and Other Stories, but unfortunately it’s a collector’s item; the copies I see on eBay go for over a hundred bucks, which even for me is ridiculous.

Enhancing Image

Pruitt is seemingly a normal boy, except for the fact that he’s an orphan, now living with his spinster aunt and having a private tutor. Pruitt’s parents died… somehow, and now the boy mostly goes off and does his own thing: in his case this “case” tends to involve torture of some kind. A sadistic kid might bully his little sister, or pull the legs off a bug one but one, but Pruitt’s brand of sadism is amplified by him seemingly having the power to order flies to do his bidding. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them. And his tutor, Ms. Bittner, is deathly afraid of flies. Personally I find flies to be way more annoying than scary, but to each their own.

Most of the fantasy published in Unknown is not horror, but “The Idol of the Flies” most certainly is; if the stuff with the flies doesn’t creep you out enough, then Pruitt doing things any normal child can do almost certainly will. Not only does he pull epic pranks on the adults in the house, but he also bullies a local man with severe scoliosis (or something like that), physically tormenting him to the point where I actually wondered if Pruitt might kill him. Oh, and if that’s not enough for ya, read about what Pruitt does with a toad and twig—or maybe don’t, it’s not for the faint of heart. What makes these things so disturbing is that you don’t need anything supernatural in order to make them possible, and indeed much of the story reads like non-supernatural horror. How does the whole controlling-flies thing figure into it, though? Because of course something fantastical has to be going on, and there has to be an explanation for how Pruitt is able to use all these flies for his schemes.

The interior artwork for the story (which I’ll get into more in the spoilers section) shows Pruitt with an idol he’s made out of coal tar and which resembles a fly. Where did Pruitt get the idea to do this? I don’t remember us being given a clear answer on that, but that doesn’t matter too much. You might think he’s an incarnation of the devil like it’s The Omen or something, but I’ll just say right now it’s not that. It would be one thing if Pruitt was a demon in a human’s skin, but he’s just a normal-ass child; he does what he does because he loves nothing more than to hurt others, as if he were a child’s innate desire to destroy taken to its logical extreme. I suppose he’s like the kid from Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life,” though God help us if he had reality-warping powers.

We don’t get much of a line into Pruitt’s mindset, but when we do, it’s pretty ugly. He comes off like a Flannery O’Connor character in that rural grotesque way, though this was published several years prior to O’Connor’s first story. I’m sure O’Connor never read a Rice story in her life, but I can’t help but feel like there’s a connection…

Pruitt scuffed his shoe on the stone steps and wished he had an air rifle. He would ask for one on his birthday. He would ask for a lot of impossible things first and then—pitifully—say, “Well, then, could I just have a little old air rifle?” Aunt would fall for that. She was as dumb as his mother had been. Dumber. His mother had been “simple” dumb, which was pretty bad—going in, as she had, for treacly bedtime stories and lap sitting. Aunt was “sick” dumb, which was very dumb indeed. “Sick” dumb people always looked at the “bright side.” They were the dumbest of all. They were push-overs, “sick” dumb people were. Easy, little old push-overs.

Come to think of it, one of the few things that gives me the creeps is one of tried-and-true staples of horror: creepy children. Maybe it’s because someone young like me probably has anxiety about the prospect of parenthood, or maybe it’s because it feels so unnatural for a child, who after all has experienced so little of the world, to do things that are so heinous, or maybe it’s just because human children are the least adorable children in the world (consider that a baby crocodile is cuter than a human child) and they just suck, but creepy children will almost always get me to some extent. Pruitt is exceptional, even in the pantheon of bastard fictional children (let’s not forget Village of the Damned while we’re at it), in he seems to do everything of his own volition; it’s not like he’s brainwashed or being controlled by a demonic overlord, although that is a possibility. Thankfully, for how dastardly her pint-sized villain protagonist is, Rice has something just as dastardly in mind for her creation.

