THE DEEP ONES: "The Challenge from Beyond" by Moore, Merritt, Lovecraft, Howard and Long

"The Challenge from Beyond" by Moore, Merritt, Lovecraft, Howard and Long

Discussion begins August 1st.

First published in the September 1935 issue of Fantasy Magazine



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Challenge_from_Beyond
http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cb.asp

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?69041

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Nameless Cults: The Cthulhu Mythos Fiction of Robert E. Howard
Seekers of Dreams: Masterpieces of Fantasy
Horrors Unknown

MISCELLANY

http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2011/02/pulp-fantasy-library-challenge-from.html
http://www.thecimmerian.com/happy-birthday-mr-merritt/
http://player.fm/series/hppodcraft-dot-com-the-h-dot-p-lovecraft-literary-podcas...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._L._Moore
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Merritt
http://miskatonicbooks.wordpress.com/tag/frank-belknap-long/
http://tinyurl.com/blsaech

Reading this one online.

"Moore, Merritt, Lovecraft, Howard and Long" sounds like a law firm. :D

>3 artturnerjr:, Yes, right along the other great law firms such as Hungadunga, Hungadunga, Hungadunga, Hungadunga & McCormick or Dewey, Cheatem & Howe.

Just read this one out of Nameless Cults.

>5 paradoxosalpha:

Nameless Cults for me, too!

I was going to comment on each writer's section, but heck, Moore and Merrit just get the thankless job of setting up the premise, although I like how each describes the cube's odd qualities. But then HPL grabs it a slams it home. I love this little passage explaining in fine detail Campbell's strange state of disembodiment:

He knew only that he seemed to be at rest and without pain. Indeed, the absence of all physical sensation was the salient quality of his condition. It made even the blackness seem less solidly black—suggesting as it did that he was rather a disembodied intelligence in a state beyond physical senses, than a corporeal being with senses deprived of their accustomed objects of perception. He could think sharply and quickly—almost preternaturally so—yet could form no idea whatsoever of his situation.

Round-robins of this type often end up being something less than the sum of their parts, and I think that's true here too. I thought Moore created a fine opening tease, and Merritt expanded the scope nicely. But the HPL and Howard sections come off as practically parodies of themselves.

The level of detail in the I-just-remembered-obscure-occult-tradition was laughably excessive, even if the extra-galactic scenario painted was interesting. And the cross-over with the Great Race of Yith even made it seem like Lovecraft pastiche! Rather than horrifying externality, the whole revealed super-plot seemed like the backdrop for a Saturday morning adventure cartoon.

Taking up that sensibility and providing the action foreground for it, Howard's section tells us how liberated and powerful Gregor Samsa must have felt ... ?

With all that, I thought Long did a surprisingly adequate job of bringing the thing to a satisfactory close, although the rapid alternation between the two settings got old after six paragraphs or so. The "Wheel of Morality" ending was worth a mordant grin.

ETA: I don't regret proposing this piece, but I'll happily relegate it to novelty status.

> 7

Sure, HPL does okay with Cambell's own experience, but the farther he goes from the setup provided by Moore and Merritt, the more we get of this bizarre over-explanation:

Beyond the limits of their own galaxy -- which was not ours -- they could not navigate in person; but in their quest for knowledge of all space and time they discovered a means of spanning certain transgalactic gulfs with their minds. They devised peculiar objects -- strangely energized cubes of a curious crystal containing hypnotic talismen and enclosed in space-resisting spherical envelopes of an unknown substance -- which could be forcibly expelled beyond the limits of their universe, and which would respond to the attraction of cool solid matter only.

>9 paradoxosalpha:

I think that HPL and REH are using the format to be deliberately excessive. They get to let their hair down and have fun. I rather like the way they go all heavy metal, with tongue in cheek.

>8 paradoxosalpha:

Novelty, sure. How could it not be with a paragraph of pure pulp like the following, courtesy of HPL:

As the story went, there dwelt on a world—and eventually on countless other worlds—of outer space a mighty order of worm-like beings whose attainments and whose control of nature surpassed anything within the range of terrestrial imagination. They had mastered the art of interstellar travel early in their career, and had peopled every habitable planet in their own galaxy—killing off the races they found..

Evil worm-things - a nudge to REH for "Worms of the Earth"? In the very next paragraph, though, he begins to expound on an idea that recalls the means of interstellar travel in "The Whisperer in Darkness":

Beyond the limits of their own galaxy—which was not ours—they could not navigate in person; but in their quest for knowledge of all space and time they discovered a means of spanning certain transgalactic gulfs with their minds. They devised peculiar objects—strangely energized cubes of a curious crystal containing hypnotic talismen and enclosed in space-resisting spherical envelopes of an unknown substance—which could be forcibly expelled beyond the limits of their universe, and which would respond to the attraction of cool solid matter only.

> 7, 9, 10:

Yes, the first two segments do the setup right, and HPL does his OCD antiquarian thing to a T.

Then REH runs in: a berserk, mighty-thewed barbarian, destroying everything in his path with his massive double-headed battle-axe, unwieldy in any hands but his!!

I think REH revealed a lot of himself in the way he goes all Nietzsche on us. I don't mean Friedrich but the editor of The Will to Power, his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the proto-Nazi.

FBL does a pretty good cleanup with whatever shards of plot remain.

I enjoyed the discussion of this romp at hppodcraft.com (see the link above to player.fm .

> 10 with tongue in cheek

I certainly hope so!

"go all heavy metal" -- it's easy for me to imagine an Iron Maiden song based on this story.

>13 paradoxosalpha:

Of course, Iron Maiden are dead serious. I could see Eddie in the form of a killer worm-centipede on one of their covers, though!

