Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature

by Brian Stableford

  The character of Lord Horror is (rather remotely) based on William Joyce, who broadcast German propaganda to the British people throughout World War II. Joyce’s exaggeratedly plummy English accent encouraged his listeners to refer to him as “Lord Haw-Haw,” a joke which quickly became a significant element of the folklore of the war. (The ability to turn an authentically sinister source of anxiety into irreverent comedy is, of course, an important method of psychological defense.) Joyce had lived in England and Ireland for many years before the outbreak of World War II, had been active in Oswald Mosley’s Fascist organization, and had fraudulently obtained a British passport, but he was an American citizen and his defection to Germany in 1939 was not, technically, an act of treason. The fact that he was hung by the British in 1946 was a triumph of vengeful ire over more refined ideals of justice, which is ironically echoed in the nasty and heavy-handed way in which the creator of Lord Horror has been treated by the British criminal justice system.

  Britton’s Lord Horror proudly wears the glamour of Fascism, and exhibits the prejudices and aspirations fundamental to Nazism. This characterization is calculated to excite revulsion and anxiety; the plot of the novel endeavors to achieve its revelations by means of shock tactics. Lord Horror is a horror story, an alarmist fantasy, and a provocatively shocking text. The narrative is sometimes very funny and sometimes utterly repulsive, seeking by means of such huge swings of mood to enhance its overall effect. The imagery of the story borrows on the one hand from comic-strip art and on the other from the philosophical weltanschauung of Schopenhauer, attempting through such odd juxtapositions to heighten the reader’s sense of the awful absurdity of the polite veneer which hides the politics of genocide.

  Lord Horror deals with unpleasant subject-matter: race-hatred; the glamour of Fascism; the psychology of oppression and repression. The author’s method of dealing with these subjects is one whose roots are to be found in the sarcastic fantasies of the French and English Decadent Movements and in the theatricality of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu-roi. The novel’s central characters—Lord Horror, his associate “creep boys” Meng and Ecker, and the Führer of whom they are in search—are gaudy grotesques and their adventures constitute a phantasmagorical black comedy. Their actions, attitudes and aspirations are satirically exaggerated to the point of ludicrous caricature. Britton’s Hitler—a quaintly pathetic figure quietly pursuing his research in the philosophy of Schopenhauer while his unheeded masculinity, symbolized by the incredibly expansive Old Shatterhand, entertains extremely inconvenient delusions of grandeur—is not monstrous as a person, but the monstrousness of his career and its legacy are exhibited in no uncertain terms.

  * * * *

  The first Lord Horror comic, also issued in 1989, is something of a patchwork, including several illustrations by Kris Guidio of scenes from the novel (including one involving “Appleton”) as well as a strip-story describing—among other things—the character’s encounters with the Cramps and Mikhail Gorbachev. The simultaneously-issued first issue of its companion comic, Meng & Ecker, carries on its first page a warning to the effect that “Artistic ideas expressed in these adventures may not coincide with your beliefs—but that’s the price you pay for free speech, playmates!” This statement took on an extra dimension of irony when the appeal court which declined to order the destruction of the novel ordered that Meng & Ecker #1 was indeed obscene and should be destroyed.

  In one of the vignettes contained in this first comic-book collection Meng and Ecker drop in on a science fiction convention and offer a brief commentary on the career of L. Ron Hubbard. In another they try to locate Oscar Wilde in Blackpool but fail, although the reader sees him operating a Punch and Judy stall in which one of his puppets is Lord Horror. The puppet Horror displays a “singalong moral code” which begins with a definition of judges as “Men bought and paid for by the state. Will say what they are told. Will kill you to make a point.” What effect this had on judge Gerrard Humphries, who confirmed the destruction order, only he can know; it is also possible that he might have been influenced in his decision by the cover illustration, which shows Meng (dressed, as usual, in flamboyant drag) brandishing a knife in one hand and James Anderton’s severed head in the other.

