"The Hoofed Thing" aka "Usurp the Night" by Robert E. Howard

 

originally published Weirdbook #3, 1970

Michael Strang lives in an unnamed suburb and has a fiance named Marjory.  It seems Marjory's a bit upset right now because her fat Maltese cat Bozo has disappeared.  And so have a bunch of other cats in the neighborhood lately.  So Michael decides to play Good Boyfriend and goes out looking for Bozo, albeit without much hope or seeming enthusiasm.

He decides to make his first stop at the home of his relatively new neighbor, a dude named John Stark whom Michael has never met or even seen.  It seems Stark is recluse and potentially a creep.  And his house is pretty run down.  But what the hell?  Stark turns out to be a creepy-looking old coot with a beak nose and a club foot.  He doesn't know anything about the cat but invites Michael in for a drink anyway.  It seems Stark is one pretty interesting guy and he shares Strang's interest in anthropology, a subject he knows a lot about.

Well, Bozo never does turn up but Michael gets Marjory a bulldog "with the face of a gargoyle" to make up for it.  She names it Bozo, though it seems to me Michael might be more deserving of such an appellation than the dog.  Meanwhile Michael takes to hanging out at Stark's place cuz Stark knows all kindsa stuff about all kindsa things.  The only disconcerting note is that there's something going on upstairs at his place.  It sounds like some kind of animal is scrabbling around up there.  Something with hooves!  At first it sounds tiny, but over time it seems to sound as if it were getting bigger...

Things are getting funky around town though.  First it was the cats disappearing, then dogs.  Someone tries to snatch Bozo from his kennel in Marjory's family backyard, but the dog-napper is interrupted and gets away.  A few days later Michael has to rescue Stark for a tree, where Bozo has chased him and is menacing him.  He doesn't make the connection. 

Then kids start disappearing.  Then a couple teens having a "petting party" at the local lover's lane see someone carry off the body of a dead derelict.

Stark calls Michael up and asks him to come help him get a cabinet unstuck.  While he's working on the cabinet, he sees Stark apparently sneaking up on him with a huge mallet.  Caught, Stark makes an excuse ("thought you might need this").  Michael completes his task and gets the hell out of there. He goes home and decides to chill out with some light reading.  His choice for same is the German edition of Unaussprechlichen Kulten  ... um, yeah.

Anyway, after waking up all shook up from some Von Junzt-inspired nightmares he decides to call up Marjory and is told by her mom that M is supposed to be out on a date - with him!  "He" had called earlier and asker her to meet him at John Stark's place.  Finally putting two and two and four and a thousand together (he finally recalls that when Stark was creeping up on him with that mallet, he was fully mobile instead of his usual club-footed limp), he knows he must act!  He grabs a sword off his wall which has been in the Strang family for generations and once belonged to a mighty hero ancestor, because after all this is a Howard story, and heads off for Stark's.

Well down at Stark's he finds Bozo all beaten up but still brave, and Marjory all tied up. Stark nowhere to be found and that hoof-sounding thing is really making a racket upstairs.  Michael ungags Marjory who says they need to get the hell out of there like now BUT WAIT! First she has to tell Michael the whole story of what happened - for thirteen paragraphs!! So much for getting the hell out of there!  Anyway it seems Stark called her up, faking Michael's voice, asked to her to meet him at Stark's place, clobbered and tied her up and gagged her, and then proceeded to explain his whole evil plan in an epic monologue of comic-book villainy, complete with an "I might as well tell you everything since you're about to die anyway" bit.

So it seems Starky was experimenting with the usual black sorcery crapaloola that these types always get themselves into in Cthu stories, and he summoned something a "naked squalling thing" (Stark likes that phrase so much he uses it twice) from Out There, into this world.  And kept it as a pet upstairs. And it kept growing!   But he had to feed it - first cats, then dogs, then kids, then derelicts, and it just wanted more, more, more.  And since Horrible Monster from the Outer Darkness Chow hadn't been invented yet, he had to get meals for it or it was gonna eat him!  Plus it was controlling his mind now, anyway, so he hoped Marjory wouldn't take it personal that she was gonna be a monster's din-din.  

Anyway, the monster was making such a fuss upstairs Stark decides to go up to it and tell it was going to be fed soon, and then Marjory heard a horrible scream from upstairs and Stark never came back down.  And now can they get the hell out of these (she asks having just wasted thirteen paragraphs repeating every word Stark said during his Snidely Whiplash act).  

