The Throne of Bones

by Brian McNaughton

  “I’ll teach you to insult Lady Elyssa!” Trying to break free, the swashbuckler fell on his back with a crash that shook the room. Two of his male companions came to hold him down while the girl took a hesitant step toward Crondard.

  “Only in a dream,” she said. In a transformation almost as unnerving as her previous ones, her face went haggard, her eyes darkened. “A terrible dream ... I had forgotten. I was pursuing you. And you helped me, somehow, you helped me wake from it.”

  “I’m glad you’re not dead,” Crondard said, hugging the wall with his back as he edged away.

  It seemed as if she really had forgotten. Her face brightened. She even smiled. “If you’re looking for employment now, my father, Lord Ruthrent—”

  “No!” Crondard said, adding: “Thank you. I have business in Zaxann. I must go, really.”

  “How unfortunate.” She pouted. “It isn’t every night I meet the man of my dreams.”

  “Yes,” the Fomor said, nodding and grinning in what he knew was a sickly way. He turned and ran for the courtyard before she could recall her dreams more clearly.

  “Flee, coward!” he heard Cousin Leodri bellowing as he untied Floss and hurried with him to Thunderer’s stall. “Next time I see you, I’ll make a torch of your tail!”

  Elyssa Fand was beautiful. Even sober, he might have tried to overcome his memories and taken up her offer, if she had not smiled when she had. In Zornard Glypht’s nightmare, the girl who called herself Fanda had smiled with a perfect set of teeth. But tonight, one of Elyssa’s canine teeth was missing.

  He believed it was the one she had left in his thumb when he threw her head to the dogs.

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  Afterword

  When I read Brian McNaughton’s “Meryphillia” in Lovecraft’s Legacy, I found it a breath of fresh air; for it was not merely one of the two or three fine stories in an otherwise lackluster anthology, but it was perhaps the only story in the book that showed actual originality. Here, for once, was not a self-proclaimed “disciple” of Lovecraft paying dubious homage by merely writing a half-baked rip-off of one of his mentor’s own tales. Reading that story again in this volume, in the company of its fellows (many of which are still finer specimens of horrific art), I come to wonder whether “Mery-phillia” was even conceived as a “Lovecraft pastiche,” or a pastiche of any kind. For Brian McNaughton seems to have mastered one of the most difficult of literary arts: to draw upon the classics of the field without losing his own voice.

  Like few modern writers in our realm, McNaughton has drunk deep in the well of literary horror and absorbed what he has read. To say that one can find echoes of Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany, Robert E. Howard, and perhaps other writers in his work is not to say that he is in any way dependent upon them; rather, they seem merely to have provided him with suggestive hints on how to say the things he himself has to say.

  Perhaps Clark Ashton Smith, with his delightful mixing of morbidity and humor and his evocative use of language, is the chief influence on McNaughton; but let me say bluntly that, in my humble opinion, McNaughton is a better prose writer than Smith. Smith’s true greatness is as a poet. He is one of the great poets of our lamentable century, and would be so recognized if modern poets had not suffered a kind of collective insanity and decided that bad prose is superior to poetry. But what has been said of Smith’s prose fiction certainly brings to mind the principal qualities of McNaughton’s. Recall Ray Bradbury: “Take one step across the threshold of his stories, and you plunge into color, sound, taste, smell, and texture—into language.” Or remember the precocious Donald Wandrei, who in his teens wrote what may still be one of the finest appreciations of Smith in “The Emperor of Dreams” (Overland Monthly, December 1926). Wandrei was of course writing about Smith’s poetry, since Smith had not yet begun the extensive writing of fiction; but his words uncannily anticipate the fiction of both Smith and McNaughton:

  He has constructed entire worlds of his own and filled them with creations of his own fancy. And his beauty has thus crossed the boundary between that which is mortal and that which is immortal, and has become the beauty of strange stars and distant lands, of jewels and cypresses and moons, of flaming suns and comets, of marble palaces, of fabled realms and wonders, of gods, and daemons, and sorcery.

