Conan The Cimmerian Barbarian

Blood And Crom

Conan The Cimmerian Barbarian -
The Complete Weird Tales Omnibus
by Robert E. Howard
Pulp Lit Productions
ISBN: 9781635912715

Robert E. Howard wrote his completed Conan stories, of which there are around 20 (and that’s including a few novellas and one novel), between the years 1932 and 1936. The last story, Red Nails, was published shortly after his death. When he was 30 and his mother had become gravely ill, he was filled with despair and shot himself, thus ending a quite prolific literary career filled with many different characters of varying genres. Indeed, it might be said by some that he invented the ‘heroic fantasy’ or ‘sword and sorcery’ genre with others following in his path (Tolkien’s The Hobbit was first published in 1937).

I have, of course, read all of Howard’s Conan stories before, a number of times (not to mention Conan tales by other writers over the years). The last time I read them it was in a two volume paperback edition which collected the stories in the chronology of the character’s exploits. However, I wanted a nice hardback edition and, well, I can’t say I chose the absolute best edition with this Pulp Lit Productions version, Conan The Cimmerian Barbarian - The Complete Weird Tales Omnibus. It has its advantages as well as its disadvantages which, I’ll go into first because, well there is a lot of positive stuff here so, lets get the silliest thing out of the way first.

When I bought this edition of the book, for reasons I’ll go into soon, I was under the impression that I was rebuying all of Robert E. Howard’s Conan tales but, as the editor of this edition points out in his introduction, two stories are not present. One of which is a quite famous one, The God In The Bowl. Apparently this was Howard reworking one of his earlier stories and retrofitting it to his Conan character (much like I’ve seen certain money hungry authors adapt other Howard tales into Conan stories, over the intervening decades) and it wasn’t, like the other missing story, ever published in Weird Tales and, well, this is supposed to be an anthology of Conan tales published in that magazine. I could almost live with that if it weren’t for the fact that one Conan story and also one monograph on The Hyborian Age by Howard, also included in this admittedly handsome tome, were published in other publications. This felony... and I think it such because of the rules of exclusion of the two remaining Conan tales... is further compounded with the book starting off with three non-Conan short stories, one of Kull The Conqueror and two featuring Soloman Kane. This, it says, is to give us an understanding of how the writing style grew and advanced into Conan but, frankly, I’d have been more able to see this with the inclusion of those two missing Conan stories. So, yeah, that’s my only real negative here and I’ve said my piece on that.

The positives are much more interesting though because the book has been designed in a way to more or less match the reading experience as it would have been presented month after month in Weird Tales. Not that the stories are split into multiple parts but they are double columned on the page with the original interior illustrations reproduced... and with Margaret Brundage’s cover art included, albeit in black and white form, when the covers of a particular issue were highlighting Howard’s Conan contributions (two full colour Brundage art paintings are also used for the front and back covers). What I will say about Brundage’s work is... the paintings are absolutely beautiful and, in no way a reflection of Conan as a character, even by the standards that these kind of muscular characters were portrayed as back in the 1930s. The likeness of Conan is very weak in these but, it has to be said, her lithe and, almost always semi naked, women are a wonder to behold.

Another good thing about this volume is that it’s a real education into the haphazard and non-chronological way in which these things were, not just published but written. These are published in the exact order in which Weird Tales published them and so the first Conan story here is The Phoenix And The Sword. This is indeed one of the earliest Conan stories written and here Conan is already at the farthest end of his career, in that he is already the usurper King Conan of Aquilonia. The preceeding tales dot around from various different points in his career... thief, buccaneer, general, king etc... without much thought from either the magazine’s publishers nor, it has to be said, from Howard, as to the chronology of the character, although there is a perceived order when you read through the tales somewhere in there, trying to get out. Helpfully, the editor writes a small introduction to each story to place the timeframe in Howard’s output in the reader’s mind and, at the end of each story, there is a note on which page to turn to next if one wants to read the stories in the order in which Howard actually completed them, as opposed to their publication order. Reading them in their publication order this time, for the first time, gave me a real insight into what I thought had always been a long term plan in Howard’s mind. There are often passages which refer to Conan one day becoming king of a region and, where I’d always assumed that this was something he’d been working towards, I’d not realised that he had already written at least two of those tales where he was a monarch.

Even the novel, The Hour Of The Dragon, which sees Conan lose and then, through a hard quest and series of battles, regain the throne of Aquilonia, was published before the last, posthumous story, Red Nails, which sees Conan back in time as being a thief and adventurer again.