But NO!  Declares Michael, bravely puffing out his chest.  He MUST destroy the creature upstairs!  For the sake of the children!  So stride upstairs he does, chest out, sword in hand, Marjory sobbing "No Michael! No!" in the background.

Upstairs he hacks his way into the room and confronts the beastie, a bunch of tentacles with hooves - oh and little bits of Stark laying around the room, such as his head.  Michael does what any proper Howard hero would do and hacks the beastie to pieces, only to note that those pieces are turning into pools of black shining goop and then absorbing the Stark leftovers into bigger pools of black shining goop.  So he flees back downstairs, pursued by black shining goop, scoops up Bozo and Marjory, stops to set the house on fire and then stands outside with his girl and her dog, watching the place burn down.

Oh holy fuck.

You know the thing was I was actually enjoying this junk up until Michael ungags Marjorie and she starts into her ludicrous monologue.  It's cliched and obvious sure, but solidly written and though I knew right how the story would go, I was engaged enough to be interested in how it would get there.  I also dug the fact that the story was not a Lovecraft re-hash.  It was all mostly ordinary people in an ordinary Amurrican suburb, and could almost have been one of Richard Matheson's 50's "weirdness arrives in middle America" tales.  Editor Robert M. Price claims "we would not stray too far if we were to call it Howard's version of "The Dunwich Horror", but Price is a fucking idiot.  It's clearly influenced by "TDH", among other things.  

And then all of a sudden it turns into practically a parody of bad pulp writing, and of Howard's own tropes.  Stark's gut spilling and Michael's sudden burst of square-jawed heroism are flat-out hilarious. 

So, the makings of a decent Weird Tales tale ruined by some absurdly bad writing - Howard was capable of much better.

"The Door To the Word" by Robert E. Howard and Joseph S. Pulver

originally published Nameless Cults, Chaosium, 2001

Expanded from 'The Door to the Garden', Fantasy Crosswinds #2, 1977.

John O'Dare lived the "savage" life of an adventurer, then settled down and became a writer of adventure novels.  Good-selling ones, too, it seems.  Now he's sitting in an easy chair in his home, enjoying the good life, a good book, and staring at the big-ass ring he inherited from his ancestor, Lord Donal O'Dare, witha big-ass stone and weird writing no one can decipher or identify.

His reverie is interrupted when he starts to have an acid flashback - except acid hadn't been invented yet so WTF.  After several hallucinogenic moments a skinny guy in a tunic and sandals suddenly climbs through his window.  Then apologizes for climbing through the wrong window.  O'Dare figures this guy is an escaped lunatic, but he soon finds out his visitor is named Xatha.  And he comes from somewhere else.  Like way else.  

It seems Xatha was farting around in some gorgeous garden at "the rim of the world" that is entered by portals or gates.  Everything was going just ducky until he got attacked by a bat-winged hamburger snatcher he calls "Begog".  He escaped through one of the gates, into our world, but Begog clawd him and sure enough, he's got the wounds to prove it.  Oh and by the way that's his ring, thank you very much!  At that moment, Begog himself shows up, so O'Dare and Xatha flee through another portal and end up back in Xatha's homeland.  (Here Pulver picks up the story).

Xatha's homeland is straight out of Lord Dunsany which means its pretty, verdant, wondrous, lovely, charming blah blah blah in a pile of superlative adjectives (don't get me wrong, I like Dunsany).  

Xatha takes him to his home city and introduces him to local hot chick Elethia, The Esteemed Father - their Grand Pooba, and his own pops, Zaga - who's way more manly than Xatha.  T.E.F. explains that Begog and his armies of orc-y things have been assailing them for centuries, due to screw-ups their ancestors made.  Oh and yes, it eas Donal O'Dare who crossed the worlds and took the ring off of them.  The gem in the ring (and other pieces of jewelry) are what keep Begog at bay.  But they're running low on juice and need to be recharged.  They're suddenly attacked by baddies but O'Dare, Xatha and Zaga chop them all up into hamburger. Off they go to recharge the gems. Riding on the back of pretty dragons.