>8 paradoxosalpha:

I felt the same way with HPL & REH contribution to the story. HPL totally contradicts Merrits description of the glyphs being "akin to cuneiform" with his (I'm paraphrasing here) 'no that's stupid, their alien glyphs' and goes into his epic cosmos tale of insanity ending his part with George's mind unravelling as he realizes his consciousness is in a giant alien centipede. Followed immedietly with REH's 'Hell yeah I'm a giant alien centipede! Being human sucks ass! Now to go to their nearest temple and b!tch slap their god!' I don't know, the disconjointed writing style between the authors was quite comical, and it seemed like the authors were satirizing themselves. I laughed out loud more than once while reading this story, yet strangely enough, I liked it. Very tongue in cheek.

Here, indeed, was outré nightmare at its height—capricious fantasy at its apex.

Indeed!

I was smiling through the C. L. Moore and A. Merritt sections, grinning like Carroll's Cheshire Cat through the Lovecraft section, and actually laughing out loud by the time I got to the Robert E. Howard section. HPL and REH are clearly indulging in deliberate self-parody here, and more power to them - it shows (as Kenton indicated in #10) a nice lack of hubris and a delightful willingness to fuck around amongst friends in a story that is clearly not gonna turn out to be a Great Weird Fiction Masterpiece.

I have my copy of An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia bookmarked to the entry on "Challenge from Beyond" if anyone would like me to post from it.

>16 artturnerjr:

Sure, Art - what's it say?

I've not much to add. A fun silly piece with the highlight being Howard's predictable-in-hindsight off the rails response to the set-up he was handed. I hope they got as much enjoyment out of writing it that I did reading it.

Okay, apart from the plot summary, An HPL Encyclopedia sez:

{"The Challenge from Beyond"} was the brainchild of Julius Schwartz who wanted two round-robin stories of the same title, one weird and one science fiction, for the third anniversary issue of Fantasy Magazine. He signed Moore, Long, Merritt, HPL, and a fifth undecided writer for the weird version, and Stanley G. Weinbaum, Donald Wandrei, E.E. "Doc" Smith, Harl Vincent, and Murray Leinster for the science fiction version. It was something of a feat to have harnessed all these writers - especially the resolutely professional A. Merritt - for such a venture, in which each author would write a section building upon what his or her predecessor had done; but the weird tale did not go quite according to plan.

Moore initiated the story with a rather lackluster account of George Campbell. Long then wrote what HPL calls "a rather clever development"; but this left Merritt in the position of actually developing the story. Merritt balked, saying that Long had somehow deviated from the subject matter suggested by the title, and refused to participate unless Long's section was dropped and Merritt allowed to write one of his own. Schwartz, not wanting to lose such a big name, weakly went along with the plan. Merritt's own version fails to move the story along in any meaningful way. HPL realized that he would have to take the story in hand and actually make it go somewhere.

Notes to HPL's segment survive... and contain drawings of the alien entities he introduces into the tale (giant worm- or centipede-like creatures). His segment is clearly an adaptation of the central conception of "The Shadow out of Time" - mind-exchange. Accordingly, the idea got into print months before its much better utilization in the latter story. HPL's segment is three to four times as long as that of any other writer's, or nearly half the story.

Robert E. Howard was persuaded to take the fourth installment, while Long - whom HPL talked into returning to the project after he had abandonded it when Schwartz dropped his initial installment - concludes the story

The complete weird and science fiction versions appear in The Challenge from Beyond (Necronomicon Press, 1990).

I'd love to see those HPL sketches!

It's interesting that the encyclopaedia piece glosses over the direction Howard took the story. Those of us who read it in Nameless Cults have Price's editorial notes, quoting REH's gratitude at being included, and de Camp's description of the REH part and its "Howardian super-hero -- a Conan among centipedes."

>21 artturnerjr:

It's interesting that the encyclopaedia piece glosses over the direction Howard took the story.

Well, S.T. Joshi (the co-author of the Encyclopedia) has never been a big fan of REH's fiction, so it's not really surprising that he gave him short shrift here.

"...a Conan among centipedes."

Oh, yeah - that's exactly what makes his section so hilarious. As you pointed out earlier, it's Kafka in reverse.

>19 artturnerjr:

Thanks for posting that, Art. It mostly jibes with my take on the story. Julie Schwartz was a pretty amazing guy, all around. I enjoyed the tale well enough simply because it was his idea to get these giants together and let them riff.

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&old=1&id=3414
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Schwartz

>22 semdetenebre:

Julie Schwartz was a pretty amazing guy, all around.

Agreed. Having grown up reading DC and Marvel superhero comics in the 70s, Julie was obviously a pretty important influence on me. Finding out later on that he was also the agent of so many great weird and science fiction writers back in the day is just icing on the cake. 8)

>19 artturnerjr: Thanks for the quote from the HPL Encyclopedia. I was wondering how Merritt got roped into this being the big name here.

I had forgotten the description of the story in Joshi's H. P. Lovecraft: A Life. It's quite similar though Joshi also says, in that book, Lovecraft's section was published as a self-contained narrative in the 10th issue of Crypt of Cthulhu.

A quickie review of "Challenge" that I posted on Amazon just for fun:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R2C6MREVSXSO0Z/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B...

A mention in another thread made me seek out and read this one, which I for reasons I forget didn't get around to back in '12.

Agreed with various that literarily speaking it's little more than a novelty. Merritt sticks to the track laid by Moore but doesn't really go very far along it, HPL and REH go entertainingly off the rails and Long is sort of impressive in taking it to a semicoherent close.

And apparently humans are the most murderous bastards in the universe, a single one being enough to topple an empire that has conquered a galaxy and wiped out numerous intelligent species.