The idea of being trapped on an island with some kind of terror is not a new theme. But of all those Dr. Moreau scenarios there are two stories that stick out in my mind and share an odd kind of connection. These are “The People of the Black Coast” by Robert E. Howard and “The Quest For Blank Claveringi” by Patricia Highsmith. You wouldn’t put Howard and Highsmith together for much but at the intersection of WEIRD and ISLAND you do.
“The People of the Black Coast” first appeared in Spaceway (September-October 1969), so it was published thirty-three years after Howard’s death. I’m not sure in what year he wrote it. The 1960s to 1980s were filled with lost and incomplete REH stories that appeared in smaller Science Fiction magazines like Fantastic Universe and Spaceway. Kirby McCauley reprinted the story in Night Chills (1975) and that is where I saw it first. Later in 1978, Berkeley Books put out Black Canaan with a Ken Kelly cover that features this story. (You know the ones, with the cool fold-out posters.)
“…If you can imagine spider crabs larger than a horse—and yet they were not true spider crabs, outside the difference in size. Leaving that difference out, I should say that there was as much variation in these monsters and the true spider crab as there is between a highly developed European and an African bushman.” (“The People of the Black Coast” by Robert E. Howard)
In the Pacific, between the Philippines and Guam, lies the Island of the People of the Black Coast. The narrator and his girl, Gloria, have to swim to the island after her airplane failed and fell into the sea. The island is actually a vast basalt city inhabited by intelligent giant crabs. The People have superior intelligence to humans but weaker senses. They communicate by telepathy. They can also use their mind powers to overwhelm their prey. The story ends with the man contemplating nature’s cruel law and looking forward to killing the crabs though he knows he will not survive.
This story is an odd piece of Howard writing, most likely inspired by H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine. In the last part of the book, the time traveler goes millions of years into the future (after fleeing the Morlocks) and sees an earth that is dying but still inhabited by crab creatures. I believe it is these critters that sparked this idea for REH. In true Howard style his hero takes on the foe with lots of gusto and action, dying surrounded by his dead enemies. Conan would approve.
The story was adapted ten years later by Roy Thomas for Conan the Barbarian #99 (June 1979). Thomas turns it into another Conan adventure. By virtue of being in a continuing series, Conan does not meet the fate of Howard’s original narrator. Conan crushes the crab men with boulders.
“The Quest For Blank Claveringi” appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, June 17, 1967. I didn’t see it until I got Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural (1985) edited by Marvin Kaye. The hero of this tale is no Howardian tough guy but the academic, Professor Avery Clavering, who wants more than anything to discover a snail that he can name in his own honor. He is 48 and not a stellar scholar. It is vanity that drives him, not Darwinian survivalism.
He sees the snails for the first time:
The professor ran round the gulley to have a better look. It was a snail, and its shell was about fifteen feet high. He had a view of its left side, the side without the spiral. It resembled a peach-colored sail filled with wind, and the sunlight made nacreous, silvery patches gleam and twinkle as the great thing stirred. The little rain of pebbles had aroused it, the professor realized. If the shell was fifteen or eighteen feet in diameter, he reckoned that the snail’s body or foot would be something like six yards long when extended… The snail was backing to pull its head from the narrow part of the gulley. The moist body, the color of tea with milk, came into view with the slowness of an enormous snake awakening from slumber…
A gigantic face regarded him, a face with drooping, scalloped cheeks or lips, with antennae six feet long now, the eyes on the ends of them scrutinizing him at his own level and scarcely ten feet away, with the disdain of a Herculean lorgnette, with the unknown potency of a pair of oversized telescopes. The snail reared so high, it had to arch its antennae to keep him in view. Six yards long? It would be more like eight or ten yards…
He knew about snails’ teeth, the twenty-odd thousand pairs of them even in a small garden snail, set in comblike structures, the upper front teeth visible, moving up and down constantly just under transparent flesh. A snail of this size, with proportionate teeth, could chew through a tree as quickly as a woodsman’s axe, the professor thought. (“The Quest For Blank Claveringi” by Patricia Highsmith)
Highsmith takes the time to describe what a giant snail would be like, how something usually insignificant would be terrifying at such a large size. She too is channeling H. G. Wells, who used this same technique in The Food of the Gods (1903) with a chicken.
Clavering spends some time photographing the snails then wants to return to his boat, the Samantha. Unfortunately, he has erred with the anchoring and the boat has drifted off to sea. He is now stuck on the island with the killer snails. Clavering battles the snails with hatchet, knife and spear made from a tree but he is no hero. Later when Dr. Stead and some natives come in search of the man the snails chase them off. Clavering runs into the sea but the snail pursues and his story ends under the those rows of teeth. Pretty impressive for what is basically a Pulp scenario.
And here is where the two authors meet. In both stories the protagonist, the human, is in a way, physically superior to the attacker. Howard’s man can club the crabs to death and Professor Clavering can simply out-pace the snails. But the bottleneck of the island works against their brute strength. Neither man can ultimately escape but will eventually sleep and be taken by the terror. It is this realization that creates the final horror of the story along with the image of crab and snail devouring a man.
