The Fire of Asshurbanipal: Adventure Meets Horror

A Late Manuscript

“The Fire of Asshurbanipal” (Weird Tales, December 1936) by Robert E. Howard is the point at which adventure fiction and horror meet. The story was found in a trunk with a note to be sent to Farnsworth Wright in case of the author’s death. This is according to Glenn Lord who published the first version of the story in The Howard Collector #16 (Spring 1972). Lord gives us a little preamble with:

In his letter of August 29, 1936, to Otis Adelbert Kline, Dr. I. M. Howard wrote: “There were three manuscripts ready to be mailed to Weird Tales…”Black Hound of Death”, “Fire of Asshurbanipal” and “Dig Me No Grave”. There was a notation on the back of envelope directing me to send these to Weird Tales in case of his death…These were the last stories he wrote and were mailed after his death and are not paid for…”

Imitating Lovecraft

Lord goes on to correct REH’s father assumption. The stories were not the last he wrote but from 1930, when Howard “was experimenting in the Lovecraftian vein”. “The Fire of Asshurbanipal” was a re-write of a straight adventure story that we don’t know if REH had submitted to Adventure, Top-Notch  or other likely magazines. The re-write injects more horror elements into the beginning and totally re-writes the last third.

In this way, Robert E. Howard tried out “Adventure Mythos” as I called it in a previous article. The idea of a Pulp adventure story with real supernatural elements seems like a no-brainer but it is actually rare. Think of the Indiana Jones films. The action hero is straight out of the 1930s Pulps but in most adventure mags the ghost/demon/evil/monster proves to be fake. Doc Savage never faced any real terrors (well, almost never). Like the Shudder Pulps, you could have as much Gothic terror as you like as long as at the end, it’s a guy in a suit, a malformed animal or just a plain crazy maniac. Only the true horror Pulps like Weird Tales, Strange Tales, Strange Stories and Ghost Stories, did the opposite.

The First Version

The first version of “The Fire of Asshurbanipal” has two adventurers in the desert looking for a lost city. There is a one-line mention of The Necronomicon of Abdul Al-Hazrad. (In the Weird Tales version, there was more added around this nugget.) The two men are Steve Clarney, an American, and Yar Ali, a Muslim Pathan who enjoys celebrating with praise to Allah. The two men are out of water and bullets when they arrive at the city in the sand. Inside they find the legendary skeleton holding the jewel they seek. This is the point at which the two version diverge.

In the initial rendition, before they can grab the stone, an old rival shows up (Indiana Jones style!) and captures them. There is a good punch-up but Steve is shot in the shoulder. Nuredin el Mekru, the leader of the Arabs, is a sheikh. He has a scar on his chin that Steve gave him in Somalia. The sheikh commands some local Bedouins as well some of his old Somali pirates. Victorious, he shall torture the two infidels later. He takes the jewel despite the Bedouins warning him not to. The man drops dead and the rest of his crew runs away.

The Jewel of the Skeleton

After Yar Ali chews Steve’s bonds off, the two examine the dead man. They saw what killed him, even if the superstitious Bedouins did not. An asp had been curled up inside the skeleton’s skull. The two take the jewel, the horses of the men they killed that were left behind, loaded with food and water. They ride off for further adventures after they sell the jewel and get Steve’s shoulder healed up.

All-in-all, it is a pretty good but standard adventure yarn with two likable heroes. I am surprised it wasn’t picked up by Top-Notch. (Maybe Adventure was a little too picky for this one.) Whatever the case, Howard rewrote it for Weird Tales, lengthening it by several hundred words. This was standard practice for the writer. Several Bran Mak Morn and Conan tales started out being written for Adventure but ended up in Weird Tales.

The Second Version

In the revised version, Howard adds a moment in which the two men look at the jewel and perceive that an evil lurks in the chamber. Yar Ali compares it to a time when he had sensed a python lurking near by and another time when Thuggee stranglers awaited in the darkness. Nuredin and his men attack as in the other version but his time when Nuredin is about to take his prize, he gets a lecture from a Bedouin about the stone. The man relates that a priest named Xuthltan dwelt in the court of Asshurbanipal. He used the blackest sorcery to curse the stone by calling on the forgotten gods, Cthulhu, Koth and Yog-Sothoth. A strange black cloud appears and a shambling horror forms, scaring away the inhabitants of the city. The Bedouin explains that men may look on the gem and survive but never touch it. (Xuthltan’s name conjurs up memories of the Conan story “The Slithering Shadow” (Weird Tales, September 1933) and Xuthal of the Dark. That story, too, features a lost city in the desert, haunted like the Bedouin’s tale.)

