The Monsters of the Hyborian Age 10: The God in the Bowl

If you missed the last one…

A Detective Story

Robert E. Howard’s “The God in the Bowl” is a monster tale. But it is also something a little different. Unlike any other Conan tale, it is also a detective story. Using the format of a Pulp Mystery, Howard creates an intriguing question to keep you reading: what is inside the bowl? Being a monster fan, I loved it when it proves to be a creature, referred to as a “god”. This usually means it is very ancient, powerful but not omniscient. It is “god” with a small “g”.

A Barbarian in Numalia

The plot has the young Conan, a thief in Numalia, breaking into a museum called the Temple of Kallian Publico. While mid-job. the owner is discovered murdered. Our Hyborian detectives are magistrate, Demetrio, and the prefect of police, Dionus. They suspect the foreigner but do not disarm him. The men investigate and find out from Promero, Publico’s clerk, that a new shipment has arrived from Stygia. The spherical sarcophagus has been broken into and emptied. They learn the object was sent by Caranthes of Hanumar, Priest of Ibis, who may have sent a famous diadem of the giant-kings. Is Conan the murderer and a thief of the treasure?

Promero tells them:

“I warned Kallian, but he would not believe me! It is a scaled serpent coiled with its tail in its mouth. It is the sign of Set, the Old Serpent, the god of the Stygiansl This bowl is too old for a human world—it is a relic of the time when Set walked the earth in the form of a man. Perhaps the race that sprang from his loins laid the bones of their kings away in such cases as this!”

Prime Suspect

When the cops start accusing the barbarian for the murder of Kallian Publico, who has been horribly strangled, Conan reveals he was sent to the museum to steal for Aztrias Petanius, the young artistocrat who accuses him. When the fact that something living came out of the sphere becomes obvious, the civilized men flee. Only Conan remains to fight the thing from the bowl:

Conan stared in wonder at the cold, classic beauty of that countenance, whose like he had never seen among the sons of men. Neither weakness, nor mercy, nor cruelty, nor kindness, nor any other human emotion showed in those features. They might have been the marble mask of a god, carved by a master hand, except for the unmistakable life in them—life cold and strange, such as the Cimmerian had never known and could not understand. He thought fleetingly of the marble perfection of the body concealed by the screen; it must be perfect, he thought, since the face was so inhumanly beautiful.

But he could see only the finely-molded head, which swayed from side to side. The full lips opened and spoke a single word, in a rich, vibrant tone like the golden chimes that ring in the jungle-lost temples of Khitai. It was an unknown tongue, forgotten before the kingdoms of man arose, but Conan knew that it meant: “Come!”

Medusa’s Call

Conan, who still has his broadsword, without looking directly at the gorgonic gaze, slashes and cuts the head off.

Then the full horror of it rushed over the Cimmerian. He fled, nor did he slacken his headlong flight until the spires of Numalia faded into the dawn behind him. The thought of Set was like a nightmare, and the children of Set who once ruled the earth and who now slept in their nighted caverns below the black pyramids. Behind that gilded screen had lain no human body—only the shimmering, headless coils of a gigantic serpent.

Edited Versions

The authorship of this late tale, published in Space Science Fiction (September 1952) by editor, Lester Del Rey, was not a fragment expanded by L. Sprague de Camp. The story did get heavily edited by LSD:

When the story “The God in the Bowl” appeared in manuscript in 1951 , I revised it considerably for publication. For the present edition, however, I have gone back to the original manuscript and produced a version much closer to the original, with a bare minimum of editorial changes.

This version would have appeared in Gnome Press’s The Coming of Conan (1953) but the quote by LSD came from the Lancer paperback Conan (1967). The changes he refers to in the magazine version versus the paperback version are mostly in the first part of the story. The finale is pretty much the same. It is in the end of the story the monster (almost) appears.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

I’d like to take just a second to applaud Howard here. Usually “The God in the Bowl” gets short shrift as a minor tale, a latecomer, sometimes mistaken as an expanded fragment (like Lin Carter’s “Black Abyss”). (E. F. Bleiler said it “not very good” (The Guide to Supernatural Fiction, 1983) though he did realize it is a detective story.) What some fail to see is Howard could have as easily written the story as a rural mystery, with Conan replaced by a drifter, of Irish background, of course, and Demetrio and Dionus as a local sheriff and deputy. Something akin to “Pigeons From Hell”. Once again, Howard pulls in Pulp formula, like he did with historical, pirate yarns and Westerns, into Sword & Sorcery. As a form of heroic fantasy, S&S is the most agile of sub-genres. Let’s see Tolkien do that!

Comic Versions

The story was adapted into comics two times, first by Marvel Comics in Conan the Barbarian #7 (July 1971) “The Lurker Within”. The adaptation was written by Roy Thomas with art by Barry Windsor-Smith, Sal Buscema and Dan Adkins. Smith designed the god to be entirely serpentine except for the head.

In November-December 2004, Dark Horse did their version over two issue, Conan #10 and 11. It was written by Kurt Busiek and drawn by Cary Nord. The Dark Horse version sticks much closer to the story, only revealing in the final frame the serpentine body.

Movie Versions

There is a third version (of a sort) of The God in the Bowl. This is Ray Harryhausen’s rendition of Medusa in The Clash of the Titans (1981). The famous snake-headed woman of Greek myth is usually portrayed as having a human body. Ray switched it up and gave her a snake body ala Robert E. Howard. She had to return for the CGI remake in 2010. I don’t know if Harryhausen was familiar with Howard’s tale but I would not be surprised by it.

Next time…The Bloodstained God…