"Worms of the Earth"

 

by Robert E. Howard

originally published Weird Tales November 1932

Bran Mak Morn, king of the Picts, currently in disguise as a mere diplomat, watches as Roman governor Titus Sulla, has a fellow Pict crucified for killing a merchant (well...), and man is he pissed.  He wants revenge, and he wants Sulla's ass.

Catch is, Sulla lives in a heavily fortified tower and would never come down and just duel with a barbarian king.  Bran has a particularly nasty plan - to get the Worms of the Earth - the subhuman and monstrous remnants of a once-human race his ancestors drove into subterranea. 

Despite dire warnings from his advisors and ominous dreams, he presses on, finding his way to a hermit witch-woman, shunned by others because of her own half-human heritage, tells him how to retrieve an artifact of great value to the Worms, which he can use as a bargaining chip.

At great risk, Bran follows her instructions, crawling through a barrow to a weird altar-lie setup, where he steals a black stone covered in runes, which he hides at the bottom of a nearby lake.  

The Worms are summoned, and agree to pull Sulla down out of his tower and bring him, intact, to Bran for a duel to the death.   

Bran returns to the lake, narrowly avoids a monster there, and retrieves.  But second thoughts nag him.  He rides out the tower, and finds it in ruins.  The Worms have pulled the entire structure down, and taken Sulla to the rendevous point.  Bran rides out there, and finds that Sulla's experience of being abducted and dragged through the Worms underground tunnels has left him permanently insane.  Bran kills him out of mercy, curses the Worms and witch-woman, and rides away, as the witch-woman laughs and laughs...

Man oh man, what a ride.

I remember first reading this in English class, having some time to kill after finishing a final (happened to me a lot).  From the dark, brutal crucifixion that opens the story, to its dark and fatalistic conclusion, I was friggin' hooked.

This is powerful shit.  Quite possibly Howard's greatest story (though there are other contenders).  I'm always impressed upon re-reading how potent it is, from start to finish.  Howard fully pulls you into this dark world, making you feel every bit of pain, darkness, and fear invoked herein.  Top of the line, baby!

"Dig Me No Grave"

 by Robert E. Howard 

originally published Weird Tales, February 1937

It's a dark and stormy night - and Kirowan is being woken up by his buddy Conrad, who needs him to come to the house of a mutual acquaintance, John Grimlan.  Exactly why Conrad needs Kirowan for this (emotional support? Heavy lifting?) Exactly why Kirowan doesn't do what I would do and say "wha-fuck ... call me in the morning..." and go back to bed is a little fuzzy but maybe things were different in the 30's.  

Things get even fuzzier since via their conversation Grimlan was a major creep and apparently had been really old for a hundred years or something.  In any case he had earlier given Conrad a sealed envelope with instructions as to what to do after he died (immediately after I guess).  But this very night he had begged Conrad to burn the envelope and dismember his body(!!!!), neither of which Conrad did, instead letting Grimlan suffer through his last moments writhing in agony.  I mean, what kind of true friend would decline to dismember your body after you die?  Yeesh, how our morality has fallen.  

(Or perhaps Kirowan was just pissed, since only a few nights before Grimlan had gone off on a condescending tirade about how he didn't know shit about the occult or anything else, didn't know of the winds that blew from Yuggoth or the actual title of the first 1977 Star Wars film)

Down at Gimlan's place, there's no electricity, but Kirowan left Gimlan's bod laid out on a table in the library with seven black candles burning (but he still didn't dismember him!).  But he left him wearing bedroom slippers, though uncovered.  Now he's covered with an ornate robe, the slippers are gone, and the candles are lit.  And a mysterious "Oriental" is lurking in the corner.  He confesses to lighting the candles, covering Grimlan's body, and taking the slippers (the bastard!)

The envelope is opened and Kirowan reads the text, which includes a pledge of Grimlan's soul to Malik Tous, an evil Asian deity.  As Kirowan reads, the candles go out, one by one.   As he finishes, the last candles snuffs, and the house is plunged into darkness.  They hear a terrible scream.  Conrad manage to find and light another candle.  Grimlan's bod and the mysterious visitor are gone.  The men smell smoke, and realizing the house is on fire, flee.  After escaping the house, they look back, and see the place engulfed in flames, a dark, winged figure rising from the smoke, clutching what appears to be a man's body in its talons...

I actually first encountered this one in a fairly faithful adaptation in a Marvel comic, and it stayed with me.  It's not a great story but it is a very good one.  Mainly because its full of dark, spooky, claustrophobic atmosphere.  It just works.  Howard's strength as a writer was to make you feel it, and he does here - you're in that room, the candles burning, the sinister incantation being read.

Amazingly, given I've read this a bunch of times since the 80's, and the comics version many more (and since the 70's), and I just now figured out that the "mysterious Oriental" was actually Malik Tous!  DUH!!

