Although the bulk of Robert Bloch’s career seems devoted to ironic dark fantasy, he was a great admirer of Lovecraft and a loyal editor of his work. He described himself as “primarily a writer of fantasy and mystery-suspense fiction…on the peripheral edges of science fiction proper—fantasy, weird horror, and suspense.” (Smith, 193) His early career was heavily influenced by Lovecraft, and he was among the many younger writers who sent his manuscripts to Lovecraft for review. In fact, he and Lovecraft rather playfully created characters to represent themselves, each of whom the other killed off in their fiction. Bloch’s mature career included screen writing, most notably for Hitchock’s Psycho, based on his own novel, and for three Star Trek episodes. Certainly, Psycho focuses on fear, the fear of an unknowably diseased mind and the danger of becoming a victim, the threat once again of destruction of the self, either through insanity or through falling prey to such an alien mentality.
Other writers who pursued Lovecraft’s theme of fear of the unknown include Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard. The fantasy worlds they create echo the unknowable cosmic worlds Lovecraft hinted at in his “Call of Cthulu” and in “The Dreams in the Witch House,” worlds older than humanity or settings before historical time. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian encounters ancient godlike beings and evil magicians in his adventures of bravery and swordmanship. But perhaps the strongest echo of Lovecraft occurs in Smith’s “The City of Singing Flame,” published in 1932. The subterranean setting of this story and the weird, ancient creatures who inhabit it certainly evoke scenes from At the Mountains of Madness as well as the fascination/repulsion factor that characterizes many of Lovecraft’s narrators. However, Smith’s characteristic utopian view comes in with the promise of an ideal world beyond the City of Flame, a world in which humans can maintain a sense of identity in an alien paradise, if willing to extinguish themselves in the flame. This is a happier fate than that of most of Lovecraft’s characters who lose their identities to an evil, alien force. However, in Smith’s story, circumstances do not allow the characters to remain in this other-dimensional utopia.
As pointed out in much of the above discussion, the work of the Lovecraft Circle shares a common ground in dealing with what if questions that provoke horror. In doing so, they deal with possible futures, with utopias and dystopias, with fear and wonder. These works have been remarkably durable, frequently appearing in movie form, television programs, in the popular culture even in such an unlikely place as The Simpsons. In all cases, they seek to take the world we live in and stretch our imaginations to force us to ponder the frightening consequences of the unimaginable. Like Poe before them, these writers were able to tap into our most primal fears and have therefore earned their place in the realm of fantasy/science fiction.
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LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED
Lovecraft, H.P. The Dunwich Horror and Others. Selected by August Derleth with texts edited by S.T. Joshi and an introduction by Robert Bloch. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1985.
Lovecraft, H.P. The Horror in the Museum and other Revisions. With texts edited by S.T. Joshi and an introduction by August Derleth. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1989.
Lovecraft, H.P. Tales. New York: The Library of America, 2005.
Smith, Curtis C., Ed. Twentieth Century Science-Fiction Writers. Second Edition. Chicago: St. James Press, 1986.
Williamson, Jack. Foreword to The Prentice Hall Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Edited by Garyn G. Roberts. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003.
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Dennis H. Barbour is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English and Philosophy at Purdue University Calumet in Hammond, IN. He received his PhD in American literature from Auburn University and his MA and BA in English from Indiana State University. He has published articles on the pedagogy of business writing and on topics in American literature. He has also published an article on the Mad Max trilogy and is working on a book on heroism in the apocalyptic film. In addition to a lifelong interest in science fiction/fantasy, he also teaches courses in popular culture, the Bible as Literature, and seminars on special topics. From an early age, he has been a huge fan of Poe and of H. P. Lovecraft. He is married to an editor, Nancy, has two adult daughters living in Chicago, a dog, and a cat.
LAURENCE MANNING
(1899–1972)
A member of editor Hugo Gernsback’s stable of writers, the Canadian-born Manning came to the U.S. in 1921, two years after graduating from Kings College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with a bachelor’s degree in civil law. He wrote almost all of his science fiction over a few years in the early 1930s.
Manning was an amateur scientist as well as a writer, at a transitional time when many scientists were essentially hobbyists. He was a pioneer in rocketry and a founding member of the American Rocket Society (then called the American Interplanetary Society) in 1930, as well as the editor of its journal, Astronautics. By the mid 1940s, Manning felt rocketry had become too advanced for amateurs and retired from the society.
Aside from a handful of short stories that he wrote in the 1950s, Manning stopped writing science fiction in 1935 to manage a mail order nursery that he owned, He did write a popular book on gardening, The How and Why of Better Gardening in 1951.
“The Man Who Awoke” was Manning’s most popular story. It spawned four sequels, and the pieces were eventually collected together as a fix-up novel published three years after Manning’s death—his only science fiction to appear in book form. His other novel, The Wreck of the Asteroid (1933) only appeared in serialized form in Wonder Stories.
