The Last of Elak

Read/Watch 'em In Order #103

There was a three year gap between Henry Kuttner's first three Elak of Atlantis stories and the last one. "Dragon Moon" is a novelette first published in the January 1941 issue of Weird Tales magazine. It scored a nifty if not entirely accurate cover illustration as well.


It was worth the wait. "Dragon Moon" is arguably the best of the four. In any case, I think it can be definitely said that the two longer stories--the first and the last ones--are superior to the shorter ones.


Also, I had been wondering about the internal chronology of the tales. The first ended with Elak saving his brother's throne and ending up with a lady who looked to be his One True Love. The two following stories, in my mind, seemed to take place before this, when Elak was wandering around having random adventures and meeting a different girl in each one. The internal chronology didn't really matter, but it's the sort of thing I'm required to think about by the National Geekiness Over-Analyzing Fiction Act of 1978, passed by Congress that year and signed into law by Jimmy Carter.

Anyway, this last story is clearly set after the first, since it references the events of that previous entry. But Elak's One True Love isn't around or even mentioned. In fact, the story begins with Elak getting into a brawl over a tavern maid.

So there's no denying it. Elak--the dog--is a love 'em and leave 'em kind of guy. Oh, well. At least he's good with a sword and tends to defeat evil beings on a fairly regular basis.

Elak is saved from being skewered during the brawl by Dalan, a Druid wizard who was one of his allies in the early novelette. But Dalan isn't saving Elak just to be a nice guy. He has a job for the wandering swordsman.

Elak, remember, is royalty from the kingdom of Cyrene. But the king of a neighboring country has been possessed by a being of cosmic power--a creature beyond good and evil who is now using his puppet body to form an army and invade Cyrene. The creature tried to possess the king of Cyrene as well, but that king (Elak's brother) killed himself rather than allow this to happen.

The villian is very Lovecraftian, which is not surprising. Kuttner was a member of the Lovecraft Circle--those writers who corresponded with Lovecraft and often added stories to Lovecraft's Cthulu-verse. In fact, it is easy to consider the Elak stories as being set within Lovecraft's continuity, though I don't think there was a deliberate intention to do so.

So Elak is asked to head home and lead an army against the invaders. He doesn't want to and, in fact, refuses at first. But a barely thwarted attempt by the cosmic being to take over his mind convinces him to take action.

He and his perpetually drunken sidekick, Lycon, find a ship heading in the right direction. It might have been preferable, though, if the ship's captain had not been the guy Elak fought in the tavern brawl. He and Lycon soon find themselves working as galley slaves.

That situation requires an escape and incitement of rebellion among the other galleys slaves. Then a telepathic message from Dalan puts Elak on the track of the one person who can help them defeat the villain. That person is the villain's mom, who also happens to be the daughter of a god.

All of this leads to an epic battle and the requirement of a goddess to make a profound sacrifce in order to provide Elak with a particular talisman at just the right moment.

This last Elak tale is exciting, full of the vivid other-worldy imagery that was the main strength of the series. The plot is solid and internally logical and both Elak and Lycon are great characters. It's too bad Kuttner never returned to those characters. Elak and Lycon undoubtably had a lot of unrecorded adventures.

You can read "Dragon Moon" online HERE.

A Quick Trip to a Really Weird Underworld

Read/Watch 'em In Order #102

The October 1938 issue of Weird Tales brought us the third (and penultimate) story about Elak of Atlantis, written by Henry Kuttner. As with the previous Elak story, this one snagged a cover illustration. Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Weird Tales, must have liked these stories. Or at least felt that the vivid and unusually imagery in the stories made for great illustrations.

In "Beyond the Phoenix," Elak and his perpetually drunken sidekick Lycon are working as bodyguards for the king of the city of Sarhaddon. A wizard named Xandar lures them away from the king before sending in a team of assassins. Xandar wants to usurp the throne, release an ancient evil being named Baal-Yagoth and spend his time on the throne torturing people. Xandar is not a nice person.

The king is killed and Elak, Lycon and the king's beautiful daughter have to make a quick getaway on the king's funeral barge. The barge, though, does a bit more than simply travel over water. It's designed to take dead kings back to the land of the Phoenix from which legends say the first king of Sarhaddon came.

So Elak and his allies end up in a very, very strange place, where two powerful maybe-humans are locked in a power struggle, with one of them allying herself with Xandar to release Ball-Yagoth upon the world. Elak is pretty much drafted to help stop this, so he'll have his work cut out for him.

The Elak of Atlantis stories continue to be good, with vivid prose carrying us along through clever and unusual plots. This one is a bit weaker than the first two--it ends a little to abruptly and Elak doesn't get to be as proactive as a hero in a sword-and-sorcery tale should be. At key moments, he's simply being ordered or compelled to take action by a god. Because of this, he's simply not as cool as he was in the first two tales. But this criticism is subjective--if taken on its own without direct comparison to the previous tales, it is entertaining.

We'll see how Elak does in the last story from this series.

