C.L. Moore

Several months ago I read an article, I believe it was in Reason Magazine, about a relatively obscure author from the 1930s & 40s, Catherine L. Moore, popularly referred to as C.L. Moore.  In addition to being a contemporary of H.P. Lovecraft (HPL) and Robert E. Howard (REH), she also wrote stories for Weird Tales, and I’ve read at least one letter between her and Lovecraft, so they knew each other.

I managed to snag a compendium of her stories, used, The Best of C.L. Moore.  Incidentally, she tended to use “C.L.” to avoid being typecast as a female author, but given the subject matter my guess is that any experienced reader would be able to tell anyway.

Shambleau.  Her protagonist, Northwest Smith (possibly an inspiration for Indiana Jones) barely escapes the clutches of a seductive Medusa-like alien he saved from a lynch mob.

Black Thirst.  Northwest again.  A Minga woman invites Northwest into the forbidden Venusian fortress where she lives.  It turns out to be far larger than expected.   WHOA.

The Bright Illusion.  True love between a human male and an alien woman.  Kinda trippy and romantic.

The Black God's Kiss.  Moore introduces us to Jirel of Joiry, a female equivalent of Conan.  She too kills - in a different way.  This appeared in Weird Tales, and is truly weird.

Tryst In Time.  More love - a love that transcends and spans several different ages and epochs, souls reborn yet still the same.

Greater Than Gods.  A man is forced to choose between two very beautiful but very different women, and is shown the consequences, throughout his future lifetime, of each choice.  How can he choose?  Stay tuned.

Fruit of Knowledge.  The story of Lilith, Adam's first wife, before Eve.  Scandal!  Betrayal!  Jealousy!  It's Blake, Miranda, and Gwen in the Garden of Eden.  

No Woman Born.  A beautiful woman suffers a terrible accident which disfigures her - until she's turned into a beautiful robot - imagine those "Marilyn Monroe robot" posters from the 1970s.  What happens now?

Daemon.  No women in this one.  A feebleminded, soul-less Brazilian from Rio de Janeiro is stranded on an island with a wise old man, who dies on the island.  The pirate captain who stranded them both comes back to kill him off.

Vintage Season.  This features an amazing clique of eccentric tourists renting an oddly nondescript house in L.A. It turns out that these are tourists from another time coming to witness a historic natural disaster they know will soon occur.  This was turned into a movie, "Timescape", with Jeff Daniels, which I haven't seen.

Her style is densely verbose, similar to HPL and REH.  The majory difference is how often women and their issues become involved.  HPL himself almost completely ignored women, which led some to speculate that he was gay.  His wife, Sonia Greene, dismissed those rumors, and you would imagine she would be in a position to know.  For REH, women are mostly tagalong companions, except for Red Sonya ("Shadow of the Vulture").  Give HPL and REH a vagina and a heavy dose of estrogen, and you might wind up with CL Moore.  If you can tolerate their writing style you might enjoy hers.  They're all fairly long, but that aspect is at least novel.  Go for it.

John Carter, Warlord of Mars

A few years ago I read one of Robert Heinlein’s later books, Number of the Beast, which was a bit strange.  The crew members encounter fictional universes and fictional characters brought to life – even Heinlein’s own creations, Lazarus Long (from Time Enough For Love) and Jubal Harshaw (from Stranger in a Strange Land).  But the four main characters were Zachariah Carter, his wife D.T. Burroughs, her father Jacob Burroughs, and his wife Hilda Burroughs.  D.T. is short for “Dejah Thoris”.  This led me to read the books which apparently inspired Heinlein, the John Carter trilogy.

 The books are Princess of Mars, Gods of Mars, and Warlord of Mars.  Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author, is best known for his other creation, Tarzan.  These were written around 1913-16, and have a very stilted form of writing which even Tolkien and Moorcock don’t reach.  The closest is Robert E. Howard of Conan fame, but even Howard wasn’t this pompous and stuffy; nonetheless, I’d find it hard to believe that Howard wasn’t influenced by Burroughs.  Having said that, though, Howard’s stories are somewhat more Byzantine and complex than the John Carter stories, but it seems as though the John Carter stories definitely provided a solid bedrock of ideas and basis upon which Howard was able to craft Conan.

 Carter himself is a Civil War veteran from Virginia, who mysteriously finds himself teleported to Barsoom (Mars); how he got there is NEVER explained.  There he meets a warlike race of very tall green men with four arms.  He finds the gravity to be much lower than Earth, so he can jump around.  His warlike bearing and skill at arms soon earn him the respect of Tars Tarkas, one of the Jeddaks (chieftains) of the green men.  Eventually his travels take him to Helium, land of the “red men”, and he meets the Princess, Dejah Thoris.  He wins her love and her heart, and the rank of Prince of Helium, a title he uses in the next books.  By the end of the first story, he has to fix the atmosphere plant which provides the sentient races of the entire planet with breathable air – yet is suddenly and abruptly (again, never explained how) teleported back to Earth without knowing whether he succeeded or failed.