"At the Mountains of Madness" (screenplay)

 

by Gullermo del Tor and Matthew Robbins

unpublished and unproduced

Tasmania, 1939.  A derelict whaler named Arkham floats into a harbor and is boarded by mystified sea patrol and fishermen.  They find the ship in bad shape, evidence of it having been commissioned for an Antarctic expedition by Miskatonic U nine years earlier, some bizarrely mutilated dogs and men, and a madman barricaded in a cabin.  When he kills a sailor with an axe, he gets shot.

Meanwhile, the British are getting set for another Antarctic expedition, headed by Alan Starkweather, backbone of the Empire and all that.  He's informed that the Arkham has turned up.  With one survivor - the madman.  Starkweather is able to talk to him a bit, and he freaks when he hears they're heading for Antarctica.  He also has a hallucination in which his head blows open and becomes a mass of waving tentacles.  He tells them they must kill him if he "begins to change".  And reveals that he is Dr. William Dyer of Miskatonic U.

Thus begins a flashback in which Dyer recalls being handpicked for the 1930 Arctic expedition, leaving Massachusetts with much fanfare, and leaving behind his wife, who is preggers.  

Dyer is about to make a last minute bow-out when Lake, head of the expedition, shows him something - a recently found fossil of an impossible creature found in the Antarctic.  Dyer is on board!

The expedition sails on, and with exposition and character development.  In what may be a mirage, they seem to see signs of a vast city in the fog-enshrouded mountains of the arctic regions.  Lake learns that Dyer's lover has died in childbirth, along with their child, but he keeps the news under wraps.  Another expedition member, Atwood, becomes more and more openly devout, leading prayer meetings.  Dyers becomes best buddies with a fellow named Danforth.  And a big grumpy dude named Larsen takes care of the sled dogs.

The two ships pass into cloud banks and everyone is knocked out. Dyer dreams the fossil is coming to life and sending out signals.  Apparently some time is lost (even the crew is confused by this, but several days at least have gone by when they come to), and the ship runs aground at the titular mountains.  Everyone stands around in awe at these cyclopean peaks, and structures clearly not built by human hands.  Magnetic fields prevent contact with the second ship, time seems to be moving faster than normal, and other weird phenomena take place, including an encounter with man-sized albino penguins, and the finding of weird stone obelisks under the water.  These turn out to be coffins containing the same kind of weird-ass monster as the fossil.  

As they dissect some of the thingies, Larsen and crewman Gunnarson attempt to hunt giant penguins and are attacked by a shoggoth, which has disguised itself as a wounded dog, ala John Carpenter's version of The Thing. It seems the shoggoths attack by fusing victims into their mutable bods.  

On the ship, expedition member Danforth digs out a copy of the Necronomicon he just happens to have brought along, and reads passages from it to illustrate his point that the things from the coffins are an alien race described in the ancient book.  Fellow expedition members mock him.  Conflict erupts among the expedition members, especially when Dyer finds out about his wife and child's demise.  

The scientists manage to crash a plane into the ruins of an ancient, alien city, while Gunnarson, now actually a shoggoth, joins the remaining crew back at the ship.  Larsen escaped the earlier shoggoth attack but is MIA.  The city is explored and revelations about the inhabitants are revealed.   Back on the ship, the shoggoth-impostor wreaks havoc.

An attempt is made to dissect the alien bodies, which goes awry when they turn out to be very much alive and proceed to vivisect one of the scientists.  A confrontation between shoggoths and their former masters ensues aboard the ship.  Dyer and Larsen escape and run around the ice caves arguing.  They eventually make it back to the Arkham, where they're attacked by an army of shoggoths in Gunnarson-form.

Atwood is confronted by a shoggoth in the form of expedition leader Dr. Lake.  The shoggoth-as-lake humiliates Atwood and mocks his religious beliefs.  Larsen dynamites the boat free, but in the process awaken the shoggoths object of worship - Cthulhu hisself!  They escape, Danforth dies, and Dyer ends up a madman, and we're back in the present.  Starkweather doesn't believe his story.  Dyer kills himself, and Starkweather sails for Antarctica.

Holy fuck!  Is that a wild ride or what?

A script is not a film, but can be judged by the merit of its readability and the ease with which one can picture it as a movie, and this one is very readable and easy to picture as a movie.  But I admit the movie I picture from it is a mixed bag.  There's a lot of things I like here:  it captures I think almost all the important, and even less important, details and ideas from Lovecraft's story - and in that sense does him justice.  It would make an exciting and scary film.

But, too often I see routine, trite modern horror movie stuff - crazy guys with axes, lots of blood and gore, and endless riffs on Carpenter's remake of The Thing. Which I happen to like - but the Howard Hawks original is superior.  

I think the most obvious one is the scene of the Elder Things coming to and dissecting a scientist.  Here its explicitly shown, and though, as written, it sounds scary and effective, it also weakens the whole concept.  In the story, Dyer and Danforth only find evidence after the fact - men and dogs killed, the Elder Thing bodies missing, and a man and a dog apparently dissected.  They try to write it off initially as being the work of a crewman gone nuts, be we the reader know damn well what really must have happened.  And its far scarier that way than flat-out showing it happen.

