Dagon (1917) by H. P. Lovecraft

   Dagon is one of H. P. Lovecraft's earliest and creepiest stories. It was inspired by a dream and contains in its few pages many elements that seemed to fascinate and disturb Lovecraft, elements that he returned to later in his greatest tales. We have a vast island that rises from the ocean floor and contains a great horror as in The Call of Cthulhu. We have the unspeakable knowledge of things better not known that permeates Lovecraft's fiction. And of course we later encounter the "Esoteric Order of Dagon" in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, another story that deals with unsavory underwater life. It is interesting to see Lovecraft already working  on these themes and ideas that became so important in his fiction much later on.
   The story begins early in the first world war, when our narrator's ship has been captured by the Germans. This is before the sinking of the Lusitania and the Germans having "sunk to their later degradation." The Germans' discipline was so inexplicably lax that our narrator manages to somehow escape on a well provisioned boat. He ends up drifting aimlessly on the Pacific for days.
   One day he wakes to find himself on muck-encrusted land, his boat lying a few feet away. The space is "putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish." Apparently, while he was sleeping, a vast area from the ocean floor had risen due to some unprecedented volcanic upheaval. He is stuck there, sheltering from the sun under his boat, for three days before the ground is dry enough to walk on.
   Lovecraft does a splendid job describing this scene. One can practically smell the rotting fish and feel the muck sucking at one's shoes. His dream must have been a vivid one because this does feel as if it is a description of a real experience.
   The narrator decides to explore and starts walking. Eventually, one night under a "gibbous" moon, he encounters a huge stone monolith. He is separated from it by a large body of water, but he is close enough to see that it is covered by strange hieroglyphics and odd pictorial carvings. The carvings seem to represent some kind of giant mermen, with webbed hands and feet, bulging eyes and flabby lips (a true Lovecraftian horror to be sure). The narrator just decides that they must depict some kind of gods once worshipped by primitive men when, out of the water, rises just such a monster. Our narrator then does what a Lovecraft character does best in such a situation and immediately goes mad.
   He makes his way back to the boat, somehow ends up back on the ocean, and wakes up in a San Francisco hospital where he has been brought after being rescued by an American ship.
   Was his experience just a dream? If only he could believe so, but he knows better. What seems to be the driving force of his madness is the knowledge that a whole race and civilization of those sea-creatures are living on the bottom of the ocean and can arise at any time. With this knowledge comes the realization that human beings are really not all that special after all. Our narrator has caught a glimpse of the real scale of human beings in the cosmos. It is too much for him, and sadly, his end is a bad one.
   This story is a brilliant introduction to the themes that are so important in Lovecraft's fiction. It also reveals the depth of his great talent even at this early stage. The story can be found in The Call of Cthulhu and other Weird Stories from Penguin, and also Dagon and other Macabre Tales from Arkham House.

   