Picking the Wrong Side

Read/Watch 'em In Order #101

Henry Kuttner's second Elak of Atlantis tale appeared in the July 1938 issue of Weird Tales and this time snagged a pretty awesome Virgil Finlay cover.

The first Elak story had ended with the hero accompanied by the woman he'd fallen in love with, so "Spawn of Dagon" is probably set earlier in Elak's life. The girl is nowhere to be found, though another beautiful damsel in distress is in need of rescuing.

Elak and his perpetually drunken sidekick Lycon begin the story looting the corpse of a city guard they had just killed. Lycon falls into a drunken stupor at a a really bad moment, forcing Elak to carry him while fleeing from still more guards.

They are helped by a guy named Gesti, who takes them into an underground labyrinth and is soon offering Elak a job: kill a wizard named Zend and destroy the red sphere that is the source of Zend's magic.

With Lycon still drunk, Elak takes on the job alone. But after entering Zend's home through a secret passage, he encounters difficulties. Among these difficulties are a disembodied head that shouts out warnings of intruders and a massive minion whom Zend recognizes as a recently executed criminal. Despite his recent death, thuogh, the criminal is still walking around.

But these difficulties are nothing compared to the fact that Gesti--the man who hired Elak... well, he isn't really a man. And having  Zend killed is actually the first step in a plan to destroy humankind. So Elak soon realized he's on the wrong side.

 "Spawn of Dagon" is a great story: exciting and atmospheric, with humor effectively peppered through throughout tale. The character of Lycon is used very effectively. He seems worse then useless at first, but proves his loyalty and occasional usefulness at the  story's climax.

 As I mentioned earlier, this story seems to take place before "Thunder in the Dawn." I like continuity in my fictional universe, so it's tempting for me to theorize about  the chronology of Elak's adventures.

But sometimes it's better to treat a series of  tales about a particular hero as a series of mythic legends that don't require an internal chronology. Film director George Miller has this attitude about the Mad Max movies. I recently had an online discussion in which someone made a very good case for looking at the original Conan the Barbarian stories this way rather than paying attention to any of the suggested chronologies that have been published over the years. Perhaps it's best to look at the Elak stories the same way. I'll use my authority as an obscure blogger with a tiny readership to adjudicate on this after we've looked at the last two stories in the series.

Elak of Atlantis

Read/Watch 'em In Order #100

Henry Kuttner was a great writer, producing a quite a large body of work despite dying relatively young at the age of 42. His stories included science fiction, fantasy, horror and even some superhero comic book scripts for DC's Green Lantern during the 1940s.

One of his ventures were four sword-and-sorcery tales written for Weird Tales (three of them in 1938 and one more in 1941). These tales involve a wandering adventure with a royal background--Elak of Atlantis.

The first Elak tale was published in the May and June 1938 issues of Weird Tales. Titled "Thunder in the Dawn," it is a masterful example of world-building, includes a number of great characters (both good guys and bad guys) and includes some battle scenes that come close to equaling Robert E. Howard in their excitement. Much of the rest of the story reminds me of A. Merritt, with perhaps a dash of Clark Ashton Smith thrown in.

Elak is indeed a wandering adventurer, but he was once a prince in the kingdom of Cyrena, located at the northern end of the continent of Atlantis. He left after killing his stepfather. We are never really given the details of this, though we are assured several times that it was a fair fight.  Elak let his brother take the throne of Cyrena and began to indulge his wanderlust. Somewhere along the line, he gained a sidekick--a fat and perpetually drunken swordsman named Lycon. But even if Lycon drinks too much, he's intensely loyal and good in a fight.

Elak had intended never to return to Cyrena, but a Druid wizard named Dalan finds him and tells him an evil wizard, backed by an army of Vikings, has taken over the kingdom and holds Elak's brother a prisoner. So Elak has to go home--he's the only one who can unite the local chieftains into an army.

But before heading home, Elak insists on paying one last visit to his girlfriend Velia. The trouble with that is Velia is married to the local ruler. She's not married to the ruler by choice, but was sold to him by her family. Normally, adultery is my Berserk Button and there are few protagonists in fiction who can commit this particular sin without instantly losing my sympathy. But Velia was forced into a marriage to a brutal man who would literally skin her alive if she crossed him. So I think we can safely give Elak and Velia a pass for running off together when the husband catches them.

Thus Velia is added to the group for their voyage back to Cyrena. It's an eventful trip, with Velia's husband pursuing and the wizard ruling Cyrena tossing some pretty powerful magic at them. At one point, Elak ends up in a strange dimension that is literally populated by dead gods and only escapes when someone else sacrifices more than her life to save him.

All of this is being told to us in vivid and often powerful prose that brings the characters and their strange, magic-drenched world to life. And this continues throughout the novella as Elak eventually leads an army against the Viking invaders and fights a long, brutal battle. Eventually, he and Dalan journey into the lair of the evil wizard, where Elak learns one effective way of imprisoning someone is to make that person a god.

It's an exciting and gripping story, the longest of the four Elak tales as it effectively introduces us to Elak and his companions, then tosses them into a bizarre and breathtaking adventure.