All goes well till they reach their destination of Ssian-ho, another city, which they find has been reduced to rubble, and Xatha's brother killed in the conflict.  They're attacked again, and start piling up bodies of baddies until Begog hisself shows up.  It looks like curtains for our heroes until an orb of light suddenly shows up and makes Begog vanish.

Back home, Elethia, now enaged to O'Dare, elects to go with him and Xatha to find more gems.  They find them, but are attacked again by Begog, who knocks O'Dare into a portal and back to Earth.  Where people think he's nuts.  But he's gonna get back there.  And he has a plan...

Well this one at least is different, insofar as Pulver takes it in directions I can't even imagine Howard going.  I mean Dunsanian fruit salad just wasn't R.E.H.'s style.

In any other respects this is routine Burroughs+Dunsany+Lovecraft stuff.  Begog is kinda cool though.

"The Black Bear Bites" by Robert E. Howard

originally published From Beyond the Dark Gateway, April 1974 

Black John O'Donnell lies in hiding outside the mysterious house of Yotai Yun, on the outskirts of Hankow.  He's there to avenge a friend - Bill Lannon - who earlier infiltrated the house, looking into the sinister deeds of a sinister cult bent on world domination.  Lannon turned up dead soon after, and it wasn't a pretty death.  A fellow westerner, Eric Brand, had laughed at Lannon's plan.  It hadn't ended so funny.

O'Donnell gets in, clobbers some guards, finds they'e got a regular armory going, finds out he's been detected, listens in as Yotai Yun executes his most loyal servant and dumps him in the river, then listens in as Yotai Yun and The Black Lama, a mysterious hooded figure, blab about their big plan to conquer the world.  And about infiltrating a cult of Yog-Sothoth.

O'Donnell is found out and has to fight his way out, shooting Yotai and The Black Lama in the process.  It ain't looking good for him though, as he's outnumbered by Yotai's men.  But the authorities arrive just in time, and it turns out The Black Lama is Eric Brand!

This is basically an adventure tale with some Cthulhuvian in-jokes tossed in.  Not much to see here though the first part with O'Donnell hiding and spying is actually suspenseful and fun.

"The Abbey" by Robert E. Howard and C.J. Henderson

originally published Fantasy Crossroads 4/5, 1975

Our narrator, John O'Donnell, is wandering British woods when he comes across the "ruins" of what appears to be an ancient Saxon-built abbey, with a pool in front.  I say "ruins" because the place seems to be in fine shape.  Inside on a table he finds a letter written "in a feminine hand" - whatever that is!  Anyway, the letter is an earlier visitor's account of finding the abbey (except on their trip, the place was in ruins...) and getting bitten by a large toad-thingie that jumped out of the pool.  And afterwards the letter-writer's being plagued by weird dreams and croaking sounds.  Oh and there's a sketch of scourge on the margins of the letter.  Weird!

That's the extent of Howard's actual fragment.  From there, Henderson takes over.

O'Donnell is surprised by the entrance of skinny old priest, who chats with him amiably but obtusely and seems to know way too much about him.  When the priest's convo gets too weird, O'Donnell behaves as a proper R.E.H. hero should do - pulls a gun and shoots him.  To no noticeable effect!  The plugged priest pulls off his robe, revealing a pair of great wings.  O'Donnell shoots him some more and then stomps him to death, then runs out to the pool (noticing that the abbey is now a ruin again) and demands that whatever is in the pool come out and face him like a man!  Or a toad-thing!  Or whatever!

He starts throwing big rocks and stones into the water, exhausting himself.  That's when the sabre-toothed toad - as big as a boar! - comes out of the water and goes for him.  Poor O'Donnell is doomed!

Just then a bare foot from nowhere emerges and crushes the toad!  (Can I be forgiven for thinking this sounds a bit like the intro to Monty Python?) It turns out its the ghost/spirit of the young woman who wrote the letter.  She's been trapped there ever since.  And now O'Donnell has freed her.  P.S. she's naked and doesn't seem to mind.

Now - this part throws me ... did I miss something?  Because if her foot was big enough to completely crush something the size of a boar, she must've been pretty damn big!  But nowhere is this mentioned.  Did Henderson forget to mention it?  Did O'Donnell?  Am I just stupid?

Anyhoo, this is nothing to write home about.  I do find Howard's portion interesting, and find myself thinking that it would have made a decent opening to a short story or even a novella - the toad attack being the first bizarre incident of many more to come.  

"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.