Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

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Tag: weird tales

Short Story Review: “The Old Nurse’s Story” by Elizabeth Gaskell

November 10th, 2025

(Cover by C. C. Senf. Weird Tales, October 1927.)

Who Goes There?

Here we have one of the most respected Victorian writers, if also perhaps underread to this day, with Mrs. Gaskell. A lot of her work was, even after her dead, accompanied with the byline of “Mrs. Gaskell,” but Elizabeth Gaskell was very much her own woman. She was born in 1810 and was close contemporaries with the likes of George Eliot and the Brontë sisters, to the point of being close friends with Charlotte Brontë and writing the first major biography of her. Gaskell was also an accomplished novelist, in part helped by her friendship with Charles Dickens at a time when Dickens was the most popular author in England. “The Old Nurse’s Story” was itself first published in the Christmas 1852 issue of Household Words, a magazine Dickens was editing at the time. While she’s not as popular now as Eliot or the Brontë sisters nowadays, her novels, especially Cranford, North and South, and the sadly unfinished (on account of Gaskell dying suddenly just before she could write the ending) Wives and Daughters, are very well-liked. Her biography of Charlotte Brontë, whilst now being acknowledged as a biased account, also guarantees her a spot in Victorian literature that will probably always be considered worth remembering.

Gaskell, aside from writing novels about social justice (namely the downtrodden lives of those living in the newly industrial parts of England) and more personal topics, partook in what was becoming a fine tradition among British (and to a lesser extent American) writers: the ghost story. In the years long before Fortnite and even the internet, long before even the horror story got walled off and put in its own genre ghetto, it was quite common for “literary” authors in the Anglosphere to write spooky tales of the supernatural, especially with the intention of them being read aloud at Christmastime. Ya know, for the fun of it. “The Old Nurse’s Story” is a very good example of such a tale, as well as being a Gothic narrative in the most classic sense. While the Gothic novel had waned in both popularity and works being written by the 1820s, the Gothic short story picked up the pieces a couple decades down the road.

Placing Coordinates

First published in 1852 and reprinted in the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales. It’s also been reprinted in The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (ed. Robert Aickman), The Gentlewomen of Evil: An Anthology of Rare Supernatural Stories from the Pens of Victorian Ladies (ed. Peter Haining), Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth (ed. Jen Baker), The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories (ed. Tera Moore), The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (ed. Michael Newton), and the Gaskell collection Curious, If True. Because it’s very old and very public domain, you can find it online easily.

Enhancing Image

Hester, the titular nurse, relates to us (in the position of Rosamond’s children) the story of a particularly strange and traumatic series of events in both their lives. Rosamond, now a grown woman and a mother, was once a child in Hester’s care, at first part of the time and then full-time, following the deaths of both of Rosamond’s parents. Her father died of fever while her mother died shortly after childbirth, to a stillborn baby which would’ve been Rosamond’s younger sibling. (Sounds dramatic, I know, but it would not have been so unusual back in those days.) On her deathbed the mother makes Hester promise to look after the little Rosamond, although really she didn’t have to say anything about that, for “if she had never spoken a word, I would have gone with the little child to the end of the world.” Hester, herself barely an adult at this time, is made to be both Rosamond’s nurse and surrogate mother whilst the two are taken in by the Furnivalls, that is Rosamond’s mother’s relatives. After that slightly convoluted prelude, we find ourselves at Furnivall Manor, the big spooky mansion where the rest of the action is to take place. Given that the framing device sees Hester and Rosamond alive and in good health, we can safely assume that they will come out of these spooky happenings more or less fine, but then we’re not reading this story for the question of if Our Heroines™ will persevere, but rather how. That Hester is also telling us this story in first-person, in a conversational tone, gives the impression that this is a story one should read aloud to an audience, perhaps on the night before Christmas.

(Of course, I say “conservational,” but this is by the standards of mid-Victorian speech, which is more verbose and long-winded than what we’re used to nowadays. Let’s say that Gaskell, in a way not untypical for her time, likes to abuse the semi-colon.)

Furnivall Manor is home to four old farts, namely Grace Furnivall, her maid “and companion” Mrs. Stark, and James and his wife Dorothy. The only exception is Agnes, the one servant in the house who does not have a close relationship with anyone else. As for the current Lord Furnivall, he’s always away from the manor, and I don’t think we ever see him. The west drawing-room is open, but the east drawing-room is locked shut and nobody ever goes in there, for reasons Ms. Furnivall refrains from giving. It doesn’t take long at all for us to find that this mansion has a dark family secret, and we can infer this straight from the fact that Ms. Furnivall had an older sister who died many years ago, from decidedly unnatural circumstances. There’s also eerie organ music that plays in the halls at night, despite there being no one playing the instrument and everyone having gone to bed. Oh yeah, “The Old Nurse’s Story” wastes no time in getting to the good stuff. In fact, despite its length, this is by no means slowly paced, but rather is as long as it is because of Gaskell’s style that she uses here, where there’s no stone left unturned and paragraphs tend to go on for nearly a page at a time. There’s a whole family history delved into here, in a story that’s only about 25 pages, much like in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” But whereas “Usher” has to do with a rich family dooming itself via an incestuous streak, the Furnivalls are cursed from a combination of pride and jealousy. Just how exactly these sins play into the ghostly proceedings, we will soon see, for as I said, it’s a question of how the manor is haunted.

For one, we know (or rather are told) that Old Lord Furnivall loved music, both to hear and to play it, and also that he was quite the bastard when he was alive. He apparently mistreated his two daughters, Maude and Grace, although just to what extent we can’t say for sure. We know that the Furnivalls are dominated by pride in their wealth, or at least the appearance of wealth, even in the living relatives, to where James can’t help but look down on his wife Dorothy a bit for having been a farmer’s daughter. Rosamond’s own mother, despite being from a high-born family, had chosen to marry a man of the cloth (I believe it was Anglican, not Catholic, kinda goes without saying), who while virtuous also didn’t make much money. Class figures greatly into “The Old Nurse’s Story,” both thematically and even how it plays a major role in the underlying conflict. This is unsprising, given that Gaskell, like Dickens, was politically progressive, despite being actively religious (specifically she was a Unitarian Christian). The idea that one can be both a practicing Christian and decidedly on the political left may sound far-fetched now, but believe it or not, such strange creatures can occasionally be found in the wild to this day. As for the characters in the story, religion doesn’t play much of a role; but still there’s a palpable class tension between the modest Hester and Rosamond and the rather haughty upper-class Ms. Furnivall and Mrs. Stark. And then there are the ghosts, who are a different matter entirely. There’s Old Lord Furnivall at his organ in the dead of night, and more distressingly there’s a child, slightly younger than Rosamond, who prowls the frosty manor grounds…

(It’s worth mentioning that Hester says winter has hit the manor when it’s only October, which sounds weird, but it’s also worth mentioning that in the northernmost part of England the murderous chill of winter would have set in quite early in the year.)

The first big scare, and the most effective (mostly because it’s something that can happen in real life), is when Rosamond goes missing one day, and it’s both frightfully cold and snowing outside the manor. Hester nearly scares herself to death with fright in trying to find Rosamond, who herself is only rescued thanks to a farmer who lives not too far from the manor, the child nearly frozen to death. Yet strangely Rosamond is not scared of what she found in the snowy outdoors, namely a child who beckons Rosamond to come play with her. The child is obviously a ghost, and is implied not to be leading Rosamond to her death out of malice, but rather out of loneliness, not being fully aware of what she’s doing. It’s unclear if the ghost child is even aware that she’s a ghost. But between the ghost child and the ghost of Old Lord Furnivall, there are a few spirits lurking at the manor that have not yet been laid to rest. Ms. Furnivall has been keeping a secret all these years, and despite being somewhere in her seventies and being deaf enough that she has to use a horn, she’s not too feeble to confess a wrongdoing of the past. Again it’s worth observing that Rosamond is saved by a man of low stature, and that Hester, being merely a nurse-maid, is unequivocally the most heroic figure in the story—which is not to say that all the low-born characters in the are story are virtuous. Gaskell generally sides with the working class, but her view of individual virtue and how it relates to class conflict is more nuanced, as we are about to discover.

There Be Spoilers Here

Back when they were young, Maude and Grace Furnivall were the starlets of the manor and two fine ladies from that part of the country. Old Lord Furnivall wanted nothing less than the best for his daughters, although when I say “the best” I specifically mean the best in terms of status. Only a man with high enough status is deserving of either of these sisters, which doesn’t stop the ladies from having ambitions of their own. There was a time when a “dark foreigner” would visit the manor from abroad once a year, being a talented musician but naturally also one who was not rich. Old Lord Furnivall admired the man’s talent, and also loved to have the foreigner listen to his own playing, but he probably would not have approved of the musician marrying one of his daughters. This didn’t stop the musician from “walking abroad in the woods” (going on walks between man and woman was like going on a date) with each of the sisters at different points. The musician and Maude got married in secret and the musician knocked her up. Maude managed to hide her pregnancy and even to raise her daughter, under the guise that the child was a charity case from some working-class home. But the musician had skipped town, never to return, and Grace was the only other person who knew the secret; so, in a moment of fiery jealousy, she ratted out her sister to their father, who was not pleased. Maude and her child were evicted from the manor, with her later being found under a tree, crazed and nearly frozen to death, her child dead in her arms. Maude died not long after that, and the guilt never left Grace.