 In Gods of Mars he returns to Barsoom and meets black men – though they are not negroes, just apparently caucasians with black skin; and Therns, who are white men who wear blond wigs (see Carter disguised as a Thern, above middle).  This time he is catapulted 20 years into the future, and chases after Dejah Thoris, and meets his son by her, Carthoris.  Unwittingly, he has destroyed Barsoom’s major religion by revealing its goddess, Issus, to be mortal.  Dejah Thoris is imprisoned in a temple for a year, so we don’t know if she will survive.  Thus ends the second book.

 In Warlord of Mars, the story is wound up.  He continues to chase after Dejah Thoris (who did survive), who has been captured by a renegade black man and one of the Therns.  He finds jungle men (some variant of the red men) (what? No Tarzan?) and finally yellow men (not Asians, just white men with yellow skin) in the frigid wastes of the north pole of Mars.  There is a climactic battle in which his allies (of course) come to rescue him, very much the Martian cavalry of the story.  Like Conan, John Carter seems to enjoy a strikingly convenient supply of good luck which he, of course, is amply able to take advantage of to his benefit and the detriment of his enemies, who consistently underestimate him.

 While there are plenty of swords, I see no sign of sorcery.  Flying machines get their power from repulsion rays.  The flying ships are described and illustrated (see above middle) in a way which brings to mind the ones in “Return of the Jedi”.  All the technology has a curiously simple explanation like ERB simply made it up with a minimum of thought. Guns are rare; most of the fighting is with swords and spears.  Despite plenty of religion, no magic occurs and the one deity is exposed as a mortal.  Except for the green men, a race of plant monsters, and a race of white haired apes, all the races are pretty much different-colored Caucasians (no Blue Man Group, though).  The sex, to the extent there is any, is merely implied (how else would Carter have a son with Dejah Thoris?), although most inhabitants of Mars, including the women, are consistently scantily clad.  And ERB never explains how they got to Mars or whether any of the races are actually indigenous to Mars (unlikely, as they all need an atmosphere plant).  

Princess of Mars (DVD). Until 2012, this was the only actual film treatment of the stories.  Despite the fact that these stories were written before 1916 and have been known for ages, this film was made – apparently direct to DVD – in 2009.  John Carter is played by a soap opera heart-throb, Antonio Sabato Jr., and the only other major star is Traci Lords, the former porn actress, portraying Dejah Thoris.  I can appreciate her effort to find normal roles, but the reality is her acting stinks: she simply scowls 99% of the time like a female Clint Eastwood.  Although I found the overall acting in this to be equally bad, they did stick pretty much to the story.  Hell, they even came up with an explanation on how he got to Mars.  Give them a B+ for effort and a C- for execution.

 Recently Disney took a shot at this, with Lynn Collins & Taylor Kitsch (both in “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”) as Dejah Thoris and John Carter, respectively, which came out in 2012.  This had an all-star cast, which also included Willem Dafoe (as Tars Tarkas), Thomas Hayden Church, and Mark Strong.  I liked it much more than the prior attempt, but the moviegoing public seemed to prefer "The Hunger Games", which I refuse to see for that reason.  While they took a few liberties with the plot, overall it was extremely well done.  Even Bryan Cranston (Walt White) is in here as decrepit Union cavalry officer.  Good job; more people should have seen this tribute to one of the earliest, most original forms of science fiction, rather than waste their attention on the completely unoriginal "Games".

H.P. Lovecraft

This one was way overdue. I’d actually referred to Howard Phillips (H.P.) Lovecraft in previous entries but never gave him star billing until now. He’s a horror writer whose active years were 1915 to 1936, but who didn’t become famous until the 60s, thirty years after his death. I started reading his stories in high school, and re-read them periodically to this day. I’m not a fan of horror, whether books (haven’t read a single Steven King story) or movies (don’t waste my time with that crap) but I make an exception for Lovecraft.

Life. Born in 1890, died in 1937, Lovecraft spent most of his life in New England, specifically Providence, Rhode Island, where he’s buried – with a brief spell spent in New York City when he was married to Sonia Greene. Hardly surprisingly, most of his stories take place there too – with one story, “The Horror at Red Hook”, based in NYC. He wrote short stories for Weird Tales and other pulp magazines, plus a fair amount of amateur journalism, the latter recently compiled into a book called Miscellaneous Writings, which collects his nonfiction. He missed out on WWI (“The Great War”). He travelled to the South and was both a major Anglophile – making it a point to give all his words English spellings when appropriate – and a Confederate sympathizer despite being a Yankee’s Yankee.

