This is Halloween: Running the Dogs

Given that I love Halloween, I want to contribute a bit of spookiness of my own to the mix. Digging deep in the voluminous files of Stately Black Manor, I have blown the dust off an oldie of my own, a little vignette of a couple of raccoon hunters and their hounds. Enjoy.

 

Running the Dogs

The elk was a silent shadow under the moon, staring at us with a cold malice I would never have thought possible in an animal.  Its eyes were pits of darkness that sucked in the thin silver moonlight, looking in and beyond us, freezing us more thoroughly than the sharp late November air.  The huge bull stood as still as the stars, his evil flowing through the tall fence that bound him, an evil that cowed our dogs and jellied our knees. 

      “He can’t get through that fence,” Frank shivered backward, his old Mossberg twelve-gauge his only comfort, “he can’t get through that fence.” 

      The dogs wrapped around our legs, too frightened to whine.  All except Rounder, the wise blue-tick stalking closer to the elk, hate-filled and stiff-legged, tense as a spring-trap, his growl a distant thunder.  He was a climber, and the fence wouldn’t stop him.  The elk shifted his black gaze to the hound, both animals continuing a war old before man walked the Earth.  The moon stopped; the air grew breathless.

      Somewhere there was a distant shout, a yell like no other, a deep wordless bellow that seemed to speak of dead secrets and frustrated revenge.  Rounder jerked back as if kicked; Frank stumbled back a step with a strangled yelp; the elk turned and melted back into the woods from which he came.  I dropped to one knee, dazed and sick, my Remington dropped beside me, forgotten. 

      We grabbed the dogs, Rounder moaning and fussing, and headed for the truck.  Silence stood between Frank and me, neither of us willing to speak for fear of making what had happened become real.  I glanced back continuously as we drew away from the fence, terror slowly building as I expected at any moment to see pieces of the darkness that was the tree-line pull away and glide across the moonlit field towards us.  We were almost in a full run when we got to the truck, the dogs having torn away from us and already huddled near the tailgate. 

      Frank floored the pick-up away from the field, bouncing crazily down the gravel road, the dogs in their boxes, us in the cab.  Frank struggled to light a cigarette, the rutted road defeating him as I switched on the radio, the classic-rock thump a welcome relief to us both.  We banged along in the truck for what seemed like half the night before either of us spoke.

      “God-damn that was a big elk,” Frank hugged the steering wheel, his cigarette nervous in his fingers.

      “Big ain’t the word for it.”  I looked out the door window of the truck at the dark farmhouses sliding by, the moon keeping pace with us.

      “I mean, I seen them elk out there before, but God-damn...”

      “Who keeps elk anyway?  It’s gotta be expensive to bring ‘em in from out west.”

      “Raises ‘em for meat; elk’s pretty expensive, I hear.  Makes a lotta money, man.”  He shook his head like somebody might when they wake up with a headache.  “It was so big...”

      “It wasn’t that it was all that big...it just looked...I don’t know...”

      “Hateful.  That was just one hateful-assed elk.” 

      A small town was passing us, one of those tiny Ohio towns down around Amish country that seem to loom off the backroads, tired and forlorn since the farmers left so long ago.  The town seemed oddly familiar, looking like the small town near the elk-farm we had just left, yet hastily rearranged and placed along the road to intercept us once again.  A worn out gas station - not one of those all-purpose gas station/grocery store/lottery dealer places, but an honest-to-God gas station, with analog readout pumps, rusted 7-Up sign, and sagging garage - was all that seemed to be open.  Frank pulled in, balled up his empty cigarette pack, and hopped out.

      I looked around us.  “Where are we?”

      Frank shrugged.  “I dunno.  I lost track back around Wellington.  Down on three-oh-one, maybe, south of Homerville?” 

      I shook my head.  “No.  This looks like the place we left back there.”   I jerked my head back down the road towards that place, dreading to look. 

      “You’re crazy.  We been drivin’ twenty minutes.”  He turned and went into the station, snorting.  I walked out towards the road away from the lights, looking out at the moon-blued soybean fields across the way.  The sound of laughter came in on the chill breeze, the strange hysterical laughter of children fighting off sleep, but with a harsh tone to it, an almost angry sound.  There was movement in the soybean field, dark shapes twisting and gyrating, seeming to beckon to me.  I hopped the ditch along the road and headed out to the shadows under the moon.

      I could not tell how many there were.  They seemed to slip and whirl around a still form on the ground, a form that bleated in pain, not animal, not human.  With each yelp the shadows laughed and drew closer to the form, beating it noiselessly with arms or clubs-I couldn’t tell.

      “Hey you kids...” I began to call, the words strongly begun but catching in my throat.  The shadows stopped their brutal dance, twisting to face me, featureless in the dark.  I moved forward, the first step the bravest I’ve ever taken.  With a noise like wind in the treetops the shadow kids raced past me, giggling.  I walked to the form on the ground.

      The form lurched up, leaning drunkenly towards me.  A hand that could not be lit by the moon reached out, grabbing my coat.  A face I could not see drew near mine, cold, cold breath washing over me, words without meaning scraping my ears.  I pulled away, twisting from the rubbery grasp, tripping backwards only to recover just as the form gripped me again.  I pushed at its face, my hand slipping across a burning cold surface.  It gobbled meaningful gibberish in my ear as I punched it, once, twice, again.  It moved away, like smoke on a strong breeze, recovered, moved to me again.  Then I ran.

      The gas station was impossibly far away, glaring across the field like a beaten face.  The truck gleamed by the pumps, the only piece of sanity left in this dark town.  The laughing children swirled around me, a flock of crows after roadkill.  The form behind me was fast, too fast, staggering insanely at my elbow.  I jumped the ditch, pain shooting from my left ankle, a moment on the road, a rush and a roar as I saw the semi hurtling at me, a desperate spurt, the wind of the semi’s passing pulling me after and then down, somewhere in the tempest Rounder baying from his box.  I scrambled up and spun, ready to make a stand.

      There was nothing in the road except the flattened corpse of a rabbit, weeks old.  Beyond was the empty soybean field, the stars twinkling madly.  Suddenly I could feel how ragged my breathing was, how much my ankle hurt, how soaked with sweat I was.  I walked to the truck, fighting to get my trembling under control.  The truck was running, doors flung wide.  The lights of the gas station reached out to it, and to me, luminous fingers groping into the dark.  Frank was nowhere in sight. 

