If you missed the last one…
This post is brought to you by Strange Adventures by G. W. Thomas. This collection of Horror/Adventure stories includes “Ungerheuerhorn” a tale about giant ape monsters in the Alps. Though it tips the hat to E. F. Benson’s “The Horror Horn”, the protagonist is an American gun salesman based a little on Robert E. Howard. Or you could say, he is a guy that Robert E. Howard would have liked. (Yah, I know the guy on the cover is a Mountie. Artistic license?) The companion volume, Strange Detectives, doesn’t have any ape monsters but it does have a big sasquatch dude. Like REH, I am partial to hairy ape men.
Robert E. Howard did like ape monsters. Thak, the ape creature from “Rogues in the House” was already featured in this series. There was also the Winged Ape from “Queen of the Black Coast”. These may have been inspired by H. Rider Haggard’s Heu Heu the Monster (1924) with its statue of a giant ape god. Like the Ape Gigans in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1865), the creature never appears. Still, in the Pulps, you have to have an ape if you talk about apes. Chekhov’s gun was alive and well in Weird Tales.
Unlike the two previously mentioned stories, “The Flame Knife” and its apy fiend were not from any published Pulp. This ape creature is a REH-like monster filtered through editor, L. Sprague de Camp. The original piece “The Three-Bladed Doom” was an El Borak tale that LSD cobbled into a Conan story back in 1955 for Gnome Press’s Tales of Conan. It later appeared in Lancer’s paperback, Conan the Wanderer in 1968. Thankfully the story got an illustrated version from ACE Books in 1981 with great images by Esteban Maroto.
The plot of “The Flame Knife” is mostly irrelevant here because Conan stumbles on the Snow Ape while in Iranistan. It is a deadly encounter but only livens up an adventure plot that contained no monsters originally. Despite this, LSD does a pretty good job of making the fight exciting.
It was like ghoulish incarnation of a terrible legend, clad in flesh and bone; a giant ape, as tall on its gnarled legs as a gorilla. It was like the monstrous man-apes that hunted the mountains around the Vilayet Sea, which Conan had seen and fought before. But it was even larger; its hair was longer and shaggier, as of an arctic beast, and paler, an ashen grey that was almost white.
Its feet and hands were more manlike than those of a gorilla, the great toes and thumbs being more like those of man than of the anthropoid. It was no tree-dweller but a beast bred on great plains and gaunt mountains. The face was apish in general appearance, though the nose-bridge was more pronounced, the jaw less bestial. But its manlike features merely increased the dreadfulness of its aspect, and the intelligence which gleamed from its small red eyes was wholly malignant.
Conan knew it for what it was: the monster named in myth and legend of the north—the snow ape, the desert man of forbidden Pathenia. He had heard rumors of its existence in wild tales drifting down from the lost, bleak plateau country of Loulan. Tribesmen had sworn to the stories of a manlike beast, which had dwelt there since time immemorial, adapted to the famine and bitter chill of the northern uplands.
The monster attacks Conan, who fights it with his knife:
Conan evaded the disembowelling sweep of the great misshapen left hand with its thick black nails, but the massive shoulder struck him and knocked him staggering. He was carried to the wall with the lunging brute, but even as he was swept back he drove his knife to the hilt in the great belly and ripped up in desperation in what he thought was his dying stroke.
Monster dispatched, Conan gets back to his Eastern-flavored intrigue.
This ape creature, compared with Thak in particular, is larger and more fierce, perhaps a little less intelligent. (This is hard to tell as there is no match of wits in this tale. Neither man ape took an IQ test either.) Conan does not jump on the creature’s back and in classic Frank Frazetta style, dispatch it. Instead, the monster takes a blade to the gut then tries to kill the Cimmerian in its death throes.
As always, Marvel Comics did an adaptation by Roy Thomas in Savage Sword of Conan #31-32, July-August 1978. The ape encounter takes place in the #32. The art is by John Buscema and Tony deZuniga, a duo I like. (I used to love Tony’s Zip-A-Tone inking, but not so much these days.) The ape doesn’t look apish enough to me, more like a lion-man. Part of my criticism is having seen the excellent Esteban Maroto illustration from three years later. Still, Buscema gets across the ferocity of the monster and its deadly disemboweling razor-sharp claws.
Conclusion
I don’t usually prefer L. Sprague de Camp’s edited version of Robert E. Howard. I get it de Camp was trying to create the semblance of consistency across a jumble of Pulp stories. I usually prefer my REH in its original form. In this particular case, I welcome the Monster fight. I have read The Three-Bladed Doom as part of the El Borak saga but throwing in a monster never hurts. The idea of snow apes living in what will become Iran some day is a bit of a stretch but who can say how much changed between the Hyborian Age and more modern times? I mean British Columbia and the American Northwest were home to Bigfoot and Sasquatch, so why not Iranistan? And one more ape monster in the Conan saga, lie another snake, won’t go amiss.
Sword & Sorcery from RAGE machine Books
THE FLAME KNIFE is the second Conan book I ever owned and read after the other ape in a red cape cover by Frazetta.