There Be Spoilers Here

So we’ve had animal abuse and Pruitt ruthlessly bullying a disabled man, but just how evil is he? He hasn’t actually killed another person, has he? He’s like six or seven years old, he can’t be that bad! Well…

We’ve heard before that Pruitt is an orphan, now living with his late dad’s sister, his parents appearently killed in an accident—which, as it turns out, was no accident. Pruitt’s been a little shit to his aunt and tutor, and also basically everyone else, up to this point, but we’ve not quite plumbed the depths of his sadism until now, in this tangential but horribly revealing passage wherein he reminisces (pretty happily, mind you) on the death of his parents—or more accurately, how he killed them:

This was the way he felt when he knew his father and mother were going to die. He had known it with a sort of clear, glittering lucidity—standing there in the white Bermuda sunlight, waving good-by to them. He had seen the plumy feather on his mother’s hat, the sprigged organdy dress, his father’s pointed mustache and his slender, artist’s hands grasping the driving reins. He had seen the gleaming harness, the high-spirited shake of the horse’s head, its stamping foot. His father wouldn’t have a horse that wasn’t high-spirited. Ginger had been its name. He had seen the bobbing fringe on the carriage top and the pin in the right rear wheel—the pin that he had diligently and with patient perseverance, worked loose with the screwdriver out of his toy tool chest. He had seen them roll away, down the drive, out through the wrought-iron gates. He had wondered if they would turn over when they rounded the bend and what sort of a crash they would make. They had turned over but he hadn’t heard the crash. He had been in the house eating the icing off the cake.

I was expecting, at some point, for there to be a reveal that Pruitt is the way he is because he’s possessed by some demon or supernatural power, but no, it seems he’s been this way for as long as he was able to conceive of such horrid acts. I think what’s scary about all this is that while they are extremely rare, children (especially as young as Pruitt) who are so malicious do exist in the real world—only they don’t worship an idol made of coal tar. It’s also disquieting how (like a real child) Pruitt uses his youth and presumed innocence as a weapon, playing puppydog with other people so as to deflect blame; sure, they think, he might be a bit of a rascal, but ultimately he’s just a child! Except that children are perfectly capable of doing horrible things—they’re just too ignorant to know better.

If I do have a problem with this story, it’s that the climax is rather abrupt, though I suppose it’s easy enough to anticipate if you know your demonology. The twist is also pretty strongly alluded to in the story’s interior artwork, courtesy of Kolliker.

What happens when you deal with the devil for your fly-manipulating powers? Eventually the devil comes to collect. He’s called Beelzebub here, which, ya know, lord of the flies and all that, though the story’s title seems to refer to both Beelzebub and the coal tar idol Pruitt uses. Anyway, despite his single-digit age, Puitt gets sent to HELL, which is pretty epic. Normally I’d be disturbed by such an outcome, but Puitt is shown to be such an irredeemably evil creature that in the context of a story’s world where the devil (and presumably God) exists, maybe it’s best to kick this kid off the top of the highest mountain.

While I take issue with how the climax is paced, I find the ending immensely satisfying. How often does a child in a story (particularly of this vintage) get killed off, and on top of that said child is also the protagonist! Truth be told, it would’ve been too dark if Pruitt had gotten away with everything, so as weird as it is to this, it’s fitting that Rice give him the fire-and-brimstone treatment. I also think it may be too on-the-nose for Bittner, in the final scene, to be reading a textbook entry on Beelzebub (perhaps in worry that readers might not get who “Asmodeus” is), but the dramatic irony of her being unaware of Pruitt’s fate is also satisfying. If what we’ve been reading prior to the climax was discomforting, watching this little shit doing all these things and not get punished for it, then the ending is worthy compensation.

A Step Farther Out

Did not think one of the oldest stories covered this month would also be the scariest, but I’m gonna say “The Idol of the Flies” is thoroughly disquieting. Ironically the demonic climax might be the least scary part of the whole ordeal, if only because the protagonist is devilish enough on his own. Pruitt has to be one of the most evil children in literature, and he’s arguably the most evil main character we’ve come across—yes, even more than Kornbluth’s Mindworm, which is more amoral than sadistic. Just letting you know that if you haven’t read it already, expect some animal torture and abuse of the disabled; this thing doesn’t mess around, all the more remarkable given its vintage. I can’t say I’m totally surprised, though, as the quality of the average Unknown story is much higher than average; really I would say the average Unknown story beats out the average Astounding story nine times out of ten. Rice showed herself to be a master of horror in the making, and it’s a shame that because of Unknown‘s premature death and the loss of her debut novel made her career as a fantasist screetch to a halt.

If you’re looking for a horror story about how children are vicious little monsters just in time for Halloween, boy do I have a recommendation!

See you next time.