Hester coming to the manor with Rosamond reopened a wound that seemed to have nearly healed, or at least would have probably died along with Ms. Furnivall. The climax is theatrical, and if I had a gripe with this story I think the final confrontation is a bit overblown, compared to what came previously, although the very end is haunting. Having confessed to what she had done to Maude, Ms. Furnivall has lifted the curse from the manor and placed all on her own shoulders. There’s peace for everyone else, but not for her. She dies in her bed shortly after, in agony, with the words: “Alas! alas! what is done in youth can never be undone in age! What is done in youth can never be undone in age!” It’s a pretty bleak ending, the only thing preventing it from being a total downer being that Hester and Rosamond come out of the ordeal in one piece. If we can infer from the framing device, Rosamond (although we hear not a word from her adult self) has not repeated the mistakes of her relatives.

A Step Farther Out

I had read this one only yesterday, and part of me wishes I got to sat it on longer. This is a story that requires some retracing of steps and understanding the whole of it in order to better appreciate. The syntax Gaskell uses here also takes some time getting accommodated with, but this is coming from the perspective of someone who hasn’t read that much Victorian literature. While the walls of text and the convoluted family dynamics can be a bit intimidating, I do very much recommend seeking out “The Old Nurse’s Story,” especially if you’re into ghost stories by the likes of Robert Aickman and M. R. James.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Day of Judgment” by Edmond Hamilton

October 29th, 2025

(Cover by Pete Kuhlhoff. Weird Tales, September 1946.)

Who Goes There?

Born in 1904, Edmond Hamilton was, along with friend and close contemporary Jack Williamson, one of the last of the classic SF pulp writers, and one of the few of that type to survive the raising of standards for SF writing that came about during the World War II years. He tried but failed to strike a business relationship with John W. Campbell, but found Campbell’s criteria to be too exacting and finicky, so he was to appear regularly in just about every genre magazine of the era that Campbell wasn’t editing. In the pre-war years Hamilton was known for his quite literally world-shattering space opera, being one of the pioneers of that subgenre; but whereas E. E. Smith captured readers’ imaginations with his novels, Hamilton stuck to the short story and novella early in his career, and he also deliberately mixed horror elements in with his SF. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that he had made his debut in Weird Tales, and was maybe the most consistent contributor of “weird-scientific” stories for that magazine. He remained loyal to Weird Tales until it shut down (not for the last time) in 1954. So we have a story today that’s not really horror at all, but rather is SF that could’ve just as well have been published in Startling Stories or Thrilling Wonder Stories at the time. This is also one of those cases where I checked out the story based on the nifty magazine cover it inspired.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September 1946 issue of Weird Tales. It’s only been reprinted twice, in The Last Man on Earth (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh) and the Hamilton collection The Best of Edmond Hamilton.

Enhancing Image

As you can guess from the cover, this story involves anthropomorphized animals, or more accurately animals that have been unintentionally uplifted via atom-bomb-induced mutation. Hahl and his comrade S’San, a dog-man and a cat-man respectively, are minding their own business when a star passes over them, passing so close in fact that it crashes in the Crying Stones, an island that is forbidden to the Clans. The Clans are of course communities of different humanoid animals, including dogs, cats, foxes, and even horses. These beast-people are akin to those poor mutilated creatures in The Island of Doctor Moreau; but whereas the beast-folk in that novel are in a state of constant agony, their equivalents in “Day of Judgment” don’t have too bad a life—even barring the nuclear devastation they’ve been born into. Hahl, being a dog, if one that walks on two legs, is curious about this fallen star, going against S’San’s warnings. Naturally the fallen star turns out to be a spaceship that’s landed on the island, home to two humans, a man and a woman. When I reviewed Peter Phillips’s very good (and chilling) “Lost Memory” not long ago I went into some detail about how humankind getting back into contact with one of our robot or animal companions might turn out badly, but this is not so much case with the humans in Hamilton’s story. For one, it’s been long enough since the nuclear holocaust wrecked the world (several dog generations we’re told) that the radiation has long since died down. Also, while the humans are outnumbered, they do have futuristic weapons, whereas the beast-folk have not yet gotten past the stone-and-spear phase. Still, their first meeting is a rough one.

Unfortunately “Day of Judgment” is not very interesting on its own, although it is interesting when taken in the context of a certain strand of SF that proliferated in the years immediately following WWII, that being the tale of nuclear anxiety/depression. I wrote an editorial on this topic some months back, because it’s a topic that informs a great deal of SF published from about 1946 to 1960. There were stories beforehand that speculated on the use of a theoretical nuclear weapon, but following the atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki there came along a new subspecies of SF story, written from an American or at least Allied perspective, about a world in which humanity has disfigured or destroyed itself with atom bombs. There are too many examples to count, but some notable ones include Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” Judith Merrill’s “That Only a Mother,” Theodore Sturgeon’s “Memorial,” A. E. van Vogt’s “Dormant,” and perhaps the ultimate post-nuclear story of the era, Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. These are at times melancholy and outright pitch-black stories in tone, and it’s strange to think these are coming from people who were on the winning side. Hamilton himself was a hawk who supported America’s involvement in WWII and later (more regrettably) Vietnam, although he was not the the screaming cold warrior that Robert Heinlein was. Even someone with Hamilton’s politics could see that the proliferation of nuclear weapons would likely be a losing game for everybody. The human couple in “Day of Judgment” have returned from a failed Venus colony, only to find Earth has been bereft of human life for a hot minute now, replaced by intelligent beast-people.

The immediate question is what ought to be done with these humans, as they could well present a threat to the Clans, but the thematic question is whether humanity, in the wake of the nuclear age, deserves a second chance. This is Hamilton, who for how dark he can be at times is not as much a pessimist as his wife (Leigh Brackett), so you can guess.

There Be Spoilers Here

A trial ensues among the clans, with the humans being in a position where they might be executed; of course they won’t be, which is a bit of a shame, since a bleaker ending would’ve elevated this story a bit. I’d like to take a moment to talk about a gripe I have with Trondor, the leader of the horse clan, and his ilk: these fuckers stand on their hind legs, which are hoofed. This simply doesn’t work. Humans are able to walk on two legs because of a lack of a real tail, and more importantly we have feet with flexible toes which are good for keeping ourselves balanced. If someone loses even one toe on one of their feet they find it more difficult to stay balanced when standing, so imagine not having any toes on your feet. I can take cat and dog furries, but I draw the line at horse-people with hooves instead of clawed or fingered toes. Anyway, that was my TED talk.

A Step Farther Out

I would say I’m sorry for the delay, but I didn’t have too much to say about this one and I’m not sure how many cared to hear what I had to say. This is the second time I’ve reviewed Edmond Hamilton and the second time I’ve come away feeling rather indifferent, which sucks because I’ve read enough of his work outside the confines of this site that I know he’s capable of a good deal better. Then again, he wrote a lot, and since he wrote as a way to make a living, he didn’t spend much time on revising his work. He’s a relic from a bygone era, but I don’t mean that in an insulting way.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Woman of the Wood” by A. Merritt

August 25th, 2025

(Cover by C. Barker Petrie, Jr. Weird Tales, August 1926.)

Who Goes There?

A couple years ago I was supposed to review A. Merritt’s novel The Dwellers in the Mirage, although I couldn’t get far into it before admitting defeat. It could be because I was reading it as it appeared in Fantastic Novels, a magazine with a type size intended for ants and other insects, but I was struggling with it. At the time I knew I would have to give Merritt another shot at some point, not least because of his reputation in the field—or, more accurately, his lack of a reputation nowadays. Abraham Merritt only wrote eight novels and small number of short stories, which for someone who wrote pulp fiction is borderline miniscule, but in fact he had such a well-paying day job that he felt not the need to write much fiction. He worked as assistant editor and later editor of The American Weekly, a Sunday newspaper whose top positions paid a pretty good deal. (Making it as a journalist a century ago meant a lot more than it does now, in the sense that you could afford a house without taking on a second job.) Merritt basically quit writing fiction after 1934 to focus on his lucrative career, resulting in a writing career that lasted not quite twenty years. As with close contemporary Edgar Rice Burroughs, Merritt didn’t start writing fiction until he was in his thirties; but once he picked it up, he found a good deal of success with it as well. Merritt cultivated such a devoted following that he’s one of a very small group of people to have a genre magazine named after him, the short-lived A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine.