      I walked into the station, looking for an attendant that wasn’t there.  Ancient Valvoline cans and stacks of antique Firestone tires patiently waited within the garage bays.  A greasy, worn Chilton’s manual lay open on a shelf, schematics of a ‘51 Chevy transmission seeming to form some arcane formula in the fluorescent light.  A faint hum of static came from a roughly-handled radio sitting on a work bench. It all seemed fake somehow, like a mock-up of a gas station made by an intelligence familiar with the main items but clueless on the details: woodcarving tools stored in socket set boxes; cans of yeast mixed with cans of motor oil; a pneumatic wrench too strangely shaped to have ever been used.  The place felt alive, a thrumming coming from below that was felt through one’s bones rather than heard.

      “Help you?” I jumped at the sound.  He was an old, old man, his eyes hidden by wrinkles, his bent frame belied by the impression of a hidden tautness, like a dog ready to jump on someone coming through the door.

      “The guy I was with.”  I braced myself, as though waiting for a punch to be thrown.  He slowly turned, thumbing towards the truck.

      “I expect that’s him there.”  The faintest trace of hatred was a ghost in his graveled voice.  “Reckon you boys oughta be off home now.”  He turned back to me, and I saw the glitter of black eyes peer out through the wrinkled brow.  I tried to defy those old eyes, but I could not.  I could only hold them for a moment before I had to look down, down at his twisted and mottled hands that wrung a shop rag with barely hidden violence.

      I walked from the garage, my tongue thick with fear as I passed the old man.  He smelled of rot and freshly turned earth.  Something deep and instinctual urged me to hit him, to force him back to the ground from which he sprang, and then to run; but I resisted, the truck my only focus, the dogs rattling in their boxes, Rounder moaning a primal warning.

      I got into the truck.  Frank was there, his face unreadable as he pulled us back onto the road.  I dreaded to speak, to voice the insanity of the night, for fear even Frank had become part of it.  The more I looked at him the more he became a figure from beyond madness, a hunched insect creature affecting the shape of man, almost hugging the steering wheel to his chest.  He did not look at me, staring at the humming road that rose to meet us in the night.  His cigarette burned evilly, a smoldering anger in its ember.  There was no comfort in the radio, the whispering hiss of static hiding some monologue of cosmic malignity.  We hurtled along the nightroads, the towns of man lost to us now, passing farm buildings that were grotesque humps on the back of the land.  I fought an urge to hit Frank, or what he had become, and jump from the truck. The urge became stronger, unbearable, and I felt like I was confined in a moving prison cell. Then a howl came from somewhere, everywhere, a pure, clean sound of redemption.

      The dogs.  Their calls were a chorus of primal good, led by the strong booming bay of Rounder.  The darkness seemed to lift a bit, the stars melting and reforming, the road blurring and becoming solid again.  The truck snarled and swayed, Frank convulsing in agony.  I shoved next to him, grabbing the wheel, locking the brakes.  He grabbed at me, punching and gouging.   I lit from the truck, with him just behind.  He doubled over, falling to his hands and knees.  I pulled down the tailgate, opening the dog boxes one by one.  The dogs spun and yowled in joy, like they did during the first snowfall.  Only Rounder was subdued, standing dignified and holy over Frank, guarding for and against. 

      I had no doubts now about Frank.  I lifted him from the road, clapping him on the back to assure both of us he was real and whole again.

      “Those cigarettes are gonna kill you.”

      A raspy sigh was his only reply.  We sat on the tailgate, letting the dogs sniff the ditches and fields around us, the star-filled bowl of the night bright above us.  The moon was low and feeble, obscured by a distant stand of trees.  The eyes of the dogs flashed in the starlight.  Frank finally stood, stamping his feet against the cold.  He softly called in the dogs, bundling them into their boxes. 

      “I reckon we ought not to run the dogs out here anymore.”  He clicked the tailgate shut quietly and carefully.  I straightened my hat and stuffed my hands in my coat pockets.  The horn of a diesel locomotive sounded somewhere far off.

      “No. I reckon not.”

This is Halloween: Val Lewton's Cat People and Curse of the Cat People

I return now to discuss the final two Val Lewton films I haven’t covered: Cat People (1942) and Curse of the Cat People (1943). Coincidentally, Cat People is the first of the films he produced on his own.

 

Cat People

Nautical engineer Oliver and fashion designer Irena meet cute at the zoo in New York’s Central Park. A whirlwind romance later and they’re married. This, despite the fact that Irena believes herself to be descended from devil-worshipping Serbs who fled from King John, and will turn into a great cat when her passion is aroused. Oliver’s patience inevitably begins to fray as the marriage remains unconsummated, and he demands Irena see a psychiatrist, who turns out to be a hypnotist and quite an unethical slimeball. Oliver soon begins to grow closer to his assistant Alice, and Irena becomes increasingly jealous. A cat-like shadow begins to prowl about, sheep end up slaughtered, and Alice begins to feel a constant hostile presence.

Many, if not most, of Lewton’s films are permeated with a dreamy atmosphere that shades over into nightmare gradually and irresistibly. Cat People begins the trend of his films being imbued with shadow, a darkness that looms about pools of light. Sometimes the shadow is merely an emptiness beyond the reach of lights; sometimes it comes alive and invades those luminous islands.

Irena becomes drawn to a black panther at the zoo, fascinated by its sleek menace. Is this cat the one that terrorizes the night, or is it Irena? Lewton always leaves the audience unsure if the threats in his films are natural or supernatural.

He was also a master of creating terror from the unseen; Alice finds herself trapped in her building’s swimming pool – but by what? The room is well-lit and no panther is evident, but the play of shadows and the growling and roaring of a great cat surround Alice, and the viewer…only to be dispelled when help arrives in answer to Alice’s screams. Irena appears, smugly polite…was she the panther? Was there a panther at all? Were the sounds Alice heard real, or her imagination? It’s impossible to really know, and that’s what’s unsettling about Lewton’s films.