Nonetheless, Del Toro was (is) trying to launch a commercial movie (Tom Cruise was supposed to play Dyer in this production), and gore and shock sell more than subtlety and creeps.

Well, you can't review a film based solely on a screenplay, but I will say this is a very readable and enjoyable screenplay that is easy to visualize as a film, so that's good.  It does a good job of hitting the checkboxes, including all the major (and many minor) scenes, elements, and ideas that HPL included in his story, while still creating something that would be marketable as a big-budget movie in today's market.  I have to give credit for both sides of that, even though I have to confess those things that would make it marketable as a current horror film are the very things I dislike the most.

"At the Mountains of Madness"

 

by H.P. Lovecraft

originally published Astounding Stories, February and March, 1936

Dr. William Dyer, a geologist at Miskatonc U, has something he wants the world to know.

It seems there's a highly-publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica about to launch.  And Dyer has a dire (sorry, had to) warning for them.  You see, he was a member of a smaller Antarctic expedition a few years back, and there's some things he and his fellow survivors (hint hint - not all of his team made it back) have kept under wraps.  But now, for the sake of protecting other hapless explorers from getting in the same jam he and his got into, the whole truth and nothing but the truth shall be known!

Out there in the frozen lands, they found a previously unknown range of mountains that put the Himalayas to shame.  And some pretty amazing fossils.  And then, one member named Lake and a small team found fourteen frozen bodies (described in intense detail) that L. Sprague DeCamp flippantly described as extraterrestrial sea cucumbers.  Well whatever they are they're weird as hell and pretty gross-sounding.

What's more they found `em in layers of rock so friggin' old that such life forms couldn't possibly have existed that far back!  Well, except apparently they could, cuz ... but anyway this is an exciting find!  Nevertheless these things are weird as hell and the sled dogs hate their frozen bods so much they have to be restrained at considerable distance from them.

However, Lake and team lost contact, and Dyer takes the rest to find out what happened.  When they get there, the camp has been devastated.  Everyone's been slaughtered except one man (Gedney) and one dog.  And most of the monster bods are gone.  And someone dissected a man, and a dog, in one of the tents.  I mean dissected - not just hacked up.  Dyer decides the missing man must have gone nuts and killed and mutilated all the others.  Hid buddy Danforth ain't so sure.

Dyer and Danforth go on to discover the ruins of a huge, ancient, and decidedly non-human civilization, one which resembles things mentioned in The Necronomicon.   The beings who built this civ - i.e. the sea cucumber things - were assisted and served by a race of gloop monsters called shoggoths which they bred for service.  Apparently all earthly life also evolved from shoggoth ingredients, thus making the sea cucumbers the creators of mankind (and everything else).  They also learn of great wars betwee the sea cucumbers, the Mi-Go, and the Star-Spawn of Cthulhu.  And of a revolt by the shoggoths, and the decline and degradation of sea cucumber civilization.  It also appears there was something in the enormous mountain ranged beyond the city that the cucumbers were afraid of.  

Eventually they realize (or admit) that the cucumbers thought to be dead had actually been alive, revived, and killed and dissected the men and dogs.  They find the bodies of the now-slaughtered revived cucumbers, and also some giant, blind albino penguins - which don't seem to be responsible for the cucumber-cide.  They encounter a living black bubbling blob - a shoggoth.  They escape and manage to fly their plane out, but Danforth looks back and sees something beyond the mountains  - the thing the cucumbers feared, and goes mad, screaming in imitation of the sounds made by the shoggoths...

I remember the first time I read "Mountains".  It was a bitterly cold and gray day in January.  I cut school and stayed home, wrapped up in blankets with the lights on, as the sun never came out that day, not once - it was like perpetual twilight.   And I intended to start reading "Mountains", but I got sucked in, and 3-4 hours later I was wrapping the sucker up, my little teenaged brain blown.  

Lin Carter has called the story plodding and slow.  It is slow, though I never find it plodding. The interesting thing is it now reads to me like an archaic National Geographic article.  And that is, I think, entirely the intention.  Lovecraft, in the voice of Dyer, keeps listening times and temps and latitudes and longitudes (supposedly all of HPL's Antarctic data was accurate, at least as known in the early 30's). All of this, as in "The Shadow Out Of Time", where he does much the same thing, is intended to give an air of verisimilitude to the tale.  This is supposed to be a true story.  Outlandish, wild, and a dire warning.  Dyer wants to be believed, and he's offering up details to bolster his plausibility.

I dunno, I might find it plodding too if I came to it blind.  But since I've read it a couple times before, this re-read was thoroughly enjoyable, like re-watching a favorite old movie even though one could practically quote all the dialog.  

As it was I really enjoyed this one.  I've been putting off re-reading "Mountains" for several years because I thought I would find it slow going, but I was completely into it and enjoyed every minute of it this time around.