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869) by Jules Verne

   Jules Verne's greatest creation was not a story or novel. His masterpiece was the brilliant, mysterious Captain Nemo, one of the greatest fictional characters of the 19th century. We might forget some of the details of plot in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, but we never forget Nemo or the amazing submarine of his design, The Nautilus. He was a genius and lover of personal freedom who made himself master of the oceans. In him burned a hatred for the world above the waves and he swore never to set foot on dry land again. Who was this mysterious man and what drove him on his never-ending journey across the oceans? That mystery is the heart of this timeless novel.
   In the year 1866 ships had been encountering "an enormous thing," that was larger than any whale and had a mysterious glow. Professor Aronnax, who believes this thing to be some deep sea monster, has been invited on board a ship out to hunt the beast. They encounter it and the Professor is thrown overboard. His faithful servant Conseil attempts to rescue him and the two are both lost at sea. Not for long though, for soon they encounter the floating monster itself, and sitting on top of it is the harpooner from their ship, Ned Land. Of course the "monster" is really a submarine.
   Ned, Conseil and the Professor are brought inside and meet the mysterious Captain Nemo, lord of The Nautilus. He commands a crew that seem to be from all over the globe and who speak a strange language of their own. Nemo believes the castaways are a danger to him now that they know the secret of The Nautilus. He lets them live but they are his prisoners. He decides that they must never return to their world so he condemns them to live in his. He tolerates them, and as far as he is concerned they are lucky he does.
   And so begins their strange adventures. Twenty Thousand Leagues is an episodic book that often reads like a bizarre travelogue. Every step of their journey is detailed down to their exact coordinates. Verne delighted in scientific detail, and we get a load of it in this novel. The descriptions of the sea life they encounter cover whole pages at a time. All this works to give the story a sense of reality, as if this fantastic journey actually happened and Professor Aronnax is merely giving his bland chronicle of everyday events.
   While the Professor seems to be having a fine time, Ned Land just wants to escape. The tension between Land and Nemo grows throughout the story. Eventually the castaways together decide they must escape at all costs and they await their opportunity. Of course, Nemo has made it clear he will never let them off The Nautilus alive.
   Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea remains one of the greatest adventure novels ever written and Captain Nemo is one of literature's immortals. He stands alongside Sherlock Holmes and Dracula as a 19th century character who will never die. Jules Verne, unfairly considered a writer for children, has never been given the credit he is due for creating such a complex character.
   I should note that the first English translation, in addition to making several strange blunders with the language, also cut out a good chunk of the text. Many good translations are now available. I would recommend the text available from Oxford classics.

 
 
 

Red Shadows (1928) by Robert E. Howard

    Solomon Kane was one of Howard's first adventure heroes. He certainly was one of his most unique. He was a sixteenth century English puritan driven to wander the Earth righting wrongs and battling evil. A religious fanatic, he himself believed that it was his god that drove him on, while Howard suggested that it was in fact his own wanderlust and insatiable desire for adventure. He was a tall, rangy man who dressed entirely in black and was an expert with both rapier and musket. He would track down an enemy relentlessly for years to exact vengeance, yet he also had a soft spot for all innocents and was described by Howard as a "kindly" man.
   Red Shadows was Howard's first published story about Solomon Kane, and it has some of the defects found in many of Howard's early tales from the 1920s. He had not yet mastered his style at this point, and the writing does not have the swift, smooth narrative flow that his later stories have. In fact, it seems a bit clunky in spots. What it has going for it is a brilliant plot, Howard's usual sense of dark atmosphere, and fully developed characters. The evil Le Loup, The Wolf, is in fact one of Howard's most memorable villains.
   The story begins when Kane encounters an injured girl lying in the shadows beneath some trees. She has been ravaged and stabbed by the evil Le Loup, who along with his bandits has sacked her small village. She dies in Kane's arms. Kane says simply, "Men shall die for this." He proceeds to hunt down and kill Le Loup's men one by one. He finally confronts The Wolf himself in a cave, but the villain escapes him.
   Eventually Kane tracks down Le Loup to Africa, a local that Kane will frequently return to in future stories. As one would expect, Robert E. Howard's Africa has very little relation to the real place. Most of what Howard knew of Africa seems to be what he read in H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Howard's Africa was a true "dark continent", a lost world as fantastic as Conan's Hyborian Age. It was filled not only with savage men and animals, but also monsters and magic.
   Le Loup has managed to insinuate himself among a native African tribe, where he has become second only to the king himself. Solomon Kane is captured and as a prisoner he meets the magician N'Longa, who becomes an important character later in the series. N'Longa is upset that Le Loup has taken some of his own prestige in the tribe and he offers to help Kane escape. Later Kane is, of course, tied to a stake to be burned alive. I shall not describe how N'Longa ends up helping Kane or how the story ends, so as not to spoil it for those unfortunate enough not to have read it. It is enough to say that it involves the raising of the dead, a vengeful Gorilla, and the brilliant final battle between Kane and the fiendish Le Loup. Yes, this story really does have a grand payoff at the end.
   In the Kane series one can really see how Robert E. Howard progressed as a writer. By his later Kane stories he had mastered his talent. Tales like The Hills of the Dead and Wings in the Night are pulp masterpieces. Howard was not there yet with Red Shadows, but he was getting close. Solomon Kane was already fully developed as a character at this point. Howard's plotting and sense of pace were excellent. It was only his writing style that he had yet to master, for at that point it still felt overly garish and a bit clumsy. Later he would take the best of pulp language and craft a unique narrative style that could create action, scenery and atmosphere beyond compare.
   Red Shadows can be found in The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane. And, just to show how highly regarded the tale is, it is also included in The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume One: Crimson Shadows.

