THE SLAYER OF SOULS
Thinking about what pulp stories would make great material for a movie, I remembered THE SLAYER OF SOULS. Robert W Chambers wrote a lot of mushy romance novels that leaked corn syrup, and some historical adventures. But we who love the gruesome and unearthly will remember him for a few horror stories he turned out early in his career... specially "The Yellow Sign," which actually scared me reading it on a warm sunny afternoon in front of a laundromat. You can't get more prosaic than that setting.
THE SLAYER OF SOULS is a wild, swerving-all-over-the-place thriller, and since it is long out of copyright, it's available on the Net for those who crave something more exotic and satisfying than the material found on the spinner racks in the local pharmacy. THE SLAYER OF SOULS was published in 1920, by which time the genius of Robert W. Chambers had been steadily lost to the dark side of crankingout dozens of gushy Romance novels (feh!). Yet he still retained some of
the powerful imagination and feel for sheer creepiness that made "The Yellow Sign" so haunting. So THE SLAYER OF SOULS was a mixed experience for me. It has an exciting premise and great ideas, but the execution is slightly weakened by flowery over-writing. (One whole chapter is given over to the platonic honeymoon of the young heroine and her new husband; it's pretty slack going, even without the limpid songs she sings to him.)
I suspect this book first appeared in serial form in a magazine. Each chapter begins with a helpful recap of the story to that point, and this also explains the frequent explanations of who the characters are.
THE SLAYER OF SOULS tells of a vast sinister conspiracy from the East, where just about every nationality or group that seemed threatening in the postwar world has been united for a determined attack on Western civilization. The German militarists in the First World War, the
Russians with their atheistic Bolsheviks, the Anarchists with their bombs, nationalist uprisings in Africa and India, even the Labor Movement in the United States... behind them all are the ancient cult of Assassins and devil-worshippers, the Yezidee. In the first few months of 1919, they launched their concerted attack on America's mind and soul. Against the supernatural powers of the Yezidee sorcerers, Secret Service agents are hopelessly in over their heads. Luckily, fate has provided a gorgeous young girl called Tressa Norne to save the day. Because she was
a captive in the Temple of Erlik for four long years, she has mastered enough of their magic to meet the oppressive forces on their own terms... even the Slayer of Souls himself. This is Hassan, the Old Manof the Mountain, Master of the Assassins.
Escaping from the Yezidees, Tressa returns by ship to San Francisco. She fears that her soul has been literally destroyed but still hopes she may live out her life in peace. In her hotel room, the locked doors open by themselves and in walks a dandy named Sanang. Handsome, suave, as sly as
you could wish in a villain, he has brought a roll of white cloth for her winding sheet. They trade flowery insults and threats full of obscure references (the first exchange of all too many such barrages), she intimidates him enough that he seeks to leave; she opens the doors for him just by staring at them and materializes a small yellow snake to scare him away.
There are a lot of references to America as a clean, fresh New World far from the sinister magic and terrors of ancient Asia. "You fear this native land of mine, America; and its laws and customs, and its clear, clean sunshine; and its cities and people; and its police! Take that
message back. We Americans fear nobody save the true God!" (It has been so long so I have read thriller fiction where anyone unashamedly stood up for America and Christianity that this gave me a strange pang of nostalgia. Remember when holy symbols such as the crucifix used to be
effective against evil forces in movies and stories?)
After that, it's a rollercoaster series of battles of one psychic duel after another. Sanang wants to reclaim Tressa, both for her spiritual powers and because he lusts for her supple bod. On her part, Tressa fights back doggedly for her freedom and to protect her country, teaming up with an American agent named Victor Cleves. Inevitably, Tressa and Victor tumble big time for each other and the resulting stiff Harlequin Romance dialogue can be a large pill to swallow.
But getting past all the stilted flirtations, there's more than enough bizarre incidents and colorful imagery to satisfy any pulp fan. A grizzled Hassani killer is getting ready to sneak down into Tressa's room and open her throat with his knife when he suddenly finds a little
yellow death-adder in his sheets; the hotel doctor checking his corpse doesn't realize that the golden bracelet in the shape of a snake hadn't been on the assassin's wrist a few minutes earlier. (Our gal is fighting with her enemies' own dark methods.)
"Beside the castle of the Slayer of Souls on Mount Alamout, eight other towers were erected for the Eight Chief Assassins", and these eight black magicians are in America right at that very moment, hunting for Tressa and spreading their psychic poison. So we're in for an epic battle.
Not all the enemy are Asian. One is a German hunchback named Albert Speke, a Bolshevik who speaks with an atrocious stereotyped Jewish accent (there's something in this story to offend almost every modern reader at some point). And not all their weapons are on the spiritual level, as they are not above using a poison gas developed for the Great War or spreading the germs of the Black Death.
Tressa Norne is a remarkably complicated and ambiguous figure. Twenty-one but looking much younger, she grew up in China (where her parents were murdered) and was taken at seventeen to serve as a temple maid to the demonic Erlk. Deep down, she believes in the God her family
worshipped but she knows evil satanic forces do exist and are at work-- she commands some of these forces herself. (This is the reason she considers herself hopelessly damned - "Do you not believe that ability to employ unknown forces is forbidden of God, and that to disobey His law means death to the soul?")
When fighting the Eight Assassins, she becomes an imposing sorceress with powers Dr Strange wouldn't scorn; yet, there's enough of the unspoiled young girl in her that she can yearn to be innocent again. Tressa is quite an intriguing creation; I can see why Chambers' romance
stories were so popular with young women for decades, if he came up with female characters as interesting as her.
If you want an example of how foreign the past can seem, the Secret Service chief sternly tells Victor Cleves he had better marry Tressa. No other man would want her, after it was known she had been staying in Cleves' apartment. Her reputation would be hopelessly ruined. Imagine
characters saying this today in a story or film, audiences would scratch their collective head in puzzlement. ('Her reputation...? I don't get it, do they mean her executive skills or what?' We're in a different world this century.)
Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933) is still another writer who was enormously popular in his day, cranking out more than seventy novels,yet largely forgotten today. His historical novels set in upstate New York are said to be pretty good, as are the few fantasies (such as this one) that I've read so far. But somehow, he has ended up known mostly for his creation of THE KING IN YELLOW and "The Yellow Sign", and that largely because those stories were later tied into H.P. Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Mythos."
It's ironic and a bit sad that fine writers like Chambers and Talbot Mundy are largely remembered only because of the influence they had on Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. And it's unfair that,while almost every word the latter two writers ever put on paper has been reprinted
frequently, books by the authors who served as their inspirations are out of print and hard to find. THE SLAYER OF SOULS, at least, has been reprinted as recently as 2003, and it's widely available on the Internet as an e-text. Of interest to pulp fans is that it appeared (in editedform) in the May 1951 issue of FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES.