In “The Supernatural Horror in Literature” H. P. Lovecraft selects three novels as the offspring of Bram Stoker’s Dracula: “…Dracula evoked many similar novels of supernatural horror, among which the best are perhaps The Beetle, by Richard Marsh, Brood of the Witch-Queen, by “Sax Rohmer” (Arthur Sarsfield Ward), and The Door of the Unreal, by Gerald Biss. The latter handles quite dexterously the standard werewolf superstition…”
Lovecraft is correct in his assertion, in that all three concern a group of people under attack by an outside evil force. In Dracula, the last half of the book largely focuses on Van Helsing and Co. battling the Count for the possession of Mina Harker. Locked inside their home, surrounded by crosses and garlic bunches, Dracula lurks outside, waiting for his chance to turn Mina to the darkness. Van Helsing and his young friends must go all the way to Transylvania to save her and defeat the Count.
Richard Marsh would not have agreed with Lovecraft. He claimed that The Beetle had nothing to do with Dracula. A serial version of The Beetle started The Peril of Paul Lessingham: The Story of a Haunted Man in Answers, on March 13, 1897. Dracula was released on May 26, 1897. Marsh might be believed. His book outsold Dracula but has not won the fame of Stoker’s classic. I think we can remove Marsh from this discussion, because it is going to focus the other two novels, clearly showing Stoker influence.
Let’s begin with a novel that has influenced films, if not fiction. Brood of the Witch-Queen. The characters in this book are similar to Dracula’s cast. Dr. Cairn is the wise physician/occult defender of the Van Helsing variety. His son Robert is like Jonathan Harker though he hasn’t as many allies. He does have his friend Sime and Mr. Saunderson, but otherwise must fend for himself. Myra Duquesne, the object of desire like Mina Harker, is pursued by Antony Ferrara for evil reasons: the half of Sir Michael’s fortune that she possesses.
The biggest departure for Rohmer is his choice of Egyptian magic instead of vampirism. Rohmer is of course best known for his stories of Dr. Fu Manchu and inevitably associated with China. This is erroneous since the Chinese Rohmer knew were those living in the East End of London, and not those native to their original homeland. Rohmer, in fact, wrote more about Egypt than mainland China. He uses mummies and Egyptian magic in several stories including The Green Eyes of Bast, She Who Sleeps and Bimbashi Baruk of Egypt. He also wrote of magic with great authority, being a student of occultism. He penned a non-fiction book on magic called The Romance of Sorcery (1914). Whether the reader wishes to accept the views on magic or not, whether you feel it accurate or spurious, his sense of the occult feeds his fiction with a sense of truth lacking in many of his contemporaries. He uses many Egyptian elements cleverly, many of which have become clichés after decades of use in Hollywood and the Pulps: beetles, mummies, resurrection and crossing time. All these elements can be seen in The Mummy and The Mummy Returns with Brendan Fraser. Arthur Conan Doyle may have used them before Rohmer in his stories “The Ring of Thoth” and “Lot 249” but it is Rohmer’s novel that explores them at greater length.
The Dracula-like theme of supernatural attack can be found in this tale of Egyptian magic. The author even throws in a vampire in one small section. Despite this thematic spine to Brood of the Witch-Queen, the novel is a very different book compared to Dracula. First and most striking is the episodic nature of the plot. Sax Rohmer would have sold the novel as serialized portions, appearing as a group of connected short stories, then published in book form as a whole. Witch-Queen was published in 1914, a time of many weekly and monthly magazines like Argosy and All-Story.
Brood of the Witch-Queen appeared in Premier Magazine in nine segments in May 1914-January 1915 as well as in The Canadian Magazine and Short Stories. This episodic presentation causes some good and some bad results for the novel reader. On the plus side, the book starts with a bang. We get to witness Antony Ferrara’s invisible killing of the king-swan at Oxford. Dracula starts with a similarly exciting opening with Jonathan Harker being held captive in Transylvania, but then the novel slows dreadfully until about half way. Rohmer’s Witch-Queen never slows its pace. We are exposed to horror after horror as Robert Cairn and his father track down the evil sorcerer, are attacked, escape, then rescue others from his grasp.
Each segment has the structure of a short story with weird encounter and denouement. This keeps the book exciting but ultimately weakens it as the reader follows the Cairns from location to location. Only the threat of Antony Ferrara’s attacks ties the book together. The final chapter of the novel, when the sorcerer dies by his own fire elemental, ends much too abruptly without any feeling of summation or real conclusion. The story is merely over. The feel of the book in the end is perhaps more similar to a television show like Buffy the Vampire-Slayer with many small episodes making up a larger story arc.
What makes Rohmer’s Brood of the Witch-Queen a classic isn’t its unique use of Egyptian magic, or a revolutionary plot — in these respects, it is derivative–it is the pace and the verve with which Rohmer tells it. Compare Brood of the Witch-Queen with any of his contemporaries, writers like Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, M. R. James. Unlike most of them (William Hope Hodgson seems one possible exception) Rohmer starts the action quickly and keeps the pitch up, giving frequent shocks and memorable scenes of terror. The over-all structure suffers but you’ll never get bored. It’s a parade of terrors that feels more like a Pulp novel written twenty years later.