Much of this film, much of Lewton’s entire oeuvre, deals with belief and the power of the mind to warp our perception and create fear from nothing. The mind can be manipulated, either intentionally, as with the psychiatrist, or unintentionally, as Oliver and Alice begin to feed off Irena’s own belief in her supposed curse, beginning to believe it also. By extension, there is a meta portion of this equation, too, as Lewton’s films also manipulate the minds of the audience, creating fear from what is perceived yet not actually seen. These things would end up becoming foundation stones for future horror films and television shows, becoming second-nature to us in this culture.

This film would also see the advent of the Lewton Bus, 

which by now is so cliché as to have inspired many familiar versions of it. If you aren’t familiar with “it’s just a cat!,” one permutation of the Lewton Bus, then welcome to Earth and take a gander:

See? You've seen it a million times.

Curse of the Cat People

Lewton's idea of a sequel is a strange one, indeed. Oliver, Alice, and Irena return, but there the resemblance to the first film ends. 

Several years have passed since the events of Cat People. Oliver and Alice are married and living in a small town, with six-year-old daughter Amy. Amy is an introverted, daydreaming child, shy and retiring, unable and, apparently, unwilling to make friends. Her parents fret about her living such a solitary life, and her schoolwork suffers. Eventually the girl acquires an imaginary friend, one that looks exactly like her father's first wife, Irena. When she identifies her friend as the woman in a photo with her father, Oliver becomes alarmed and increasingly determined to force Amy to do away with her delusions.

This is a strange movie. It is unlike any of Lewton's other films, determinedly staying with the child's point of view. Again, the mind becomes the source of tension in Lewton's hands. Is she imagining her friend? That seems the obvious conclusion, but then...reality is always fluid in Lewton's universe. There is a "haunted" house, a "magic" ring, a "fairy princess" (for lack of a better term), a strange old woman and her bitter daughter (or is she?), a killer blizzard, and the border between sanity and insanity constantly shifting for a number of characters.

This is about as close to a David Lynch film as Lewton made. The plot here is almost completely irrelevant, simply there to set up a series of strange encounters between Amy and her imaginary friend, obnoxious neighborhood children, weird neighbors, and her parents. Oliver, Amy's father, played with all the charisma of a store mannequin by Kent Smith, is about as close to a villain as the film gets until near the very end. The story, such as it is, has the air of inevitability to it, of fate and destiny, and while it pays off at the end (I guess?), it's still tough to describe without it sounding like nonsense. The ever-present shadows of Lewton films are less pronounced here, but the murk remains in a subdued way, found in the sorrows of childhood.

Both films are now classics, Cat People in particular, but I feel Lewton would really hit his stride in other films. Regardless, both films make for unsettling viewing, bringing the viewer into a dark dimension.

Hemingway and the power of Midnight downpours

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway's devastating tale of romance between an American volunteer in the Italian army and a British nurse, set during the First World War, is among my favorite books by one of my favorite authors. Hemingway's prose is terse and insightful, muscular yet somehow lyrical. Few writers have the ability to deliver an emotional gut-punch to me like Hemingway can.

Mired in a stalled Italian military column, Hemingway's ambulance-driver protagonist sits in his vehicle in the dark, a heavy rain pouring down, and slides into a dream. What follows is one of the loveliest passages Hemingway ever put down on paper, capturing the fey logic that exists between waking and dreaming, where the border between awake and asleep becomes porous. The ache of loneliness for an absent lover, the hypnotic drumming of night rain, a need to be up and away from where one is...Hemingway captures all this and more:

In bed I lay me down my head. Bed and board. Stiff as a board in bed. Catherine was in bed now between two sheets, over her and under her. Which side did she sleep on? Maybe she wasn't asleep. Maybe she was lying thinking about me. Blow, blow, ye western wind. Well, it blew and it wasn't the small rain but the big rain down that rained. It rained all night. You know it rained down that rained. Look at it. Christ, that my love were in my arms and I in my bed again. That my love Catherine. That my sweet love Catherine down might rain. Blow her again to me.

Just perfect.

This is Halloween(?): The Invisible Man

For my second horror read of the season, I chose another H.G. Wells classic I hadn't read before: The Invisible Man.

First, I was always under the wrong impression; this book is not a horror story. Honestly, I don't know what I expected. The Claude Rains film of 1933 is usually grouped with the other Universal Horror films, and while I never thought that film was scary, I figured the book was likely to be so. But nope.

A sizable chunk of the book reads much like a comedy. Wells spends a good portion of the book describing the provincial and silly folk among whom the titular character finds himself. These rather gentle bumpkins take a good bit of verbal abuse and other rude behavior from the Invisible Man, and there is some slapstick and general comedic mayhem as they try to figure out just what the oddly-dressed stranger among them has going on. It seems very meandering to me, as though Wells didn't quite know where to take the story.

Eventually, though, the narrative takes a turn to the sinister as the Invisible Man, whom we learn is named Griffin, has to flee the little town he was staying in. He chances upon and consequently terrorizes a hobo into doing his bidding. It starts out fairly light-hearted, with the two moving around the countryside and going back to the town to retrieve Griffin's notebooks. It goes downhill when the tramp decides (almost inexplicably, really) to steal the books and run off.

This leads to what passes for an antagonist to the Invisible Man, and the closest the reader gets to a hero in the story. Kemp, an old schoolmate of Griffin, just happens to live near where the tramp flees, and after a few coincidences that seem to me as though Wells wanted to hand-wave past some gaps in his narrative, Griffin holes up in Kemp's house.

We learn how Griffin came upon his discovery of the secret to invisibility in a sizable flashback to London of a few months earlier. We see him experimenting on wool, a cat, and himself, after which he mails off his notebooks to retrieve later, then sets fire to the boarding house he lives in to destroy all evidence of his experiments. Seems precipitous to me, seeing as how it's snowing out and he's stark naked. He tries to steal from a department store, fails, then robs a costume shop. There are some interesting moments interspersed throughout, with Wells dealing with some implications of being invisible - dirt and snow can reveal him, and an invisible person has to be constantly watching out for other people, animals, and vehicles when in a crowded area. It's interesting, but after a while the narrative seems to be meandering again.

