“The Dweller in the Tomb” by Henry Kuttner is a Mythos mimic of another kind. In the last installment, Frederick Cowles’ “The House on the Swamp” reminded me of a Derlethian Mythos pastiche. This time around Kuttner is purposefully reusing his own work to sell to a different kind of Pulp.
Henry Kuttner’s first big splash as an author was “The Graveyard Rats” in Weird Tales, March 1936, a Lovecraftian piece if not a Mythos tale. His first overt Mythos piece was the next one, “The Secret of Kralitz” (Weird Tales, October 1936). The plot of that story has Franz, the heir of Castle Kralitz, told not to seek out his inheritance. His father, the current Baron, tells him how their ancestor tore down the local abbey and killed all the priests. This was because the abbot refused to turn over a girl who sought sanctuary there. Since those days the House of Kralitz has been cursed. When the time was right the heir would be invited to the cavern below the castle and see the family curse firsthand.
The night comes and Franz is summoned. He bravely faces the strange creatures that are his ancestors. They feast on the dead. They speak of eldritch horrors and fungoid denizens of space. Finally, Franz is showed the tomb where he will be buried, before becoming a ghoul, too.
It is a short, moody piece. In many respects it is a pastiche of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Tomb”. Kuttner would write nine others, collected in The Book of Iod (1995).
Now this twenty-one year old writer (in 1936) obviously was a Lovecraft fan, just as he was obviously a Robert E. Howard fan when he will write the Elak of Atlantis stories a few years later. (Many years later, Kuttner, along with his wife, C. L. Moore, would be acknowledged as the great Science Fiction writer, Lewis Padgett.) But back in 1936-37, Kuttner made most of money writing for other kinds of Pulps. In particular, these were Shudder Pulps and adventure magazines for the Ned Pines’ Thrilling chain. Thrilling Mystery was one of these, a Shudder Pulp dedicated to sadistic covers and Scooby-Doo style horror. The atmosphere is over-the-top but every story, no matter how crazy or horrifying, had to have a logical and earthly explanation.
In the February 1937 issue of Thrilling Mystery, Kutner had “The Dweller in the Tomb” (a very Lovecraftian title right from the get-go. Think of Robert Bloch’s “The Creeper in the Crypt”, or Robert E. Howard’s “The Dwellers Under the Tomb”, for example.)
The plot this time has newly weds (no, not Brad and Janet, but Jim and Lucille) arrive at a creepy castle in Sussex. The property belongs to Jim Mason’s uncle, Martin Argyll, a researcher into the Occult. They meet Martin’s assistant, Fred Kent, whose father had been Argyll’s partner. (In 1939, Kuttner would adopted the pseudonym, Kelvin Kent for a series of SF tales. He must have liked that name.) Argyll explains that the castle was built on top of old druidic ruins. There is a vault under the building that he wants to show the new couple. All this is found in an ancient manuscript telling of the history of Sussex Castle.
Fred takes them to their rooms. (Separate rooms. Despite the garish torture cover with a naked woman on it, this married couple will sleep in separate rooms!) While having a smoke on the balcony, a garrotte slips over Jim’s head and he is nearly strangled. Fred shows up in time and saves him. Someone doesn’t want Argyll’s nephew to come to the castle.
Fred explains to Jim that Martin is engaged in a strange quest. He tells of a room in the tomb below where Fred was instructed to dig. There he unearthed a metal disk. Under the metal plate is the preserved undead body of an ancient druid priest. This creature knows the secret of eternal life. Fred had tried to destroy the disk with a crowbar but failed. (Lucille enters now, wearing a gauzy, see-through negligee. She has heard the terrible story.) Fred offers the pair his car, and tells them to get away.
And then Martin is there, an automatic pistol in his hand. Everybody is going to the tomb below. He needs sacrifices for the giant that lives under the disk. The dweller is to be released and given the blood of the three. The prisoners glumly descend to the basement tomb. They can hear the heavy footsteps of the dweller. Argyll offers them up to the giant, waiting for his reward. Martin tears off Lucille’s negligee. The dweller ignores the others and attacks Martin. He has a heart attack and dies. Fred gets the gun and shoots the giant. The creature says: “Curse you, Kent. You blasted double-crosser–”
The jig is up. The giant is the chauffeur, who also was the one who got Jim with the garotte. Fred had meant to scare them off, but now he will have to kill them. The whole thing was an elaborate revenge scheme. Martin Argyll had killed Fred’s father, by leaving him penniless and finally a suicide. When the castle came up for sale, Fred engineered it so Martin would hear the bogus story of the druids and the dweller. The manuscript was a clever forgery.
Fred is ready to kill the Masons. Lucille has other plans. She distracts the gunman long enough for Jim to wrestle with him. Jim gets a burning flesh wound but the two fall into the pit where Fred dies. Jim picks up Lucille’s negligee and wraps it around his wife. The two look into each others’ eyes with undying love.
Though not a direct plot mimic, Kuttner has used Lovecraftian tropes for his own purposes here: the cavern under the castle, the magical history and curse, the ancient manuscript (not the Necronomicon) and plenty of Poesque gloom and doom. The Shudder Pulps, for all their frantic terror, shied away from real Lovecraftian cosmic horror. When Jack Williamson tried to write a Shudder Pulp story with HPL influences he produced “The Mark of Monster” which was rejected by the Thrilling editors. It sold immediately to Weird Tales.
This kind of recycling familiar props in a Shudder Pulp wasn’t uncommon. Robert Bloch and Jack Williamson both wrote Shudder Pulp stories using robots, a subject they knew well from real SF stories. Edmond Hamilton used devolution once again in “Beasts That Once Were Men”, Kuttner later would use werewolves in “I Am the Wolf”, and Robert Bloch vampires in “Death is a Vampire”. Why shouldn’t Henry Kuttner’s Mythos fiction spawn a Shudder Pulp version of the same?
