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Anyone who reads through the whole of
Derleth's anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos will likely be surprised
at the mediocre quality of many of the stories collected there. Aside from HPL's
own tales, one of the few bright spots is Robert E. Howard's "The Black
Stone". This tale, in fact, must be considered one of the best Lovecraftian
pastiches ever penned. We would rate it higher than the middling evaluation
implied in Ben SoIon's description of "The Black Stone" as "a
better-than-average Cthuloid tale" by Howard. ("Howard's Cthuloid
Tales" in The Blade of Conan. p. 146.) What Solon seems to mean is
that the story is at least somewhat superior to Howard's other lame attempts to
reproduce Lovecraftian fiction. The rest of the stories of this type, Solon
thinks, share in the near-amateurish imitativeness of Lovecraft's other
impersonators. We agree that "The Black Stone" is far and away the
best of Howard's Lovecraft-like tales. But ironically, it is also by far the
most imitative, forming an exact parallel to Lovecraft's own story "The
Nameless City". Yet even this massive borrowing is forgivable, since it is
arguable that Howard's is the better tale.
The Black Clone
In both "The Nameless City", written
in 1921, and "The Black Stone", published in 1931 and written perhaps a
year or so earlier, the protagonists are traveling adventurers who seek out all
sorts of curiositiee. Lovecraft's quester is hot on the trail of an ancient
Arabian city, whispered of in campfire legends. Howard's vagabond cannot rest
until he has seen for himself a mysterious obelisk in Hungary, which he has read
about in connection with both the demonologist Von Junzt (author of Unaussprechlichen
Kulten) and the poet Justin Geoffrey. Arriving in the respective vicinity of
each, the adventurers pay no heed to the warnings they receive. At the site
itself, both find that the object of their quest is a specimen of time-worn
masonry, so old as to predate not only any known culture, but the human race
Itself. And eventually it becomes clear that the stone ruins are merely the tip
of the iceberg. They are but the exposed remains of huge subterranean
fortresses. Finally, the protagonists of both tales have ghostly visions of the
long-dead inhabitants of the caverns below. Lovecraft's visionary sees "a
nightmare horde of rushing devils; hate-distorted, grotesquely panoplied,
half-transparent devils of a race no man might mistake --- the crawling reptiles
of the nameless city." Howard's dreamer sees a soundless holograph of a
frenzied bloody ceremony presided over by "a huge monstrous toad-like thing
[that] squatted on the top of the monolith!" Awakening, both thrill-seekers
are suitably frightened out of their wits.
Not only are the plot outlines
point-for-point the same, but the stories are even introduced with identical
devices. In each case, the narrator knows of a previous dreamer at the same
haunted site who preserved his nightmares in verse. Both are even called
"the mad poet".
"It was of this place that Abdul
Alhazred the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplainable
couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons, even death may die.
("The Nameless City")
"And I suddenly saw a connection
between this Stone and a certain weird and fantastic poem written by the mad
poet, Justin Geoffrey's The People of the Monolith. Inquiries led to
the information that Geoffrey had indeed written that poem while travelling in
Hungary, and I could not doubt that the Black Stone was the very monolith to
which he referred in his strange verse.
"They say foul beings of Old
Times still lurk
In dark forgotten corners of the world,
And Gates still gape to loose, on certain nights,
Shapes pent in Hell."
("The Black Stone")
Even the word "pent" appears in
"The Nameless City" in a parallel context. The lizards evidence
"the pent-up viciousness of desolate eternities."
With all these similarities, it is hard to
resist the conclusion that Howard borrowed substantially from Lovecraft's
earlier story to create "The Black Stone". Yet the latter is a better
story. Howard weaves a richer fabric for his tale by filling in the Dracula-like
Carpathian background and recounting in some detail how his hero traces down the
monolith. Lovecraft takes the analogous elements for granted, with the result
that the story seems to spring out of thin air and we do not have the impression
of a real search ending terribly. And though it must be admitted that not
too much actually happens in Howard's story, there is an interesting
climax (the dream-vision), as well as a satisfactory resolution (the discovery
of the scroll recounting the death of the toad-god and its corroboration of the
vision). Lovecraft's story, on the other hand, plods along toward a final
disclosure that has been let out of the bag long before. Sufficient hints have
indicated that the inhabitants of the city were intelligent reptiles, and once
the narrator catches up to the reader on this score, his actual revelation is
rather confusingly stated. Did he escape? Were there any lizards left alive? Or
what?
Rogues in Arkham House
But "The Name less City" was not
the only Lovecraftian quarry mined by Howard. In addition, he seems to have
lifted one sequence from "The Mound", which of course resembles "The
Nameless City" in several respects, notably the underground city lit by a
misty radiance. Both "The Mound" and "The Black Stone"
depict the explorer being warned away by stories about ill-fated locals who had
been foolish enough to spend the night on the haunted ground. They came back not
quite right, tormented henceforth by maddening dreams.
Howard has probably also taken from
"The Mound" the device of the ancient scroll locked in a buried
container. In "The Mound", the scroll is the testament of sixteenth century
Spanish conquistador Panfilo de Zamacona. In "The Black Stone", it is
Turkish scribe and soldier Selim Bahadur, from the same century. Lovecraft uses
the scroll's story as the basis for most of his adventure, and the few events
directly involving the modern protagonist serve but to corroborate Zamacona's
narrative. As we have seen, the reverse is true in Howard's story.
The last important source for "The
Black Stone" was Lovecraft's tongue-in-cheek "History of the Necronomicon",
where he recounts the doom of Abdul Alhazred. "He is said by Ebn Khallikan
. . . to have been seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured
horribly before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses." Compare the
death of Von Junzt according to "The Black Stone": "Von Junzt was
found dead [in a locked and bolted chamber] with the marks of taloned fingers on
his throat." And "what of the monstrous hand that strangled out his
life?" In both cases, the coroner reports the cause of death as a phantom
monster suspiciously like the one that rent Lovecraft himself limb-from-limb in
Robert Bloch's "The Shambler from the Stars".
Incidentally, following the description of
Von Junzt's demise, Howard provides possibly the best depiction of the
"forbidden, blasphemous knowledge" motif. A colleague reads the
manuscript Von Junzt was completing at the time of his death. He is so shocked
that he burns the pages and slits his throat. He literally could not live with
the knowledge of what he had read.
So, "The Black Stone", though one of
Howard's most "derivative" stories in one sense, is also one of his
best. After all, as Conan could attest, the important thing isn't the stealing
itself, but what you do with the loot once you've got it.
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