Sometimes fans can get so heated up by a favorite story sequence or saga that they start to see examples everywhere. For me it was the Cthulhu Mythos. As I am sure most SF/F/H fans know, “The Mythos” is a series of interconnected stories by a circle of friends centered on the works of H. P. Lovecraft. For HPL and his friends, it was a game. Lovecraft would include a character from Robert E. Howard’s story, while Howard include a reference to one of Clark Ashton Smith’s monsters, etc. Later HPL, Frank Belknap Long and Robert Bloch would kill each other off as disguised characters. The end result was the impression that all the various story series were part of a gigantic myth.
The original Lovecraft game ended with HPL’s death but the Mythos lived on after its creator. Manly Wade Wellman was one of the writers who penned a Mythos tale in honor of the Gentleman From Rhode Island called “The Terrible Parchment” (Weird Tales, August 1937). Manly got the brilliant idea to combine the awful tome with the monster, making his manuscript a seething, writhing terror. This kind of fun continued with Gardner F. Fox and C. Hall Thompson until August Derleth shut it down in an attempt to corner the Mythos market for the newly formed Arkham House.
Wellman and Seabury Quinn (perhaps Weird Tales‘ most popular author) were not part of the original Lovecraft Circle, so they tried to start a similar game that I labeled “The Ghostbreaker Mythos” in another article. Robert E. Howard, who was one of the circle, peppered his Fantasy tales with Mythos references. Even Edmond Hamilton’s Captain Future contained veiled examples of the Old Ones. My point here is simply: it was never easy to say for sure if a story was or was not part of the Mythos.
I wrote Karl Edward Wagner a letter in 1987 about his Mythos fiction and I had included the story “.220 Swift” which he kindly denied inclusion. Well, which stories are or are not Mythos is no longer a concern for me. I will leave that to scribes like E. P. Berglund and Robert Weinberg’s massive The Reader’s Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos, a volume I am glad to be included in. After a few hundred Mythos tales you get, well, less ardent.
Actually what happens is you begin to see the entire horror field more as a connected web and anything as limiting as a “Mythos” becomes a barrier rather than a help. What I wish I had asked Karl Edward Wagner on April 7, 1987, was why did he choose to write about the Ancients, knowing that Manly Wade Wellman had twenty years earlier. Now there would have been a story! Because these two writers were good friends. Manly (along with his wife Frances who wrote under the name Frances Garfield) acted as a kind of guru of Fantasy and Horror to younger writers (like Wagner and David Drake) in the Chapel Hill, North Carolina area. (In the second letter Karl told me how he would visit Frances after Manly’s death and enjoy whiskey and KFC with her.)
North Carolina is important here. Not only was it a hub of horror it was also, historically, a place of mystery. That story that Wellman wrote twenty years earlier was one of his famous Silver John tales, “Shiver in the Pines” (Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1955). Like many of these wonderful ghostbreaker tales (John is the only ghost buster who ever used a silver-stringed guitar and Johnny Cash style music to fight evil!), the setting is as an important character in itself, based on actual places and local lore. In this case, it was the Mines of the Ancients. In the 1540s, Spanish conquistadors had stopped in what would be North Carolina and legend said they left gold mines behind. These mines, some tales suggested, were not made but found, and that guardians had been placed in them. “Shiver in the Pines” follows a group of locals (including John) who accompany a sorcerer into a mine to find gold. The expedition is actually a confidence trick but the con men hadn’t counted on any Ancients showing up.
But then I stopped, the way you’d think roots had sprung from my toes into the rock. There were three up there, not two.
That third one looked at first glimpse like a big, big man wearing a fur coat; until you saw the fur was on his skin, with warty muscles bunching through. His head was more like a frog’s than anything else, wide in the mouth and big in the eye and no nose. He spread his arms and put them quiet-like round the shoulders of Reed Barnitt and Aram Harnam, and took hold with his hands that had both webs and claws.
The two men he touched screamed out like animals in a snap-trap. I sort of reckon they tried to pull free, but those two big shaggy arms just hugged them close and hiked them off their feet. And what had come to fetch them, it fetched them away, all in a blink of time, back into that darkness no sensible soul would dare. (“Shiver in the Pines” by Manly Wade Wellman)
These terrible creatures are not the Ancients but their guardians. As Clay Barnett puts it: “The Ancients are dead. Way I figure, what’s in there isn’t Ancients–just something Ancients left behind. I don’t want any part of it.”
And this is good advice. When the men put back the gold they found in the mine, the two captives are returned, but changed.