Yet Merritt’s reputation dwindled in the years following his death in 1943, with naysayers popping up rather early on. In one of his books of criticism, I forget which piece exactly, James Blish calls Merritt a lousy writer. While such an assessment is more often true than not when it comes to once-beloved genre writers from so long ago (E. E. Smith was indeed a pretty bad writer, and his immense influence on the field is thus hard to account for), this judgment of Merritt seems harsh to me. It’s telling that Merritt was one of the first people to be inducted posthumously into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, then was “awarded” the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award in 2009. His stuff only seems to be kept in print by small independent presses, and I’m actually unsure if even all his novels are in print. He also wrote few short stories, with “The Woman of the Wood” being his only original appearance in Weird Tales. Merritt’s work was frequently reprinted in the genre magazines of the time, but he was originally published in the general pulps, namely Argosy.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1926 issue of Weird Tales, and later reprinted in the January 1934 issue. It’s also been reprinted in the first issue of Avon Fantasy Reader, A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (ed. Terry Carr and Martin H. Greenberg), The Fantasy Hall of Fame (ed. Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg), and the Merritt collection The Fox Woman and Other Stories. It’s in the public domain now, which means you can read it however, although it’s not been transcribed for Project Gutenberg in the US as of yet. Very little of Merritt’s public-domain work is there.

Enhancing Image

McKay, an American World War I veteran, has come to the mountains of France in need of some fresh air. A pilot in the war, McKay had apparently joined the French forces and later the Americans, once they entered the war; but while he served honorably, the experience left him shell-shocked. “The war had sapped him, nerve and brain and soul. Through all the years that had passed since then the wound had kept open.” This is, of course, Merritt telling us upfront that we ought to take McKay’s testimony of the strange events to follow with a grain of salt. Indeed, McKay not entirely having his mental screws in place is key to the story working, or else it would sound even more ridiculous than it already does. McKay is quite different from his creator, being a war veteran while Merritt was not, but both men are what we might call eccentrics, and both also have green thumbs. McKay would be perfectly happy as a gardener, such that he seems to get along better with plants than people, and like Bob Ross he has a tendency to bestow human personality on the birch and pine trees of the Vosages. He’s staying at a lodge, owned by an unnamed inn-keeper and his wife, on the edge of a lake, with only one other human habitation at that forested lake—that being the house of Polleau and his two sons.

Polleau and his sons are the descendants of serfs who lived off the land generations ago, but they’ve been feuding with their surroundings such that several members of their family have befallen to bizarre tree-related accidents. Now they are the last of their kind. Given that McKay repeatedly equate the trees with royalty and medieval figures, it’s easy to picture the last of the serfs going up against a legion of nobility (or so Merritt/McKay thinks) from centuries past, in a France which has not had a monarch for many years at this point. When one of the sons tries cutting down a birch (the birch trees are given feminine qualities), McKay witnesses something very strange indeed: the trees seem to fight back. The birch, wounded, lies on a neighboring fir “as though it were a wounded maid stretched on breast, in arms, of knightly lover.” Something I’ll say in Merritt’s favor is that while he’s fond of using certain words over and over, he has a knack for evocative imagery that’s a step above most other people submitting to Weird Tales at the time. The cast is small, and it become apparent pretty soon where Merritt is gonna take the plot, but the setting is well-realized, and there’s an intense earthiness to it that reads like a pulpier and perhaps less scary Algernon Blackwood. I have no doubt that Merritt would’ve read his fair share of Blackwood, considering he was big into reading on the occult and both authors have a shared fondness for rural spaces. “The Woman of the Wood” was by no means the first “Nature fights back” story, probably not even the first to be published in Weird Tales that year, but it’s redeemed by Merritt’s knack for setting and tone.

One of the sons lose an eye in the ordeal, which was a bit more violent than I was expecting, but also it’s unsurprising that a) this conflict between man and tree is a bit more literal than would be deemed realistic, and b) McKay sympathizes a lot more with the trees. Later he is tormented, or maybe just haunted, by a small army of birches come to life as ghostly women, which is how I imagine we got the cover for this magazine issue. The trees tempt McKay to “slay” (they keep using that word specifically for a while, which makes the proceedings just a bit hard to take seriously) the Polleau family for them. Since the closest we have to a human woman in the story is the inn-keeper’s wife, who doesn’t say much, the estrogen quota will have to be met in the form of sly and vaguely slutty tree spirits. The spirits of the forest are not exactly evil, nor are they really good, but simply wanting to retaliate against a small but passionate force of deforestation. It does not seem to occur to anyone, even Polleau himelf, that the old man and his sons should probably make plans to move out of the mountains; but then, considering what we see of them, it wouldn’t be surprising that their pride would make moving out of the question. As is typical of weird fiction, and also pulp writing generally at the time, there’s an appeal more to emotions than the brain. That Merritt can delay the reader in thinking about the logical issues of the setting is to the story’s benefit, not really a negative. That McKay himself is shown to be in a fragile mental state to begin with also makes his extreme actions in the climax easier to understand.

There Be Spoilers Here

The really crazy part, which might be the one thing I wasn’t expecting in terms of the story itself (putting style and pacing aside), is that McKay gets away with murder. Yeah, he shivs one of the sons in the goddamn neck, in a kind of tree-induced rage, actually rips out the guy’s throat with the knife (it should be sliced instead of ripped if it’s with a blade, but putting that aside…), and it’s pretty graphic. It’s about as graphic as you could get away with in a dark fantasy magazine with a lot of naked women on its covers in the 1920s. And what’s more, the trees kill Polleau and the other son off-screen, giving McKay enough leeway to get off scott free. The trees don’t even take vengeance on him when he turns down their offer to join them (I assume by giving up his human body to become a tree spirit, I’m not sure), they just seem a little crestfallen about it. But yeah, aside from being shaken from killing a guy and making contact with a bunch of ghosts, McKay gets out of this in one piece. Didn’t expect that.

A Step Farther Out

Merritt’s known more for his novels (not that he’s known much at all these days), but I’m more of a short story fan myself. Why he didn’t contribute more to Weird Tales, I’m not sure. Maybe the pay rate wasn’t enough. At least with Amazing Stories in the late ’20s, Merritt’s lack of original appearances (although he did give the green light on a few reprints) can be explained by Hugo Gernsback being reluctant to pay anybody much of anything. By the time more rivals to Weird Tales, and indeed more genre alternatives to the general pulps, came about, Merritt stopped writing, and then he died about a decade later. It’s a bit of a shame, because it turns out he wasn’t half bad at writing short fiction. “The Woman of the Wood” is a decent bit of rural weird horror that’s aged better than most from the same period, namely due to Merritt’s style plus the lack of racism.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Red Nails by Robert E. Howard (Part 3/3)

April 28th, 2025

(Cover by J. Allen St. John. Weird Tales, October 1936.)

The Story So Far

Valeria of the Red Brotherhood is a warrior-pirate who was aboard ship not too long ago, but jumped in order to escape an unwanted marriage proposal. She then joined an army of mercenaries, but left that as well, after killing one of the officers. She’s now a fugitive, but she’s not alone, for Conan was in the same army and also deserted, with the intent of following Valeria’s trail. Conan doesn’t wanna kill Valeria, indeed having killed the brother of the officer she had killed off-screen, but rather is curious about her—in more ways than one. Aside from being warriors, one thing Conan and Valeria have in common is that they’re very bad at taking orders. They’re having a “fun” time bickering when a dragon in the forest they’re hiding out in kills their horses, and looks to have them for lunch next. Using a spear and some poison fruit, Conan’s able to incapacitate (although probably not kill) the dragon, and the two make a run for it on foot. On the plains by the forest there’s a domed city, called Xuchotl, which once had an indigenous population but which is not thinly populated by two clans, who years ago had moved in and slaughtered the original residents. Yes, that is technically genocide. We’re told that the indigenous people of the city were no better than those who killed them, and in some ways might’ve been worse. Now it’s a war between the last members of the Tecuhltli and Xotalancas, clans named after their founders. No children have been born in these clans in quite a few years, and it seems each is a mini-civilization on its last legs.

With the help of a Tecuhltli named Techotl, Our Heroes™ get introduced to the Tecuhltli higher-ups, namely their “king” Olmec and his partner Tascela (in the previous installment I said they were married, but their relationship is actually more ambiguous than that), the latter appearing youthful and yet, it turns out, being centuries old. Olmec sort of hires Conan and Valeria in the hopes that they’ll help vanquish the remaining Xotalancas. (The red nails of the title refer to red nails that are stuck into a column in Olmec’s chamber, each representing a vanquished enemy.) This arrangement goes sideways, though, when later that day one of Tascela’s servants tries to put Valeria into a deep sleep with the help of a black lotus. Valeria doesn’t appreciate this very much, so she tortures the servant until she confesses what Tascela’s plan is, although she escapes into the catacombs, never to be seen again but likely to be killed off-screen by something. It’s at this point that Valeria hears swords clashing at the gates, which probably means the Xotalancas have chosen now to make their final assault.