Anyone who’s read these wonderful tales will, of course, know how ahead of his time Howard was in terms of the violence and raciness of the tales. Compared to some of the pulp classics of the day such as The Shadow or Doc Savage (my favourite), the pages of Weird Tales were running red with the blood of crushed heads and bodies smote in half by Conan’s broadsword. Short, pacey sentences such as “The man’s brains spattered in his face.” were not uncommon in these tales. And the Margaret Brundage paintings were definitely on point when it came to the profusion of naked damsels with curves wobbling through the text.

Another thing I noticed, or rather deduced, was the promotion of the evil sorcerer Thoth Amon character after Howard’s death. Anyone reading the Marvel comics or writers such as L. Sprague De Camp’s additions to the Conan saga will know Thoth as his constant and devious literary nemesis. However, after making his first appearance as a periphery character who escapes his own bondage and never once met Conan in The Phoenix And The Sword, he is only mentioned, briefly in passing, in a couple of other stories. He never meets Conan and you never know whether either of them are on each other’s radar. I believe he turns up in The God In The Bowl but, like I said... that story is not included here and I don’t remember much about it. So his rise to super villainy, not to mention appearing as a main character in the second Conan movie, is definitely something that Howard would probably have not done himself.

Talking about the films though... although they are kind of pastiches of the original tales with a lot of stuff just created for the screen, you can certainly see where certain moments came from in terms of what Howard himself wrote. For instance, the crucifixion scene, complete with Conan biting on the neck of a vulture feasting on him as he hangs on a cross, is from the tale A Witch Is Born. The scene where a wizard turns a man’s arrow into a snake in The People Of The Black Circle is obviously something which the writers of the first movie looked at when concocting the demise of Valeria in that film, as is the battle with the giant snake where Conan pins its jaws together with his dagger.

Indeed, the movie version of Valeria herself seems to be an amalgam of at least two characters in Howard’s original chronicles of Conan. Valeria is very much a feisty and strong female co-star of the final tale in this volume, Red Nails. However, she also has more than a lot in common with Conan’s lover, Belit, the pirate queen from The Queen Of The Black Coast, including the long speech which is almost verbatim in the movie about coming back from death to once again aid Conan, something which she indeed does at the end of the tale, when the Cimmerian buccaneer finds himself in trouble.

There are other things of interest in the text too. For instance, the city of Dagon, which comes right out of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu tales (Howard was a contemporary correspondent of the writer and wrote his own Cthulhu tales too), turns up in the Conan story The Devil In Iron. And, from my point of view, I couldn’t help but think that the giant metal God from this same tale might well have inspired Ray Harryhausen’s giant metal creature Talos in Jason And The Argonauts (I know Harryhausen wanted to have a crack at Conan, at one point in his own career).

Another item of interest is the way in which the writing changes on occasion. There are two of the tales which feature a less than happy ending (although Conan always escapes with his own skin, obviously). And a couple of the tales aren’t always as focussed on the Cimmerian as they are on other characters. This would include one which is... and I thank the editor for pointing it out in an introduction... about the politics of the Old West but, instead of writing it in one of his Western yarns, Howard uses it as a metaphor in Beyond The Black River. But this really is a cowboys and indians sort of piece. Another example of the text suddenly straying in terms of the norm, would be in the penultimate couple of chapters of Hour Of The Dragon. Having stayed at Conan’s side for pretty much the entirety of the novel, the reader is suddenly redirected to Conan’s enemies and the last, big battle of the novel between the various armies is told from their point of view rather than the victorious Aquilonian forces and their allies. Which is kind of interesting and one wonders where Howard would have gone with the way the tales were written from here, had he not cut his own life so short.

And that’s all I have to say about the original, ‘pure Howard’ Conan stories as collected in Conan The Cimmerian Barbarian - The Complete Weird Tales Omnibus. Other than this edition comes with a free download of the book, both as an ebook and as an audio book, if you purchase this. You know my thoughts on the pros and cons of this volume so caveat emptor... and all that. You make your choice now with at least the knowledge of all that’s contained in this edition. Personally I enjoyed it very much... it would have been just perfect though, if the remaining two stories had been included.

The Complete Stories Of Doctor Satan

Satan’s Little Helper

The Complete Stories
Of Doctor Satan
Written by Paul Ernst
Fiction House Press
ISBN: 9781947964891

I first learned of the literary character of Doctor Satan at the beginning of the year, due to a tome dedicated to the cover artist who painted three covers featuring the character, The Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage - Queen Of Pulp Pin-Up Art (reviewed here). My mind obviously immediately jumped to a famous cinema serial but, it turns out, this character has nothing to do with the one portrayed in the 1940 theatrical serial Mysterious Doctor Satan. In fact, this predates that character by four or five years.

