My Top Ten Horrors

In no particular order, here are what probably my favorite horror short stories (though I would imagine I've forgotten something)--just in time for Halloween.  Links to e-texts provided where available.

"The Great God Pan" by Arthur Machen
"Who Goes There?" by John Campbell
"The Voice in the Night" by William Hope Hodgson
"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
"Into Whose Hands" by Karl Edward Wagner
"The Clown Puppet" by Thomas Ligotti
"Pigeons from Hell" by Robert E. Howard
"Don't Ask Jack" by Neil Gaiman
"Whisperer in the Darkness" by H.P. Lovecraft
"Born of Man and Woman" by Richard Matheson

Honorable mentions go to "Dread" by Clive Barker, "Dr. Locrian's Asylum" by Ligotti, "The River of Night's Dreaming" by Wagner, "The Sandman" by E.T.A. Hoffman, "The Repairer of Reputations" by Robert W. Chambers, and "The Second Variety" by Philip K. Dick.  Maybe I should have done a top twenty!

Warlord Wednesday: A Monster Memorial

In keeping with the season, I'd like to honor the various creatures, subhumans, demons and god-things, that have met their final reward through the efforts of Travis Morgan and his friends.  Who could forget these favorites:

The lizard-men Morgan found worshipping his plane in #3:

The tragic werewolf in the tower from #22:

The punk snow giant Morgan ran across in the mountains in issue #25:

The fish-men who bedeviled his submarine paramour in #24:

And post-Grell, the vampire queen of a frozen valley from #108:

Famous Monsters: The Mummy

In 1932, The mummy was the third of the classic Universal monsters to appear, following Dracula and Frankenstein who had debuted the previous year. It was probably Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 that raised the public profile of mummies--particularly Egyptian mummies--enough to get a film made based on the concept. Universal’s run of mummy movies was followed by a Hammer franchise in the fifties, and a post-Indiana Jones re-imagining in 1999 kicked off another series at Universal.

Like Frankenstein, mummies don’t usually get to be sexy...Well, except Valerie Leon as Princess Tera in Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb:

But the above photo illustrates one of the interesting things about movie mummies. At some point in the story, they tend to regain a less dessicated form and don’t really look like a mummy anymore. The other take frequently seen is to have the mummy be some mute automaton doing the evil bidding of some wicked priest--in other words a classic (pre-brain-eating) zombie.

Maybe this is the big problem with mummies. They're either essentially what gaming would call liches, or they’re zombies. It’s really only a roll of bandages and Egyptian bling that make them stand out.  Shamble, moan, strangle.  Repeat.

I suppose some difference can be discerned in their origins. Liches are boot-strapping undead; they’re generally self-created, and so have to be evil individuals of esoteric knowledge. Classic zombies are either living people (and so not undead at all), or they have something unfortunate (and undeserved) done to them after death by an evil individual of esoteric knowledge. Mummies are either being punished (in most of the mummy films), or honored or accidentally created (like real life).

And of course, they need not be Egyptian. Mummies come from all over, and some of these other mummies have made it into fiction. The Aztec mummy got its on film series, which includes a fight with a robot.

Not psychotronic enough for you? Well South of the Border, they don’t stop at just Aztec mummies. They've got a whole museum full of natural occurring mummies in Guanajuato. In film, these guys wind up fighting superhero luchadores on more than one occasion. Again, the differentiation between them and zombies is largely semantic. Still, Guanajuato’s peculiar mummies can be good game fodder, even without the masked wrestlers.

No reason mummies should have be from historic eras. Howard’s titular mummy from the modern adventure yarn Skull-Face, is Kathulos, an undead sorcerer from Atlantis.  Now he's a mummy who doesn't just shamble and moan.

Famous Monsters: Frankenstein

With Halloween drawing nigh, I thought I’d take a look at the iconic Universal monsters and what inspiration can be found to freshen up their traditional protrayals in gaming. Since vampires (particularly Dracula) have gotten a lot of virtual ink in the blogosphere of late, I figured I’d with start with the vice-president of the monster club, Frankenstein’s monster. Frankenstein, to his friends.

I suppose you could call his type “a construct” or a “golem.” It’s not really an archetype that seems to fire people's imaginations to the degree the vampire does. No series of sexed up urban fantasies for the ladies about a hunky dude made from stitched together corpse pieces (at least not that I’m aware of).

Comics still seem to love Frankie, though. Mark Wheatley gave us Frankenstein’s Mobster, where a slain cop in a city overrun by crime becomes a “made man”--literally. Grant Morrison offered up a more over-the-top, pulpy adventurer Frankenstein as part of his Seven Soldiers line. Somewhat similar (though less over-the-top) was the Wachowski Brothers’ alt-history, Doc Frankenstein. 