  The world that McNaughton has created in this book is the world of the ghoul; and who knows but that The Throne of Bones will become the standard textbook for the care and feeding of ghouls just as Dracula has become that for vampires? The ghoul entered Western literature chiefly through William Beckford’s Arabian extravaganza, Vathek (1786); and it was the learned Samuel Henley who—aside from pilfering Beckford’s French original and sneaking into print an English version a year before the French edition emerged—wrote highly learned notes to Vathek that H. P. Lovecraft absorbed when writing of ghouls himself in “The Hound” and other tales. Here is Henley on ghouls:

  Goul or ghul, in Arabic, signifies any terrifying object which deprives people of the use of their senses; hence it became the appellative of that species of monster which was supposed to haunt forests, cemeteries, and other lonely places, and believed not only to tear in pieces the living, but to dig up and devour the dead.

  From this nucleus, and from elaborations upon it in Bierce, Lovecraft, Smith, and others, McNaughton has built up an entire ghoulish universe—a universe, to be sure, full of danger and terror, but one that we perhaps wistfully wish we occupied rather than this prosy sphere of ours where the only ghouls are pathetic specimens of the Jeffrey Dahmer type.

  But McNaughton has drawn upon far more than merely the master-works of horror for his conceptions. As I read this book I was startled to note how easily I could have imagined myself in the classical world—perhaps that long twilight of the Roman Empire, with barbarians at the gates, whose twisted decadence is so perfectly captured in Petronius’ Satyricon. The influence of Graeco-Roman antiquity upon McNaughton would make an interesting essay. Those “Fomorian Guards” he speaks of: how can we not recall the Praetorian Guards, that cohort which began as members of the staff of Roman generals during the Republic but which later became the Emperor’s private army and caused much mischief in the later Empire? When we read the name of Akilleus Bloodglutter, how many of us know that Akilleus is nothing more than a literal transcription from the Greek of that hero of the Iliad whom most of us know more familiarly under the name of Achilles? And perhaps it also takes a classicist not to be fazed by McNaughton’s casual tossing in of recondite words like “psittacine nugacities,” a charming Graeco-Latin hybrid (from psittakos, parrot, and nugae, trivialities).

  An essay, indeed, ought to be written on the general influence of classicism on weird writers. It was Lord Dunsany who, in speaking of his failed attempts to learn Greek and the possible influence of that experience upon the creation of his worlds of fantasy, wrote that it left me with a curious longing for the mighty lore of the Greeks, of which I had had glimpses like a child seeing wonderful flowers through the shut gates of a garden; and it may have been the retirement of the Greek gods from my vision after I left Eton that eventually drove me to satisfy some such longing by making gods unto myself....

  Lovecraft read far more widely in ancient literature than Dunsany (although he too was very deficient in Greek, as his thoroughly botched derivation of the word Necronomicon attests), but he goes on to say that he himself derived his myth-pattern—what we now call the “Cthulhu Mythos”—chiefly from Dunsany. In other words, he too sensed that Dunsany’s pantheon of gods in Pegana draw upon classical myth, and his own myth-cycle would do the same. Clark Ashton Smith’s knowledge of the classics—not to mention his knowledge of such classically influenced poets as Shelley, Keats, and Swinburne—is evident on every page of both his fiction and his poetry. I have no doubt that McNaughton has his share of classical learning as well, whether gained directly from the ancients or from their modern disciples.

  Then there are M
cNaughton’s names. They are a wonder, for, bizarre as many of them are, they all seem uncannily right for the universe he has created. Lovecraft remarked of Dunsany: “His system of original personal and place names, with roots drawn from classical, Oriental, and other sources, is a marvel of versatile inventiveness and poetic discrimination”; and I can think of no better description of McNaughton’s nomenclature. Sythiphore, Chalcedor, Paridolia, Zephryn Phrein, Lord Nephreiniel of Omphiliot—these names seem not so much invented as found in some remote corner of the collective imagination to which only McNaughton has had access. They are not the products of whim, but are logically formed on the basis of a language as rigidly governed by the rules of grammar and syntax as the classical tongues themselves.

  But beyond the surface glitter of McNaughton’s work—its controlled exoticism of language, its many nods to distinguished predecessors in the field, its flamboyant mixture of sex, satire, and morbidity—there is the incessant rumination on that most inexhaustible theme in the human imagination: Death and that “undiscovered country” that may lie beyond.

  And it is here that McNaughton draws upon that immemorial classic of our field, Edgar Poe, who knew more than he or any man should have known of Death:

  Out—out are the lights—out all!

  And, over each quivering form,

  The curtain, a funeral pall,

  Comes down with the rush of a storm.

  While the angels, all pallid and wan,

  Uprising, unveiling, affirm

  That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”

  And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

  It is that Worm that is the true hero of The Throne of Bones.

  —S. T. Joshi

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