Doctor Satan was a ‘supervillain’ created by Paul Ernst. He wrote eight fairly short Doctor Satan stories, pitting him against his arch nemesis, the hero of the stories, Ascott Keane. He and his secretary Beatrice Dale manage to, more or less, temporarily defeat Doctor Satan in each story... but the readership of Weird Tales, which is where these stories appeared from August 1935 to August 1936, didn’t think a lot of him and the character didn’t resume his terrorism on the world after those initial eight. The stories included are Doctor Satan, The Man Who Chained The Lightning, Hollywood Horror, The Consuming Flame, Horror Insured, Beyond Death’s Gateway, The Devil’s Double and Mask Of Death.

Now, I have to say, I’m a little bit with the majority of the readership on Weird Tales on this one but, there’s enough interesting features to the stories which made this worth reading. The primary one being the strange and diabolical death traps, a different one in each story, that Doctor Satan uses against his victims to try and inspire huge ‘protection’ payments from others... regardless of the fact that he’s, like Ascott Keane, a rich millionaire playboy and in Satan’s case, doesn’t care about the money... he just likes to bend people to his will and uses the money as his goal. Among the manners of death devised by Satan, are poisonous insects, a spotlight which causes the flesh, muscles and blood of a body to shift their molecular state so that they’re transparent (leaving people looking like living skeletons), a static electricity disintegrator bomb which charges up to the required power to explode according to it storing up enough energy when an automobile hits a certain speed, people who combust from the inside out, a paralysing gas which leaves men dead for a number of hours, a ray which kills people by shrinking them down to the size of a little doll (I wonder if the creators of The Master in Doctor Who had access to these tales?), hypnotic trances designed to make the victim go mad and a device which changes the speed of time flow at whatever it’s pointed at... so that people and objects are slowed down to frozen or, in the case of one, sped up so that his heart shatters.

By far the most spectacular death, though, is used as the opening hook for the very first Doctor Satan story. In it, victims complain of dizziness and headaches for a good number of hours before dying from a fast growing tree sprouting out of the top of their heads. This is quite a spectacular death and I’m surprised that nobody has done this in a film (as far as I know). It turns out that the victims are accidentally inhaling a seed placed in their vicinity which works its way up the nostrils and into the brain, where it quickly grows to a big tree-like plant through the top of their crushed skull. Satan’s deadly skills are a combination of rational science and his studies of the occult, both skills which are also inherent in the main protagonist of the stories, Ascott Keane.

Now Ascott Keane is a quite boring but notable figure. Mostly he’s boring because the stories are so short that no real personality has time to manifest before he’s already tracked down Doctor Satan and is having a ‘final battle’ with him. However, he’s a wealthy individual who pretends to be a shallow millionaire playboy while he secretly helps out those in need with his remarkable crime busting skills. Hmm... sound familiar? I guess he may be partially inspired by Lamont Cranston in The Shadow stories but, either way, this seems like a template for a certain Bruce Wayne, who wouldn’t make it into comics as Batman until that character’s 1939 debut. I would imagine Bob Kane and Bill Finger would have been reading pulps like Weird Tales, The Shadow and Doc Savage at the time. I mention Doc Savage because the fantastical elements of the stories used by Ernst for this character seem pretty inspired by Lester Dent’s iconic hero of bronze. One difference being that these stories are not particularly well written... whereas the Doc Savage novels are little works of art. Another difference being that although the strange components of the mysteries faced by Doc are always explained away by science (excepting the very last of Dent’s stories about the character, Up From Earth’s Centre), the strange devices and devilish plots weaved by Doctor Satan rarely stand up to scientific explanation and are almost always sugar coated with supernatural, occult icing on the cake. Which makes them both less credible and, feeling like a bit of a cheat if I’m honest. However, without those elements we wouldn’t have a story where Doctor Satan and Ascott Keane fight in spirit form in the astral plane, as their bodies are both sent into death for a period of time as they explore this other world.

I can’t find much in the way of information about Doctor Satan but I do have some issues with the order of the stories. Weird Tales often chose to not publish stories in a chronological order (as I found out when I read the Conan stories in the order in which they appeared in the magazine) and there are some dead giveaways here. For the majority of the stories, Doctor Satan has two thuggish assistants working with him called, Girse and Bostiff. Bostiff is interesting because he is quite muscle bound but has no legs, resembling one of the lead characters in Tod Browning’s Freaks... so how the writer can quite casually use this guy to manhandle victims for Doctor Satan is puzzling at best. He never uses a wheelchair, just uses his arms as legs while simultaneously seizing people and lifting heavy objects somehow. This makes no sense to me. He seems a somewhat inefficient kind of ‘right hand man’ to have around, at the best of times...