  Subsequent issues of Meng & Ecker (whose 9th issue was released in June 1995) follow much the same unrepentantly gross and somewhat higgledy-piggledy pattern as the first, but the Lord Horror series issued alongside them took a very different track. Nos. 3 to 7 (all issued in 1990) constitute a five-part graphic novel called Hard Core Horror, subtitled “The Romance of Lord Horror and Jessie Matthews.” (Jessie Matthews was a singer and actress who became the principal British matinée idol of the thirties and eventually ended her career by playing the anchor role in the long-running radio soap opera Mrs. Dale’s Diary.) This parodic tale of absurdly star-crossed lovers is played out against the background of Mosley’s Fascist Movement and the outbreak of World War II, with some interpolated commentary by Horror’s brother, James Joyce (also, allegedly, a writer of some note).

  The strip story serialized in Hard Core Horror features some extraordinarily vivid work by Guidio, which evolved from relatively modest beginnings into displays of an extraordinary quality and intensity. The initially-unfocused strip story is supplemented in its first three parts by similar text stories—which constitute a serial of sorts—printed in white on a black background. In the fourth part, however, the text moves to the front of the book while Guidio’s pictures appear in the latter part, mostly as full-page panels without any accompanying text. The war has begun and the imagery of the holocaust has already begun to appear, becoming progressively more horrific, and now the focus of all the text materials becomes much sharper and more intense. In the fifth and final part the holocaust has moved to centre stage, depicted in drawings of a new and distinctive style—which have empty blanks where an accompanying text might have been—and in photographs. A few introductory texts carry information about the actual “Lord Haw Haw,” while the single brief textual insertion in the middle of the illustrative material is pertinently extreme. Lord Horror’s last appearance, inside the back cover, is as a menacing silhouette; the back cover itself depicts a soberly staring Hitler and carries a quote from Dryden: “To die for faction is a common evil, but to be hanged for nonsense is the Devil.”

  Like Lord Horror, Hard Core Horror is a potpourri of the absurd, the irreverent and the horrific, stirred with a certain gleefully-calculated malice, but like the novel the graphic novel has a fundamentally serious purpose, which is ultimately clarified to a much higher degree. It is an accomplished and brilliantly disturbing work of art. Part Three includes, for interested parties, a schematic map of Lord Horror’s relationships with other literary works which is not entirely tongue-in-cheek, while the back cover credits describe the various elements, in turn, as “A Savoy Venus and Tannhaüser Production,” “A Savoy Gustave Flaubert Production,” “A Savoy Ionesco Psychodrama Production,” “A Savoy Deuteronomy Production” and “A Savoy Parallax Production.”

  The second part of Hard Core Horror reprints comments from my 1989 review of the novel which might equally well be applied to the graphic novel, including the judgment that “As intoxicants go, this is bathtub gin toughened up with a strong dose of absolute alcohol—never mind the bouquet, just try to stop your head falling off…it belongs right up there on the top shelf with all the other great works of combatively offensive literature which you would not like your wives and servants to read.” When I made that remark (referring to a comment made by the barrister appointed to the task of prosecuting D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover by way of testing the limits of the Obscene Publications Act) I did not realize—indeed, I could not have imagined—that I would end up in court as an “expert witness” attempting to save Lord Horror from condemnation under the same act.

  * * * *

  Lord Horror’s career as a recording artist continued with the release
in 1990 of a new version of the Cramps’ Garbageman, credited to “The Savoy Gustave Flaubert Salammbo Orchestra” with Lord Horror—again played with admirable zest by P. J. Proby—as vocalist. The cover art for the 12” single, depicting a crucified Horror, was taken from parts three and four of Hard Core Horror. As with the Savoy Blue Monday—which is a remarkably effective and shamelessly aggressive dance-track—the arrangement of the Garbageman backing track is very striking, commencing with an astonishing drum-roll and proceeding with explosive force.

  Garbageman contrasts strongly with the debut single by Meng & Ecker (here impersonated by female vocalists borrowed from Primal Scream and the Happy Mondays), whose A side is the flippantly obscene Shoot Yer Load. It also contrasts somewhat with the next Lord Horror release, this time accompanied by “The Savoy King Cocaine Band,” which presents a version of Iggy Pop’s Raw Power. On this occasion Horror’s voice was provided by the enthusiastic but eventually-breathless Bobby Thompson; the backing-track again makes extravagantly innovative use of percussion-sounds.