THE MAN WHO AWOKE, by Laurence Manning
First published in Wonder Stories, March 1933
CHAPTER 1
The Road to Tomorrow
It was in all the newspapers for the entire month of September. Reports came in from such out-of-the-way places as Venezuela and Monte Carlo: “missing banker found.” But such reports always proved false. The disappearance of Norman Winters was at last given up as one of those mysteries than can only be solved by the great detectives Time and Chance. His description was broadcast from one end of the civilized world to the other: Five feet eleven inches tall; brown hair; grayish dark eyes; aquiline nose; fair complexion; age forty-six; hobbies: history and biology; distinguishing marks: a small mole set at the corner of the right nostril.
His son could spare little time for search, for just a month before his disappearance Winters had practically retired from active affairs and left their direction to his son’s capable hands. There was no clue as to motive, for he had absolutely no enemies and possessed a great deal of money with which to indulge his dilettante scientific hobbies.
By October only the highly paid detective bureau that his son employed gave the vanished man any further thought. Snow came early that year in the Westchester suburb where the Winters estate lay, and it covered the ground with a blanket of white. In the hills across the Hudson the bears had hibernated and lay sleeping under their earthen and icy blanket.
In the pond on the estate the frogs had vanished from sight and lay hidden in the mud at the bottom—truly a miracle in suspended animation for biologists to puzzle over. The world went on about its winter business and gave up the vanished banker for lost. The frogs might have given them a clue—or the bears.
But even stranger than these was the real hiding place of Norman Winters. Fifty feet beneath the frozen earth he lay in a hollow chamber a dozen feet across. He was curled up on soft eiderdown piled five feet deep, and his eyes were shut in the darkness of absolute night and in utter quiet. During October his heart beat slowly and gently, and his breast, had there been light to see by, might have been observed to rise and fall very slightly. By November these signs of life no longer existed in the motionless figure.
The weeks sped by and the snow melted. The bears came hungrily out of whiter quarters and set about restoring their wasted tissues. The frogs made the first warm nights of spring melodious to nature-lovers a
nd hideous to light sleepers.
But Norman Winters did not rise from his sleep with these vernal harbingers. Still—deathly still—lay his body, and the features were waxy white. There was no decay, and the flesh was clean and fresh. No frost penetrated to this great depth; but the chamber was much warmer than this mere statement would indicate. Definite warmth came from a closed box in one corner and had come from it all the winter. From the top of the chamber wall a heavy leaden pipe came through the wall from the living rock beyond and led down to this closed box. Another similar pipe led out from it and down through the floor. Above the box was a dial like a clockface in appearance. Figures on it read in thousands from one to one hundred, and a hand pointed to slightly below the two thousand mark.
Two platinum wires ran from the box over to the still figure on its piled couch and ended in golden bands—one around one wrist and one circling the opposite ankle. By his side stood a cabinet of carved stone—shut and mysterious as anything in that chamber. But no light was here to see by, only darkness—the black of eternal night, the groping stifling darkness of the tomb. Here was no cheering life-giving radiation of any kind. The unchanging leaden metal sealed in the air from which the dust had settled completely, as it never does on the surface of our world, and had left it as pure and motionless as crystal—and as lifeless. For without change and motion there can be no life. A faint odor remained in the atmosphere of some disinfectant, as though not even bacteria had been permitted to exist in this place of death.
* * * *
At the end of a month Vincent Winters (the son of the missing man) made a thorough examination of all the facts and possible clues that the detectives had brought to light bearing upon his father’s disappearance. They amounted to very little. On a Friday, September 8th, his father had spent the day on his estate; he had dinner alone, read awhile in the library, had written a letter or two and retired to his bedroom early. The next morning he had failed to put in an appearance for breakfast, and Dibbs the butler, after investigating, reported that his bed had not been slept in. The servants had, of course, all been minutely questioned even though their characters were such as almost to preclude suspicion. One only—and he the oldest and most loyal of them all—had acted and spoken in answer to questions in a fashion that aroused the curiosity of Vincent Winters. This man was Carstairs, the gardener—a tall ungainly Englishman with a long sad-looking face. He had been for twelve years in the employ of Mr. Winters.
On Friday night, about midnight, he had been seen entering his cottage with two shovels over his shoulder —itself, perhaps, not an incriminating circumstance, but his explanation lacked credibility: he had, he said, been digging in the garden.
“But why two shovels, Carstairs?” Vincent asked for the hundredth time and received the same unvarying answer: “I’d mislaid one shovel earlier in the day and went and got another. Then I found the first as I started home.”
Vincent rose to his feet restlessly.
“Come,” he said, “show me the place you were digging.”
And Carstairs paled slightly and shook his head.