In the present, Griffin begins laying out his plans for a reign of terror, with Kemp as his partner. It seems ludicrous, really, because even an invisible man is just one guy, and has to run around naked, to boot. Maybe that was Wells' point; all along, he has painted Griffin as hot-tempered, arrogant, and prone to acting before thinking. He's also a psychopath; he describes how he robbed from his father to pay for his experiments, and the money turns out not to be his father's. The old man commits suicide, and Griffin cold-bloodedly brushes the whole thing off. Along with a murder (possibly two; the costume shop owner he robbed he knocked out, and may well have killed him), it's pretty good evidence this guy is a jackass of the highest order. So while it's plausible that he would want to start a one-(invisible)-man reign of terror, it still seems kind of stupid that he thought that was any kind of plan.

Kemp, meanwhile, has been biding time. He let the law know the invisible man was in his house, but after a typically clumsy attempt at capturing the villain, he's back on the loose. Griffin besieges the house, shoots a cop, breaks out all the windows, and generally misbehaves until he actually makes it into the house. Kemp hot-foots it away, and after a general running brouhaha, Griffin is dogpiled and beaten to death.

Then we get an epilogue where the tramp, years later, is a successful innkeeper. Denying the invisible man's notebooks were still in his possession, we get a special moment where he drags them out of hiding to read at night. 

Well then.

All in all, while the book is readable, it seems very scatterbrained. I usually read with the intent of sussing out what deeper meaning the author was trying to convey, but to tell the truth, I couldn't really dredge up much of anything here besides obvious stuff like being a jackass can be exacerbated by having an advantage no one else has. If anyone else can point me to some subtext, I'm more than happy to read about it.

This Is Halloween: The War of the Worlds

Every year, I celebrate the Halloween season by reading classic works of horror throughout October. This year, I decided to write about some of them. First up: H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.

It's tough to overstate just how important H.G. Wells is in the genesis of science fiction. His work established some of the most long-lasting and recognizable tropes in the genre. The War of the Worlds is almost certainly his best-known work, and its influence in popular culture is so pervasive that the basic premise of the story, and, perhaps, its plot as well, is familiar to most people in Western culture. Its only real rival would be The Time Machine, and I would be willing to bet that fewer people in our culture could rattle off the basic plot to it as they could that of The War of the Worlds. But my point remains: everyone has heard of these two books, and their basic elements continue to be used again and again in pop culture. And they aren't the only two books he wrote in the genre, not by a long shot. But The War of the Worlds towers above the rest.

So that's why even I'm surprised at how long it took me to finally sit down and read it.

The basic plot: meteors strike the Earth in various places near the city of London, and are soon revealed to be conveyances for an invading force from the planet Mars. The resulting "war" quickly proves to be a rout, with humanity finding itself almost completely helpless to turn back the invasion.

Similar to The Time Machine, the protagonist here is unnamed. Wells does a creditable job of making his narrator both a blank slate upon which the reader can project themselves, and an actual character with a definite personality. Through him, we witness the explosions on Mars, seen via telescope, that heralded the arrival of the Martians some time later, and their subsequent attempts to secure the Earth as their own.

Two things struck me immediately about Wells' tale: one, he makes his Martians ("alien" and "extraterrestrial" had not become common terms for creatures from other planets yet) truly alien, and two, they actually begin terraforming (or, really, "aresforming") Earth to be more easily habitable for them. Given the time period and almost complete lack of precedence for either at the time (1895), the fact that Wells included both concepts in the same book is stunning.

Wells' pacing and his narrator's viewpoints places the reader near the action and distant from it in turns, until there is almost a hypnotic tone to the story. Or, a better way to put it is there is a nightmarish quality, where events are beyond the reader's ability to change or comprehend, like the coming of a sudden violent storm.

So what was Wells getting at, specifically? Placing the book in context makes it obvious. The British Empire bestrode the world, dominant for centuries. Like the Martians, it could come and go as it would into any part of the world, its own agenda paramount. Wells was making some sharp societal observations about his nation.

The Martians are implacable and irresistible, their great metal tripodal machines striding the countryside and cities like colossi - not like; they are colossi. When humans prove troublesome, the Martians simply lay down clouds of killing gas, like an exterminator might fumigate a house for rats. There is an air of doom, in the sense of the word as fate, or judgment, here meted out by an uncaring universe rather than a divine hand. And what sins are being punished? One, above all: hubris. Man had come to see himself as the ruler of his planet, and, by assumption, the universe. The Martians were simply an instrument of the universe, sent to disabuse humans of their presumption.

Certainly the Martians were felled by simple organisms (I won't even SPOILER ALERT that; who doesn't know this about the story?), ones that Man himself could easily resist. Yet are not countless humans killed by diseases everyday, diseases that elude even our best science? In the end, Wells' conclusion was one that could apply to any empire, in any time: even the greatest of human powers is still subject to the world around it, helpless before the whims and onslaughts of time or chance or even the most humble forms of life on his own planet. Our greatest folly is to believe we control the destiny of everything around us; at best, we exert some control over our own actions.

I would have ended on that somber, high-falutin' note, but there was something else I wanted to add. Wells' story is a pretty good tale of terror. Like Godzilla some 60 years later, the giant Martian machines run over and through anything in their way, heat rays crisping any who don't flee. It isn't an adventure tale, by any means; no heroes show up to save the day. But for a glorious moment, Wells gives us a glimpse of a story that might have been just that heroic: the attack by the Royal Navy's torpedo ram ship, the Thunder Child. The Thunder Child charges into the fray, intercepting the Martians that have waded out into the English Channel to destroy the fleet of ships desperately carrying refugees to the continent. Ramming first one tripod and then another, the doomed ship  manages to evoke a bit of hope before it meets its fate. It's a thrilling sequence.

The War of the Worlds is a true classic. The power of the narrative makes it obvious to me why it has endured for well over a century. In its time, there couldn't have been anything else remotely like it. It's hard to imagine what science fiction, or even pop culture in general, would have looked like without it. It's also far ahead of its time; it would be decades before science fiction could match it again for its literary and intellectual quality. In fact, it reads better and more logically than a lot of science fiction I've read from the 1920s and 1930s. A great book I should have read years ago.

Brace yourselves: it's a Dark Dimension crossover!

It's the showdown you've been waiting for!

Marvel as I join my Distinguished Colleague at Dog Star Omnibus for the crossover of the millennium!

Thrill as titans clash in a conflict for the ages!