  All three of the Lord Horror singles are reprised on the CD album Savoy Wars, and are undoubtedly its most impressive tracks. The A side of the Meng & Ecker single is also included, along with several tracks originally released as 12” singles by P. J. Proby and one other item. The one song originally credited to Proby which is peripherally connected with the Lord Horror corpus is M97002 Hardcore, a remarkable drum-driven crescendo with a determinedly obscene lyric. The track’s title incorporates the number under which Britton served his second prison sentence in 1993—a sentence which followed a series of raids made on his shops after the successful appeal (made in July 1992) against the seizure of Lord Horror. Although it would be libellous to suggest that these raids were made in reprisal their timing is certainly suspicious; it might, of course, be similarly inappropriate to state flatly that M97002 Hardcore ought to be regarded as a kind of counter-reprisal. The original version contrived to kick up another storm of tabloid controversy by virtue of the sleeve’s flippant—and presumably untrue—claim that the female voice echoing Proby’s drunken oaths belonged to Madonna.

  The odd track out on Savoy Wars (also released, in three different versions, on a CD single) is Reverbstorm, an original work written by Paul Temple whose upbeat xylophonic dance-track sounds almost poppy enough to be a hit. The lyric is reprinted in Reverbstorm #1, the first of a new series of comic books starring Lord Horror, this time mostly drawn by John Coulthart. Four of a projected eight have so far been released (in June 1995).

  John Coulthart had earlier supplemented Guidio’s work in the unusually restrained and quaintly charming one-off comic-book Monoshock, but his work in Reverbstorm has grown more phantasmagorically effective with every issue, as he has gradually moved away from modes of depiction inherited from Guidio. An astonishing sequence of full-page illustrations in Reverbstorm #4, prefaced by one bearing the legend “Show Me Heaven…” depicts a host of strange monsters—one of which was identified in Reverbstorm #1 as “the soul of the Virgin Mary”—involved in acts of violence and extravagant consumption against various industrial cityscapes. These extraordinary works of art are not entirely without parallel in the world of modern comic-book illustration but their extreme grotesquerie also warrants comparison with the works of Bosch and Bruegel, particularly with the latter’s visual accounts of the temptation of Saint Anthony—which, via Flaubert and Gustave Moreau, became an important icon of the nineteenth-century Decadent Movements.

  Reverbstorm is more of a patchwork than Hard Core Horror, but its main connecting thread reunites a noticeably uglier but somewhat less ebullient Lord Horror with avatars of Jessie Matthews and James Joyce in a contemporary setting. Each volume so far published follows the precedent set in the later volumes of Hard Core Horror of removing the greater part of the text to a separate section, allowing most of the illustrations to stand alone, save for supplementary quotes eclectically plucked from a wide range of sources. The texts vary very markedly, although they all partake of Britton’s distinctively surreal style, even more crowded with bizarre juxtapositions than Coulthart’s art-work. The text of Reverbstorm #4, which deals with the creation of Meng and Ecker by the experimentally-inclined Dr. Mengele, includes a passage which provides a thumbnail sketch of the ideological background of Lord Horror’s adventures:

  Fifty years on, Horror had confided to Ecker, Auschwitz would be a recognisable brand name, a mythic character as well known as Sherlock Holmes or Tarzan.… Auschwitz, the holy end-all of life’s futile pattern, slinking through the subconscious of humanity, the one archetypal riff common to all nightmares, fuelled on the anvil of Little Richard.… In a hundred years, Auschwitz would form its own genre and become the most successfully marketed product in the history of the world.… The camps were the ultimate enclosed world, the desired image of world television, beamed by satellite into each city, town and village.… Guilt would never stand in the way of commerce, assured Horror, his cobra eyes stealing the dark.12

  * * * *

  The opportunity to participate in the appeal against the Lord Horror destruction order—alongside Michael Moorcock and social psychologist Guy Cumberbatch, both of whom also gave evidence in favor of the book—was very welcome, all the more so as I had never been in a court of law before. It was an interesting experience.

