This post is brought to you by Strange Adventures by G. W. Thomas featuring the novella “The Black Wolf”, about a group of French Canadien trappers facing off against a band of killer wolves led by a strange black wolf. The beast comes from a wrecked ship and it wants those coffins filled with Transylvanian dirt… This is a Northern tale set in Labrador in the 1890s, so there is history and Horror but there is also action. A good strange adventure needs both. Check out the companion volume Strange Detectives as well.
Ed Earl Repp (1901-1979) does not have much of a reputation in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. He was an early Pulpster who wrote more Westerns than Sci-Fi spectaculars. As a high production tale spinner, he was one of the first to use an assistant to write the prose while he engineered the plots. I did one post about him under my Strange Northerns here. “Under the North Pole” is pretty typical of what he did later on, with a secret laboratory under the Arctic. That tale was from 1939, ten years after he had established himself. “The Radium Pool” is a two-parter in Hugo Gernsback’s Science Wonder Stories, August Septemer 1929. It was collected along with two other early tales in The Radium Pool (1949). This longer tale was Repp’s first published SF work so it isn’t too surprising that he imitated a popular writer of the time, A. Merritt. (He was not alone in this.) (“The Mud Rush” in The Blue Book Magazine, January 1928 predates “The Radium Pool”, with a plot about diamond-mining in Africa.) His first Western appeared as “The Dragoon Sidewinder” (Wild West Stories and Complete Novel Magazine #83, April 1932). For a few short years 1929-1931, Repp was mostly an SF writer.
Repp was not unusual in appearing in a Hugo Gernsback magazine with an A. Merritt style tale. (There were only two SF magazines in 1929, Science Wonder and Hugo’s old magazine, Amazing Stories, now under the editorship of T. O’Conor Sloane.) Jack Williamson had done it a month earlier with “The Alien Intelligence”.The Merritt-style tale is one of explorers to some remote part of the earth where they discover a lost city or civilization that harbors dark magic or science. “The People of the Pit” (All-Story Weekly, January 5, 1918) was the first with The Moon Pool (All-Story Weekly, February 15-March 22, 1919) doing it at novel length. Gernsback and Mary Gnaedinger, over at Famous Fantastic Mysteries, would reprint every scrap of Merritt they could find. Repp beginning his career in this mode is pretty typical.
Part One
The story begins with a newspaper reporter, Dowell, who is sent to Death Valley to cover a story. A Professor Bloch claims to have made an important discovery, fossils of great strangeness. These prove to be large frog-headed things. The scientist believes they came from a remote part of Death Valley called the Manalava Plain. To support this theory, the two rescue an old prospector from coyotes. The old miner recounts having seen these strange creatures and his visit to the plain. He accompanied another man, Robert “Whisperin'” Sands, who was searching for his lost love, Allie Lane. The two men find abandoned wagons and then a pool of radium and a cave. Another lost wagon bears a message from Allie Lane for Sands.
First the pair encounter a weird cactus-monster:
“Presently we came upon a weird sort of a cactus tree—a species of a kind that I’d never seen on the desert! It was red instead of green and had long, flowing branches like the tentacles of an octopus! The tentacles twitched restlessly although there was not a breath of wind to stir them. I warned Sands to stay a safe distance away from it. The thing seemed alive! Farther off, standing dimly in the green murky haze, I saw other trees like the one in front of us. They stood motionless and stiff…We looked at the cactus closely. Its tentacles were waving spasmodically as though warning us to return from whence we came. I tore my eyes from it and studied the earth. Sands gasped when I pointed out to him the fragments of a human skull and other anatomical portions of the human frame, apparently crushed, strewn under the waving, rubber-like tentacles of this weird cactus.
Beyond the monster is the radium pool of the title, which does some fantastic things with weird spheres and towers of radiation firing from the surface. Sands and his partner get well-covered in radioactive particles. Sands puts his fingers into the radium pool, melting off some digits. But he also discovers the radiation is reversing his age. They flee into the cave, which sport diamonds and other raw treasures. Following the cave’s corridor, thinking to find evidence of Allie Lane and her father’s deaths, they come across two skeletons. They decide to go on even though the skeletons are wired up as a warning. (Both are male, so Sands figure Allie made it past here.)
The two men have a terrible time dodging flying silver balls, obviously thrown off by the radium pool. They run and find themselves lost in the dark. Most of the cave is lit by the dull glow of radiation but not this new section. The miner cries when he discovers he has lost his only lamp. The two men are feeling lost and scared when light appears along with the frog-men the narrator mentioned earlier:
“Tall in stature—probably seven feet high, they towered above us. With great heads void of hair, powerful bull necks, barrel chests and long skinny limbs that appeared to be of rubber like the tentacles on the weird cactus back on the Manalava Plain, the creatures to the human eye, were repulsively grotesque! Their arms, thin and sinuous, like their legs, seemed of rubber and they hung motionless at their sides. I looked for hands. There were none. At the ends of the tentacle-like arms, there seemed to be sucker-like cups like the end of an elephant’s trunk!