Anyway, regardless of this, Girse is killed by Ascott Keane in a trap meant for himself in the fourth story, The Consuming Flame. Which is fine but, in the fifth story, Horror Insured, Girse is back in it like nothing had even happened. What’s more, he is killed by Keane again at the end of this one. I’m guessing Horror Insured was, perhaps, originally rejected and so Ernst maybe wrote another story featuring the death of Girse, The Consuming Flame. And then, I suspect, the editor of Weird Tales decided to run his original ‘death or Girse’ story a month or two later. Which makes for a glaring continuity error.

Similarly, Bostiff meets his death at the hands of Keane, wielding the occult powers of the Blue Mist of Death in The Devil’s Double. However, in the next and final tale, Mask Of Death, he seems to be up and about again with no mention of how he’s back from the dead. So I’m assuming the publication dates were flipped for these two stories and they were not printed in the order the writer intended.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about The Complete Stories Of Doctor Satan. It’s a nice enough idea of a character and has some really cool, strange concepts written into its DNA which make the stories worth reading, even though they could have been a lot better written to capitalise on the strength of the sometimes ‘totally out there’ fantastical elements. Not one I’d recommend to many people unless you have read other pulps and these are no comparison to the Doc Savage novels, it has to be said. Still, happy to have had the opportunity to read them and, well, they’ve pointed me in the direction of something else I need to read... if I can lay my hands on another ‘out-of-print’ copy.

The Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage

Brundage Domination

The Alluring Art of
Margaret Brundage -
Queen Of Pulp Pin-Up Art
by Stephen D. Korshak and J. David Spurlock
Vanguard ISBN: 9781934331507

I remember seeing my first Margaret Brundage cover printed in a large format, hardback anthology book about the early days of science fiction maybe 40 or more years ago. It was for one of the Conan stories, Queen Of The Black Coast in the 1934 issue of Weird Tales. My one big takeaway, at the time, was that no matter how splendid and inviting the female figure in the illustration looked, the guy in the picture didn’t look a heck of a lot like Conan, even for the period it was illustrated when perceptions of body types were much different to what they are today (I now know the model for the picture is Margaret’s once husband ‘Slim’ Brundage). During Autumn of 2020, I re-read the complete run of the Conan stories that were published in Weird Tales again (a review will be forthcoming at some point this year, in a special Robert E. Howard Prose and Movies themed week on this blog) and with it, I rediscovered the beautiful artwork of Brundage once again.

It’s true, to my eyes the male figure still looks nothing like the descriptions of Conan in the stories (I think Frank Frazetta probably gave us the truest rendition of Howard’s powerhouse Cimmerian) but the girls are something else and, now I have this book, The Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage - Queen Of Pulp Pin-Up Art, I find that it was mainly the profusion of scantily clad and often totally naked women rendered lovingly by Brundage in pastels which were the main selling point of Weird Tales... a magazine she started doing covers for in the early 1930s through to the late 30s/early to mid 40s. I was also surprised to learn that, asides from the novelty of a female cover artist plying her trade with such erotically provocative imagery, she was also something of the trendsetter of this style, with most magazine cover art which came before her being of sci-fi style machinery, rockets etc. for these kinds of publications.

Alas, despite the fact that we have this lovely and brilliant book with her illustrations in it, there seems to be a lot of information lacking about her actual life. We do know that she was born in 1900 in Chicago and had a hasty marriage (with a protracted aftermath) to ‘Slim’ Brundage, who she met while working at The Dil Pickle Club, a hotspot of bohemian art and socialism. I know she was a six foot tall chain smoker and that she went for the cover artist job for Weird Tales in order to support her young son and crippled mother. When the owners of Weird Tales were bought out and relocated, various factors including the transportation of delicate, fragile pastel work to those offices of the new publishers meant that she no longer had a job. She clung on to life tenaciously though, leaving her cover artist days behind her and becoming involved in various political organisations, sadly outliving her son by a few years.

There are other details which I won’t summarise here (hey, read the damned book) but what little facts are available, plus a hell of a lot about the political and social background of where Margaret was and who she was seen with at various stages of her life, is lovingly put together for this publication. There’s even a second ‘book within a book’ which organises a lot of this info into more of a chronology and really fleshes things out, which is called The Secret Life Of Margaret Brundage or: Slim & Margaret: A Bohemian Romance of the Chicago Renaissance by J. David Spurlock.

