In case you missed the last monster…
“Rogues in the House” (Weird Tales, January 1934) was the seventh Conan story Howard sold. It is set in Conan’s youth when he was a thief in Zamora. Conan is forced to take a job of invading the home of a wizard, Nabonidus. The house is filled with traps along with a singularly terrible monster: Thak the apeman.
Thak is an ape-man from the mountains on the fringe of Zamora. Nabonidus took him as a cub The wizard believes his race will become human with anther hundred thousand years of evolution. As primitive cavemen they know nothing of fire-making, clothing or weapons. They possess a primitive language of clicks and grunts. Nabonidus trained the ape cub to his needs but the beast retained human-like resentments. The servant, now the master, took the wizard’s robes and lords over the house.
The house is filled with secret spy holes and periscopes. Conan sees the brute through one of these:
Murilo stared in the mirror at the creature which sat with such monstrous patience before the closed door. He shuddered at the sight of the great black hands, thickly grown with hair that was almost fur-like. The body was thick, broad and stooped. The unnaturally wide shoulders had burst the scarlet gown, and on these shoulders Murilo noted the same thick growth of black hair. The face peering from the scarlet hood was utterly bestial, and yet Murilo realized that Nabonidus spoke truth when he said that Thak was not wholly a beast. There was something in the red murky eyes, something in the creature’s clumsy posture, something in the whole appearance of the thing that set it apart from the truly animal. That monstrous body housed a brain and soul that were just budding awfully into something vaguely human. Murilo stood aghast as he recognized a faint and hideous kinship between his kind and that squatting monstrosity, and he was nauseated by a fleeting realization of the abysses of bellowing bestiality up through which humanity had painfully toiled.
Of course, Conan will have to fight the monster if the men are to regain the house. The Cimmerian does this by jumping on Thak’s back:
Then as the monster rushed past the curtains, from among them catapulted a great form that struck full on the apeman’s shoulders, at the same instant driving the poniard into the brutish back. Thak screamed horribly as the impact knocked him off his feet, and the combatants hit the floor together. Instantly there began a whirl and thrash of limbs, the tearing and rending of a fiendish battle.
Conan locks his legs around the monster and stabs him with his knife. After he kills the beast, he declares he has not killed a monster but a man. The monster out of the way, the various opponents who had banded together, turn on each other. Conan almost prefers the company of apes.
Howard’s inspiration for Thak the apeman is largely from H. Rider Haggard’s Heu-Heu, The Monster (1924). Howard loved ape monsters (like snake monsters) and would even top Thak when he gave wings to the baddy in “Queen of the Back Coast” (more later). Thak has a caveman element as well. Howard’s first sale was “Spear and Fang”, a tale of love in the age of cavemen, inspired by H. G. Wells’ “The Grisly Folk”. (Manly Wade Wellman’s caveman series about Hok also came from this story.) I suppose another obvious source of inspiration is Tarzan. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ apeman was always wrapping his legs around lions as he stabbed them with his knife. Many critics have drawn a comparison between Tarzan and Conan over the years. This story is perhaps the strongest example of that similarity.
Thak came to life visually when Frank Frazetta painted Conan’s encounter for the cover of Conan (1967). Frazetta knew how to make the red cloak an integral part of that image. His painting inspired all that followed.
The comics have adapted this story two times. Roy Thomas wrote the first one with art by Barry Smith and Sal Buscema in Conan the Barbarian #11 (November 1971).
The film version of Thak the apeman appeared in Conan the Destroyer (1984). In this garbled compilation of Howard elements, Conan and his friends go to Thoth-Amon’s castle where the ape demon dwells inside mirrors. Conan has to destroy the glass and the monster. A poor fate for such a classic Howard tale.
Dark Horse Comics adapted the tale a second time in Conan #44 (September 2007). Adaptation by Tim Truman with art by Cary Nord.
Thak the apeman is a classic Hyborian monster. He is the link between Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard. No wonder I went from one to the other so easily as a kid. (It was also when the paperbacks and the comics were everywhere. It would have been hard to miss either of these giants of fantastic literature.) Howard’s genius was to take a jungle creature and place it inside a claustrophobic Gothic manse. Shades of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” as much as Heu Heu or the bolgani in Tarzan of the Apes. His rudimentary intelligence makes him more than simply an ape.
Next time…The Winged Ape…