Stories. These were published separately during his lifetime and mostly ignored except by other writers in his circle of friends, which included Robert E. Howard of “Conan” fame. His friend August Derleth compiled them into book format in the 60s, and at this point finally – long after his death – people began to pay attention to him at last. They vary from short stories and poems all the way to longer epics like “At The Mountains of Madness” and “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.”

By now there are two volumes of “Annotated H.P. Lovecraft”, which include extremely helpful and illuminating annotations to the stories, explaining obscure references or archaic terms, in many cases clarifying points which may have been common knowledge to a reader of Weird Tales in the 20s and 30s but would be completely alien to a modern reader. Unfortunately the two books come nowhere close to covering all of Lovecraft’s stories.

   Lovecraft’s angle is that there are vast, cosmic secrets which man is too small, puny, and insignificant to understand or even grasp. Man is alone in a hostile universe. Strange entities from outer space, including Cthulhu, the Deep Ones, the Old Ones, the Great Race, all colonized Earth before even the dinosaurs roamed the planet, building vast cities in what are now remote, desolate areas. These deities and races consistently pop up in his stories, referred by him as “Yog Sothery” but today are well known as “the Cthulhu Mythos”.

His top stories are:

At the Mountains of Madness. Actually published in Astounding Stories instead of Weird Tales, which rejected it. Antarctic explorers find an ancient alien civilization dating before the dinosaurs, buried deep within the mountains. The aliens are the Old Ones, barrel-shaped with star-shaped heads and membranous wings. Their slaves are the shoggoths, semi-sentient gelatinous beings. The hero, stunned enough to find all this, finds even more horrors: the civilization isn’t quite dead….

The Call of Cthulhu. Considered his masterpiece. An artist has mysterious dreams, and finds that others around the world have been having similar nightmares at the same time. A police detective finds a bizarre cult in the swamps of Louisiana – which matches other cults in equally remote locations across the world, all disturbingly similar. Finally, a ship finds Rl’yeh, a city of non-Euclidian geometry sunken deep in the Pacific, which rises above the waves “when the stars are right.” The HP Lovecraft Appreciation Society produced a B&W silent movie version of this story which is probably the best movie adaptation of any Lovecraft story produced by anyone at any time.

The Shadow Out of Time. A university professor falls into a bizarre trance for 5 years, then wakes up with a strange, but imperfect, form of amnesia. Soon thereafter he starts having strange nightmares of a prehistoric city in Australia full of cone-shaped aliens – and he is one of them. Eventually he goes to Australia and finds the city…and finds that he knows his way around despite never having been there before. As if the city itself wasn’t horrifying enough, he finds something even worse.

The Colour Out of Space. A strange meteor lands in backwoods New England. Soon the farm near it is corrupted, everything turning to grey dust. The family goes mad and eventually perish in a horrible fashion. The excellent horror of this is that the malevolent entity is not some doofus in a hockey mask or a Fedora with wisecracks and razor nails, but an impersonal, mindless substance from outer space which defies the scientists’ best efforts to identify it or analyze it.

The Whisperer in Darkness. A Vermont man is abducted by strange fungi-like aliens from Yuggoth (Pluto) and horribly corrupted.  The HPLHS people followed up "The Call of Cthulhu" with an adaptation of this one as a "talkie", which they couldn't resist: the buzzing sound made by the Mi-Go as they attempt human speech.  The film adaptation is super creepy and very well done.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth. A Massachusetts town has a horrible secret: it has been cross-breeding with bizarre monsters from beneath the waves. The protagonist discovers the secret and barely escapes, for the time being. After doing some research into his own genealogy, he finds his own relationship to Innsmouth is closer than he imagined – too close.

The Dunwich Horror. A corrupt family breeds a half-monster son, Wilbur Whatley, whose quest for The Necronomicon at Miskatonic University ends in his death. But the monster he had been hiding at home, an invisible monstrosity, no longer fed prodigious amounts of raw meat, breaks out and terrorizes the local town. Finally a doctor, who has himself educated himself with The Necronomicon, leads a small group of brave townspeople to defeat the monster – with magic.

He also liked fantasy, indulged in the extended epic “Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath”. It’s good, but not nearly as good as Howard, Tolkien or Moorcock. He has one (1!) science fiction story, “In The Walls of Eryx.” He co-wrote a story with Harry Houdini, “Imprisoned with Pharaohs”, which I read on my trip to Egypt in high school.

