A Critical Comparison of Sword and Sorcery and Espionage Fiction

Sketch by Jessica K. Robinson

During a conversation about the sword and sorcery (S&S) genre, the writer Daniel J. Davis brought up the espionage fiction (EF) genre, and specifically the James Bond franchise. 

Rehearsing the conversation will test patience because it has become centripetal, spinning out from an initial disagreement to an intellectually fecund hodgepodge of related questions. 

Sufficiently answering these questions would be require an entire convention, several panels, the intellectual labor of a book (or several books). So, the focus here will be much more narrow.

Thesis: sword and sorcery is a universal genre that will endure; espionage fiction, in comparison, is probably ephemeral and will pass away in time. Moreover, S&S shouldn't emulate EF's emphasis on male wish fulfillment fantasy.

Comparing Sword and Sorcery and Espionage Fiction

To substantiate this argument, let's get more concrete: consider two specific texts of the same medium (film) and a similar historical milieu of origin (Hollywood in the early 1960s).

For sword and sorcery, let's consider Don Chaffey's Jason and the Argonauts (1963), a widely acclaimed S&S film due to Ray Harryhausen's legendary stop-motion animations. For espionage fiction, Terence Young's Do No (1962), definitely not the best James Bond but nevertheless an iconic one (1962). 

Both film are based upon literary texts; moreover, both are archetypes of their respective genres: Jason and the Argonauts' (S&S film) and Dr. No (EF film). And, both are equally campy at times.

Bond's Dependence and External Motivation

Arguably, Bond is a dependent. Bond is an agent of MI6, a branch of the government of the United Kingdom. Accordingly, he is part of a pecking order. He benefits from the support provided by MI6, the agency, its associated engineers, and its intelligence operatives who provide him information.

Additionally, Bond's is not, technically speaking, self-motivated. Instead, he is externally motivated. His mission in Dr. No is an investigation at the behest of his superior, M.

Jason's Autonomy and Self-motivation

Jason in Jason and the Argonauts isn't dependent on an agency like MI6. He autonomously embarks on his quest, goes in search of the Golden Fleece, because he wants to claim the Thessalian throne, his divine inheritance. Authorized by the gods to embark, he is not part of a pecking order but establishes one himself by bringing together a crew of the Argo. Because Jason and the Argonauts takes place in a pre-industrial world, Jason doesn't have to rely on high-tech gadgets produced by engineers (except, perhaps, his ship). Let's not forget, though, his occasional recourse to divine aid.

Bond and Navigating Complex Systems

What is the central conflict of Dr. No? A super-intelligent villain, Dr. No, aims to exhort ransom payments from world governments. Bond has to unravel Dr. No's tangled conspiracy and disrupt it. Bond uses a variety of skills to do this: his charisma, his seduction skills, his ingenuity, his technology, and ultimately his fighting abilities (he throws Dr. No into boiling water).

Jason and External Conflict

What is the central conflict of Jason and the Argonauts? There is an artifact of legend, the Golden Fleece, that Jason seeks. In the course of discovering its whereabouts, Jason has to face a variety of external enemies: a giant Talos, a group of horrible harpies, a treacherous pass of clashing rocks, a hydre, and finally, the Dragon's Teeth -- death incarnate. Like Bond, Jason uses a variety of skills to achieve his goals, but his challenges are less complex than Bond's. They tend to be monsters that need killing.

Setting in S&S and EF: Historicity vs. Timeless Mythology

Dr. No takes place in Jamaica in the midst of the Cold War. The setting is very specific, geographically and historically speaking. Jason and the Argonauts takes place in a Mediterranean world that never was; this unreal Mediterranean world is a mythological rendering, somewhat out of time. Like Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age, the setting is timeless.

To generalize, Jason and the Argonauts' setting is universal and ahistorical whereas Dr. No's setting is particular and historical.

Theme of James Bond and Dr. No

Bond is historically contingent, requires some basic knowledge of Cold War politics (international espionage, spies, UK, MI6, etc.) so its claim to universality are tenuous. One could argue EF is about the power of an augmented man, a kind of proto-cyborg, except the prostheses that supplement the protagonists are gadgets and at-broad systems of support. It makes sense that the pioneers of 1980s Cyberpunk would pull from the tropes of EF in the 1980s.

