Rambling Response to Henry Kuttner's The Dark World

I downloaded the ebook of this after I read an article suggesting that Henry Kuttner was an important figure in the evolution of Sword and Sorcery, helping to shift it from Robert E Howard to Fritz Leiber. So I assume, I forget most of the article to be honest and in retrospect I think it left a fair bit to be desired. I was clearly a bit confused when I downloaded it and took what must have been chapter titles as titles for short stories, so when I decided to read it recently I was a bit surprised to find it was a short novel. I was also surprised to discover it’s not really what I’d call Sword and Sorcery, although it’s not that far from the mark in some respects.

The Dark World tells the story of Edward Bond, an American veteran. Something happened to him in the war and he never felt quite like himself afterwards. He also had a strong sense that someone or something was pursuing him. Indeed they are and they find him and pull him through limbo from our Earth to the Dark World of the title. Here he learns he is not himself, he is Ganelon a lord of the Coven and the chosen of Llyr, a godlike being who only shows himself through a Golden Window from which he devours his sacrifices.

The real Edward Bond was Ganelon’s double on Earth, since the two worlds are essentially parallel universes. A sorceress did a switch and imprinted Bond’s memories on Ganelon, so he spends most of the novel trying to remember who he is and how to enact his evil plans.

I won’t go any further into the plot in case you want to read it yourself – it is a very short novel, more a novella and the pace is good so it won’t take long. Suffice to say it has many Sword and Sorcery elements – the Coven which is made up of a vampire, a Gorgon and a werewolf, a godlike being who can only be defeated by a particular legendary sword that bears the same name, there’s even the Forest people fighting a resistance – but all of these things are given a pseudo-scientific explanation.

The monsters of the Coven and even Llyr are all revealed to be extreme mutations of the basic human and their powers are explained in terms of forces and rays not magic. All of which shifts this into Science Fantasy, but I don’t think that was why it wasn’t what I expected.

The article that led me to Henry Kuttner (yet not CL Moore, I’ll get to why that’s a problem) had me thinking his work was very much in the Robert E Howard tradition, but the only author I was reminded of was Abraham Merritt. Yes there’s the dashing hero but The Dark World and The Ship of Ishtar (the only work of Merritt’s I’ve currently read) work on more mythic levels and have a romanticised detachment compared to the visceral world of Conan.

Their plots are also more dreamlike and have elements of psychological jiggery-pokery – such as I’m Ganelon but I remember being and think like Edward Bond, but gosh darn that’s familiar. And these things bring me back to CL Moore who to my mind combined them with the down-to-earth (or Mars or Venus) reality of Howard and excelled them all.

I had a quick look at the Wikipedia entry on The Dark World and it’s contested whether Kuttner is wholly responsible for writing it. He married CL Moore and the pair of them collaborated heavily from then until his death, making authorship difficult to ascertain. From what little I’ve read I would say Moore may well have had a hand in The Dark World but I don’t think she penned the final story.

The reason I should’ve been drawn to her at the same time as Kuttner is their collaboration and that before it she was the more important author. Having read a lot of her stories in a Gollancz anthology I’m amazed by her writing and consider her one of the best of the pulp-era fantasy writers. She’s certainly an author I want to explore further.

Keep dreaming!