« Podcasts for Your Consideration | Main | News and Notes »
April 16, 2007
Pulp Review: Brood of the Witch-Queen
So one of the things I'm occupying my time with these days is making a serious study of pulp fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I'm talking the real pulps from back in the day, like The Shadow and Doc Savage as well as Lovecraft (of course) and many others. There's also a rich French pulp tradition that I've just recently gotten turned on to and am in the process of exploring. I love these old pulps, and in some way I kind of feel that this is the kind of writing I'm trying to do in my own way. Sort of. More on that at some other, much later date. In the meantime, I'm going to use the site here to keep a kind of log of my reactions to the various pulps as I read them.
I started this round with a relatively obscure book (at least compared to say, The Shadow), a supernatural horror novel by Sax Rohmer, who's better known as the creator of Fu Manchu. We'll get some Fu Manch reviews in here later. If you're interested in the book you can, as I did, download a free e-book copy of it here at manybooks.net There are actually a bunch of the earlier pulps up there, including five Fu Manch novels. None of the big names like Shadow or Doc Savage though. Anyway, let's get on with the review...
Brood of The Witch-Queen
Every inch of this story screams pulp to me, and not always in a good way. There are lots of exclamations points and surprises, along with a few shocking plot diversions that don't really connect to the story very well but add some excitement and horror to the atmosphere. It moves along at breakneck speed and piles one dangerous encounter or mysterious magical murder on top of another. Set in 1914, it moves from Oxford to London to Egypt, and back to England and features witches, vampires, curses, mummies, and even a fire elemental. As with Rohmer's Fu Manchu stories, the villain is by far the most interesting aspect of the story, and seeing what he'll do next is the main reason to keep reading.
The story pits a father and son, two stalwart Scottsmen named Cairn, against the androgynous and evil Antony Ferarra. The younger Cairn, Robert, knows Antony from school, while his father, Dr. Cairn, was best friends with Antony's adopted father. It is only as he comes into his majority and his adopted father dies under mysterious circumstances that Antony begins to come into his evil own. He turns out to be quite a powerful magician, apparently owing to some secret in his heritage that only Dr. Cairn knows (but he's not telling). Antony develops a penchant for seducing young women and then killing them via magical, untraceable means, and soon seems to be a threat against his adopted cousin Myra (the damsel so often in distress and the object of Robert's passion). In defense of Myra, Robert and his father go after Antony, and a deadly game of blockheaded cat and magical mouse ensues.
I really had little use for the square jawed, dim Robert, but his father Dr. Cairn is a much more interesting character. He's got his own secret and his own reasons for feeling somewhat responsible for what Antony Ferrara has become, and these feeling keep him hamstrung in the beginning when the evil magician's just getting started. The fundamental and most interesting conundrum this book poses is this: what do law abiding, good people do when faced with a murderous evil that kills in ways no legal system is ever capable of dealing with? Do you take the law into your own hands and be judged a murderer?
Despite the cliches (Myra seems to actually swoon quite a lot) and some uneven plotting (what's with that vampire in the Scottish family's background), I enjoyed this story, mostly to see what the villain would do next and to discover how Dr. Cairn would try and stop him. It actually reminded me a great deal of a Call of Cthulhu adventure, and I think someone could turn it into a role-playing game scenario pretty easily. And in the end, the true origin of Antony's powers is definitely something I hadn't seen before and offers a good object lesson about what can happen when one messes with mystical forces they don't fully understand. There's some original, unusual horror in here, mixed in with much that is familiar, but overall I'd say it's worth a quick read if you're looking for some fast and easy supernatural horror pulp.
3 out of 5 Witch Broodlings
Posted by rdakan at April 16, 2007 12:13 PM