Occult Noir and Mythos meet!The classic Mythos collection!
In “The Supernatural Horror in Literature” H. P. Lovecraft selects three novels as the offspring of Bram Stoker’s Dracula: “…Dracula evoked many similar novels of supernatural horror, among which the best are perhaps The Beetle, by Richard Marsh, Brood of the Witch-Queen, by “Sax Rohmer” (Arthur Sarsfield Ward), and The Door of the Unreal, by Gerald Biss. The latter handles quite dexterously the standard werewolf superstition…”
Lovecraft is correct in his assertion, in that all three concern a group of people under attack by an outside evil force. In Dracula, the last half of the book largely focuses on Van Helsing and Co. battling the Count for the possession of Mina Harker. Locked inside their home, surrounded by crosses and garlic bunches, Dracula lurks outside, waiting for his chance to turn Mina to the darkness. Van Helsing and his young friends must go all the way to Transylvania to save her and defeat the Count.
Richard Marsh would not have agreed with Lovecraft. He claimed that The Beetle had nothing to do with Dracula. A serial version of The Beetle started The Peril of Paul Lessingham: The Story of a Haunted Man in Answers, on March 13, 1897. Dracula was released on May 26, 1897. Marsh might be believed. His book outsold Dracula but has not won the fame of Stoker’s classic. I think we can remove Marsh from this discussion, because it is going to focus the other two novels, clearly showing Stoker influence.
Let’s begin with a novel that has influenced films, if not fiction. Brood of the Witch-Queen. The characters in this book are similar to Dracula’s cast. Dr. Cairn is the wise physician/occult defender of the Van Helsing variety. His son Robert is like Jonathan Harker though he hasn’t as many allies. He does have his friend Sime and Mr. Saunderson, but otherwise must fend for himself. Myra Duquesne, the object of desire like Mina Harker, is pursued by Antony Ferrara for evil reasons: the half of Sir Michael’s fortune that she possesses.
The biggest departure for Rohmer is his choice of Egyptian magic instead of vampirism. Rohmer is of course best known for his stories of Dr. Fu Manchu and inevitably associated with China. This is erroneous since the Chinese Rohmer knew were those living in the East End of London, and not those native to their original homeland. Rohmer, in fact, wrote more about Egypt than mainland China. He uses mummies and Egyptian magic in several stories including The Green Eyes of Bast, She Who Sleeps and Bimbashi Baruk of Egypt. He also wrote of magic with great authority, being a student of occultism. He penned a non-fiction book on magic called The Romance of Sorcery (1914). Whether the reader wishes to accept the views on magic or not, whether you feel it accurate or spurious, his sense of the occult feeds his fiction with a sense of truth lacking in many of his contemporaries. He uses many Egyptian elements cleverly, many of which have become clichés after decades of use in Hollywood and the Pulps: beetles, mummies, resurrection and crossing time. All these elements can be seen in The Mummy and The Mummy Returns with Brendan Fraser. Arthur Conan Doyle may have used them before Rohmer in his stories “The Ring of Thoth” and “Lot 249” but it is Rohmer’s novel that explores them at greater length.
The Dracula-like theme of supernatural attack can be found in this tale of Egyptian magic. The author even throws in a vampire in one small section. Despite this thematic spine to Brood of the Witch-Queen, the novel is a very different book compared to Dracula. First and most striking is the episodic nature of the plot. Sax Rohmer would have sold the novel as serialized portions, appearing as a group of connected short stories, then published in book form as a whole. Witch-Queen was published in 1914, a time of many weekly and monthly magazines like Argosy and All-Story.
Brood of the Witch-Queen appeared in Premier Magazine in nine segments in May 1914-January 1915 as well as in The Canadian Magazine and Short Stories. This episodic presentation causes some good and some bad results for the novel reader. On the plus side, the book starts with a bang. We get to witness Antony Ferrara’s invisible killing of the king-swan at Oxford. Dracula starts with a similarly exciting opening with Jonathan Harker being held captive in Transylvania, but then the novel slows dreadfully until about half way. Rohmer’s Witch-Queen never slows its pace. We are exposed to horror after horror as Robert Cairn and his father track down the evil sorcerer, are attacked, escape, then rescue others from his grasp.
Each segment has the structure of a short story with weird encounter and denouement. This keeps the book exciting but ultimately weakens it as the reader follows the Cairns from location to location. Only the threat of Antony Ferrara’s attacks ties the book together. The final chapter of the novel, when the sorcerer dies by his own fire elemental, ends much too abruptly without any feeling of summation or real conclusion. The story is merely over. The feel of the book in the end is perhaps more similar to a television show like Buffy the Vampire-Slayer with many small episodes making up a larger story arc.
What makes Rohmer’s Brood of the Witch-Queen a classic isn’t its unique use of Egyptian magic, or a revolutionary plot — in these respects, it is derivative–it is the pace and the verve with which Rohmer tells it. Compare Brood of the Witch-Queen with any of his contemporaries, writers like Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, M. R. James. Unlike most of them (William Hope Hodgson seems one possible exception) Rohmer starts the action quickly and keeps the pitch up, giving frequent shocks and memorable scenes of terror. The over-all structure suffers but you’ll never get bored. It’s a parade of terrors that feels more like a Pulp novel written twenty years later.
