"Medusa"

by E.H. Visiak
originally published 1929 by Victor Gollancz 

Medusa tells the strange story of a young boy who is hired onto a sea voyage by a man named Huxtable, who is searching for his son, missing at sea and thought to have been taken by pirates.

Not much happens at first, though there are reports by the crew of a man-like monster following the ship.  Eventually they find the pirate ship, but the only body on it is an old babbling madman.

Huxtable tells the boy a story of a once highly-advanced race that commanded incredible scientific and sorcerous knowledge.  However, their explorations led to their downfall, and the race degenerated into fish-men.  

The legend turns out to be real, when the fish men, who have powers over space and time, attack the ship and take the crew, Huxtable, and the boy, prisoner.  They are taken to an small rock island with a huge jutting obelisk and some ancient ruins.  There the crew are sacrificed to a giant, octopoid creature that uses hallucinatory powers (to which the boy is immune) to appear to be a smokin' hot babe.  The boy escapes.

This book probably doesn't strictly belong here.  It was not an influence on Lovecraft, nor likely influenced by him.  And yet only the latter is surprising.  But first, let's talk about how Medusa got into Lovecraft-ville in the first place.

First. In 1983, Twilight Zone magazine published two articles in which two major fantasy authors (Thomas M. Disch and Karl Edward Wagner) and one fantasy scholar (the mysterious R.S. Hadji - who may not have been a real person - and possibly the psuedonym of another author, possibly even then-TZ-editor T.E.D. Klein) - gave their annotated lists of the greatest horror/SF and fantasy books, stories, and authors.

To the surprise of many of us horror/fantasy nerd readers (including moi) who thought we knew a lot, there were quite a few titles/authors we'd never even heard of.  This sent many of us scrambling on wild chases to track down these titles/authors.  Which turned out to be a neat trick, because many of them were very, very rare and obscure and hard to find, and in those pre-internet days, tracking down a used book was entirely a luck-of-the-draw activity.

 And Medusa - well that made TWO of the lists - Wagner's "13 Best Supernatural Horror Novels" and Hadji's "13 Neglected Masterpieces of the Macabre".  And here's how they described it:

(Wagner): "If David Lindsay had written Treasure Island in the throes of a peyote-induced religious experience ... Well, if Coleridge had given Melville a hand on Moby Dick after a few pipes of opium."

(Hadji): "Subtitled "a story of mystery & ecstasy and strange horror," this is one of the most truly original fantastic novels in the English language. The prose is a joy to read, the vocabulary of Milton couched in the grammar of Stevenson, while the plot is a heady amalgam of a boy's pirate adventure and metaphysical romance. A voyage to the South Seas culminates in a rendezvous with the sunken demesne of the monstrous octopoid Medusa, last of a pre-human race that achieved inter-dimensional travel. It seems vaguely reminiscent, in this, of Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu," but is utterly unlike in spirit. Visiak achieved the terror and wonder, the sense of awe, that Lovecraft could only grasp at."

Well, holy fuck -  if that doesn't send any Cthulhu fan scurrying for a copy, I don't know what would!!!

So, Medusa became the most sought-after obscure horror-fantasy novel among fans of obscure horror-fantasy.  This further complicated by the fact that, while many of the books listed were very rare, Medusa was perhaps the rarest - or at least one of the rarest.  

Me, it was 20 years before I finally managed to get my hands on a copy via interlibrary loan.

This leads me to: second.

See, a lot of us fans went searching and, over the years, found these things.   Many have been reprinted thanks to small press publishers.  But here's the thing: what we found was that Wagner/Hadji seemed to have been having a bit of fun at our expense. 

You see, out of 78 books listed by Wagner/Disch/Hadji, I have read 45 of them to date.  Out of which, there are 12 I would truly recommend (a couple of them outstanding - and guess what - neither of those are rare or obscure), most are moderately entertaining but in no way special, and many of which I truly disliked.

I know, mileage varies, but, based on what's been posted to forums over the years, my batting average is about the norm.

In other words, most of these books have been a disappointment.  And the biggest letdown, tentacles down, for most seekers, has been Medusa.

In truth - I like Medusa well enough.  It's a fast read, entertaining, very Robert Louis Stevenson.  And the fish-men's attack on the ship is actually scary and evocative as hell (the big octopus thing is a major anti-climax, though).  I'd say it's worth reading if you can borrow a copy.  But the damn thing now commands ridiculous prices in its original printings ($850 and more), and even the reprint from a few years back by Centipede is now going for $100.  

Medusa's problem is that it was built up by bullshit.  After reading Wagner/Hadji's comments, we expected an uber-Cthulhu, a work of cosmic sea-horror that would blow Lovecraft out of the water. "Visiak achieved the terror and wonder, the sense of awe, that Lovecraft could only grasp at" - my ass.  Visiak didn't even come close.

So is Medusa a bad book?  No.  Just a letdown thanks to its ridiculously built-up rep.

What IS interesting is how the last portion parallels "The Call of Cthulhu" and "Dagon", with it obelisk covered in strange hieroglyphics, its Deep One-like fish men, its octopoid mind-fucking monster.  The interesting part is this thing was published not long after "The Call of Cthulhu" - yet is unlikely Visiak ever saw Lovecraft's stories.  And it seems that Lovecraft, who surely would have been intrigued by aspects of Visiak's novel, never even heard of it - it is never mentioned in any of his writings or correspondence - nor is Visiak.  Multiple Discovery in action....