Dive for cover as the words fly in a literary lambaste!

Your eyes will reveal to you wonders that will leave you gape-mouthed in disbelief!

Face front, True Believers! Lash yourselves to something solid and behold a meeting of minds unimagined heretofore. Mountains will fall and continents will be riven asunder as you stand witness to:

Captain's Blog pt. 44: The Storybook Records

You dare not miss it!

In other words, come take a look as I make a guest-blogging appearance at Dog Star Omnibus' Star Trek Power Records post.

'Nuff said!

Captain Blood: His Odyssey

Sabatini's Captain Blood: His Odyssey is a defining book for the swashbuckling buccaneer genre. I wish I'd read it as a kid, but I think I got more out of it as an adult. There is a lot of derring-do and high adventure, but there is also a good bit of history.

Peter Blood, adventurer, soldier, and physician, is caught up in the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685 and railroaded into a conviction of treason. The charges are spurious, at best, but given the political climate of the times, very little is needed to have Blood packed off into slavery in the Caribbean. Blood is given more latitude due to his expertise as a doctor, but it's still a dreary, harsh, and often arbitrarily cruel existence.

When the Spanish raid Barbados, Blood and a number of other slaves take the opportunity to make an escape. They seize the Spanish ship and off they go, with Blood's experience as a captain earlier in his career making him the natural skipper. Eventually, Blood's daring and ingenuity make him the scourge of the Spanish in the Caribbean, and beloved by buccaneers.

Along the way, Blood makes a number of enemies, from Colonel Bishop, who owned Blood as a slave, to a family of Spanish admirals. He makes a few friends, including Colonel Bishop's beautiful niece, Arabella, but he is destined to suffer from a series of romantic misunderstandings with her and a fellow suitor that will almost bring him and much of the British-ruled Caribbean to ruin.

There is a lot of fun here, with Blood leading raids and fighting off attackers almost non-stop, except for months of lazing around Tortuga or Jamaica, often feeling sorry for himself because of being scorned by Arabella. He also walks a tightrope between being a buccaneer preying upon the Spanish without being technically a British agent, and outright piracy. He briefly enters into the service of both the English and the French at different times, but both times he is faced with superiors so ludicrously villainous that he soon finds ways that his contracts with them have been violated, and thus, null and void. Colonel Bishop is one of those superiors, and is so wrapped up in his desire for revenge on Blood for escaping slavery, that he spends a good bit of his time as governor of Jamaica thinking of ways to hang Blood rather than doing anything productive.

George MacDonald Fraser provides an interesting introduction to the book I have, taking us back to his days as a Scottish schoolboy discovering Sabatini's book and being transported by it. Fraser is, of course, best-known for his Flashman books, about one of the worst poltroons I've ever read about. Although Peter Blood is a heroic character, always ready to risk death for what is right, one can discern Sabatini's influence on Fraser's writing, mostly in how deftly both authors wove the exploits of their characters around and through historical events.

That's N.C. Wyeth's artwork on the cover, which is the same painting that graced early editions of the book in 1922. Wyeth's work is always interesting, and in this case, it's easy to see where Errol Flynn's look came from when he played the title role of the 1935 movie of the book.

The book alternates between lighteartedness and some rather grim events, giving it a jarring, dichotomous feel. Also, major characters die "offstage" at times, making the demise of some of Blood's most persistent antagonists and faithful companions frustratingly anticlimactic. The ending of the book itself is oddly, and ambiguously, ominous, casting a shadow on what might have been a happy resolution. All of these things sound like I found them to be detriments, but I ended up finding them adding to the mystique of the book. There was something realistic about it all, with no character safe and some plot points left dangling, as often happens in real life. Sometimes life is messy and unresolved, and even Captain Blood cannot swashbuckle his way out of every grim situation...even ones he'd hoped for and found not as satisfying when he finally got his wish.

Starlight and more...

Late last night, closer to dawn than Midnight, I awoke and, feeling restless, stepped outside for some air and to let the dog do his business. The sky was star-filled and very peaceful. As I scanned the skies, to the northeast I saw a strobing flash I assumed to be a jetliner's running lights. When I see a red-eye flight tracing its way across the sky, I tend to look and ruminate on all the souls winging their way to their destinations way up there in the firmament.

But there was no further flashing. I stood for a moment, puzzled. There was no plane up there, just the stars. I don't know if I saw one of them pulse, or if it was a shooting star. I've seen plenty of shooting stars in my life, and this didn't look like any of those. A star that pulsed like that - far brighter than the twinkling you see when the atmosphere bends the light about - would be an astronomical event that would, at the very least, show up on space-related websites and blogs. I don't know a lot about astronomy, despite a lifelong love of it, but I do know enough to understand that such a pulse is a big deal in the astronomical world. So far, I haven't seen any mention of a star flashing last night.

So, the only conclusion I can come to is that it was either a very, very ephemeral shooting star, or a plane that had its lights out and suddenly flashed one of them once. The latter seems unlikely, so I'm left with the former. It would have been cool to witness a major event in the stargazing world, but hey, a shooting star is always a treat.

The road goes ever on...Palantir Quest

 The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with eager feet,

Until it joins some larger way

Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter I: A Long-Expected Party

The Lord of the Rings is a book of endings: the end of the time of Elves in Middle-earth; the end of the reign of the Stewards in Gondor; the end of King Theoden's line, and his life; the end of the tale of the Ringbearers; and, of course, the end of the great Shadow that had darkened the world for millennia, which also ended the third, and very troubled, age of Middle-earth.

Yet, it is also a book of beginnings. The Fourth Age dawns as the book ends. The age of Men begins. Mirkwood is reborn as Greenwood. Elves and Dwarves move into new homes. Throughout Middle-earth a Renaissance starts, with the Peoples of Middle-earth coming together to create a new society. Rebuilding of much that was destroyed is begun. That which was lost is recovered. There is much remembered sorrow, but much hope for the future.

I never felt the need for Tolkien to write more about the Fourth Age. The story, as written, is deeply satisfying, even if also deeply melancholy. His attempt to set a tale in this new Age was soon abandoned by him, and it's understandable why; after the towering achievement of The Lord of the Rings, everything else would have been anticlimactic, and risk undercutting the power of that epic.