“For several moments they stood appraising us. Likewise we studied them. I noticed that above their heads waved two thin, flexible tubes that curled at the end and were attached to the brows just above their owlish orbs. Like the antennae on a desert butterfly, the tubes twitched this way and that! The absence of ears at the sides of their flat heads added bestiality to their repulsive features, and their mouths, like the jaws of a toad, were pointed and bony! Each had the face of a frog and all looked alike except that the creature standing nearest to me and in front of the rest, was perhaps a head taller. He wore a brightly-hued belt of metal around his narrow, skinny hips.
Sands shoots one of the frog-men in the head but it does nothing. The two men are captured and carried away by the strange freaks
My first thought when I saw the name Professor Bloch was of Robert Bloch. Repp might have been using his friend’s name as a joke but Bob Bloch was only two when this story appeared. His first tale in Weird Tales would not show up for sixteen years. So Repp wasn’t referring to the author of Psycho, but more likely wanted his erudite scientist to be Jewish.
Part Two
The two men are taken, clutched by rib-crushing arms, to a green-light chamber. In the center is a model of the solar system. Above are a set of thrones. The frog-men bow as their leader, Abaris, dressed in gold and purple, approaches. With the emperor figure are two humans, a beautiful woman and a man who appears to be her father. Sands, who is unconscious, is dumped on the ground before the thrones. The narrator recognizes the woman from a photo of Sands’s, as that of Allie Lane, not aged in forty years.
The narrator has a conversation with the leader via telepathy. He learns that the frog-men are Jovians. As rulers of Jupiter (they also claim the rest of the universe) they threaten the newcomers. Allie and her dad are in some kind of mind-control daze. The prospector converses with Abaris, learning that the frogmen plan to leave the planet soon. Abaris, Allie and her father disappear, leaving the narrator to revive Sands.
They search the caves without interference from the Jovians. They find a room filled with odd Jovian tech (see Paul’s illo above). The prospector surmises the frog-men are stealing a giant radium deposit with this machinery. Sands doesn’t care. He just wants to find his girl. Which they do next, finding her in gorgeous room. Allie doesn’t appear to be mind-controlled any longer. It takes her a while to recognize Sands. There is a rather maudlin reunion between lovers, that the narrator steps away from. This scene felt more like H. Rider Haggard’s She than A. Merritt. (We learn that the cactus monster is a device of the Jovians, possessing all their abilities except thought.) Allie summons her father, who was once a minister, who marries them immediately.
The prospector suspect that Abaris will not welcome this development. He shows up, demanding the girl. He and Sands battle it out, but everyone except the narrator ends up on the space sphere and are off to Jupiter. The scientists who found the old prospector have their doubts but some of the evidence speaks to his claims. The narrator swears, if a space expedition to Jupiter is put together to rescue the Lanes, he will be on it.
This early Merritt-esque tale also shows themes Ed Earl Repp would use again, the underground complex, alien tech, remote and dangerous locales. The frog-men are obviously borrowed from The Moon Pool but Repp prefers Jovians to eldritch horrors. That’s probably why H. P. Lovecraft never mentions this tale. (The mad scientist with beautiful daughter will show up again, but you can’t blame that on A. Merritt. )My biggest reaction to this second half is that it is essentially the plot of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Richard O’Brien must have been tapping into some deep-rooted Pulp vibes when he wrote that masterpiece.
Conclusion
The Western setting of Repp’s tale, and his plentiful details of the dry world of Death Valley, are a clue of later stories to come. Ed Earl Repp would write more Westerns than SF, increasingly so as his career went on. His Science Fiction ended (for the most part) in 1944 with “Spawn of Jupiter” (Amazing Stories, March 1944). His Westerns would appear until 1955 with a later resurgence in 1974 for the revived Zane Grey Western Magazine. Unlike some Pulpsters, Repp did not make the transition to paperback novels (Westerns or ACE SF Doubles). His only novel is Rescue From Venus (Science Fiction Quarterly, Spring 1941). What he did do was go to Hollywood. He wrote fifteen films from 1934 to 1949. At the age of forty-eight, he essentially retired from screen-writing and Pulps. Nobody really noticed.
Mythos Horror & Ghostbreakers at RAGE m a c h i n e
Leave a Reply