They sort of leaned together, like tired horses in plow harness, not quite touching shoulders. Their hands-Reed Barnitt’s white ones, Aram Harnam’s shaggy ones-hung with the fingers bent and limp. They looked down at us with tired eyes and mouths drooped open, the way you’d think they had some hope about us, but not much…The hair on Reed Barnitt’s hatless head was as white as his face. And Aram Harnam’s beard, and the fur on his hands-black no more, but a dirty, steamy gray. Maybe it had changed from fear, the way folks say can happen. Or maybe there’d been time for it to change, where they were…Their eyes picked up the lantern light and shone green, like the eyes of dogs. One of them, I don’t know which, made a little whimpering cry with no words in it. They ran from me into the dark, and I saw their backs, bent more than I’d thought possible…As I watched they sort of fell forward and ran on hands and feet. Like animals. Not quite sure of how to run that way on all fours; but something told me, mighty positive, that they’d learn better as time went by. I backed down again, without watching any more.
In the end the captives remain in the caves, to live like animals. John and his friends are happier having nothing to do with the gold or the Ancients.
Twenty two years passed and Wellman was an inspiration to new, young writers like Karl Edward Wagner. Wagner wrote many fine horror tales, including the very Weird Tales-connected “Sticks”. In the letter he talks about how he wrote it especially for Lee Brown Coye. Wagner was also a fan of Robert E. Howard (having written a Conan and a Bran Mak Morn pastiche novel, The Legion From the Shadows (1976) as well as edited collections of Howard’s original Weird Tales versions of the Conan), and created his own Sword & Sorcery hero in Kane. The first of two stories, he uses the Ancients in is “Raven’s Eyrie” (Chacal #2, Spring 1977), a Sword & Sorcery tale, but it is in his horror tale “.220 Swift” (New Terrors, 1980) that he better addresses Wellman and his earlier story.
Set in the present, “.220 Swift” begins with have another set of men exploring caves in the hills, looking for the Mines of the Ancients. Heading this group is Dr. Morris Kenlaw (whose name is Morris Klaw with an ‘en’ added), an archaeologist, his unofficial assistant Eric Brandon, an albino who is working on a doctorate, and several locals. After a few false starts, Kenlaw finds a cave on the old Brennan property (a tip of that hat to Joseph Payne Brennan?). After some looking around Kenlaw and Brandon discover chambers cut by hand, Spanish skeletons and finally a massive gold vein. Kenlaw reveals his true intentions by trying to kill Brandon with a pick axe. His plans to make it look like an accident go horribly wrong when the large man gets stuck in a narrow tunnel. The claustrophobia Wagner describes is horrific enough but it’s then that Kenlaw encounters the rulers of the cave, small white-skinned creatures that eat his face off.
Brandon wakes from Kenlaw’s treacherous pick axe blow to discover the dead scientist and the cave folk. Unlike Kenlaw, the Ancients treat Brandon with respect. Through a series of Robert E. Howard like dreams we learn the history of the Ancients, how they predated the Indians, encountered and hated the Spanish, who enslaved them as miners, and how they revolted. Brandon, in a Bran Mak Morn style kingship, remains with the Ancients as their new leader. When Kenlaw is discovered dead and Brandon declared missing, FBI agents look into Brandon’s past, and discover he was not a student but a hit man specializing in using the .220 Swift bullet of the title. They also discover his name isn’t Brandon but Brennan and he became an orphan when his mother died and his father abandoned him. There is evidence his mother was impregnated, not by the father, but by creatures in the mines near the Brennan home. Eric Brennan has returned to his people. The story ends with Eric inviting a local girl, Ginger Warner to go for a walk with him. She finds his talk insane and her fate only becomes evident when Brandon introduces her to her new family.
In many respects Wagner’s story is a more complex version of Manly Wade Wellman’s “Shiver in the Pines”. We have a group of men searching; they find gold; they find monsters; there is treachery; they are changed by the experience. Where the stories differ is in who the focal character is. Wagner’s story has no Silver John to save anyone. The core of “.220 Swift ” is not Wellman but Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.
To return to my letter, and the suggestion that Wagner’s tale is a Mythos story: I can see how this story would press my Lovecraftian buttons. The character of Brandon as a cross-breed hints strongly of HPL’s “The Lurking Fear” and the scene where Kenlaw has his face eaten off is also reminiscent of that story. The vast system of limestone caves is also part of Lovecraft’s tales of ghouls. The claustrophobic feel is descended from Henry Kuttner’s classic Mythos tale, “The Graveyard Rats”. So, in this sense, I can see why I had thought “Cthulhu Mythos” all those years ago. Wagner may not have intended the story to be Mythos, but he never kept it from being Lovecraftian.
NB. I often wish I had asked Karl entirely different questions in those two letters. Certainly more about Sword & Sorcery and nothing much about Mythos. We don’t get to change the past. Another chance I missed was when I met Robert Bloch at V-Con in Vancouver (1985, I think). I was too shy to ask him so many things. I just got him to sign my copy of a Lovecraft book he had written the intro for. This seems to be fan-boy tradition. H. P. Lovecraft did the very same thing with Lord Dunsany back in 1917 or so.