However, the needs of a reader and the desires of a roleplaying gamer are two different things. The Fourth Age of Middle-earth is ripe with opportunity for glorious deeds. Many - though not all - roleplaying games are, at their hearts, very optimistic. Adventurers go out to tame the wilds, recover the lost, and rebuild the ruined. For such games, the Fourth Age is a nigh-perfect setting. 

Sauron is gone, but his legacy still lingers. Middle-earth is still a dangerous place. Ancient secrets stand ready to be brought to light. For the first time, Iron Crown Enterprises decided to explore this new Age with a tour-de-force adventure.

I said in the last post that I had finished with the setting sourcebooks for the Middle-earth Roleplaying game. One last book remains that fits within the parameters of this blog. This is not a book about a place, but rather a grand epic journey of exploration and adventure across the entire continent detailed in all those books I've discussed before. This is a search for some of the great treasures of Middle-earth, long thought lost. This is:

Not the most dynamic cover, but one that helps capture an evocative mood and personage of a long-forgotten age.

After years of publishing solid, meticulously-detailed books and adventures for their Middle-earth Roleplaying game, Iron Crown Enterprises began to slow the pace of their production. At least, it seemed that way to me. By the mid-1990s, I rarely saw new MERP books. Occasionally I did see revised and expanded versions of earlier material, ranging from Arnor, which covered the same region as Rangers of the North: the Kingdom of Arthedain, Lost Realm of Cardolan, Bree and the Barrow-downs, and Rhudaur (in the form of Hillmen of the Trollshaws), to Moria, to Mirkwood. There was even, finally, a book dedicated to the Shire itself. Unfortunately for me, though, I decided to pass up these bulked-up books, figuring at the time that I already had the originals, so why would I need these? Given the crazy prices I've seen some of them going for now, and the revised Moria book I did, luckily, find for cheap, I now regret not picking them up when I saw them back then. Regardless, it seemed to me that MERP was slowly fading away as a game; in fact, when I found Palantir Quest for sale as a brand-new product, I was surprised. I'd thought the game had finally given up the ghost before then.

Palantir Quest further surprised me for what it was. Though the bulk of the material ICE published for MERP was set in 1640 of the Third Age of Middle-earth, Palantir Quest finally broke new ground and set the adventure in the Fourth Age. While many of the books and adventures that existed by then had brief notes for the setting at other times, Palantir Quest was the first to be explicitly set after Sauron's fall and the end of the War of the Ring. This was something I'd waited a long time for.

One of the problems with setting a game in Middle-earth is the carefully plotted timeline Tolkien had established. One could ignore the timeline and allow the player characters to do what they wanted, even to the point of changing the entire course of the narrative of The Lord of the Rings. ICE attempted to head-off this potential problem (though some might not see it as a problem at all) by making the time setting for their game material more than 1400 years before Bilbo was born. That era was rife with adventuring possibilities, with little chance of knocking all of Tolkien's story off-track. The downside was that Middle-earth did not much resemble what most potential players would be familiar with going in. There was no Rohan, and there was still a king in Gondor, for two big examples. Still, there was a lot for adventurers to do...but it just never really appealed to me, to be frank.

I've detailed elsewhere how the Fourth Age of Middle-earth is full of gaming potential, without the baggage of books and movies detailing everything about it. The downside to that, of course, is that players, being what they are, and most likely Lord of the Rings fans to boot, will also likely miss being able to interact with some of the setting's most famous characters. Another complaint I've heard about the Fourth Age is that there is "nothing to do." The One Ring is gone, Sauron has fallen, and even his greatest servants have been vanquished. It's an understandable reaction, of course; who wouldn't want the chance to at least help overthrow Sauron? Conversely, many roleplaying game settings don't have such a narrative focus around which they revolve, making the Fourth Age of Middle-earth much more reminiscent of them. It's a wide-open time, with plenty still left to do, and an incredibly long and detailed backstory for it all.

This isn't really related to the adventure at hand, but shows a pretty spectacular moment in Middle-earth history.

Palantir Quest cuts right to the heart of the matter by centering around one of the great remaining mysteries of Middle-earth. The seeing-stones of the folk who founded Arnor and Gondor were powerful and coveted artifacts, desired by everyone from the kings of Gondor to the Dark Lord himself. Few in number in the first place, their numbers dwindled as the centuries went by, lost to war and betrayal. Yet they weren't truly lost; palantiri are nearly indestructible. One was taken to the Uttermost West by the Elves who left Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age. Some may have been rendered unusable: the one in Minas Tirith would only show flames and Denethor's burning hands after that doom-haunted Steward of Gondor took it to his funeral pyre, though someone as strong-willed as Aragorn likely could have used it if he exerted himself greatly; while even if recovered, the one Sauron held at Barad-dur is likely too tainted by evil to ever be usable again by mortals. The Orthanc stone, used by Saruman, is the last known working palantir in Middle-earth, held and used by King Elessar (aka Aragorn) in Minas Tirith. However, three stones still remain unaccounted for, though still in Middle-earth. Locating and recovering them would be a great step in helping the Reunited Kingdom rebuild.

I would have thought they'd make the pedestal taller for the palantiri...

The three remaining palantiri were lost to the depths; the one in Osgiliath fell into the mighty Anduin River, while the other two, one that had been in the tower at Weathertop, the other from the long-ruined city of Annuminas, were lost together in a shipwreck in the far northern sea. These latter two are the focus of the titular quest of the book discussed here.

Polar bears?

Woolly oliphaunts?

Yes, please.

Palantir Quest is a true tour-de-force adventure. It ranges across Middle-earth, from Minas Tirith to the far north, and many familiar sites in-between. It even moves into territory only hinted at by Tolkien, including a hazardous sea-passage to an incredibly ancient ruin on the last bit of land remaining from the great continent of Numenor, which was drowned beneath the sea due to the hubris of its folk. If that last reminds you of Atlantis, it should; the tale of the Numenoreans, Aragorn's ancestors, is, indeed, Tolkien's take on the Atlantean legends. It's not an exaggeration to say that this quest is for lost artifacts of Atlantis, to help rebuild an ancient civilization that fell to its own folly and the anger of the gods.