Enhancing Image

A battle goes down, with the Tecuhltli being victorious, of course. They’ve killed the last of the Xotalancas, which ordinarily would mean everyone gets to live happily ever after, but as you know, Tascela has other plans. Olmec also has plans of his own, and ultimately the two rulers fight for a bit over who gets a piece of Valeria’s ass. Olmec wants to rape Valeria while Tascela somehow has even worse plans in mind. Of course, while Olmec is a burley bearded guy who can break someone’s spine in half, Tascela is a sorceress who many years ago had put a spell on Olmec so that he would be unable to lay much more than a finger on her. Is this the only Howard-written Conan story with both a heroine and a villainess? Unfortunately, by this point Valeria has become little more than the obligatory damsel who needs rescuing, although while she’s physically helpless she does have quite the mouth on her. We hear about some “profanities” coming from her and it’s easy to imagine her dropping several F bombs if not for censorship. I sort of get the criticism of Valeria not being enough of a badass heroine, but at the same time I do think she works as a kind of foil to Conan. I think it’s also worth mentioning that it’s easy to believe Howard had based Valeria on Novalyne Price, his girlfriend at the time, namely through her assertive attitude and penchant for cursing, as was apparently Novalyne’s habit when she wasn’t on the job. Clearly by the last couple years of his life Howard was moving in a direction that, while not exactly feminist, was more sympathetic to women as people. Remember that this is a guy who really could not imagine living in a world without his mother in it.

As if to compensate for the slow middle section of the novella, the back end of Red Nails is nonstop violence and conspicuously erotic imagery (I don’t mean that last part in a bad way). Howard said in at least one letter that he thought of Red Nails as his sexiest Conan story, and between the two BDSM-coded torture scenes it’s easy to believe him. Yes, a second BDSM-coded torture scene has hit the towers! This time it’s Valeria who’s on the slab, with the dark-skinned Tascela towering over her, in an image that provided the cover for the first installment. (I should probably have mentioned by now that Tascela is coded as being equivalent to ancient Egyptian royalty, going by how Howard describes her clothing and especially with how she’s illustrated in the version of Red Nails printed in The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume II.) Conan kills Olmec and comes in for the rescue, but it looks like Our Heroes™ are outnumbered when the thing from the catacombs emerges as a deus ex machina, in the form of Tolkemec, who had been banished there many years prior. Conan kills Tolkemec while Valeria takes the chance to stab Tascela in the back, who despite being able to replenish her youth and make people follow her every order is apparently made of tissue paper if someone manages to catch her off-guard. “I had to do that much, for my own self-respect!” says Valeria, as almost a meta statement on how given her damsel status for much of the story she had to take down someone. Why not her evil counterpart, then? It makes enough sense. It also acts as a bit of a twist on its own, if also as an anticlimax, since Tascela shows herself to not be much of a fight after all, at least physically.

As I was reading Mark Finn’s Blood & Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard (a good one-volume biography, if also unfortunately sloppy in the proofreading department), and Finn makes a point that I’m sure is not new but which I thought useful for my own read of Red Nails: he considers Red Nails to be a thematic counterpart to Howard’s earlier Beyond the Black River, which might still be my favorite Conan story. Granted that Beyond the Black River benefits from a tighter narrative focus and the damsel being a man instead of a beautiful woman for Conan to make out with, the two novellas do each show one side of the same coin, with Beyond the Black River showing barbarism creeping up on civilization while Red Nails shows what Howard saw as the inherent evil of civilization. A more conventionally racist (mind you that Howard did have racist tendencies) narrative would’ve painted the original inhabitants of Xuchotl as backward “savages,” but from what we’re told about them they were actually quite an advanced and “civilized” people—at least on paper. But they were also decadent, and their collective villainy made way for the settlers that came in and slaughtered them. Now that the clans have been wiped out as well, Conan sees the city being truly bereft of human life now as no great loss. “It’s well the breed exterminated itself,” he says, which could be referring to the original inhabitants, the clans (who after had spawned from one people), or both. For both Conan and Howard, civilization is only temporary, and at some point will meet its end. This is the view of a philosophical pessimist, which one could argue is the most essential foundation for dark fantasy.

A Step Farther Out

I have to admit that when I finished Red Nails I felt a bittersweetness, because it was the last Conan story Howard wrote; even had he lived longer it’s unlikely he would’ve written more Conan, as he made it clear in letters at the time that he was getting tired of the character, and moreover he was getting tired of writing fantasy in general. That one can think this while only pushing thirty is something many of us would now think of as absurd, but Howard really meant it. About a year after he finished Red Nails he got in his car, took out a revolver, put it to the side of his head, and pulled the trigger. It’s ironic that he had basically intended this as the final Conan story, since it ends on a relatively upbeat note (I mean hey, all the bad people are dead) and implies more adventures between Conan and Valeria—only we never got to see those. Eventually I’ll cover more Howard, specifically work of his that isn’t Conan, assuming I don’t follow my leader.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Red Nails by Robert E. Howard (Part 2/3)

April 22nd, 2025

(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, Aug-Sept 1936.)

The Story So Far

Valeria of the Red Brotherhood is a pirate-turned-mercenary who abandoned her ship to avoid an unwanted marriage proposal, only then to also desert the band of mercenaries she had joined, after killing one of the officers. She’s currently a fugitive, but she’s not alone, for it turns out Conan, who was in the same army as Valeria, also deserted and followed her trail—partly out of curiosity but also because he makes no secret of having the hots for the female warrior. (You gotta give Conan credit: the man is upfront about what he wants.) Valeria is not so smitten with the legendary Cimmerian. At the same time the two are probably better off together than each going their separate ways, for the moment. Their bickering is interrupted when a dragon of the forest they’ve taken refuge in devours their horses off-screen, with Our Heroes™ looking to be another meal. The dragon is not the fire-breathing dragon of medieval folklore, nor the slim serpent with wings of ancient China, but a dinosaur-like beast whose belly drags on the ground and who’s got more teeth than a dentist could possibly hope to count. With the help of a makeshift spear and the juice of a poison fruit, Conan incapacitates the dragon and Our Heroes™ flee the forest, into a wide plain and then into a massive interior city. Xuchotl is an ancient city that’s partly underground and totally encased by a dome, and at first it looks to be abandoned. When Conan splits from Valeria to do some investigating, the latter stumbles onto a couple of the city’s inhabitants and gets herself into a battle she really did not anticipate. The first installment ends with Valeria and Techotl, a member of the Tecuhltli, fending off some ravenous dogs. This first installment actually ends in the middle of the second chapter; I’m not sure if this is a criticism, I just wanted to point that out. The question then is: Where could Conan be?

Enhancing Image

Of course this had to be unintended, but I find it interesting that the first installment started and ended without Conan, only for the second installment (which is actually just the second chapter continued) to reintroduce him as fast as possible. Also, aside from the action scene at the beginning, this middle chunk of Red Nails will be much more focused on building character and the world of Xuchotl. There’s a lot less fighting and a lot more dialogue. This is not really a bad thing, since Xuchotl is one of the more imaginatively realized settings for a Conan story. Right after Howard wrote Red Nails, about a year before its publication, he admitted in letters that it would not only be his last Conan story but also probably the last fantasy story he ever wrote—mind you he was only 29 when he said this. The notion that someone so young could feel that they’ve said all they could say about a character, never mind a whole genre, might strike us as crazy, but I do believe that even had Howard lived to a nice old age it’s unlikely he at the very least would’ve written more Conan stories. Red Nails was the grand finale of the series, even if it doesn’t exactly feel like one; but also Howard really pulled out all the stops with the action, worldbuilding, and character moments. It’s also, it must be said, possibly the sexiest of the Conan stories, but that’s for me to give the details of in just a moment. For now we must be content with being introduced to the rest of the Tecuhltli, who stand opposed to the clan on the other end of the city, the Xotalancas. Turns out the city had already been built and had its own indigenous population when the founders of these clans had arrived. Given that said indigenous population is not longer here, you can guess what happened, although curiously the original people of Xuchotl are also said to have been brutal and decadent in their own right.