  During a trial which took place in 1953, after which six books by the pseudonymous Hank Janson were condemned as obscene and ordered to be destroyed under the provisions of an earlier law, the presiding magistrate became annoyed with the counsel for the defense because he wanted the members of the jury to read the books before pronouncing them obscene; the magistrate thought this an unnecessary waste of time. My knowledge of this remarkable incident, and my awareness of the extent to which men of the law respect precedent, helped me to be less astonished when His Honour Judge Humphries begin the proceedings by inquiring of the counsel for the defense as to whether it was necessary that he and the two presiding magistrates should actually have read the book. Judge Humphries seemed rather annoyed when defense counsel Geoffrey Robertson, Q.C. suggested—diplomatically—that he ought not to reject the appeal without first reading the book. (It would, of course, be dangerously close to libel were I publicly to entertain the hypothesis that the reason why the court overturned the destruction order on the book, while upholding it in respect of the comic book, had less to do with the eloquent arguments of the defense than the confidence with which the three adjudicators could claim familiarity with the contents of what they so ardently desired to condemn.)

  It is, alas, the case that few would-be censors are capable of intelligently reading or viewing that which they wish to censor. They can count the swear-words or enumerate the acts of violence, but questions of meaning remain obstinately outside the scope of their enquiry. While giving evidence in the court and observing the behavior of those sitting in judgment I was forcibly struck by the gulf of incomprehension which separated Judge Humphries and his stubbornly silent fellows from the testimony of the witnesses—and, by implication, from the world at large. When Guy Cumberbatch attempted to argue that Meng & Ecker #1 was no more obscene or offensive than the best-selling weekly Viz, it was obvious that His Honour had never heard of Viz. Cumberbatch valiantly attempted to counter this ignorance by producing a copy from his briefcase and offering it for the judge’s perusal, but to no avail. (In the Janson appeal, counsel’s observation that the titles under consideration were no more obscene than hundreds of others openly on sale in any bookshop or newsagency drew the response from one of the presiding judges that they too obviously ought to be banned. It was the resulting barrage of prosecutions that led to the revision of the law and the introduction of the present Obscene Publications Act.)

  It may be worth noting that the publications on sale in virtually every newsagency in the United Kingdom, running no risk of confrontation with the law, include numerous “true crime” periodicals which feed and ca
rry forward a widespread public fascination with serial murder, rape and mutilation, as well as several devoted to weapons technology. It is surely irrational to imagine that imagery of these kinds somehow becomes more dangerous when it is transplanted into a wholly imaginary and highly-stylized context. For the most part, Hard Core Horror, Meng & Ecker, and Reverbstorm do not glamorize violence—to the extent that their imagery is consistent and coherent it implies that violence is horrible and ridiculous—but insofar as Lord Horror’s gloating razor-attacks can be considered a kind of glamorization they are surely infinitely less seductive than the ads and features in magazines which celebrate the killing power of weaponry with clinical detail and quasi-masturbatory glee.

  The battle to save the comic books from condemnation is still being fought and we can only hope that it is eventually won; it would be no trivial matter were it to be lost. At present, the situation seems to be that all of the Savoy comics remain vulnerable to seizure at the whim of the police, and that most of the Savoy records are overtly or covertly proscribed by many shops. (It hardly needs to be added that they are not to be heard on legally-operated radio stations anywhere in the UK). I understand that when the police were instructed to return the copies of Lord Horror seized in the 1991 raid they gave back only six of the 150 copies taken, claiming that the rest had been distributed in connection with the court case. The Savoy Wars have not yet achieved a temporary cease-fire, let alone a permanent peace.

  * * * *

  The censorious mind works from the assumption that unpleasant things are better hidden away. It presumes that what can be kept out of sight can be kept out of mind, and that this will work to the public good. This is a sad and bad mistake.