This is what is called an "event-based" adventure, as opposed to a "site-based" adventure. However, many of the events take place in certain sites, so, in effect, this book is a pretty decent balance of the two. "Event-based" adventures have a negative connotation to some, since such adventures acquired the reputation of having things happen beyond the will or ability of the player's characters to change them. In effect, the players and their characters would become spectators to a story, not forging their own destiny. At their worst, these kinds of adventures are likened to amusement park rides through "haunted houses" or "jungles," where the riders are in no real danger, but also cannot truly interact with what's going on. They're also called "railroads," since they only go in one predetermined route (video games that are like this are said to be "on rails").  

Palantir Quest doesn't fall prey to much of these problems, though I'd suggest a careful reading of the book by the person who is going to run it for the other players. I suggest this so that the gamemaster (the person running the adventure) can grasp some of the possible side adventures, and add to them when and where appropriate. As an example of what I'm getting at, a brief interlude in the Barrow-downs could end up becoming a much more involved adventure of its own; also, the trek from Bree to Annuminas is glossed over, but the players, if they're like most gamers, will likely want to veer off the road or explore the wilderness. Thankfully, ICE's practices of old remain intact in Palantir Quest: there are detailed charts of random encounters possible for most of the regions passed through on the quest. I highly recommend their use, as, too, the climate tables. I'd also recommend the use of the regional sourcebooks in tandem with this book, as many of them contain information easily usable or adapted for the Fourth Age of Middle-earth.

The art is especially good in this book. While it doesn't contain the full-color Peter Fenlon maps of so many MERP books, it does have snippets of them, apparently reused from other books in the series. There are a number of other maps, of specific locations, that help detail the constituent adventures of the larger campaign, and which are pretty nice in themselves. I do have to mention the art of Kent Burles, which makes up much of the character and creature illustrations. I'm particularly enamored of his art, and it's too bad that I haven't seen more of it, either in other MERP books (besides in the expanded Moria sourcebook I mentioned and linked to above) or any other game books I've run across. Still, I greatly appreciate what there is.

I'm avoiding spoilers in this overview. I know it's an almost-twenty-year-old book, but adventures for roleplaying games are, by their nature, evergreen. I'll quote some of the text from the back cover of the book to give an idea of what the quest is all about:

Strange portents in the great Seeing-stone of Minas Tirith give promise that one of the lost palantiri of the North has returned to the lands of Men. Can the adventurers find this legendary treasure and bring it to King Elessar? Rogues of the wilds, blizzards out of the Forodwaith, and the greed in Men's hearts all conspire against them.

Plus, the player's characters get to hobnob with Aragorn and impress him. That's cool in itself.

I really like this depiction of Aragorn, or King Elessar, all decked out in his royal armor.

Being given this quest should come after the player's characters have established a name for themselves. You could start the campaign out cold, with the players using new characters generated to be powerful enough to take care of themselves in a dangerous quest, but it would be way more satisfying for them to be given this quest after several accomplishments under their belts from earlier adventures. Successfully completing it not only results in some great rewards, but also in gaining the trust of the King of Gondor. Of course, such trust means even more quests assigned...there is the issue of the still-missing palantir, washed down mighty Anduin and, likely, into the sea. Who knows where it now rests, or if someone has already recovered it and holds it, ignorant of its power, far to the South? Plus, Aragorn and King Eomer of Rohan will be striking into the East and South to vanquish the armies of Sauron's erstwhile allies, and seasoned, trustworthy lieutenants are always needed...

These places aren't going to explore themselves, after all.

This adventure has a lot of potential for fun. It's a well-thought-out campaign, taking the characters into interesting places in Middle-earth, some they will almost certainly recognize, others merely hinted at in the books and movies. It illustrates really clearly how the Fourth Age of Middle-earth was an untapped reservoir of adventure possibilities, and how disappointing it is that this reservoir was only tapped to this much depth the one time.

In my last post, I noted that it was the last of my essays and reviews of Iron Crown Enterprise's regional sourcebooks for their Middle-earth Roleplaying game. This post is the last on this blog for any MERP books. This book was unique in being a whole complex series of linked adventures, a campaign, rather than detailing a region and including adventure ideas, or an adventure of lesser scope and impact. It might interest the non-gamer who wonders what might have happened after Sauron was defeated; game adventures like this aren't necessarily the best reads for those unacquainted with roleplaying games, but this one is clearly-written enough to be worth a page-through. As such, it seemed fitting to end this series of posts with this book.

So there you have it. A series of articles about MERP books, books that I spent a lot of time poring over long after many a witching hour. In fact, these books were some of the first things I thought of when I first started this Dark Dimension blog. It's satisfying to have taken a close look at all of them, and written about them for those interested. This isn't the end of Dark Dimension, just the end of a project I didn't think I'd have the patience to complete. Stick around, and I'll see what other obscure subjects I can explore that are best perused on the other side of Midnight.

"...the Guarded City, with its seven walls of stone so strong and old that it seemed to have been not builded but carven by giants out of the bones of the earth": Cities of Middle-earth - Minas Tirith

The spiritual heart of Minas Tirith.

This is the last bastion for good in Middle-earth; should it fall, all hope falls with it. A great white stone city, anchored on a mighty mountain, Minas Tirith is the capital and bulwark of Gondor. It is the focal point of Sauron's wrath, the last major obstacle between the Dark Lord and total domination of Middle-earth.

The fate of Middle-earth rested upon the strength of the Great Gate holding just long enough...

As far as I know, this was the only hardback volume in the Middle-earth Roleplaying (MERP) game line by Iron Crown Enterprise (ICE). The Angus McBride cover depicts the climactic scene when the great gate of the city has been breached and Gandalf confronts the Witch-king, the greatest of the Ringwraiths. In many ways, this painting is symbolic of the entire story of the Lord of the Rings, distilling it down to its essence. It's a fitting image for the book and for the MERP line in general.

Minas Tirith was, long before the time of Bilbo and Frodo, one of two tower-crowned fortresses that flanked the greatest city of Gondor, its capital, Osgiliath. At that time, it was known as Minas Anor, the Tower of the Sun. Across the mighty Anduin river, nestled near the Ephel Duath, or Mountains of Shadow, was its sister-fortress Minas Ithil, the Tower of the Moon. For centuries the three cities flourished. Then civil war and plague struck Gondor, and Osgiliath began a long decline into ruin. Then Sauron's lieutenant, the Witch-king, struck Minas Ithil and seized it for the Dark Lord, and it became known as Minas Morgul, the Tower of Black Magic. Afterward, Minas Anor was renamed Minas Tirith, the Tower of Guard, and became the capital and main fortress of Gondor.