As well as all this stuff though, there are many beautiful full page renditions of her artworks, in their original form without any of the typography plates later seen on the cover versions. There are also page sized reprints of all her magazine covers as they appeared here too and it’s these replicas of well over 60 covers (and not just her ones for Weird Tales) that are the buried treasure compiled within these pages. Along with a few surviving photos of Margaret herself (not many, she was a woman who seemed allmost inadvertently shrouded in mystery) plus the odd photo from the kind of nudie girly magazines that Margaret would be using as reference for her images (I’m glad to see nothing changes in the world of art... I used to do the same thing for fashion drawings when I was at college).

There’s also the odd, fantastic anecdote along the way and the design of the book is such that some of these appear as asides to the main text in some nice, solid layouts. For instance, H. P. Lovecraft seemed somewhat disapproving of how naked girlies could help magazine sales (and I don’t believe she ever illustrated one of his covers) whereas Robert E. Howard seemed totally in love with her illustrations. I also love the fact that, once the writers had cottoned on to her style of content that raised the sales, they would start working scenes with naked damsels into their tales for a better shot at getting the coveted cover spot with their story. There’s a sad anecdote about Brundage calling in at the Weird Tales offices and crying the day away along with the guy running it when they heard of Howard’s tragic suicide in 1936. He was certainly her favourite writer of the whole Weird Tales bunch.

Another thing I took away from this was an insight into her working process. She would be sent a ‘cover story’ for publication due in two months time (she would work on one cover a month) and that would be the one story from the magazine she would read. She’d then send pencil sketches of possible covers for a few scenes and then get the green light as to which one to work up into a cover. Occasionally there would also be changes after the cover was done... by her own admission, she wasn’t that great at hands (they look alright to me but what do I know, to be honest, the hands are not the first thing the eyes are drawn to in a Margaret Brundage illustration).

There’s much more here too, especially about her political leanings but, for me and probably a lot of people, it all plays second fiddle to the wondrous, provocative and truly gorgeous art which is lovingly reproduced on the interior pages of this beautiful book. A book which is adorned with the usual critic quotes on the back which, when you look more closely at them, you realise aren’t what they appear and are, instead, comments about Brundage from her contemporaries such as some of the writers of Weird Tales... another nice touch.  I’m really glad to have this one and am especially grateful to the young lady who gifted this to me at Christmas. If you are a lover of either ‘heroic fantasy’ art or the female form (or, you know, that thrilling combination of the two) then you would do well to pick up a copy of The Alluring Art Of Margaret Brundage - Queen Of Pulp Pin-Up Art before it goes out of print. An essential volume as far as I’m concerned.

The Complete Fiction Of H. P. Lovecraft

HP Source

The Complete Fiction
Of H. P. Lovecraft
by H. P. Lovecraft
Knickerbocker Classics - Racepoint Publishing
ISBN: 978-1631060014

I write this account of my recent researches into The Complete Fiction Of H. P. Lovecraft, not to serve as a caution or celebration to such explorers of literary intent who come after me but more as an accurate account of my findings that stand as testament to the slip into the mind shredding insanity that may be lifted wholesale from the sweet and slow miasma of his enthusiastic portent.

The facts simply, as I see them, are that I have been reading the works of one Howard Philips Lovecraft, off and on, for almost four decades of my life in one form or another, conveyed by various and fantastical lurid covered compendiums of his words in varying forms up to about ten years ago, when the Penguin Modern Classics published three collective volumes of his work in paperback form. However, I then came, a year or two ago, upon a handsome looking hardback tome proclaiming the entirety of his fictional output, minus the poetry which is of less interest to me and without samples of his non-fictional articles of which, I have to confess to the world now, that I know very little about. My hand was drawn to this heavy edition, comprising some eleven hundred pages of his fantastical gnarly brain windings in a foil blocked and embossed slipcase, because I felt that, despite the brilliance of the Penguin editions, this would be both everything in one venue and also may contain, which upon reflection I’m sure it does, small stories which may not have been included in the various other chilling anthologies from which I have partaken over the years.

So it was then, that I chose the two weeks of the summer recess from my working environment in the year of our Lord 2020, when the accursed Covid plague that has breached the livelihood and sanity of my fellow man lay lurking outside the city population’s front door like a shadow lurking in the whispering darkness, to further delve into these cosmic mysteries. Each afternoon, after my morning’s ponderous and sometimes sinister early activities, I organised a brief sojourn into the summer house at the far end of my garden and sat with the volume in question as the sun ate away at the day and the squirrels peaked in past the double doors of my preferred exile.