His writing is extremely pedantic and he uses lots of arcane, obscure, and archaic verbiage. Women are almost nonexistent, except the villain in “The Thing on the Doorstep”, and the hero never has a love interest (no, not even a male love interest – according to Sonia Greene, Lovecraft was not gay) unlike the Robert E. Howard stories based on the same mythos; Howard takes the pedantic language down a notch and his heroes – notably Conan – are more muscular men of action than Lovecraft’s intellectual dreamers. The compendium of Howard-written Cthulhu Mythos stories is called Nameless Cults. Many stories begin with the narrator about to commit suicide because he can’t live with the horrible knowledge he now possesses, and the story consists of telling us what he learned (so we, in turn, can also kill ourselves. Thanks, asshole.) Others, such as “The Lurking Fear” and “The Rats in the Walls”, concern bloodlines irretrievably corrupted with debauchery and insanity. Insanity is also a common theme: someone’s mind breaks from having seen too much, and they end up locked away in an asylum, babbling disjointed fragments of Cthulhu Mythos jargon in various obscure, ancient, and dead languages no one would have occasion to learn.

Since by now I’ve read all the stories, some more than twice, my tolerance for his ponderous verbosity is less than when I was 15 and reading the stories for the first time. Even Tolkien is easier to digest in large quantities than Lovecraft. And I find that, unlike many other books, such as Atlas Shrugged, where I found something much different as a 30-something reader than I did as a 15 year old, with Lovecraft I still find the same thing over and over again. Even so, for a newcomer the charm and horror should be fresh and new.

The Necronomicon. Throughout the stories a fictional book, The Necronomicon, periodically plays a role, most importantly in “The Dunwich Horror”. Supposedly written by a mad Arab in the Middle Ages, it contains horrific knowledge and means to summon various unbelievably vile monsters and deities. Of course, the book doesn’t exist, it was merely created by Lovecraft as a plot device, though that hasn’t stopped plenty of people from believing, quite seriously, that it does exist. In fact, twenty years ago I found a “real copy” years ago at B. Dalton, of all places, which turned out to be a complete paperback Charmin – full of “Sumerian mythos” spells in Enochian and having zero to do with Lovecraft. Apparently someone thought they could throw this BS together, call it “The Necronomicon” and make some easy cash. Avoid at all costs, as it’s not even particularly interesting on its own merits. It’s not even worth picking up for $1 at a used book store, thrift shop, or garage sale.
More recently Donald Tyson took a stab at it, and scored 100%. Not only does he evoke the Mad Arab – giving him a complete motive behind his depraved lifestyle – he takes us on a tour of Egypt, Damascus, Memphis, Thebes, Babylon, the Nameless City of Irem, Stonehenge, the Plateau of Leng, the Tower of Babel, and even the Garden of Eden. All your favorite Lovecraft villains are here: Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Yig, Shub-Niggurath, and Dagon. He dovetails the Cthulhu Mythos into the Bible and everything we think of as pre-Christian Middle Eastern history, weaving it in with a subtlety and cleverness that even Lovecraft couldn’t manage. I like that he effected the style of how Arabs write, and didn’t fall into the trap of trying to evoke Lovecraft’s style of writing. It’s probably the best Lovecraft-related fiction not written by Lovecraft himself.

Movies. Some of his stories have been made into movies, with varying degrees of faithfulness and success. The most notable are “Herbert West: Reanimator” and “The Dunwich Horror” (featuring Dean Stockwell as Wilbur Whately). John Carpenter’s “The Thing” takes place in Antarctica and has a definite Lovecraft influence. Even “Ghostbusters” had a Lovecraft element, this whole business of the post-WWI architect and the apartment building; and there is an episode of the animated Ghostbusters series in which they actually take on Cthulhu himself. Probably the best was the “Call of Cthulhu” silent movie mentioned above. Part of the problem with the Lovecraft movies is that he became popular in the 60s, and the idiots cluelessly expropriating the story names to make films had NO IDEA what his books were about and simply took a stock “ooh, scary spooky monster!” type film and slapped the Lovecraft name on it, obviously hoping to cash in on it. The recent Stuart Gordon films (“Reanimator” and “From Beyond”) are a case in point: 99% gross-out, disgusting crap, when Lovecraft was all about situations and horrible truths, a huge, horrible cosmic picture, not someone’s intestines falling out on the floor. I’m not a fan of horror movies, for that reason, aside from “The Sixth Sense”, which was put together like a Swiss watch and not simply an endless barrage of decapitations and disembowlments.

Music. The obvious one here is the band H.P. Lovecraft, a 60s psychedelic band similar to Iron Butterfly. They have two albums, but only one song, “At the Mountains of Madness”, based on Lovecraft: the rest is typical 60s pop music. Metallica have two songs, “The Call of Ktulu” and “The Thing That Should Not Be”, based on Lovecraft. But I discovered that you can literally write a whole book just on Lovecraft-inspired music, because someone did: The Strange Sound of Cthulhu, by Gary Hill.

Of course, the best site to check out is the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society at http://www.cthulhulives.org/toc.html. Check it out.