 
 
 

Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood (stories 1906-1917)

     Algernon Blackwood spent his whole life under the spell of nature. For him nature was not only an escape from the cruelties of urban life, it was a gateway to a larger world that existed just beyond our own. The trees, the rocks and the sky were all alive to him and harbored a consciousness. He felt that communication with this life was possible if only he could find a way. These feelings were behind all his work and it was a sense of awe rather than pure fear that he hoped to instill in his readers.

   All that being said, he wrote some of the most terrifying stories of the twentieth century. Most of his best are indeed found in this "best of" volume. I can't think of a better introduction to this great writer than this book.

   The best story is the first, The Willows. H. P. Lovecraft felt that this was the greatest weird tale ever written, and if Lovecraft had never written any stories himself it still would be. It tells the story of two friends who are traveling by canoe on the Danube river and camp on a small, sandy island surrounded by willows. Here they encounter strange elemental beings that seem to exist just outside our own world. No summary can to justice to this story. The building of suspense and horror are brilliantly presented and Blackwood succeeded in instilling a sense of cosmic awe. It is unlike anything that came before and it is small wonder that Lovecraft was so impressed.

   For pure horror The Wendigo is probably the stand-out story. A hunting party encounters the legendary Wendigo of Native-American legend. The encounter is uniquely different from anything one would expect, and really delivers the chills. Take this one on your next camping trip to the deep woods.

   The Glamour of the Snow is particularly interesting. It tells the story of a man's meeting with a woman who just might be a nature elemental. However, the story is truly about Blackwood's own feelings of conflict between urban life and living in the larger natural world. The main character is torn between them and he must choose between the two. A very dangerous choice as it turns out.

   For a classic ghost story, The Listener is one of the best. It is a creepy tale of  haunting and possession. The ending is probably more sad than shocking for today's readers but that seems to work to its advantage.

   I also must give special mention to the final story, Max Hensig. This is so unlike any other story in the book that it gives a great sense of Blackwood's range as a writer. It takes place in New York City with all its urban grime and it is not a supernatural story at all. It is a brilliant suspense story about an alcoholic reporter who becomes the target of a fiendish serial killer. Max Hensig, the killer, is a truly vile and menacing character that one would expect to find in more modern fiction. Blackwood spent time as a New York reporter himself, a bitterly unhappy period for him, and his experience gives this story a grim sense of reality.

   Nearly all the stories in this book are good. The Empty House, a typical haunted house story, is the only one that really falls short. This was one of Blackwood's earliest tales, and it shows. There really isn't an ounce of fear in the whole thing, and frankly the comic-relief characters are so annoying that one can't help but hope for their demise. That said, it is more than made up for by the other stories in the book. The rest are top-notch. 

   Blackwood is one of the most important writers of the early twentieth century. It is a real shame that he isn't better known today by general readers. For fans of horror fiction however, he remains a giant. If you are unfamiliar with him do yourself a favor and pick up this book. 

The Gods Of Mars (1913) by Edgar Rice Burroughs

   Edgar Rice Burroughs was not a fan of organized religion. He recognized it for what it all too often is: a tool by those in power to manipulate others. He knew that those in charge were just men, men with no more knowledge of the divine than he had himself. False religions were common in his fiction, but never more so than in The Gods of Mars.
   It was only a matter of time before John Carter returned to Mars. A Princess of Mars was a great success and Burroughs' readers demanded more. Fortunately Burroughs had a lot more to say about Carter and the red planet. Unlike some of his other series, the Martian tales never declined in quality and The Gods of Mars is the best of the series. Here John Carter faced his greatest challenges and faced  the deadliest dangers of his career. By this point Burroughs had mastered his profession and with Gods he delivered one of his most inventive and action-packed novels.
   The story begins with John Carter stranded on Earth in 1886. For ten years he had longed to return to his beloved Barsoom. Now, standing before the Hudson River, he again felt the pull of the red planet. Just as before he experienced a moment of cold and darkness as his soul is pulled mysteriously to Mars. He wakes to find himself in the very last place he would want to be on Barsoom: the Valley Dor.
   The Martians had a very peculiar religion. Eventually, if they managed to live long enough, every Martian took a voluntary pilgrimage along the River Iss, to the lost Sea of Korus in the Valley Dor. The Martians believed that the Valley Dor was heaven, a paradise where they would be reunited with loved ones and enjoy everlasting peace. John Carter discovered the ghastly reality. The Valley Dor was a deathtrap where pilgrims were torn apart and devoured by weird plant-men and the great white apes of Barsoom. Any survivors were enslaved by the Holy Therns, priests who also just happened to be cannibals.
   Here Carter encounters a group of pilgrims who are being attacked by the plant men. Among them is the green Martian Tars Tarkas, John Carter's best friend. Carter and Tars Tarkas survive and together they fight their way through the valley and into the domain of the Therns. They encounter the mysterious beauty Thuvia, who becomes a very important character in the series, and together they plan to escape and expose the false religion for the terrible lie that it is. The problem is that to return from the Valley Dor is heresy in itself, one punishable by death anywhere on the planet. John Carter not only has to fight men and monsters, he also has to try and defeat a deeply-rooted cultural superstition. A hard task, even for the superhuman John Carter. Once he manages to escape the Valley Dor his troubles are only beginning.
   Along the way Burroughs invents some of his most interesting Martian cultures yet. The Holy Therns are both menacing and repulsive. The Therns' enemies are the Black Pirates of Barsoom. The Black Pirates inhabit  a subterranean world by an underground sea and are particularly fascinating.
   Burroughs wrote many extremely entertaining books, but The Gods of Mars is something more than that. While it succeeds brilliantly as escapist adventure, it is also a story about the crippling power of cultural superstition. Fighting monsters is one thing. Fighting a whole world's ancient religion is something else again. It is here, in this book, that Burroughs takes John Carter to his greatest level as a hero.
   This is Burroughs at his best. Well worth checking out.
 
 

 

King Solomon's Mines (1885) by H. Rider Haggard

   King Solomon's Mines was the first English adventure novel to be set in Africa. Fortunately, it was written by a man who had spent  considerable time in Africa and had extensive contact with native Africans. Because of this his Africa has the realistic feel of an actual place, unlike the fantasy Africa later presented by Edgar Rice Burroughs and so many others. While Haggard's colonialist attitudes are obvious, he presented the natives as actual human beings as opposed to the stereotypes so common in later literature of the period.
   The hero of the novel is big game hunter Allan Quatermain, who became very popular and returned to star in a whole series of stories. He is remembered now, if at all, mostly through film adaptations. Allan did not fare well in the movies. The Quatermain from the movies is a far cry from the novel's short, grizzled, fifty-five year old with false teeth.  As a matter of fact, Quatermain from the novel is a humble, plain-spoken man who is not even particularly heroic. One can't help but like Allan, despite his unfortunate habit of slaughtering whole herds of elephants.
   Quatermain is hired by Sir Henry Curtis to find his missing brother, who was last seen searching for the legendary King Solomon's Mines. As it turns out, Allan Quatermain was the last to have word of this brother. He also happened to own a map to the mysterious Kukuanaland, where the mines were said to be. Allan was not very eager to set out on this adventure, since he didn't think any of them would live through it, but since Curtis promised to leave money to Allan's only son he agreed. They were accompanied by Captain Good, a likable fellow who functions as comedy relief, and the noble African Umbopa. After a series of harrowing adventures they make it (barely) to Kukuanaland where they become involved in a bloody revolution among the natives. They encounter dastardly villains, harrowing dangers and loyal allies.
   Probably the most interesting thing about this book is Haggard's presentation of English colonialism. He seemed to view it as natural and desirable that England should rule over the native African cultures. At the same time, having known natives personally, he recognized that they were as human as he was and he presented them as such. His Africans were complex individuals who were sometimes heroic and sometimes villainous. Umbopa, a character as important as any other in this story, is a perfect example of this. While Quatermain is constantly annoyed by Umbopa's attitude toward the white men, this is only because Umbopa has no doubt that he is their equal. We are lucky that Haggard did not have the hateful racist attitudes of so many of his many imitators.
   Of course, while it is much more than mere escapist fiction, King Solomon's Mines does work wonderfully as a pure adventure novel. It has a tremendous sense of pace and deftly-written action scenes. The characters in the novel are all finely drawn and come across as actual people. The style is straightforward and unadorned. Most of the dialogue is realistic, though the natives tend to speak as if they just walked out of the King James Bible.
   This book spawned a whole genre of "lost world" novels. Authors such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard were all deeply influenced by Haggard. Haggard himself continued in this vein and wrote dozens of adventure novels. Many were very good, though eventually he started to repeat himself somewhat. King Solomon's Mines is the great original and is well worth the time of any adventure fan.
 
 

 

The White People and Other Weird Stories (1894-1916) by Arthur Machen

   Arthur Machen believed deeply in a very personal form of mystic Christianity. For Machen, powerful forces lurked behind the material world, forces that were dangerous to disturb. He deeply resented the growing secularism of his time and had a bitter hostility toward the results of scientific thought in society. For him the world was, and needed to stay, full of awe-inspiring mystery. Because he was an immensely talented writer he was able to infuse his fiction with this unique view of the world. The results were some of the weirdest and most unsettling stories in all of horror fiction.
   For the past few decades most of Machen's fiction was pretty hard to find outside a couple often-reprinted stories in anthologies. It was good news for horror and fantasy fans when Penguin published this edition of his stories. We can thank the editor, S. T. Joshi, for pushing for its publication. Nobody knows weird fiction of this era like Joshi and he understands Machen's importance. Machen, after all, was a major influence on H. P. Lovecraft and figures prominently in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature.
   The title story, The White People, is the book's stand-out. It is by far his weirdest and most disturbing work. It is a "found diary" story creepier than any of the "found footage" horror films that have been churned out during the past few years. The diary belonged to a fourteen year old girl whose ignorance of the true meaning of her experiences amplify their horror. I hesitate to give any details for fear of spoiling the story for those who have not read it. It is enough to say that it is one of the most powerful and disorienting stories in all of horror literature.
   Another very good story is The Novel of the Black Seal, one of Machen's many meditations on the consequences of seeking knowledge best left unknown. It is one of the stories to feature his "little people"; a race of ghastly creatures that live in the wild hills of Wales. These creatures have survived from ancient times and are the dark basis for the lighter legends of elves and fairies. They have control of evil forces long forgotten by human beings. A Professor Greg goes looking for conclusive proof of the existence of these creatures. That turns out to be a very bad idea.
   I also must mention The Novel of the White Powder, if only because it is so gloriously revolting. An unfortunate man gets the wrong medicine from the druggist with nightmarish results. His mental and physical transformation is particularly ghastly.
   If there is any failing to this volume it is that Machen's best known story, The Great God Pan, is inexplicably not included. For the life of me I cannot understand why this is so. Not only was it Machen's first critical success, it is also one of his best stories. It can't be because of space, as it is a better story by far than some that were included. The Terror, for example, is a decent enough story but it is not close to being as good as Pan. Perhaps Joshi was looking to make this more of a well-rounded book, including works where the supernatural is only touched upon such as A Fragment of Life, than a book of his "best" work. To make its exclusion even more frustrating we have that beautiful painting of Pan right on the cover.
   If Machen had a major fault in his work, it was his reliance on coincidence. The coincidences in his stories were a crutch that he often relied on to get his plots where he wanted them to go. Sadly, they often stretched credulity to the breaking point. However, this fault is a forgivable one when balanced out against the atmosphere and uniqueness of his work.
   If you have any interest in weird fiction this book is very rewarding.