The works, I realised, as I began to devour them with less trepidation than I perhaps should have exhibited, were organised into some kind of chronology reminiscent of the order in which Lovecraft wrote these tales of other worlds and his legendary Cthulhu mythos - often peppered with the effects and paraphernalia of the Elder Gods and their alien brethren - as opposed to the ragged order in which they, indeed, found commercial publication to the general public at large, some posthumously in the long wake of success after this writer’s tragically early demise in 1937,  at the tender age of 46 and one half years old. This gives one a sense of the honing and development of both the author's skill at crafting his yarns and also of the rising degree of sophistication which such tales of questionable implication can be considered to have some great merit or accomplishment. Which, I might add, for the most part, the majority of these narratives certainly demonstrate.

As I began to approach the half way mark, where loosely recurring characters such as Charles Dexter Ward and Richard Upton Pickman, in whatever form, human or otherworldly, they appear to be manifesting in each subsequent tale, I began to realise that there was both a pattern to the general nature of his works but also, as I read further, I realised that there was one unflinching truth which was astonishing in its occurrence in the majority of this man’s work. I should perhaps hold my tongue, or at least stay my keyboard, rather than utter the central contrivance upon which I stumbled at this time. I have read various volumes in my studies of the dark worlds beyond our human recognition over the years but I had not made such an alarming discovery even in such tomes as the Liber Ivonis, the Cultes de Goules or the De Vermis Mysteriis. Nor, even, had my dabblings with a certain ‘hard to find’ French translation of the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred revealed a similar ingredient to that which I had stumbled upon in my appreciation of this much ‘influential beyond the realm of sleep and death’ writer who is H. P. Lovecraft. I will not write of this again unless I feel, later in my ramblings, that I am forced to reveal this fateful ‘trick of the wit’ which I can scarcely consider without a troubled frown reshaping my outer visage.

That Charles Dexter Ward could be considered a cypher of that very writer is perhaps not problematical until one finds mention, without actually meeting, a quick reference to a character in Through The Gates Of The Silver Key... which he wrote with the help of one Edgar Hoffmann Price... known simply as ‘Howard Philips’. Of course, the fact that these are where the source of Mr. Lovecraft’s initials spring, perhaps should in no way make the former any less of a stand in for the latter, thoroughly unexplored character. I did, however, find it startling in his use of the nomenclature in this instance.

As I continued my explorations I had, as I made clear, found a pattern to his work and this seems to take the form of three kinds of tale made manifest in his writings. The first type, which tend to develop to almost unendurable lengths, a curiously intense sense of foreshadowing of things to come, are the tales of terror of either a supernatural or alien design. These I find honest and noble but, although my mind could recall almost no details of Lovecraft’s fiction which I had previously perused, they held no real surprise as to the nature of the twist in the tale... an outcome which is sadly shared by the entirety of his output, although truth be told, my revelation as to the nature of his strategy and the layers of continually creeping portent certainly doesn’t help the potency of his ultimate ambition.

The second type that he demonstrates is that which I can only think of as his travelogues. These tend to take place in the shadowy world of dreams, in which the central characters - most of Lovecraft’s aspects tend to narrate proceedings in the first person form - describe the architecture and psychological feel of certain wonderlands and forbidden places in a realm entered by sleep but with sometimes less of an obvious return in sight. These I find perhaps the dullest of affairs in all this writer’s canon although, I have to say, that I finally took some small enjoyment from his somewhat gruelling and long work The Dream Quest Of Unknown Kadath, where none was found before.

The third type is the happier fusion of these two styles with the travelogue nature of certain styles of the second archetype supporting and making more concrete the diabolical nature of the account and it is these that tend to make up a proportion of my favourite of his tales. I might mention here that of my two absolute favourites, At The Mountains Of Madness and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the former exhibits the third type of yarn spinning while the latter is perhaps, in some ways, a much loved throwback to his earlier tales of terror, albeit one which demonstrates that a sense of humour, though not readily apparent in the po-faced nature of his written form, is certainly not lacking in the heart of the artist.

As I read through this mad mountain of erstwhile fantasy, comprising examples of varying human transformation such as of fish or ape, reanimated corpses stumbling about in varying degrees of success, body swaps from one realm to another and the hideous, lurking horrors of Lovecraft’s fantastic imagination... I also found there to be the profound influence of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, not to mention the name checking of certain friendly contemporaries and the stuff of their tales such as Robert E. Howard and young Robert Bloch. There is even a tale, ghostwritten as the popular Harry Houdini, which was a commission for the esapologist’s own magazine, where his central ‘real life’ character certainly takes up the familiar visage of a typical Lovecraft protagonist and this, too, tends to slip into the less dreamstate version of his travelogue template.

