Giant Squid Creations

Following Dark Moon which I discussed earlier, comes the short story When Caverns Yawned by SP Meek. It’s one of his Doctor Bird and Operative Carnes stories, the first I’ve encountered, and I have to say it was terrible. The villain was a one-dimensional evil genius and he has an infallible plan for world domination – or giving America over to Soviet Russia at least. Doctor Bird matches wits with this scheme and of course comes up with a way to stop it. The story is bland, the characters cardboard cut-outs and the writing gets lost in useless explanations of scientific theories. Apparently he was a popular contributor to the SF pulps in the early ’30s but as tastes turned to more literarily acceptable fare he gave up science fiction and wrote children’s stories. Then came part two of a four-part novel by Ray Cummings, The Exile of Time . I’ll go back, read the other parts, then get back to you. Next came Hal K Wells’ When the Moon Turned Green , which was about a scientist wh...

In my last blog I mentioned that I read Kuttner’s first novel, so now I thought I’d quickly write about it. First of all I’d like to say the title isn’t really appropriate – neither is the original title One Million Years to Conquer – and doesn’t give a good idea of what your about to read. I expected some sort of monster story but it’s far from that. The original title is a bit closer to the truth but still off the mark. That said, I have no suggestions for a replacement. It’s a complex story in some ways and overly simplistic in others. The first half or more is split into two narratives, one telling of an alien seeking super geniuses in humanity by cryogenically sleeping through millennia, the other of a super genius who discovers an extraterrestrial plague he struggles to find a cure too. Without going into details of the plot, the stories collide when the alien’s timeline reaches our super genius/hero’s, at which point all bets are off and chaos ensues for few pages before f...

While I was reading Henry Kuttner’s first novel The Creature from Beyond Infinity (originally published in Startling Stories November 1940 as One Million Years to Conquer ) I decided to have a look for some more of his work – not necessarily a common response to the book but there you go. I didn’t actually find anything I didn’t already have but I stumbled across a series of issues of Astounding Stories from 1930 and 1931. So of course I downloaded them all. They’re on Project Gutenberg but also a number of ‘free book sites’. I chose one to read at random the other day; saying that I must admit the classic image of a bug-eyed monster on the cover may have influenced my selection. It was May 1931 and it opens with a novelette by Charles W Diffin called Dark Moon . As it happens the cover image with the bug-eyed monster is from this story, although I pictured the monster slightly differently when I read the description. In many respects Dark Moon seemed to me to be classic p...

I just finished reading this delightful little horror story from Robert E Howard and I’m fairly impressed. It was originally published in Weird Tales in 1938, a posthumous publication. You can read it here . It’s a classic horror in many ways, travellers stop the night in an abandoned house, only one leaves alive and that just barely. There’s an old legend of a violent and cruel family, there’s darkness that seems almost palpable, there’s dead men walking and terror-induced bouts of insanity. At the heart of the mystery is voodoo, which I didn’t expect at first. It doesn’t go into too much detail, but does of course paint the practice as evil. The murderous creature in the house is a zuvembie, that is, a creature who used to be a woman but who is now a twisted creature with hypnotic powers that delights in killing people. I have no idea if there’s more lore about zuvembies but I may investigate later. What was interesting was the portrayal of African Americans in this story. U...