“What, man! You refuse?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Vincent. Yes, I must refuse to show you…that.”
There were a few moments of silence in the room. Vincent sighed.
“Well, Carstairs, you leave me no choice. You are almost an institution on this place; my boyhood memories of the estate are full of pictures of you. But I shall have to turn you over to the police just the same,” and he stared with hardening eyes at the old servitor.
The man started visibly and opened his mouth as if to speak, but closed it again with true British obstinacy. Not until Vincent had turned and picked up the telephone did he speak.
“Stop, Mr. Vincent.”
Vincent turned in his chair to look at him, the receiver in his hand.
“I cannot show you the place I was digging, for Mr. Winters ordered me not to show it to anyone.”
“You surely don’t expect me to believe that!”
“You will still insist?”
“Most assuredly!”
“Then I have no choice. In case it were absolutely necessary to do so, I was to tell you these words. ‘Steubenaur on Metabolism.’”
“What on earth does that mean?”
“I was not informed, sir.”
“You mean my father told you to say that if you were suspected of his…er…of being connected with his disappearance?”
The gardener nodded without speaking.
“H’m…sounds like the name of a book…” Vincent went into the library and consulted the neatly arranged card catalog. There was the book, right enough, an old brown leather volume in the biological section. As Vincent opened it wonderingly, an envelope fell out and onto the floor. He pounced upon this and found it addressed to himself in his father’s handwriting. With trembling anxious fingers he opened and read:
My dear son:
It would be better, perhaps, if you were never to read this. But it is a necessary precaution. Carstairs may in some unforseen way be connected with my disappearance. I anticipate this possibility because it is true. He has in fact helped me disappear at my own orders. He obeyed these orders with tears and expostulation and was to the very end just what he has always been—a good and devoted servant. Please see that he is never in want.
The discovery and investigation of the so-called “cosmic” rays was of the greatest interest to us biologists, my son. Life is a chemical reaction •consisting fundamentally in the constant, tireless breaking up of organic molecules and their continual replacement by fresh structures formed from the substance of the food we eat. Lifeless matter is comparatively changeless. A diamond crystal, for instance, is composed of molecules which do not break up readily. There is no change—no life—going on in it. Organic molecules and cells are termed “unstable,” but why they should be so was neither properly understood nor explained until cosmic rays were discovered. Then we suspected the truth: The bombardment of living tissue by these minute high-speed particles caused that constant changing of detail which we term “life.”
Can you guess now the nature of my experiment? For three years I worked on my idea. Her-kimer of Johns Hopkins helped me with the drug I shall use, and Mortimer of Harvard worked out my ray-screen requirements. But neither one knew what my purpose might be in the investigations. Radiation cannot penetrate six feet of lead buried far beneath the ground. During the past year I have constructed, with Carstairs’ help, just such a shielded chamber on my estate. Tonight I shall descend into it, and Carstairs will fill in the earth over the tunnel entrance and plant sod over the earth so that it can never be found.
Down in my lead-walled room I shall drink my special drag and fall into a coma which would on the surface of the earth last (at most) a few hours. But down there, shielded from all change, I shall not wake until I am again subjected to radiation. A powerful X-ray bulb is connected and set in the wall. Upon the elapse of my allotted time this will light, operated by the power generated from a subterranean stream I have piped through my chamber.
The X-ray radiation will, I hope, awaken me from my long sleep, and I shall arise and climb up through the tunnel to the world above. And I shall see with my own two eyes the glory of the world that is to be when Mankind has risen to its great destiny on the steppingstones of science.
Do not try to find me. You will marry and forget me in your new interests. As you know, I have turned over to you my entire wealth. You wondered why at the time. Now you know. By all means marry. Have healthy children. I shall see your descendants in the future, I hope, although I travel very far in time: One hundred and twenty generations will have lived and died when I awaken, and the Winters blood will have had time to spread throughout the entire world.
Oh my son, I can hardly wait! It is nine o’clock now and I must get started on my adventure! The call is stronger than the ties of blood. When I awaken you will have been dead three thousand years, Vincent.
I shall never see you again. Farewell, my son! Farewell!
And so the disappearance of Norman Winters passed into minor history. The detective agency made its final report and received its last check with regret. Vincent Winters married the next year and took up his residence upon his father’s estate. Carstairs aged rapidly and was provided with strong young assistants to carry on the work of the place. He approached Vincent one day, years later, and made the request that he might be buried on the estate at the foot of the mound covered with hemlock and rhododendrons. Vincent laughed at the suggestion and assured him that he would live many a year yet, but the old gardener was dead within a year. Vincent had the tomb dug rather deeper than is usual, peering often over the shoulder of the laborer into the depth of the grave. But he saw nothing there except earth and stones. He erected a heavy flat slab of reinforced concrete on the spot.
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 87