In addition to these references and, perhaps the reason for the successful incline and influence of this wordsmith in later years, was the weaving together of many of his ‘weird tales’ into a single, if loose fitting, cloth. The metatextual nature of which nobody can deny and perhaps this knitting together of different parts of his tales with the many references to the Necronomicon, Cthulhu and places in Arkham such as Innsmouth and Dunwich, is what made the workmanship so proudly displayed now an appealing prospect for the preservation of his life’s work. There's even a tale, The Thing On The Doorstep, that acts as a direct sequel to The Shadow Over Innsmouth... although the concept explored therein is much different.

All this I took in as I continued to read, afternoon upon afternoon, with a fervour no alienist could cease, until I at last reached the final tale which, once again, proved my terrifying deduction about the structure in which this consummate artist presented these antediluvian phantasmata to his potential readers. This is the one thing which made me shudder and which has haunted my dreams when I think back to those sunny afternoons of reading these chill and casually unspeakable terrors, rewarding the efforts of my matutinal activities. As Lovecraft himself wrote at the opening of his famous tale The Call Of Cthulhu, which I quote here for the understanding of the reader... “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

Alas, such correlation was not destined to be stifled in mine own case as I reveal now to you, patient reader, my one terrible discovery of this writer’s eerie and powerful works which will forever mock me when I revisit his fantastical realms - otherworldly or terraqueous. And it is this.

For the majority of these stories found in The Complete Fiction Of H. P. Lovecraft, the writer crafts the tale in such a way that, since we usually know the outcome of the final fate of the central character given the tremendous amount of foreshadowing employed by the artist, that character will usually make a dreadful and groundshaking discovery about two thirds or three quarters of the way through and then, after this has happened, will give excuses as to not reveal that dark secret until such a time as it needs to be truly known. Hiding this information in plain sight from the reader, he waits until the very last paragraph, sometimes the very last sentence of a tale to... REVEAL THE NIGHTMARISH TWIST OF THE THING THAT HIS WHOLE DISCOURSE RESTS UPON.

Professor Nuts4r2
Miskatonic University
Arkham

Conan The Barbarian

Something familiar, Something peculiar, Something for everyone: A CROMedy tonight!

Conan The Barbarian 2011 USA

Directed by Marcus Nispel

Screening at UK cinemas

Ok... so last night I saw a new peplum called Conan The Barbarian. True, it’s not a peplum in the absolute strictest sense of the word (just like John Carpenter’s Ghosts Of Mars and Assault on Precinct 13 aren’t technically Westerns, although you’d be hard pressed to find anyone refuting that claim) since it’s an American made tale of the mighty Cimmerian... and this is fitting since Conan was created, after all, by a young man by the name of Robert E. Howard of Cross Plains, Texas in 1932.

The movie I watched, however, does harken back to the traditions of the Maciste and Hercules pictures that were churned out year after year by the Italian film industry. Granted, it’s not as close in style to these movies, perhaps, as the original 1982 movie of the same title, but it’s certainly another stab at the US sword and sandal epics that kickstarted the whole peplum cycles in the first place (right back in the silent movie era if memory serves me right... and I know if it doesn’t then one of you lot will jump on here and have a moan at me in the comments section, I hope).

And it gets better. Not only was it a fair to middling peplum... although very much with a modern (or should that be postmodern?) flavour, but it’s also not a terrible version of Conan, so that’s not so bad then. Granted, it’s not quite got the feel the original stories had when they were published in such pulps as Weird Tales, but the character has certainly been injected with a certain gutsiness which is pretty basic if you’re going to make a movie about this kind of character.

The classic image of Conan is not that of the ones depicted on the occasional cover of Weird Tales magazine, who may well have been best represented by an actor like Victor Mature, but those put out by both Marvel Comics in the 70s and in the illustration work of the late, great Frank Frazetta. Which is fine because that was also closer to Howard’s Conan than the images depicted on the pulp covers.

This Conan is, thankfully, not a straight remake of the 1982 movie, however it is also nowhere near it’s equal and, unfortunately, makes some of the same mistakes as that one did... and when I say mistakes I am merely commenting on the faults of the process of adaptation as I see them applied here.