Thus Conan and Valeria find themselves caught in the middle of a war between dying clans (there are no children among the Tecuhltli and presumably the same goes for the enemy) that has been going on for fifty years, so that basically nobody alive now was around to witness how it had all started. When we meet the rulers of the Tecuhltli, Olmec and his wife Tascela, we get the feeling that something is very off, not least because Tascela looks to be young and beautiful but is, in fact, at least in her seventies, given that she was an adult when the war started and indeed the big reason for why it had started in the first place. How she has retained her youth is a mystery—for now. During Olmec’s big exposition dump about the history of the clans, Tascela also seems weirdly focused on Valeria, as if transfixed by her beauty. (It’s worth mentioning that while homosexuality was sometimes mentioned in mainstream fiction of the time, it was sort of taboo in the genre magazines, so that even the implication of it here is Howard teasing the reader.) Now, my dumb ass thought going in that the story’s title referred to red fingernails, but actually it’s referring to red nails impaled in the Tecuhltlis’ headquarters, each representing a slain enemy. Granted, the red nails could also refer, if only metaphorically, to Valeria, who after all is of the Red Brotherhood. For better or worse Conan is rendered the secondary protagonist while Valeria is the real hero(ine) of Red Nails; and in case there was any doubt of this she once again takes hold of the narrative in the fourth chapter, which is where the second installment ends and which is short but pretty memorable. Red Nails could be considered a logical successor as well as a companion piece to Beyond the Black River, which in some ways it’s very different from but also in other ways similar. We go from the frontier to what is basically a buried city, and the POV character who follows Conan is female instead of male, but their premises are similar enough.

Now, let’s talk about the torture scene, although it’s actually not the torture scene that provided the cover for the previous issue of Weird Tales. After their meeting with Olmec and Tascela, Conan and Valeria once again part ways for the moment, with the latter going to take a nice post-battle nap. She wakes suddenly, however, to find that Yasala, Tascela’s servant girl, had tried to pull a Bill Cosby on her with the help of a black lotus, a blossom “whose scent brings deep sleep.” Valeria is very cross about this, especially because Yasala refuses to explain herself. Valeria then does what any normal person would do and decides to strip Yasala naked and tie her down, for the purposes of strangely erotic torture with a lash. Now, as somebody who is not particularly into BDSM (although I’m not opposed to it), I have to admit that what follows is pretty hot, to the point where I would be surprised how it made its way into Weird Tales in the ’30s if not for the fact that paying kink lip service was actually far from uncommon for the magazine at this time. (There are, in fact, multiple Robert E. Howard stories that made the cover for this very reason, courtesy of Margaret Brundage.) Indeed, I can imagine that reading Weird Tales in the early-to-mid-’30s (the magazine cleaned up its act towards the end of the decade, at least when it came to the covers) and being introduced to BDSM this way. Shit must’ve blown some minds. Anyway, Valeria gives Yasala a good thrashing until the latter finally gives in, saying the Bill Cosby routine was part of Tascela’s scheme. Once Valeria unstraps her she throws some wine in Valeria’s face for her troubles and runs off the catacombs, where it’s implied she meets her death off-screen. Meanwhile Valeria hears the clashing of swords in another direction, implying that the Xotalancas are at the gates.

A Step Farther Out

Sorry for the delay, but I hope the wait was worth it. Red Nails is shaping up to be yet another top-tier Conan story, but we still have a good chunk of it to go. I’ve read enough Conan at this point, a lot of it outside the confines of this site, to separate the mediocre (because there are a few Conan stories where Howard was clearly phoning it in) from the good stuff. It helps a lot that Valeria herself is a very fun character, who in some alternate timeline probably could’ve gotten her own spinoff series. I’ve read into the possible inspirations behind Valeria, with the most likely contenders being C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry, whose first couple stories Howard had very likely read by the time he wrote Red Nails; and then there’s Novalyne Price, Howard’s girlfriend at the time. The details of Howard and Price’s relationship are unspeakably depressing, so I won’t go into it, but it seems he had based Valeria’s tenacity on Price. (I’ve been reading Mark Finn’s Blood & Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard, and there’s a good chance I’ll be done with it by the time I finish reviewing Red Nails.) My point is that I was looking for a palate cleanser after the dismaying experience that was reading the first installment of E. E. Smith’s Triplanetary, and I’m happy to say Red Nails is meeting my expectations.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Red Nails by Robert E. Howard (Part 1/3)

April 15th, 2025

(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, July 1936.)

Who Goes There?

E. E. Smith has I guess the distinction of having the first serial I started to review but simply could not finish. I’m already a couple days behind in my schedule as it is. It would’ve been one thing if I did not enjoy reading Triplanetary (which is certainly the case, mind you), but Smith was also maybe a victim of bad timing. We are cursed to live in interesting times. Both in my personal life and in the outside world there have been some, let’s say disturbances. My question then is, if I’m not gonna continue my review of Triplanetary, what could I use as a substitute for the rest of the month? There were many options; as you probably know, a lot of novels and novellas were serialized in three installments. But for me the answer was obvious: I’d be returning to Robert E. Howard.

Despite the fact that he committed suicide when he was only thirty, Robert E. Howard can lay claim to being the most influential American fantasy writer of all time, not to mention being arguably the greatest of the pulp writers who never broke into mainstream or “slick” fiction. He began writing with the hopes of being published when he was 15, although he wouldn’t actually make his first fiction sale until he was 17 or 18; little did he know, when he started writing at 15, that his life was already halfway over. But once Howard started getting published, he never stopped—not even when he died. Almost too many short stories and poems to count were published, either complete or as fragments, in the decades following Howard’s death in 1936. He wrote nonstop for about a dozen years, and for practically every pulp and genre market, except, weirdly enough, science fiction, which he didn’t seem to have much if any interest in. He wrote fantasy, horror, Westerns, historical adventures, and even sports stories (Howard was especially fond of boxing). He also ran several different series focusing on a colorful roster of courageous and quite masculine heroes, from Solomon Kane and the sailor Steve Costigan to, of course, Conan the Barbarian. Conan is one of the most iconic characters in fiction, and he was also Howard’s final fantasy hero, being a culmination of themes and tropes Howard had developed. Red Nails was the last Conan story Howard had completed; the first installment would’ve been on newsstands around the time of Howard’s death. I had been meaning to get to this one for a while.

Placing Coordinates

Serialized in Weird Tales, July to October (the August and September issues were combined) 1936. Since this is Conan it’s been reprinted quite a few times, including 13 Short Fantasy Novels (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh) and too many Howard collections to count. It’s also on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

Valeria of the Red Brotherhood is a pirate-turned-mercenary who’s currently a fugitive, having killed an officer in Zarallo’s Free Companions, an army of mercenaries and, ironically from what we hear about it, not free at all. Another member of that army was Conan, and like Valeria he too deserted, albeit for different reasons. Since this is the third Conan story I’ve reviewed, I think acknowledging formula is in order. Howard wrote a lot, and like anyone who writes enough for long enough he fell back on formula and certain turns of phrase, and even how he would structure his plots. With the Conan series the idea is that the “real” protagonist is not Conan, but some third party who has their own adventure, including their own personal stakes, and who sees Conan’s exploits from the outside. There are some exceptions, but most of the Conan stories do not start with Conan as the focus characters. Valeria herself is by no means the only female main character in a Conan story, but she’s certainly a contender for the feistiest, alongside Bêlit from “Queen of the Black Coast.” But whereas readers might recall Conan’s relationship with Bêlit being genuinely romantic (if also ill-fated), his interest in Valeria is more purely carnal. Indeed Conan and Valeria’s relationship is about as explicitly sexual as one could’ve gotten in ’30s pulp magazines without the characters having actual sex (at least not yet). Valeria compares Conan to a stallion and at one point Conan threatens to spank Valeria in a way that is clearly more meant to be taken as kinky teasing rather than punishment.

Of course, Valeria is a tsundere who is not so taken with Conan’s teasing and raw machismo, although there’s the sense that she can’t help but admire him as a fellow warrior. I’ve read up a bit on Red Nails and one criticism I’ve seen repeated is that for someone who is described as a bad bitch, and who takes a lot of pride in her supposed abilities as a fighter, Valeria is not as strong as she appears. This may prove more valid than it seems to me initially, but I like the idea of a pirate lady who is perhaps a little out of her depth when fighting on land—you could say like a fish out of water. She also clearly resents being on the receiving end of misogyny and mockery from her male colleagues, saying, “Why won’t men let me live a man’s life?” at one point. (Obviously such a sentiment reads different nowadays, what with our understanding of genderqueerness, although Valeria is at the very least gender-nonconforming.) Due to the episodic nature of the Conan series it can be hard to lay out some internal chronology, but I’m pretty sure Red Nails takes place after “Queen of the Black Coast” since Conan has already lived as a pirate by the time of the former, although he makes no mention of Bêlit. I like how these two are former pirates who’ve come to land under different circumstances, with Conan’s last ship getting sunk in battle and Valeria quite literally jumping ship to avoid an unwanted marriage proposal. Also it’s worth mentioning that despite being written after some of the darkest entries in the series (“Queen of the Black Coast” and Beyond the Black River especially), Red Nails starts off considerably lighter in tone, insofar as it reads like a more typical pulp adventure.

