When reading Lin Carter you have to ask yourself before beginning: “Which author is he pastiching now?” If there is pure Lin Carter fiction out there, I have yet to read it. (This is quite possible. I haven’t read everything he wrote, not by a long shot.)
Mike Resnick wrote about this fact of Lin’s creative output in “The real story behind: THE FORGOTTEN SEA OF MARS and the GANYMEDE books” (at Erbzine):
I did one more grind-it-out-for-cash job, REDBEARD, in 1967, though it didn’t come out until 1969. Then one day I was in New York, having lunch with Lin Carter. He told me he had just finished a Leigh Brackett book, and was embarking on an ERB book, and had just signed to do a Robert E. Howard book. I asked him when he was going to do a Lin Carter book. He just stared at me, as if the question had no meaning to him — and in that instant I realized that I didn’t want to grow up to be Lin Carter, spending my whole life copying other writers’ styles and ideas.
I understand Resnick’s position but it doesn’t stop me from reading Carter. A good example is a short series of two stories he did for Fantastic that I call The People of the Dragon after the first story. These included “The People of the Dragon” (February 1976) and “The Pillars of Hell” (December 1977). Over a year apart, Carter wasn’t pumping these out, but I have to admit I wish there were more of them. By 1978, Ted White was gone from Fantastic and Carter might not have had a sympathetic editor to sell them to any longer.
So to answer my original question: who is Carter pastiching? Robert E. Howard once again, specifically his James Allison stories. In that set of three or four stories, James Allison is a young Texan who lost a leg in a riding accident. At night he dreams of past lives he had that follow the Aryans who migrated across the world. The stories include some great Howard pieces including “The Garden of Fear”, “The Valley of the Worm” and “The Marchers of Valhalla”. Inspired by Jack London’s The Star Rover (1915), the device of re-experiencing past lives gives Howard a way to fill in his history between the ages of Kull’s Valusia and Conan’s Hyboria. It also removed the necessity of his hero surviving at the end of each story.
Ted White blurbs the first story with:
Lin Carter tells us this is the first story in a new series in which a tribe of Stone Age savages learn gradually and painfully the arts of civilization, encountering along the way uncanny forces, eldritch survivals of a lost age of primal sorcery. The gap between each story is about a generation, sometimes two–the heroes in one story will be the parents or grandparents of those in the next. herewith, our introduction to — The People of the Dragon.
The plot has Junga and his tribe huddled in the dark, trying to survive their savage world. Junga’s father and brother go off to hunt. In a dream, the voice of Gomar, his father, warns them to avoid the marshy places where the Father of Slime dwells. Unfortunately the chief doesn’t follow this ghostly warning and the hunters discover the place of the monster, a ruin:
We came at last to the brink of a great, shallow pit, like the bed of a vanished lake. But it was empty of water, that lake, though a thick coating of black mud, or something very like unto mud, lay along the bottom of the depression…and my heart froze within my breast at what I saw pitifully tumbled about upon the floor of the pit. They were the bones of men…
The tribesmen have found their missing hunters. Junga buries the dead, swearing vengeance. Accompanied by his friend, Charn, Junga goes after the Father of Slime. The two hunters trail the monster, until they find it lurking in a pool of black water. The slime heaves, creates pseudopods, and attacks. Jungo cleaves the tentacles with his stone axe. Charn throws spears but to no avail. Where the slime touches them, it burns. They retreat.
The slime pursues the runners, eventually covering Charn in a wave of black putrid flesh. Junga is carrying a brand and thrusts it into the monster. The oily slime ignites and burns quickly. The two men hear the thing scream as it dies. They leap to safety and watch the thing consumed. They return to their tribe to fight another day.
The terrible slime monster has a long tradition including such Weird Tales classics as Thorp McClusky’s “The Crawling Horror” (Weird Tales, November 1936) and Joseph Payne Brennan’s “Slime” (Weird Tales, March 1953) but this creature reminds me mostly of Lovecraft’s shoggoths and even more of Clark Ashton Smith’s Spawn of Tsathoggua from “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” (Weird Tales, November 1931). Carter’s obsession with the Cthulhu Mythos is well known, so no real surprise.
“The Pillars of Hell” jumps to a time when Charn is chief. The narrator is Jugrid, son of Junga. There is discord in the tribe because of Kugar the Cunning and his cronies. Men begin to go missing in the night. The Doom of the Silent Lands takes prisoners and Kugar presses to leave. Charn dies and Junga becomes chief.
Eventually the siren call comes for Jugrid. (He has strapped the great Ax of Zar onto his back, knowing that he would be called.) He tries to deny it by clasping a sharp knife. He follows until he sees the four ancient pillars of a ruin. He sees a man ahead of him to go the pillars and touch it. Tendrils appear from the stone:
And I stood, frozen and trembling, whimpering curses between gritted teeth, as the oily vapor coiled about him and ate the leathern tunic from his body and the flesh from his bones and crumbled the very bones themselves into a powdery ash! (The last part of that quote is in Lovecraftian italics.)
Jugrid watches man after man die of this fate. He snaps out of the siren’s control and attacks the pillars. First he pulls the girl Athala away, about to touch a pillar. Then he draws his knife and stabs until the blade breaks. At last he remembers the Ax of Zar and draws that. Before he can use it, Athala has touched the stone and her eyes fill with malign evil. The pillars have taken over her body.
Jugrid knocks her down, driving out the evil. The pillars try to control him with siren music. He takes up his ax and attacks. He cuts a chunk out of the pillar. The music stops but he keeps chopping and chopping until all the pillars lie in ruin, the stones dying with a whimper. Jugrid and Athala return to their people.
Not that much different than the first story, I would hope that if Lin had written more he might change up the formula a little. This story doesn’t have the Lovecraftian touches of “The People of the Dragon” though it does remind me a little of the Conan pastiche of “The Curse of the Monolith” (Worlds of Fantasy, September 1968) that he wrote with L. Sprague de Camp.
Which brings me to my final question: is this story Sword & Sorcery? Howard’s James Allison stories are usually included as such, though the prehistoric setting seems more in line with Howard’s first sale, “Spear and Fang” (Weird Tales, July 1925). I am inclined to think of these as S&S tales. The technology is Stone Age but the plots are not typical of caveman fiction. (Think of H. G. Wells or even Edgar Rice Burroughs. Their plots usually involves some kind of neolithic romance.) Carter isn’t doing that here. He has the classic S&S plot of hero versus monster. Call if Stone Ax & Sorcery if you like but in spirit this is Howardian heroic fantasy, not Clan of the Cave Bear.