Conclusion: Why S&S will Endure Longer than EF

Dr. No is a wish fulfillment fantasy dramatizing the adventures of (excuse this irreverent term) a boyish man who uses all the gadgets he needs to beat the bad guy and nail the bikini model.

Jason and the Argonauts treats universal psychological archetypes: the slaying of dragons, the defeat of death, the triumph over our inevitable demise (consider the final skeleton fight where Jason literary fights incarnations of death and triumphs). 

Both are entertaining films. Both are fun. Both are occasionally campy. But one possesses artistic potential. Guess which one?

Some would like to conflate sword and sorcery with the same kind of adolescent masculinist fiction represented by Dr. No. They shouldn't. S&S is superior to EF. Arguably, S&S is a modern incarnation/iteration of epic and heroic poetry, a narrative architecture that is deep part of the human experience.

For artistic, philosophical potential, sword and sorcery triumphs over espionage fiction; and it's at least equal to espionage fiction for entertainment value.

Post-script: EF fiction is ephemeral because it does not take itself seriously, is merely entertainment. It doesn't seem to aspire to art (and that's o.k.). There is some S&S, however, that is artistically ambitious. In my opinion, the S&S that apes the gender dynamics of EF will pass away, not necessarily because of those gender dynamics, their unpopularity, their non-PC nature, but instead because focusing on male wish fulfillment fantasy is a symptom of immaturity, lack of sophistication, and boorishness.  Inversely, the S&S that acknowledges its origins in epic poetry, the greatest literary art, will endure.

"The Diamond in the Tang Where the Quillons Meet": A Sword and Sorcery Response to Holmes, Trueheart, and Davis

Drawing by Jessica K. Robinson

Fritz Leiber  (1910-1992) is one of the great stars of the sword and sorcery constellation along with Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, Lin Carter, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, and many more. Moreover, Leiber can be regarded as forging the term for the kind of heroic fantasy his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tales helped to epitomize. Leiber did so in a few letters to fanzines, Ancalagon and Amra in 1961. Here is an except from a widely-cited letter to Amra (April 6th, 1961):

I feel more certain than ever that this field should be called the sword-and-sorcery story. This accurately describes the points of culture-level and supernatural element and also immediately distinguishes it from the cloak-and-sword (historical adventure) story-- and (quite incidentally) from the cloak-and-dagger (international espionage) story too!

Leiber brings "culture-level," "supernatural element," and specifically distinguishes S&S fiction from "historical adventure" and "international espionage."

These caveats are worth analyzing closely.

"Culture-level." Most S&S takes place in a pre-modern, pre-gunpowder, pre-industrial world, although there are exceptions (e.g. several will argue that Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane's stories are S&S despite Kane's use of firearms).

"Supernatural element." Most S&S pits protagonists against the supernatural. Black-robed sorcerers, eldritch tentacle-demons, sexy vampire-witches, giant slavering apes, gore-mouthed cyclops, etc.: these are not the good guys. They are dangerous, irredeemable, killable-without-any-guilt enemies. Moreover, the protagonists ploy their death art against them, and the sword dance that ensues is a key spectacle of the genre.

Many will cite the distinctive ontological status of the supernatural in S&S unreal worlds as fundamentally transgressive to sharply distinguish S&S from epic fantasy or high fantasy. For example, in The Lord of the Rings, there are good wizards, good elves, good tree monsters, even good... Gollums. In S&S, however, by and large, the supernatural is an abomination that must be beheaded, split in twain, garroted, skewered, introduced to the pointy end of a blade in other ways, and so forth.

Some literary genealogy: S&S's relationship to the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft needs to be addressed Doing so might begin to explain the distinctively irredeemable nature of the supernatural in S&S.

If we accept that Robert E. Howard, with his Kull stories, created S&S, then we should be ready to acknowledge that at this time Howard was under the literary influence of H.P. Lovecraft. Their voluminous correspondence is available in a fine edition by Hippocampus Press. Also, Howard was not just publishing in but also reading (and enjoying) Weird Tales and contributing to the Lovecraft circle's inside-joke pseudo-bibliographies and unreal mythologies.

A key element of Lovecraft's philosophical outlook was his materialism, atheism, and scientific view of the world, which conditioned him to view the supernatural idiosyncratically as the "most terrible conception of the human brain." He described it in this way: "a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space." The supernatural, for Lovecraft, is bad news (to say the least).

This idea is clearly contra to other fantasists like Tolkien, whose Catholic faith reconciled him to the supernatural. Lovecraft's anti-supernaturalism, however, is a powerful aesthetic resource, one that Howard drew from as he created S&S.

Lovecraftian anti-supernaturalism clearly influences the way the supernatural manifests in Robert E. Howard's S&S. Arguably, it ramifies in the later evolution of the genre.

The thematics of this famous literary enterprise--the meaninglessness of humanity as it is juxtaposed against the vast cosmos, the unfathomable indifference and occasional hostility of outer spaces, the paranoid idea that all is not as it seems and that there are watchers waiting, lurking--these were part of the gloriously fecund muck that vomited out our beloved S&S.

Moving on.

Sword and sorcery is not (necessarily) historical fiction. Still assuming Howard created S&S, we must also acknowledge his love of history and of writing historical fiction, and how this affinity influenced the shape S&S took.

It is firmly established that Howard's S&S tales, specifically the Conan stories, allowed the commercially-minded writer to scratch his historical fiction itch without having to do tons of research and so arrest his literary production. A legacy of that is that historical verisimilitude and actual historical facts aren't a sufficient defining characteristic of S&S. Sure, some S&S can be set in an actual historical epoch rather than a secondary fantasy world with funny names, but a defining characteristic of S&S is its lack of a need for historical verisimilitude.

Finally, espionage fiction. This confuses me. I am not sure why Leiber makes this distinction. James Bond novels and international espionage fiction in general don't seem to have much in common with S&S other than its emphasis on the literary archetype of the high status competent male. So, Leiber's distinction seems gratuitous here. I could be wrong.

Winnowed to its essential elements, Leiber's definition of S&S is pretty dang specific: S&S is set in a premodern world, the supernatural must be present, historical accuracy isn't a concern, and it is not espionage fiction.

Is this a sufficient definition? It doesn't seem to be for a lot of people. For example, Morgan Holmes, Jared Trueheart, and Daniel J. Davis think that S&S is fundamentally a genre about masculine prowess.

They insist that S&S is male-centric and that its masculinist elements are the key to its appeal to readers. Sword and sorcery has balls, they insist hysterically.

To an extent, one might understand where they are coming from. Look at the heaps of creased-spined paperback S&S published in the 1960s and 70s, and you will find lots of evidence to confirm their view. Specifically, look at the covers of those beautiful novels. What will you see?

Frazetta. And several other artists emulating and paying homage to Frazetta's genius. Accordingly, assuming Robert E. Howard created S&S, you can look at the original issues of Weird Tales that published the first S&S yarns and you will see the beautiful (and scantily clad) women of Margaret Brundage squirming in the arms of a barely-recognizable Conan.

If you judged S&S by its covers, then you would assume that it is fundamentally a genre of the alpha male, fighting and killing evil, and taking as a prize the sexy damsel.

We learned this in kindergarten: never judge a book by its cover.

Is that all S&S is? Or, is such a characterization an insulting simplification of a highly artistic genre of imaginative literature that actually contains surprising philosophical depths?

I think Holmes, Trueheart, and Davis are wrong to anti-intellectualize S&S. Sword and sorcery is more than alpha male fantasy. Consider Conan's famous answer to Bêlit's question, "What do you believe?" The usually taciturn, grim, alpha male responds with a monologue that raises my hackles every time I read it:

He shrugged his shoulders. 'I have known many gods. He who denies them is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom's realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the Nordheimer's Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.'

Fundamentally, S&S is about the human condition, our ephemeral bodies, our finitude, and our existential struggles in a cruel and often hostile world; and, more importantly, it grants readers symbolic agency, even power, in that struggle.

It’s strange and confusing that Holmes, Trueheart, and Davis insist on the exclusivity of a gender framework. This is what S&S about, when it is the best:

“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” (Ecclesiastes 9:11)

"Time and chance happeneth to them all," booms the cosmos. Conan's antiphonal confession: "I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content."

From the myopic, gender-exclusive lens of Holmes, Trueheart, and Davis, Conan's profound answer to the riddle of our tragic vulnerability to the violence of time is uninteresting, a distraction in the narrative thrust of a story speeding toward tits, glazed abs, rocking beds, and death dealing, a minor blip before the sword dance begins and, to quote Davis, the dubious scopophiliac pleasure of watching as "Conan gets hot and heavy with Belit."

Holmes, Trueheart, and Davis are wrong to dig in on this one.

Conan's response is not a distraction.

Conan's response is the diamond set into the center of the tang where the quillons meet in the sword of the genre.

A Response to Morgan Holmes and Jared Trueheart: Sword and Sorcery and the Inconsequentiality of Gender

Recently Morgan Holmes, a sword and sorcery expert, was interviewed by masculinity writer, Jared Trueheart, about the genre of sword and sorcery and its relevance to male readers. It was an interesting interview. Having written for the Robert E. Howard United Press Association since 1992 and several other Howard and genre-fiction related topics, Holmes is a fountain of knowledge.

With respect, though, Trueheart's focus on the gender dynamics of sword and sorcery is too narrow. Gender dynamics are an important facet of S&S, of course, but there is much more about the genre.

The High Status Competent Male as Archetype

Asked by Trueheart to discuss the unique appeal of sword and sorcery to male readers, Holmes states, "There is a magnetism of the alpha male rising in an adverse situation and prevailing." This isn't a distinctively sword and sorcery quality. There are several genres that focus on competent and high status men, and Holmes brings up a few: espionage fiction (James Bond), adventure (Allan Quartermain), detective fiction (Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade), wilderness survival (Beauty Smith), modernist novel (Jake Barnes), and several more genres and writers. Arguably, there is nothing distinctively S&S about fiction that treats the archetype of the high status competent male.

The high status and competent male is an archetypical protagonist that is deployed in many genres. A lot of sword and sorcery is linked to that archetype, of course, and the Conan the Cimmerian stories are a great example. Nevertheless, there are lots of examples of sword and sorcery where the high status competent male is not essential.

Consider Fritz Leiber's "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser" stories. If--and only if--one excuses Fafhrd's clownishness and ignores some of the difficulties that he clumsily gets himself into, one might argue that this lummox is a "man's man," a high status and competent male; but Leiber doesn't goes out of his way to emphasize Fafhrd's high status and/or his competence. The same goes for his companion, the Gray Mouser, who is physically diminutive, sneaky, and not very masculine, hardly a man's man.

Jack Vance's Dying Earth series comes to mind, specifically The Eyes of the Overworld. Cugel the Clever is one of the most memorable sword and sorcery protagonists there is and he is anything but traditionally masculine. He's an amusing twerp, a kind of harlequin figure. Although Cugel's taste for voluptuous women is insatiable, he is a fashion and food connoisseur, avoids physical altercations, and spends the novel waffling between sweat-streaked panic and bombastic overconfidence.

One also recalls the Albino Emperor, Elric of Melniboné, Thrall of Arioch, who is sickly, effeminate, anxiety ridden, not in control of his emotions, even hysterical at times.

And there are more examples...

The "high status competent male" is powerful archetype. There is no doubt that, as fantasy, this archetype resonates with adolescent boys and men, myself included. However, when sword and sorcery is analyzed with a wide enough angle, the archetype is not a defining characteristic of the genre. There are several examples of S&S that have no truck with the archetype, so universalizing claims that S&S is a form of masculine writing are questionable. A weaker claim is called for: lots of S&S fiction is masculine in nature.

S&S Criticism: Gender Myopia and the Gothic

Defining sword and sorcery is infamously difficult. Several folks tried to do so at a Sword and Sorcery Panel at Robert E. Howard Days in Cross Plains, Texas.

Holmes published an apropos (and excellent) essay in the academic anthology, The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales: The Evolution of Modern Fantasy and Horror, that might help. The essay is titled, "Gothic to Cosmic: Sword-and-Sorcery Fiction in Weird Tales" and it explores the origins of sword and sorcery. In this essay, Holmes makes a compelling argument: "Historical adventure, gothic fiction, and planetary romance all came together to form the sub-genre." What is so compelling about this is Holme's appropriate inclusion of "gothic fiction." Why?

There are several parallels between the controversies surrounding gothic fiction and sword and sorcery. Like sword and sorcery, gothic fiction--at least at its historical origin point--seemed distinguished by a gender dynamic, i.e. a protagonist of a specific gender (female) and a gendered group of readers (women). Gothic fiction, originating in the pseudo-medievalist works of Horace Walpole, Anne Radcliffe, and M.G. Lewis, always featured a terrorized female protagonist, a middle-class virginal woman who finds herself incarcerated in a castle, a maze, a labyrinth, and who is then harried by supernatural threats that are holdovers of a medieval past. Consider The Castle of Otranto (1764), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Monk (1796): all of these quintessential gothic novels feature labyrinths, supernatural occurrences, and medieval imagery, and a central terrorized female.

One might plausibly argue that the gender dynamics of gothic fiction are what make it distinctive. One could even speculate about why more women seemed to read gothic novels in the late 18th and early 19th century by examining its unique appeal to the female reader of the time. But by focusing too narrowly on the gender dimensions of gothic literature, one misses that it is concerned with far more than gender.

The gothic novel of the late 18th century, this central influence on sword and sorcery, is a symptom of the revolutionary changes happening in 18th century western Europe: the French revolution, the end of absolutism as a viable form of government, the blooming of industrial production, the decline of the power of the church, and more. The gothic is centrally concerned with the supernatural, with aesthetically violating the natural, the ordinary, and the real. If one focused too long on its gender dynamics, one wouldn't see its broader philosophical and historical significance.

Sword and Sorcery and the Violence of Time 

As regards sword and sorcery: I do not think the gender dynamics of the genre are unimportant. For example, in Holmes' S&S essay, he analyzes C.L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry stories and observes, "Many of Moore's stories have a suggestion of sexuality to them, and they could be considered feminine sword and sorcery." While the concept of "feminine" and "masculine" sword and sorcery is interesting, the central theme of sword and sorcery has less to do with gender and more to do with being human, with being a finite and vulnerable body subject to the ferocity of time: aging, violence, and the constraints of society and tradition.

The sword and sorcery hero or heroine--whether he be a high status competent male with bulging pecs or she be a rebellious spitfire with bulging boobs--is distinctive less for his or her gender and more for his or her unique enlightened stance toward a world that is changing rapidly: as ephemeral forms, the sword and sorcery hero and heroine stands stubbornly against the yawning vastness of cosmic, deforming time. They are animated by the understanding that life is brief, that the body weakens, and that the grains fall from cup to cup.

Conan, Fafhrd, the Gray Mouser, Jirel of Joiry, Cugel the Clever, Elric of Melniboné: they are all poised on the precipice of radical change--a dying earth, a cosmic struggle, a decaying empire, the retreat of a frontier; indeed, these S&S heroes are united less because of their gender, their status, and even their competence and more by their heroic disregard of social convention, their indifference to status hierarchies, their love of life, and their enlightened understanding of time and the irresistible threat it poses. Despite their context of radical change, they flourish, even glory, in their finitude and ephemerality as we readers, subject to time ourselves, cradle and dogear their acid-rich, paperback worlds.

Discussing aging boxers with August Derleth in 1933, Robert E. Howard, the creator of sword and sorcery, wrote this, which, by analogy, captures a central theme of sword and sorcery, a genre acutely concerned with the tragic passage of time, the way form inevitably and irresistibly decays into formlessness:

"It makes me feel like an old man to watch fighters I knew in their prime, get slapped around by kids. A fighter’s life is short at best, no time to waste, no time to rest; the spot-light shifts, the clock ticks fast, all youth becomes old age at last. Same way with writers, too, some of them."

Gender aside, sword and sorcery dramatizes our gender-neutral, all-too-human fight against (and inevitable defeat by) time.

That notwithstanding, here is something Holmes said in Trueheart's interview that I completely agree with:

"I think men benefit reading period. There is good entertainment with writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Jack London, Ian Fleming, and the better sword and sorcery fiction. Contrary to popular conception, sword and sorcery has both the mental and the physical. Conan and the Continental Op [a protagonist created by Dashiell Hammett, popular in pulp fiction magazines, the proto-typical hard-edged detective] are both manipulating situations in addition to the action that we normally associate with the fiction. The very first Conan story opens with him working on a map of an area the Hyborians know nothing about. Conan learns various languages and has listened to philosophers.

"Both the mental and the physical." Indeed.

Reflection on Clark Ashton Smith's "The Return of the Sorcerer"

I recently participated in a discussion on the RPG podcast Plot Points about a Clark Ashton Smith story, "The Return of the Sorcerer" (Strange Tales, September 1931).  Here is an excerpt from Plot Points description: discusses "table-top role-playing games and their supplements as literature. Our quirky panel discusses games old and new, spotlights innovations in the hobby, and links to literature."

The discussion was with Ben Riggs, the host, and Clinton Boomer, a game writer and designer. The concept of the discussion was "Appendix N University." We selected a single author from Gary E. Gygax's "Appendix N" and discussed a story written by that author.

"Appendix N" is a famous list of (mostly) pulp writers that influenced Gary E. Gygax as he co-designed Dungeons and Dragons. It was revised for the recent 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons and has been re-labeled the "Appendix E."

Curious enough, Clark Ashton Smith is not actually on the original Appendix N (but instead appears in the Appendix E of 5th edition). Pulp canon usual suspects, such as H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, are there, but Smith isn't included, and his absence is something of a controversy. When people discuss the Appendix N, it is common that Clark Ashton Smith is referenced. Most assume that Smith is an Appendix N author and only realize later that Gygax left him off. Perhaps this is why they included him in the updated Appendix E?

As an enthusiast of the Weird Tales Three (Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith), I have something of a theory about why CAS is left off the original but I can't verify this. I speculate Smith was left off because Gygax wasn't able to read Smith's works. In the late 1970s, Lovecraft would have been available in at least the Arkham House editions and probably (more likely) the Ballantine Editions. Howard's Conan stories would have been available in the Lancer editions. Alas, Clark Ashton Smith wouldn't have been available except for the original pulps and some earlier, rarer paperback editions, such as the Panther Lost Worlds anthologies. Am I wrong? Were the Panther's of CAS widely available?

Anyway, as a supplement to the podcast, I want to briefly analyze "The Return of the Sorcerer," the story we discussed in the podcast episode linked above. Spoilers below.

Plot Summary (spoilers): The story is about an out-of-work Arabic scholar, Mr. Ogden, who is hired by a scholarly recluse, John Carnby. Carnby wants Ogden to translate certain passages from the dreaded Necronomicon. Ogden does so. The first translated passage tells of how sorcerers can return from the dead to perform evil acts, and most often for revenge. Carnby then has Ogden translate another passage and this one treats "a singular incantatory formula for the exorcism of the dead" (17). By and by John Carnby confesses that he has murdered his twin brother, Helman Carnby, and so mutilated his body; alas, the many pieces of Helman's body have been shambling around the house. John Carnby is sure that his brother is going to wreak vengeance and so he struggles to exorcise his spirit from the house. The story ends when Helman's mutilated corpse reconstitutes into a gruesome form and murders Carnby. Ogden runs screaming from the house.

I love this bizarre story. There are so many elements that are just right. The way that setting and atmosphere are put to the service of characterization is one element that I want to touch on. Consider this description of the house:

It was a large, two-story house, overshaded by ancient oaks and dark with mantling of unchecked ivy, among the hedges of unpruned privet and shrubbery that had gone while for many years. It was separated by a vacant, weed-grown lot on one side and a table of vines and trees on the other, surrounding the black ruins of a burnt mansion. (11)

The house is painted with shadow and choked by unruly vegetation. On the left is an empty, abandoned lot; on the right, another house, a charred ruin, a fleshless architectural skeleton. Although Smith is rendering a conventional haunted house here, he does so masterfully. It's almost as if the house has a disease. The lots in proximity to it have suffered for their closeness.

Another element of the story that I love are certain descriptive passages. Consider this description of Carnby's study:

There were tables strewn with archaic instruments of doubtful use, with astrological charts, with skulls and alembics and crystals, with censers such as are used in the Catholic Church, and volumes bound in worm-eaten leather with verdigris-mottled clasps. In one corner stood the skeleton of a large ape; in another, a human skeleton; and overhead a stuffed crocodile was suspended. (14)

This description is so satisfying and suggestive and bears some of the weight of characterizing John Carnby and his sorcerous endeavors: Carnby is meditating on the stars (charts), mortality (skull), the past (books), and the evolution/devolution of life (ape, skeleton, crocodile). In a highly compressed description, the narrator has given us a sense of the intellectual hubris of the the character.

I love when writers braid characterization into setting. Even though we have heard very little at this part in the story from Carnby, we have experienced his house from the outside and his study, his intimate space, and so we learn a lot about him.

The final passage I want to look at is the climax, when Helman Carnby's shambling corpse kills John Carnby, his murderous brother. Focus on the shadow and notice how what Smith hides is just as important as what Smith describes:

Huge, elongated, misshapen, the shadow was seemingly cast by the arms and torso of a naked man who stood forward with a surgeon's saw in his hand. Its monstrosity lay in this: though the shoulders, chest, abdomen, and arms were all clearly distinguishable, the shadow was headless and appeared to terminate in an abruptly severed neck. (26)

The shadow of a headless corpse wielding a surgeon's saw to murder: this is pulp at its finest, a kind of literary "Death Metal." The fact that we are not getting the bald description of the phenomenon but instead the shadow cast by it makes it all the more enthralling.

Smith is a masterful storyteller. "The Return of the Sorcerer" is a tightly constructed horror narrative that is structured around the climax of the demented murder. The climax is only one intense paragraph. So, Smith uses that rest of his words to build up to this most important of moments.

In this story, character and setting are inextricably linked; place shines light on character. By contrast, consider the protagonist, our surrogate, Mr. Ogden, who is almost a non-character, an abstract avatar (and strategically so). His function is to allow us, the reader, into this strange world to see for ourselves the horrible, climactic spectacle.

I highly recommend "The Return of the Sorcerer." I read it from an anthology, The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton Smith published by Prime Books in 2009. It has an excellent introduction by Gene Wolfe.

Read the story, check out the podcast episode, and let me know what you think.

Howard Days 2019

Nicole and I arrived in Abilene around 6 o'clock. We had a quick dinner and then holed up in our hotel room, reading and drinking decaf. I was eager to finish up Mark Finn's 2nd edition of Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard. I've attended Howard Days three times now; each time I read Mark's book en route on the various flights and during the various layovers. The first year I read the original Monkey Brain version, but now I read the REH Foundation edition, which is superior. I'm annoyed because my academic book went to press before I procured a copy of the 2nd edition, so references in my book are going to be to the first edition.

The next morning we woke up early and had breakfast. During breakfast I paged through Patrice's book, The Robert E. Howard Guide (Skelos). I really enjoy this book and loan it to my students when they voice interest in REH. Although the book presents itself as non-serious, I am still impressed by the analysis and speculation Patrice provides, particularly in the chapter surveying twenty stories that must be read. 

I then began polishing up my Glenn Lord Symposium paper. I made a minimalistic powerpoint consisting mostly of long quotes. My rules of thumb (I tell my students) for verbalized academic papers are few: (1) make sure they take no longer than 10 minutes to read (approximately 1800 words), make sure they are accompanied by a focused power point, and make sure they are read energetically. Otherwise, everyone will fall asleep. Also, remember, some people will fall asleep, and it's not an insult.

Nicole and I then drove from Abilene to Cross Plains and went straight to the panels. The first panel I saw was on writing about Robert E. Howard. It featured David C. Smith, Patrice Louinet, Bobby Derie, and Rob Roehm I was sad to learn that Mark Finn couldn't make it. He was listed as being on the panel. 

The panel was great. My lingering question was how does a writer strike a balance between diehard-fandom/scholarship and "just for fun" fan banter. We diehards can sometimes take the fun out of discussing this stuff, I think. How can we be ambassadors of Robert E. Howard while maintaining rigor? Patrice Louinet insightfully suggested to always keep one's audience in mind. Alas, it's difficult, sometimes, to get a clear sense of who one's audience is.

The next panel was the Glenn Lord Symposium.  Ralph Norris, Nicole, and I gave our papers. It was a pleasure meeting Ralph. I had trouble following his paper's argument but it seemed erudite and thoughtful. It's wonderful that an academic medievalist has turned his attention to Howard. I think Howard Days should have another Glenn Lord Panel. There are academics who would come but they need to have a legitimate "academic" venue, like the Symposium, in order to put in for travel reimbursement and academic service credit. Humanists are often quite poor and graduate students are poverty stricken. 

After that was the Foundation Awards. It's wonderful the foundation does this. The kind of work diehard fans and scholars do is often under-appreciated and sometimes feels thankless, so awards like this serve a useful incentivizing function. Nicole and I have been thinking about coming up with an award sponsored by The Dark Man, perhaps for best article or something like that.

After that we went back to the pavilion and shot the breeze. It felt a little empty considering Rusty Burke, Mark Finn, Frank Coffman, Karen Kahoutek, and others were missing, but it still was wonderful. Within a few minutes I was talking to some newcomers about the nature of the 1930s pulp magazine marketplace. Where else?

Fast forward to the banquet: David C. Smith's speech was excellent. I am so enthused that he emphasized Howard as a literary artist. Often I find myself so intrigued by Howard's life and times that I give short shrift to the centrality of his literary artistry. 

Sad to say, after the banquet, we went back to Abilene, to the hotel room (last year I stayed and drank beer into the night). At the hotel, I read an Oxford UP book by Belinda Jack, Reading: A Very Short Introduction (2019). If you're interested, I reviewed it on Goodreads. It is an excellent micro history of reading, from Sumerian clay tablets to the Kindle.

The next day Nicole and I didn't return to Cross Plains until around lunch. Scott Valeri, David C. Smith, Nicole and I had burgers at a local restaurant. We talked about all sorts of things: the weirdness of academic literary criticism, the history of pulp fandom, fantasy fiction and the influence of D&D in the 1980s, and more. These great conversations are why I attend Howard Days.

Next, there were panels. There was one on "sword and sorcery," with Jason M. Waltz, David C. Smith, Dierk Günther, and me. It was a great panel, I think, with David taking the lead. We touched on a lot of undecideds. The central idea was that sword and sorcery is infamously difficult to define, and this was captured succinctly in the panels inability to come to a consensus on whether or not Solomon Kane is a sword and sorcery character or not. Jeff Shanks contributed as well by sharing talking about the difficulty of writing an article about sword and sorcery for Gary Hoppenstand's anthology, Pulp Fiction in the 1920s and 1930s (Salem, 2013).

After that there was a panel on the future of Robert E. Howard. Nicole and I talked a little about The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies, its evolving status at our university (Christopher Newport University), and our hopes for it in the future. Paul Herman talked about the Foundation's future plans and a representative from Cabinet Entertainment, Michael Jacobson, talked about the future of Conan.

Nicole and I then went back to our hotel room for some quiet recovery. Like most deep readers, I'm an introverted, socially anxious person. All that socializing and talking--lunch and two panels--pretty much wiped me out. After a bit, we returned to Cross Plains, enjoyed the annual poetry reading, and ended the night chatting with people at the pavilion as the darkness crept in. Again, it felt a little empty but good conversation was had by all.

I'm really looking forward to returning next year. There was palpable energy. 2020 is going to be a great year for REH.