But of course, there’s trouble afoot. As Conan and Valeria leave their horses and really get down to bickering with each other, they realize too late that they really should’ve kept a better eye on those horses. A dragon ate them both, somehow, making such short work of the animals that their bones made a distinctive crunching sound. Our Heroes™ have come face-to-face with a dragon, a beast about as large as an elephant with “huge eyes, like those of a python a thousand times magnified,” a head larger than a crocodile’s, a belly that drags on the ground, “absurdly short legs,” and a long and flexible tail. It’s basically a walking tank with a trash compactor for a mouth. Much of the first installment of Red Nails has to do with getting around this dragon, which was not quite what I was expecting, since what I had heard most about this novella was the main setting—but we’ll get to that in a moment. It looks like Our Heroes™ are cooked, but Conan comes up with an ingenious tactic that might (just maybe) kill the dragon. He makes a spear and covers the tip with the juice of a poisonous fruit, then aiming for a spot on the dragon that isn’t totally covered with scaly armor. It works, or at least it works well enough, with Conan and Valeria running off, leaving the poisoned dragon to die a slow death—maybe. I have a feeling this will not be the last we see of it. Finally we come upon a city on the plain, although it’s no ordinary city but one that seems at least partly underground, being totally kept indoors as if under a dome. Being on the run, and with no other signs of civilization in sight, Conan and Valeria enter the interior and probably abandoned city. It took long enough, but in the back end of this installment we do finally enter Xuchotl.

There Be Spoilers Here

This first installment starts and ends with Valeria by herself, since she and Conan are separated for a time once they’ve entered the city. Conan goes off to investigate by himself and leaves Valeria by herself, which turns out to have been a bad move. Valeria finds herself caught in the midst of a battle between two clans that lurk in the city, those of Tecuhltli and those of Xotalanc, having been rescued by a scarred man named Techotl, who comes from the former clan. The builders of the city seem to have died or fled, but they’ve left a great deal in their wake. People reading Red Nails expecting Conan to have more time on the page than he does will be surprised and probably disappointed. The idea, I suppose, is that Conan is simply too powerful a character to be consistently in the midst of the action, so Howard came up with reasons for his to be somewhere else. (Tolkien had a habit of doing this with Gandalf, as another example.) Conversely, if Valeria was out of her depth before then she’s almost useless by the end of this installment. So there’s that.

A Step Farther Out

Ah, it feels good to be back. It’s been over a year since I last got to write about Conan, and Howard’s fiction generally. I’m sure someone out there will blame more for pussying out with Triplanetary, but life is short and I will not, at least for the moment, waste it on trudging through terrible writing. It’s not even like I get paid for any of this. It could also be that I returned to Howard because I’m turning thirty in eight months and I can’t say I’m happy about that. It got me thinking about Howard again, for his life story is surely one of the most tragic in the history of genre writing; but, on the plus side, while he never married or had children, anyone who loves fantasy of the blood-and-thunder variety has a least a bit of Robert E. Howard in their heritage. It’s like how some white Europeans have, to this day, a sliver of neanderthal in their DNA. A relic from an ancient time. Modern fantasy writing, it seems to me, plays things too safe and sanitary, so that we could really use a darker, bloodier, sexier fantasy—albeit not that much of it. You don’t wanna have too much of a good thing, after all.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Sunfire by Francis Stevens (Part 2/2)

February 15th, 2025

(Cover by R. M. Mally. Weird Tales, September 1923.)

The Story So Far

A group of five ~~stupid white men~~ explorers have ventured deep into the Brazilian jungle, along the Rio Silencioso, in search of a piece of ancient South American architecture which may hold immense riches. They do find what they’re looking for—and also a good deal more on top of that. The pyramid is “hollow,” and also seemingly abandoned. The only sign from the outside that there might be people here is a seaplane in the river, in working order but also abandoned. The explorers consider this now at least in part a rescue mission, starting with the one living person they find: a pretty young white girl, who does not give her name and who will not or cannot talk with the explorers. The extremely racist and apparently hormone-addled men practically trip over their own dicks in order to please the girl, or to understand her at all, but she makes it clear she’s not to be understood on their terms. The girl uses “Pan’s pipes” to charm the obligatory monster of the story, a giant snake-centipede creature, whose biological origin remains unexplained, although between that and the giant diamond at the center of the pyramid, the “Sunfire” of the title, this is a story that rings as nominally SF rather than fantasy. It could also be considered an early example of horror-comedy, albeit not an effective one. The explorers seem to have gotten this far on sheer idiot luck, since they repeatedly exhibit a lack of professionalism and competency. The question then is, how will they get out of this? Who is the girl, really, and what does she want? Who gives a shit? Certainly not me.

Enhancing Image

I started reading King Solomon’s Mines yesterday and am already about a third into it; it’s a rather short novel, but it’s also addicting. While H. Rider Haggard’s novel is certainly “problematic,” and has gained sort of a reputation for being such, it’s still nowhere near as racist as Sunfire, or indeed many of the “lost race” pulp adventures that Haggard partly inspired. Sunfire really is not unique in any way, compared to other pulp writing of the 1910s and ’20s, except maybe that it infuses more humor than the norm, and also the fact that Stevens was a woman. In fairness, there is a hint of proto-feminism here, although Stevens does little to advance it. While not technically the protagonist, the girl (we find out her name is Enid Widdiup) is the sun around which the rest of the story revolves, and ultimately, once she’s been broken out of her trance, she ends up being more competent and well-spoken than the explorers. Enid in fact turns out to be an aviator, which would make her one of the very first female aviators in history; she’s also an explorer herself, and she had actually come here on the seaplane the men had seen earlier. This is all rather curious, and it would be much more than just a curiosity if Stevens hadn’t waited until damn near the end of the story to tell us. If Sunfire has an major issue, aside from the dump truck’s worth of racism, it’s that it feels generally undercooked, being a novella with a cast of characters that’s mostly unmemorable and interchangeable. I neglect to mention the explorers’ names because they really don’t matter much. Because of the somewhat comedic tone, the stakes get deflated before Stevens can lay on some really juicy weird horror.

There’s also the villain, or rather villainess, named Sifa, who barely figures into things—another example of Stevens presenting us with something that would be curious, but only just that, as it stands. She only appears in the back end of Sunfire and ends up not being much of a threat. I was reading Bobby D.’s review of Sunfire, to see if he might’ve noticed something I did not, although given that his work tends to be focused around H. P. Lovecraft it was not as much about the story itself as I would’ve hoped; but still he said that Stevens’s story borders on being a parody of what was then a dominant form of pulp writing, although unfortunately it doesn’t go far enough. She has some fun with her incompetent “heroes,” but their rampant bigotry is more played for laughs than something that Stevens actually criticizes. Even for someone who was probably on the liberal side circa 1920, white supremacy was less of a threat to the wellbeing of mankind and more of perhaps a nuisance. The explorers are basically the white trio (so minus the fascinating and surprisingly progressively portrayed Umbopa) of King Solomon’s Mines, but without most of those men’s virtues and with their more unsavory characteristics turned up a notch or two. This may have been intentional on Stevens’s part, but then probably not; from the little pulp fiction of the era that I’ve read it’s not unusual for the protagonists to come off as, let’s say flawed to the point of obnoxiousness. Indeed despite being the literary generation to come after the likes of Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson (who, make no mistake, wrote “popular fiction” and not what was then considered of the “literary” sort), the field that Stevens wrote seemed more stilted and narrow-minded. Even the most acclaimed of the early 20th century pulp writers, namely Edgar Rice Burroughs and A. Merritt, now strike us as semi-literate and offensive. Reading such fiction feels like seeing an ancient fly trapped in amber.

On a positive note, I do like the “author’s note” at the end, in which Stevens treats the characters as if they’re real people, and gives a kind of “where are they now” epilogue that one often sees at the end of the movies that are “based on a true story.” It’s cute.

A Step Farther Out

I’ve read from more than one person that Sunfire is really not where one ought to start with Stevens, which is a shame since it’s the only story of hers that’s eligible for review on this here website. Stevens wrote for the general pulps in the 1910s, before the likes of Weird Tales and other “modern” genre magazines came along, and one does get the sense that she wrote for that earlier market rather than what was then the new generation of pulp fiction. In that sense I feel bad, since I know I’ve been treating her a bit harshly by way of tackling something which she herself seemed to have thought so little of that she let it sit on her desk, or on some shelf, collecting dust for a few years before it was finally published.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Sunfire by Francis Stevens (Part 1/2)

February 8th, 2025

(Cover by R. M. Mally. Weird Tales, July-August 1923.)

