The Dark World: Glimmers in the Gloom
A certain murkiness surrounds the authorship of The Dark World (1946), which is only appropriate given the title and the contents of the novel. (Novella? I didn’t count the words, but I wonder if the total actually reached 40,000.) But I’ll hold off on the question of authorship until after I write a bit about the contents.
I’m glad we still have access to such oddities. It is unlikely a publisher would pick up such a weird tale today, one lacking clearly defined genre boundaries. Is it fantasy? Sword and sorcery? There is sorcery involved, indeed a wizard of note makes an appearance. And swords come into play. Yet at the same time, the story is at pains to ascribe pseudo-scientific causes to lycanthropy, vampirism, and other supernatural qualities and events that occur in the Dark World. Indeed, the Dark World itself is described as resulting from a splitting of the timeline, a relatively early use of the multiple universe theory. And much of the combat that occurs in the story involves firearms. So is it science fiction?
I don’t much care. Let speculative fiction jumble whatever elements the author desires, so long as the result is entertaining and self-consistent.
There, however, Dark World might fall rather short. Perhaps due to the brevity of the story, perhaps due to authorial indifference, world building is scanty. What little picture we get of the world itself is — well, incomplete suggests that we have sufficient puzzle pieces to actually consider completion a possibility. We get what seems on the surface to be a fantasy medieval setting, with castles, wizards, men in armor, and a Robin Hood-ish resistance dwelling in the forest, all dependent upon horses for transportation. Yet at the same time both the zombie-like soldiers of the dominant power structure and the brave freedom fighters use firearms. And swords, though the battles are so ill-defined that you can’t really be sure how or at what point the fight switches from one to the other. Either the author forgot or simply didn’t care. (Or authors switched back and forth without bothering to carefully read what came before in the narrative.)
And yet there is an intriguing story here, a unique body-switching tale with much of the drama occurring inside the POV character’s head as first one, then another of the personalities takes over the body: Edward Bond from our world or Ganelon from the Dark, both identical in form. (I’m guessing there is not nature/nurture issue at play; it’s all nurture.) There is much early play with missing memories and so we learn the rules of the Dark World along with Ganelon as bits and pieces come back to him. This is reminiscent of Corwin’s early story in the Amber novels. (This, it seems, should not be a surprise as Roger Zelazny has pointed to The Dark World as an inspiration for Amber.) Ganelon is a dark lord in waiting, in many ways an outright villain, though the writing is strong enough that he is often sympathetic and we get hints that he might, just might, be redeemable.
For a story in which much of the action is internal, of a psychic nature, the pacing is reasonably quick and we reach a series of culminating battles in good time. Perhaps took quickly. I mentioned that I’d like to have seen greater world building. I’d also like to have more clearly defined set piece battles, with greater clarity as to what is happening. That is frequently an issue with many earlier stories written by authors who had a fascination with psychic powers.
And that brings me to the question of authorship. Who wrote The Dark World? I’m no literary detective. I don’t have programs at hand that evaluate a writer’s frequently used words or phrases. All I can do is speculate.
As is well known, Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore’s marriage was also a writing collective. They co-wrote many stories. There is speculation that Moore wrote a significant portion — or perhaps even all — of The Dark World. I don’t know, but I can see it. Compare Moore’s Jirel of Joiry stories to Kuttner’s Elak of Atlantis stories. Moore’s settings tended to be sketchy, limning just enough to establish the peril Jirel was in, and then allowing Moore to delve deeply into her psychic battles. While Elak occasionally faced similar nebulous, primarily psychic threats, his surroundings were more neatly drawn. Kuttner provided a greater sense of physical reality, his Atlantis felt more real than Moore’s hazily mystic France.
Academic, I suppose. Whoever wrote The Dark World, I managed to keep my own preferences from preventing me from enjoying it for what it was. If you are in the mood for contrasting character studies and a deep dive into the psyche of a villain, this might be the book for you.
If you’d like to read something rather more grounded and gritty, why not something of mine?