I should point out combining Frankenstein with pulpy elements didn't start with these recent comics.  The Utley and Waldrop novellette "Black as Pit, From Pole to Pole" (1977) has Frankenstein wandering into the Pellucidar-esque Hollow Earth.  Dell comics made him a superhero back in the sixties.

Perhaps the best way to reimagine Frankenstein is in terms of what he's come to represent. Critics of genetic engineering and the like are always invoking his name. Splice is just the most recent riff on this sort of (post-)modern Prometheus.

How can this all be related to gaming? Well, the flesh golem of AD&D’s Monster Manual is the classic movie Frankenstein, and most sci-fi/conspiracy games do a riff on the more modern science-fear inspired Frankensteins. It would be cool, though, to see a more intelligent, villainous Frankie. Something along the lines of his original portrayal.  Something less "stand-in for fears of man overstepping his place," and more singular menace.

Jess Nevins argues in Fantastic Victoriana that Shelley’s protrayal of the monster has a tinge of Yellow Peril to it, and I think he’s right. Maybe Frankenstein with a Fu Manchu spin would be the way to go? Let’s let the guy with bolts in his head have some soliloquies instead of just grunts.

Addendum: Check out Jim Shelley's Flashback Universe blog for a couple of comics panels of Frankenstein fighting a dinosaur, and a pictorial overview of various comic versions of the monster.  Great minds think alike!

One Panel Adventure Seeds

Here are some vignettes clipped from Golden Age comics chosen for adventure inspiration.  I've contextualized in the world of the City, but they could take place almost anywhere...

An obsessed half-ogre strongman, a cold beauty...a recipe for more than big top drama?

As madmen go, at least he's polite.

The leader of the spider-folk talked a lot.  That was good.  It kept him from using his scalpel.

A ghoul on a spree, with a taste for beautiful dames.

When you're on the lamb, you take your chances with back-alley sawbones.

Geography That Wasn't

I've been doing a lot of reading lately on lost cities, phantom islands, and the like, and I've come across some "historical" maps that time has proven to be more like alternate history.  Maybe you'll find some inspirations from these examples of terra fabula, too:

First off, here's California back when it was an island.  It ddin't finally settle on the North American mainland for good until the 1770s.

Let's get rid off that pesky California (and all the Americas, for that matter), with Paolo Toscanelli's 1474 map which gets the the earth's circumference wrong and has Cathay and Cipangu (Japan) just a quick sail away.  Hey, this map was good enough for Columbus!  Helpfully, the real North America appears ghostly in the background of this reproduction.

And this is another projection.

Finally, here's an island of Taprobana, which may have become Ceylon, or Sumatra--or disappeared all together.  It was an important trading port between east and west.  Marco Polo thought Adam was buried there, on the top of Mount Serendib.

Green Hell

 

The jungles of Asciana’s Grand Cinnamon River basin are a popular setting for pulp adventure mags found on any newsstand in the City. The stories may be fiction, but the adventures are real. The continent of Asciana was once home to an advanced civilization, perhaps a culture related to either Mu or Meropis. Tales say that ancient cities--and ancient treasures--may have been swallowed by the jungle and await rediscovery. More than one would-be adventurer has been lost in this “green hell” searching for these legends.

It’s a place of exotic dangers. Natural dangers include giant snakes, river sharks, piranhas, and even carnivorous plants. Then there are the intelligent threats. The hostile (sometimes headhunting) Native tribes, and the reptilian caimen-- somewhat smaller and more nimble relatives of the northern gatormen--are well known.

There are also more mysterious, lesser understood threats. Forrester and Randon’s 5877 expedition reported the existence of xenophobic mushroom people, dubbed myconids, which zealously defend their territory against intruders. The mutated plants and animals they used in their defense were viewed by the expedition as examples of powerful thaumaturgy, but later scientists reviewing their accounts have suggested that the myconids may actually employ an advanced biological technology. The expedition was lucky to escape with their lives, and were unable to bring back any specimens for study.

Even more enigmatic are the creatures hinted at by the tragic Wilmarth expedition. The information is fragmented, gathered as it was by necromantic communication undertaken by Wilmarth’s widow--a process hindered by the manner of his death. In any case, if the murmurings of Wilmarth’s traumatized and shrunken head are to be believed, there are intelligent (and malevolent) stingrays found in remote tributaries of the Cinnamon which exert a supernatural influence over nearby human tribes.

Whatever the reality of these rumors, the ultimate truth is clear--the Ascianan jungle is a dangerous place, indeed.