Who Goes There

Francis Stevens is the androgynous-sounding pseudonym of one Gertrude Bennett, who, for just a handful of years, wrote prolifically for pulp magazines such as Argosy and Adventure, that generation of cheap fiction magazines which preceded the first proper “genre” magazines (in the US, anyway) such as Weird Tales and Amazing Stories. Stevens wrote fiction at a mile a minute for the same reason a lot of authors did in those days: it helped pay the bills. She apparently wrote to help with her ailing mother, although once her mother finally passed on she stopped writing fiction full stop. She was one of the first female pulp/genre writers in American literature, making her one of the true pioneers; but she was (and still is) such an obscure figure that it took many years to verify when she actually died, not helped by the fact that she seemed to vanish off the face of the earth for the last quarter-century of her life. Unfortunately, Stevens’s story is not unusual among pre-New Wave female writers in this field. Sunfire was the last Stevens story published, by a few years, although it wasn’t necessarily the last one she wrote. Somebody, maybe Stevens herself, took it off the shelf, dusted it off, and submitted it to the newfangled Weird Tales, for one last paycheck. The result is a story (it’s really a novella) that feels more in line with pulpy adventure fiction that would’ve been popular in the 1910s than the occult horror and dark fantasy of Weird Tales.

Placing Coordinates

Serialized in the July-August and September issues of Weird Tales. It would not be reprinted in any form until it got a chapbook from Apex International in 1996—73 years after its original pubilication. It would get a more adequate reprint in the Stevens collection The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy. Despite what that title might make you think, I would consider Sunfire to be nominally SF.

Enhancing Image

Five stupid white men have ventured deep into the Brazilian rainforest, along the Rio Silencioso (“the River of Silence”), in search of a mythical island amidst the jungle depths, known as Tata Quarahy, “Fire of the Sun.” The trip had started out with the help of a local guide, named Petro, plus four other locals who go unnamed and who assisted with the boating, as the waters and their environs are indeed treacherous. Prior to the story’s beginning, Petro and the other locals had all died from what amounted to food poisoning, with the adventurers being spared on account of having taken their own separate meals, which is a funny way of saying the white men have only gotten this far because of some ridiculously good luck. The fact that five people have already died from this adventure doesn’t seem to bother the survivors much, probably because the ones who’ve died were non-white. Incidentally, at least in this installment, we don’t encounter a single non-white person within the “screen” of the action, with Petro only occasionally being quoted from beyond the grave. The irony of this story’s flippant treatment of its indigenous characters (or rather, how it keeps said characters totally offscreen via the grim reaper) is that the white men are for the most part interchangeable in character. These fuckers more or less act and talk the same as each other. As a compromise I’ll only be mentioning individual names when it’s needed to make sense of the plot, which paradoxically both is and is not hard to follow.

The adventurers have miraculously come upon the island, which is quite small but which hosts a pyramid, implying the existence of a tribe here. However, since this is a pulp adventure story written in 1920 at the latest, the presence of a pyramid must mean that something malicious is brewing. Indeed, Our Heroes™ find a seaplane on the water, close to the island and still seemingly in working condition, but abandoned. Somebody from the “civilized” world had been here recently, although whether they’re still alive is another question. They suspect, correctly, that if they’re to find answers that they would be inside the pyramid, which, much like with some real-life pyramids (and also Super Mario 64), is a lot bigger on the inside than the outside. A few complications arise, though. The first is that through all their searching outside the pyramid, the only other person they can find is a young white girl, probably in her teens, who either will not or cannot talk to the white men, despite obviously not being native to this dark little corner of the world. The other is a giant monster, somewhere between a snake and a centipede, large enough to kill a man, but which the woman, with the power of Pan’s pipes, is able to hyponotize.

The thing had the general shape of a mighty serpent. But instead of a barrellike body and scaly skin, it was made up of short, fiat segments, sandy yellow in color, every segment graced—or damned—with a pair of frightful talons, daggerpointed, curved, murderous. At times the monstrous, bleached-yellow length seemed to cover half the floor in a veritable pattern of fleeing segments.

This is all haphazardly written, of course, in a way that would have been the norm for pulp fiction of the time but not “literary” fiction. Stevens, like most if not all of her peers, wrote for money, and writing with a paycheck as the first (probably only) incentive does not encourage fine-tuning one’s prose. Oh, it’s quite bad, but that part of the deal is unsurprising. Even the king of the pulpsters, Edgar Rice Burroughs, whom genre writers in the following generation or two treated as a demigod, was by no means a good writer by the metrics of what we now call good writing. If Stevens can be commended for anything it’s what she decides to not write, as opposed to what’s on the page, namely with how she treats the mysterious girl. Whereas we’re stuck with five nigh=interchangeable buffoons for the whole ordeal, the girl Our Heroes™ are determined to rescue (because they find her attractive, and also [they mention this several times explicitly] because she’s white) comes off as an enigma. She saves the adventurers from the giant monster but then basically traps them inside the pyramid. The reader is thus presented with two conflicts: how the adventurers are to get out of this mess, and also what they ought to do with the girl, who seems prone to either helping them or endangering them depending on her mood. There is also the larger mystery of the pyramid, but that’s really secondary.

Readers who are unfamiliar with the low standards of early 20th century pulp prose may survive said prose in a vacuum, but will have a much harder time coping with Sunfire‘s almost cartoonish levels of racism. The racism is almost, for better or worse, very much a staple of that generation of pulp writing, in the days before “science fiction” even came about as a term. I’m still a layman, so I’m not sure why, even by the standards of the time, pulp fiction comes off as especially bigoted, since the literary fiction of the time, while certainly guilty of racism and perhaps most notably antisemitism (ask F. Scott Fitzgerald why he wrote a Jewish caricature in The Great Gatsby), tended to not be nearly this outward with its WASP-y insecurities. The closest I can think of as an explanation is that pulp fiction of the time, having been written to serve the short-term intrigue of people who may not have the time or education to invest in “the good stuff,” emphasizes the exotic, which means Orientalism. Anything outside the Anglosphere is different, which usually means it’s fascinating but in some way defective, if not downright evil. One of the adventurers, when recalling a piece of advice the late Petro had given them, notes that Portuguese, at least in context of Brazilian speakers, is a “simple” language. There’s a “comedic” scene in which, inside the pyramid, two of the adventurers, Sigsbee and Tellifer (the latter nicknamed “TNT”), fall into a dark pit and get covered head to toe in black soot. Sigsbee, with a giggle, says the two of them resemble black people like this, although he doesn’t say “black people.”

This is the kind of material I’m working with.

There Be Spoilers Here

Not only are the adventurers trapped here, and TNT having nearly fallen to his death in a black pit, but the soot on their bodies takes on a much more sinister (and I do have to say genuinely creepy) turn when it’s revealed that that the big prize of the pyramid, what seems to be a huge diamond, is used as a lens, or rather like a big magnifying glass when the sun strikes through the top of the pyramid at a certain angle. Whatever is caught in the black pit when this happens will be burned to a crisp, with only soot left behind as the remains are dumped or perhaps fed to the giant monster. The diamond, the “Sunfire” of the story’s title, is what the adventurers must seek after aside from the girl, but also the thing most liable to kill them. How will they get out of this sticky situation? What is the deal with the girl? Why do I torture myself by reading something so bad?

A Step Farther Out

Well, sometimes you have to read trash in order to better appreciate the gold; or in this case, read a laughably racist and single-minded adventure yarn that the author neglected to publish for a few years.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: January 2025

January 1st, 2025
(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, July 1935.)

Happy New Year. Blow confetti. Get drunk. Maybe kiss and cuddle a friend or significant other of yours. Although of course you would’ve done that last night. A lot of stores are closed today, because work sucks and the reality is that with a few notable exceptions nobody really wants to work. I hope this message finds you well. There will be a couple changes to this site, which mind you does not mean bad news at all. Frankly those of you who frequent here might not even notice the one “negative” change, that being the fact that given my current life circumstances I can no longer guarantee that a post will be finished on the date I expect it to be. For two years I kept to a pretty strict release schedule with my posts, but after moving into my own place, with all the pros and cons that come with that, I would expect more posts to get delayed by, say, a day, if I were in your position. Occasionally I might not even be able to post a review that I said I would; this happened a few times actually, since November, and I think it’s time to acknowledge that while I try to be prolific, I can only do so much, from a mix of life changes and depression. Also that’s why I’m reviewing a story I was supposed to write about in November, but never got around to even reading it, that being Eleanor Arnason’s “Checkerboard Planet.”

Now, in good news…

The serials department is back, after I had announced at the start of last year that I would only be covering short stories, novellas, and complete novels in 2024. I had thought about what would be the first serial to commemorate the department’s coming back from hiatus, and ultimately I figured it had to be something big. Thus I went with a Robert Heinlein novel I’ve not read before, and truth be told Heinlein’s juveniles are a bit of a blind spot for me in my knowledge of his work; I’ve read a few of them, my favorite probably being Between Planets, but I should certainly read more. It’s also been too long since I last covered Heinlein here.

