If you missed the last one…
This post is brought to you by Bearshirt #5 The Beacon House and Other Stories by G. W. Thomas. This story 
collection follows four novels and offers six tales of Arthan the Bear-man when he was only a youth of seventeen. He faces off against some pretty wicked monsters, including a giant worm, a bat creature, tentacles from the sky, prehistoric birds, tree men and a race of evil scientists and their cyborg killers. This is a book for anyone who loves a good old-fashioned Sword & Sorcery tale with plenty of monsters and action. Be sure to sign up for the newsletter and get “Green With Envy” from this book.
Not all the L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter Conan tales are masterpieces. “The Castle of Terror” is such a tale. It is little more than Conan watching a band of Stygian slavers get pulled apart by a Lovecraftian horror. I suspect it was largely written by Lin Carter. It has the hashmarks of one of his Lovecraft pastiches. Despite its flaws, which I can acknowledge, I enjoyed it anyway.
“The Castle of Terror” appeared in Conan of Cimmeria (1969) and did not have a magazine appearance. Marvel Comics adapted it as “Whispering Shadows!” in Conan the Barbarian #105 (December 1979). It was adapted by Roy Thomas. Art was by John Buscema and Ernie Chan.
The story begins with Conan crossing the Veldt after his plans in Bamula fall apart. For eight days he crosses the grasslands before a pride of lions get on his tail. He flees the killers and escapes them when they refuse to cross into the territory of a dark tower. Thunderstorms drive the Cimmerian into the weird black building. The structure has the usual non-Euclidean weirdness of a Lovecraft story as well as a feel that it was raised by serpents. Conan wonders if it was built by the Serpent Men in a time before Kull ruled in Valusia. He can tell that the altars of the place once ran red with sacrificial blood.
Conan tries to sleep. Weird ghosts haunt his dreams. These phantoms congeal into:
After an indefinite time, a change took place in die ruddy luminance of the astral plane. The spectres were clustering together into a shapeless mass of thickening shadows. Mindless dead things though they were, hunger drove them into an uncanny alliance. Each ghost possessed a small store of that vital energy that went toward bodily materialization. Now each phantom mingled its slim supply of energy with that of its shadowy brethren.
Gradually, a terrible shape, fed by the life force of ten thousand ghosts, began to materialize. In the dim gloom of the black marble balcony, it slowly formed out of a swirling cloud of shadowy particles.
The squidgy that forms from this mess is looking to devour Conan but a tastier treat presents itself, a band of Stygian slavers who have taken shelter from the storm. The thing reveals itself as it attacks:
While the sentry stood in the main doorway with his back to his comrades, a grim shape formed among the snoring band of slavers. It grew slowly out of wavering clouds of insubstantial shadows. The compound creature that gradually took shape was made up of the vital force of thousands of dead beings. It became a ghastly form–a huge bulk that sprouted countless malformed limbs and appendages. A dozen squat legs supported its monstrous weight. From its top, like grisly fruit, sprouted scores of heads: some lifelike, with shaggy hair and brows; others mere lumps in which eyes, ears, mouths, and nostrils were arranged at random.
The slaughter is all one-sided as the hundred-headed thing kills and kills:
…The thing lurched across the floor. Leaning unsteadily down, it clutched one of the Stygians with half a dozen grasping claws. As the man awoke with a scream, the nightmare Thing tore its victim apart, spattering his sleeping comrades with gory, dripping fragments of the man.
Swords hacked into misshapen thighs; spears plunged into the swollen, swaying belly. Clutching hands and arms were hacked away to thud, jerking and grasping, to the floor. But, seeming to reel no pain, the monster snatched up man after man. Some Stygians had their heads twisted off by strangling hands. Others were seized by the feet and battered to gory remnants against the pillars.
The wounds the slavers are able to inflict are almost instantly healed with the new victims incorporated the mass. Conan wisely decides to flee. What can he do that a dozen men could not? He has to kill one man, the slaver on watch who has become insane from the killing, before the Cimmerian can flee into the African night.
As I said before, the story is mostly pointless beyond a good monster kill. Conan is realistic about the situation, choosing to run away. For the Monster Fan, the story is enough. It was a stop-gap between two other stories in the collection and didn’t need to be long or complex. There are rewards here for Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard fans. The inhuman architecture and recollection of the Serpent Men is a nice tie-in as is a ghost that is more shoggoth than spirit. The monster’s many heads are gross but not really relevant. They don’t talk or bite or anything like that.
I have to wonder if Lin Carter was actually inspired by an old Doc Savage novel, The Thousand-Headed Man (July 1934) by Kenneth Robeson (Lester Dent). Carter certainly was a fan of Doc, even wrote a pastiche series called Zarkon 3000. In The Thousand-Headed Man, Doc and his five buddies go to a lost city in the Indo-Chinese jungle and face off against the horror known as the Thousand-Headed Man. Isn’t that kinda what Conan did? That novel got a comic adaptation 1966. The book was adapted by Leo Dorfman and drawn by Jack Sparling.
Squidgies abound in Conan comics and stories. All manner of tentacles and slugs and gooey things but they are not usually Lovecraft-related. (For these, go here.) This one certainly feels linked to the Cthulhu Mythos. (For more Lovecraftian beasts, check Monsters of the Cthulhu Mythos) There were some actual Lovecraft monsters co-opted in like the shoggoth (which is very similar) from “Stalker on the Snows” in Conan the Savage #4, November 1995.
Conclusion
I have to smirk a little, imagining L. Sprague de Camp going along with this story. As I said, it feels very Lin Carter. When I asked LSD about the Conan and Mythos connections at a Calgary convention back in the 1980s (I think), he said there were connections. But he wasn’t overly pleased about it. It was a very conservative yes. (This was LSD after all. Conservative was his middle name. After Sprague.) I poke fun but I can remember my questions about his Novaria series being much warmer in reception. And why not? We all prefer talking about our own stuff, don’t we?
Sword & Sorcery from RAGE machine Books
That was a very pleasant read.
We aim to please.