Now Robert E. Howard’s stories are the way I knew Conan as a kid... and for some reason the quote “I’ll split your head like a ripe melon” is spiralling it’s way back from the past to me. I have to say though, if this phrase were the only qualification to make a great movie from the Cimmerian’s adventures then both the Conan The Barbarian movies are excellent adaptations (I’m gonna forget about Conan The Destroyer because the Conan’ness of it was torn from it and it was reduced to being a second rate Sinbad movie... with Grace Jones in it). However, what I remember from these stories is that they were all fairly short. If my hazy memory serves me well then I think I’m right in thinking that Howard only wrote one full novel... one set much later in Conan’s chronology, when he was a king and had a son. The shorts were always quite episodic and although a rough chronology could be put together from them, they were mostly never a part of a larger arc and usually started when Conan was always just on his way to or from somewhere else where he’d had untold adventures.

The films are therefore not the best format to adapt this character to because you have to impinge your own narrative structure on them. Howard’s other character Soloman Kane had a whole movie made a year or so ago about a back story that he never wrote... but that one at least was on a level with the 1982 Conan movie in terms of watchability. Both the 1982 and the 2011 movies have gone for a revenge story surrounding the death of Conan’s parents when he was a child (indeed, the new one makes the death of his father into almost the reveal of Charles Bronson’s character in Once Upon A Time In The West)... both run in slightly different directions and both properly bring in black magical arts and sorcery, as they should. It has to be said though that the new Conan The Barbarian also uses a ridiculous and tired old concept of a divided symbol or talisman (in this case a mask) of which the restoration of all the pieces will allow a sacrificial ritual to be performed and evil to rise. In the pre-credits sequence (which actually uses a few dialogue lines in voice over which were used in the 1982 movie’s pre-credits sequence) we are even shown the mask smashed into uneven segments. Funny then, I thought to myself as the bad guy in this movie did his thing, how those segments just snap back into place like an old Aurora model kit with no glue or anything needed... considering it had been, you know, smashed into pieces and all.

This Conan, like the 1982 version, has various set-pieces linked together by the underlying narrative but each of these set-pieces does follow a progression (unlike the 1982 original which had a few things going off into their own tangents) and while this probably makes for a stronger movie for some audiences, I somehow found it a bit of a turn off and another step away from the spirit of Howard’s Conan. That being said, I’m sure Howard would have gone on to write many more, tightly structured Conan novels had he lived... but he shot himself at the age of 30.

There were a fair few Conan novels written and published by other writers in the 70s when I were a lad (it was almost impossible to go in any bookshop in those days and not see 30 or so different novels depicting a half-naked Conan attacking some foul creature of dark sorcery while a similarly half-naked girl looked on). However, I can’t really look on these as official Conan stories and so I can only compare the film to the original novels and, obviously, films in a similar vein from the past.

Where I stand with the new one is that it gets a few things right and a few things wrong... and we’re left with something which is not quite Conan but enjoyable all the same... although, to be fair, it does drag in some places.

So what did it get right and where did it go wrong?

Well it was pretty violent, Conan was pretty ruthless and there was mention and obvious links and references in the movie to his days as a “freebooter”. This is all good stuff. Unfortunately, for all this it still got a bit boring in places and there were not enough examples of monsters or sorcery. The one big scene where Conan had to fight invincible soldiers spawned from the sand drags on far too long and just was not a great action sequence. He needed to fight a skeleton or a snake humanoid or something more Conan-ish I fear... and possibly find himself seduced by an evil enchantress. This one didn’t quite cut it because it felt like everything in this movie had to have a reason for happening... and Conan was never really like that as far as I can remember. Things just happened to him.

Also, Tyler Bates score is quite competent and useable but it's not the absolute masterpiece of scoring that we got from the late Basil Poledouris for the 1982 movie. That one is constantly flagged up as being one of the greatest movie scores ever written, rubbing shoulders with the likes of the more famous scores by Rosza, Herrmann and Bernstein so... well really, Tyler Bates had a lot to live up to and he does a serviceable job.

So I’d recommend this movie to a point but I’d have to say that this one didn’t nearly nail it as much as the 1982 movie did and also I’d have to personally proclaim this as one of the noisiest action movies ever. This continues the tradition of movie sound effects started in From Russia With Love of having the thuds, clangs and suchlike turned up way past their natural sound setting. Yep, all the sounds are dialled up to 11 on the mix in Conan The Barbarian. So you might want to have a think about giving your eardrums the gift of cotton wool before you go into the cinema. Also... the 3D was, as usual in contemporary movies, completely unnecessary. So there’s that.

All in all then, a mostly fun, enjoyable film but it’s not nearly as much as being in the spirit of the original Conan stories as the original movie was (which is a hard act to follow since that one was written by John Milius and Oliver Stone)... or even as much of a Conan movie as The Scorpion King was to be honest. Recommended with caution on the understanding that this is only the second best Conan movie ever made... like I said, we don’t mention Conan The Destroyer around these parts.