In other good news, we have another magazine to pay tribute to this year, albeit not on quite the same scale as what I did with F&SF. As you may or may not know, Galaxy Science Fiction launched with the October 1950 issue, making October (or September, depending on how you look at it) of this year its 75th anniversary. Along with F&SF, Galaxy played a pivotal role in reshaping who and what got published in genre SF following Astounding‘s near-stranglehold on the field the previous decade. Especially in the ’50s, a disproportionate number of now-classic stories and novels first saw print in the pages of Galaxy, under the ingenious (if also tyrannical) editorship of H. L. Gold. Unfortunately Galaxy had a bit of a rough history after its first decade, going through a few editors and experiencing declining sales before finally being put out of its misery in 1980. It only lasted thirty years, which admittedly is still better than what most SFF magazines get, but during that time it was arguably the finest magazine of its kind. So, in March, July, and October, as with last year, I’ll be reviewing only short stories, this time from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s respectively, and all from Galaxy. I’ll also be reviewing one short story, novella, or serial from Galaxy every month apart from that. This should be a good deal of fun.

Now what do we have on our plate?

For the serial:
1. Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, September to December 1957. Heinlein is that rare author who really needs no introduction, but who no doubt deserves one. He made his debut in 1939, at the fine age of 32 but having already entered the field more or less fully formed as a writer; it helps that he had already written a novel, albeit one that had initially gone unpublished, at this point. From the late ’40s to the end of the ’50s he wrote a series of “juveniles,” which helped lay the groundwork for we would now call YA SF. Citizen of the Galaxy was one of the last of these juveniles, and as far as I can tell its serialization occurred more or less simultaneously with its book publication.
For the novellas:
1. “The Organleggers” by Larry Niven. From the January 1969 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Reprinted thereafter as “Death by Ecstasy.” One of those old-fashioned planet-builders who appeared just as the New Wave was getting started, Niven very much follows in the footsteps of Poul Anderson and Jack Vance. “The Organleggers” is the first in a series of SF-detective stories starring Gil Hamilton.
2. “In the Problem Pit” by Frederik Pohl. From the September 1973 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Pohl is one of those people who can claim to have taken part in pretty much every aspect of SF publication, from author and editor to literary agent. He edited Galaxy and If in the ’60s, to much acclaim, but in the early ’70s he gave up editing returned to writing fiction regularly.
For the short stories:
1. “Checkerboard Planet” by Eleanor Arnason. From the December 2016 issue of Clarkesworld. Judging from her rate of output you might think Arnason a more recent author, but in fact she was born in 1942 and made her debut back in 1973. She’s been an activist for left-liberal causes since the ’60s but did not start writing full-time until 2009, hence her recent uptick in productivity.
2. “Jirel Meets Magic” by C. L. Moore. From the July 1935 issue of Weird Tales. Moore might not be a mainstream figure in genre fiction, but she and her first husband, Henry Kuttner, have a strongly passionate following among older readers. With justification. She’s a favorite of mine. It’s been almost two years since I reviewed the first two Jirel of Joiry stories, which is far too long a wait.
Won’t you read with me? Or try to.
The Observatory: This Is Not a Review

November 6th, 2024

(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, September 1941.)

I was supposed to write my review of “Beyond the Threshold” by August Derleth for today, but I could not find it in myself to do so. For one I have to admit I’ve been feeling horribly drained from the business of moving into my apartment, which I still haven’t totally finished with yet. I’ve barely slept for the past few weeks, hence the lack of a mid-month editorial post in October. Anyway, this isn’t a review. If you want my opinion on the story, it’s middling. Derleth was a pretty good editor but a second-rate writer, from the weird fiction of his that I’ve read, and “Beyond the Threshold” explicitly tips its hat to Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos (a name Lovecraft himself did not use) without doing anything meaningfully extra. It has a bit of that rural Wisconsin atmosphere, but mostly does away with it in favor of a typical old-dark-house-has-dark-secrets narrative. If you want a take that’s a bit more in-depth you’ll have to wait a couple weeks, as I am really doing a proper (albeit short) review of this story for Galactic Journey, as part of the chunky anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. I’ll be reviewing more than half the stories in that book, so keep an eye out for that. Hopefully I will have also regained my writing energy by then.

Unfortunately I’m not here to talk about fiction, really. In the morning, today, November 6th, Americans woke up to find that the improbable (not the impossible, because I think we all understood the chance of this happening was very real) had happened. Now, I don’t make my politics a secret on here; after all it’s my blog and nobody else’s. Over the past couple years my views have shifted farther left: back in August 2022, when I posted my first review here, I think I considered myself a fellow traveler, but now I would say I’m a libertarian socialist. I used to be a libertarian of the American sort (we all make mistakes, huh), but now I’m a libertarian in the tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin, William Morris, and Oscar Wilde. I’m ambivalent about the state’s capacity to help marginalized groups and I’m even more ambivalent about marginalized people’s rights being secured through electoral means. Yesterday we had the chance to prove that we are above electing the king of the yuppies (that he’s also very likely a rapist is pretty significant, but which mainstream news media has treated as almost incidental) back into office, but we failed. The Democratic establishment failed its voter base and its voter base in turn failed the most vulnerable people in this country. Indeed it’s a collective failure of liberalism in the US that we have not seen since—well, the 2016 election. We’ve been told (accurately) that Trumpism is an American blue-collar sort of fascism, yet if this is true then liberalism has failed to stop fascism—again.

To be clear, and I shouldn’t have to say this given what I had just said but I’ll do it anyway, I don’t like Kamala Harris, as both a politician and person. I think she’s a weasel, a centrist with a few progressive sympathies but ultimately someone who tried really hard to cater to “moderate” conservatives, a plan which literally did not work. It was a huge gamble, because calling Dick Cheney brat (how do I even explain to people of the future what “being brat” means) alienated a lot of left-liberal people, understandably. Who the actual fuck voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 but then Harris in 2024? Who of that demographic was persuaded? Cuddling up with neo-conservatives while also ignoring (at best it was ignoring) the concerns of Palestinian-Americans and Arab-Americans at large was not a good move! I know, this may seem like a controversial opinion, but as someone who basically was radicalized by Israel’s siege of Gaza, I think the Biden (later Harris) campaign leaving Arab-Americans in the dust was very bad. Islamophobia has been a major problem in this country since at least 9/11, and it has not really gotten better. Sure, we have a few Muslim members of congress, but look at how the Biden administration has defended them against harassment, or rather how the Biden administration has not: it’s disgraceful. I say this as someone who, back when I was a right-libertarian and edgy atheist (I’m much softer on religion nowadays), also had Islamophobic tendencies; so I know very well what it looks like. Large swaths of the population see Muslims as subhuman, and unfortunately those people will be totally without shame about it.

We have failed queer people (so that includes me), we have failed people with disabilities (also includes me), we have failed the working class, we have failed black Americans, we have failed Muslim Americans, we have failed the women of this country, and of course we have failed ourselves. What do we do with this information? How does it relate to this blog, which is after all a genre fiction review fan site? Because I’m not here to write political tracts, I’m generally someone who reads for the pleasure of it. As a leftist I still enjoy right-leaning writers like Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, and so on. I don’t believe in abstaining from reading fiction by authors with very different political views, or at least I try to hold myself to that belief; obviously there’s a limit for everything. But, I’m queer, and my partners are all queer, and so are quite a few of my friends. I had to talk one of my partners through a panic attack over the phone last night. We live in a country that basically wants us dead, because most of the American population is homophobic and/or transphobic. This has been the case since forever, but it’s impossible to ignore now, with social media and the little slivers of mainstream visibility queer people get. It’s not even about resisting the incoming Trump administration, it’s simply about coping, and finding ways to support marginalized people, even if these are small things like donating to someone’s GoFundMe. God knows I’ve been supporting some of the fellow queer people in my life for a minute now. I’ve said before that I use this blog as a coping mechanism, because I have a history of depression and anxiety, and that hasn’t changed.

Here’s the thing, and this happened after Trump won in 2016 as well: the people who voted him in, who are really fucking stoked about him winning, are not gonna be any happier in the long run. If anything, with the exception of the rich (because the rich will evade basically any kind of retribution, even climate disaster [for now]), these Trumpists are gonna be made more miserable, if for no other reason than that Trump is such a toxic personality that mere exposure to him and his fucking yapping for long enough will do something horrid to one’s psyche, even if that person is pro-Trump. I’ve seen it happen first-hand, it’s a very creepy phenomenon, but Trumpists also don’t wanna admit that their own guy, whom they treat like a demi-god, makes them feel miserable. And we’re not even getting into his “economic plan” to combat inflation, because assuming that actually happens we’re all gonna be feeling that a year from now. In a way I’m morbidly curious about the future, with how bleak and yet how cloudy it is. I talk about the past all the time here because the past is never dead, and like a shambling corpse that has risen from the grave it terrorizes us despite not having a pulse. If the past is a zombie then the future is a horror that has not yet been birthed, and I’m not sure which is worse. The only thing I can say is that I hope to stay alive, despite my own thoughts of suicide.

I’ll be seeing you again, soon.