The sheikh is not impressed. He grabs the stone, then drops it. He chases it across the floor. A tentacle appears from the wall, grabbing him. The tentacle and victim disappear inside the wall. The men can hear him scream in agony behind the masonry! The Bedouins flee, leaving Steve and Yar Ali tied up and helpless. The two men shut their eyes so they can not see the terror that comes out of the secret door again. They wait in terror for a long time but eventually they open their eyes. The monster has left them alone.

The Unnameable

As before, Yar Ali chews off Steve’s bonds and they make to escape. It is now they discover that there is something that hadn’t been in the chamber before. Nuredin’s severed head has been placed on the floor as a warning. Also in the dust are tracks from the monster, splay-footed and unearthly. The men do not take the gem but do find the horses and flee. It is now that Steve admits he saw the creature from the wall. As they ride away, he tells Yar Ali that he will be haunted by what he saw, that terrible things dwell on the Earth from eons past.

“I’ll try to tell you what I glimpsed; then we’ll never speak of it again. It was gigantic and black and shadowy; it was a hulking monstrosity that walked upright like a man, but it was like a toad, too, and it was winged and tentacled. I saw only its back, if I’d seen the front of it–its face–I’d have undoubtedly lost my mind….”

The creature sounds like a description of Cthulhu, or one of his offspring anyway. It should be noted here that Howard’s use of Cthulhu was condoned by H. P. Lovecraft, who allowed certain friends to write inside his Cthulhu Mythos (not HPL’s terminology). The fact that Howard shrank Cthulhu mattered little to Lovecraft, who saw the whole thing as joke between friends. It is only today that the image of Cthulhu has solidified into the titanic monster he has become.

An Older Tradition

Now let’s be clear that Robert E. Howard wasn’t creating something new here. The great classics of adventure often had a supernatural element in them. Think of H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887) or Nada the Lily (1892). Haggard and others who followed in his footsteps liked to spice their work with a least the hint of dark magic. (This applied in all the classic adventure scenarios: jungles (voodoo), deserts (lost cities), on the sea (Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym ends with strangeness), the Poles (the strange Northern as well as weird tales of the Antarctic), and others locales.) This is really what the Indiana Jones films were tapping into.

Let’s also be clear that Robert E. Howard could have given a fig for any definition of genre. He was a storyteller. He was a professional Pulp writer. This disregard for convention (which was almost always unintentional) drew the ire of a few fans who complained in The Eyrie that Howard’s vampire didn’t follow Hollywood’s convention in “The Horror From the Mound” (Weird Tales, May 1932). Howard didn’t care. It made the story better.

Innovator

In this way he was the creator of two new things in fantastic literature. The first was the wolf man style werewolf in “Wolfshead” (Weird Tales, April 1926) that Hollywood later adopted. The other was the entire sub-genre of Sword & Sorcery, where REH combined magazine adventure with a Fantasy background, giving us the fascinating worlds of Kull in “The Shadow Kingdom” (Weird Tales, August 1929). In this style of Fantasy, Conan or one of Howard’s other warriors, could have a pirate adventure, a jungle adventure, a lost city adventure or even a Northern adventure. Howard had grafted the adventure scenario into heroic fantasy.

Conclusion

Was Howard alone? Hardly. All of A. Merritt’s best work before and after Howard’s death use adventure and the supernatural. His The Moon Pool (1919) was a favorite of H. P. Lovecraft’s, largely inspiring the Deep Ones. Edmond Hamilton began his career with “The Monster-God of Mamurth” (Weird Tales, August 1926) in which a man finds a city in the desert and its invisible spider horror. Unlike Howard’s tale, Hamilton truncates the adventure of getting to the city so he can focus on the horror aspects. Many other stories in “The Unique Magazine” set their horrors inside an adventure scenario even if they do not fully exploit them.