The lands immediately surrounding Minas Tirith, including the Pelennor Fields where much blood was shed.

As the centuries wore on, Gondor remained strong, though decline was obvious. King Earnur disappeared into Minas Morgul after foolishly challenging the Witch-king to single combat, leaving no heir. From then on, for nearly a millennium, Gondor was ruled by Stewards who ruled from Minas Tirith. A slow malaise began to take hold of Gondor, a pessimism that poisoned the will of the people there, until by the time Aragorn came to claim his birthright, Minas Tirith was half empty and awaiting the inevitable. Worse by far was the secret that Denethor II, the ruling Steward, had been using the Palantir, the great seeing-stone, to spy on Sauron. The Dark Lord knew this, and manipulated what Denethor saw, poisoning the noble steward's mind with dark images of defeat, until the Steward was driven to near-insanity...and beyond. The corruption of Sauron had finally taken hold directly within Minas Tirith, at the very pinnacle of its power. The great city was teetering on the brink of oblivion.

The Tower of Anarion. This book's interpretation of the city includes a spire on the pinnacle of rock right above the Great Gate.

Cities of Middle-earth: Minas Tirith details the city at a time before Minas Ithil had fallen and a king still sat in the great Tower of Ecthelion. The longevity of the city, and its relative stability, makes the book still usable in any era. Some attention is given to what the city is like in other time periods, and it's easy enough to adjust how the city is described. The culture, architecture, guilds, military, and government remain essentially the same, though, of course, the Stewards take the place of the Kings when Earnur disappears. I've criticized some MERP books for not being very true to the setting Tolkien created, but this book cleaves closely to a Tolkienesque feel. This may not be exactly what Tolkien had in mind, but it evokes the city in a way that seems authentic. As far as I can tell, none of it conflicts with what Tolkien wrote. This is a well-detailed book, and will appeal to those who enjoy reading about Middle-earth, including non-gamers.

For gamers, though, this is quite a package. The city is meticulously detailed, from the surrounding Pelennor Fields to the White Tower at the city's heart. Numerous characters and organizations are given for the player's characters to interact with as they explore one of the iconic locations of Middle-earth. For a long time, I didn't see how there could be much for players to do here, but as time has gone on and I've gotten (somewhat) more mature, I see a wealth of adventure opportunities within the city's environs. Those looking for a "hive of scum and villainy" to carouse in will, perhaps, be disappointed; this is a city in which the adventures are more about maneuvering within various social strata and finding subtle and deeply-rooted corruption, not barroom brawls and "kick in the door" looting. Libraries full of forgotten lore, nobles with mysterious agendas, rivalries between guilds, and even a thieves guild all provide adventure hooks, and any reasonably curious adventurers will find plentiful ways to get into trouble. Even if players simply want their characters to take a tour of one of the great sites of Middle-earth, the information is here for the gamemaster to provide a textured description of the city. This includes sites made famous in the narrative of the book, such as the resting place for Minas Tirith's venerated dead, the Hallows.

This texture is reinforced with the usual MERP game material. Descriptions of the flora and fauna and weather of the area is given. There are tables of major characters to be found in the city, including a table of random encounters for each level, including the Pelennor Fields and the Harlond, Minas Tirith's ship dockyard. Random encounters range from cutpurses to tax collectors...though it may be tough to tell the difference. Even if renamed and used in another setting, there is plenty of material here to run a large, important city.

The only weak point of the book is its illustrations. Let me be clear: Peter Fenlon's maps are as gorgeous as they always are, and some of the high points of the book. The floorplans of many buildings are also well-done. The other art itself is good, though none of it is very dynamic. There are many portraits of city inhabitants, but most are static headshots. Many of those are by the redoubtable Liz Danforth, so it's impossible to really complain about them.

A mysterious inhabitant of Minas Tirith, with designs known only to her.

The problem is the paucity of pictures showing the city as a lived-in place. Street scenes and buildings views are few and far between, and, as with the character portraits, are not very evocative. The building plans are outstanding, but some perspective shots of them inhabited and in use would have helped bring some life to the city. Published about a decade before the Lord of the Rings movies, there wouldn't have been a lot of visual reference material to bolster the book's relative lack of them. Now, though, I'd recommend supplementing the book with still shots from the movies when using it in a game. Still, though, that Angus McBride cover may be the best image he did for the MERP line, and it makes up quite a bit of the ground not covered by the interior illustrations.

And let's not forget this nifty overhead streetplan of the city.

This is a fine book, one of the best of the MERP line. As true to Tolkien's writing as it can be while filling in a lot of detail, Cities of Middle-earth: Minas Tirith is an impressive work for gamers and non-gamers like. Readers and viewers of the Lord of the Rings see it at some of its worst, most desperate moments, yet it still manages to be remembered as a great, beautiful city. Although shadowed by the threat of Mordor to the east, it still manages to shine brightly to the Free Peoples of Middle-earth. Its greatest potential for adventure is during its darkest times; the city would welcome aid as Sauron's forces pour forth to conquer the city. Even after the Dark Lord falls, there is still much to do within the city; help is needed to rebuild, and the spies and agents of Sauron may still reside within, preparing final spiteful strikes to avenge their fallen master. Even ICE saw potential for Minas Tirith as an adventure site in the Fourth Age.

A splendid yet empty hall in Minas Tirith.

This is the final Middle-earth location sourcebook I'll be dealing with here on Dark Dimension. There is one last book in the line I'll cover here, but that will come later. There are other books in the series, but they are more geared to gamers, and will eventually be discussed in another blog. After that last book, I'll swing Dark Dimension's direction away from game books, at least for a while, and delve into more generally interesting topics. I hope everyone who's been reading has enjoyed these posts and gotten something out of them. I've enjoyed writing them and looking back on 25+ years of gaming. The last few posts have taken quite a bit of time to finish and publish, and I still have yet to convince myself to write smaller posts in the interim to break up the long gaps. I hope to fix that, with a few smaller posts here and there, but we'll see...